A Question Of Character Is Very Different From A Stand On Policies

I live in a solidly blue district-- CA-28. The PVI is D+23. Hillary whipped Trump here 72.1% to 22.3%. Some of the country's most Democratic bastions are in the district: Hollywood (plus East and West Hollywood), Silverlake, Echo Park, Los Feliz, Atwater, Glendale, Sunland-Tujunga... I have no idea where that 22.3% could possibly be. La Crescenta Montrose? La Cañada Flintridge? Our congressman is a conservative Democrat, New Dem (former Blue Dog) Adam Schiff. People see him on TV railing against Trump and their brain tells them he's a progressive because they automatically assume that anyone who hates Trump loudly enough must be a progressive. Don't be fooled. Schiff has a ProgressivePunch "D" rating. He's a military-industrial complex stalwart who voted with the Republicans to invade Iraq in 2003. Unlike California colleagues Ted Lieu and Ro Khanna, who are working furiously to get the U.S. out of the Yemen genocide, Schiff has been a supporter of the U.S. role. Early in 2015 he said that "The military action by Saudi Arabia and its partners was necessitated by the illegal action of the Houthi rebels and their Iranian backers," basically the Republican Party talking point. This is what Schiff's voting record always looks like: mainstream Democrats on one side and Republicans and conservative Democrats on the other side. Schiff stands with the Republicans and the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, despite representing a progressive district. In this vote for an anti-family healthcare bill last summer, notice that among California members all the Republicans voted yea while the Democrats were split. Schiff voted with the Republicans, as did Pete Aguilar (New Dem), Ami Bera (New Dem and criminal), Julia Brownley (New Dem), Salud Carbajal (New Dem), Lou Correa (Blue Dog), Jimmy Panetta, Raul Ruiz (New Dem), Norma Torres (New Dem). The rest of the Californians-- from Pelosi, Lieu, Khanna, Barbara Lee, Judy Chu, Nanette Barragán, Maxine Waters, Linda Sánchez, Jimmy Gomez to Doris Matsui, John Garamendi, Mike Thompson, Mark DeSaulnier, Jared Huffman... even arch-conservatives like Jim Costa and Scott Peters-- voted NO.

You can hear a bunch of ex-Bush administration conservatives railing against Trump on MSNBC everyday. They are entertaining and it is satisfying to hear them rip into Trump. But they are conservatives, not progressives. On Christmas Day, the L.A. Times ran a column by very right-wing Republican Jonah Goldberg. Believe me, he's not our friend, despite his column, Why the Trump presidency will end poorly. He began with a collegial translation of Heraclitus' enduring ethos anthropoi daimon: "character is destiny," often appearing as "man’s character is his fate."

James Q. Wilson had a simple definition of character: "decency, politeness, self-restraint, commitment, honesty, cooperativeness and the ability to think of others’ well-being." You see where this is, inevitably, going. We all know exactly who is none of the above. "Weirdly," wrote Goldberg, "it’s gotten to the point that when I say President Trump is not a man of good character, I feel like I should preface it with a trigger warning for many of my fellow conservatives. Most of the angry responses are rooted in the fact they do not wish to be reminded of this obvious truth. But others seem to have convinced themselves that Trump is a man of good character, and they take personal offense at the insult, even though I usually offer it as little more than an observation." He worries that conservatives are actually "redefining good character in Trump’s image, and they end up modeling it." Some, he wrote, "overlook that his insults are not merely an act, but rather the product of astonishing levels of narcissism, insecurity and intellectual incuriosity. His Twitter feed is simply a window into his id."

The president who became a celebrity by telling reality-show contestants “you’re fired” has not fired any of his Cabinet officials face-to-face, or even on the phone. He relies on others, or on Twitter, to deliver the news. He loves controversy because it keeps him in the center ring, but he hates confrontation.

The driving force behind nearly all of the controversies that have bedeviled his administration is his personality, not his ideology.

To be sure, ideology plays a role. It amplifies the anger from both his left-wing critics and his transactional defenders. Many of the liberal critics shrieking about the betrayal of the Kurds implicit in his decision to withdraw from Syria would be applauding if a President Clinton had made the same decision. And many of the conservatives celebrating the move would be condemning it.

But his refusal to listen to advisors; his inability to bite his tongue; his demonization and belittling of senators who vote for his agenda; his rants against the 1st Amendment; his praise for dictators and insults for allies; his need to create new controversies to eclipse old ones; and his inexhaustible capacity to lie and fabricate history: All this springs from his nature.

Over the weekend, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie offered an odd defense of the president. He’s like a “72-year-old relative,” Christie said on ABC’s This Week. “When people get older, they become more and more convinced of the fact that what they’re doing is the right thing.”

Christie has a point. But the reason Trump won’t change has little to do with age and everything to do with character.

Jonah Goldberg is right about Trump's character... but wrong on virtually everything else. When his book, Liberal Fascism was released, most people realized he has a serious screw loose. Son of another crackpot, Lucianne Goldberg, he built his career making up stories about Bill and Hillary Clinton. In another one of his crazy books, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, he started the lies right on the jacket, claiming to have been nominated for two Pulizers. He wasn't ever nominated for a Pulitzer; he's widely considered a liar, a buffoon and a very mediocre writer who has been on the losing side of every important issue in his lifetime-- except one: Trump. Eventually, his publisher acknowledged the "mistake," and rewrote the jacket blurb. In any case, Eugene Robinson put it better in his Christmas eve Post column, "Trump is incompetent, impulsive and amoral": "The chaos all around us is what happens when the nation elects an incompetent, narcissistic, impulsive and amoral man as president. This Christmas, heaven help us all."

No Pulitzer nominations for the crackpot neo-fascist-- but an excellent example of how conservatives cheat in the war of ideas

UPDATE: On Character... And Bone Spurs

Trump hates the military, always has. This week the fake, illegitimate "president" became the first occupant of the Oval Office in nearly 3 decades not to visit active duty military personnel around Christmas. Instead he was home alone in the White House freaking out and tweeting about... what else? Himself. Today, the NY Times poked at him by looking into how he dodged the draft during the Vietnam War. "For 50 years, the details of how the exemption came about, and who made the diagnosis, have remained a mystery, with Mr. Trump himself saying during the presidential campaign that he could not recall who had signed off on the medical documentation. Now a possible explanation has emerged about the documentation. It involves a foot doctor in Queens who rented his office from Mr. Trump’s father, Fred C. Trump, and a suggestion that the diagnosis was granted as a courtesy to the elder Mr. Trump."

