We just have to survive

Posted on November 6, 2024 by Joe Weber

Trump’s victory makes a troublesome statement about America

As of this writing, some 71.9 million Americans proved something quite disturbing as of the close of Election Day yesterday. They revealed themselves as ignorant of economics, heartless toward the desperate, tolerant of racism (if not racist), and disrespectful of basic morality and law.

Their vote for Donald J. Trump is enough to make one ashamed of being an American.

There are hard lessons in the election of a dictatorial demagogue whose personal immorality is well-established, whose venal self-interest has been all too obvious and whose ignorance and scorn of history, political norms and institutions such as the military is astonishing. Among other things, the vote reflects failures on the part of our educational, religious and civic institutions.

It suggests an America suffering from a deep rot that could be tough to root out. It suggests an America that is in dire need of a hard look at itself.

“We just elected a convicted felon who has normalized bullying, spread hate like an industrial sprinkler and shown us over and over and over again he sees laws as irrelevant and self-enrichment as sacrosanct. Faced with a billowing ocean of red flags – from indictments for trying to overturn the 2020 election to the coddling of dictators who rule enemy nations – a majority of Americans cast their vote for the man who is a totem of the worst in all of us,” USA Today columnist Rex Huppke writes. “So spare me the wails of ‘This isn’t who we are!’ I’ve got bad news for the sane and decent among us: This is exactly who we are.”

Check out the insight of Lisa Lerer of The New York Times:

“Donald Trump told Americans exactly what he planned to do.

“He would use military force against his political opponents. He would fire thousands of career public servants. He would deport millions of immigrants in military-style roundups. He would crush the independence of the Department of Justice, use government to push public health conspiracies and abandon America’s allies abroad. He would turn the government into a tool of his own grievances, a way to punish his critics and richly reward his supporters. He would be a ‘dictator’ — if only on Day 1.

“And, when asked to give him the power to do all of that, the voters said yes.

“This was a conquering of the nation not by force but with a permission slip. Now, America stands on the precipice of an authoritarian style of governance never before seen in its 248-year history.”

Source: Agence France-Presse, via The New York Times

And consider what David A. Graham of The Atlantic had to say:

“Trump may be the most negative mainstream candidate in American history. Observers including my colleague Peter Wehner have noted the contrast between Trump’s disposition and Ronald Reagan’s sunny optimism. But in a strange way, Trump does offer a kind of hope. It is not a hope for women with complicated pregnancies or LGBTQ people or immigrants, even legal ones. But for those who fit under Stephen Miller’s rubric that ‘America is for Americans and Americans only,’ Trump promised a way out.”

Indeed, Trump’s election represents a victory for the nativists in the long-established cyclical pattern of the U.S. to repel, welcome and then again repel outsiders. Though we are a nation of immigrants, we repeatedly have shut our doors to those who would join us. As far back as the Alien & Sedition Acts of 1798, we’ve shown our suspicion of newcomers. In the 1800s, native Americans detested and demeaned Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants. Then, the Immigration Act of 1924 set a quota on European immigrants and shut out Asians. And in World War II, as the Holocaust raged, thousands of Jews were barred from the U.S.

Oh, and we “interned” thousands of Japanese-Americans during that war for no other reason than the color of their skin.

Japanese-American “interns,” source: The National WWII Museum

Trump’s plans to deport millions of migrants to the U.S. are well in line with this entrenched American anti-immigrant and racist tradition. Even though his own grandfather Friedrich came to the U.S. from Germany and his wife, Melania (originally Melanija Knavs) hails from Slovenia, Trump has a deep-set revulsion to immigrants — at least non-white ones. Perhaps betraying his Germanic sympathies for eugenics, Trump in a radio interview linked immigration, violent crime, and genetics, saying, “we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

Soon, we are likely to see American law enforcers rounding up migrants, putting them into internment camps and tossing them out of the U.S. Families will likely be uprooted and broken up, all because of a failure to establish a path to citizenship for them. The effect on our economy could be devastating, as people who do our roofing and carpentry, pick our vegetables and staff our grocery stores and restaurants are driven out.

