Tag: Donald Trump

A few quick thoughts on Mitt Romney’s Trump speech

I just watched Mitt Romney’s speech in which he lacerated Donald Trump. A few quick thoughts:

1. Romney has many admirable qualities, but he’s the worst possible leader of an anti-Trump movement. He’s the very symbol of what Trump supporters despise.

2. The quick consensus on Twitter seems to be that Romney made a mistake by not apologizing for the endorsement he received from Trump in 2012. It wouldn’t have been a big deal. At that time, Trump wasn’t spouting the hateful nonsense that he is today (or at least not as much of it). So why not just say it?

3. Is Romney a candidate? He says no, but of course he is. He essentially called for a brokered convention. If there’s a Draft Romney movement, do you really think he’d walk away? If there’s anything we’ve learned about Mitt over the past dozen years, it’s that he desperately wants to be president.

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Jack Shafer: Don’t blame the media for Donald Trump

Jack Shafer of Politico puts into words what I’ve been inchoately thinking: Though the media surely have not covered themselves in glory by showering so much attention upon the candidacy of racist demagogue Donald Trump, it’s really not their fault that he’s leading the Republican field. Taking note of the epic negative coverage Trump has received, Shafer concludes:

If you were a conventional media observer, you might say that the Trump candidacy demonstrates not the power of the press, but—overwhelmingly, and to our chagrin—its relative powerlessness. But maybe that’s just what we want you to think.

Trump is a creation of the media, of course—but not of the news media. As Shafer observes, he’s been a fixture in the entertainment media for years on the strength of The Apprentice and his bestselling books.

I’d dial Shafer’s take back a bit. I do think the media are to blame for giving Trump way too many column inches (look it up, kids) and too much air time at the expense of the other candidates, and I don’t think the coverage has been as tough as it should have been until recently. But neither do I think the media had it within their power to derail the Trump Express.

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Will Trump face an independent challenge from the right?

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Donald Trump on December 29 in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Photo (cc) by Matt Johnson.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Super Tuesday was newsworthy not so much because of what happened, but because it set the stage for what may prove to be cataclysmic events in the weeks and months ahead—especially on the Republican side.

To no one’s surprise, racist demagogue Donald Trump took another huge step toward becoming the Republican nominee, raising serious questions about the future of the party. Worcester’s own Charles P. Pierce, who writes a popular political blog for Esquire, compares the situation to the break-up of the Whig Party in the 1850s. In the Financial Times, Martin Wolf is even gloomier in a column headlined “Donald Trump embodies how great republics meet their end.”

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton hit her marks with ease. Bernie Sanders will soldier on, but as a left-wing protest candidate angling for a nice speaking slot at the party’s national convention rather than as someone who is actually running for president.

What follows is a round-up of commentary that will help you make sense of what comes next.

• The Republican crisis. Let’s start with a week-old piece whose relevance has only increased. As Conor Friedersdorf wrote in The Atlantic, fears that Trump would mount an independent candidacy if he didn’t get his way have been turned on their head. Now it’s conservative Republicans who may ask one of their own to run as an independent this fall against major-party candidates Clinton and Trump.

Such a candidate would likely come not from the Republicans’ minuscule moderate wing but from the right, the better to challenge Trump’s heterodox (and ever-shifting) views on Social Security, health care, and abortion rights. Republican Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska has said that he won’t support for Trump and might support an independent conservative.

So here’s an idea: Why not South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley? She’s certainly conservative enough, coming to prominence several years ago on the strength of her Tea Party support. She’s non-white and struck just the right tone on the Confederate flag following the Charleston shootings last year. In other words, she’s an ideal alternative to Trump, who took a disturbingly long time to disavow the support of Ku Klux Klan figure David Duke.

If not Haley, there’s always Mitt Romney, as this Boston Globe editorial reminds us.

• Sanders faces reality. In the span of just a few weeks, Hillary Clinton has lurched from inevitable to teetering on the brink and then back to inevitable again—a media-driven phenomenon that we talked about on WGBH-TV’s Beat the Press last week.

So what went wrong with the Bernie Sanders campaign? Washington Postcolumnist Dana Milbank took a dive into the numbers and found that, though voters are angry, the anger is mainly on the Republican side. Milbank writes:

Americans overall have a dim view of where the country is headed: 36 percent think we’re on the right track, and 60 percent say we’re headed in the wrong direction, in the January Washington Post-ABC News poll. But break that down further and you find that 89 percent of Republicans think we’re on the wrong track. With Democrats, it’s reversed: Only 34 percent say we’re heading the wrong way.

Given those findings, Clinton’s decision to go all-in with her embrace of President Obama makes a lot of sense.