Trump’s Sense Of Self-Liberation Comes At A Dangerous Moment For Him-- And Therefor For The Rest Of Us

"The functional importance of the ego is manifested in the fact that normally control over the approaches to motility devolves upon it. Thus in its relation to the id it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces. The analogy may be carried a little further. Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id's will into action as if it were its own."
-Sigmund Freud

Yesterday the NYTimes reported that Señor Trumpanzee "has decided not to hire two lawyers who were announced last week as new additions to his legal team, leaving him with a shrinking stable of lawyers as the investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, enters an intense phase." They were referring to the bizarre husband/wife team of lunatic right crackpots Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing. Earlier in the morning Señor T was whining on twitter that he was having no trouble finding lawyers to represent him, although there's certain chance any reputable attorney would ever agree to be on a legal team that included sociopaths like diGenova and Toensing.

Last week, noted Trumpanzee watcher Gabriel Sherman reported for Vanity Fair that Putin's man in the Oval Office has decided to return to the seat-of-the-pants decision-making that he believes won him the presidency. "Trump," he wrote, "seems to be loving his new freedom. 'He was fucking excited and jubilant,' said one Trump friend who spoke to him in recent days. 'He was like, everything’s great and these fuckers in the media are beside themselves.' But Trump’s self-liberation comes at a dangerous moment, with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation reaching closer and closer, stoking Trump’s impulses to go to war. Earlier this month, Mueller crossed one of Trump’s stated 'red lines' when he subpoenaed Trump Organization business records. According to four Republicans in regular contact with the White House, the move spurred Trump to lose patience with his team of feuding lawyers. 'Trump hit the roof,' one source said. Today, Trump’s personal lawyer John Dowd resigned under pressure from Trump... In private, Trump friends and outside advisers have been stoking his desire to go on the offensive for months. Trump has heard that his lawyers are 'idiots'; that Mueller’s probe is a 'coup d’etat'; and that Trump’s only crime is having 'won the election.'... [N]o heavy-hitting white-shoe law firm seems to want to represent him."

What a mad house! And it's worth revisiting a Jeffrey Goldberg feature in The Atlantic from earlier in the year, Trump's Tweets Are a 'Narnian Wardrobe to His Lizard Brain'. Jeffrey Goldberg, in way of introduction to sad right-wing loon Jonah Goldberg that some of the most interesting people in the world to him at the time were "the homeless conservatives, that not-so-merry band of right-leaning ideologues and idealists who reject Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party and who find it more pleasurable to stand outside Mar-a-Lago and throw rocks than to make believe that what is happening inside is normal. One of the most important of these homeless conservatives is Jonah Goldberg, who has been a stalwart anti-liberal voice for a generation. But Goldberg, a senior editor at the National Review (which is itself a kind of shelter for Never Trumpers) has seen many of his friends accommodate themselves to the new reality. 'The slow takeover of the right by the Trumpets is akin to Invasion of the Body Snatchers,' he told me on a recent episode of  our podcast, The Atlantic Interview."





Jonah: "What we’ve seen in the last couple of years is the Republican Party get either dragged along or leap ahead into essentially a cult of personality. A cult of personality is somewhat misleading because it’s only a handful of people who really think that Comrade Trump will deliver the greatest wheat harvest the Urals have ever seen... A year and a half ago, at Fox and other places on the right, I remember being so unbelievably disheartened by how many pundits and commentators-- not just at Fox, but talk radio, all over the place-- lied. They would say, 'Trump is fantastic. Trump is awesome. Trump is a genius. He’s a businessman.' All this stuff. And then the camera goes off, and the microphone goes off, and then they would say, 'I can’t believe I have to defend this guy.' ...[T]he problem with Trump’s Twitter feed is that it is like the Narnian wardrobe to his lizard brain. It just vomits out whatever his raging sphincterless id has got going at the given moment. It gets him into an enormous amount of trouble."

Jeffrey:  Let me ask you how a person who is non-conservative, completely transactional, has no higher thoughts about America and its role in the world, and has no ideological thoughts per se-- how did he so easily take over an entire party?

Jonah: There are a thousand different variables. One was simply the structural, game-theory nature of a 16-person race, which was a huge problem. I think, in terms of important long-term trends, there was a certain psychic break that occurred with the tea parties. The general thrust of the tea parties was exactly the kind of response that I would want from Americans-- back to basics, back to the Constitution, limited government, living within our means. They were wholesale written off as racists and bigots. People overlooked the fact that many of the leaders of the Tea Party, their preferred candidates, were African Americans-- Herman Cain, Ben Carson. That was a tell. That was them saying, “We don’t like being called racists.”

A lot of people, including some serious intellectuals, said, “Well that project doesn’t work. We’re heading towards tribalism, so we might as well develop our own kind of tribalism.”

Two other factors are here. One is, Trump broke the blood-brain barrier of entertainment into politics.

Jeffrey: We needed 15 years of reality TV to bring about this shift.

Jonah: I think that’s right. A lot of Hollywood liberals were encroaching on politics for a very long time, chipping away at this barrier. It’s just ironic that Donald Trump was the first one over the fence. This is why I think in the long term, this is bad news for the left. The Republican celebrities-- our bench is mighty thin-- Kid Rock, Scott Baio. But meanwhile, I think in the summer of 2016, if Oprah, George Clooney, Tom Hanks jumped in...

Jeffrey: Well, Oprah very well might.

