Saving the Republic From Trump

 

I warned four years ago in this space that Trump and Trumpism needed to be rejected at the ballot box, at the time confident he would lose. And he we are four years later and well it's the same pitch as last time.

And obviously just as last time, this is NOT a normal election. This isn't a spirited debate about taxes and regulations or like in say 2004 where the top issue was which was the best way to fight Islamic terrorism. No, this is a fight for the future of our country to remain a democratic republic or do we begin the slow slide into autocracy?

It wasn't really a campaign of policy ideas four years ago. And it's been even less so this time. You can't really even have a debate on policies with Trump and Biden because the former is living in some alternate universe where everything under him is great and everyone is lying about everything all the time, except him. People could vote for Biden just to get rid of Trump, which is fine. But also he has put forth detailed plans on health care, fighting climate change, reducing student loan debt, raising the minimum wage, etc. 

What exactly is Trump even running to accomplish if he is re-elected? As best as I can tell it is mainly to just own the libs and troll the elites. He claims to have already built the wall (he hasn't) and made big beautiful trade deals (they are mostly the same as before). And those were his main areas of focus in 2016. What's left - even crueler immigration and refugee policy? Firing every non-loyalist at the FBI and DOJ? Pardoning everyone connected with his administration or campaign who has been indicted? His agenda is full of "wins" for him personally or for his bank account, touted as wins for the country. And then his cult gets on board. 

He's running a scare campaign that if Biden wins we'll have chaos with riots and protests, a mismanaged pandemic/vaccine, and massive unemployment. We already have that now! Or he's saying Biden never denounced riots/looting (a lie, he did) or that he will end the suburbs, god, and guns. OK, sure, like that would even be possible if it was on the to-do list, which it isn't, because the accusation is insane. Meanwhile for four years Trump has failed at handling every crisis and made things worse. The pandemic - failure, North Korea missile development - failure, Hurricane Maria response in Puerto Rico - failure, the trade war he started with China - a complete and utter failure. 

It's impossible to keep track of the scandals. A weekly list for Trump would have been a career ending list for any other politician a few years ago. It's a campaign detached from reality, where in this bubble Trump is doing a great job, is super popular, has made American great, and will win a re-election landslide unless there is massive voter fraud. Meanwhile, he is the least popular President ever, never once having a 50%+ average approval rating at any time and averaging 43/54 approve/disapprove over his first four years in spite of a good economy for three of them. Reality breaking into the MAGA cult bubble will be jarring for them this week.

Meanwhile, outside the MAGA bubble, we're living through a pandemic that will likely have killed well over 300,000 people by the time the next president is sworn in. The economy is still in bad shape with thousands of businesses closed permanently, and the unemployment rate dropped in September and October mainly because people were no longer eligible in their states. And we're probably looking at having to do another lockdown soon, as Europe is about to do. The health care system was already inefficient, sometimes cruel, and with resources overtaxed before the pandemic and it may get worse if SCOTUS strikes down the ACA. Trump has no plans to attempt to solve any of these problems. He doesn't even pretend to care about most of them. Imagine running for re-election and barely even talking about any of the top issues facing the country, based on polls, other than "law and order" the only response he has to protests and riots. And yet he still has a 10% chance to win according to 538.com.

The fact that Joe Biden is likely to win the national popular vote by 7+ points and Trump is presiding over this pandemic, faltering economy, and massive corruption, and we still have to sweat out the returns in a handful of swing states is a systemic failure. This should be a blowout. We are super polarized now and political scientists equate a 9-12 point popular vote win now as similar to what a Nixon or Reagan level landslide was at that time. But people are so siloed now in how they consume news. And in the Trump Media Universe he is doing a great job. Herbert Hoover never had Rush Limbaugh and Fox News telling their audiences that the sky was actually red, not blue, or else he may have had a fighting chance vs FDR in 1932. Hoover still got 40% of the vote in that election. So maybe we were always polarized. Now it's just that we are both polarized and almost perfectly sorted along racial, education, and rural/urban lines that it allows for incredibly unpopular candidates to still have a chance in the Electoral College. This is all because the biggest slice of the less popular candidate's base is white, rural, no-college voters and they have disproportionate power in our system.

