“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
“We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.”
“Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the Democrats believe every day is April 15.”
“Socialists ignore the side of man that is the spirit. They can provide you shelter, fill your belly with bacon and beans, treat you when you’re ill, all the things guaranteed to a prisoner or a slave. They don’t understand that we also dream.”
“If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals — if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.”
“Democracy is worth dying for, because it’s the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man.”
“I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.”
One of the improvements of American life that drives liberals nuts is the rise of the right-wing media roughly since the start of the Clinton administration.
Liberals hate, hate, hate the fact that conservative talk radio has been far more commercially successful than liberal talk radio. (Air America, anyone?) Al Gore’s attempt to build a liberal Fox News, Current TV, was absorbed into Al Jazeera America, which is pulling its own plug. When National Review is derided as the establishment, it proves that there are plenty of conservative voices, which did not use to be the case in the mass(ish) media. It proves National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr.’s truism about liberals claiming to support other views without supporting the existence of other views.
Susan Wright isn’t happy with the conservative media, however:
The Golden Age of journalism is dead. There are no more Edward R. Murrows, William F. Buckleys, or Walter Cronkites. Don’t look for them. They don’t exist. Those days when the news was the news and a journalist made his bones by digging for the facts and breaking the big stories are now the stuff of faded legend. While the advent of the internet has given us a few inspiring bloggers and investigative wonders (R.I.P Andrew Breitbart), you find that you spend more time sifting through the ramblings of tinfoil hatted-bedlamites, in search of a grain of authenticity than you do reading factual, supported news.
Trust used to be a core principle of the journalism game, as well. Walter Cronkite was once called the most trusted man in America. People wanted to believe that when they invited those familiar faces into their homes each night that they were being told the truth, with no shading or variances, in any way. These days, you can’t be sure if what you’re hearing is factually based, distorted to suit the political ideology of the reporter, or if their reports are rooted in backroom deals and payoffs.
All that brings me to my point: We have reached a tragic period in our nation’s history, where the media seeks to influence the news, rather than simply report it. The danger in that is that they seek further treasure than just ratings. I don’t even care about CNN, MSNBC, or any of the other alphabet soup networks, who, over the years, have proven to be reliably left-biased. Conservatives assumed they had one network that didn’t seem to be overrun with leftist radicals, and that was FOX. There are also a litany of supposed rightwing talk radio hosts. Millions of conservatives tune in to Fox News, each day. Just as many tune in to hear Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, or Sean Hannity on any given day, in hopes of hearing well-researched and principled discussion on the state of the nation.
At this very critical juncture in our history, while our nation and our liberties have been ravaged by the Obama years, and life as we know it in this nation hangs precariously by a thread, Fox News, Limbaugh, Levin, and Hannity have gambled with our future, knowing we have no collateral to back up the game. For months, these fair weather friends of conservatism have heaped slovenly, starry-eyed adoration on Donald Trump. Trump – that gilded toad, who’s conservative history began at about the time he decided to run as a Republican has been shoved in our faces from the day he announced, garnering twice as much attention as any actual, proven conservative candidate by Fox News. In fact, Fox flooded the airwaves with appearances by Trump more than double any other candidate, according to a Business Insider article from December 2015, and that’s not taking into account the time dedicated to marveling over his every word and deed. In spite of the supposed lingering feud between Trump and Fox, they have been a boon for him. Their 24/7 coverage of all-things-Trump have made this arrogant buffoon seem like a legitimate candidate, rather than a bad Saturday Night Live skit. He already had name recognition, due to his reality TV show, but what Fox has done borders on journalistic malpractice. At the expense of other candidates, with actual conservative credentials to fall back on, not to mention experience and policy knowledge, they have led the public to believe that it is the job of other candidates to answer for Trump. There was no programming with Fox where Trump wasn’t mentioned, and if another candidate got air time, that time was spent fielding questions about Trump. The idea of letting those candidates give their pitch for their campaigns was something that came only in passing, and usually the Fox personalities found a way to direct it back to a Trump question. For those of us who actually want to hear from candidates who’ve been conservative for more than a year, it has been a disgusting debacle to witness.
Then there’s “conservative” talk radio. For any who thought turning off the TV and switching to radio would offer some respite from Trump fatigue, no such luck. I was once an avid listener of Levin, Limbaugh, and Hannity, but no more. For months after Trump’s ridiculously garish announcement, these talking heads would gush, ad nauseam, about his boldness, how he was turning the establishment on their heads, he was shaking things up, he was saying what nobody else would say, etc… If Trump wore a blue tie on a Thursday, Sean Hannity would spend 2 hours of his 3 hour show dissecting the significance, and outright brilliance of that tie choice. The other hour would be spent asking callers to tell how much they loved Trump’s tie. I’ve seen brown-nosing and toadie groveling, in my day, but Hannity’s obsession with Donald Trump borders on the psychotic. No one will be surprised when Hannity is busted outside of Trump’s penthouse apartment building, holding a boombox over his head, while Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” cuts through the night air.
