Dickens would have been proud

Posted on October 2, 2024 by Joe Weber

JD Vance’s performance on the debate stage was quite Dawkins-like

In 1838, Charles Dickens gave us a most memorable character in Oliver Twist. His Jack Dawkins is a masterful pickpocket, a marvel at skillful deception. He’s known as the Artful Dodger.

JD Vance makes the fictional character look like a piker.

To be sure, Yale Law School can point to the GOP vice presidential nominee as a superbly trained graduate. He’s articulate, can be gentlemanly and can master complex facts well.

Consider what another grad of the school had to say about him:

“At our shared alma mater Yale Law School, I used to have to debate people like JD Vance all the time— phony strivers who will lie and say anything to get ahead,” former Obama Administration aide and CNN commentator Anthony Kapel “Van” Jones tweeted before last night’s debate. “They are hard to beat. Coach Walz will be constrained by his decency. Let’s see if a good, big hearted man can beat a pretender with a high IQ, but low integrity.”

Vance told a lot of whoppers, but give some thought to his biggest dodge of the night. When Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic nominee for vice president, pressed him on whether Donald J. Trump lost the 2020 election, Vance ducked. He was unwilling to contradict or offend his senior running mate, who still maintains he won. “Tim, I’m focused on the future,” he said. Walz’s retort: “That is a damning, that is a damning non-answer.”

As for his focus on the future, Walz pushed on Trump’s efforts to lay the groundwork for the public to not accept a Trump-Vance loss. Vance’s flagrantly dishonest answer was that Trump “peacefully gave over power on January the 20^th.” Huh, did he forget Jan. 6, 2021, as so many Republicans seem eager to do?

As The Wall Street Journal recounted, “JD Vance deflected when asked about comments he made after Jan. 6, 2021, saying that he would have allowed Congress to entertain alternative slates of electors from key swing states, a power that the U.S. Constitution and federal law don’t grant to the vice president.”

But Walz, to his credit, hammered home the point.

“He lost the election,” Walz said. “This is not a debate. It’s not anything anywhere other than in Donald Trump’s world, because, look, when Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election, that’s why Mike Pence isn’t on this stage. What I’m concerned about is where is the firewall with Donald Trump? Where is the firewall if he knows he could do anything, including taking an election and his vice president’s not going to stand to it. That’s what we’re asking you, America. Will you stand up? Will you keep your oath of office even if the president doesn’t?”

Yes, Walz often came across as fuzzy, even inarticulate. Until he was pressed, for instance, he didn’t own up to misspeaking about being in Hong Kong during China’s suppression of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989. He had, in fact, been to China soon afterward and, mostly on school trips, visited some 30 times later. Walz also botched a reference to Iran, instead garbling his words and saying: “But the expansion of Israel and its proxies is an absolute, fundamental necessity for the United States to have the steady leadership there.”

Chalk that sort of thing up to nervousness and, as some commentators have suggested, to his and Kamala Harris’s refusals to grant more major new outlet interviews. Such interviews can be great opportunities to hone answers to difficult questions. Mark it down, too, to a congressman and governor who spent most of his career teaching high school kids and serving in the Army National Guard, not polishing untruths at the likes of Yale.

By contrast, consider Vance’s tapdancing on abortion, a major challenge for Republicans who crave the independent non-evangelical women’s vote. Vance denied his documented past support for a national ban on abortion, insisting he sought only to set “a minimum national standard” – whatever that means.

And consider his dodge on choice, as he insisted that abortion should be a states’ rights matter, with different states free to set different policies – no matter whether that forces women to travel to find such care (which caused the death of one such Georgia woman, as Walz noted). Vance also repeated the anti-abortion movement’s saccharine and insincere arguments about giving women other choices:

“I want us, as a Republican Party, to be pro-family in the fullest sense of the word. I want us to support fertility treatments,” Vance said.” I want us to make it easier for moms to afford to have babies. I want it to make it easier for young families to afford a home so they can afford a place to raise that family. And I think there’s so much that we can do on the public-policy front just to give women more options.”

There were many more such examples in Vance’s too-smooth-by-half presentation.

