Taking stock of Never-Trumpers
Two fascinating pieces came out recently about the phenomenon of the Never-Trumpers, now that it’s a year-plus into the Trump presidency.
The first is David Brooks’ (yes, he of the crease in Obama’s pants) essay in the Times, entitled “The Failures of Anti-Trumpism.” I have to hand it to Brooks, because it isn’t easy to admit defeat like this [emphasis mine]:
Over the past year, those of us in the anti-Trump camp have churned out billions of words critiquing the president. The point of this work is to expose the harm President Trump is doing, weaken his support and prevent him from doing worse. And by that standard, the anti-Trump movement is a failure.
We have persuaded no one. Trump’s approval rating is around 40 percent, which is basically unchanged from where it’s been all along…
A lot of us never-Trumpers assumed momentum would be on our side as his scandals and incompetences mounted. It hasn’t turned out that way. I almost never meet a Trump supporter who has become disillusioned. I often meet Republicans who were once ambivalent but who have now joined the Trump train.
Brooks goes on to give several reasons for this, which boil down to: (1) Never-Trumpers are often “insufferably condescending”; and (2) Trump still speaks to a certain disillusioned section of America. The first is a matter of tone, and the second a matter of empathy and communication.
But there is a curious omission on Brooks’ part, and I think it’s very telling. He doesn’t deal with what Trump has actually done up to this point: the judges he’s appointed, the tax cut he advocated that was passed, the ways in which he has limited illegal immigration (and will probably do more), and his tough stance in certain areas of foreign policy (including of course Israel).
Earth to Brooks: might Trump’s actual accomplishments in his first year have something to do with the fact that so many “Republicans who were once ambivalent…have now joined the Trump train”?
So, why does Brooks ignore that—which I believe is one of the biggest reasons Trump’s approval is, if anything, higher than when he took office? It’s certainly the reason why someone like me isn’t railing against him at the moment, although I did plenty of railing during the primaries. I had always said let’s give him a chance, I hope his performance as president is better than I think it will be, and that if it was I’d be pleased.
But Brooks and his ilk seem to evaluate politicians differently. What he (and they?) look for and admire seems to be style, first and foremost (the crease in Obama’s pants is a good illustration). Perhaps Brooks thinks that way because he thinks that style=substance, or at least is a very good indicator of substance. But I’ve not really found that to be true with any reliability, although of course sometimes the two do go together.
Trump is uncouth, coarse, nasty, seemingly inarticulate (although on close observation he actually communicates bluntly and directly and rather effectively). In other words, Trump is oh-so-many things Brooks doesn’t like, and I don’t care for either. But style is far less important to me in a president than what that person does in terms of action and policy.
I still think that, all else being equal, I’d love to have a president with everything I wanted, including style (Churchill keeps coming to mind, and Lincoln would do nicely, although he was considered uncouth in his day). And I suppose it also depends on whether you see Trump not only as uncouth but as deeply corrupt and dangerous. I once thought corrupt/dangerous was probably true, but as time has gone on I’ve seen less evidence of it rather than more. But if it were true that Trump was corrupt (or more corrupt than the alternatives) and dangerous (or more dangerous than the alternatives) it would be a reason to oppose him mightily.
But Brooks doesn’t seem to be saying that’s what he thinks, or at least he’s giving no details, at least not in that column. He says Trump has done damage (but is it the Resistance that’s done damage?). He cites Trump’s incompetences (at what?) and scandals (but are they real, or trumped (!) up, and are they important?). But he offers no evidence in the column itself of the sort of corruption or dangerousness that would warrant the depth of the Newer-Trumpers’ opposition.
The second article is a riff on the first one. It’s by Jon Gabriel, an editor at Richochet. Here’s an excerpt from it in which he talks about his own decision to leave the Never-Trumper camp:
As any longtime reader knows, I was a Never Trumper throughout the election. But when the nation selected him, I laid down that label and accepted reality. Trump was my president for the next four to eight years, I earnestly hoped for his and my country’s success, and I would praise or criticize him based on his actions.
The all-important phrase (to me, anyway) is based on his actions.
Gabriel and I are different. He was a Never-Trumper right up till the election. I was never a Never-Trumper, but I was strongly against Trump during the primaries and mostly sad and grieving after his nomination—sad and grieving because I saw the end result as the election of Hillary Clinton. When Trump was elected I was surprised, although “surprised” is too mild a word for it. But just as with Gabriel, at that point “I earnestly hoped for his and my country’s success, and I would praise or criticize him based on his actions.”
That seemed an obvious course of action to me. I had done the same with Obama, and wrote about it, too, right after his election in 2008. It didn’t take long for me to judge Obama on his actions and find them very disturbing. That judgment of mine just kept growing and growing during his presidency, but at the outset I was willing to give him a chance and judge him just as I’d judge anyone.