Mark Levin’s fans are voicing feeble defenses of the man these days, pointing out how harsh he’s being with Trump. GEE… Welcome to the party, Mark! For months, Levin couldn’t stop talking of Trump’s brilliant strategy, how he was tapping into conservative angst. He wasn’t PC and the so-called establishment couldn’t stand it! Oddly enough, in 2011, Levin said of Trump, “Trump is NOT the real deal. He will get Obama re-elected. This is not a game. This is not a circus. He is not a conservative… We should not encourage this,” But a mere 4 years later, Levin was one more clown under the Big Top. His recent return to his senses is too little, too late.
Rush Limbaugh is a particularly heinous breed of sycophant. Supposedly, Trump is a golfing pal of Limbaugh’s. If he would just say he was going to stump for his friend, those of us who know Trump is a dangerous, narcissistic, tyrant-in-waiting, would at least know why, but el Rushbo plays it off, while pretending to be impartial. He’s anything but that. He likes to tout his “talent on loan from God.” Maybe he should return the talent and ask for some integrity. He has sold us out. He has sold himself out. Any vestige of being a courageous voice for the right is gone. He’s a voice for the highest bidder, well-being of our nation be damned.
The thing is, I get how Trump appeals to the public’s anger. Republicans turned out and gave their party the majority in the House and Senate, only to see them promptly become the right arm of Obama. People are angry, but at some point, you stop venting and you start looking at the best way to fix what has gone wrong. Unbridled anger may be temporarily satisfying, but it won’t lead to the solutions we so desperately require. That is where media becomes important. Done responsibly and with honor, it is a valuable tool for vetting our choices, but here we are. The media are playing a game, attempting to shape the race, rather than do their jobs and give the public a full and accurate picture of our choices. What’s more, they’ve worked overtime to give undue publicity to a man no more qualified to be president than an 8 year old is qualified to be a surgeon.
The reason for it all is ratings. This vile man’s antics bring ratings from a populace that too often would rather be entertained than informed, and the media is exploiting that fully. Trump, the grand self-promoter, guarantees the Honey Boo-Boo crowd will flock to him like flies to horse dung and Fox News, along with the right wing punditry are doing the shoveling. Who cares that a Trump nomination will likely give us a minimum of 4 years of Hillary? If he gets the nomination and somehow wins the general, even if the nation goes swirling, he’s likely to say something outrageous to some foreign dignitary or insult an ally so flagrantly, that the ratings will go through the roof! I guess it’s a matter of priorities, and the priorities of the media are corrupt.
I’m glad that there are still some conservative stalwarts out there, who refuse to play this game and are rightly sounding the alarm against Trumpism. Governor Rick Perry called it early, but I watched with disgust, as Fox News personalities treated him like an enemy of the state, in interview after interview. Voices like Erick Erickson, Glenn Beck, Brent Bozell, Mona Charen, Dana Loesch, and Bill Kristol have joined to try and speak uncompromising reason, where the Hannitys, Limbaughs, and Levins have wallowed in their acquiescence to this reality TV candidacy.
Michael Reagan, in a recent interview with OpportunityLives.com may have given the most wise and insightful word on what we’re seeing in media today:
“We’ve given too much power to talk radio. The Republican Party has allowed talk radio to define us. The Republican Party needs to itself, not rely upon talk radio to define it. They might find out talk radio isn’t always their friend” (Emphasis mine).
I can only pray that the damage of Fox News, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and others, who’ve acted as Donald Trump’s personal PR team for months now is not lasting and sanity takes hold before this primary season is over. Maybe if we all started switching off and doing our own research, rather than feed on a steady diet of self-serving media, we’ll once again find ourselves in a place where We the people choose our candidates, based on merit, not the Cult of Personality that drives news coverage, these days.
As someone who neither watches Fox News nor listens to hardly any conservative talk radio, I think there is some accuracy and some inaccuracy here. It’s a bit disturbing to find someone who doesn’t grasp that the media — right wing, left wing, unaligned, etc. — is a business dependent on advertisers, who advertise based on audience (readers, listeners, viewers, etc.) numbers.
