appear in today's editions of The Washington Post and The New York Times
I think the three from which I will excerpt below the fold are all worthy of your time to read.
They are respectively by George Will and E. J. Dionne from the former paper, and Charles M. Blow from the latter.
I will intersperse some observations of my own and offer a few words at the end.
Please keep reading.
First, George Will, in The havoc that Trump wreaks — on his own party, which begins:
Every sulfurous belch from the molten interior of the volcanic Trump phenomenon injures the chances of a Republican presidency. After Donald Trump finishes plastering a snarling face on conservatism, any Republican nominee will face a dauntingly steep climb to reach even the paltry numbers that doomed Mitt Romney.
He provides numbers of % of white voters, % of non-White and Hispanic voters. Thus we read
White voters were nearly 90 percent of Romney’s vote. In 1988, George H.W. Bush won 59 percent of the white vote, which translated into 426 electoral votes. Twenty-four years later, Romney won 59 percent of the white vote and just 206 electoral votes. He lost the nonwhite vote by 63 points, receiving just 17 percent of it. If the Republicans’ 2016 nominee does not do better than Romney did among nonwhite voters, he will need 65 percent of the white vote, which was last achieved by Ronald Reagan when carrying 49 states in 1984.
He also notes that Romney did even worse among Asian-Americans, whose percentage is growing faster than that of Hispanics. And here I note that not only has Trump constantly attacked China, but Bush's awkward remarks about "anchor babies" applying to Asians.
Will of course cannot criticize Trump without simultaneously finding ways to get in his usual digs about Obama.
I also note that each time he writes about the Republican primary the Post is now putting in a disclaimer that his wife works for Scott Walker. One might therefore consider that will is expressing the frustration of the traditional Republican establishment that they are losing control of their own nomination process. After all, we have seen a pattern of a logical choice favored by the establishment before the cycle begins, often someone whose turn it was considered, thus Dole in 1996, McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012.
Next, E. J. Dionne, in a piece titled The Trumpification of the News.
Several snips from that column:
Television is about ratings; Trump delivers ratings; therefore, Trump, whose speeches are 90 percent about Trump — his feelings, experiences, feuds, grudges and, of course, genius — is on television nonstop.
1) Trump’s celebrity, built on the idea that a smart deal-maker can get anything done that he wants, gives him a base among those who don’t care much about politics, and (2) parts of the Republican Party are so fed up with their leadership that the more in-your-face Trump is, the happier they are.
Republican leaders care primarily about a low-tax, pro-business agenda. But they have kept their most conservative supporters at a very high level of angry mobilization, exploiting anxieties about demographic and social change. They kept pledging they would really and truly repeal Obamacare, even when they knew they didn’t have the votes. Trump is the revenge of the party’s non-insiders who are tired of being used.
The Trump partisans are, in fact, a very small minority of Americans. Do the math. The polls show that Trump is supported by about 25 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who, together, account for somewhere between 40 percent and 45 percent of the country.
So, generously, the Trump insurrection is built on the backing of all of about 11 percent of Americans.
Here I note that Dionne wrote this using the average of the national polls, not including the one released yesterday showing Trump at 40% among primary voters.
For me, the key might be the final paragraph, which also partly explains why Sanders is NOT getting coverage even with crowds larger than those of Trump despite Trump's massive free media:
Television is a business like any other, but journalism in a democracy is supposed to be about more than that. Nowhere is the tension between financial and public imperatives more obvious than in the massive coverage of the Trump spectacular and the parsimonious attention given to anything serious any other candidate might say. But hey, how often does a serious speech about our economic troubles win ratings for anyone?
Finally, the inimitable Charles M. Blow. In a piece titled
Enough is Enough Blow explains why he will in general, after this column, cease writing about Trump.
For him the last straw was the ejection of Jorge Ramos. He acknowledges he perhaps should have acted earlier, citing several examples, including
Maybe I should have been done the one and only time I ever met Trump and his first words to me were a soliloquy about how black people loved him, and he was the most popular white man among black people.
Now that should sound familiar - like Trump saying he would win the Latino vote.
Blow offers some of the greatest hits from the list of 199 presented earlier by Politico, starting with
9. “I have black guys counting my money. … I hate it. The only guys I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes all day.” (USA Today, May 20, 1991)
He is calling the news media to account:
The never-ending, exhaustive, even breathless coverage of every outrage that issues forth from this man’s mouth is not news. Every offense and attack is not news.
