This presidential election is a contest between the oldest of the baby boomers. Yet Donald Trump, 70, and Hillary Clinton, 68, represent two very different decades in the formation of that generation. Donald Trump became famous as a classic 1980s type, while Hillary Clinton first attained public notice as a classic 1960s type.
.. During the Reagan years, writers celebrated capitalism not only as a wealth-generating engine but also as a moral system, a way to arouse hard work, creativity and trust.
.. A friend of mine came up to me at one of those parties and summarized the atmosphere: “Not indicted, not invited.”
.. As we saw on Monday night, Trump now represents capitalism degraded to pure selfishness. He treats other people like objects and lies with abandon. Proud to be paying no taxes while others foot the bill, proud to have profited off the housing bust that caused so much suffering, he lacks even the barest conception of civic life and his responsibilities to it.
.. When asked why she wants to be president or for any positive vision, she devolves into a list of programs. And it is never enough just to list three programs in an answer; she has to pile in an arid hodgepodge of eight or nine. This is pure interest-group liberalism — buying votes with federal money — not an inspiring image of the common good.
.. The twin revolutions of the 1960s and the 1980s liberated the individual — first socially and then economically — and weakened the community. More surprising, this boomer-versus-boomer campaign has decimated idealism.
.. Ironically, one of the tasks for those who succeed the baby boomers is to restore idealism. The great challenge of our moment is the crisis of isolation and fragmentation, the need to rebind the fabric of a society that has been torn by selfishness, cynicism, distrust and autonomy.
.. At some point there will have to be a new vocabulary and a restored anthropology, emphasizing love, friendship, faithfulness, solidarity and neighborliness that pushes people toward connection rather than distrust. Millennials, I think, want to be active in this rebinding. But inspiration certainly isn’t coming from the aging boomers now onstage.
The Lies Trump Told
He lied about the loan his father once gave him.
He lied about his company’s bankruptcies.
He lied about his federal financial-disclosure forms.
He lied about his endorsements.
He lied about “stop and frisk.”
He lied about “birtherism.”
He lied about New York.
He lied about Michigan and Ohio.
He lied about Palm Beach, Fla.
He lied about Janet Yellen and the Federal Reserve.
He lied about the trade deficit.
He lied about Hillary Clinton’s tax plan.
He lied about her child-care plan.
Hillary Turns Trump into Mitt Romney
What does Donald Trump call business? His livelihood is the rationale for his candidacy—“that the basic function of the government is deals. And you need a president who can do deals. And he has a record of doing deals,” as Michael Kinsley put it—and yet his particular idea of business had not, until last night, been discussed much during this campaign season. His Republican adversaries in the primaries had spent careers celebrating the virtues of capitalism; during the general election, some rigorous early scrutiny of his finances faded when it became obvious that, even if he wasn’t as rich as he claimed, he was still very rich. Last night, Clinton, with Trump’s help, sharpened the portrait of Trump the plutocrat. “The wealthy are going to create tremendous jobs,” Trump insisted, in trying to explain why tax cuts for the richest Americans would be good for those who had been left behind. The billionaire acknowledged that in some years he had not paid taxes, and said that, even if he had, “it would be squandered.” Hillary Clinton won this debate in many ways, but her attack on his ways of doing business cut the deepest: she Romneyed him.
.. He bragged about opening a private club in Palm Beach (“a tough community”) that included African-Americans and Latinos, as if that insulated him against all charges of racism. He seemed basically resistant to the notion that he had some obligation to contribute to the public good.
.. When George W. Bush (“the M.B.A. President”) and Mitt Romney ran on their business records, the proposition was that business provided a theory of how the world worked and how executives ought to behave.
.. One gift of this debate to Clinton’s party is that he now looks like a much more familiar target: a rich guy who is out for himself.
The Sermon of the Trump: Evangelical Catechesis
The Law of Trump
17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Constitution; I have not come to abolish but enforce. 18 I tell you what America; we will make America great again by enforcing the Constitution, unlike Hillary. 19 Hillary would be a bad, bad deal for America. She’s the worst. 20 She’s worse than the media, and we know how bad they are.