Indeed, the economic effects in general of the Trump presidency could prove devastating. They could make the inflation of the Biden years pale. The economically ignorant may have voted for Trump in large part because of that inflation – unaware that the price spiral sprang mostly from post-Covid shortages and a robust employment picture – but they soon are likely to experience steep price hikes when Trump’s tariffs kick in and drive up the costs of American-made goods and imports alike.

The global trade war that his levies are likely to spawn will also hurt America’s standing in the world and substantially increase tensions with China and other countries. Of course, his likely abandonment of Ukraine, his coziness with Vladimir Putin and his distaste for NATO will have severe implications, as well.

At this political nadir, it’s difficult to find reasons for hope. Editorialists at The Wall Street Journal have argued that checks and balances in the U.S. system will contain some of Trump’s worst impulses, scaling down any aspirations toward dictatorship he may have. But will there be many such checks, given the toadies in what will be a Republican-dominated Senate (and perhaps House, though we don’t know yet)?

In fact, is it more likely that a second-term Trump will be far less bound than even the first-term Trump was?

“Those expecting his instincts to be tempered by advisers, as sometimes happened during his first term, will be disappointed,” The New York Times editorialized. “His inner circle has been purged of people who say no. In a second Trump term, the secretary of state would not come from Exxon, and the secretary of the Treasury would not come from Goldman Sachs. The smart — and courageous — people have left the room. What remains are loyalists and ideologues and a decision-making process that begins and ends with the question of what is most expedient for Mr. Trump.”

While it’s hard to strike an optimistic note, it is, nonetheless, heartening that some 66.9 million of our countrymen saw Trump for the loathsome and dangerous figure he is. Overall, the man won with a bare majority of 51 percent to Vice President Kamala Harris’s 47.5 percent, according to current tallies by the Associated Press.

Those Harris supporters apparently went to good schools or, at least, paid attention when they were there. This, in fact, is no small concern. According to early exit polls, some 54 percent of Trump voters nationwide lacked college degrees, perhaps explaining the ignorance that drives many of his backers. And that number could rise as more thorough surveys come in over time.

Pew in 2020 reported that voters who identify with the Democratic Party or lean toward it were much more likely than their Republican counterparts to have a college degree (41% vs. 30%). In 1996, the reverse was true: 27% of GOP voters had a college degree, compared with 22% of Democratic voters. But the problem is that, as of that year, about two-thirds of registered voters in the U.S. (65%) lacked a college degree.

The 2024 election, by and large, was a working-class election. That is the group that gave Trump the votes in the so-called Blue Wall, handing him Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. If Harris had carried those elector-rich states, she would occupy the White House for another four years. In other words, Trump’s success was a triumph for the undereducated who bought the promises of a demagogue who tailored his grievances to theirs.

Give Trump credit. He may be a business failure (see his bankruptcies), but he is a brilliant huckster.

Source: pool photo from The New York Times

Those to whom he pandered were gulled in 2016 and again in 2024, it seems. The lapse seems to prove an adage often attributed (perhaps incorrectly) to Mark Twain that “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.”

Indeed, the number of people who paint a rosy picture on the first Trump term, at least economically, is extraordinary and flies in the face of objective evidence to the contrary (inflation notwithstanding). Consider our historically low jobless rates and the performance of the stock market in recent years, for instance.

No one knows for sure what the future holds for the economy. But Trump’s plans bode ill, whether regarding tariffs or the decimation of the federal budget because of his top-down tax cuts. It’s entirely possible that the people fooled by Trump again this time will rue the day they made their choice.

And, on the upside (the side occupied by those 66.9 million Harris voters), Trump will face an uphill fight for some of his other moves. Perhaps we can take heart from the encouragement of such resistance by Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor and a distinguished academic.

“We will do that by resisting Trump’s attempts to suppress women’s freedoms. We will fight for the rights of women and girls to determine when and whether they have children. No one will force a woman to give birth,” Reich writes.

“We will block Trump’s cruel efforts at mass deportation. We will fight to give sanctuary to productive, law-abiding members of our communities, including young people who arrived here as babies or children.

