Scalia’s health problems were manifold—his family members didn’t want an autopsy or feel that one was necessary. (“I knew, and he knew, that he was at a place in life where he could be taken from this world at any time, and that’s what happened last week,” Scalia’s son Eugene told Laura Ingraham on Wednesday. “Our family just has no doubt he died of natural causes.”) But precision, at this political and cultural moment, would have been helpful. Texas, after all, is a state where a good number of people believe that a military-training exercise named Jade Helm is a cover for a plot by the Obama Administration to declare martial law, and where senior elected officials—senators, governors—are willing to humor them.
This is also why Trump is unlikely to pay a political price for his failure to quickly dismiss the conspiracy theories. He is in tune with the feeling among many in the electorate that the official story is almost never the whole story.
.. The Scalia conspiracy theories are crude and fantastic, but one reason they may persist is that the respectable Republicans—Presidential candidates and Senate leaders—echo their bottom line, which is that it would be illegitimate, a seizure of power, almost, for President Obama to name a successor to Scalia. He doesn’t have the right, even though the inauguration of the next President is almost a year away; he would be cheating, ignoring the people. The quiet implication is that Obama, himself, is not legitimate.
Donald Trump’s Less-Than-Artful Failure in Pro Football
Far from mastering “The Art of the Deal” — the title of his 1987 best seller — Trump made real estate blunders that turned billions in potential profits into mere millions. His foray into Atlantic City brought him perilously close to personal bankruptcy. As for all of his claims about owning a sprawling business empire, what he actually runs these days is a licensing company that slaps the Trump name on everything from buildings to steaks to an education company that was sued by New York State in 2013 for “persistent fraudulent, illegal and deceptive conduct.” My conclusion — and I say this as a grizzled veteran of business journalism — was that Trump’s business acumen (not to mention his net worth) was wildly overstated, not least by Trump himself. His core business skill is self-promotion.
.. All through that second season, Trump continued to push his fellow owners to move the U.S.F.L. to the fall and go toe-to-toe with the mighty N.F.L. It made no sense. Until it achieved parity on the field — and that was a long way off — the U.S.F.L. had no hope of attracting large numbers of fans and TV ratings in the fall.
.. But how realistic was it to expect the Chicago Blitz to compete financially with the Chicago Bears? “To go head-to-head with them was insane,”
.. How was Trump planning to dig the U.S.F.L. out of a hole he had largely created? Litigation, of course!
.. Trump then made his next mistake, bringing on a flamboyant lawyer named Harvey D. Myerson — Heavy Hitter Harvey, the media called him, “a blustery, cigar-smoking, fancy-footwork kind of lawyer,” as Taube put it to me. Trump hired Myerson with great fanfare, saying “he’s aggressive, he’s tough-skinned and he knows how to win.”
.. Alas, Heavy Hitter Harvey knew next to nothing about antitrust, which requires deep, specialized knowledge.
.. The jury found that the N.F.L. monopolistic practices had indeed injured the U.S.F.L. Then came the coup de grâce: It awarded damages of one dollar. Trebled, that came to $3. With interest, it was$3.76. The U.S.F.L. appealed, claiming that the trial judge should have excluded some of the most damning evidence against it. The appeals court rejected that argument, writing, “Courts do no exclude evidence of a victim’s suicide in a murder trial.”
Francis and Trump: Populist Leaders Preaching Divergent Messages
Seen from Europe, Mr. Trump is an amplified version of angry populists like Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader in France, playing to fears about migrants, Islam and economic stagnation.
.. “It expresses a resentment and hatred towards the ‘foreigner’ born of fear and economic insecurity,” Mr. Franco added. “Trump becomes the metaphor of an egotistical and racist Christianity, which for the pope represents an unacceptable oxymoron.”
.. “Francis’ walls are between the north and south of the world, and that’s why they bother him,” Mr. Vian said in a telephone interview. “His reactions are moral, not political.”
.. While populists like Mr. Trump and Ms. Le Pen partly blame foreigners for inequities, Francis points to structural inequities deriving from the global capitalist order. His speeches about the excesses of capitalism, often sprinkled with Old Testament fury, divide the world between exploiters and the exploited.
“God will hold the slave drivers of our day accountable,” Francis said in a speech to workers and business owners in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, as he called for greater Christian ethics in business. “The flow of capital cannot decide the flow and life of people.”
.. More than anyone, Mr. Trump symbolizes the excesses of capitalism
.. His economic critique is also a moral one, as he laments a “throwaway culture” in which poor people and migrants are collateral damage. By contrast, Mr. Trump likes to divvy people up as winners and losers.
.. God sent a messenger, Jonah, to warn people and the local king that they must change how they treat one another or the city would be destroyed. The king listened, and Ninevah was saved.
The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Trump
Donald Trump has been recognized for his mastery of the media, his fascination with gilt and his bold advocacy for baffling hair.
But I think his greatest distinction is as a surrealist. Not since Salvador Dalí has someone so ambitiously jumbled reality and hallucination.
.. Not long ago, he insistently questioned the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency by latching onto the popular right-wing conspiracy theory that Obama had been born in Kenya and couldn’t produce a proper American birth certificate.
Has he forgotten that? Or is he simply betting that Americans have?
Every campaign is a painstaking manipulation of memory, an attempt to get voters to focus on only certain parts of the past and disregard the rest.
.. His greatest trick, though, isn’t to toy with memory but to overwhelm it, rendering insults and provocations at such a hectic pace that the new ones eclipse and then expunge the old ones. It’s as if the DVR of the electorate and the media can store only so many episodes before it starts erasing earlier indignities.