Foul language, debasement and politics

Posted on October 10, 2024 by Joe Weber

Just how far down can we go?

When the sketch comedy show “In Living Color” debuted on Fox in 1990, it introduced America to a wonderful phrase, “Clutch the pearls.” And, as our culture has continued to descend toward some unfathomable bottom, pearl-clutching has become ubiquitous, moving beyond shocked high-society ladies.

So, gentle reader, kindly indulge me while I engage in a bit of it (though I own no pearls).

Actor Sam Elliott, known for portraying cowboys and other men’s men, has just broken some new ground in this area in a fresh ad for Kamala Harris, available here:

In his deep, sonorous tones, Elliott says the vice president has “more courage, more honor, more guts” than Donald J. Trump has ever had. And he tells the bros — presumably the targets of the ad — to shake off anything holding them back. “If it’s the woman thing, it’s time to get over that … it’s time to be a man and vote for a woman.”

Will it work? Who knows? It takes a lot to cut through the clutter, especially with young male voters. Some 36 percent of likely male voters between 18 and 29 favor Trump, compared with only 23 percent of young women, according to the Harvard Youth Poll. While such results suggest that Harris enjoys a commanding lead among young people of both sexes, chipping away at Trump’s support among the bros can only help her.

But one thing about the ad is a bit unsettling — and here comes my pearl-clutching. “Are we really going back down that same f—-ing broken road or are we moving forward …?,” Elliott asks. So, unless there’s some editing, that ad — produced by a Republican anti-Trump group, The Lincoln Project — will not run on network TV.

Perhaps the language — including a word many of us have been known to use at times — is just fine, given the places on social media where the ad runs. That’s where the target demographic is, after all.

Howard Stern and Harris, source: Rolling Stone

Indeed, such demographics and all others are being keenly pursued by Harris and her vice presidential nominee. Tim Walz. That’s why Harris has appeared in such media as Howard Stern’s satellite radio show, “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and the Call Her Daddy podcast and Walz opted for “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” To be sure, Harris has also sought out the older demographics by sitting for a “60 Minutes” interview, but she wants the younger folks, too.

Still, the unsettling thing about the Elliott ad is that it’s part of a continuing debasement of political culture. Coarse language is just a part of that, a symbol of it.

Sadly, we can lay the blame for this squarely on Trump. This process began, of course, in 2016 with Trump’s juvenile nicknaming of his opponents — Crazy Hillary, Birdbrain for Nikki Haley, Pocahontas for Elizabeth Warren, etc. And that has continued with Crazy Kamala, Comrade Kamala and Tampon Tim. Trump is also known for his coarseness in his rallies, dropping f-bombs with regularity. “Let’s indict the motherf—-er,” he infamously said of Biden at a California GOP meeting last year.

To be sure, some Democrats have aired once-private vulgarities in public, too. In 2019, then newly elected Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib in vowed to “impeach the motherf—-er,” referring to Trump, in a meeting of the liberal group MoveOn.org.

And, as reported by The Washington Post, Harris has been known to be proud of her proficiency in profanity in private — but rarely in public. Last May, though, she bluntly described her thoughts about breaking barriers in a conversation at the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies.

“We have to know that sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open,” Harris said. “Sometimes they won’t, and then you need to kick that f—ing door down.”

But Trump and his followers degrade language in public on a regular basis. As president, he referred to African nations as “s—holes” and called Joe Biden a “son of a b—-” and, earlier, famously boasted of grabbing women “by the p—-,” of course. His supporters have gleefully echoed his vileness at rallies, wearing T-shirts that say “Biden sucks, Kamala swallows.” Trump’s crowds seem to exult in the freedom he gives them to act, well, like a “basket of deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton memorably put it.

As the Post pointed out, there is a long history of presidents swearing in private, and maybe a growing level of acceptance for public profanity from leaders. But now Americans are hearing a woman in Harris’s position using unbecoming language, an unfamiliar reality, according to presidential historian Tevi Troy.

“There’s the question of whether it’s appropriate for a president to be cussing. Then there’s the second question of whether it’s considered ladylike to be cussing,” said Troy, who has studied presidents and profanity. “So she’s operating in both spheres, and we’re in uncharted territory.”

