Bill McMorris:

The Minnesota Democratic Party has suspended a spokesman for calling for violence against Republicans even as two GOP candidates have been assaulted in suspected politically motivated attacks.

The Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party has suspended communications staffer William Davis for one week without pay after making a Facebook post joking that Democrats would “bring [Republicans] to the guillotine” on Nov. 7, the day after the midterm elections. Minnesota Republican Party chairman Jennifer Carnahan said the suspension was not enough, calling for his immediate firing in the aftermath of separate attacks against Republican candidates. She said she has been subjected to numerous death threats during her tenure as the state party leader and that death threats are no laughing matter.

“The overt hatred and violence that has become prevalent from many Democrats towards Republicans in recent times is unlawful, unacceptable, and downright scary,” she said in an email. “Yes, we have free speech and the right to peacefully assemble, but these words and actions by the left have gone too far. … He should have been terminated immediately.”

DFL officials did not respond to request for comment.

The suspension came days after Minnesota state representative Sarah Anderson was punched in the arm after spotting a man destroying Republican yard signs. She said the attack left her scared, and her attacker only desisted when she fled to her car and threw it in reverse.

“It was just insane. He was charging at me, saying, ‘Why don’t you go kill yourself?'” Anderson told the Washington Free Beacon. “To have someone physically coming after you and attacking you is just disheartening.”

The Plymouth Police Department investigation into Rep. Anderson’s alleged assault remains ongoing. A spokeswoman confirmed the department had identified a suspect, but declined further comment.

Anderson was not the only GOP candidate attacked. First-time state representative candidate Shane Mekeland suffered a concussion after getting sucker punched while speaking with constituents at a restaurant in Benton County. Mekeland told the Free Beacon he has suffered memory loss—forgetting Rep. Anderson’s name at one point in the interview—and doctors tell him he will have a four-to-six week recovery time ahead of him. He said he was cold cocked while sitting at a high top table at a local eatery and hit his head on the floor.

“I was so overtaken by surprise and shock and if this is the new norm, this is not what I signed up for,” he said.

Benton County Sheriff Troy Heck told the Free Beacon that his department has interviewed the alleged assailant. Investigators are awaiting medical records about the extent of Mekeland’s injuries before referring the case to the local district attorney’s office. He expects those results to come in the next week.

Mekeland said he was disappointed that he had not seen Democrats condemn the attack against him, but was floored to see the party take such a light approach to Davis’s comments.

“He’s a political staffer so you’d think if anybody should know boundaries, I think that’d be it,” he said.

Anderson was equally harsh about the DFL’s response, calling it “incredibly irresponsible.”

“This is exactly what incites people to violence. … It’s why you have somebody who goes and attacks me on Sunday just because we have different political beliefs,” she said.

The alleged assaults have both candidates weighing changes in their approach to campaigning in closing days of the race. Mekeland was unable to leave the house to knock on doors due to his sensitivity to sunlight on Tuesday. He said he and his volunteers will only travel in pairs for the rest of the campaign to ensure they are not alone during such visits, which will limit the ground they cover. Anderson said she has gotten offers from her husband and other volunteers to escort her around the district. She pledged to keep knocking on doors until Election Day.

“I refuse to be bullied and intimidated,” she said. “You can’t let this stop you from reaching out and talking to voters.”

Not only are Republicans subject to physical violence. The Bangor Daily News reports:

A threatening letter sent to the home of Republican Sen. Susan Collins that claimed to contain deadly ricin specifically mentioned her vote to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, her husband said.

Thomas Daffron, who opened the letter Monday, said the writer claimed the letter was tainted with ricin residue.

Collins, who was in Washington at the time, told WABI-TV that she learned of the letter in photos sent from her husband. Daffron and the couple’s Labrador retriever, Pepper, were both quarantined for a time. …

Collins and her staff have been subjected to threats over her decision to back Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court.

