After a long stretch of being wrong about how far naked and unashamed xenophobia could take someone in the current iteration of the Republican Party, it seems like I’m on much firmer ground in predicting Donald Trump’s path through the general election. I was right in saying that the media have no real interest in promoting Trump’s counter-narratives about Clinton, because watching the first-ever total implosion of a major party candidate in real time is great television. (Notably, his only strong stretch in the polls this entire season was between Conway’s hiring and the first debate, when she kept him relentlessly on-script and took away his opportunities to freelance.)
More germane to the last week or so, I was also right in thinking that once Trump started getting serious media scrutiny, he wouldn’t be able to take the heat. He held off scrutiny on his tax returns, but only because he’s now far too busy defending himself from upwards of a dozen allegations of sexual assault that he essentially confessed to into a hot mike. He’s a hot mess of a disaster of a candidate, and it’s becoming clearer and clearer by the day as his response to virtually every challenge is to flail in an incoherent baby temper tantrum, call his opponents playground slurs, and try to find someone else to blame for his failures.
And that brings me to the third thing I was right about. I have been saying ever since Trump’s first polling meltdown, shortly after the convention, that if Trump got behind in October he would spend the last month of his campaign trying to find someone to pin the blame on rather than trying to win, because Trump is a narcissist as well as a misogynist and the preservation of his ego holds a higher priority for him than anything else. He can’t handle losing, he especially can’t handle losing to a woman, and so if he isn’t going to be President then he knows that it must be somebody’s fault. So I knew that October would be a month of Donald Trump blaming the GOP for his failure, simply because they’re the only possible suspects once you eliminate Hillary (who, as a woman, simply isn’t capable of beating TRUMP!)
I don’t mention this to boast, though. I mention this because I want to make it clear that I really thought I was braced for this. I really did think that I understood what it meant to have a solid month of Donald Trump running smack into the brick wall of his own incompetence and throwing a month-long pity party for himself with the cameras all pointed at him to catch his miserable, mean-spirited, petty spite in all its magnificent glory. I thought I might even enjoy some of it.
OH GOD WAS I WRONG. This is…this is seriously the most chilling, creepy, horrifying and horrible week of politics we’ve ever had in American history. This is Donald Trump being revealed as a serial sexual predator, and finding a posse of sleazy apologists who will go out and say, as a Hail Mary strategy for getting their pal an office that they manifestly have not even considered whether or not he deserves, that the accusations against Trump are all lies, slander and misconstruals of innocent comments from over a decade ago and should be ignored…but that Bill Clinton’s sexual assaults are all the gospel truth from wronged women who have been silenced for over thirty years and disqualify his wife from office.
In other words, they’re out there saying, “We can’t afford to have a sleazy, perverted, gross dirty old man getting into the White House. VOTE TRUMP!”
I anticipated that Trump would go after his own party. I did not anticipate the sheer, pathetic, unmitigated moral cowardice with which the GOP would greet these attacks. I did not expect that after a tape surfaced of the candidate openly boasting about his ability to commit sexual assault and get away with it, followed by a dozen corroborating stories from women in his past, that the response from the Republican Party would be, “Um, yeah, that’s pretty bad, but, um… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”
And while I expected Trump would descend into paranoid fantasies to preserve his ego, I really didn’t think we’d get a rally where he flat-out said that Hillary Clinton was conspiring with “the international bankers” (I’m actually kind of amazed he avoided saying “Zionist”) to destroy the United States of America by rigging the election with the help of a complicit GOP. I did not think we would get to the point where he literally accused his political opponent of being the Devil. I did not think that Trump would preserve his fantasies of being a political messiah by literally inciting crowds to revolt in the event that he was not elected. I thought I was braced for a crazy October, but the crazy is now coming thicker and faster than I was emotionally prepared for.
