Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

What's in a name? I've often found the origins of surnames interesting. They often have something to do with a long, long ago relative's occupation, even the family business or the city the family came from. For instance, in England, Coopers were barrel makers and Arrowsmiths made arrows. In Italy, people named DiNapoli came from Naples, etc. So, it was with some amusement the other day when I came upon tonight's meme. My amusement is even doubled by the fact that the surname of Trump isn't even the Trump family's real name. It's the one they chose!

As we know, the Trump Crime Family's real surname is Drumpf. It was reportedly changed to Trump by Señor Trumpanzee's grandfather Friederick Trump who first came to America in the 19th century. It is said that he felt Trump sounded less obviously German and wanted to make the change at a time when German immigrants were unpopular and looked down upon. Oh! The Irony!

The name Drumpf apparently has no particular meaning. The variant name Trumpf, however, does. It is German for trump card. In card games, a trump card is a resource, thing of value played as a last second trick used to gain a surprise advantage; as in Russia is Trump's trump card, perhaps?

But what of the name that the Trump family actually goes by? Trump Tower does have a better ring to it than Drumpf Tower, although, Drumpf Dungeon would be nice. Well, it turns out, as tonight's meme indicates, when one drops the f from Trumpf and looks at the variants, one now sees something that has been hiding in plain sight for decades and decades. Although one of the uses of the word trump does relate to Trumpf or trump card, ie. dependable or triumph, trump and its variants also have a completely apt current meaning. It means useless, nonsense, or deceitful; again, trickery (sort of like doing a deal with a contractor and not paying the contractor, or, promising other things you have no intention of delivering). The current negative meaning appears to be traceable to the French word tromper which means to deceive. That in turn probably comes from a longstanding view of the Germans held by the French. There is even an old English meaning that is also quite apt. In England, since the 16th century the word trump has meant breaking wind. The Trumps unwittingly chose a name that relates to what they actually are. Ladies and Gentlemen, President Donald J. Fart.

Prediction: Over time, words and names gather up additional meanings, as even tonight's meme and this post indicate; even changing meanings altogether. Often these meanings stem from historical events or traits associated with the word or name. When one realizes that, it's not hard to imagine what the name and word Trump might mean in the near future. Pendejo? Rancid? Sleazy Scumbag? Moron (as used by some of Trump's own staff)? Nazi? Dirtbag? Buffoonish asshole? The negative possibilities are endless. I can even see Trump become synonymous with an awful and fatal mental disease; as in Sorry, you have Trump Syndrome. How bad will the meaning of the future of the Trump name be? Will it even exist or will it be disappeared by those who bear it and be just left to historical mentions. Ever look up the name Hitler in your phone book? It's not there.

Who Likes Herr Trumpf? It May Shock You To Find Out

When presumptive Republican nominee, Herr Trumpf, remarks ominously-- as he often does-- that he hasn't even started on Hillary yet, what he means is that he hasn't started tearing the most ethically flawed Democratic nominee in decades to shreds. There is as much material for him to use to brand her with as is there for the Democrats-- who aren't nearly as good at it as he is-- to use to brand him with. If these two sub-par candidates is the best their parties can do, America is in more trouble than most scholars have supposed.

Thursday, three scholars-- Alan Abramowitz, Ronald Rapoport and Walter Stone-- penned a guest post for Sabato's Crytsal Ball which provides some valuable insight into why Herr Trumpf is winning and what the impact of that win will be on the GOP. And... it's not just the racism and bigotry per se. Herr Trumpf, they wrote "has achieved his frontrunner status by appealing to a large group of Republican voters who are fed up with their party’s established leadership" and they see him as the "most divisive" frontrunner.

In their research, they asked respondents (Republican and independent voters) to rate the major Republican candidates on a seven-point scale with ratings of "superior," "far above average," "slightly above average," "average," "slightly below average," "far below average," and "poor." Of all of the major candidates, Trump received the highest percentage of "superior" and "far above average" ratings and the highest percentage of "far below average" and "poor" ratings. That indicates the roots of divisiveness. And here's how it could play out: "a large proportion of Republican voters indicated that if Trump is the Republican nominee they would defect to an independent mainstream conservative candidate in the general election. Given a choice of voting for Donald Trump as the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney as an independent, or Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee, only 64% of Republican voters chose Trump while 30% chose Romney and 6% chose Clinton. Among those not supporting Trump for the Republican nomination, Romney actually led Trump by 46% to 45% with 9% choosing Clinton." So why the great divergence of opinion among GOP voters? They examined the relationship between Trump support and a variety of factors that have been identified as possibly explaining reactions to Trump’s candidacy: authoritarianism, nativism and economic liberalism.

We measured authoritarianism by asking respondents to agree or disagree with the statement that “what this country needs is a strong leader to shake things up in Washington.” Fifty-nine percent of Republican voters strongly agreed with this statement and among that group, 50% ranked Trump first and only 14% ranked him last. In contrast, among the 17% of Republican voters who were classified as low on authoritarianism by either agreeing only slightly or disagreeing with this statement, only 20% ranked Trump first and 48% ranked him last.

Nativism was measured by three questions asking respondents to agree or disagree with a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States, a proposal to build a wall along the Mexican border, and a proposal to deport all illegal immigrants currently living in the United States. All three proposals elicited strong support from Republican voters. In fact, there was a higher degree of consensus on these issues than on any of the economic or cultural issues in our survey. Fifty-one percent of Republican voters strongly favored building a wall along the Mexican border, 57% strongly favored deporting illegal immigrants, and 37% strongly favored a temporary ban on Muslims entering the U.S. Fully 28% of Republican voters strongly favored all three of these proposals.

...[N]ativist attitudes were very strongly related to where respondents ranked Donald Trump. Among those scoring low on nativism, only 16% ranked Trump first while 47% ranked him last. In contrast, among those scoring high on nativism, 60% ranked Trump first and only 6% ranked him last. Nativist attitudes were, in fact, the single strongest predictor of support for Trump.

