From The Wall Street Journal comes this remarkable take on the various pronouncements of Donald Trump: Hey, where’s our sense of humor? Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. in his November 11 WSJ column, argues that many if not most of the things Donald Trump said during the campaign were basically jokes, or quips, or wisecracks that went over the heads of the too-serious media. He quotes venture capitalist Peter Thiel suggesting Trump should be taken “seriously, not literally.”
For example, Jenkins says this about the Billy Bush tape: ”Ninety-nine percent of America that doesn’t work in a media company in midtown recognized instantly that it wasn’t two rapists discussing the finer points of sexual assault. It was one guy clowning for another on the subject of celebrity sex appeal.”
Hmm. I wonder if Jenkins would have characterized it as harmless clowning if Barack Obama had said during his campaign…
"I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it…I did try and fuck her. She was married,…and I moved on her very heavily…I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there. And she was married…then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look…I’ve got to use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her…you know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait…and when you’re a star, they let you do it, you can do anything….grab them by the pussy…you can do anything.”
Probably not, I’m thinking. I think his reaction – and the reaction of fellow travelers in hypocrisy like Hannity, Giuliani, and Gingrich – would have been neck-bulging, vein-popping apoplexy, and I suspect their rage would have had racial overtones. For Trump, though, it’s just a joke the rest of us don’t quite get.
Or how about this? What if Obama said: “You know, it really doesn’t matter what the media write as long as you’ve got a young, and beautiful piece of ass.”
Would Jenkins say the media failed to read between the lines and grasp the humor in what Obama was saying? Nah.
Here are just a few other things Trump has said that Jenkins might have failed to see the humor in if Obama or Clinton had said them:
"My IQ is one of the highest — and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure; it’s not your fault.”
"I’m just thinking to myself right now, we should just cancel the election and just give it to [me], right?
“I could stand in the middles of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
An example Jenkins cited to illustrate his hypothesis was Trump’s remark about John McCain: “I like people who weren’t captured.” Jenkins writes: “It was disrespectful, yes. It was also a joke; a wisecrack, offered in response to Sen. McCain’s equally flippant dismissal of Trump supporters as ‘crazies.’
Maybe so. I doubt it, but maybe so. But imagine if Hillary Clinton had said that. My guess is that Jenkins et.al. would not have characterized it as a joke, a wisecrack, or even as merely disrespectful. I suspect they might have wrapped themselves in the nearest flag and gotten quite huffy about her disdain for a military hero. Just a guess.
How about if Hillary Clinton had said, “I know more about ISIS than the generals do, believe me.” What!? You!? You know more than the generals?! You, a girl?!” I don’t think Jenkins and the boys would have characterized that boast as harmless Clintonian japery.
I wonder if Jenkins considers the following an example of Trump’s jokey hyperbole: “Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty, in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends, and her donors.” What would Jenkins have said if Clinton or Obama had resurrected this ancient anti-Semitic trope of the sort that was quite popular in 1930s Germany. Would he have called out the idea for the fantasy that it is and solemnly castigated the person who advanced it for being a Jew-baiting demagogue?
The point: Even if we give Jenkins the benefit of the doubt here and conclude that everyone should have done a better job of reading between Trump’s lines, the problem remains: He would not have chided us for failing to do the same for Clinton or Obama. He would have taken them absolutely literally.
The double standard applied to these candidates in this election, and not just by the right, was breathtaking. We had Trump the phony “university” swindler, Trump the deadbeat who put multiple businesses in bankruptcy and left investors and vendors holding the bag, Trump the playboy who went through glam wives and lived extravagantly large while pleading poverty to avoid paying federal taxes, Trump the admirer of the KGB operative whose country has nuclear missiles pointed at American cities, and so many others – things he said and did any one of which, if said/done by his opponent, would have buried her forever. Clinton’s sin was to use the wrong email server. Gasp, said the chorus of critics who didn’t really know what an email server was.
The media (and pollsters) did get one thing right, though. They predicted that Clinton would get slightly more votes than Trump, and that’s what happened. The great previously undetected uprising of the working class actually amounted to a bit less than half the electorate.
Friday, November 11, 2016
Wednesday, November 9, 2016
The Electorate Throws a Tantrum. The Establishment Abides.
