Last Friday a Twitter user named Darryl Cooper wrote a 35-tweet thread explaining the mindset of Trump supporters who think the 2020 election was rigged.
The thread was read verbatim on the Tucker Carlson show, and Cooper’s Twitter account went almost overnight from about 7,000 followers to about 70,000.
Glenn Greenwald invited him to write a summary of the thread for his Other Voices Substack account. Although he did not agree 100 percent with Cooper, he thought Cooper’s viewpoint is important to understand. So do I.
Cooper said that for many years, most conservative Republicans, although they disagreed with the direction the country was moving, long had a basic confidence in the country’s institutions – the military, police and judiciary, the large corporations and even the press, which might be biased
This changed with the run-up to the 2016 elections and the victory Trump administration. Intelligence agencies, Democratic politicians and the Washington press endorsed a conspiracy theory of Russian collusion which, it turned out, was based on opposition research conducted for the Hillary Clinton campaign. Each of the claims were debunked one by one.
I happen to think Donald Trump was a terrible President. But he was almost never attacked for the things he actually did wrong (nor was Hillary Clinton, for that matter). Trump was attacked for his erratic statements, which didn’t matter, and for things he didn’t really do.
Cooper wrote:
Trump supporters know – I think everyone knows – that Donald Trump would have been impeached and probably indicted if Robert Mueller had proven that he’d paid a foreign spy to gather damaging information on Hillary Clinton from sources connected to Russian intelligence and disseminate that information in the press. Many of Trump’s own supporters wouldn’t have objected to his removal if that had happened. [snip]
Trump supporters had gone from worrying the collusion might be real, to suspecting it might be fake, to seeing proof that it was all a scam. Then they watched as every institution – government agencies, the press, Congressional committees, academia – blew right past it and gas-lit them for another year. [snip]
This is where people whose political identities have for decades been largely defined by a naive belief in what they learned in civics class began to see the outline of a Regime that crossed not only partisan, but all institutional boundaries. They’d been taught that America didn’t have Regimes, but what else was this thing they’d seen step out from the shadows to unite against their interloper president?
In the run-up to the 2020 campaign, the establishment press abandoned all pretense of neutrality, and, with the help of social media companies, imposed a news blackout on information that would help Donald Trump or hurt Joe Biden.
Is it any wonder, Cooper asked, that Trump supporters do not believe assurances from the Washington press corps and the Biden administration that the election was on the up-and-up?
These are remarks that Hillary Clinton made at an LGBT fund-raising event in New York City on Sept. 9, 2016
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic – Islamophobic – you name it.
Hillary Clinton
And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.
But the “other” basket – the other basket – and I know because I look at this crowd I see friends from all over America here: I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas and — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that “other” basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from.
They don’t buy everything he says, but — he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.
I recently read a collection of essays entitled NASTY WOMEN AND BAD HOMBRES: Gender and Race in the 2016 US Presidential Electionedited by Christine A. Kray, Tamar W. Carroll and Hinda Mendell (2018).
The question the book seeks to answer is how such an ignorant and misogynistic man such as Donald Trump could have defeated such an intelligent and well-qualified woman as Hillary Clinton.
The answers are sought in rhetoric, psychology and popular culture, not public policy. Clinton and Trump are treated as symbols, not as individuals with public records. The election is treated as a psychodrama, not as a struggle for power.
The common theme was the need to overcome prevailing male attitudes toward women (“the patriarchy”) and prevailing white attitudes toward people of color (“white supremacy”).
I have reservations about this approach, which I’ll get to in due course.. But I first want to acknowledge the book’s merits.
One chapter discussed the obscene and vicious abuse directed at Hillary Clinton based on her gender, in the form of postcards, posters and Internet memes. She was caricatured as a witch, a Medusa, a hag, a lesbian and a transgender man. Unlike with Trump and Bernie Sanders, her age was held against her; she was depicted as a hag. No human being should be subjected to this.
This unfortunately is not unusual nowadays for women who successfully compete with men. They are subject to harassment via the Internet, up to and including threats of rape and death..
Donald Trump got his share of abuse, too—for example the widespread meme, including a video distributed by the New York Times, showing Trump and Vladimir Putin as gay lovers—the unstated assumption being that gays are weak and disgusting.
But I don’t think Trump, Sanders or any other male candidate was subjected to anything comparable to what Clinton had to endure because of her sex, and that Barack Obama had to endure because of his race.