“Vance repeatedly stretched, twisted and abandoned the facts (e.g., minimizing climate change as ‘crazy weather patterns,’ denying increased manufacturing under the Biden-Harris administration, claiming the administration ‘lost’ more than 300,000 children, misrepresenting his own position on abortion, claiming Trump saved the Affordable Care Act), or simply ducked the question (e.g., deporting children, seizing federal lands for housing, refusing to certify the 2020 election),” Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post put it in her newsletter.

For his part, she wrote, “Walz landed jabs on Vance’s extremism and went after felon and former president Donald Trump for ‘fickle’ and irresponsible leadership (e.g., brushing off traumatic brain injuries inflicted on soldiers by Iran as ‘headaches,’ calling climate change a ‘hoax’).”

Rubin also gave the Democrat high marks for a couple scorching lines: On gun violence: “Sometimes it is just the guns,” Walz said. And on abortion rights: “How can we as a nation say that your life and your rights, as basic as the right to control your own body, is determined on geography?”

She argued that “Vance came across as slick, rude (interrupting the moderators and whining about being fact-checked) and preprogrammed.” By comparison, she argued that Walz was a “happy warrior.”

Maybe, maybe not. But some of the best assessments of the night came from opinion-writers for The New York Times, most of whom gave the debating victory to Vance – but only on style points. Consider their left-handed compliments:

“Vance did an excellent job of impersonating a decent man,” Farah Stockman said. And Binyamin Applebaum added: “He made Trumpism sound polite, calm and coherent.” Maybe the most trenchant view came from Jamelle Bouie, who said: “Vance won this debate. It’s not hard to see why. He has spent most of his adult life selling himself to the wealthy, the powerful and the influential. He is as smooth and practiced as they come. He has no regard for the truth. He lies as easily as he breathes.”

Some voters may make up their minds based solely on these debate performances. And, if they read the fact-checks, that may be enough for them to see Vance for who he is, not who he cast himself as. Certainly, they ought to look past the hail-fellow-well-met façade that Vance presented, paying mind instead to the Vance who feeds red meat to the mobs at Trump campaign events.

“Less obvious is the disconnect between the Vance we saw last night and the Vance who’s been stoking fear with tales of pet-eating immigrants and problematic elections on the campaign trail,” Fortune’s Diane Brady wrote.

In the end, few voters will make their choice based on the No. 2 men on the tickets. Surely, Trump and Harris will stand at the fore on Nov. 5.

Hulu’s The Artful Dodger, source: The Michigan Daily

Still, the artful dodger did show up his boss in one major respect. Trump’s lies are often easy to read, sometimes given away by his capo-like rage-filled body language (and dutifully recorded by legions of fact-checkers). Vance tells his at times with a doe-eyed ease and conviction that almost masks an Ivy League sneer.

“I cannot imagine many voters would switch sides based on this outing,” Rubin wrote. “But perhaps some voters will conclude that someone as condescending and nasty as Vance should not be a heartbeat from the presidency.”

Easy fixes sometimes are anything but

Posted on September 25, 2024 by Joe Weber

Contrasting the Trump and Harris economic planS

Politicians like easy-sounding solutions to complex problems, particularly on the economic front. Their fixes often are aimed at pleasing voters who know little or nothing of economics. At times, their efforts smack of pandering and might even be harmless.

But, at other times, they can be quite dangerous — as seems likely with the plans of Donald J. Trump. Just mull over what 16 Nobel laureate economists have to say:

“The outcome of this election will have economic repercussions for years, and possibly decades, to come,” warns a letter signed by Columbia Prof. Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist at the World Bank; Harvard Prof. Claudia Goldin, former director of the Development of the American Economy program at the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research, and 14 other Nobelists. “We believe that a second Trump term would have a negative impact on the U.S.’s economic standing in the world and a destabilizing effect on the U.S.’s domestic economy.”

They caution that Trump’s plans, including his goal to impose tariffs of 10 percent to 20 percent on foreign goods and 60 percent on Chinese-made products, will do exactly the opposite of what he’s been promising as he has attacked the Biden-Harris administration for inflation. Just as inflation rates are coming down, those duties would kickstart a price-spiral anew.

“Many Americans are concerned about inflation, which has come down remarkably fast,” the economists argue. “There is rightly a worry that Donald Trump will reignite this inflation, with his fiscally irresponsible budgets. Nonpartisan researchers, including at Evercore, Allianz, Oxford Economics, and the Peterson Institute, predict that if Donald Trump successfully enacts his agenda, it will increase inflation.”