• A massive media fail. In Politico, Hadas Gold pulls together multiple strands in trying to explain why the media got Trump so wrong by treating him until recently as a laughingstock with no chance of winning the nomination. (Mea culpa.)

The best quote is from New Yorker editor David Remnick, who tells Gold, “The fact that so many of us, all of us, were wrong in predicting anywhere near the extent of his success so far, may be partly due to the fact we didn’t want to believe those currents could be appealed to so well and so deeply and successfully.”

• Two cheers for democracy. At National Review, the venerable conservative journal that recently devoted an entire issue to anti-Trumpism, Kevin D. Williamson writes that the two major political parties both produced better nominees before the rise of the modern primary-and-caucus system:

In our modern political discourse, we hear a great deal of lamentation about deals made in “smoke-filled rooms,” but in fact that horse-trading led to some pretty good outcomes. Vicious demagogues such as Donald Trump and loopy fanatics such as Bernie Sanders were kept from the levers of power with a surprisingly high degree of success.

• Why Rubio keeps losing. Marco Rubio finally won something—the Minnesota caucuses. But the Florida senator, a Tea Party favorite embraced by the party establishment, has consistently underperformed. Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who on Super Tuesday won his home state along with Oklahoma and Alaska, now appears to be a more viable challenger to Trump than Rubio does.

Why did Rubio never rise to the moment? There were the robotic talking points, of course, as well as his seeming lack of any sort of core as he veered wildly from sunny optimism to telling a thinly veiled joke about the size of Trump’s packageover the weekend.

In Slate, Isaac Chotiner opines about all these things and more—and reaches the conclusion that Rubio’s meltdown in the New Hampshire debate, in which he panicked under a withering assault from Chris Christie, may have done lasting harm, even though he seemed to have recovered. Chotiner writes that “it’s possible the initial conventional wisdom about his debate performance was correct,” although he adds that it’s “wishful thinking” to believe that Rubio would otherwise be the front-runner.

• Christie’s hostage video. Chris Christie’s uncomfortable appearance with Trump on Tuesday night following his endorsement provoked an outburst of mockery on Twitter. Typical was this tweet from Adam Riglian:

The Guardian and CNN.com have some amusing wrap-ups as well.

Obama, Republicans agree: The State of the Union is Trump

The divider-in-chief. Photo (cc) 2015 by Michael Vadon.
The divider-in-chief. Photo (cc) 2015 by Michael Vadon.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

President Obama told a few jokes during his final State of the Union address. The best one, though, was so couched in the language of humility and high-mindedness that it flew right over everyone’s heads.

Claiming that one of his “few regrets” was that “the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better,” Obama said: “There’s no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide, and I guarantee I’ll keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office.”

Obama surely knows as well as anyone that Abraham Lincoln’s election led directly to the Civil War. As for Franklin Roosevelt, here’s what he had to say about the one percent of his era: “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

In fact, we live in divisive times—a moment when we can’t agree on issues ranging from gun control to climate change; when Republican representatives and senators Tuesday night couldn’t bring themselves to offer even tepid applause for Obama’s call for universal pre-kindergarten and “more great teachers for our kids.”

The unnamed guest at the State of the Union—and in South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley’s Republican response—was Donald Trump, who has emerged as the exemplar of that divisiveness, and a dangerous one at that. Defying all predictions (including mine) that he would fade by the time the presidential campaign got serious, Trump continues to loom large, offering little other than an authoritarian appeal to rage and racism.

Obama addressed Trump with this: “When politicians insult Muslims, when a mosque is vandalized, or a kid bullied, that doesn’t make us safer. That’s not telling it like it is. It’s just wrong. It diminishes us in the eyes of the world. It makes it harder to achieve our goals. And it betrays who we are as a country.”

Haley, calling herself “the proud daughter of Indian immigrants,” also addressed Trump directly, though, like Obama, she did not name him: “During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices. We must resist that temptation. No one who is willing to work hard, abide by our laws, and love our traditions should ever feel unwelcome in this country.”

It was a poignant moment for perhaps our two most successful nonwhite political leaders—both Christians, one suspected by his enemies of being a secret Muslim, the other raised a Sikh. But it remains to be seen whether it will do any good. As you may have heard, right-wing controversialist Ann Coulter responded on Twitter that “Trump should deport Nikki Haley.”

At Talking Points Memo, liberal journalist Josh Marshall called Obama’s speech “a rebuke to the Trumps and the Cruzes” and, for the rest of the country, “a wake up call, a friendly reality check.” He also described the Trump moment that Obama was addressing in apocalyptic terms—which increasingly strikes me as appropriate:

We’re in the midst of a presidential primary race which has antics and spectacle but, taken in full, is putting on display a dark side and dark moment in America. Not to put too fine a point on it but an avowed white nationalist group is running campaign advertisements for the Republican frontrunner. And it doesn’t seem to be taken as that big a deal. The frontrunner himself can’t even bother to disavow it.

