More on that national emergency vote

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve noticed—around the blogosphere in general as well as on some comments at yesterday’s thread about the twelve Republican senators who voted to block Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the border—that quite a few people on the right are of the opinion that there was no excuse for voting against Trump’s declaration. The idea is that anyone who voted against what he did does not have the nation’s interests at heart, and that it’s clear and completely unequivocal that Trump’s declaration was totally legal.

I disagree somewhat. I happen to think that yes, Trump is allowed by law to do exactly what he did, and (as I wrote in yesterday’s post) that the correct action for Congress to take would be to repeal the act that gave him these powers, if they don’t like what he did. But they don’t want to do that, of course. Perhaps it’s too much work, perhaps it would be impossible to pass it, perhaps they want to keep the act in place so a future president can use it for things they want to see happen, perhaps all of the preceding. But that doesn’t change the fact that the correct approach would be to repeal the act and replace it with something more to their liking.

As for the legality of Trump’s declaration, Trump declared the national emergency under this act passed by Congress in 1976. Go to this previous post of mine and you’ll find a fairly lengthy discussion of how it works and whether his declaration conforms with that act. Here’s an excerpt:

The power of a president to declare a national emergency is a statutory one, enacted in 1976 to supersede a previous hodge-podge. Such a declaration needs to be renewed annually to be in effect, and Congress can revoke it “with either a joint resolution and the President’s signature, or with a veto-proof majority vote.”

Prior to the passage of that National Emergencies Act:

…[P]residents [had] asserted the power to declare emergencies without limiting their scope or duration, without citing the relevant statutes, and without congressional oversight. The Supreme Court in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer limited what a president could do in such an emergency, but did not limit the emergency declaration power itself.

Since the signing of that bill, there have been 42 national emergencies declared; most of them limited trade in various ways in accord with another act of Congress.

Under what conditions can a national emergency be declared? It’s pretty broad:

The Act authorized the President to activate emergency provisions of law via an emergency declaration on the conditions that the President specifies the provisions so activated and notifies Congress.

There are certain exceptions, but they don’t apply to the current case (one, for example, is regulating transactions in foreign gold and silver}. But Pelosi’s rhetoric aside, there are also 136 enumerated and relatively specific powers granted, and you can find a list of them here (written in December of 2018):

Unknown to most Americans, a vast set of laws gives the president greatly enhanced powers during emergencies. President Donald Trump’s threats to bypass Congress and secure funding for a wall along the border with Mexico by declaring a national emergency are not just posturing. The Brennan Center, building on previous research, has identified 123 statutory powers that may become available to the president when de [sic] declares a national emergency, including two that might offer some legal cover for his wall-building ambitions (10 U.S.C. 2808 (a) and 33 U.S.C. 2293 on our list…).

Here is 10 U.S.C. 2808(a):

Secretary of Defense, without regard to any other provision of law, may undertake military construction projects, and may authorize Secretaries of the military departments to undertake military construction projects, that are necessary to support such use of the armed forces.

And the one I consider more relevant, 33 U.S.C. 2293:

Secretary of the Army may terminate or defer any Army civil works project and apply the resources, including funds, personnel, and equipment, of the Army’s civil works program to authorized civil works, military construction, and civil defense projects that are essential to the national defense, without regard to any other provision of law.

Looking at that, I think it’s relatively straightforward that the president has very broad powers to declare national emergencies and that what Trump proposes to do—if he uses the Army’s civil works program—might be fully legal under 33 U.S.C. 2293, if the argument is accepted that the wall is essential to the national defense or if it is found to be an “authorized civil work.” Naturally, there will be a legal challenge that the wall and the immigration situation is not the sort of immediate and threatening emergency that would justify such a declaration, and/or that it’s unnecessary for national defense and/or not an authorized civil work.

In addition, there’s the question of whether Trump can use the military to do this; here’s a discussion of that. Suffice to say the answer is “maybe,” and the issue is likely to be settled in court, as well.

