Introduction: The Donald Enters the Clown Car Like, Well, a Clown
It began as a tease. Would Donald Trump, the buffoonish business mogul and reality tv star, add his name to the clown car of non-entities running for the Republican nomination for president, as he had threatened to do in previous elections ever since 1987? Would he join a third Bush, three failed governors who had ruined their state's economies, a brilliant neurosurgeon oblivious to politics, the next generation Paul, an insane senator from Canada, two right wing Christian fanatics, a failed businesswoman, a long forgotten governor, and an assortment of other embarrassments in search of the nomination of a party in its death throes after a hostile takeover of right wing extremists?
Then it became a reality, as Trump entered the race on June 16th, cruising down an escalator at the lavish Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York to deliver a meandering, mindboggling, 45-minute speech. Beneath a banner revealing his campaign slogan, "Make America Great Again," he rambled about in a stream of consciousness series of statements to a crowd, many of whom he had paid to fill up the room. He began: "This is beyond anybody’s expectations. There’s been no crowd like this. And, I can tell, some of the candidates, they went in. They didn’t know the air-conditioner didn’t work. They sweated like dogs. They didn’t know the room was too big, because they didn’t have anybody there. How are they going to beat ISIS? I don’t think it’s gonna happen." From there, he wended about, uttering whatever thought popped into his head. After taking shots at China and Japan, he zeroed in on Mexico: "When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." From there, he moved to the Middle East: "They just built a hotel in Syria. Can you believe this? They built a hotel. When I have to build a hotel, I pay interest. They don’t have to pay interest, because they took the oil that, when we left Iraq, I said we should’ve taken." Turning to the economy, he announced: "And our real unemployment is anywhere from 18 to 20 percent. Don’t believe the 5.6. Don’t believe it. That’s right. A lot of people up there can’t get jobs. They can’t get jobs, because there are no jobs, because China has our jobs and Mexico has our jobs. They all have jobs." After a lengthy attack on the Affordable Health Care Act, he went after his fellow Republican candidates in even more nonsensical statements: "They will never make America great again. They don’t even have a chance. They’re controlled fully, they’re controlled fully by the lobbyists, by the donors, and by the special interests, fully. Yes, they control them. Hey, I have lobbyists. I have to tell you. I have lobbyists that can produce anything for me. They’re great."
Finally, he turned to his own qualifications to be the next President of the United States: "Now, our country needs--our country needs a truly great leader, and we need a truly great leader now. We need a leader that wrote 'The Art of the Deal'. . . . And we also need a cheerleader. . . . I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created. I tell you that. . . . I own a big chunk of the Bank of America Building at 1290 Avenue of the Americas, that I got from China in a war. Very valuable. . . . I’m using my own money. I’m not using the lobbyists. I’m not using donors. I don’t care. I’m really rich. . . . I think I am a nice person. People that know me, like me. Does my family like me? I think so, right. Look at my family. I’m proud of my family. . . . And I have assets--big accounting firm, one of the most highly respected--9 billion 240 million dollars. . . . I would repeal and replace the big lie, Obamacare. . . . I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively, I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall. . . . Nobody would be tougher on ISIS than Donald Trump. Nobody. I will find--within our military, I will find the General Patton or I will find General MacArthur. . . . Secretary Kerry goes into a bicycle race at 72 years old, and falls and breaks his leg. I won’t be doing that. And I promise I will never be in a bicycle race. That I can tell you. . . . I look at the roads being built all over the country, and I say I can build those things for one-third. What they do is unbelievable, how bad. . . . I am the most successful person ever to run for the presidency, by far. . . . Sadly, the American dream is dead. But if I get elected president I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before, and we will make America great again. Thank you. Thank you very much." Then Trump gave a signal and Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World" blared out into the room. It was to be his campaign song, but the next day Young blasted Trump for stealing his song without permission, forbade him from using it, and offered it, free of charge, to Bernie Sanders.
Trump was now a candidate. He was at 3% in the polls. But he was great entertainment and the news media couldn't get enough of him, because entertainment gets better ratings than journalism. And anyway, journalism in America is dead.
