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The Trump Personality in Politics

Ilhan Omar calls on House leadership to take action against Lauren ...
Part of the House Republican clown caucus (l-r): Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Majorie Taylor Greene

As a public-school teacher for 30 years, I know the critical rule of classroom management.  If one kid’s bad behavior is left unattended, it won’t take long for the classroom to become a zoo.  A parallel is Trump’s entry into the Republican presidential sweepstakes in 2015.  More than Trump entered the race, also came his personality.  It has left an impression on certain adolescent-minded clusters of grownups in the Republican Party – both registered voters and some in elected office.  Think of the clown caucus who engineered the ouster of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker.

“Trumpian” boils down to braggadocio, bombast, simplistic and blunt issues in a blunt style with a lot of bullying of friends and foes alike.  It’s the over-the-top behavior of a person who craves the tabloid limelight.  The Obama birth certificate dustup is a classic example of a simplistic and blunt issue to be exploited for personal gain, which would be Trump’s signature approach to modern politics.  The only thing is, the bombast that drew so much attention ended in Trump scaping egg off his face when Obama produced the document.

Few, however, would predict that a windbag’s curtly rudeness would have an appeal among the rank and file.  And the whole style seemed to be electorally validated when Trump won in a 2016 black swan event.  Success can bring out the worst in people, and “Trumpian” came to be as fashionable as the John Wayne swagger in the 1950s.

While the personality type is appealing to certain party voters, it’s a big turnoff to getable swaths of the general electorate.  After 2016, Trump’s appeal down ballot was a disaster.  Let’s not forget 2022, at a time when the Democrats have made a shambles of the country, the Republicans could only squeak out a bare majority in the House leaving the clown caucus in a position to put their Trumpian hijinks on public display.  The Republicans are proving that neo-Marxism is survivable if Trump, his political personality, and the clown caucus are the face of party.

In Orwell’s “1984”, Big Brother had a face. In today’s rendition of the Republican Party, its face is that of Donald Trump with the likes of Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Majorie Taylor Greene, Matt Rosendale, and Nancy Mace in a chorus line behind.  Big Brother wouldn’t be laughed at; the picture of Trump and the Trumpkins elicits guffaws at first, followed by beads of sweat from the realization that they have actual power.  To be sure, these are not the kind of people that I would trust with my kids.

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Big brother from 1984

95,000 words, many of them ominous, from Trump's tongue ...

The despicability of the Democratic Party and a sizeable faction in the Republican Party is registered in polls, something that you’ll recognize if you rely on more than Laura Ingraham for your news.  She doesn’t hesitate to bellow a poll with Trump ahead of Biden.  Yet, the reality in the most recent Suffolk University/USA TODAY poll presents a more complicated picture (see below).  Yes, among Republican primary voters, Trump is far and away the favorite with 58%.  Metrics of enthusiasm for Trump are high among these voters.  But – here’s the key number – among the general electorate, Biden squeaks out a tiny lead, essentially a tie.

Trump is favored on a host of issues – the border, economy, foreign affairs – but when offered a choice between Biden and Trump, it’s essentially a dead heat.  What’s holding Trump and the Republicans back from a sweeping lead?  Look at Trump’s negatives.  He’s even more reviled than Biden in a recent NBC News poll (see below).  Biden’s negative rating stands at 49%; Trump registers a 54% downside.  Megaphones like Laura Ingraham of Fox News would mention a Trump lead in a poll’s head-to-head matchup, but nary a word about Trump’s unlikability.  Does “putting lipstick on a pig” remind you of anything?

The Trump personality is only appealing to a sizeable portion of the Republican Party base.  It’s reviled nearly everywhere else.  Trumpian bluster might carry a candidate through the primary, but in places other than a crimson district, it’s the kiss of death.  If you want to stop the Democrats’ neo-Marxism, first win elections.  What’s a turn-on for primary voters can be poison in the general election.

Democrats know this.  That’s why they’re interfering in Republican primaries to elect Trumpians.  In my home state of Montana, mysterious ads are appearing that throw mud on Tim Sheehy, who’s challenged in the primary by the Trumpian Matt Rosendale.  Not a word in these hit pieces about Rosendale.

The group – Last Best Place PAC – is an undercover Democrat operation (see below) to help get Rosendale the nomination and, thus, an easier challenger for incumbent Democrat John Tester.  It’s the same Democrat tried-and-true tactic from 2022.  It’s not out of distaste for Sheehy that drives Schumer and company to stick it to Sheehy.  He knows, like everyone else who are not fans of the Trump schtick, that a Trumpian is a weaker candidate.  What worked in Arizona, Pennsylvania, et al, in 2022 has a good chance of succeeding in 2024.  Watch Republicans rush headlong into the trap.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Further, watch an example of a boisterous Trumpian on full display, Lauren Boebert from September of this year.  After this, is she like Trump – “I could stand in the middle of 5th Ave. and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters” – and therefore immune from the voters’ wrath?  Are some Republican voters that morally stunted?  Is the Trumpian personality that hypnotizing?

The Trumpian personality came through the door in 2016 and has entrenched itself.  At this point, the party will have to face a disaster before the malignancy can be removed.  Like a classroom under the control of hellions, we have a party that has allowed this element to run roughshod.  And we will pay the piper.

RogerG

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* For deep dive into the Suffolk University/USA TODAY poll, see the full text of the poll at https://www.suffolk.edu/-/media/suffolk/documents/academics/research-at-suffolk/suprc/polls/national/2023/10_24_2023_marginals_embargoed_2.pdf?la=en&hash=ABF93DCEAAFCA91DBE9BD17A2A10E4E4A2C6189E

* The NBC News poll can be read at https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/first-read/poll-overwhelming-majorities-express-concerns-biden-trump-ahead-2024-r-rcna111347

* “Nine months before the Montana GOP primary, a mysterious super PAC is on the airwaves attacking Tim Sheehy”, Ally Mutnick, Politico, September 12, 2023, at https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2023/09/12/congress/montana-senate-sheehy-pac-ads-00115276

* More on the Democrat-affiliated PAC: “Dems Look To Meddle in Montana’s GOP Senate Primary”, Meghan Blonder, The Washington Free Beacon, September 13, 2023, at https://freebeacon.com/elections/dems-look-to-meddle-in-montanas-gop-senate-primary/

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Speaking Truth to the . . . Unhinged

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Our politics are insane, much more so than normal.  Our national figures act as if they walked off the drawing boards of the cartoonists for Warner Brothers Looney Tunes.  Our two major political parties modulate between a cult of personality and a nest of neo-Marxist revolutionaries.  It’s deranged.  Why vote?

Of special note is Donald Trump’s grip on the GOP.  Opinion polls consistently show him to be the far-and-away front runner for the nomination.  Objectively, by any measure, the guy is loathsome.  Would you actually like your children if they grew up to behave like him?  Think about it.  The bombastic self-promoting narcissism has left a trail of former allies, now turned enemies, in its wake.  All that’s left are sycophants and a chunk of the party base seemingly in the grip of a mass psychosis, for want of a better term.

