Tag Archives: Atlantic

How Unlikely Is It That It’ll Be Trump v. Biden in ’24?

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Biden vs. Trump 2024 would be the rematch nobody wants

I believe I have previously mentioned my fanboy enthusiasm for the work of Mark Leibovich, formerly of The New York Times Magazine and now, like just about every other four star journalist/writer, at The Atlantic. Leibovich’s classic book is “This Town” a truly “inside” view of the D.C. cocktail party/power culture, where politicians, lobbyists and big name journos regularly-to-constantly schmooze, clink glasses and incestuously buff up each other’s bona fides. It was as hilarious as it was dismaying.

His most recent, “Thank You for Your Servitude”, released last fall, was all about the truly craven GOP toadies — can you say Lindsey Graham fast enough? — who have taken out triple mortgages on what little soul they ever had to defend Donald Trump on everything he’s ever said or done. Which means committing character suicide five times a day.

Anyway, Leibovich being Leibovich with his Times/Atlantic pedigree, gets all sorts of people who really should know better to talk to him. And almost all play laughable word games to lay out their imagined resolution for what we’ll call “the Trump problem.” A chaotic epoch that nearly all of them wish would end … like yesterday … no matter how much they defend him publicly.

What Leibovich leaves for his punchline conclusion is that there is actually a detectable consensus, though only a couple party pros dare say it out loud.

And that is … they wish (and hope) the guy just up and dies. Face first into a bucket of KFC wings. Whatever.

You laugh. But they’re serious. I ask you, what do you think mouldering stalactites like Mitch McConnell really think is their best way out of the constant Trump quagmire?

This all came to mind again the other day when a couple of us were talking about the last time the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates were set a year and a half or more before the election? How far back do you have to go in our lifetimes? Adlai Stevenson and Ike in ’56? In every other election cycle the presumptive tickets shifted significantly over the 18 to 24 month “home stretch.”

And yet … here we are in June of 2023, 16 months before the next election and the hardened assumption is that our choices will again be Trump and Joe Biden. One guy is 81 and while competent moves like a guy who is, well, 81. Opposite him is a guy, nigh onto morbidly obese and demonstrably erratic mentally, who has just turned 77 and is under more legal pressure than John Gotti, with indictments piling up faster than tickets on an overparked delivery van in lower Manhattan. (I have personal experience with that one.)

My point here is to warn against certainty in this situation and prepare contingencies.

Trump looks strong. He is making his usual boatload of money off the Mar-a-Lago indictment. (And again, what is in anyone’s mind who writes a $50 check to a guy who says he’s a billionaire?) His poll numbers vis a vis Ron DeSantis and the other GOP munchkins remain daunting. Sixty-plus percent of Republican voters say they believe he won the 2020 election. He looks invincible, and as we all know, could campaign all next year wearing an ankle bracelet. (Hell, he could sell replicas at his MAGA merch tables.)

But … it is very hard to imagine Trump bears up physically under the stresses that are compounding by the hour. And mentally … well, he’s Trump. But as some have pointed out, a big part of his appeal to his celebrity-obsessed base is that he’s “fun” or at least “entertaining”, two, um, virtues less evident with every droning, monotonous, whiny speech, like the buzz-killer he delivered in Bedminister after this week’s indictment.

Thankfully, his main competition over in the Pissed Off White Victim bubble is De Santis who has all the charm and entertainment appeal of a medieval executioner.

And Biden … well, face it. 81 is 81 and serious things regularly happen to 81 year-olds with the best health care money can provide. What happens with even a minor stroke? Or some other age-related infirmity? Should Biden be so incapictated he’s unable to run, try imagining the Democratic scramble — even this month, much less next summer or later, to produce another unifying candidate. Kamala Harris? Mmmm, I kinda doubt it. Mayor Pete? Gavin Newsom? Bernie?

Minus Trump, how do you assess a DeSantis match up against Biden? How many “swing voters” would reflexively gravitate back to the young, smarter, more disciplined, Trumpy-but-not-Trump Republican? Would his cynical, cro-magnon policies like that six-week abortion ban and all-the-guns-you-can-eat really deter critical suburban women?

I don’t know, but because I embrace the gloom, it’s stuff I think about.

Have a nice day.

Even Trump Has to Know Testing Will Help His Reelection

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It is truly a fool’s errand trying to make sense of anything Donald Trump does, beyond assuming he sees it as being in his very personal self-interest. But given that –and only that — that as an incontestabe reality, I still can not understand his refusal to ramp up and coordinate nation-wide testing for COVID-19.

If you accept that every move he makes is sociopathically-focused on getting himself reelected in November, and by that I mean shamelessly re-writing recently (recorded) history, scanning the radar for any and every possibility to lay blame for this catastrophic debacle on someone else and encouraging his troll-cult of “gun enthusiasts” to actively rebel against the states on whom he’s sloughed off the fundamental responsibilities of the federal government, the lack of “testing thing” still makes no sense.

I don’t know about you, but I long, long ago stopped thinking that Trump — a man who can’t read note-card memos much less books and thinks Captain Bligh was a role model for “very powerful” leadership — makes many or really any of the policy decisions in his White House. Clearly, he has no interest in doing anything other than the ceremonial, lights-and-cameras-on work of being President.

