Unqualified Offerings

One thing I admired about Bush’s 2004 campaign was that he was unwavering in his messaging on Iraq.  Sure, it was already turning into a disaster, but he just kept up 3 points:  Saddam was a bad man, removing him made America safer, and it was part of the War on Terror.  You might be firing up your keyboards to say that the first point is irrelevant, the second is false, and the third is only true in a definitional sense, but who cares?  What he said was far more coherent than any of what Kerry had to say about Iraq.  In that sense, I think this article about Trump’s campaign is dead on:

But when it comes to the economic platform in his speeches he remained disciplined and clear: he’s going to crush undocumented workers, roll back globalization, and cut taxes and regulations in DC. He has catch-phrases and symbols for each (the wall, rip up trade deals, drain the swamp), and it’s easy for his (white) voters to see how those line up with a better economic situation for themselves. As I’ve emphasized, this is what policy is, and Trump was fantastic at it.

What were Clinton’s three things to benefit workers? There was policy everywhere, but none of it clear for voters. An infrastructure deal, though would that even happen and didn’t Obama already try that? Anyway, Trump promised to do it twice as big. After that it wasn’t clear what was a priority.

…

It’s the first and most consistent thing he discusses. It’s implied it is a specific kind of job, a white, male, bread-winning manufacturing job. He doesn’t discuss “the economy” and how it could work for all, he doesn’t talk about inequality, he doesn’t talk about automation and service work; he makes it clear you will have a high-paying manufacturing job when he is President.

So what? Much of the Democratic platform is based on pushing through the fact that this political economy was anachronistic decades ago. As Daniel Rodgers writes, “Many of the economic planks in the Democratic Party program were not pitched” for Trump voters, who sensed the platform reflected that “that the culture wars had finally come home.” Family leave, child allowances, and universal pre-K acknowledge that we need to look beyond male breadwinners as the core economic unit. Fight for $15 is about turning service work into a decent, secure, working-class life. Efforts to try and disentangle commodities like health-care and retirement from employment run into the hope that employment would be sufficient to provide them. Voters won’t want to hear this.

This is the reality that Democrats have to engage with.  They didn’t feel the need to engage with it in the 90’s because they kept winning the White House with a Bubba.  They didn’t need to engage with it after 2000 because they only lost on a technicality.  They started talking about this sort of engagement with the White Working Class after 2004, but then 2008 and 2012 came and they elected and re-elected the First Black President.  It was easy to believe that there are new facts on the ground, a diverse new America that will shape the new electoral reality.

I don’t know what to say to people who want to believe that the factories will come back in force.  Hard truths delivered like foul-tasting medicine will go over about as well as the horrible genre of privilege think-pieces by the More Woke Than Thou set.  A promise to fight for people, in non-technocratic language, might work.  I’m pleasantly surprised by my conservative friends expressing sympathy for the Native Americans trying to resist a pipeline in North Dakota, in part because they’re talking about pollution of their own water, i.e. very direct and tangible harms.  Something that appeals to the need to be a provider will have to be part of the argument.  This article by Joan Williams is a surprisingly good place to start–when I hear “Director of the Center for WorkLife Law” I generally think of someone who’s going to tell me to be sympathetic to elite knowledge workers who want even more flexible hours than they already have, but she thinks beyond the elite bubble.

Whatever we do, we can’t just respond to him with shock over his style.  We have to respond to him on the tangibles, even if that means “normalizing” him.  Eminem became a millionaire by being the guy who elicited “Oh wait, no way, you’re kidding, he didn’t just say what I think he did, did he?” from culturally sensitive people.

Donaldik Fyodorvich spoke on the phone with the President of Taiwan.  This is, apparently, a highly unusual move, to say the least.

If you ask me whether I think Taiwan ought to be able to sit at the Big Kids’ Table, I will say that my personal opinion is yes.  However, if you ask me whether the guy who will be ultimately responsible for US foreign policy ought to be diplomatic, especially with a nuclear power that has a very large economy, my answer will be EMPHATICALLY YES.  I can sit here in a coffee shop, blogging while procrastinating from grading papers, and say that Taiwan ought to sit at the Big Kids’ Table.  That does not mean that it is a good idea for the president-elect to just ignore how diplomacy works.  That does not mean that it is a good idea to ignore realities.  Foreign policy is about weighing interests and trying to advance key interests carefully and effectively, usually with great patience.  It is not about just taking a call because why not.

