I feel like I should put a notice on this APR.
WARNING: the contents here are high in Donald J. Trump. People who have more than half a brain have determined that exposure to Donald J. Trump, in even moderate doses, is bad for your temper, can cause sleeplessness, frustration, despair, ennui, rage, and a conviction that the world has already been loaded into one ugly, hairy, spray-tanned handbasket for that final trip to hell.
Seriously, industrial-sized doses of melatonin and keeping your eyes closed until November might be the best thing. Just don’t oversleep. You’ll need to drag yourself to the polls to be sure that the nation isn’t in for a thin coating of cheap gold paint. Or possibly to thwart The Handmaid Ted before he replaces the Constitution with select pages from The Crucible.
So… sorry to hear you’re awake. Fortunately, at least some of the writing this morning is really, really good.
Leonard Pitts looks into the GOP’s open grave.
“If he was for it, we had to be against it.”
FORMER U.S. SEN. GEORGE VOINOVICH QUOTED IN ‘THE NEW NEW DEAL’ BY MICHAEL GRUNWALD
The “he” is President Obama. The “we” is the Republican Party. And it is not coincidental that as the former pushes toward the end of his second term, the latter is coming apart.
The GOP is an incoherent mess. Republican-on-Republican rhetorical violence has become commonplace. Party members find themselves mulling whether to break away and form a third party or unite behind a coarse, blustering bigot whose scapegoating and strongman rhetoric has Holocaust survivors comparing him to Hitler.
Yes. Of course. An ex-friggin’-xactly. It’s precisely the path that the GOP selected for “victory,” the path that started with “the nine most terrifying words” and which runs through “eighty years of precedent” that leads straight to Trump.
The situation is so objectively and transparently grim that many on the right no longer even bother to spin it. “I’m a lifelong Republican,” tweeted historian Max Boot last week, “but [Donald] Trump surge proves that every bad thing Democrats have ever said about GOP is basically true.”
“It would be terrible,” wrote Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens last week, “to think that the left was right about the right all these years.”
I hate to… no I don’t. I told you so. Everyone told you so. Because it was immediately obvious to the most casual observer.
Michael Grunwald distilled the GOP’s thinking as follows: “As long as Republicans refused to follow his lead, Americans would see partisan food fights and conclude that Obama had failed to produce change.”
Republicans and their media accomplices buttressed that strategy with a campaign of insult and disrespect designed to delegitimize Obama.
Leonard Pitts writes some of the finest regular columns of our time, but this one is timeless. Go read it. Put down the muffin. Read it now.
And yes, there’s more of Trump stuff inside, and I’m sadly all out of sloth-buckets. Come on in anyway.
Nicholas Kristof thinks that things on your TV may be even scarier than you think.
Is there any scarier nightmare than President Donald J. Trump in a tense international crisis, indignant and impatient, with his sweaty finger on the nuclear trigger? …
Most of the discussion about Trump focuses on domestic policy. But checks and balances mean that there are limits to what a president can achieve domestically, while the Constitution gives a commander in chief a much freer hand abroad.
That’s what horrifies America-watchers overseas. Der Spiegel, the German magazine, has called Trump the most dangerous man in the world. Even the leader of a Swedish nationalist party that started as a neo-Nazi white supremacist group has disavowed Trump. J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, reflected the views of many Britons when she tweeted that Trump is worse than Voldemort.
Jawohl! Der Spiegel has named Herr Drumpf the most dangerous man in the world. And believe me, they know from dangerous.
Asked about Syria, Trump said last year that he would unleash ISIS to destroy Syria’s government. …
Trump has also called for more U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq, and raised the prospect of bombing North Korean nuclear sites. A poorly informed, impatient and pugnacious leader can cause devastation, and that’s true of either Kim Jong-un or Donald Trump.
… Both Bush and President Obama worked hard to reassure the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims that the U.S. is not at war with Islam. Trump has pretty much declared war on all Muslims.
Just a quick reminder: at the beginning of World War II, it was Germany which had the biggest and best military in the world. If the US decides to ride the Trump train to crazyland, and that ride includes half the stuff the Donald has talked about, the world will reluctantly get their collective act together then drag themselves over here to kick our ass. But it won’t be fun.
And on the recruiting posters all Americans will look like Donald Trump. Which will totally serve us right.
Ruth Marcus declares the latest GOP debate the low point of politics since maybe that thing with Caesar.
Children, gather round and let me tell you about a time before candidates vouched for the size of their, um, endowments on national television.