So, to summarize: I think that Trump has not exceeded his powers. But I also think that reasonable minds can differ on that, and furthermore it is a valid concern that this sets a bad precedent for future presidents to go further and actually exceed their powers. Then again, they don’t need Trump for that; they can do it quite handily on their own, and the way things are going, that will happen.

So those twelve Republican senators are neither crazy, nor secret Democrats, nor open borders advocates (although some are). Some are indeed classic RINOs who tend to vote with Democrats a lot of the time, but some generally are quite conservative (some are libertarian-leaning) and my sense is that they are sincerely interested in limiting presidential power. The horse may be long gone from the barn on limiting presidents, but I don’t think anything is served by declaring that these twelve are all part of a vast uniparty that’s the enemy of the people and of the right as a whole.

The real question is a philosophical/political one: if your opponent is going to fight dirty, how dirty must you fight in order to get ahead of him because you know he will do whatever it takes at the first opportunity? And is Trump really fighting dirty in this case by his national emergency declaration, or not? I think not, but I also think that reasonable minds can differ on that. And I think some of these senators have reasonable minds. But they just might be helping to hand victory to a party that has no such reservations about power and principle, and that is the big problem.

Trump vetoes Senate’s block on his emergency declaration

The New Neo Posted on by

Congress tried to block Trump’s emergency declaration:

The Senate passed a resolution Thursday to overturn President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, with 12 Republicans joining all the Democrats to deliver a rare bipartisan rebuke of the president.

The disapproval resolution passed the House last month, so the 59-to-41 Senate vote will send the measure to the president’s desk. Trump intends to use the first veto of his presidency to strike it down, and Congress does not have the votes to override the veto.

Trump’s response was a veto:

The twelve Republicans are Wicker, Rubio, Portman, Collins, Murkowski, Blount, Alexander, Toomey, Romney, Paul, Moran, and Lee. They say it’s not because they don’t like the wall, but because they think the president exceeded his powers.

When I looked into the powers presidents have been given to declare national emergencies, I think it’s fairly clear that Trump did not exceed his powers. Now, maybe Congress shouldn’t have given him such broad statutory powers in the first place. But they did. If they want to take away those powers, they need to pass another law to change that.

Tom Cotton is correct on that:

More from Cotton:

Now, I’m sympathetic to arguments that the National Emergencies Act is too broad and gives the executive branch too much power. That’s a reasonable debate to have. Believe me, Congress has ceded too much power to the executive for more than a century, expanding an administrative state that increasingly deprives our people of a meaningful say in their government. So I invite my Democratic colleagues to reconsider the wisdom of this path. Maybe we can reform the EPA. Perhaps we can require up-or-down votes in Congress to approve big regulations so politicians can show some accountability for once. I’m ready for those debates. Believe me, I’m ready. But in the meantime, don’t pretend we didn’t delegate all these powers, or that it’s lawless for the executive to use laws we passed, just because you deplore him.

It’s not really that difficult an idea to comprehend, and yet it will fall on deaf ears—deaf Democratic ears and probably twelve sets of deaf Republican ears, as well.

Terror attack on New Zealand mosques

The New Neo Posted on by

A terrorist mass murderer went on a shooting spree in two New Zealand mosques, killing 49 people. He left a lengthy manifesto, and even livestreamed the attack.

This event is extremely terrible in human terms. But in terms of firearms policy, a person’s reaction will almost certainly depend on that person’s pre-existing opinions about gun ownership and gun control. Since I am a strong proponent of the right to bear arms, my reaction is to ask why these worshipers were unarmed sitting ducks (as I assume they were, although I haven’t seen many reports that go into any details on that). New Zealand has a significantly lower percentage of gun-owning households than the US (see this vs. this). I don’t know whether the mosques were “gun-free zones” and haven’t located that information yet, but in the US the majority of mass shootings have tended to occur in places where people are less likely to be armed or are even prohibited from carrying arms.

