One reason I grow weary of the focus people place on the personalities and even (to a degree) the character of our presidential nominees is that winning control of the executive branch is always about a lot more than that. Either you’re on the left or you’re not. And if you want to understand what was lost in this election, just look at the rules that will go away. For example, let’s just look at energy-related issues.
Immediately after the election, EPA took preliminary steps toward regulating methane releases from oil and natural gas production — even though Trump’s win means that the overall effort to rein in the potent greenhouse gas is most likely doomed. In addition, the Fish and Wildlife Service released the final version of updated rules governing almost 1,700 oil and gas wells inside national wildlife refuges, and the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management released a major rule on leases for wind and solar projects on federal land.
Interior also released a final rule to limit fracking-related methane pollution on public lands a week after the election, prompting oil industry groups to file a lawsuit within minutes. And by Dec. 1, EPA faces a court-ordered deadline to propose a rule requiring companies that mine for minerals like gold and silver to demonstrate they can afford to clean up any pollution they cause. EPA is also awaiting White House approval for a rule governing emergency preparedness at chemical plants, in response to incidents such as a deadly 2013 fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas.
It’s not just that Trump and the Republican Congress will gut all these rules in favor of polluters and climate warmers, the judges they appoint and confirm will move in the same direction.
But Hillary gave a speech to Goldman Sachs and isn’t likable enough, so fuck everything!
It doesn’t work like that.
I probably weigh character higher than policy, assuming there’s a serious character defect. Character is extraordinarily important in a president. But the defect has to be highly significant to overcome the massive difference between what a Republican in the White House gives us compared to a Democrat. Clinton never met that standard, or even came close to meeting it.
Obviously, Trump’s defects were so great and so glaringly obvious that he lost the support of everyone from right-wing newspaper editorial boards to the foreign policy establishment to Glenn Beck.
In his case, it was justifiable to conclude that policy be damned, this man should not be president. In Clinton’s case, anyone who came to that conclusion was simply wrong, and we will all pay the consequences.
Oh, we have yet to plumb the depths of what the Trump Administration will destroy. He showed himself during the campaign to be a pandering, self-serving, scientifically unaware whore who will happily hand over the keys to the monsters who would ruin and reverse any progress we’ve made toward energy and conservation.
Every time I consider what will be done on any number of issues, I feel sick at my stomach. And he’s not even in the White House yet.
I think he’s still angry about the dressing down, fun-making at the Correspondents Dinner. In his gut (not his brain) he wants to erase the Obama presidency.
Yes,
And I think what he wants more than anything is for Obama to have to publicly submit to him, in the same way Romney has, only X 10. Trump will eventually manipulate a scenario where it appears Obama has to genuflect, and the media will completely jump on board.
.
Oh, he’ll ask Obama — publicly — to join his administration.
As ambassador to Kenya.
Such a wonderful opportunity to renew those family ties in his native land, doncha know.
No way is gang likes Obama’s 50%+ approval rating. They’ll do everything they can to bring that down.
Late night messages of the ‘Far worse than I thought! Terrible!’ can be expected.
Maybe a post inaugural meeting with Obama in front of the press that suddenly goes south, and Obama has to stand there…..like Trump had to sit there at the dinner.
.
On the other hand, there’s this story today on CNN.com:
http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/27/politics/donald-trump-obama-phone-call/index.html
Truth or spin? Given how shaken Trump looked at the end of his first post-election meeting with Obama, who I’m sure will do everything he can to minimize damage despite his personal feelings, I think it might actually be true.
Though I daresay Trump’s inner circle gang would prefer to see the upstart Kenyan humiliated.
To keep his yuuuge ego properly inflated to supersize proportions, Donald relies on surprise and contrarianism -for its own sake.
He imagines this shows intellectual independence, open-minded magnamity and ideological reversibility, aka pragmatism.
It doesn’t. It looks like bluff on steroids.
Maybe he’s hoping some of Obama’s suave savvy will rub off on him.
Trump does seem to realize he’s profoundly out of his depth, and I would expect he’ll tap Obama for advice for some time. But that will, at best, sand off a few nasty parts of a very large horror and the overwhelming majority of Trump’s disastrous ideas and cronies will remain.
Hate to say it but I think you’re spot on.
When I saw your headline I thought you were referring to the 4,000 people Trump will appoint to senior government and regulatory positions. Collectively, they can do more harm than any one man ever could. So far lobbyists, industry insiders, climate change deniers, anti-semites (Arabs are a semitic people too), privatisers and old time GOP cronies and donors seem to be in prime position for preferment. So much for the “outsider” image the media helped him create.
