Perhaps some of what I am about to mention, perhaps almost all of it, will appear in the Abbreviated Pundit Roundup. But I want to be sure that you are aware of a number of pieces. I will point at several, and explore two in some more depth, before offering a few of my own thoughts at the end.
First, from today’s Washington Post are the following:
former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson’s The GOP is learning the hard way that character matters, whose final paragraph reads
For now, Republicans such as Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are content to criticize the candidate they have endorsed. But a party convention is an up-or-down moment. Will they allow the balloons to drop on a leader with a broken moral compass? Or will they try to change the convention rules — perhaps to require a supermajority in picking a nominee — in an act of desperate resistance? Either way, Republicans are learning the hard way that character counts.
Corbin Reiff takes Trump to task for his smears on the US Army and its handling of money. Rieff for a while was the NCO in charge of handling claims by Iraqis against the US Army, and gave out several millions of dollars. In I gave out ‘baskets of money’ in Iraq. Trump is completely wrong about what our Army did there. his final two paragraphs lays it out clearly:
Trump’s statement attacking not just my character but also that of all the men and women I had the honor of serving with was repugnant. These people had raised their right hands and sacrificed a year or more of their lives in one of the worst situations imaginable, all for their country. These are the people who actually lived up to Trump’s supposed credo: “Make America great again.”
It’s infuriating to hear a billionaire real estate mogul, turned reality television star, turned presidential candidate, speak so callously against a group of Americans whom he knows next to nothing about. Maybe I should know better. Maybe I should turn the other cheek. Maybe this is all just Trump being Trump. But I can’t. This man wants to be commander in chief of the United States’ armed forces. Thus far, he has shown that he has neither the temperament nor the character to fulfill that role.
Please keep reading.
RIght-winger Charles Krauthammer also weighs in with Trump is running as Trump. Surprise! which begin like this
When in his 1964 GOP acceptance speech Barry Goldwater declared that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” a reporter sitting near journalist/historian Theodore White famously exclaimed: “My God, he’s going to run as Barry Goldwater!”
Six weeks into Donald Trump’s general election campaign, Republicans are discovering that he indeed intends to run as Donald Trump. He has boasted that he could turn “presidential” — respectful, respectable, reticent, reserved bordering on boring — at will. Apparently, he can’t.
and after running through lots of now familiar material — about the Judge, about Orlando, etc. — concludes rather bluntly
Reagan biographer Lou Cannon thinks that the Goldwater anecdote is apocryphal. How could anyone (even a journalist) have thought that Goldwater, who later admitted he always knew he would lose, was going to run as anything but his vintage, hard-core self?
Same for Trump. Give him points for authenticity. Take away for electability.
Then there is a strong column by David Ignatius titled What Obama’s last year in office teaches us about resilience, written in the context of yet again watching the President address the nation’s grief. It ends thusly:
Obama’s complicated legacy will take years for historians to unravel. But it’s noteworthy that in the final year of his presidency, his approval rating has climbed above 50 percent, while the unfavorable rating for Trump now stands at 70 percent, according to the latest Post poll.
Perhaps this will be Obama’s 11th-hour achievement: a gathering appreciation of his leadership and a growing revulsion at the tactics of his would-be successor.
Eugene Robinson is his inimitable self, in a column that yet again demonstrates how well he deserved his Pulitzer for Commentary. His piece is titled The challenges in covering Trump’s relentless assault on the truth. He begins like this
Donald Trump must be the biggest liar in the history of American politics, and that’s saying something.
He then presents a series of paragraphs, each of which begins with a statement of the dimensions of Trump’s lying, followed by material that supports that statement. I will list those beginning statements in order in bold —
Trump lies the way other people breathe.
Trump lies when citing specifics.
Trump lies when speaking in generalities.
Trump lies by sweeping calumny.
Trump lies by smarmy insinuation.
The last of those is illustrated by Trump’s smearing of the President by implications of disloyalty, and of his similar smearings of Hillary Clinton after Orlando.
Robinson makes clear that he is writing to defend neither Obama or Clinton, but to defend the truth,. He then writes
There is no playbook for evaluating a candidate who so constantly says things that objectively are not true.
All of the above examples come from just five days’ worth of Trump’s lies, from Sunday to Thursday of this week. By the time you read this, surely there will have been more.
Robinson describes the challenges this represents in covering the presumptive Republican nominee, and I would note that means the journalist if intellectually honest has no choice but to challenge Trump on his untruths, in real time if necessary — think here of Candy Crowley and Mitt Romney in one debate four years ago.
The conclusion of this powerful piece is well supported by what Robinson has already presented to the reader:
Trump is not just an unorthodox candidate. He is an inveterate liar — maybe pathological, maybe purposeful. He doesn’t distort facts, he makes them up.
Trump has a right to his anger, his xenophobia and his bigotry. He also has a right to lie — but we all have a duty to call him on it.
