Two interesting articles in the New York Times today:
A list of possible choices for the new Trump cabinet.
A profile of the climate-change denier in charge of the transition for the Environmental Protection Agency.
An article about the corporate lobbyists rushing in to “help” the transition..
Politico convened the five authors who have written biographies of Trump. They know him as well as anyone but his immediate family.
They didn’t expect him to win the election. They think he didn’t expect to win the election.
Now that he will be president of the United States, what is he likely to do?
An interesting and fairly scary read.
Several readers have written to say that they were very disappointed that I have spoken ill of the President-elect. They said they would not read the blog any more because I do not share their admiration for our next President. I hate to lose readers, but part of the point of this blog is that I write what I believe and I invite readers to do the same. I will not change my views to pander to readers.
I did not support Donald Trump for the Presidency. I thought he was unqualified to serve, had no relevant experience, and had repeatedly expressed bigotry towards many fellow Americans. I supported Hillary Clinton after she won the Democratic primaries. I would have supported Bernie Sanders with equal zeal had he won the primaries. I did not want Trump to be elected. Okay, he was elected, and I am a loyal American. I respect the office, and I watch with concern as he decides how to staff his administration and which of his campaign promises he will keep.
This is a blog devoted to “a better education for all.” Its central purpose is to support public education as a public good. I oppose privatization of public schools. That much has been clear to anyone who has read the blog on any given day. Donald Trump has pledged to direct federal funding to privately managed charter schools, to vouchers for religious schools, and to homeschooling. He has no problem with for-profit schools. Those are reasons enough for me to oppose his candidacy and to worry about his presidency. I worry that he will damage public education irreparably in the next four years, with his party in control of the Congress and equally committed to privatization of public education.
Thus, if a reader says I will stop reading your blog because you didn’t support Trump, I don’t think they understand that Trump’s promise to privatize public schools is directly in conflict with the essential purpose of this blog.
I opposed him because of the horrible things he said during the election campaign about women, immigrants, Muslims, Mexicans, and others. I opposed him because of his campaign’s use of anti-Semitic images. I opposed him because of the many years he devoted to proving that President Obama was not an American, a charge he retracted during the campaign, with little remorse. Since his election, in a very few days, there have been many incidents of hatred towards people who are nonwhite, Muslim, Hispanic, or “Other.” Just yesterday, CNN played a clip of middle-school students in the Midwest chanting “Build the wall, build the wall,” to intimidate their Hispanic schoolmates.
David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, says that Trump’s election is nothing less than “an American tragedy.”
He wrote on the day after the election:
The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.
There are, inevitably, miseries to come: an increasingly reactionary Supreme Court; an emboldened right-wing Congress; a President whose disdain for women and minorities, civil liberties and scientific fact, to say nothing of simple decency, has been repeatedly demonstrated. Trump is vulgarity unbounded, a knowledge-free national leader who will not only set markets tumbling but will strike fear into the hearts of the vulnerable, the weak, and, above all, the many varieties of Other whom he has so deeply insulted. The African-American Other. The Hispanic Other. The female Other. The Jewish and Muslim Other. The most hopeful way to look at this grievous event—and it’s a stretch—is that this election and the years to follow will be a test of the strength, or the fragility, of American institutions. It will be a test of our seriousness and resolve.
I am an Other. Probably many of you who read this are Others. I hate to hear the words he uses about women. I hate to hear what he says about women in the locker room or on the bus with the boys. I have grown up with sons and grandsons, and that is not the language they ever use. I hate what he said about Mexicans. I hate the idea that he proposed banning all people of one religion from entering our country. I am afraid that he will remove all regulations on guns, and we will all be armed and suspicious of one another. I am afraid that he will remove all regulations on drilling and fracking, and the air and water will be polluted, and oil rigs will be permitted in our national parks and everywhere else.
I will no longer engage in any arguments about which Democrat might have been a better candidate than Hillary. That’s over. Now we must deal with the fact that the man who will be our President for the next four years has been elected on a platform and promises that resurrect nativism, racism, white nationalism, and division.
He will be our President, and, as I said, I respect the Office of the Presidency. But I cannot endorse any of the appeals to bigotry and bias. I cannot endorse his rejection of the science about climate change. I do not agree that our nation should abolish all controls on guns.