And I don’t know when it will stop. At this point, I would be entirely unsurprised if another thirty or forty women come forward before Election Day; Trump has had decades of unrestrained and unpunished privilege in which to assault women, and I’m sure the only question is how many of them are willing to talk about it. And I think that Trump will get more and more unhinged as his accounts finally come due. But I no longer feel like I know what it means for a major-party candidate to be unveiled as a grifter and sexual predator with the whole world watching, less than a month before we elect our first woman to the Oval Office. It’s just too damn motherfucking nuts right now to get a grip on.
I guessed some of this stuff in principle, but…in practice, being right about it doesn’t fucking help.
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Have you read
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/the-tweet-storm-that-should-terrify-the-republican-party/503771/
I think the sentiments expressed might align with your personal feelings.
Most Republicans who have spoken up have done so too late- a handful have been expressing reservations for months, but most who don’t like him have been putting their heads in the sand just waiting for him to go away and hope they’re not screwed in the process. There have to be some of them at this point who get that they’re going to lose, and lose big, and even understand that doing so is what the party needs. But most of the lot of them have just been waffling between staying behind the candidate on the one hand and on the other saying, “well, I don’t agree with what horrible thing he said two hours ago, and I won’t agree with the abominable thing he says at the next rally.”
He really is a monster. Aside from being a con man and a demagogue totally unfit for office.
I can’t believe this really surprises anyone. I didn’t expect these specific events but I had no doubt that things would get this bitter and this dark before the election. I hope you are ready for things to get a whole lot worse over the next few weeks. Not just between now and election day, but for a long time after. If you expect it all to just calm down and go back to normal when CNN calls the election for Hillary you are in for another big shock. He is a hateful proud man who would rather convince millions of people that the government is rigged against them than accept that he lost. If he can’t find a way to brush it all off and tell himself he won, he will continue to lash out and rile up millions of already angry and disillusioned people into a rabid frenzy.
@William Kendall: The GOP strategy for Trump is essentially the same strategy they’ve employed for the entire Obama administration: Hope privately that the Democrats fix everything on their own so that they don’t have to look bad to their base by cooperating with “the enemy”, while publicly blaming the liberals for everything.
The problem is, that strategy has finally hit its limits here. They were really hoping that Clinton would dispatch Trump for them so that they wouldn’t have to take any kind of moral stand, but they didn’t realize that Trump would drag the party down with them.
Now they’re being forced to take a stand, because trying to have it both ways just makes everyone hate them. The base hates them for not going full Breitbart in the defense of Trump, and the rest of the country thinks they’re spineless shits for not doing it a year ago when it mattered. They tried to walk a tightrope, and they did it for so long that not a one of them looked up and realized the other end was tied to a woodchipper.
(I think that is either my best or worst metaphor ever. Not sure which.)
I’ve said it many times- this was once the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Eisenhower. They would be horrified by what has become of it.
Oh, at this point I’m pretty confident Reagan would be considered a RINO.
Actually, no. The modern Right has ditched “RINO” in favor of “cuckservative”. Because of course they fucking have.
So the next oppo drop will probably be Monday afternoon, to give it two 24-hour cycles before the last debate. I’d say even chances of an assault on video and something entirely new.
(Pretty sure that if Trump has anything left on Clinton he’d have dropped it by now, so anything out there in the hands of Republican Party donors or insiders (or Putin) is probably going to be kept fresh for 2018 or 2020 at this point…)
Idea for Saturday Night Live sketch: Democrat fixers standing in front of a calender, trying to figure out a schedule to drop all the Trump scandals where they won’t get in each others’ way.
I might be biased as brown person but calling Trump a monster when his opponent has destabilized the Middle East and has bombed more brown people than anyone else is the sorta white feminist hysterionics that makes me hate white people so much
” He is a hateful proud man who would rather convince millions of people that the government is rigged against them than accept that he lost. If he can’t find a way to brush it all off and tell himself he won, he will continue to lash out and rile up millions of already angry and disillusioned people into a rabid frenzy. ”
True, but they’d have been frenzied anyway. I heard a number of local conservatives (I used to be in a very red-state community) during the Clinton years discuss how Clinton “was never elected by a majority of the American voters” and later how Al Gore really lost the popular vote. For close to 25 years there’s a chunk of the base that thinks any president they didn’t elect is invalid. The Clinton years also gave us growing numbers of right-wing militias and G. Gordon Liddy telling listeners how to kill federal agents in body armor.
