I was hours old when the Rolling Stones released “Satisfaction”:
Four years later, the Beatles released “The Ballad of John and Yoko”:
The short list of birthdays today includes Roger Brown, who played saxophone for the Average White Band …
Brett Arends wrote this last week:
I’m used to partisan, inaccurate drivel from all sides these days, but the media’s coverage of President Trump’s tariffs and the so-called “trade war” takes some kind of cake.
There’s no serious doubt that some in the media would absolutely love to tank the stock market. They figure that would hurt Trump’s re-election chances in 2020. Monday’s stock market slump, which saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -1.41% tumble 2.4% and the Nasdaq Composite 3.4%, looked just like what the doctor ordered.
I write this, incidentally, as someone who is no fan of the president. But I remember when politics was supposed to stop at the water’s edge.
And, anyway, facts are facts. Most of what the public is being told about these tariffs is either misleading or a downright lie.
I’ve been following the coverage all weekend with my jaw on the floor.
Yes, tariffs are “costs.” But they do not somehow destroy our money. They do not take our hard-earned dollars and burn them in a big pile. Tariffs are simply federal taxes. That’s it. The extra costs paid by importers, and consumers, goes to Uncle Sam, to distribute as he sees fit, including, for example, on Obamacare subsidies.
It wasn’t long ago the media was complaining because Trump was cutting taxes. Now it’s complaining he’s raising them. Confused? Me too.
And the amounts involved are trivial. Chicken feed.
President Trump just hiked tariffs from 10% to 25% on about $200 billion in Chinese imports. In other words, he just raised taxes by … $30 billion a year.
Oh, no!
The total amount we all paid in taxes last year — federal, state and local — was $5.51 trillion. This tax increase that has everyone’s panties in a twist is a rounding error.
Meanwhile, the total value wiped off U.S. stocks during Monday’s panic was about $700 billion. More than 20 years’ worth of the new tariffs.
Even if Trump slapped 25% taxes on all Chinese imports, it would come to a tax hike of … $135 billion a year. U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) last year: $20.5 trillion.
So even this supposedly scary “escalation” of this “tariff war” would, er, raise our total tax bill from 26.9% of GDP all the way to 27.5% of GDP.
Oh, and isn’t it interesting to see some people’s priorities? Apparently the most shocking part of this trivial tax hike is that it might raise the price of new Apple iPhones.
Last I checked, these were luxury items, right?
Meanwhile, the trade spat seems to be bringing down food prices. China is going to take less of our farm products. So wheat prices are down 20% since the start of the year. Soybeans are at 10-year lows.
Good for consumers, right?
No, no, of course not! Silly you. This is also bad news … for farmers!
And all this ignores the much bigger picture, anyway.
The tariffs are simply a means to an end. The president is trying to get China to start buying more of our stuff. He knows the so-called Middle Kingdom, which now has the second-biggest economy in the world, responds to incentives more than to nice words. These tariffs give China an incentive to open up.
OK, so China’s first reaction is just to retaliate. Big deal. That’s just posturing.
Right now we export less to China than we do to Japan, South Korea and Singapore put together. That’s the point. So the effect of China’s new tariffs on the U.S. are yet another rounding error. Even if China banned all imports from the U.S., that would amount to only 0.6% of our gross domestic product. And we’d sell the stuff somewhere else.
Don’t buy the hysteria. President Trump is simply trying to pressure our biggest competitor to buy more American goods. That should be a good thing, even if you don’t like him.
Arends is not, as far as I know, a Republican or a conservative. Marketwatch lists him as “an award-winning financial columnist with many years experience writing about markets, economics and personal finance. He has received an individual award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers for his financial writing, and was part of the Boston Herald team that won two others. He has worked as an analyst at McKinsey & Co., and is a Chartered Financial Consultant. His latest book, Storm Proof Your Money, was published by John Wiley & Co.”
So Arends may be right. We better hope he is.
An American University professor who has correctly predicted the last nine presidential elections says President Trump will win the 2020 election unless congressional Democrats, “grow a spine,” CNN reported.