(The latest example were his “Liberate Minnesota!”, “Liberate Michigan!” and “Liberate Virginia, and save your great Second Amendment! It’s under siege!” tweets. These were tweets posted not as he was in his gold-trimmed jammies late at night, getting ready to go nighty-night after a snack of Kentucky Fried Chicken, nor were they even in the early AM, a bit groggy and entertaining impure thoughts about the blonde on “Fox and Friends”. No. They were just before noon, in the middle of a supposedly all-hands-on-deck, 24/7 fight against an international pandemic, and seconds after watching some nitwit on FoxNews. He was watching fcking TV! Point being … he never works at his job. Someone else is doing that.)

The assumption, already well-documented through contemporary reporting and almost certain to be verified in the “after action” investigations into what — to repeat myself — is the worst dereliction of duty and failure of executive function by a president in U.S. history, is that Trump “policy” such as it is is a product of the imaginations of others. Like, for example, 34 year-old former high school malcontent/Joe Goebbels-like senior advisor Stephen Miller. And the chronically-bungling senior advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner. And likely the various old tycoon cronies like Tom Barrack — (one of) the guys who did what he could to profiteer off the 2008 collapse, the inauguration and every Trump move since, along with whoever followed him into the men’s room, and of course the deep thinkers on talk radio and FoxNews.

But even then, with Trump as this vain empty vessel playing useful idiot for America’s worst characters and impulses, it makes no sense not to use the Defense Production Act and divert a fraction of the fire hose of deficit-exploding money for a Manhattan Project-style nationwide testing program. Testing, ordered by him (or whoever) and directed by him (or one of his many “task forces”) would without question have the effect of restoring a semblance of order and a functioning economy … before the election.

As we know from those pesky things called numbers, testing in the USA is slowing down rather than speeding up.

As dismaying as it it to imagine, Trump would be rewarded for at least doing that, never mind so completely screwing up the response to a forseeable and well-predicted international disaster.

So why isn’t Team Trump, Miller, (or the latest chief of staff and ex-North Carolina hill country real estate broker Mark Meadows), Jared, Ivanka, Sean Hannity, etc., pushing him on this? It’s not like he’d have to, you know, do anything. He wouldn’t have to show up in a WalMart parking lot and stick swabs up voters’ noses. He wouldn’t have to even break into any of his free-styling gibberish-and-invective spewing afternoon press rallies to express a moment’s worth of empathy for the 35,000 – 40,000 already dead. Hell, he could even go out and play golf! (They might even let him use the ball-washers.)

The only explanation that makes any sense is that someone, somehow has already made it clear that his failure to date is so far beyond the range of Herbert Hoover, (as in Hoover times-100), that the only election strategy now worth pursuing is to pour everything into the blame game. Blame everything on the states, states with Democratic governors in particular. THEY refused to do their job! THEY refused to test! THEIR incompetence is what has held down the economy. And THEIR whining about needing Trump’s help only shows THEIR ineptitude and weakness.

Without testing there’s no imaginable way the economic tragedy of Trump’s incompetence will have dissipated by November. With testing — at the level of hundreds of thousands per day — there is at least a real-world chance that recovery would be sufficient enough to allow millions to return to work.

And at that point thousands would forget/ignore how all this got so off-the-charts bad and vote to give Dear Leader another chance.

Go ahead explain it to me. I don’t get it.

Hillary Won the Battle, But Donald Could Still Win the War

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3In the 20 minutes it took me to drive home from a debate-watching party last night the “elite media” decided that Donald Trump badly lost the first debate with Hillary Clinton and that as ridiculous as he looked and sounded (the sniffing!) it wasn’t going to matter all that much.

In 2016 when everyone with a smartphone is a pundit and a publisher, citizen-satirists spat out some hilarious bits overnight. Like, for example, Donald Trump’s constant sniffing set to Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine”. We also got a re-visit of Rose O’Donnell’s Trump imitation, and her “Daily Show” “history of The Donald”. Not to mention, if sick jokes are your thing, scalding fact-check after scalding fact check. Not that, the cable heads reminded each other, either Trump or his people care all that much about facts..

Conventional wisdom this morning is that Trump was exposed to well over 80 million people, many of whom have never seen him one-on-one with a serious opponent who wasn’t pandering to the same low-information voter base. The jabbering mess that he was last night may move a few “educated white suburban voters” away from him. Either that  or away from the voting booth entirely.

Other speculation I’ve seen over the last eight hours suggests “independent-minded” millennials clinging to either Jill Stein or Gary Johnson may … may … decide that since Hillary didn’t come off like Margaret Hamilton as The Wicked Witch of the West they might, y’know like, go for her after all. Despite “all that crooked stuff about her”, almost none of which they can explain with any detail or coherence.

But as much as I thought Hillary did just fine — she can drop the “trumped up trickle down” line — I watched Trump and kept thinking, “This works for him. It makes no sense at all. But it sounds like the same gilded-Mussolini, tough strutting egomaniac that ‘his people’ adore.” What they saw last night was the same thing they’ve seen since the get-go. Namely, “The guy who is going to stick it to everyone and everything that has made my life the mess it is.”

