This column was prepared in a factory that contained several stories about Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and other nuts. If you have an allergy to nuts, please carry an epi paragraph (also known as an epigraph — maybe a nice snippet of poetry) to protect yourself against potential reaction to nut exposure.
Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have news for those who think nominating Trump = end of GOP
Everywhere you look, in the year of Donald J. Trump, observers are talking about a national party realignment or a Republican death spiral. ...
Mr. Trump (or Ted Cruz) could very well lead the party to a decisive and divisive defeat. If it was catastrophic enough, it could lead to changes in party strategy. Yet predictions of a Republican crackup should be greeted with skepticism.
Republicans field a losing candidate, their party seems disordered, split from within, and the voters aren’t there for a presidential win. So… what happens next?
Think back to 2008. George W. Bush’s exit was humiliating. The party’s approval ratings had fallen to modern lows.
The verdict was clear: The Republican Party had to change or die.
Only it didn’t do either. Rather than reform and moderation, the party started a campaign of confrontation and obstruction of the new administration.
Two years later that strategy paid off. In a midterm election President Obama called a “shellacking,” Republicans gained more seats in the House of Representatives than any party had since 1938.
The result of a massive failure behind either Trump or Cruz could be a GOP that doubles down on hate, centering on the extreme right wing proposals of Cruz, or the bigotry of Trump along with the now central theme of the GOP — the government is the enemy — in order to consolidate power at the state level.
The GOP may not be able to take the White House, but it’s unlikely to lose the House of Representatives or slip out of power in the states where the GOP has seized state offices.
But still… we can hope.
Those of you who spent the evening fruitlessly searching the front page for this week’s installment of On Whetsday… I apologize. It’s not there. It’s not there for the very fine reason that, uhh, I uh. Hmm. It appears that I forgot to queue it up earlier in the week when I was supposed to. Sorry about that. On Whetsday will return next week with Big News. So just hold your breath and build up that literary anticipation.
Now, bring your epigraph and come inside.
Ian Austen says Americans should be jealous of Toronto… because of Rob Ford.
When Rob Ford’s time as mayor of Toronto became a reality show that lurched from one cringe-inducing revelation to another, one question loomed: How did he come to lead Canada’s largest city? His rumpled suits, fondness for profanity, racist and homophobic remarks, public drunkenness, admitted drug use and general boorishness made Mr. Ford seem like an outlier in a city that had carefully cultivated a reputation for multiculturalism, tolerance and sophistication.
But Mr. Ford, who died on March 22 while being treated for a rare form of cancer, wasn’t a sign that something was wrong with the city, but evidence of the smart planning and foresight that helped Toronto avoid many of the problems that plague American cities. In short, Toronto works because its suburbs never separated themselves economically or politically from the city core. Mr. Ford, a suburban populist, may have been an embarrassment to some, but his election shows that the system works.
Hmmm. Tilting head to left. Now tilting head to right. Yes, I see what you’re saying… but no, this not what working looks like. There are a lot of good arguments for forming broader metro governments, but “you too can have a homophobic racist from the suburbs running your city” is not one of them. We’re full up on homophobic racist big mouths as it is.
Frank Bruni on what brings Republicans together.
Our infrastructure is inexcusable, much of our public education is miserable and one of our leading presidential candidates is a know-nothing, say-anything egomaniac who yanks harder every day at the tattered fabric of civil discourse and fundamental decency in this country.
But let’s by all means worry about the gays! Let’s make sure they know their place. Keep them in check and all else falls into line, or at least America notches one victory amid so many defeats.
To be fair, it’s not just gays. Republicans will also go out of their way to hurt blacks, immigrants, and the poor (especially when they can find a way to ping all three at once). But yes, if you’re a GOP politician worried that your support among crazies might be eroded by someone who says “bomb the Muslims” even more than you do, finding some way to make life miserable for the gay community is good bet.
That must be the thinking behind Republican efforts to push through so-called religious liberty laws and other legislation — most egregiously in North Carolina — that excuse and legitimize anti-gay discrimination. They’re cynical distractions. Politically opportunistic sideshows.
And the Republicans who are promoting them are playing a short game, not a long one, by refusing to acknowledge a clear movement in our society toward L.G.B.T. equality, a trajectory with only one shape and only one destination.
The Republicans behind these bills aren’t just trying to stop the arc of history from curving toward justice, they’re trying to bend it back away from progress already made. Here’s my bet: this Republican reward to bigotry has already expired. Not only will it lose them votes in future cycles, it won’t win any in 2016.