They will be unhinged by Trump’s loss even if he kept his mouth shut. Then again, they might have become unhinged if he’d won–after all, that would prove the whole country supports racism and sexism, right?
“his opponent has destabilized the Middle East and has bombed more brown people than anyone else” That would be Bush II.
I’m not sure why this is such a surprise to people. The Republican party has been dog whistling this shit since the 60s, nothing Trump has done or said is new. The only meaningful difference between Trump and any other Republican presidential candidate is that he’s directly saying it out loud. Probably the worst thing Trump has said this campaign is saying the military should commit war crimes against the families of suspected terrorists, and I had the president of a major conservative think tank tell me that to my face in 2005(More specifically, he though Iraq would be going better if we killed more civilians). In 2000, Bush ran a race-baiting ad about John McCain’s “black baby”. None of this shit is new.
David Neiwert’s been predicting this for at least fifteen years online. Neither this squalor, nor Jo Cox’s murder heralding Brexit, surprises us Umberto Eco fans.
Re: Ratman
So it was Hillary herself that started the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? She did vote for the war in Iraq, and was Secretary of State, but (a) the war would have happened with or without her vote and (b) the area was pretty damn unstable before she became Secretary of State.
As for Trump, the only reason he hasn’t bombed anyone is that he’s never had the chance to. But if you take him at his word, he certainly would if he was given the chance. He wants to build a wall to keep Mexicans out. He wants to institute a ban on Muslims coming in. He wants to torture people. He wants to target civilian families of enemy combatants. Those last two are actual war crimes, by the way.
So yes, he’s not a monster on the scale of someone who has committed war crimes, but that is only because he’s never been in a position to commit war crimes. That’s not a great argument for putting him in the position, since he did flat out SAY we would commit war crimes if given the chance.
“This is seriously the most chilling, creepy, horrifying and horrible week of politics we’ve ever had in American history.”
I’ll give you chilling, creepy and horrifying (in the sense of “Oh, that’s just gross,”). However, we have a political history that includes such gems as:
0. The Alien and Sedition Acts were pretty horrible and were basically John Adams pushing through laws that would make Trump proud.
1. The War of 1812, where a war of choice and aggression resulted in the only time a foreign army has occupied U.S. soil (and burned the White House. THANKS CANADA!)
2. Bleeding Kansas – when you had slave owners from Missouri traveling north to the Kansas territory, and free-staters from the east coming in, each trying to make a majority. It ended up being, basically, a stage rehearsal for the Civil War.
3. Speaking of, the Civil War was more or less the worst moment in American Political history, where political differences, for the first and only time, led to actual revolution and bloodshed on a national scale.
4. The Rise of the KKK.
And that’s all more or less in the first 100 years of U.S. history. Trump is terrible, but I don’t think he’s risen to worst moment in U.S. history. Now, if on November 9th, he encourages his followers to refuse to accept the results of the election and tries to lead them in some sort of revolt or uprising, he might make the list. If on November 8th his supporters incite violence at polling places as the watch to make sure that “voters are accountable” which is a chilling statement in and of itself, then he might make the list. But so far, he’s just a terrible excuse for a human being, let alone presidential candidate.
I’m just saying, we all need to keep perspective. Trump is an unmitigated disaster, national embarrassment, and a walking cesspit of misogyny, racism, homophobia and barely contained violence and sexual assault. Rob Ford writ large. But he’s not a historically destructive force. Yet.
On the one hand, I take your point. I should really have said “in my lifetime”.
On the other hand, if you really have to say, “Well, Trump isn’t as bad as the War of 1812,” I think my point is pretty much made. 🙂
I live in Portland, and I just heard Kevin Mannix, former Republican candidate for governor, basically say on local NPR (paraphrasing) “Trump may be a horrible person, but at least he’s pro-life and will nominate who I want to be on the Supreme Court”
Anyone who believes that Trump will appoint specific people to the Supreme Court just because he said he would is willfully ignoring his entire history of business dealings.