And listen to some of those folks, who’ve crunched the numbers on Trump’s plans:

“The Peterson Institute for International Economics think-tank in Washington calculates that 20 per cent across-the-board tariffs combined with a 60 per cent tariff on China would trigger a rise of up to $2,600 a year in what the average household spends on goods,” reports the Financial Times. “They say that the tariffs would disproportionately hit the low-income households that Trump claims his economic policies help protect.”

And the Peterson Institute is hardly alone. The Tax Policy Center, concurs, albeit with slightly different figures because Trump has floated both 20 percent and 10 percent global tariffs.

“A worldwide 10 percent tariff and a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods proposed by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump would lower average after-tax incomes of US households in 2025 by about $1,800, or 1.8 percent,” writes center senior fellow Howard Gleckman, a former BusinessWeek colleague. “They’d reduce imports into the US by about $5.5 trillion, or 15 percent, from 2025–2034.”

The consensus among the experts is that Trump’s plan would hit consumers hard. The effect would show up not only in finished goods made overseas, but in anything manufactured in the U.S. with foreign-made components, as the higher costs would filter through the system. Thus, there would be no escaping the higher prices.

Beyond just ratcheting up inflation, Trump’s plans could drive down gross domestic product and employment.

“Candidate Trump has proposed significant tariff hikes as part of his presidential campaign; we estimate that if imposed, his proposed tariff increases would hike taxes by another $524 billion annually and shrink GDP by at least 0.8 percent, the capital stock by 0.7 percent, and employment by 684,000 full-time equivalent jobs,” says another nonpartisan group, the Tax Foundation.

The kick in the teeth that Trump could deliver to the nation may also come at a tough time, as the economy slows under the Federal Reserve’s so-called “soft-landing” approach. The Fed, the independent group that has the job of reining in inflation, recently lowered interest rates by a substantial half-point in the federal funds rate. That’s because its leaders believe that inflation is moving toward a sustainable 2 percent annual rate, the Fed’s target, without driving unemployment up to unacceptable levels.

The Federal Reserve, source: Investopedia

As the Fed tries to balance employment and inflation, it is no doubt mindful that the national jobless rate recently rose to 4.2 percent after dipping as low as 3.4 percent, a 54-year-low, earlier in the year. The Fed is following classic economic theory: when the jobless rate is too low, higher wages kick up inflation; when unemployment is too high, of course, that’s a red light for the economy.

In time, the lower interest rates that the Fed has engineered should deliver an upward jolt to the economy. That will set the stage for the next president – whoever that is – to bask in the glow of sustainably low unemployment with reasonable inflation. But that president’s policies, if they are inflationary, could tip the balance.

As the experts see it, the outlook under a Trump presidency is hardly cheerful, particularly if his tariffs trigger an all-out global trade war. “The last time we were in a trade war under Trump, the global manufacturing cycle went into a recession,” Julia Coronado, a former Fed economist who now runs the MacroPolicy Perspectives consultancy, told the Financial Times.

Recall that, during Trump’s term, the economy slipped into recession from February to April 2020, a few months before his tour in the White House ended. Covid drove that downturn, which was marked by a jobless rate of 14.8 percent in April of 2020. When Trump left office, the jobless rate had fallen to 6.4 percent and it fell substantially after that, in part thanks to the infrastructure-spending policies of President Joe Biden.

Contrast Trump’s plan with Harris’s blueprint for stimulating housing construction, particularly for the middle class. She wants to boost housing supply by expanding the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, providing incentives for state and local investment in housing and creating a $40 billion tax credit to make affordable projects feasible for builders. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s, and Jim Parrott, a housing adviser under the Obama administration, estimate that America has a shortfall of three million homes right now, and Harris aims to close that gap. The two are advising her campaign on these plans.

Ben Harris of the Brookings Institution, a former chief economist of the U.S. Treasury, concurs that the plan is sound. “Critics assail the high cost of subsidies to developers, but they are the best tool the federal government has to incentivize homebuilding,” he writes. “We desperately need more affordable homes in America – millions of them – and the only practical way to boost supply quickly and meaningfully is to offer financial incentives to local governments to expand zoning for affordable housing and to developers to build it. The vice president proposes to do both.”