Same for Trump. It seems like that’s what every thinking person would do and should do. Obviously, that’s not the case.
Maybe for me it’s easier because I already am on record as admitting I changed my mind about my basic political affiliation, and that I’ve been wrong about a number of things in the past. What’s another change of mind, particularly if the news is better than I expected?
Now, don’t misunderstand me; I like to be right and hate to be wrong. But I’d rather follow what I see as the truth than hold to the rightness of previous views that have been tested and found wanting.
There’s one more thing motivating the remaining Never-Trumpers on the right, and I believe it may be most important of all. We’ll call it the Trump Taint. They don’t want to be associated in any way with someone so declasse, so crude, so coarse, so vile. so un-intellectual. Their stomachs turn over at the thought. The fact that Trump is filthy rich doesn’t help; they’re more interested in the “filthy” part than the “rich” part, and wealth cannot redeem him.
In addition, during his career in real estate and business, Trump cultivated his plebian roots, which is somewhat funny because he grew up very wealthy. But great wealth is not what I’m talking about; Trump could have generations of wealth and still be nouveau, if you get my drift.
This dichotomy has long existed in American political life, and it’s not about money or lack thereof. Bill Clinton, who really did grow up on the somewhat wrong side of the tracks, was an appealing figure to the elite (elite Democrats, in this case) because he was highly educated and articulate. But LBJ (also a Democrat) was a coarse, bullying guy from Texas, and he displaced the assassinated, classy, Harvard-educated, witty, handsome JFK and was hated even by Democrat elites because of all that.
Sarah Palin was like a dress rehearsal for Trump. She went to the wrong colleges, came from the wrong place, had the wrong way of speaking, and so a great many on the right hated her. I haven’t done a study, but I bet the same people who had turned on Sarah Palin are the Never-Trumpers on the right today.
[NOTE: To save you the trouble of going to my earlier post to find that Brooks quote about Obama’s pants, here it is:
“I remember distinctly an image of”“we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.”
That was about style. Brooks also was very impressed by Obama’s perceived erudition (the link in the first sentence is now a dead one, unfortunately):
“I was interviewing Obama a couple years ago, and I’m getting nowhere with the interview, it’s late in the night, he’s on the phone, walking off the Senate floor, he’s cranky. Out of the blue I say, “Ever read a guy named Reinhold Niebuhr?” And he says, ‘Yeah.’ So I say, ‘What did Niebuhr mean to you?’ For the next 20 minutes, he gave me a perfect description of Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought, which is a very subtle thought process based on the idea that you have to use power while it corrupts you. And I was dazzled, I felt the tingle up my knee as Chris Matthews would say.”
It’s hard to know exactly what Obama said that was so dazzling. But since David Brooks has never written anything that indicates he’s any sort of deep thinker himself, perhaps the mere fact that Obama was familiar with the name “Reinhold Niebuhr” was enough to do the trick.
Fellow-intellectuals. I’m one too, but that’s not my criteria for politicians. In fact, I think it can be a handicap. Too much fox and not enough hedgehog.]
[ADDENDUM: By the way, the style/erudition thing is one of the reasons Jordan Peterson so confounds and frightens the left.]
Some of the most odious and most truly insufferable talking heads on cable are anti-Trumpians claiming to be conservatives or Republicans, such as Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, Rick Wilson, and Nicole Wallace. They are truly the useful idiots of the left.
“But Brooks and his ilk seem to evaluate politicians differently. What he (and they?) look for and admire seems to be style, first and foremost (the crease in Obama’s pants is a good illustration)”
[snip]
” They don’t want to be associated in any way with someone so declasse, so crude, so coarse, so vile. so un-intellectual. ” [Neo]
Credentialed rather than educated; glib rather than knowledgable; the appearance of class rather than class itself (see this link to Ann landers:)
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/756822-class-never-runs-scared-it-is-sure-footed-and-confident-it
If you want a good indication of just what this appreciation of style v. substance is all about, just spend two hours binge-watching a few Frasier reruns — our ruling class and media personalities in a nutshell.
(As Frasier and David Brooks might exclaim: “ANN LANDERS?!! OMG he actually quotes Ann Landers?”)
If I interpret Brooks correctly, it is our fault that the anti-Trumpians have not succeeded–although they have not surrendered by a long shot.
He does note, honestly, that they are an insufferably smug crowd; but, still… If it were not for the deplorable ignorance, and resistant nature, of the Trump supporters, they (we) would have listened to our betters from the beginning.
They can never admit his successes; and of course his successes are not their successes.