“I will not live in fear. I will not be intimidated. I’m going to continue to do what I think is right for the people of the state whom I work very hard for, and for our nation,” she said.

Earlier this month, Kelley Paul, wife of U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R–Kentucky), wrote for CNN …

An open letter to Senator Cory Booker:

It’s nine o’clock at night, and as I watch out the window, a sheriff’s car slowly drives past my home. I am grateful that they have offered to do extra patrols, as someone just posted our home address, and Rand’s cell number, on the internet — all part of a broader effort to intimidate and threaten Republican members of Congress and their families. I now keep a loaded gun by my bed. Our security systems have had to be expanded. I have never felt this way in my life

In the last 18 months, our family has experienced violence and threats of violence at a horrifying level. I will never forget the morning of the shooting at the congressional baseball practice, the pure relief and gratitude that flooded me when I realized that Rand was okay.

He was not okay last November, when a violent and unstable man attacked him from behind while he was working in our yard, breaking six ribs and leaving him with lung damage and multiple bouts of pneumonia. Kentucky’s secretary of state, Alison Lundergan Grimes, recently joked about it in a speech. MSNBC commentator Kasie Hunt laughingly said on air that Rand’s assault was one of her “favorite stories.” Cher, Bette Midler, and others have lauded his attacker on Twitter. I hope that these women never have to watch someone they love struggle to move or even breathe for months on end.

Earlier this week, Rand was besieged in the airport by activists “getting up in his face,” as you, Senator Booker, encouraged them to do a few months ago. Preventing someone from moving forward, thrusting your middle finger in their face, screaming vitriol — is this the way to express concern or enact change? Or does it only incite unstable people to violence, making them feel that assaulting a person is somehow politically justifiable?

Senator Booker, Rand has worked with you to co-sponsor criminal justice reform bills. He respects you, and so do I. I would call on you to retract your statement. I would call on you to condemn violence, the leaking of elected officials’ personal addresses (our address was leaked from a Senate directory given only to senators), and the intimidation and threats that are being hurled at them and their families.

Donald Trump will naturally be blamed for this. But how many Democrats have been assaulted or threatened by Republicans based on Trump’s words or any other motivation? Were any Democrats shot by a disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporter last year? Were any Minnesota Democrats punched in the head?

So where does this go next? Someone — a candidate, a volunteer for a candidate, a supporter or an opponent of any of the three — is going to get killed next. Election Day is in 19 days.

Giancarlo Sopo writes in USA Today:

Cuba’s socialist revolution was supposed to work for workers — like my grandparents who lived in Miami during Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship. In January 1959, just two weeks after Fidel Castro seized power, they returned to the island to care for my grandmother’s ailing mother. For the next 20 years, they remained prisoners in their own country.

As Cuba’s political and economic situation worsened, my grandfather told a friend he wanted to return to the United States. Someone overheard the conversation and reported him to the authorities. For this, the Castro regime threw him in jail. He was later stripped of his job and salary as an accountant and assigned to feed zoo animals. In addition to the emotional distress it caused, this made my family’s financial circumstances even more precarious.

To understand my grandparents’ desperation to flee socialism, imagine leaving everything behind and starting anew at almost 60 years old.

I was born in Miami a little after my family was able to return to America — when President Jimmy Carter allowed travel restrictions to lapse. Growing up, a framed photo of my parents with President Ronald Reagan was a mainstay in the living room of our modest duplex. Yet, during the first election I was able to vote, I served as a precinct captain for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Four years later, I knocked on doors in New Hampshire for then-Sen. Barack Obama. In 2016, my wife and I drove 14 hours to volunteer for Hillary Clinton and this June, we marched in support of immigrant families.

The popularity of ‘democratic socialism’

Despite my working-class immigrant roots, I am concerned by the popularity of socialism within my party. On the night of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory in New York, I thought her use of the term was a misnomer. Then I began studying the views of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the rapidly growing national organization she belongs to, and was disturbed by what I learned.