Check this out:

Dennis Wilder, former top White House Asia adviser during the George W Bush administration, said: “It would be a mistake for Beijing and others to over-interpret the meaning of a phone call between president-elect Trump and the president of Taiwan.”

He said that Mr Trump was “not steeped in the diplomatic history of US-China relations and probably has not been briefed by the Department of State on the US-China understandings on our unofficial ties to Taiwan.” He added: “We are in uncharted territory with Trump foreign policy, and nations should give him some latitude as he forms his foreign policy team.”

Trump is officially less diplomatic than Bush The Lesser.

It is, frankly, embarrassing that this is the guy who will be representing us in conversations with the President of China, one of the oldest countries on earth, and one of its high cultures.  I’m proud of America, in my own way.  I might not be into flags and troops, but I’m amazingly proud to be part of the country that took in the world’s misfits and malcontents and wound up becoming the wealthiest country on earth, sending a man to the moon, and inventing rock and roll.  For that I hope that even in the distant future historians will count us among the great cultures of the world.  I’m not naive enough to think that any society can be this great forever, but I’ve at least entertained the hope that we could have a good long run, and hold our heads high among our peers on earth. The world should always look with awe at the flag on the moon, the noble ideals in the Bill of Rights, and our awesome catalog of rock songs.

In that light, I want the President of the United States to be a person who can stand as (at least) an equal of the President of China.  I want a President who can be counted as respectable while visiting the pyramids on an official tour of Egypt.  I hope that someday we might have a President who will visit Iraq to offer contrition and stand respectfully amidst the memory of Sumer.  I hope that our President could stand with dignity in the city built on the foundation of Tenochtitlan and negotiate ably in defense of our interests.  I would like a President who could go to Tehran and be regarded with respect as he negotiates with Persians.

Instead we have a guy who is less diplomatic than a n00b intern at the State Department.

Now, Donaldik Fydorovich claims that the Taiwanese President called him, rather than the other way around.  Maybe that’s so.  But even a marginally competent transition team would have routed that call to someone who would have handled it…diplomatically.  I don’t know exactly what you say to a Head of State who calls and asks to talk to the President-Elect despite the diplomatic awkwardness of it.  It’s not my job to know that.  It is, however, the job of the President-Elect’s foreign policy advisors to know that.

And, incidentally, I don’t blame the President of Taiwan for making such an unusual call, if it was in fact a call that she initiated.  It is her job to advance the interests of the country, and I cannot blame her for seeking a phone call with the President-Elect.  It is, however, the job of the President-Elect of the United States (and the people whom he selects to advise him) to weigh the interests of the United States and decide if receiving that call advances the interests of the United States, taking into account relations with China.

Kevin Drum’s comments on Trump’s latest Twitter outburst have me cracking up with laughter…until I remember that this shit is real.

I still wake up each morning thinking it can’t really be true that Donald Trump will be president of the United States in less than eight weeks. I mean, he’s…he’s—he’s a willfully ignorant crackpot. He’s a ridiculous game show host. He’s a five-year-old in a 70-year-old body. He’s addicted to gossip and TV. He’s a trust fund kid who thinks he’s a great businessman. He doesn’t have the attention span to read an actual book. He loves conspiracy theories. And he’s got an ego so fragile it ought to be packed in styrofoam peanuts.

…

What kind of person is so unhinged that even though he won a presidential election, he goes nuts when he’s reminded that he lost the popular vote and (a) demands that all his minions start writing sycophantic tweets about his historic landslide victory, (b) continues stewing about it anyway and fabricates an allegation of massive voter fraud perpetrated by the Democratic Party, (c) flips out at an anodyne segment from a CNN reporter about his lies, and (d) spends his evening hunched over his smartphone rounding up a motley crew of racists, nutbags, and teenagers to assure him that he’s right?

