Defenders of Donald Trump are trying to claim he was joking when he said at a news conference this morning that he hoped Russia had hacked Hillary Clinton’s email server and that it would expose “the 30,000 emails that are missing.” For instance, here’s Newt Gingrich on Twitter:
The media seems more upset by Trump's joke about Russian hacking than by the fact that Hillary's personal server was vulnerable to Russia
Now, there are several pieces of evidence out there that show Trump wasn’t joking at all. But one should be enough. Here’s the Washington Post:
“They probably have them. I’d like to have them released. . . . It gives me no pause. If they have them, they have them,” Trump added later when asked if his comments were inappropriate. “If Russia or China or any other country has those emails, I mean, to be honest with you, I’d love to see them.”
That doesn’t sound like a joke to me.
So now we have a major-party presidential candidate—whose ties to Vladimir Putin are already under scrutiny (here is a good overview from the BBC)—inviting Russian intelligence to interfere in the presidential campaign more than it already has. He refuses to release his tax returns, which anti-Trump conservative George Will has pointed out could contain information about his dealings with Russia. And tonight he denied having met Putin, thus flatly contradicting previous statements. (He’s lying, but I don’t know which statement is the lie.)
House Speaker Paul Ryan should rescind his endorsement. Indiana Governor Mike Pence should resign from the ticket. Of course, neither will happen.
Trump’s running mate. Official Kremlin photo (cc) 2014 via Global Panorama.
The job of the party infrastructure is to win elections. Democratic and Republican party officials regularly recruit candidates and punish weaker contenders who refuse to get out of the way. So the Wikileaks revelation of emails showing that the Democratic National Committee talked about helping Hillary Clinton and hurting Bernie Sanders mean exactly nothing. One email suggested that Sanders be attacked on the grounds that he might be an atheist. That’s pretty vicious stuff, but it didn’t happen.
Top Democrats believed that they were more likely to lose in November with a 74-year-old socialist at the top of the ticket than with Hillary Clinton, however flawed she may be. You’re free to disagree, but that was their judgment, and it’s not insane.
Outraged Sanders supporters might also keep in mind that the Wikileaks email dump is almost certainly a favor to Donald Trump from the Russian government, even if Wikileaks wasn’t directly involved. What we’ve already learned about the Trump-Putin connection would have been enough to force a presidential candidate to step aside in past election cycles. Now no one seems to care.
Meanwhile, Trump is back to claiming that Ted Cruz’s father may have been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
By now you’ve probably glanced at multiple takes from pundits who are recoiling in horror at Donald Trump’s angry, red-faced, seemingly endless acceptance speech. I don’t disagree with any of them. Yes, he embraced the cult of personality, which is the hallmark of authoritarianism. Yes, his demonization of the Other was reminiscent of fascism.
Underlying all of that, though, is something that went largely unspoken: under the right circumstances, fascism can be popular. And if the circumstances aren’t right, you can sometimes create your own. I’ll get to that. But first, let’s take a look at whether the public liked what it saw and heard.
An instant poll taken right after a speech may not tell us much, but I thought the one conducted by CNN and Opinion Research Corporation was fairly well designed. It was random, and its composition—41 percent Republican, 23 percent Democratic, and 36 percent independent—was, as the pollsters put it, reflective of the fact that more Republicans than Democrats are going to watch a Republican speech.
So what did the CNN/ORC poll find? Fifty-seven percent thought Trump’s speech was “very effective,” and another 18 percent thought it was “somewhat effective.” Just 24 percent had either a “very negative” or “somewhat negative” reaction. In response to what they thought of the policies that Trump outlined, 73 percent said they would move the country in a “positive” direction and 24 percent said “negative.”
In other words, Trump is going to get his convention bounce despite a week marred by chaos, plagiarism, Ted Cruz’s defiance, and Trump’s truly disturbing interview with the New York Times in which he threatened to walk away from our NATO commitments.
The United States in 2016 is prosperous, with the economy slowly returning to normal following the worst collapse since the Great Depression. Illegal immigration is down. Year-to-year blips notwithstanding, crime and violence have declined considerably from years past. With our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq winding down, far fewer American troops are being sacrificed. We are in the midst of an awful period of mass shootings, the killings of black men by police officers under circumstances that are often questionable, and, now, the targeting of police officers. But as terrible as these things are, our 24-hour media culture has made them appear far worse.
But as I said, when the circumstances aren’t right for authoritarianism, the strongman creates his own circumstances. That’s what Trump has been doing for his entire campaign. And it’s what he did Thursday night.
