ALTERNATIVE FACTS?
THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY
In a way, Donald Trump’s rise to the
presidency was even more amazing than that of Bill
Clinton. He had to overcome negatives galore just to win
the Republican nomination. Twice divorced with one
marriage breaking up over a well-publicized affair, business
shenanigans that left him rich while costing others everything
they had—all sorts of other problems. He did have lots of
name recognition, and there were plenty of people who admired
his success in business and wanted to emulate it (e.g., buying
copies of his book, The Art of the Deal). But, at
first, he seemed a joke candidate. He was a golfing buddy
of Bill Clinton, and called Clinton just before he announced his
run for the presidency. Did he run to disrupt the
Republicans so Hillary could gain the White House? Did he
have a bet with Clinton: I know how you pulled off your
political tricks, and I can do it too? Who knows?
Here are clips of some of those who assured
us Trump had no chance at all:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahkMA6JPOHU
At first, it seemed Trump wouldn’t get far. The Republican field was filled with
solid candidates—so many serious contenders that there had to be
“under card” debates along with debates featuring the
front-runners. Carly Fiorina, Rick
Santorum, Ben Carson all seemed presidential. But much of
the party watched in dismay as, one by one, these candidates
dropped out. It was circular firing squad time
again. Jeb Bush spent millions to defeat Marco Rubio, and
Rubio and Cruz bloodied each other up a lot.
But Trump’s great advantage was the
media. He knew how to give them a show, and that’s what
they wanted. He said outrageous things, or said solid
things in an outrageous way. And the press couldn’t help
themselves. The media gave us all Trump, all the
time. During the primary, three quarters of media coverage
went to Trump, one quarter to all of the other 16 candidates
combined!
In the Republican debates, the moderators
let Trump hog the microphone—because it got them ratings.
The more thoughtful candidates were just too boring. There’s no such thing as bad
publicity, Hollywood figures used to say. That’s
generally not true in politics, but, somehow, Trump’s ability to
draw attention to himself by saying outrageous things ended up
working to his advantage—although he alienated many, many
leading Republicans. Trump got the
nomination, but he had to bring home at least some of the many
“never-Trumpers” if he were to become president.
After winning the nomination, Trump had to
get by Hillary. Did it take a great politician to defeat
her? Well, maybe not. She was about as flawed a
candidate as the Democrats could have put up.
The only things really going for her: a ton of money and
the strong desire of many to see a woman president, flawed or
not. An indication of Hillary’s potential weakness: the
rise of Bernie Sanders. Sanders
wasn’t even a Democrat, but dislike of Hillary was so intense
that, without much in the way of resources, Sanders still had a
chance to beat her. Once again,
media bias played a part. The
networks wanted a Sanders/Hillary grudge match and ignored more
serious candidates. Harvard professor Lawrence
Lessig, who would probably have made a superb president,couldn’t
even get to the debate stage even though the “normal” rules on
who was included would have put him there.
Former Virginia senator and Navy Secretary Jim Webb got
to the stage, but never got a chance to say much at all. Webb was a brilliant man with plenty of
foreign policy expertise and a lot of just plain courage. But
allowing Webb a fair chance on the debate stage would have
ruined the Bernie/Hillary show. Both the media and Democratic
party leaders connived to make sure he wouldn't get be heard.
Webb dropped out of the race in disgust.
When Hillary got the nomination, she once
again had problems within her own party: Sanders supporters that
weren’t too happy. Further, Hillary
made a lot of unforced errors, e.g., referring to Trump
supporters as a “basket of deplorables." That comment
especially played right into Trump's hands.
Here, I think, is the secret of Trump’s
success. Just as Bill Clinton helped create a situation
where women identified with Hillary, Trump created a situation
where millions of people identified with him, and perceived
attacks on him as attacks on them. Millions of working
class Americans were tired of being labeled racists because of
their opposition to policies that were hurting them badly.
When Trump was attacked as a racist, they shrugged: it’s not
true of us; it’s not true of him. Similar with some of
Trump’s other “outrages.”