If the idea was to blow up the Washington establishment and show its members who’s boss, it failed miserably, since just about everyone who was in power before the election, still is. The furious-with-the-power-structure faction of the electorate sent business-as-usual incumbents back to Washington in droves. In their only major trade-out, they put into office a fool who knows nothing of government, economics, or foreign affairs and who has great disdain for minority groups too numerous to mention. Of course, it never was about throwing the bums out. It was about making America great again; and by “great again” they seem to be referring to a time when women knew their place and blacks, gays, and other minorities didn’t compete with decent white folks for the good jobs.
There is always a segment of the population that has an unspecific sense of malaise -- who yearn for change of some kind, no matter how unfocused -- and national elections are just the thing for that, since they are, by definition, about change. It doesn’t seem to matter that times are pretty good, as they are now – general prosperity in the form of full employment or close to it, savings accounts thriving in financial markets, negligible inflation, low-interest debt. There remains a free-floating hostility for a variety of bogeymen, and you can round up the usual suspects – the establishment, Wall Street, the wealthy, big government, lawmakers that don’t “get anything done,” and various minority groups. These folks are encouraged to see themselves as victims of “the system,” and that, apparently is more appealing to them than enjoying their prosperity and general good fortune. And so, change. It’s so desperately needed as to warrant the selection of a knowledge-free blowhard as its agent.
The selection was made that much easier, that much more justifiable, by the dark reputation of his opponent – a reputation that was created largely out of thin air through the invention of a series of fictitious “scandals” ginned up by people who definitely had skin in the game – namely, unrepentant political opponents who coveted the power she and her party had and would say and do anything to get it
And so, Donald Trump. If any actual change is in the offing because of all this, it surely will be for the worse, particularly for this constituency, since the most likely results of Trump’s economic ideas, insofar as they can be deciphered, will be recession and job loss. But, no matter. That constituency was able to get its rocks off, as it were, and that, apparently, is what counts. Results? We don’t care about no stinkin’ results.
Meanwhile, returning to haunt our dreams are the acolytes of Saint Bernie Sanders, insisting, incredibly, that Donald Trump is the fault of Hillary Clinton and her adherents, because they renounced Sanders who would have been the more effective Trump opponent. The polls showed that, they say; but Sanders was deprived of the nomination by shenanigans within the Democratic National Committee.
This is truly delusional, First, do we need to talk about what polling tells us? Second, the actual numbers, as opposed to poll results, are implacable: Clinton got 3.6 million more primary votes than Sanders. You can’t rig that. It tells us she was a more broadly supported candidate in the general election than Sanders would have been. In this election, rationality and decency lost to irrationality, ignorance, and hatred, and the loss would have been just as bad with Sanders if not worse. Also, not helpful: obsession with the "establishment" (whatever that is) and continually characterizing Clinton as being part of it and therefore undesirable; naively swallowing, hook, line, and sinker the phony Clinton "scandals" ginned up by Republicans; and pointlessly switching a vote that would have gone to the Democrat to one of the off-party candidates.
The guess here is that Trump never really wanted or expected to be president – that it was just another ego trip, a place from which he could spout his half-basked theories about everything while his toadies nodded enthusiastically, and he could bellow orders at them to get me this and go fetch that. Now, however, he’s like the dog that caught the garbage truck. OMG, what now? Same with his constituents.
There is always a segment of the population that has an unspecific sense of malaise -- who yearn for change of some kind, no matter how unfocused -- and national elections are just the thing for that, since they are, by definition, about change. It doesn’t seem to matter that times are pretty good, as they are now – general prosperity in the form of full employment or close to it, savings accounts thriving in financial markets, negligible inflation, low-interest debt. There remains a free-floating hostility for a variety of bogeymen, and you can round up the usual suspects – the establishment, Wall Street, the wealthy, big government, lawmakers that don’t “get anything done,” and various minority groups. These folks are encouraged to see themselves as victims of “the system,” and that, apparently is more appealing to them than enjoying their prosperity and general good fortune. And so, change. It’s so desperately needed as to warrant the selection of a knowledge-free blowhard as its agent.