Will any of this have an effect? As other observers have noted, Haley was chosen to give the response by House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and she no doubt said exactly what they wanted her to say. If the Republicans somehow manage to choose a normal nominee, she would make a logical running mate.

But Trump’s core supporters—angry, less educated white men—are probably no happier about being lectured to by an Indian-American woman than they are by an African-American. “The target,” wrote Slate’s Jim Newell of Haley’s speech, “would appear to be Trump’s brand of nativism, which, as we know, is also a significant share of Republican voters’ brand of nativism.”

Or as the conservative commentator Ramesh Ponnuru put it at National Review:

Won’t Trump and his supporters be able to claim vindication from the fact that both President Obama and the Republican respondent to him, Nikki Haley, gave speeches that attacked him? Indeed, that obviously reflected an obsession with him? He wants to stand against the leaders of both parties, and today they both obliged.

Dana Milbank, a liberal columnist for The Washington Post, praised Obama’s speech, writing that “in the current environment, there is nothing more important than answering the dangerous demagoguery that has arisen.” You could say the same about Haley, whose remarks were less pointed, but who had a narrower path to walk given that she was calling out a fellow Republican.

We’ll find out during the next few weeks whether it did any good. To return to Lincoln and FDR, we presumably ought to be able to get through this moment without a civil war, and we’re finally recovering from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of Roosevelt’s time.

What we really need—to invoke a considerably less distinguished president—is a return to normalcy. It will be up to the voters soon enough.

Two repulsive moments should’ve defined Tuesday’s debate

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Who won Tuesday night’s Republican debate in Las Vegas? More important, whom have the pundits anointed as the winners, thus helping to frame the race in the final weeks leading up to Iowa and New Hampshire?

I’ll get to that. But first I want to highlight two statements that were so repulsive, so nauseatingly immoral, that we shouldn’t let them go unmentioned. I’m referring to front-runner Donald Trump’s endorsement of US-led terrorist attacks on the families of terrorists and former front-runner Ben Carson’s blithe acceptance of the killing of children.

Trump was asked by Georgia Tech student Josh Jacob via Facebook about his recent statement that the United States must kill the families of ISIS members. Jacob knew whereof he spoke: according to Politico, Trump recently said exactly that, thus—er—trumping his call for banning Muslims in terms of sheer outrageousness. Here’s Trump two weeks ago:

It’s a horrible thing. They’re using them as shields. But we’re fighting a very politically correct war. And the other thing is with the terrorists, you have to take out their families. They, they care about their lives. Don’t kid yourself. But they say they don’t care about their lives. You have to take out their families.

On Tuesday, Trump neither backed down from nor clarified his views. He mentioned the mother of San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook, and in the context of his earlier statement you might have wondered if he thought she should be dragged out of her home and executed in front of the neighbors. He repeated a longstanding falsehood that the family members of the 9/11 terrorists were flown out of the country after the attack on the World Trade Center.

“They knew what was going on,” Trump said (I am relying on a debate transcript published by The Washington Post). “They went home and they wanted to watch their boyfriends on television. I would be very, very firm with families. Frankly, that will make people think because they may not care much about their lives, but they do care, believe it or not, about their families’ lives.”

As Conor Friedersdorf put it in The Atlantic’s live blog:

Donald Trump frequently makes offensive statements, often transgressing against deeply held norms, so much so that we begin to ignore them. But the abhorrent statement that he would strike out at the family members of terrorists may well be a new low, even for him.

Carson’s remarks were less consequential given his fading importance in the Republican contest. But this is a man whose entire campaign is based on his self-promoted image as a good person and a deeply religious Christian. So when debate panelist Hugh Hewitt asked him about the inevitability that thousands of children would die in the carpet bombing of ISIS-held territory that Carson supports, Carson said nothing about trying to minimize civilian casualties. Instead, the neurosurgeon floated off into a reverie about brain tumors. Which led to this:

CARSON: Well, interestingly enough, you should see the eyes of some of those children when I say to them we’re going to have to open your head up and take out this tumor. They’re not happy about it, believe me. And they don’t like me very much at that point. But later on, they love me….

You know, later on, you know, they really realize what’s going on. And by the same token, you have to be able to look at the big picture and understand that it’s actually merciful if you go ahead and finish the job, rather than death by 1,000 pricks.