In addition to authoritarianism and nativism, economic attitudes also predicted support for Trump. In contrast to most other Republican presidential candidates and, indeed, most other prominent Republican officeholders, Trump has sometimes veered from conservative orthodoxy on economic issues. For example, he has publicly opposed cuts in Social Security and Medicare or plans to privatize either of these entitlement programs. He has, at times, suggested that wealthy Americans should pay higher taxes, although the official tax plan released by his campaign actually called for significant cuts in taxes on the wealthy. Finally, even as he has joined all of the other major presidential candidates in calling for repealing Obamacare, Trump has repeatedly promised to replace it with something “amazing” that would preserve many of its benefits and occasionally hinted that he agreed with the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate-- a position that he subsequently walked back.

...Republican voters were actually quite divided on these issues with a large proportion taking the liberal side in opposition to the position of most Republican leaders. Fully 68% of Republican voters were opposed to cutting spending on Social Security and Medicare to reduce the deficit, 56% favored raising taxes on households with incomes above $250,000, and 39% favored raising the minimum wage... [E]conomic liberalism was related to whether respondents ranked Trump first among our 11 GOP candidates but not to whether they ranked him last. Fifty-one percent of those who scored high on economic liberalism ranked Trump first compared with only 23% of those who scored low on economic liberalism... [R]eactions to Trump’s candidacy among Republican voters reflect his message-- a combination of negative attitudes toward outgroups such as Muslims and immigrants and support for some liberal economic policies that benefit the middle class. In other words, Trump is running as a kind of populist.

...The combination of these three predictors [nativism, economic liberalism and authoritarianism] provides a powerful explanation of support for Donald Trump among Republican voters. The percentage of Republican voters choosing Trump as their first choice ranges from only 5% among those at the low end of the scale to 71% among those at the high end of the scale.

Why Trump loves the poorly educated (and the less affluent)

These findings raise an additional question: What kinds of Republican voters tend to score highest on the factors that predict Trump support-- nativism, economic liberalism and authoritarianism? Many commentators on this year’s GOP primaries have noted that Trump generally does best among Republicans with lower incomes and less formal schooling. Trump recently reinforced this idea by stating that “I love the poorly educated.”

Our results help to explain why Trump loves “the poorly educated.” They provide support for the conclusion that Trump receives support disproportionately, though by no means exclusively, from Republicans with less schooling and lower incomes. The results for education are especially striking-- in our sample, Trump was supported by 46% of those who did not graduate from college versus only 30% of those who graduated from college. In terms of family income, he was supported by 44% of those with family incomes of less than $50,000, an identical 44% of those with family incomes of between $50,000 and $100,000 but only 30% of those with family incomes of greater than $100,000.

Our data help to explain why Trump does best among those with lower incomes and less formal schooling. The results... show that these characteristics are associated with all three predictors of Trump support: Better educated and more affluent Republicans tend to score lower on nativism, economic liberalism, and authoritarianism. Once we control for these attitudinal predispositions, there is little relationship between Trump support and either education or family income. Less educated and lower income Republicans disproportionately support Trump because they score higher on nativism, economic liberalism, and authoritarianism.

Our findings help to explain why Republican leaders have been struggling to find a way to block Trump’s nomination. They also help to explain why they have, so far, had little success in this effort. Trump is a uniquely divisive candidate within the Republican Party. He receives both intense support and intense opposition from Republican voters. As a result, his nomination would likely present a severe challenge to party unity.

Our findings indicate that Trump’s strong performance in national polls and in Republican primaries to date reflects the fact that a large proportion of Republican voters agree with his message and approve of his authoritarian style of leadership. The strongest part of that message is clearly hostility toward outgroups including Mexican immigrants and Muslims, and the large majority of Republican voters agree with Trump on these issues. Trump’s supporters are also not traditional small government, low tax conservatives. He appeals strongly to a large group of Republican voters with relatively liberal views on certain economic issue-- views that are clearly out of step with the positions of most Republican Party leaders and elected officials. For all of these reasons a Trump candidacy would almost certainly produce serious divisions among GOP leaders and voters, potentially leading to the election of a Democratic president and major Republican losses in down-ballot contests, including key U.S. Senate races.

I'm still not entirely ready to give up on my own theory that hardcore Trumpf funs are primarily life's losers with no hope and no stake in building anything for the future.

Did You Know Herr Trumpf Owns A Modeling Agency?

Herr Trumpf, the Republican Party front-runner, is very hands on with his modeling agency, which imports foreign models and uses them as slaves.

He founded the firm, Trump Model Management, in 1999. Paris Hilton and Isabella Rossellini were two of their models. So was Melania, now Herr's wife and a potential First Lady. He uses the H-1B visa program to import them, which has proven very profitable. You may recall that Herr Trumpf has been an outspoken critic of the program and beat up on Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and, at a debate, on Little Marco, knowing full-well it was part of his own business model (fraud).

Trump is now the object of a class action lawsuit that exposes him for luring foreign models to America with inflated promsies of fame and fortune, which, like all Trump promises, were never delivered on. The girls were promised-- contractually-- between $75,000 and $400,000 a year and, after scam-like deductions for Herr Trumpf's operation, wound up with starvation wages. less than $5,000 for three years of work, for example.

A judge will decide by the end of this month whether to proceed with a proposed class action lawsuit filed by a Jamaican fashion model against Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump's modeling agency, the judge's office said.

Alexia Palmer accuses Trump Model Management LLC of lying to the federal government in its work-visa application that said she would be paid a $75,000-a-year salary while living in the United States, according to court documents.

Instead, according to court papers, Palmer received a total of $3,880.75 during the three years she was under contract with the agency. The complaint alleges “fraudulent misrepresentation” and violations of U.S. immigration and labor laws. It asks for $225,000 in back pay.

The suit was originally filed in October 2014. A decision on a pending motion by Trump Model Management to dismiss is expected by the end of March, the clerk for Judge Analisa Torres, who is presiding over the case in the U.S District Court, Southern District, told Reuters.

If Torres rules the case can proceed, it could revive attention on Trump’s foreign labor practices at a time when the celebrity billionaire's rise in American politics has riveted the world’s attention.

Trump’s lawyers have called the case "frivolous" and "without merit." In court documents, they said Palmer wasn’t an employee and was more than adequately compensated for a “very brief stint as a fashion model,” which they say amounted to less than 10 days of work over three years.

