Dana Milbank thinks it’s not enough to beat Donald Trump.
As a matter of math, Arizona is irrelevant: If Clinton is doing well enough to win here, she will already have locked up the election elsewhere. But if Trump is to be denied in his bid to subvert democratic institutions by claiming a rigged election, he needs to be defeated resoundingly, removing all doubt. Clinton needs to run up the score.
The need to deal Trump a humiliating defeat has a sociological basis in the “degradation ceremony,” in which the perpetrator (Trump) is held by denouncers (officeholders and others in positions of influence) to be morally unacceptable, and witnesses (the public) agree that the perpetrator is no longer held in good standing.
To put it in terms that Trump would understand, he doesn’t just need to lose. He needs to be voted off the island, no chairs turn. He needs to be fired.
Trump’s recent actions — talking about a “rigged” election while laying the foundation for a Trump TV network — suggest that he will attempt to defy the degradation ceremony that a loss typically confers. Hence the importance of a landslide.
Protecting democracy requires that Donald Trump be completely humiliated. Proving once again that one good thing leads to another.
Now come on in. Let’s see what the rest of pundit land has to say.
Leonard Pitts suggests a different position for Donald Trump.
Donald Trump has a victim mentality.
If the term sounds familiar, it’s because it has long been the preferred conservative riposte when black people complain of being strangled by housing discrimination, economic injustice or police brutality. The likes of Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh often use it to belittle and dismiss African-American concerns.
But really, who has ever had a greater sense of themselves as a victim than Trump? Who has ever been a bigger whiner, excuse maker and all-out crybaby? Who has ever been more in need of lectures about personal responsibility than the Republican candidate for president?
Well there was … no. But wait … no. Have to admit. Trump is the winner. He’s the whiniest, (tiny) hands down.
It is important to note that Trump did not spring from nowhere. Rather, he is the logical byproduct of a GOP that has spent the last quarter century telling its acolytes they were victims: of “media elites,” Hollywood values and science, to name just a few. And if you’re looking for election rigging, look no further than the party that has thrown up arbitrary legal barriers designed to make voting harder for African-Americans and other non-Republican constituencies.
Voter suppression > voter fraud by just about any factor you want to name.
Frank Bruni on how the media should handle Trump after the election.
Was he ridiculous? Beyond measure. Relevant? Beyond doubt. As long as the reporting about him was skeptical — and, after a certain point, the bulk of it was — there was more reason to train the spotlight on him than to pull it away.
That’s about to change — bigly. He is bound to lose the election, and we in the media will lose the rationale that his every utterance warrants notice as a glimpse into the character of a person in contention for the most consequential job in the world.
Not paying attention to Trump is undoubtedly the right thing to do for the nation … plus it will drive Trump crazy. Crazier. Which is a nice bonus. Of course, he’ll probably just keep cranking the insanity dial until people stop trying to put baby in the corner.
… he will remain the same attention-whoring, head-turning carnival act that he is today. And we will face a moment of truth: Do we care chiefly about promoting constructive discussion and protecting this blessed, beleaguered democracy of ours? Or are we more interested in groveling for eyeballs and clicks?
Is that even a question? At what point in the last … three decades? Four? Has the media bypassed the sh#tstorm for the substantive?
Marc Fisher is looking at our November 9th Trump disposal problem.
Even if he loses, Donald Trump isn’t going away. But the man and the political phenomenon he has unleashed over the past 16 months are already posing a difficult chicken-or-egg question: Has Trump transformed America, or simply revealed it? …
Has Trump granted Americans license to express overt racism or new levels of acrimony? “It seems like a plausible narrative, but I seem to recall all kinds of sketchy things said about races and genders and groups aired publicly on a weekly basis before, say, the summer of 2015,” said John McWhorter, a Columbia University professor who studies public rhetoric. “He is distinct only in being someone of such prominence saying such things. I think the real change was Facebook and Twitter in 2009. Trump is just a symptom.”
There is a difference, and should be a difference, between some bozo on Facebook making a racist comment and the Republican candidate for president making the same comment. The idea that someone, somewhere was being bad before 2015, so Trump is blameless is … stupid. That’s what it is. So are several of the other ideas put forward in this piece, which mostly seems concerned with not condemning either Trump or his followers for making racism, sexism, and bigotry the mainstream of the Republican Party.
Ross Douthat thinks that Hillary Clinton represents some sort of danger. Let’s see why.
A vote for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, the Clinton campaign has suggested in broad ways and subtle ones, isn’t just a vote for a Democrat over a Republican: It’s a vote for safety over risk, steady competence over boastful recklessness, psychological stability in the White House over ungovernable passions.
