Cromwell

An effective political commercial does at least one of two things: it tells you something you didn’t already know about the candidate; or it makes you feel more strongly about him. What does this mean for commercials in 2024?

Commercials which portray Trump as an evil crook or which complain about inflation probably won’t make much of an impact, since everyone already has a view of Trump and has experienced inflation. But a commercial about the impact of Trump’s tariffs might very well move the needle, because the average voter knows nothing about these plans. The same would be true of Trump’s supposedly secret plan to end the war in Ukraine. The public deserves to hear more on this issue.

Josh Stein, the Democrat running for governor in North Carolina, is running a particular commercial about every ten minutes. It features Mark Robinson, his extremist Republican opponent, saying that abortion would not be necessary if women would be responsible and keep their skirts down. The commercial is getting a bit tiresome at this point, but it is extremely effective. What does that tell us?

That insulting over half the electorate probably isn’t a good idea. That abortion is still a big issue. And that most of the anti-abortion movement is more driven by the desire to punish what it views as inappropriate sexual conduct by women than by any wish to protect fetuses, as I’ve noted on many previous occasions.

In other words, the right continues to believe that the wages of sin is birth.

C: I haven’t talked to you since the trial started. What were your reactions?

S: The trial was rigged, of course.

C: How so?

S: In so many ways. First of all, all of the witnesses were liars who hated Trump.

C: Hope Hicks? David Pecker?

S: They’re all liars. Everyone but Trump.

C: The man who told 30,000 lies in office?

S: The Washington Post lies, too. Second, the judge was biased.

C: His rulings were consistent with New York law. No serious commentator thinks otherwise.

S: He’s a Democrat, so he’s biased. He should have recused himself.

C: Just like Thomas and Alito?

S: That’s different. They represent real America. They have to vote to save us from moochers and woke warriors.

C: What else?

S: The jury came from Manhattan. They were all Trump haters, not real Americans.

C: But Trump is from Manhattan, not real America, as you call it.

S: He got over it. He hates cities as much as I do. Real America is white, Christian, and rural. It’s the only America that counts.

C: You don’t trust the jury system?

S: I only believe in juries in red America. Blue people aren’t real Americans. All they do is try to tell us how to think and ship our jobs overseas. They shouldn’t even have the right to vote.

C: So I guess you don’t really believe in liberal democracy, either?

S: I believe in Donald Trump. He’s all that stands between me and a blue wall of wokeness. He’ll make America great again, and then we can go back to normal.

C: Do you think a dictatorship is necessary to make America great again?

S: A short one, maybe. The guilty need to be punished. Revenge is required. Then we can go back to normal.

C: What does Trump stand for that you find so compelling? After all, his personal weaknesses are a matter of public record.

S: He hates the same people I do, and he’s determined to destroy them. He may not be much like me, and he may give lots of handouts to rich people, but he wants to get rid of wokeness and the elites and give power to real Americans. That’s what I believe in.

Vance professes to believe that American weapons are irrelevant to Ukrainian security; the ultimate guarantees of Ukrainian independence are the lack of Russian resources to occupy the country and Putin’s supposed desire to reduce defense spending. Is he right?

No. The issue with an occupation is a real one–in fact, I cited it as a reason he wouldn’t invade years ago–but a man who inflicts hundreds of thousands of casualties on both sides because Duke Vladimir of Rus hung out in Ukraine isn’t likely to be deterred by such a prosaic problem. And there is no reason to believe that Putin wants to put his economy back on a peacetime footing. The war has been a strategic disaster for Russia, but it has helped Putin dispense with the flotsam and jetsam of democracy and run the country as a purely fascist state. The end of the emergency would result in calls for liberalization. Why would Putin go for that?

It is not true, as Vance suggests, that a total Russian victory is inevitable. NATO weapons may not be enough to expel the Russians entirely from Ukraine, but all of the evidence indicates that they are enough to create a stalemate that NATO and Ukraine can ultimately tolerate. That’s our real war aim here.

In the end, the survival of American liberal democracy doesn’t depend on the Constitution or adherence to democratic norms. It doesn’t even revolve around an independent judiciary; as Stalin might say, how many divisions does John Roberts have?

No, the survival of our liberal democracy in the face of a potential Trump despotism depends on the willingness of the military to refuse to obey unlawful orders to set up and run concentration camps and to shoot down protesters. That’s the bottom line here.

Does that fill you with confidence?

In the most extreme scenario, Trump uses the pretext of an immigrant “invasion” to use emergency powers to round up both immigrants and political opponents. He ignores court orders telling him to stop. When demonstrations against his program turn violent, he invokes the Insurrection Act and declares a permanent state of martial law in the blue states. The internet and the MSM are completely purged of dissenting views. America is now a Trumpist dictatorship.

Nothing about this scenario is absurd. We know Trump wanted to use the Insurrection Act during his first term, but he was talked out of it at the time. Who will dare do it this time?

Not any of the Republicans in Congress, that’s for sure.

In this intermediate scenario, Trump emulates his new hero, Viktor Orban, to create a political system that is stacked against his opponents. The civil service is purged; the military and our universities are brought completely under control; gerrymandering continues; culture war enemies are completely vanquished; and the left-leaning MSM are crushed by defamation suits and regulatory harassment. The reactionary judiciary blesses it all. Orban would be proud.

The problem with this approach is that support for liberal democracy is more entrenched here than in Hungary. Can Trump really force Jeff Bezos to sell the WaPo to a right-wing supporter? Can he find enough reactionary professors to turn our elite universities around? Will the apolitical military go quietly? Can blue state governments be brought under control without the use of force? I doubt it.