The MSM (such as the article I linked at the beginning of this post) calls the perpetrator (can we dispense with “alleged,” because he left a manifesto and filmed himself?) “right-wing.” It seems from the evidence that his actual beliefs were a garbled pastiche that defies such easy characterization, but that won’t stop the MSM and those who want to blame the right.

What were the perp’s actual stated beliefs? One would do well to heed the advice in this article:

Early Friday, a number of unverified social-media posts surfaced, along with a bizarre manifesto posted to 8chan, rich with irony and references to memes.

Together, the posts suggest that every aspect of the shootings was designed to gain maximum attention online, in part by baiting the media. The shooter live-streamed the attack itself on Facebook, and the video was quickly shared across YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. Before committing the act, he shouted, “Remember, lads, subscribe to PewDiePie,” a reference to Felix Kjellberg, who runs YouTube’s most subscribed-to channel. The phrase itself is a meme started by PewDiePie’s fans, and its goal is to be reprinted…

Significant portions of the manifesto appear to be an elaborate troll, written to prey on the mainstream media’s worst tendencies. As the journalist Robert Evans noted, “This manifesto is a trap … laid for journalists searching for the meaning behind this horrific crime. There is truth in there, and valuable clues to the shooter’s radicalization, but it is buried beneath a great deal of, for lack of a better word, ‘shitposting.’”

Shitposting is a slang term used to describe the act of posting trollish and usually ironic content designed to derail a conversation or elicit a strong reaction from people who aren’t in on the joke…

The shooter also credits the far-right personality Candace Owens with helping to “push me further and further into the belief of violence over meekness.” Though the shooter could be a genuine fan of Owens, who has been known to espouse right-leaning views on immigration and gun control, this reference might be meant to incite Owens’s critics to blame her.

That doesn’t mean the racism expressed throughout the 74-page manifesto isn’t genuine. But the complexities of the crime are still unfolding, and as the New York Times journalist Kevin Roose cautioned, “The NZ shooter’s apparent manifesto is thick with irony and meta-text and very easy to misinterpret.”

That’s—interesting, particularly coming from The Atlantic and The New York Times. My feeling is that they’re onto something. Among other things, this shooter wanted to create a stir, and he certainly got what he wanted.

And much of the MSM is certainly making the most of it so far. But here’s another surprisingly cautionary note, this time from NY Magazine, not ordinarily known for caution in such matters. Here’s how that piece treats the Candace Owens reference:

In a self-conducted Q&A, [the shooter] says that popular American conservative Candace Owens “radicalized [him] the most,” although this is almost certainly another joke, since he says, “The extreme actions she calls for are too much, even for my tastes.”

Since Owens doesn’t call for extreme actions, this is clearly ironic. The article’s author concludes:

Covering mass shootings is a tricky proposition for the media, which needs to balance conveying information with denying perpetrators the attention they often crave. The Christchurch shooter himself stated that his attack and his writing were in the interest of “further destabilizing and polarizing Western society.” This is the same general MO — shitposting to exacerbate tensions on social media and muddy the waters — of groups like the Internet Research Agency, the Russian-government-backed troll farm. The shooter writes that he is aware the attack will heighten the intense debate over the Second Amendment in the U.S., a target shared by the aforementioned Russian group. The shooter’s plainly stated desire to murder Muslims — due to his (needless to say) erroneous belief that they represent a threat to white people — and to create confusion and further polarization seems like the most important component of his manifesto to pay attention to, rather than whatever social media content he might invoke.

This man is apparently in custody, so there will almost certainly be a trial. Whether we will ever know much more than we know now about his motives is highly uncertain. Most mass shootings in houses of worship have seemingly simple motives, and most killers who leave manifestos are at least trying to making their motives clear, whether they succeed or not. The New Zealand perp seems to be doing something quite different. Whether or not hatred of Muslims is at the core of his motivation for killing so many Muslim worshipers, at the very least we can safely say that he considers Muslim lives quite expendable in the course of achieving whatever goal it is that he seeks.