Was it really so long ago — okay, actually, it was — that a sunglasses-wearing Bill Clinton was criticized for going on “The Arsenio Hall Show” to play his saxophone? Clinton coarsened the discourse, we were told. How tame that seems in retrospect. How dignified.
… Clinton’s willingness to show some leg seems positively Victorian in contrast to today’s discourse.
Thanks, largely but not entirely, to one Donald J. Trump.
Marcus runs through a quick recitation of recent Trumpisms.
Which brings us to Thursday, March 3, which will go down as the most embarrassing day in the history of U.S. presidential politics. At least let’s hope this is as bad as it gets. …
This might be funny — these poor guys and their anxieties — if the stakes weren’t so high. Gender solidarity impels me to suggest a solution for this juvenilia: a debate stage populated by women. That would take care of the playground insults, the shouting, the constant interrupting and talking-over.
Can we try it? I mean that. Sure, we could be talking about Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, and Jan Brewer having a nonsense-off. Completely independent of how you feel about the race between Bernie and Hillary, I think we can all agree on this: men have blown it. I mean… blown it. Royally. I’d be all up for a Constitutional amendment removing the vote from me and all other men for… fifty years? I want at least a couple of generations to pass. Long enough for people to chuckle over the idea of a man running for president. That’s chuckle. Not that strangled sound we make over the current crop.
Kathleen Parker agrees that Mr. Drumpf is enough to end the modern GOP.
So it has come to this: a brokered convention or President Hillary Clinton. ...
The most Republicans can hope for now is that Kasich and Rubio win the primaries in their home states of Ohio and Florida, respectively, as Cruz did in Texas, and enough other contests to deny Trump the necessary delegates, thus paving the way for a brokered convention. This was the recommendation of former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who presented a line-item, factual takedown of Trump on Thursday.
The other option, offered in the service of saving the republic, is to vote for Clinton. …
Even though few Republicans could ever vote Democratic, and certainly not for Clinton, it wouldn’t be the end of the world as we know it. But voting for Trump, whom other civilized nations find abhorrent, might be.
It’s pretty rare, maybe even unique, for me to recommend reading one of Parker’s pieces, and of course by next week she may be riding the of-course-we’ve-always-loved-Trump express that so many Republicans seem ready to board. But this week, go peek at the rest. There are digs at Palin, McConnell, and Ryan that warm the Sunday morning cockles.
Still, if a last-minute audible isn’t available, it may be time for some creative destruction. Should Trump become the nominee, more reasoned minds in the GOP might do well to abandon it altogether. The death of this party — of know-nothing ugliness and outright fascist rhetoric — might be a blessing, a cleansing of the palate before a resurrection of the party of limited government and individual liberty.
Until then, it’s hail to the chieftess.
They have to burn the party in order to save it… from Republican voters. By the way, I want it noted that it’s Parker, not me, who immediately jumped to the conclusion that the Democratic victor will be Clinton. I. Did. Not. Say. That. Thank you.
Michael Gerson doesn’t want to burn the GOP. He only plans to abandon it.
The GOP is not facing a debate over policy, but rather a hostile takeover by a pernicious force. Traditional Republicans are now presented with a series of deeply flawed options. And serving the party’s ideals may eventually require leaving it, at least for a season.
Traditional Republicans? What are those? I think the last one wobbled into a John Huntsman pancake breakfast and died from trying to eat all the left over carbs.
So what are anti-Trump Republicans — Republicans who want their nominee to sound more like Abraham Lincoln and less like George Wallace or Marine Le Pen — to do?
Again… where are these people? Real Lincoln Republicans were last found in the party circa 1963. Pretending that everything was hunky-dory up until Donald stole your crayons has zero overlap with the Palin-Limbaugh-Cruz-colored reality.
Option 1: Support the candidate in second place in the hope of beating Trump’s plurality with more votes and delegates….
Option 2: Even if Trump’s plurality can’t be beaten by a single candidate, deny him a majority of delegates at the convention and stop him there. ...
Option 3: Support a center-right, third-party candidate for president who would represent a civil rights Republicanism and hold the core message of the party in trust for better days. …
Option 4: Essentially sit out the election, wait for Trump to lose (he is considerably behind Clinton in most national polls) and participate in the GOP reconstruction.
Again, on the Clinton thing… it wasn’t me, it was him. Not me. Him. This article is actually kind of worth reading, if only for the hilarious levels of desperation.
Ross Douthat comes forth to represent the William Buckley wing of the party (which is a sad thing right there).
Maybe Donald Trump is doing us a favor.
A pause while Douthat takes a thinly veiled dig at Obama.