“We will not allow mass arrests and mass detention of anyone in America. We will not permit families to be separated. We will not allow the military to be used to intimidate and subjugate anyone in this country.

“We will protect trans people and everyone else who is scapegoated because of how they look or what they believe. No one should have to be ashamed of who they are.

“We will stop Trump’s efforts to retaliate against his perceived enemies. A free nation protects political dissent. A democracy needs people willing to stand up to tyranny.”

Is Reich whistling in the wind? Well, it depends on who will do the resisting. Most women voters (54 percent) voted for Harris, as did most people 18-29 (55 percent), most Blacks (86 percent) and Latinos (53 percent). Will such people, along with white men who likely will find themselves disenchanted anew after a couple years, wield enough power in the midterms to neutralize Trump?

American history and politics, like much else, tend to move in cycles. If Hegel was right and if Trump’s mistakes loom large enough, things will come around again. Embarrassing, disturbing and troublesome as this election has been, coming ones could give sensible folks hope. We just have to survive the coming storms.

Really, what do we have to fear?

Posted on November 4, 2024 by Joe Weber

The NY Times seeks balance but the facts are a lot more lopsided

It is the duty of the media to report the news in a fair and balanced way. Journalists learn this from the get-go in J School. Give equal weight to all responsible and credible sides in every story, whether they involve elections or almost any other controversial topic. Tell a full, complete and impartial story to the best of your ability.

But the key words there are “responsible,” “credible” and “full.”

The New York Times set out on this election eve to tell a tale of our national anxiety – of which there is surely no shortage. But did it meet the tests posed by such key words?

“The nation enters this Election Day on edge over possibilities that once seemed unimaginable in 21st-century America: political violence, assassination attempts and vows of retribution against opponents,” the paper began its piece, under the headline “How Americans Feel About the Election: Anxious and Scared.” The piece carried the subhed: “Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump have framed the presidential race as an existential battle. Voters are heeding their warnings.”

But one must wonder, based on that evenhanded subhed, whether the existential issue really exists for both sides.

Certainly, with democracy at stake, it exists for supporters of Kamala Harris and, one might fairly say, for the whole country. Should Trump prevail — and live up to his promises of retribution, the use of the military against dissenters, the pardoning of Jan. 6 rioters, the gutting of civil-service protections and a stronger hand for the Presidency, and much more — then the term “existential” seems apt.

But does the equation work the other way? Is it reasonable to think the word is appropriate if we elect a sitting vice president who isn’t planning to do any of those things, who isn’t planning to upend Washington or to embrace chaos, and who would likely bring a lot of continuity to the job?

So, one might question whether the Times, in an effort to live up to the ethic of evenhandedness, is misleading readers. One might ask whether it is dealing in false balance, so-called “bothsidesism,” at the expense of the truth here.

This is not to say that Americans of all stripes are not anxious about the vote. Indeed, it is a seminal election and both conservatives and liberals have a lot at stake. And this is not to say that the paper’s diligent reporters aren’t fairly reflecting the divergent views of ordinary folks whom they quote.

“In dozens of interviews over the final weekend of the campaign, Americans from across the political spectrum reported heading to the polls in battleground states with a sense that their nation was coming undone,” the piece says. “While some expressed relief that the long election season was finally nearing an end, it was hard to escape the undercurrent of uneasiness about Election Day and what might follow afterward.”

And the individuals mentioned reported real fears, as the paper recounted:

“I worry about violence,” said Bill Knapp, 70, a retiree from Grand Rapids, Mich., faulting Trump for that possibility as he mingled with other Harris supporters at a local Democratic campaign office. “I’m bracing for that no matter what the outcome is.”

And, on the Trump side, the paper reported on how 56-year-old Melody Rose of Levittown, Pa., worries about everything from affording a place to live to the outbreak of World War III — a global conflict Trump warns is all but inevitable unless he retakes the White House.

“We’ll lose all our freedoms,” Rose said. “I think there will never be another election season again.”

Oh, really?