"No exceptions," he says on his campaign website

The crooked attorney who represents Trump is his frivolous law suits against anyone he ever gets into business with claims Palmer wasn't treated like a slave at all. "Anything she's saying about being treated as a slave is completely untrue. The greater demand for the model, the better that model does. In the case of the individual you're talking about, there wasn't-- unfortunately-- a lot of demand for the model." ABC News noted that "Palmer’s case comes as Trump is increasingly being questioned by his political rivals about his treatment of women and immigrants, and specifically, his frequent use of the guest worker visa known as H-1B. Both Republican presidential candidates Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz took swipes at Trump about his use of foreign workers under the visa program. Trump has vacillated on the subject, defending his use of H-1B visas at his country club resorts, saying American workers would not be willing to take seasonal jobs as waiters and dish washers. He disavowed and then renewed his support for a position laid out in a recent statement, which called for an end to “rampant, widespread H-1B abuse.”

Herr Trumpf: "I'm Not A Settler"... He Is A Liar Though

The point of watching Herr's Trumpf's statement above is really to show whomever doesn't already know, that he's either delusional or a bold-faced liar... or both. We'll get to the lies in a moment. But if you've been watching TV as much as Herr Trumpf does, you've seen the "settler" ads he subliminally referenced a couple times in his statement. You noticed, right? "And you know what? The United States should fight back also. We shouldn't just be settlers, we should fight back. And do what's right."



Trumpf seems rattled by the traction that Trump-University-As-Scam seems to be getting. It's starting to become part of the national collective unconscious and sooner or later-- unless he can derail the narrative-- it's going to start penetrating down to news and information bottom feeders (his usually impervious base). Herr Trumpf's claims not withstanding-- and the bold-faced lie in the top video about the Better Business Bureau faxing him a copy of an "A" credit rating-- Trump University's final rating was D-minus. PolitiFact decided to do a full-blown investigation to get to the bottom of the conflicting claims. Predictably, they found Herr Trumpf a liar once again.

Republican frontrunner Donald Trump’s challengers have called him many things; add to that list the charge from Florida Sen. Marco Rubio that Trump is a con man. Rubio's recent attacks have focused on allegations of false marketing by Trump University.

It wasn’t a real university-- and had to change its name to Trump Entrepreneur Institute because of that. It was largely a seminar program that promised to teach its students the real estate secrets that turned Trump into a billionaire. With some participants paying as much as $35,000, the project drew investigations and lawsuits in at least three states.

The university registered as a private company in New York in October 2004 and largely shut down by 2011. When NBC host Chuck Todd raised issues with the university, Trump defended the program, noting that nearly all the students thought it was "great."

"They signed these documents saying, they rated the course, 98 percent approval rating and high marks," Trump said on Meet the Press on Feb. 28, 2016. And he added, "We have an A from the Better Business Bureau."

We went to the Better Business Bureau website and saw that as of today, the Trump Entrepreneur Institute has no rating. The website explained, "This business has no rating because BBB has information indicating it is out of business."

Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks told us, "When the school was operational it was rated A."

We asked Hicks to document that rating and didn’t hear back.

Katherine Hutt, director of communications for the Council of Better Business Bureaus, said that as a matter of policy, they don’t provide any ratings from previous years. But the organization issued a statement that "Over the years, the company’s BBB rating has fluctuated between an A+ and a D-."

We don’t know when the bureau might have given Trump University a top grade, but based on the Internet Archive, the last time the Better Business Bureau gave the university any rating at all was 2010, when it give it a D-minus. That assessment showed up in plenty of news articles.

That year, the New York Daily News reported that "the Better Business Bureau in January slapped a D-minus rating on Trump U., a rating now under review after Trump U. objected."

CBS News said the same thing in an April 21, 2010, article.

And in May, 2011, the New York Times wrote "The Better Business Bureau gave the school a D-minus for 2010, its second-lowest grade, after receiving 23 complaints."

The Washington Post had the same information in May 2011 when it reported that the New York State Attorney General was investigating the Trump Entrepreneur Institute. The Attorney General’s Office did file charges but stumbled on the grounds that the statute of limitations had passed.  The matter is under appeal.

Under the new name Trump Entrepreneur Initiative, ratings ranged from C to B between 2012 and 2014. We found no ratings at all for the past two years.

Our ruling

Trump said about his entrepreneur institute that "we have an ‘A’ from the Better Business Bureau." Literally speaking, that is inaccurate. The Better Business Bureau gives the program no rating today because it’s no longer a going concern.

Trump University had an A at some point. The Better Business Bureau doesn't release details of its past ratings, but it did say Trump's program had ratings that ranged from A+ to D-.

What we do know, from several published reports and archived Web pages, is that the university had a D in 2010 and under its new name, had ratings ranging from C to B, with no ratings after March 2014.

Trump’s claim is literally wrong and also ignores the university’s lower Better Business Bureau scores. We rate it False.

Last night he bragged about Trump Steaks-- a defunct company-- which he claimed was being served at his victory party. The meat at the party came from a Bush Brothers outlet in West Palm Beach. His water company serves branded Trump water in "his" hotels and golf courses, but it's just another scam-- water from Village Springs Water in Willington, Connecticut, where they have a business of slapping anyone's private label on their bottles, which they do for local convenience stores, bar-mitzvahs and for anyone seeking to impress someone into thinking they have their own bottled water. Despite his statements last night, Trump Vodka is long closed down, Trump Magazine is just a fancy sales brochure for the Mar-a-Lago Club, and Trump Airlines in now just Herr Force One.

Puncturing the Trumpf publicity bubble will come into play in a big way as part of the establishment rationale for denying him the nomination in July at the brokered convention where they hope to foist Paul Ryan on the GOP as the "compromise" candidate. Writing for the Washington Post yesterday from the Republican Governors Association meeting in Utah, Philip Rucker and Robert Costa asserted that the establishment's "slow-bleed strategy is risky and hinges on Trump losing Florida, Illinois and Ohio on March 15; wins in all three would set him on track to amass the majority of delegates. Even as some party figures see glimmers of hope that Trump can be overtaken, others believe any stop-Trump efforts could prove futile."