Finally let me turn to today’s New York Times and a column by Timothy Egan titled simply A Week for All Time. Egan begins thusly
They will remember, a century from now, who stood up to the tyrant Donald Trump and who found it expedient to throw out the most basic American values — the “Vichy Republicans,” as the historian Ken Burns called them in his Stanford commencement speech.
The next paragraph expands beyond Burns and challenges the putative leaders of the Republican party:
The shrug from Mitch McConnell, the twisted explanation of Paul Ryan, who said Trump is a racist and a xenophobe, but he’s ours — party before country. As well, the duck-and-hide Republicans, so quick to whip out their pocket copy of the Constitution, now nowhere to be seen when the foundation of that same document is under assault by the man carrying their banner.
Egan then, like Robinson, has a structure that like Robinson hammers home in a repetitive fashion the notion he wishes to address. There are not similar introductions to each paragraph, but there is a similar forcefulness. After ending that section with Trump’s implying our soldiers in Iraq were thieves, he writes this:
It comes in such waves, the preposterous lies, the breaches in honor, from this man who wants to use high office to attack his enemies in civil court, who would apply a religious test to fellow citizens, whose mass deportation plan would likely round up the parents of some of the Latinos killed in Orlando. And because it comes in such waves, there is no time to process it all. Was it just a few weeks ago that he attacked a federal judge, hearing a case in which Trump is accused of fraud on a mass scale, because of the judge’s ethnic heritage?
He praises those Republicans with the courage to oppose Trump: Mitt Romney, the Bush presidents, Meg Whitman, comparing their decency to Trump’s lack thereof.
This is a powerful column, one that deserves your full attention.
His penultimate paragraph quotes from the speech by Burns that he referenced in the beginning. And then he closes with a paragraph that is both forceful but also represents a challenge:
In this week of trial and tragedy, Trump showed us how he would govern — by fear, by intimidation, by lies, by turning American against American, by exhibiting all the empathy of a sociopath. Seal this week. Put it in a time capsule. Teach it. History will remember. But come November, will we?
I have taken the time to go through all of this material — which is not all of the material in either paper — because I think it demonstrates our having reached something of a tipping point.
We had a terrorist attack. We had a former Republican nominee John McCain effectively blame that attack on the President. In the past such an attack would redound not against the sitting President per se — after all, George W Bush did not suffer because of September 11 — but would cause the nation to rally in a way that meant assertion of strength mattered, and usually this would benefit Republicans, whether in office or not.
At least for now, this is not the case, because it is not just the press that has responded to Trump’s reaction in the context of all his other horrid bloviations, it is also the American people.
The election is not over. The Republicans could in theory still dump Trump. His ego is such that if he continues to sink badly in the polls one has to wonder if he will find an excuse to drop out — does he really want to get clobbered by a woman whose integrity and compassion and competency he regularly smears?
Egan is correct, that historians — if we are still allowed to have honest history, which is in as much doubt as honest journalism would be in the event of Trump somehow getting elected — will look back on this week as having been pivotal.
Robinson is right that journalism has no choice but to go beyond he said she said, and provide its listeners/readers/viewers with sufficient context to know how untruthful Trump is, how far from our history and from the intent of our constitutional principles.
Were all my government students still with me, rather than graduating at 4:30 this afternoon, I would be face with exactly the same challenges as Robinson lays out for journalists. I would because of intellectual honesty have to make sure my students had proper context, and would have to be willing to make clear that a lie is a lie even when spoken by a Presidential candidate that some (now very few) support. That in theory could cost me a job, but I would gladly give a job before I give up what the most important thing I give my students, that I model for them personal integrity and intellectual honesty, and the willingness to stand on what I believe. I would have an obligation to this country to speak out.
We have a senior speaker other than our top two students. The young man selected was my student. I do not know the content of his speech, but I worked with him on the mechanics of being an effective speaker, which is in part why he won the honor. I mention him because during the primary in Virginia he openly announced his support of Trump. Even he, however, has become dismayed by recent remarks, and has now all but disavowed the man. In part it is because he is of Latino heritage and was greatly dismayed, even angered, by the attack on the judge. He was also very much upset with what happened in Orlando.
We cannot always predict what will be a tipping point, for individuals or for a society.
We are seeing a false and distorted nationalism across Europe, with the rise of what can only be described as neofascist parties in a number of nations. The UK may well vote for Brexit, in which case I fully expect Scotland to vote again and this time to withdraw from the UK and go independent.
Our world is at a crossroads. As Americans we have little we can do except observe what is happening overseas.
But as Americans, as those who are for better or worse the sovereigns of this nation, We the People, have not only the right but also the responsibility to exercise that sovereignty.
I read the papers today. I shared some of what I read. The country is at an important crossroads. What is interesting is to see the increasing unanimity of the horror that is Donald Trump.
As I said at the beginning, you have a lot of reading to do today.
?Peace?