Trump: All politicians are "saps and weaklings"

Would you trust your democracy to this man?

Sycophant: a servile self-seeking flatterer.

In the earliest days of the primaries leading up to the 2016 election, Donald Trump spoke openly to Atlantic writer Mark Leibovich about his strategy for capturing the Republican Party.

Trump said

he was used to dealing with “brutal, vicious killers”—by which he meant his fellow ruthless operators in showbiz, real estate, casinos, and other big-boy industries. In contrast, he told me, politicians are saps and weaklings.

“I will roll over them,” he boasted…. They were “puppets,” not strong people. He welcomed their contempt, he told me because that would make his turning them in supplicants all the more humiliating.

“They might speak badly about me now, but they won’t later,” Trump said. They like to say they are “public servants,” he added, his voice dripping with derision at the word servant. But they would eventually submit to him and fear him. They would “evolve,” as they say in politics. “It will be very easy; I can make them evolve,” Trump told me. “They will evolve.”

The rest of the article shows how, one-by-one, the “spineless ciphers” of the Republican Party went from bitter Trump critics to pathetic lackies. The article is accompanied by a row of photographs of the culprits, with quotes criticizing and then capitulating to their new master. Marco Rubio is a particularly sad example. He called Trump a con artist and “the most vulgar person ever to aspire to the presidency” in 2016 and this year said electing Trump is “the only way to make America wealthy and safe.”

But the most detailed account of a transition from Trump critic to enthusiastic member of the Trump “brownnoser brigade” appeared in a profile of Utah Senator Mike Lee by Tim Alberta, also in the October Atlantic.

Lee may have been the Republican who worked harder than any other to keep Trump from the party nomination in 2016. At the Republican convention that summer he tried to change the rules to allow Trump’s delegates to switch their vote. When that failed, he organized a floor protest of Trump’s nomination, which also flopped. After the Access Hollywood video came out in October, he posted a four-minute video calling for Trump to “step aside” and hand the nomination to a more worthy candidate.

Once Trump assumed the presidency, Lee changed his tune. The candidate whose attitude toward women and disdain for Democracy made him unfit for office became a “genuinely likeable person” who “has deep empathy for Americans.” From that point on, Lee’s ass-kissing knew no bounds. He

* compared Trump to an icon of his Mormon faith;

* collaborated with the president’s defense team during the first impeachment;

* participated in the administration’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election by recommending the now notorious, indicted attorneys Sydney Powell and John Eastman to lead the legal team, devising the “alternative electors” strategy, and spending “hours” on Jan. 4 calling state legislators on Trump’s behalf;

* continues to defend his and Trump’s actions in those efforts, calling them “unconventional” but perfectly legal.

Trump has offered to make Lee his attorney general and Lee has signaled a willingness to do Trump’s bidding in that position. When asked if he would insulate the DOJ from political pressure, he dismissed the notion as “romantic.”

The MAGA movement is portrayed by its enemies as first and foremost, a threat to democracy. I would suggest, however, that it is better understood as a threat to politics, the activity—the craft—through which democracy is practiced, which involves conciliation, discussion, deliberation, compromise,  toleration of opposition and acceptance of election results. It is how we manage conflict and opposing interests without resorting to violence or coercion. It is how complex, diverse societies establish stability and order while preserving "essential freedom" (Bernard Crick).

Trump may be a populist or a demagogue. He is also a crusader against politics and politicians and he has tapped a deep well of anti-politics in American society. What’s most disturbing about him is not his policy agenda or his offensive speech but his ability to so easily dispatch the political leaders of a venerable American institution and turn it—and them—into instruments of his will.

What remains to be seen is whether Trump is one of a kind or if others will follow using his playbook. Could the Democratic Party be just as vulnerable to such a hostile takeover, or was the Republican Party somehow ripe for the pickin’.

Watching "Babylon Berlin"

 When I first started teaching high school I was struck by how skilled my students were at using Hitler analogies to make a point. It turns out that someone named Goodwin noticed a similar tendency in online discussions and invented a term for it, which he named after himself.  Hitler is a pathetic way to make an argument. It's an impulse that leads to things like mustachioed pictures of Obama or Trump and should be avoided by all intelligent, fair-minded people, even in 9th grade.

As I begin my fourth sabbatical, however, I must confess that I have a tendency to succumb to my own personal corollary to Goodwin's Law:

"As I devote more time to reading, the probability of picking up a book on Germany between the wars approaches 1."

This sabbatical it was Richard Evans' The Coming of the Third Reich. As it happens, my daughter was watching "Babylon Berlin," so I also ended up re-watched seasons 1-3 with her, and now we are into the new season 4.

