All right. It’s Sunday. Again.
I welcomed last Sunday with the profound wish that I never again say the name … you know. That one. However, that is now a little difficult. In fact, now I have to be that guy. The guy who just will not … and can not stop … repeating the same … theme over … and over. Sorry about that. Really sorry about that. I would say that you don’t know how deeply, truly, achingly sorry about that I am. Except you probably do. And while I’m repeatedly saying that f-word not allowed in mainstream media, I’m also going to repeat my endorsement of this.
Masha Gessen has a rule book for surviving when a nation decides that “yeah, that democracy thing was fun … but we’re tired of that. Let’s see what it’s like to put an all powerful dickwad in charge for a a change!”
... Trump is anything but a regular politician and this has been anything but a regular election. … He is also probably the first candidate in history to win the presidency despite having been shown repeatedly by the national media to be a chronic liar, sexual predator, serial tax-avoider, and race-baiter who has attracted the likes of the Ku Klux Klan. Most important, Trump is the first candidate in memory who ran not for president but for autocrat—and won.
Trump isn’t there to govern. He’s the boss of us.
Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says.
Trump is going to indict Hillary Clinton. He doesn’t need to find more evidence. Not against her, and not against you. He only needs a compliant Justice Department willing to indict whoever he points at. Trump will point. The wall. The war crimes. He means it all.
Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. .
Oh, look. Maybe Trump won’t repeal all of Obamacare after all and … and nothing. Trump is a monster. He will do monstrous things. The media will eagerly report everything that looks like a normal political move, first because it suits them, and finally because it’s all they’re allowed.
Rule #3: Institutions will not save you.
Our institutions exist as much by joint agreement as by any combination of law. Trump will not agree. And what’s the law anyway? Are you the one with prisons and internment camps? No, you’re not. You don’t get a say in what “the law” does.
Continued after the break. And hey, there are actually pundits ...
Rule #4: Be outraged.
You’ll have plenty of reasons. Get a head start.
Rule #5: Don’t make compromises.
Taking one step toward Trump isn’t like negotiating with a normal politician. Not even like negotiating with a deceitful SOB like Gingrich or McConnell. Here, I’m going to let Gessen carry this one.
[Compromise] will be fruitless … but worse, it will be soul-destroying. In an autocracy, politics as the art of the possible is in fact utterly amoral.
And finally,
Rule #6: Remember the future.
Sure, I sound like the last mewling descendant of Cassandra now. Let’s hope I always do. I will gladly step into that dunking booth and encourage people to throw at both the target and my nose. Fast pitch. Above a tank of six-months-past-its-expiration-date habanero yogurt.
Just promise to remember those rules. Go read them in full.
Leonard Pitts is simply ashamed.
Earlier this year, when Trump became the de facto nominee of the Republican Party, I said in this space that if we were truly the kind of nation that would elect such a manifestly unfit man to the presidency, we might as well know it. “Any country,” I wrote, “that would elect Donald Trump as president deserves Donald Trump as president. But the question is: Are we that country?”
I was hoping for an emphatic no, a no that would raise a mushroom cloud over the nativism, coarseness and know-nothingism Trump represents. But America just said yes. And let there be no confusion over what that yes says about us.
And Pitts has a message for all the “Trump deserves a chance to prove himself” folks.
If you came here looking for silver linings, I’m afraid you’re in the wrong column. We Americans do that reflexively. Optimism is in our DNA. So people will try to find ways to make this something other than the disaster it is.
But let’s get real. You could raid all the warehouses of Revlon, Maybelline and Estée Lauder and still not find enough lipstick to beautify this pig.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before (from me, and yes, you have) but you should really read all of Pitts’ column.
While I’m disappointed and embarrassed, I am not shocked. This country has always been loathe to come to terms with — or even admit — the depths of its biases. Witness the pundits who spoke of white “economic anxiety” while Trump supporters were beating up Mexicans and chanting “Jew-S-A.”
Gail Collins and the glass ceiling that just wouldn’t crack.
It took Hillary Clinton a while to talk about the first-woman-president idea. She didn’t stress it early in her 2008 campaign. But people kept coming up to her with pictures of their grandmothers who got to vote for the first time in 1920. Others begged her to get the job done so they could see a woman in the White House before they died. …
Of course, for Hillary, there was no dodging history, and as the campaign went on this year, the dream became infectious. Which only made last Tuesday night seem less than the defeat of a candidate, than a massive slap in the face for millions.