I’d be interested about the experience of conservative woman in politics, such as Sarah Palin and Nikki Haley, Do they get the same level of vicious and obscene abuse as white women? My guess is, probably not, but I don’t know.
Another of the essays was about images of the women’s suffrage movement of a century ago. The suffragists were mocked for presuming to assume male roles. The mockery was extremely condescending, but it wasn’t threatening or obscene.
Is the viciousness of attacks on women nowadays due to a lowering of standards of public discourse? Or do anti-feminist men today feel more threatened than than anti-suffragist men did back then?
But then there also are women, quoted in another chapter, who think that Hillary Clinton does not behave as a woman should. Many of these same women excused Donald Trump’s bad behavior.
Indeed, the 2016 Presidential campaign illustrated the double standard for personal morality for men and women. It is not just that Hillary Clinton could not have gotten away with trash-talking like Donald Trump. Neither she or any of the current crop of female Presidential candidates could have been forgiven for infidelity in their marriages, as Bill Clinton and Donald Trump have been.
Various writers highlighted this double standard and speculated as to the cultural and psychological reasons why it exists. Others dealt with a range of topics, from the myth of immigrant crime to religious freedom for Muslims.
Populism is the expression of the righteous anger of the common people against injustice or perceived injustice.
Right-wing populism is the re-direction by the holders of wealth and power away from themselves and toward scapegoats.
The great political scientist Thomas Ferguson and his team of researchers recently published new studies of how right-wing populism operated in the 2016 national elections.
Several studies assert that supporters of Donald Trump are motivated primarily by racial anxiety and not be economic anxiety. The conclusion they draw is that the Democratic Party does not have to become more populist in order to win elections.
Ferguson’s team says the truth is more complicated. Racial anxiety and economic anxiety are not all that separate, they wrote.
Donald Trump told his supporters that their economic woes were due to immigration and foreign trade, and promised to fix both. These are legitimate economic issues.
Many working people feel, for understandable reasons, that competition with foreign workers—both workers in foreign sweatshops and unauthorized immigrants in the USA—is driving down thrown wages. I have to say that, as President, Trump has tried to keep his promises to try to restrict immigration and imports. He has acted in a crude and counterproductive way, but he has acted. These issues can no longer be ignored and will have to be rethought.
That’s not to deny that Trump also has tried to stir up animosity against African-Americans, Mexicans and Muslims. But he also promised to launch a trillion-dollar infrastructure program, protect Social Security and Medicare and replace Obamacare with something better.
My big mistake during the 2016 election campaign was in under-estimating the harm that Donald Trump might do as President.
Donald Trump
I thought that it might do less harm, from the standpoint of progressive reform, for an incompetent authoritarian right-winger such as Trump to take office and take the blame for the coming financial crash, than for a Democrat to take office, fail and open the way for more capable, far-sighted right-wing authoritarian in 2020.
I thought that when my Democratic friends spoke of how Donald Trump was going to destroy American democracy, they failed to recognize how far we had already strayed from democracy.
This “normal” that you speak of: When was that, and where is it to be found? The Benghazi hearings? The drone war and the secret “kill list” that included American citizens? The birther controversy and the “death panels”? Potential vice president Sarah Palin? The Iraq war and the “unknown unknowns”? The Lewinsky scandal and the “meaning of is”?
In many important bad ways, the Trump is a continuation of the Obama and George W. Bush administrations. He allows the drift toward military confrontation with Russia. He continues the failing wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East. He continues to staff his cabinet and key departments from Wall Street, especially Goldman Sachs. He has little or nothing to offer working people.
The new bad thing about Trump is his attack on what his former adviser Steve Bannon called the “administrative state.” It’s true that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush talked as if government as such was the enemy, and made appointments without concern for their lack of qualification. But the Trump administration has taken this to a new, much lower level.
Trump appointed former Texas Gov. Rick Perry as Secretary of Energy. During the 2016 primary campaign, Perry had the DoE in mind as one of three departments he wanted to abolish, but couldn’t remember its name.
The DoE among other things assembles the country’s nuclear weapons, oversees the safety of nuclear plants and nuclear waste dumps and trains foreign countries’ inspectors that verify nuclear disarmament. The health and safety of Americans depends on the DoE functioning well.
When Trump took office, the DoE arranged a briefing on all its programs, just as it had done for Obama and George W. Bush. But the Trump representative wanted just one thing—a list of all employees who had attended conferences on climate change (presumably to arrange a purge list).