The so-called Golden Age of Journalism is, believe it or not, not the usual historical state of journalism. Only in the last century did most newspapers confined their partisan or ideological biases to the opinion pages. The line between news and commentary has been blurred more often than those of us in journalism like to admit. For instance …
… was it appropriate for Cronkite to editorialize that the U.S. should get out of Vietnam?
Was that commentary appropriate from NBC’s Chet Huntley the night John F. Kennedy was assassinated?
Every journalist has a political point-of-view and they don’t magically check that at the door the minute they land a job. Many pretend to pursue some noble cause of pure “objectivity,” but it is truly in vain. Every good journalist is informed about what the subjects they cover and it would be near-impossible to be informed and not have an opinion.
Aside from outright disclosing a political bent (or as we do here at Mediaite, labeling an article a “column”), there are plenty of ways “objective” journalists can unwittingly reveal their biases.
Let’s say a conservative commentator spends a whole minute speaking with passion about some issue. Journalists can show their bias by writing it up in two generally different ways: “Conservative commentator ranted about xyz topic” or “conservative commentatorspoke passionately about xyz topic.” In the mind of the reader, the former could paint the conservative as a raving lunatic; the latter, an eloquent defender of ideas.
There is also the more indirect form of tipping your hand: selection bias. For example: some would say Fox News’ “hard news” hours spent way too much time harping on the Benghazi attacks over the last month; others would say MSNBC’s “hard news” programming, in addition to all the traditionally “liberal” broadcast network newscasts, outright ignored the story.
You may notice that outlets often accused of conservative bias do tend to focus more on stories that are embarrassing to the left, while dismissing or neglecting stories that could do damage to the right. The same goes for the news outlets generally assumed to be liberally biased.
That’s why we would all be better served if journalists simply disclosed their political biases and abandoned all pretense of the “objective” journalist.
I’ll start: If you read any of my posts labeled as “columns,” you might already know that I am a libertarian. I believe President Barack Obamais a terrible president; and I think Mitt Romney is just as terrible a candidate for replacement. If you read a “column” of mine and you understand libertarianism, you generally know what you are getting.
And when you read a post of mine that is intended to be “straight reporting,” you know what the writer behind the article thinks of his subjects. You can choose to nitpick for bias in my story selection, chosen verbs and adjectives, and characterizations; or you can read it and know that I did my best to be fair despite my own personal views.
Our very own Tommy Christopher and Noah Rothman catch a lot of heat from critics accusing them of “shilling” for Democrats and Republicans respectively. But you know where they stand. They’ve disclosed it on numerous occasions. If you don’t like their viewpoints, you can choose not to click. It’s that simple. And when Rothman writes a “straight” post (Christopher typically only writes columns) you can choose to read it or dismiss it knowing that there is a conservative behind the report.
That certainly applies to Hannity and Limbaugh. If you don’t like what they have to say, don’t listen to them. The superiority of the free market is proved by the fact that if enough people choose to not listen, Hannity and Limbaugh will lose their jobs.
James Wigderson spotted praise for that bulwark of conservatism, National Review, from, of all people, John Nichols:
National Review, the often-defining voice of conservatism over the past six decades, the favored publication of Ronald Reagan and of those who claim the Reagan mantle, has pulled out all the stops in the battle to avert the nomination of Donald Trump by the Republican Party.
The magazine is fighting more than an electoral battle. It is waging a serious struggle to prevent the redefinition of conservatism as Trumpism — so serious, and so clear in its intent, that the Republican National Committee has disinvited National Review from a partnership with NBC on the party’s Feb. 28 presidential debate in Houston. The magazine’s publisher responded that exclusion from the debate was a “small price to pay for speaking the truth about The Donald.”
The stakes are high, as the new issue of National Review illustrates. It’s an anti-Trump manifesto, from the “Against Trump” headline on the cover to the editorial declaration that “Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.”
To drive their point home, the editors feature articles by almost two dozen of the nation’s most prominent conservative commentators, authors and activists, arguing variations on the theme of Erick Erickson’s piece: “Don’t let Trump define conservatism in his image.”
Conservative elites do not want Trump to define conservatism. Good luck with that.
There’s a fair debate to be had about whether Trump is imposing a definition of conservatism or merely amplifying themes that have been ever more present on the right fringe of a movement that has tried too hard to adjust itself to the demands of an angry tea party faction and an absolutist House “Freedom Caucus.” There can also be a debate about whether grass-roots Republicans, churned up by years of talk-radio ranting, are as put off by Trump’s bullying tactics as conservative elites seem to imagine.