I will watch and wait to see if President-elect Trump moderates his views and policies. I will hope for the best. I want America to be a land of hope and dreams, of idealism and mutual respect, of e pluribus unum, not just unum. We are a quilt of many colors and it is a beautiful quilt. We all belong here. I will wait to see if President-elect Trump is willing to speak to and for all of us and not just for his rabid movement.
I want America to be America. I want it to be a land of liberty and justice for all. I want my grandchildren to learn what I tried to teach my children: kindness, compassion, a commitment to fairness, a love of justice, and a willingness to defend the underdog. I want them to aspire to be good people. I want them to treat others with respect for their individuality and humanity.
If you have read this far, and you hate what I have written, don’t read the blog. Unsubscribe. Delete.
I have always said that I will speak as honestly as I know how, and I would write from the heart. This is written in honesty, from the heart. You don’t have to agree. This is what I wanted and needed to say.
Bret Stephens is an editorial writer for the conservative Wall Street Journal. His rebuke to fellow Republicans is thoughtful and gutsy.
By BRET STEPHENS
Nov. 7, 2016 7:27 p.m. ET
Someday, maybe, when I’m old and a child asks me what I remember about the awful election of 2016, I’ll say: It was the Big Reveal.
Revealed: That the guiding spirit of the modern conservative movement is neither Burke nor Lincoln. It’s Marx. “These are my principles,” Groucho once cracked, “and if you don’t like them, well, I have others.” Everything Republicans once claimed to advocate—entitlement reform, free trade, standing up to dictators, encouraging the march of freedom around the world—turns out to be negotiable and reversible, depending onDonald Trump’s whims and the furies of his base.
Revealed: That moral clarity and moral equivalence have become interchangeable concepts in today’s GOP. The same Republicans who pontificated throughout the 1990s about restoring honor and dignity to the Oval Office are now eager to rent that office to a man who boasts of his own sexual predations. Why? Because Bill Clinton already did it.
Revealed: That Mr. Trump’s unrelenting and apparently irrepressible bigotry, misogyny, bullying and conspiracy-mongering won’t keep Republican leaders from supporting him, provided he mouth pieties about appointing more Scalias to the court or cutting corporate tax rates. “More common ground than disagreement,” was how House SpeakerPaul Ryan justified his June endorsement of the GOP nominee, right around the time he described Mr. Trump’s slander of “Mexican” judge Gonzalo Curiel as a “textbook definition of a racist comment.” A smarter response by the speaker might have been: “You lost me at hello.”
Also revealed: That conservatives who once took umbrage at being called racist or anti-Semitic are now happy to flirt with white nationalism. That a party of self-described strict constructionists sees nothing amiss in Mr. Trump’s call to rewrite the 14th Amendment. That the ability of Mr. Trump and his supporters to hurl insults at their critics is only exceeded by their exquisite sensitivity when they are insulted back. That a reset with Russia is a fiasco when executed by Hillary Clinton but evidence of fresh foreign-policy thinking when proposed by Mr. Trump.
The bill of particulars could fill the rest of the column. It’s normal that elections make fierce partisans of many of us. It’s normal that Mr. Trump would attract the usual right-wing buffoons to his banners. Normal, also, is that many voters may not be troubled by Mr. Trump’s cruder statements when they hear him addressing their deepest economic and social anxieties.
What isn’t normal is the ease with which so many conservative leaders, political and intellectual, have prostrated themselves before Mr. Trump simply because he won. In July, Dan Senor, a senior adviser to Mitt Romney in 2012, tweeted that he had once commiserated with a Midwestern governor about how unacceptable Mr. Trump was as the GOP nominee. That governor? Mike Pence.
As for conservative thought leaders, the book that comes to mind is Julien Benda’s 1927 classic, La Trahison des clercs, “The Treason of the Intellectuals.” Benda railed against a new class of European thinkers who specialized in “the intellectual organization of political hatreds,” the “desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action,” and above all “the cult of success,” based on “the teaching that says that when a will is successful that fact alone gives it a moral value, whereas the will which fails is for that reason alone deserving of contempt.”
Benda used to be a favorite among conservative thinkers who saw him as a prophetic voice against multiculturalism, postmodernism and other left-wing academic fads rooted in 19th century German Romanticism. Where are those thinkers now that Mr. Trump is using his own fetish for action and cult of success to dismiss his political opponents as losers, lowlifes and criminals? Where are they now that Mr. Trump’s Breitbart minions are organizing political hatreds against “globalists” and other new enemies of the people?
