Reading Donald Trump: Responding To Charlottesville

Yesterday, in Charlottesville, Virginia, someone killed someone with a car.

If you haven't yet seen video of the incident, in which a car plowed into a crowd of people protesting a rally of white nationalists who were in turn protesting the removal of a statue of General Robert E. Lee - and if you want to - here's CNN's version, which stitches together video clips from two of the counterprotestors.

This post isn't about that. It's about President Donald Trump's response to that. He already had a press conference scheduled yesterday to announce new funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs, and took time to comment on what was happening in Charlottesville. Here's the transcript, in its entirety, as reported by Vox:

Thank you very much. As you know, this was a small press conference, but a very important one. And it was scheduled to talk about the great things that we're doing with the secretary on the veterans administration. And we will talk about that very much so in a little while. But I thought I should put out a comment as to what's going on in Charlottesville. So, again, I want to thank everybody for being here, in particular I want to thank our incredible veterans. And thank you, fellas. Let me shake your hand.

They're great people. Great people. But we're closely following the terrible events unfolding in Charlottesville, Virginia. We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides. It's been going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama, this has been going on for a long, long time. It has no place in America. What is vital now is a swift restoration of law and order and the protection of innocent lives. No citizen should ever fear for their safety and security in our society. And no child should ever be afraid to go outside and play or be with their parents and have a good time.

I just got off the phone with the governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, and we agree that the hate and the division must stop, and must stop right now. We have to come together as Americans with love for our nation and true affection-- really, I say this so strongly, true affection for each other. Our country is doing very well in so many ways. We have record -- just absolute record employment. We have unemployment the lowest it's been in almost 17 years. We have companies pouring into our country, Foxconn and car companies and so many others. They're coming back to our country. We're renegotiating trade deals to make them great for our country and great for the American worker.

We have so many incredible things happening in our country, so when I watch Charlottesville, to me it's very, very sad. I want to salute the great work of the state and local police in Virginia. Incredible people. Law enforcement, incredible people. And also the National Guard. They've really been working smart and working hard. They've been doing a terrific job. Federal authorities are also providing tremendous support to the governor. He thanked me for that. And we are here to provide whatever other assistance is needed. We are ready, willing and able. Above all else, we must remember this truth: No matter our color, creed, religion or political party, we are all Americans first. We love our country. We love our god.

We love our flag. We're proud of our country. We're proud of who we are, so we want to get the situation straightened out in Charlottesville, and we want to study it. And we want to see what we're doing wrong as a country where things like this can happen. My administration is restoring the sacred bonds of loyalty between this nation and its citizens, but our citizens must also restore the bonds of trust and loyalty between one another. We must love each other, respect each other and cherish our history and our future together. So important. We have to respect each other. Ideally, we have to love each other.

One sentence set the Internet on fire, and well it should have: "We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides." On many sides? What the frick-frack are you talking about? Even some of his fellow Republicans took issue.

I suspect that many people, watching the video of his remarks, stopped listening at that point, as a result of their heads having exploded. But read the rest of the second paragraph, beginning with "It's been going on for a long time in our country," and answer me this: is or is not that entire paragraph a steaming pile that goes beyond being offensive into being incoherent?  What does "Not Donald Trump. Not Barack Obama" even mean?? And, what's been "going on for a long, long time"?

Then, keep going, if you dare - how does "the hate and division must stop, and it must stop now" - a sentiment hard to refute - how does that lead to a boast about "record employment"?

Someone killed someone with a car.

"We're renegotiating trade deals to make them great for our country and great for the American worker."

SOMEONE KILLED SOMEONE WITH A CAR.

The next paragraph is quintessential Trump: the childlike description of the day's events in Charlottesville as "very, very sad," buried in fluff about incredible people doing incredible things, and the assertion that "Federal authorities are also providing tremendous support to the governor. He thanked me for that." Because everything, all the time, has to become about him.

