As this dystopian election campaign has unfolded, my mind keeps being tugged by a passage in Plato’s Republic. It has unsettled — even surprised — me from the moment I first read it in graduate school. The passage is from the part of the dialogue where Socrates and his friends are talking about the nature of different political systems, how they change over time, and how one can slowly evolve into another. And Socrates seemed pretty clear on one sobering point: that “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy.” What did Plato mean by that? Democracy, for him, I discovered, was a political system of maximal freedom and equality, where every lifestyle is allowed and public offices are filled by a lottery. And the longer a democracy lasted, Plato argued, the more democratic it would become. Its freedoms would multiply; its equality spread. Deference to any sort of authority would wither; tolerance of any kind of inequality would come under intense threat; and multiculturalism and sexual freedom would create a city or a country like “a many-colored cloak decorated in all hues.”
This rainbow-flag polity, Plato argues, is, for many people, the fairest of regimes. The freedom in that democracy has to be experienced to be believed — with shame and privilege in particular emerging over time as anathema. But it is inherently unstable. As the authority of elites fades, as Establishment values cede to popular ones, views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehending. And when all the barriers to equality, formal and informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal; when elites are despised and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you arrive at what might be called late-stage democracy. There is no kowtowing to authority here, let alone to political experience or expertise.
The very rich come under attack, as inequality becomes increasingly intolerable. Patriarchy is also dismantled: “We almost forgot to mention the extent of the law of equality and of freedom in the relations of women with men and men with women.” Family hierarchies are inverted: “A father habituates himself to be like his child and fear his sons, and a son habituates himself to be like his father and to have no shame before or fear of his parents.” In classrooms, “as the teacher ... is frightened of the pupils and fawns on them, so the students make light of their teachers.” Animals are regarded as equal to humans; the rich mingle freely with the poor in the streets and try to blend in. The foreigner is equal to the citizen.
And it is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.
He is usually of the elite but has a nature in tune with the time — given over to random pleasures and whims, feasting on plenty of food and sex, and reveling in the nonjudgment that is democracy’s civil religion. He makes his move by “taking over a particularly obedient mob” and attacking his wealthy peers as corrupt. If not stopped quickly, his appetite for attacking the rich on behalf of the people swells further. He is a traitor to his class — and soon, his elite enemies, shorn of popular legitimacy, find a way to appease him or are forced to flee. Eventually, he stands alone, promising to cut through the paralysis of democratic incoherence. It’s as if he were offering the addled, distracted, and self-indulgent citizens a kind of relief from democracy’s endless choices and insecurities. He rides a backlash to excess—“too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much slavery” — and offers himself as the personified answer to the internal conflicts of the democratic mess. He pledges, above all, to take on the increasingly despised elites. And as the people thrill to him as a kind of solution, a democracy willingly, even impetuously, repeals itself.
And so, as I chitchatted over cocktails at a Washington office Christmas party in December, and saw, looming above our heads, the pulsating, angry televised face of Donald Trump on Fox News, I couldn’t help but feel a little nausea permeate my stomach. And as I watched frenzied Trump rallies on C-SPAN in the spring, and saw him lay waste to far more qualified political peers in the debates by simply calling them names, the nausea turned to dread. And when he seemed to condone physical violence as a response to political disagreement, alarm bells started to ring in my head. Plato had planted a gnawing worry in my mind a few decades ago about the intrinsic danger of late-democratic life. It was increasingly hard not to see in Plato’s vision a murky reflection of our own hyperdemocratic times and in Trump a demagogic, tyrannical character plucked directly out of one of the first books about politics ever written.
Could it be that the Donald has emerged from the populist circuses of pro wrestling and New York City tabloids, via reality television and Twitter, to prove not just Plato but also James Madison right, that democracies “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention … and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths”? Is he testing democracy’s singular weakness — its susceptibility to the demagogue — by blasting through the firewalls we once had in place to prevent such a person from seizing power? Or am I overreacting?
Perhaps. The nausea comes and goes, and there have been days when the news algorithm has actually reassured me that “peak Trump” has arrived. But it hasn’t gone away, and neither has Trump. In the wake of his most recent primary triumphs, at a time when he is perilously close to winning enough delegates to grab the Republican nomination outright, I think we must confront this dread and be clear about what this election has already revealed about the fragility of our way of life and the threat late-stage democracy is beginning to pose to itself.
Plato, of course, was not clairvoyant. His analysis of how democracy can turn into tyranny is a complex one more keyed toward ancient societies than our own (and contains more wrinkles and eddies than I can summarize here). His disdain for democratic life was fueled in no small part by the fact that a democracy had executed his mentor, Socrates. And he would, I think, have been astonished at how American democracy has been able to thrive with unprecedented stability over the last couple of centuries even as it has brought more and more people into its embrace. It remains, in my view, a miracle of constitutional craftsmanship and cultural resilience. There is no place I would rather live. But it is not immortal, nor should we assume it is immune to the forces that have endangered democracy so many times in human history.
Part of American democracy’s stability is owed to the fact that the Founding Fathers had read their Plato. To guard our democracy from the tyranny of the majority and the passions of the mob, they constructed large, hefty barriers between the popular will and the exercise of power. Voting rights were tightly circumscribed. The president and vice-president were not to be popularly elected but selected by an Electoral College, whose representatives were selected by the various states, often through state legislatures. The Senate’s structure (with two members from every state) was designed to temper the power of the more populous states, and its term of office (six years, compared with two for the House) was designed to cool and restrain temporary populist passions. The Supreme Court, picked by the president and confirmed by the Senate, was the final bulwark against any democratic furies that might percolate up from the House and threaten the Constitution. This separation of powers was designed precisely to create sturdy firewalls against democratic wildfires.
Over the centuries, however, many of these undemocratic rules have been weakened or abolished. The franchise has been extended far beyond propertied white men. The presidency is now effectively elected through popular vote, with the Electoral College almost always reflecting the national democratic will. And these formal democratic advances were accompanied by informal ones, as the culture of democracy slowly took deeper root. For a very long time, only the elites of the political parties came to select their candidates at their quadrennial conventions, with the vote largely restricted to party officials from the various states (and often decided in, yes, smoke-filled rooms in large hotel suites). Beginning in the early 1900s, however, the parties began experimenting with primaries, and after the chaos of the 1968 Democratic convention, today’s far more democratic system became the norm.
Direct democracy didn’t just elect Congress and the president anymore; it expanded the notion of who might be qualified for public office. Once, candidates built a career through experience in elected or Cabinet positions or as military commanders; they were effectively selected by peer review. That elitist sorting mechanism has slowly imploded. In 1940, Wendell Willkie, a businessman with no previous political office, won the Republican nomination for president, pledging to keep America out of war and boasting that his personal wealth inoculated him against corruption: “I will be under obligation to nobody except the people.” He lost badly to Franklin D. Roosevelt, but nonetheless, since then, nonpolitical candidates have proliferated, from Ross Perot and Jesse Jackson, to Steve Forbes and Herman Cain, to this year’s crop of Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and, of course, Donald J. Trump. This further widening of our democracy — our increased openness to being led by anyone; indeed, our accelerating preference for outsiders — is now almost complete.
The barriers to the popular will, especially when it comes to choosing our president, are now almost nonexistent. In 2000, George W. Bush lost the popular vote and won the election thanks to Electoral College math and, more egregiously, to a partisan Supreme Court vote. Al Gore’s eventual concession spared the nation a constitutional crisis, but the episode generated widespread unease, not just among Democrats. And this year, the delegate system established by our political parties is also under assault. Trump has argued that the candidate with the most votes should get the Republican nomination, regardless of the rules in place. It now looks as if he won’t even need to win that argument — that he’ll bank enough delegates to secure the nomination uncontested — but he’s won it anyway. Fully half of Americans now believe the traditional nominating system is rigged.
Many contend, of course, that American democracy is actually in retreat, close to being destroyed by the vastly more unequal economy of the last quarter-century and the ability of the very rich to purchase political influence. This is Bernie Sanders’s core critique. But the past few presidential elections have demonstrated that, in fact, money from the ultrarich has been mostly a dud. Barack Obama, whose 2008 campaign was propelled by small donors and empowered by the internet, blazed the trail of the modern-day insurrectionist, defeating the prohibitive favorite in the Democratic primary and later his Republican opponent (both pillars of their parties’ Establishments and backed by moneyed elites). In 2012, the fund-raising power behind Mitt Romney — avatar of the one percent — failed to dislodge Obama from office. And in this presidential cycle, the breakout candidates of both parties have soared without financial support from the elites. Sanders, who is sustaining his campaign all the way to California on the backs of small donors and large crowds, is, to put it bluntly, a walking refutation of his own argument. Trump, of course, is a largely self-funding billionaire — but like Willkie, he argues that his wealth uniquely enables him to resist the influence of the rich and their lobbyists. Those despairing over the influence of Big Money in American politics must also explain the swift, humiliating demise of Jeb Bush and the struggling Establishment campaign of Hillary Clinton. The evidence suggests that direct democracy, far from being throttled, is actually intensifying its grip on American politics.