This would be a long, grinding process. Observers of the Hungarian descent have projected that it will take at least a decade. Trump doesn’t have that much time. As a result, Option 3 makes more sense for him.

The optimist looks at a second Trump term and imagines something similar to the first one. Sure, the man on golf cart is obnoxious and divisive and corrupt. He moves the culture war further to the right, imposes inflationary tariffs, stabs Ukraine in the back, and gives lavish presents to businessmen who support him. But he doesn’t leave NATO, he doesn’t start any unnecessary wars, he doesn’t shoot protesters, he doesn’t stifle dissent in the MSM and on the internet, and above all, he complies with court orders pertaining to constitutional rights. The most fundamental guardrails against despotism remain in place.

Is this a plausible outcome? Tomorrow, I will describe two darker scenarios, and you can decide for yourself.

I shouldn’t have to applaud the Supreme Court for making the patently obvious finding that the plaintiffs in the abortion pill case didn’t have standing. Given its recent record, however, it is entitled to a single cheer. The decision could have been much worse.

This is probably the high-water mark for the left in the term. Expect plenty of red meat for reactionaries, and lots of support for the McConnell Project, in what remains.

As I’ve said before, I didn’t really care much about chaos at the border, because it didn’t have any direct impact on me. Then Abbott started his program of busing migrants to large blue cities, which couldn’t find the resources to take care of them. Support for the migrants fell dramatically on the left. It put Biden’s re-election campaign in jeopardy. Now I have to care.

If Trump wins in November, he will owe his victory in large part to Abbott. Will he show any gratitude? Don’t bet on it.

A note to my readers: I will be on vacation this week. Regular posts will resume on 6/17.

Netanyahu is coming to America to ask–no, to demand, because Bibi never just asks us for anything–our unconditional support for whatever Israel wants to do in Gaza. In other words, he wants us to give him a blank check. Biden won’t give it to him, but Trump and the Republicans probably would.

The problem is that giving your smaller ally a blank check doesn’t usually end well. Isn’t that right, Kaiser Wilhelm?

Biden is currently running a commercial which warns us that Trump is seeking revenge in his campaign. Is that an effective message?

Without more, I don’t think so. I think Biden needs to describe what that means for the voting public. The fact is that Trump has no plans or even much interest in improving the lot of the average American. He is running solely to satisfy his own emotional needs; getting revenge against the men who defeated and prosecuted him is part of that campaign.

Why would you vote for someone who doesn’t give a damn about your welfare?

The Israelis launched a strike on a school that was occupied by both civilians and Hamas fighters yesterday. A small number of fighters and a much larger number of civilians were killed. The world is outraged; the Israelis say the attack was justified. What conclusions should we draw from this?

Hamas is fighting a guerrilla war in Gaza. It has no alternative, because it is totally outmanned and outgunned. Its fighters try to survive by mixing with the civilian population. It is what the Viet Cong did, and what the Boers did, and what the Cuban rebels did in the 19th century. As a tactic, it is nothing new.

The logical approach to the problem is to separate the fighters from the population. The Israeli military is not doing that, either because the government sees the entire population as the enemy, or because it thinks the job is just too hard. The government has decided that its overriding objective is to kill fighters, not to protect civilians. As a result, attacks like yesterday’s resulting in high numbers of civilian casualties are commonplace. The Israelis aren’t singling out civilians, but if they get in the way, they are acceptable collateral damage.

Indifference to civilian deaths creates a political problem for Israel both in Gaza and in the rest of the world. The Israelis are, in the long run, only strengthening opposition to their control of Gaza by offering no plausible alternative to resistance. One of two things is going to happen: either Hamas, or something like it, will revive after the Israelis get sick of the costs of the occupation; or the Israelis will have to escalate and either liquidate the population or move it elsewhere.

Trump 2.0, unlike the previous version, won’t be frustrated by members of his own administration. A GOP Congress will let him do whatever he pleases. The judiciary will try to keep him within the lines, but he can and will ignore even the Supreme Court if he sees fit. The military will try to remain apolitical, but you would be foolish to assume that they will disobey orders from the commander-in-chief just because they are unlawful, particularly after Trump gets to choose the leadership. That leaves the blue states as a potential source of effective dissent. What will he have in store for them?

The Insurrection Act, a bogus “emergency,” and martial law. Sure, he didn’t try it last time, but are you willing to bet your life on that happening again, after everything that has happened in the last few years?

Trumpism doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it has plenty of characteristics in common with European right-wing populism, including hatred of immigrants, support for declining industries and rural areas against a supposedly insensitive urban elite, and contempt for woke cultural ideas. But is Trumpism unique in some ways?

Yes. First of all, the European extreme right parties are ideological; they aren’t cults of personality. The individual grievances of their leaders don’t figure into their campaign strategies. Second, they aren’t attacking their own legal and political institutions as being fundamentally rotten. Finally, they haven’t targeted a large proportion of their own citizens as being the enemy. Trump and his supporters have made it clear that anyone who votes against them is not a real American and should be dealt with accordingly.

The emphasis on personal grievances is really what sets Trump apart from any other right-wing dictator or semi-democratic strongman with whom I’m familiar. Even Hitler and Mussolini didn’t do that; for them, at least in public, it was about the revival of the nation, not themselves. In a way, that may make Trump less dangerous than someone driven by ideology, but his reservoir of venom is almost bottomless, so it would be a mistake to assume that his ambition to turn blue America into an ash heap is limited.