RIP.

[NOTE: For what it’s worth, so far the intuitive vibe I get from this shooter is similar to the one generated by Las Vegas shooter Paddock, about who I’ve written at length. His motives, IMHO, were basically arrogance, general hatred of the human race, the expression of nihilistic rage, and a desire for fame and to show his superiority. I’m surprised that the New Zealand perp allowed himself to be captured alive, unlike Paddock.]

[ADDENDUM: This caught my eye. If true—and there’s no way of knowing whether it’s true—it seems very odd indeed:

A senior Turkish official says the suspect arrested in the New Zealand mosque attack travelled to Turkey multiple times and spent what the official called an “extended period of time in the country.

He says the suspect may have also travelled to countries in Europe, Asia and Africa.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity in line with Turkish government rules.

The official says an investigation is underway of “the suspect’s movements and contacts within the country.”

He did not say when the suspect travelled to Turkey.]

Testing

The New Neo Posted on by

The blog is having what I think are some cache problems. This is a test post.

Seems to be working now.

Question: if you usually access the blog from a phone or pad, did the McCarthy post and quantum post (the two posts right under this) show up this afternoon, or did they just appear?

Andrew McCarthy on Manafort and double jeopardy

The New Neo Posted on by

I agree with McCarthy that this should make everyone afraid.

But it doesn’t. Some are applauding.

Well, as the New York Times notes, the New York state charges filed Wednesday are based on bank loans that were part of the fraud charges brought by Robert Mueller in the Virginia case. The Times says that “the Manhattan prosecutors deferred their inquiry in order not to interfere with Mr. Mueller’s larger investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.” Having been in these tussles, I don’t buy that. The Manhattan prosecutors stood down because, once Mueller’s federal case went forward, they were out of luck.

And now, gamesmanship is the order of the day: The state prosecutors have brought a case they otherwise never would waste time on — not because the case should be done, but to try to block a pardon [by Trump, who can only pardon in federal cases].

This raw politicization of prosecutorial power ought to frighten everyone. Yet, solely because of Donald Trump and Paul Manafort, New York Democrats have been pushing to water down state double jeopardy protection — shamefully, as if civil rights were only for the ruling class’s political friends.

If Trump were to pardon Manafort, that would vitiate the federal prosecution. The point of the pardon is to excuse the offense as if it never happened. So, the idea is that if Manafort’s federal prosecution were to be voided, there would be no state double jeopardy bar against a subsequent New York State prosecution.

Everyone knows this is only happening because Manafort was thought to be a possible conduit towards getting Trump on some charge or other. So far it hasn’t worked. Everyone also knows that Manafort is almost certainly guilty. But that doesn’t mean he should be subject to double jeopardy.

McCarthy’s suggestion:

If I were representing Manafort, I would consider asking for a commutation, not a pardon. In a commutation, the president can reduce the sentence down to time served and spare the person any further prison time on the offense. Yet, the convictions stand.

I believe that as long as the federal convictions remain in place, Manafort would maintain his double-jeopardy protection against a future New York State prosecution based on the same conduct.

Quantum monism

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not entirely sure that I understand this, but I’m entirely sure that it’s interesting:

Taking quantum mechanics seriously predicts a unique, single quantum reality underlying the multiverse. The homogeneity and the tiny temperature fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background, which indicate that our observable universe can be traced back to a single quantum state, usually identified with the quantum field that fuels primordial inflation, support this view.

Moreover, this conclusion extends to other multiverse concepts such as different laws of physics in the various valleys of the “string theory landscape” or other “baby universes” popping up in eternal cosmological inflation. Since entanglement is universal, it doesn’t stop at the boundary of our cosmic patch. Whatever multiverse you have, when you adopt quantum monism they are all part of an integrated whole: There always is a more fundamental layer of reality underlying the many universes within the multiverse, and that layer is unique.