Jonah: She might! The last thing is hugely important, and it’s lost on big chunks of the right and of the left, is that people did not like Hillary Clinton. They just didn’t like her. And whatever you thought of Bill Clinton-- Lord knows I wasn’t a fan-- everyone could recognize his political skills. I mean, that guy, you could pull him off an intern, slap him with a flounder, and say, “Give me 45 minutes on intellectual property rights in the Third World,” and he could just go. Hillary Clinton’s idea of extemporaneous speaking was leaping from her prepared remarks to prepared notecards. She’s the lady who says no eating in the library. She was also seen as much more left wing than her husband. Fair or not... [W]hat Trump doesn’t understand, what Steve Bannon doesn’t understand, is that Donald Trump’s mandate was: Don’t be Hillary Clinton. He accomplished that on Day One. Some part of his brain understands that, which is why I guarantee you that in the last 48 hours, Donald Trump has tweeted something about Hillary Clinton. Sean Hannity has done some raging scandal about Hillary Clinton. Psychologically, one of the things these guys have to do to justify their support for Trump is to remind people constantly, “You could have had Hillary.”

You hear echoes of this all over the place. I was on a National Review cruise three months after the election, and this person was asked, “How’s Trump doing?” And they said, “I judge it entirely by how much better this is than what Hillary would have done.” You hear this all over the place on the right. To me, this is a profoundly screwed up way of thinking about things. I don’t know of any other Republican or Democratic president that we said, six months into their presidency, “Well, Bush is making some mistakes but at least he’s not John Kerry.” That’s meaningless. Just one click better than the person that you thought would have ruined the country?

...Jeffrey: Which party is going to disintegrate first, the Democratic Party or Republican Party?

Jonah: I think probably the Republican Party. All the problems that we’ve been talking about that gave us Trump—they’re all made worse by more dysfunction on the right. If serious people don’t think seriously about immigration and deal with people’s legitimate frustrations with it, then unserious and irresponsible people will step in and take up the issue. I think Trump definitely proves that. If Washington does not get anything done anyway, why not treat it like a circus?

Jeffrey: The Republicans are spiraling down faster?

Jonah: They’re spiraling down faster. But a huge part of the reason for the Democratic Party and the Republican Party’s existence is to not be the other party. You take away the Republican Party, and you can get a catalytic effect where they can overtake each other in their dysfunction.

Jeffrey: What replaces the Republican Party if it disintegrates?

Jonah: I think we could be heading into some 1948-style election where you have a four-way race. Game theory says the more entrants you have, the less you need to be the winner. You can see all sorts of independent kind of runs. But let me put it this way: If the Republican Party goes first, I think what we know is the Democratic Party is soon to follow.

Trumpism-- Is It A Uniquely American Infectious Disease?

Earlier this morning, we looked at the mad house the White House has become since Putin installed Señor Trump in the Oval Office, the most brilliant foreign policy coup in Russian history-- and certainly the worst non-violent attack on America ever. Our resident psychologist, Helen Klein, keeps trying to explain Trump's behavior in terms of psychological deformities. Yesterday right-wing polemicist Jonah Goldberg tried the same thing, more or less, at the National Review, although in terms of Trumpism rather than the workings or dysfunction of Señor T's mind. His point is that "Trump presents an insurmountable challenge to an intellectual approach to politics because his decisions aren't based on any coherent body of ideas... Trumpism," he says is a "psychological phenomenon." I think most observers have come to that conclusion over the past several decades, several years, several months... or even several days, depending on how long he or she has been paying attention to the penny-ante huckster and cheap cable TV reality show Putin saddled us with. There certainly is no "coherent Trumpist ideology."

On the left, there’s an enormous investment in the idea that Trump isn’t a break with conservatism but the apotheosis of it. This is a defensible, or at least understandable, claim if you believe conservatism has always been an intellectually vacuous bundle of racial and cultural resentments. But if that were the case, Commentary magazine’s Noah Rothman recently noted, you would not see so many mainstream and consistent conservatives objecting to Trump’s behavior.

Intellectuals and ideologically committed journalists on the left and right have a natural tendency to see events through the prism of ideas. Trump presents an insurmountable challenge to such approaches because, by his own admission, he doesn’t consult any serious and coherent body of ideas for his decisions. He trusts his instincts.

Trump has said countless times that he thinks his gut is a better guide than the brains of his advisers. He routinely argues that the presidents and policymakers who came before him were all fools and weaklings. That’s narcissism, not ideology, talking.

Even the “ideas” that he has championed consistently-- despite countervailing evidence and expertise-- are grounded not in arguments but in instincts. He dislikes regulations because, as a businessman, they got in his way. He dislikes trade because he has a childish, narrow understanding of what “winning” means. Foreigners are ripping us off. Other countries are laughing at us. He doesn’t actually care about, let alone understand, the arguments suggesting that protectionism can work. Indeed, he reportedly issued his recent diktat on steel tariffs in a fit of pique over negative media coverage and the investigation into Russian election interference. His administration was wholly unprepared for the announcement.

News emanating from the White House is always more understandable once you accept that Trumpist policy is downstream of Trump’s personality.

The president's attack on his attorney general's conduct as "disgraceful" makes no political, legal or ideological sense, but it is utterly predictable as an expression of Trump’s view that loyalty to Trump should trump everything else.

Likewise, his blather about skipping due process to “take the guns” was politically bizarre but perfectly consistent with his poor impulse control and well-established tendency to tell people in the room with him what they want to hear.

And, of course, his decision to promote and protect his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is purely psychological. Giving Kushner the responsibility to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for all time seems like the premise of a sitcom-- yet is wholly congruent with Trump’s management style.

Still, many of Trump’s biggest fans stick by him, mirroring Trump’s mode of thinking and discovering ever more extravagant ways to explain or rationalize the president’s behavior. (Krein’s abandonment of Trump was an exception to the rule.) When Trump attacked Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Jerry Falwell Jr. of Liberty University tweeted his support, floating the idea that Sessions was an anti-Trump deep cover operative who endorsed Trump to undermine his presidency from within.

It seems Trumpism is infectious. If this infection becomes a pandemic-- a cult of personality-- one could fairly call Trumpism a movement. But psychology would still be the best way to understand it.

Too late for the U.S. Congress. Few were immune and the bulk of Republican members of both the House and the Senate are the equivalent of the Walking Dead now. The rest of us have to protect ourselves, not just from Trump, but from Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell as everyone in their voracious, insatiable herds. Count on American women to protect their children, their families-- and the species. A new Quinnipiac poll released yesterday found 41% of voters feeling that Señor Trumpanzee is the worst of the 13 presidents who have served since the end of World War II. Trump's overall approval rating is 38%. (And only 26% of Americans approve of how he handles issues involving Putin.)