None of this is necessarily cause for alarm, even though it would be giving the Founding Fathers palpitations. The emergence of the first black president — unimaginable before our more inclusive democracy — is miraculous, a strengthening, rather than weakening, of the system. The days when party machines just fixed things or rigged elections are mercifully done with. The way in which outsider candidates, from Obama to Trump and Sanders, have brought millions of new people into the electoral process is an unmitigated advance. The inclusion of previously excluded voices helps, rather than impedes, our public deliberation. But it is precisely because of the great accomplishments of our democracy that we should be vigilant about its specific, unique vulnerability: its susceptibility, in stressful times, to the appeal of a shameless demagogue.
What the 21st century added to this picture, it’s now blindingly obvious, was media democracy — in a truly revolutionary form. If late-stage political democracy has taken two centuries to ripen, the media equivalent took around two decades, swiftly erasing almost any elite moderation or control of our democratic discourse. The process had its origins in partisan talk radio at the end of the past century. The rise of the internet — an event so swift and pervasive its political effect is only now beginning to be understood — further democratized every source of information, dramatically expanded each outlet’s readership, and gave everyone a platform. All the old barriers to entry — the cost of print and paper and distribution — crumbled.
So much of this was welcome. I relished it myself in the early aughts, starting a blog and soon reaching as many readers, if not more, as some small magazines do. Fusty old-media institutions, grown fat and lazy, deserved a drubbing. The early independent blogosphere corrected facts, exposed bias, earned scoops. And as the medium matured, and as Facebook and Twitter took hold, everyone became a kind of blogger. In ways no 20th-century journalist would have believed, we all now have our own virtual newspapers on our Facebook newsfeeds and Twitter timelines — picking stories from countless sources and creating a peer-to-peer media almost completely free of editing or interference by elites. This was bound to make politics more fluid. Political organizing — calling a meeting, fomenting a rally to advance a cause — used to be extremely laborious. Now you could bring together a virtual mass movement with a single webpage. It would take you a few seconds.
The web was also uniquely capable of absorbing other forms of media, conflating genres and categories in ways never seen before. The distinction between politics and entertainment became fuzzier; election coverage became even more modeled on sportscasting; your Pornhub jostled right next to your mother’s Facebook page. The web’s algorithms all but removed any editorial judgment, and the effect soon had cable news abandoning even the pretense of asking “Is this relevant?” or “Do we really need to cover this live?” in the rush toward ratings bonanzas. In the end, all these categories were reduced to one thing: traffic, measured far more accurately than any other medium had ever done before.
And what mainly fuels this is precisely what the Founders feared about democratic culture: feeling, emotion, and narcissism, rather than reason, empiricism, and public-spiritedness. Online debates become personal, emotional, and irresolvable almost as soon as they begin. Godwin’s Law — it’s only a matter of time before a comments section brings up Hitler — is a reflection of the collapse of the reasoned deliberation the Founders saw as indispensable to a functioning republic.
Yes, occasional rational points still fly back and forth, but there are dramatically fewer elite arbiters to establish which of those points is actually true or valid or relevant. We have lost authoritative sources for even a common set of facts. And without such common empirical ground, the emotional component of politics becomes inflamed and reason retreats even further. The more emotive the candidate, the more supporters he or she will get.
Politically, we lucked out at first. Obama would never have been nominated for the presidency, let alone elected, if he hadn’t harnessed the power of the web and the charisma of his media celebrity. But he was also, paradoxically, a very elite figure, a former state and U.S. senator, a product of Harvard Law School, and, as it turned out, blessed with a preternaturally rational and calm disposition. So he has masked, temporarily, the real risks in the system that his pioneering campaign revealed. Hence many Democrats’ frustration with him. Those who saw in his campaign the seeds of revolutionary change, who were drawn to him by their own messianic delusions, came to be bitterly disappointed by his governing moderation and pragmatism.
The climate Obama thrived in, however, was also ripe for far less restrained opportunists. In 2008, Sarah Palin emerged as proof that an ardent Republican, branded as an outsider, tailor-made for reality TV, proud of her own ignorance about the world, and reaching an audience directly through online media, could also triumph in this new era. She was, it turned out, a John the Baptist for the true messiah of conservative populism, waiting patiently and strategically for his time to come.
Trump, we now know, had been considering running for president for decades. Those who didn’t see him coming — or kept treating him as a joke — had not yet absorbed the precedents of Obama and Palin or the power of the new wide-open system to change the rules of the political game. Trump was as underrated for all of 2015 as Obama was in 2007 — and for the same reasons. He intuitively grasped the vanishing authority of American political and media elites, and he had long fashioned a public persona perfectly attuned to blast past them.
Despite his immense wealth and inherited privilege, Trump had always cultivated a common touch. He did not hide his wealth in the late-20th century .. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/01/donald-trump-timeline.html — he flaunted it in a way that connected with the masses. He lived the rich man’s life most working men dreamed of — endless glamour and women, for example — without sacrificing a way of talking about the world that would not be out of place on the construction sites he regularly toured. His was a cult of democratic aspiration. His 1987 book, The Art of the Deal .. http://www.amazon.com/Trump-Art-Deal-Donald-J/dp/0345479173 , promised its readers a path to instant success; his appearances on “The Howard Stern Show” cemented his appeal. His friendship with Vince McMahon offered him an early entrée into the world of professional wrestling, with its fusion of sports and fantasy. He was a macho media superstar.
One of the more amazing episodes in Sarah Palin’s early political life, in fact, bears this out. She popped up in the Anchorage Daily News as “a commercial fisherman from Wasilla” on April 3, 1996. Palin had told her husband she was going to Costco but had sneaked into J.C. Penney in Anchorage to see … one Ivana Trump, who, in the wake of her divorce, was touting her branded perfume. “We want to see Ivana,” Palin told the paper, “because we are so desperate in Alaska for any semblance of glamour and culture.”
Trump assiduously cultivated this image .. http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/03/trump-blames-his-tv-character-for-sexist-remarks.html .. and took to reality television as a natural. Each week, for 14 seasons of The Apprentice, he would look someone in the eye and tell them, “You’re fired!” The conversation most humane bosses fear to have with an employee was something Trump clearly relished, and the cruelty became entertainment. In retrospect, it is clear he was training — both himself and his viewers. If you want to understand why a figure so widely disliked nonetheless powers toward the election as if he were approaching a reality-TV-show finale, look no further. His television tactics, as applied to presidential debates, wiped out rivals used to a different game. And all our reality-TV training has conditioned us to hope he’ll win — or at least stay in the game till the final round. In such a shame-free media environment, the assholes often win. In the end, you support them because they’re assholes.
In Eric Hoffer’s classic 1951 tract, The True Believer .. https://www.amazon.com/True-Believer-Thoughts-Movements-Perennial/dp/0060505915?tag=nymagcom-20 , he sketches the dynamics of a genuine mass movement. He was thinking of the upheavals in Europe in the first half of the century, but the book remains sobering, especially now. Hoffer’s core insight was to locate the source of all truly mass movements in a collective sense of acute frustration. Not despair, or revolt, or resignation — but frustration simmering with rage. Mass movements, he notes (as did Tocqueville centuries before him), rarely arise when oppression or misery is at its worst (say, 2009); they tend to appear when the worst is behind us but the future seems not so much better (say, 2016). It is when a recovery finally gathers speed and some improvement is tangible but not yet widespread that the anger begins to rise. After the suffering of recession or unemployment, and despite hard work with stagnant or dwindling pay, the future stretches ahead with relief just out of reach. When those who helped create the last recession face no consequences but renewed fabulous wealth, the anger reaches a crescendo.
The deeper, long-term reasons for today’s rage are not hard to find, although many of us elites have shamefully found ourselves able to ignore them. The jobs available to the working class no longer contain the kind of craftsmanship or satisfaction or meaning that can take the sting out of their low and stagnant wages. The once-familiar avenues for socialization — the church, the union hall, the VFW — have become less vibrant and social isolation more common. Global economic forces have pummeled blue-collar workers more relentlessly than almost any other segment of society, forcing them to compete against hundreds of millions of equally skilled workers throughout the planet. No one asked them in the 1990s if this was the future they wanted. And the impact has been more brutal than many economists predicted. No wonder suicide and mortality rates among the white working poor are spiking dramatically.
“It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the ‘new poor,’ who throb with the ferment of frustration,” Hoffer argues. Fundamentalist religion long provided some emotional support for those left behind (for one thing, it invites practitioners to defy the elites as unholy), but its influence has waned as modernity has penetrated almost everything and the great culture wars of the 1990s and 2000s have ended in a rout. The result has been a more diverse mainstream culture — but also, simultaneously, a subculture that is even more alienated and despised, and ever more infuriated and bloody-minded.
