In the film, Steve Carell’s character, I believe, has a short speech in which he talks about how the crash is really about the collapse of authoritative institutions in American society. You could not trust the banks. You could not trust politicians. And you still can’t, though you have to trust them to some extent, because you cannot live otherwise. Me, I see the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church as Catholicism’s version of Wall Street’s 2007-08 crash (and by the way, I am told that the recent indictments of Franciscan priests in Pennsylvania on charges related to sex abuse are just the beginning there).
.. If Trump were turning his big guns away from immigrants and onto Wall Street (and, by extension, on the big business lobby that wants to keep the immigrant flood rolling across the border), he would be a lot better off. People want an accounting. I don’t believe Trump will give it to us, but the inchoate desire is there.
.. The bigger thing is — I regarded this crisis at bottom as a problem of incentives. People behaved badly because they were incentivized to behave badly, and the incentives haven’t really changed that much.
The Man the Founders Feared
.. we now live in a time when the organizing principle that runs through the campaign of the Republican Party’s likely nominee isn’t adherence to a political philosophy — Mr. Trump has no discernible political philosophy — but an encouragement to political violence.
Mr. Trump’s supporters will dismiss this as hyperbole, but it is the only reasonable conclusion that his vivid, undisguised words allow for. As the examples pile up, we should not become inured to them. “I’d like to punch him in the face,” Mr. Trump said about a protester in Nevada. (“In the old days,” Mr. Trump fondly recalled, protesters would be “carried out in a stretcher.”)
Of another protester, Mr. Trump said, “Maybe he should have been roughed up.” In St. Louis, Mr. Trump sounded almost wistful: “Nobody wants to hurt each other anymore.”
.. When interviewed afterward Mr. McGraw said, “The next time we see him, we might have to kill him.”
And Donald Trump’s reaction? He said he was considering paying Mr. McGraw’s legal fees. “He obviously loves his country,” Mr. Trump added, “and maybe he doesn’t like seeing what’s happening to the country.”
Will Trump Be Dumped?
He doesn’t like invidious comparisons but he’s cool with being called an authoritarian.
“We need strength in this country,” he told me Friday morning, speaking from his Fifth Avenue office. “We have weak leadership. Hillary is pathetically weak.
.. Trump insisted that “the violence is not caused by me. It’s caused by agitators.” He added that “Hillary is the one disrupting my rallies. It’s more Hillary than Sanders, I found out.”
.. I wondered if he realized that, in riling up angry whites, he has pulled the scab off racism. “Obama, who is African-American, has done nothing for African Americans,” he replied.
.. He said he would soon unleash the moniker that he thought would diminish Hillary, the way “Little Marco” and “Lyin’ Ted” torched his Republican rivals; “I want to get rid of the leftovers first.”
.. Unable to resist, even though he knows I respect Kelly, he also described her to me as a “total whack job” with “no talent.”
.. Joe Scarborough said that just as F.D.R. was the master of radio and J.F.K. of television, D.J.T. is the titan of Twitter. The titan agreed, gloating about how his tweets to his seven million followers, sometimes penned in his jammies, become cable news bulletins. “Yeah,” he said, “I’ll do them sometimes lying in bed.”
Not exactly a fireside chat. But it sure started a fire.
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Republican Leaders Map a Strategy to Derail Donald Trump
“The burden is on Trump, not the party, if he fails to clinch the nomination,” said David Winston, a Republican pollster who advises the House leadership. “He has presented himself as the ultimate dealmaker, and it’s on him to close this one.”
.. “The burden is on Trump, not the party, if he fails to clinch the nomination,” said David Winston, a Republican pollster who advises the House leadership. “He has presented himself as the ultimate dealmaker, and it’s on him to close this one.”