The ultimate in pushy parents

The New Neo Posted on by

When I read about the college entrance bribe scandal, the first question that came to my mind was what did these parents think was going to happen when their kids got into a school for which they were neither prepared nor qualified?

But then it occurred to me that the parents probably thought their children would be just fine. The parents might be planning to continue to cheat and bribe on their offspring’s behalf. Or, perhaps they thought that biggest hurdle in college is getting in, and after that it’s all trophies, for everyone, all the time.

This passage caught my eye:

No students were charged, and authorities said in many cases they were kept in the dark about the alleged scam.

It seems pretty obvious that in the cases in which the parents hired surrogates to take the SATs and other tests, the children would have had to be in on the scam. But apparently that was not the bulk of the cases. And for those students whose parents did this without the kids’ knowledge, can you imagine how mortified those particular children must feel now? I wrote “must feel,” but that’s not strictly true. It’s really “might feel,” because with parents with such ethical standards, it’s hard to know what their children have learned about right and wrong.

Not to mention how frightened and even perhaps guilty the children—even the ones who hadn’t a clue—probably feel at the prospect of their parents’ spending time in prison for something the parents will say they did for their kids. The whole thing is a form of child abuse, among other things—unless the impetus came from the kids, which I very much doubt.

And the magnitude of what some parents paid is mind-boggling to us regular folks:

Some of the parents spent between $200,000 to $6.5 million to ensure that their children received guaranteed admission at the schools of their choice, John Bonavolonta, FBI special agent in charge, said.

“Their actions were, without a doubt, insidious, selfish and shameful,” he added.

More:

Of the 50 people charged so far, 33 are parents and nine were college coaches. The others were a mix of standardized test administrators, a test proctor and Singer associates, authorities said.

“We believe everyone charged here today had a role in fostering a culture of corruption and greed that created an uneven playing field for students trying to get into these schools the right way through hard work, good grades and community service,” Bonavolonta said.

True.

However, I’m a bit tired of this “level playing field” assumption. It doesn’t really seem that hard work, good grades, and community service work to achieve the same result for everyone.

Of course I’m not in favor of bribes and/or cheating, and the rules should be applied equally to all. That’s obvious and inarguable. But there are ways around the rules, legal ways. There are legacies. There are racial preferences (ask any Asian if the playing field is level for him or her, for example).

The playing field is never level and all efforts to make it level can never make it so. In fact, some make it less so. Most of the time we can’t properly evaluate advantages and disadvantages for categories of people, or even for individuals. For example, very wealthy people can give their children material things that poor people and even financially comfortable people can’t. But it’s also not clear how to measure those advantages the extremely rich have—for example, did these particular mega-rich people give their kids a sense of purpose or integrity? And aren’t those things extremely important, probably more important than nice clothes and a big house and jet-setting all over the world (whether these kids or parents are aware of it or not)? There are so many children of the ultra-wealthy who are messed up that it’s almost a cliche—actually, it is a cliche: “poor little rich girl.”

Which has nothing to do with cheating. At least, we can be very clear about our condemnation of those who cheat. But I don’t think we’re all that clear on much else in terms of college admissions and the manifold efforts to be “fair.”

Boeing grounds all 737 Max planes, the type involved in the Lion Air and Ethiopian crashes

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s official; the Boeing 737 Max has been temporarily grounded everywhere:

The US plane-maker said it would suspend all 371 of the aircraft.

The Federal Aviation Administration said fresh evidence as well as newly refined satellite data prompted the decision to temporarily ban the jets…

The FAA has a team investigating the disaster at the Ethiopian Airlines crash site working with the National Transportation Safety Board.

Dan Elwell, acting administrator at the FAA, said on Wednesday: “It became clear to all parties that the track of the Ethiopian Airlines [flight] was very close and behaved very similarly to the Lion Air flight.”

He added that “the evidence we found on the ground made it even more likely the flight path was very close to Lion Air’s”.