This is an age in which a woman might succeed a black man as president, but also one in which a member of the white working class has declining options to make a decent living. This is a time when gay people can be married in 50 states, even as working-class families are hanging by a thread. It’s a period in which we have become far more aware of the historic injustices that still haunt African-Americans and yet we treat the desperate plight of today’s white working class as an afterthought. And so late-stage capitalism is creating a righteous, revolutionary anger that late-stage democracy has precious little ability to moderate or constrain — and has actually helped exacerbate.
For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome. This is just one aspect of what Trump has masterfully signaled as “political correctness” run amok, or what might be better described as the newly rigid progressive passion for racial and sexual equality of outcome, rather than the liberal aspiration to mere equality of opportunity.
Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom rung of the culture as well. A struggling white man in the heartland is now told to “check his privilege” by students at Ivy League colleges. Even if you agree that the privilege exists, it’s hard not to empathize with the object of this disdain. These working-class communities, already alienated, hear — how can they not? — the glib and easy dismissals of “white straight men” as the ultimate source of all our woes. They smell the condescension and the broad generalizations about them — all of which would be repellent if directed at racial minorities — and see themselves, in Hoffer’s words, “disinherited and injured by an unjust order of things.”
And so they wait, and they steam, and they lash out. This was part of the emotional force of the tea party: not just the advancement of racial minorities, gays, and women but the simultaneous demonization of the white working-class world, its culture and way of life. Obama never intended this, but he became a symbol to many of this cultural marginalization. The Black Lives Matter left stoked the fires still further; so did the gay left, for whom the word magnanimity seems unknown, even in the wake of stunning successes. And as the tea party swept through Washington in 2010, as its representatives repeatedly held the government budget hostage, threatened the very credit of the U.S., and refused to hold hearings on a Supreme Court nominee, the American political and media Establishment mostly chose to interpret such behavior as something other than unprecedented. But Trump saw what others didn’t, just as Hoffer noted: “The frustrated individual and the true believer make better prognosticators than those who have reason to want the preservation of the status quo.”
Mass movements, Hoffer argues, are distinguished by a “facility for make-believe … credulity, a readiness to attempt the impossible.” What, one wonders, could be more impossible than suddenly vetting every single visitor to the U.S. for traces of Islamic belief? What could be more make-believe than a big, beautiful wall stretching across the entire Mexican border, paid for by the Mexican government? What could be more credulous than arguing that we could pay off our national debt through a global trade war? In a conventional political party, and in a rational political discourse, such ideas would be laughed out of contention, their self-evident impossibility disqualifying them from serious consideration. In the emotional fervor of a democratic mass movement, however, these impossibilities become icons of hope, symbols of a new way of conducting politics. Their very impossibility is their appeal.
But the most powerful engine for such a movement — the thing that gets it off the ground, shapes and solidifies and entrenches it — is always the evocation of hatred. It is, as Hoffer put it, “the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying elements.” And so Trump launched his campaign .. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/inside-the-donald-trump-presidential-campaign.html .. by calling undocumented Mexican immigrants a population largely of rapists and murderers. He moved on to Muslims, both at home and abroad. He has now added to these enemies — with sly brilliance — the Republican Establishment itself. And what makes Trump uniquely dangerous in the history of American politics — with far broader national appeal than, say, Huey Long or George Wallace — is his response to all three enemies. It’s the threat of blunt coercion and dominance.
And so after demonizing most undocumented Mexican immigrants, he then vowed to round up and deport all 11 million of them by force. “They have to go” was the typically blunt phrase he used — and somehow people didn’t immediately recognize the monstrous historical echoes. The sheer scale of the police and military operation that this policy would entail boggles the mind. Worse, he emphasized, after the mass murder in San Bernardino, that even the Muslim-Americans you know intimately may turn around and massacre you at any juncture. “There’s something going on,” he declaimed ominously, giving legitimacy to the most hysterical and ugly of human impulses.
To call this fascism doesn’t do justice to fascism. Fascism had, in some measure, an ideology and occasional coherence that Trump utterly lacks. But his movement is clearly fascistic in its demonization of foreigners, its hyping of a threat by a domestic minority (Muslims and Mexicans are the new Jews), its focus on a single supreme leader of what can only be called a cult, and its deep belief in violence and coercion in a democracy that has heretofore relied on debate and persuasion. This is the Weimar aspect of our current moment. Just as the English Civil War ended with a dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell, and the French Revolution gave us Napoleon Bonaparte, and the unstable chaos of Russian democracy yielded to Vladimir Putin, and the most recent burst of Egyptian democracy set the conditions for General el-Sisi’s coup, so our paralyzed, emotional hyperdemocracy leads the stumbling, frustrated, angry voter toward the chimerical panacea of Trump.
His response to his third vaunted enemy, the RNC, is also laced with the threat of violence. There will be riots in Cleveland if he doesn’t get his way. The RNC will have “a rough time” if it doesn’t cooperate. “Paul Ryan, I don’t know him well, but I’m sure I’m going to get along great with him,” Trump has said. “And if I don’t? He’s gonna have to pay a big price, okay?” The past month has seen delegates to the Cleveland convention receiving death threats; one of Trump’s hatchet men, Roger Stone, has already threatened to publish the hotel rooms of delegates who refuse to vote for Trump.
And what’s notable about Trump’s supporters is precisely what one would expect from members of a mass movement: their intense loyalty. Trump is their man, however inarticulate they are when explaining why. He’s tough, he’s real, and they’ve got his back, especially when he is attacked by all the people they have come to despise: liberal Democrats and traditional Republicans. At rallies, whenever a protester is hauled out, you can almost sense the rising rage of the collective identity venting itself against a lone dissenter and finding a catharsis of sorts in the brute force a mob can inflict on an individual. Trump tells the crowd he’d like to punch a protester in the face or have him carried out on a stretcher. No modern politician who has come this close to the presidency has championed violence in this way. It would be disqualifying if our hyperdemocracy hadn’t already abolished disqualifications.
And while a critical element of 20th-century fascism — its organized street violence — is missing, you can begin to see it in embryonic form. The phalanx of bodyguards around Trump grows daily; plainclothes bouncers in the crowds have emerged as pseudo-cops to contain the incipient unrest his candidacy will only continue to provoke; supporters have attacked hecklers with sometimes stunning ferocity. Every time Trump legitimizes potential violence by his supporters by saying it comes from a love of country, he sows the seeds for serious civil unrest.
Trump celebrates torture — the one true love of tyrants everywhere — not because it allegedly produces intelligence but because it has a demonstration effect. At his rallies he has recounted the mythical acts of one General John J. Pershing when confronted with an alleged outbreak of Islamist terrorism in the Philippines. Pershing, in Trump’s telling, lines up 50 Muslim prisoners, swishes a series of bullets in the corpses of freshly slaughtered pigs, and orders his men to put those bullets in their rifles and kill 49 of the captured Muslim men. He spares one captive solely so he can go back and tell his friends. End of the terrorism problem.
In some ways, this story contains all the elements of Trump’s core appeal. The vexing problem of tackling jihadist terror? Torture and murder enough terrorists and they will simply go away. The complicated issue of undocumented workers, drawn by jobs many Americans won’t take? Deport every single one of them and build a wall to stop the rest. Fuck political correctness. As one of his supporters told an obtuse reporter at a rally when asked if he supported Trump: “Hell yeah! He’s no-bullshit. All balls. Fuck you all balls. That’s what I’m about.” And therein lies the appeal of tyrants from the beginning of time. Fuck you all balls. Irrationality with muscle.
The racial aspect of this is also unmissable. When the enemy within is Mexican or Muslim, and your ranks are extremely white, you set up a rubric for a racial conflict. And what’s truly terrifying about Trump is that he does not seem to shrink from such a prospect; he relishes it.
For, like all tyrants, he is utterly lacking in self-control. Sleeping a handful of hours a night, impulsively tweeting in the early hours, improvising madly on subjects he knows nothing about, Trump rants and raves as he surfs an entirely reactive media landscape. Once again, Plato had his temperament down: A tyrant is a man “not having control of himself [who] attempts to rule others”; a man flooded with fear and love and passion, while having little or no ability to restrain or moderate them; a “real slave to the greatest fawning,” a man who “throughout his entire life ... is full of fear, overflowing with convulsions and pains.” Sound familiar? Trump is as mercurial and as unpredictable and as emotional as the daily Twitter stream. And we are contemplating giving him access to the nuclear codes.
Those who believe that Trump’s ugly, thuggish populism has no chance of ever making it to the White House seem to me to be missing this dynamic. Neo-fascist movements do not advance gradually by persuasion; they first transform the terms of the debate, create a new movement based on untrammeled emotion, take over existing institutions, and then ruthlessly exploit events. And so current poll numbers are only reassuring if you ignore the potential impact of sudden, external events — an economic downturn or a terror attack in a major city in the months before November. I have no doubt, for example, that Trump is sincere in his desire to “cut the head off” ISIS, whatever that can possibly mean. But it remains a fact that the interests of ISIS and the Trump campaign are now perfectly aligned. Fear is always the would-be tyrant’s greatest ally.
