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 limits of labels

Posted on August 7, 2024 by Joe Weber

Trump has struggled to pigeonhole Harris and Walz

“Thrice-wed philandering felon, fraud and sexual abuser” has a certain ring to it and offers a helpful summary value. The phrase is useful shorthand for social media.

But such a label has limits.

While that description of Donald J. Trump is accurate, for instance, it falls short. It omits qualities of his such as racism, sexism, demagoguery and ignorance. Such a tag, label or meme may have a bumper-sticker utility, but can go only so far and can often mislead or be misused.

On that point, Trump and his aides have scrambled to come up with pithy terms to attack Vice President Kamala Harris and her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Trump has tried out “the most Radical Left duo in American history.” And one of his campaign videos says Walz “will be a rubber stamp for Kamala’s dangerously liberal agenda.” Parroting that, House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik lambasted “the most radical Far Left-wing ticket in history.” And, of course, there’s the “DEI hire” label.

Will such terms stick?

Under Trump’s guidance, Republicans have sought to reduce people to such abusive monikers and juvenile nicknames, such as Trump’s “Crazy Kamala” or the bizarre “Kamabla.” Presumably, they believe such caricatures will cement identities in voters’s minds. As a clever marketer, Trump knows that this gimmick, born of consumer advertising, locks in simple associations (think “soft” for Downy or “electric” for Tesla).

But, really, will anyone who looks even slightly beyond them buy those reductions? Will most Americans, particularly all-important independent voters, warm to Trump’s approach? Writing for the conservative news site, The Free Press, columnist Joe Nocera sketched out the flaws in Trump’s tack for Walz under the headline “Tim Walz is no radical.”

“He signed a bill that provides free breakfast and lunches for Minnesota public schoolchildren. An advocate for fighting climate change, he took a page from the Republican playbook and championed legislation to reduce government red tape for renewable energy projects,” Nocera writes. “On his watch, abortion rights, a critical issue for Democrats, were enshrined in state law. An NRA darling in Congress (he’s a lifelong hunter), Walz as governor supported expanded background checks and red flag laws. They are also now the law in Minnesota. Plus paid parental and medical leave. Plus a ban on non-compete agreements (giving workers the ability to easily switch jobs). Plus bills to strengthen worker safety.”

Joe Nocera, source: Sarasota Herald-Tribune

Are those measures the sort that most Americans will scream “radical” about? Certainly, a Trump Administration would revile such moves, but do they make one swallow Trump’s belittling sobriquets? As Nocera put it, “Call me crazy, but I think a lot of voters will find this ‘progressive,’ ‘extremist,’ ‘socialist’ agenda attractive.”

As Walz said of this caricature of him in an interview on CNN, “What a monster! Kids are eating and having full bellies so they can go learn, and women are making their own healthcare decisions, and we’re a top-five business state and we also rank in the top three of happiness … Look, they’re going to label whatever they’re going to label.”

To be fair, Walz came up with a very sticky label for Trump and his running mate, JD Vance. He memorably called them “weird,” a word that emphasizes the essential oddness of both men. It also reflects the sort of Midwestern folksy jargon and commonsense judgment that Walz is known for. Indeed, some observers credit his use of the word for getting him the VP choice or, at least, moving him up the ladder.

“Weird,” moreover, is apt and avoids the incendiary tones of more provocative labels for Trump and Vance. It makes them look ludicrous, just the type of characterization that the thin-skinned and humorless Trump can’t abide.

Still, such a term, like other labels thrown about by both camps, can do only so much. More sophisticated critiques are necessary, and we will surely see them.

Some on the right have already attacked Walz, for instance, for being slow to deploy the National Guard to contain the riots that followed George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis in 2020 – a slipup Walz fessed up to. “Walz and his team have said they dealt with the issues as best they could,” Reuters reported. “The two-term governor acknowledged his decision to delay deploying the National Guard and called the city’s response an ‘abject failure,’ during a press conference a few days after protests gripped the Twin Cities and the greater Minneapolis area, causing extensive damage to buildings, businesses, and a police precinct that was overrun by rioters and set ablaze.”

To many, a single misjudgment in a long career hardly seems like a fatal flaw. Of course, we will never see an acknowledgement of a mistake by Trump, who lacks the capacity for self-criticism. But we will see Walz’s hesitancy highlighted on Fox and other venues.