It’s not an admission that the aircraft design is at fault. But it’s an admission that there’s reason to believe it might be.

More information here:

One of Boeing’s internal guidelines for [updating the 737 design] was that any changes must be achievable without the need for any pilot retraining. But the engines Boeing wanted to use were larger than the old versions and had to be mounted higher and farther forward on the wings. These larger engines could cause the aircraft to destabilize under certain conditions, including high-banked turns at low speed.

To counter this, Boeing developed MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System). MCAS is an additional software package intended to prevent stall under certain circumstances by pushing the plane’s nose downwards. Boeing didn’t try to hide the system — it’s disclosed in the plane repair manuals — but they didn’t disclose it to pilots or make any kind of effort to train crew members on its existence. Boeing’s argument throughout this process has been that the 737 Max 8 is a perfectly safe plane and that all existing crew training is sufficient to respond to any emergency situation they might encounter…

There have been reports that Ethiopian Air Flight 302 “smoked and shuddered” before its plunge. If these prove true, it could point away from the MCAS system. It’s also possible that the MCAS system overrode any action the pilots were attempting to take to return the plane to proper control as a result of an engine or another component failure. Right now, we simply don’t know. Boeing is preparing a software update for the 737 Max 8, but that update was already in the works last month before Flight 302 fell out of the sky.

The DOJ told the FBI to hold off on Hillary charges

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember Lisa Page? Her testimony has been made public [emphasis mine]:

Newly released transcripts from Page’s private testimony in front of a joint task force of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees in July 2018 sheds new light on the internal discussions about an investigation into Clinton’s emails…

Comey cleared Clinton of all charges in a press conference on July 5, 2016.

Page told the committee that the FBI “did not blow over gross negligence.” Responding to a question from Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, Page testified the FBI, including Comey, believed Clinton may have committed gross negligence. “We, in fact — and, in fact, the Director — because, on its face, it did seem like, well, maybe there’s a potential here for this to be the charge. And we had multiple conversations, multiple conversations with the Justice Department about charging gross negligence,” she said.

Page further testified the DOJ put a stop to that: “The Justice Department’s assessment was that it was both constitutionally vague, so that they did not actually feel that they could permissibly bring that charge.” The specific statute being referenced, 18 U.S. Code § 793, deals in part with “gross negligence” in the handling of national defense information, which Clinton came under scrutiny for possibly violating.

Page said Comey and the FBI spoke with DOJ about a gross negligence charge for Clinton multiple times, but that the DOJ consistently pushed back on it. “We had multiple conversations with the Justice Department about bringing a gross negligence charge. And that’s, as I said, the advice that we got from the Department was that they did not think — that it was constitutionally vague and not sustainable,” she said.

Ratcliffe asked if the decision not to charge Clinton with gross negligence was a direct order from the DOJ. “When you say advice you got from the Department, you’re making it sound like it was the Department that told you: ‘You’re not going to charge gross negligence because we’re the prosecutors and we’re telling you we’re not going to,’” he said.

Page responded: “That’s correct.”…

When asked if she knew why DOJ believed that, Page replied: “I really don’t know… I am confident that it was based on their own research in consultation with others, but I don’t have personal knowledge about what the Department did in order to come to that conclusion.”

When Comey made his announcement back in July of 2016, listeners on the right (including me) immediately noted the strangeness—in the legal sense—of what he was saying (see also this as well as this and this). It just didn’t make sense. It was as though they had come to the conclusion that they would not charge Clinton, and had to come up with an excuse after the fact. The excuse was absurd, but it was all they could conjure up, and they went with it.

What Page said supports that idea.

More:

At the time, the National Review’s Andy McCarthy wrote, “According to Director James Comey, Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code … and, in essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute.”

It was speculated at the time that the DOJ was behind the FBI’s action, and that part of the impetus was that tarmac meeting between Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton, after which Lynch refused to recuse herself but said that she would abide by the FBI’s decision.