Allan Lichtman, a political historian, said Democrats only have a shot at the White House if they begin impeachment proceedings against Trump, calling the decision both “constitutionally” and “politically” right in the wake of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
“It’s a false dichotomy to say Democrats have a choice between doing what is right and what is constitutional and what is politically right. Impeachment is also politically right,” Lichtman told CNN’s Brooke Baldwin on Wednesday.
Lichtman has developed a system of 13 “key factors” that help determine whether the party in the White House will maintain its hold, according to CNN. The factors range from whether the party has an incumbent president running to the country’s short- and long-term economic conditions to foreign policy successes and failures. If the party loses out on six factors or more, he says they will lose the presidency.
Lichtman says the Trump administration is down three key factors: Republican losses in the midterms elections, a “lack of foreign policy success” and Trump’s “limited appeal to voters,” CNN reported. Impeachment would trigger a fourth key — scandal over the proceeding’s public nature.
“Let’s not forget, impeachment is not just a vote in the House,” Lichtman said. “It involves public hearings as part of the impeachment inquiry, and, what everyone forgets, a public trial in the Senate in which House prosecutors present evidence, present documents, make opening and closing statements.”
Lichtman cited scandal as a central factor in former Vice President Al Gore’s loss in the 2000 presidential election after President Clinton’s impeachment process.
“Democrats are fundamentally wrong about the politics of impeachment and their prospects for victory in 2020,” Lichtman told CNN’s Chris Cillizza on Tuesday.
Interesting conclusion given that most observers think impeachment would anger Republican-leaning voters to generate more turnout, and is bound to fail since there is no way, given current evidence, that enough Republicans vote to convict Trump.
I think Lichtman also misreads why Trump lost because the reason doesn’t fit into Lichtman’s 13 indicators — he was a bad candidate who ran a bad campaign. Given how well the economy seemed to be doing, Gore should have won the Electoral College easily in 2000. Bad candidates lose not just their home states, but their predecessor’s home state.
Nevertheless, go for it, Democrats.
The number one song in the U.S. …
… and in Britain …
… the day in 1965 this was happening up in the sky:
Today in 1958, Alan Freed joined WABC radio in New York, one of the great 50,000-watt rock stations of the AM era.
Birthdays include Captain Beefheart, known to his parents as Del Simmons:
Charles Miller, flutist and saxophonist for War:
One of Gladys Knight’s Pips, William Guest:
The number one single today in 1963:
Today in 1967, the Beatles released “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”:
The number one single today in 1968:
Today in 1969 during their Montreal “Bed-In” (moved from New York City due to a previous marijuana conviction), John Lennon and Yoko Ono, with backing vocals from Timothy Leary, Tommy Smothers, Dick Gregory, DJ Murray the K, Allen Ginsburg and others, recorded this request:
The number one single today in 1970:
Mayor Pete Buttigieg, in a fiery recent speech, said “The struggle is not over when transgender troops, ready to put their lives on the line for this country, have their careers threatened with ruin one tweet at a time by a commander in chief who himself pretended to be disabled to get out of serving when it was his turn.”
In the comments aimed at the LGBT community, he railed against U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, a prime target if there was one.
“That’s the thing that I wish the Mike Pences of the world would understand,” he thundered, “That if you have a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me. Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.”
A tad perplexing given that Pence has never given any indication of having a problem with Mayor Pete.
In fact, in June 2015, then Indiana Governor Mike Pence was asked about Buttigieg’s sexual orientation. He responded: “I hold Mayor Buttigieg in the highest personal regard. We have a great working relationship, and I see him as a dedicated public servant and a patriot.”
Likewise, in March of the same year, the then Governor tweeted that if he finds any restaurant discriminating against anyone on the basis of sexuality, he would personally be opposed to it.
It defies logic that the party of Harvey Weinstein would complain about Mike Pence bringing about The Handmaid’s Tale; a man who believes in 1950s style chivalry. But it is for that 1950s chivalry itself, Pence and his family has been repeatedly targeted by activistsas well as the media.