To understand the gravity of Trump’s scorched earth of the party, first we must grasp the fact that there aren’t any serious RINO’s – “Republican in name only” in the mold of Lowell Weicker or the Rockefellers – in the party anymore.  Reaganite fusionism defined the character of the party, and for most still does.  RINO has been mindlessly coopted by Trumpers for anyone not enthralled by the man from Mar-a-Lago.  “RINO” is conjoined to “establishment” and the “swamp” to make the nonsense compelling to those consumed in jargon and sloganeering, and nothing else weightier.

Speaking of nothing else weightier in the head, so bound up in jargon are Trumpkins, and so ill-informed, that a gaggle of them showed up at a July 29 meeting of the California GOP to protest a rules change at the behest of their political guru, DJT.  They thought that it was the “establishment” trying to screw Trump, completely unaware that the rules change was concocted by the Trump campaign for the benefit of Trump.  Whew, go figure.

Let’s examine the line of corpses along Trump’s path to power.  Jeff Sessions, an early endorser and Trump’s first AG, was one of the first to end up on the cult’s blacklist.  The Bushes, not as flamboyant as the orange man, were reduced to wishy-washy “neo-conservative” and “establishment”, not that most of the cult’s enthusiasts could define the words.  Ex-military commanders such as John Kelley (chief of staff) and James Mattis (SecDef) quickly learned that working with an ignorant blowhard is untenable.  Hawks of the peace-through-strength variety like John Bolton – the Democrats’ bette noir and now Trump’s – was tarred for not acceding to Trump’s impulsive isolationism.  Bill Barr, Trump’s latest AG and bulwark against the Democrats’ Mueller grotesquerie, was blasted for not being sufficiently supportive of Trump’s stop-the-steal drivel.  One could go on and on.  The track record would invite the conclusion that anyone friendly to Trump will eventually become an enemy, given enough time.  The closer you get, the more likely you will get burned.

It’s even true for that mainstay of conservatism, Mike Pence, VP under Trump.  He’s now enemy # . . . for not rejecting Electoral College votes from states of Trump’s choosing on January 6. Trump besmirched Pence with the schoolyard taunt “Liddle Mike Pence” after Pence forthrightly recalled on Fox News, “The American people deserve to know that President Trump and his advisers didn’t just ask me to pause.  They asked me to reject votes, return votes, essentially to overturn the election.”  As if on cue, Trumpists showed up at a recent Pence event in New Hampshire yelling “traitor” and “sellout” as he tried to speak.

Pence brutally heckled, called a ‘traitor’ by Trump supporters at Iowa ...
Pence heckled by Trump supporters in New Hampshire

The stupidity should blast anyone in the face still in charge of their wits.  Trumpkins enjoy the jargon of epithets, such as “neo-conservative” as a substitute for adult reasoning.  That abuse of “neoconservative” by Trumpkins obscures the policy reality of “peace through strength”. Strength for what?  Yes, peace, but also a peace worth living. Reagan’s “evil empire” and “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” is the quintessence of what used to be standard Republican foreign policy.  If Trump exercised a little (liddle?) self-reflection, it was his too. Only, since the guy doesn’t read – he’s “too smart” for that – Trump had to first see it on tv: the bodies of gassed children after an Assad bombing.  It took tv before Trump realized that’s there’s something more to foreign policy than “America First” sloganeering.

Go figure, dump Reagan to chase after an opinionated cretin.  I refuse to follow the lemmings.  That old saw about the election being a binary won’t wash a third time.  I am not going to let a cult force me into seeing Trump as our only bastion against neo-Marxism.  If the country chooses neo-Marxism to Trump, which seems likely, many Republicans will have to face life outside the cult and the country will have to face life inside a hellscape.  Republicans should have presented a better option to the country.

And that’s speaking truth to the . . . unhinged.

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RogerG

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* The Trump/Pence imbroglio is recounted in, of all places, Newsmax: “Trump Says ‘Liddle Mike Pence’ Has Turned to Dark Side”, August 6, 2023, at https://www.newsmax.com/politics/donald-trump-mike-pence-truth/2023/08/06/id/1129783/

* The ill-informed but excitable Trump following at the July 29 meeting of the California GOP: “Tensions flare as California GOP gives Trump a boost by overhauling state primary rules”, LA Times, July 29, 2023, at https://news.yahoo.com/tensions-flare-california-republicans-trump-211138809.html

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A Banana Republic of the Execrable

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Jack Smith, Special Counsel

“Give me the man, and I will find the crime [for him].”  Stalin’s chief prosecutor, Andrey Vyshinsky, or Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s head of the NKVD (secret police)

Which one made the historic quote from the 1930’s in Bolshevik Russia?  Possibly both, but it doesn’t matter.  It’s the official governing philosophy of a country that long ago aborted the rule of law.  The law is whatever those in power say it is, a classic definition of tyranny.  Welcome to the USA, circa 2023.

Stalin And Beria | Russian history, Soviet union, Joseph stalin
Beria and Stalin
22 novembre 1954 - Muore Andrey Vyshinsky, procuratore di Stalin | Massime dal Passato
Andrey Vyshinsky

Execrable people do execrable things, such as pretend to use the law, absent any law, to target a person, just like the Stalin gang.  To be honest, though, Donald J. Trump is an execrable character.  Well, to be honest, Jack Smith, Special Counsel, is an execrable character.  Well, to be honest, the entire cabal of talking heads of the Democratic Party and their media sycophants are pretty execrable characters.  If for no other reason, this is damning proof of our descent to the level of governing respectability of the Assad regime (without the barrel bombs and poison gas) or Burma, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan (from Freedom House’s list of the worst of the worst).  Execrable potentates produce execrable government.

As such, banana republic may not go far enough in describing our fall from grace.

“Execrable” behavior, it must be admitted, is not necessarily a crime.  Marriage infidelity is not a crime (ergo Bill Clinton and Donald Trump), but it certainly is ruinous to the pocketbook in divorce court and lawsuits.  Ask them.  Politically, the only decent way to remove execrable characters is to vote them out of the way, and hopefully not empower other execrables in the process.  If a narcissistic, self-serving blowhard is not to your liking, here’s a clue, don’t vote for them.  But don’t take a law and stretch it to the breaking point around the necks of the detestable-but-politically-viable, as is the habit of Jack Smith and his discreditable Washington, D.C., grand jury.

But such is the modus operandi of the Democratic Party.  In the latest episode of the execrable targeting the execrable, Smith laid before us a third indictment of Trump.  Read the monstrosity here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.232192/gov.uscourts.dcd.232192.275.0.pdf.

In the plethora of Trump verbalisms since the 2020 election, Smith (er, Vyshinsky) thinks that he found the smoking gun of Trump’s state of mind, because Smith’s overly distended application of the law demands clairvoyancy of the inner recesses of Trump’s brain.  In a discussion with senior advisers, Trump alludes to a matter being turned over to the next president.  What a thin reed to hang a political rival.  Do I really need to go over this flimsy thread of legal mishmash?