Neo is aware, of course, that other than his indomitable will in the moment of national crisis, Churchill’s style was not much appreciated in his time. He was rejected before the crisis and dumped soon after it ended. Lincoln was indeed considered a buffoon, and something of a failure as well, throughout most of his tenure. So, we must await history’s judgement on Trump. For the moment, I blow hot and cold. I really don’t like his style. While I like most of what he does; I have a kernel of doubt as to whether he follow through on much of his rhetoric. I am more than a little concerned that he cannot keep a stable retinue around him. It is not clear whether he makes bad choices initially, or whether he is impossible to work with. Probably a bit of each.
Trump’s popularity is at 50%, not 40%. Brooks, typical reporter, can’t count to eleven without taking his shoes and socks off and still gets it wrong half the time.
Again – revisiting the past – I was a vociferous opponent of Trump when there were still alternatives. I perceived that Hillary Clinton was weak, loathsome and widely hated (even my lefty friends had to keep kicking each other to support her), so that opened the door for any competent Republican candidate to actually have a shot at winning. I was horrified when Trump, whom I perceived at the time to be one of the weakest candidates running, went on to win the nomination.
Obviously, in the summer and fall of 2016, I had no idea of the outrageous, screaming, stomping, infantile tantrum lefties were going to throw when they lost the election; they would have ruined any Republican that won, because they were willing to literally make things up and hate the Republican president for the non-real things that they, themselves, had made up. In retrospect, Trump actually did better than any traditional politician would have done against the unrelenting, withering storm thrown at him simply because of his pugnacious and decidedly non-politico personality. A decent, honorable, nice Republican president – of the sort that many Never-Trumpers seem to lust for – would have been torn to shreds.
Would I prefer a real statesman? Duh! Of course. But in the fall of 2016, we had a choice: Hillary or not-Hillary, and not-Hillary came in the from of Trump. As in Neo’s case, I expected little of Trump but in a race between a candidate that 100% would’ve been bad for me and a candidate that might not be 100% bad for me, I opted for the latter … and generally speaking, have been pleasantly surprised. In truth, he has fulfilled many election promises while battling a hard left that literally thinks they are living in 1930s Germany and are the good guys; and an establishment right that hates Trump for everything from not being a RINO to not being a politician at all. I don’t agree with everything he does and generally consider almost anything he tweets to be a #HopelessFacepalm, but compared to what Hillary would have done by now – if the infirm old hag was still getting around under her own power – I never regret voting for Trump.
The Never-Trumpers are curious creatures; I recall debates here on this forum with the likes of former frequent poster Bill, whose decency and good intentions I wholly respected but whose position on the Never-Trumper fight I never understood. What reality did you live in, I asked him silently (and sometimes, pretty much in print), where there was a better not-Hillary option? Or did you really not consider the stakes at this point to be sufficiently high that it was better to hold to one’s pristine standards and aid in a Hillary victory (by either not voting, or wasting a vote on a candidate with no chance to win) than besmirch yourself by voting for a candidate you didn’t approve of? I didn’t understand why Never-Trumpers like him grabbed hold of lefty talking points, either intentionally misinterpreted or wholly fictional (eg, turning the campaign joke of “Hey Russia, find Hillary’s emails,” into “OMG!!!! He is conspiring with Russia to interfere with the election”).
I still don’t get them, but between them and the hard left, I fear for the future. Briefly, after Trump was elected, I thought, “Wow, maybe we have a chance after all!” but now I know that the left will not give up until they get what they want, and a good chunk of the ersatz right will do exactly what the left wants them to do.
The linchpin of my anti-Trumpism is not the style, it’s the demagoguery.
“Trump is uncouth, coarse, nasty, seemingly inarticulate (although on close observation he actually communicates bluntly and directly and rather effectively).” He is especially good at that last.
Not only was LBJa those negatives also, but LBJ was extremely corrupt and an outrageous liar.
Teddy Roosevelt meets the same charges to a certain extent.
****
I can virtually guarantee that neither Brooks nor Obama had or has the slightest insight into Niebuhr. They were bullshitting each other in the way only Ivies can do.
Reminds me of a high school Euro history exam in which I had to identify and expound on two 20th century Nobels in literature. Thomas Mann, no problem, but a 2nd one? I remembered my 13 year-old sister’s books (which I’d glanced at idly, never read) on Pippi Longstocking, plus the author’s name, wrote a total BS 4 page essay on that, got an A+ with high teacher praise. Of course the author, Lindgren, never got a Nobel!
Bluffs sometimes succeed.
Trump is a doer, not a talker and that resonates with much of middle America.
Brooks and his ilk are good for nothing but talking, which is about the same as saying good for nothing. They certainly haven’t offered any solutions to the looming debt crisis the country is headed for.
The chatty class.
I suspect if you scratch a never Trumper you’ll find a globalist at heart.
Ann,
Don’t demagogues mislead rather than use rational arguments? If so, does not Obama come quickly to mind?
