Harry Reid wasn’t in a kumbaya frame of mind, calling Trump “a sexual predator who lost the popular vote.”
.. in 2008 not comprehending that many voters viewed him as the escape hatch from Clinton Inc. It never would have occurred to anyone then — even the Clintons — that President Obama would be the one to brush away any aversions and objections, take us by the elbow, and firmly steer us back to Clinton Inc.
.. But Obama lost touch with his revolutionary side and settled comfortably into being an Ivy League East Coast cerebral elitist who hung out with celebrities, lectured Congress and scorned the art of political persuasion.
.. He was cozy with Silicon Valley and dismissive of working-class voters anxious about globalization, shrugging that “We’re part of an interconnected global economy now, and there’s no going back from that.”
.. He was dismissive of Bernie Sanders and his voters, treating Sanders as a fairy tale, just as Bill Clinton treated him in 2008 when he was a senator with little record
.. Obama was the ultimate establishmentarian. As he told the Rutgers student paper in May, “We have to make incremental changes where we can, and every once in a while you’ll get a breakthrough and make the kind of big changes that are necessary.”
.. Hillary’s campaign message boiled down to “It’s my turn, dammit.”
If you voted for Trump because he’s ‘anti-establishment,’ guess what: You got conned
The greatest trick Donald Trump pulled was convincing voters he’d be “anti-establishment.”
.. But the idea that he would do this was based on a profound misunderstanding of what the establishment actually is, and who Donald Trump is.
.. An organizational chart of Trump’s transition team shows it to be crawling with corporate lobbyists, representing such clients as Altria, Visa, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Verizon, HSBC, Pfizer, Dow Chemical, and Duke Energy. And K Street is positively salivating over all the new opportunities they’ll have to deliver goodies to their clients in the Trump era. Who could possibly have predicted such a thing?
The answer is, anyone who was paying attention.
.. No, their commitment is to be of service to that most oppressed and forgotten group of Americans, the wealthy. Trump’s tax plan would give 47 percent of its benefits to the richest one percent of taxpayers. Paul Ryan’s tax plan is even purer — it gives 76 percent of its cuts to the richest one percent in its first year, and by 2025 would feed 99.6 percent of its benefits to the top 1 percent.
.. Once that’s accomplished, Trump and the Republicans plan to either gut or completely repeal the Dodd-Frank financial regulations, the greatest wish of Wall Street bankers. Can you feel the anti-establishment wind blowing?
.. So what’s going on here? Most plainly, the voters thinking that Trump would vanquish the establishment were just marks for a con, like those who lost their life savings at Trump University. But
.. By now we should understand that while Trump is an ignorant buffoon in some ways and an outright moron in others, he’s also a savant of hatred and resentment. He not only identifies the ugliest feelings that portions of the electorate have — that’s the easy part, and all of his primary opponents knew equally well what those feelings were — he finds just the right way to reach in and goose them. And he grasped that people were ready to sign on with an attack on all sectors of established power, in Washington or anywhere else.
.. What Trump tapped into was their sense of powerlessness, that unseen forces are pulling the strings and manipulating “the system” for their own benefit. That “system” encompasses everything from politics to the economy to their local schools to culture. The system made that factory leave town. The system lets immigrants come in and speak a language other than English. Everywhere you look you’re being held down by the system.
So when Trump complained that anything that didn’t go his way meant the system was “rigged” against him, they nodded in agreement and said, “Yep, it’s rigged against me, too.”
.. He’s reckless, impulsive, vindictive, hateful, and authoritarian, and his presidency is going to be somewhere between disastrous and cataclysmic, likely in ways we can’t even imagine yet.
Donald Trump’s Stunning Win
Trump did not win this election alone. He won it because he was the candidate of the Republican Party. He could not have won if the leaders of that party had withdrawn their support in a manner that was designed to deal him a defeat, rather than to provide them with an alibi. In the last days, Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House and a Wisconsin congressman, campaigned for Trump openly, tweeting and speaking of the glories of a “unified Republican government.” He and his fellow-Republicans allowed this to happen.
There was also the quicksilver word of 2016: trust.
.. It would be wrong to deny that she made certain mistakes which crippled her bid, particularly in the period between when she left the State Department and when she announced her candidacy, for example in taking large sums of money from financial institutions for paid speeches—which was legal, but she seemed oblivious to how it looked. These seem like misdemeanors compared with what Trump has been up to, but they did matter to voters, and Clinton ought to have recognized that. Instead, she lived her life as if she were going to be running against Jeb Bush, a candidate as burdened by charges of dynasticism and political profiteering as she was.
.. When she protested that everything she did was done according to “the rules,” what voters appear to have heard was an admission that the entire system was built in a way they didn’t like.
The Dangers of Hillary Clinton
“We’ve tried sane, now let’s try crazy,” is basically his campaign’s working motto.
The promise to be a bull in a china shop is part of his demagogue’s appeal. Some of his more eloquent supporters have analogized a vote for Trump to storming the cockpit of a hijacked plane, with the likelihood of a plane crash entirely factored in.
.. The dangers of a Hillary Clinton presidency are more familiar than Trump’s authoritarian unknowns, because we live with them in our politics already. They’re the dangers of elite groupthink, of Beltway power worship, of a cult of presidential action in the service of dubious ideals. They’re the dangers of a recklessness and radicalism that doesn’t recognize itself as either, because it’s convinced that if an idea is mainstream and commonplace among the great and good then it cannot possibly be folly.
Almost every crisis that has come upon the West in the last 15 years has its roots in this establishmentarian type of folly. The Iraq War, which liberals prefer to remember as a conflict conjured by a neoconservative cabal, was actually the work of a bipartisan interventionist consensus, pushed hard by George W. Bush but embraced as well by a large slice of center-left opinion that included Tony Blair and more than half of Senate Democrats.
.. Indeed what is distinctive about Clinton, more even than Bush or Obama, is how few examples there are of her ever breaking with the elite consensus on matters of statecraft.
She was for the Iraq War when everyone was for it, against the surge when everyone had given up on Iraq, and then an unchastened liberal hawk again in Libya just a few short years later.
She was a Russia dove when the media mocked Mitt Romney for being a Russia hawk; now she’s a Russia hawk along with everyone else in Washington in a moment that might require de-escalation