Watching that show about 1920s Berlin after reading Evans helped me make more sense of the complicated plot of the series. And it made what I'd read in Evans about that period come alive.

I found an encyclopedic fan website (historica.fandom.com) that explains the plot, the characters, and the background. I highly recommend this series, and if you do tune in, the website helps to make sense of the complicated characters and plot. Also, TVTropes.org has BB character summaries—don't click on the white redactions; they are spoilers. There are a few real characters mixed into the plot and the fan site doesn't clearly distinguish between them, so it's good to use Wikipedia to separate truth from fiction.

It's satisfying to be watching a TV show and suddenly notice a character you've just read about in a history book. Gustav Stresseman, the Wiemar foreign minister, appears a couple of times, winning the Nobel Peace Prize and surviving an assassination attempt. (The show's protagonist, Gereon Rath, saves him from a fictional plot in 1929—the real attempt happened in 1925.) Evans wrote that Stresseman was the Weimar Republic's "most skilled, most subtle and most realistic politician." He was a monarchist, but he was willing to participate in democratic politics and he was able to build a bridge between the anti-democratic nationalists and the Social Democrats. His death in 1929, coinciding with the crash of the US stock market, made the rise of the Nazis more likely. Those two events are the hinge between seasons 3 and 4.

The film also reinforces the most significant impression I took away from the book, Evans' case for contingency. In the film, we don't know how things will turn out and the good guys are determined, smart, and effective. They face many obstacles, but they have a way of defeating the villains. Evans also tells us that the rise of a viciously racist fascist regime in Germany leading to World War and Holocaust was not the inevitable fruit of German history and culture and the politics of Weimar, which has been a common assumption of most post-war writing about the rise of German antisemitic fascism. In fact, just before the market crash triggered the depression, he writes, Germany's experiment in democracy "seemed to have weathered the storms of the early 1920s" and was entering "calmer waters. It would need a catastrophe of major dimensions if an extremist party like the Nazis was to gain mass support" (230). After the stock prices crashed, German unemployment rose from 4.5% to 24%.

Before 1914 Evans claims, if you had to predict which European country would have created the Holocaust, it would have been France, not Germany. The film does portray lots of antisemitism in the Wiemar period, but it was by no means universal. Jewish characters hold important positions and are respected and admired by the film's protagonists. Nor was the persecution of homosexuals an inevitable product of German culture. The film's depictions reflect the fact that Berlin was the most tolerant city for gay culture in Europe during the 1920s.

I've been repeatedly drawn to this history because of what Germany's failed experiment in republican government tells us about the vulnerabilities of democracy in the face of a version of right-wing populism with certain parallels to the present. The idea that democracy is fragile has become painfully obvious in the 21st century and historians like Jason Stanley and Timothy Snyder have been showing us scary parallels between the Nazis and Trump since at least 2016.

In a parallel that was hard to ignore, Evans begins his chapter on "Culture War," saying that Germans in the 20s "suffered from an excess of political engagement and political commitment . . . no area of society or politics was immune from politicization" (392-395). In recent years, Americans have politicize personal identity, pregnancy, school libraries, and even Thanksgiving dinners. As my new favorite political thinker writes, "the attempt to politicize everything is the destruction of politics" (Crick, 151).

And yet, Evans' point about contingency is well taken. The differences between America today and Germany in 1929 could not be greater. Our democracy is not new and was not imposed on us by hated conquering foreigners. The US Constitution has deeply ingrained roots and its principles are baked into civic culture. We don't have a violent revolutionary leftist movement like the German Communist Party, loyal to a foreign enemy nation and dedicated to overthrowing the system—Antifa notwithstanding. We aren't suffering in the aftermath of defeat in a war that wiped out 2.7 millions countrymen, paying reparations to our subjugators. And even if the Fed fails to avoid a recession, it is unlikely that we will end up with 24% unemployment.

In short, Weimar Germany is not a road map of our future, and Trump is a bad guy in his own unique way. Don't draw a mustache on him.

---

Source: Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics.

In defense of MAGA voters

The neighbors' place.

The people I mostly interact with are adamantly anti-Trump.  Well, so am I. After Joe Biden's disastrous debate performance, I started saying I'd vote for a ham sandwich before I'd vote for Trump in November.  Thankfully the Democrats came up with a better option than ham for the next president. 

How, my friends, family and colleagues at work, often wonder, could ANYONE vote for someone so horrible?  How can they believe his lies? How can they excuse his glaring character flaws? How can they think he cares about their interests?