Ross Douthat is… aww, just listen.
The European elite still believes in the Kantian dream of perpetual peace, which is how the Continent ended up with Angela Merkel’s open-door policy for Syrian refugees. ...
That’s a subtext of Trump’s rhetoric. Making America great again involves crushing ISIS, yes, but otherwise it seems to involve washing our hands of military commitments — ceding living space to Putin, letting Japan and South Korea go nuclear, calling NATO obsolete. And it’s simply the text of Bernie Sanders’ campaign. He’s running explicitly as the candidate of Venus (or Scandinavia, if you prefer), promising socialism at home and an end to military adventures abroad.
Douthat’s point the first: Those European idiots actually believe all that stuff about freedom and opportunity. They should be so grateful we kicked off some wars for them in Iraq and Afghanistan, which totally has nothing to do with unrest in Europe or producing those refugees. And, um, point the B: Bernie and Trump are both out to make American’s big, potent missile go totally limp.
But wait! There’s another trick in the Douthat toolkit. One that he deploys faster than you can say “you know, Nazi actually means socialist!”
The time is the late 2020s, let’s say, and the French and Germans and Poles demand that the United States lend our still-unparalleled military strength to a conflict that seems essential to European security — toppling a nascent caliphate in North Africa, or recovering W.M.D. from a collapsing post-Putin Russia.
And a Socialist administration in Washington, backed by more than a few Trumpian Nationalists in Congress, looks across the ocean at Europe’s wars and whispers, “not this time.”
Did you see that? He managed to get socialist and nationalist into the same sentence in way that was so, so natural! And to imply that Bernie and Donald have the same policy.
If you see Douthat bumping up against the entrance to the NYT this week, please open the door for him. Anyone patting himself on the back that hard is bound to injure his arm.
Okay, that’s a one week timeout for Douthat.
Steven Greenhouse on the short (but way too long) history of the $15 wage.
Last Monday, Gov. Jerry Brown of California announced a deal with state lawmakers to raise California’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2022 — a move expected to lift pay for five million workers. And late Thursday Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York reached a deal with legislative leaders to adopt a $15 minimum wage in New York City in 2018 and in its suburbs in 2021, with a $12.50 minimum in upstate New York. ...
In New Jersey, Democratic lawmakers have warned Gov. Chris Christie that if he vetoes a $15 statewide minimum, they will ask voters to approve a constitutional amendment that sets a $15 floor. And in Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser has announced plans to push the City Council to embrace the idea. The Legislatures in Connecticut and Massachusetts are also weighing $15.
Which is great. Hopefully, this tide will keep rolling. But I confess to really liking this bit…
“There’s still a lot of pro-labor, pro-worker sentiment,” said Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown University who has written about populism and popular movements. “Inequality is a big issue nowadays. The Fight for $15 has become the way that civil rights was in the early ’60s — it’s an issue you can’t avoid. For politicians — or at least Democratic politicians — you want to be on the right side.”
The workers who fought for this effort deserve every dollar, and both they and the organizations who backed them deserve a massive amount of praise for laying their jobs (and sometimes more) on the line to bring this victory. This is a win whose value goes way beyond $15. Not mentioned in the article: the Occupy movement. But they should be. For every joke about drum circles and self-organization, they contributed immensely to making income disparity more visible. Sometimes having no leaders just means everyone is a leader.
Daniel Drezner is officially the umpteenth person to proclaim that this time Trump has gone too far.
Trump’s political epitaph has been written a lot in the primary season, and to be clear my money is that he still becomes the GOP nominee for president. But for all … talk about the loyalty of Trump’s supporters, the man remains a spectacularly unpopular presidential candidate. Don’t take my assertion on this point: click here and here and here and here and here and here and so on. It’s not hard to find evidence that Trump is: (a) unpopular and (b) getting way more unpopular.
Within a crowded GOP field, Trump’s jerk persona and heterodox ramblings clearly draw enough support for him to do well. In a general election, he’s such an undisciplined, unmitigated disaster that there’s talk of Democrats retaking the U.S. House of Representatives.
Notice that when I talked about this, I said it was unlikely. It’s unlikely.
This is happening at the same time that Trump is getting pilloried for his foreign policy statements. Even the foreign policy experts most sympatico with Trump’s worldview are shunning him.
If Trump does crash, it won’t be because of foreign policy statements. We are talking about a guy running on the idea of building a giant wall on our southern border. The people supporting Trump couldn’t find the Middle East in a map with Middle East written on it. They’d be lucky to find the US southern border.