When history teachers want to include women in the story of the American Revolution, they often have their students read the famous letter Abigail Adams wrote in 1776 to her husband, urging him to “remember the ladies” and write laws for the new country that would “put it out of the power of the vicious and the lawless to use us with cruelty.” The kids are not generally encouraged to move on to John Adams’s reply: “As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh.”
To get from there to Hillary Clinton’s run wasn’t just a long road, but one filled with setbacks and challenges. Collin’s article provides a good refresher for those who, like me, all too readily forget the sheer scope of the effort required to “get the word ‘male’ in effect out of the Constitution.” Worth not just a read, but a bookmark.
The New York Times explains why Trump’s pro-Putin policies are so dangerous.
Just when relations between Russia and the West are at their most precarious point since the Cold War, Mr. Trump has been Russia’s defender and the beneficiary of Moscow’s efforts to influence the presidential campaign. At times he has seemed almost intoxicated by the Russian president, praising Mr. Putin’s firmness and insisting that the two could resolve any differences if they met. Meanwhile, he has shown little concern that Russia poses a major strategic challenge.
Because Trump sees nothing that doesn’t pose a threat, or an advantage, to him personally.
Russia’s hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign to interfere in the election was brazen. Even worse were actions that threatened human life and global stability, like Mr. Putin’s airstrikes against civilians in Syria, his positioning of nuclear-capable weaponry near Poland and the Baltic States, his annexation of Crimea and the war he waged in eastern Ukraine. He violated the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty by producing a ground-launched cruise missile and canceled a 16-year-old accord on reducing stockpiles of weapons-grade plutonium.
Despite this behavior, despite the obvious need for the next president to be alert to Mr. Putin’s mischief and to be willing to resist it, Mr. Trump has so far been Mr. Putin’s apologist.
Grant Stern notes that, just because the FBI whistled past Trump’s Russia connections, that doesn’t mean someone isn’t taking a look.
President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are reviewing the Democratic Coalition’s investigative report highlighting 10 “clear links” that the FBI failed to investigate about our President-elect’s business ties to Russia, and to the Putin regime. …
“The FBI missed at least 10 key connections between President-elect Trump and Russia when they conducted their investigation and concluded that our President-elect had no links to the country,” said Scott Dworkin, Senior Advisor to the Democratic Coalition and author of the report. “It is imperative that the American people be made aware of this information.”
Frank Bruni has a pretty simple message on Tuesday night’s debacle.
We geniuses in the news media spent only the last month telling you how Donald Trump was losing this election. We spent the last year telling you how the Republican Party was unraveling.
And here we are, with the Democrats in tatters. You might want to think twice about our Oscar and Super Bowl predictions.
And he has what might as well be a personally-aimed thump at my nose.
Despite all the discussion of demographic forces that doomed the G.O.P., it will soon control the presidency as well as both chambers of Congress and two of every three governor’s offices. And that’s not just a function of James Comey, Julian Assange and misogyny. Democrats who believe so are dangerously mistaken.
Uh huh. 40K votes would have flipped both MI and WI. Tiny margins defined many other states. There is more than enough in Comey’s ugly intrusion or in, as the media so loved to say, the “drip drip drip” of Wikileaks to account for those tiny margins.
You know why pundits didn’t discover these huge, painful, structural problems with the Democratic Party until Tuesday? Because they’re not real. A marginal loss is just that, a marginal loss. And getting a third term with the same party in power is difficult in any year. No re-write of voter distribution or hidden cadre of Trump supporters is required. The media is trying to turn an incident into a narrative.
Ross Douthat engaged this week in one of the laziest possible pundit exercises — and pundits are not exactly front-line war reporters on any occasion. This week, Douthat issues a fake “letter from the future” about the brilliance of the Trump administration. Skip it unless you have a firm hold on your breakfast. This week’s word is: “TrumpWorks,” which only proves that you do not want to hire Douthat to market your next product.
Nicholas Kristof on the era where fake news has become the dominant news.
If you get your news from this newspaper or our rival mainstream news sources, there’s probably a lot you don’t know.
You may not realize that our Kenyan-born Muslim president was plotting to serve a third term as our illegitimate president, by allowing Hillary Clinton to win and then indicting her; Pope Francis’ endorsement of Donald Trump helped avert the election-rigging.
Kristof’s list is actually longer, including the demony smells that Clinton puts off according to Alex Jones.