This goes beyond public language, though. After all, using decent language — in any setting — is just a matter of showing respect for others. And Trump is a master of disrespect. Recall how he mocked a disabled reporter, Serge Kovaleski, by mimicking his physical challenges.

Trump seems to delight his crowds by waxing profane about many people— Blacks, gays, immigrants, non-Christians of all sorts. In her criticism, Clinton derided Trump followers as racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and Islamaphobic, and those labels likely still apply to many of them. The attacks work for Trump.

Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, have displayed extraordinary disrespect for legal Haitian immigrants, for instance, in their attacks on residents of Springfield, Ohio. Their demonization and villainization works to whip up fear and racism among his white followers, as it confirms their sense of superiority by invoking tropes such as the eating of household pets.

“The power of such baseless accusations by Trump and Vance lies not in their factual basis, but in their resonance with long-standing racial fears about Black and brown people,” Princeton Prof. Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús writes in Time Magazine. “These anxieties transcend the specific moment of misinformation. Rather they tap into a fears rooted in Christian bias and cultural stigma and then perpetuated by law enforcement, animal rights groups, politicians, and white communities who see non-white immigrants as existential threats to the purity of American neighborhoods.”

Ever since Trump derided southern border-crossers as criminals and rapists in 2016, he has found a ready market among fearful white followers. One hears of people in lily-white areas rushing out to buy guns to protect themselves from the invading hordes Trump has described.

“Fear, like hope, can be very motivating and is not inherently bad. The challenge is to identify when fear is being used deceptively,” Dolores Albarracin, a professor of psychology, business, and medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said in an American Psychological Association piece in 2020. “For example, intentional distortion of evidence is within the realm of disinformation and often foments fear for political purposes.”

Certainly, the denigration of Haitian immigrants falls into the latter category. Trump campaign lies about the pets were denied by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and local Springfield, Ohio, officials, but Trump followers breezed right on by the facts. “Bomb threats, school closings, rallies, and more have come at the cost of misinformation and baseless claims,” the Columbus Dispatch reported. “Associating eating pets with immigrants is often considered a longstanding trope that exposes racism and discrimination.”

Such cultural debasement by Trump extends to the media and other institutions, as well, of course. The former president has long excoriated the media and his recent refusal to appear on “60 Minutes,” for fear that his misstatements would be called out by fact-checkers, just underscores that.

He has also demeaned the legal system (and not exclusively over his 34 felony convictions, as well as the $88 million in judgments he must pay a woman he raped, E. Jean Carroll). And he has similarly discredited the FBI, intelligence agencies and the military.

Of course, if Trump wins on Nov. 5, we can expect more of the same. If he loses — and if the GOP consigns him to the political dustbin — perhaps we can hobble back to a culture of normalcy. The Elliott video for Harris is not an official campaign ad and it’s highly unlikely Harris would greenlight such language in forthcoming ads. We could also expect that a President Harris would likely keep her salty language behind closed doors.

Celebrating the best of American culture is a lot of what Harris is about. Trump is all about something else entirely.

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.”

Trumpy matters

Posted on August 23, 2024 by Joe Weber

A bit more about a sib’s concerns about Harris versus her guy

For various reasons, a sibling of mine has long been committed to Donald J. Trump. She points to several areas where she believes the Biden-Harris team has problems, some of which were discussed in a prior edition of The Big Picture. Take a look there, if you like, for a bit of context.

Today, though, let’s take up a few other problem spots my sister has mentioned: electric vehicles, tent cities and riots. All are well worth exploring.

ELECTRIC VEHICLES

Eager to reduce our dependence on climate change-inducing fossil fuels, the Biden Administration has argued that America should cruise into the future on EVs. It has provided an array of incentives, many of which come on top of similar efforts in some states, to make such vehicles affordable for more of us. A federal tax credit of $7,500 is available, based on the make of the vehicle and the income of the buyer. And states such as Colorado match that, so qualified buyers can drive off with quite a bargain.

Helped by such carrots, EV sales have soared since Biden took office. From 0.3 million in 2020, they jumped to 1.6 million last year. The growth continued in the first half of this year, first with a modest 2.6% rise in the first quarter, year over year, then with an 11.3% rise in the second quarter.