Voters will have to evaluate the successes and failures of both Harris and Walz, since both folks have histories to assess. Similarly, they will need to evaluate their characters and resumes.

What sort of judgment will people apply? For Walz, they can assess his background as a teacher, long-term congressman, governor and champion of legislation that seems to have helped people’s lives. For Harris, they can evaluate her role as being in the room for three and half years when Presidential decisions were made and for traveling the world to shore up relationships that Trump damaged, as well as her record in law enforcement.

Do these things paint a bold, bright contrast with a chaos-inducing criminal who killed a bipartisan effort to reform border regulations just to advance his candidacy? Do they differ from Vance’s comparison of Trump to Hitler, as well as his labeling the man an “idiot” and “reprehensible” before Trump elevated the young opportunist to his ticket?

If we get the chance to see debates between Trump and Harris, as well as between Vance and Walz, we may better be able to evaluate these folks. Certainly, they would in those settings toss labels and memorable lines at one another, some of which could easily stick.

Recall the folksy “there you go again” phrase Ronald Reagan used in his 1980 debate with Jimmy Carter and Reagan’s 1984 quip against Walter Mondale: “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Then there was Lloyd Bentsen’s jab against Dan Quayle in 1988: “I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” And Barack Obama’s memorable phrase in a faceoff with Hillary Clinton in 2008: “You’re likable enough, Hillary.”

It’s hard to imagine Trump or his staffers having the wit for such lines. And, indeed, since Trump has sought to rig a debate by changing rules he earlier agreed to for a faceoff with President Biden, one may not happen between the top candidates. As for Walz and Vance, both men seem to be spoiling for a fight.

When Harris jumped in after Biden stepped out, she seemed to set Trump back on his heels. He and his team can’t seem to quite pigeonhole her as they would like to and he has gone off-script at times (“she happened to turn Black”). Now, Walz’s arrival has “terrified” Trump, says the former president’s niece, Mary Trump.

“You can see why Donald is terrified,” the clinical psychologist said, according to Newsweek. “Because his criteria for a running mate included somebody who would lick his boots, subjugate himself, and exhibit the kind of cruel weirdness that Donald, and the base of the Republican Party, revel in. Vice President Kamala Harris picked someone who has executive [experience] and actually wants to work to make the lives of Americans better.”

Is Mary Trump, whose book about Trump labels him “the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” onto something? Voters will have to decide.

Has grace forever departed the GOP?

Posted on August 3, 2024 by Joe Weber

Trump continues to show a lack of style, basic manners and common decency

In the heated 2008 presidential election, a supporter of the Republican candidate, Sen. John McCain, told him that she couldn’t trust Barack Obama. The woman called Obama “an Arab” at the height of a conspiracy movement that claimed the Democrat was not a natural-born American citizen and therefore ineligible for the presidency.

“No ma’am, he’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign is all about,” McCain said to applause.

That’s called grace. It’s something many Republicans once had.

Before McCain, there was President George H.W. Bush. In 1993, he left a handwritten note in the Resolute Desk in the White House for his successor, Bill Clinton.

“When I walked into this office just now I felt the same sense of wonder and respect that I felt four years ago,” Bush’s note said. “I know you will feel that, too.”

“I’m not a very good one to give advice,” the note continued, capturing Bush’s genuine strain of humility. “Don’t let the critics discourage you or push you off course,” he wrote, and ended by saying, “Your success now is our country’s success. I am rooting hard for you.”

Contrast such basic good manners and decency with Donald J. Trump’s reaction to the release of Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan and others unjustly imprisoned by Vladimir Putin.

“Are we also paying them cash? Are they giving us cash (Please withdraw that question, because I’m sure the answer is NO)?” he said. “Just curious because we never make good deals, at anything, but especially hostage swaps. Our ‘negotiators’ are always an embarrassment to us!” he added in his social media post.

No congratulations. No best wishes.

Graceless? Trump is the embodiment of gracelessness.

Of course, his absurd attack on Kamala Harris about whether she was Black or Indian was another recent example. His racist boorishness, apparently aimed at eroding her support in Black communities while stoking white resentments at the gains minorities have made, may have played well with a few supporters.

But for many folks, it confirmed the same sort of oafishness he demonstrated with his birtherism claims about Obama.

NY Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, Trump’s mockery; source: CNN

Need other examples of his callous buffoonery? Recall his mockery of a disabled journalist, New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, in late 2015. Of course, there was his incessant nicknaming of opponents, which continues today.