With Ryan hiding coyly behind the curtain, some worry that you can't beat a force of nature like Trumpf with no one-- and "no one" pretty much defines Rubio and Cruz. The modern world is looking very unfriendly to the GOP governors. Utah's Gary Herbert: "We’ve got this Enquirer magazine mentality. We are subject to this reality-TV voyeurism that is taking place. Fast-food headlines, no substance, all flash. The Twitter atmosphere out there, snarky comments on email, Snapchat. Everything is superficial. . . We’ve got to wake up, America."



American ­Future Fund is trying to wake up Florida with a series of ads highlighting the victims of Trump University. Our Principles PAC is on the attack in Florida and plans to run ads in Ohio and Illinois attacking Herr Trumpf as a jobs outsourcer. One of the super-rich Republicans paying for the ads is Randy Kendrick, wife of the owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks, who said she was moved to act by Trump’s provocative rhetoric. "Dictators arose because good people did not stand up and say, 'It’s wrong to scapegoat minorities.'"

Our Principles PAC is the biggest spender against Herr so far and as of March 7 they had deployed $8,438,485 against him. This list of expenditures from the last 2 weeks doesn't look like a winning strategy to me though:

Is Mr. Trump A Bad Man?

Monday morning, the Newster, clumbsily misreading Romney's intentions through the prism of his own blind ambition, went on Fox and Friends to declare Romney would never be the GOP nominee because of the anti-Herr Trumpf speech he gave. Gingrich, who has been sucking up to Trumpf the way he always sucks up to wealthy people who might write him a check, missed the point of Romney's speech: 1- to save the GOP and the nation from Trumpf (and an authoritarian and fascist turn) and 2- to help prepare the ground for a Paul Ryan nomination.

Republican fat-cats were buoyed by Herr Trumpf's wobbly performance at the Michigan debate last week and then his relatively poor showing at the GOP contests over the weekend, in which in lost Maine and Kansas to Cruz and Puerto Rico to Rubio and just scraped by in Louisiana and Kentucky (with an 18-18 delegate split with Cruz in Louisiana and a 17-15 split with him in Kentucky, 14 more delegates going to Rubio and Kasich). The Kansas loss was especially interesting:

• Cruz- 35,207 (48.2%) and 24 delegates
• Herr Trumpf- 17,062 (23.3%) and 9 delegates
• Rubio- 12,189 (16.7%) and 6 delegates
• Kasich- 7,795 (10.7%) and 1 delegate

Cruz won all 4 congressional districts, the 4th (Wichita) with nearly 60% to Trumpf's 22%. This doesn't look like a daisy-strewn path to the nomination. But tonight we'll find out if Michigan makes Herr look like a winner again. Although the Fox poll that was taken after the Detroit debate shows Trumpf lost 5 points in a week, he's still the prohibitive frontrunner:

• Herr Trumpf- 42% (down 5 points)
• Kasich- 19.6% (up 6 points)
• Cruz- 19.3% (up 5 points)
• Little Marco- 9% (down 6 points)

Still, the NY Times reported yesterday that the rich Republican sugar daddies are riding to the rescue of the GOP establishment, checks in hand, now that they sense Trumpf is wounded, perhaps fatally.

Republicans hoping to halt Donald J. Trump’s march to their party’s presidential nomination emerged from the weekend’s voting contests newly emboldened by Mr. Trump’s uneven electoral performance and by some nascent signs that he may be peaking with voters.

Outside groups are moving to deploy more than $10 million in new attack ads across Florida and millions more in Illinois, casting Mr. Trump as a liberal, a huckster and a draft dodger. Mr. Trump’s reed-thin organization appears to be catching up with him, suggesting he could be at a disadvantage if he is forced into a protracted slog for delegates.

Shane Goldmacher and Alex Isenstadt reported for Politico that the fat cats are ready to ante up $25 million, not $10 million! Half that money is actually pro-Rubio money trying to save his campaign from imploding in Florida. Nixon's former Jew counter, GOP in-house Nazi Fred Malek, scoffed from his perch at the Republican Governors Association that "it's too little, too late." But with Rubio rapidly sinking into oblivion-- having bravely taken a bullet by jumping into the sewer with Trumpf to take him on on his own terms-- the establishment lane is looking more and more like a road to nowhere... unless they can really pull off a deadlock, brokered convention and sneak Paul Ryan in as the "compromise" candidate.

Ted Cruz’s emergence as the best-placed alternative has complicated the anti-Trump movement’s push to find financiers. Many top Republicans, especially in those Washington, see Cruz as just as objectionable as Trump.

"It is why it has been so difficult to get an anti-Trump campaign together,” confided one top Republican strategist, who opposes both men. "If the ultimate beneficiary of anti-Trump efforts is Ted Cruz, the effort itself is probably not worthwhile.”

..."The establishment and the Right-- normally at each other’s throats-- have laid down their swords to prevent Donald Trump from hijacking the conservative movement and the Republican party in one fell swoop,” said the strategist. "I do think we have enough time. There’s a lot of paddles in the water but it's an extremely intense current and it’s upstream.”

Monday Jane Eisner, the editor-in-chief of the Jewish Daily Forward, asked the question many American Jews have been worrying about: Is Herr Trumpf Really A Hitler-Style Fascist? She surveyed Holocaust survivors, who she found nervous, not only by what the buffoon says but by the ignorant and hate-filled following of aggrieved losers he's amassed.

“I am very worried about what he says. I am much more worried by how it’s received,” Münzer told me in a phone interview from his Washington, D.C., home, as voters in nearby Virginia went to the polls and handed Trump another Super Tuesday victory. “The fact that he’s been able to attract these huge numbers of people, so full of hate-- I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anything quite like this.”

Münzer, 74, is a volunteer at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and takes part in two different monthly groups with other survivors, who are politically engaged and vocal about it. “The topic [Trump] comes up all the time,” he said. “These are people of a variety of political stripes, but on this issue, I really think there is unanimity.”

Münzer, a retired physician, traces his abhorrence and fear of Trump back to his experience as a very young child when the Nazis targeted Jews for extinction. “I owe my life to a Muslim Indonesian woman in Holland who risked her life to save me,” he recalled. “Anyone who singles out any kind of community for hate, I find appalling.”