Dana Milbank has some insight on those Trump supporters.
In a Republican debate last month, Donald Trump was asked whether his claim that “Islam hates us” means all 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide hate the United States.
“I mean a lot of ’em,” Trump replied, as some in the crowd — Trump supporters, presumably — laughed and applauded.
That ugly moment comes to mind in describing how many of Trump’s supporters have racist motivations for backing him: Not all — but a lot of ’em.
…
A Pew Research Center national poll released Thursday found that 59 percent of registered voters nationwide think that an increasing number of people from different races, ethnic groups and nationalities makes the United States a better place to live; only 8 percent say this makes America worse. But among Trump backers, 39 percent say diversity improves America, while 42 percent say it makes no difference and 17 percent say it actually makes America worse. Supporters of GOP rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich were significantly more upbeat on diversity.
Blow a dog whistle long enough, and your party fills up with dogs.
Katherine McHugh worries about Indiana’s ridiculous new abortion law.
Even after years of education, training and experience as an obstetrician/gynecologist, I am never prepared to deliver the news that a pregnancy is abnormal. There is no good way to tell a pregnant woman — a woman who may already be wearing maternity clothes, thinking about names and decorating the nursery — that we have identified a fetal anomaly that can lead to significant, lifelong disability or even her baby’s death.
In such situations, physicians have two responsibilities. First, we must always be supportive of the mother or family who has suddenly been confronted with the loss of an imagined ideal pregnancy and child. And second, we help them understand that they have options, one of which is the termination of the pregnancy.
Unfortunately, that’s no longer the case here in Indiana. A new law signed by Gov. Mike Pence (R) punishes doctors if they perform abortions for women because of their fetus’s race or sex, or after a diagnosis of disability.
Indiana—we never stop thinking of ways to be hateful. Sorry I said ridiculous earlier. I meant sickening.
Daniel Miller on why you might want to have some lick’em dots in your pocket.
In 1970, Congress dropped psychedelics into the war on drugs. After a decade of Timothy Leary, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” and news reports of gruesome murders, the federal government declared that the drugs had no medical use — and high potential for abuse. The chairman of New Jersey’s Narcotic Drug Study Commission called LSD “the greatest threat facing the country today . . . more dangerous than the Vietnam War.”
But over the past decade, some scientists have begun to challenge that conclusion. Far from being harmful, they found, hallucinogens can help sick people: They helped alcoholics drink less; terminal patients eased more gently into death. And it’s not just the infirm who are helped by the drugs. Psychedelics can make the healthy healthier, too. ...
Is it possible that a drug labeled as one of the most destructive and dangerous could make everyone’s lives better?
It’s a fascinating article and well worth reading, but I admit that LSD terrifies me. Not just LSD. Even pot and alcohol terrify me. A whiff of laughing gas at the dentist terrifies me. Anything that makes me surrender a modicum of control terrifies me. Maybe because my grip is kind of slippery to begin with.
Leonard Pitts and the movement to have GOP politicians walk the walk.
So do you think guns should be allowed at the Republican National Convention?
Granted, the question is moot. On Monday, the Secret Service announced that only its agents and Cleveland police will be allowed to bring firearms into Quicken Loans Arena when the GOP assembles there this summer. But “moot” is not the same as irrelevant.
As you may know, the Secret Service put its foot down because of a petition at Change.org demanding that convention goers be allowed to bring weapons to the Grand Old Party. The fact that the arena does not allow weapons, says the petition, is “a direct affront to the Second Amendment and puts all attendees at risk.” ...
The petition adds that because “Cleveland . . . is consistently ranked as one of the top 10 most dangerous cities in America” and because of “the possibility of an ISIS terror attack on the arena,” convention goers must be allowed to bear arms.
As of Tuesday, over 50,000 people had signed.
You have to give it to the author of the petition. That’s first rate trolling.
So why not guns inside the Republican convention? If it’s OK to have guns in schools, bars and churches, then why not there? If Republicans in Iowa think blind people should have guns and Republicans in Alabama want little kids to have guns, then why not sighted adults? If, as Republicans routinely argue, more guns equals greater safety, why shouldn’t convention goers be armed? Wouldn’t this provide better protection for their candidates?
So far, the party has declined to answer.
If the Democratic Party had failed to answer a question about guns, Wayne LaPierre would already be delivering a video condemnation from his custom doom bunker.