HEWITT: So you are OK with the deaths of thousands of innocent children and civilian? It’s like…

CARSON: You got it. You got it.

And how did the audience respond? Although I didn’t hear it, according to several accounts, including this one from Business Insider, Hewitt—not Carson—was booed. (Update: Business Insider has changed its item to say that Carson’s “You got it” was a response to the audience, not to Hewitt. I half-agree. I think it was clear that Carson was responding to both—affirming his position on civilian deaths and playing to the crowd.)

Now I realize I’m deep into my word count and I’ve barely mentioned how the dynamics of the Republican race may or may not have changed as a result of Tuesday night’s proceedings. My assessment: not by very much, though I do think a few interesting things took place on the margins.

I thought four serious candidates came out of the debate: Trump and Jeb Bush, who had his best night by going after Trump; and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, who, like Trump and Bush, clashed repeatedly in their own mini-debates. I don’t know that Bush really hurt Trump, who was at his confident, bullying, ignorant (as he was on the nuclear triad) best. But Bush got off some decent one-liners. I especially liked his calling Trump the “candidate of chaos,” since it conjured up images of Maxwell Smart and KAOS.

Rubio took Cruz to school when Cruz criticized him for supporting the toppling of brutal dictators like Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and, now, Bashar al-Assad of Syria. But Rubio seemed lost and unable to explain his position when Cruz accused him of being soft on immigration. And I agree with Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, who writes, “Rubio is polished but you can see in the split screens a guy who’s studied up but basically insecure and unsure of himself in debate.” Overall, it was not a great night for the Republican establishment’s preferred choice (assuming Bush can’t find his way back to relevance).

Did Chris Christie have a moment? I didn’t think so, but I may have missed something. Polling prodigy Nate Silver believes Christie may be in roughly the same position that John Kerry was in late 2003, when Howard Dean looked like the inevitable if unlikely nominee. (Thanks to old friend Al Giordano, who flagged that on Twitter.) Adds Taegan Goddard of Political Wire: “Christie, in particular, may have bought himself more time and could be a real threat to Rubio as the establishment choice.”

I don’t want to let Trump’s promise not to run as an independent go unmentioned. It was interesting mainly because Hewitt, the conservative commentator who asked the question, actually applauded Trump’s answer. If CNN had any journalistic standards (and it doesn’t), Hewitt would have instantly disqualified himself from participating in future debates. No cheering in the press box.

Finally, a word about Rand Paul. While John Kasich and Carly Fiorina have outlasted their usefulness, Paul—who has as much chance of winning the nomination as George Pataki—comes across in debate after debate as knowledgeable, principled, and able to bring something to the table that the others can’t.

Paul’s strong libertarian views, and especially his non-interventionist approach to foreign policy, are completely out of step with today’s Republican Party. CNN apparently had to ignore its own rules to include Paul in the debate.

Paul’s continued participation is a little like inviting Bernie Sanders onto the stage to offer running commentary. But it’s also a welcome respite from the death and destruction promised by the rest of the field.

Making sense of Trump’s morally bankrupt anti-Muslim rant

CVs3MltWsAAi1JAPreviously published at WGBHNews.org.

Donald Trump’s call to ban Muslims from the United States is so reprehensible that it’s hard to know where to begin. So I’ll begin with this: Aside from being morally bankrupt and likely to provoke anti-Muslim violence, Trump’s rhetoric is based on a profound misreading of reality.

Every weekend I receive an email newsletter from The Washington Post called “The Optimist,” which highlights 10 or so uplifting stories. Its aim, I imagine, is to prevent you from slitting your wrists after wading through a week’s worth of news about death, destruction, and other depressing topics.

The lead item in “The Optimist” this past weekend—after the mass murders in San Bernardino but before Trump’s hateful outburst—was headlined “We’ve had a massive decline in gun violence in the United States. Here’s why.”

According to the article, by Max Ehrenfreund, the Pew Research Center has found that gun homicides fell by nearly 50 percent from 1993 to 2013—from seven per 100,000 to 3.6. The possible reasons ranged from more police officers to declining alcohol consumption to fewer instances of lead poisoning, which causes brain damage that can lead to criminal behavior.

Moreover, terrorism—including terrorism inspired by Islamic extremism—comprises such a small proportion of homicides that it barely amounts to a rounding error. According to The New York Times, 45 people in the United States have died in jihadist terrorism attacks (including the 14 killed in San Bernardino) since September 11, 2001. The death toll from terrorists associated with white supremacists and other right-wing groups is slightly higher: 48.

And these figures pale in comparison to the more than 200,000 “conventional murders” that were committed during the same period. But the Times article notes, correctly, that “the disproportionate focus they [terrorist attacks] draw in the news media and their effect on public fear demand the attention of any administration.”