Like those of yesteryear, today’s socialists believe the government should nationalize major industries, propose eliminating private ownership of companies, and reject profits. In other words, democratic socialism is a lot like the system my family fled, except its proponents promise to be nicer when seizing your business.

When I confronted some progressive friends about this, they initially dismissed my concerns. After sharing some articles with them, the conversation shifted to “they just want us to be more like the Nordic countries” and “they’re not like real socialists!” Both are reductionist, self-delusions to avoid confronting difficult truths.

The latter is a particularly absurd fallacy because it requires one to believe that adults who willfully join socialist organizations, sound like socialists and call themselves socialists are not what they claim to be.

Claims of “Nordic socialism” are also largely exaggerated. As Jostein Skaar, of Oslo Economics, told me, “I would stress that the Norwegian economic system is capitalistic, heavily influenced by the U.S. and U.K.”

This is probably why DSA argues that the Nordic model is not good enough.

The ideological counterparts of America’s democratic socialists are likelier to be found to our south than in northern Europe. For instance, Cuba — where the state controls three-fourths of the economy, limits private-sector activity, and employs the majority of workers — is clearly more representative of DSA’s economic vision than Denmark, where 89 percent of the wealth is privately owned and seven out of 10 Danes work in the private sector.

Moreover, as an investigation by Transparency International revealed, the Venezuelan government owns at least 511 companies — resulting in a state-owned enterprises per-capita ratio that is more than three times greater than all of Scandinavia’s combined.

As someone who spent years defending Democrats from “socialista” charges, I understand why people roll their eyes when Cuba and Venezuela are mentioned alongside democratic socialism, but to reject the comparison simply because we don’t like those countries’ outcomes misses the point of why they turned out the way they did. I’m under no illusion that increased access to health care and education will turn us into the Venezuelan capital Caracas, but it’s foolish to believe that democratic socialists — who promise to end capitalism — would be satisfied with Medicare for all, if given the reins of power.

This must never happen. The descendants of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels should have no place in the party of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. Given its horrific record of human suffering, it would be a moral disgrace for Democrats to embrace socialism just to win elections, as some suggest. Those who use the blitheful ignorance of many for the political gain of a few deserve to lose. Indeed, if socialism represents the future of the Democratic Party, that’s a dystopia no American should want to be a part of.

Devin Stewart:

Like most Democrats, I reacted to the stunning 2016 election of Donald Trump with a combination of confusion and dread. After all, Hillary Clinton was the favorite and, to Democrats like me, a Trump victory seemed to portend certain economic disaster, nuclear war, and pretty much the end of America as we knew it.

But now nearly two years into his administration, Trump has presided over a “winning streak” that includes a booming economy and stock market, an unemployment level at a nearly 50-year low, two Supreme Court appointments, no new foreign wars or domestic terrorist attacks emanating from abroad, a significant degree of progress on trade relations with Canada and Mexico, a “needed reset” on the China relationship, and the prospect of peace on the Korean Peninsula.

Perhaps it is time that even his opponents reconsider Trump. Does Trump have a strategy that we can describe? Is Trump a return of Richard Nixon, of Ronald Reagan, or of something else entirely? After several months of watching the news without gaining any answers, I finally canceled my cable subscription and sought out other sources. I found some insights in unexpected places.

Trump’s presidency marks a return to realpolitik and great power politics. No one knows what goes on in Trump’s mind or if even he believes he has a strategy. What matters is what Trump does, so this essay looks at his actions, considers the bias of his critics, and seeks a new way to understand his policies. It considers the possibility that Trump has a method to his madness.

The first clue toward understanding this new era was the way in which American media covered Trump’s approach toward North Korea, a country I have watched closely for 20 years as an Asia specialist.  North Korea is an urgent nuclear threat to the United States, as President Barack Obama warned Trump during their famous meeting after the election. Kim Jong Un subsequently accelerated his missile development and demonstrated weapons that could reach the U.S. mainland. During the fall of 2017, my colleagues and I laughed nervously about the prospect of nuclear war — given Trump’s threats earlier that summer to meet North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” and at the U.N. General Assembly to “totally destroy” Kim’s regime.