These paradoxical attacks on Pence are the culmination of the forces we have observed in the past few years. In order to understand that, one needs to understand the liberal crusaders.
Modern liberalism, for lack of a better word, is a religion.
It may sound counterintuitive for an idea superficially claiming to be emancipatory being as rigid as a religion, however especially post-2016, liberalism turned into a religion scorned, beaten back, and is now taking a crusading turn.
Look to Stephen Pinker, one of the grinning saints of modern providential liberalism.
You can find a detailed review of his new book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, here. Basically, Pinker doesn’t understand what “enlightenment” is.
He considers everything that happened since 1590 to be good. He doesn’t consider the Judeo-Christian values and cultural forces, the reactionary movements, Bernini, Bach, Beethoven, to be of any influence on the enlightenment, and never answers why the Renaissance happened only in Europe, not elsewhere. Pinker also cherry-picks data to suit his findings on declining violence. The reaction to my review was hysterical. Saints must not be critiqued.
While the theory of liberalism as a philosophy arose as an emancipatory idea against faith, family, and flag conservatism in Europe, it slowly morphed into a quasi-religious force of its own, and mostly due to its own inherent contradictions.
Like Marxism, another philosophical theory determined to “free” people from the bonds of bourgeoisie family and morality and religion, ultimately turned religious, liberalism has followed the same path.
Every global Abrahamic religion had a peaceful rise, until it faced organized or mass opposition. Christianity rose peacefully till it came into conflict with the pagan religions in Greece and Rome, and then again, during the Crusades against Islam.
Islam had a whole period of invasion when it destroyed the pagan religions in Persia and the Levant, as well as coming into conflict with Christianity.
Liberalism, which was a theory of individual rights, now faces its own crusading moment.
During the 1960s liberalism came into conflict with the idea of faith, family, and flag conservatism across the West. The idea was to destroy the bonds of conservative morality, in favor of radical emancipatory individualism. But it took a crusading turn during the post 1990s Soviet collapse. Liberalism contained within itself a providential sense of history as an arc, that is destined to have a glorious end, much like all major Abrahamic religions awaiting God’s kingdom. Liberalism also has the concept of “original sin”, in this case, known as “privilege”, from which you can never be truly free, regardless of your financial or social position. And finally, liberalism has a crusading zeal, a universalist aspect at odds with its own inherent individualism. And that is where all the problems lie.
Superficially, individual rights should be all good. But individualism is contradictory, and some people’s right to religion clashes with some other people’s right to sexuality. Both might co-exist without coming into conflict, but liberalism’s crusade sees it wishing to eradicate any rival religion and spread its liberal values, norms, rules and mores.
Coexistence is impossible with such an expansionist, pervasive force. When you see a push for transgender troops or female infantry even at the risk of efficiency and cohesion in the armed forces, this is a refusal to co-exist.
When LGBT rights clash with a Christian baker’s faith, even when there are hundreds of other cake shops available, or when drag shows that openly exploit children come into conflict with parental rights, this is a refusal to co-exist.
The same idea leads to foreign interventions and wars with culturally alien countries.
That crusading zeal is universal and it won’t end anytime soon. History needs to have its liberal kingdom of heaven in the future, and any rival religious force that stands in the way needs to be eradicated. Opposing history’s arc makes you a heretic against the one true faith, not to be won over with an idea, but to be vanquished.
In that light, it is understandable why the reaction post-2016 was so severe.
A religion which is destined to be the future cannot be thwarted.
In Western societies, as organized Judeo-Christian values continue to recede (compared to non-Western societies, like Eastern Europe, India, or the Middle East, where strong cultural and religious values are ascendant), liberalism is supposed to fill the void.
But in 2016 it was rejected by almost half of the electorate. And the crusade began.
Up until 1990, liberals were happy to accept defeat and understand that power changes and is cyclical. That has changed. No election, no result, nothing will be considered valid anymore, unless there’s absolute submission to liberal faith.