Well … yes, yes, and yes. It’s also a vote for the most progressive platform put forward since FDR. Let’s see if that’s what Douthat finds so dangerous.
The dangers of a Hillary Clinton presidency are more familiar than Trump’s authoritarian unknowns, because we live with them in our politics already. They’re the dangers of elite groupthink, of Beltway power worship, of a cult of presidential action in the service of dubious ideals. They’re the dangers of a recklessness and radicalism that doesn’t recognize itself as either, because it’s convinced that if an idea is mainstream and commonplace among the great and good then it cannot possibly be folly.
Yep. That’s it. Douthat goes on to assail a list of ideas, including falsely presenting Angela Merkel’s acceptance of a large number of refugees as an open border policy—it’s not—and passing along the pretense that Germany has descended into violence and chaos—it hasn’t.
In a way, Douthat’s column is a shadow of Donald Trump’s campaign. They both know they’re going to lose, and they’re both taking it badly in their own special ways. Your Douthat word of the week is “establishmentarian,” which is kind of pitiful, but it was that sort of column.
Nicholas Kristof wonders if Trump will scare the bejesus out of enough evangelicals to end the right’s lock on the Christian right.
Some conservative evangelicals malign God by suggesting that Christians should scorn adoring same-sex couples yet vote for a sexual predator. They seem to slip seamlessly from “love thy neighbor” to acquiescing in the Gospel of Donald: Thou shalt “grab them” by the genitals.
Yet there’s far more to the story, and liberals haven’t given enough credit to the many conservative Christians who have made the wrenching decision to condemn Donald Trump as the antithesis of the values they honor.
“How could ‘family values voters’ support a man who had, among other things, stated openly that no man’s wife was safe with him in the room?” asked R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in an essay for The Washington Post.
I grew up a Southern Baptist, and I’m still royally pissed at how the conservatives mounted their coup of the convention and changed not just the philosophy of the denomination, but the whole structure and nature of baptist churches. My own former church has become a “mega church” with it’s own set of facilities divorced from those of the surrounding community. It’s so isolated from the broader world, and so highly politicized, that it’s hard for me to ever believe it could drop that tight weld to the Republican Party. And honestly, there’s little sign that this is happening, despite any stance by Dr. Mohler.
A recent poll … found that white Americans with evangelical beliefs overwhelmingly support Trump over Clinton, 65 percent to 10 percent.
Paul Theroux tells a fascinating story of how he, as a young teacher, became involved in an African rebellion.
Fluent in the local language, obscure because he was a teacher in a bush school, and easily able to travel in and out of the country on his United States passport, the American performed various favors for the rebels, small rescues for their families, money transfers, and in one effort drove a car over 2,000 miles on back roads to Uganda to deliver the vehicle to one of the dissidents in exile. On that visit he was asked to bring a message back to the country. He did so, without understanding its implications. It was a cryptic order to activate a plot to assassinate the intransigent prime minister.
And draws an analogy to make a challenging request that may be hard to swallow, but should be heard.
It was faith that induced John Walker Lindh to travel to the Islamic world. A Californian, raised as a Catholic, he converted to Islam at age 16. A year later he studied Arabic and Islam in Yemen, and subsequently, still a teenager, he relocated to Pakistan, where he studied at a madrasa. In the spring of 2001, stimulated by his faith, he volunteered for the Afghan Army. As his father, Frank Lindh, explained in The Nation in 2014: “John’s motivation was based on youthful idealism: He felt it was his religious duty to help defend civilians against Russian-backed warlords, the so-called Northern Alliance, which was seeking to displace the Taliban government. He was deeply moved by stories of horrific human rights abuses by the Northern Alliance.”
Theroux wants President Obama to commute Lindh’s sentence, and makes some tough comparisons to Bill Clinton’s last minute pardon of Marc Rich. Give it a read.
Dan Roberts and Mona Chalabi address concerns that 90% of the polls just might be wrong.
Those Republicans still loyal to Trump cling to the hope that all the polls are wrong – that in barely two weeks’ time, angry voters will again stun the world. Over and over, Donald Trump is saying one word: Brexit.
“We will win,” he told a rally in Pennsylvania on Friday. “We will shock the world. This is going to be Brexit-plus.”
Earlier, in North Carolina, he promised to go “beyond Brexit”. By evening, “Brexit times five” was coming.
Can we find a nice short form for “Donald Trump Loses?” Wait. Why do I want to do that? I like how it sounds already.
… Britons proved less ashamed of Brexit’s dark reputation once they were inside the privacy of a polling booth, eventually voting in favour of leaving by a nearly four-point margin. What if US pollsters are missing shy Republicans? Or failing to account for Trump’s ability to inspire people to turn out in greater numbers?