Another survivor who volunteers at the museum, Halina Yasharoff Peabody, told me that she, too, finds herself in a unique state of apprehension over Trump’s candidacy. She was seven when the war broke out in Poland and survived only by the sheer guts and cunning of her mother, who secured false papers so that she and her two daughters could live as Catholics.

“He wants to be a dictator. We’ve had dictators and that can’t be good,” Peabody told me in a phone interview. “It seems unreal, what is happening. I don’t understand how people can follow a person who doesn’t know what the law is.”

Intellectually, I can dismiss their concerns. My innate skepticism and, frankly, my respect for American culture and history, make me want to reject the simplistic analogies of Trump to, say, Adolf Hitler. Hitler was motivated by a clear, if twisted, ideology; Trump’s “policies” are often just spontaneous pronouncements, without any coherence other than to demonize the other and make himself the answer to all that needs fixing in America today.

Hitler exploited a nation brought to its knees by a crippling world war and a severe depression; America was brought back from economic ruin by the very president Trump seeks to succeed in office, and despite rhetoric to the contrary, this country still has the world’s most powerful economy and military. Hitler skillfully leveraged state-sponsored violence against its own citizens; Trump’s self-centered campaign, ugly though it is, has no such mechanism at its disposal.

What struck me in speaking with these survivors is the way the Trump phenomenon has shaken their otherwise persistent faith in an America that they fled to for its tolerance and its ideals. “I came here for freedom,” Peabody said. “I don’t want not to be able to express myself.”

Even at this raw moment, I don’t envision those freedoms disappearing-- and in fact, I’m proud of the many Jews, Republicans included, who are unequivocally repudiating Trump’s statements and tactics.

Still, I asked Peabody if she feels particularly vulnerable as a Jew. “I’m worried about every minority. I do know that my minority is always attacked. They always find me a good scapegoat,” she replied. “There is a lot of anger in the world, but this is no way to correct it.”

Does Herr Trumpf Deserve A Second Look?

I yesterday's NY Times Maureen Dowd referred to Herr Trumpf as "a master of bling and bluster" and admits she's flown on Herr Force One. "No one," she wrote, "is more shocked at how far, how fast, Trump has come than Trump. Watching him morph into a pol in real time and wriggle away from the junior-varsity G.O.P. chuckleheads trying to tackle him is hypnotic. He’s like the blond alien in the 1995 movie Species, who mutates from ova to adult in months, regenerating and reconfiguring at warp speed to escape the establishment, kill everyone in sight and eliminate the human race... Trump really wants to be president. It isn’t a joke any more."

The most enjoyable thing about the Trump phenomenon has been watching him make monkeys out of a lot of people who had it coming.

Marco Rubio, a frothy focus-grouped concoction whose main qualifications to be president consist of a nice smile and an easy wit, has been mocking Trump as a con man.

Real estate developers are con men by nature, trying to get what they want at the lowest price and sell it at the highest price, overpromising how great it’s going to be... It’s delicious watching the neocon men who tricked the country and gulled the naïve W. into the Iraq invasion go ballistic trying to stop the Gotham con man.

...It’s amazing, having been tainted by the worst foreign policy disaster in American history, that the Republican national security intelligentsia would unite against a Trump presidency in an open letter, charging that he would “make America less safe” and “diminish our standing in the world.” Sort of like the Iraq invasion?

...It’s delightful to see the encrusted political king-making class utter a primal scream as Trump smashes their golden apple cart. He’s a real threat to the cozy, greedy, oleaginous cartel, their own Creature from the Black Lagoon.

For all the Republican establishment’s self-righteous bleating, Trump is nothing more than an unvarnished, cruder version. For years, it has fanned, stoked and exploited the worst angels among the nativists, racists, Pharisees and angry white men, concurring in anti-immigrant measures, restricting minority voting, whipping up anti-Planned Parenthood hysteria and enabling gun nuts.

How lame was it that after saying he was a crazy choice, Rubio, Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan and John McCain turned around and said they will support Trump if he’s the nominee?

...He has a tenuous relationship with the truth and an inch-deep understanding of policy. Although it is compelling when he says he would surround himself with an A team in the White House, his campaign is not chock-a-block with A-team players. On Friday, his team put out a press release saying Trump would campaign this weekend in a town called “Witchita” in the state of “Kanasas.” And he has not brought on heavyweights who could bring him up to speed on substance.

Nor is it only the pundits who are ringing the alarm bells about Herr. Linda Drake's story ran in yesterday's New York Daily News, just another ordinary American ripped off by the fast-talking, bloviating billionaire-- predatory, fast-talking, bloviating billionaire. She and her husband invested almost a quarter million dollars in one his luxury condo complexes and got nothing for it but a legal battle.

On Face The Nation yesterday, Cruz shared his visions of a dark conspiracy of a media with "bombshells" that will bring Trumpf down but that they are saving so the GOP destroys itself and allows everybody's favorite corporate shill to win the White House. Cruz, more a receptionist than a kook: "I think an awful lot of reporters-- I can't tell you how many media outlets I hear, you know, have this great exposé on Donald, on different aspects of his business dealings or his past, but they said, 'You know what? We're going to hold it to June or July. We're not going to run it now.' ... And all of the attacks on Donald that the media is not talking about now, you'd better believe come September, October, November-- if he were the nominee-- every day on the nightly news would be taking Donald apart... Donald may be the only person on the face of the planet that Hillary Clinton can beat," especially with the drip drip drip of these bombshells that are being hidden until the general election when Cruz predicts there will be "singular focus of the media... [W]e've been burned by that before. We're not interested in losing again, particularly when the stakes, I think, are catastrophic." Cruz is clearly becoming unhinged-- which will make him a more viable primary candidate.

Professional rightists-- like Hate Talk Radio host Limbaugh and NY Times wingnut Douthat-- are all over the map, groping for a comfortable postion. On Fox New Sunday yesterday, Limbaugh said "with the case of Trump, there’s a much bigger upside than downside." while Douthat wrote he thinks the country should be grateful to Herr for showing us how authoritarianism works, how it seduces, and ultimately how it wins, his caveat being "God willing-- he’s doing it in a way that’s sufficiently chaotic, ridiculous and ultimately unpopular that he will pass from the scene without actually taking power, leaving us to absorb the lessons of his rise."