When you look at candidates, analysts should look at the coalitions of interests they represent and who they would bring with them into power. Unfortunately to focus on “character” and personality obscures this. In Trump’s case this means old money, oil & gas, real estate, and military industrial complex are in the ascendency. It’s hard to see how this can lead to a better future for any but a few favoured few.
Amazing what a monarchist people my Americans are, always looking for that One Leader who will “inspire” us and unable to take any interest in parties and programs, and how that’s encouraged by the political journalists.
It’s a function of the decline of civic humanism. I’m not kidding. When I went to school we were really imbued with that. We were taught how the government works and the history of our country. Our parents went through the Depression and WW2 — we hear a lot about it.
You want to see something chillingly prescient, watch this short clip of David Souter in 2012, “On Civic Ignorance — This Is How Democracy Dies.”
http://crooksandliars.com/2016/10/justice-david-souter-civic-ignorance-how
We have to deal with this problem through political organizing.
I saw that Souter thing recently on TV for some reason, don’t remember exactly when or where. Yes, chilling.
I have a problem seeing “old money” in either campaign. Where did the Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Ford, and all the other fabled old money go this election.
The moneyed interests in this election looked all very much alive and not inherited at all, save Trump himself and the Koch Brothers.
Yes, we should have candidates campaign with the logos of their major sponsors on their clothing. Then we would have seen more than the Trump label on Trump.
I was using the term old money in a slightly different sense – to reflect old industry – military, manufacturing, oil, real estate, corporate law etc, – rather than new high tech, robotics, ICT, Pharma, financial services. Rust belt rather than silicon valley.
The old money was behind Clinton. Money but no life. They’ve been heading this way since 1963.
It reminds me of those lines from Yeats,
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,
and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
Don’t lose heart, it’s not the first time those lines have been apt. At the same time things are getting worse, other things are getting better. Flowers push up on the wasted ground.
It is truly aswful, and Trump never really got pressed much during the campaign about who he would bring into his administration. In hindsight, maybe the Democrats should have pushed this angle more, but honestly, do you think the average rust belt voter gives much of a shit about who the secretary of state in the next administration is going to be?
And really, don’t you think maybe Hillary’s failure to more fully embrace a $15 an hour minimum wage, or perhaps her inability to even show up to Wisconsin might have had as much to do with her loss in the rust belt than anything else?
And when you have Chuck Schumer bragging that Democrats were going to pick up two moderate Republicans for every blue collar vote they lost you have pretty strong evidence that they made some very bad decisions this election cycle. And really, that’s what upsets me the most about this eleciton- a series of very bad decisions by establishment Democrats essentially doomed us all. God help us.
And yet they never ever get the blame and still have credibility.
It was very hard during the campaign for the press or the Dems to focus much on anything but personality. Trump held out a different very shiny object almost every day. He is a master of legerdemain. He also wore his criticisms as a badge of honor. But, overall, Clinton didn’t run a very good campaign imho.
It was very hard during the campaign for the press or the Dems to focus much on anything but personality.
They chose to do that though, the Democrats did. They could have exclusively focused on him fucking the small businessman and stuff like that but didn’t. Sure they ran some commercials centered around that but they ran tons more saying Trump was unfit to be President.
Not only don’t they give a shit who the next Secretary of State is going to be, most of them don’t even know what a Secretary of State is.
“don’t you think maybe Hillary’s failure to more fully embrace a $15 an hour minimum wage, or perhaps her inability to even show up to Wisconsin might have had as much to do with her loss in the rust belt than anything else?”
Yes I do, that and a thousand other things like that. They’re all symptoms of an underlying rot.
That was a very unfortunate quote by Schumer, but I’m not going to write him off just yet. For ezample, he voted against NAFTA and he is a good friend of Bernie Sanders. Maybe he feels liberated now, just like Elizabeth Warren and lots of others.
“A series of very bad decisions by establishment Democrats essentially doomed us all.” Essentially true. But who really made the decisions? There was definitely a group think, which is a different kind of thing. And then there were people that pretended to go along because, for whatever reason, they didn’t want to buck the system.
But yeah, that is exactly what happened. Only it’s not the first time, it’s just the worst time.
We elect a glorious, shimmering Idea.
Then turn on it.
Then try and find a more glorious one.
It’s what Democrats do.
Grayson.
Part of the Grayson/Wiener — or was it Wiener/Grayson? — ticket that was going to challenge Obama for the nomination from the left in 2012…
Haha, yeah! If they’d done that, we’d be screwed right now!
Whew. Bullet dodged.
The quaint term for “gang” is machine. BooMan, glad you reminded us that the 4000 people or so in the Plum Book positions come along with the candidate we are voting for. And that these are the parking places for most of the campaign staff, donors, and major volunteer organizers.