And yet, despite the fact that everything, all the time, has to become about him, in the last paragraph he speaks as if he doesn't see how this - a rally whose organizers are his supporters, in which some participants gave Nazi salutes while saying, "Heil Trump!", and in which someone kills someone with a car -  really is about him. He doesn't see all of this as a result of his success in feeding the fears and resentments that energize hate. No, he doesn't see that; to him, it's a mystery, so he wants to study the situation:

"And we want to see what we're doing wrong as a country where things like this can happen."

The phrase "so many sides" set the Internet on fire, but the entire statement, the entire utterance, was incoherent nonsense. If you form the habit of reading transcripts of Donald Trump, rather than watching videos, you'll see that incoherent nonsense - the weaving of incomplete sentences, pointless hyperbole, insults, unverifiable declarations of fact, and outright lies - is his norm.

And yesterday, I believe, Donald Trump's entire mode of public discourse congealed into an unusable mass of verbal putty.

The man who encouraged supporters to rough people up at his campaign rallies finished by saying. "We have to respect each other. Ideally, we have to love each other."

I'm going to go out a limb to say this: It's too late, Mr. President. The people who voted for you have been too strongly encouraged to hate, to listen to you speak about love. The people who voted against you are too deeply convinced that you do not know love. No one, friend or enemy, can believe that you mean it now when you say that we have to respect and love each other.

If you did mean it, then so much the worse for you, that none of us will believe you. And so much the worse for us, that none of us believe we can.

When Trump tweeted (of course), "We ALL must be united & condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Lets come together as one!" former KKK leader David Duke CORRECTED HIM: "I would recommend you take a good look in the mirror & remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency..."

The most powerful man in the world has lost the greatest power that he could have - the ability to inspire others to follow the better angels of their nature. Having chosen to inspire others to hate, he cannot inspire others to love; having lowered himself to operating as a fountain of contempt, he can lift neither himself nor others to drink from purer streams.

Donald Trump's presidency may continue - he has 1,255 days remaining in office. But yesterday, his leadership died.

Mr. Trump, meet Mr. Gardiner.

On August 16, 2015, presidential candidate Donald J. Trump appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press," for an interview with Chuck Todd. The interview included this exchange:

CHUCK TODD: Who do you talk to for military advice right now?

DONALD TRUMP: Well, I watch the shows. I mean, I really see a lot of great-- you know, when you watch your show and all of the other shows and you have the generals and--

CHUCK TODD: So you do the--

DONALD TRUMP: And you have certain people that you like--

Trump's initial response reminded me of one my favorite scenes from one of my favorite films, a film that I think about more and more often as Trump reveals more and more of how he operates as a person. The film is "Being There," a 1979 comedy starring Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine and Melvyn Douglas, adapted from a novella by Jerzy Kosinski.

Sellers plays a man named Chance who has lived his entire life as the gardener for a palatial estate, and who only knows two things - gardening and television. His employer dies, and he is turned out to make his way in Washington, D.C. He has a minor accident with a limousine, and the passenger, Eve Rand, insists on taking him home so that her husband's live-in medical staff can tend to him. Along the way, she misunderstands his name, "Chance, the gardener," as "Chauncey Gardiner," and we're on our way: from that point on, the richest and most powerful people in D.C. misunderstand everything he says, including the reporters who catch him escorting Eve to a formal affair, and seek comment on newspaper stories about him:

"I like to watch TV."

The sauce on this delicious scene is the look of sheer admiration on the TV reporter's face at the very end.

If you have not yet seen "Being There," put it on your list. After viewing it, you'll understand why, for more than a year now, one commenter after another has compared Donald Trump to Chauncey Gardiner - most recently, Malcolm Jones at The Daily Beast:

"...both Trump and Chauncey are, in their respective ways, almost purely creatures of television. It is their shared window on the world, and not only that: Each man also owes his success to television." 

In 1979, "Being There" was one of the funniest movies I had ever seen. Nearly 40 years later, without being less funny, it has also become one of the scariest.

