Fall is here, and what have we learned? Well, we’ve learned that ...
Donald Trump can’t run a presidential campaign without ruining it with racist and sexist bile.
Donald Trump can’t run a charitable foundation without breaking a fistful of laws.
Donald Trump can’t run a business without blowing almost a billion dollars.
What was it Donald Trump was wanting to run again? Something simple? Something where if he ruins it, breaks it, blows it nobody will mind? Hmm?
Leonard Pitts wonders if politicians are testing the "better to keep your mouth closed" theory.
I was willing to let Aleppo go.
As with Barack Obama’s “57 states” and Rick Perry’s infamous “oops,” I was willing to write off Gary Johnson’s recent gaffe — his inability to identify the rebel stronghold in Syria — as just one of those brain cramps even well-informed people occasionally suffer, especially under the klieg lights of media attention. Then Johnson, the Libertarian candidate for president, went and did it again.
Asked last week by Chris Matthews of MSNBC to name his favorite foreign leader, Johnson could come up with not one. “I guess I’m having an Aleppo moment,” he confessed.
There’s a lot of that going around. And it raises a question: since when is knowing things no longer a prerequisite to running for president?
Knowledge is elitist. Besides, Gary Johnson just happens to be a very nice guy who wants both colleges and loan companies to maximize their profits while eliminated the Department of Education—just like millennials want. Bad news: You can’t afford to go to college. Good news: You can still run for president.
… it’s hard to overstate the gall of a Gary Johnson. But the fact that such uninformed — even broadly ignorant — people capture attention and votes and that one of them may even be our next president, also offers a vivid illustration of the unserious nation we have become.
We’ve been here before. Anyone who watched the Carter—Reagan debates saw one smart, prepared and knowledgeable candidate and one who had spent four decades perfecting his avuncular chuckle. We saw how that turned out and we paid for it. We’re still paying for it.
And now, words of wisdom from our own Pastor Dan.
Thank you, preacher. Now, let us go inside and hear the Gospel According to Punditry…
Ross Douthat is also mourning intellectualism … but not quite in the same way
The Republican Party’s politicians have mostly surrendered to Donald Trump. The Republican Party’s entertainers have mostly been enthusiastic about his candidacy. But the conservative intelligentsia — journalists, think-tankers and academics — has been conspicuous in its resistance.
Now, though, we have “Writers and Scholars for America” — a collection of prominent signatories to the proposition that given the available options, “Donald J. Trump is the candidate most likely to restore the promise of America.”
If you’re wondering if the list includes anyone you’ve ever heard of, the answer is … Newt. Newt Gingrich is on the list along with a bunch of Republican academics so lightweight they couldn’t tether a party balloon.
Some of these writers feel that the American republic has already gone under, we’re just choosing between elected emperors, and you might as well gamble on a Caesar who’s willing to flay the empire’s ruling class. Others take the more modest view that Trump is correct on particular issues (immigration, foreign policy, the importance of the nation-state) where the bipartisan consensus is often wrong, and his candidacy is a chance to vote against an elite worldview that desperately needs to be chastened and rebuked.
More than a fifth of Trump supporters believe Trump will start a nuclear war. Let me repeat that: More than a fifth of Trump supporters believe that the guy they are supporting Will Start A Nuclear War. There’s a huge streak of burn-it-all-down-ism in the Trump movement, and some of the writers on this list seem to be part of it.
Douthat actually does a pretty good job of explaining why there is no intellectual case for Trump. Plus, the word of the day is fecklessness, and I already used that this week, so it’s totally feck.
Gail Collins asks the question we’ve all asked ourselves
Why isn’t she leading 3 to 1? This is not a normal race between a Democrat and a Republican. One of the candidates has made it clear that he has no attention span or self-control. World security experts in both parties are terrified by the idea of a Trump presidency. He’s screwed small contractors in his business dealings and bought dumb presents for himself with money from his charitable foundation — a charitable foundation, by the way, that appears to have been managed by a team of gerbils. Also, he keeps changing his positions on critical issues and has paid settlements to people alleging he discriminated against them on the basis of race or not being attractive enough.