Trump was particularly effective in
manipulating the media. Media coverage was all negative,
all the time: but it was exactly the right kind of negative for
Trump: negative coverage that actually strengthened his core
support. It's not quite clear whether Trump just
instinctively knows exactly how to provoke the right kind of
antagonism or whether he’s got it planned out. Andrew
Jackson, president from 1829 to 1837 was a very similar
personality type and used a similar method. Historians
still don't know if Jackson calculated things out or if he just
had superb instincts. Whichever, it worked for Jackson, and it
worked for Trump.
Of course, Trumps was walking a tightrope,
pushing the envelope all the time. And there was always the
chance that he'd fall. The media was talking impeachment before
Trump even took office. But, in attacking Trump in the way
they did, Trump’s opponents ruined their own credibility: 65% of
voters think there is a lot of fake news in the mainstream
media. Bad as Trump’s approval rating tended to be through
much of his presidency, congress was liked even less--and the
media even less!
So is/was Trump the president we
deserve? Well, I think he’s at least the president the
media deserves. We got a president who talked often about
“alternative facts.” This seems absurd: facts are facts
aren’t they? Well, not any more:
There’s a joke you may have heard:
There once was a business owner who was
interviewing people for a division manager position. He decided
to select the individual that could answer the question "how
much is 2+2?"
The engineer pulled out his slide rule and
shuffled it back and forth, and finally announced, "It lies
between 3.98 and 4.02".
The mathematician said, "In two hours I can
demonstrate it equals 4 with the following short proof."
The physicist declared, "It's in the
magnitude of 1x101."
The logician paused for a long while and
then said, "This problem is solvable."
The social worker said, "I don't know the
answer, but I am glad that we discussed this important question.
The attorney stated, "In the case of
Svenson vs. the State, 2+2 was declared to be 4."
The trader asked, "Are you buying or
selling?"
The accountant looked at the business owner,
then got out of his chair, went to see if anyone was listening
at the door and pulled the drapes. Then he returned to the
business owner, leaned across the desk and said in a low voice,
"What would you like it to be?"
On all sorts of issues, this is where our
country seems to have gone. Facts are whatever we want
them to be. Truth is whatever we want it to be.
When I make a bad joke, my daughter Lauri will tell me, “That’s not
funny.” I respond: it’s funny because I think it is.
With humor, that’s just fine. It’s a matter
of taste. But with political and economic questions,
thinking so doesn’t make it so.
There’s a wonderful graph in the Babylon
Bee.
It’s always a struggle to adapt to
information that doesn’t feed our need for confirmation
bias. Does the study of history help? Well,
maybe.
Aristotle talked about three kinds of
persuasion: ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos
has to do with the credibility of the speaker/source. Pathos has to do with emotions and
experience. Logos has to do with
reason. The “alternative facts” theme suggests that we have
something of an ethos dilemma: whom do you trust?
History might help here.
History might also help us in figuring out
the “pathos” of alternative sides. And
it can certainly help with the logos.
So—let’s see what we can do with this. We’ve got the MAGA types on the one
hand who thoughtTrump is Making American Great Again. And on the other side were the
Never-Trumpers who hated Trump so much that they blurted out
profanity-laced tirades, not directed just at Trump, but at all
who supported him.
During the last year of the Trump
administration, things went from strange to even stranger.
It looked like Trump had played his hand well and that he was
headed toward re-election. The economy was humming,
unemployment was way down, and real wages for working class
people were going up for the first time since 1973. Trump
was picking up support from a substantial number of blacks and
Hispanics. American troops weren't being sent into needless
wars, and, if not quite what he claimed, the trade deals Trump
negotiated were better than would had existed previously.
The attempt to "Bork" Kavanagh failed.
But then some real craziness. The
Mueller probe not only came up with nothing, but "probing the
probe" showed that Obama administration officials may have
proceeded illegally in initiating the probe in the first
place. Instead of giving up, the Democrats in the House
switched charges. Instead of Russian collusion, the
accusation was that Trump used a call to Ukrainian officials
improperly for an investigation that would damage a potential
rival, Joe Biden.
Well, the dirt was certainly there.