It didn’t take long for Mayor Pete to be pilloried for being insufficiently pure by his own side.
There is a reason crusading, fanatical religions mellow down with time. Any and all fanaticism contains within itself the seeds of self-destruction. Fanaticism alienates normal people, purifying fire and hypocrisy, and fanatical liberalism is no exception.
There’s a reason why Mike Pence is never charged with #MeToo offenses, but a lot of liberals have been. There’s a reason why there’s a growing backlash against unethical Trans lobby groups and experiments on children across the Atlantic.
Unless liberals learn to co-exist and follow the principle of live and let live, they will be the prime driver to the backlash against themselves.
Conservatives also need to realize that one cannot simply be a passive observer against fanaticism, hoping the time just passes. It won’t stop with a Christian baker, or even with Mike Pence.
The rights of one’s faith will continue to be eroded, as the march of liberalism continues.
Jonathan V. Last comments about the civil war of sorts within the political right:
Yesterday my friend, Sohrab Ahmari, wrote an attack on National Review’sDavid French explaining why French and people like him are dangerous.
Ahmari’s view is that he wants “to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.”
He seeks “government intervention” to tackle unspecified societal problems, though he does allow that “Government intervention will not be the answer to every social ill.”
He castigates French for not agreeing to support Donald Trump by saying that “he has kept his hands clean, his soul untainted.” He does not seem to mean this as a compliment. Because he follows it by insisting that “But conservative Christians can’t afford these luxuries.”
And finally there is this:
Progressives understand that culture war means discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions. Conservatives should approach the culture war with a similar realism. Civility and decency are secondary values. They regulate compliance with an established order and orthodoxy. We should seek to use these values to enforce our order and our orthodoxy, not pretend that they could ever be neutral. To recognize that enmity is real is its own kind of moral duty.
I do not doubt that Sohrab sincerely believes all of this.
But instead of pushing back against this or that point, I would offer the following:
If it is true that our cultural conflicts are so deep that we are enemies with our fellow Americans—that there is real enmity—then the die is already cast.
If Sohrab is correct that conservatives and progressives are engaged in war and that only the election of this president, or that senator, or the confirmation of this other Supreme Court justice will postpone the end times, then the end times are already upon us.
Because one side can’t keep their finger in the dyke for forever. Eventually it must crack and we must all be washed out to sea.
I don’t think I harbor many illusions about the world. If you’ll forgive me saying so, I might be the least sentimental person you know.
And it seems to me that American society is, in important ways, much healthier and more unified than it has been at many points during our history. Things are better than they were in 1860. Or 1870. Better than during the Great Depression. Better than during the 1970s.
Do you remember the 1970s? Major cities burning every summer? Murder rates soaring across the country? Student radicals setting off bombs and taking over university buildings with guns?
Pick a random Tuesday from 1977 and there’s a fair chance it would be the biggest news day of the year for us in 2019.
(My favorite case in point: In 1977, 12 Muslim terrorists seized control of three buildings in Washington. At the B’Nai Brith headquarters, they herded about 100 hostages onto the roof and held them at gunpoint for two days. This was all happening literally four blocks from the White House. And this was such business-as-usual for the ’70s that today nobody even remembers it happened.)
Not everything is better. By some measures—say, the disintegration of the family—we are much worse off today.
But my point is that this is how it always is. Nothing is ever solved. Nothing is ever finished. American society lurches from one set of problems to another. Some things improve, others degenerate.
And our big societal conflicts tend not to be resolved, but rather to be subsumed into the next set of conflicts, and paved over as we move forward.
I say none of this to be optimistic—I am not, by nature, an optimist. But simply to say that the conflicts of today look a lot like the conflicts of yesterday. And the day before that.
If you thought that civility and decency were cardinal virtues in the last era, then they are probably still cardinal virtues today.
This seems to be the conundrum currently of Trump, although since I remember the history that’s taken place during my lifetime I remember George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan being seen as equally, depending on the moment, stupid, dense and dangerous to life itself on earth.
