Given all this, could a Trump-style celebrity takeover someday befall the Democrats as well, without the white identity politics but with all the raging telenovela drama that’s trailed in Trump’s wake?
.. The anger coursing through left-wing protest politics could find a cruder, more nakedly demagogic avatar than Bernie Sanders. A Hillary Clinton administration could supply various betrayals and compromises or foul up in some disastrous way, encouraging a sense that the professional class that dominates liberalism’s upper reaches needs to give way to a revived (and larger) version of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition — a “real American future” analogue to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” appeals.
.. If Trump has thrived by imitating Europe’s right-wing nationalists, a Trumpism of the left would imitate the left-wing populists of Latin America and Asia — the Chavismo of Alicia Machado’s native Venezuela, or the Trumpian socialism presently being served up by the ranting, trigger-happy president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte.
This campaign could get worse — a lot worse. Here’s why.
this election campaign is going to get worse — maybe a lot worse — before it gets better. By the time it’s done, the whole nation may feel like it needs a shower.
I base this depressing prediction on three assumptions: Polls showing the Obama coalition coming together behind Hillary Clinton are correct; Donald Trump does not want to be embarrassed as a massive loser; and the Republican Party cares more about keeping its majority in the House than about Trump’s tender feelings.
.. So I expect Trump to double down not just on his attacks against Clinton but also on the two issues that won him his white working-class following: immigration and trade. That means more bigotry, more xenophobia and more totally unrealistic promises about the miracles that he and his team of rich-guy economic advisers will magically perform.
.. Clinton campaign has bought time during the Olympics broadcasts for an ad in which Trump acknowledges that his Trump-branded shirts are made in Bangladesh and his neckties in China.
.. Some Republicans will be under increasing pressure, either from their constituents or their consciences, to distance themselves from Trump and perhaps even rescind their endorsements. How will Trump react to such betrayal? Surely by lashing out
The Tempting of Bernie Sanders
The reality is that an insurgent campaign that actually wants to beat Hillary Clinton would need to exploit vulnerabilities besides her insufficient zeal for a single-payer health care plan.
.. For that, you would need to say something pithier, like:
Look, as a senator Hillary Clinton cast a reckless vote for the Iraq war, which cost thousands of American lives and led directly to the rise of ISIS. As secretary of state she treated national security cavalierly, exposing classified information to our enemies, and also led us into a second disaster in Libya — where ISIS now has a stronghold as well. Why would you trust this woman to handle Syria, or Ukraine, or any other crisis? The record is clear: A vote for Hillary is a vote for recklessness and hawkishness, for Dick Cheney’s secrecy and George W. Bush’s interventionist folly, for disasters that no liberal should support.