The selection was made that much easier, that much more justifiable, by the dark reputation of his opponent – a reputation that was created largely out of thin air through the invention of a series of fictitious “scandals” ginned up by people who definitely had skin in the game – namely, unrepentant political opponents who coveted the power she and her party had and would say and do anything to get it
And so, Donald Trump. If any actual change is in the offing because of all this, it surely will be for the worse, particularly for this constituency, since the most likely results of Trump’s economic ideas, insofar as they can be deciphered, will be recession and job loss. But, no matter. That constituency was able to get its rocks off, as it were, and that, apparently, is what counts. Results? We don’t care about no stinkin’ results.
Meanwhile, returning to haunt our dreams are the acolytes of Saint Bernie Sanders, insisting, incredibly, that Donald Trump is the fault of Hillary Clinton and her adherents, because they renounced Sanders who would have been the more effective Trump opponent. The polls showed that, they say; but Sanders was deprived of the nomination by shenanigans within the Democratic National Committee.
This is truly delusional, First, do we need to talk about what polling tells us? Second, the actual numbers, as opposed to poll results, are implacable: Clinton got 3.6 million more primary votes than Sanders. You can’t rig that. It tells us she was a more broadly supported candidate in the general election than Sanders would have been. In this election, rationality and decency lost to irrationality, ignorance, and hatred, and the loss would have been just as bad with Sanders if not worse. Also, not helpful: obsession with the "establishment" (whatever that is) and continually characterizing Clinton as being part of it and therefore undesirable; naively swallowing, hook, line, and sinker the phony Clinton "scandals" ginned up by Republicans; and pointlessly switching a vote that would have gone to the Democrat to one of the off-party candidates.
The guess here is that Trump never really wanted or expected to be president – that it was just another ego trip, a place from which he could spout his half-basked theories about everything while his toadies nodded enthusiastically, and he could bellow orders at them to get me this and go fetch that. Now, however, he’s like the dog that caught the garbage truck. OMG, what now? Same with his constituents.
Saturday, November 5, 2016
Voodoo Economics Again
The alt-right folks, the white supremacists, the swastika lovers are all obviously a lost cause when it comes to dissuading people from supporting Donald Trump, but what about the more rational people in the Trump camp? If they can’t be moved by the fact that their guy boasted about, and may well have committed, sexual assault, withheld payment from family-business contractors who did work for him, then dared them to sue him, ran several businesses into bankruptcy and left investors holding the bag, ran a fraudulent “university” that did nothing but separate people from their money, never stops whining that the system is stacked against him and his troubles are everybody else’s fault, has refused to disclose his tax returns – documents that may well show that he salutes the flag of an adversary because of his business ties to it, mounted a blatantly racist and totally false “birther” campaign targeting the President of the United States, and has demonstrated a total lack of understanding of the competing interests at play in the Middle East and made a fool of himself advocating military tactics he knows nothing about…
…if they can’t be persuaded by all of that (and so much more) – if their weird man crush remains intact – then maybe a discussion of money – their money – will do the trick
I assume that pro-Trump financial advisors are telling their clients what’s about to happen to them if Trump wins the election. Which is, they’re going to lose a lot of their money. As Heather Long of CNN Money put it: “Trump is the king of unpredictability (something Wall Street hates), and he's campaigned on an anti-trade agenda, which wouldn't be good for big business.”
It may be that markets are already pricing in the possibility of a Trump win – as of this writing, the Dow has lost ground for nine straight days, the longest decline since the 2008 crisis – but still, most Wall Streeters predict a sell-off in the event of a Trump victory. Their predictions range from a low of 8-percent to 15-percent or more. The reason, and it’s a pretty straightforward one: Clinton, no matter how loudly Republicans howl about what they perceive as her anti-business bent, represents the continuation of a business and economic environment in which the Dow has more than doubled in value, inflation has remained negligible, and bellwether industries – e.g., automotive – have prospered as never before. In other words, she represents business as usual. Investors like that.
Trump represents who knows what. And investors don’t like that. Besides his general criticism of the regulatory environment in the U.S., and of the way trade deals have been negotiated, he hasn’t said much. One thing he has said, in keeping with the tough-buy, us-against-them stance his followers find so appealing, is that he’d impose a 45-percent tariff on Chinese imports. That’s an idea that Michael Schuman, in an article in the New York Times, argued, “would set off a cascade of global economic consequences, mostly negative.” Consequences that could well include a trade war and a recession, neither of which would be good for American business and job prospects.