Yesterday (8/2/23), Bill Barr, Trump’s ex-AG, went on CNN to declare that the indictment has validity.  Hogwash.  Entering into state-of-mind divination is a dubious gambit, and doubly so when aimed at one’s political rivals.  Now, Barr may be right in that the indictment presents only a bare-bones preview of the case against Trump.  Regardless, the appearance of impropriety will do more damage to our national reputation than any actual impropriety.  If actions aren’t clearly illegal, delving into the equivalent of psychological augury won’t make them smell any better.

The administrative state’s open Democrat favoritism, the Russia Collusion hoax, the chicanery of the tech biggies and politicized intel heavies to shove Hunter’s laptop down the memory hole, the obvious double standards so numerous as to boggle the mind, etc., should make any sentient adult cringe.  We have disqualified ourselves as assessors of any other nation’s governing practices.  We should be under international observation, not be the observers.  And I don’t need Barr’s mumbo-jumbo, whatever Barr’s state of mind might be, to mask the stench oozing out of this indictment.

The second impeachment had legitimacy, mostly because impeachment is as much a political act as anything.  Trump’s behavior post-election was, and continues to be, reprehensible.  Reprehensible behavior is impeachable.  For all practical purposes, a legal pretext is nice but not necessary.  Not everything can be innocently written off as Trumpiness.

The documents indictment similarly has legal legs.  But prosecution for expressing a belief about some set of circumstances, whether actually believed or not, takes us into very dark and unsavory places.  It’s the stuff of governance in most countries of the UN General Assembly and Putin’s Russia.  Are poisonings and mysterious falls from 15-story windows next?

Are we a banana republic or something worse?  What’s even more troubling is the fact that many of the people on the public stage and with ultimate authority are either supported or elected by us.  Is this the best that we can come up with?

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RogerG

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A Break with Victor Davis Hanson

After Words with Victor Davis Hanson | C-SPAN.org

If you’ve listened to someone often enough, you might already know what they’re going to say before they say it.  This is not necessarily a criticism – heaven knows, it’s true of me on many subjects (talk to my wife and adult children).  But sometimes the monotony repetitively takes you to some unacceptable opinions.  This is my predicament with Victor Davis Hanson (VDH).  It is well-known that Hanson is an unflinching supporter of Donald Trump to such an extent that any Trump criticism is heavily muted, when there’s ample grounds to be critical from any perspective, while other of Hanson’s views appear newly adapted to momentary Trumpisms and the meandering and muddled political movement that has recently come into being around him.  It’s disturbing to me.

For the record, I am not new to VDH.  I own and have read many of his books, attended to his commentary on Fox News, and have been an avid listener of his podcast, The Victor Davis Hanson Show, among others.  I am well-versed on VDH’s positions; however, the Trump boosterism of late has been taken to absurd lengths.

How absurd?  The movement attached to the Trump banner is a protectionist one, an opponent of entitlement reform, near isolationist in foreign policy, and will turn on a dime at the behest of the latest self-serving political burp of its leader.  So, if DeSantis stands in the way, Trump will dust off the Left’s tax-cuts-for-the-rich and charge the Florida governor with the sin that he’s out to get your Social Security, and the legion of Trump parrots soon erupt in unison.  If, as in 2016, Jeb Bush stands athwart Trump’s path, bash the Bushes, their “forever wars”, and the ill-defined “establishment”, going so far as to come close to imitating the abuse of returning Vietnam vets by anti-war activists.  Trump’s loathing of John McCain, for instance, approaches those spittle-laced lows when he said, “He [McCain] is not a war hero” and “I am not a fan of people who surrender”, quite a statement from a candidate for commander-in-chief and later an occupant of that office.  The fact that many vets remained loyal to this man is unfathomable.

John McCain’s courage, braving attacks over the skies of North Vietnam, refusal to be released ahead of his fellow Americans in the Hanoi Hilton, and torture at the hands of his communist jailers deserves more than “I am not a fan of people who surrender”.  And all this coming from a man who benefited from five draft deferments.  Go figure.  The behavior hasn’t daunted Hanson’s Trump-praise.

Hanson’s silence over Trump’s protectionism is absolutely befuddling from a man of such a stellar academic background.  There’s simply no recognition of the potential devastation that tariffs and other trade-protectionisms has wrought.  His commentary avoids the role that homegrown government regulation, taxes, and union favoritism at all levels has played in hallowing out America, creating the Rust Belt.  Reagan disbanded PATCO (the air traffic controller union) and fired its striking air traffic controllers; Trump masks the unions’ complicity in their own demise by patronizing them with a blame of foreigners.

Any Econ 101 student knows that a foreign company doesn’t pay a tariff, but apparently not Donald Trump or Hanson, if Hanson’s silence means anything.  We hear plenty about “globalization” and “bi-coastal elites” from Hanson but nary a word about Trump’s blathering economic incoherency.  Let me set the record straight, even if Hanson won’t: when taxed, companies are pass-through agencies – the new taxes (tariffs in this case) descend on the consumer, and always will, always with price increases, sometimes with fewer choices, and many times with the loss of jobs in other sectors.  It’s a classic example of self-inflicted foot-shooting.  Remember Smoot-Hawley?  Look it up.

Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression timeline | Timetoast timelines

Then, how do you reinvigorate blue-collar work, a key interest of Hanson’s – and mine?  Start by cleaning your own house.  Answer this question: Why are American companies fleeing our shores?  Or maybe this question: How is it that an illiterate peasant from the Chinese outback is more appealing than an American with generations of advanced cultural and human capital?  The answer lies in more than labor costs.  Hint: the first flight of American fabrication was to destinations below the Mason-Dixon line, thereby escaping the clutches of the AFL-CIO and the big-government and big-tax/regulation Democrat regimes above it.

Or, how about the devastating effect of our fascination with college-is-for-everyone?  Taxpayer grants and student loans, with taxpayers on the hook, were fire-hosed to make it happen.  Consequently, working with one’s hands became construed as placing a person barely above the apes in evolutionary development.  It’s all so crassly dopey.  Yet, the practical corollary to the largesse is a turn to the labor of semi-literate Chinese peasants so Americans can enjoy student loan debt, Sociology and ****-studies courses, their meth and the dole in depopulating neighborhoods, or extended adolescence in a growing number of failures-to-launch.  Education in America is as much a disaster as Detroit.  All of it homegrown.

In this respect, though, Hanson can be spot-on in his condemnation of the condition of our schools, K to grad school – but, Victor, please connect the dots.  Tariffs and protectionism will do nothing but mask this glaring deficit.  If you care about expanding opportunities in the “dirty jobs” sector and making the made-in-America chant more than a cover for union featherbedding, I suggest that we make our bed, clean our room, and, by God, make ourselves competitive rather than wallow in perpetual whinerhood.  And it begins with classical curriculum, classical instruction, accountability, and the rejection of government as helicopter parent.

Speaking of government as helicopter parent, Trump has staked his name to hostility to entitlement reform, and particularly the two biggest ones, by far: Social Security and Medicare.  They’re both headed to insolvency – Medicare first, soon followed by SS.  Trump, as Hanson prostrates in silence, is waiting till we saddle every American child with unrecoverable future debt, or we can no longer defend ourselves with the two domestic fiscal behemoths gobbling up more and more of the nation’s purse.  And to think that it’s only a cynical ploy to buy the votes of the seasoned citizenry with fiscal foolishness and outright lies.  The Third Rail of Politics had better be reformed or we’ll have to get used to an America with the military gravitas of Canada.  Reform is not an option.