We don't find an explanation in the media we consume.  Sometimes I find myself scrolling liberal YouTube or other social media, watching clips from various man-on-the-street interviews of the Trump voter done by slick late-night comedians, or random You Tubers with a camera and a microphone.  They give preposterous answers to questions about current events, public policy or history. They spout absurdly implausible conspiracy theories.  They offer elaborate, logic-defying explanations for Trump's lies, exaggerations and foibles. It's quite satisfying. It makes me feel so smart.

Those of us marinating in these presentations without any alternative sources of information about these fellow citizens of ours, conclude that MAGA world is made up of the least intelligent, least educated, least rational, most racist, sexist, xenophobic, gullible people among us. Those who have tried to enlighten them out of their MAGA delusions generally conclude that they are impervious to facts and reason. 

I recall a moment of shock and humility among the the people around me after Trump's victory in 2016, and some folks were saying that it was time to start listening to some of the voters outside of our own blue bubble and understand the source of their discontent.  

I was in a book group at the time and suggested that we read Arlie Hochschild's book, Strangers in their Own Land, a five-year study of conservative working class Louisianans who were reliable voters for a Republican Party that opposed environmental regulations that curbed oil company practices that were causing catastrophic destruction of their homes and communities, creating among other things, a "cancer ally" and home-swallowing sink holes. 

I think Hochschild's aim was to create empathy and understanding of these voters in the hopes of opening up dialogues and eroding the alienation and polarization that has made it increasingly difficult for people with opposing views to hash out compromises—or to even see the opposition as legitimate.  The book didn't seem to have that effect on most of my fellow book-readers, but to confirm their negative assumptions and bafflement. 

The book had a different effect on me, I guess because I'd spend the summer of 2016, after the Brexit vote, and Trump's primary victory, trying to understand what was going on with those voters as I was preparing to teach my fall course on American Politics and Public Policy. I also happened to be writing a meditation on the subject to be delivered at the start of the term.

Since then I've kept seeking out explanations for the Trump voters and I think there's more than the what we see on late night comedy. Here's a list: 

1. Support for Trump is based in both rational and irrational thinking, solid facts and delusions.  That's true of a lots of thinking here in Blue America, too.  I include a segment in my politics class about the cognitive distortions that cloud everyone's thinking, especially when it comes to politics.

2. Trump voters are a varied bunch, like Blue voters, they don't all agree with each other. They range from rabidly angry anti-democratic hooligans who see Trump as divinely inspired, to average middle class voters who only reluctantly pull the MAGA lever, more out of opposition to the Democratic policies than love of Trump. Similarly, Democratic voters include some people with views and action I'd rather not have to align myself with.

3. Trump emerged from a rising populist sentiment in the 2010s that was justifiably revolting against  what Thomas Frank calls "elite failure"—de-industrialization, hollowing out of the middle class, forever wars, the opioid epidemic, the Great Recession, uncontrolled immigration, the catastrophic decline of private-sector unions, corporate money in politics. But after Trump captured the Republican Party, the Democratic establishment put its finger on the nomination scale to make sure the left populist lost to Clinton, who had become a symbol of elite rule.  Pre-convention polls suggested Sanders would have done better than Clinton in the general election. So we got right- instead of left-wing populism. 

Whatever. The point of this, is to share a few things I've read recently in the off-chance who might want to have a more nuanced understanding of the Trump voter.  

• NYT columnist Ross Douthat is not a Trump supporter, but he is a conservative who has no trouble coming up with justifiable reasons to vote for Trump again, for example in a Sept. 14, 2024 piece, "What Undecided Voters Might Be Thinking."
• This podcast, Batya Ungar-Sargon, a 2016 Sanders supporter explaining why Harris's debate performance might not have won working class Trump voters. 
• Thomas Frank does a good job of explaning the populist revolt against the Democratic Party in his books Listen Liberal and The People, No.  
• The writings of John Judis and Ruy Tuxiera blame the Democratic Party for losing voters more than the blame the irrationality of Trump voters.  For example, their last collaboration, Where Have all the Democrats Gone, Tuxiera's Substack blog, "Liberal Patriot," and Judis's primers on populism and nationalism combined along with a book on socialism in "The Politics of our Time."
• Kaitlyn Flannigan's Atlantic article, "How Late Night Comedy Feuled the Rise of Trump," argues that our gleeful riducule of Trump voters probably cements their support of him.

Last but best, the organization Braver Angels has had great success in bringing voters from the opposing sides together to at least listen to each other and sometimes even find common ground. I witnessed this in person at their annual convention in Kenosha Wisconsin this past June.