It’s rare nowadays to go for a drive and not see an EV. Tesla now has to compete with such new offerings as the BMW i5, Cadillac Lyriq, Honda Prologue, and Kia EV9 SUV, Cox Automotive reports. And the outlet says higher volumes of the Ford Mustang Mach-E and F-150 Lightning are helping Ford hold onto its No. 2 position, behind Tesla, in the EV market.

Publicly available chargers are also multiplying, aided by Biden funds. As of April, the U.S. had more than 168,300 such charging stations across the country, most notably in California with nearly 44,600 public and private outlets. The U.S. has a long road to travel to equal China’s charger network, which in 2022 was estimated to have at least 1.76 million stations. But the Biden Administration is moving on the issue and this year made more than $623 million in grants available for chargers under a $2.5 billion program in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

In recent years, U.S. carmakers rushed to meet heightened EV demand, though some are now taking a breather, scaling back, delaying or tweaking plans. Ford is stepping up its hybrid production, for instance, to attract drivers not fully committed to electric, CNBC reported. GM is continuing to produce hybrids and gas-powered cars after it initially went all in on electrified vehicles.

The carmakers don’t expect demand for EVs to stop growing, only to grow more slowly. U.S. EV sales last year equaled about 7.6% of the overall national market, Cox Automotive estimated, according to CNBC. Analysts still expect that to rise to between 30% and 39% by the end of the decade.

The burning question my sib raised was whether the U.S. energy grid could handle the heightened demand. In this, she is echoing former Fox News fabulist Tucker Carlson, who in 2022 bemoaned “California’s already collapsing energy grid” in the wake of heat wave-induced blackouts that year. As Scientific American reported, however, utilities have been moving to strengthen the grid as a warming climate steps up demand for power for lots of reasons and they are planning for EVs.

In California—the national leader in EVs with more than 1 million plug-in vehicles—EV charging currently accounts for less than 1% of the grid’s total load during peak hours, the newsmagazine reported. In 2030, when the number of EVs in California is expected to surpass 5 million, charging should account for less than 5% of that load, a spokesperson for the California Energy Commission said.

The pull on the grid is expected to rise more from the nation’s move away from climate-damaging fossil fuels in coming decades. So, utilities are aiming to boost their capacity by adding clean energy sources, expanding battery storage and building transmission lines, the magazine reported.

“We’re talking about a pretty gradual transition over the course of the next few decades,” Scientific American quoted Ryan Gallentine, transportation policy director at Advanced Energy Economy, as saying. “It’s well within the utilities’ ability to add that kind of capacity.”

Harris has been a booster of the administration’s EV policy and that’s likely to continue.

For his part, Trump has long ridiculed EVs and promised to end federal supports for them. More recently, as he has gotten closer to Tesla founder Elon Musk, Trump has softened his tone – or just started talking out of both sides of his mouth. It’s an open question whether he’s just pandering to car-industry workers fearful of the change and to Musk at the same time.

“I’m constantly talking about electric vehicles, but I don’t mean I’m against them. I’m totally for them,” he told a crowd in Michigan, as The New York Times reported. Moments later he said, “I’ve driven them, and they are incredible, but they’re not for everybody.”

Source: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

TENT CITIES

Homelessness is a national scourge, to be sure. Tent cities have spread across the country, as the numbers of people without homes have climbed in recent years. The total figures – including people who use shelters and those who don’t — were sliding gradually from 2007 until 2016, moving from about 647,000 to about 550,000. Then, after Trump was elected, the count rose anew to about 580,500 in 2020, and it has climbed since to about 653,100.

“The most significant causes are the shortage of affordable homes and the high cost of housing that have left many Americans living paycheck to paycheck and one crisis away from homelessness,” Jeff Olivet, head of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, told The Hill late last year.

Housing prices have soared across the country. In early 2017, at the beginning of the Trump Administration, the median price of a home in the U.S. topped $313,000 for the first time, rising to $338,600 by the end of his term in the final quarter of 2020, according to the St. Louis Fed. Since then, the median figure has climbed to a high of $442,600 in the last quarter of 2022 and, under pressure from high interest rates, it has since dipped slightly to $412,300.