To be sure, Harris’s plan to provide $25,000 to first-time homebuyers is drawing less praise.

Calling that “a really bad idea,” Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, says: “The ultimate beneficiary of that credit is not going to be first-time home buyers. It’s going to be people selling homes.” Economics writer Peter Coy of The New York Times echoes that, saying the plan would do nothing to boost housing stock, but only demand. “Sellers surely would take advantage of the increased demand by raising their prices,” Coy writes. “So a big portion of the taxpayer money that was intended for home buyers would wind up in the pockets of sellers.”

But it’s far from clear how the construction stimulation efforts and the aid to homebuyers would offset one another. A rush of homebuilding in theory should lead to lower prices, and the numbers of people likely to be involved in her $25,000 support effort seem relatively small.

Moody’s estimates that Harris’s down-payment plan would help some 11.7 million more first-time homebuyers, including 2.75 million first-time Black and Latino homeowners. This is just 3.2 million more first-time homebuyers and 1 million more Black and Latino first-time homebuyers than would take place without her plan.

For her part, Harris is doing some pandering by proposing to attack alleged price-gouging, particularly in grocery costs. Quoting a campaign statement, The Washington Post reported that Harris wants to implement “the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries — setting clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries.”

The details were not clear, the Post reported. But it said Harris would aim to enact the ban within her first 100 days, in part by directing the Federal Trade Commission to impose harsh penalties on firms that break new limits on so-called gouging. The statement did not define gouging or excessive profits.

As Alexander Henke, an economics professor at Howard University, told the school newspaper, Harris’s “vague” plan appears to be more like a political economy move than an economic one, tapping into popular sentiment against price gouging by delivering poll-tested messaging. And Harris should know better — she studied economics at Howard and her father, Donald, is a retired Stanford University economics professor.

What’s more, this horse long ago left the barn. Most of the inflation is now behind us, suggesting that the economy is resolving the inflation on its own and there would be few prosecutions.

Just look at the numbers. Prices for food overall rose 9.9 percent in 2022, faster than in any year since 1979, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The hike was especially sharp in so-called food-at-home prices, up 11.4 percent. But the rises have slowed since then, climbing last year by 5.8 percent overall and by 5 percent for food-at-home. This year, the department expects prices for all food to increase 2.3 percent, with food-at-home prices rising just 1.2 percent.

What drove up prices in prior years? Were greedy corporations taking advantage of consumers? Were nefarious or misguided Biden-Harris policies driving up the price of eggs (something VP nominee JD Vance embarrassingly got wrong in a Pennsylvania grocery store photo-op)?

Not according to experts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. They point to post-Covid volatility in global commodity prices and a sharp rise in wages for grocery-store workers (likely related to a shortage of such workers). When such “input” costs rise, everyone in the production and retail chain tries to sustain their profit margins. As it happened, foodmakers showed no margin gain in recent years, while retailers showed only a modest uptick in already-thin margins.

Other key elements of the plans of both candidates suggest far different approaches — Trump would take a largely top-down tack while Harris, as she puts it, aims to build the economy from the middle class out. She hit hard on this theme in a Sept. 25 address on the economy and her idea are spelled out on her website.

Harris would boost the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent and she has promised not to raise taxes on people making less than $400,000 per year. She wants to restore and expand the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit, including a $6,000 child tax credit for the first year of a newborn’s life. She would also increase the tax deduction for start-up businesses from $5,000 to $50,000, a move she argues would stimulate innovation among all-important small businesses.

By contrast, Trump wants to reduce the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 15 percent for companies that make their products in the U.S. He already cut the rate from 35 percent during his 2017-2021 presidency. It’s long been known that such moves deplete government revenues. Trump also said he would end taxes on overtime pay and on tips (the tips idea is one Harris also suggests). And Trump also aims to exempt Social Security income from taxes, unmindful apparently of how the Social Security system, even under the current system, will likely be insolvent by 2035 unless policymakers impose a fix.

Trump also wants to extend individual tax cuts he pushed through Congress in 2017, including for the wealthiest Americans. Experts estimate that would reduce revenue over a decade by about $3.3 trillion to $4 trillion.