Dennis Prager-- Still Crazy After All These Years

Robert Mueller by Nancy Ohanian

Right-wing propagandist Dennis Prager and I were born a few months apart and we lived near each other in Brooklyn. I went to James Madison High School; he went to the nearby Yeshiva of Flatbush on Avenue J., as did a number of other crackpots like Meir Kahane and Abraham Foxman (as well as non-crackpot, fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi), Like me, he washed up in L.A. where he worked as a radio presenter, first doing programs about Judaism and eventually just standard Republican Hate Talk Radio, albeit from a Jewish perspective. His bigotry and racism are couched in his phony-baloney Old Testament persona. Yesterday he wrote a deranged column for National Review attacking conservatives who haven't acquiesced to the golden pig Señor Trumpanzee.

It's part of his shtik to say he's trying to understand conservatives who are still opposing Trump, who Prager hasn't figured out is an existential threat to democracy and to America. "I have concluded," he wrote, "that there are a few reasons that explain conservatives who were Never-Trumpers during the election, and who remain anti-Trump today." He has a different existential battle rattling around in his crazy head.

The first and, by far, the greatest reason is this: They do not believe that America is engaged in a civil war, with the survival of America as we know it at stake.

While they strongly differ with the Left, they do not regard the left–right battle as an existential battle for preserving our nation. On the other hand, I, and other conservative Trump supporters, do.

That is why, after vigorously opposing Trump’s candidacy during the Republican primaries, I vigorously supported him once he won the nomination. I believed then, as I do now, that America was doomed if a Democrat had been elected president. With the Supreme Court and hundreds of additional federal judgeships in the balance; with the Democrats’ relentless push toward European-style socialism-- completely undoing the unique American value of limited government; the misuse of the government to suppress conservative speech; the continuing degradation of our universities and high schools; the weakening of the American military; and so much more, America, as envisioned by the Founders, would have been lost, perhaps irreversibly. The “fundamental transformation” that candidate Barack Obama promised in 2008 would have been completed by Hillary Clinton in 2016.

To my amazement, no anti-Trump conservative writer sees it that way. They all thought during the election, and still think, that while it would not have been a good thing if Hillary Clinton had won, it wouldn’t have been a catastrophe either.

That’s it, in a nutshell. Many conservatives, including me, believe that it would have been close to over for America as America if the Republican candidate, who happened to be a flawed man named Donald Trump, had not won. Moreover, I am certain that only Donald Trump would have defeated Hillary Clinton.

In other words, I believe that Donald Trump may have saved the country. And that, in my book, covers a lot of sins-- foolish tweets, included.

The Never Trump conservative argument that Trump is not a conservative-- one that I, too, made repeatedly during the Republican primaries-- is not only no longer relevant, it is no longer true.

Had any Never Trump conservative been told, say in the summer of 2015, that a Republican would win the 2016 election and, within his first few months in office, appoint a conservative to the Supreme Court; begin the process of replacing Obamacare; bomb Russia’s ally Assad after he again used chemical weapons; appoint the most conservative cabinet in modern American history; begin undoing hysteria-based, economy-choking EPA regulations; label the Iranian regime “evil” in front of 50 Muslim heads of state; wear a yarmulke at the Western Wall; appoint a U.N. ambassador who regularly condemns the U.N. for its moral hypocrisy; restore the military budget; and work on lowering corporate tax rates, among other conservative achievements-- that Never Trump conservative would have been jumping for joy.

So, why aren’t anti-Trump conservatives jumping for joy?

I have come to believe that many conservatives possess what I once thought was a left-wing monopoly-- a utopian streak. Trump is too far from their ideal leader to be able to support him.

There is also a cultural divide. Anti-Trump conservatives are a very refined group of people. Trump doesn’t talk like them. Moreover, the cultural milieu in which the vast majority of anti-Trump conservatives live and/or work means that to support Trump is to render oneself contemptible at all elite dinner parties.

In addition, anti-Trump conservatives see themselves as highly moral people (which they often are) who are duty-bound not to compromise themselves by strongly supporting Trump, whom they largely view as morally defective.

Finally, these people are only human: After investing so much energy in opposing Trump’s election, and after predicting his nomination would lead to electoral disaster, it’s hard for them to admit they were wrong. To see him fulfill many of his conservative election promises, again in defiance of predictions, is a bitter pill. But if they hang on to their Never Trumpism and the president falls on his face, they can say they were right all along.

That means that only if he fails can their reputations be redeemed. And they, of course, know that.

But there is another way. They can join the fight. They can accept an imperfect reality and acknowledge that we are in a civil war, and that Trump, with all his flaws, is our general. If this general is going to win, he needs the best fighters. But too many of them, some of the best minds of the conservative movement, are AWOL.

I beg them: Please report for duty.

Matt Lewis responded to Prager's bullshit at the Daily Beast this morning. "A common denominator for Trump backers," he wrote, "might be a belief in an apocalyptic future-- lacking their Trumpian savior, of course. Likewise, Never Trumpers did not see a Trump loss as the end of America. But that is only one of the differences that separate the pro-Trump conservatives from the Never Trumpers... Conservatives who are viscerally turned off by the Trump cult of personality prize things like the rule of law and balance of powers. Part of what this means is that the idea of a ruling class repels us. We believe the maxim that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and we instead celebrate the system and institutions that check the accumulation of power. We see dissent as patriotic. We see the messianic impulse of some Americans as a very dangerous tendency. We believe that it’s not healthy to put politicians on a pedestal. We believe you should respect your leaders and pray for them-- but not to them... [H]e works for us. And we shouldn’t ever let him forget it."

Jonah Goldberg, another right-wing asshole writing in yesterday's National Review took offense. "I’m not going to try to psychoanalyze Dennis’s motivations here," he wrote. But I will say that this essay reads more like an effort to affirm what a talk-radio audience wants to hear than a good-faith effort to understand and persuade conservatives that he claims to admire. If Dennis is truly interested in persuading the very diverse group of conservative Trump critics on the right, my advice would be to call them on the phone and ask them why they-- we-- say what they say and do what they do. Insinuating that conservative thinkers and writers are vain elitists who are betraying their cause by not becoming spinners (never mind soldiers) is not, to my mind, the best way to persuade them-- or me-- of anything."