And though Trump’s unfavorables are extraordinarily high (around 65 percent), he is already showing signs of changing his tune, pivoting (fitfully) to the more presidential mode he envisages deploying in the general election. I suspect this will, to some fools on the fence, come as a kind of relief, and may open their minds to him once more. Tyrants, like mob bosses, know the value of a smile: Precisely because of the fear he’s already generated, you desperately want to believe in his new warmth. It’s part of the good-cop-bad-cop routine that will be familiar to anyone who has studied the presidency of Vladimir Putin.
His proposition is a simple one. Remember James Carville’s core question in the 1992 election: Change versus more of the same? That sentiment once elected Clinton’s husband; it could also elect her opponent this fall. If you like America as it is, vote Clinton. After all, she has been a member of the American political elite for a quarter-century. Clinton, moreover, has shown no ability to inspire or rally anyone but her longtime loyalists. She is lost in the new media and has struggled to put away a 74-year-old socialist who is barely a member of her party. Her own unfavorables are only 11 points lower than Trump’s (far higher than Obama’s, John Kerry’s, or Al Gore’s were at this point in the race), and the more she campaigns, the higher her unfavorables go (including in her own party). She has a Gore problem. The idea of welcoming her into your living room for the next four years can seem, at times, positively masochistic.
It may be that demographics will save us. America is no longer an overwhelmingly white country, and Trump’s signature issue — illegal immigration — is the source of his strength but also of his weakness. Nonetheless, it’s worth noting how polling models have consistently misread the breadth of his support, especially in these past few weeks; he will likely bend over backward to include minorities in his fall campaign; and those convinced he cannot bring a whole new swath of white voters back into the political process should remember 2004, when Karl Rove helped engineer anti-gay-marriage state constitutional amendments that increased conservative voter turnout. All Trump needs is a sliver of minority votes inspired by the new energy of his campaign and the alleged dominance of the Obama coalition could crack (especially without Obama). Throughout the West these past few years, from France to Britain and Germany, the polls have kept missing the power of right-wing insurgency.
Were Trump to win the White House, the defenses against him would be weak. He would likely bring a GOP majority in the House, and Republicans in the Senate would be subjected to almighty popular fury if they stood in his way. The 4-4 stalemate in the Supreme Court would break in Trump’s favor. (In large part, of course, this would be due to the GOP’s unprecedented decision to hold a vacancy open “for the people to decide,” another massive hyperdemocratic breach in our constitutional defenses.) And if Trump’s policies are checked by other branches of government, how might he react? Just look at his response to the rules of the GOP nomination process. He’s not interested in rules. And he barely understands the Constitution. In one revealing moment earlier this year, when asked what he would do if the military refused to obey an illegal order to torture a prisoner, Trump simply insisted that the man would obey: “They won’t refuse. They’re not going to refuse, believe me.” He later amended his remark, but it speaks volumes about his approach to power. Dick Cheney gave illegal orders to torture prisoners and coerced White House lawyers to cook up absurd “legal” defenses. Trump would make Cheney’s embrace of the dark side and untrammeled executive power look unambitious.
In his 1935 novel,It Can’t Happen Here .. https://www.amazon.com/Cant-Happen-Here-Signet-Classics/dp/0451529294?tag=nymagcom-20 , Sinclair Lewis wrote a counterfactual about what would happen if fascism as it was then spreading across Europe were to triumph in America. It’s not a good novel, but it remains a resonant one. The imagined American fascist leader — a senator called Buzz Windrip — is a “Professional Common Man … But he was the Common Man twenty-times-magnified by his oratory, so that while the other Commoners could understand his every purpose, which was exactly the same as their own, they saw him towering among them, and they raised hands to him in worship.”
He “was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic.” “ ‘I know the Press only too well,’ ” Windrip opines at one point. “ ‘Almost all editors hide away in spider-dens, men without thought of Family or Public Interest … plotting how they can put over their lies, and advance their own positions and fill their greedy pocketbooks.’ ”
He is obsessed with the balance of trade and promises instant economic success: “ ‘I shall not be content till this country can produce every single thing we need … We shall have such a balance of trade as will go far to carry out my often-criticized yet completely sound idea of from $3000 to $5000 per year for every single family.’ ” However fantastical and empty his promises, he nonetheless mesmerizes the party faithful at the nominating convention (held in Cleveland!): “Something in the intensity with which Windrip looked at his audience, looked at all of them, his glance slowly taking them in from the highest-perched seat to the nearest, convinced them that he was talking to each individual, directly and solely; that he wanted to take each of them into his heart; that he was telling them the truths, the imperious and dangerous facts, that had been hidden from them.”
And all the elites who stood in his way? Crippled by their own failures, demoralized by their crumbling stature, they first mock and then cave. As one lone journalist laments before the election (he finds himself in a concentration camp afterward): “I’ve got to keep remembering … that Windrip is only the lightest cork on the whirlpool. He didn’t plot all this thing. With all the justified discontent there is against the smart politicians and the Plush Horses of Plutocracy — oh, if it hadn’t been one Windrip, it’d been another … We had it coming, we Respectables.”
And, 81 years later, many of us did. An American elite that has presided over massive and increasing public debt, that failed to prevent 9/11, that chose a disastrous war in the Middle East, that allowed financial markets to nearly destroy the global economy, and that is now so bitterly divided the Congress is effectively moot in a constitutional democracy: “We Respectables” deserve a comeuppance. The vital and valid lesson of the Trump phenomenon is that if the elites cannot govern by compromise, someone outside will eventually try to govern by popular passion and brute force.
But elites still matter in a democracy. They matter not because they are democracy’s enemy but because they provide the critical ingredient to save democracy from itself. The political Establishment may be battered and demoralized, deferential to the algorithms of the web and to the monosyllables of a gifted demagogue, but this is not the time to give up on America’s near-unique and stabilizing blend of democracy and elite responsibility. The country has endured far harsher times than the present without succumbing to rank demagoguery; it avoided the fascism that destroyed Europe; it has channeled extraordinary outpourings of democratic energy into constitutional order. It seems shocking to argue that we need elites in this democratic age — especially with vast inequalities of wealth and elite failures all around us. But we need them precisely to protect this precious democracy from its own destabilizing excesses.
And so those Democrats who are gleefully predicting a Clinton landslide in November need to both check their complacency and understand that the Trump question really isn’t a cause for partisan Schadenfreude anymore. It’s much more dangerous than that. Those still backing the demagogue of the left, Bernie Sanders, might want to reflect that their critique of Clinton’s experience and expertise — and their facile conflation of that with corruption — is only playing into Trump’s hands. That it will fall to Clinton to temper her party’s ambitions will be uncomfortable to watch, since her willingness to compromise and equivocate is precisely what many Americans find so distrustful. And yet she may soon be all we have left to counter the threat. She needs to grasp the lethality of her foe, moderate the kind of identity politics that unwittingly empowers him, make an unapologetic case that experience and moderation are not vices, address much more directly the anxieties of the white working class—and Democrats must listen.
More to the point, those Republicans desperately trying to use the long-standing rules of their own nominating process to thwart this monster deserve our passionate support, not our disdain. This is not the moment to remind them that they partly brought this on themselves. This is a moment to offer solidarity, especially as the odds are increasingly stacked against them. Ted Cruz and John Kasich face their decisive battle in Indiana on May 3. But they need to fight on, with any tactic at hand, all the way to the bitter end. The Republican delegates who are trying to protect their party from the whims of an outsider demagogue are, at this moment, doing what they ought to be doing to prevent civil and racial unrest, an international conflict, and a constitutional crisis. These GOP elites have every right to deploy whatever rules or procedural roadblocks they can muster, and they should refuse to be intimidated.
And if they fail in Indiana or Cleveland, as they likely will, they need, quite simply, to disown their party’s candidate. They should resist any temptation to loyally back the nominee or to sit this election out. They must take the fight to Trump at every opportunity, unite with Democrats and Independents against him, and be prepared to sacrifice one election in order to save their party and their country.
For Trump is not just a wacky politician of the far right, or a riveting television spectacle, or a Twitter phenom and bizarre working-class hero. He is not just another candidate to be parsed and analyzed by TV pundits in the same breath as all the others. In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event. It’s long past time we started treating him as such.
*This article appears in the May 2, 2016 issue of New York Magazine.
Eisenhower student says teacher tried to pull him out of seat during Pledge of Allegiance
VIDEO - Shemar, an Eisenhower High School sophomore, shares why he refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, leading to a teacher attempting to pull him out of his chair. Sept. 9, 2016. (Zak Koeske / Chicago Tribune)
Zak Koeske Daily Southtown
An Eisenhower High School sophomore who said he has dealt with threats and harassment from fellow students following a flap with a teacher over his participation in the Pledge of Allegiance last month is leaving the school, his mother said.