We started and ended with jazz yesterday, so it’s worth noting that today is the anniversary of the release of the first jazz record, “Darktown Strutters Ball”:
The number nine …
… seven …
… and five singles today in 1969:
“They don’t support FISA reform,” he declared. “They are not protecting your rights. They want to protect the president. But the rest of you, forget about it. The government can spy on all of you, and they don’t give one crap about it.”But it was Amash’s comments about character and virtue that best underscored why he presents a potent challenge to Trump loyalists in the Republican Party. “More than anyone in our government, we need the president to be ethical, to be of high moral character, and to do the right thing,” he said. “And the pattern you find in the Mueller report is someone who does not meet that standard.”Trump’s moral deficiencies trouble many of Amash’s constituents.“As a retired educator, a grandparent, a parent, someone who has taught in Sunday schools, I don’t know how we tell our children not to lie, that it’s wrong to lie, when it’s evident throughout the highest levels of government,” one woman said. “I don’t know how we teach our children not to bully on the playground when bullying comments are constantly coming out in the media.”The crowd responded powerfully when Amash spoke against the example Trump was setting for children, perhaps because Amash made the version of a moral critique most likely to resonate with constitutional conservatives and libertarians. After a Trump supporter noted that the economy is strong and complained that many Americans oppose the president anyway, for example, Amash said: Think about how well things are going with the economy and people are still so mad. Why is that? … I think it’s because of the tone we’re setting at the top. We’re not treating one another with respect. We need to bring that back. We need to treat one another with love and respect. And we don’t have that right now. If there’s one thing that I pray and hope for our country it’s that we’ll love each other and care about each other regardless of our backgrounds and differences.
This kind of division is dangerous and it destroys liberty.
I’m a big believer in liberty and the Constitution. Nobody cares about liberty in Congress more than I do. One thing you see around the world is liberty cannot survive in a system where people hate each other and where there is no virtue. You can’t have a system like that. Our Founders and Framers talked about that. You have to have people who care about virtue and you have to have love.
If you hate each other, if you disparage each other, other systems prevail … When you have people who are angry and upset at each other all the time, you’re much more likely to create a system where the government takes more control.
Later, another Trump supporter declared that the people applauding Amash for coming out for impeachment might pretend to like him, but were unlikely to vote for him in the next election. He chided Amash to wake up to that reality. Amash replied:
I represent the entire district. So it doesn’t matter to me if a person voted for me or didn’t vote for me, or donated to me or didn’t donate to me. I think I’ve been pretty clear about that. That’s not going to change my principles and who I am … I agree with you that many of the people cheering me on aren’t going to support my campaign. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter to me. This is what it means to be a bigger person. It doesn’t matter to me that some people won’t support me or are hypocritical. You have to do the right thing regardless.
Amash’s criticism of Trump may never spur an impeachment inquiry. But the nature of it forces conservative Trump voters to make a clarifying choice: To stay loyal to a president of bad character, they must attack a man of good character who votes in accordance with the principles they share.
The Trump playbook isn’t working with Justin Amash.
He hasn’t been bullied or insulted into submission; the tweets haven’t worked, the trolls and flying monkeys of social media haven’t intimidated him; and he seems to have shrugged off threats of a primary challenge and the condemnation by the inaptly-named Freedom Caucus.
And yesterday, after quadrupling down on his condemnation of President Trump he got standing ovations from his hometown crowd.
Of course, it’s possible to overestimate all of this: he remains very much an outlier in his own party and at home it’s not clear how much of the support he’s getting is from the hard-core GOP base. So far, Amash’s call for impeachment represents less the stirring of a GOP conscience than it has served to highlight the atrophy of that organ under Trump.
And yet.
Among Republicans, breaking with Trump is supposed to be a form of ritualized political seppuku. Ask Jeff Flake or Mark Sanford. There’s a reason why even Mitt Romney seems to have gone into the witness protection program these days.