His incitement of a mob to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was perhaps the most dangerous – and deadly – case of his asinine behavior. Recall that the mob called for the assassination by hanging of Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, whom he had pressured to invalidate the election results.

Then, consider Trump’s absence at the January 2021 inauguration of President Joe Biden. The move broke with over 150 years of tradition, showed scant respect for the office and made a mockery of the peaceful transition of power.

And give some thought to the opposite, the reactions of Biden and Harris to the attempted assassination of Trump. Harris labeled it “heinous, horrible and cowardly.”

For his part, Biden called Trump personally after the shooting. “I told him how concerned I was and wanted to make sure I knew how he was actually doing,” Biden told NBC’s Lester Holt. “He sounded good. He said he was fine, and he thanked me for calling…. I told him he was literally in the prayers of Jill and me, and his whole family was weathering this.”

Would Trump have done the same were the situation reversed? Hard to imagine that from a man who doesn’t appear to know the meaning of even basic manners, much less the graciousness that once was a hallmark of many of his party’s leaders in years past.

Will we again get back to such common decency? It seems likely that the only way that will happen is if Trump and his party are soundly trounced in the upcoming election, the numerous prosecutions of him move forward and the toxin that is Trumpism is purged from the GOP.

All that, of course, is a tall order. But, for anyone with a sense of basic manners, it would seem to be within reach.

Is ignorance driving the right?

Posted on July 29, 2024 by Joe Weber

No, it’s all too well-informed

It was all too easy – and electorally fatal – for Hillary Clinton in 2016 to bemoan the “basket of deplorables” that she said accounted for half of Donald J. Trump’s supporters. She branded them “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.”

The reaction she got was predictable. Trumpers began wearing T-shirts proudly sporting the “deplorables” moniker. And Trump went on to beat Hillary in the Electoral College vote, albeit falling behind her in the popular vote.

Certainly, that bit of middle finger-giving – that dose of philistine class resentment of Hillary – wasn’t the only thing that did her in. But it didn’t help.

As we think about who supports Trump now, eight years and one chaotic Trump presidency later, it’s all too easy to denigrate his supporters as sharing all those “ists” and “ics.” And, indeed, it’s likely many do.

It’s all too easy to cast them as underschooled and ignorant. We know that in 2016 white voters who had not completed college (44% of all voters) cast their votes for Trump by more than two-to-one (64% to 28%), according to the Pew Research Center.

But what then are we to make of those among well-schooled folks that Trump seems to appeal to? What are we to make of the 36% of college-educated voters who voted red back in 2020? Of 60% of Republican voters with a college degree, per a pollster cited by The New York Times, who still back Trump? In fact, the former president’s support among white, college-educated Republicans doubled to 60% over the course of last year, according to Fox News polling.

What are we to make of Kevin D. Roberts, who has bachelor’s, masters and doctoral degrees in history, and heads The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that would help staff a Trump Administration and set its policies? What of the many Harvard grads, such as Steve Bannon, Wilbur L. Ross Jr. and Michael Pompeo, who served in or otherwise advised the previous Trump Administration?

JD Vance, 2017; source: Middle Tennessee State University

Indeed, what are we to make of JD Vance, educated at Ohio State and Yale Law and now Trump’s vice presidential choice? Or of the likes of Elon Musk and the many venture capitalists, such as Stanford lawyer Peter Thiel, who back the pair?

While many of the folks who back Trump are ill-schooled, it’s clear that such folks — and many others — are not among them. They know exactly what they would get in a second Trump Administration and, presumably, they know it would serve their interests with tax breaks, anti-immigrant and isolationist policies, right-wing judicial appointments and the broad array of conservative aims that make up documents such as Project 2025.

It’s all too easy to contend that ignorance and poor education predominate among Trump supporters. With such a view, liberals and middle-of-the-roaders can feel superior, can look down their noses at the “deplorables.” They can pat themselves on the back for supporting Kamala Harris, a well-schooled Black-Indian woman (Howard University and University of California, Berkeley) who makes most of the right wingers literally pale in comparison.

But it’s wrong and dangerous to do so. Such a view underestimates the real threat that the Trumpers pose.

Reproductive rights, LGBTQ equality, the rights to a fair shake for Blacks and other minorities, the U.S. position in NATO and the world, enlightened educational systems, the ability to read books that discomfit us, the separation of theology from governance – all such things are at stake. Trump supporters would erode them all. And that’s not out of ignorance, but out of intentional, thought-out views (even if they repulse many of us).