Jan. 6 rioters, source: Pew Research Center

Yes, it’s true that Democrats from Harris on down are rousing – and worrying – their backers with the specter that Trump will sow chaos and threaten the democratic order. But, isn’t Trump’s rejection of the 2020 results and his refusal to say whether he would accept defeat this time just such a threat? Isn’t hard evidence, such as the bloody rioting on Jan. 6, persuasive about who is vulnerable here? Was that day really a “day of love,” as Trump sought to recast it, even several people died and many were badly hurt?

And, for their part, are Harris and the Democrats similarly planning to reject an electoral rejection, should that happen? To not honor the will of voters, as Trump appears willing to do?

Indeed, are Democratic operatives planning to intimidate voters at the polls, as thousands of GOP “watchdogs” are likely to do? The Republican National Committee last June launched a drive in swing states to marshal thousands of polling place monitors, poll workers and attorneys to serve as what the RNC called “election integrity” observers.

It’s no wonder, that some Harris voters are afraid to even speak out loud about their candidate. As the Times piece reported, at an early voting site in a small city outside Grand Rapids, Mich., a 69-year-old man who would publicly identify himself only as Gary D. spoke in hushed tones when discussing his choice.

“Some questions are not safe to answer,” he said, glancing around before admitting he backs Harris. “Ten years ago I would say ‘yeah,’ no problem. Now, things are different now. I feel like there’s more intimidation than there used to be.” His biggest feeling about the election “fear.”

Given Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and weighing it against the “fascist” charges Harris and her supporters have leveled, is there really any balance? Is there, moreover, a question of accuracy?

At a recent Georgia rally, Trump said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1790, the law under which Japanese, Italian and German Americans were interned during the second world war, as The Guardian reported. He said he would pursue the death penalty for undocumented immigrants who kill an American.

As Politifact reported, Trump early last month told supporters in Scranton, Pa., that Harris is surrounded by “very smart, very vicious people” who are “the enemy from within.” A few days later, he told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo that U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is “the enemy from within.” Asked about possible Election Day chaos, he warned of “very bad people,” “radical left lunatics” who should be handled if “necessary” by the National Guard or the military.

The outlet noted that experts say the “enemy from within” phrase echoes rhetoric by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis., who led 1950s congressional investigations seeking to root out imagined communists who he claimed had infiltrated the federal government.

“Trump’s use of the ‘enemy within’ language is intentionally vague, open-ended, and malleable,” Allison Prasch, an associate professor of rhetoric, politics and culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Politifact.

She suggested it “plants a seed” in the listeners’ minds that “there is something or someone that must be punished” for the current state of the economy, the immigration system, false claims about voter fraud, the U.S. political system or whatever he’s talking about, the outlet reported.

“With this vague but explicit idea articulated, Trump underscores the ‘Us versus Them’ framing of the US electorate while also distancing himself from any actions taken by supporters against this ‘enemy within,’” the academic said. “It’s incredibly dangerous.”

One, again, must ask who those in real danger are.

A friend in Seattle argued this past summer that liberals like him need to get guns because they could be the targets of crazed Trumpers. Does he have a point? Has he got a stronger case than would Trumpers who fear they could lose their guns if Harris wins, as the former president has baselessly said?

The effort at balance that the Times made is understandable, but it is also wrongheaded. To be sure, the editors and reporters haven’t missed the real threats that Trump and his backers pose — they’re all there. But they have buried those real dangers in a flawed evenhandedness.

Much more on target is another piece in the paper, headlined “For Trump, a Lifetime of Scandals Heads Toward a Moment of Judgment” with the subhed “No major party presidential candidate, much less president, in American history has been accused of wrongdoing so many times.”

That piece lays out, in fact, much of the reason that Trump is running. He is determined to try to get out from under an extraordinarily long long list of legal woes, and serving in the White House could do much of that for him — certainly in eradicating the pending Department of Justice actions and, perhaps, delaying state actions.

“America for the first time in its history may send a criminal to the Oval Office and entrust him with the nuclear codes,” the piece says, referring to Trump’s 34 felony convictions. “ What would once have been automatically disqualifying barely seems to slow Mr. Trump down in his comeback march for a second term that he says will be devoted to ‘retribution.’