What Trump is doing, then, is showing us something different, something that less fortunate countries know all too well: how authoritarianism works, how it seduces, and ultimately how it wins.
Another pause, as Douthat lays at least half the cause for Trump’s assumption of the Republican mantle on Democrats before noting Trump’s political supporters. Who, oddly enough, all seem to hail from the GOP.
There is no real ideological consistency to this group: Trump’s expanding circle of apologists includes Sarah Palin and Steve Forbes, Mike Huckabee and Chris Christie; he has anti-immigration populists and Wall Street supply-siders, True Conservatives and self-conscious moderates, evangelical preachers and avowed white nationalists. The only common threads are cynicism, ambition and a sense of Trump as a ticket to influence they couldn’t get any other way.
Douthat then runs through all the various, broadly-defined groups responsible for enabling Trump before getting to...
Others, especially in the intelligentsia, have a kind of highbrow nihilism about our politics, a sense that American democracy’s decadence — or the Republican Party’s decadence, in particular — is so advanced that a cleansing Trumpian fire might be just the thing we need.
Intelligentsia? Highbrow nihilism? A sense of America’s decadence? Quick! Someone bring this man a mirror!
I have a little bit of the last vice
A little? A LITTLE?
… which is why I spent a long time being anti-anti-Trump: not rooting for him to win, but appreciating his truth-telling on certain issues, his capacity to upset the stagnant status quo.
There’s more… only I kind of lost interest at that point. Mostly because I was trying to figure out the issues on which Trump engaged in “truth-telling.” Was it the Pope fighting? Probably Douthat liked the Pope-fighting.
James Downie believes that Trump will never settle his brown shirt into the Oval Office.
For months, political observers said over and over that the GOP front-runner wouldn’t win the nomination. But after accumulating seven more victories on Super Tuesday, bringing his total to 11 of the first 15 states, Donald Trump has destroyed that conventional wisdom and looks likely to be Hillary Clinton’s opponent in the fall.
Again, it’s Downie that made the Clinton assumption, not me. Please direct all hate mail to him. Thank you.
… To borrow a phrase from one of the men trailing Trump: Let’s dispense with the notion that Trump has a real shot at winning in November.
Start with the basic electoral math. At the national level, Trump trails Clintonby more than three percentage points in the RealClearPolitics polling average, and she has led him in 15 of 17 national polls since December. Trump clearly does the worst against her of the possible Republican nominees. Hisunfavorables are historically high for a general election nominee. And if “more than three points” doesn’t sound impressive, note that Barack Obama rarely led Mitt Romney by more than three points in the polling averages — and he won easily. What state polling we have suggests that Clinton, like Obama, will start with 220 or 230 electoral votes safe or close to that amount, leaving Trump little room for error.
And when it comes to the media, which has been—if not “Trump friendly” at least “Trump stunned” to this point.
...barring a dramatic turn in the controversy over her State Department email, there isn’t much reason to think Clinton will struggle in the fall. Some have suggested that record turnout in the Republican primaries bodes ill for the Democrats come November. But there’s no historical evidence of such a connection.
You’ll have to excuse me. I’m going to still be scared right up to election day. And after. Because the things that seem radical and unthinkable this round? The GOP will embrace them ten minutes later. By next election, Trump and Cruz will be the staid establishment candidates that the new crop laugh about (while firing bacon-wrapped AK’s into the sky at their open-carry, bring your own minority target, rallies).
Anne Applebaum worries that we’re seeing nothing less than the fall of the west.
... in my adult life, I cannot remember a moment as dramatic as this: Right now, we are two or three bad elections away from the end of NATO, the end of the European Union and maybe the end of the liberal world order as we know it.
In the United States, we are faced with the real possibility of Republican Party presidential nominee Donald Trump, which means we have to take seriously the possibility of a President Trump. Hillary Clinton’s campaign might implode for any number of reasons, too obvious to rehash here; elections are funny things, and electorates are fickle. That means that next January we could have, in the White House, a man who is totally uninterested in what presidents Obama, Bush, Clinton, Reagan — as well as Johnson, Nixon and Truman — would all have called “our shared values.”
Trump has advocated torture, mass deportation, religious discrimination. He brags that he “would not care that much” whether Ukraine were admitted to NATO… he prefers the company of dictators to that of other democrats.
The old wisdom that was borne out of the West was forsaken... and not just in the United States.
A year from now, France also holds a presidential election. One of the front-runners, Marine Le Pen of the National Front, has promised to leave both NATO and the E.U. , to nationalize French companies and to restrict foreign investors. Like Trump, she foresees a special relationship with Russia, whose banks are funding her election campaign. ...
