Donald Trump and the Clintons back in the day. Photo via NBC News.
Over the past few weeks, the political press has settled into a pattern I was hoping we could avoid in 2016: the normalization of the presidential campaign. With increasing frequency, the media are ignoring or playing down negative news about Donald Trump while throwing a collective fit over Hillary Clinton’s appearances of possibilities of rumors of wrongdoing.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman—whose paper has been a prime offender—warned on Monday that the race is in danger of turning into Bush versus Gore all over again. He wrote: “True, there aren’t many efforts to pretend that Donald Trump is a paragon of honesty. But it’s hard to escape the impression that he’s being graded on a curve.” Writing in the Atlantic, James Fallows provides a thorough overview of exactly how the media’s “normalizing approach” is playing out.
Donald Trump suggested this afternoon that Hillary Clinton be assassinated if she appoints judges who would restrict gun rights. His campaign is trying to spin it. But surely everyone understands that the Orange Menace just crossed the last remaining line.
It’s no longer a matter of whether Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, et al. will unendorse him. It’s whether they have the integrity and patriotism to invoke whatever emergency measures exist to remove him from the ticket.
My first inclination today was to write something about this being a moment that we might look back on as the beginning of the end for the Trump campaign.
But rather than belabor the obvious, I’d like to examine the proper role of the news media in covering a campaign like this, which is utterly unique in the post-World War II era—possibly even in the post-Civil War era. Let me start by laying out what I hope the vast majority of you will regard as self-evident truths about the two major-party candidates.
Suddenly we have relevance. Today’s New York Post features a large front-page photo of Melania Trump and another woman, both of them nude and in an erotic embrace. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! But Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, is among the most anti-gay elected officials in the country. Someone needs to question Pence about this. Would he allow Mrs. Trump to buy a cake in Indiana?
In case you haven’t heard, the New York Post today is running 20-year-old nude photos of Melania Trump. The pictures were taken during a modeling session for which she was presumably paid. There doesn’t seem to be any scandal associated with the photos. And yet, last night, I saw a number of people denounce the Post‘s decision to publish them as “sexist.”
Is it? I wouldn’t have published the photos. You’ll notice that I’m not linking to them. Yet when various media outlets published a mostly nude photo of Scott Brown during his mercifully brief career as a national political figure, I don’t recall anyone denouncing that as sexist.
File this under “no big deal.” Especially after Donald Trump viciously attacked the Khans, the Constitution-waving Gold Star parents who spoke out against Trump’s hatred of Muslims at last week’s Democratic National Convention. That, folks, is a big deal.
Update: Here’s a worthwhile distinction. Not sure why I didn’t think of it myself.
not sure it's sexist but I think it's wildly inappropriate. Brown was a candidate; Melania is not.
In retrospect, Michael Bloomberg’s speech on Wednesday may have been the most important of the Democratic National Convention. By explicitly framing the contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as a clash between sanity and insanity, between competence and incompetence, the former New York City mayor provided a framework not only for Clinton’s acceptance speech but for the rest of the campaign.
“Let’s elect a sane, competent person with international experience,” the Republican-turned-independent said in his plodding manner. “The bottom line is: Trump is a risky, reckless, and radical choice, and we can’t afford to make that choice. Now, I know Hillary Clinton is not flawless. No candidate is. But she is the right choice and the responsible choice in this election.”
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.