Other major government departments are the same. We Americans depend on their ability to function in ways we don’t think about (for example, the Department of Agriculture’s meat inspections) and often don’t even know.
The Trump administration has systematically downgraded the ability of government to function, except for the military and the covert action agencies. It is also downgrading the government’s scientific and data collection functions, to eliminate sources of objective information that could be used against him.
The resulting failure of government will be used as an argument to abolish key public services or turn them over to profit-seeking businesses.
Thomas Frank has a new book out, an essay collection called Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports from a Sinking Society. The videos above and below consist of interviews he gave about it. Here’s how he introduced it.
The essays collected here scan over many diverse aspects of American life, but they all aim to tell one essential story: This is what a society looks like when the glue that holds it together starts to dissolve. This is the way ordinary citizens react when they learn the structure beneath them is crumbling. This is the thrill that pulses through the veins of the well-to-do when they discover there is no longer any limit on their power to accumulate.
In headline terms, these essays cover the years of the Barack Obama presidency and the populist explosion that marked its end. It was a time when liberal hopes were sinking and the newly invigorated right was proceeding from triumph to triumph. When I wrote the earliest installment in the collection, Democrats still technically controlled both houses of Congress in addition to the presidency; when I finished these essays, Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office and Republicans had assumed a position of almost unprecedented power over the nation’s political system.
For a few, these were times of great personal satisfaction. The effects of what was called the Great Recession were receding, and affluence had returned to smile once again on the tasteful and the fortunate. The lucky ones resumed their fascinating inquiries into the art of the cocktail and the science of the grandiose suburban home. For them, things transpired reassuringly as before.
But for the many, this was a period when reassurance was in short supply. Ordinary Americans began to understand that, recovery or not, things would probably never be the same in their town or neighborhood. For them, this was a time of cascading collapse, with one trusted institution after another visibly deteriorating.
It was a golden age of corruption. By this I do not mean that our top political leaders were on the take—they weren’t—but rather that America’s guardian class had been subverted or put to sleep. Human intellect no longer served the interests of the public; it served money—or else it ceased to serve at all. That was the theme of the era, whether the locale was Washington, D.C., or the college your kids attended, or the city desk of your rapidly shrinking local newspaper. No one was watching out for the interests of the people, and increasingly the people could see that this was the case.
When Donald Trump ran for President, it was on an economic populist platform that, in many ways, put him well to the left of Hillary Clinton and of any Republican since Richard Nixon.
Most of what he promised would have been politically popular, economically feasible and beneficial to American working people—although not necessarily politically feasible. But none of it was done or even seriously attempted.
Jonathan Chait last week wrote about Trump’s broken promises for New York magazine. Here’s a short list of Trump promises:
Create a health insurance program that covers more people than Obamacare.
Negotiate lower drug prices through Medicare.
Pull out of NAFTA and negotiate a better trade deal.
Raise taxes on the rich, including himself.
Enact a $1 trillion infrastructure program (later $1.5 trillion).
Enact a six-point plan to curb lobbying, including no lobbying by former government officials or members of Congress until five years after leaving office and curbs on foreign companies making campaign contributions.
Trump has done nothing to replace or reform Obamacare, only made minor changes that make it worse. Nothing was done to lower drug prices.
Simply canceling NAFTA would have been wrong. Nations, even superpower nations, can’t just break agreements and not suffer consequences. But there certainly is a need to renegotiate NAFTA and similar agreements.
The infrastructure plan is now $200 million, and even that has been postponed until next year.
As for putting limits on lobbying—that is a joke!
But I suspect that most Americans aren’t aware of this. Most of the reporting on Trump has to do with the Russiagate investigation, or Trump’s scandalous personal behavior, or the latest outrageous thing that Trump has said on social media.
These things matter, of course. But they have nothing to do with public policy.
Political scientist Thomas Ferguson has spent his career tracing the influence of money on U.S. national politics. In this interview from last week, he said the big story of the 2016 election is that it is politically possible to defeat big money.
Bernie Sanders raised 60 percent of his funds from small donors, who gave $200 each or less, Ferguson said. This is unprecedented. He said Sanders could well have won the Democratic nomination and the general election if he had started earlier and done things differently.
But even in defeat, he said, Sanders showed it is possible to fund a national political campaign without going to the wealthy and corporate donors that the leaders of both political parties depend upon.