It is just exhausting thinking about it. Shortly into his term, Jon Stewart noted that the presidency is supposed to age him, yet it's aging us. And this Andrew Sullivan essay was so on the nose:

With someone like this barging into your consciousness every hour of every day, you begin to get a glimpse of what it must be like to live in an autocracy of some kind. Every day in countries unfortunate enough to be ruled by a lone dictator, people are constantly subjected to the Supreme Leader’s presence, in their homes, in their workplaces, as they walk down the street. Big Brother never leaves you alone. His face bears down on you on every flickering screen. He begins to permeate your psyche and soul; he dominates every news cycle and issues pronouncements — each one shocking and destabilizing — round the clock. He delights in constantly provoking and surprising you, so that his monstrous ego can be perennially fed. And because he is also mentally unstable, forever lashing out in manic spasms of pain and anger, you live each day with some measure of trepidation. What will he come out with next? Somehow, he is never in control of himself and yet he is always in control of you. 

One of the great achievements of free society in a stable democracy is that many people, for much of the time, need not think about politics at all. The president of a free country may dominate the news cycle many days — but he is not omnipresent — and because we live under the rule of law, we can afford to turn the news off at times. A free society means being free of those who rule over you — to do the things you care about, your passions, your pastimes, your loves — to exult in that blessed space where politics doesn’t intervene. In that sense, it seems to me, we already live in a country with markedly less freedom than we did a month ago. It’s less like living in a democracy than being a child trapped in a house where there is an abusive and unpredictable father, who will brook no reason, respect no counter-argument, admit no error, and always, always up the ante until catastrophe inevitably strikes. This is what I mean by the idea that we are living through an emergency.

Anyway, today or in a few days we can end the emergency. And then we do not really have to care about what Trump does or says ever again. And won't that be glorious? Of course we still have to worry about what could be an insane lame duck session until Biden is sworn in, while Trump potentially metaphorically burns down the government on the way out the door. But yes, after 5+ years of Donald Trump dominating the news, we will hopefully earn a much-needed break. 

There really isn't a choice here. Joe Biden is an experienced leader, a decent caring human being with decades of service. Trump, on the other hand, as David Frum pointed out in 2017, is literally the worst human being we have ever elected President. And that included slaveholders and Andrew Jackson.

Biden is not perfect and has some Senate votes he wishes he could have back. But he's a normal consensus Democratic candidate, touting endorsements from all across the political spectrum, some of whom were part of the Bush and Trump administrations. He has dozens of policy prescriptions, some big and some small, that are aimed at addressing the country's major problems. He'll listen to the experts. All of these problems won't mysteriously vanish in January when he is sworn in, or probably not even by November 2024, but it would be a step in the right direction. This is a vote for sanity and decency to save the republic. 

Romney will not become President "Moderate Mitt"

David Frum believes Romney is lying and that's the reason to support him

David Brooks and David Frum, my favorite conservative pundit, both endorsed Mitt Romney in the last week, both seemingly supporting him in hopes that he is really lying and would really govern as "Moderate Mitt."

I understand this impulse. If you are one of the few prominent moderate Republicans remaining, you must convince yourself that the Presidential candidate would govern more to your liking or else there would be little reason to remain a Republican at this point. At the Congressional level, moderate Republicans are practically extinct. The last chance for a moderate Republican to have any impact on the party is at the Presidential level and he/she will have a really tough time making it through a primary. Romney, to his credit, did win the primary rather easily. But his path isn't likely to be repeated by future moderates. They just don't make many as shameless as Romney, and only someone lacking in any conviction could reinvent himself on virtually every issue in such a short period of time.

