The Republican candidate’s attacks on a federal judge directly undermine the principle on which America was founded.
.. what is deeply un-American about it, is its essentialism. Trump is saying that because of who you are, in an ethnic or hereditary sense, he will make judgments about what you think and what role in society you can play. The related assumption, as Garrett Epps explains to irrebuttable effect, is that people’s public roles cannot separated from their ethnic or religious identities. A “Mexican” judge will think and act as a Mexican, not as a judge.
There is no more un-American concept.
Clinton Finds an Effective Attack Against Trump
The new weapon she brought was the insight that Donald Trump’s anti-élite grievances contain a constant denigration of America, and of the vast, collaborative project of making it better. “He called our military a ‘disaster,’ “ Clinton said. “He said we are, and I quote, a ‘third-world country.’ “
.. The liberal line during the past week has been that Clinton ought to call Trump a fraud. Her attack, when it came, ran deeper. The real, devastating charge in Clinton’s San Diego speech was that Trump does not believe in America.
.. You could measure the depth of the hit in Trump’s response. Normally so gleeful on Twitter, he sneered at her for using a teleprompter, and that was about it. Then, in a transparent effort to steal the headlines, Trump resumed his attack on the federal judge presiding over one of the lawsuits against Trump University
.. Foreign policy is natural territory for Clinton, its substance and subtleties familiar, but it also has another helpful feature: it lets her mostly avoid the tensions within modern liberalism. She doesn’t have to talk about the nineteen-ninties.
.. in California, where the main political fault lines are not between conservatism and liberalism but within liberalism itself: between the vaulting meritocracy of Silicon Valley and the poverty it obscures, between middle-class progress and environmental conservation, between minority politics and expression in a place that no longer really has a majority.
.. in Santa Clara County, the center of Silicon Valley, which last year was reported to be the national leader in average wages but also had a double-digit poverty rate.
.. It is telling that Clinton, attacked relentlessly by Sanders for giving paid speeches for Goldman Sachs, never really defended her view of capital’s role in the economy
.. Either Clinton really believes that her husband’s Administration resolved the basic problems of social design or, more likely, she is enough of a partisan that she will not publicly describe where it went wrong. One way or the other, she has a blind spot.
.. That up-and-up-and-up-again cadence that she uses when she’s promising the new jobs and infrastructure bound to come in her Administration was gone entirely.
.. she seems to have acquired an idea of her opponent and, in turn, herself: that she is the patriot in the race, and the believer.
The Donald Trump Veepstakes: A Cheat Sheet
“I think Newt is lobbying to be the vice president, and I think their people are paying a lot of attention to him,” adding, somewhat dubiously, “It’d be a ticket with six former wives, kind of like a Henry VIII thing. They certainly understand women.”
.. Cons: “He offers a barking carnival act that can be best described as Trumpism: a toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued. Let no one be mistaken—Donald Trump’s candidacy is a cancer on conservatism, and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised, and discarded.” —Perry on July 22, 2015
The Consequences of Calling Trump a Fascist Become Clear in San Jose
If you dub Trump ‘Hitler,’ can you be surprised when people oppose him with violence?
.. To many, Trump’s strongman tactics, his insistence on making attendees at his rallies swear oaths to him, and his apparent disregard for the separation of powers and rule of law, reek of the demons of the 20th century. Many see in Trump — and the new class of Eastern European autocrats whom he, in many ways, resembles — shades of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco.
.. it’s not hard to see why so many thinkers view Trump as a fascist threat, given his willingness to use violence to further his own goals. Assaults on protesters at his rallies are all too common, and they’re often egged on by Trump himself, standing at the podium.
.. So if Donald Trump is a fascist, what is to be done?
.. In reality, the opposite has happened. Political violence has arisen not from the right, but from the left.
.. The term “fascist” is a very, very powerful thing. Its powers extend far beyond those exerted by the words “racist” or “misogynist” or “xenophobic,” for fascists threaten not merely a specific race or sex but rather the entire polity. If pundits are to use it to describe Trump and his movement, they must be prepared to live with the consequences.