Tag: George W Bush

WILL A POST-TRUMP GOP RETURN TO ACTUAL BELIEFS & VALUES?

Here’s a history question to kick off our quadrennial political party conventions: Name the candidate whose nomination acceptance speech contained these five sentences:

  • “Everyone, from immigrant to entrepreneur, has an equal claim on this country’s promise.”
  • “Bigotry disfigures the heart.”
  • “Corporations are responsible to treat their workers fairly and to leave the air and waters clean.”
  • “Greatness does not rise or fall with the stock market.”
  • “True leadership is a process of addition, not an act of division.”

So, who spoke those words?  John Kennedy in 1960? Lyndon Johnson in 1964?  Hubert Humphrey in 1968? How about Barak Obama in 2008?   

Try George W. Bush in 2000.  Yes, those compassionate, caring  and inclusive thoughts came from the last Republican president prior to the dark and daunting dawn of Trumpism, an era that began with quite a different nomination acceptance speech:  “I alone can fix it.”  

It’s jarring to read Bush’s speech just as Trump prepares to accept the GOP nomination for four more years of chaos and corruption. Although only two decades have passed, it’s easy to forget that the Republican party once had actual values, that it stood for principles larger than electoral self-preservation.

Here’s how Stuart Stevens, a veteran Republican operative, put it in a Washington Post op-ed: “Most Republicans would have said that the party stood for some basic principles: fiscal sanity, free trade, strong on Russia, and that character and personal responsibility count. Today, it’s not that the Republican party has forgotten these issues and values; instead, it actively opposes all of them.”

Donald Trump not only owns this party, he has remade it in his own image.  Most historians mark the birth of Republicanism in 1854 when members of the Whig party broke away over the Whigs’ embrace of slavery.  Little did they know that, 166 years later, their anti-slavery movement would evolve into a white grievance party. 

This bizarre evolution, however, has less to do with conscious and deliberate policy changes, and everything to do with raw fear. It wasn’t as if Trump got congressional Republicans to alter their beliefs and values based on the strength and logic of his argument. Instead, it was that figurative gun he held to their heads, a weapon in the form of a single tweet that could end their political careers faster than a speeding bullet.

Focusing strictly on Trump’s merits back in 2016, many prominent Republicans rejected him. That rejection was a gift in disguise. He used it to fire up his base, to bond with them over their shared disdain and distrust for the elite political class.  This president’s fire power has always been his base, a passionate contingent of fed up white folks searching in vain for a rebirth of the 1950s. 

Here’s what some of the GOP stars were calling Trump before the 2016 election:  

Senator Lindsey Graham:  “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.”

Senator Ted Cruz:  “pathological liar, utterly amoral,  a sniveling coward.”

Former Congressman Mick Mulvaney:  “terrible human being.”

Former Texas Governor Rick Perry:  “a cancer on conservatism, a barking carnival act.”

Once Trump was elected, and his base displayed its steroidal bona fides, the Republican establishment caved, abandoning all remnants of beliefs, values and decency. Winning elections was all that mattered. That meant keeping The Donald happy and avoiding a demeaning tweet. So, Graham became Trump’s golf buddy, confidant and best friend in the Senate. Cruz sang his praises whenever possible. Mulvaney became his chief of staff. Perry joined the Trump Cabinet as Energy Secretary. 

Those few congressional Republicans who refused to march in lockstep with Trump either retired or were defeated for reelection. For the most part, their replacements have been sycophantically aligned with the president.

This is not at all how Republicans envisioned its future a mere seven years ago. In 2013, GOP leaders, ordered a probing and strategic evaluation of the party. It had lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. Many key states that had been considered Republican territory were increasingly voting Democratic. The result was an eye-opening reckoning with demographics. 