Every morning that Trump rolls out of bed and calls in to a news show is not news.
Covering a political phenomenon as news is one thing. See the coverage of Bernie Sanders. Creating a political phenomenon and calling it news is quite another.
And near the end of the column we read this:
The media is being trolled on a massive scale and we look naïve and silly to have fallen for it, even if he draws readers and viewers. When people refer to the press as the fourth estate, it shouldn’t be confused with a Trump property.
Several of my own observations, partly in response to these columns, partly things about which I have been thinking independently of these columns, and some thoughts I have borrowed from others who have been discussing the Trump phenomenon.
First, the Republican nominating process is convoluted enough with different rules for winning different primaries that I'm not sure even the press can analyze the impact of the Trump effect. Apparently there is an obscure rule that even in winner take all states unless one wins 50% of the vote the state might revert to proportional. On the other hand, in theory there is a threshold for getting ANY delegates, which I think is 20% statewide. Thus if one considered the recent poll showing Trump getting 40%, and no one else above 13%, in such a scenario theoretically Trump with less than half the votes could get all the delegates.
There has been much commentary upon the impact of SuperPacs allowing weaker candidates to continue longer, thus complicating the process. My own sense is that if the Trump phenomenon continues we will see some coming together of the funders of such groups to coalesce around few opponents to Trump, conceivable even only one, to stop him. Now, that COULD backfire, but we are in unknown territory.
One friend cautions not to underestimate Trump in a general election, because of what we have seen in other countries with appeals to nativism - here one can clearly look at Italy with Berlusconi, but I think we could also to a degree look at Canada with Harper. This friend's contention is that Trump's heat and his refusal to play by the ordinary rules would, were he opposed by a flat, passionless Democrat, quite possibly create an opening for him to win.
Let me explain why I disagree with that. The assumption is that the Democratic nominee is Hillary and that she will be a flat campaigner. First, when she is attacked she has shown in the past that she can give as good as she gets, and she has shown some flashes of passion already in this campaign.
Second, if Trump were the nominee and continued to come across as sexist, racist and nativist, no matter how many angry White men he could turn out, the electoral math would be against him.
Consider that his treatment of Jorge Ramos would pretty much guarantee losing Nevada, CO, NM and quite possibly AZ, and might even, depending upon court rulings on the voter ID law, put Texas in play. I think it would kill him in FL. Against this it MIGHT help him win OH and PA, although I tend to doubt it. And that is looking only at the Hispanic vote.
Second, Trump would get killed among women. Including not only independent women but some Republican women.
Blacks would turn out massively.
My own sense is that in a Hillary v Trump competition, the Dem candidate is pretty much assured of at least 350 EVS and maybe even 400.
UNLESS - assume it becomes clear Trump will be the Republican nominee. Any of the current candidates might be barred by sore loser laws for filing as an independent, but what about someone who has not run. What if someone who appeals to Republicans on the business agenda but is sensible on some social issues who can self-fund gets into the race? I am talking specifically about Michael Bloomberg. It is not at all clear how such a scenario plays out, and under such a circumstance there is probably a better than even chance that the election winds up with no electoral vote winner, then goes to the House, where Republicans would have control.
But here's the thing - could the state delegations coalesce around either Trump or Bloomberg? Might the House fail to elect a President?
Under that scenario the Senate would elect the VicePresident by simple majority, and if no President is elected that person would become President. It would be the incoming Senate, but with the outgoing Vice President to make rulings and in theory cast a tie-breaking vote. How might the Senate races play out in a 3-way race? Even if the Republicans kept 51 votes in the Senate, what would Ted Cruz and Mike Lee do?
In short, our politics are close to being broken. Our press with its non-stop coverage of Trump and its failure to give adequate coverage to Sanders (in part because the Dems have not yet had debates) are exacerbating the problem.
The Trump phenomenon COULD implode. But I think this is less like the series of front-runners for a day last cycle than it is like Ross Perot in the 92 cycle, although he got into the race much later.
We may have a better idea after the forthcoming CNN debate.
We will have to see if TV management starts being more thoughtful in their coverage.
We will have to see if the bashing of Trump only increases his support.
Stay tuned.
Oh, and for the record, I have not taken sides on the Democratic race. Yet.