A year after those hyperbolic threats, Trump has just finished bragging at the U.N. General Assembly about how he had made significant progress in diplomacy with North Korea — even some “skeptics” agree. Overall, however, the press remains skeptical about Trump’s efforts with North Korea. It blames Trump for recklessly escalating the rhetoric and then blames him for meeting Kim in Singapore for diplomatic talks and getting “played.” After that meeting, the press predictably slammed Trump for not getting North Korea to immediately denuclearize, an unrealistic goal.

Of course, every president experiences fierce and sometimes unfair press criticism. They all feel quite persecuted by the press and frequently complain about their treatment. But Trump’s adversarial relationship with the press seems of a different type. He has challenged the press directly, even labeled them the enemy of the people. In response, much of the mainstream press seems to have adopted a certain smugness in the way that they consistently denigrate not just the president’s policies, but also his competence and fitness to be president. In contrast to the tone of press criticism of Obama, the mainstream media seems absolutely certain that they are smarter than Trump. In other words, they are smug. So, despite a radical change in U.S.-North Korea relations, the tone of the press coverage remains highly negative.

But the president’s approach has a clear logic. Trump shattered “decades of orthodoxy” by starting the North Korea negotiations with a summit directly between himself and Kim and offering the concession of pausing U.S.-South Korea military drills on the Peninsula. In contrast, previous administrations had dispatched diplomats to lay the groundwork for nuclear disarmament first, with the prospect of meeting the president as a reward. The recent isolation of North Korea with sanctions and limited diplomatic engagement had only persuaded it to build up its nuclear weapons capability and strengthened mutual suspicions. Trump’s instincts on North Korea may even be better than that of his advisors, accordingto former officials like Morton Halperin, a longtime arms control expert who served in the Johnson, Nixon, Clinton, and Obama administrations. Trump’s approach of engaging North Korea personally and directly makes much more sense than simply demanding immediate denuclearization.

Of course, the verdict on Trump’s effort with North Korea is not yet in.  But much of the press has not paid sufficient attention to the progress Trump has already made. His approach has secured the remains of some American troops lost during the Korean War, contributed to successful inter-Korean talks, and promised a follow up U.S.-North Korea summit. He is trying an unorthodox approach, but it is too soon to render conclusions about them because we are right in the middle of it. Experiencing the discrepancy between mainstream coverage of North Korea and my own analysis was eye-opening.

The second came from a project I was running at the Carnegie Council. The first was on Trump’s approach toward Asia. In 2017, I hosted a podcast with George Friedman, who described the post-World War II system as a “freak” and predicted that the world is returning to “a more normal structure in which the nation-state is dominant, international trade is intense but managed by states for their own benefit, and where this idea that the nation-state is obsolete goes away.” A similar theme came up during my podcast with scholar Raymond Kuo, who hopefully described Trump’s transactional approach as possibly like that of “master statesman” Otto Von Bismarck during his rule over Germany in the late 19^thcentury. Maybe Trump is just a return to the norm of what Ian Bremmer calls our “G-Zero World.”

A third insight was from the unlikeliest place: the critically acclaimed animated show, “Rick and Morty.” During Trump’s campaign, his supporters frequently talked about how funny the candidate was. This humor was lost on most of my left-leaning peers. But “Rick and Morty” showed me what I have may been missing. Here is a popular TV show about a mad scientist Rick, an amoral, sociopathic man who considers himself the smartest man in the universe and tells dirty jokes in front of his grandson Morty. The slapstick, low-brow, and nihilistic insults and dirty humor of “Rick and Morty” — much like Trump — resemble some of the comedic greats from the decades  prior to the 1990s: “The Honeymooners,” “Benny Hill,” “Abbott and Costello,” “The Three Stooges,” and “I Love Lucy.” These comedic devices can be traced back hundreds of years to Asian and European theater, which used slapstick, puns, insults, and innuendo.