Kelley Porter Turner said Wednesday that she was pulling her 15-year-old son Shemar out of Eisenhower and had already started the process of enrolling him in an online charter school.
[...]
"I was like, 'No, I'm not going to stand up,' so I didn't," said Shemar, who first refused to stand and recite the pledge in class on the morning of Friday, Aug. 26, just hours before San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sparked a national debate on the issue by sitting for the National Anthem during an NFL preseason game.
When Shemar's teacher asked why he wasn't standing, he replied, "America sucks," he said.
The Latest: Trump says he’ll reverse US-Cuba agreement
Trump would undo Obama's Cuba moves unless religious freedom allowed
Video 1:22 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, campaigning in Miami, says he would undo U.S. President Barack Obama's "one-sided" Cuba actions unless the Castro government allows religious freedom and frees political prisoners. (Reuters)
By Associated Press September 16 at 7:57 PM
WASHINGTON — The Latest on the U.S. presidential race (all times EDT):
7:40 p.m.
Donald Trump says that, if he’s elected president, he will reverse President Barack Obama’s efforts to normalize relations with Cuba — unless the country abides by certain “demands.”
Trump says at a Miami rally that those demands will include religious and political freedom for the Cuban people and the freeing of all political prisoners.
Trump says he’ll “stand with the Cuban people in their fight against communist oppression.”
The comment marks yet another reversal for the GOP candidate, who previously said he supported the idea of normalized relations, but wished the U.S. had negotiated a better deal.
“Fifty years is enough,” he told the Daily Caller last year.
Trump on Friday called the deal “one-sided” and said it only benefits the Castro regime. __
7:30 p.m. .. [ .. so now Republican's are criticizing Clinton for looking ""so serious"" .. miserable misogynist inclinations just don't disappear do they ..]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FJ2mOcr7to [note: ends with a loud beeeeeep tone for a few seconds after Clinton walks off, so good to stop this one once she concludes her comments and commences her exit; with comments]
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Full Show - EXCLUSIVE: TIM KENNEDY ANNOUNCES HISTORIC UFC205 - 09/15/2016
On this Thursday, September 15 edition of the Alex Jones Show, we look into the Clintons’ latest lie as Bubba claims Hillary was sick with the flu. Wait… wasn’t it pneumonia? It’s all lies, of course. We also report on how France is preparing for civil war amid the backlash against Muslim migrants invading the country who have no desire to assimilate to Western society, particularly the rule of law. Special Forces veteran and MMA fighter Tim Kennedy to discuss current world events and what you can do to prepare for civil unrest.
Trump tells Post he is unwilling to say Obama was born in the U.S.
Video [embedded]: Donald Trump's long history of birther comments Donald Trump spent a lot of time raising doubts over President Obama's birth certificate in 2011. He finally admitted Obama was born in the U.S. on Sept. 16, but falsely accused Hillary Clinton's campaign of starting the rumor.
By Robert Costa September 15, 2016
CANTON, Ohio — Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said in an interview here that he remains unwilling to say that President Obama was born in the United States, that he is more bullish than ever on his chances to win and that he is not exploring the launch of a new media company in case he loses the race.
Trump also made a far-from-subtle push — in the interview and in a letter from his doctor released Thursday — to be seen as vigorous and healthy, as his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, returned to the campaign trail after being treated for mild pneumonia.
In the interview, conducted late Wednesday aboard his private plane as it idled on the tarmac here, Trump suggested he is not eager to change his pitch or his positions even as he works to reach out to minority voters, many of whom are deeply offended by his long-refuted suggestion that Obama is not a U.S. citizen. Trump refused to say whether he believes Obama was born in Hawaii.
“I’ll answer that question at the right time,” Trump said. “I just don’t want to answer it yet.”
When asked whether his campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, was accurate when she said recently that he now believes Obama was born in this country, Trump responded: “It’s okay. She’s allowed to speak what she thinks. I want to focus on jobs. I want to focus on other things.”
He added: “I don’t talk about it anymore. The reason I don’t is because then everyone is going to be talking about it as opposed to jobs, the military, the vets, security.”
Late Thursday, campaign spokesman Jason Miller said in a statement that Trump no longer doubted Obama’s birth in Hawaii and had done “a great service to the President and the country” by prompting Obama to release his long-form birth certificate in 2011. But Miller also repeated the widely debunked claim that Clinton and her campaign had questioned Obama’s birthplace in 2008, which is false.
Miller is among three Trump associates who have recently claimed a change of heart, but the candidate has yet to say so himself. Trump has repeatedly raised questions about Obama’s heritage over the past five years.
In the interview, Trump defended his wife’s immigration history; attacked targets including CNN host Anderson Cooper and Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.); and said he had been “respectful” since Clinton fell ill but “that doesn’t mean that I’m going to stay there.”
Sitting in his plush, cream-and-gold cabin as his top aides looked on, Trump began by repeatedly recounting his poll numbers, which have ticked up nationally and in some key states.
Trump said a possible turning point in the race came last week when Clinton said that “half” of his supporters belonged in a “basket of deplorables” — a remark she has since said she regrets.
“It’s the single biggest mistake in this political cycle, a massive comment, bigger than 47 percent,” Trump said, a reference to Mitt Romney’s controversial 2012 statement at a fundraiser about voters who receive government benefits or pay little in taxes. “When I first heard it, I couldn’t believe that she said it.”
Clinton and her campaign argue that some Trump backers are racist and misogynistic and have sought to link him to the “alt-right” movement of self-avowed white nationalists, many of whom have rallied around his candidacy.
“The alt-right. You know they came up with the term ‘alt-right,’?” Trump said, blaming Clinton and her allies, although the term has been used within the movement for years. “I think the term itself is ridiculous. The alt-right. When did it come into existence? It was just made up.”
Trump was a leading and vocal proponent of the debunked conspiracy theory that the nation’s first black president was born overseas and thus not eligible for the White House. Obama released his Hawaiian birth certificate in 2011, but Trump has never disavowed his earlier claims.
The Republican nominee said he still believes he can win significant support from black voters. “I’ve come up with African American voters like a rocket ship,” he said.
When told again that the birther issue could still hang over his candidacy and its appeal to that voting bloc in particular, Trump glared and said, “I think it hangs over the reporters.”
There have been rumors and scattered media reports for months that Trump has been considering founding a media company with his friend Roger Ailes, former Fox News chairman, should he lose the presidency. But Trump said he has never had a conversation about launching a venture with Ailes or other prominent right-wing media figures.
“No, never did,” he said. “I want to win the presidency, and I want to make America great again. It’s very simple. I have no interest in a media company. False rumor.”
Trump characterized Ailes, who resigned from Fox News after a series of sexual-harassment allegations, as a trusted friend more than a formal adviser. “He’s certainly been very successful at what he does and on occasion, we’ll talk,” Trump said. “I love the benefit of his experience and knowledge. He’s had an amazing experience. But there is no role.”
Trump said Ailes has told him “some interesting things about past debates” during conversations they’ve had over several weekends at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J.
“Debate skills are either something you either have or don’t have. You have to prep. You have to have knowledge,” he said. “But when people say you have to be nice or not nice, well, I won’t really know until it begins. Because if she treats me with respect, I’ll treat her with respect. If she doesn’t, I’ll reciprocate. If she’s respectful of me, I’ll be that way with her.”
Trump said he was unconcerned that moderators may decide to fact-check during the forums.
“I don’t care. My facts are good. My facts are good. I don’t get enough credit for having my facts right,” Trump said. “They’ll say I’m wrong even when I’m right.”
Trump took an unprompted shot at Cooper, who is one of the moderators selected by the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates. Trump said he would take part in the debate moderated by Cooper but remains unhappy with his selection.
“I don’t think Anderson Cooper should be a moderator, because Anderson Cooper works for CNN and over the last couple of days, I’ve seen how Anderson Cooper behaves,” Trump said. “He’ll be very biased, very biased. I don’t think he should be a moderator. I’ll participate, but I don’t think he should be a moderator. CNN is the Clinton News Network and Anderson Cooper, I don’t think he can be fair.”
On Wednesday, Trump’s wife, Melania, released a letter from her attorney, who attested with “100% certainty” that she had immigrated legally from Slovenia, following several news stories scrutinizing how she entered and worked in the United States before gaining citizenship.
With the letter, Trump said, there is no longer a need for his wife to hold a news conference on the topic, as the campaign once promised. He also reiterated his refusal to release his tax returns, as Clinton and all other presidential candidates have done for decades, citing an Internal Revenue Service audit that he says is ongoing.
Briefly discussing foreign affairs, Trump bristled at the idea that he had “embraced” Russian President Vladimir Putin with positive comments about him, including his contention last week that Putin was superior to Obama in leadership skills.
“By the way, that’s a totally false narrative. I haven’t embraced them. You know that,” he said. When told that he has been more warm to Putin than many other Republicans, Trump said: “No. No.”
“I simply said that Putin is a stronger leader than Obama,” he said.