Donald Trump And The Psychology Of Demagoguery

I'm going to play amateur psychologist here.

In November, a Black Lives Matter protester was attacked at a Donald Trump rally. The Young Turks, an uanbashedly liberal/progressive online news outlet, filed this report, with commentary by anchor Cenk Ungyar:

Last week, The Young Turks filed this report on a Trump rally in Vermont: 

The first thing we hear Mr. Trump say is this absolutely priceless line:

"We'll get more and more angry as we go along."

So, this is a man for whom anger is a virtue to be cultivated. And he appeals to people for whom anger is a virtue.

I believe his audience's anger is rooted in fear, a fear evoked by the realization that America's demographics are changing. Being white, male, straight and (nominally) Christian doesn't mean what it used to in terms of ensuring that you will be treated better than people who lack those identifiers.

Further, I believe that the fear these people feel is rooted in a self-doubt that runs so deep that they can't articulate it. But if they could, they would say something like, "I am afraid that without advantages being conferred by possessing at least three of these four qualities - whiteness, maleness, straightness and Christianity - I can't compete. If the playing field were ever truly level, I'd be done. I don't have enough of what it takes to win in a truly fair fight."

The real power of a demagogue lies not in their ability to tap into their audience's hatred for others; it lies in their ability to tap into their audience's doubts about themselves. Which is why my all-time favorite demagogue can tell his audience point-blank, "If I had my way, I'd have all of you shot!" And have them go wild.



Mr. Trump may never be that blatant, but if I were following his activity, I would listen for hints of contempt for his audience. I would also ask, "How does Donald Trump, through his companies, treat his employees, especially the lower-level ones?" Because the people in Mr. Trump's audiences are not his peers. If they were in his companies, they would be his underlings. His way-underlings.

The thrill is gone

I think something inside me died Thursday night.

My wife and I were in the living room, watching "Rock Center," having tuned in for their story on Scientology. A commercial came on about planned news coverage of President Obama's second inauguration on Monday, and she said, ""We have to watch that."

I responded with something less than a shrug, and she said,

"You don't care." And I said,

"He's going to put his hand on a Bible and make a promise that he won't keep, and nobody will even care that he doesn't keep it."

And as I heard myself say that, it felt like something inside me had died. A few days ago, in response to the suicide of Aaron Swartz, I said that in future elections, I don't expect either the Republican or the Democrat party to offer a presidential candidate who will preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

I guess what died Thursday was the illusion that either party had done so in the last election.

Or the one before that.

Or the one before that...

And with it died the imagining that the press might press a president on his constitutional duty toward the Constitution.

I don't know what my political life will look like going forward. I do know that it will not look like November 4, 2008, when the outcome of an election made me feel glad and proud. 

An October glimpse of American spring? - Postscript

I call B.S. on America's mainstream media.

On Tuesday, CNN.com ran a story by Tom Cohen with the headline, "Campaign enters final stretch as Obama takes final debate."

Here's the opening:

"Three debates down. Two weeks of campaigning to go.

President Barack Obama put Republican challenger Mitt Romney on the defensive on foreign policy in the final presidential debate Monday night, with analysts and an immediate poll giving Obama the victory."

That is B.S.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post's coverage of Monday night's Obama-Romney debate included a piece by Dan Balz and David Nakamura, with this headline: "Obama keeps Romney on his heels in last debate."

The Balz/Nakamura story includes this paragraph:

"The final debate concluded a gripping series of encounters between the two candidates that shook up the campaign as dramatically as any recent series of debates. Romney used the first debate to greatest advantage with an aggressive performance that contrasted to a lackluster evening for the president. Obama rebounded in the second debate, which was marked by sharp and testy exchanges between the two candidates, but not so much as to reverse the gains Romney had made."

That, too, is B.S.