If you charge Trump as being a demagogue, about what has he mislead you with irrational argument(s)?
I suspect you use “demagogue” as just another negative word to fling at people whom you do not like, as you would “pedophile” or “homophobe” or
“racist”.
Neo comment from the fox-hedgehog link:
Yes, some regard Kerry as an intellectual. My take on Kerry as an intellectual is that he can’t string together two coherent sentences. John Kerry’s “nuance” is better called incoherence.
Frog:
Bluffs sometimes succeed.
I am reminded of a bluff answer I gave in my AP World History course. For the war cry of the Conquistadores, I replied: “Para Dios, para la Virgin, para la plata.” (For God, for the Virgin [Mary], for silver.) The correct answer, it turned out, was “Santiago.” (Saint James)
My teacher marked me correct. At the time I thought I had bluffed him, but I now think that he knew it was a bluff, but thought it clever and also a good summary statement of what the Conquistadores were fighting for.
I am convinced that much of the opposition to Trump is based upon his style and personality. In that respect I agree with Senator Chuck Grassley who said he doesn’t get into personalities and he just focuses on policies.
Ben Sasse of Nebraska is an Ivy Leaguer. (Must not have been accepted at Creighton.) I suspect his opposition to Trump is rooted in Trump’s style.
Gringo:
Kerry has the right degree. Of course, Bush has a similar degree, but somehow that wasn’t enough, because of the accent (and the membership in the GOP). I have detested Kerry for close to 50 years, but he’s got that gravitas—or something.
Brian E:
I’m pretty chatty and not too do-y myself.
But for whatever reason, I’ve never been anti-doer.
T: the beauty of Frasier was that it ridiculed that behavior in a fairly charming way. The ‘earthy’ characters were usually seen to be in the right.
Gringo: You think he may have seen through your bluff? Don’t be too sure. 30 years ago I had a History teacher who couldn’t keep Napolean Bonaparte and Napolean III straight. And I don’t just mean she mispoke, the way the mother of ten kids might sometimes get flustered by all of the names and middle names either.
Ann:
Merriam-Webster defines ‘Demagogue’ as:
1 : a leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power
2 : a leader championing the cause of the common people in ancient times
What false claims and prejudices did President Trump employ to win the election?
“Perhaps Brooks thinks that way because he thinks that style=substance”
I think it’s a case of “style=is one of us”. Trump doesn’t talk like one of them so he must be a contemptible prole.
“perhaps the mere fact that Obama was familiar with the name ‘Reinhold Niebuhr’ was enough to do the trick.”
Brooks prefers a corporatist* who is familiar with Niebuhr over a candidate who isn’t but who values individual liberty and and wants to shrink our gargantuan government.
*Obama told a group of historians he preferred a corporatist system of government (see Mussolini), and as we all know Obama has always been friendly with communists and black fascists.
Gringo: You think he may have seen through your bluff? Don’t be too sure.
This particular teacher was, in terms of knowing the subject he taught- in his case an American History teacher taking on AP World History- was the least knowledgeable teacher I have EVER had. (Granted, he did know his American History.) So it is quite possible he didn’t see through my bluff.Perhaps I figured that given my overwhelming contempt for him, I had to give him at least one break.
WHY, you ask? Brooks just can’t cope with the facts on the ground. Cqn’t deal with them. Can’t ADMIT to them.
The intellectuals loved JFK. He had class and style but he was an incompetent.
I still don’t get them, but between them and the hard left, I fear for the future.
Yes. The GOP Congress left us with turd in the punchbowl and then, of course, Ryan left for K street. The crap about his children is cover. Watch what he does.
Unless the OIG report is devastating, I think we lose at least the House this fall. Then watch for two years of chaos which is all the left knows how to do.
I was and remain a never-Trumper. While not blind to his successes like the administrative removal of needless regulations and his one legislative achievement, the tax bill, I still judge him as the absolute worst of the worst. At first I was also impressed with his appointments like Gorsuch, until he started firing the ones he could – like a lightweight reality show host who is never satisfied unless he is the center of attention. And it’s not just the firing itself but the delight he takes in making men of real stature and good will, like Rex Tillerson, eat shit. This kind of behavior is more than disturbing.
I genuinely tried to overlook his style, ignore his rambling tweets, push past his ill tempered insults, and concentrate on the conservative goals being met. Then he signed the omnibus tax bill, a piece of legislation that no conservative president would think twice about vetoing. With a running deficit of $600 billion he wants infrastructure boondoggles to boot. Conservative? No wonder Ryan is resigning instead of being made to look a fool doing the bidding of this spend and don’t tax Democrat pretending to be a Republican.
And finally, putting all of THAT aside, he’s become even more erratic and in an area that has life and death consequences, foreign policy. Please bear with me on this, as there’s a little story that relates.