Here’s the upshot of that study: In a country where the Caucasian majority is on a steadily downward spiral to minority status, and where women and LGBTQ folks are both growing as a constituency and gravitating to the Democrats, the GOP needs a much larger tent.  In other words, white men alone will not save Republicans from extinction. Under the banner of the Growth and Opportunity Project, the party allocated $10 million to back comprehensive pro-immigration reform and outreach to women, Black, Asian, Latino and LGBTQ voters.

And then along came Donald Trump. As Stuart Stevens, the Republican political consultant, put it, Trump “didn’t hijack the GOP and bend it to his will.” Instead, he sensed correctly that there was no burning desire for big tent diversity in this party. So he, in Stevens’s words, “offered himself as a pure distillation of accumulated white grievance and anger.”  

What most of us saw as acts of compassion, caring and inclusion, Trump decried as political correctness. He encouraged division and white supremacy as the justifiable fruits of political incorrectness. “Trump didn’t make America more racist,” Stevens wrote, “he just normalized the resentments that were simmering in many households. . .and let a lot of long-suppressed demons out of the box.” 

Like everything Trumpian, this mind-boggling 2016 course correction – a reversal, actually – was rooted only in the moment it happened, with absolutely no thought of long-term strategy. Even in that moment, it just barely worked. Trump won with 46.1 percent of the vote. 

The GOP’s 2013 study is more germane than ever. A party tailored to the enmity of angry white men has no long-term future in a country that is growing more racially and ethnically diverse by the day. 

The only hope for Republicans is that Joe Biden scores an overwhelming victory in November. That might be enough for them to finally realize that the pro-slavery Whigs their party broke from 166 years ago was reincarnated into the Party of Donald Trump.  

They badly need to sever those bonds.

IT’S NOT JUST TRUMP – OUR WHOLE SYSTEM IS BROKEN

Our body politic is totally messed up. If a family member was as out of control and dysfunctional as the U.S. Congress, we would have staged an intervention long ago. Could it be that we are so sidetracked by the aberrant, maniacal antics of an unhinged president that we can’t bring ourselves to focus on the much broader problem of a broken system?

It is, after all, difficult to have a serious conversation about realigning the architecture of governance over the constant din of presidential tantrums, tweeted threats of nuclear annihilation and never-ending Russia investigations. Yet, if we step back from the chaos of the moment and examine how we got there, this glaring truth emerges: Donald Trump is a symptom, not the cause, of our problem. It may be hard to remember, but our democracy was pretty out of whack before the Donald landed in the White House. In fact, that’s how he got there.

The heart of our systemic problem is a deep toxicity of tribalism that has coagulated in the veins of our politics, blocking the free flow of creative, constructive, problem-solving solutions. For most of this country’s history, elected representatives from both parties were able to tackle major issues through a rugged-but-productive give-and-take. It wasn’t always pretty, but it worked. All that slowed to a crawl, then to a virtual stop, over the past decade.

A 2014 study examined the productivity of Congress over the years by measuring the number of major issues that body failed to address. It found that the volume of gridlock had doubled since 1950, with 75% of key legislation dying by deadlock. Things have only gotten worse. Despite single-party control of the House, Senate and the presidency, not a single salient issue has been resolved this year. Small wonder that 80% of Americans disapprove of Congress. Even before last year’s election, 70% of Democratic activists said they were afraid of Republicans, while 62% of the GOP said they were afraid of Democrats. That’s a level of hyper partisanship never before recorded or experienced.

Analysts offer a multiplicity of causes for this congressional quagmire. Among them: growing income disparity, free-flow of corporate money in campaigns, racism, and an expanding right flank in the Republican Party, exacerbated by gerrymandered reapportionment and primary battles between the GOP mainstream and the right. On top of those factors, the relative parity between the two parties creates an intense competition. The result is that making the other side look bad is more important than passing productive legislation.