They are busy devising ever-more elaborate excuses for the Republican nominee. A flawed messenger for a worthy message. An agent of mass disruption in an era of secular stagnation. A hollow man who may yet take our good advice and stumble his way to greatness. A jerk who nonetheless compares favorably to Mrs. Clinton.
What all this shows is that most conservative intellectuals have proved incapable of self-examination or even simple observation. Donald Trump is a demagogue. Period. The fervor of his crowds recalls Nasser’s Egypt. His convictions are illiberal. His manners are disgusting. His temper is frightening. It ought to have been the job of thoughtful conservatives in this season to point this out, time and again. If they can’t do that, what good are they?
George Orwell said that “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” The Big Reveal of 2016 is that most conservatives failed the Orwell test. On Tuesday we’ll learn if American voters can do better.
Write bstephens@wsj.com.
It’s over. Thank goodness.
Just one thing more is needed.
Go to the polls and vote. Knock on your neighbors’ doors and encourage them to vote. Offer them a ride.
Vote.
That is your duty as a citizen.
Democracy is not a spectator sport.
Please vote.
Rachelle Horowitz was the transportation director of the l963 March on Washington. She was arrested protesting lunch counter discrimination on Route 40, Maryland, protesting Soviet Nuclear Testing at the Russian Embassy in New York City, protesting anti-labor and discriminatory policies at the World’s Fair in Queens, New York, protesting Apartheid at the South African Embassy in Washington, D.C. She was the Administrative Director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute and Political Director of the American Federation of Teachers. She sits on the board of the National Democratic Institute.
Thinking about a protest vote?
An open letter from an old protest voter to new ones
Dear Protest Voter,
I was once you.
In l960 when John F. Kennedy ran against Richard Nixon, I was 21. I was about to cast my first vote for President of the United States.
In my heart, I knew John F Kennedy was a far better choice to lead our country than Richard Nixon. I was a civil rights activist, a democratic socialist, a protester and JFK was not radical or even liberal enough for me. So I wrote in Norman Thomas.
After voting I helped organize a protest march and rally for civil rights in New York City. We were demanding an end to segregation and discrimination. The speaker was a southern hero, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth. He had risked his life – literally – that morning by voting in Birmingham, Alabama, and had then flown to New York to speak at our rally.
We chatted a little as he waited to speak, and he casually mentioned how happy he was to have voted for JFK. I confessed my Norman Thomas write-in. He was incredulous and horrified. I felt like a silly, white, northerner who had the luxury to protest while his life and the fate of the nation was at stake.
I knew then that I would never waste another vote. I would protest; I would march; I would let my opinion be known. But when there were lives at stake, I would not demand political purity or total agreement with what I thought was right.
Sadly, I didn’t get a second chance to vote for JFK. Years later, I became active in Ted Kennedy’s 1980 campaign. My husband and I became his friends. Yet, I never had the courage to tell him about l960.
Well, its 56 years later. I don’t think Hillary is perfect.
But I do think she is plenty good enough… And I hope you don’t waste your vote.
I wrote in Norman Thomas in NYC – JFK won without me…
But in this election if you live in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and a bunch of swing states, your vote may do more than weigh on your conscience. It may plunge this country into a Trumpian nightmare.
So get out there and protest, march, rally and lead this country in the right direction. But, please, make your vote count. You can’t afford not to.
Rachelle Horowitz
This powerful editorial about the election was published by the New York Daily News, Donald Trump’s hometown tabloid. The editorial appeared before Comey injected his explosive news into the election. The Daily News reacted to Comey’s statement with a call for him to be fired for meddling in the election. Then on November 1, the News published a front-page editorial titled: “Damn Right We’re With Her.”
The editorial board of the News knows Trump very well. They have watched him for many years.
If you want to know why Trump must be defeated, this is your reading assignment for today.
The first editorial tells you why Trump should not be president–ever.
The November 1 editorial tells you why Clinton should be elected.
The editorial board has met with both Trump and Clinton many times.
And this is why they doubled down on their endorsement despite Director Comey’s intervention:
The Daily News again extends its wholehearted endorsement of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
We do so with faith that Clinton would be a transformative leader for the good, far beyond making history as the first female President.
And we do so with fact-based, fearful conviction that Donald Trump would lead a nation divided against itself, with catastrophic consequences at home and abroad.
Lost in a campaign distorted by Trump’s ego-driven demagoguery is the indisputable truth that Clinton’s instincts, skills and programs are an excellent match for the challenges of a uniquely frightening American moment.