Heather Cox Richardson; source: Boston Globe/Getty Images, via The Guardian

Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson suggests that the coming election will be as consequential as choices Americans made in the late 1700s, the Civil War era and the New Deal period. These were times when Americans resisted impulses toward dictatorship and disrespect for the principles of equality.

“It is up to us to decide whether we want a country based on fear or on facts, on reaction or on reality, on hatred or on hope,” Richard contends. “It is up to us whether it will be fascism or democracy that, in the end, moves swiftly, and up to us whether we will choose to follow in the footsteps of those Americans who came before us in our noblest moments, and launch a brand new era in American history.”

Indeed, there have been many ignoble moments in our history, times when the right came close to defeating the principles of democracy and equality. Many Tories opposed the American Revolution, preferring the rule of a monarch to an elected legislature. Enslavers and Klansmen long fought for dominance in the country. More recently, in the 1920s, antisemitic and theocratic figures such as Father Charles Coughlin, powered by radio, amassed followings. In 1939, American Nazis rallied in Madison Square Garden.

The lure of the strongman, of religious nationalism and of isolationism, has been potent in the United States for as long as we’ve been a country. And rarely have leaders acted like George Washington and Joe Biden in relinquishing power voluntarily.

Certainly, some of the folks behind Trump want to give into that lure again. They would launch us further down the path toward a narrow and intolerant Christian nationalism. Some would so out of class resentments and ignorance, but many — especially since we have ample experience with Trump — would do so knowingly, with clear intent and deliberation.

Trump’s flaws are legion and well-known, from his lack of morality and narcissism to his very real ignorance. But to the better-schooled among his supporters, he is a useful idiot. He is the one who will deliver for the self-interests of billionaires such as Thiel, for opportunistic hypocritical politicians such as Vance, Nikki Haley, Marco Rubio, etc., for policymakers such as those at The Heritage Foundation. To the evangelicals, he remains a sinner whom they see, nonetheless, as G-d’s weapon against sin.

After four shambolic and norm-shattering years of Trump, most Americans turned away from him in 2020. Will they do so again? There is a real risk that the anything-but-ignorant folks who see him as their water carrier will prevail a second time.

Most Americans turned away from racism and the other ugly isms to elect Barack Obama in 2008 and in 2012. They believed in democracy, the rule of law and the importance of American governmental institutions. This election will be another test of just what values they hold dearest. For them, too, it will be anything but a matter of ignorance.

Will free(r) trade survive?

Posted on July 25, 2024 by Joe Weber

This presidential election is putting globalization into the crosshairs again.

Stanford University economist Thomas Sowell offered a profound thought: “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”

As we ponder the appeal of Donald J. Trump, this insight is worth considering. While he stitches together various discontented groups in his bid to retake the White House, the former president seeks to turn the clock back even further on globalization, among other things. By imposing stiff new tariffs on imports, he maintains that this would restore jobs in hard-pressed Middle American communities.

But would it? Would restricting imports boost the numbers of factory jobs, especially in the states Trump hopes to win? And have similar efforts by President Biden – no friend of globalization himself — paid off for most Americans?

The Tax Foundation, a business-friendly but nonpartisan group in Washington, contends that such tariffs under both Trump and Biden have had a contrary effect – at least for Americans overall. Indeed, it’s not clear that they even helped voters in hollowed out manufacturing communities.

The foundation estimates that if imposed, Trump’s proposed tariff increases would hike taxes by $524 billion annually and shrink GDP by at least 0.8 percent. The group finds that the levies would slash employment by 684,000 full-time equivalent jobs. And that’s all before counting the effects of retaliation in this potential escalation of an ongoing trade war.

As president, Trump imposed nearly $80 billion worth of new taxes on Americans by levying tariffs on thousands of products valued at approximately $380 billion in 2018 and 2019, the group calculated. This amounted to one of the largest tax increases in decades.

And things actually worsened under Biden. That’s because the Biden administration kept most of the Trump administration tariffs in place, and in May 2024, announced tariff hikes on an additional $18 billion of Chinese goods. The cost amounted to an additional tax increase of $3.6 billion.

“We estimate the Trump-Biden tariffs will reduce long-run GDP by 0.2 percent, the capital stock by 0.1 percent, and employment by 142,000 full-time equivalent jobs,” the foundation says.