I wonder if Prager will bring Goldberg a matzo brei laced with arsenic.

What's not to like?

Trump And Ryan-- The Marriage Forged On Satan's Anvil

In their post Wednesday morning about what to look for in the debate Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns of the NY Times suggested watching to see if Trump torches his own party. Sounded like fun to me.

Snubbed by Mr. Ryan in the final month of the campaign, Mr. Trump has seemed as eager to attack turncoat leaders in his own party as to make the case against Mrs. Clinton. He has reserved special venom for Mr. Ryan, blasting him as a weak leader with bad ideas about trade and immigration, and suggesting that Mr. Ryan might be sabotaging Mr. Trump’s campaign to pave the way for a presidential run of his own in four years.

These attacks have the potential to rip apart the Republican Party in ways that will last long beyond Election Day. Should Mr. Trump use a prime-time debate to sic the Republican base on its leaders-- and to cast himself, essentially, as an independent candidate challenging elites on the left and right-- he could inflict damage on the party far deeper than what Mrs. Clinton might deliver on her own.

And should Mr. Trump strafe the party that nominated him, it could have immediate consequences for Republicans seeking election to the House and Senate, who cannot afford an abrupt drop in turnout from demoralized and angry voters in their own camp.

But during the debate, the Adderall-impaired Trump had other things on his mind. He didn't attack Ryan. Last night, in the spin room after the debate, Hannity, a full-fledged Trump surrogate, told Robert Costa that Ryan is a "saboteur" and called on Republicans to force him from office and replace him with... Louie Gohmert. (No, I did not make that up.) If Ryan watched Trump giving the election to Hillary, he must have wanted to kill himself. Trump is clearly unhinged and deranged. And Ryan's cowardice and bad judgment in regard to the threat Trump poses to America, have caused his own favorability among Republicans to crater. And does he ever deserve it-- and worse... although being replaced by Louie Gohmert is kind of weird, even in terms of the 2016 election cycle.

Ryan’s cratering popularity follows his public denunciation of Trump’s 2005 hot-mic statements to Access Hollywood in which the GOP nominee bragged about sexual assault. Ryan said he continues to endorse Trump’s campaign, but will no longer defend  him. In response, Trump accused Ryan of conspiring against him and of being part of a “sinister deal” to help defeat him.

Only 40 percent of Republicans now hold a positive view of Ryan (R-Wis.), according to the poll, down from 54 percent 10 days ago.

Among Trump supporters, just 28 percent still like Ryan, down from 48 percent. About 6 in 10 Trump supporters disliked the speaker in the latest poll. Four in 10 Republicans disliked him in last week’s poll.

Among all voters, Ryan favorability rating has sunk to negative 20, the lowest rating recorded in a YouGov/Economist poll for the GOP leader since he became speaker of the House one year ago.

Similarly, a new Morning Consult/Politico poll shows Ryan’s popularity taking a nosedive among Trump supporters and Republicans overall, though by a smaller margin. The poll shows Ryan’s net favorable among Trump supporters fell by 32 points since an Oct. 8 survey. Among Republicans, Ryan’s favorability fell 23 points.

If things weren’t already looking sad enough for Ryan, the Morning Consult poll also found that more Trump supporters would rather see Ryan replaced as speaker of the House than continue to hold his job in the next Congress.

Meanwhile Trump's doofus ally from New Jersey, wallowing in his own misery, didn't show up. Maybe he's getting ready for his impending court case-- or maybe just enjoying his record-breaking 21% approval rating among New Jersey voters. Overall, rightist Jonah Goldberg summed last night up for conservatives in his National Review column: "[W]here I dissent somewhat from the conventional wisdom is the notion that Trump was doing great until that one response. He lied repeatedly and shamelessly, most importantly about all of the stories of his sexual advances being debunked. They haven’t been. (I loved him saying-- over and over-- that “nobody” has more respect for women than he does. Nobody?) He was doing better than he has in previous debates and he was even scoring real points, but he simply wasn’t doing anything to get voters to see him in a fresh light. And when you’re this far behind, you need to add voters to your column. He didn’t do that. He didn’t even try. And that should be unforgivable."

No Stopping Herr Trumpf Now-- Who's To Blame?

Remember the bright red "Keep Calm It Won't Be Trump" memes floating around the internet as recently as two weeks ago? No more. Geoff Garin, head of Hart Research polled 160 political insiders about who they expected to see win the Republican nomination. Way back in October, 8% had chosen Herr Trumpf. Now 59% say the GOP nominee will be Herr. 18% say Rubio-- who has fallen to slipping under the waves in all the new polls of New Hampshire Republicans-- and 16% say Cruz.

Our own informal poll of DWT readers show the majority are hoping for a deadlocked-- brokered-- GOP convention in Cleveland in July, in which no candidate has the 1,237 delegates to win on the first ballot. It isn't so much that they want to see Paul Ryan emerge as the nominee-- a likely outcome, and one GOP billionaires are financing right now-- as it is the expectation of a gun battle inside the convention hall when the Trumpf fans figure out the establishment is stealing the nomination from the only man who can make America great again. (Yes, Ohio has a concealed carry law and guns will be allowed into the Republican convention.)

This week, Reid Epstein, writing for the Wall Street Journal outlined the scenario that will lead to the gun battle likely to wipe out the Republican Party once and for all. Epstein sees several dynamics at play:

• the crowded field, formerly known as the "deep bench"
• Herr Trumpf's ability to energize unaffiliated fascist voters looking for a fuehrer
• the take over of the GOP by the Old Confederacy and the redrawn primary map that gives more sway to Southern states that back nominees who aren’t acceptable to normal people
• the GOP's new way of counting delegates in early contests that will spread them out among the competitors, preventing anyone from separating from the pack

Remember of the 1,237 delegates needed to win, only 133 are being chosen in the 4 early states the media (and the candidates) are obsessing over. The March 1 Confederate Super Tuesday counts for around 600 delegates, "awarded proportinally based on the percentage of the votes the candidates receive, making it likely that one candidate won’t be able to build an insurmountable lead over a crowded field in which several contestants are accruing delegates."