We are a country at war. The 50 states are united in rage. The 320 million people of this land tear at one another in a battle to reclaim their destiny from a government that, put bluntly, screwed them on a bipartisan basis.
Almost an entire American generation has been born since the country last had a semblance of responsive, responsible governing. Instead, Democrats and Republicans alike have exhausted the nation in stalemates over symbols and dogma.
Meanwhile, the working and middle classes suffered joblessness, home foreclosures, wage stagnation, massive student debt, opioid addiction and further ills – as the wealthy rode the waves ever more comfortably, often with Uncle Sam manning the galley oars.
Now comes a reckoning that made vengeful soulmates of the unlikely Bernie Sanders and the ungodly Trump. Vessels for white-hot anger, the socialist and the tax-evading billionaire built their candidacies on destroying a “rigged” system as champion of its victims.
But revenge for the sake of revenge – which is the heart of Trump’s campaign – would be madness as the chief motivator for selecting the custodian of the world’s shining-star democracy, largest economy and mightiest military.
On Oct. 20, the Daily News Editorial Board published the longest editorial in its 97-year history – a call for burying Trump in a landslide. We needed 7,500 words to document his unfitness for the presidency as an ignorant and divisive “liar, thief, bully, hypocrite, sexual victimizer and unhinged, self-adoring demagogue.”
Leaving aside his Trumpian mountain of disqualifications, the crucial distinction between the renegade Republican and Clinton is that Clinton is, at heart, a forward-looking optimist who offers rational programs targeted to create a stronger, fairer, more unified America.
Her unparalleled understanding of the world, her unmatched grasp of policy successes and failures and her proven ability to broker constructive compromise between hunkered-down ideologues must far outweigh the nagging mistrust that Clinton generates after her decades at the height of national service….
No illusions: Expecting to hold the House, Republicans have telegraphed plans to launch multiple anti-Clinton investigations. Still more, Senate GOP leaders have pledged to block all Clinton Supreme Court nominations.
Even so, victory — the more solid the better — would position Clinton to win action on behalf of the working and middle classes by addressing the interests both of her ideological foes and of all the Americans who are furious that Washington catered to a corrupt, elite establishment while condescendingly dismissing their needs and beliefs.
Donald Trump is all about selling a single repulsively flawed product: himself.
Hillary Clinton is no saleswoman. Instead, she is a doer who has a historic chance to prove that the U.S. government can actually work to the benefit of its citizen bosses.
No election in our lifetimes has produced a clearer choice: Clinton over Trump, urgently and by acclamation.
There is more. It is worth reading, as is the first editorial referenced here.
Bottom line is that Clinton has plans to improve life for our nation, while Trump is an egotistical bully, a liar, and a vengeful hypocrite who would bring our nation and our economy to ruin.
We know that Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump loves to tweet. It turns out that he has a posse of Twitter buddies who support and magnify his messages.
You can read about them here.
They are Trump’s Twitterverse.
Sid Miller’s tweet about Hillary Clinton may have been a mistake, but he’s found a place in Trump’s Twitterverse.
Miller has the most successful social media operation of any statewide elected official.
At 1:43 a.m. Tuesday, more than 12 hours before a tweet from Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller’s Twitter account referred to Hillary Clinton using a sexually explicit, derogatory term for women, Miller, or whoever was tweeting on his behalf at that hour in the morning, tweeted a question — “Can we bring Milo back?!?”
Milo is Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart senior editor who Twitter in July banned for life for directing his vast army of 300,000 Twitter followers to bombard “Saturday Night Live’s” Leslie Jones with racist tweets for her starring role in the “Ghostbusters” movie remake.
Miller’s middle-of-the night Twitter query was directed at four other cult figures, like Yiannopoulos with large social media followings at the alt-right edge of the Donald Trump political orbit.
There is Ricky Vaughn, who commonly uses the vulgarism for Clinton, and it appears might have been the source for Miller’s offensive tweet, which was quickly taken down.
There is RooshV, a renowned “pick-up artist” who on Oct. 17 wrote that women should confine themselves to reproductive sex, child rearing and homemaking, and who has warned that if Clinton is elected, a heterosexual male will never again serve as president.
There is Mike Cernovich, the man The New Yorker in its Oct. 31 issue profiles as the “meme mastermind of the alt-right,” who, on his “Danger and Play” blog, developed a theory of white male identity that posits that “men were oppressed by feminism, and political correctness prevented the discussion of obvious truths, such as the criminal proclivities of certain ethnic groups.”