Whether the publication that has presented itself as “America’s most widely read and influential magazine and website for conservative news, commentary, and opinion” will play a part in derailing the front-runner for the nomination of the party it has so frequently influenced over so many years is open to question. The answer to that question will tell us a good deal about our evolving media and our evolving politics.
It will also tell us something about who gets to define conservatism.
The point of National Review’s intervention is to suggest that there remains a mainstream and reasonably responsible conservative tradition in American politics — and that Trump is not a part of it.
National Review has intervened with this purpose before. The magazine’s founder, William F. Buckley Jr., challenged the far-right John Birch Society and its allies in the early 1960s, and he challenged anti-Semitism and crude nationalism in the early 1990s. I spent time with Buckley in that period, talking politics and ideology. We disagreed on issues, but I was always struck by Buckley’s sense of duty to defend conservatism as a clear and coherent ideology that did not bend too far to match the politics, or the fears, of any moment. He did not mind waging a losing battle that might clarify the ideals and goals of the movement, as he did with his 1965 New York City mayoral race on the Conservative Party line, and with his magazine’s decision on the cusp of the 1972 primary season to suspend support for Richard Nixon and endorse the insurgent primary challenge by Ohio Congressman John Ashbrook to the renomination of a sitting Republican president.
Buckley liked to take stands. And he was proud to challenge false prophets of conservatism.
So it was with some amusement that I read Donald Trump’s response to National Review’s response to Donald Trump. The billionaire tweeted: “The late, great William F. Buckley would be ashamed of what had happened to his prize, the dying National Review!”
At a press conference in Las Vegas, Trump expanded on his attack: “The National Review’s a dying paper. Its circulation’s way down. Not very many people read it anymore. People don’t even think about the National Review. I guess they wanted to get a little publicity.”
Trump is wrong on so many levels.
First off, Buckley was a Trump critic in the years before the writer’s death in 2008. In 2000, when Trump was toying with a presidential run on the Reform Party ticket, Buckley warned:
“Look for the narcissist. The most obvious target in today’s lineup is, of course, Donald Trump. When he looks at a glass, he is mesmerized by its reflection. If Donald Trump were shaped a little differently, he would compete for Miss America. But whatever the depths of self-enchantment, the demagogue has to say something. So what does Trump say? That he is a successful businessman and that that is what America needs in the Oval Office. There is some plausibility in this, though not much. The greatest deeds of American presidents — midwifing the new republic; freeing the slaves; harnessing the energies and vision needed to win the Cold War — had little to do with a bottom line.”
Second, National Review has maintained credible print circulation numbers (around 150,000 currently), and it has adapted with notable success to the digital age.
Third, National Review is a magazine, not the “paper” Donald Trump derides with his casual fallacy.
I’ve heard Nichols talk, and I’ve dueled with him on Wisconsin Public Radio. You will not be surprised to read that John and I don’t agree on much. However, I’ve never heard Nichols say that opinions different from his don’t deserve a public airing. In fact, the conservative movement would be better off engaging people with views like Nichols’ views instead of retreating into the right-wing cocoon.
Last month I wrote about the number of overtime games I’ve seen and, more recently, announced.
Since then I’ve added two more free basketball games to the list, UW–Platteville’s 66–62 OT win at Stout and the Pioneers’ 78–75 OT win at Whitewater.
The former was the Pioneers’ first WIAC win after an 0–3 start. The latter was Platteville’s fourth consecutive win after said 0–3 start. That streak ended the Warhawks’ nine-game winning streak over the Pioneers, which, for those who care, puts Platteville up 105–102 over Whitewater.
Announcing college basketball is fun, even though doing it correctly requires work. Heading into the second half of the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference men’s basketball season, two teams are at 5–2, three teams are at 4–3, and two teams are at 3–4. It is hard to get closer than that.
Wisconsin Public Radio’s Ideas Network can be heard on WHA (970 AM) in Madison, WLBL (930 AM) in Auburndale, WHID (88.1 FM) in Green Bay, WHWC (88.3 FM) in Menomonie, WRFW (88.7 FM) in River Falls, WEPS (88.9 FM) in Elgin, Ill., WHAA (89.1 FM) in Adams, WHBM (90.3 FM) in Park Falls, WHLA (90.3 FM) in La Crosse, WRST (90.3 FM) in Oshkosh, WHAD (90.7 FM) in Delafield, W215AQ (90.9 FM) in Middleton, KUWS (91.3 FM) in Superior, WHHI (91.3 FM) in Highland, WSHS (91.7 FM) in Sheboygan, WHDI (91.9 FM) in Sister Bay, WLBL (91.9 FM) in Wausau, W275AF (102.9 FM) in Ashland, W300BM (107.9 FM) in Madison, and of course online at http://www.wpr.org.