Although this strategic dysfunction set in well over a decade ago, it was not openly acknowledged. That all changed in 2010 when Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell came out of the closet and announced that his top legislative goal was to make sure then-president Obama did not get a second term. It’s been downhill ever since. A new breed of hardline conservatives, ranging from the Senate’s Ted Cruz to the House’s Freedom Caucus, got elected by bucking the Republican establishment. As the Wall Street Journal noted, these folks think nothing of closing the government over the debt ceiling or Planned Parenthood without the slightest expectation of success. Such “unbending opposition,” says the Journal, “is not a means. It is an end in itself.”

It was in that kind of atmosphere, that the Democrats, enjoying a rare bicameral majority in 2010, did something that had never been done in modern congressional history. It passed a major bill, the Affordable Care Act, without a single vote from the opposition party. The Republicans seized the moment, coined the term “Obamacare” and have been staging exorcisms ever since. Obama became the source of all evil for those on the right. Trump didn’t write that script. He just picked it up and went with it. Meanwhile, particularly in the last two years of his presidency, Obama gave up on an intransigent Congress and used executive orders to put as much of his program into place as possible. He sealed a deal with Iran on his own, created a legal status for the dreamers, issued numerous rules and regulations on the environment, and negotiated the Paris climate change pact.

“We have a president,” Trump said during his campaign, “that can’t get anything done so he just keeps signing executive orders all over the place.” Last week, Trump signed his 49th executive order, the most of any president (at this point of his term) in more than 50 years. He has managed to reverse the bulk of Obama’s executive actions. At this moment, Obamacare continues to breathe only through the ineptitude of its would-be executioners.

This schizophrenic approach to governance is not what the founders had in mind. Yes, power needs to change hands at the direction of the electorate, but the entirety of our domestic programs and commitments to other countries has never been discarded en masse. Until 2010, every major legislative package (Social Security, Medicare, Civil Rights, Voting Rights, etc.) was passed with votes from both parties. None of those laws were repealed when control of Congress changed.

Partisanship is an inherent component of our democratic process, but partisanship on steroids, divorced from cooperation and constructive engagement, is a lethal anathema to good governance.

An amazingly prophetic George Washington, in his final address as president, warned that extreme partisanship would lead not just to a revenge-seeking loop between the parties, but ultimately to authoritarianism. Said our first president: “The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to see security and repose in the absolute power of an individual (who) . . .turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.” As if he had the vision of 2017 in front of him, Washington then suggested that this evil of hyper-partisanship will open “the door to foreign influence and corruption.”

Before it’s too late, we need to return to a political system where the needs of the people outweigh the needs of the politicians.

WARREN HARDING IS NO LONGER THE WORST PRESIDENT

It may have escaped your attention, what with Rocket Man and the Dotard flexing for nuclear war, but historians are pretty sure that Donald Trump has already overtaken Warren Harding as the country’s worst president. This has no doubt brought Harding his first good night of eternal rest since dying in office in 1923.

In many ways, the 29th and 45th presidents are starkly dissimilar. Harding drank too much. Trump, in his singular gift to humanity, is a teetotaler. Harding was suave and debonair. Trump is puffy and orange. Harding was known to woo and enchant women with romance. Trump grabs them the wrong way. Harding was prone to honest self-reflection, having once said, “I am not fit for this office and should never have been here.” Trump stares down his massive failures and declares his reign to be “the best presidency ever.”

Yet, both men entered the White House through amazingly similar routes. Malcolm Gladwell, in his best-selling treatise on the ups and downs of intuitive decision making, “Blink”, devoted a section to Harding as an example of the down side. Harding, the author noted, never distinguished himself when he was in the Ohio legislature or the U.S. Senate. Instead, writes Gladwell, a political sponsor pushed Harding to run because he “looked like a president.” Those looks were enough to get him the Republican nomination at a brokered convention in 1920, and, from there, the presidency. The charisma and presidential confidence that voters saw, however, was a mere façade. Harding lacked the capability of functioning successfully as a president.