Part One: As Everyone Laughs, The Donald Ascends in the Polls
Over the next seven weeks, Trump rose meteorically in the polls as he blustered, attacked, tweeted, and swung from the hip at the other candidates in both parties and doubled down on every controversial statement he made, refusing to give an inch. His main point seemed to be that he was a winner and everyone else was a loser. By the first Republican debate on August 6th, he was the Republican frontrunner.
At that debate, Fox News, which had helped to create him, tried to kill their own monster, from their very first question, addressed to all the candidates but really aimed at Trump, about whether they would support the eventual nominee and forswear running as a third party candidate. Megyn Kelly addressed his many misogynistic statements over the years, and both Rand Paul and Chris Christie went after him. Trump swatted them away like so many mosquitoes, and frightened Jeb Bush into backing off from negative comments he had made about Trump. That night, Trump took to Twitter to attack Fox and Kelly, making a crude comment that she was menstruating when she went after him. After a curt conversation with Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News, Kelly was sent on a vacation, Fox backed down rather than lose many of their viewers who had embraced Trump--and Trump soared in the polls.
Part Two: The Democrats in Disarray
Meanwhile, over in the Democratic Party, they were having serious problems of their own. Bernie Sanders had caught fire and had gone from 50 points down to the presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton in the Iowa polls to within 7 points, and he was now leading in conservative New Hampshire by 9 points. As Fox had tried to do to Trump, the corporate media tried to stop Sanders--not by attacking him but by ignoring him. Nevertheless, huge campaign rallies, Sanders' insistence on talking about the issues, his refusal to say anything negative, even when prodded by reporters, about Hillary Clinton, and a viral support for him on the social media was making the strategy of ignoring him as unsuccessful as Fox's strategy of attacking Trump.
Clinton had many positives going for her as the campaign began--experience as the former First Lady and confidant of a two-term president, Senator from New York, Secretary of State during Barack Obama's first term, expertise in foreign affairs, and she would be the first woman to serve as president. But she also carried a lot of baggage. Her husband had repealed the New Deal's Glass-Steagall Act, setting the stage for the financial meltdown in 2008, and he had signed and supported crime policies that had led to the incarceration of America. Although the Benghazi scandal was a trumped up Republican smear campaign, and the new e-mail scandal lacked real merit, she was justly accused of flip flopping on major issues--like same-sex marriage, Wall Street reform, the student loan/debt crisis, and her initial support for the Iraq War--and her ties to Wall Street and big banking were serious negatives.
Bernie Sanders also had many positives that, as people became aware of his record, catapulted his campaign: he had a lengthy, consistent record of opposing Bush's wars in the Middle East, and he focused on issues that mattered to Americans--saving and expanding Social Security and
Medicare, tuition-free higher education in state universities, forgiving and refinancing college loans, raising the minimum wage, fighting global warming, raising veteran's benefits, fixing the Veteran's Administration, introducing a Veterans Jobs Bill in the Senate that Republicans shot down, supporting renewable energy resources, fixing the nation's crumbling infrastructure, making the super wealthy and corporate America pay their fair share of taxes, breaking up too-big-to-fail corporations and banks, reinstating Glass-Steagall, LGBTQ equality and rights, ending the disenfranchisement of minority, elderly, and young voters, equal pay for women, pro choice on women's reproductive rights, opposing the PATRIOT Act, reintroducing the Equal Rights Amendment, opposing Citizen's United, sensible immigration reform, defending the EPA and Planned Parenthood, protecting our national parks, supporting clean air and energy bills, banning trophy hunting of endangered species, opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), opposing the Keystone Pipeline, opposing NAFTA, a single-payer health care system, regulating pharmaceutical companies, and serious campaign finance reform. Unlike the other candidates, he has announced and taken stands on virtually every single issue, so the above list is a very select one. For more, see:
http://www.ontheissues.org/...
But Sanders had his own obstacles to overcome as well. An Independent who caucuses with the Democratic Party, in many states his Independent voters could not vote for him in the Democratic primary without first registering as Democrats and many will end up being turned away from the polls. He was also a self-styled democratic socialist, a much misunderstood term that could be exploited by opponents to scare off less educated voters. Although born and raised in New York City, and educated in Chicago, he was a senator from the tiny state of Vermont. He was also Jewish and would be the first non-Christian candidate from a major party. Last, he turns 74 years old this Tuesday, and although he's in the peak of health and vigor, agism remains a factor.