In an election of battling interests it is helpful to understand which interests backed which candidates. Clinton’s close relationship with traditional Wall Street firms and TBTF banks were a drag on her campaign, but Trump’s surrounding himself with casino operators, construction companies, natural resources companies, and hedge funds were not. Trump maintained the image that as an independently wealthy billionaire, he was above being bought. The casinos, hedge funds, construction companies, and natural resource companies won. That is what is scary about Trump when climate change is the number one problem and the economy is also the number one problem. A massive infrastructure program that makes exactly the wrong infrastructure investments possible–those that further strip-mine the planet and build sprawling urban areas into wastelands that further appall his exurban base.
Clinton’s case was damaged by the people we could imagine as part of her machine. Trump sowed the illusion that he was running without a machine, just on his own in a singularly overwhelmingly and yugely successful feat of personal mastery.
The Clinton Russian gambit was so confusing to voters unaware of what Russia is or has become that it did not register or it opened the path for Trump’s humble foreign policy shtick.
For the moment, it looks like the GOP used the strategy of having Trump as a President, using the Vice-President’s spot as Cheney did to create a Prime Minister role within the US government. Pence is that prime minister; he will drive a lot of the domestic policy while Trump uses foreign and national security policy to “make America Great again”. Economic and environmental policy are within Pence’s purview as is all of the culture war items. Flynn likely is effectively foreign minister, as Henry Kissinger was for Richard Nixon.
Were it not for the spoils in jobs and contracts, how fast would the Trump administration get rid of the Departments of:
Education
Labor
Health and Human Services
Housing and Urban Development
Transportation
Interior
Agriculture
and:
Environmental Protection Agency
Federal Communications Commission
Federal Election Commission
Security and Exchange Commission
National Endowment for the Arts
National Science Foundation
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
The latest education reform has already effectively eliminated the Department of Education. It’s still there, but it doesn’t have much authority anymore – it’s been devolved to the states.
It always was mostly devolved to the states. It was best at special emphases, like mandating serving disabled students.
We elect a Party, not a person. There, I fixed it for you; and the wonder is that it has not been universally obvious for lo these decades. Individual candidates do not exist; their names may as well not even appear on the ballot. Scrutin de liste, bitches!
For the civil servants who report to the gang that Trump puts in place and others who will continue to have authority after January 20.
Masha Gessen, NY Review of Books: Trump: The Choice We Face
We cannot depend on our Democratic elected officials to do this, so steeped in realism and pragmatic action are they. But for us personally, this is what it might come down to. Watch for your own excuses.
I cannot disagree more with that quote.
The argument that Clinton made was Trump was a bad person and you should note vote for him.
When you take a step back and look at the swings in the places where both places fought, it becomes apparent this strategy failed.
We need to talk about peoples lives and how to help, and how Trump is going to hurt them.
We have to make it about THEIR lives, not some moralistic point we want to make.
As I have thought over the last 3 weeks, I think was the fundamental mistake that was made. People are scared for their future. They want jobs, and a government that will protect them from what the believe are foreign enemies.
Gessen seems to want to preach at the public.
It won’t work. Because it does not spring from an understanding of the problems Americans face.
It is out of touch.
I’m not sure I agree with you. I read Geeson’s linked piece here as advice on how we must prepare ourselves to survive in a Trump Presidency. It goes way beyond jobs. It goes to survival of our democracy and our freedom. That is now the threat that Trump’s Presidency now poses. Too many Americans are viewing him in the light of prior President elects. He ain’t one.
You’re talking about the 2016 election campaign and theoretical political campaigns to come. TarheelDem is pointing us toward what will happen on January 21st and the days after.
Gessen is not preaching in that quote. The tone of her essay is very somber; I recommend you read it so you catch it in context.
What she’s presenting is the opportunity for Americans to avoid the need to seek their own Nuremberg Defenses in the future.
Look, I don’t come at this conclusion easily. I come at it after observing Trump’s Cabinet nominees and Administrative appointments, and the behaviors Trump and his sycophantic followers have taken on since his Electoral College victory.
Those appointments and nominees are extreme radicals; the KKK, Alex Jones, the Heritage Foundation and ALEC are 100% satisfied by the plan. Many of their followers would be only too happy to be deputized to eliminate the enemies of the nation. We are responsible for our own reactions to the worst, much of which may come before the midterm elections. Forming rhetoric for a election campaign plan is not the only thing we need to be thinking about now.