Ferguson is noted for his “investment theory of political parties”—that wealthy interests invest in political parties and candidates, and that the only political issues that elections decide are issues on which the big donors disagree or that they don’t care about.
He says there are basically two elections. There is the informal money election, conducted by big donors, which winnows the field Then there is the actual vote, which chooses among the candidates pre-selected by the money election.
What Sanders—and also Trump, to an extent—showed is that large numbers of small political “investors” can offset the few big donors. Sanders was the equivalent of an entrepreneur who funded a start-up with a GoFundMe fundraiser.
Trump himself raised 40 percent of his campaign funds from small donors, which is unprecedented for a Republican, Ferguson said. But most of that was before he won the Republican nomination.
Starting in August, big money started to roll in—especially from Rustbelt manufacturing interests, who liked Trump’s promise to raise tariffs against foreign imports, and also from such far-right figures as Sheldon Adelson, Peter Thiel and Robert and Rebekah Mercer.
Hillary Clinton received most of the donations that came from Wall Street and the defense and aerospace industries.
Hillary Clinton received 28.4 percent of the votes of eligible voters, Donald Trump received 27.2 percent and 44.4 voted for nobody. I wouldn’t assume that the 44.4 percent were apathetic. I’m sure many of them (some of whom had voted in 2008 and 2012) had their reasons for rejecting both candidates.
The Democratic National Committee is suing Wikileaks, along with the government of Russia, the Trump campaign and various Russians and Trump supporters, over the leaks of DNC e-mails during the 2016 election campaign.
They charge that, among other things, the leaks of the DNC e-mails violate laws protecting copyright and trade secrets. If this was upheld, it would basically make a great deal of investigative reporting illegal—including much of the reporting on the Russiagate investigations.
The real crime of Wikileaks, now as in the past, has been to reveal inconvenient truths.
The Democratic party suing WikiLeaks for costing them the election is like an armed robbery convict suing a security camera company for getting him arrested. The emails it published are 100 percent authentic and entirely undisputed, and they consist of nothing other than Democratic party big wigs talking to one another.
The documents published by WikiLeaks in 2016 showed an unquestionable violation of the DNC’s Impartiality Clause in the “us vs them” tone of the conversations in the more egregious DNC leaks, the Podesta emails showing that the DNC and the Clinton camp were colluding as early as 2014 to schedule debates and primaries in a way that favored her, and then-DNC Vice Chairwoman Donna Brazile acting as a mole against the Sanders campaign and passing Clinton questions in advance to prep her for debates with Sanders.
It also revealed more broadly incriminating facts about the Democratic party in general, including the Clintons taking bribes from Qatar and Morocco and knowingly accepting funds from political bodies that arm ISIS, an email showing how a CitiGroup executive was responsible for selecting Obama’s acceptable cabinet picks, and Clinton’s infamous “public position and a private position” statement.
Trying to reverse the outcome of the 2016 election is futile. Democratic leaders would do better to concentrate on winning this year’s state and congressional elections, while meanwhile trying to curb President Trump’s unconstitutional use of executive power.
The United States government claims we are under attack from Russia. That is the justification for military buildup in Syria and along Russia’s borders, for waging economic war against Russia and sanctions against Russian individuals, and for a diplomatic campaign against Russia.
Before we blunder into a nuclear war, which would mean the end of the United States, the Russian Federation and much of the rest of humanity, we need to look at the basis for these claims. Specifically, we need to assess the evidence for three claims: –
That the Russian government manipulated the 2016 election campaign and brought about the election of Donald J. Trump.
That President Trump knew about this and “colluded” with Vladimir Putin to bring it about.
Ideally, I would advocate reserving judgement until the results of the Mueller investigation are in. But official Washington, including the press corps and the top leaders of the Democratic Party, are acting as if the results are already in.
Thomas Jefferson once wrote that newspaper articles should be classified as truths, probabilities, possibilities and falsehoods.
Here is how I see the balance of truths, probabilities, possibilities and falsehoods:
∞∞∞
Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Putin stated several times in 2016 that he would be pleased if Donald Trump was elected, because Trump advocated better relations with Russia.
Why would he not? Russia in 2016 was hard-pressed by U.S.-led economic sanctions and a U.S. military buildup. Hillary Clinton was and is an extreme war hawk.
Putin is a ruthless operator with few scruples. There is credible circumstantial evidence that Russian intelligence sources engineered a false flag terror attack in order to rally public sentiment against the rebel province of Chechnya. There is strong evidence that Russian intelligence services murdered the dissident and human rights advocate Alexander Litvinenko.