“He has survived more scandals than any major party presidential candidate, much less president, in the life of the republic … He has turned them on their head, making allegations against him into an argument for him by casting himself as a serial victim rather than a serial violator.

“His persecution defense, the notion that he gets in so much trouble only because everyone is out to get him, resonates at his rallies where he says ‘they’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you, and I’m just standing in the way,’ the Times reports. “But that of course belies a record of scandal stretching across his 78 years starting long before politics. Whether in his personal life or his public life, he has been accused of so many acts of wrongdoing, investigated by so many prosecutors and agencies, sued by so many plaintiffs and claimants that it requires a scorecard just to remember them all.”

So, one must for a final time ask: who really poses the danger here? And is that something every voter should ponder as he or she enters the voting booth?

Sound and fury

Posted on October 24, 2024 by Joe Weber

But, rather than signifying nothing, it is most revealinG

Macbeth, a general in one of Shakespeare’s more famous armies, offers a profound insight in Act V of his renowned play. “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” he says.

As the presidential election race tightens, we are hearing many such furious tales from Donald J. Trump.

Consider his “wildly false personal attacks” on the vice president, as The New York Times put it. Trump labeled Harris a “low IQ individual” and suggested baselessly that she has a drinking problem and may be abusing drugs. In a typical case of what the psychologists call projection, he said she was not “mentally or physically able” to be president. He said the sitting VP, former senator and former California State Attorney General was “lazy as hell.”

Will these racist dog-whistles play well with his base? Will the billionaires atop Trumpworld and the white working class and rural folks on the bottom cheer him on for them, seeing them as more evidence that Trump is the ultimate anti-politician? That he speaks like they do?

There’s no doubt that some part of Trump’s base warms to the canards he hurls at Harris, especially since he has so little else to attack her for. But deeply ingrained racism and sexism can’t be the whole story that underlay some 46.3 percent of the electorate’s sentiments.

There’s likely something even more insidious and troubling at play.

Prof. Emeritus John Hibbing, source: The Daily Nebraskan

A well-regarded political scientist who recently retired from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln sheds some light on what animates Trumpers. Prof. John Hibbing, author of The Securitarian Personality: What Really Motivates Trump’s Base and Why It Matters for the Post-Trump Era, points to fundamental splits that divide American voters.

For Trumpers, the key issues are immigration, gun rights, the death penalty and defense spending. For Harris supporters, they are racial justice, healthcare, women’s rights and income inequality.

Hibbing developed this taxonomy from his observations, his work with focus groups and from a national survey that included more than 1,000 Trump backers. He argues that those in the Trump base crave a particular form of security that revolves around their key issues. Trump plays to their longings brilliantly.

Trumpers, Hibbing contends, feel threatened by those they regard as outsiders, groups that include welfare cheats, unpatriotic athletes, norm violators, non-English speakers, religious and racial minorities, and people from other countries. Their key aim – which allows them to disregard Trump’s immorality, dishonesty and corruption – is to elect someone they believe will shield them, their families and their dominant cultural group from these “outsider” threats.

If Hibbing’s framework is correct, what Trumpers crave is a strongman. And Trump’s well-honed image as an alpha male checks most of the boxes for them. Perverse as it may be, moreover, his prolific sexual history (including assaults) and his recent bizarre comments about Arnold Palmer’s genitals may only reinforce that macho image.

John F. Kelly, source: The New York Times

Indeed, one can only wonder whether recent comments about whether Trump is a “fascist” play well to the Trumpers Hibbing describes — that such claims may be counterproductive to those making them. Trump’s former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly, a retired Marine general, told The New York Times that Trump’s desire for power fits the fascist label.

And Mark T. Esper, who served as Trump’s secretary of defense, amplified that. On CNN, he said that “it’s hard to say” Trump does not fall into the category of a fascist. Moreover, as The Washington Post reported, that followed a warning from retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a new book that the former president is “fascist to the core.”