That rise has four building blocks. First, his strongest supporters have entirely legitimate grievances. The core of that support is a white working class that the Democratic Party has half-abandoned and the Republican Party has poorly served — a cohort facing social breakdown and economic stagnation, and stuck with a liberal party offering condescension and open borders and a conservative party offering foreign quagmires and capital gains tax cuts. Trump’s support is broader than just these voters, but they’re the reason he’s a phenomenon, a force.

Second, you have the opportunists-- the politicians and media figures who have seen some advantage from elevating Trump. The first wave of these boosters, including Ted Cruz and various talk radio hosts, clearly imagined that Trump would flare and die, and by being in his corner early they could win his voters later, or gain his fans as listeners. But the next wave, upon us now, thinks that Trump is here to stay, and their hope is to join his inner circle (if they’re politicians), shape his policy proposals (if they’re idea peddlers), or be the voice of the Trump era (if they’re Sean Hannity).

There is no real ideological consistency to this group: Trump’s expanding circle of apologists includes Sarah Palin and Steve Forbes, Mike Huckabee and Chris Christie; he has anti-immigration populists and Wall Street supply-siders, True Conservatives and self-conscious moderates, evangelical preachers and avowed white nationalists. The only common threads are cynicism, ambition and a sense of Trump as a ticket to influence they couldn’t get any other way.

Then third, you have the institutionalists-- less cynical, not at all enamored of Trump, but unwilling to do all that much to stop him. These are people who mostly just want Republican politics to go back to normal, who fear risk and breakage and schism too much to go all in against him.

The institutionalists include the party apparatchiks who imagine they can manage and constrain Trump if he gets the nomination. They include the donors who’ve been reluctant to fund the kind of scorched-earth assault that the Democrats surely have waiting. They include the rivals who denounce Trump as a con artist but promise to vote for him in the fall. They include Republicans who keep telling themselves stories about how Trump will appoint conservative justices or Trump is expanding the party to pretend that Trump versus Hillary would be a normal sort of vote. And they even include the occasional liberal convinced that Trump-the-dealmaker is someone the Democrats can eventually do business with.

Then, finally, you have the inevitabilists-- not Trump supporters, but Trump enablers, who encourage the institutionalists in their paralysis by acting and talking as if the support of 35 percent of the primary electorate means Trump Cannot Be Stopped.

Some inevitabilists are intoxicated with celebrity and star power. Cable news is riddled with such voices, who daily manifest Orwell’s dictum, “Power worship blurs political judgment,” so that, “Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.”

Others, especially in the intelligentsia, have a kind of highbrow nihilism about our politics, a sense that American democracy’s decadence-- or the Republican Party’s decadence, in particular-- is so advanced that a cleansing Trumpian fire might be just the thing we need... Fortunately Trump’s fire should still be contained, by the wider electorate if not by his hapless party. Fortunately he’s still more a comic-opera demagogue than a clear and present danger.

Insurance... in case Trumpf does make it through the primary, Democrats should not take a chance on as fatally flawed a candidate as Hillary Clinton is. She is distrusted and disliked by independents and without there votes, she isn't going to the White House. Bernie out-performs her in every head-to-head general election matchup. You can support him here... and you should.

More On The Nature Of Conservatism And Herr Trumpf

This is really a continuation of the 6AM post on the easily verifiable catastrophe of Republican Party governance. Even the over-hyped Texas economy-- all statewide officers are Republicans and the Texas state Senate has 20 Republicans and 11 Democrats and the state House has 98 Republicans and 52 Democrats-- has started crumbling, the victims of GOP ideological nonsense in action. As the price of oil tanked, Texas' hollowed out economy started collapsing as though the state was a whiter version of Nigeria and run by the same kind of crackpots.

In his NY Times column Friday, in-house Republican David Brooks celebrated Romney's fusillade against Herr Trumpf. "[N]ow," he wrote, "finally-- at long last-- major Republicans are raising their heads and highlighting Trump’s actual vulnerability: his inability to think for an extended time about anybody but himself." True enough, but isn't that the very nature of political conservatism? Isn't that the whole ugly crux of it? Herr Trumpf admits his role model is P.T. Barnum; the GOP hasn't evolved enough to face that fact about itself.

He seduces people with his confidence and his promises. People invest time, love and money in him. But in the end he cares only about himself. He betrays those who trust him and leaves them high and dry.

Actual honest conservatives have a candidate they should be backing: Hillary Clinton. A former Republican who still admits that "I feel like my political beliefs are rooted in the conservatism that I was raised with... I'm very proud that I was a Goldwater Girl." And that pride is reflected in her political career. Personally, I'm a liberal and I would never vote for her but with the Republican Party having already descended into an outright reactionary morass, Republicans might as well help spark the political realignment and embrace her. Brooks' ugly description of Trumpf's business practices makes Little Marco's point that Herr is nothing but a con-man and a scammer. But isn't that exactly what the Republican Party's version of conservatism has become?

Start with Trump University, where Trump betrayed schoolteachers and others who dreamed of building a better life for themselves.

Trump billed his university as a place people could go to learn everything necessary about real estate investing. According to a 2013 lawsuit filed by New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, more than 5,000 people paid $40 million, a quarter of which went to Trump himself.

Internal Trump University documents suggest that the university wasn’t really oriented around teaching, but rather around luring customers into buying more and more courses.

According to the New York lawsuit, instructors filled out course evaluations themselves or had students fill out the non-anonymous forms in front of them, pressuring them into giving positive reviews. During breaks students were told to call their credit card companies to increase their credit limits. They were given a script encouraging them to exaggerate their incomes. The Better Business Bureau gave the school a D- rating in 2010.

“They lure you in with false promises,” one student, Patricia Murphy, told The Times in 2011. Murphy said she had spent about $12,000 on Trump University classes, much of it racked up on her credit cards. “I was scammed,” she said.

The barrage can continue with Trump Mortgage. On the campaign trail, Trump tells people he saw the mortgage crisis coming. “I told a lot of people,” he has said, “and I was right. You know, I’m pretty good at that stuff.”