For those who think that those on the left side of the political spectrum come up with all the idiotic political ideas, The State of Columbia, S.C., reports otherwise:
State Rep. Mike Pitts, R-Laurens, filed a bill in the S.C. House Tuesday to establish a “responsible journalism registry” to be operated by the S.C. secretary of state.
That summary says the bill would “establish requirements for persons before working as a journalist for a media outlet and for media outlets before hiring a journalist.” The summary also includes registration fees, and sets fines and criminal penalties for violations.
The proposed registry “is ridiculous and totally unconstitutional,” said Bill Rogers, executive director of the S.C. Press Association. The State newspaper is a member of the Press Association.
The government can not require journalists to register, Rogers said, citing the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights, which ensures freedom of the press.
Why would a legislator blatantly insult the First Amendment like this? The Post and Courier of Charleston, S.C., reveals the answer:
An Upstate lawmaker who tried to keep the Confederate flag flying and whose campaign spending habits were part of a Post and Courier examination of Statehouse money trails says it’s time to register journalists in the state. …
The measure is at least the second bill filed in the Statehouse this year with virtually no chance of advancing, but is meant to emphasize a lawmaker’s personal statement. …
Pitts told The Post and Courier his bill is not a reaction to any news story featuring him and that he is “not a press hater.” Rather, it’s to stimulate discussion over how he sees Second Amendment rights being treated by the printed press and television news. He added that the bill is modeled directly after the “concealed weapons permitting law.”
“It strikes me as ironic that the first question is constitutionality from a press that has no problem demonizing firearms,” Pitts said. “With this statement I’m talking primarily about printed press and TV. The TV stations, the six o’clock news and the printed press has no qualms demonizing gun owners and gun ownership.”
Under the bill the Secretary of State’s Office would be tasked with keeping a “responsible journalism registry” and creating the criteria, with the help of a panel, on what qualifies a person as a journalist–similar to doctors and lawyers, Pitts said.
Pitts said the criminal penalties mentioned in his bill for violations would be “minor fines” similar to those concealed weapons permit holders face.
The Laurens lawmaker questioned whether working journalists actually follow the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, which outlines principles for professional journalists to follow to ensure fair and accurate reporting.
“Do journalists, by definition, really adhere to a code of ethics?” Pitts asked. “The problem that I have with the printed press is, like I said, it appears especially in the last decade to me each story has become more editorial than reporting. It might just be my perception.”
The bill was sent to the Committee on Labor, Commerce and Industry and Pitts is hopeful for a hearing, at the least, and he said he received strong support from several representatives.
“Let’s be realistic this is an election year, it is well into the second year and the Senate is not going to do anything this year and certainly not going to do anything controversial,” Pitts said. “So no I don’t anticipate it going anywhere. Would I mind getting a hearing on it to further the debate and discussion? I would love to have that.”
Pitts, who sits on the House Ethics Committee, was featued in the Post and Courier report “Capitol Gains” for his trips out West to Alaska, Oregon, South Dakota and Montana to hobnob at summits with “sportsmen legislators.” On one occasion he received a $1,104 trip in 2014 to attend the annual National Assembly of Sportsmen’s Caucuses Summit in Sunriver, Ore., where he was also went hunting. He used campaign money to gas up his rental car on the trip. There was nothing illegal in the spending.
Pitts also was the leading advocate for keeping the Confederate flag flying outside the Statehouse during last summer’s flag debate in the wake of the Emanuel AME Church shootings.
University of South Carolina journalism professor, veteran newsman and Dean of the College of Information of Communications Charles Bierbauer was one of several media sources in the state that said Pitts’ proposal had no chance of ever becoming reality.
“It says here in the building where I work that ‘Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press’ ” Bierbauer said in reference to the new journalism school.
Of Pitt’s proposal he added, “These are nuisance bills that allow an elected official to say ‘I proposed to bring down those muckrakers.’ ”
So Pitts is trying to compare the First Amendment to the Second Amendment. Fine. He should be a fan of both. Apparently he is a fan of the former only until he is a target. This is why journalists worthy of the title are skeptical of all politicians, regardless of party, or lack of party.
I have referred here to Donald Trump’s blaming Ronald Reagan’s 1987 tax reform for the first of Trump’s four business bankruptcies, and how very un-Republican that is.
That comment came in a Playboy magazine interview. Trump’s first big Playboy Interview was in 1990, when he made this interesting statement:
Sometimes you sound like a Presidential candidate stirring up the voters.
I don’t want the Presidency. I’m going to help a lot of people with my foundation-and for me, the grass isn’t always greener.