Harris has also proposed hiking taxes on high-income earners. Americans earning below about $100,000 annually would continue to pay no taxes on long-term capital gains and higher-income families earning up to $1 million would continue paying up to a maximum rate of 20 percent. But those who earn $1 million a year or more would see a rise in the tax rate on their long-term capital gains to 28 percent.

Whether soaking the rich a bit, as Harris proposes, is good or bad economically, it may sell politically. And, if nothing else, it’s likely to do far less harm than Trump’s tariffs would.

Watch your parkin’ meters

Posted on August 11, 2024 by Joe Weber

“Followership” is a dangerous thing. See JD Vance

As the Vietnam War ramped up and Lyndon Johnson struggled to carry JFK’s mantle in the White House in early 1965, Bob Dylan released “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Among the song’s memorable lines: “Don’t follow leaders, watch the parkin’ meters.”

For anyone who has been disappointed by politicians, teachers, clergy or others in authority, the line resonates. It suggests that, ultimately, we all must think for ourselves in both the big and little things. That’s so because the most inspiring leaders can take us astray and, perhaps, because the most charismatic can be the most dangerous.

Such folks can have an extraordinary ability to convert even the seemingly brightest people into followers.

Consider JD Vance. The Ohio senator and running mate for Donald J. Trump underwent an extraordinary conversion under the former president’s influence.

Recall that Vance in 2016 called Donald J. Trump an “idiot,” said he was “reprehensible,” and labeled him “cultural heroin.” He shared his feelings about the then-candidate to a Facebook friend: “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.” And in an October 2016 interview Vance said he was a “never-Trump guy.” The following year, he said the president-elect was a “moral disaster.”

Now, of course, all that has changed. Vance has metamorphosed into a true believer. He has become Trump’s angry warrior, his “attack dog,” as Politico and Axios, among others, have called him. Nowadays, he barnstorms the country, lambasting Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Never mind that his broadsides, especially on Walz, don’t hold up; like his master, he disregards the facts to serve his own ends.

How could that be? How could Vance, a clearly intelligent Yale Law School graduate and U.S. Senator, have done such a flip-flop?

Perhaps the most insightful comment on the point comes from a University of Oregon political scientist, Joseph E. Lowndes. “Vance has been a chameleon his whole life – that’s how he described himself in his autobiography,” Lowndes is quoted in The Guardian as saying. “He has no core, and seems to have been influenced by a series of strong personalities, from Amy Chua, to Peter Thiel, to Trump.”

Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, was a Yale Law School professor of Vance’s who persuaded him to write The Hillbilly Elegy about his troubled upbringing. Thiel is an idiosyncratic Silicon Valley billionaire who has long backed Vance in business and politics.

If Lowndes is right, Vance is an example of the ultimate follower, a shape-shifting devotee who assembled his identity under the influence of others. Certainly, there’s reason to think Vance at best had a fragmented sense of self before being molded by powerful people.

“Vance was born James Donald Bowman, after his biological father, Donald Bowman, who separated from Vance’s mother Beverly when he was young,” Vanity Fair reported. “When Beverly later remarried, Vance was adopted by his stepfather and became James David Hamel; this is the name he kept through his early adulthood. He went by J.D., before and after the name change, but when he enlisted in the Marines, he was known officially as Corporal James D. Hamel. Then in 2013, around the time he was admitted to the bar, he opted to change his surname to Vance. In Hillbilly Elegy, he notes that he chose the name in honor of Bonnie Blanton Vance, the grandmother who helped raise him. (In his recent campaign speeches, Vance has spoken fondly of his ‘Mamaw and her extensive arsenal.)”

The many changes Vance, now 40, has undergone have drawn notice even among psychologists.

Prof. Emeritus John A. Johnson, source: Pennsylvania State University

“Then there is Vance’s religious odyssey,” Psychology Today blogger John A. Johnson writes. “Understandably, when he was a child being raised by his grandmother, he initially adopted her belief in Jesus and loathing of organized religion, especially televangelists, whom she called ‘crooks and perverts.’ As he got older, the pain he experienced from living in a dysfunctional family led to constant arguments with his grandmother about whether God really loved them. As a teenager, he reconciled with his father and attended his father’s Pentecostal Church. But after a stint in Iraq with the Marines, he became skeptical about many things he had believed, and, by the time he attended college, he read Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and began calling himself an atheist. However, he found secular worldviews insufficient for providing meaning in life and eventually converted to Catholicism.”