Joe's son Hunter had a position on the board of Burisma
Holdings, a Ukrainian company. The younger Biden was
apparently getting $50,000 a month for serving in a position for
which he had no expertise. And, as far as we know, he
never even visited Ukraine. Why the high pay? Joe
Biden boasted publicly that he had threatened to stop $1 billion
in aid to Ukraine if a prosecutor investigating Burisma wasn't
fired. Now this was apparent corruption on Biden's
part--no great surprise to those of us who have followed Biden
since the Bork hearings and before. And it's hard to
figure out what would be wrong with asking Ukrainian officials
to investigate. Still, Trump got impeached over the
issue. Not surprisingly, the Republican-controlled senate
wasn't having any part of it, and Trump was acquitted 52/48 on
one charge, 53/47 on the charge of obstructing Congress.
It was an odd impeachment--and (once again) note that 2020 was
an election year. Don't like Trump? Just come up
with a better alternative.
But was there one? There were lots of
Democratic hopefuls in the early debates, but only one with a
really enthusiastic following: Bernie Sanders. Sanders had
a solid chance of capturing the nomination, but the Democratic
establishment just didn't want that. Sanders' avowed
socialism would make him a sure loser, they thought--and so they
pulled out all the stops to engineer the nomination of a sure
loser: Joe Biden.
Now how Joe Biden has survived politically
as long as he has is something of a mystery to me. He was
one of the Democratic candidates for president back in
1988--until his gaffes caught up with him. Conservative
commentator Dan Bongino recently featured these news
clips related to Biden's 1988 campaign. Note that
in 1988, the mainstream media (including CBS, ABC and Newsweek)
still felt a responsibility to thoroughly vet candidates whether
they were Republican or Democrat--and Biden simply didn't pass
muster. The final line is devastating: voters are going to
have to decide if Biden is dishonest or dumb.
Biden hasn't improved with age. He was
awful on the Democratic debate stage, and he's still prone to
gaffes. Telling a Black interviewer, "If you have a
problem figuring out whether you're for Trump or me than you
ain't Black" is both patronizing and stupid--the same kind of
incautious remark that had led to Biden's 1988 flame-out.
But then the potential game-changer:
COVID-19--a near-miraculous gift to Biden, the Democrats, and
the media: maybe. Fairly or unfairly, presidents get
blamed for disasters on their watch, and the COVID-19 deaths
were on Trump's watch. To make matters worse for Trump,
the lock-downs imposed to contain the disease threw the economy
into a tailspin. There went Trump's best Trump card: his
ability to claim he had made things economically better for all
Americans.
And yet, at first, COVID-19 or no, Trump was
still on track for re-election--until the George Floyd
killing. The response to the killing? Peaceful
demonstrations. Violent demonstrations. Looting.
Vandalism. Tearing down of statues. Calls to eliminate the
police. A six-block area of a major city was seized by
protestors and held for weeks. Jewish-owned businesses
burned. Black-owned businesses burned. Liberals, conservatives
and moderates were fired for questioning the tenets of the new
group-think.
Now one would think there would be a
backlash to all this that would help Trump. What's
happened, though, is the race-card, a card that seemed worn out
from overuse, had became a high card once again.
In my Summer 2020 version of the class, I
finished the class (and this lecture) with a question:
Will it [the race card] get Trumped in November? Or will we have a new president whose clever campaign strategy consisted mostly of just lying low. "Joe Biden is stuck in his basement," says a Washington Post opinion. "It's exactly where he needs to be." Late-night comedian Stephen Colbert agreed. "He's an unstoppable force, as long as he never leaves his basement."
Either way, the 2020 election will give us we the president we deserve.
At that point, the election was too close to
call--and, in a weird way, it still is.
As the election results came in, it seemed that Trump had done it again. Here's a late broadcast from election night. No clear winner at the end of the broadcast, but note that Trump was up by 244-243 in the states that had been "called"--and that's even with Arizona called *very* prematurely for Biden--though Georgia was called (prematurely) for Trump. The remaining states were Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. In all three, Trump looked the likely winner. But in all three, vote-counting suddenly stopped. Poll watchers were allegedly told to go home. Voting resumed, and, all of a sudden, in all three states (plus Georgia) tens of thousands of Biden votes suddenly appeared, and, when the dust had cleared, Biden seemed to have won.