Collins brings it down to change vs. not-change, but for a less comforting answer, see below.
Stephanie McCrummen’s article on a Trump supporter is guaranteed to terrify anyone whose nerves have held steady to this point.
The first time she had seen him, at a rally in June, she was just beginning to realize how many people saw the world the way she did, that she was one among millions. At the time, her hips were still sore from a series of injections intended to calm her. She had gotten them in February, during a difficult time in her life, when she had been involuntarily hospitalized for several weeks after what she called a “rant,” a series of online postings that included one saying that Obama should be hanged and the White House fumigated and burned to the ground. On her discharge papers, in a box labeled “medical problem,” a doctor had typed “homicidal ideation.” ...
“It never crossed my mind that I’m losing it,” she said several months after her release, and a big reason for this conviction was the rise of Donald Trump, who had talked about so many of the things she had come to believe — from Obama being a founder of the terrorist group ISIS, to Hillary Clinton being a co-founder, to the idea that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia may have been murdered in a White House plot involving a prostitute and a pillow.
Trump has gone beyond normalizing the darkest ideas to creep from the spidery edges of the Internet — he’s championed them. He’s dismissed facts. Railed against science. He’s denormalized normal.
… like so many she had gotten to know online through social media, she also believed that Obama was likely gay, that Michelle Obama could be a man, and that the Obama children were possibly kidnapped from a family now searching for them.
This is who they are.
Colbert King reminds us of what that means
How about we hold off on dancing in the end zone in celebration of the new National Museum of African American History and Culture? And let’s quit wasting time in pursuit of black celebrityhood. What about the danger staring us in the face?
The prospect of a Donald Trump White House presents African Americans with the most consequential presidential election since the 1876 race between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. That 19th-century contest ultimately derailed efforts to extend the full rights and privileges of citizenship to freed African Americans. Unless folks of color get off our duffs, history may well repeat itself. …
Repulsive though he is, nominee Trump’s character defects aren’t what make him a threat. What does sicken and alarm, and what ought to concentrate African American minds, is the thought of Trump with the powers of the presidency in his hands. Therein lies the danger. …
Now imagine a Justice Department under Trump’s control. It will be 1876 all over again.
Anyone who at this point in the race is still considering Donald Trump has already decided, at the very least, that what Trump offers is worth tolerating racism. For some, the racism is what he offers. But in either case, prying them away from Trump isn’t likely … which makes it all the more important that those not supporting Trump do everything possible to get everyone possible to the polls.
Dana Milbank looks at the disasters that didn’t happen
For 90 minutes on Monday, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton clashed in their first presidential debate on a full range of issues. But meriting not a single mention? Obamacare. ...
Remember that talk of Obamacare forcing employers to cut back on workers’ hours and even “phase out full-time work”?
Didn’t happen. ...
Remember the talk about the “job-killing government takeover of health care”?
The U.S. economy has added 15.1 million private-sector jobs over the past 78 months. …
Oh, and we’re still waiting for that first “death panel” to convene.
I spent some time last week reading back through pre-2012 Republican predictions. By now we’re supposed to be in a hellscape where the American dollar has collapsed, half the population is in FEMA camps, and all the guns are melting down in a big government bonfire. The funny thing is, a good portion of the people who support Donald Trump are probably disappointed.
E J Dionne wonders if some side-by-side labor would stitch the country together
So much attention was showered on Donald Trump’s appalling early-morning tweets on Friday that an important speech by Hillary Clinton on national service was almost entirely wiped out of the news cycle.
In the short run, Clinton probably didn’t mind — the damage Trump did to himself was enormous. But the episode showed how little notice is being given to the substantial number of policy proposals being put forward in this campaign, almost entirely by Clinton. It is one of the many costs of Trumpian reality-show politics.
Dionne is right that this is a good one, and it deserves more focus.
First, she proposed roughly tripling the size of the AmeriCorps program, from 75,000 to 250,000 annual volunteer slots. …
She also proposed doubling the college scholarships that AmeriCorps members earn through their service, which would provides a stronger incentive to serve while helping to ease the problem of college affordability. …
Clinton’s agenda also included expanding the Peace Corps and increasing “service opportunities for people of all ages” through a variety of measures, including reserving 10 percent of AmeriCorps slots for Americans over the age of 55. “Let’s give people an encore opportunity after they’ve ended their formal careers so they can apply a lifetime of knowledge and experience to a stronger community,” she said.