Although the Donald hardly brought a Mount Rushmore face to the ticket, he had something just as powerful as Harding’s presidential aura. As a blustery business mogul, Candidate Trump was rude, crude and mad as hell. Eschewing all forms of political correctness, he denigrated every minority group imaginable and ripped into establishment elites for coddling them. For a good chunk of voters, it was a different kind of love at first sight. To the disgruntled, disaffected and disenfranchised – mostly older, angry Caucasians longing for the good old days when white privilege actually counted for something – Donald Trump was their Warren Harding. It wasn’t his looks. It was how he acted, what he said, his anger, his persona. He was one of them, their only hope to take a rapidly changing country back. But there was a problem, the same one Harding’s supporters faced: a deep void behind the veneer. There was no substance, intellect or skill to convert an illusion of competence into effective governance.

And so we have, in the ninth month of this administration, a new paradigm of presidential paralysis, a bizarre, needy codependency between the president and his not-so-merry band of malcontents. It’s a vicious cycle of dysfunction, in which Trump responds to each failure with an outrageous act that disgusts most people, but is lovingly devoured, like a piece of red meat, by his faithful base. As a result, he loses support from moderates and independents, while holding on to a “strongly support” base of around 20%. He keeps on stumbling because, among other reasons, it’s hard to move political mountains with that kind of math. And, with each failure, he trots back to his base with another piece of red meat. Rinse and repeat.

For example, take the crazy NFL brouhaha. Trump had been having a bad week. Yet another shot at Obamacare repeal appeared dead on arrival. He took heat for softening on the dreamers and working with Democrats. The right was all over him for backing an establishment Republican Senate candidate in Alabama. So he rips into the NFL for not firing the “son-of-a-bitch” players who kneel during the National Anthem. By all objective accounts, the move was a disaster. Players, coaches and even team owners who had supported Trump, linked arms before Sunday’s games to protest the president’s comments. Predictably, his base loved it, which meant that Trump was ecstatic. “It’s really caught on, it’s really caught on,” Trump said at a conservative White House dinner Monday night. “I said what millions of Americans were thinking.” Meanwhile, days before his NFL rampage, 66% of Americans told pollsters that Trump has done more to divide the country than unite it.

Solidifying the love of those closest to you, even if others disapprove of your actions, can be a commendable personal trait. But it is not particularly useful in the pragmatics of electoral politics. Every recent president has attempted to broaden their appeal, despite loud outcries from their base. George W. Bush’s pro-immigration stance, and his successful push for a Medicare drug program, infuriated his base but drew in more moderates. Liberals are still complaining about Bill Clinton’s welfare reform move that got him more support from the right. Many on the left, including the Congressional Black Caucus, were privately outraged with what they felt was Barack Obama’s failure to do more for the people who helped him get him elected. Yet it was important to Obama to be more than a black president. He, like his predecessors, wanted to expand his support and broaden his base. That’s what makes presidents more effective.

Trump is forever stuck in campaign mode, a one-trick pony who excels at creating outrage just so he can bask in the glory of a shrinking fringe group. He’s had their adulation since the birther days. They still chant “Lock Her Up” at his rallies because nostalgia feels so much better than the dismal reality of failure. Like Warren Harding, Donald Trump fooled a lot of people into thinking he’d make the perfect president. Unlike Harding, however, Trump fooled himself into believing the same thing. That’s why he has to keep performing for his base. Their applause is what makes his act possible. Without it, the curtain will eventually fall.

WHEN TRUMP TALKS, ENGLISH TEACHERS TRY NOT TO LISTEN

The first review of our 45th president’s verbal skills came seconds after he finished his inaugural address. According to New York Magazine, the 43rd president, George W. Bush, turned to those next to him and said, “That was some weird shit.” This from the guy who once said, “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.” Clearly, the torch of presidential inarticulateness has been passed.