Of course, in the 2000 election, supporters
of Democratic candidate Al Gore wouldn't accept the results and
spent months insisting that the Florida results had to be
investigated. Not until the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision
a month later did the Democrats have to acknowledge the Bush
victory.
In the Biden/Trump race, though, the media
went to work supporting the notion that any challenge to
apparent result was somehow undermining American
democracy.
Trump supporters wanted investigation of
what happened in Detroit, Michigan; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania;
Atlanta, Georgia; Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Maricopa County,
Arizona (where Phoenix is). These are the places where the
vote counting stopped and started again and where there were
massive flips in vote totals toward Biden.
Should they have gotten their vote
audits? Probably. Auditing the vote might have
helped a lot in assuring Americans about election of
integrity. But, over and over again, the courts refused to
insist on audits: not because their wasn't evidence of fraud,
but because, said the courts, those bringing the lawsuits had no
standing to sue.
Not surprisingly, many of Trump's supporters
were angry, and (also not surprisingly) Trump played on that
anger. No, we should not accept the election results, said
Trump at a January 6 rally.
Trump's speech is well worth your
time. It lays out clearly Trump's grievances and the
grievances of his supporters. It also lays out clearly
what Trump aimed for in his presidency and what he had
accomplished--or thought he had accomplished.
https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2021-01-13/transcript-of-trumps-speech-at-rally-before-us-capitol-riot
Trump called explicitly for non-violent protest.
"I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard."
The conclusion of his speech isn't anything
like a call to riot:
Our exciting adventures and boldest endeavors have not yet begun. My fellow Americans, for our movement, for our children, and for our beloved country.
And I say this despite all that’s happened. The best is yet to come.
So we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I love Pennsylvania Avenue. And we’re going to the Capitol, and we’re going to try and give.
The Democrats are hopeless, they never vote for anything. Not even one vote. But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones because the strong ones don’t need any of our help. We’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.
So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.
I want to thank you all. God bless you and God Bless America.
Thank you all for being here. This is incredible. Thank you very much. Thank you.
But, whether he knew it or not, Trump was
playing with fire.
It's important to remember that political
violence from the left was a major problem from the first day of
the Trump administration. Take a look at the violent
anti-Trump protests the day Trump was inaugurated.
Antifa called for more. Here's an Antifa flyer from
January 2023. There were similar flyers in 2017.
After the George Floyd killing, Antifa and
BLM took advantage of the situation and escalated their violent
attacks. Every day, there were new stories of looting,
arson, attacks on police stations, attacks on federal
court-houses, and, sometimes, murder. Billions of dollars
in property damage--covered, amusingly, by reporters telling us
protests were "most peaceful" as building in the background
burned.
Political violence on one side will almost
always lead to political violence on the other, and it's no
great surprise that some of Trump's supporters marched into the
Capitol building itself. Now this was stupid and
unfortunate in its results.
Though there were only weeks to go in his
presidency, the Democrats in Congress decided it was time to
impeach Trump once again, claiming he had incited his followers
to riot. The clock ran out. Biden was
inaugurated--but impeachment went on anyway. Trump gets
the distinction of being the only president to be impeached
twice, the only president to be acquitted twice, and the only
president to be impeached after he had left office!
Now all this would be amusing except that,
as was the case with the Nixon Watergate situation, distractions
of this type get in the way of effective governance.
So why are all these bad things happening to
the good American people, and why are we divided more greatly
than at any time since the Civil War? More important, is
there any hope for America?
Well, this is where we came in at the start
of this class with America facing a time of crisis that
threatened the survival of the nation. I noted that, as we faced
this crisis, Lincoln
called America, the "last, best hope of earth."
But, as Lincoln himself knew, it's not America that's the true "last, best hope of earth," but something else entirely. And, as I have noted earlier in the course, it is to that something else, the true, last, best hope of the world that Americans have always turned in time of crisis. It is that great hope that got us through the Revolution, through the Civil War, through the Depression, and through World War II. And if in our current crises we as individuals and as a nation look to something beyond America, if we had look once again to that one great hope, the true "last, great hope" of the earth, then our country will perhaps once again have been closer to what our founders hoped it would be, a city on a hill, and a light to the world.