So it is possible that the Russian government penetrated the Democratic National Committee computer files and published e-mails that embarrassed Hillary Clinton, or that individual Russian hackers did so with the knowledge and encouragement of the Russian government.
The reasons I have doubts this happened are (1) the FBI has never conducted its own examination of the DNC computers and (2) the FBI has never interviewed Julian Assange about his claim that he received the information from a whistleblower. Why would they not do this? Were they afraid of what they might find out?
Maybe the DNC was hacked by more than one person or group, acting independently of each other.
In any case, the result of the DNC e-mail hacks was to disseminate truthful information, which is not an act of war.
If Vladimir Putin did try to engineer Donald Trump’s election, he must feel buyer’s remorse. President Trump has approved weapons shipments to Ukraine, which goes beyond what President Obama ever did. He wants to keep U.S. troops in Syria indefinitely to undermine Russia’s ally, Syria. He is continuing the nuclear arms race against Russia.
Like President Obama, Trump talks about improving relations with Russia. But like Obama, he so far has done nothing to make this happen. Putin, with all his ruthlessness, is a defender of the status quo. It is the U.S. government that seeks regime change in targeted countries, and that seeks military dominance in every important region of the world.
The Guardian published an article about how a company called Cambridge Analytica used unauthorized data obtained from Facebook to help swing the 2016 election to Donald Trump.
The Facebook “likes” and other data were used to draw psychological profiles of individual voters, who were then targeted with messages based on those profiles.
A year or so ago, I made a post, based on an earlier article in The Guardian and an expose by the Real News Network, about how Steve Bannon and the Trump campaign used Cambridge Analytica to identify idealistic liberals, young women and African-Americans in key states, and feed them information to discourage them from voting for Hillary Clinton.
Many people question whether such manipulation was possible on a significant scale. I am not qualified to say.
The thing is, targeted messages don’t have to work every time, or even most of the time—just enough times to tip the balance. And the technology is being constantly improved, so even if they didn’t make a difference in 2016, they may affect the next election and the one after that.
I don’t have good ideas as to what to do about this. It is not unethical to send accurate information to someone you think will respond to it. Does it become unethical when the information and its target are chosen by an artificial intelligence program? At the very least, we the people ought to be able to know where the messages come from.
Afterthought [3/20/2018]
After thinking this over for a couple of days, I’m of two minds about Cambridge Analytica and similar companies.
Russia Collusion: Hillary Clinton, DNC & FBI are the real stars by Michael Doran for National Review. [Added 3/15/2018] A plausible account of how Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson created and sold the Russiagate story. Long but interesting.
Friday’s Grand Jury indictments of 13 Russians and three Russian organizations indicate that Russian meddling in the 2016 elections went far beyond mere Russian propaganda on social media.
But there were no charges of knowing collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian agents.
Russians allegedly entered the United States under false identities, impersonated Americans on social media and organized political rallies on behalf of fake organizations—all to promote the candidacy of Donald Trump or discredit his opponents.
They are charged with violating American laws on campaign financing, registration of foreign agents, identity theft and fraud.
All this is within Special Prosecutor Robert S. Mueller’s mandate to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election. He is not like a Kenneth Starr in the Whitewater investigation, fishing for anything that can be used against the President.
There’s no question that Vladimir Putin welcomed the candidacy of Donald Trump. He promised to improve relations with Russia, and, as Putin said, why wouldn’t the Russian government welcome that? That’s not evidence of a Trump-Putin plot to rig the 2016 elections
If there really was such a plot, this would be grounds for an impeachment. But this is so improbable as to be virtually impossible.
All the information that has come out about Trump campaign officials trying to set up meetings with Russians is, to me, evidence against collusion. If the fix were really in, Trump would have ordered his underlings to stay as far away as possible from Russians.
The real problem is the way the Russiagate issue is being exploited politically.
It is being used as a justification for military confrontation with Russia in Ukraine, Syria and other countries. A confrontation at worst risks an accidental nuclear war and at best creates a useless conflict which brings no benefit to Americans.
It is being used as a justification for censorship of Americans, particularly leftists, whose views supposedly serve the interests of Russia. I suppose this would include me, as a blogger who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary and the Green Party in the general election. I think about the 1950s and 1960s, when progressives who supported civil rights or labor rights were accused of following the Communist Party line.