Even when Trump goes to a foreign country and sides with a blood-soaked dictator to score political points against a domestic critic or when he tosses out insane conspiracy theories and accuses his critics of “treason,” we’ve become accustomed to the GOP crickets.
There’s a logic behind all of this. Polls would suggest that they have no choice: 90 percent of Republicans back the president and conservative media has become both a safe space for MAGAism and a powerful enforcement mechanism for conformity.
Then there is the Trump realpolitik: Nearly the entire incentive structure of Republican politics now pushes elected officials towards acquiescence. If you want to be relevant or have influence . . . or matter at all in conservative politics these days, you have to go along.
Once the bargain has been struck, there is no going back. After a while what was grudging becomes habit and morphs into a culture. …
Does this matter? He’s just a lone voice. But maybe it does, because it creates a counter-narrative: there is political life after independence. Conscience is not suicide. Check out this tweet from our former colleague Haley Byrd:
Perhaps there is a constituency for principle after all. Who knew?
Meanwhile, Amash is drawing attention for making a stronger case for impeachment than the Democrats. If you haven’t read yesterday’s tweet storm, it’s well worth your time.
And just gets better. Read the whole thing.
Exit take: It’s happening. Matt Lewis says it’s time for conservatives to draft Amash for president.
It’s not a crazy idea.
Well, Sykes may not think it’s crazy, but it is highly unlikely to happen. Libertarians are now pondering whether Amash should run for president as a Libertarian party candidate.
So if Amash is opposed to Trump, he must be one of those renegades who doesn’t vote with his own party, right? Well, FiveThirtyEight did the math …
… and finds something I’ve noticed about such Wisconsin Republican renegades as Dale Schultz, Luther Olsen and Mike Ellis — they are less likely to vote Republican when the GOP is in control than when it isn’t. In the 2017–18 House of Representatives, when the GOP was in charge, Amash voted Trump positions only 54 percent of the time. This year, with Democrats in control, Amash votes Trump positions 92 percent of the time.
Part of the reason is that the out-of-power party tends to stick together, and individual majority-party legislators have more power with a small majority. But Amash presumably could score points with his constituents by voting against Trump this year, and yet he hasn’t done that very often. One would think Amash would know his district and his constituents better than national political pundits.
For what it’s worth, the GOP needs more small-L libertarians in it. (I shocked my opponent, The Capital Times and The Nation’s John Nichols, on Wisconsin Public Radio when I said I supported Amash instead of Paul Ryan for speaker of the house.) I bet Michigan dairy farmers are feeling the same pain as Wisconsin dairy farmers over the Trump trade war. Trump lost some of his Second Amendment credentials by favoring a ban on bump stocks, which among other things fails the test of effectiveness.
As someone who is neither a Trump cheerleader nor a NeverTrumper — in other words, someone who praises Trump when warranted and criticizes Trump when warranted — I am certain conservatives would have cheered had Barack Obama faced a primary challenger in 2012, and they may have quietly cheered on Comrade Sanders not because they agreed with him, but because he made Hillary Clinton’s political life difficult. So to condemn Amash because he has differences with Trump, even though he votes with Trump most of the time, is inconsistent and excessively purist.
Even though he was nominally busy in Japan, President Trump found time over the weekend to take shots at Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden. Rather than dunking on Biden’s public handsiness or challenging his claim to the mantle of America’s blue-collar champion, however, Trump went after Biden’s stewardship of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, a 1994 measure eventually signed by President Bill Clinton that increased federal funding for law enforcement nationwide.
To the degree that a Trump tweet can still raise eyebrows, this one did. After all, there was no fiercer citizen advocate in the early ’90s for cracking down on crime than Donald Trump, who infamously took out full-page ads in several newspapers calling on New York to “Bring back the death penalty! Bring back our police!” during the 1989 case of the Central Park Five, who were falsely convicted of attacking and raping a jogger.
That Trump’s a colossal hypocrite is not exactly new news. What’s interesting here is the way that he is now bringing the tactics that won him the 2016 Republican primary into the 2020 Democratic primary—a contest in which he’ll play an enormous role without even participating.