Such sentiments give credence to the recent report in The Atlantic about Trump’s dissatisfaction with generals who bridled at his dictatorial impulses. “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” Trump said in a private conversation in the White House, the magazine reported.

But will enough Americans be alarmed by such comments, troubled by such judgments by people once close to Trump? Will most see Trump’s seeming “strength” as dangerous, unlike some Trumpers? And, more to the point, will they see Harris as a better alternative?

Of course, some may just play down or ignore such sentiments. Consider the apologists at The Wall Street Journal, who seem oblivious to Trump’s tsarist ambitions. The editorialists there invoke American checks and balances to suggest he would be reined in. By contrast, The New York Times warns that Trump’s “inner circle has been purged of people who say no. In a second Trump term, the secretary of state would not come from Exxon, and the secretary of the Treasury would not come from Goldman Sachs. The smart — and courageous — people have left the room.”

Certainly, some will warm to Trump’s tyrannical inclinations and his latest barbs. But this last-dash sound and fury could also cost him. Sensible voters may respond to Harris’s arguments that Trump’s vileness – the scorching and divisive language and lies that come so naturally to him – should be put well behind us. After all, does anyone really want more of this for the next four years?

Still, with most voters likely to have cemented their impressions of both candidates — and with many having already voted — it’s unclear how much difference the closing-days rhetoric will matter. Each candidate now wants mainly to mobilize their bases and, perhaps, chip away at the support of the other.

For her part, Harris aims to undermine Trump’s strongman image. Thus, her attack on him for being “weak.” Harris challenged Trump recently for refusing to release a report on his health, sit for a “60 Minutes” interview and commit to another presidential debate – all of which she did.

“It makes you wonder: Why does his staff want him to hide away?” she asked the crowd at a rally in Greenville, N.C. “One must question: Are they afraid that people will see that he is too weak and unstable to lead America?”

And she has embraced the “fascist” label for him. “We must take very seriously those folks who knew him best,” she said in a CNN town hall, referring to the numerous former Trump advisers who have broken with him.

“Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?” host Anderson Cooper asked Harris. “Yes, I do. Yes, I do,” she replied.

She added that voters care about “not having a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”

Strong charges, of course. But Harris is also waving a red flag about Trump’s mental acuity. And, given his increasingly erratic speech, her criticisms may carry weight with some voters still mulling over their choice.

Trump’s mental fitness has long been in doubt and, at 78, it’s as reasonable to question that as it was to question President Biden’s sharpness. Lately, Trump has served himself ill in this regard with the meandering talks he calls his “weave.”

He infamously cut off questions at a recent town hall outside Philadelphia and instead swayed to music on stage for 30 minutes. He bobbed his head through the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.,” swayed to Rufus Wainwright’s “Hallelujah,” watched a Sinead O’Connor video, rocked along to Elvis, watched the crowd during “Rich Men North of Richmond” and then, finally, left the stage to shake hands on his way out.

More recently, his campaign canceled at a virtual town hall he was scheduled to take part in, suggesting he is tiring. Reporters have noted that his energy is flagging at some events, and he’s lost his way verbally – never his strength anyway.

He discussed the porosity of limestone in Washington, D.C., as he complained about vandalism. He referred to his so-called Front Row Joes — devoted superfans he often points out during his rallies — as Front Row Jacks, then corrected himself by calling them “the Front Row Jacks and Joes.” He got Harris’s gender wrong in a comment about vice presidential nominee Tim Walz. And, at a McDonald’s, he couldn’t recall the word “fryer.”

“Those French fries were good. They were right out of the, uh — they were right out of whatever the hell they make them out of,” Trump said.

As The New York Times reported on Oct. 17, Trump described mail-in ballots as “so corrupt,” reviving one of his false attacks on the 2020 election results. Then, he shared his thoughts about when he watched SpaceX, Elon Musk’s spaceflight company, fly a rocket back onto its launch site.

Such bizarre off-script comments gain attention, for sure. These “flashes of controversy and oddity,” as The Wall Street Journal described them, have spawned headlines and airtime. Perhaps his followers simply disregard them, choosing instead to hear about how much he plans to deport immigrants and otherwise protect them from various threats.