I expect his actual priority in appointees would be justices who will let him do whatever the hell he wants.
//So it was Hillary herself that started the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? She did vote for the war in Iraq, and was Secretary of State, but (a) the war would have happened with or without her vote and (b) the area was pretty damn unstable before she became Secretary of State.//
>> You forgot when she convinced Obama to bomb Libya which even he admits was a mistake.
//As for Trump, the only reason he hasn’t bombed anyone is that he’s never had the chance to. But if you take him at his word, he certainly would if he was given the chance. He wants to build a wall to keep Mexicans out. He wants to institute a ban on Muslims coming in. He wants to torture people. He wants to target civilian families of enemy combatants. Those last two are actual war crimes, by the way.//
>> I’d take that criticism seriously except for the fact that the Obama Administration has already bombed hospital and wedding not sure what would change except maybe the press covering it.
//So yes, he’s not a monster on the scale of someone who has committed war crimes, but that is only because he’s never been in a position to commit war crimes. That’s not a great argument for putting him in the position, since he did flat out SAY we would commit war crimes if given the chance.//
>> So I have to choose between someone who say he want’s to bomb brown people and someone who already has. That’s very assuring.
@Ratman: Well, it’s more “someone who apparently couldn’t understand why we wouldn’t just nuke Tehran”. Apparently when Trump was working with foreign policy experts, he didn’t understand why we didn’t include first-strike nuclear weapons in our policy options and didn’t appreciate being told that it would be a bad idea. Think about how that might go in the Middle East.
Literally, no matter how bad you think Hillary is at anything–foreign policy, cozying up to Wall Street, openly sexually assaulting women–Trump is always a million times worse.
@John Seavey:
Sure. Although, a case can be made for examples like George Wallace, Strom Thurman and Richard Nixon as well. Socially, we’re terrible at remembering the past and predicting the future. We remember the good bits of the past, the stirring speeches, but we forget the crap that happened in the background that made them necessary. So Trump is terrible, but I don’t think he’s uniquely terrible in the history of the United States (although on November 9th, when he loses, he might prove me wrong).
@Ratman:
Granted, Obama has hit civilian targets. Hillary is really pretty hawkish, and it’s something to remember. But to say, “Well, Hillary is bad, so it doesn’t matter, really, between her and Trump” seems to be bad logic. Hillary did vote for the war in Iraq which was shockingly bad judgement and she should (and has) had to explain why she did that. She did want to bomb Libya. And I would go so far as to say Afghanistan was a mistake. I have always been of the opinion that 9/11 was a criminal act, and therefore, the correct response was to use law enforcement techniques and professionals, not military ones.
All that said, John’s right. Trump legitimately does not seem to understand why we can’t just nuke ISIS. When he says “We have to knock out ISIS,” what do you think his plan for that is? It’s almost certainly more bombing in Syria and Iraq, and probably far more aggressively than anything that Obama’s done. When he says, “American Muslims know what’s going on,” that’s absurd. I’m a white Christian man. Does that mean I know when every homegrown white terrorist (or militia member as the media seems to call them) is going to go and shoot a cop or invade a wildlife sanctuary? Of course not. Trump has said that he wants to round up the families of terrorists and kill them. This is an order of magnitude worse than anything that anyone in U.S. politics has said on either side of the aisle in my memory. Sure. Trump hasn’t done these things, only said them. However, your proposition then is that we should either assume he’s been lying about this and, by extension, all of his positions all along, or that somehow what Hillary has done is worse. That’s a proposition that I don’t see as valid.
How could anyone vote for a person whose vocabulary is so poor that he’d seriously use “bigly” in a sentence?
Things like “bigly” probably help him among certain people, proving to them that he’s like them, not an intellectual. That one could well be an intentional goof. W. did those a lot too.
The difference is that W. didn’t seem like such an asshole, at least not all the time. Trump’s persona has deteriorated by leaps and bounds just since this blog post went up, yet a whole bunch of people will still vote for him. That’s the depressing part.