Imagine if Donald Trump were a woman. You simply can’t
“What works for them [men] won’t work for you [women],”
.. “I’ll go to these events and there will be men speaking before me, and they’ll be pounding the message and screaming about how we need to win the election. And I want to do the same thing. I love to wave my arms, but apparently that’s a little bit scary to people. And I can’t yell too much. It comes across as ‘too loud’ or ‘too shrill’ or ‘too this’ or ‘too that’.”
.. The first presidential debate should be studied by future generations – who, I dearly hope, will have a more evolved attitude towards gender than we do ..
.. Imagine it was a woman. Picture a woman up there on the podium last night shouting over her rival, jabbing her finger in the air, denying she’d said things there was ample evidence of online that she had said. Imagine a completely inexperienced woman insisting she had better political nous than someone who had been at the forefront of politics for decades.
.. After all, according to a tweet Trump retweeted last year, “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?”
.. Some of her supporters have already complained that she didn’t jump on some of Trump’s more deranged statements, such as that not paying federal income tax is “smart”. But she couldn’t – because she’s not trying to appeal now to her supporters but to the undecideds who might well find that kind of attack “too shrill”.
.. She instead, wisely, let him hang himself with his words, and restricted herself to some side-eye smiles to the camera and nudges to the fact-checkers.
.. Chuck Todd, from the ostensibly neutral network NBC, actually complained that Clinton seemed “over-prepared”. Because nobody likes a woman who performs too well, guys.
A Republican congressman griped that “she just comes across as my bitchy wife/mother”, which serves as a convenient reminder that people who are sexist about Clinton actually just hate women.
Trump and the Truth: The “Lying” Media
Trump nakedly wants what maybe all politicians want, but few have the temerity to ask for: plenty of attention, all of it admiring. He appears to believe in a captive press, of the kind found, for example, in Benito Mussolini’s Italy or Fidel Castro’s Cuba. And he believes in a cult of personality—his own—that should obviate the need for questions. Just acknowledge his tremendousness and shut up. “Don’t believe the biased and phony media quoting people who work for my campaign,” he tweeted in May. “The only quote that matters is a quote from me!”
.. Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, offered a unique interpretation of what journalists do. “I really don’t appreciate campaigns thinking it is the job of the media to go and be these virtual fact checkers,” she said on Sunday, on ABC’s “This Week.” Since when is it not journalists’ job to check facts?
.. after the debate was over, Trump complained that “they” had given him a “defective mic.” He added, “I wonder, was that on purpose?” (That’s a species of excuse he’s used before: in February, after he failed, in one of this phone interviews with CNN, to disavow David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, he blamed the affair on a “bad earpiece.”)
.. Trump has repeatedly made is that as President he would “loosen” or “open up” libel laws, so that, as he said at a campaign rally in Texas in February, “when the New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when the Washington Post . . . writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.” It’s not clear how he would do this as President or whether he even could, and when he’s been challenged on those points he hasn’t made it any clearer, probably because he has no idea.
.. More frightening, though, is the way that Trump has spoken about the law as an instrument of personal vengeance—his way of getting back at his critics and making them pay. “We’re going to have people sue you like you’ve never got sued before,” he said, talking about reporters, at a February rally in Texas.
.. Clinton’s falsehoods belonged more recognizably in the realm of what politicians do so often: she obfuscated, or exaggerated, or was less than transparent in defending her handling of particular matters during her career in public life. She did not tend to lie, as Trump does, about what Politico called matters of “policy substance”—what one could also call demonstrable facts about the world.
.. “A man who is unconscious of himself acts in a blind, instinctive way and is in addition fooled by all the illusions that arise when he sees everything that he is not conscious of in himself coming to meet him from outside as projections upon his neighbors,” Carl Jung wrote in his 1945
The Problem with Trump Isn’t His Debating Skills
what was really outside any norm of decency was what he thought even after you had dutifully distilled away the incoherence and the manic improvisations. Talking, again, about President Obama’s birth certificate, he displayed not only the usual pathological inability to admit to an error—any error, ever—but an underlying racism so pervasive that it can’t help express itself even when trying to pass as something else.
.. Yet Trump continued last night his self-congratulations for compelling the President to do this, along with the grotesquely racist notion that it was “good for him” (i.e., for the President). It slowly dawned on the listener that this was all of a piece with the rest of Trump’s racial attitudes: he believes that, as a rich white man, he had a right to stop and frisk the President of the United States and demand that the uppity black man show him his papers. Stop-and-frisk isn’t just a form of policing for Trump; it’s a whole way of life.
.. It was of a line with his equally bizarre notion that owning a country club that doesn’t actively discriminate against black people is not a minimal requirement of law but a positive achievement of the owner.
.. His cruelty to Alicia Machado was unleavened by any apparent respect for her as a human being in any role other than as an envelope of flesh—an attitude he only doubled down on the following morning by complaining that she presented what he saw as an obvious problem as a reigning Miss Universe: she had gained “a massive amount of weight” (by Trump standards, that is). Again, this wasn’t a problem of how he chose to present his beliefs; the problem is with the beliefs. This wasn’t a question of preparation. It was that the things he actually believes are themselves repellent even when coherently presented. This was not a bad performance. This is a bad man.
The Dangerous Acceptance of Donald Trump
Trump is a declared enemy of the liberal constitutional order of the United States—the order that has made it, in fact, the great and plural country that it already is. He announces his enmity to America by word and action every day. It is articulated in his insistence on the rightness of torture and the acceptable murder of noncombatants.
.. He makes his enmity to American values clear when he suggests that the Presidency holds absolute power, through which he will be able to end opposition—whether by questioning the ownership of newspapers or talking about changing libel laws or threatening to take away F.C.C. licenses. To say “Well, he would not really have the power to accomplish that” is to misunderstand the nature of thin-skinned authoritarians in power. They do not arrive in office and discover, as constitutionalists do, that their capabilities are more limited than they imagined. They arrive, and then make their power as large as they can.
.. Ted Cruz called Trump a pathological liar, the kind who does not know the difference between lies and truth. Whatever the clinical diagnosis, we do appear to be getting, in place of the once famous Big Lie of the nineteen-thirties, a sordid blizzard of lies.
.. The Big Lie was fit for a time of processionals and nighttime rallies, and films that featured them. The blizzard of lies is made for Twitter and the quick hit of an impulse culture. Trump’s lies arrive with such rapidity that before one can be refuted a new one comes to take its place.
.. The Big Lie was fit for a time of processionals and nighttime rallies, and films that featured them. The blizzard of lies is made for Twitter and the quick hit of an impulse culture. Trump’s lies arrive with such rapidity that before one can be refuted a new one comes to take its place.
.. The radical progressives decided that there was no difference between the democratic left and the totalitarian right and that an explosion of institutions was exactly the most thrilling thing imaginable.
.. The American Republic stands threatened by the first overtly anti-democratic leader of a large party in its modern history—an authoritarian with no grasp of history, no impulse control, and no apparent barriers on his will to power. The American Republic stands threatened by the first overtly anti-democratic leader of a large party in its modern history—an authoritarian with no grasp of history, no impulse control, and no apparent barriers on his will to power.
.. Countries don’t really recover from being taken over by unstable authoritarian nationalists of any political bent, left or right—not by Peróns or Castros or Putins or Francos or Lenins or fill in the blanks. The nation may survive, but the wound to hope and order will never fully heal.