As Neo and others may remember back when we were mulling over candidates leading up to the 2016 primary, I mentioned that my sister-in-law was a retired Hewlett-Packard executive who knew Carly Fiorina. Well, my sister-in-law is now suffering from old age dementia. Her short-term memory is going quickly. As she loses more and more control, she strikes out. All those decisive qualities she had, the ability to make quick decisions, the high intelligence, all of that is being put to use to hammer her care takers. No one is immune from her scathing rebukes, not even her family. She WILL NOT be proved wrong. She WILL NOT be embarrassed. She WILL NOT take advice, even for her own good. In the morning she will plan some event and by afternoon forget and deny that she ever intended it. At the same time she is erratic. On a good day she will be sweet and full of laughter, remembering the vacations at Banff & Lake Louise, or skiing in the Alps. And on a dime she will turn into a hate-filled, mouth-twisted, eyes glaring woman demanding obedience.
When Trump tweets at 3:00AM that the missiles are on their way and by afternoon says we’ll see, when he rambles on without a script, when he makes up imaginary trade deficits with Canada, when he fires his help in the demeaning way he fires them, when he lies and doesn’t know it, he’s exhibiting the same symptoms that my dear sister-in-law has. This would be bad enough if it only affected domestic policy, but when it entails matters of war and peace, it needs to be stopped.
If he wasn’t from the beginning, Donald Trump is now unfit for the office.
What I think is happening is that, while the reason given by many anti-Trumpers is that Trump is crude and crass, unqualified and erratic, the real reason is much more basic.
Disruptor Trump is trying to bust up what has been a great deal for the Deep State, the Washington Establishment.
He’s trying to derail the ol’ gravy train, trying to turn the Ship of State in a new direction, and a lot of people don’t like this.
The Ricochet article was good,
One of the side-bar links sounded interesting.
https://ricochet.com/509513/10-6-aggressions/
(That’s 10 to the power of negative 6)
He talks about how an engineer would measure microaggressions, so I think it is relevant to the way the left and the n-T’s are reacting to the macroaggression of Trump’s victory.
“We’ll call it the Trump Taint. They don’t want to be associated in any way with someone so declasse, so crude, so coarse, so vile. so un-intellectual. Their stomachs turn over at the thought. The fact that Trump is filthy rich doesn’t help; they’re more interested in the “filthy” part than the “rich” part, and wealth cannot redeem him.”
As a declasse person myself, I feel a kinship with Trump. My entire life, whether as a oil geologist/Navy or airline pilot, my focus was always on getting the job done, not on appearances or intellect. I grew up poor in a mountain tourist town that attracted many wealthy people. I found most of them to be shallow and lacking in knowledge of the outdoors, which mattered a lot to me.
In the flying business you can’t BS your way into a job and a knowledge of history or politics is totally unnecessary. Knowing weather, aircraft systems, flight rules and regulations, the performance capabilities of your aircraft, anticipating problems (forehandedness), polishing your skills, and more are in the arena of action. Therefore, I have a kinship with the man who is a doer even though his personal style is not that wonderful. (In truth, my personal style is not all that wonderful -so that may be another reason why I’m not an anti-Trumper.)
I disliked LBJ’s personal style AND his policies, but I still obeyed the orders from him and McNamara in Vietnam. It is our system. It works better than constantly trying to get rid of the Presidents we don’t agree with.
The Other Chuck: Very sorry to hear about your sister-in-law’s mental health problems. Nothing is harder to deal with than having a loved one in the grips of dementia/Alzheimer’s. Your comment is no doubt heartfelt and seems quite real to you. You certainly have pointed out many of Trump’s declasse proclivities, which may or may not indicate dementia. If I recall correctly, we here at Neo’s spent eight years trying to analyze Obama’s psychological makeup. Armchair psychiatry can be an absorbing pursuit, but in the end, it doesn’t amount to much. There are many sane, qualified people in contact with Trump everyday. When Mad dog Mattis, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, etc. say the man has dementia, I will be alarmed.
The Other Chuck:
I’m not going to ask you for proof of President Trump’s lies. I’m sure the sources would be as suspect as most media reports about him since the election.
I was not a NeverTrumper. I was a NeverHillary voter, who decided that I just couldn’t vote Trump: I voted for the Libertarian, like I have since 2004.
But I must say that Trump has pleasantly surprised me. I see the tweets everyone seems to hate as genius; rhetorical smoke bombs. They mean almost nothing, because his actions matter. They’re like throwing chaff and flares at missiles, like driving a cat bonkers with a laser pointer. They are cover. And I’m certain that men like Putin understand this
He’s the first president in a long time to step outside the Box. The Pan-National Globo-Socialism Box.