No area is more infected with Trumpisms than in thoughts about America’s role in the world.  In this respect, Trump’s “America First” chant has morphed into a cover for a new isolationism on the right.  No issue exposes this new feature on the right more than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  As a historian, Hanson must realize, in the current circumstance of a hyper-aggressive Putin, that the parallels with 1939 Europe are straightforward.  Yet, Hanson dismissively expresses a quick and offhanded support for Ukraine as he muddles this backing with the new right’s pessimism about Ukraine’s longevity and our dwindling military stocks.

The incoherence should knock a sane person over the head.  The lack of Ukrainian endurance could be a self-fulfilled prophecy by the incessant complaint about our “dwindling stocks”.  More than the Ukrainian drain of our own military readiness, unwittingly, the new right is admitting that our superpower status is a joke.  It’s an admission that we can’t defend our interests and supply a country the size of Uganda in their fight against being gobbled up.  It’s 1938-9 Czechoslovakia and 1939 Poland all over again.

The Soviet Union kept the communist North Vietnamese in the field for a couple of decades, and we can’t aid a Uganda?  What makes people like Hanson think that we can defend Taiwan against the #2 economy in the world with the largest army and navy?  Ineluctably, this line of argument is a quiet admission that the “pivot” to face the CCP threat is a suicide mission.

Actually, Ukraine is a wakeup call.  Stopping one leg of the new Axis in Ukraine is directly tied to stopping the other leg in the Pacific.  Don’t think that for a moment that Xi and his minions aren’t watching our enfeebled internal debates about Ukraine.  Instead, we ought to be alerted to getting our act together by injecting steroids into our defense industrial complex and conforming our defense capabilities to the new reality of “quantity has a quality all its own”, and stop grousing about our lack of 155 munitions.  We can do that, first, by stopping our deficit-spending-till-bankruptcy, and restraining our utopia-searching and robbing-Peter-to pay-Paul domestic fiscal schemes. Our fiscal balance sheet can only tolerate so much greenie nonsense, equality-mongering, and blank checks to the elderly and everyone else “oppressed”.  At least Rush Limbaugh had the temerity to call the AARP “greedy geezers”. Instead, with Hanson and Trump, we get fiscal insanity.  Come on, Victor, speak up, make sense.

Victor Davis Hanson Podcast -- Episode 2: Rush: The Genius of, the Era of | National Review
Rush Limbaugh at National Review Institute’s fall gala, 2019. (Lila Photo)

Making sense is what we need at this stage in our country’s history, and all-to-frequently we aren’t getting it.  The reign of incomprehensibility even affects the language that we use to discern the difference between liberal and conservative.  Check this out: Hanson labeled as “liberal” conservatives who are still conservative but weary of Trump.  His charge that National Review is “liberal” is particularly stunning.  One can only conclude that Hanson’s distinction between liberal and conservative hinges on a person’s or organization’s stance toward Trump.  So, Victor, which one of these articles in the July 31 issue of National Review is “liberal”?

• “Family Policy Meets Deficit Politics: For solutions, consider the supply side”: a call for the use of conservative economics (supply side) to assist families.
• “Throwing Off China’s chains”: a defense of those in and outside of Communist China who risk their lives – many already lost them – to resist the tyranny.
• “Our Chosen Chains: Smartphones, handguns, and the destructive use of freedom”: an article on the debilitating effect of modern media, especially social media, on ourselves and our children.
• “The Restrained Roberts Court: Pace their critics, the justices respect precedent”: a retort to the leftist complaint that the Robert Court is “activist” as well as a defense of originalism, the conservative jurisprudence.
• “Supreme Modesty: Conservatives have saved the Court from itself”: the piece speaks for itself.
• “Elite Universities’ Affirmative-Action Reaction: Biased admission practices are no way to address historical injustice”: a defense of the Court’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision that banned racial favoritism in college admissions.
• “A Year after Bruen: The current Second Amendment test leaves questions”: the article defends the Court’s protection of the Second Amendment in recent cases but admits there are problems that still need clarification.

Et cetera.

A conservative position is manifest in every issue.  I’ve been a subscriber since the early 1980’s.

The same is true for National Review Online.  Don’t take my word for it; go see for yourself (https://www.nationalreview.com). The woke would go ballistic. But here’s the crux: on the whole, the magazine is no fan of Trump and is mostly pro-Ukraine. I can only conclude that since Hanson is at least modestly pro-Ukraine, the decisive factor for being “liberal” is whether one is a Trump fan or not.  If you can’t countenance Trump’s appalling behavior, narcissism, incessant capacity to make foes of friends, and gross immaturity to blame others for his own misfortunes, you must be “liberal”.  What?!

I’ve had enough of Trump after voting for him twice. Am I now a “liberal” by Hanson’s metric?  Funny, I don’t think and feel like one.

For want of a better explanation, Hanson appears to have fallen victim to presentism, what I call the tyranny of the present.  Strange for a historian of antiquity.  In the minds of many people, current happenings and concerns are of overriding existential import, more so than anything else … ever!  Some people get caught up in the cognitive and emotional fevers of the moment, like a social contagion.  Today, the personage of Trump looms large … undeservedly so.  Trump is too small a vortex to cram the actual meaning of conservative/liberal.  Trump is only the fascination of the moment.  He too will pass.  One more GOP election disappointment to add to the growing list ought to perform the cure.

Hanson shows little awareness of it.

CARTOON: Donald Trump and the wall | Las Vegas Review-Journal

RogerG

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Donald Trump, The Democrats’ Best Friend

Trump arraigned: Former president pleads not guilty to 34 felony counts
A stone-faced Donald Trump pled not guilty to a 34-count felony indictment in a Manhattan courtroom in April 2023. Trump is the first U.S. president, former or current, to be charged with a crime.

I’ve been a Republican for almost the entirety of my adult life.  As a conservative, where else is one to go?

Now, my party has a love-struck teenage fixation on Donald Trump.  Regardless of the reason for the infatuation, he stands head and shoulders above the rest in the Republican 2024 field, according to polls.  But that’s a sampling within a minority of the total electorate.  While Trump is dearly loved among a majority of that minority, he is thoroughly detested in the general electorate.  Nominating Trump will make the Democrats’ task so much easier.

The fact of broad disgust toward Trump is only one part of the bad political calculus for the GOP.  The majority of a minority seems intent on making Trump the face of the party at a time when he faces multiple criminal investigations across many fronts – namely Atlanta and Special Counsel Jack Smith – some of them more serious than others.  The majority of the minority callously sweeps aside these legal threats as if they were Russia Collusion all over again.  That would be a mistake.  Expect these existential threats to more fully hit the fan after he secures the nomination.  For the three months of the 2024 election season, the party will be saddled with a criminal defendant at trial and quite possibly a perp-walk post-election, whether he wins or loses the election.

