“How can Hillary Clinton be losing to a mentally unstable megalomaniac and sexual predator who doesn’t pay income taxes?”
.. George Packer wrote tellingly about last week in the magazine: an America bitterly divided along class, racial, and cultural lines.
To quote Benjamin Disraeli, the nineteenth-century British statesman, we now have “Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets.”
.. Whatever their views of him as an individual, they like what he stands for: nationalism, nativism, and hostility toward what they consider a self-serving élite that looks down on them.
.. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has accused Clinton of operating a fraudulent business that bilked tens of thousands of dollars from people on modest incomes, stiffing trades people on a routine basis, making a mockery of the tax laws and not paying a cent of income tax for twenty years, boasting about charitable giving while not donating any of his own cash, or sexually assaulting women.
.. During the Republican primaries, some outlets, particularly on television, indulged Trump shamefully, while using him as a ratings booster.
.. it hasn’t done enough to exploit his other vulnerabilities, to paint the Republican candidate as a con man whose schemes have victimized many ordinary, hard-working Americans.
.. they should be ramming home every day the message that Trump is a serial chiseler of the little guy, not his savior. Why isn’t Clinton regularly appearing alongside some of the people who lost their savings to Trump University? Where are the ads featuring tradesmen and suppliers and charities that Trump has stiffed?
.. If you tune into conservative talk radio, as many Trump supporters do, you will hear a constant discourse of resentment, conspiracy theories, and alienation from the institutions of economic and political power—including the Republican Party establishment.
.. The Trump movement, like the Tea Party movement it supplanted, is a reaction to the socially liberal, polyglot America that is rapidly emerging in the twenty-first century. Representing an older, whiter, and more embattled tradition, it is constantly evoking what it sees as a lost Valhalla—a place of plentiful jobs, rising living standards, conservative social values, fewer immigrants, and minorities who knew their place.
.. And if, in the coming years, robots and algorithms provide another big shock to the economy, destroying tens of millions more decent-paying jobs, how many former truck drivers and displaced white-collar workers will be receptive listeners to a future Trump?
An Election Is Not a Suicide Mission
To the pro-choice side, especially to lukewarm pro-choicers looking to feel better about their own muddled sense of things, this choice has sometimes been cast as evidence that pro-lifers don’t really believe our own rhetoric — that if we really believed abortion to be murder, really murder, we wouldn’t be incrementalists and small-r republicans on the issue; we would support violence, rebellion, nullification, secession, you name it.
.. The strongest counterpoint to this line of argument comes from the Roman Catholic catechism’s teaching on just war. As the Catholic writer John Zmirak noted in the aftermath of the Planned Parenthood shootings last years, the church does not allow nations to take up arms and go to war merely when they have a high moral cause on their side. Justice is necessary, but it is not sufficient: Peaceful means of ending the evil in question need to have been exhausted, there must be serious prospects of military success, and (crucially) “the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.”
.. So long as your polity offers mechanisms for eventually changing unjust laws, it’s better to accept the system’s basic legitimacy and work within it for change than to take steps, violent or otherwise, that risk blowing the entire apparatus up.
.. But the Trump alternative is like a feckless war of choice in the service of some just-seeming end, with a commanding general who likes war crimes. It’s a ticket on a widening gyre, promising political catastrophe and moral corruption both, no matter what ideals seem to justify it.
Could Evan McMullin tip the election?
“He can’t do anything, but he hurts us in Utah,” Trump complained. “If for some reason we lose Utah, that could have a very devastating impact on the overall.”
McMullin, a Utah native, promptly tweeted: “@realDonaldTrump, Yes you’ve never heard of me because while you were harassing women at beauty pageants, I was fighting terrorists abroad.”
.. The funny thing is a lot of people in Utah are Mormons, and they don’t drink coffee,” he said, sitting down over hummus and ice water at the Hawk ’n’ Dove on Capitol Hill. “So, we’ve done zero campaigning in coffee shops. If Donald Trump were truly interested in the state and in the voters, he might know a thing or two about that.”
McMullin added with a smile that dessert is “what we do in Utah. We have a lot of desserts, a lot of sugar-infused treats, and that’s what we do instead of coffee.”
.. After leaving the CIA in 2011, McMullin — who has an MBA from Wharton — became an investment banker for Goldman Sachs in San Francisco.
.. In the “Meet the Press” green room on Sunday, McMullin ran into Mike Pence, Trump’s running mate, who had joined in mocking the Utahan in the joint interview with Baier, saying: “Nobody ever heard of him.” In person, it was all different. McMullin recalled: “He said it was truly nice to meet me, and I reciprocated, and we wished each other well.”
.. McMullin is the key player in one of two “not-impossible scenarios” that would throw the election into the House. Under what Krueger calls “The Utah Scenario,” if McMullin takes Utah’s six electoral votes, Clinton could wind up with 267 and Trump with 265, both short of 270.
..The LDS Church-owned Deseret News wrote a jaw-dropping editorial in October calling for Trump to resign his candidacy, which essentially outlines why Trump is the antithesis of Mormonism.”
.. “That means the Republican Party is headed more quickly to problems than perhaps the Democratic Party is. But it also means the conservative movement can emerge anew in a more viable way.”
What Trump Sees in Putin: Am I being respected enough?
But those of us who have watched Trump for a while remember his Tiananmen Square comments and kind words for Saddam Hussein, Moammar Qaddafi, and the rest. You don’t really have to bribe the mogul to get him to say nice things about foreign strongmen with brutal methods. He just does it instinctively.
The core question at the heart of every Trump decision and interaction is, “Am I being respected enough?” Any slight, insult, or lack of respect sets off Trump’s sense of grievance and need for revenge. All slights, insults, and signs of disrespect are indications of weakness. They must be rooted out and snuffed out; they must be humiliated. Counter-punch anyone who dares criticize — even a Gold Star family. No act, comment, or gesture can be ignored. Even loyalists need to be periodically humiliated so that they’ll remember their place — think of Chris Christie.
Trump looks at Vladimir Putin’s Russia and sees a well-run place. Nobody messes with the boss over there. Everybody knows their place. It’s orderly. Everybody respects that leader’s strength. As longtime Trump employee Michael Cohen put it, “To those of us who are close to Mr. Trump, he is more than our boss. He is our patriarch.”