Of course, prices are higher generally in urban areas. Making matters worse, rents have climbed, making that alternative too costly for a record half of those who rent, according to a new Harvard study. Since 2001, inflation-adjusted rents have gone up 10 times faster than renters’s incomes.

“Housing experts say the underlying problem for both buyers and renters is a massive housing shortage that has built up over decades and will take years to remedy,” NPR reported. “Single-family construction has been picking up, and some developers are building slightly smaller, lower-cost homes … But the Harvard report’s authors say this reprieve isn’t likely to last.”

“For one thing, high interest rates and other rising costs — land, labor, insurance — have again slowed down apartment construction,” NPR reported. “And because all those things are so expensive, most of what’s being built is at the higher end of the market. Over the past decade, the U.S. has lost more than 6 million units with rents under $1,000. For extremely low-income renters, the National Low Income Housing Coalition calculates that for every 100 households, there are only 34 places they can afford.”

Harris seems quite mindful of the issue. She is offering plans to incentivize builders to build starter homes. And, to help buyers she is floating the idea of providing $25,000 down payments for qualified buyers. The details are yet to come, but readers can some discussion of the ideas in a prior Big Picture installment.

Minneapolis riot damage, June 2020; source: Star Tribune photo

RIOTS

This concern is, well, ironic. On Jan. 6, 2021, rioters took over the U.S. Capitol after Trump whipped them up, threatened to hang Trump’s sitting vice president, Mike Pence, and assaulted nearly 150 police officers, sending some to the hospital with severe injuries. Four people died. Nearly $3 million in damages were reported.

Trump today calls the rioters patriots and has promised to pardon those convicted of various crimes in connection with the Capitol insurrection.

But my sib isn’t referring to that riot, of course. Rather, she seems to be troubled about the street rage that reigned in 2020 — while Trump was still in office — in places such as Minneapolis. That was the scene of the brutal murder of a Black man, George Floyd, in May 2020. Four policemen were involved in Floyd’s killing.

“Some demonstrators vandalized police vehicles with graffiti and targeted the precinct house where the four officers had been assigned,” The New York Times reported. “Protests also occurred in the city in the subsequent days. Officers used tear gas and fired rubber bullets into crowds. Some businesses, including restaurants and an auto-parts store, were set on fire.”

Floyd’s murder and other incidents of police violence against Black people around the same time in places such as Louisville, Kentucky, and Brunswick, Georgia, spawned still more demonstrations. In all, protests erupted in at least 140 cities across the United States, and the National Guard was activated in at least 21 states in the period.

Three days after Floyd’s murder, then Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz – now the Democratic vice presidential nominee — activated the National Guard. The city sought his help after vandalism and fires broke out during demonstrations.

“Let’s be very clear,” Walz said. “The situation in Minneapolis, is no longer, in any way, about the murder of George Floyd. It is about attacking civil society, instilling fear and disrupting our great cities.”

Nonetheless, Walz was criticized by Republicans for waiting too long to act. As noted by FactCheck.org, there was some ambiguity in what city officials wanted at the time, so it’s not clear that Walz was at fault. Walz did apologize to a Hispanic CNN reporter who was arrested while covering the disturbances, saying he took responsibility for the arrest.

Now that Walz is a political opponent, however, Trump recently revived the criticism. This is a reversal from his stance in the spring of 2020, when he praised Walz for calling in the Guard. An audio recording obtained by ABC News documents Trump telling Walz in a June 1, 2020, call with governors that he was “very happy” with how Walz responded in the days after protests turned violent.

“You called up big numbers and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins,” Trump said on the call, according to ABC News.

The big question now, of course, is: what would Harris do if confronted with national disorder because of police violence against Blacks? Well, she made her career in law enforcement, prosecuting criminals in San Francisco as district attorney and then statewide as California’s Attorney General. Liberals lambasted her as too tough on crime and as a supporter of policies that fostered mass incarceration.

To serve their ends, Trump and his allies are painting Harris as “dangerously liberal” and soft on crime. “She has plenty of evidence to point to that shows she was, at times, a tough-on-crime prosecutor,” Vox noted. “She also has plenty of evidence that shows she was, at other times, a reformer.”

In politics, as in war, truth can be one of the first casualties. As the Trump folks seek to define Harris and Walz to suit their cartoonish images, they don’t seem to have much regard for the facts.

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.