As for his down-ticket pull – remember the results of 2018, 2020, and 2022? – a criminal defendant to lead the charge only worsens the party prospects across the board, state and federal.  An improbable win on election day would mean immediate impeachment and removal from office, with criminal sentencing later, by a decidedly hostile Congress.  Thinking beyond the momentary thrill of the political lust, a GOP trainwreck looms.

The guy is abhorred in the general voting public, and that isn’t just an opinion.  FiveThirtyEight lays out the evidence.  In eight polls from June 27 to July 11, Trump’s unfavorables outrank his favorables by no fewer than 12 points.  By July 18, the level of detestation ballooned to 16.1 points.  He’s no more likeable than Biden (see below).  For Democrats, if you’re saddled with political dead weight (Biden or any of the other substitute lightweights), bring your opponent down to your level, and that means assisting the Republicans in seppuku (suicide) – nominating Trump.  A bad hand quickly becomes a winnable one.

At this moment, Republicans are choosing seppuku while the Democrats face their own existential threat from No-Labels.  The group has a greater potential of siphoning off votes from Democrats uneasy about adolescent genital mutilation (gender-affirming care) without parental consent or knowledge, abortion at any time prior to the exit from the womb (maybe after), boys in girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, sports, kowtowing to the CCP, the crime, the crime, and more crime.

No doubt, though, the Republican base is intent on making it possible for the Democrats to escape their vicious wrongdoing.  The Democrats have to live down their noxiousness, but the great leveler is Donald Trump.  Look at the numbers.  They haven’t changed much and will only get worse for the GOP as we proceed to election day 2024.

Yep, Donald Trump is the Democrats’ best friend . . . and maybe their only hope.

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RogerG

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* “Latest Polls”, FiveThirtyEight, July 18, 2023, at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/

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Adolescent Fantasies in Our Politics

Reagan vs. Trump: Two entertainer-politicians compared | Salon.com
Reagan had policy chops having spent decades reading, thinking, writing, and engaging with policy pundits to establish what he thought and why. Not so with Trump. Yet, he is the darling of strident and nuttier elements on the right.

Complexity at almost any level isn’t high on the list of those things appreciated by many people, maybe most, especially if the forces at work don’t stare the average person in the face.  A popular default position is the childlike reduction of circumstances into a single person, such as the economic boom that is attributed solely to Trump by his congregation of worshippers.  Don’t bother them with the details.

Like the Age of Augustus for Rome, we have that “Trump” economy (’17-’19), the “Bush” financial crisis (’07-’08), the “Reagan” boom following the “Reagan” recession, the “Hoover” depression (’29-’32), etc., etc.  The adolescent fantasy is particularly acute when considering economic matters.  It’s almost as if, in presidential elections, that we are choosing a god to deliver us from the vagaries of life.  Quickly, millions of economic actors as free and independent producers and consumers, technological trends, social disruptions in the form of the decline in public morality and the family, huge government incentives and disincentives to be both unproductive and productive, and misbegotten popular beliefs are erased in a mad rush to praise a group’s patron saint.  No wonder that we get so much wrong because many of us understand so little.  Now isn’t that a clear condemnation of our system of education?

12 Common Mistakes We're All Guilty Of Making But Need To Stop Immediately

Nature abhors a vacuum, and the same is true in a person’s head.  A lack of knowledge leads to the resort to the equivalent of magic.  For instance, one person is our savior or master villain. Seldom is it that simple.  A classic example of this mass psychomotor tic is the so-called “Trump” economic boom.  Trump boosters reduce everything to the “genius” of Trump.  In fact, the guy was more of a braggadocious surfer than a George Washington or reincarnation of ancient Rome’s Cincinnatus.

Trump benefitted from two years of united Republican control of the elective branches of the federal government in the first half of his only term as president.  To address the huge government discouragements to be productive, the Republican playbook was unleashed.  Not long after Trump took the oath, Congress under a Republican majority and Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Leader Mitch McConnell set to work to reverse the neo-socialism of the prior Pelosi Congress and Obama administration.  The Congressional Review Act was dusted off to veto by congressional vote the Obama rampaging Leviathan’s regulations in the workplace and EPA.  Trump had no idea, but he was around to sign the repeals.  See, deregulation works, as predicted in the free-market sermons of the Chicago school economists (Friedman, Stigler, etc.).

PPT - Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics PowerPoint Presentation - ID:1459998

Stagflation in the 1970s Educational Resources K12 Learning, Economics, History, United States ...

Capitalism and Freedom: REAGANOMICS, THE ECONOMICS OF SUCCESS

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2018 was festooned with the free-market, small-government ideas that have been bouncing around Republican circles and conservative think tanks since Reagan.  If a nation wants to keep its businesses, stop beating them over the head with one of the highest capital gains tax regimes in the world.

If you want your people to be productive, put down the tax lash that was applied to their backs too.  Republicans for years were slammed with “tax cuts for the rich”, so this time around, most of the benefits accrued to the middle class while additional slices of the population were removed from the tax rolls entirely.  These ideas bounced around the Republican caucus for decades, long before Trump came down the escalator to bash “the swamp”.  Trump showed and expressed no interest or knowledge in the intricacies of tax policy, except maybe what directly affected the family real estate empire.  He had no idea about the strategic triad in national security nor supply-side economics.  He’s not a reader nor deep thinker.  He just happened to be the man behind the Resolute desk to hector the Republican caucuses to give him a trophy (a win) so he could revel in the Roman-like triumph of a signing ceremony.  In that sense, narcissism proved useful.

Criminal justice reform in Congress: Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan try to get along - POLITICO
Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House, and Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader, in 2018 at the time of the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Trump’s ubiquitous self-aggrandizement has been routinely applied to increased domestic energy production during his term.  Simply put, Republicans don’t have the Democrats’ fossil-fuel phobia, which is a healthy beginning. It’s not necessarily a Trump thing; it’s the Republican Party platform of many iterations past.  They’ve always wanted to open up ANWR, and I don’t know of many Republican leaders opposed to pipelines.  They got through without a hitch when the GOP was in charge, pre-Trump.  Ditto for approving domestic production on public lands.  Trump only did what was established GOP doctrine.

The GOP was itching at the chance to rescind the donkey party’s draconian fuel-efficiency standards, which was a sleight-of-hand way to coerce you into a frivolous electric vehicle and ditch the far more practical piston-driven family sedan.  Expressing the GOP’s longstanding faith in free markets, when the GOP is in power, the free-to-choose philosophy has dominant sway.  The dictat was lifted like some of the other near-totalitarian nonsense of the donkey party.  Not necessarily a Trump thing, a free-market GOP thing.

The results were a repetition of the Reagan-era boom, which is just shorthand for the implementation of the outlook coming out of the Hoover Institution, Heritage, and the American Enterprise Institute, the free market Club for Growth, etc. – some of them predating Reagan, and some bashed today by Trump for insufficient toadying.