Which is why we are in the midst of a national freakout over jihadist-inspired terrorism—not just to the exclusion of other murders, but to the exclusion of other acts of terror as well. Consider:

It’s been a little over a week since three people were fatally shot at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. The suspected killer, Robert Lewis Dear, may have been inspired by selectively edited videos put together by abortion-rights opponents. Yet the incident, while receiving considerable news coverage, did not lead to anything other than the usual back-and-forth over gun control.

Similarly, the mass murder last June of nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, apparently at the hands of a young white supremacist named Dylann Roof, led to a worthwhile national conversation about the Confederate flag—but nothing more.

The worst mass shooting in American history, needless to say, was the 2012 massacre of 20 young children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. That particular incident actually did lead to a prolonged debate over gun control and the ease with which the mentally ill killer, Adam Lanza, had managed to obtain lethal weaponry. Ultimately, though, very little action was taken.

As those of us who live in Boston will never forget, the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings and their aftermath—which claimed the lives of four people and caused dozens of serious injuries—were a genuine example of jihadist terrorism. The bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, were radicalized Muslims who read Al Qaeda’s Inspire magazine, which contained articles such as “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”

In addition, the Tsarnaev brothers were actual immigrants, unlike Syed Rizwan Farook, the native-born American who carried out the San Bernardino massacre with his Pakistani immigrant wife, Tashfeen Malik. Yet the marathon attacks did not lead to the sort of hysteria that Trump is now exploiting.

Then again, 2013 preceded the presidential campaign. And Donald Trump was not running.

Last week I wrote that media angst over Trump’s continued dominance over the rest of the Republican presidential field was misplaced—that polls showing he was stuck at about a third of prospective Republican primary voters showed he couldn’t win the nomination and would eventually be overtaken. I still believe that. Nevertheless, Trump can do an enormous amount of damage simply through his continued presence in the race.

For the media, the danger is that his frightening comments will be dismissed as a tactic to gain a momentary advantage over his rivals rather than as loathsome, un-American rhetoric that has no place in civil society. Trump may or may not know—and he surely doesn’t care—that he is tapping into some pretty dark recesses of the American psyche. For instance, Boston Globe political reporter James Pindell on Monday cited a recent poll showing that only 58 percent of New Hampshire Republicans believe that Islam should be legal.

https://twitter.com/JamesPindell/status/673980644913905664

Politico, perhaps the leading exemplar of the savvy school of political analysis (that’s not a compliment; I mean it in the Jay Rosen sense of the term), got off to a particularly bad start. A piece by Ben Schrenckinger called Trump’s proposal “provocative” and “eye-catching,” and asserted that he is passing Republicans’ “toughness test” with “flying colors.”

On the other hand, the cover of today’s Philadelphia Daily News features Trump extending his right arm in a Hitler-like pose with the headline “The New Furor.” That’s more like it.

The Republican presidential candidates, at least, seem to be stepping up. Even Dick Cheney has denounced Trump, telling conservative talk-radio host Hugh Hewitt, “I think this whole notion that somehow we can just say no more Muslims, just ban a whole religion, goes against everything we stand for and believe in.”

But this has gone on long enough—too long. Trump can’t win, but he’s degrading political discourse and inciting people who don’t need much in the way of provocation to act on their hatred and fears.

He can’t be driven out of the race until he starts losing (if then), and I suppose he can’t be ignored, either. But he can be denounced and scorned—delegitimized would be a more clinical term for it.

The next Republican presidential debate will be held on December 15. It’s going to be must-watch TV. That’s exactly what Trump wants, of course. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to go well for him. Let’s hope it doesn’t.

Media angst aside, Trump is not going to be elected

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Portrait of Trump (cc) by thierry ehrmann.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

According to the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, 32 percent of registered Republicans and voters who lean Republican favor Donald Trump. And 34 percent of registered Democrats and Democratic leaners support Bernie Sanders.

Why am I telling you this? Because members of the political press are having a collective nervous breakdown over their inability to shake Trump’s support despite his lies about “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the 9/11 attacks, his mocking of a disabled reporter, and his overall thuggish behavior. So keep those poll numbers in mind, because I’ll come back to them in a few moments. First, though, I want to discuss the angst that has broken out within the pundit class.

The redoubtable media observer Jay Rosen, author of the blog PressThink, wrote about the Trump phenomenon earlier this week. “The laws of political gravity” never actually existed, Rosen argued, and the Trump campaign has merely exposed that fact:

The whole system rested on shared beliefs about what would happen if candidates went beyond the system as it stood cycle to cycle. Those beliefs have now collapsed because Trump “tested” and violated most of them—and he is still leading in the polls…. The political press is pretty stunned by these developments. It keeps asking: when will the “laws of political gravity” be restored? Or have they simply vanished?