Even if one candidate wins 40% of the delegates awarded by March 15, he or she would have less than one-half of the necessary delegates to win the nomination.

If the leader at that point is a social conservative like Mr. Cruz, the road to Cleveland will be difficult: No Southern states vote after March 15, making a comeback possible in the Midwest and Northeast for an establishment candidate, should one survive. March 15 also brings the first winner-take-all states: Florida (99 delegates) and Ohio (66).

The last real chance for candidates to become the presumptive nominee comes in late April, when New York and five other Northeastern states hold primaries. There are few chances after that to run up large delegate numbers. The biggest prize on the calendar comes at the end, when California votes June 7. But that state, like New York earlier, will award its 172 delegates proportionally by congressional district, forcing candidates competing there to plan strategy based on how many votes they can win in areas like Los Angeles, with comparatively few Republican voters but many delegates, that haven’t seen a contested presidential primary contest in generations.

Delegates won during the primary season are obligated to vote for their candidate only on the party’s first ballot at the July convention. If no candidate wins a majority in that tally, the delegates would be free to vote for whomever they like, creating the possibility of a free-for-all when GOP delegates gather at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland starting on July 18.

They stole the GOP away from the establishment

And that's where the guns start blazing. Except the scenario is all wrong. Despite the best efforts of the GOP establishment, Herr Trumpf is going to walk into the Quicken Loans Arena with the 1,237 delegates he needs because he will be unstoppable-- as Ted Cruz predicted glumly-- after he sweeps Iowa (once Cruz country), New Hampshire (once Jeb or Rubio or Christie or Kasich country), South Carolina (once Cruz or Bush country) and Nevada (once Rubio or Bush country).

At Politico Alex Isenstadt looked at the finger-pointing inside the Republican establishment as they all blame the rise of Herr Trumpf on each other and as they see control of their little racket-- the Republican Party-- slip through their fingers. "The chiding," he wrote, "once limited to private conversations, is now erupting in public view-- with campaigns, operatives, donors, party officials and conservative intellectuals arguing over why something hasn’t been done to stop the man who has been leading nearly every state and national poll since August. Trump, many in the GOP’s upper ranks are convinced, would lead the Republican Party to an epic defeat in November, with consequences all the way down the ballot." They all agree on one thing: "This whole thing is a disaster." Many people blame Jeb whose SuperPAC hasn't deployed effectively against Trumpf but used millions of dollars attacking the hapless Rubio and the other hopeless also-rans. There's a lot of insider hate being directed towards Jeb's selfish, greed-obsessed, incompetent hatchet man, Mike Murphy.

Yet others say it’s unfair to solely blame Bush-- and that Rubio is just as culpable. Despite winning the support of an array of deep-pocketed donors, including hedge fund manager Paul Singer and tech titan Larry Ellison, Rubio has and his allies have done little to attack Trump. Of the $33 million that Rubio and the super PACs supporting him have spent on television ads, none of it has been against Trump. He rarely tweets about Trump, and when asked about him in interviews, Rubio tends to dodge the question.

“He has been afraid to criticize Trump for fear of being attacked unless directly put on the spot by a reporter,” said Tim Miller, a Bush spokesman.

Still others fault Ted Cruz, who spent months cuddling up to Trump in hopes of scooping up his supporters. Only this week, as he saw his lead slipping away in Iowa, did Cruz and several of his super PACs launch hard-hitting TV ads castigating the Manhattan billionaire as a New York liberal who couldn’t be trusted on hot-button social issues like abortion.

The anti-Trump barrage may be too little, too late, many Republicans fear.

“Cruz's crew should’ve done it. It was incredibly shortsighted. The longer [Trump] goes, the harder he is to kill,” said Brad Todd, a veteran Republican strategist who until recently worked for a super PAC that supported Bobby Jindal’s presidential campaign. “Now they are locked in a death match with a short clock, and their money is worth less than it would be when the air was clear and Trump's fans were just flirting.”

But it’s not just campaigns that are coming under fire-- it’s also donors, many of whom were presented with the opportunity to go after Trump but didn’t pull the trigger. Among those pushing to launch a serious anti-Trump campaign was Alex Castellanos, a veteran GOP strategist who was a top adviser to Mitt Romney. Last year, Castellanos visited a number of top GOP donors, operatives and lobbyists in an attempt to find financial support for a proposed TV ad campaign that was to cost in the eight-figure range.

Often a carrying a personal laptop into meetings, Castellanos laid out a detailed plan for a negative ad blitz against Trump, casting him as a flawed strongman. Yet those familiar with the effort say Castellanos, who spent hours venturing into New York and Washington offices, was met with disinterest from donors, who gave a variety of reasons for not wanting to open their checkbooks. Some predicted that Trump would collapse by the sheer weight of political gravity. Others said they had business interests with the front-runner, or expressed fear of retribution.

“Some donors are wonderful, but others have been saps during this entire process,” said Anderson. “If you want to know how to lose elections, the first people who you should talk to are the Republican Party’s major donors.”

Much frustration has been directed at the RNC, which some believe has been pushed around by the party’s surprise poll-leader. Last year, many cringed when RNC Chairman Reince Priebus traveled to New York City to meet with Trump when he signed a pledge to support the eventual GOP nominee. And when the RNC dropped National Review last week as a sponsor for a forthcoming debate, fans of the magazine’s anti-Trump special issue saw fear at work.

“My sense is that most rational RNC members hope Trump is not our nominee but do not want to upset him in case he is the GOP nominee,” said Al Cardenas, a former Florida Republican Party and American Conservative Union chairman who supports Bush. “The challenge is that while the RNC and others play this strategy out, the odds improve that Trump will be the nominee without an organized opposition to his candidacy beyond his rivals in the primary.”

...Sally Bradshaw, a longtime top Bush adviser who helped write the report, blamed a "lack of courage in our party" for the failure to take on Trump, as Bush has. She called Trump a “bigot” and said he “couldn’t unite our party and bring women, Hispanics and independent voters into the fold.”