But have the levies benefitted folks in protected industries? Have they kept open factories in the industrial Midwest that otherwise would shut down? Is the tradeoff worthwhile?

As WABC-TV broadcaster Warner Wolf used to say, let’s go to the videotape, (well to the stats, anyway):

The number of manufacturing jobs climbed during Trump’s tenure, rising from 12.383 million in January 2016 to a high of 12.828 million in January 2019, before slipping a bit (perhaps seasonally). This suggests that his policies (perhaps) helped add a relatively small 445,000 such jobs. Thanks largely to Covid, the tally dropped to 12.188 million by January 2021, the beginning of Biden’s term, but then climbed to a high of 12.966 million by this past January before slipping back to a preliminary estimate of 12.950 million by June.

The figures suggest that Biden’s policies (perhaps) helped restore more manufacturing jobs – as few as 122,000, if one counts from the Trump-term height, or as many as 760,000, if one counts from the Covid-dampened figure in 2021.

But do tariffs deserve the credit for gains in either administration? Not according to economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research. As The New York Times reported, a nonpartisan working paper by four such researchers examined monthly data on U.S. employment by industry. Their finding: tariffs that Trump placed on foreign metals, washing machines and an array of goods from China starting in 2018 neither raised nor lowered the overall number of jobs in the affected industries.

Worse, those additional costs did hit many Americans, who paid higher prices for such goods, fueling inflation. Moreover, they incited other countries to impose their own retaliatory tariffs on American products, making them more expensive to sell overseas, and the levies had a negative effect on American jobs, the paper finds. As the Times reported, that was particularly true in agriculture: Farmers who exported soybeans, cotton and sorghum to China were hit by Beijing’s decision to raise tariffs on those products to as much as 25 percent.

Trade wars of the sort that Trump launched, that Biden exacerbated, and that Trump promises to accelerate don’t appear to help even the people they are designed to help. And, overall, consumers and workers pay the freight for this, bearing the burden of higher prices for both imports and domestically produced competing products, the academic work suggests.

“Historical evidence and recent studies show that tariffs are taxes that raise prices and reduce available quantities of goods and services for U.S. businesses and consumers, which results in lower income, reduced employment, and lower economic output. For example, the effects of higher steel prices, largely a result of the 2002 Bush steel tariffs, led to a loss of nearly 200,000 jobs in the steel-consuming sector, a loss larger than the total employment in the steel-producing sector at the time,” the Tax Foundation contends.

So, what accounts for the recent rise in jobs in manufacturing? Well, part of that may be normal economic growth. The number of manufacturing jobs had been rising since at least 2014, predating both Trump and Biden. And, under Biden, assorted industrial policies may have helped boost the tallies, irrespective of tariffs.

Researchers at the Center for American Progress point to investment programs that Biden championed. Singling out three, the group, which styles itself as “progressive” but independent, lists the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), CHIPS and Science Act, and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The measures were aimed at undoing decades of disinvestment in American communities, the group says.

The efforts were designed to rebuild the nation’s physical, digital, and utility infrastructure; retake the global lead in advanced semiconductor manufacturing; speed the nation’s transition to electric vehicles (EVs) and green energy; and create high-quality jobs, the center notes. These three policies combined direct public spending with grants, loans, tax incentives, and other financial assistance for private companies to promote key sectors, especially manufacturing, using public investment as a way to “crowd in” private investment.

To be sure, there can be little doubt that globalization in recent decades cost some people dearly, even as it benefitted most Americans. While low-cost imported goods helped most consumers, and access to the U.S. market lifted the economies of many other countries, this didn’t help some people – particularly those in industrial states that turned to Trump for relief.

Listen to the liberal Economic Policy Institute: “Globalization of our economy, driven by unfair trade, failed trade and investment deals, and, most importantly, currency manipulation and systematic overvaluation of the U.S. dollar over the past two decades has resulted in growing trade deficits—the U.S. importing more than we export—that have eliminated more than five million U.S. manufacturing jobs and nearly 70,000 factories.”

And consider the disproportionate effect this has had on working-class white voters in the most hard-pressed states – the sort of voters one sees packing into Trump rallies. As The New York Times reported, economic mobility for many of them declined in recent years, even as it improved for many Black Americans.

“Over the past few decades, globalization and changes in technology have caused many jobs to go from the United States to China, India and elsewhere,” the newspaper reported, drawing on a new Harvard study. “These shifts appear to have pushed white people out of the work force, while Black people found other jobs.”