But one has to wonder, do we really want a president who has trouble finishing thoughts as he practices “the weave?” And might geriatricians have other descriptions for such rambling, with characterizations that are more medical and psychological? One must ask: how would incoherence — especially when it’s vicious, racist and vindictive — serve us for the next four years?

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.”

Unfinished business

Posted on September 18, 2024 by Joe Weber

As the Trump-Harris race shows us, sexism remains alive and well

Fifty-four years ago this Sept. 19, Mary Tyler Moore launched an eponymous hit series on CBS about a young woman who was “gonna make it after all” as a TV journalist in Minneapolis. “Mary Richards” would build a life for herself as an independent woman. The show ran for seven seasons and won a stunning 29 Emmys. Widely hailed for being part of so-called Second Wave Feminism, which focused on equality and discrimination, the series dealt with sex, sexism, birth control and other hot-button topics of the time.

Debuting as women were surging into the workplace in larger numbers, the Mary Tyler Moore Show paved the way for other TV efforts that revolved around women demanding to be on equal footing with men. Among them were “Rhoda,” “Murphy Brown,” “30 Rock” and, in some respects, “Friends” and “Cheers,” all heavily influenced by Moore’s groundbreaking effort.

How can it be that a half-century on from then America has still not left the battles over sexism behind? How can it be that for the current generation of women political figures such as Donald J. Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, are doing their best to remind us of what, in many respects, were the bad old days? How can it be that gender remains an issue for many Americans as they ponder whether a woman can serve as president?

Women now approaching their 60s — such as Vice President Kamala Harris, 59 — were children when “Mary Richards” was challenging glass ceilings on Moore’s show. But, all around them, real women were doing the same.

Harris’s late mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, for instance, came to the United States from India alone at 19, earned a doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology from the University of California Berkeley, and went on to make important contributions as a researcher focusing on breast cancer. As a single mom, moreover, she raised Harris and her sister after splitting up with Harris’s father.

As gains that women have made are under siege now, it’s no surprise that Harris should adopt as one of her campaign mantras “We are not going back.” In counterpoint to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” evocation of a mythical American past, Harris’s tagline suggests progress in matters such as reproductive freedom, LGBTQ rights, Black and other minority rights, and a modern version of feminism — one in which a woman can become not only the first female vice president, but president.

Harris would have America “turn the page” — another tagline — on Trumpism. That, pathology, as she sees it, is the 78-year-old former president’s use of racial divisiveness, his juvenile treatment of opponents, and his well-recorded disrespect for the military, his disregard for the law (as his felony criminal convictions suggest) — along with his sexism.

Trump’s attitudes and actions toward women, of course, seem like something on which turning the page seems well overdue. Recall Trump’s lewdness in the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape. Take note of his sexual abasement of E. Jean Carroll, after which juries found him liable for abuse and defamation, costing him more than $90 million. Don’t dismiss his hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and his extramarital affair with Playboy model Karen McDougal, part of his well-documented pattern of cheating on three wives.

Remember that about two dozen women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct dating back to the 1970s. Recall that his first wife, Ivana, accused him of rape during their 1990 divorce (she later retracted her claim). Another woman accused him of “attempted rape” in 1993 at his Mar-a-Lago resort, but settled a separate breach of contract case and forfeited the rape claim. Still another alleged that Trump attacked her on a flight to New York. Trump denied it all.

Just how vile is he? He looks on own daughter, Ivanka, in, well, a less than fatherly way. “If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her. Isn’t that terrible? How terrible? Is that terrible?,” he said in 2006 on ABC’s “The View.” And, in a 2015 interview with Rolling Stone, Trump reportedly celebrated her “beauty,” adding, “If I weren’t happily married and, ya know, her father …” He was even rebuked by his former chief of staff for sexual remarks about Ivanka in front of White House staff.

Trump’s extraordinary litany of public comments define him, too. To pick three from a very long list, he labeled his own former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and former Gov. Nikki Haley “birdbrain,” said “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband, what makes her think she can satisfy America?,” and said of talk show host Megyn Kelly “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” He slandered Harris as “Dumb as a Rock,” only to be humiliated by the former California State Attorney General and former U.S. Senator’s brilliance in skewering him in their debate.