“We won’t beat Hillary Clinton with Donald Trump as the nominee,” she added. “It doesn’t take a whiz-bang political data scientist to figure that out."

They're still sitting around with their fingers up their asses as their party has been hijacked. Jeb's newest theme is that Trumpf isn't a true Christian, the same ugly accusation Huckabee's SuperPAC (funded by Ronald Cameron, a rich chicken processor from Little Rock and Sharon Herschend owner/operator of Dollywood, Silver Dollar City in Branson, Wild Adventures in Valdosta, Georgia, the Harlem Globetrotters brand, Ride the Ducks, and Stone Mountain, the Confederate Mount Rushmore and a birthplace of the KKK) is making about Ted Cruz. Watch this hideous ad running in Iowa and you'll understand why it was so easy for a hustler from New York to take the Republican Party right out of their hands without breaking a sweat:



Right-wing nut Jonah Goldberg, writing in the L.A. Times was weeping bitterly over the conservative crackup-- the loss of the right's philosophical coherence and its s imminent demise-- he sees roiling his dark horrible world. He blames Herr Trumpf-- and the "fierce internecine battle over whether to oppose Trump's run, passively accept his popularity, or zealously support his bid."

The level of distrust among many of the different factions of the conservative coalition has never been higher, at least not in my experience. Arguments don't seem to matter, only motives do... [T]he GOP establishment has become so corrupted, its members would knowingly reject a savior just to protect their comfortable way of life... There's no shortage of reasons for why the right is at war over whether or not to take a flier on Trump. All of the various establishments and the counter-establishments over-promised and under-delivered in recent years. Cruz and his supporters accused his fellow politicians of being corrupt sell-outs and so many people believed him, they'd now rather take a gamble on Trump than back Cruz, a mere politician.

Eric Boehlert has been more than happy to explain how the Republican Party is getting burned by the implosion of the right-wing noise machine. "What's inescapable about the mounting GOP hand wringing," he wrote, "is that Trump is a right-wing media creation. He's flourishing on the fertile playing field of bigotry and resentment that National Review, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and a litany of others, have helped seed for many years. There's little doubt that during President Obama's two terms they cultivated an anti-intellectual movement that now appears poised to seize control of the Republican Party." And their civil war is getting bloodier by the way.

On one side, Trump's denounced as a "vicious demagogue," a "con man," a "glib egomaniac," and "the very epitome of vulgarity." On the other side, Trump's army has derided National Review as out of touch, and accused the magazine of cozying up to "open border zealots," a cardinal sin on the right.

None of that disguises the fact that Trump is the monster the Noise Machine created by encouraging bigoted and dishonest forces within the conservative movement; by giving credence to the three year Benghazi cover-up charade, the two year IRS witch hunt, by fueling ugly passions about Obama wanting to take away everyone's guns, and by arguing he's uninterested in defending America's national security.

For years, lots of conservative pundits and talkers cashed large, and in some cases very large, paychecks feeding this ugly beast. Now the beast is beyond their control and they're going to whine all the way to New Hampshire?

Call it the perils of Obama Derangement Syndrome.

Conservative John Ziegler saw this media-enable crack-up coming months ago:

Thanks to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Matt Drudge, Sarah Palin, a website named "Breitbart," and certain elements of Fox News (all of whom have both pushed and ridden the Trump bandwagon for selfish commercial purposes), the conservative base is living under several important delusions which has allowed for "Trumpsanity" to foster and grow.

The Right Wing Noise Machine was revved up to 11 during the Obama years in an effort to destroy his presidency. In the end, the Noise Machine's lasting contribution, in the form of a Trump nominee, may be assuring that Obama hands the White House over to another Democrat.

The Republican Civil War-- As Seen Through Two Very Different Sets Of Eyes

And then there will be this to contend with...

Many Republicans are distraught that Trump has dragged their party back into the mud and slime of racism, bigotry and ugly communal hatred. This is what Reince Priebus' autopsy after the Romney debacle was supposed to prevent. Primitive hatemongers like Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee could never have done it by themselves, but the celebrity and marketing power of Trump isn't something the Republican Establishment was banking on. He's redefining the Republican brand-- or sharpening the definition that the party elites have tried to gloss over and play down-- as a party steeped in negativity, xenophobia, Know-Nothingness and a natural and smooth kinship with the KKK and Nazi Party. Today's CNN/ORC poll shows Trump still in first place-- only more so. With Establishment candidates like Jeb (down 4 to 9%), Kasich (down 3 to 2%), Rubio (down 5 to 3%) and Walker (down 3 to 5%) disappearing as serious contenders, Trump surged from 24% August 16 to 32% today.

Some Democratic observers-- like Michael Tomasky at the Daily Beast-- can hardly believe their good fortune and are sitting back ordering more buttered popcorn. And a Republican or two-- well, Canadian conservative David Frum-- see the opportunity for dragging the GOP into modernity. 

Let's start with Tomasky, who is enjoying the blood feud that's erupted between the distraught GOP elites and the sweaty Trumpians and other assorted white supremacists who attacked Jonah Goldberg for his doubts of the efficacy of the Trumpoid Apocalypse.

Commenters on the article were venomous: Go ahead, you RINO-quisling-sellout (or, occasionally, you dastardly Jew), who needs you anyway? This comment was representative, and even a little quasi-poetic: “So Blow and Rage, Jonah, Blow into the winter night, strut and fret your rabid slobber onto the stage, idiot-like until you are flattened by the Trump steamroller-- of course we will be forced to hear more of your shout and flabberting, but it won’t mean a thing. I hope the Republican Party collapses so we can get on with partnering with something that is not so diseased that its internal organs are melting into a pus-fulled [sic] syrup that is oozing out of every…whatever.”

...[F]or people like me, this is definitely pass-the-popcorn time. What better entertainment could there possibly be than watching American conservatism being wrecked by a bunch of white nationalists?

American conservatism has spent decades winking at these kinds of groups and voters-- denouncing them very occasionally when caught red-handed playing in the same sandbox, as when a white Southern Republican is forced to explain that gosh, he didn’t know the local citizens’ council was a white supremacist group; but for the most part courting these voters and stoking their anxieties through means sometimes subtle, sometimes not. So let them tear each other apart.