None of those items is actually true, of course, but all have been reported by alt-right or fake news websites (the line between them is sometimes blurred). And one takeaway from this astonishing presidential election is that fake news is gaining ground, empowering nuts and undermining our democracy.
There’s another name for fake news, especially when that news is used to bolster a government position. Especially especially when that news is designed to reinforce the statements of an vengeful autocrat. What’s that word? Starts with a ‘P’ …
Geoffrey Kabaservice on what to expect when you’re expecting … a Republican administration.
It doesn’t require a huge stretch of the imagination to envision Mr. Trump’s trying to use the power of the presidency to punish his enemies, withdraw from military and diplomatic alliances, start trade wars, and engage in a wide-scale roundup of illegal immigrants that would call to mind Operation Wetback in the 1950s crossed with the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. However, such a divisive policy inevitably would split the country and the Republican Party as well, leading to a crushing loss in the 2018 midterm elections.
I’m in agreement right up to that “split the country and the Republican Party” bit. The idea that the Republicans are going to stand up to Trump on anything is the biggest joke of the bleak, post-election comedy hellscape.
And a party that’s seen to move in the direction of white nationalism will also turn off college-educated white voters, who still form a critical part of the Republican coalition.
Hey, in for a wall, in for a Gulag. Voters who put up with—or embraced—Trump’s bigotry aren’t going to turn away just because he did what he said he would do.
Colbert King says it much more plainly.
We learned election night, if we didn’t already know it in our heart of hearts, that we are not the inclusive, multiracial and multicultural country we make ourselves out to be. Despite projecting the image of a United States embodying a kumbaya-like spirit of human unity, our identities are rooted in race, religion and ideology. That showed up in the election returns. It could be seen in the faces of Trump’s core constituencies.
And don’t think of them as only old, Rust Belt, blue-collar supporters.
White people made Trump president.
Not much to add to that but … yup.
The sound of joyful exclusion could be heard in the voice of David Duke, the white nationalist former Ku Klux Klan leader who called Trump’s electoral victory “one of the most exciting nights of my life.” “Make no mistake about it, our people have played a HUGE role in electing Trump,” Duke tweeted .
The Democratic Party’s “structural issue” is that white people voted for white nationalism. The first person to suggest some compromise is needed on that front, should be welcome at Republican HQ.
Kathleen Parker has already moved on to the Trump 2.0 or 3.6 or whatever we’re up to now.
Witnesses who tuned in to Donald Trump and Barack Obama’s post-election get-together can’t have missed the change in the president-elect’s demeanor and affect.
Quiet and reserved, he seemed almost chastened. Dare I say, humble and deferential to the man whose citizenship he challenged for years leading up to his candidacy.
Dear Kathleen, please observe Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality.
That is, the White House itself brings out the reverent in the irreverent. When you step inside, you become a part of something larger than one individual or 320 million souls. You can feel history breathing in those walls. Walking down grand corridors, heels clicking against marble, you pause for a moment to listen, certain there had been other footfalls behind you.
Ah, “the majesty of a king will stay that assassin’s hand” argument. Thank you, English Bob.
Dana Milbank reminds us when the Republicans last had the whole of Washington in their grasp.
In the Fox News coverage playing on screens in the ballroom, Megyn Kelly turned to Karl Rove. “It didn’t happen under Reagan or the Bushes. When was the last time a Republican president had a Republican Congress?”
“1928,” Rove answered.
Errr …. no.
Republicans actually had unified control for four years under George W. Bush, and for two years under Dwight Eisenhower …
There you go.
But the 1928 comparison is instructive. It’s the last time a Republican president enjoyed anything like the majority Trump will have, particularly in the House.
And how did that work out for them?
It suddenly strikes me that, in the whole swamp-sweat-sewer-explosion of the last year, I have not heard from Amity Shlaes, the right’s go-to fake historian. Maybe now that Breitbart and Alex Jones are re-writing history on demand, Shlaes’ relatively subtle “Hoover Good! FDR Bad!” is no longer required. Did you know that Bill Clinton started the Great Depression when he kicked over a lantern in a Chicago barn while having sex with a Ms. O'Leary. And a cow! It’s true!
With unified control, Republicans now own every issue — health care, the economy, national security — and Democrats, who narrowly won the popular vote and are supported by exit polls showing tepid support for many of Trump’s policy priorities, have little incentive to cooperate.
“Little” is an overstatement.