How Trump’s Success Changed Cruz’s Campaign

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1. howardat58 says:

   March 12, 2016 at 3:39 pm

   With nitric acid as the solvent ???

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2. Jack says:

   March 12, 2016 at 8:30 pm

   My favorite take on Trump’s ascendancy is from ROLLING STONE’s Matt Taibbi:

   http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-america-made-donald-trump-unstoppable-20160224

   I read this in line at the grocery store last night.

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   • Jack says:

     March 12, 2016 at 9:02 pm

     Here’s some excerpts from MATT TAIBBI at

     http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-america-made-donald-trump-unstoppable-20160224

     – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

     (Donald Trump) iss no ordinary con man. He’s way above average — and the American political system is his easiest mark ever

     A thousand ridiculous accidents needed to happen in the unlikeliest of sequences for it to be possible, but absent a dramatic turn of events – an early primary catastrophe, Mike Bloomberg ego-crashing the race, etc. – this boorish, monosyllabic TV tyrant with the attention span of an Xbox-playing 11-year-old really is set to lay waste to the most impenetrable oligarchy the Western world ever devised.

     It turns out we let our electoral process devolve into something so fake and dysfunctional that any half-bright con man with the stones to try it could walk right through the front door and tear it to shreds on the first go.

     And Trump is no half-bright con man, either. He’s way better than average.

     It’s been well-documented that Trump surged last summer when he openly embraced the ugly race politics that, according to the Beltway custom of 50-plus years, is supposed to stay at the dog-whistle level. No doubt, that’s been a huge factor in his rise. But racism isn’t the only ugly thing he’s dragged out into the open.

     Trump is no intellectual. He’s not bringing Middlemarch to the toilet. If he had to jail with Stephen Hawking for a year, he wouldn’t learn a thing about physics. Hawking would come out on Day 365 talking about models and football.

     But, in an insane twist of fate, this bloated billionaire scion has hobbies that have given him insight into the presidential electoral process. He likes women, which got him into beauty pageants. And he likes being famous, which got him into reality TV. He knows show business.

     That put him in position to understand that the presidential election campaign is really just a badly acted, billion-dollar TV show whose production costs ludicrously include the political disenfranchisement of its audience. Trump is making a mockery of the show, and the Wolf Blitzers and Anderson Coopers of the world seem appalled. How dare he demean the presidency with his antics?

     But they’ve all got it backward. The presidency is serious. The presidential electoral process, however, is a sick joke, in which everyone loses except the people behind the rope line. And every time some pundit or party spokesman tries to deny it, Trump picks up another vote.

     …

     Trump’s basic argument is the same one every successful authoritarian movement in recent Western history has made: that the regular guy has been screwed by a conspiracy of incestuous elites. The Bushes are half that conspiratorial picture, fronts for a Republican Party establishment and whose sum total of accomplishments, dating back nearly 30 years, are two failed presidencies, the sweeping loss of manufacturing jobs, and a pair of pitiable Middle Eastern military adventures – the second one achieving nothing but dead American kids and Junior’s re-election.

     Trump picked on Jeb because Jeb is a symbol. The Bushes are a dissolute monarchy, down to offering their last genetic screw-up to the throne.

     …

     It’s simple transitive-property rhetoric, and it works. The press went gaga for Rubio after Iowa because – why? Because he’s an unthreatening, blow-dried, cliché-spouting, dial-surveying phony of the type campaign journalists always approve of.

     And when Rubio gets exposed in the debate as a talking haircut, a political Speak n’ Spell, suddenly the throng of journalists who spent the past two weeks trying to sell America on “Marcomentum” and the all-important “establishment lane” looks very guilty indeed. Voters were supposed to take this seriously?

     Trump knows the public sees through all of this, grasps the press’s role in it and rightly hates us all. When so many Trump supporters point to his stomping of the carpetbagging snobs in the national media as the main reason they’re going to vote for him, it should tell us in the press something profound about how much people think we suck.

     …

     Trump isn’t the first rich guy to run for office. But he is the first to realize the weakness in the system, which is that the watchdogs in the political media can’t resist a car wreck. The more he insults the press, the more they cover him: He’s pulling 33 times as much coverage on the major networks as his next-closest GOP competitor, and twice as much as Hillary.

     Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star. It doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off, even when it’s filming its own demise.

     The problem, of course, is that Trump is crazy. He’s like every other corporate tyrant in that his solution to most things follows the logic of Stalin: no person, no problem. You’re fired! Except as president he’d have other people-removing options, all of which he likes: torture, mass deportations, the banning of 23 percent of the Earth’s population from entering the United States, etc.

     He seems to be coming around to the idea that having an ego smaller than that of, say, an Egyptian Pharaoh would be a sign of weakness. So of late, his already-insane idea to build a “beautiful” wall across the Mexican border has evolved to the point where he also wants the wall to be named after him. He told Maria Bartiromo he wanted to call it the “Great Wall of Trump.”

