The problem with being a strongman is that there is no one else to blame when things go wrong. Trump’s need to whine and shift responsibility to his opponents and the MSM, therefore, may well be our best guarantee of maintaining our political and free expression rights.
Whether Barr agrees or not is another matter.
Unless Trump succeeds in emulating his idol Putin and making himself president for life, the GOP will need a new candidate in 2024. My best guess is that you will see something of a generational divide at that time. On the one hand, you can expect Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz (Class of 2016) to come back and try again; on the other, there will be new faces, such as Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, and Rick Scott, in the picture.
Which generation will prevail? I will be addressing this question from a variety of angles in a series of posts over the next day or two.
From their perspective, GOP members of Congress basically sold their souls to the devil by voting for the $2 trillion relief package. They can justify it by telling themselves that it was necessary to keep Trump in office and the free-spending Democrats out of power. But what happens after the election? What will they say in January, 2021?
If Biden wins in November, history tells us that the GOP will immediately start screaming about the deficit and demanding spending cuts. It is consistent both with their ideology and their desire to sabotage growth under a Democratic president. But what if Trump wins? No longer subject to the will of the electorate, will he continue with opportunistic “national conservative” economic policies, or will he swerve back to the CLs and support radical spending cuts?
I don’t know the answer to that one–only that it will come up, and be the source of serious debate within the GOP.
When the virus hit, he was reluctant to impose strict limitations on social and economic activity for fear of damaging the economy. Instead, he decided to shut the barn door after the horse had bolted by protecting the borders against outsiders from infected areas. Predictably, this approach was a failure.
Is it Trump or Ron DeSantis? You decide.
Andrew Cuomo rarely makes any direct comments about Trump, presumably for fear of inviting retaliation against the people of New York. It would be, in any event, unnecessary. Cuomo brings consistency, compassion, and a reliance on the best information to the fight against the virus. It is the exact opposite of the sewage that flows from the White House on a nightly basis, and everyone knows it.
Cuomo is clearly the leader of the blue team in the current political battle. Is that a problem, given that Biden is the presumptive nominee? Not really. Biden isn’t even the nominee yet; he doesn’t have any power to fight the virus at this point; and the election is over seven months away. There will be plenty of time for overt partisanship between now and then.
The elderly are among the GOP’s most reliable voters. The party also professes to be “pro-life.” The suggestion by GOP politicians and supporters that the elderly should sacrifice themselves for the GDP (a false choice, given that consumer confidence in the face of millions of virus deaths would be zero) is consequently all the more striking.
What does it mean? In a nutshell, that Trump’s crass materialism and worship of the stock market has taken over the GOP, and that the man on golf cart’s political survival is a matter of greater concern to GOP leaders than the health and well-being of the American public. Can there be any greater indictment of the party than that?
Young socialists believe it, and aren’t afraid to say it: Barack Obama was a failed president. With the advantages of a supermajority in the Senate and an economic crisis, he bailed out the system instead of bringing about “the revolution.” Inequality was worse when he left office than when he came in. His legacy is a source of shame, not pride.
The vast majority of Democrats feel otherwise, of course, which is why Bernie Sanders will never be heard saying any of this. His attempt to finesse the issue instead of confronting it was a rare act of political realism. It also tells you that, deep in his heart, even he knew that he couldn’t beat the Democratic establishment unless they handed the nomination to him on a silver platter. When it was all said and done, the electorate chose the man who most obviously personifies the Obama legacy, and Sanders had no answer for it.
The excellent John Harris of Politico calls Trump an “authoritarian weakman” for his failure to amass and use extraordinary powers in the current crisis. I personally prefer the term “man on golf cart,” but the meaning is the same. Is he right?
Yes. I predicted this years ago when I posed the question about a man on horseback who couldn’t ride a horse. Being a successful strongman takes discipline, focus, and hard work. Trump is incapable of any of that; he just wants to spend his time in office rewarding himself and his friends, punishing his enemies, and soaking in public adulation.