And there is Jack Posobiec, special projects director of Citizens4Trump, who maintains that the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape of Trump talking about his predatory behavior with women was part of an attempted coup against Trump by House Speaker Paul Ryan and his GOP allies.
Speaking for Miller, Todd Smith, his longtime political adviser, said Wednesday that Miller had quickly and properly apologized for the appearance of the obscene word in a tweet reporting poll results from Pennsylvania, and that this Twitter contact with these provocative figures was simply in keeping with Miller’s new stature as a major player among Trump’s supporters.
+Sid Miller finds fringe friendships in Trump’s alt-right Twitterverse photo
Texas Agricultural Commissioner Sid Miller in his 11th floor office in the Stephen F. Austin state building on North Congress Avenue. … R
“Sid Miller is sort of front and center of the Trump campaign communications effort over the last week,” Smith said. “He was mentioned at least four different times by Donald Trump in campaign rallies across the United States, so it been natural for him to communicate with other very well known Trump supporters.”
Miller is a member of Trump’s agricultural advisory committee and recently appeared on Fox News speaking in support of Trump.
Of Yiannopoulos, who is on a college speaking tour that launched at Texas Tech University in mid-September, Smith said, “Milo is a writer with Breitbart, a recognized news source,” and that he believes his banishment is “because of his Trump positions.”
“Sid Miller does not believe that people should be banned for their beliefs,” Smith said. “He believes in the First Amendment.”
It appears that Miller’s digital team picked up the offending language from a tweet that originated with @TheRickyVaughn, whose tweets in recent days have focused on spreading the rumor that independent Republican candidate Evan McMullin, who is threatening to deny Trump Utah’s electoral votes, is secretly gay and instructing “how to bullycide” his supporters to abandon him.
RooshV is, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which studies extremist groups, Roosh Vörek — “a Maryland-raised PUA (“pick up artist”) whose specialty is sex with foreign women; his blog is a sales vehicle for his books like ‘Bang: The Pick Up Bible’ and ‘Bang Iceland: How to Sleep With Icelandic Women in Iceland,’ which one Icelandic feminist group described as a `rape guide.’”
Amid the controversy over the Access Hollywood tape, RooshV tweeted, “It’s a (((clever))) trick: create the rape culture that makes every man a `rapist”’ and then use it against non-establishment candidates.” (The extra parentheses are used by the alt-right to suggest Jewish influence.)
“If Trump loses this election, no heterosexual man will ever be President of the United States again. They’ll all be labeled a rapist,” he tweeted.
In his recent essay on women’s roles, RooshV, wrote, “a woman who is engaging in sex with a multitude of partners without any concern for reproduction, and who has less interest in child rearing than in surrogate activities like working in an office, dancing in nightclubs, or playing trivia games on her electronic device, and who is unwilling or unable to make a home comfortable for her family is going against her purpose. This may remind you of women you know.”
In its Cernovich profile, The New Yorker writes that nowadays, the Southern Californian’s “blog is mostly a platform for pro-Trump spin, but at first it was about how to pick up women.”
His self-published 2015 book, “Gorilla Mindset,” was a guide for how men could “unleash the animal” within them. He has just written another book about finding fulfillment in Trump.
Miller is no slacker in the social media arts.
“He has more people engaged on a daily basis than any other statewide official by a gargantuan margin,” Smith said. His Facebook page just passed 290,000 likes.
Smith said he understands why people were outraged by Tuesday’s tweet.
“I understand why people were outraged, and Commissioner Miller was outraged that a tweet came out on his account with that word,” Smith said. “He publicity said so and apologized and pulled it down.”
But, he said, enough is enough.
“We’re six days out from the most important election in our lifetime, the future of our nation is being decided for the next 40 years,” said Smith, and from now to then, Miller will be doing everything he can to work with allies of Trump to see that he is elected, and not go picking through their tweets for points of difference.
This is important information.
Think about it before you vote.
Would you vote for this woman for President?
Andrew Sullivan is no fan of Hillary Clinton. He expresses his strong dislike of her in this article, but his focus is on what a Trump presidency might mean for the future of the nation. He says we are facing the abyss. He hesitates to use the word, but on several occasions in the article, he suggests that Trump has the character and attitudes of a fascist.