Trump and Biden have actually followed very similar paths on criminal justice: advocates of strong enforcement in the ’90s who have evolved away from mass incarceration and stringent sentencing in the last few years. Biden, for his part, followed the Democratic party as it gradually moved away from Clinton-era support of law-and-order policies through the Obama era to the present day.
This year, Biden has struck an uneasy balance between suggesting that he had been wrong to support the 1994 crime bill and insisting it wasn’t as bad as critics say: “I haven’t always been right, I know we haven’t always done things the right way, but I’ve always tried,” he said at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day breakfast in January. He then added: “The idea that the crime bill generated mass incarceration, it did not generate mass incarceration.”
Trump’s move to support criminal justice reform, on the other hand, has been both recent and sudden, in keeping with his we’ve-always-been-at-war-with-Eastasia style. When he was running for president, restoring law and order to a lawless America was a common refrain; during his inaugural address, he railed against the “American carnage” of impoverished inner cities and the “crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.” At some point, however, Trump’s focus shifted: He still talks about these things with regard to immigrant crime, but less so with that committed by U.S. citizens.
Of course, going from “Make America Great Again” in 2016 to “Keep America Great” in 2020 requires a shift in the language used to describe America. But there’s also plenty of reason to believe Trump has simply come around naturally on the issue of Americans given unjustly onerous sentences for relatively insignificant crimes (thanks in great part to the lobbying of, of all people, Kim Kardashian West).
All of this is to say that Trump would have every incentive, under ordinary political circumstances, to defend Biden from attacks about the 1994 crime bill—attacks that, until this weekend, had been lodged by other 2020 Democrats, from Kamala Harris to Bill de Blasio. It’s the crazy radical progressives, he might have said, who want to prioritize the comfort of felons over that of law-abiding, who want to demonize our police, who want to take us back to the dark ages of the crime-sodden ’70s and ’80s. That was the backhanded tone he struck last month, when Biden first entered the race: Joe’s a moron, of course, but at least he’s not evil!
But Trump’s abandoned that tactic now that Biden is surging in the polls. You can’t become frontrunner without Trump painting a target on your back.
This was always the greatest strategic difference between Trump and his bundle of foes during the 2016 Republican primary. Each of them had his or her carefully cultivated political brand that defined natural enemies: establishment types against Tea Partiers, restrained blue-state governors against celebrity legislators; Chamber of Commerce mainstays against Bible Belters. When Trump came out of nowhere to take a commanding lead in the field, nobody seemed able to audible away from those strategies, opting instead to keep digging away at their chosen opponent and hope the Trump bubble would pop on its own.
Trump’s political strategy, meanwhile, was incredibly straightforward: At any given moment, he was attacking whichever candidate seemed strongest. Summer 2015, when Jeb Bush seemed like he had the inside track? Punch—Jeb’s a low-energy establishment loser. Late 2015, when Ben Carson was surging? Punch—Carson’s totally incapable of governing and probably mentally unstable. Early 2016, by which point Ted Cruz was pretty much the last other guy with a heartbeat? Ted’s the biggest liar you ever met, a maniac, incapable of making deals and getting things done, his dad probably helped kill JFK, punch, punch, punch.
We already know the Democratic royal rumble is likely to prove brutal with 24 contenders and counting in the ring and the desperate desire to depose Trump as soon as possible stressing everybody out. Now throw Trump himself into that mix, and realize that he’s likely to treat this cycle like Russia treated the last one: trolling and rabble-rousing online, throwing daily Twitter bombs at candidates he thinks he can damage, and just generally multiplying the chaos by any means possible.
It’s going to be a long 18 months.
It’s going to be a long 18 months because the presidential election cycle should never begin before New Year’s Day. For those who are not Democrats, though, it will be fun to see Trump, who lives in the head of every Democrat, it seems, to force each candidate to defend himself or herself against Trump in addition to the other candidates.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 