Trish Zornio, source: Colorado Springs Gazette

Biomedical scientist Trish Zornio, admittedly partisan as an unsuccessful 2020 Democratic hopeful for the U.S. Senate from Colorado, weighs in on the point in The Colorado Sun. “The man is a walking set of contradictions, and he might as well have ‘Will sell soul for power’ tattooed across his forehead,” she writes.

Certainly, his embrace of Trump (and Trump’s choice of him) reeks of opportunism. But Vance’s yearslong pursuit of father figures suggests more is involved than simple political gain. Strong people seem to have meant far more to him over the years.

To be sure, many of us can credit mentors with helping shape our views, especially when we were young and malleable. That’s a vital function, one might argue, of educators. And perhaps some have influenced our personalities.

But sometimes those influences can be too powerful, indeed can become coercive. I saw this in writing two books that explored what might be called “followership.” One, Transcendental Meditation in America, examined the influence the guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi exerted on his devotees, even among many who were well educated. The other, Divided Loyalties, probed the power that Islamists had on naive young men recruited to join ISIS.

People unmoored in their own ill-formed identities sometimes surrender themselves to persuasive leaders to help fill in the holes they feel in their lives and personalities. If Lowndes is correct, that’s a sad statement about Vance that could have dire consequences for the country, should the increasingly addled-seeming Trump, now 78, be reelected in November.

Mike Pence; Source: AFP/Getty Images, via The Guardian

Recall that Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, had the strength of character to resist Trump’s demands that he improperly decertify the 2020 election results. Pence, it’s clear, had a well-developed sense of who he was and he did the legally and morally correct thing, even if it cost him his political career.

Vance, by contrast, would have done his master’s bidding.

“If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there,” Vance told ABC News. “That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020. I think that’s what we should have done.”

It’s no wonder that Trump warmed to Vance. Trump, of course, has long needed to be surrounded by yes-men and adoring followers. In Vance, he seems to have found just what he needs and we all may yet be poorer for that.

Getting the sharp end

Posted on August 9, 2024 by Joe Weber

Cartoonists make their points about Trump et al.

For many of us, words are everything. We delight in them, we excoriate with them, we lavish praise with them. We struggle to find just the right ones.

But for cartoonists, the challenge is tougher. In a small space their images can — and must — speak volumes. Even as they may hit a few targets at a time, they must make a single, sharp point. They carry an extraordinary burden.

Consider Donald J. Trump’s propensity for lying. By the count of The Washington Post, during his tenure as president, he logged 30,573 false or misleading claims. Each requires many words to debunk, an exhausting task that, too often, is ignored by Trump’s followers.

At his Thursday press conference in Florida, for instance, Trump told some whoppers.

“As is typical for the former president, his remarks were littered with falsehoods,” wrote The New York Times. “He falsely accused Democrats of violating the constitution by replacing Mr. Biden on the ticket. He said nobody was killed on the Jan. 6 siege on the Capitol, when in fact several people died, including one Trump supporter, who was shot dead by the Capitol Police.”

As reported by The Associated Press, Trump insisted there had been a “peaceful transfer of power” in 2021. He argued, too, that the results of the 2022 ruling that overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision pleased Democrats, Republicans and “everybody.” To quote the news service, “He also falsely claimed he drew more people to his speech at a ‘Stop the Steal’ speech before the riot than the famous March on Washington in 1963, the iconic event at which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.”

Note that journalists routinely include the word “falsely” in their reports. Sad.

Explaining his falsehoods, though, can take a lot. Indeed, a long page on Wikipedia is devoted to his lies. Scholars have written papers and journalists have opined at length about them. “Jeremy Adam Smith wrote that ‘lying is a feature, not a bug, of Trump’s campaign and presidency’. Thomas B. Edsall wrote ‘Donald Trump can lay claim to the title of most prodigious liar in the history of the presidency.” George C. Edwards III wrote: “Donald Trump tells more untruths than any previous president. There is no one that is a close second.”