“This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton: death, destruction, terrorism, and weakness,” Trump said in what I thought was the defining moment of his speech. And as Philip Rucker and David Fahrenthold observe in the Washington Post, that brought the delegates to their feet for another round of their favorite chant: “Lock her up! Lock her up!”
At that point, the Great Leader smiled benignly and said, no, their focus should be on defeating Clinton in November. It was Peak Trump—the ultimate piece of political theater from someone who has turned “I didn’t say it, but others are” into an art form. Meanwhile, the hatred Trump has encouraged with his “Crooked Hillary” epithet and his insistence against all evidence that she has committed crimes led to an outburst from one of his own advisers that Clinton should be “shot for treason.”
There was so much mendacity on display that the fact-checkers could barely keep up. Glenn Kessler and Michelle Ye Hee Lee’s analysis in the Washington Post was especially comprehensive, finding that Trump lied about crime, immigration, taxes, food stamps, the Iran nuclear deal, Benghazi, Clinton’s private email server, trade, and more. They rightly called his speech “a compendium of doomsday stats that fall apart upon close scrutiny. Numbers are taken out of context, data is manipulated, and sometimes the facts are wrong.”
As has often been observed, we are now living in a post-fact era. But Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s pushback against CNN’s Jake Tapper may have represented a new low. When Tapper pointed out that FBI statistics don’t support the Trumpian view of the United States as a post-apocalyptic moonscape (my characterization, not Tapper’s) of crime and violence, Manafort responded, “People don’t feel safe in their neighborhoods. I’m not sure what statistics you’re talking about. The FBI is certainly suspect these days after what they just did with Hillary Clinton.” In other words, if the facts don’t support you, smear the fact-finder.
Finally, a few words about Trump’s outreach to the LGBT community. Letting Peter Thiel speak and spelling out the letters L-G-B-T-Q as if you were squinting at an eye chart at the optometrist’s is no substitute for signing off on a viciously anti-LGBT party platform—or for choosing a running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, whose anti-gay record is among the worst of any major elected official.
Clinton continues to hold a small but solid lead in the polls. Nevertheless, that margin has been shrinking. As of this morning, FiveThirtyEight gives her a 60 percent chance of winning the presidency (down from 80 percent a few weeks ago) while the New York Times has her at 74 percent.
One thing we learned four years ago (if anything from four years ago still matters) is that even a small lead can prove durable given that most voters in this divisive era make up their minds long before Election Day. But fear and hatred are powerful forces, and Trump has proved himself to be a master at manipulating the emotions of his supporters.
It seems unlikely that he’ll expand that support enough to actually win. But who among us thought a year ago that he’d be standing at the podium on the last night of the Republican National Convention, accepting the party’s nomination for president of these United States?
There is no one in politics better at playing a bad hand than Ted Cruz. Even before we learned that Donald Trump had given a deeply disturbing interview to the New York Times in which he walked away from our NATO commitments, I thought gettingbooed off the stage was likely to prove a good career move for Cruz. Now he looks like a genius.
We’ve all said this a million times over the past year, but Trump’s remarks about NATO struck me as disqualifying in a way that his previous ill-considered outbursts were not. Republicans may have cringed at his racist, violence-loving rhetoric, but ultimately they don’t care if he’s disparaging Latinos, Muslims, or women. But to undermine NATO—why, that’s the sort of thing they would falsely accuse President Obama of, or Hillary Clinton.
If these people had any principles, Paul Ryan today would endorse Clinton. Mike Pence would quit the ticket. Of course that won’t happen. But conservatives who are not institutionally tied to the Republican Party are going to rage about this for the rest of the campaign. Even before the NATO outburst, for instance, the Washington Post‘s Jennifer Rubin, a hardline conservative, offered some advice to Clinton on how she could win over Republicans. And here is a leader of the anti-Trump conservative movement, former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum:
Ten years from now, every delegate in tonight's hall who is still alive will claim to have cheered Ted Cruz
There are many lowlights to ponder in the Trump interview, but here’s one that really stuck out:
When the world sees how bad the United States is and we start talking about civil liberties, I don’t think we are a very good messenger.
My God. This is exactly the sort of rhetoric that Republicans have been falsely accusing Democrats of using for years. Obama apologized! And, needless to say, Trump is just plain wrong. We have many faults, because we’re a country and because we’re human. But very few nations are as free as the United States. Trump wouldn’t need to build a wall if so many people weren’t trying to come here.