Trump on Thursday released a letter from his longtime doctor, Harold N. Bornstein at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, that summarized the candidate’s latest physical and discussed it on “The Dr. Oz Show.” It said he takes a statin drug to lower his cholesterol and has a body mass index in the overweight range but is in “excellent” condition.
Trump defended Bornstein — who has come under scrutiny after acknowledging that he rushed writing a previous hyperbolic statement on Trump’s health — as “very, very professional.”
“He’s never been exposed to the public like this, so he was having a little bit of a hard time,” Trump said.
Trump said Bornstein’s letter will be the final document that he will release on his health before the election. He does not plan to share a trove of medical files as other presidential candidates, such as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), have done during previous campaigns.
“There is nothing else to release,” Trump said.
He took a swipe at Clinton, whose campaign on Wednesday released a two-page letter from her doctor that said she had been treated for “mild” bacterial pneumonia but is in overall good health and “fit to serve as president.”
“She didn’t give this. She didn’t give all of these EKGs,” Trump said, referring to an electrocardiogram test result included in the letter. “I took EKGs. She said her cholesterol is okay, I say what my cholesterol is. I give the good, the bad and the other cholesterols. I give all three cholesterols.”
When asked directly whether he has ever had a major illness or a heart attack, Trump said he has not. “No,” he said. “I’ve never had a scare.”
Trump shrugged off a question about whether he could use more exercise.
“I guess. But that’s exercise,” he said of his raucous rally speeches. “When you’re up there soaking wet, the room is 90 degrees because there are so many people. ... It’s warm. It’s like that in a lot of rooms.”
Told that Reid had said that Trump is “not slim and trim,” Trump grimaced and waved his hand dismissively.
“Harry Reid? I think he should go back and start working out again with his rubber work-out pieces,” an apparent reference to the exercise band that snapped last year and caused Reid to fall and break a number of ribs and some facial bones.
Since Clinton fell ill Sunday at a memorial service marking the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Trump has been mixed in his responses. He has sounded taunting in some of his recent remarks, such as when he wondered aloud at his rally Wednesday whether Clinton “would be able to stand up here for an hour and do this.”
“I don’t think so,” Trump told the cheering crowd.
“I asked a question,” Trump said in the interview soon after. “Everyone screamed ‘No!’ I want to be respectful. I’m a respectful person. That doesn’t mean that I’m going to stay there. But right now, she’s in bed recuperating and I want to be respectful.”
Trump also said that he resisted weighing in on Clinton’s illness Sunday on Twitter because “I thought it would be inappropriate to tweet when I saw her in serious danger.”
But was he tempted?
“No,” Trump said quickly. “No. I was not tempted. Not even a little bit.”
Hillary Clinton At 39th Annual Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute Public Policy Conference FNN
Published on Sep 15, 2016 by FOX 10 Phoenix
Hillary Clinton delivers remarks at the 39th Annual Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute Public Policy Conference and Annual Awards Gala at The Walter E. Washington Convention Center.
Donald Trump’s ridiculous claim that Hillary Clinton started the birther movement “You know who started the birther movement? You know who started it? Do you know who questioned his birth certificate, one of the first? Hillary Clinton. She’s the one that started it. She brought it up years before it was brought up by me.” - Donald Trump, interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, May 4, 2016 May 6, 2016 Updated September 16, 2016 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/05/06/donald-trumps-ridiculous-claim-that-hillary-clinton-started-the-birther-movement/ [with embedded videos, and comments]
AP FACT CHECK: Trump says Clinton lacks policies. Seriously? Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally, Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2016, in Clive, Iowa. Sep. 13, 2016 WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican Donald Trump has rolled out a new attack line against Hillary Clinton as they enter the final stretch of the presidential race, and it's a head-turner. His claim: that his Democratic rival has been running a policy-free campaign, lacking specific proposals. It's actually Trump who's the newcomer to policy specifics. While some of Clinton's positions have been criticized for vagueness, her campaign has produced so many pages of policy that they've been turned into a book. TRUMP, at a rally Tuesday in Clive, Iowa: "In recent days, we've rolled out one new policy idea after another ... By contrast, Hillary Clinton is running a policy-free campaign. She offers no ideas, no solutions." THE FACTS: By any measure, Clinton has released far more specific plans on far more topics than her GOP rival. Trump's website currently lays out eight policy positions, including spelling out his "economic vision," his plans for child care and immigration reform and his plan to "pay for the wall." Clinton's offers position on 38 issues for potential voters to read. They cover, for example, efforts to cure Alzheimer's disease and autism, a prescription for reining in Wall Street, a plan for tuition-free in-state college, and a menu of initiatives to combat climate change. She even outlines an initiative to protect zoo animals in the event of a disaster. While Trump's proposals have grown more detailed in recent weeks, throughout most of his campaign he mocked Clinton for putting out so many proposals — while his aides derided reporters for pressing for specifics, insisting that voters didn't care. "She's got people that sit in cubicles writing policy all day," Trump told Time magazine in June. "Nothing's ever going to happen. It's just a waste of paper." As for specifics, "My voters don't care and the public doesn't care," he said. "They know you're going to do a good job once you're there." [...] http://bigstory.ap.org/article/81e5ad60099d4b749d0934de8ec63341/ap-fact-check-trump-says-clinton-lacks-policies-seriously
Full Show - TRUMP SET TO WIN BY A LANDSLIDE // GLOBALIST PANIC AND PLAN ASSASSINATION - 09/16/2016
Published on Sep 16, 2016 by The Alex Jones Channel
On this Friday, September 16 edition of the Alex Jones Show, we look into Trump's domination in the polls as he continues his march toward the presidency seemingly unopposed. Meanwhile, Hillary is still struggling to gain her footing as more liberals turn against her. And Democrats start worrying about Gary Johnson and other third parties stealing votes from Hillary. On today's show, former Secret Service agent Gary Byrne, who protected the Clintons between 1991 and 2003, discusses his recent op-ed in which he claimed the explanation that Hillary was merely suffering from “overheating” was “highly suspect”. Also, political insider Roger Stone joins the program to discuss Trump's big Friday speech, in which he discussed Obama's birth certificate. And documentary filmmaker Joel Gilbert breaks down his Super Trump campaign.
US says it killed new ISIS information minister in drone strike US defense official says drone strike targeted new ISIS official in charge of media and propaganda The strike comes weeks after the US confirmed it had killed ISIS' spokesman Updated September 16, 2016 Washington (CNN) - Just weeks after ISIS suffered a major loss when its chief spokesman was taken out in an air attack, the US announced it had killed his close associate in a strike. The US targeted ISIS leader Wael Adel Salman, aka Abu Muhammed Furqan, in a September 7 airstrike, Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said in a statement issued Friday. The strike took out one of the very limited number of ISIS leaders who had "direct access" to Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, according to a US official. The US conducted the strike using a drone, hitting him on a motorcycle just outside a house in Raqqa, ISIS's self-declared capital, the official added. Cook called Salman one of the "most senior leaders" in ISIS. "He operated as the minister of Information for the terror organization and was a prominent member of its Senior Shura Council -- ISIL's leadership group," Cook added, using the government's preferred acronym for the terror group. The US has now killed in the last two months two of the "very few" ISIS leaders with direct access to Baghdadi, the official said. Mohammad al-Adnani was killed in Syria in a US airstrike on August 30. He was thought to be in charge of external terror operations. "Baghdadi's inner circle was already small, and it's getting smaller," the official added. Salman is assessed to have been one of the five most-senior officials in ISIS before he and Adnani were killed. Cook said Salman was responsible for overseeing the production of "terrorist propaganda videos showing torture and executions." [...] http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/16/politics/drone-strike-isis-minister-information/
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FULL: First Lady Michelle Obama Campaigns For Hillary Clinton
Published on Sep 16, 2016 by FOX 10 Phoenix
Anyone who wants to be president should not "pop off about going to war" because it is serious business, Michelle Obama said Friday as she reflected on the "sobering experience" of visiting wounded patients at military hospitals. In the early years of President Barack Obama's tenure, the first lady said, their hospital visits would last for hours as they visited with dozens of patients, including many who had lost limbs or had suffered other devastating injuries. "And that's something a commander in chief thinks about before they pop off about going to war, because when you've spent time on a base and you know these men and women and you know their families you don't just talk about war like there are no implications," Mrs. Obama said during an appearance with former first lady Laura Bush at the National Archives. Less than eight weeks away from the presidential election, Mrs. Obama's comments were viewed as a direct criticism of Republican candidate Donald Trump, who has said that he would "bomb the hell out of ISIS," also known as the Islamic State group. Trump's Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, has said he cannot be entrusted with the codes needed to launch America's nuclear arsenal. Mrs. Obama used the same "pop off" language later Friday as she headlined her first campaign rally for Clinton.
