Her open threats to rivals epitomize the old-school gutter politics that are integral to her party’s problems.
.. Pelosi’s unabashed use of open threats and her death grip on power are a very big problem for her party.
.. She pointedly reminded them that “every action has a reaction . . . every attack provokes a massive reaction.”
.. Anyone who has led them to four consecutive defeats, bringing their House caucus to its lowest point in the last 90 years
.. Though reliably liberal, she is not a radical or a left-winger in the Bernie Sanders mold. To the contrary, she is a traditional machine Democratic politician, who likes to boast of her fundraising prowess. And that, rather than her political stands, is why her critics are right. In that sense, she represents everything that is wrong with the Democrats.
.. While Democrats like to say that they are the party of the young and that this portends their eventual return to power, they are led by a sclerotic band of elderly power brokers
.. The Democrats’ House leadership team of Pelosi, her longtime antagonist Steny Hoyer, and James Clyburn are, respectively, 77, 78, and 76. When you consider that the Democrats’ two leading presidential contenders last year were the 69-year-old Hillary Clinton and the 75-year-old Bernie Sanders, it’s little wonder that Democrats are frustrated with their party’s inability to promote younger and fresher faces.
.. The Democrats’ House leadership team of Pelosi, her longtime antagonist Steny Hoyer, and James Clyburn are, respectively, 77, 78, and 76. When you consider that the Democrats’ two leading presidential contenders last year were the 69-year-old Hillary Clinton and the 75-year-old Bernie Sanders, it’s little wonder that Democrats are frustrated with their party’s inability to promote younger and fresher faces.
.. If, as many Democrats are now confessing, their brand is even worse than that of the Republicans, Pelosi is the face of that problem.
.. the Democrats remain a party that hasn’t had a fresh idea since the New Deal or the Great Society.
Democrats and the Losing Politics of Contempt
Democrats didn’t lose for lack of political talent, campaign financing and organization or enthusiasm among their base. They lost because of their brand.
.. Democrats may think the brand is all about diversity, inclusion and fairness. But for millions of Americans, the brand is also about contempt — intellectual contempt of the kind Nimzowitsch exuded for his opponent
.. Contemporary liberalism now expresses itself chiefly in the language of self-affirmation and moral censure: of being the party of the higher-minded; of affixing the suffix “phobe” to millions of people who don’t appreciate being described as bigots.
.. It’s why a political strategy by Democrats that seeks to turn every local race into a referendum on Trump is likely to fail.
.. One temptation Democrats would be smart to avoid is to see Ossoff’s loss as evidence that the party needs to move further left, on the theory that not enough of the base showed up to vote.
.. And nominating more progressive candidates isn’t likely to solve the contempt problem, at least with voters not yet in sync with progressive orthodoxies on coal, guns or gender-neutral bathrooms.
.. Speaking of the 42nd president, many are the charges that can be laid at his feet, but contempt for half of all Americans was never one of them.
Naomi Klein: Trump is the First Fully Commercialized Global Brand to Serve as U.S. President
So, I think we need to understand that Trump is not playing by the rules of politics. He’s playing by the rules of branding. And, you know, there have been presidential conflicts of interest before. There have been presidents with business interests before. But there has never been a fully commercialized global brand as a sitting U.S. president. That is unprecedented.
And the reason that’s unprecedented is because this is a relatively new business model. It is—the business model that has been adopted by the Trump Organization is really not one that existed before the 1990s. It is what I called in my first book, No Logo, the hollow brand model, right? And the model comes out of the fact that in the—so, the original history of branding is you have a product—you know, maybe it was rice, maybe it was beans, maybe it was shoes—you’re a manufacturer first, but you want people to buy your product, so you brand it. You put a logo on it. You identify it with, you know, some sort of iconic image, like Uncle Ben’s or whatever it is, right? You give it a kind of personality.
.. an advertising executive who said, “Consumers are like roaches. You spray them and spray them, and they become immune after a while.” It’s just lovely insight from a marketer, yeah, about how they see customers. So, marketing started to get more ambitious, and then you started to see these companies that position themselves as lifestyle brands. And they said, “No, we’re not product-based companies. We are in the business of selling ideas and identity.” Nike was the ultimate example of this. Nike CEO Phil Knight stepped forward and said, “We are not a sneaker company. We are not a shoe company. We are about the idea of transcendence through sports,”
.. Starbucks wasn’t a coffee company; it was about the idea of community and the third place. And, you know, Disney was family.