The Federalist Society, the source of many of Trump’s judicial picks, dates back to the second year of Reagan’s first term. Without that Federalist Society list, who knows, we might be faced with Trump’s older sister, Mary Trump Barry, sitting on a federal circuit or the Supreme Court.  To no surprise, Trump relied on the originalist Federalist Society to secure the support of an originalist GOP in order to appoint originalist judges.  Even an ill-read Trump could figure that one out.

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Trump’s originalist Supreme Court nominations: Amy Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch

Speaking of Mary Trump Barry, appointed by Reagan as a US Attorney and later elevated by Bill Clinton to a district judgeship, she has some misgivings about her brother. Obviously with some animus, Trump’s niece, Mary L. Trump, recorded Mary T. Barry in a conversation about her brother.  Speaking of a hot mic, this one sizzles.  Mary Barry:

“All he [Trump] wants to do is appeal to his base.  He has no principles.  None.  His goddamned tweeting and lying… oh my God.  I’m talking too freely, but you know.  The change of stories.  The lack of preparation [he doesn’t read].  The lying.  Holy shit….  It’s the phoniness of it all.  It’s the phoniness and this cruelty.  Donald is cruel.”

Republicans and Trump associates against Trump. Part nineteen. Even his sister?

If this was an episode of Family Feud, it would be a civil war with the direct family offspring versus the extended one.

The country was rewarded by the GOP’s Reaganomics in the two years of unified Republican control of the elective branches of government.  From Jan. 2017 to Jan. 2019, Trump was one of 290 Republicans in the 115th Congress and the 45th presidency: 238 R congressman (majority) + 51 R senators (majority), + the R chief executive.  The “I”, “I”, “I” of Trump is such a gross exaggeration that it borders on a lie.

The Pelosi House that took office in Jan. 2019 couldn’t stop the positive wave of Reaganomics through the economy.  Average family income grew by $4,600 in 2019 alone, and all racial groups benefitted; the poverty rate plummeted; inflation hovered around the fed’s target; unemployment for all groups hit historic lows.  Frequently, the quarterback is accorded the limelight, but how many weren’t the next Tom Brady because their career ended with an ambulance trip to the hospital due to a porous line, or their receiver corps was plagued with slow feet and stone hands?  Trump just so happened to benefit from a great offensive line and receivers.  And there wasn’t a Hillary around to protect the donkey party’s entrenched collectivism.

It didn’t take long for that self-proclaimed “winner” to be outed as an inveterate loser.  In 2018, he lost the House.  In 2020, his antics cost the Republicans the presidency and the Senate.  In 2022, a Trump endorsement was the kiss of death, except in the deepest blood-red precincts.

Now, a good portion of registered Republicans seem prepared to trade their party identity for that of a lemming.  What didn’t work in 2018, 2020, and 2022 is enthusiastically embraced for 2024 according to polls.  Einstein’s formulation of insanity keeps coming to mind – doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

The truth is that the Electoral College doesn’t choose a god.  It elects a chief executive to carry out the laws, and that’s it.  Trump didn’t invent sensible economics.  Heck, the little that he knows was given to him by the constellation of Republican advisers that attend to every Republican president.

Even Trump couldn’t screw up what was handed to him in 2017 to 2018.  What he did manage to do was to see to it that it didn’t last beyond Jan. 2019.  First, Pelosi seized the House gavel, then Schumer took the one in the Senate, and at the same time, a senescent oldster campaigning from his basement rest home bested him and moved into the White House.  That orange-haired “winner” is a loser, loser, loser, thrice over.

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Trump tries to take all the credit that rightfully belongs to a throng of conservative pundits, think tanks, and public figures.  Instead, a bombastic clown dominates the scene.  Four charges from Mary Trump Barry keep resonating: “lack of preparation”, “lying”, “cruel” and “phoniness”.  That says about it all.

And to think that a large number of Republicans want to do it all over again.  Amazing, absolutely amazing.

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RogerG

Read more here:

* The comments of Mary Trump Barry can be read in a Wikipedia post, and in the Washington Post (Aug. 22, 2020), “In secretly recorded audio, President Trump’s sister says he ‘no principles’ and ‘you can’t trust him’”, Michael Kranish, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/maryanne-trump-barry-secret-recordings/2020/08/22/30d457f4-e334-11ea-ade1-28daf1a5e919_story.html

* The success of Trump’s unacknowledged Reaganomics can be read in “The Biden Economy and How It Could Be Fixed”, Andrew Puzder, Imprimis, Hillsdale College, March 2023, at https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Imprimis_Mar_3-23_8pg_4-3Web.pdf

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Debunking “2,000 Mules”

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Dinesh D’Souza

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* Please read John McCormack’s rebuttal to “2,000 Mules” at https://www.nationalreview.com/…/06/12/sorry-trump-lost/

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John McCormack

I have been asked to watch Dinesh D’Souza’s “2,000 Mules” by people who believe it to be gospel on the November 2020 election.  I didn’t because spending the money elsewhere mattered more to me.  Heaven knows, I got the gist from a host of Trump-friendly publications and websites without the added expense.  Being a man on the right, access is no problem.  After reading about many of the same sources referenced by D’Souza in the film, D’Souza’s argument ranks up there with anything written by the author Dan Brown (“Angels & Demons”, “The Da Vinci Code”, and “Inferno”, etc.).  The only difference between the two D’s is that Brown acknowledges his work to be fiction.

There is a debate here that needs to be aired.  Trump, the leading contender for the Republican 2024 crown, is running on … what for it … November 2020.  His contention that the election was stolen is the centerpiece of his campaign, along with the long trail of verbal abuse directed at anyone he doesn’t like, normally people who haven’t shown sufficient obeisance.  He made it the focus of his return to the center stage, so it deserves a careful examination.  John McCormack gives one of the best and most concise critiques of the Trump claims that I’ve come across.

First, from the get-go, the notion that a massive, sprawling plot mostly across five states, maybe more, involving hundreds of thousands of fellow conspirators with none of this huge crowd being detected or slipping up boggles the mind.  That alone, without seeing the film, should cause a person to be very leery.  There are millions of spine-tingling stories across the internet of mysterious dark forces bringing down the world.  How is this one any different?  They, like all tall tales of expansive conspiracies, have to maintain an inhuman level of operational secrecy.  The absence of at least a few dufuses to spill the beans among the hundreds of thousands of participants (voters, couriers, organizers) simply can’t pass the smell test.

Here’s one rule for rationally assessing conspiracy claims: believability is in inverse proportion to the number of participants.

The “mules” in the film are the 54,000 couriers (not 2,000) who allegedly stuffed ballot boxes in key locations.  None has been fingered by Trump’s army of independent bounty hunters, nor law enforcement, to prove the existence of the plot.  Nor will the producers and publisher divulge the names of the left’s NGO’s who are supposedly at the center of the scheme.  Dominion’s $787 million lawsuit award hangs over the producers and publishers who might be inclined to name some.  Apparently, millions of dollars for over-priced attorneys and the need to bribe some in the jury pool is a bit too daunting to run the risk.