This idea hasn’t been front and center in the news, but hopefully the Clinton campaign will keep it at the center of the discussion—no matter what Trump is talking about.
Frank Bruni confesses that he was once impressed with Chris Christie
What in God’s name happened to him? To his potential? Yes, yes, I know: the George Washington Bridge happened. And the downgrade of New Jersey’s credit rating happened — again and again and again.
But while those events explain his diminished political fortunes and failed presidential campaign, they didn’t force him into his current role as a prime defender of an indefensible man. I looked up two weeks ago and he was on CNN, peddling the brazen lie that Donald Trump hadn’t spent the last five years raising questions about President Obama’s birthplace. He radiated insincerity. He oozed subservience.
Did he also smell of Big Macs, because, you know ...
The Trump campaign has shown me many things that I never thought I’d see and others that I’d never seen so clearly, including the readiness of power-hungry men to trade dignity for relevance and swap pride for a place at the table, even if the table is a despicable one. ...
Rudy Giuliani made that deal, too, and Trump has been his ticket to a renewed and terrifying omnipresence. …
Newt Gingrich knows that itch, and he, too, has been scratching it lately, in the service of Trump. …
It’s amazing how alike some of the manservants clinging to Trump are: His campaign is like some Canyon Ranch for bullies needing revitalization
If you put Trump, Christie, Gingrich and Giuliani all in the same room, what do you get? I don’t know, but lock the door. Quick.
Kathleen Parker wonders why Alicia Machado is in the news, but … not the way you may think
According to Machado, who has appeared on numerous talk shows, Trump called her “Miss Piggy,” “eating machine,” and “Miss Housekeeper,” by which we are to infer that he was cruel, lacking in compassion — though he says he interceded when pageant officials wanted to fire her — and a classist, racist, misogynist ogre.
I’m sorry. Who didn’t know?
Well, that’s a point.
Pardon, but have The Deeply Offended been circling the moon the past 20 years? Trump didn’t suddenly become a jackass; he didn’t suddenly begin treating women as chattel; he didn’t suddenly show his nasty attitude toward those he considers beneath him.
That’s all true. But specific instances of jackassery still carry more impact than the theoretical knowledge of general jackassitude.
Plainly, Clinton tossed in the Machado tidbit knowing that Trump would seize the bait and get tangled in the nets. He can’t help himself, as any witness to recent history knows.
That he would double and triple down, tweeting in the middle of the night four days later, is more than Clinton could have hoped for. Early Friday morning, Trump apparently couldn’t sleep for thinking about it and tweeted that Clinton had been duped into mentioning his comments about the “disgusting” Machado.
Keep it up, Donnie, and Machado will have her own reality show before you get yours back.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg has some advice for everyone
Another often-asked question when I speak in public: “Do you have some good advice you might share with us?” Yes, I do. It comes from my savvy mother-in-law, advice she gave me on my wedding day. “In every good marriage,” she counseled, “it helps sometimes to be a little deaf.” I have followed that advice assiduously, and not only at home through 56 years of a marital partnership nonpareil. I have employed it as well in every workplace, including the Supreme Court. When a thoughtless or unkind word is spoken, best tune out. Reacting in anger or annoyance will not advance one’s ability to persuade.
It’s easy to assume that this is advice that Donald Trump never received, but someone probably did pass along a similar bit of wisdom at some point. But if Trump’s mother-in-law (and of them) passed along such advice, you can be sure Trump ignored it. After all, she was a woman. And probably not even a 9.
A Sunday morning FLASH BACK ... Flash Back ... flash back ...
Mitt Romney told wealthy donors gathered at a high-dollar campaign fundraiser that there’s a group of voters he believes he can never win over: people who pay no taxes.
It’s taken us some time, but we’ve finally identified one of the the people in Romney's 47% who really is as bad as the Mittster claimed.