Obama
Bush II
Clinton
Bush I
At least those 4 and possibly more have been part of a colossal shell game, where “Democrats” and “Republicans” play Good Cop/Bad Cop with the American Voters; they frame each issue in a mealy mouthed, sound bite/bumper sticker fashion. It’s nothing but a Uniparty. And the joke was always on us (just look at how ineffective the so called republicans have been with a majority).
Everything, every resource the Powers That Be Have has been and will be thrown at him because he’s actually putting our interests first rather than the globalist objectives. He must be shown to be stupid, crazy, a bull in a china shop; anything to blunt the tide of nationalism Trump is riding.
Unfortunately, you see his behavior through the lens of Family pain and trauma. I’m sorry for that.
The truth of the matter is that politics in Washington has become an increasingly ugly game, one that has less and less connection with the ideas of our Founders, the Constitution, and our past traditions of governance, in what used to be our democratic Republic.
The Republic has been under sustained attack by the Left, and is slipping ever faster away.
To quote David Burge:
1. Identify a respected institution.
2. kill it.
3. gut it.
4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.
That, I fear is what is happening/has happened to our governing institutions.
More and more it’s looking more like ancient Republican Rome transformed into Imperial Rome, with all it’s corruption, violence, and decadence.
It’s all about power, influence, and money–and perhaps it always had been–it’s just now people care a lot less about disguising it.
This red vs blue game given to distract and entertain the masses will have serious negative consequences later on on the spiritual and moral state of the humans in the USA.
As for style vs substance, I’ve noticed that those on the Trum bandwagon here prefer to engage me over my personal style of using nicknames for the US President rather than any actual policy disagreement they have. So even the people who support Trum, will prefer to argue about the style, instead of merely Trum’s detractors.
HRC will be in jail when Trum is President.
You can read that in one of two ways. One of the ways leads to the whole “lie” issue, since an ally and friend of HRC would never be serious about putting her in jail.
Then there’s the Goldman Sachs boys on the admin payroll. Another substantial policy agreement I don’t see people argue much about. It’s as if people have suffered convenient temporary amnesia since the primaries.
Perhaps the mere fact that Obama was familiar with the name ‘Reinhold Niebuhr’ was enough to do the trick.
Chomsky had some riffs about Niebuhr. It wouldn’t surprise me if that was the extent of Obama’s knowledge.
I never noticed any indication Obama knew much about anything beyond the Howard Zinn level.
People went on about Obama’s speeches, but who remembers a single bit of his phrasemaking beyond the lie, “If You Like Your Doctor, You Can Keep Your Doctor …”
For me David Brooks is the most repulsive columnist out there.
Not that he’s repulsive per se, but he really should know better and my impression is he’s convinced himself otherwise and therefore he’s fully empowered to lecture the rest of us.
Or maybe he takes Niebuhr as a pass to do so:
_________________________________________________
This insinuation of the interests of the self into even the most ideal enterprises and most universal objectives, envisaged in moments of highest rationality, makes hypocrisy an inevitable by product of all virtuous endeavor.
–Reinhold Niebuhr
________________________________________________
Chomsky enjoyed using the Niebuhr angle on American leaders.
The Other Chuck: If one judges Trump solely by his tweets and such behavior, he sure seems Wacko Crank. That was my take during the 2016 campaign.
In 2018 I have concluded there is a certain amount of cunning to Trump’s blowhardiness. Otherwise he would have gotten almost nothing done in the past 15 months and made some major mistakes.
Are people like Brooks so completely unaware that putting on a good appearance is crucial to success as a con man?
When I read Brooks’ commentary about Obama, or any other politician he favors, the image that pops into my head is of the screaming and fainting girls at that first Beatles concert in the US. He’s a fanboy, plain and simple. This is why he is incapable of accurately assessing the reasons Never-Trumpism has failed. He cannot see beyond the crude and crass Trump to the list of policy and political accomplishments.
During the primaries I favored Cruz. I was not a Never-Trumper, but didn’t like him as the candidate because I thought he couldn’t defeat Hillary and, even if he did, would be an ineffective president. Wrong.
His means of communicating: coarse, blustery, & tweeting, amuse me. From the beginning I saw these as tactical, sometimes to distract (in a slight of hand way), others to obfuscate, and often in response to what he sees as unjust attacks.
As for the growth in Trump’s support, it seems this results from the things he has accomplished, and as more and more of the Resistance & Never-Trump attacks prove untrue, many of us become more sympathetic to him.
My hope is that Trump is able to continue and persevere. He was clearly angered by the raid on his personal attorney, openly fuming. I suspect the attacks will become more intense as he continues to accomplish things and his approval ratings rise.
Was out doing some do-gooder stuff with a bunch of Deplorables. How did I know? They were not trying to top each other’s virtue-signaling with more and more vile comments about Trump.