Trump’s biggest lies are the ones he tells himself. The reality is that Trump opened his mortgage company in 2006. Others smelled a bubble, but not Trump. “I think it’s a great time to start a mortgage company,” he told CNBC. “The real estate market is going to be very strong for a long time to come.”

Part of the operation was a boiler room where people cold-called clients, sometimes pushing subprime loans and offering easy approval.

Jennifer McGovern had trusted Trump and went to work for him. But she got stiffed in the end. In 2008 a New York State Supreme Court judge ordered Trump Mortgage to pay her the $298,274 she was owed. The bill wasn’t paid. “The company was set up in a way that we could never recover what we were owed,” she told the Washington Post.

The stories can go on and on. The betrayal of investors when his casino businesses went bankrupt. The betrayal of his first wife with his flagrant public affair with Marla Maples. The betrayal of American workers when he decided to hire illegals. The people left in the wake of other debacles: Trump Air, Trump Vodka, Trump Financial, etc.

These weren’t just risks that went bad. They were shams, built like his campaign around empty promises and on Trump’s fragile and overweening pride.

The burden of responsibility now falls on Republican officials, elected and nonelected, at all levels. For years they have built relationships in their communities, earned the right to be heard. If they now feel that Donald Trump would be a reckless and dangerous president, then they have a responsibility to their country to tell those people the truth, to rally all their energies against this man.

It will be quite the trick to make a logical case against Herr Trumpf without dragging the Republican Party through the same mud and muck. Trump Steaks spent more money on packaging-- classy gold embossed boxes-- than on the frozen third rate meat they shipped out in them... just like the bill of goods Republican state governments have sold to the voters of Wisconsin, Michigan, Louisiana, Georgia, Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Indiana, Kansas, Alabama, North Carolina and the rest. Don't want that for America? Neither do I. We can do something about it here.

Referring To Herr Trumpf's Fans As "Life's Losers" Isn't Going To Win Them Over

Yesterday Jim Webb, a sometime Democratic, but not really a Democrat, who flirted briefly with running for president as a Democrat, announced on Morning Joe-- he certainly went to the perfect venue-- that he would not be voting for Hillary Clinton if she wins the Democratic nomination, but that he is still open to voting for Herr Trumpf. His chief strategist, Mudcat Sanders, has also announced that he wouldn't be voting for Hillary either. They both feel she'll just be a continuation of Obama's policies, although neither talked about which Obama policies need to be changed. During his single term in the Senate, Webb was a kind of right-of-center populist. I think most Democrats were relieved when he threw up his hands and term-limited himself. Whenever someone wants to throw around the name of a Republican-friendly conservative Democrat for a nomination, Webb's name is always at the top of the list. Some of the monsters who dominate the Clinton campaign have been touting him lately. At least that's over!

Webb seemed to be willing to enable Trumpf's racism and xenophobia; sounded very much like... Jim Webb. "The reason Donald Trump is getting so much support right now is not because of the 'racist' (dismissive air quotes) etc etc. It's because a certain group of people are seeing him as the only one who has the courage to step forward and say 'we've got to clean up the stables of the American governmental system right now. We've got to make it work.'" I wonder if Webb is a heroin addict.

The day before, George Lakoff had warned that in order to push back effectively against Trump it is essential to understand his appeal. "Arguing against him," he wrote, "just helps him." Lakoff's essay-- excerpts of which are below-- divides American politics between the Nurturant Parent family (progressive) and the Strict Father family (conservative). He helps his readers understand Trump's popular appeal from the perspective of cognitive and brain sciences, his field.

 

Why Trump?
-by George Lakoff

Donald Trump is winning Republican presidential primaries at such a great rate that he seems likely to become the next Republican presidential nominee and perhaps the next president. Democrats have little understanding of why he is winning-- and winning handily, and even many Republicans don't see him as a Republican and are trying to stop him, but don't know how. There are various theories: People are angry and he speaks to their anger. People don't think much of Congress and want a non-politician. Both may be true. But why? What are the details? And Why Trump?

Many people are mystified. He seems to have come out of nowhere. His positions on issues don't fit a common mold.

He likes Planned Parenthood, Social Security, and Medicare, which are not standard Republican positions. Republicans hate eminent domain (the taking of private property by the government) and love the Trans-Pacific Partnership (the TPP trade deal), but he has the opposite views on both. He is not religious and scorns religious practices, yet the Evangelicals (that is, the white Evangelicals) love him. He thinks health insurance and pharmaceutical companies, as well as military contractors, are making too much profit and wants to change that. He insults major voting groups, e.g., Latinos, when most Republicans are trying to court them. He wants to deport 11 million immigrants without papers and thinks he can. He wants to stop all Muslims from entering the country. What is going on?

...In the strict father family, father knows best. He knows right from wrong and has the ultimate authority to make sure his children and his spouse do what he says, which is taken to be what is right. Many conservative spouses accept this worldview, uphold the father’s authority, and are strict in those realms of family life that they are in charge of. When his children disobey, it is his moral duty to punish them painfully enough so that, to avoid punishment, they will obey him (do what is right) and not just do what feels good. Through physical discipline they are supposed to become disciplined, internally strong, and able to prosper in the external world. What if they don’t prosper? That means they are not disciplined, and therefore cannot be moral, and so deserve their poverty. This reasoning shows up in conservative politics in which the poor are seen as lazy and undeserving, and the rich as deserving their wealth. Responsibility is thus taken to be personal responsibility not social responsibility. What you become is only up to you; society has nothing to do with it. You are responsible for yourself, not for others-- who are responsible for themselves.

As the legendary Green Bay Packers coach, Vince Lombardi, said, “Winning isn’t everything. It's the only thing.” In a world governed by personal responsibility and discipline, those who win deserve to win. Why does Donald Trump publicly insult other candidates and political leaders mercilessly? Quite simply, because he knows he can win an onstage TV insult game. In strict conservative eyes, that makes him a formidable winning candidate who deserves to be a winning candidate. Electoral competition is seen as a battle. Insults that stick are seen as victories-- deserved victories.

Consider Trump’s statement that John McCain is not a war hero. The reasoning: McCain got shot down. Heroes are winners. They defeat big bad guys. They don't get shot down. People who get shot down, beaten up, and stuck in a cage are losers, not winners.