In an interview Sunday on Effective Radio with Bill Samuels, New Yorker media critic Ken Auletta expressed the conventional view of how the media have enabled Trump’s rise—the “embarrassing” amount of attention they’ve given him in order to goose ratings and the obsessive attention paid to polls at a time when few ordinary Americans can even name non-celebrity candidates such as Chris Christie or John Kasich. “You’ve just got to give it time,” Auletta said, “but the press is so desperate to create narrative and to make competition exciting.”

Trump’s making fun of a disabled reporter, Serge Kovaleski, and his easily debunked claimthat he didn’t know Kovaleski was disabled, seems to have struck nerve. No, it wasn’t the first time Trump had gone after a journalist. Earlier he had attacked Megyn Kelly of Fox News and Jorge Ramos of Univision. But Trump’s cruel imitation of Kovaleski’s twisted hands was so outrageous that—to return to Rosen’s theme—it would have ended his candidacy if the “laws of political gravity” actually existed.

In a commentary for the NewsGuild of New York website, union president Peter Szekely urged his fellow reporters to stay away from the “he said-she said” treatment. “Here’s my message to reporters covering Trump,” Szekely wrote. “The reporter-mocking incident will be regurgitated numerous times going forward. When you report on it, you’ll need to mention that Trump denied it, of course. But you saw the video. You heard the words. You know the truth. Don’t hide from it.”

Now, of course, Trump’s rise has been real—more real than I and most other political observers had expected. But let me offer some perspective. In fact, what we are seeing is the acceleration of a trend in the Republican nominating process that began in 2008, when the establishment candidate, John McCain, was nearly hounded out of the campaign for insufficient wing-nuttery before coming back to win the nomination.

Four years ago, Michele Bachmann had a few moments in the sun before fading. The front cover of Newsweek for October 24, 2011, featured a smiling image of Herman Cain(remember him?) giving the thumb’s-up. The cover line: “Yes We Cain!” Well, no he couldn’t.

Which brings me back to those poll numbers. On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders is trailing Hillary Clinton by the considerable margin of 60 percent to 34 percent. In other words, Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, has consolidated the one-third of Democratic voters who will always support the most left-wing candidate. Unlike Trump, Sanders is a serious person with serious ideas. He also seems to have succeeded in pushing Clinton to the left of her comfort zone. But no one except true believers expects Sanders to be sworn in on January 20, 2017.

Trump, if you ignore the margin of error (and you shouldn’t, but never mind), is actually doing less well among Republicans than Sanders is among Democrats. But on the Republican side, with a huge field of contenders, 32 percent is enough to lead the field. At some point, establishment support is going to coalesce around one or two candidates, and Trump’s hold on a quarter to a third of the Republican electorate is going to look a lot less impressive. Marco Rubio would appear to be the most likely beneficiary of this process. But even Jeb Bush looks no more hapless than Mitt Romney did in late 2011.

In a recent analysis for The Wall Street Journal, Dante Chinni, a political scientist at Michigan State University, found that support for the establishment Republican candidates during the current campaign mirrors Romney’s in late 2011. It wasn’t until January 2012, Chinni noted, that Romney started to achieve liftoff.

“If that establishment vote comes together by January,” Chinni wrote, “the leading establishment candidate can win delegates in the early primaries and caucuses, which start in February, and build momentum.”

In September, Trump told a crowd gathered in Washington to oppose the nuclear agreement with Iran, “We will have so much winning when I get elected that you will get bored with winning.”

So much winning. In fact, Trump is not winning, and he’s not going to win. Members of the political press may wring their hands over their inability to convince Trump’s supporters that his lies, his outrageous statements, and even his flirtation with fascismshould disqualify him from the presidency. But the overwhelming majority of the public wants nothing to do with Trump.

I don’t think the media deserve the credit for Trump’s low ceiling. But I certainly don’t believe the press should be blamed for Trump’s continuing support among a minority of one of our two major parties. To paraphrase what Joseph Kennedy once said about his son Bobby (as reported by Robert Caro), they love him because he hates like they hate. That’s not going to change—but neither is it going to get him elected.

 

Conservative pundits spurn Kasich’s strong performance

John Kasich in New Hampshire earlier this year. Photo (cc) by Michael Vadon.
John Kasich in New Hampshire earlier this year. Photo (cc) by Michael Vadon.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate was a useful reminder — as if I needed one — that these events are not being staged for my benefit.