Half the world doesn’t know how the other half lives. (old saying)
Chris Arnade spent 20 years as a Wall Street investment banker, then quit in 2011 to start a new career as a photojournalist, first interviewing and photographing drug addicts and prostitutes in the Bronx, then traveling across the country to talk to working people and poor people who’ve been left behind in the new economy.
Arnade said that what he concluded was that addiction is the result of isolation, isolation is the result of rejection and the chief source of rejection is the U.S. educational system.
The U.S. educational system, he said, teaches that the way to achieve success is to go to a good college, leave home and devote yourself to achievement in your professional life.
Those who do this successfully are the elite in American life. The problem is that not everybody is able to succeed this way, and not everybody wants to do this.
Some people put family, community and religion first. In this respect, he said, there is little difference between black people and white people, or between Anglos and Hispanics.
Arnade calls the first group the Front Row and the second group the Back Row. The Back Row are not only disrespected, Arnade said. The economic system is rigged against them.
Every important decision on national policy, since at least the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, has put the interests of the Front Row ahead of the Back Row.
The one institution in society that welcomes the back row is the churches, he wrote. He himself is an atheist, but he said that churches welcome you, no matter what your credentials or lack of them. I’m not sure that is true of all churches, but his point is correct.
Another place the Back Row is welcome, he said, is McDonald’s restaurants. McDonald’s original business model was a place where you can get in and get out quickly, but McDonald’s and other fast-food restaurants have become places where you can get a nourishing meal at a low price, charge your cell phone and hang out with friends. Most of them have an old man’s table that retirees have staked out for their own.
If you’re a Front Row person and want to break out of your bubble, stop having coffee at Starbuck’s (or the equivalent) and stopstart spending time in McDonald’s (or the equivalent), Arnade advised,
Neither Donald Trump nor his key supporters expected him to be elected President, according to Michael Wolff, author of a new book about the Trump administration. They expected to lose and were unprepared to actually govern. This would explain a lot.
Wolff was granted free access to the Trump White House—a fact that in itself shows the administration was in disarray—and has published a book, Fire and Fury: Inside Trump’s White House, which came out today. The following is from an excerpt published in the current issue of New York magazine—
The candidate and his top lieutenants believed they could get all the benefits of almost becoming president without having to change their behavior or their worldview one whit. Almost everybody on the Trump team, in fact, came with the kind of messy conflicts bound to bite a president once he was in office. Michael Flynn, the retired general who served as Trump’s opening act at campaign rallies, had been told by his friends that it had not been a good idea to take $45,000 from the Russians for a speech. “Well, it would only be a problem if we won,” Flynn assured them.
Not only did Trump disregard the potential conflicts of his own business deals and real-estate holdings, he audaciously refused to release his tax returns. Why should he? Once he lost, Trump would be both insanely famous and a martyr to Crooked Hillary. His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would be international celebrities. Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the tea-party movement. Kellyanne Conway would be a cable-news star. Melania Trump, who had been assured by her husband that he wouldn’t become president, could return to inconspicuously lunching. Losing would work out for everybody. Losing was winning.
I suspected something like that myself. It explained Trump’s reluctance to spend his own money on his campaign. It explained why Trump was willing to say whatever crossed his mind, regardless of the repercussions—which was part of his appeal.
Trump’s facial expression during the Inauguration was stormy and angry. His face was not the face of someone enjoying a triumph. But, according to Wolff, all this quickly changed. Trump now is fully confident of his ability to be an effective President.
Another striking thing about Wolff’s account is that none of the top people in the Trump administration, except for his sons, daughter and son-in-law, manifest any personal loyalty to Trump himself. This does not bode well for Trump in dealing with the Mueller investigation.
Wolff’s report should be read with skepticism. His article is full of direct quotations of conversations he was not in a position to hear. It is a mixture of first-hand, second-hand and possibly third- and fourth-hand information.
The reader must judge how much is known fact and how much is gossip. For me, Wolff’s account is plausible and, as I said, it would explain a lot.
Even outspoken progressive Democrats such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and the authors of Daring Democracy hold back from doing two things.
They don’t talk about the U.S. state of permanent war, and they don’t criticize the record of Barack Obama.
Thomas Frank, who recently did three more interviews for the Real News Network, doesn’t talk about war and peace either, but he is at least willing to take an honest look at the Obama record and the record of Bill Clinton before him.
I have the three interviews on YouTube, with links that should take you to transcripts.