First Lady Michelle Obama Campaign Remarks in Fairfax, Virginia First lady Michelle Obama hit the campaign trail for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton at a rally in Fairfax, Virginia. She urged the audience to register and vote for the former Secretary of State who she said inspires her and has the qualifications and resiliency to do the job. The first lady also talked about her husband’s legislative accomplishments as ways he has answered his critics, including Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who questioned the president’s American citizenship. The rally was held at George Mason University. September 16, 2016 https://www.c-span.org/video/?415374-1/first-lady-michelle-obama-campaigns-hillary-clinton-virginia [with transcript]
Murfreesboro man charged in assassination plot against 2 members of Congress
Kaehiokahouna Stewart of Murfreesboro appeared in federal court Friday on charges that he threatened to shoot up a courthouse and kill people, actions that targeted a U.S. congresswoman and senator from Hawaii. (Photo: File)
Stacey Barchenger 6:18 p.m. CDT September 16, 2016
A Murfreesboro man appeared in federal court Friday afternoon on charges that he threatened to shoot up a courthouse and kill people, actions that targeted a U.S. congresswoman and senator from Hawaii.
Kaehiokahouna Stewart, 36, was arrested Friday morning at his home, officials said. Court documents and officials say Stewart went so far as to buy a plane ticket to Hawaii to carry out his murder plot.
A complaint filed by the government says Stewart sent threatening emails and posted threatening videos on social media, specifically targeting U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono and U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard.
On Aug. 19, Stewart sent an email saying he would fly from Nashville to Honolulu on Nov. 1 “with the intent to shoot people at the Princess Jonah Federal Building,” a news release from U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee David Rivera’s office says.
The complaint says Stewart has sent grievances to various government officials, including Hirono, Gabbard and President Barack Obama, since November 2013.
“Stewart falsely believed that his (Social Security number) had been duplicated and issued to a fellow soldier he met while stationed at Camp Stanley in Korea in 2002,” the news release says.
He wrote to the Social Security Administration and Department of Defense saying they ruined his life.
"Stewart demanded he receive 100% Veterans Administration disability and $50 billion or he would purchase a gun and a silencer and would not be responsible for any crimes he committed," the complaint says. It also says Stewart's Social Security number was determined to be one digit different from the other U.S. Army soldier.
Stewart went to visit Hirono’s office in Washington, D.C., in May 2015, the complaint says. After an office staffer would not help him, saying his issue was handled in the senator's Hawaii office, he said he was leaving and if he had to come back "there would be a problem," the document reads. Capitol Police were called because of the incident.
A spokesman for Hirono's office declined to comment on the case Friday. Gabbard's staff could not be reached after hours.
As recently as Sept. 8 Stewart posted an Instagram video saying he would fly to Honolulu on Nov. 1, traveling with an AR-15 rifle and two handguns, according to the complaint. In videos posted on YouTube that are identified in the complaint, Stewart is seen holding handguns and documents and saying "(expletive) the United States ... they owe me money." He also talks about burning an American flag.
Investigators said Stewart bought a ticket to go to Hawaii on Nov. 1, but it was exchanged, which means it could be used on another date, Rivera’s office said. The complaint says Stewart circled Nov. 5 on a calendar where he wrote "FEED DA FISHES," a reference to disposing of a body.
Stewart will remain in custody until his next court date, which is scheduled for Sept. 30.
U.S. Magistrate E. Clifton Knowles read Stewart his rights in an initial appearance Friday afternoon and appointed Assistant Federal Public Defender Caryll Alpert to the case. It is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Van Vincent.
The charges against Stewart, threatening to murder a U.S. official and communicating threats through interstate commerce, carry possible prison sentences of 10 years and five years, respectively. Fines are up to $250,000 on each charge.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZYm0hlYLMc [Trump's performance begins at c. the 9:15 mark; for Priebus's borderline frantic remarks and Giuliani's frothing fulminations in full, see the YouTube next below; with comments]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcbBCCecEtI [Reince Priebus's borderline frantic remarks begin at c. the 2:20 mark; Giuliani's frothing fulminations begin at c. the 6:50 mark; Trump's performance, with a significant audio dropout, begins at c. the 19:50 mark (see the YouTube just above for Trump's complete performance); with comments] [also at e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrwycV41-Y8 (with comments)]
*
Donald Trump Says Hillary Clinton’s Bodyguards Should Disarm to ‘See What Happens to Her’
Donald J. Trump drew cheers at a campaign rally Friday in Miami when he said Hillary Clinton did not deserve armed protection. Damon Winter/The New York Times
By NICK CORASANITI, NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and MICHAEL BARBARO SEPT. 16, 2016
MIAMI — Donald J. Trump once again raised the specter of violence against Hillary Clinton, suggesting Friday that the Secret Service agents who guard her voluntarily disarm to “see what happens to her” without their protection.
“I think that her bodyguards should drop all weapons,” Mr. Trump said at a rally in Miami, to loud applause. “I think they should disarm. Immediately.”
He went on: “Let’s see what happens to her. Take their guns away, O.K. It’ll be very dangerous.”
In justifying his remarks, Mr. Trump falsely claimed that Mrs. Clinton wants to “destroy your Second Amendment,” apparently a reference to her gun control policies.
Presidential nominees are protected at all times by heavily armed teams of Secret Service agents, some uniformed and some undercover, who are devoted to the candidates’ physical safety.
Mr. Trump’s comments were a provocative echo of widely condemned remarks [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/10/us/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton.html ] he made in early August at a campaign rally in Wilmington, N.C. There, he airily suggested that gun rights supporters should rise up against Mrs. Clinton if she were elected to stop her from appointing judges who might favor stricter gun regulation.
“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” Mr. Trump said, as the crowd began to boo. He quickly added, “Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.”
Those remarks were widely interpreted as an invitation for gun-rights supporters to take matters into their own hands should Mrs. Clinton prevail in November’s election.
Mr. Trump never apologized or disavowed the comments, despite angry denunciations from Mrs. Clinton’s running mate, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, and groups like the Brady Campaign [ http://www.bradycampaign.org/ ] and the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence [ http://smartgunlaws.org/ ].
On Friday night, Robby Mook, her campaign manager, said after Mr. Trump’s rally in Miami that he had shown “a pattern of inciting people to violence.”
“Whether this is done to provoke protesters at a rally or casually or even as a joke, it is an unacceptable quality in anyone seeking the job of commander in chief,” Mr. Mook said in a statement. “This kind of talk should be out of bounds for a presidential candidate.”
Matt Bennett, a vice president at Third Way, a think tank that advocates gun control, expressed disbelief at Mr. Trump’s “cavalier disregard for the safety” of Mrs. Clinton.
“No serious gun rights person believes that a Secret Service protectee should have their protection taken away,” Mr. Bennett said.
It was the culmination of a rocky and unpredictable day for Mr. Trump, and diverted attention, for a moment at least, from his grudging admission of error when he finally conceded [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/politics/donald-trump-obama-birther.html ] that President Obama was born in the United States.
On Friday night, breaking from his prepared remarks and turning his gaze from the teleprompters, Mr. Trump looked straight into the crowd as he made the insinuation about Mrs. Clinton’s safety. He gestured emphatically with his hands as he spoke, at one time pointing to a member in the crowd to find agreement.
“What do you think?” he asked about his remarks on Mrs. Clinton’s bodyguards, as the arena erupted into cheers.
In May, Mr. Trump accused Mrs. Clinton in a Twitter post of hypocrisy for accepting armed Secret Service protection while supporting some limits on access to weapons for civilians. That post also levied a false accusation against Mrs. Clinton, suggesting she supported a ban on all guns. She does not.
“No more guns to protect Hillary!” he added, although he did not go so far as to say what could happen if such protection were to be removed.
Violence and allusions to it have punctuated Mr. Trump’s campaign: Punches have been thrown at his rallies, protesters have been roughed up by Trump supporters, and the candidate himself has repeatedly deployed a lexicon of physical aggression.
“I’d like to punch him in the face,” Mr. Trump said in February when a protester was dragged out of his rally in Las Vegas.
In the past, Mr. Trump has sought to distance himself from his own menacing remarks by later dismissing them as playful or misinterpreted. His Republican supporters, meanwhile, have been pressed after every remark to distance themselves from him. On Friday night, officials of the Republican National Committee, which is working to help his campaign, did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Trump’s comments were a variation on criticisms made by the National Rifle Association, perhaps Mr. Trump’s closest political ally in the presidential race. The group has publicly criticized Secret Service protection for Mr. Obama’s two daughters, which is required under federal law, as hypocritical.
In 2013, the group released an advertisement calling Mr. Obama “an elitist hypocrite” for allowing the service to protect his family — which, like other first families, has faced multiple death threats — but opposing the widespread use of armed guards in schools.
Nick Corasaniti reported from Miami, and Nicholas Confessore and Michael Barbaro from New York.
Trump adjusts call for Clinton bodyguards to lose their guns
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the James L. Knight Center, Friday, Sept. 16, 2016, in Miami. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
By JONATHAN LEMIRE Sep. 16, 2016 10:42 PM EDT
MIAMI (AP) — Donald Trump made his usual sarcastic call Friday for Hillary Clinton's Secret Service agents to be stripped of their firearms — and then added, "let's see what happens to her."