But if the grass ever did look greener, which political party do you think you’d be more comfortable with?
Well, if I ever ran for office, I’d do better as a Democrat than as a Republican-and that’s not because I’d be more Republican-and that’s not because I’d be more liberal, because I’m conservative. But the working guy would elect me. He likes me. When I walk down the street, those cabbies start yelling out their windows. …
Wait. If you believe that the public shares these views, and that you could do the job, whynot consider running for President?
I’d do the job as well as or better than anyone else. It’s my hope that George Bush can do a great job.
You categorically don’t want to be President?
I don’t want to be President. I’m one hundred percent sure. I’d change my mind only if I saw this country continue to go down the tubes.
Later in the 1990s, Trump again got the Playboy Interview treatment, written by Mark Bowden, who has resurfaced nearly two decades later to say …
He was like one of those characters in an 18th-century comedy meant to embody a particular flavor of human folly. Trump struck me as adolescent, hilariously ostentatious, arbitrary, unkind, profane, dishonest, loudly opinionated, and consistently wrong. He remains the most vain man I have ever met. And he was trying to make a good impression. Who could have predicted that those very traits, now on prominent daily display, would turn him into the leading G.O.P. candidate for president of the United States?
His latest outrageous edict on banning all Muslims from entering the country comes as no surprise to me based on the man I met nearly 20 years ago. He has no coherent political philosophy, so comparisons with Fascist leaders miss the mark. He just reacts. Trump lives in a fantasy of perfection, with himself as its animating force.
Before I met him back in 1996, I felt bad for him. He’d had a rough 10 years. He had just turned 50 and wasn’t happy about it. He looked soft, from his growing jowls to the way his belt bit deeply into the spreading roll of his belly. As a businessman he had crashed and burned, rescued only by creditors who had to bail him out lest they be dragged down with him. His enterprises were being run by court-appointed managers, who had put him back on his financial feet mostly by investing heavily in Atlantic City, which was then on the rise.
He had insulated himself from failure with bluster. In public he was still The Donald—still rich, still working hard at being a symbol of excess. I was working on a profile of him for Playboy, which was his kind of magazine. He considered himself the magazine’s beau ideal, and was inordinately proud of having been featured on the magazine’s cover some years before. His then wife, Marla Maples, told him, sardonically, that he ought to buy the magazine: “You bought the Miss Universe Pageant; it’s right up your alley.” He must have figured it was a safe bet to agree to cooperate for my story. But well before I left him, we both knew he probably wouldn’t like the final product.
I was prepared to like him as I boarded his black 727 at La Guardia for the flight to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home—prepared to discover that his over-the-top public persona was a clever pose. That underneath was an ironic wit, an ordinary but clever guy. But no. With Trump, what you see is what you get. His behavior was cringe-worthy. He showed off the gilded interior of his plane—calling me over to inspect a Renoir on its walls, beckoning me to lean in closely to see . . . what? The luminosity of the brush strokes? The masterly use of color? No. The signature. “Worth $10 million,” he told me. Time after time the stories he told me didn’t check out, from Michael Jackson’s romantic weekend at Mar-a-Lago with his then wife Lisa Marie Presley (they stayed at opposite ends of the estate) to the rug in one bedroom he said was designed by Walt Disney when he was 18 (it wasn’t) to the strength of his marriage to Maples (they would split months later).
It was hard to watch the way he treated those around him, issuing peremptory orders—“Polish this, Tony. Today.” He met with the lady who selected his drapery for the Florida estate—“The best! The best! She’s a genius!”—who had selected a sampling of fabrics for him to choose from, all different shades of gold. He left the choice to her, saying only, “I want it really rich. Rich, rich, elegant, incredible.” Then, “Don’t disappoint me.” It was a pattern. Trump did not make decisions. He surrounded himself with “geniuses” and delegated. So long as you did not “disappoint” him—and it was never clear how to avoid doing so—you were gold.
What was clear was how fast and far one could fall from favor. The trip from “genius” to “idiot” was a flash. The former pilots who flew his plane were geniuses, until they made one too many bumpy landings and became “fucking idiots.” The gold carpeting selected in his absence for the locker rooms in the spa at Mar-a-Lago? “What kind of fucking idiot . . . ?” I watched as Trump strutted around the beautifully groomed clay tennis courts on his estate, managed by noted tennis pro Anthony Boulle. The courts had been prepped meticulously for a full day of scheduled matches. Trump took exception to the design of the spaces between courts. In particular, he didn’t like a small metal box—a pump and cooler for the water fountain alongside—which he thought looked ugly. He first questioned its placement, then crudely disparaged it, then kicked the box, which didn’t budge, and then stooped—red-faced and fuming—to tear it loose from its moorings, rupturing a water line and sending a geyser to soak the courts. Boulle looked horrified, a weekend of tennis abruptly drowned. Catching a glimpse of me watching, Trump grimaced.
