But I think it’s much more than the messiness of politics, especially as exemplified by the current deadlock between the legislative and executive branches of our government, that gives rise to the desire for an outsider. Most Americans suspect that politics is corrupt. This is the legacy of Watergate, and that suspicion of political corruption fuels the desire for outsider candidates. What baffles me is that anyone could think that Donald Trump would be an antidote for political corruption.
.. Mr. Trump didn’t just, as Mr. Brooks puts it, walk onto the scene. Mr. Trump was triumphantly ushered in with kid gloves by the media establishment because its ratings skyrocketed when it reported about him.
.. David Brooks presents an allegory regarding what happens when good people say nothing. He was perhaps too young and idealistic to appreciate the nascent monster in the tactics laid out by the G.O.P. political strategist Lee Atwater, or the Machiavellian goals cloaked in Newt Gingrich’s Contract for America. But where was his voice when Sarah Palin was milking the very undercurrent of violence he now attributes to the Donald Trump campaign, or when the media fomented hatred across the airwaves until even our own members of Congress believed the misinformation (Joe Wilson’s shout of “you lie!” during Mr. Obama’s speech to Congress), or when the Senate G.O.P. leader vowed to put party ahead of country to make President Obama a “one-term” president?
Mr. Trump’s candidacy has been more than 30 years in the making,
.. Shortly before the fateful Kennedy-Nixon contest, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said that TV should help foster an alert and knowledgeable citizenry worthy of a modern republic. Alas, the opposite has transpired. We live in a world of sound bites, and we prefer quick fixes and four-word solutions proposed by telegenic candidates. The tragicomic irony: We are confronted with complex challenges, but the zeitgeist does not encourage candidates or voters to respond in kind.
.. As we see in debate after debate, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, Mr. Trump’s main competitors, consider Mr. Trump a traitor because he asserts that he will play politics by engaging in compromises. So, Mr. Trump may be all the bad things that Mr. Brooks asserts he is, but he distinguishes himself from and riles the other contenders by his lack of purity and his willingness to play politics.
Mr. Trump confirmed in a statement that the state Republican Party’s inability to assure an uncontested race was a deal-breaker, though he played down his interest. “I never looked seriously at running for governor,” he said, adding, “If I ran, I would have won.”
.. Mr. Nojay, armed with data, ran Mr. Trump through a list of presidents and their résumés. “Going back to George Washington, there has never been a president who has not served in high public office,” he said he told Mr. Trump.
.. Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers, including Roger Stone, a veteran political consultant, opposed the run for governor, arguing that Mr. Trump did not need Albany to serve as a prelude to his 2016 presidential bid.
.. But Mr. Trump, unwilling to face competition for the nomination, told Mr. Long that one condition for his candidacy would be to get Rob Astorino, the Westchester County executive who was already planning to run, out of the race.
“I made it clear to him, that’s not how politics works,” Mr. Long said. “It isn’t us picking up a phone and telling a candidate you can’t run.”
.. Eventually, Mr. Astorino recalled, he was asked (though he would not say by whom) to consider joining a “unity ticket” in which Mr. Trump would run for governor and Mr. Astorino for lieutenant governor. Mr. Astorino would become governor after Mr. Trump declared his presidential bid.
The Republican Party is held together by the core premise that the status of some traditionally important groups be supported and indeed extended. That would include “white male producers,” but not only. You could add soldiers, Christians (many but not all kinds), married mothers, gun owners, and other groups to that list.
.. Democrats are a looser coalition of interest groups. They agree less on exactly which groups should rise in status, or why, but they share a skepticism about the Republican program for status allocation, leading many Democrats to dislike the Republicans themselves and to feel superior to them.
.. No matter how much Republicans talk about broadening their message, the core point is still “we want to raise the status of groups which you don’t belong to!” That’s a tough sell, and furthermore the Republicans can fall all too readily into the roles of being oppressors, or at least talking like oppressors.
Republicans, who are focused on the status of some core groups at the exclusion of others, are more likely to lack empathy. Democrats, who oppose some of the previously existing status relations, and who deeply oppose the Republican ideology, are more likely to exhibit neuroticism.
.. At the state and local level, the governments controlled by Republicans tend to be better run, sometimes much better run, than those controlled by the Democrats (oops).