Trump has long incorrectly suggested his Democratic opponent wants to overturn the Second Amendment and take away Americans' right to own guns. At a rally in Miami, he again riffed about confiscating the agents' guns and then went further.
"I think that her bodyguards should drop all weapons. They should disarm, right?" Trump asked the crowd. "Take their guns away, she doesn't want guns. Take their — and let's see what happens to her. Take their guns away. OK, it would be very dangerous."
Trump's meaning was not immediately clear and a campaign spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for an elaboration.
But the Clinton campaign had a quick reaction. Spokesman Robby Mook released a statement Friday night saying Trump "has a pattern of inciting people to violence. Whether this is done to provoke protesters at a rally or casually or even as a joke, it is an unacceptable quality in anyone seeking the job of Commander in Chief.
"This kind of talk should be out of bounds for a presidential candidate," Mook wrote.
A spokeswoman for the Secret Service declined to comment.
The seemingly ominous comment evoked a remark Trump made last month that many Democrats condemned as a call for Clinton's assassination. Speaking at a rally in North Carolina, the Republican nominee erroneously said his opponent wants to "abolish, essentially, the Second Amendment."
He continued: "By the way, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know."
Within minutes, the Clinton campaign condemned the remark. Mook said then, "A person seeking to be the president of the United States should not suggest violence in any way."
Trump later disputed that criticism, saying everyone in his audience knew he was referring to the power of voters and "there can be no other interpretation."
Trump, who has the endorsement of the National Rifle Association, eventually took to Twitter to say the Secret Service had not contacted him about the remarks.
The comments Friday in Miami came hours after Trump finally reversed his long-held position that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Appearing in Washington, he said Obama was born in the United States but then incorrectly suggested that the Clinton campaign had started the conspiracy theory.
Trump ignored questions from reporters about his switch and has yet to explain why he abandoned the "birther" stance that fueled his political fame and was viewed by critics as an attempt to delegitimize the nation's first African-American president.
While campaigning in South Florida, which has a large Cuban-American population, Trump also said that if he's elected president, he will reverse Obama's efforts to normalize relations with Cuba — unless the country abides by certain "demands." Among those, he said, would be religious and political freedom for the Cuban people and the freeing of all political prisoners.
Trump says he'll "stand with the Cuban people in their fight against communist oppression."
The comment marks yet another reversal for the GOP candidate, who previously said he supported the idea of normalized relations, but wished the U.S. had negotiated a better deal.
Trump also said the U.S. has a broader obligation to stand with oppressed people — a comment that seems at odds with his "America first" mantra. "The next president of the United States must stand in solidarity with all people oppressed in our hemisphere, and we will stand with oppressed people, and there are many," he said.
He added that the people of Venezuela "are yearning to be free, they are yearning for help. The system is bad. But the people are great."
Trump has often cited the country as a model of a failed state, warning that if Clinton is elected, she'll turn the U.S. into Venezuela.
Jill Colvin contributed reporting from Washington.
The Latest: Trump says he’ll reverse US-Cuba agreement
By Associated Press September 16 at 7:57 PM
WASHINGTON — The Latest on the U.S. presidential race (all times EDT):
7:40 p.m.
Donald Trump says that, if he’s elected president, he will reverse President Barack Obama’s efforts to normalize relations with Cuba — unless the country abides by certain “demands.”
Trump says at a Miami rally that those demands will include religious and political freedom for the Cuban people and the freeing of all political prisoners.
Trump says he’ll “stand with the Cuban people in their fight against communist oppression.”
The comment marks yet another reversal for the GOP candidate, who previously said he supported the idea of normalized relations, but wished the U.S. had negotiated a better deal.
“Fifty years is enough,” he told the Daily Caller last year.
Trump on Friday called the deal “one-sided” and said it only benefits the Castro regime. __
7:30 p.m.
Hillary Clinton says it’s “especially tricky for women” to balance the upbeat nature of a presidential campaign with the serious national security responsibilities of the White House.
Clinton says in an interview on NBC’s “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” that Republicans noted she looked “so serious” during a recent forum on national security. She says you don’t talk about the Islamic State group “with a big grin on your face.”
Clinton says it’s a “constant balancing act” to keep a positive spirit while “taking seriously” the issues she needs to discuss as a candidate.
Fallon jokingly donned a white surgical mask and rubbed Purell in his hands after greeting Clinton, who had a recent bout with pneumonia. Fallon’s interview with Clinton airs Monday. __
7 p.m.
Donald Trump is again calling for Hillary Clinton’s Secret Service agents to be stripped of their firearms — this time adding, “let’s see what happens to her.”
The Republican nominee often makes sarcastic calls for Clinton’s bodyguards to be disarmed, incorrectly suggesting she wants to overturn the 2nd Amendment.
He went a little further Friday night in Miami.
He says: “Take their guns away, she doesn’t want guns. Take their — and let’s see what happens to her. Take their guns away. OK, it would be very dangerous.”
Trump’s meaning was not immediately clear. But it was reminiscent of his suggestion last month that “Second Amendment people” could do something to stop Clinton from appointing Supreme Court justices. __
6:30 p.m.
Donald Trump is taking the stage in Miami with a new backdrop — a tribute to the French Revolution with the banner “Les Deplorables.”
The song “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from the Broadway hit “Les Miserables” played as Trump saluted the crowd at the James L. Knight Center.
“Welcome to all of you deplorables!” Trump said. The screen behind him glowed with a mock-up of Trump and some supporters in French Revolutionary garb.
The Republican nominee has relentlessly criticized his opponent, Hillary Clinton, for suggesting half of Trump’s supporters belong in “a basket of deplorables.”
Trump has taken to saying he will be the president “for all Americans, even those who don’t vote for me.” __
5:50 p.m.
Donald Trump is promising to “be a friend” to Haitian-Americans during an appearance in the Miami neighborhood known as Little Haiti.
The Republican presidential nominee appeared at the Little Haiti Visitors Center on Friday and accused his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and her husband of profiting off Haiti’s 2010 earthquake.
Trump claimed “a lot of money” was funneled to “Clinton cronies” and said the community “deserved better.”
The Clinton Foundation had a mixed record with its efforts to rebuild Haiti, but no evidence that the Clintons committed any wrongdoing has been produced. __
5:25 p.m.
Joe Arpaio, the Arizona sheriff who’s become famous for his hard-line stance on immigration, is coming under new criticism for his investigation of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.
Arpaio launched an investigation in 2012 that remained open as late as two months ago. He defended the investigation by saying people in his county had requested it.
Paul Penzone, Arpaio’s Democratic opponent in the November election, says the investigation is “nonsense” and a waste of resources.
Arpaio’s campaign manager and the sheriff’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump acknowledged Friday that Obama was born in the United States. __
3:35 p.m.
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will be the only two candidates at the first presidential debate.
The commission overseeing the debates invited the two major-party candidates to its Sept. 26 event on Friday. Libertarian party nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein did not get invited.
The commission said the two third-party candidates didn’t register enough support in polls to qualify. The commission has set a 15 percent threshold. Johnson averaged 8.4 percent in the polls the commission considered, and Stein 3.2 percent.
The third-party candidates could qualify for either of the final two debates in October if their polling average clears 15 percent then. But by missing out on the initial debate, they are losing their best chance to gain the attention needed to achieve that. ___
Former presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders tells Chris Hayes why he thinks the American people will vote for Hillary Clinton, warning that 'now is not the time to be supporting a protest vote'.
American white supremacists encouraged by Trump campaign
The Rachel Maddow Show 9/16/16
Rachel Maddow shows American racist groups describing at a press conference how they have found comfort and encouragement in the Donald Trump campaign, emboldening them to come out from the darker edges of American politics. Duration: 7:09
Trump employs symbols of America's racist fringe [alternative segment title: "Famous Last Words"]
The Rachel Maddow Show 9/16/16
Rachel Maddow shows how the Trump campaign's embrace of recognizable racist symbols and messages is taken as a signal of agreement by racist groups on the fringe of American politics. Duration: 10:27
Trump2016 Campaign Manager and frequent Real Time guest Kellyanne Conway joins Bill live from Trump Tower to discuss the Republican nominee's latest comments in this clip from September 16, 2016.
Kerry Washington Knows Spin When She Sees It | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)
Published on Sep 16, 2016 by Real Time with Bill Maher
Emmy-nominated actress Kerry Washington joins Bill to discuss her political activism and why "voting for Trump is voting against ourselves" in this clip from Real Time on September 16, 2016.
New Rule: Bring Civility Back to Politics | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)
Published on Sep 16, 2016 by Real Time with Bill Maher
In his editorial New Rule, Bill Maher calls this election a "referendum on decency" and argues for a return to the days when politicians could disagree respectfully - or at least without resorting to the name-calling and slurs that are slung around in today's climate. Original Air Date: September 16, 2016.
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