The Democratic Party historically was opposed to big banks, going back to Franklin Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan and Andrew Jackson. That was almost a defining characteristic.
It was golden-tongued Bill Clinton who made the Democrats a second party of Wall Street, and persuaded the Democratic rank and file to accept it. His argument was that Democrats couldn’t win unless they matched Republicans dollar-for-dollar in campaign spending, which they could not do if they were anti-Wall Street.
I voted for Clinton reluctantly. In those days I thought that Democrats, however flawed, were better for working people than Republicans.
I disliked Clinton, not because of the sex scandals or his policies, but because of his treatment of employees of the White House travel office, which arranged accommodations for White House staff and the White House press corps accompanying the President on his travels. He and Hillary Clinton wanted to close the travel office and turn its functions over to cronies of theirs, which they had a legal right to do.
When this became an issue in Congress, Clinton ordered a FBI investigation of the travel office employees to see if any of them were guilty of criminal wrongdoing. He was willing to destroy the careers and ruin the lives of people who did not intend him any harm, but were merely in the way of something he wanted to do.
I did not fully realize until later the harm that Clinton’s signature policies did—the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement, the end of welfare for mothers with dependent children, the crime bill leading to mass incarceration and the deregulation of the banking industry. As Thomas Frank noted in the video, all four of these things were long-time Republican goals.
Clinton even toyed with a bipartisan agreement with Newt Gingrich to cut Social Security.
Hillary Clinton was cheated out of her victory in 2016—not by Russians, but by Republicans.
Republican state governments changed the rules to make voting more difficult for categories of people likely to vote Democratic, and they purged thousands of legally-registered voters, mostly Democrats, from the voter registration rolls.
President Barack Obama and Attorney-Generals Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch had eight years to do something about this.
Yet they did little of nothing—that is, nothing that I know of, but I want to hedge the possibility that there was some minor effort I didn’t notice.
The Democratic Party had eight years to push back against this. The Democrats could have started a grass-roots effort to get Democrats registered despite all barriers, and to reinstate voters who were illegally purged. Yet they did little or nothing.
None of this is an excuse for what the Republicans did, of course, but the Republican motivation is clear. Why weren’t Democratic leaders motivated to fight back?
Paul Jay of the Real News Network did a good interview with Thomas Frank, one of my three or four favorite political writers, on why Hillary Clinton is attacking Bernie Sanders at this late date. The interview starts about five minutes into the video.
Frank says Clinton has no just reason to hate Sanders personally. He conducted a relatively gentlemanly primary election campaign, and supported her loyally during the general election. She should be grateful that he decided to run within the Democratic Party in the first place, and not as a third-party candidate, like Ralph Nader in 2000.
But what Sanders represents, which is the pro-labor New Deal tradition of the Democratic Party, is deeply threatening to the power of the corporate wing of the party, which is what Clinton and her husband have represented through their political careers.
I think the reason the Democratic Party has done so little to fight voter disenfranchisement and to register voters is that disenfranchised and unregistered voters are mainly in demographic groups that corporate Democrats don’t care about.
They would rather seek the votes of culturally liberal suburban Republicans, whose votes, as Frank noted in the interview, Clinton actually won in the 2016 election.
The argument of the corporate Democrats is that (1) the Republican leaders are so reactionary and dangerous that nothing else matters except defeating them, (2) this can’t be done without matching the Republicans dollar for dollar and so (3) Democrats can’t afford to advocate policies contrary to the interests of their big-money contributors.
This is why they found that Sanders campaign so threatening, Frank said. Sanders showed it was possible to conduct a political campaign based on small donations. As far as that goes, Clinton outspent Trump two to one, and she still lost.
Sanders and Clinton are both getting on in years, and I don’t think either has a future as a national political candidate. But I think there will be a long struggle between Sanders and Clinton factions under different names. The struggle will be bitter because the stakes are high—whether the U.S. government will be accountable to the common people or to a corporate and political elite.
Colin Woodard, a journalist and historian, claims that the United States of America is not a unified nation, but an arena of struggle among separate and distinct regional cultures.
For more than 250 years, he wrote, American history has been shaped by the basic conflict between regions he calls Yankeedom and Deep South, and the shifting alliances among the other regions.
Canada, too, is shaped by regional identity. In fact, neither the United States nor Canada is a unified nation at all, according to Woodard; the real nations of North America are the 11 regional cultures, which are as follows:
Yankeedom, heirs of the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay.