So many words. But Dan Piraro’s cartoon above gets to the point far more simply. Plato thought there were universal truths. For Trump, by contrast, the truth seems to be whatever notion he can conjure up that serves him at the moment. Even for folks who know little of Plato (perhaps like Trump), the cartoon works.

A cartoon, ideally, can endure even as it nails feelings of the moment. Piraro’s work above is eight years old, yet it still is fresh. So, too, is a memorable bit of Mike Lukovich’s work from 2016, an Olympic year like 2024. This image is circulating with new life on the Net:

Trump, of course, earlier this spring suggested he may not accept this fall’s election results, as he repeated his claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. “If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results. I don’t change on that,” he said. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

The Olympics have offered fertile ground for other cartoonists, too. New York Daily News artist Bill Bramhall saw the July 28 election in Venezuela as a chance to pillory Trump. Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro lied about his hefty defeat at the polls and, so far, has clung to power. In an image drawn from a great collection of cartoons by U.S. News and World Report, Bramhall also invoked the infamous shirtless images of Russia’s Vladimir Putin to cast Trump as a third-rate would-be dictator:

Bramhall also is very much in the moment with an image that reflects the recent stock market turmoil and the trouble that Trump got into with his infamous suggestion that Vice President Kamala Harris only recently decided she was Black.

Trump’s incendiary commentary about Harris also inspired Chris Britt, a longtime editorial cartoonist for several newspapers who also works as an author and illustrator:

Lukovich, too, generates powerful cartoons that speak to the moment. As vice presidential hopeful Tim Walz has made “weird” the operative word for Trump and his peculiar running mate, JD Vance, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution cartoonist leapt into the fray. He used Trump’s frequent references to a 1988 movie cannibal, Hannibal Lecter, and Vance’s memorable cat ladies line to underscore the pair’s oddness:

A few cartoonists have plumbed The Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a conservative administration to great effect. Despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary, Trump has maintained he knows nothing of Project 2025 and has sought to distance himself from it. So Chris Britt saw the topic this way:

Pulitzer Prize winner Walt Handelsman of The Advocate, and formerly of the Times-Picayune, took on the topic, too:

The boldest cartoonists are willing to push their themes to the edge of acceptability and sometimes beyond. Lukovich was irked by Trump’s use of the term “Black job.” Trump’s usage has been widely ridiculed, of course, including recently by Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles, who said she loved her Black job. Here was Lukovich’s take, which managed to both salute Harris and criticize Trump:

Race and gender were useful themes for Dave Whamond when Harris jumped into the race:

And gender, in particular, touched a nerve with Ed Wexler:

When Harris tapped Walz, she inspired several folks. Consider the riff The Plain Dealer’s Jeff Darcy took on JD Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” tapping into Walz’s Nebraska origins:

Handelsman also had an interesting take on Walz joining the ticket:

So, too, did Clay Jones:

For better or worse, this election will surely provide lots more fodder for these talented artists. As they poke, needle and ridicule, they may especially get under the humorless Trump’s thin skin.

The gloves are off

Posted on July 23, 2024 by Joe Weber

If Trump’s edge has been plain speaking, he’s about to meet his match

Some of my relatives in New Jersey have liked one thing above all about Donald J. Trump. As one put it, “he talks like us.” The meaning: unlike politicians whose insults are measured and almost diplomatic, whose criticisms on sensitive topics are muted, the blunt New Yorker “tells it like it is.”

Unburdened even by basic manners, the former president is given to fixing labels on opponents such as “lightweight,” “dumb” or “dummy,” “a dope” or “dopey,” “weak,” “a loser,” “boring” and so on. Like a grade school bully, he bandies about terms such as “Crooked Hillary,” “Crooked Joe,” “Pencil Neck,” “Birdbrain” and “Little Marco.”

Well, Trump may meet his match in Kamala Harris. Addressing her campaign staff, the vice president said that, as a longtime prosecutor, she dealt with perpetrators of all sorts: “Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” she said. “So, hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”

Diplomatic? Hardly. Blunt to a fault or coarse? Well, no. Harris is too smart and too — well, adult — for that. On point, though? Unquestionably.

To be sure, Harris’s prosecutor-versus-predator theme isn’t exactly new. She indirectly called Trump a “predator” in the 2020 campaign in her comments in the virtual Democratic National Convention. But, with his 34 felony convictions since then, along with a fraud judgment of $454 million against him and the $88.3 million in a pair of judgments against him for his sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll, her barbs underscoring Trump’s venality hit home much harder now.