Another thing Trump has said is that the numbers are “phony.” Because a large part of his pitch to his followers is that the economy is in terrible shape – still in the recession that started in 2007 -- and that he alone can fix it, he simply denies reality. The reality is that over 15-million jobs have been added since 2010, the unemployment rate is half of what it was in 2009, and average hourly wages jumped 2.8 percent, to $25.92, in October from a year earlier, the biggest such increase since 2008. He has also repeated the wild fiction that the unemployment rate is higher than what the Labor Department says it is; much higher, he tells people – more like 40-percent. If that were actually the case, we would probably have noticed it, since during the Great Depression unemployment peaked at just under 25-percent, and their were bread lines, soup kitchens, Hoovervilles, people selling apples on street corners, and caravans of “Oakies” headed west in search of economic salvation. There were no automobile manufacturers setting sales records as they are now. (It must be all those unemployed folks who are buying all those cars and pick-ups.)
It’s not surprising that 370 economists, including eight Nobel Prize winners, have signed a letter denouncing him for peddling “magical thinking and conspiracy theories over sober assessments of feasible economic policy options.”
In the years since the recession ended and the recovery began, investors – including millions of Trump supporters whose life savings are in stock-market-heavy 401K accounts -- have seen their investments grow and have prospered greatly. Now, apparently, they’re about to vote to bring that to end and get things headed in the opposite direction.
…if they can’t be persuaded by all of that (and so much more) – if their weird man crush remains intact – then maybe a discussion of money – their money – will do the trick
I assume that pro-Trump financial advisors are telling their clients what’s about to happen to them if Trump wins the election. Which is, they’re going to lose a lot of their money. As Heather Long of CNN Money put it: “Trump is the king of unpredictability (something Wall Street hates), and he's campaigned on an anti-trade agenda, which wouldn't be good for big business.”
It may be that markets are already pricing in the possibility of a Trump win – as of this writing, the Dow has lost ground for nine straight days, the longest decline since the 2008 crisis – but still, most Wall Streeters predict a sell-off in the event of a Trump victory. Their predictions range from a low of 8-percent to 15-percent or more. The reason, and it’s a pretty straightforward one: Clinton, no matter how loudly Republicans howl about what they perceive as her anti-business bent, represents the continuation of a business and economic environment in which the Dow has more than doubled in value, inflation has remained negligible, and bellwether industries – e.g., automotive – have prospered as never before. In other words, she represents business as usual. Investors like that.
Trump represents who knows what. And investors don’t like that. Besides his general criticism of the regulatory environment in the U.S., and of the way trade deals have been negotiated, he hasn’t said much. One thing he has said, in keeping with the tough-buy, us-against-them stance his followers find so appealing, is that he’d impose a 45-percent tariff on Chinese imports. That’s an idea that Michael Schuman, in an article in the New York Times, argued, “would set off a cascade of global economic consequences, mostly negative.” Consequences that could well include a trade war and a recession, neither of which would be good for American business and job prospects.
Another thing Trump has said is that the numbers are “phony.” Because a large part of his pitch to his followers is that the economy is in terrible shape – still in the recession that started in 2007 -- and that he alone can fix it, he simply denies reality. The reality is that over 15-million jobs have been added since 2010, the unemployment rate is half of what it was in 2009, and average hourly wages jumped 2.8 percent, to $25.92, in October from a year earlier, the biggest such increase since 2008. He has also repeated the wild fiction that the unemployment rate is higher than what the Labor Department says it is; much higher, he tells people – more like 40-percent. If that were actually the case, we would probably have noticed it, since during the Great Depression unemployment peaked at just under 25-percent, and their were bread lines, soup kitchens, Hoovervilles, people selling apples on street corners, and caravans of “Oakies” headed west in search of economic salvation. There were no automobile manufacturers setting sales records as they are now. (It must be all those unemployed folks who are buying all those cars and pick-ups.)
It’s not surprising that 370 economists, including eight Nobel Prize winners, have signed a letter denouncing him for peddling “magical thinking and conspiracy theories over sober assessments of feasible economic policy options.”
In the years since the recession ended and the recovery began, investors – including millions of Trump supporters whose life savings are in stock-market-heavy 401K accounts -- have seen their investments grow and have prospered greatly. Now, apparently, they’re about to vote to bring that to end and get things headed in the opposite direction.
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