Late in the proceedings, John Kasich put the finishing touches on what I thought was a strong performance by name-checking the conservative Catholic theologian Michael Novak in arguing that the free-enterprise system needs to be “underlaid with values.” No, I haven’t read Novak, but I was intrigued. Earlier, Kasich had what I thought was an effective exchange with Donald Trump over immigration. (The Washington Post has published a transcript here.)

To check in with the conservative media today, though, is to learn that some on the right think Kasich all but disqualified himself.

“Kasich espoused positions that can charitably be called compassionate conservatism, less kindly mini-liberalism of the sort that he says he practiced so successfully in Ohio when ‘people need help,’” writes the economist Irwin M. Stelzer at The Weekly Standard. Adds Paul Mirengoff of Powerline: “John Kasich annoyingly kept demanding speaking time. He used some of it to remind everyone that he’s the least conservative candidate in the field.”

A neutral analyst, Boston Globe political reporter James Pindell, thinks Chris Christie’s strong showing in the unwatched (by me, anyway) undercard makes him a good bet to replace Kasich in future debates. Kasich, Pindell notes, “backed increasing the minimum wage, bailing out big banks, and allowing 11 million illegal immigrants to stay in the country. It is hard to see how many Republicans will go along with the sentiment.”

Clearly Kasich — a top lieutenant in Newt Gingrich’s conservative revolution of the mid-1990s — has been recast as a hopeless RINO. And the notion that he might be the most appealing candidate the Republicans could put up against Hillary Clinton is apparently not nearly as interesting to conservative stalwarts as his heterodox views, summarized by the PBS NewsHour.

As the debate opened, all eyes were on the moderators. Would they manage to avoid the anti-media controversies that befell the CNBC panelists a couple of weeks ago while still managing to maintain a firm hand? My answer is that they partially succeeded. They avoided the snarky, disrespectful tone of the CNBC debate, and the candidates responded with a substantive discussion of the issues.

But on several occasions the panelists were just too soft. One example was Neil Cavuto’s exchange with Ben Carson in which he tried to press Carson on questions that have been raised about his truthfulness. Carson didn’t really answer, and before you knew it he was off and running about Benghazi.

Cavuto’s follow-up: “Thank you, Dr. Carson.”

Then there was the rather amazing question Maria Bartiromo asked Rubio toward the end of the debate, which I thought was well described by Max Fisher of Vox:

https://twitter.com/Max_Fisher/status/664292269554438144

Who won? After each of these encounters, the pundits keep telling us that Rubio is on the move. And yes, the Florida senator has risen in the polls, though he’s still well behind Trump (who informed us that he and Vladimir Putin are “stablemates”) and Carson.

But Rubio’s over-rehearsed demeanor may not wear well. I thought his weakest moment on Tuesday came when Rand Paul challenged him on military spending. The audience liked Rubio’s militaristic response. Paul, though, appeared to be at ease as he offered facts and figures, while Rubio just seemed to be sputtering talking points.

As for Jeb Bush, well, the consensus is that he did better than he had previously, but not enough to make a difference. “He may have stopped the free fall,” writes Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post’s conservative blogger, “but he was outshone once again by competitors.” The questions about Bush’s continued viabililty will continue.

Carly Fiorina turned in another in a series of strong performances. But they don’t seem to be helping her much in the polls, and there was nothing that happened Tuesday night to make me think that’s going to change.

John Dickerson of Slate, who is also the host of CBS News’ Face the Nation, seems to believe the race will ultimately come down to Rubio’s mainstream conservatism and the much-harder-edged version offered by Ted Cruz, who once again showed he’s a skilled debater.

If that’s the case, let’s get on with it. Tuesday night’s event featured eight candidates — a bit more manageable than the previous three debates, but still too large to sustain a coherent line of thought. (What was that about Michael Novak again, Governor Kasich?)

For that to happen, though, Trump and Carson are going to have to fade. And despite months of predictions (including some by me) that their support would collapse, they remain at the top of the heap. As long as that’s the case, Rubio versus Cruz means precisely nothing.

“The Democrats are laughing,” Cruz said at one point in response to a question about immigration. In fact, the Republicans have given their rivals plenty of comedic material during in 2015. The question is whether that will change in 2016 — or if Hillary Clinton will be laughing all the way to Election Day.

Will the media call out Trump on his anti-vaxxer nonsense?

Donald Trump in 2011. Photo (cc) by Gage Skidmore. Some rights reserved.
Donald Trump in 2011. Photo (cc) by Gage Skidmore. Some rights reserved.

By any reasonable standard of what constitutes acceptable public discourse, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign should have ended on Wednesday at about 10:50 p.m.