Just kept unloading the Feeding America truck and laying the stuff out for the folks lined up.
No class, I guess.
From what I can see, the indefatigable President Trump is apparently working, practically 24/7, on his agenda, and has far more accomplishments under his belt than he is given credit for, and this against resistance from almost every quarter, and with a skeleton crew–many of his appointments being delayed by Congressional Democrats.
I suspect that a lot of his bluster and his tweets are designed to misdirect his enemies away from the much more substantial things he is doing behind the scenes.
Too bad about Trump….uncouth, crass, deplorable, perhaps even a nut.
…nonetheless, the elections in 2016 were, for me, about one thing and one thing only: “throwing the bums out”. (What, after all, is a democracy for?…)
The bums who had been there for eight years and expected to be there for eight more (and more and more).
Simple.
In the race between an uncouth crazy man (who might not really be crazy even though he was doing his best to seem so) and a criminal gang, the choice, for me—between the criminal and the possible nut, between the criminal, anti-Constitution status quo and the new, hopefully refreshing but possibly crazy face—was no contest. (Disclosure: I live abroad and did not vote.)
And the more I read about the criminality of those bums (though it does not surprise me one bit), the more it seems evident that America dodged a bullet (as the cliche goes).
We shall see….
On the subject of changing one’s mind, Lord Keynes said, “When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do?”
Too many of the so-called establishment conservatives are just Republican versions of the vaguely homoerotically inspired, status chasing, social climbing, attention seeking, pantheist ass-sniffers who have populated the entourages of, and covered for, Democrat Presidents for ages.
As is the case with so many other commenters here, I was first and foremost a never-Hillary voter. I did not like Trump, spoke out long and loud in favor of Cruz during our local primary debates, and prayed Trump would not win the nomination. Part of my resistance to Trump, as is so with other commenters, was my conviction that he could not beat Hillary. His lack of polish figured in there, but not by much.
I lunch every Monday with some politically savvy people who were opposed to Trump largely because he is uncouth. They continue to be opposed to Trump, still because he is uncouth. This aspect of his character annoys me, but I remember our couth politicians, like JFK and even Bush I, and I’m not sure the nation was better off for their polish and Ivy League self-assurance.
Having spent a career in the higher levels of the USG, I’ve seen and worked with a lot of very polished people. I am not impressed with them. Some were well educated and still had no common sense, others had common sense but were committed to the party line so completely that they screwed things up or stood by uncritically as others loyal to the party screwed things up.
The nation survived Obama and will likely survive Trump. That is thanks to some very prescient forefathers, in my estimation. The bad news about Obama is he moved us ever closer to our own brand of Socialism; the bad news about Trump is that his detractors can work for the destruction of the nation as they hide behind outrage at his lack of couth.
I continue to be troubled at the manner in which Trump goes through staff. But I am more troubled by the unequal manner in which the news media — such as it is — treats him. At the gym yesterday I saw some CNN coverage of Comey’s comments during his book tour and I thought: “these same criticisms (that the President asked the FBI to investigate the Russian hooker story) could have been made of previous presidents, but they would have had absolutely no resonance. The men were simply too protected by the Fourth Estate.”
The world is not fair, but we always knew that, didn’t we?
Now we have the midterm elections to worry about, followed by the 2020 presidential election. I am supremely fatigued by the constant bickering all around.
The NeverTrumpers can’t understand why style suddenly doesn’t mean more than substance any more. It’s mostly because, after eight years of Obama, the damage done by a President who literally did his best to destroy his own country is too obvious for the media to successfully hide any more, and will remain that way until it’s repaired.
Once the problems are fixed and we don’t have to demand substance any more, the USA will go right back to electing whichever president makes the biggest false promises, almost certainly a liberal if not a Democrat.
Trum has a kind of mirror technique, that I use and William Clinton used before.
Instead of thinking about how to act or react, Trum gets into a kind of empathic mode that allows him to act as if he was part of the consensus, whatever consensus he was facing with at the moment.
This makes him very perceptive on social media, allowing him to perceive trends and social beliefs that most experts would need to spend a long time analyzing to obtain.
William Clinton had the same ability but only because he needed it to survive his father. He took that so far he became a sociopathic rapist. But that’s a different topic.
When Trum throws out lines like “Hillary would be in jail if I was President”, he’s emoting and reflecting off of the audience’s own desires. While Clinton was hiding his real self because of fear, Trum just prefers to be a mirror because it is convenient and useful. When Trum calms down, he may have an entirely different idea of how to proceed. This may be perceived as “instability”, but people who are mirrors are not unstable. In order for a mirror to reflect something, it must be whole.
We only reflect the intent and behavior of other people for our own purposes. We only look unstable because most people’s emotions are unstable. It’s why when anybody poke Trum, he appears to go ballistic. He’s just returning the favor 100x or 1000x fold. He’s not really thinking about it, just going by his instincts. Then he becomes a laser focus weapon.