Today we see a particularly chilling example of totalitarian behavior:
http://jezebel.com/trump-a-sore-winner-baselessly-attributes-popular-vot-1789408942
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally
12:30 PM – 27 Nov 2016
Sure, Trump’s clownish. But we also see in this and other evidence a particularly vicious plan forming to disenfranchise millions and millions of American citizens who represent Hillary’s majority voter blocs, people Trump and his movement have been speaking about in extremely dehumanizing ways for a while now.
If Democratic Party voters are considered illegal as a class, what is possible then? If the accountability of the ballot box were taken even more substantially than it already has, can we doubt that Trump would wish to break out the truncheons?
What each of us will do if Trump orders the metaphorical (or real) railroad cars to collect the vermin is something we should be thinking through now. History shows that these plans are executed quickly. Will we cooperate? Will some of us be identified as the enemy?
On January 20 at 12:30 pm (approximately) the primary and overriding problem that the US people will face is Donald J. Trump and his gang. Gessen in his previous post and in this one is telling how to deal with an authoritarian kleptocrat based on his experiences with Putin and on dealing with Nazis with his grandfather’s experience as a member of a Judenrat in the 1930s.
When there is a repressive regime, the choice between collaboration and resistance becomes very fuzzy and problematic. Read the article at the link. The quoted section will make more sense.
At the moment the establishment (media and political) is normalizing a Trump presidency, thinking he can be housebroken. Sarah Kendzior and Masha Gessen see the situation differently and think the Trump gang is using the desire for normalization to lull the opposition into openness for a rapid transformation of reality by the Trump regime. They argue that it is resistance now rather than later that will make resistance possible.
Given how Trump moved through the Republican primary field and the general election, I share their pessimism. We are in for an unprecedented hard time ahead.
WHY did the public disagree?
The argument was not nearly as obvious as you suggest to significant numbers of the young and the less educated who voted for Obama and did NOT vote for Clinton.
I swear I read stuff like this everywhere. And it really at this point is just clueless.
IT IS DENIAL.
It fundamentally misreads why people vote the way they do.
People want THEIR OWN lives to be better. Clinton’s defects led significant numbers who voted for Obama to vote for Trump because they did not trust her.
People just don’t get it. These arguments lost.
They don’t matter. Newspaper endorsements do not matter. Elite opinion does not matter.
Why should it matter? Did any of these people get Iraq right? Did they call the financial crisis? Did any of these people suggest Trump could win 48 hours before he did?
Why should anyone put stock in the ideas of people who though Clinton was a 99% favorite to win?
The establishment has been discredited. If that is the “gang” you want in power good luck with that.
Look – I underestimated Trump too.
But if you are going to try to understand the next four years by hanging on to a world view that failed 3 weeks ago, you are going to be continually surprised.
Who will be taking the oath again?
“It fundamentally misreads why people vote the way they do.”
I think you’re doing the same, a bit. Yes, people want their own lives to be better. But not just materially: emotionally better works, too. That’s what Trump offered, to the vast majority of his voters, far as I can tell.
The Democrats suck. The Republicans suck. One candidate will try to make your life marginally better via complex policies that you don’t understand; the other is already making you feel better via simple statements that you do.
The other night I thought of a perfectly rational reason a Rust Belter might have voted for Trump. Hillary began her campaign as a strong supporter of a really horrible trade deal. Despite her rewrite of history, she had been very positive about TPP for years, and her whole stance has always been in support of the big trade deals. It wasn’t until she was well into her primary battle with Sanders that she changed her position on TPP.
Considering that her husband had enthusiastically pushed NAFTA, and that she supported it and continues to this day to defend NAFTA, I’m not surprised that people didn’t find her “flip flop” very convincing. Sanders was killing her on that issue.
It really didn’t help that Obama was pushing TPP to the bitter end.
Once Sanders was out of the race, well, Trump had been consistently against the TPP.
I rationalized to myself that the TPP was practically dead, and that she wouldn’t dare revive it in this political climate. But the fact is (and we all know this, because it was discussed here a fair amount), if Hillary had won, we could be looking at a new life for TPP right now in this lame-duck session.
Yet it was declared officially dead the other day because Trump won’t support it.
I loathe Trump, but I can’t fault anyone who voted for him for that reason, and that’s probably not the only such issue.
The fact is, and it’s been said again and again, this election was just a nightmare. And it came about through the years of bad management of BOTH parties.
I’m reading 200 counties flipped from Obama to Trump.
The Supreme Court and the 20 million people who would lose Obamacare should have been enough to get you to vote for Hillary
Turns out – not so much. You still need a message to your base, which include, or once included, working people. Like someone noted above, why did she not fully embrace the $15 min wage and other similar ideas? When Trump and co start cutting into medicare and social security and when the impact of Obamacare and the supreme court are felt, then people could change their minds. Too late.