Compare that oeuvre to the 1990s-2000s, during which comedy was more satirical, knowing, self-referential, meta, and smug. This idea is far from perfect, but examples of satire that use slapstick as well include “The Daily Show,” “The Colbert Report,” “South Park,” “Team America: World Police”, and Sacha Baron Cohen’s parodies. American society today seems to be witnessing a return of what columnist Noah Smith calls “goofy” humor and a decline of “knowingly sarcastic” humor. Even The New Yorker complained that the 2018 Emmys were too smug and later described Trump’s rallies unfavorably as a “vaudeville routine.” Perhaps our shift toward a reversion in history also means we are seeing a cultural reversion as well.  Smugness has become politically tone deaf.

It’s possible that his opponents simply do not get Trump’s humor. The famous comment Trump made in 2016 about hoping that Russia would find Hillary Clinton’s 30,000 missing emails was delivered amid the Republican candidate’s riff about the Jon Lovitz character Tommy Flanagan, the pathological liar, from Saturday Night Live. Another source of media consternation was Trump’s remark that he preferred soldiers who were not captured, in contrast to John McCain, who was captured in the Vietnam War. Al Franken made the same joke about 20 years ago and Chris Rock delivered it in his 2008 HBO special to huge laughs. Rock’s hilarious punchline: “I don’t wanna vote for the guy that got captured. I wanna vote for the mother f—er that got away!” But when Trump made the same comment, much of the media portrayed these jokes as evidence that Trump was a treasonous, insensitive monster. Of course, there are different standards of propriety for politicians and for comedians, but one can’t help but sense that there is an entirely different standard for Trump.

The same dynamic played out after Trump called the gang MS-13 “animals” (which he later clarified) and also when he said that people disputing the confederate statues in Charlottesville had “very fine people on both sides” of the debate. In these two episodes, the U.S. media twisted the president’s statements to make him sound like he was calling all immigrants animals and that he was calling neo-Nazis fine people. But that’s not what he said. Slanted media coverage of politicians is nothing new, but fellow Democrats must be aware of it even when it confirms their views.

Of course, Trump, like all presidents, is trying to have it both ways. He is trying to encourage his base, while seeking to avoid alienating the mushy middle. It is a bit unseemly and at times hypocritical, but it is politics, not bean bag. Trump’s opponents like to call out his hypocrisy in hyperbolic terms, but in so doing they simply stoke outrage while failing to provide any sort of objective analysis about what he is really accomplishing.

Such an analysis would require a difficult reckoning with some missteps that long predate Trump. Backing for Trump stems in part from mistakes made by his predecessors. Bill Clinton’s famous 1996 “bridge to the 21st century” speech depicted a world in which the United States could “maintain our world leadership for peace and freedom” while also protecting the environment and training its citizens to compete in a globalized world. Americans could have it all.

During the 1990s, that phrase “bridge to the 21st century” became — sometimes sarcastic — shorthand for a set of policies that the United States would promote to foster globalization, technology, and open trade. It was a trusting aspiration that if only the United States would follow its liberal principles, other countries would follow along. That mentality led to welcoming China into the World Trade Organization, the flawed efforts to invade and nation-build Iraq and Afghanistan Wars by the Bush administration, and then the 2008 financial crisis.

Like many Gen-Xers who studied politics or international relations in the 1990s and 2000s, I absorbed this gospel of liberal internationalism almost completely. But Trump’s early successes have already caused me to question those tenets of my education.