.. So, Trump was more of a traditional business in the 1980s. And Trump was just sort of like a guy who built buildings, but—built buildings and had a flair for marketing. But the game changer for him was The Apprentice. That’s when he got to—he realized he could enter the stratosphere of the superbrands.
.. And his business model changed. It no longer became about building the building or buying the building. That was for other people to do. He was about building up the Trump name and then selling it and leasing it in as many different ways as possible. So you’ve got the Trump water and Trump Steaks and Trump’s very so-called dodgy university.
.. Trump’s big idea, the idea at the center of his brand, is the power that comes with wealth. And so, the more powerful he is—and, of course, he happens somehow to have got himself the most powerful job in the world—that fact alone is massively increasing the value of his brand, which his sons are cashing in on busily on every front by selling that name for inflated prices.
.. this idea that we’re going to somehow catch him out, damage him by proving that he is corrupt, you know, that he treats people awfully, that’s his brand.
His brand is that he’s the boss, and he gets to do whatever he wants.
.. The Apprentice, as you so aptly describe, was really based on selling a cutthroat brand of capitalism to the American people as the way that people should be.
.. Yeah, it’s televised class war. I mean, it opens up with an image of a homeless man sleeping rough on the streets of New York, and then cuts to Trump in his limousine. And it’s basically like “Who do you want to be? The homeless guy or Trump?” Right? And so, you know, this happens. You know, the show launches at a time when people understand that this—that neoliberalism is not lifting all boats. It is this cutthroat world of winners and losers. And which one do you want to be?
.. I didn’t know that in later seasons they deported half of their contestants into tents in the backyard. They called it Trump’s trailer park. And, you know, they would overlay the sound of like howling dogs at night. And it was this idea of creating drama out of the massive inequalities of our economic system. The people who were sleeping in the backyard, who had been deported into Trump’s trailer park, would peek over the hedges to look at the people living in the mansion, you know, drinking champagne and floating around in the swimming pool, right?
.. if you play by my rules, you end up in the mansion. And it will be even sweeter because people are sleeping outside, right? Because you won.
Why does Trump keep making promises he can’t keep? The secret lies in his past.
the location provided a vivid case study in the dangers Trump will face as time goes on. This early in his presidency, he can still talk about the glittering future he’ll deliver. But at some point, he’ll have to reckon with what his policies have actually done and failed to do.
Trump is applying to governing the same theory that worked quite well for him in his business career. But the rules have already changed for him.
.. the Republican health-care bill will save Americans from the catastrophe of the Affordable Care Act. But it’s an odd thing to say in Kentucky, which may have fared better than any other state under the ACA. The state accepted the law’s expansion of Medicaid and saw an additional 443,000 of its citizens — a full 10 percent of the state’s population — get health coverage at no cost. The state also launched its own ACA exchange, Kynect, which was one of the most successful in the country. According to Gallup, the uninsured rate fell from 20.4 percent in 2013 before the law took effect down to 7.8
.. But hey, who needs Medicaid or subsidized health coverage if you’ve got a great job mining coal, where salaries are high and benefits are comprehensive? Trump repeated that promise, too — that once we get rid of some environmental regulations, all those coal jobs will come back:
.. In his particular corner of the business world, you really can create wealth just by managing public perception — or at least he could. This was the theory of his entire career
.. When he conned someone, like the attendees of Trump University, no matter how unhappy they were he could move on to other marks
.. It was a big world, and there were always other people who might be taken in by the next scam. But in politics, you have to go back to the people you made promises to the first time around, and ask them to put their faith in you again.
.. it’s obvious that Trump looks at his first legislative priority much like one of his buildings: What matters is that people think it’s the tallest one around, even if it isn’t. He doesn’t seem to know or care much about what’s in the GOP’s bill to repeal the ACA or what the effects would be. It’s just about getting a win one way or the other.
.. he met with congressional Republicans not to discuss the content of the bill, but to cajole and threaten them into voting for it. He told Mark Meadows, head of the far-right Freedom Caucus, to stand up while he told him, “I’m gonna come after you, but I know I won’t have to, because I know you’ll vote ‘yes.’ ” (Meadows says he’s still voting no.)
.. So what happens when Trump goes back to Kentucky in three years, and he has taken away voters’ health coverage but didn’t manage to bring back the coal jobs of yesteryear?