How are Democrats going to deal with the Trump administration going forward? *Updated with some new links and more.
Control of Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court as soon as they can install a new Scalia clone — Republicans hold most of the marbles. What can Democrats do in the next 4 years? Can we make McConnell’s plan for Obama work on making Trump into a one term wonder? Let’s go back into the ancient past — the W years — and see if there are lessons that can be learned, things that can be done differently.
Different Cons, Still a Con Game
The last time around with a Republican administration, under George W. Bush, we were subjected to the the ambitions of the Neo-Cons, a group of ideologues who felt as the only superpower still standing, it was the destiny of the United States to use its military might to dominate the world.
The Soviet Empire had fallen apart and was still struggling to find a new balance. China had yet to expand as aggressively as it now has into the South China Sea. The 911 attacks gave the NeoCons the excuse to embark on the Grand Adventure in the Middle East — going after Iraqi oil and establishing a foothold for democracy in the region. (Aside from Israel, that is.)
Also, it was personal for W. — Saddam had gone after his daddy.
So, the Global War On Terror became the center around which the the Bush administration turned. Practicing deception on a global scale, letting the military-industrial complex gorge, turning the Clinton surplus into a gaping hole, making America into a torture state, and using fear & paranoia to keep America hungering for Big Daddy…
Bush had started out as the guy to have a beer with, as opposed to that loser know-it-all Al Gore, then transformed into the “Mission Accomplished” great military leader. Too bad for John Kerry, who was ridiculed for actually having been in combat. Meanwhile Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz and the rest of the Bush gang ran the NeoCon agenda into the ground, and finished up their adventure in Conservatism by blowing up the economy to boot.
Was it only 8 years ago? Nobody was ever held to account for all the lives and treasure lost in Iraq, the lies that were told, the war crimes that were committed — Obama came in and spent his initial term trying to clean up the mess he’d inherited. Far from being chastised by the disasters of the Bush regime, the Republicans in Congress began obstruction of Obama from day one.
Bad behavior works — when no one pays a price.
The peculiarities of unilateral bipartisanship, the Citizens United money deluge, and the rise of the tea party means Republican behavior has been shaped more by threats coming from their own side than by anything Democrats have been able to do.
The media dynamic plays into this. The MSM bends over backwards to avoid the dreaded “liberal bias”, does one-hand other-hand false equivalence as a reflex, and too often does stenotype repeating of Republican talking points. Meanwhile, pretty much anything goes if you’re a Republican.
And then there’s the vast right-wing echo machine.
Pundits are trying to understand why so many angry white guys of lower education came out for Trump? Anyone thought of looking at talk radio demographics? FOX NEWS? Eight years of Obama accomplishments were transmogrified into an unmitigated string of disasters, while throwing in all the disasters created by the right wing as being the fault of Democrats — government dysfunction for example.
Obamacare death panels; out of control premiums, plus soft on terror, immigration out of control, OMG EBOLA WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE, government debt exploding, LIBRUL HORROR bankrupting all it touches and killing jobs. Big government spending! Only free markets can save us.
Which brings us to Trumplandia: Grifters and the wrecking crew
Donald Trump is not surrounding himself with NeoCons. Preliminary reports are his cabinet will include people like Newt Gingrich, Rudi Giuliani, Chris Christie — professional conservative grifters whose ideology is not as important as cashing in on money and power with that ideology.
Tom Sullivan quotes Matt Taibbi:
There really are two Americas, one for the grifter class and one for everybody else. In everybody-else land, the world of small businesses and wage-earning employees, the government is something to be avoided, an overwhelming, all-powerful entity whose attentions usually presage some kind of financial setback, if not complete ruin. In the grifter world, however, government is a slavish lapdog that the financial companies that will be the major players in this book use as a tool for making money.
Only Taibbi's focus on financial firms was a bit narrow. That grifter philosophy has traveled far beyond Wall Street. Corruption has trickled down.
Part of grifting is to spread that fear of government among the marks while simultaneously using it to cash in at their expense. When Donald Trump says he’s going to shake up government, he really means a shake-down, using government as a wealth transfer machine into private pockets. This is a model he uses in his businesses — use other people’s money for a project, and make sure a big chunk ends up in his hands whether or not the project succeeds. Privatize gains, socialize losses is how it applies to government spending.
Slate has the low-down on how Trump’s calls to rebuild America’s infrastructure is going to use public money for private gain.
Under Trump's plan—at least as it's written (more on that in a minute)—the federal government would offer tax credits to private investors interested in funding large infrastructure projects, who would put down some of their own money up front, then borrow the rest on the private bond markets. They would eventually earn their profits on the back end from usage fees, such as highway and bridge tolls (if they built a highway or bridge) or higher water rates (if they fixed up some water mains). So instead of paying for their new roads at tax time, Americans would pay for them during their daily commute. And of course, all these private developers would earn a nice return at the end of the day.
There’s more at the link on this: it would concentrate projects only where people could pay for them, and the cost would be higher for the private sector to do this because of the cost of private versus public borrowing of money among other things.
The heavy voting of so-called values voters for Trump, a man who is anything but a moral paragon, demonstrates that it’s not just morality they’re really going for; it’s wealth and power. Catering to them is another way to grift, one Mike Pence practices. He’s managed to rationalize any moral objections to Trump’s career as a self-confessed sexual predator enough to work with him.