He writes:
The most frustrating aspect of the last 12 months has been the notion that we have been in a normal, if truly ugly, election cycle, with one extremely colorful and unpredictable figure leading the Republican Party in an otherwise conventional political struggle over policy. It has been clear for months now, it seems to me, that this is a delusion. A far more accurate account of the past year is that an openly proto-fascist cult leader has emerged to forge a popular movement that has taken over one of the major political parties, eroded central norms of democratic life, undermined American democratic institutions, and now stands on the brink of seizing power in Washington. I made this argument at length in April, when Donald Trump was on the brink of securing the nomination. Everything that has happened since has only made my fears more pressing.
I find myself wondering if I have lost my marbles. It seems far too melodramatic. I am an emotional character — I feared that Obama might have thrown the election away in the first debate in 2012 — and there are times in discussions with friends when the catastrophic scenarios we’ve been airing seem like something out of a dystopian mini-series designed for paranoids. Please, therefore, discount the following as the product of an excitable outlier if you see fit. I sure hope you’re right. But as it seems more evident by the day that Donald Trump could very well become the next president of the United States, it is worth simply reiterating the evidence in front of our nose that this republic is in serious danger.
This is what we now know. Donald Trump is the first candidate for president who seems to have little understanding of or reverence for constitutional democracy and presents himself as a future strongman. This begins with his character — if that word could possibly be ascribed to his disturbed, unstable, and uncontrollable psyche. He has revealed himself incapable of treating other people as anything but instruments to his will. He seems to have no close friends, because he can tolerate no equals. He never appears to laugh, because that would cede a recognition to another’s fleeting power over him. He treats his wives and his children as mere extensions of his power, and those who have resisted the patriarch have been exiled, humiliated, or bought off.
His relationship to men — from his school days to the primary campaign — is rooted entirely in dominance and mastery, through bullying, intimidation, and, if necessary, humiliation. His relationship to women is entirely a function of his relationship to men: Women are solely a means to demonstrate his superiority in the alpha-male struggle. Women are to be pursued, captured, used, assaulted, or merely displayed to other men as an indication of his superiority. His response to any difficult relationship is to end it, usually by firing or humiliating or ruining someone. His core, motivating idea is the punishment or mockery of the weak and reverence for the strong. He cannot apologize or accept responsibility for failure. He has long treated the truth as entirely instrumental to his momentary personal interests. Setbacks of any kind can only be assuaged by vindictive, manic revenge.
He has no concept of a non-zero-sum engagement, in which a deal can be beneficial for both sides. A win-win scenario is intolerable to him, because mastery of others is the only moment when he is psychically at peace. (This is one reason why he cannot understand the entire idea of free trade or, indeed, NATO, or the separation of powers.) In any conflict, he cannot ever back down; he must continue to up the ante until the danger to everyone around him is so great as to demand their surrender. From his feckless business deals and billion-dollar debts to his utter indifference to the damage he has done to those institutions unfortunate enough to engage him, he has shown no concern for the interests of other human beings. Just ask the countless people he has casually fired, or the political party he has effectively destroyed. He has violated and eroded the core norms that make liberal democracy possible — because such norms were designed precisely to guard against the kind of tyrannical impulses and pathological narcissism he personifies.
Anyone paying attention knew this before he conquered the Republican Party. Look at what has happened since then. He sees the judicial system as entirely subordinate to his political and personal interests, and impugned a federal judge for his ethnicity. He has accused the Justice Department and FBI of a criminal conspiracy to protect Hillary Clinton. He has refused to accept in advance the results of any election in which he loses. He has openly argued for government persecution of newspapers that oppose him — pledging to open up antitrust prosecution against the Washington Post, for example. He is the first candidate in American history to subject the press pool to mob hatred — “disgusting, disgusting people” — and anti-Semitic poison from his foulest supporters. He is the first candidate in American history to pledge to imprison his election opponent if he wins power. He has mused about using nuclear weapons in regional wars. He has celebrated police powers that openly deploy racial profiling. His favorite foreign leader is a man who murders journalists, commits war crimes, uses xenophobia and warfare to cement his political standing, and believes in the dismemberment of both NATO and the European Union. Nor has he rejected any of his most odious promises during the primary — from torturing prisoners “even if it doesn’t work” to murdering the innocent family members of terror suspects to rounding up several million noncitizens to declaring war on an entire religion, proposing to create a database to monitor its adherents and bar most from entering the country.
We are told we cannot use the term fascist to describe this. I’m at a loss to find a more accurate alternative.
America at the abyss, and the rest of the world is watching.