Part Three: Enter Debbie Wasserman Schultz or, How To Snatch Defeat from the Jaws of Victory
To make matters worse for the Democrats, the Democratic National Committee's Chair was Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who had been Clinton's campaign manager in her battle with Barack Obama for the 2008 nomination. Wasserman Schultz, a Congresswoman from Florida, had been named the DNC Chair in 2011, and immediately got off to a rocky start.
She began by making a number of controversial and incendiary statements about the Republican Party that were either over the top (referring to them as the party of Jim Crow) or else later proven to be false. She refused to support three Democrats in Florida running against incumbent Republicans in the House, allegedly because those Republicans were her friends. In a move reminiscent of Sarah Palin's shopping sprees with donor money, in 2012, she tried to get the DNC to pay for her clothing at the Democratic National Convention and in 2013 to pay for her attire at the White House Correspondents Dinner. In the 2014 midterm elections, she adopted a strategy of dissociating Democratic nominees from President Obama, a disastrous strategy that helped lead to a Republican landslide and the loss of the Senate. In February 2015, Politico reported that she had lined up supporters who were ready to portray any decision by Barack Obama to replace her as DNC chair as "anti-woman and antisemitic."
Although the DNC is supposed to be impartial, Wasserman Schultz made it no secret that she supports her former boss Hillary Clinton for the nomination. In 2008, Hillary Clinton wanted many debates, assuming that she would easily defeat the other candidates, and the DNC acceded to her wishes with 20 debates. By the time Barack Obama had taken off and it was a head-to-head competition, she demanded even more debates and six were added, bringing the total to 26. But this election, with Clinton running against two relatively unknown competitors--Sanders and former Governor Martin O'Malley of Maryland--she wanted fewer debates, and Wasserman Schultz obliged her, scheduling a mere six debates total. Even more transparently biased, she forced the candidates to sign an "exclusivity" contract, meaning that if any of them debated anyone anywhere other than the six sanctioned DNC debates, they would be banned from those six debates. In addition, over the objections of the Sanders and O'Malley camps, she scheduled the debates late, which served two purposes, one unintentional and the other deliberate. The unintentional consequence was to make the summer and early fall of 2015 a Republican summer, giving them a lengthy news cycle to promote themselves to the nation while the Democrats lay dormant. The deliberate part of the strategy was to hold the debates at points in time when they would not give voters a chance to see Sanders--who had already been ignored by the corporate media--in time to gain him further support. For example, the first debate will take place on October 13th, four days after the deadline in New York state for independents to register as Democrats in order to vote in the primary. The third debate is scheduled on Saturday, December 19th, when people are busy shopping for Christmas. The final two debates have not yet even been scheduled.
Despite howls from Democratic voters signing petitions for more debates and protesting on Wasserman Schultz's Facebook site (whose comments she ignores), and over the further protests of party members and the candidates, Wasserman Schultz refused to relent, offering the tepid excuse that it is the DNC Chair who decides the debate schedule and the issue is closed. At the DNC's summer convention in Minneapolis, Governor O'Malley used
much of his speech time to criticize the lack of debates. Noting that 20 million Americans had tuned in to listen to the first Republican debate, he stated: "They [the Republican candidates] malign our president’s record of achievement, they denigrate women, and immigrant families. They doubled down on trickle down, and they tell their false stories. And, we respond--with crickets, tumbleweeds, a cynical move to delay and limit our own party debates.” As the room cheered him on enthusiastically and Wasserman Schultz sat on the stage staring daggers at him, O'Malley continued: "Four debates [before the first primary voting]. Four debates? This is totally unprecedented in our party history. This sort of rigged process has never been attempted before. Who’s decree is this exactly? Where did it come from? To what end? For what purpose? What national or party interest does this decree serve?" Near the end of the last meeting, Cecil Benjamin, a state chair, offered a motion to increase the number of debates, igniting a burst of cheers and applause from the ballroom. But Wasserman Schultz put an end to it by ruling him out of order and adjourning the meeting. And she has refused to take calls from Democratic state chairs and prominent Democrats about the debates. Martha Fuller Clark, the Chair of the New Hampshire State Democratic Committee, succinctly summed up Wasserman Schultz's behavior: "That's nuts."