The database for the story consists of cellphone pings and security camera footage on adjacent buildings.  I’m reminded of the techie acronym gigo: garbage data goes in, garbage comes out.  Data doesn’t stand alone; it is massaged by prior assumptions.  So, if you go into the issue assuming something is fishy, don’t be surprised that in your imagination a fish pops out.  But it’s not a fish; it’s the lingering smell in your nostrils from cleaning the garbage cans the day before.  The pings could be delivery and Uber drivers and the surveilled clutches of ballots at drop boxes turn out to be a family member legally depositing ballots for the family.

Not that fraud doesn’t happen.  Of course, it does.  It occurs in every election, and is made easier by ballot harvesting, no voter ID, and shot gunning ballots through the mail turning election day into election season.  But it doesn’t happen like this.  When you have elections like this, elections begin to lose respect and you end up fanning the imaginations of the already unhinged.  That’s the real lesson of 2020.

Let’s go back to election day being . . . election day, and 70% of the ballots cast in-person.  Add voter ID and we might have more people accepting the results.  We don’t need to follow a self-serving narcissist into another electoral defeat.  The GOP’s self-preservation should trump Trump.

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RogerG

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The Trump Indictment, Part II: King Oedipus Meets Dr. Faustus

Donald Trump
The Shitty Christian Blog: [OE008] The Story: Oedipus
Oedipus, King of Thebes
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MAGA/Trump supporters, 2023
Doctor Faustus is back...and this time it’s personal | The Exeter Daily
Dr. Faustus selling his soul to the devil

In 2015, I had this sinking feeling that once Trump sunk his tentacles into the GOP, he’d be hard to cleanse from the party’s bloodstream.

He is a tabloid personality with a harsh mouth and revels in political theatrics.  Republicans, as it turned out, were in a mood for a drama queen in 2016, and many still are.  They wanted somebody to “own the libs”.  Trump first gave them drama about Obama’s birth certificate and followed it with a litany of juvenile banter in “crooked Hillary” (honestly, she may be), “slow/low energy/clueless/not a man” Jeb, “I’ve never seen a human being [John Kasich] eat in such a disgusting fashion”, and now he’s progressed all the way to “coward/weak/lazy/low life/gutless pig” Bill Barr.  And to think that there are people who still defend this man and his behavior to this day.  According to recent polls, he’s the overwhelming choice to be the Republican nominee.  Disgusting.  It’s enough for a rock-ribbed Republican such as myself to rethink my party registration.  Is this what it means to be a Republican?

He’s embarrassing.  I’m embarrassed.

The latest Trump dust up is his federal indictment under:
• 18 U.S.C. § 793(e), “Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information” (31 counts)
• 18 USC §1512, “Tampering with a witness, victim, or an informant” (3 counts)
• 18 U.S. Code § 1519, “Destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy” (1 count)
• 18 USC § 1001, “Statements or entries generally” (concerns false statements, coverups, etc.) (3 counts)

The first 31 counts draw from Section 793 of the US Code which relates to parts of the old Espionage Act.  If you look at the kinds of documents that were bouncing around at his Mar-a-Lago estate and elsewhere – intelligence briefings, contingent US military plans, foreign and domestic military assessments, etc. – this is much more than diary entries, gifts from one head of state to another, personal letters, etc.  The highly sensitive nature of the documents demands a different treatment in law.  That’s one of the reasons for Section 793 and not the Public Records Act.

The other 7 counts, if true, are evidence of Trump’s pure hubris.  I suppose that if you’ve dodged so many bullets, you might come to think of yourself as immune.  It’s as if he thinks that he is wearing an invisible Lakota Sioux ghost shirt which makes him invulnerable to the bullets from DC’s henchmen.  Like other forms of magic, it works till it doesn’t (the one surviving ghost shirt from the 1890’s has dried blood around holes in it).  In this case, there is an evidentiary basis in the indictment for obstruction of justice.  They’ve got Trump on tape discussing attempts to mislead investigators and hide the documents, suborning others to commit perjury.  Then there’s the corroborative testimony of people in Trump’s inner circle.  Granted, the prosecution’s evidence will have to withstand cross examination and counter arguments by Trump’s legal eagles, but if the evidence is valid, it should raise more than a few eyebrows, with the possible exception of the most committed diehards.

Most troubling is the reaction of the media on the right.  The commentary can be summed up in “double standard, double standard, double standard”.  Very little of it focuses on the contents of the indictment.  Some of it is silly in the extreme.  Hugh Hewitt, a radio host that I respect for his generally calm and reasoned demeanor on air, expressed his disappointment that a rumored selling by Trump of classified information to the Saudis didn’t materialize in the indictment.  His reaction after reading it: “Is that all there is?” Upon hearing that, I said, “What!?”  Is the fact that the indictment failed to live up to the wildest speculation on MSNBC or the ladies on The View a real argument against it?  Hewitt, you’ve got to be kidding.

He was dismissive of the first 31 counts, the claimed Espionage Act violations, ostensibly because of the unprosecuted transgressions by Biden, Pence, Hillary, and Clinton proteges like Sandy Berger – the double standard argument morphed into an excuse for the mindlessly casual treatment of highly sensitive national security papers.  In effect, may as well shred this part of the US Code.  This Hewitt response was without seeing the exact nature of the documents, which will come out in court.  The prosecutors know this; Trump knows it; the legal eagles know it.  If it turns out that all they’ve got is love letters between Trump and “rocket man”, or some such, the DOJ will be wiping egg from its face and providing one more reason to defenestrate the FBI and defang the Garland gang.  If these documents prove to be extremely sensitive, the raw egg will be dripping down the face and all over the casual attire of a good portion of the right’s punditry class.

One of those in need of a washcloth will be Mollie Hemingway, a noted commentator in the conservative, pro-Trump firmament.  Today (6/13/23), on Hewitt’s show, she ostentatiously proclaimed in hyperbolic bombast, “For me to take this [the fed’s Trump indictment] seriously . . . I need to see hundreds of Russia-collusion-hoax people in jail.”  Ruminate on that rant for a moment.  Until we retroactively correct for all those who got away, we cannot enforce the law.  It’s ludicrous.  She’s making the case to selectively not enforce the law à la Alvin Bragg or any of the other Soros-backed DA’s who have been recently inflicted on us.  She does this while also admitting that the case against Trump in the indictment is troubling.  Is she an advocate of ignoring the evidence till enough Democrat scalps are tied to her lance?  Where does this line of illogic stop, at the point where the US Code is effectively eviscerated?  Ignore the evidence against Trump till we get Hillary in chains?

If the highly classified nature of the documents proves genuine, while honestly not a fan of Karl Marx, his famous dictum will apply to this current crop of the right’s commentariat: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

The second batch of charges – those involving obstruction (of justice) – at least causes a pregnant pause for some of Trump’s past stalwart defenders.  The guest lineup on Fox News was left with stumbling admissions of Trump in serious trouble.  That’s when they were forced to elevate their assessment beyond their “double standard” shibboleth and into the details of the indictment.  All the talk about “double standard” will ring hollow if in court the highly classified nature of the documents is born out and evidence of Trump’s perfidy and irresponsibility is shown to be valid.