.. First, Republican delusions often matter less at the state and local level, and furthermore what the core Republican status groups want from state and local government is actually pretty conducive to decent outcomes. The Democrats in contrast keep on doling out favors and goodies to their multitude of interest groups, and that often harms outcomes. The Democrats find it harder to “get tough,” even when that is what is called for, and they have less of a values program to cohere around, for better or worse.
.. It is easier for intelligent foreigners to buy more heavily into the Democratic stories. They feel more comfortable with the associated status relations, and furthermore foreigners are less likely to be connected to American state and local government, so they don’t have much sense of how the Republicans actually are more sensible in many circumstances.
Before the speech, the PA announcer had told us not to “touch or harm” any protesters, but to instead just surround them and chant, “Trump! Trump! Trump!” until security can arrive (and presumably do the touching and/or harming).
.. The same way Sarah Palin can see Russia from her house, Donald on the stump can see his future. The pundits don’t want to admit it, but it’s sitting there in plain view, 12 moves ahead, like a chess game already won:
President Donald Trump.
.. It’s been well-documented that Trump surged last summer when he openly embraced the ugly race politics that, according to the Beltway custom of 50-plus years, is supposed to stay at the dog-whistle level. No doubt, that’s been a huge factor in his rise.
.. That put him in position to understand that the presidential election campaign is really just a badly acted, billion-dollar TV show whose production costs ludicrously include the political disenfranchisement of its audience.
.. Trump’s basic argument is the same one every successful authoritarian movement in recent Western history has made: that the regular guy has been screwed by a conspiracy of incestuous elites.
.. What Trump understands better than his opponents is that NASCAR America, WWE America, always loves seeing the preening self-proclaimed good guy get whacked with a chair.
.. rump had said things that were true and that no other Republican would dare to say. And yet the press congratulated the candidate stuffed with more than $100 million in donor cash who really did take five whole days last year to figure out his position on his own brother’s invasion of Iraq.
.. Why do the media hate Trump? Progressive reporters will say it’s because of things like his being crazy and the next Hitler, while the Fox types insist it’s because he’s “not conservative.” But reporters mostly loathe Trump because he regularly craps on other reporters.
.. Reporters have focused quite a lot on the crazy/race-baiting/nativist themes in Trump’s campaign, but these comprise a very small part of his usual presentation. His speeches increasingly are strikingly populist in their content.
.. His pitch is: He’s rich, he won’t owe anyone anything upon election, and therefore he won’t do what both Democratic and Republican politicians unfailingly do upon taking office, i.e., approve rotten/regressive policies that screw ordinary people.
.. He talks, for instance, about the anti-trust exemption enjoyed by insurance companies, an atrocity dating back more than half a century, to the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945. This law, sponsored by one of the most notorious legislators in our history (Nevada Sen. Pat McCarran was thought to be the inspiration for the corrupt Sen. Pat Geary in The Godfather II), allows insurance companies to share information and collude to divvy up markets.
.. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats made a serious effort to overturn this indefensible loophole during the debate over the Affordable Care Act.
.. Trump isn’t lying about any of this. Nor is he lying when he mentions that the big-pharma companies have such a stranglehold on both parties that they’ve managed to get the federal government to bar itself from negotiating Medicare prescription-drug prices in bulk.
.. He claims (and with Trump we always have to use words like “claims”) how it was these very big-pharma donors, “fat cats,” sitting in the front row of the debate the night before. He steams ahead even more with this tidbit: Woody Johnson, one of the heirs of drug giant Johnson & Johnson .. .. is the finance chief for the campaign of whipping boy Jeb Bush.
.. Trump, incidentally, will someday be in the Twitter Hall of Fame
.. But that wasn’t because of the principle itself, but because it was always coupled with the more effective politics of resentment: Big-government liberals are to blame for your problems.
.. Elections, like criminal trials, are ultimately always about assigning blame. For a generation, conservative intellectuals have successfully pointed the finger at big-government-loving, whale-hugging liberals as the culprits behind American decline.
.. No one should be surprised that he’s tearing through the Republican primaries, because everything he’s saying about his GOP opponents is true. They really are all stooges on the take, unable to stand up to Trump because they’re not even people, but are, like Jeb and Rubio, just robo-babbling representatives of unseen donors.
.. Patinkin believed Cruz didn’t do that line because Cruz is himself in the revenge business, promising to “carpet-bomb [ISIS] into oblivion” and wondering if “sand can glow.”