My belief about that is based on what I have come to accept as a fact. Namely, that wonky policy stuff — nuclear triads, strategic alliances, pre-school baby care and all that liberal, nanny state think tank BS — matters far, far less to the average “Trumpist” than, “blowing shit up”, for lack of a better phrase. Trump’s is a grievance and resentment campaign. His people don’t want “change” so much as they want vengeance on everyone that FoxNews, Rush Limbaugh and Breitbart say have done them wrong. There’s nothing constructive, no “making America great again” about it.

As along as Trump keeps picking scabs and pressing hair-trigger emotional buttons like he did in the debate, with his visions of roaming gangs of gun-wielding immigrants turning Chicago into Aleppo, he won’t lose a single vote of the irrationally terrified, angry and under-informed. Or the “37.5% who will vote for a bag of cement with an ‘R’ painted on it”, to quote Trump-despising GOP operative Mike Murphy.

A year ago I said I could see a path to Trump actually winning (although I still don’t think he will). It was based on this simple math. If he rallies even 10% of the “low information” crowd who rarely if ever vote, and adds them to the “37.5%” who will vote for any Republican no matter if he is an “orange anus”, to quote Rosie O’Donnell, he becomes POTUS 45.

The gobsmacked “elites” (that’d be TV talking heads everywhere but on FoxNews, all Democrats but mainly Hollywood liberals, and anyone who went to college and reads books with multi-syllable words) continue to flounder about trying to explain why Trump hasn’t cratered. Theories abound. But one explanation that hasn’t been examined closely enough is Trump’s vernacular and speaking rhythm, its similarity to religion and advertising, and how effective that is with an audience almost entirely “informed” by TV and pop culture.

Allow me to quote from length, James Fallows in this month’s Atlantic cover story

***

“Donald Trump’s language is notably simple and spare, at every level from word choice to sentence and paragraph structure. Of a thousand examples I’ll use just a few.

In the second Republican debate, hosted by CNN and held at the Reagan library, in California, moderator Jake Tapper asked Trump to explain his ‘build a wall’ immigration plan. Tapper said that fellow candidate Chris Christie had called it impractical. How would Trump respond? He did so this way:

‘First of all, I want to build a wall, a wall that works. So important, and it’s a big part of it.

Second of all, we have a lot of really bad dudes in this country from outside, and I think Chris knows that, maybe as well as anybody.

They go. If I get elected, first day they’re gone. Gangs all over the place. Chicago, Baltimore, no matter where you look.

We have a country based on laws.’

Bad dudes. A wall that works. Gangs all over the place.

After the first GOP debate Jack Shafer, of Politico, ran the transcript of Trump’s remarks through the Flesch-Kinkaid analyzer of reading difficulty, which said they matched a fourth-grade reading level. One of Trump’s press conferences at about the same time was at a third-grade level.

 In political language, plainness is powerful. ‘Of the people, by the people, for the people’. ‘Ask not what your country can do for you’. ‘I have a dream’. This is especially so for language designed to be heard, like speeches and debate exchanges, rather than read from a page. People absorb and retain information in smaller increments through the ear than through the eye. Thus the classic intonations of every major religion have the simple, repetitive cadence also found in the best political speeches. ‘In the beginning’. ‘And it was good’. ‘Let us pray’.
But Trump takes this much further, as he does with so many other things. Decades ago, when I worked on presidential speeches, some news analyst made fun of me for saying in an interview that we were aiming for a seventh-grade level in a certain televised address. But that is generally the level of effective mass communication—newscasts, advertising, speeches—and it is about where most of the other Republicans ended up when Shafer ran their transcripts through the analyzer. (Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, and Scott Walker were at an eighth-grade level; Ted Cruz at ninth; and John Kasich at fifth.)

Another illustration: At a Fox Business debate in January in Charleston, South Carolina, Maria Bartiromo asked Trump about criticism from South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, also a Republican, that his tone was too angry. The transcript shows:

‘I’m very angry because our country is being run horribly, and I will gladly accept the mantle of anger. Our military is a disaster’. [The outlier word here is mantle.]

(APPLAUSE)

‘Our health care is a horror show. Obamacare, we’re going to repeal it and replace it. We have no borders. Our vets are being treated horribly. Illegal immigration is beyond belief. Our country is being run by incompetent people. And yes, I am angry’.

(APPLAUSE)

‘And I won’t be angry when we fix it, but until we fix it, I’m very, very angry. And I say that to Nikki. So when Nikki said that, I wasn’t offended. She said the truth’.

This is the classic language of both persuasion and sales—simple, direct, unmistakable, strong.”

***

Trump’s sustained viability has nothing to do with any specific remedies he has for the end-of-days apocalyptic disaster he imagines outside our windows. He is where he is because he, and he alone of everyone running this year, speaks in a way — full of terse, resonant, “See Dick run” emotional cues — that an astonishing/appalling chunk of the population finds reassuring and inspiring.

Weird as that sounds.