And then, apparently, the DOJ told the FBI what to do.

Unfortunately, it seems that the only people who care about all of this are on the right.

Trump-speak: love it or hate it

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m often struck by how artificial most politicians are when they speak. So little of what they say seems unguarded, natural, spontaneous, or sincere. Everything is strategic.

That doesn’t mean that everything a politician says is effective as a tactic. What it does mean, for so many of them, is that it is a tactic rather than the utterance of what appears to be a normal human being speaking his or her mind.

I was thinking this while I was analyzing one of Nancy Pelosi’s statements for my previous post today. I found myself in a sort of awe at how much she packed into a couple of seemingly simple sentences: so much hypocrisy, so much unctuous fake nobility, so much artificiality, a little hidden dagger, so many hidden messages. You might say I was reading too much into her statement, but I don’t think so.

It’s not just Pelosi’s statements one can parse that way (I tend to see it more on the left, but it certainly exists on the right). Obama was a master at it. One difference, though, is that when Pelosi speaks I can almost see the wheels in her head turning, but when Obama did it, it was more smooth. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons he was able to succeed in his run for national elected office, and why Pelosi always kept her election bids to re-election in her safe district and made her power moves for advancement within Congress itself. Perhaps she’s too obviously contrived to have won national office.

Perhaps that was Hillary’s problem, too. Maybe she should have kept her power moves within the government structure itself, too, and not sought national elective office from voters. She was just so artificial—among other things—whereas her equally strategic husband had perfected the art of seeming natural.

So, where does Trump fall on this spectrum? The first time I ever watched him give a political speech—and this was back when I thought he’d be a disaster for the right—I was impressed by a number of things and wrote:

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I’m not a Trump supporter, but that I also get his appeal. Watching him speak at length, I “got” it even more. He makes all other politicians look boring and stilted (hey, many of them are boring and stilted). He makes it all sound so simple—just as Obama did, but in a completely different direction and with a completely, and I mean completely, different style. Populist appeal is a neat trick in a man who’s a multi-billionaire and who grew up in enormous wealth and graduated from Wharton. But he’s got it, and although I’m sure he carefully nurtures it he manages to make it look natural.

When I started writing this post, I hadn’t looked back at that quote yet. I had planned to say a certain thing today, but as I read what I wrote in that post of three and a half years ago, I find it’s the same thing. All this time has passed and that aspect of Trump hasn’t faltered: he makes all other politicians look boring and he looks natural doing whatever it is that he does.

That’s an art, and in addition to any art of the deal, it’s one of the arts that got him elected. It’s also something that lends itself to misinterpretation. Some people think he’s stupid, but I’ve never (even when I was very much against him during the primaries) said or thought that he was stupid. He also has unusually keen intuition, which can be more precious than intelligence, and certainly doesn’t always go hand-in-hand with it.

Trump’s enemies on left and right (and he certainly has them on both sides) tend not just to dislike what he does. In fact I’m not at all sure that his enemies on the right hate him because of what he does; I think they hate him in spite of it. But those who really really really dislike Trump seem to dislike him in very visceral and personal terms. One thing the ones on the right don’t like is his lack of intellectualism. Another thing his enemies on both sides don’t like is that they interpret the seeming naturalism of his speech as meaning that he is someone who says whatever pops into his head, with no filter and little thought. I think nothing could be further from the truth.

I think what’s happening is that Trump is every bit as strategic/tactical as any politician, perhaps even more so. But he also seems to be authentic when he speaks; he seems to be himself, whatever that means. He projects a naturalness and spontaneity. I think this combination of strategy and everyman-type naturalness is utterly unique to Trump. I’m not sure where it comes from. Perhaps it’s because he is a man who is strategic to his core: it comes naturally to him. Perhaps he just has a populist gift. Perhaps he is sincerely strategic, if that makes any sense.

But whatever it is about, I think that, without that trait, Trump would not have been elected president.