“I guess that’ll have to be in your story,” he said.
“Pretty much,” I told him.
This apparently worried him, because on the flight home a day later he had a proposition.
“I’m looking for somebody to write my next book,” he told me.
I told him that I would not be interested.
“Why not?” he asked. “All my books become best-sellers.”
The import was clear. There was money in it for me. Trump remains the only person I have ever written about who tried to bribe me.
As I’ve watched his improbable political rise, it is clear that he hasn’t changed. The very things that made him so unappealing apparently now translate into wide popular support. Apart from the comical ego, the errors, and the self-serving bluster, what you get from Trump are commonplace ideas pronounced as received wisdom. Begin registering all Muslims in America? Round up the families of suspected terrorists? Ban all Muslims from entering the country? Carpet-bomb ISIS-held territories in Iraq (killing the 98-plus percent of civilians who are, in effect, being held hostage there by the terror group and turning a war against a tiny fraction of the world’s Muslims into a global religious crusade)? Using nuclear weapons? The ideas that pop into his head are the same ones that occur to any teenager angry about terror attacks. They appeal to anyone who can’t be bothered to think them through—can’t be bothered to ask not just the moral questions but the all-important practical one: Will doing this makes things better or worse? When you believe in your own genius, you don’t question your own flashes of inspiration.
I got a call from his office some days after my profile of him appeared in the May 1997 issue of Playboy. I had already heard how he’d blown his stack to Christie Hefner. I was traveling at the tim>, working on my book Black Hawk Down. The call came to me in a motel room in Colorado, from his trusty assistant, the late Norma Foerderer.
“Mr. Trump would like to talk to you,” she said.
I waited, sitting on the edge of the bed, bracing myself.
Foerderer came back on the line. She said:
“He’s too livid to speak.”
Be that as it may, Trump’s supporters should be more concerned about what RedState reports:
In July, Donald Trump made a statementabout the 2008 financial crisis that left many conservatives perplexed:
“I identify with some things as a Democrat…I was never a Bush fan. [When] the economy crashed so horribly under George Bush, because of mistakes they made having to do with banking and lots of other things, I don’t think the Democrats would have done that.”
Now to be sure, there is plenty of blame to be spread around. Both parties in Congress, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and even the American public all contributed to the crisis.
But if Trump thinks that the Democrats were not to blame, well, I will refer him to Barney Frank and Chris Dodd.
Trump’s statement prompted me to research what he thought about the economy-and proposals to fix it-during the end of Bush’s term and the beginning of Obama’s term (of which he had high hopes):
We have a young, vibrant, smart president who, I think, is going to do a really good job.
And, honestly, he has to do a really good job or this country maybe will never be the same. We had eight years of a horrendous president, a terrible president. You cannot get worse than Bush. And I really believe that Obama will be a great president, and I hope he is.
Anyway, I found out that Donald Trump supported the bank bailouts.
“Now, I did not know about a $700 billion bailout, in all fairness. And I think probably, it is something — it’s sad, but, probably, it’s something that has to get done, because your financial system is most likely going to come to a halt if it does not. So, it is a pretty sad day for this country.”
“I thought he did a terrific job,” Trump told Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren. “This is a strong guy knows what he wants, and this is what we need.”
“First of all, I thought he did a great job tonight,” said Trump. “I thought he was strong and smart, and it looks like we have somebody that knows what he is doing finally in office, and he did inherit a tremendous problem. He really stepped into a mess, Greta.”
Van Susteren then asked Trump if a simple payroll tax holiday might be a better way to stimulate the flagging economy. Trump, however, held firm in his support for Obama’s plan, which he praised for the wide breadth of approaches it took to combatting the crisis.
“Well, I think taxes are very good. I think it goes quickly. It is easily done, and etc., etc.,” Trump told Van Susteren, “but building infrastructure, building great projects, putting people to work in that sense is also very good, so I think you have a combination of both plus he is doing a rebate system and I think that is good also.”
Despite concerns with the cost, he liked Obama’s healthcare plan:
VAN SUSTEREN: What is your thought about the health care reform that is being at least proposed, at this point?