Here's the thing though, history shows us Presidents try to keep campaign promises. Frum, at least circles this square, but pointing out that with the Democrats likely to retain control of the Senate, Romney won't be able to follow through on a lot of the crazy misguided stuff he promised his base during the campaign. It's not a very comforting thought to a liberal like myself that the future of ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, etc, may hinge on a handful of Senate Democrats not caving and voting with the Republicans.

So the argument seems to go: vote for Romney because he's really been lying to us and will govern as a moderate....oh and if he wasn't lying, well the Democrats in the Senate will save us from "Severely Conservative Mitt."

I admire the hope that Romney is secretly running to stick it to the majority of his party and will govern as a moderate. It just seems extremely unlikely. I seem to remember a lot of moderates making the same case about George W. Bush in 2000. And while Bush was more moderate when it came to immigration, since his party was more moderate on that issue at the time, he governed as advertised or even more extreme than how he campaigned on virtually every other issue. As former President Bush said, "Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."

Why Obama is Winning on Taxes

I said relax. I got this.

Something is happening during this Presidential campaign that I never thought I'd see: a Democrat both wanted a debate on taxes and is so far winning it.

It took a few long steps to get there, but it started last year when President Obama began focusing like a laser on Paul Ryan's budget and on the issue of fairness in the tax code. Mitt Romney obliged by running further to the right than he probably needed to in the primary, resulting in him putting out a revised tax/budget plan that was very similar to the Ryan plan.

In 2010 the Republicans re-took the House mainly due to three issues:

1) the distortion on the Medicare "cuts" in Obamacare
2) the deficit/spending cuts
3) the economy

The first was a result of an older whiter electorate and the second was driven by the energy created by the Tea Party and the cynicism of the GOP caring about deficits only when Democrats are President. And the third was expected given the high unemployment rate and the Democrats controlling the entire government. David Frum pointed out, the Republicans cynically won back power without understanding why and then overestimated the electorate's support for their "real" agenda.

.@ingrahamangle 1) 2010 was an election w ~40% turnout, weighted to older whiter voters. Bad model for 2012.
— davidfrum (@davidfrum) September 18, 2012

.@ingrahamangle 3) The 2010 platform was basically a defense of retirees' Medicare expectations - party won w/out understanding Y

— davidfrum (@davidfrum) September 18, 2012

So it was a bit of a gift that one of the first major economic or budget visions the GOP put forth after winning the House was a budget that cut taxes on the rich, ended Medicare as we know it, and still didn't balance the budget for 40 years. In one House vote the Republicans lost credibility on the Medicare and deficit issues. And with no plan to create jobs and address this particular economic situation and not the one they wished existed, they began losing support on the economy as well.

Obama and the Democrats spent months earlier this year hitting Romney on Bain and creating narrative that Romney was a heartless CEO unconcerned about the plight of middle class Americans. As Jonathan Chait noted, then Obama began moving to phase 2 earlier in the summer, which was talking the Romney/Ryan budget and tax code fairness. If voters didn't feel Romney really understood and cared about their problems, they'd be more willing to accept Obama's argument about the choice between the two competing visions for the country.

Obama knew the GOP couldn't very well admit that they don't really care about deficits. So he was able to put Romney in a box over his tax plan. If he did indeed want to cut taxes on rich people above all else and since any plan has to be absolutely deficit-neutral, lest he want to annoy the Tea Party and the Randians, then there is no other way to make that plan work without deep spending cuts to popular programs, increasing taxes on the middle class, and/or eliminating or reducing many middle class tax deductions and tax credits through some type of comprehensive tax reform plan. It is now September 20th, and Romney has still yet to reveal any details about how this plan would work.

The Obama campaign deftly called the GOP's bluff on their fake concern over deficits and contrasted it with their overarching goal of lowering taxes on the rich. And they were able to show how there was no way to achieve both of those goals without screwing the middle class. With Romney's lack of credibility with his base he had no room to maneuver or nuance this issue, so he was stuck defending a plan that either can't work or will screw the middle class. All that doesn't fit on a bumper sticker, unfortunately, but the groundwork was laid for months. And enough voters apparently have come to understand this argument. As President Clinton said, it's arithmetic.