We may be getting close to Halloween, but that story is just too scary. Fortunately, Roberts and Chalabi don’t find much similarity between the pre-Brexit conditions and the American electorate on the eve of Trump’s last stand.
Jamiles Lartey tells how Wikileaks is getting support of all the right people. The alt-right people.
On Friday night, the Fox News personality Sean Hannity and David Duke, a US Senate candidate in Louisiana and former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, became the latest to offer their support.
In response to a tweet from the Nebraska Republican senator Ben Sasse that was critical of the Clinton leaks, Hannity praised Assange and WikiLeaks for having “done the USA a great service” by exposing “government corruption” and cybersecurity weakness.
Remember: if you’re on trial for robbery, just tell them that Sean Hannity says you did a great service in pointing out security weaknesses. Tell them “call Sean. Why doesn’t anybody just call Sean?”
Lev Golinkin on what it really means to be a refugee.
Before coming to America, Mom was a psychiatrist, working in a busy clinic in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. ...
We know a handful of ex-Soviet refugees with medical degrees who managed to remain doctors once they came to the United States. Most didn’t. They landed at JFK airport; they received three months’ assistance from a refugee resettlement group, secondhand furniture and driving lessons, if they were lucky; and then the bills came. Medical boards and years of sleepless residency are a gantlet for 20-somethings who speak fluent English and have no children. Mom was pushing 50, had no money and couldn’t speak the language. At first she tried to become a nurse, then a nursing aide, then an EKG technician. The closest she got to returning to the medical field was a stint helping an old woman take her meds.
Golinkin’s mother now works as a night security guard, her medical skills left by the roadside.
I don’t blame the United States for this. You become a refugee because something has gone terribly wrong, because your life reached a point where your best option meant abandoning your goals, roots, identity and the graves of your forefathers, and placing yourself at the mercy of strangers. Not even the land of opportunity can magically make up for all that, which is why the United States has the best-educated taxi drivers and home health aides in the world. For many, menial labor and humiliation are the price of admission to America. You scrub, you drive, you dream that your children will do better, and you try not to think of the past.
Too often we think of the people coming through the door as interchangeable units. Somewhere, right now there is some community desperately in need of the skills that Golinkin’s mother might provide.
Colbert King is ready to go toe-to-toe with Trump’s #CodeRed red shirts.
Enter Donald Trump, loudly claiming that the presidential election is “rigged” against him and delegitimizing our democratic process by suggesting that he may not accept the results if he loses.
But what he plans to do before votes are even counted should also raise concern.
Trump has called for his supporters to stand watch at polling places in “certain areas,” a tactic that could be aimed at intimidating and suppressing the votes of African Americans and other minorities.
Trump’s forces are out there for the same reason as Voter ID laws and reduced numbers of polling stations — to try and suppress minority voting.
“Watch Philadelphia. Watch St. Louis. Watch Chicago. Watch so many other places,” he said this week.
If you don’t get Trump’s meaning, his supporter Steve Webb, a 61-year-old carpenter from Fairfield, Ohio, does.
“Trump said to watch your precincts. I’m going to go, for sure,” Webb told the Boston Globe. “I’ll look for . . . well, it’s called racial profiling. Mexicans. Syrians. People who can’t speak American. I’m going to go right up behind them. I’ll do everything legally. I want to see if they are accountable. I’m not going to do anything illegal. I’m going to make them a little bit nervous.”
You get the impression that some adults are looking forward to Election Day the same way that kids look forward to Halloween—as a chance to dress up and pretend to be tough.
King points out that there are groups organizing to help voters who are suffering from attempted intimidation. Expect to see more on that point ASAP.
Catherine Rampell says Trump is rigging his own election, against himself and his voters.
If anyone is rigging the election against Donald Trump, it’s Donald Trump — by disempowering his own voters.
Yes, Trump once (accidentally, presumably) told rally-goers to “make sure you get out and vote Nov. 28,” which would be 20 days after the polls close. But that isolated goof isn’t what will do him in. Instead, it’s the fact that he has told his supporters, repeatedly, that the election is “rigged” by a vast global conspiracy that will never let him win — i.e., his own supporters might as well stay home even if they do know the correct election date.
In other words, his claims that he’s doomed to lose could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That prophecy isn’t going to fulfill itself. It’s going to take tens of millions of us to make it real.
Many demographics — women, Muslims, immigrants, Hispanics, African Americans, people with disabilities — have been harmed by Trump this campaign. But perhaps his greatest betrayal has been to his own supporters, the economically anxious, white working-class voters who he says have been forsaken by the rest of the political class. He alone can help them, he asserts.
Just barely over two weeks, people. Two weeks!