The Times suggests several explanations for the racial disparity.

“White workers might have had more wealth or savings to weather unemployment than their Black counterparts did, but at a cost to their upward mobility,” the newspaper suggests. “They might also have been less willing to find another job. A steel mill that shut down could have employed not just one worker but his father and grandfather, making it a family occupation. People in that situation might feel that they lost something more than a job — and might not settle for any other work.”

Moreover, the Harvard study found that the places where Black workers live were generally less affected by job flight than the places where white workers live. And it noted that, compared with earlier generations, Black workers today are less likely to face racial prejudice in the labor force, making it easier for them to find work. Certainly, this could only fuel the racist demagoguery so rampant nowadays.

As for globalization, even as it has brought big advantages to most Americans — and to many folks overseas — more open trade has been under assault worldwide for years. It was a tough slog for free-trade warrior Clayton Yeutter and President Ronald Reagan to open the way to freer trade back in the 1980s, and many have sought to retrench since. Indeed, the Republican party under the economic nationalist Trump has rejected the concept almost altogether, while Democrats have been only slightly less disapproving.

It’s not clear what a President Kamala Harris would do in this regard. The Tax Foundation, of course, has an idea for what she should do: “In the context of the ongoing trade war, the rise of digital services taxes, and the global minimum tax, U.S. policymakers should seek to build consensus through multilateral negotiations and the rules-based trade system rather than pursue harmful, tit-for-tat retaliation that threatens to compound the harms to U.S. businesses and consumers.”

For his part, Trump has been clear on his route, and it’s not what the foundation would prefer: As the foundation notes, he has proposed a new 10 percent universal tariff on all imports and a 60 percent tariff on all imports from China, as well as potentially higher tariffs on EVs from China or across the board.

As they battle for votes, particularly in key industrial states, Harris and Trump could easily race to the bottom in attacking world trade. The vote in states that they both need — Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan, for instance — may turn on the issue. Unlike Trump, however, Harris has some training in economics — it was one of her majors at Howard University as an undergraduate — and her father is an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University. She should know better.

Will either candidate “disregard the first lesson of economics” and indulge in pandering on the point? Will Harris’s greater degree of economic sophistication keep that impulse in check? Their stances will bear watching.

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.

Now we may get a real fight

Posted on July 21, 2024 by Joe Weber

Kamala Harris helped take down Trump once. Will she again?

Three and a half years ago, Americans decided that a mixed-race Black and Indian woman was capable of serving as president of the United States. They chose Kamala Harris to serve the proverbial heartbeat away from The Resolute Desk, as Joe Biden’s partner. This was one chaotic presidential term after they had picked a Black man, Barack Obama, to serve two terms in the White House.

But how will they choose now? If the Democratic Party taps President Biden’s vice president as its nominee – the logical choice – will America rise to the occasion? After ousting him from office in 2020, will they turn aside Republican Donald J. Trump a second time? Have Americans matured enough racially and in gender terms to look beyond identity politics to Harris’s qualifications, especially since they overlooked the ample skills and experience of a white woman, Hillary Clinton, in 2016, in favor of a white man with no political background and a checkered, bankruptcy-marred business history? (The Clintons are backing Harris.)

The polls are notoriously unreliable. But, at the moment, as Newsweek reported, the most recent analysis by election website FiveThirtyEight, released on July 17, showed Harris had a net approval rating of -11.8, with just 38.6 percent of those surveyed approving of her performance and 50.4 percent disapproving.

Dismal as such numbers are, the latest polling about Trump puts him behind Harris. A July 21 FiveThirtyEight polling analysis gave Trump a net approval rating of -12, making him slightly more unpopular than Harris, with 41.7 percent viewing him favorably and 53.7 percent unfavorably.

The margins surely would be uncomfortably close, as they were in the last few presidential elections. In 2020, Biden-Harris turned Trump into a one-term president with just 51.3% of the popular vote and 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. Trump garnered 46.9% of the popular vote, a figure that held up despite a national barrage of unsuccessful ballot challenges the former president launched.

Trump won office in 2016 with a similar share of the popular vote, just 46.1%, falling below Hillary Clinton’s 48.2%. Despite her success with voters overall, he bested her in the Electoral College, 304 to 227, by carrying the South and much of the Midwest and Northwest.