What kind of person does this? And how easy is it to manipulate someone like this? We have a helluva scary four years ahead of us.

Rick Perlstein has done yeoman’s work chronicling the process by which the fever swamps of the right were assiduously courted and empowered.  This is the culmination of that process.  The President-elect is approvingly citing random nuts on Twitter.  It’s what happens when a party has spent the last 50 years on direct mail marketing that stokes paranoia.  A whole lot of pixels have been spelled debating the exact extent to which bigotry did or didn’t factor into Trump’s support, and whether it was really bigotry or “just” a willingness to tolerate it or actually a desire to wink at it but not, you know, openly support it or whatever.  But I think a lot of those discussions miss a related but distinct factor:  General craziness.

Plenty of people argue that he’s either a bigot or else sufficiently cynical and amoral that he doesn’t mind playing off of bigoted appeals.  They have sane, clear-eyed arguments for that assessment.  Most would also argue that giving a pass for his blatant bigotry is tantamount to accepting or joining in it.  But I’m not sure that their argument applies to all of his supporters, because moral arguments generally presuppose a person who comprehends reality.  If you’re in a bizarro world where up is down and left is right and Barack Obama founded ISIS when the Secret Service wasn’t looking and gold fringes on a flag nullify a judge’s decision, I don’t know how morality works, or what people are knowingly accepting.  I’m not trying to say that it’s all good and that whatever they accept is OK and beyond judgment.  Rather, I’m saying that I’d like to see them get to planet earth before I start judging them by earthly standards.

My argument is not one of sympathy, nor a literal psychiatric appraisal (because, you know, I’m not a psychiatrist), but rather an observation that I don’t even know where to begin the conversation when somebody’s reality is so warped.  On the one hand I want to respect them as adults with agency and an understanding of their own self-interest and an ability to listen to others and reason.  On the other hand, some views are pretty damn warped, and there are subcultures with mixes of true believers, amoral political operators, and cynical con men who have spent decades feeding people those views and reaping the benefits.  In a world where Ann Coulter sells enough books to own homes in Manhattan, Palm Beach, and Los Angeles, it’s pretty clear that lefties are not the only ones living in bubbles.  At some point the ignorance goes from being a choice to being a self-reinforcing pit of quicksand from which there is no easy escape.

So here we are.  The conservative movement finally installed a President who either truly believes their bullshit or at least apes it so perfectly that he truly appears to enjoy re-tweeting them.

It occurs to me that the Trump Administration may be the most transparently corrupt in a long time, and largely because the man may not actually want the job.  To explain what I mean, let’s contrast Trump with Cheney:

Aside from possible violations involving the secrecy of things like the energy task force (not so different from Clinton using a private email server, notwithstanding protestations–from both sides–that it’s totally different), I suspect that Dick Cheney mostly complied with the letter of the law concerning the entanglement of purely personal financial interests and the conduct of his office.  Dick Cheney seems like the sort who’s OK with putting his assets into an ostensibly blind trust and then accepting that if he greases the wheels of the system things will work out for him and his own.  He might not know exactly where his money was parked during his time in office, but he surely knew that if he sets up policy certain ways and launches certain wars then the types of companies he’s tied to will benefit, and there will be plenty of people who will owe him when he leaves office. He seemed perfectly happy to be a boring man who works in secret and either has no illegal direct entanglements or only does his entanglements behind closed doors with no public fuss.

I cannot imagine Trump having fun doing business indirectly.  He doesn’t just want to set things up and let them work out in ways that keep him from any direct and provable entanglements.  He wants to be in the room to strike the deal and then go to the grand opening to appear on camera with models and celebrities.  Removing himself from the direct operation of his business would make him deeply unhappy.  Besides the fact that he’s the wrong man for the job, it’s also the wrong job for him, and that’s actually kind of sad.

I assume that he will be unable to keep himself out of the game, and that’s what will make his administration transparently corrupt.

With all of the potential for conflicts of interest between Trump’s business holdings and his work as President, I’m sure that James Comey will consistently act out of an abundance of caution, and the House will have its investigative committees working at full speed.  Right?

Um, right?

Goddamnit.