That’s when he set his extravagantly sprayed hair on fire by indulging in some truly dangerous myths about vaccines. It was, by any measure, a deeply irresponsible exercise. I’d call it pandering, except that it’s possible he believes his own foolishness.

It began when CNN debate moderator Jake Tapper invited candidate Ben Carson, a physician, to lambaste Trump for repeating the false claims of the anti-vaxxer movement linking vaccines to autism. Carson responded mildly — too mildly. And that gave Trump an opportunity to pounce.

“I am totally in favor of vaccines. But I want smaller doses over a longer period of time,” Trump began. A few seconds later came this: “Just the other day, two years old, two and a half years old, a child, a beautiful child went to have the vaccine, and came back, and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.”

Sadly, neither Carson nor the other physician-candidate, Rand Paul, wanted to rile the conspiracy theorists they’re hoping to win over. So both men oh-so-respectfully disagreed with Trump while actually endorsing his statement that parents ought to be able to spread out the timetable for their children to get vaccinated.

“It is true that we are probably giving way too many in too short a period of time,” Carson said. Added Paul, who’s traveled down this road before: “I’m all for vaccines. But I’m also for freedom.”

In case you’re not up on all the details, Julia Belluz of Vox offers an overview of the “elaborate fraud” behind the thoroughly debunked link between vaccines and autism. As for Trump’s spread-them-out advice and Carson’s and Paul’s weasely responses, science journalist Tara Haelle wrote in Forbes:

Vaccines are very precisely manufactured to include only what is absolutely necessary to induce enough of an immune response that the body can protect itself against those diseases. So a smaller dose wouldn’t protect a child. It would stick a child with a needle for no reason at all. And spreading out vaccines? That just increases the risks to the children, including leaving them more susceptible to the diseases for a longer period of time.

So what was CNN’s responsibility in promoting Trump’s life-threatening views? Some, such as Dartmouth College political scientist Brendan Nyhan, took to Twitter to argue that Tapper shouldn’t have asked the question in the first place.

I disagree. If, God help us, Trump actually got elected president, he’s going to be besieged by anti-vaxxers demanding that he translate his rhetoric into policy. Then, too, Michele Bachmann in 2011 and Chris Christie earlier this year did enormous damage to themselves by embracing the anti-vaccine movement. Why should it be any different this time?

Still, Wednesday night felt like a botched opportunity to educate viewers about the importance of vaccines.

Media reaction to Wednesday night’s anti-vaxxer moment was slow out of the gate, but by later Thursday and on Friday it had picked up. A particularly intriguing tidbit comes from Stat, a life-sciences vertical that’s part of The Boston Globe. According to reporters Eric Boodman and Ike Swetlitz, Trump is both a donor to and supporter of Autism Speaks, which emphatically rejects the anti-vaxxer myth.

In the immediate aftermath of the debate, the most addled take was offered by The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes (God love him), who wrote that Trump “surprised everyone, including Dr. Ben Carson, by being well-informed on the use of vaccines. As usual, he was a powerful presence.” You can’t make this stuff up.

The New York Times Tuesday morning had little except for a line in Gail Collins’ column and an item by Margot Sanger-Katz in its liveblog; later in the day it posted a strong article by Sabrina Tavernise and Catherine Saint Louis. The Washington Post published a long post by Michael E. Miller headlined “The GOP’s dangerous ‘debate’ on vaccines and autism.” Here’s how Miller described Carson blowing the big moment Tapper handed to him:

For months, Carson has touted his medical expertise while on the campaign trail. And in the weeks since the first debate, the famed surgeon has risen in the polls as a milder-mannered, more rational alternative to Trump.

Now was his chance for a home run; a big hit as swift and incisive as any surgical operation.

Instead, Carson bunted.

In Politico, Ben Schreckinger speculated that Trump’s “weak command” of the issues — including vaccines — may be the prelude to his long-anticipated decline. “The conversation has moved beyond Donald Trump,” he wrote. Added Jamelle Bouie of Slate: “The good news is that this debate might mark the beginning of the end for Trump, who struggled to tackle substantive questions on foreign policy, his advisers, and what he’d actually do as president of the United States.”

We’ll see. Some 51 percent of respondents to a survey posted at the Drudge Report thought Trump won; Fiorina came in second with just 19 percent. It was totally unscientific, of course, but more than 680,000 people took the time to register their views.

Overall it was a dispiriting night. It was somehow appropriate that it ended with the news that right-wing hatemonger Ann Coulter was ranting on Twitter about the “f—ing Jews.” I mean, really. What else?

The vaccine issue, though, deserves to linger — and fester, and grow, until all but Trump’s most unhinged supporters understand that this man has no business being anywhere near the White House.

Published previously at WGBHNews.org and The Huffington Post.