Fortunately, many American women have long had Trump’s number. “President Joe Biden won women by 15 points over Trump in 2020, according to exit polls, up from former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s 13-point victory among women in 2016,” The Washington Post reported. “Polls suggest that this year, women prefer Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris over Trump by similar margins. Harris led Trump by 13 points among women in an ABC News/Ipsos poll” released in early September.

Disdain for Trump is especially pronounced among younger women — even while younger men don’t shun him quite as much. “Sixty-seven percent of women 18 to 29 supported Vice President Kamala Harris in a New York Times/Siena College poll in six swing states last month, compared with 40% of young men,” The New York Times reported. “Fifty-three percent of young men in those states backed Donald J. Trump, compared with 29% of young women.”

Still, substantial numbers of women back Trump, in spite of his misogyny and coarseness. Trump has implied that Harris’s former romantic relationship with Willie Brown, a former San Francisco mayor, fueled her political success. And as the Times reported, he recently shared a screenshot on Truth Social showing an image of Harris and Hillary Clinton, appended with commentary from another user, with a reference to oral sex.

Asked by a Times reporter what she thought about Trump posting that image, co-founder of Moms For Liberty Tiffany Justice stammered: “You know what, I think that, uh, a lot of people say a lot of things. And we’re focused on the issues that are hurting American voters.”

Women who support Trump seem willing to turn their eyes away from a lot. Like Melania Trump, who suggested that her husband’s celebration of sexual assault in the Hollywood Access tape was just “locker room talk,” they wave aside his depravity.

Evangelical women who back him may see Trump as the sinner who is G-d’s tainted vehicle in areas such as abortion, although his waffling on the matter — declining to endorse a national ban — lately has irked many of them and smacked of betrayal. As he has sought to win over women concerned about such bans, Christian leaders have suggested his backpedaling could dissuade religious voters from showing up on Election Day. R. Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminar, told The New York Times’ The Run-Up podcast that Trump faces the “grave danger” of evangelicals staying home on Nov. 5.

Harris and her team, however, are busy reminding voters that Trump just last spring proudly claimed to have destroyed the protections of Roe v. Wade by appointing Supreme Court justices who gutted the longstanding legal precedent. “After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v. Wade, much to the ‘shock’ of everyone,” Trump said on his social media platform.

Trump, moreover, has lost some of his base even among evangelical women. The Rev. Billy Graham’s granddaughter, Jerushah Duford, famously condemned Trump in 2020. “How did we get here?,” she asked in a USA Today piece exhorting others to abandon him. “How did we, as God-fearing women, find ourselves ignoring the disrespect and misogyny being shown from our president? …. Jesus loved women; He served women; He valued women. We need to give ourselves permission to stand up to do the same.”

In mid-August, Duford made her support of Harris clear, taking part in an “Evangelicals for Harris” Zoom call. “Voting Kamala, for me, is so much greater than policies,” Duford said. “It’s a vote against another four years of faith leaders justifying the actions of a man who destroys the message Jesus came to spread, and that is why I get involved in politics.”

Will more women turn out for Harris? They might if they look into Trump’s history more closely, along with the views of his “childless cat ladies” running mate, Vance. The GOP vice presidential nominee apparently would have many women of the Mary Tyler Moore generation revisit their child-rearing days with grandchildren and give parents more voting power than childless Americans.

“In 2020, [Vance] did not demur when the podcast host Eric Weinstein asserted that helping care for youngsters was ‘the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female, in theory,’” The Atlantic reported. “The next year, Vance suggested that parents should have ‘more power—you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic—than people who don’t have kids.’ He also tweeted, “‘Universal day care’ is class war against normal people.’”

In past elections when Trump ran, the gender gap was substantial. This time around, it could prove to be a yawning chasm. And when one explores why, the question arises: How could any self-respecting woman, of any age and any religion and any race, support this man?

The Big Picture

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