The main problem for the media on the right is that they have manufactured a pickle for themselves.  They have not cultivated a conservative audience but instead nurtured a Trump one.  The creation of a base reliant on such an unstable personality is asking for trouble.  This media runs the risk of alienating this base if they are forced to deal honestly with the facts.  That audience is likely to be siloed in their own echo chamber and not appreciative of the exposure of their demigod emperor as not wearing any clothes.  For most people, including Trump, nudity will not enhance their appearance.

The media on the right, right now, acts as if they are sitting on pins and needles.  They reach for the thin reeds of silly arguments.  They fail to come to grips with their central problem: they hitched their wagon to a wild horse.  Or more accurately, they made a bargain with the devil.  So, Trump is a reincarnation of Sophocles’ Oedipus, King of Thebes (see “Oedipus Rex”), experiencing the wages of his pure hubris, and the Trump base is impersonating Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, selling one’s soul for instant gratification.

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RogerG

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* Jack Smith’s indictment can be found at https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.3.0.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0A-iRN3cPhLLJJwVT7jbt8WOR6ymkohVTX0v7r634xtVjR5SeHV7SeMp0

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Trump Is His Own Worst Enemy, Like Oedipus, the King of Thebes

A photo published by the U.S. Justice Department showing boxes of documents stored in a storage room at Trump's Mar-a-Lago club in Florida in 2021. (U.S. Justice Department/Handout via Reuters)
A photo published by the U.S. Justice Department showing boxes of documents stored in a storage room at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida in 2021. (U.S. Justice Department/Handout via Reuters)

Well, it’s done.  Trump is officially indicted by federal prosecutors.  Yes, again, but this one may stick.  One thing has always been true about Trump: he’s reckless in his language and behavior.  He’s so provocative that his opponents want nothing more than to bury him.  They tried in bogus impeachments and the outrageous Bragg indictment.  But the Jack Smith indictment may be something different.  Sometimes braggarts have the mental capacity to be stupid.  If you read the indictment, if proven in court before a jury, Trump is not only mulishly stupid but quite possibly criminally so.

Read the indictment for yourself. Here it is: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.3.0.pdf

I should have been more reserved in condemning the FBI’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home on August 8, 2022.  I was furious at what seemed to me to be just another DC hit job on Trump.  Regardless, they discovered a treasure trove of classified documents that covered military plans, capabilities, military assessments of our friends and foes, etc., and rashly shared by Trump with friends and apologists like Kid Rock.

If established in court, the double-standard defense quickly loses its force.  The acts are so egregious.  Anyway, since Hillary, Comey, and Biden avoided prosecution, it is no defense for Trump.  It’s an argument to throw the book at Hillary, Comey, Biden . . . and Trump.  Constantly, our criminal justice system is wracked with a few convictions in a sea of non-prosecutions and acquittals of nearly identical circumstances.  At a certain point, in flagrant situations, the law must be enforced.  It’s too bad, though, that the feds, who have soiled themselves so blatantly in the recent past, are now tasked to bring Trump to the bar of justice.

I can understand the skepticism on the right.  But we are now duly warned about putting our faith in a man who has the awful habit of being his own worst enemy.  Maybe he actually believed his own rhetoric: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”

The ancient Greeks called it hubris which led to nemesis and on to personal destruction.  The Trump saga reads like Sophocles’ tragedy, “Oedipus Rex”.  Go ahead, go online and read a few synopses of the play.  Trump is Oedipus, King of Thebes.

Donald Trump indictment latest: Former US president 'told aide to hide ...

Oedipus the King | Book by Sophocles | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster

RogerG

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Hooray for Chris Christie; Vivek Ramaswamy, Not So Much

Chris Christie Goes After Ivanka and Jared Kushner

* Please watch the entirety of Chris Christie’s presidential announcement below.  It’s a hoot.  It shows a guy with the capacity to talk extemporaneously, with good sense, and without the juvenile rhetoric of the man from Mar-a-Lago.

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Today’s pundits frequently refer to America’s political scene as one composed of tribes. Actually, “cults” is more accurate.  We have the woke cult (neo-Marxism), a gender fluidity cult, climate cult, the Gaia cult, etc.  Well, for some on the right, let’s add the Trump and nonsense cults.  Frequently, those two overlap.

So, what is a cult?  Words such as “excessive admiration”, “a fashionable person or thing among a particular group”, “veneration or devotion for a particular figure or object” stand out in the dictionaries.  Putting it together, it’s a siloed group of people who are transfixed by a person or idea and revel in confirmation bias (seek only information that supports their biases).

Regarding Chris Christie, he has stepped forward to call out the cult in the midst of the Republican base – the cult of the orange man.  Prior to him, all Republicans in the Republican presidential derby, and before, pranced around like they were walking on egg shells, afraid to upset the delicate sensibilities of Trump’s rabid followers.  Quite frankly, it’s about time the cult was challenged.  Thanks to his fortitude, Christie jumped to near the top of my score card.

And Vivek Ramaswamy leaped to the bottom.  There is a crazy element in the right’s “populist” base – another aspect of the orange man’s cult – that believes our fiscal problems are driven by excessive spending on . . . foreign aid.  Not only that, they think that appeasing aggressors leads to peace.  Hmmmm, where have we heard that before?  No “Si vis pacem, para bellum” of the Roman general Vegetius for this panderer to the mob – er, cult.  If you’re interested, it means, “If you want peace, prepare for war”.

WATCH: Vivek Ramaswamy On Why Left And Right Should Fight Woke Capital - Big League Politics
Vivek Ramaswamy

No sure path to appeasement can be imagined than knee-capping the victim by ending their access to U.S. foreign aid.  Foreign aid, though, represents less than 1% of our federal budget ($39 billion).  That’s 1.7% of our two biggest drivers of the federal budget – Social Security and Medicare – at $2.2 trillion annually.  We are not even talking about peanuts. More accurately, we are talking about a particle of a peanut that unhappily fell under the track of an Abrams tank.  So, Vivek will lead the charge against the smallest budgetary particle of a particle going to Ukraine on his way to bootlicking a thug, Putin.  He’ll have to share the other boot with Trump.

As Christie says of Trump, the man of Mar-a-Largo would quickly end the Ukraine War by giving Ukraine to Russia.  And Vivek would be cheerleading the entire way.  This duopoly of demagoguery is an insult to rationality.  Get this: show your spine to the CCP by showing how quickly you cave to a thug, an ally of the Beijing thug.  And this on the heels of the Afghanistan bugout.  Abandonment and surrender are a show of strength?  How does that work? Chairman Xi must be shaking in his boots, the same boots that Xi shares with Putin, the same ones dripping in Vivek/Trump spittle.

Hooray for Christie bringing all this lunacy to light.  I hope that he keeps it up.  He’ll steal the stage from a man whose sole theatrical tact is to bully.  As for Vivek, fresh from the taste of leather in his mouth, Christie in comparison shows himself to be the adult in the room.

RogerG

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* Vivek Ramaswamy’s appeasement policy: “Vivek Ramaswamy willing to give ‘major concessions to Russia’ to end Ukraine war”, Ryan King, Washington Examiner, 6/4/23, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/vivek-ramaswamy-give-concessions-russia-ukraine