If you haven’t already, please have a look at Franklin Foer’s recent piece in Slate on the ties between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Finally, I will close by reprising anti-Trump conservative Tom Nichols’s tweetstorm from two months ago.
Donald Trump, large and in charge. Photo (cc) 2011 by Gage Skidmore.
Last week the editors of the Washington Post‘s blog In Theory asked me to contribute to a series of posts on the media’s culpability in the rise of Donald Trump. Mine was just published. Later in the week we’ll hear from New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, Post media blogger Erik Wemple, and In Theory editor Christine Emba. The top of my piece follows.
What could be more open and democratic than a debate? For all the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth now taking place over the massive amounts of free media bestowed upon Donald Trump, it was his dominating performance in the televised debates that allowed him to separate himself from the pack.
Yet the debates themselves were an exercise in faux democracy. What really mattered, especially early on, was who got invited, who got to stand where and who was allowed to speak the most. Unfortunately, the media organizations that ran the debates (along with the Republican National Committee) relied on polls to make those decisions right from the very first encounter in August.
About three months ago I wrote an analysis for WGBH News on why Hillary Clinton almost certainly wouldn’t be indicted for using a private email server. Today the email story came to its predictable conclusion, with FBI Director James Comey issuing a devastatingly harsh report but recommending no criminal charges.
Clinton has suffered an enormous amount of damage over this story—deservedly so. But it doesn’t strike me that things got any worse for her this morning.
I don’t care that Corey Lewandowski is a partisan hack. And though it bothers me that he was Donald Trump’s thuggish enforcer, I don’t think it disqualifies him from sitting in front of a TV camera and extolling Trump’s alleged virtues.
But it does bother me—a lot—that CNN would give a platform to Lewandowski even though he may not be legally free to voice his honest opinion. That’s the least the network should get for the $500,000 it is reportedly paying him.
To recap briefly: Trump fired Lewandowski as his campaign manager a week ago Monday. Just two days later Lewandowski signed on with CNN to provide pro-Trump commentary. The hiring has been greeted with a considerable amount of outrage because of Lewandowski’s role in herding reporters into pens, banning certain journalists as well as entire news organizations from Trump events, and grabbing the arm of a female reporter hard enough that he was charged with assault. (The charge was later dropped.)
The real mind-bender, though, is that Lewandowski—who remains a true believer in Trump despite the firing—signed a non-disclosure agreement when he left the campaign. Even worse, he may also have signed a non-disparagement agreement. On the face of it, that would seem to mean there exists a legal document somewhere that says Lewandowski cannot criticize Trump. Now, maybe Lewandowski wouldn’t anyway. But there is an enormous difference between won’tand can’t. (We talked about the Lewandowski matter last week on WGBH-TV’s Beat the Press.)
Several of CNN’s on-air journalists have come up huge in holding their network to account. Last week Erin Burnett asked Lewandowski directly whether he had signed a non-disparagement agreement. Lewandowski did not answer the question. “Let me tell you who I am,” he said. “I am a guy who calls balls and strikes, I am going to tell it like it is.”
CNN media reporter Brian Stelter wrote about the situation last week and devoted a nine-minute-plus segment to it Sunday on Reliable Sources. Stelter, like Burnett, deserves credit for focusing on what exactly Lewandowski may have signed when he left the Trump campaign.
Should CNN run a disclosure every time Lewandowski opens his mouth? Yes, replied one of Stelter’s guests, Baltimore Sun media critic David Zurawick. But Zurawick added that CNN and other outlets should stay away from partisan commentators altogether. If they want to learn what’s going on inside the Trump campaign, he said, “let’s find out the old-fashioned way by reporting it, not paying weasels to tell you about it.”
Before Lewandowski’s hiring, CNN already had a pro-Trump commentator in its stable—Jeffrey Lord. And he told Stelter that he saw no difference between Lewandowski signing on with CNN, former George W. Bush consigliore Karl Rove going to work for Fox News, or former Bill Clinton apologist George Stephanopoulos being hired by ABC News.
Lord is right—or at least he would be right if it weren’t for the matter of what Lewandowski is legally free to say about his former boss. And you can roll any number of other hired guns into Lord’s critique. What do Democratic operatives Donna Brazile and Paul Begala add to our understanding when they appear on CNN? But such is the nature of political commentary on cable news, whose main imperative is to fill hour after hour as cheaply as possible. Yes, talking heads are cheap, even when they’re well-paid.