Martin O'Malley at Minneapolis on the lack of debates: https://www.youtube.com/...
On the confrontation at the DNC meeting in Minneapolis: http://www.washingtontimes.com/...
Part Four: Stop Laughing, Trump May Be Your Next President
Whatever the potential flaws the Democratic candidates may each possess, there can be no gainsaying that the actions of Debbie Wasserman Schultz have deeply divided the party. The wild success and rise in the polls by Bernie Sanders has been energizing the party, bringing into the Democratic fold those who are Independents (without whose votes, the party cannot win), the 18 to 29 year olds (only 21.3% of whom voted in the 2014 midterm elections), and the elderly. Although midterm elections historically enjoy a lower turnout than in presidential election years, in 2014 only 36.3% of the people voted, the lowest turnout for any national election in 72 years. In New York, the turnout was a miserable 28.8%, despite three statewide races (including the governor) and 27 House races. Although Bernie Sanders refuses to say anything negative about Hillary Clinton, even when hard pressed by the media to do so, and he will support her vigorously if she is the nominee, his supporters feel differently. Had the process been fair, had Wasserman Schultz not been so blatant in rigging the debates and insisting on the exclusivity clause, had she not acted so draconian in running the DNC, most Sanders' supporters, however unenthusiastically, would have gone to the polls and voted for Clinton as the better choice than anything the Republicans would have put up. But increasingly, many of those supporters are incensed and say they will either stay home, protest by writing in Bernie Sanders on their ballot, or vote for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. One need only look back at the 2000 election, and recall how Ralph Nader's Green Party votes in key states likely cost Democrat Al Gore the presidency, to take this threat seriously.
Meanwhile, although he continues to act like a buffoon, Trump has cowed reporters, fellow Republican candidates, Fox News, the RNC, and anyone critical of him into silence by his bullying tactics. And however ridiculous you may find him to be, he continues to rise in the Republican polls, where he is at 30%, another non-politician, Dr. Ben Carson, is at 18%, and the erstwhile presumptive nominee Jeb Bush has fallen into single digits. Perhaps more important, in last week's Monmouth poll, Trump was viewed favorably by 59% of Republican voters, up 7 points from August, and unfavorably by only 29%.
Much more frightening, though, is how--while the Democrats are being held out of debates and sequestered in their Wasserman Schultz imposed bunker--Trump is now faring head-to-head with Democratic candidates. In late June, a CNN/ORC national poll had Clinton leading Trump 59% to 34%. That same poll, taken in July, had Clinton leading Trump 57% to 38%. But the same poll, taken in August, had Clinton's lead over Trump narrowed to 52% to 43%. More frightening still, a SurveyUSA poll taken last week had Trump beating each of the Democratic candidates head-to-head. He led Clinton 45% to 40%; he led Sanders 44% to 40%; and he led the undeclared Vice President Joe Biden 44% to 42%. Link to poll results: http://www.surveyusa.com/...
I realize that there's a long way to go in this election, but I feel as though I've fallen into a novel started by Joseph Heller and Evelyn Waugh, continued by Thomas Pynchon, handed over to Franz Kafka, concluded by George Orwell, and then revised by Edgar Allan Poe. Visually, it looks a little something like Giovanni da Modena's painting of Dante's Inferno:
Yes, I know his response to every issue is: "I'm a winner, I'm rich," I know how to do things, Obama's a Muslim born in Kenya, I'm the master negotiator, Mexico is taking over our economy, I don't know the difference between Hezbollah and Hamas but "when it’s appropriate, I will know more about it than you know, and believe me, it won’t take me long," I'll hire General Douglas MacArthur, "I'll do good with the military," and "I'll make Mexico build the wall for us." And I know that his biggest fan is Sarah Palin. He may be a buffoon, but so far he's played the media, the RNC, Fox News, and everyone else like a violin. Go back and look at tapes of other buffoons. Laugh at them all you want to, but they can do a lot of damage. Senator Joe McCarthy was a buffoon. Mussolini was a buffoon. Ever watch Hitler give a speech? Biggest buffoon of them all. So stop passing Trump off as merely an entertaining or annoying joke.
There is a real possibility that Donald Trump could be your next president.
Still laughing?