Funny how few folk who “hate Trump’s tweets”, or his uncouth style, actually quote full tweets (or doubles).
I’ve long thought I should be reading his tweets directly, so now I am. Like this about Comey:
Donald J. Trumpâ€
Verified account
@realDonaldTrump
3h3 hours ago
More
….untruthful slime ball who was, as time has proven, a terrible Director of the FBI. His handling of the Crooked Hillary Clinton case, and the events surrounding it, will go down as one of the worst “botch jobs” of history. It was my great honor to fire James Comey!
44,260 replies 18,707 retweets 71,512 likes
Reply 44K Retweet 19K Like 72K
Donald J. Trumpâ€
Verified account
@realDonaldTrump
3h3 hours ago
More
James Comey is a proven LEAKER & LIAR. Virtually everyone in Washington thought he should be fired for the terrible job he did-until he was, in fact, fired. He leaked CLASSIFIED information, for which he should be prosecuted. He lied to Congress under OATH. He is a weak and…..
28,421 replies 17,327 retweets 60,800 likes
Reply 28K Retweet 17K Like 61K
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Well, is Comey a leaker? yes. Is he a liar? yes, like Pres. Clinton was.
Is he a slimeball? I’d say so — but I have long been a bit unhappy at a Pres. using this blunt and “honest opinion” language.
WTF — I don’t let my kids use the F-word, but it’s all around us. Thanks to anti-Christian “free speech” lovers who wanted to, and did, change the culture. Listen to the very big selling rap music; most I hear includes obscenities.
Obscenities have been normalized. I don’t like that, but the culture is not Trump’s fault.
I’m not a big fan of Twitter, either, but when I look, Trump’s tweets in their fullness are almost always far more reasonable, and even respectful of his opponents, than the Dem media fair about him.
He won over CA Gov. Jerry Brown (‘aura smiles and never frown”) on the border — CA is sending national guard. Trump says:
California Governor Jerry Brown is doing the right thing and sending the National Guard to the Border. Thank you Jerry, good move for the safety of our Country!
Trump is polite, and constantly trying to be inclusive. In fact, I challenge those who “hate Trump’s style” to find and fully quote the tweet stream for 3 examples of style you hate.
Maybe the Comey is a slime ball is one? Well, I actually like that one, think it’s true, and is insulting without being obscene nor dishonest. Plus, he says more publicly what plenty of folk, including spineless elites, might be saying with friends.
Among friends I’d say of Trump: He’s got the balls to say what he really thinks, rather than depend on others to insult his opponents. (edge of polite, for me.)
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
I just book marked it and will start reading it — but unlikely to be as high a priority as reading Neo here. (Thanks for great analysis and the right “actions speak louder than words” attitude.)
What else is America going to use the national guard for, to confiscate arms from civilians and citizens in another katrina Democrat created disaster?
People act like normal border security is somehow novel or strange now.
Some of us wanted to use the US Marine COIN doctrines in Chicago around 2008.
Trum’s policies aren’t so much innovations as merely recently mainstream.
“It’s all about power, influence, and money—and perhaps it always had been—it’s just now people care a lot less about disguising it.” [Snow on Pine @ 11:46 pm]
I offer that human behavior has changed very little in the past 200 years. This is the way people behave and this is the way many (most?) people in power have always behaved. The difference is that with the internet and the 24/7 news cycle, these actions now take place in an ever-more-transparent fishbowl rather than in the privacy of a darkened smoke-filled room. We now get to see it more that we ever have before.
SCOTTtheBADGER Says:
April 13th, 2018 at 2:27 am
Are people like Brooks so completely unaware that putting on a good appearance is crucial to success as a con man?
* * *
They don’t notice, because they are all con men.
Aesop, I believe you are correct.
You know the person I feel sorry for right now? Michael Savage.
Funny … I had to look up Niebuhr for about the third time in the last couple years, remembering only enough to bet myself that he was an American and that his thought was probably not pure social gospel progressivism, or existentialist obscurantism slathered atop the Gospel of Mark.
For better or worse he’s one of those guys who go into that mental junk drawer containing Protestant theologians with Germanic names who I have heard of and maybe glanced at, but whose insufferable ruminations proved too much for me to gain traction in even one chapter: Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Books by Bonhoeffer and Tillich sit almost uncracked on my shelf, while the execrable sub-moral vermin Karl Marx’s writings have been read to tatters; despite my complete lack of sympathy for Marx.
I’d almost rather read Sartre than their theological crap.
That said, Niebuhr seems to have a distinct niche and value of his own, and might be worth visiting, despite the fact that Mainline Protestantism is a rotten, hollow, and dying tree, about to collapse once and for all.