New Netherland, heirs of the tolerant, commercial Dutch culture of New Amsterdam.
Midlands, heirs of the tolerant culture established by Quakers in the Delaware Bay.
Tidewater, heirs of the aristocratic culture established by Cavaliers around the Chesapeake Bay.
Greater Appalachia, heirs of the original settlers of the Appalachian back country
The Deep South, heirs of English West Indian slave owners who settled in South Carolina
The Left Coast, heirs of New England Yankees who settled the Pacific Northwest.
The Far West, heirs of the varied pioneers who settled this harsh region.
El Norte, heirs of the original Spanish settlers of northern Mexico and the American Southwest.
New France, heirs of the original French-Canadian settlers and their Cajun cousins.
First Nation, heirs of indigenous peoples of the Far North.
I recently finished reading his book, American Nations: the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (2011), on the recommendation of my friend, Janus Mary Jones.
I think the regional rivalries he described are real. I learned things I hadn’t known. But I think he errs in trying to interpret American history exclusively in terms of regional conflict.
My previous five posts are about the origins of American regional cultures and how regional identity affects politics and society. The maps above are a reality check.
It shows the hypothetical outcome of the 2016 election if only certain groups of people had been allowed to vote.
Regional distributions of Democratic and Republican strength mostly remain the same, but the outcomes are considerably different.
If only people of color voted or only women voted, Democrats would have won in a landslide. But if only whites voted or only men voted, the landslide would have been Republican.
The hardscrabble people of northern England, the Scottish lowlands and Ulster were cannon fodder for the English-Scottish and English-Irish border wars.
They were uncouth, fierce, stubborn and rebellious, and hard to get along with.
When the border wars ended, they were encouraged to leave for colonial America. Once here, they were encouraged to leave the coastal settlements for the Appalachian back country.
David Hackett Fischer, in Albion’s Seed, wrote that they were the last of the four great British migrations whose folkways became the basis of American regional cultures.
Fischer stated that each of the folkways had its own concept of freedom. The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay believed in ordered freedom, the right of communities to live by God’s will and their own laws. The Cavaliers of tidewater Virginia believed in hegemonic freedom, the power to rule and not be ruled. The Quakers of the Delaware Bay believed in reciprocal freedom, the duty to allow others all the freedoms you want for yourself.
Click to enlarge
The Appalachian backwoodsmen believed in natural liberty, the right to live as you wish without interference by others. They found this liberty in America and felt at home here. They and their descendants, when asked their ancestry, are the most likely to merely answer “American.”
Their desire for natural liberty put them in the forefront of the American westward movement. Kentucky and Tennessee became states before Ohio and Alabama were barely settled from New England and the deep South.
And more recently, they provide our image of right-wing, gun-loving, evolution-denying, diversity-hating supporters of Donald Trump. This latter image, while not completely false, ignores a lot of history
A National Security Agency report, leaked to The Intercept, says that Russian military intelligence attempted to hack U.S. voter records shortly before the 2016 election.
The GRU reportedly was able to obtain passwords that enabled it to penetrate an electronic vote systems company. The Intercept identified the company as VR Systems, which serves local election boards in eight states. Using those passwords, the GRU attempted to penetrate at least 122 local governments.
The FBI has arrested a 25-year-old government contractor named Reality Leigh Winner on charges of giving the top-secret NSA documents to The Intercept.
Whether the Russian hackers succeeded and what, if anything, they did or tried to do to affect the election isn’t known. And there is no indication that anybody in the Trump campaign was aware of any of this.
During the 2016 election campaign, Bill Clinton had a long conversation with FBI director James Comey’s boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Later Hillary Clinton said that, if elected, she would re-appoint Lynch.
All this immediately cast suspicion on the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified e-mails. Usually, when the FBI is conducting an investigation, its spokesmen say nothing until the investigation is completed, and charges are filed, or not filed.
Comey’s comments about Clinton when the FBI decided not to file charges, and his further comments, may have been an attempt to show he wasn’t a tool of Lynch or the Clintons. His motives are unknowable, of course, but that is my guess.
It didn’t work. Clinton supporters were engaged by his comments, but Trump supporters also were enraged because he didn’t charge Clinton with anything.
His disclosure that the FBI is investigating possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence may mean as little as his disclosure of the investigation of Clinton’s e-mails. The mere fact of an investigation proves nothing. There’s no way to know until the investigation is over.
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