By the time that happens, Britain may also be halfway out the door. In June, the British vote in a referendum to leave the E.U. Right now, the vote is too close to call — and if the “leave” vote prevails, then, as I’ve written, all bets are off.
Read Applebaum’s piece this morning, and not because it’s full of funny Trump antics or arch slaps at GOP incompetence. Read it and remember the threat. For it is the doom of men that they forget (a double-nerd crown to the first person who sources both my embedded quotes without a search).
Jonathan Turley isn’t concerned about an overthrow of western democracy. He has a handbook for revolution.
In Super Tuesday exit polls, as many as 95 percent of Republicans and 65 percent of Democrats said they were “angry” or “dissatisfied” with the federal government. … Voters say they want a revolution. But that’s going to take more than electing personalities that channel our angry politics. If we want real change, we need to look at fundamental reforms to all three branches of our government.
Turley’s list of proposed changes promise to both energize and democratize our flagging republic, including direct election of the president, an expanded Supreme Court, and term limits in the legislature. That last idea certainly has some problems—see the Missouri House, where term limits have erased institutional memory and made the Republican Party 1000% more powerful—but if you could get the whole package together, I’d sign on.
Dana Milbank has a message for Hillary, and it’s not about email.
Hillary Clinton has a knack for turning triumph into tedium.
On Tuesday night, after her Super Tuesday wins all but guaranteed her the Democratic presidential nomination, she served up a victory speech that was a bowl of mush.
Milbank rolls his eyes at Clinton’s speech, but I rather liked it. Still, I’ll admit she has a knack for being highly accomplished, and utterly uninteresting.
Minutes later, Donald Trump, in his own Super Tuesday victory speech, made quick work of Clinton. “She wants to make America whole again,” he said, “and I’m trying to figure out: What is that all about?”
Milbank seems to think this is a good response… which makes me think rather less of Milbank. Especially when he thinks that Trump has captured the “empathy” that many felt Obama demonstrated in 2008. If there’s anything Trump is singularly lacking, it’s empathy in any form. But anyway...
This “empathy gap” propelled President Obama past Mitt Romney in 2012 and nearly allowed socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to topple Clinton in the primaries. If Clinton can’t fix the problem, it could doom her in November.
But there is, in this case, a silver bullet for Clinton: She can make Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) her running mate.
I only stuck with Milbank’s otherwise silly piece because I knew where it was going, and I like that destination. My only concern would be that taking Warren out of the Senate and dropping her into the veep slot could rob her of both agency and the ability to draw attention to issues. Even in the best-intentioned administrations, the VP slot tends to be a post that turns even the most serious-minded politician into a joke.
Though formal deliberations have yet to begin, the notion of a Clinton-Warren dream team has already been contemplated at Clinton’s campaign headquarters in Brooklyn.
I did say I was willing to see men kicked out of politics. This at least seems like a start.
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has the first of two stories on the importance of the issue now before the Supreme Court.
During oral arguments last week before the Supreme Court in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, Justice Elena Kagan noted that she was struck by the clear relationship between abortion restrictions in Texas and the closing of abortion clinics. “It’s almost like the perfect controlled experiment as to the effect of the law, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s like you put the law into effect, 12 clinics closed. You take the law out of effect, they reopen.”
How women respond to these closings, however, is another story. ...
In 2015, in the United States, there were about 119,000 searches for the exact phrase “how to have a miscarriage.” There were also searches for other variants — “how to self-abort” — and for particular methods. Over all, there were more than 700,000 Google searches looking into self-induced abortions in 2015.
Think about the last time you tried to use a Google search to address some minor medical issue. How good were the results? Now think about some young woman, alone, scared, and out of options, facing a response that suggests she self-administer poison… or worse.
Christine Dinsmore has a family history with abortion.
The assistant district attorney pressed the police officer for details. Did he ask my grandmother Maria Consolazio whether she knew she was going to die?
“I did,” Officer Arthur O’Neill answered. “She said she didn’t know.”
… This testimony in State of New York v. Regina Michele was heard in the New York City 6th District Court of Brooklyn on Nov. 10, 1921. Michele, accused of providing an abortion, denied knowing or ever seeing my grandmother. The case was dismissed.
Maria died at age 36. She had already given birth to seven children, then ranging in age from 11 months to 10 years. ...
Maria’s death haunted my mother, Anna. The tears would come whenever she recounted the day she walked into the tenement kitchen and found her mother on the floor.
This little back-to-the-future moment is what the unreasonableness of “reasonable restrictions” and the sanctimony of “pro-life” will bring.