Cromwell

It was, to be sure, a vintage Trump performance.  He stomped and sniffled around the stage like an enraged gorilla with a cold.  He attacked the moderators. He lied, constantly.  He promised to politicize the judicial system. He dissed his running mate.  He gave long, rambling, stream of consciousness answers that made no sense.   He called the benighted people of Aleppo terrorists.  He cozied up to Putin, as usual.  And, of course, he juxtaposed his “locker room talk” with “political correctness,” and went after Bill Clinton, who wasn’t the Clinton on the stage.

This would have been a great approach prior to a primary, because it undoubtedly fired up the base;  I’m sure the Breitbart crowd thinks he won. Unfortunately for him, his issues aren’t with his base;  they are with moderate, and largely Republican, women.  Motivating the base by itself will not even come close to getting him elected.

What this debate showed, above all, is that Trump only operates at one speed; when he is challenged, he gets angry and escalates.  If we elect him, he will be doubling down with our liberties, our property, and our lives.  Putin and Xi would love that, but it isn’t a good bet for us.

The town hall format has some significant advantages and disadvantages for Trump.  It is unlikely that the citizen questioners will be given the right to cross-examine him, and fact checking will be harder; that will help him.  On the other hand, the candidates will be expected to show some empathy for the questioners, and Trump is incapable of doing that, because, in his eyes, everything is about him.

My advice to Clinton is simple:  only make personal attacks as counterpunches; go high wherever possible;  don’t rely on the moderators to do any fact checking; be clear and firm when you’re on defense; and let him hang himself.

Donald Trump basically lies every time his lips move.  It’s who he is; he can’t help it.  His fondness for coarse language is well-known;  he justifies it by juxtaposing vulgarity with “political correctness.”  His misogynist tendencies and his blatant infidelities are a matter of public record.  His bigotry is the centerpiece of his campaign.  He admires foreign strong men, advocates violating international law and the Constitution, and supports a neocolonialist foreign policy.  His tax plan is a huge giveaway to rich people who are already sitting on mountains of cash. His protectionism and his deficits would lead to a sharp recession.  He thinks climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese in order to take away American manufacturing jobs.  And, of course, he’s the king of the birthers.

Apparently, that amazingly undistinguished record wasn’t enough to cost him the endorsement of most of the Republican leadership, but an eleven year old tape may do the trick.

I’m at a loss to explain it.  To me, the only people who should logically even consider voting for the man are the truly desperate, the deluded, and white nationalists.  Everyone else is gambling his life, liberty, and property for. . . what?

My wife thinks it is his use of the p-word that set this episode apart from the rest. Maybe she’s right, or maybe it was a pretext for people already planning to jump ship, or maybe it was just the final straw on the camel’s back.  One thing is for sure:  if the establishment truly deserts him en masse, the likelihood of a split in the GOP after November just increased dramatically.

Civil war immediately breaks out in the Republican Party.  Trump supporters blame the establishment for his defeat; the establishment, of course, blames him and his white nationalist supporters.

Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan work for party unity by engaging in the same kind of obstructionism that worked so well from 2009 to 2010.  In McConnell’s case, it is because he loves power; for Ryan, it is all about keeping reactionary voters on board to bring about his revolution.  Will they succeed?  Probably, but not certainly.

Two things happen:

1.  The party in the country moves sharply to the left, as Clinton’s defeat is attributed to her inability to provide a clear and inspiring alternative to Trumpism.  Bernie Sanders becomes the de facto party leader.
2.  Reactions to President Trump within Congress are mixed.  Some Democrats want to emulate Mitch McConnell and engage in obstructionism, while others view him as an ideological tabular rasa and offer to negotiate with him in order to stave off some of the worst aspects of the coming Ryan Revolution (most notably, entitlement cuts).

Trump argues that his success in gaming the system proves that he knows where the loopholes are and how to fix them.   I’ll grant him his familiarity with the tax code, but where is his plan to deal with the loopholes?  His tax proposals are nothing but a windfall for people like himself.

China and Russia have a very complex, layered relationship.  On the positive side, they resolved their boundary issue a few years ago, the PRC might not even exist but for Soviet assistance after the end of World War II, and, above all, they have a common enemy:  the US.  On the negative side:  there is plenty of racism at play, particularly on the Russian side;  the Russians were enthusiastic imperialists in China at the end of the 19th Century; the relationship between the two countries was extremely frosty during the 1960’s; and the growing imbalance of power between the two does not bode well for the future.

As China rises, it will increasingly threaten to turn parts of Siberia into an economic colony, but Russia as a whole is much too large to be a vassal state.  It is likely, in the long run, that the Russians will view the Chinese as a greater threat than the US.

                   Back to the USSR

Flew into Damascus just the other day.