Harris won’t have to sink to Trump’s schoolyard level. Don’t look for her to call him “Dumb as a Rock,” as he, flailing for a label, said of her. Of course, she could do so, with ample evidence: a former prof of Trump’s at Wharton reportedly said of him: “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had!” and his former White House colleagues have called him an “idiot,” “dope” and “moron.”

But she won’t hold back, either. It’s clear that the gloves are off in this race and Harris and her compadres won’t be anywhere near as politic as former President Biden has been in dealing with Trump and his vice presidential hopeful, JD Vance. Already, potential Democratic vice presidential nominee Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has called Vance “a phony.”

And just how this all plays out will be fascinating to watch. Despite the relative genteelness of most recent presidential races, strong language has a long history in American political campaigns. A promoter of Thomas Jefferson, for instance, in 1800 referred to the nation’s second president, John Adams, as a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” And in 1828, supporters of Andrew Jackson called John Quincy Adams, the sixth president, “a pimp,” accusing him of providing women to the Russian czar while serving as the U.S. minister to Russia. For their part, Adams’s supporters caricatured Jackson’s mother as a prostitute.

Nikki Haley, source; Getty Images via CNN

In today’s take-no-prisoners contest, the more Harris and her colleagues provoke Trump, the more he may be tempted to respond like the thin-skinned brute he is. As The New York Times has suggested, the attacks could provoke him to drop even lower, particularly because women, Blacks and other minorities seem to especially infuriate him. Recall that “Birdbrain” was his term for Nikki Haley, “Pocahontas” was his moniker for Elizabeth Warren, and “Crazy Nancy” was Nancy Pelosi. Trump used the less elegant “that bitch” for former German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Certainly, obvious racism and sexism — if Trump and his backers descend into them — will play well with some of the former president’s supporters, perhaps even with many. Indeed, we already are hearing strains of both in comments such as that of Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett, who called Harris a “DEI vice president” and “a DEI hire,” invoking the common right-wing attack on diversity, equity and inclusion programs at universities. Another Republican, Rep. Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin, said the Democratic Party backed Harris only “because of her ethnic background,” while one right-wing commentator claimed she is not a natural-born citizen because her parents were immigrants (she was born in Oakland, Calif.).

The theme of such critics will be that Harris got where she is as a kind of affirmative action baby. Never mind that Harris is the gifted daughter of an economics professor and a cancer researcher, and that she earned a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley. They will ignore the fact that she served as a deputy district attorney in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office from 1990 to 1998, that she was elected in 2004 as district attorney of San Francisco, that in 2010 she was elected as California’s attorney general and then, in 2016, was elected as a U.S. Senator from California. They will play down her work on the Senate’s judiciary and intelligence committees, on which she sat until Biden tapped her to join him in the 2020 race.

Even as he seems increasingly addled by age, Trump may be too clever – or too well-advised – to be flagrantly racist and sexist in his dealings with Harris. While others may be more cloddish, Trump knows just how to stop short of being fully outrageous, how to avoid being too explicit.

Charlottesville, 2017; source: AP, via NPR

Recall that Trump saw “some very fine people on both sides,” among the white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville in 2017. Remember that in 2020 he told a far-right extremist group to “stand back and stand by.” Recall that he urged on insurrectionists on Jan. 6, 2021, telling them to “show strength” in the march on the Capitol, after telling them to “be there, will be wild!” And remember that Trump pressed Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State to “find 11,780 votes” to try to overturn his loss in the state in 2020.

But, if Harris gets under his skin, Trump could well go too far. How will mainstream voters – particularly women – respond then? How will they react to dog whistles about race and gender? How will they react to more explicit assaults on those grounds by Trump devotees?

Harris is brilliantly positioned to take advantage of such attacks. And she is well-seated to launch far more precise – and well-founded – volleys at Trump. His flaws are legion and we can expect that she will expose, dissect and pound away at all of them.

Indeed, as my relatives may find, Harris will “talk like us” as she shines a bright, bold light on Trump’s foulness. But she may do so far more sharply — and effectively — than Trump ever could.

The Big Picture

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