The Trump Doctrine takes previous policy assumptions and turns them on their head. Trump’s “America First” approach is a reversion to the idea of realpolitik and great power competition. It is better suited to a moment in which American power is much less dominant. The president takes each state-to-state relationship on its own terms. That’s why he’s often antagonistic with allies and friendly with threatening dictators. The consequences of insultingfriendly countries, such as Canada, might be hurt feelings in exchange for better trade terms, while souring relations with an antagonistic one, such as North Korea, could result in serious security threats. He pursues the optimal outcome in a utilitarian sense rather than follow previous rules about diplomatic etiquette. Trump keeps his enemies even closer than his friends, while previous presidents did the opposite. Niccolo Machiavelli might have been familiar with these tactics.

Trump’s diplomatic method can be reduced to the four “B’s”:  bullying, bargaining, burden-sharing, and bragging. He starts an interaction by bullying the subject — usually on Twitter, seeks a chance to sit down with the target to bargain as hard as possible toward what Trump may see as a more reciprocal relationship of burden-sharing, and then finally brags about whatever the results are. Trump treats all relationships as transactional, deploying tit-for-tat tactics toward achieving his goal of “reciprocity.” His message is that he wants to make America great again but does not spend much time lecturing or moralizing to foreigners. Finally, his use of insults, jokes, and slapstick, physical humor creates an image of honesty and authenticity with his supporters. Overall, these techniques and worldviews are becoming increasingly common around the world, including with the leaders of countries as diverse as Turkey, the Philippines, Russia, Israel, Mexico — and potentially Brazil.

Trump described his realpolitik-with-no-sacred-cows approach during the United Nations General Assembly meeting in September: “America’s policy of principled realism means we will not be held hostage to old dogmas, discredited ideologies, and so-called experts who have been proven wrong over the years, time and time again. This is true not only in matters of peace, but in matters of prosperity.”

Overall, Trump’s approach represents a reversion to a style of statecraft that flips previous approaches. Technocracy, meritocracy, and bureaucratic approaches are giving way to establishing top-level personal rapport, trust, and loyalty. Free trade ideology is giving way to trade as a means to enrichment. Building institutions gives way to questioning the utility of each institution. Moral diplomacy gives way to talking to anyone who will bargain. Careful speeches give way to saying anything that gets results. Saving sacred cows gives way to killing them or threatening to do so. Open markets give way to using U.S. markets, military, and migration as bargaining chips. Every relationship is subject to maximum leverage of what is possible.

To be sure, the Trump Doctrine has critics. A common attack on Trump is that his policies risk “a slippery slope” toward something much more extreme. But the slippery slope is a logical fallacy. Just because Trump advocates trade wars to address unfair trade practices does not mean Trump will put tariffs on everything or simply cut off trade with the world. Another attack is “the ends don’t justify the means.” So if Trump decides to flatter Kim Jong Un in order to establish personal rapport, it is not justified even if it means peace on the Korean Peninsula? The belief that the United States should protect its moral high ground is anachronistic. It’s doubtful anyone will be talking about Trump’s flattery a decade from now, and it can be seen as pretty harmless if it results in reducing the threat of nuclear Armageddon.

Of course, this new world has risks. World politics is returning to a realist doctrine of “self-help” in an anarchical world. The system has returned to a web of relations and is therefore potentially more unstable. But as any realist will tell you, we have to deal with the world as it is, not as we want it. For Trump’s opponents to reach a broader perspective and truly understand the Trump phenomenon, they need to pop their cognitive bubbles and challenge their assumptions by, for example, testing out alternative views and sources of information.

This essay was an attempt to put concepts to Trump’s actions, to describe Trump in a new way. Critics may argue that in fact Trump is a narcissistic megalomaniac who likes strongmen, but no one can actually know what he is thinking. They should give up on the efforts at amateur psychoanalysis. If the political opposition wants to gain any ground, it needs to look for patterns in Trump’s actions and understand what it’s up against. Most of all, Trump’s opponents should stop their condescending attitude. Put up against Trump’s growing string of successes, such an attitude will ring increasingly hollow. For now at least, the era of smugness is over.