Russian power everywhere

Saw the bodies piled up along the way.

And, you know, I didn’t care.

 

We’re back to the USSR.

You don’t know how lucky you are, boys.

Back to the USSR.

 

My Ukraine boys really knocked them out.

They left the West behind.

And cyberspies make me sing and shout.

Assange is always on my mind.

 

Show me how you’re wiping out your foes today.

Pretend we’re killing terrorists.

Obama’s throwing mud at me most every day

But none of it can really stick.

 

We’re back to the USSR.

You don’t know how lucky you are, boys.

Back to the USSR.

 

Parody of “Back in the USSR” by Lennon/McCartney.

Do you remember when Mitt Romney was ripping the 47 percent of Americans who weren’t paying anything in federal income taxes?  Who would have imagined that the GOP would nominate one of them in 2016?

The Chinese have traditionally divided the outside world into two parts:  vassal states and barbarians.  India doesn’t fit in that narrative;  like China, it is a great civilization with an enormous population that suffered the yoke of colonialism and has nuclear weapons.  It actually exported part of its culture (Buddhism) to China, rather than the other way around.  The two differ, however, in that the impacts of colonialism were more widespread in India, India is far more chaotic and democratic than China, and the Indian economy is based on agriculture and services, not manufacturing.

Analogies are never perfect, but I think it would be fair to say that the relationship between China and India resembles in some respects the relationship between Germany and Italy.  Geographically, India looks a lot like a much larger version of Italy:  a peninsula with mountains protecting its northern border.

The rise of China, and its increasing assertiveness abroad, has inevitably led to a closer connection between the US and India.   If the Chinese blunder their way into encirclement, India (with some reluctance) will be the key player.  China and India may well be the most important big power rivalry in the 21st Century.

 

The great would-be emperor Xi.

The master of all that he sees.

He’s the man of the hour.

He wants to keep power.

He won’t give it up easily.

Most people don’t remember this, but Ronald Reagan had the reputation of being a dangerous right-winger outside of the political mainstream prior to his debate with Carter.  He went a long way towards normalizing his image by showing off his avuncular side during the debate, and he won the 1980 election by a large margin.

Donald Trump came into the first debate with a similar problem, but, unlike Reagan, he added to it with his unhinged performance.   He has Reagan’s swagger, but none of his effortless charm.  Can he recover by turning himself into the man Mike Pence incorrectly says he is in the remaining two debates?  I just don’t see it.

The next big task for the Chinese Communist Party is to do something without precedent:  to give the entire country a first world standard of living without giving up its arbitrary power over the legal system and the economy.  I think the South Korean system could be a plausible starting point;  just substitute the privately-owned chaebols for the Chinese state-owned enterprises, and you are a part of the way there.

As far as I know, Xi isn’t interested in my advice.  Otherwise, the Chinese and the South Koreans don’t have a lot of issues except for North Korea.  There will always be limits on the closeness of the relationship unless and until the Chinese can somehow bring North Korea under control.

I didn’t watch much of it, because really, who cares?  What I saw during those brief intervals was a battle between an essentially genial but overly amped attack poodle and a smarmy, condescending guy who completely disregarded the moderator’s questions and repeatedly lied about his running mate’s positions.

It would appear that America found the smarmy, condescending guy to be more compelling, which doesn’t surprise me, because lying can be an extremely effective debate tactic.  It certainly worked for Mitt Romney when he talked about his tax cut plan in 2012.

The bottom line is that, no, Donald Trump isn’t just a slightly more coarse and unpolished version of Mike Pence.  America can draw its own conclusions; we don’t need to take Pence’s word for it.

In 2012, the GOP nominated Mitt Romney, an establishment politician if there ever was one.  This year, they nominated Trump.  Did the party just go nuts in four short years, and, if so, why?

I think it is mostly happenstance.   The economy is in better shape now than it was in 2012, and there have been fewer manufactured crises over the debt limit and government shutdowns over the last four years.  The rise of IS and gay marriage probably played a role in firing up the reactionary base.  The biggest change, however, is in the GOP candidates themselves.

Romney was shrewd enough to appropriate the immigration issue for himself. He was unopposed in his lane;  his two ultimate rivals were relatively undistinguished and had little claim to be “outsiders.”  In 2016, however, the establishment lane was the one that was crowded, Trump had the advantages of outsider status, celebrity, and free media, and Trump grabbed the immigration issue at the beginning of the campaign.

All of this suggests that if the GOP doesn’t split, and Trump goes away quietly (neither event is a certainty), the GOP will return to its 2012 “normal” state if it loses the election;  in other words, everyone will go back to pretending that the GOP electorate believes in limited government rather than white nationalist politics, and blind obstruction of the Clinton agenda will be the order of the day.