The Politics of Literal Destruction
While Trump and the GOP are busy empowering grifters on the one hand, they’re also going to be installing foxes in hen houses and turning government agencies into turkey farms. Call it the wrecking crew — Trump and the rest of the Republicans will be working to demolish everything Obama accomplished in 8 years. They plan to erase his legacy if at all possible. Charles P. Pierce has an example:
How do I know this? Because the Trump administration is staffing up, and this is the guy they put in charge of the transition at the EPA. Per Inside Climate News:
For his energy and environmental policy team, Trump has selected one of the nation's most prominent climate contrarians, Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, to head his EPA transition. Ebell worked on policy for the tobacco industry before his years of work opposing environmental regulations and sowing doubt on climate science. Trump is also reported to be considering Harold Hamm, chief executive of fracking industry leader Continental Resources, for energy secretary, and Forrest Lucas, co-founder of oil products company Lucas Oil, for interior secretary.
Mitch McConnell plans to repeal Obamacare ASAP. Expect this kind of focus wherever Republicans can strike. Not only do they undo Democratic achievements, they try to taint them in the public mind, and make it institutionally impossible for Democrats to work towards their goals.
That will teach Obama to make fun of Donald Trump in public. Anyone else, for that matter: Slate picks up hints Trump already has an enemies list. Shades of Richard M. Nixon! You just know Roger Stone is hard at work.
So, What Should Democrats Do?
In simplest terms, prepare to document the destruction. Follow the money and see where the public is getting ripped off. Give no Trump appointee the benefit of the doubt. Keep track of things going badly, promises getting broken, etc. Build up case files of how this is hurting real Americans. Turn it into soundbites and keep them coming.
Get the media to report it.
Scandals are baked into the Trump administration from Day One.
His legal problems are legion, including a couple of potentially nasty trials coming up. Trump can’t hide from them as president, thanks to the GOP efforts to go after Bill Clinton with a private lawsuit while he was president. He has so many conflicts of interest, we’ll never get to the bottom of them all.
Democrats could potentially keep Trump facing lawsuit after lawsuit given his record in bad faith business deals. All we need are a few multi-millionaires, foundations, think tanks, etc. willing to fund this — something the GOP has been doing for years against Democrats.
The people Trump is surrounding himself with have very public skeletons in their closets. A Democratic president, or any kind of Democratic government official who tried to do that would be pilloried by Republicans in the press; why do Republicans get away with it time after time?
Because Democrats and the media let them.
Republicans have an undeserved reputation for moral authority. It’s time to make them own the stench of hypocrisy and failure that emanates from them.
The biggest mistake Democrats make is moving on and not looking back; it encourages bad behavior by Republicans. If Obama had put together some kind of honest third party commission to document how we ended up in the Iraq fiasco, the Republicans might have been made to pay a price for it — and we wouldn’t still be dealing with the same miscreants now.
Democrats have to do a better job working the media refs. Message discipline, and repetition, repetition, repetition. It’s time they turned Cokie’s Law on the Republicans. It’s time they developed a consistent set of talking points about the GOP. It’s time they had them ready to throw them out on talking head shows and interviews. The Democratic Party is or should be in the middle of getting its act together — it’s time to set up dedicated operations to do this kind of thing. The GOP does it by reflex now.
The GOP has one huge advantage. They have an entire media complex devoted to getting their messages out, and they use the Big Lie technique constantly. They can promise anything, and not have to worry about delivering — because they can and do blame Democrats for everything they get wrong.
Democrats have one huge advantage. They don’t have to lie about what they’ve done, what they want to do, and how they want to do it. “When they go low, we go high” is fine as far as it goes — which wasn’t far enough this time. Telling the truth is NOT going low. Democrats need to find ways to do it that can’t be dismissed.
Ideas are good — but ideas that can be told as simple stories are even better. People like stories, and they use them to explain the world in terms they can understand, even say things they wouldn’t say otherwise.
What do you think?
UPDATE: Here’s a few more ideas going forward.
• If anyone is looking for a meme to use to describe the Trump White House, you can start with P.T. Barnum.
Phineas Taylor "P. T." Barnum (July 5, 1810 – April 7, 1891) was an American politician, showman, and businessman remembered for promoting celebrated hoaxes and for founding the Barnum & Bailey Circus.[1]Although Barnum was also an author, publisher, philanthropist, and for some time a politician, he said of himself, "I am a showman by profession...and all the gilding shall make nothing else of me",[2] and his personal aim was "to put money in his own coffers".[3] Barnum is widely, but erroneously, credited with coining the phrase "There's a sucker born every minute".[4]
• If we go with the circus metaphor, then we can also talk about the clowns Trump is surrounding himself with: long time Washington insiders and political hacks of the worst kind, and corporatists. We can already start asking why Trump is embracing the political establishment he claimed he was going to clean up.
There’s potential here for caricature. If we go with the circus metaphor, Trump is the Ringmaster, and he’s surrounding himself with clowns. Garry Trudeau could have field day with this. (And there’s the thing that the Ringmaster may get all the attention, but the clowns are the ones running the circus.)
• The Democrats are now stuck with few big names left to put a public face on the party and drive the news cycle. Charles “Chuck” Schumer as incoming Senate Minority Leader is going to be the highest ranking D.C. survivor. What Schumer does going forward is going to be critical, especially in a Senate where the GOP margin has now been thinned way down.
Schumer is notorious for being a camera hog. Is he a show pony or a work horse? Can he resist the temptation to make deals with the Donald for the sake of being at the center of things? Can he learn to counter his Wall Street favoritism instincts and his DNC establishment habits? He has more than a little New York City hustler in his DNA — which might make him a good foil for Trump.
Schumer had a book out a few years ago which had a lot of populist-sounding ideas: Positively American: Winning Back the Middle-Class Majority One Family at a Time. Now looks like a really good time to mine it for ideas and update them for the current political unreality show. You might consider dropping him a line to suggest that A) eyes are on him now, and B) what he does now is going to be critical for America.