TRUMP: Well, I think it’s noble, except I just don’t know how a country that’s in such debt — we are really a debtor nation right now, and I just don’t know how a country in this kind of trouble can afford it. It’s very — I love the idea, but can this country afford it? Will it destroy the country? Will it destroy other people that have been paying into health care for years? I mean, will that destroy other people? It’s a very, very tough situation. I love it from many standpoints, but can this country afford it? And maybe this isn’t the right time.
(By the way, Trump IS and HAS been a fan of Obama’s ideal healthcare system: single payer)
How about Obama’s longstanding obsession with progressive taxation? Trump agrees:
“The one problem I have with the flat tax is that rich people are paying the same as people that are making very little money,” he said. “And I think there should be a graduation of some kind. Because as you make a certain amount of money, I think you should have to graduate upward.”
How about “protecting ” Social Security and Medicare from financially responsible and necessary reform? Trump won’t touch them either:
“Every Republican wants to do a big number on Social Security, they want to do it on Medicare, they want to do it on Medicaid. And we can’t do that. And it’s not fair to the people that have been paying in for years and now all of the sudden they want to be cut.”
Throw in his misunderstanding of the economic effects of immigration and free trade, and the current GOP front-runner is one confused man when it comes to the economy.
Of course Trump understands the real estate and entertainment businesses. But his skill in those areas clearly has not translated to a broader understanding of free market principles.
If Republican voters care about those principles, more than say, bluster, it will only be a matter of time before Trump fades. Otherwise, and it is a very real possibility, the GOP just may nominate another candidate who represents more of the same economic failures of the past.
Jonah Goldberg has found, he thinks, the perfect presidential candidate, though, uh, its eligibility may be in question:
I think it’s a safe bet that for most of us, the year-that-was was not the year we wanted it to be. …
But for most of us, 2015 was the year in which differences hardened. Republicans, not content with disliking Democrats more than ever before, now dislike each other with unprecedented fervor.
During the first Democratic debate, after rattling off a list of enemies she was proud to have made, Hillary Clinton said she was probably most proud of making Republicans her enemy. …
In a year-end interview with NPR, Barack Obama said that “not all” of his critics are motivated by anger over his status as the first African-American president.
And that’s true. There are precious few people I know who would look at the charnel house that is the Middle East and think, “That’s going swimmingly,” if Obama were of a different hue.
But in fairness to the president, one could be forgiven for thinking it was a good year for bigots. A drug-addled loser shot up a black church in hopes of starting a race war. The silver lining, for want of a better term, is that he didn’t get what he wanted. Instead, in what was inarguably the most miraculous and touching moment of this horrible year, he got forgiveness from the victims’ families.
But the disappointment of a punk who wanted a genocidal race war is not exactly an uplifting metric to declare it a good year. Nor is the news that in 2015, race relations have hit a 20-year low, according to a Time magazine survey.
For decades, we’ve been told the country needs an “honest conversation” about race. Today, honest conversation itself is racist.
The university, once considered a safe space for differences of opinion, must now be a safe space to avoid differences of opinion. At the University of Missouri, a communications professor asked for “muscle” to dispatch a journalist doing his job. At Yale, visitors who came to speak in favor of free speech were spit on — literally.
It’s not much better off campus. Unwilling to jump on the climate-change bandwagon? Well, that makes you not just wrong but evil. Don’t want to bake a cake for a gay wedding? Impolite society has no use for you.
My scorecard is a mess. Republicans who’ve spent years trying to protect freedom of religion cheer when Donald Trump wants Muslims monitored by the state and even barred from the country. Democrats who don’t blink at the prospect of forcing nuns to pay for birth control and who would toast marshmallows at a burning Chick-fil-A want the government to do everything it can to make Muslims feel honored and respected.
I could go on and — alas — on. But what’s the point? If you were alive in 2015, you saw it too. Which brings me to 2016 and my endorsement for president. Only one candidate can unite us all in a way George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama could not.
You’ve probably already guessed who I have in mind. But just in case you haven’t, it’s the Sweet Meteor O’Death, or, as he’s known on Twitter, @Smod2016.
I shouldn’t call SMOD a “he,” for as an inanimate hunk of ice and rock hurling towards our planet, SMOD has no sex. (In these gender-confused times, that in itself should be a selling point.) Hate the “1 percent”? SMOD will erase all income inequality. Under SMOD, America will have no industrial carbon emissions, and the Islamic State will be crushed. Hateful speech will be silenced, and no gay wedding cakes will be baked. SMOD has no super PAC and takes no money from unions. SMOD already has the only endorsement it requires: the cold impersonal law of gravity.
So if you want to end the messy bickering and negativity once and for all, SMOD is the candidate for you. Otherwise, expect more of the same in 2016 and beyond.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 