The New York Times' Tuesday editorial, headlined "The final debate," opened thusly:

"Mitt Romney has nothing really coherent or substantive to say about domestic policy, but at least he can sound energetic and confident about it. On foreign policy, the subject of Monday night’s final presidential debate, he had little coherent to say and often sounded completely lost. That’s because he has no original ideas of substance on most world issues, including Syria, Iran and Afghanistan."

B.S., B.S., B.S.

These stories are all B.S. for one simple reason: Monday night's debate was not the last debate. It was not the final debate. More explicitly, it was not the final debate between presidential candidates. On Tuesday night, 24 hours after the debate that mainstream media called "last" and "final," there was another presidential debate, moderated by Larry King and featuring, not two, but FOUR presidential candidates: Rocky Anderson (Justice Party), Virgil Goode Jr. (Constitutional Party), Gov. Gary Johnson (Libertarian Party), and Jill Stein (Green Party).

Tuesday night's debate was sponsored by Free and Equal Elections, a nonprofit whose stated mission is "to reform federal, state and local elections, making it easier for candidates to get on ballots and ensure all ballot qualified candidates are included in various forums and debates."

Monday night's debate was sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates, a nonprofit formed by the Republican and Democrat parties.

I won't rehash what I've already written about the history of presidential debates, and the CPD's exclusion of third-party candidates. The point of this post is to note the degree to which the press has cooperated with them in that exclusion, with the result being B.S.

On a purely journalistic level, describing Monday night's meeting between Messrs. Obama and Romney as the last or final presidential debate when there was a presidential debate happening Tuesday night, is inexcusably sloppy.

Now get this: after Tuesday night's debate, Free and Equal Elections asked for a vote on who should participate in a SECOND debate. The top two candidates will square off next Tuesday, October 30, at 9 pm Eastern, in Washington DC.

Don't expect to view that debate, or to learn about it, by way of media who have already said that Monday's debate was the "last" or "final" one. But you can prepare to view it bookmarking Free and Equal.

Meanwhile, here is what you missed Tuesday night. Please notice that not only does this debate feature candidates you may not have heard of - it also includes questions, from everyday people, that journalists seem afraid to ask. (I will spare you a whole essay about questions that are not being asked in the CPD debates.)

Do you think these candidates (whether you agree with them or not) deserve to be heard? Do the questions here deserve to be asked?

Mitt and me

So, a Facebook friend of mine posted this piece from Salon that includes an income calculator to figure out how long it would take Mitt Romney to earn the reader's salary.

I'm not sure what the usefulness of the calculator is. Does the fact that Romney's $21.6 million income in 2010 translates to him making as much in one day as I did all year - does that equip me to do anything?

Does it help me for Slate to point out that half of Romney's income came from capital gains? I suppose that information is mildly interesting, but that's about it - unless it is accompanied by information on how I can get capital gains, too.

And that's the thing - when I learn that Mitt Romney made $10 million or so in capital gains in 2010, my overriding question becomes, "How can I do that, or something like it?"

I suspect that that's not the response the good folks at Salon were seeking (if any). But truth be told, I don't understand people not asking that question. Unless they're simply more spiritual than me. Or something. Alright, I don't understand.

Likewise, when I hear about corporate tax breaks, it makes me want to incorporate. Who wouldn't?

Nearly everyone I know, as far as I can tell. Fact is, I spend a good deal of time feeling like a weird duck because most of my acquaintances never seem to think about incorporating, or generating capital gains, and some of them even seem to think that corporations and capital gains are inherently evil.

Which leads to another thing. Ever since the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (usually abbreviated to "Citizens United") gained attention, many people have taken up the slogan, "Corporations are not people." Okay, but if that's your stance, don't reify corporations with adjectives like "evil" and "greedy." People are those things.

(And poor people can be just as greedy as rich people; they're just not as good at it.)

I think the thinking that is quick to identify corporations, capital gains and rich people generally as evil results from making politics the antecedent of economics, rather than vice versa (off the top of my head, I'd say that the appropriate antecedents of economics are theology, geology, and biology).

QUACK!!