     In his mind, it all makes sense. Drugs come from Mexico; the wall will keep out Mexicans; therefore, no more drugs. “We’re gonna stop it,” he says. “You’re not going to have the drugs coming in destroying your children. Your kids are going to look all over the place and they’re not going to be able to find them.”

     Obviously! Because no one’s ever tried wide-scale drug prohibition before.

     And as bad as our media is, Trump is trying to replace it with a worse model. He excommunicates every reporter who so much as raises an eyebrow at his insanity, leaving him with a small-but-dependable crowd of groveling supplicants who in a Trump presidency would be the royal media. He even waves at them during his speeches.

     “Mika and Joe are here!” he chirped at the MSNBC morning hosts at a New Hampshire event. The day after he won the New Hampshire primary, he called in to their show to thank them for being “supporters.” To her credit, Mika Brzezinski tried to object to the characterization, interrupting Joe Scarborough, who by then had launched into a minute-long homily about how happy he was to be a bug on the windshield of the Trump phenomenon.

     You think the media sucks now? Just wait until reporters have to kiss a brass Trump-sphinx before they enter the White House press room.

     “He has all these crazy ideas, and [reporters] are so scared of him, they don’t ask him any details,” says Michael Pleyte, an Iraq vet who came all the way from Michigan to watch the New Hampshire primary in person. “Forget about A to Z, they don’t even ask him to go A to Trump.”

     King Trump. Brace yourselves, America. It’s really happening.

     Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-america-made-donald-trump-unstoppable-20160224#ixzz42k8jksI5
     Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook

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   • dianeravitch says:

     March 12, 2016 at 9:39 pm

     Jack,

     You could have read Matt Taibbi’s article here’s week ago

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   • Jack says:

     March 12, 2016 at 9:52 pm

     Ooops, I was a little busy with parent conferences these last five days.

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3. Arthur Goldstein says:

   March 12, 2016 at 8:36 pm

   Cruz is like Grandpa Munster, but without the charm.

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4. John says:

   March 12, 2016 at 9:45 pm

   Dear Dr. Ravitch. I am a fan of yours, but let’s try to stop talking about Trump. About half of all teachers are Trump fans. No one, and I mean no one was more destructive to public education than Obama and Arne Duncan. Remember him? Clinton is just bought and paid for. Sanders has no chance. Trump is the best choice. He will give power back to the states, etc. He is a much better gamble than Clinton. So, please stop the anti Trump banter. Nothing could be worse than the last 8 years for public education. Nobody even pretends to like Clinton. She will lose badly.

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   • Ed Detective says:

     March 12, 2016 at 10:26 pm

     “About half of all teachers are Trump fans.”

     I highly doubt that. I have not met one personally.

     “Sanders has no chance.”

     If you haven’t been paying attention — the corporate media, the political establishment, and Hillary’s campaign have been running around like chickens with their heads cut off. I wonder why they would feel so threatened by Sanders if he “had no chance.”

     Let’s NOT stop talking about how Trump is a threat to peace and democracy, and Bernie Sanders is the antidote. Thanks.

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   • dianeravitch says:

     March 12, 2016 at 11:20 pm

     John,

     I agree that the last 15 years have been a disaster for public schools, students, and teachers. I hold Geirge W. Bush and Barack Obama responsible for the corporate assault on a precious democratic institution.

     I have not heard one word from Trump that indicates he knows anything about education. He thinks our public schools are disasters. He will get rid of Common Core ( how, I don’t know, and I doubt he knows what it is), and he said in the last debate that he supports charter schools.

     I find his rhetoric frightening and his rudeness and coarseness appalling. He has demeaned Mexicans, Muslims, Belgium, both parties, and he seems to be running against our government. He is a boastful egomaniac. I would not want our country to be led by such a self-centered and uncivil man.

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   • dmaxmj says:

     March 13, 2016 at 7:33 am

     Wow.Agree on almost everything you had to say other than “stop talking about Trump” and “Sanders has no chance”. Pointing out the insane monkey with the machine gun, and supporting REAL hope and change might mean Trump goes to a zoo and we get a better tomorrow.

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   • Eric Brandon says:

     March 13, 2016 at 9:04 am

     The only one who Trump will give power to is himself. Wake up. How can you support such an obvious racist for the presidency?

     As for education, I imagine that Trump will simply continue the policies of the last two presidents. He’s a real estate developer. He probably loves all the real estate angles that the charter school industry uses.

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5. Jack says:

   March 12, 2016 at 11:28 pm

   This 1964 TV ad opposing Barry Goldwater is just spooky in how applicable it is to what’s going on in 2016. To quote Yogi Berra, “It’s deja vu all over again.

   It presents the opinion of a Republican — who has always voted Republican in presidential races — but is deeply troubled about voting for THIS particular Republican nominee:

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   • 2old2teach says:

     March 12, 2016 at 11:45 pm

     My parents were Republicans. They voted for Johnson.

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6. Gordon Wilder says:

   March 13, 2016 at 11:25 am

   Obviously
   on “Cruz” control.
   It is NOT funny.

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