Does that mean we can let our guard down? No, for two reasons. First, he is rotting the foundations of our system with his divisiveness, indifference to liberal democratic norms, and corruption; the next GOP president will undoubtedly be made of sterner stuff, and he may be able to destroy the system with one final shove. Second, Trump is going to get more desperate as the election gets closer. The prospect of defeat could drive him from being a dictator on Twitter to the real thing, particularly if the emergency continues. Stay tuned.
Socialists hate Joe Biden. Hell, they even hate Elizabeth Warren. They won’t settle for anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders. Some of them are prepared to stay home, or vote for third party candidates, because they are playing the long game. In their eyes, there is no meaningful difference between Trump and Biden, and Trump is their most effective recruiter, so why vote for Biden?
The virus is the answer why. The long game consists of an infinite number of short games. If you don’t survive the present, discussions about the future are meaningless. A socialist ash heap is just an ash heap with a red flag.
My advice to them is, vote as if your life depends on it, because . . . it does.
On the 45th President Trump.
The virus has made him a grump.
His fans now have said
We’d be better off dead
Than to watch the economy slump.
In a crisis, it is inevitable that the president will command the airwaves. That is undoubtedly the reason Trump’s ratings have gone up slightly in spite of his inept and chaotic response to the virus. In a matter of days, however, we are about to be inundated with images of overwhelmed hospitals and dying virus patients in America, not China or Italy. Will that change the situation?
In the short run, I’m guessing not. Most of the images will be from New York City. People from red states who despise “New York values” are going to view the pandemic as a sort of holy revenge for the innumerable sins of blue people. That won’t move the needle much, if at all.
But what if the images change to dying white Christians and overflowing hospitals in red states? Will that have any impact? Again, I would say no. The narrative will change from divine vengeance to making painful but necessary trade-offs to protect real Americans by re-electing Trump. That’s the story that Fox News is already putting out, and it will probably stick.
To the left, we’re living in a second Gilded Age, with inequality soaring, workers struggling, and the one percent exercising way too much influence over government and the economy. There is plenty of hard data to support that conclusion, but the right sometimes disputes it, and sometimes simply dismisses it as irrelevant.
To the right, we’re refighting the Civil War, with the culture wars (most notably, but not exclusively, abortion) replacing slavery as the central issue. There is plenty of reason to believe that most of the right is more motivated by cultural than economic concerns, but the left, in its self-righteous blindness, mostly blows this off as “false consciousness” and refuses to take it seriously.
How can we reunite the country when we can’t even agree on the era we’re reliving?
Have you noticed that it has been self-proclaimed “pro-life” people who are effectively saying that old people should take one for the team and die from the virus for the sake of the economy and the Trump re-election campaign? Do you think that is an aberration?
It isn’t. While the handful of Christian Democrats who remain in the GOP can legitimately describe themselves as “pro-life,” Reactionaries have a completely different agenda. Most of them support cutting the safety net, including medical services, for the poor, the highest possible barriers to immigration for refugees, and the death penalty. If that makes you “pro-life,” then I’m Mitch McConnell.
I believe it was Justice Jackson who said that the Constitution was not a suicide pact. He was right, of course. Circumstances that the Founding Fathers could not have foreseen call for extraordinary measures. The most important consideration at such times is not paper laws or even institutions as much as trust that our leaders are completely and selflessly committed to the best interests of the nation as a whole.
That’s a problem today. Do you trust William Barr to refrain from using any new extraordinary powers to lock up Trump’s political opponents and prominent left-wing culture warriors? Do you trust Steve Mnuchin to use bailout funds for the truly needy, and not Trump and businesses that suck up to him? And, above all, do you trust Trump to put the interests of the entire country ahead of his own financial and political well-being?
Of course you don’t. You would be mad if you did.
For all of his lies and failures, Donald Trump has kept one promise in spades: he has consistently been the Great Disrupter. Every time he behaves in a completely unconventional way, even if it involves corruption or incompetence, his fans view it as evidence that, unlike other politicians, he keeps his word and doesn’t sell them out. They admire him for it.
That approach works, in a fashion, in normal times. But what happens when the Great Disrupter is knee deep in chaos? Is throwing gas on the fire a plausible strategy?
For him personally, maybe. For the country, resoundingly, no.