The strict father logic extends further. The basic idea is that authority is justified by morality (the strict father version), and that, in a well-ordered world, there should be (and traditionally has been) a moral hierarchy in which those who have traditionally dominated should dominate. The hierarchy is: God above Man, Man above Nature, The Disciplined (Strong) above the Undisciplined (Weak), The Rich above the Poor, Employers above Employees, Adults above Children, Western culture above other cultures, Our Country above other countries. The hierarchy extends to: Men above women, Whites above Nonwhites, Christians above nonChristians, Straights above Gays. We see these tendencies in most of the Republican presidential candidates, as well as in Trump, and on the whole, conservative policies flow from the strict father worldview and this hierarchy.

...Direct causation is dealing with a problem via direct action. Systemic causation recognizes that many problems arise from the system they are in and must be dealt with via systemic causation. Systemic causation has four versions: A chain of direct causes. Interacting direct causes (or chains of direct causes). Feedback loops. And probabilistic causes. Systemic causation in global warming explains why global warming over the Pacific can produce huge snowstorms in Washington DC: masses of highly energized water molecules evaporate over the Pacific, blow to the Northeast and over the North Pole and come down in winter over the East coast and parts of the Midwest as masses of snow. Systemic causation has chains of direct causes, interacting causes, feedback loops, and probabilistic causes-- often combined.

Direct causation is easy to understand, and appears to be represented in the grammars of all languages around the world. Systemic causation is more complex and is not represented in the grammar of any language. It just has to be learned.

Empirical research has shown that conservatives tend to reason with direct causation and that progressives have a much easier time reasoning with systemic causation. The reason is thought to be that, in the strict father model, the father expects the child or spouse to respond directly to an order and that refusal should be punished as swiftly and directly as possible.

Many of Trump’s policy proposals are framed in terms of direct causation.

Immigrants are flooding in from Mexico-- build a wall to stop them. For all the immigrants who have entered illegally, just deport them-- even if there are 11 million of them working throughout the economy and living throughout the country. The cure for gun violence is to have a gun ready to directly shoot the shooter. To stop jobs from going to Asia where labor costs are lower and cheaper goods flood the market here, the solution is direct: put a huge tariff on those goods so they are more expensive than goods made here. To save money on pharmaceuticals, have the largest consumer-- the government-- take bids for the lowest prices. If Isis is making money on Iraqi oil, send US troops to Iraq to take control of the oil. Threaten Isis leaders by assassinating their family members (even if this is a war crime). To get information from terrorist suspects, use water-boarding, or even worse torture methods. If a few terrorists might be coming with Muslim refugees, just stop allowing all Muslims into the country. All this makes sense to direct causation thinkers, but not those who see the immense difficulties and dire consequences of such actions due to the complexities of systemic causation.

There are at least tens of millions of conservatives in America who share strict father morality and its moral hierarchy. Many of them are poor or middle class and many are white men who see themselves as superior to immigrants, nonwhites, women, nonChristians, gays-- and people who rely on public assistance. In other words, they are what liberals would call “bigots.” For many years, such bigotry has not been publicly acceptable, especially as more immigrants have arrived, as the country has become less white, as more women have become educated and moved into the workplace, and as gays have become more visible and gay marriage acceptable. As liberal anti-bigotry organizations have loudly pointed out and made a public issue of the unAmerican nature of such bigotry, those conservatives have felt more and more oppressed by what they call “political correctness”-- public pressure against their views and against what they see as “free speech.” This has become exaggerated since 911, when anti-Muslim feelings became strong. The election of President Barack Hussein Obama created outrage among those conservatives, and they refused to see him as a legitimate American (as in the birther movement), much less as a legitimate authority, especially as his liberal views contradicted almost everything else they believe as conservatives.

Donald Trump expresses out loud everything they feel-- with force, aggression, anger, and no shame. All they have to do is support and vote for Trump and they don’t even have to express their ‘politically incorrect’ views, since he does it for them and his victories make those views respectable. He is their champion. He gives them a sense of self-respect, authority, and the possibility of power.

Whenever you hear the words “political correctness” remember this.


There is no middle in American politics. There are moderates, but there is no ideology of the moderate, no single ideology that all moderates agree on. A moderate conservative has some progressive positions on issues, though they vary from person to person. Similarly, a moderate progressive has some conservative positions on issues, again varying from person to person. In short, moderates have both political moral worldviews, but mostly use one of them. Those two moral worldviews in general contradict each other. How can they reside in the same brain at the same time?

Both are characterized in the brain by neural circuitry. They are linked by a commonplace circuit: mutual inhibition. When one is turned on the other is turned off; when one is strengthened, the other is weakened. What turns them on or off? Language that fits that worldview activates that worldview, strengthening it, while turning off the other worldview and weakening it. The more Trump’s views are discussed in the media, the more they are activated and the stronger they get, both in the minds of hardcore conservatives and in the minds of moderate progressives.

This is true even if you are attacking Trump’s views. The reason is that negating a frame activates that frame, as I pointed out in the book Don’t Think of an Elephant! It doesn't matter if you are promoting Trump or attacking Trump, you are helping Trump.

A good example of Trump winning with progressive biconceptuals includes certain unionized workers. Many union members are strict fathers at home or in their private life. They believe in “traditional family values”-- a conservative code word-- and they may identify with winners.

Why Has Trump been Winning in the Republican Primaries?

Look at all the conservatives groups he appeals to!

The Democratic Party has not been taking seriously many of the reasons for Trump’s support and the range of that support. And the media has not been discussing many of the reasons for Trump’s support. That needs to change.

There are about 15 million hard core Trumpf fans participating in the Republican primaries and caucuses. That may be enough to win him his party's nomination. But he'll need another 50 million to win the general election. Hillary is a strong primary candidate. Low-info Democrats are voting for her as much as low-info voters are voting for him. But in the general election, she's as bad a candidate as the Democrats could field. She is the establish, went and the status quo at a time when voters crave real change. She is one of the least trusted politicians in the country and independents don't like her at all and won't vote for her. You want to make sure the next president is not Herr Trumpf, please consider tapping on the thermometer and doing what you can. It helps... a lot.