So, will Harris be the party’s choice, given her narrow lead on Trump at the moment? Can she boost her approval ratings enough to stay ahead of Trump’s beleaguered numbers? The Dems convene in Chicago on Aug. 19 and, in coming weeks there will be debate over whether she can win by carrying the party’s banner.

Despite Biden’s endorsement of Harris, there already has been talk of the party “leapfrogging” over her to tap a seemingly safer white male candidate. Names of governors such as Gavin Newsome of California, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and J.B. Pritzer of Illinois have been vaunted. So, too, has that of a white woman, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

And already, some observers argue that passing over her would cost the party big with Blacks, especially women – a constituency with which Biden was lagging. By this reasoning, she could bring out enough currently dissatisfied Black voters to carry the ticket over the top, even as she boasts of her mixed-race ancestry. She might bolster her chances with whites by tapping any of those governors as a running mate.

Whitmer, of course, could help deliver the key swing state of Michigan. Imagine, though, how a ticket with two women might send far-right voters around the bend. Consider what a stark difference that would represent from the elderly white male heading the GOP and his middle-aged white veep choice.

Of course, identity politics of this sort still matter — indeed they may be everything in this race.

But, looking just at her credentials, Harris couldn’t be better poised for it. Serving at Biden’s side since 2021, she has had an inside seat at the table in important policymaking choices, such as the infrastructure bill that is now pouring billions of dollars into the nation’s bridges and roads, the support of Ukraine, the strengthening of NATO, the difficult rebuilding of America’s stature around the world after Trump’s isolationist term. As Lesley Odom Jr. and Lin-Manuel Miranda might say, Harris has been in “The Room Where It Happens.”

Few vice presidents have been able to grab the limelight from their bosses, and it may be that Harris’s lackluster ratings simply reflect the public’s lack of knowledge of her. Only 15 vice presidents have gone on to serve as president and eight of them got the jobs because of their predecessor’s death. She will now have to show how she’s up to the post, first with the party and then the public — and all in a very short time.

Certainly, Harris brought an impressive resume to the White House. She earned her undergraduate degree in economics and politics at Howard University and her law degree from the University California, Berkeley, as the Arizona Republic reported in detailing her background. She served as a deputy district attorney in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office from 1990 to 1998 in her birthplace of Oakland, California. She specialized in prosecuting child sexual assault cases. In 2004, she was elected district attorney of San Francisco and served through 2010. She was an advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, officiating the first same-sex wedding after California’s Proposition 8 was overturned, the paper reported.

Harris served as California’s attorney general from 2011 to 2017 after winning her first race in November 2010 by a slim margin over Republican Steve Cooley by 0.5% of a percentage point. On the consumer front, she won a $20 billion settlement for Californians whose homes had been foreclosed on and a $1.1 billion settlement for students and veterans who were taken advantage of by a for-profit education company, according to her White House biography.

Her law-enforcement background makes for a bright, bold comparison to the man who aspires to be the nation’s first felon-in-chief. Trump’s disrespect for the law is legend and his 34 felony convictions don’t sit well with many independent voters.

After her work in law, Harris was elected in 2016 to serve in the U.S. Senate. She served on the Senate’s judiciary and intelligence committees, until Biden tapped her to join him in the 2020 race.

Shyamala Gopalan and Harris, Source: People

Harris also brings an interesting family story. She is the daughter of immigrants, with her father, Donald J. Harris, an economics professor at Stanford who hails from Jamaica, and her mother, the late Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer researcher from India. The couple met at the University of California, Berkeley. Her husband, Doug Emhoff, is a former entertainment lawyer now serving as as distinguished visiting professor at Georgetown University Law Center. A Jew and the nation’s first “second gentleman,” he grew up in Matawan and Old Bridge, N.J.

At 59, Harris is two decades younger than the GOP’s geriatric former president, Trump, now 78. Much as Biden’s age-related deterioration has been evident, so has Trump’s, as seen by his numerous gaffes – confusing Biden and Obama, calling Argentina a person and accusing Biden of conspiring to overthrow the United States (all those from just one weekend in March). His litany of falsehoods in his GOP nomination acceptance speech made for great grist for fact-checkers.

If Harris is tapped by the party, would Trump be willing to debate her? One suspects she would demolish him, performing far better than Biden did in his troubling time on stage. Would he shrink from such a head-on fight? Without evidence, Trump argues she would be easier for him to defeat – but that is a claim that, first, Democratic Party members must now assess.

How will they choose? How will America?

The Big Picture

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