The sorry truth may be that CNN doesn’t want Lewandowski to criticize Trump even if he’s so inclined. During the 1990s Jeff Cohen, a left-wing media critic, got a tryout to fill the liberal seat on the late, unlamented Crossfire. Cohen didn’t get the job—and one of the reasons, he wrote in his 2006 book Cable News Confidential, was that he was unwilling to go along with a requirement that he defend Clinton come hell or high water.
No doubt Lewandowski will settle into his role without all that much additional controversy. Paul Fahri reported in the Washington Post on Monday that rumors of a revolt among CNN staffers had been greatly exaggerated. But something important has been lost, because CNN has gone beyond commentary, beyond partisanship, beyond the mindless recitation of talking points. With Lewandowski, we have no way of knowing whether he’s telling us what he really thinks or if he’s protecting the settlement he signed on his way out of Trump Tower.
That may not seem like much in a media environment in which we seem to hit a new low every week. But it’s one more reason why public distrust of the media is so widespread—and why it deserves to be.
Corey Lewandowski gives an affectionate shove to reporter Michelle Fields earlier this year.
If CNN wants to hire Donald Trump’s thuggish ex-goon, Corey Lewandowski, as a commentator, well, let’s just say that I would expect nothing less. But I’m genuinely appalled that CNN would bring him aboard knowing that Lewandowski is legally bound not to say what he’s really thinking.
CNN media reporter Brian Stelter, who’s doing a great job covering his employer’s ethical lapse, writes:
There are also swirling questions about whether Lewandowski is still bound to Trump somehow.
Like other Trump employees, he signed a non-disclosure agreement that ensures he will not share confidential information.
The agreement likely included a “non-disparagement clause,” impeding his ability to criticize Trump publicly.
I could almost live with the non-disclosure agreement. That’s not much different from a reporter’s protecting a confidential source. But a “non-disparagement clause”? Seriously? If Stelter has that right, then it means Lewandowski can’t offer his honest opinion on anything to do with Trump. When the next Trump outrage takes place and Lewandowski says it’s just peachy, we won’t have any idea whether he means it or not.
CNN should walk away from this colossal blunder, but of course it won’t.
The Boston Globe has published an unusual multimedia, interactive editorial calling for a ban on assault weapons that includes data, animated graphics, and thumbnail bios of six recalcitrant senators—including information on how much money they’ve received from the gun lobby as well as tools to email or tweet at them.
Front of the print edition.
The Globe is using the hashtag #makeitstop via its main Twitter account and its @GlobeOpinion account. Among other things, it’s been tweeting out the names of the Orlando mass-shooting victims.
The print edition comes with a four-page wraparound comprising the editorial and accompanying material.
Overall, it’s a well-executed effort, and I applaud editorial-page editor Ellen Clegg and her staff. I like it more than the fake front page the Globe devoted to Donald Trump earlier this year, which some people confused with the paper’s actual page one.
Unfortunately, the problem with such campaigns is that even when they’re effective at making their case, they’re ineffective in changing anyone’s minds. Still, we have to try. So kudos.
Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron (left) interviews Post owner Jeff Bezos at a recent event.
Donald Trump, who earlier today suggested that President Obama might somehow be linked to the Orlando shooting, has revoked the credentials of Washington Post reporters because of a headline stating that Trump had suggested Obama might somehow be linked to the Orlando shooting. Trump:
Post executive editor Marty Baron:
Donald Trump’s decision to revoke The Washington Post’s press credentials is nothing less than a repudiation of the role of a free and independent press. When coverage doesn’t correspond to what the candidate wants it to be, then a news organization is banished. The Post will continue to cover Donald Trump as it has all along — honorably, honestly, accurately, energetically, and unflinchingly. We’re proud of our coverage, and we’re going to keep at it.
It was just a few weeks ago that Trump launched a Nixonesque attack on the Post and its owner, Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos.
A few random thoughts.
• Shouldn’t we be suspicious of any news organization that hasn’t had its credentials revoked by the Trump campaign?
• This won’t hurt the Post a bit. Access is hugely overrated.
• I’m sorry that this is the first time I’ve written about Trump’s banishment of journalists. Previously he’s gone after Politico, the Huffington Post, and the Daily Beast. Yes, the Washington Post is one of our great newspapers. But Trump’s attacks on other news organizations are no less despicable.
• I’d like to see every news organization covering Trump burn their credentials and refuse to report on his events until open access is guaranteed for all.