The amusing thing is, Goldberg actually makes some good points in his newsletter piece, mainly that Trump isn’t much of a conservative on a number of issues. About that, he is correct.

But if he can’t instantly grasp how modern conservatism made Trump-- and not only Trump, but even more importantly, the people who are now his rabid supporters-- then I doubt it can be explained at a level of remediation that will sink in. But it’s pretty simple. When Steve King jokes about people crossing the border with their cantaloupe-sized calves full of bags of weed, he’s creating Trump and Trump’s backers. And multiply that times 300 for every crazy-borderline racist comment in recent years by Michele Bachmann and Rush Limbaugh and all the rest of them, and you get a party and a movement whose nudges at that kind of thing have done far more to create Trump and his supporters than the occasional faux-solemn and perfunctory denunciations have done to thwart them. So this problem of white nationalism bubbling uncomfortably close to the surface is one the Republican Party and the conservative movement have deserved to have for a long time now.

Mind you I don’t think liberals should be gloating too much about this yet. It’s way too hard to predict what all this will mean for the election. In all likelihood, Trump won’t have the votes to win the nomination, John Kasich or Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush will, and the Trump voters will mostly start getting themselves worked up about the looming menace of President Hillary and come out and vote for the sellout RINOs they’re now repudiating at #NRORevolt.

But let’s say that at some point, we do see a real civil war in the Republican Party over all this, and the time comes when GOP leaders need to own up to a Joe McCarthy kind of moment—that is, a moment when they are finally forced to step forward and say Donald, we don’t want you or your more extreme supporters. The National Review itself did a version of this, of course, back in the old days under Bill Buckley, when it said much the same to John Birch Society types.

But the Review was just a magazine. It lost some subscribers, I’m sure, but not the White House. For a political party the stakes are a little higher, and I don’t think today’s GOP would have the stones to do it. The party is stuck with Trump and his backers. It created them.

Don't pass any popcorn Frum's way; he's fretting, not gloating, although he does see a silver lining in the nightmare scenario Trump has unleashed on his party. He claims to feel the disappointment and frustration with the GOP Establishment that the great unwashed mass of racists, bigots and low-info paranoids are expressing with their support of Trumpy. "Donald Trump," he asserts (with dogged hope and a trace of trepidation), "was propelled into first place among Republicans in July 2015 much more by anger against the party’s existing leadership than by any attraction he exerted on his own." 

Proof? Hate Talk Radio icon Mark Levin:

Senator Mitch McConnell and Representatives John Boehner and Karl Rove and their ilk …. You’re sick of them. You’re sick of them not doing what you elected them to do. You’re sick of them lying to you. You’re sick of them attacking everybody who doesn’t agree with them through their surrogates. You’re sick of how they treat people who dare to challenge them in Republican primaries … You’re tired of so-called conservative commentators on TV and elsewhere who serve as their surrogates ... You don’t feel you have a home and you don’t feel that there’s a party that stands up for you. 

You go, girl! The hateful, hate-filled GOP rank and file eats this kind of stuff up.

Whatever happens to the Trump candidacy-- almost certainly nothing good-- the insurrectionary mood inside the Republican Party will not easily be quieted. More than 40 percent of Republicans want illegal immigrants deported. The party’s best-funded candidates are committed to some kind of pathway to citizenship. More than a fifth of Republicans believe the wealthy wield too much political power.

The forces that have worked to render the GOP a minority party remain at work:

The Radicalization of the Baby-Boom Generation as It Enters Its Sixties

Through most of their life cycle, the people born between 1945 and 1960 expressed more liberal views than people born between 1930 and 1945. That abruptly changed in 2007-2008, as the economy boomers aged, the economy crashed, and Barack Obama was elected president. The boomers, a cohort more than 70 percent white, face retirement at a time when there don’t seem sufficient public resources for everyone-- and under an administration that seems to regard non-poor retirees as a group to be redistributed from, not to.

The Assertiveness of the GOP’s Wealthy Donor Class

Limits on political giving have vanished as potential givers have amassed unprecedented wealth. Those givers differ on almost every issue from non-givers in their party on almost every imaginable issue. Unsurprisingly, the givers tend to get their way most of the time. Unsurprisingly, the non-givers resent it.

The Emergence of a Conservative Entertainment Complex

The entertainment complex appeals to a very small slice of the country--but it can make or break political careers within a larger Republican party. The only counterweight against it is the power of huge money from a narrow class of mega-donors.

After the Fox debate, I received an email from an old friend who advises one of the Republican Party’s very largest donors. I quote an extract with his permission:

This is the first time I've ever done anything but throw cold water on this idea, but I think the Republican Party is about to split.

The establishment's utter failure to even consider what Trump's rise means, much less how the Republican Party must accommodate Trump supporters rather than the other way around, means a split. And a good thing, too.

I have never voted anything other than straight-ticket Republican ticket in my life, nor ever considered doing so. But I think I'd be happy to cast one for Trump as a protest vote.

But, but, but … I wanted to say to my friend, you and your boss are the Republican establishment, or at least two of its very most important members! If we’ve reached the point where even the establishment hates the establishment, the mood is dangerous indeed.

More popcorn; more buttah! 

And if you missed Jonathan Chait's New York column yesterday, it's all about Jeb doubling down on much of what the base hates about the GOP. "George W. Bush," he wrote, "passed a sweeping across-the-board tax cut in 2001, promising his plan would promote faster economic growth while still allowing budget surpluses."

Instead, Bush’s plan brought back the structural deficits that had disappeared during the 1990s, along with a mediocre recovery that was itself inflated by a housing bubble, the popping of which culminated in the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression. You might think that the brother of that guy would go out of his way to prove that he has different ideas for fiscal policy. Instead, Jeb Bush has unveiled his tax-cut plan, and it’s the same thing his brother did, only more extreme. 

As in extremely bad for working families... and, ultimately, of course, the economy and the nation. I doubt any of the esteemed writers quoted above will agree, but there really is only one logical response to this, one that will change the paradigm.