Donald Trump makes Bush look like a master wordsmith. In a recent interview with the Associated Press, here’s how the Donald responded to a question about alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election: “ . . . there is no collusion between certainly myself and my campaign, but I can always speak for myself – and the Russians, zero.” Weird shit, indeed.

Trump’s difficulty in constructing a compound sentence without merging two disparate thoughts, mixed with a propensity to drain meaning from words through overuse, has been analyzed by a host of academicians. Linguists used something called the Flesch-Kincaid readability test to place his speeches at a fourth grade level. Psychologists compared transcripts of Trump interviews in the 1980s with those from the last four months and concluded that there has been significant cognitive decline. All this must be pleasing the president in some perverse way. The very elites who Trump thought were ignoring him are now giving him the kind of rapt attention that Jane Goodall bestowed on her chimps.

As for this expert analysis, I’m inclined to heed the cautionary observation of New York Times columnist David Brooks: “We’ve got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar.”

And beep they do. Responding to the Manchester concert bombing this week, Trump told the world that, from this day forward, he will refer to terrorists not as “monsters, which they would like,” but as “losers.” This nomenclature upgrade, as the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank noted, puts suicide bombers in an eclectic grouping. Here are just a few of the prior inductees in Trump’s Loser Hall of Shame: Rosie O’Donnell, Cher, Rihanna, Mark Cuban, George Will, an astrologer in Cleveland, Gwyneth Paltrow, John McCain and the Huffington Post. Using the same description for Rihanna and a terrorist empties the word of all meaning.

Yet, this limited vocabulary is not the biggest impediment in deciphering the president’s messages. That prize goes to an attention span that frequently changes subjects multiple times in the same sentence. In the AP interview, for example, Trump was asked about the funding of his proposed wall along the Mexican border. His answer: “People want the border wall. My base definitely wants the border wall, my base really wants it – you’ve been to many of the rallies. OK, the thing they want more than anything is the wall. My base, which is a big base; I think my base is 45 percent. You know, it’s funny. The Democrats, they have a big advantage in the Electoral College. Big, big, big advantage. . .The Electoral College is very difficult for a Republican to win, and I will tell you, the people want to see it. They want to see the wall.”

Trump’s unofficial record for a run-on sentence came during the Republican primaries when he once managed to utter 285 words on more than 15 subjects, all without ever taking a breath or using a period. Slate posted the monstrosity on its website and invited readers to take a crack at diagramming it with the Reed-Kellogg method, the bane of many an English class back in the old days. In lieu of cluttering this space with a 285-word Trump sentence, here’s the link, if you are up for a challenge. Like most of his off-the cuff soliloquies, it is peppered with repetitive words and phrases, like: “very good, very smart”, “oh, do they do a number” and “who would have thought?” Linguists, reported Slate’s Katy Waldman, have suggested that Trump’s overuse of such semantically non-meaningful words implies that he is “too distracted by the pleasure and theater of vocalizing to deliver any actual substance.”

Emphasizing theatrics over substance, may be an acceptable rhetorical device in sales, but a lot of folks expect meaningful and understandable content from the leader of the free world. Imagine the shock this week when Trump, after flying from Saudi Arabia to Tel Aviv, told a room of Israeli leaders that, “We just got back from the Middle East.” The smiling president thought he’d just delivered an applause line, but instead got a stunned reaction from an audience wondering how the guy who wants to broker a regional peace deal has no idea that Israel is in the Middle East.

In reporting on advance work for the president’s first trip abroad, Foreign Affairs said White House staff took precautions to protect their boss from verbal stumbles. Heads of state were advised to limit themselves to two-to-four minutes of discussion time, knowing how difficult it would be to hold Trump’s interest past that point. In an effort to keep him on script, Washington Monthly reported that aides tried to limit briefing notes to one page and inserted Trump’s name in every paragraph because, said a staffer, “he keeps reading it if he’s mentioned.”

Say what you want about George W. Bush, and there is a lot to say. Yet, nobody ever had to childproof his foreign trips.