Delaware Liberal

The October 14, 2016 Thread

Delaware Dem

PRESIDENT
NATIONAL–Fox News–CLINTON 49, Trump 41
TEXAS–SurveyUSA–TRUMP 47, Clinton 43
OHIO–NBC/WSJ/Marist–CLINTON 45, TRUMP 45
NORTH CAROLINA–NBC/WSJ/Marist–CLINTON 48, Trump 43
NORTH CAROLINA–Suffolk–CLINTON 45, Trump 43
NORTH CAROLINA–Emerson–CLINTON 46, Trump 42
GEORGIA–Landmark–TRUMP 48, Clinton 42
VIRGINIA–Emerson–CLINTON 46, TRUMP 43
UTAH–Monmouth–TRUMP 34, Clinton 28, McMullin 20

It was Obama day yesterday on the campaign trail.

President Obama told Republicans they are responsible for allowing Donald Trump to become the Republican nominee by “feeding their base all kinds of crazy for years” at the annual Ohio Democrats’ dinner Thursday night, TPM reports. It was a no shit moment for all us liberals and Democrats. And it is long past time Democrats on the trail begin telling voters that all Republicans in office everywhere deserve to be punished for giving us Trump.

Said Obama: “The problem is not that all Republicans think the way this guy does. The problem is that they’ve been riding this tiger for a long time. They’ve been feeding their base all kinds of crazy for years, primarily for political expedience. So if Trump was running around saying I wasn’t born here, they were okay with that as long as it helped them with votes. If some of these folks on talk radio talked about how I was the antichrist, that’s just politics.”

He added: “They stood by while this happened. And Donald Trump–as he’s prone to do—he didn’t build the building himself, he just slapped his name on it and took credit for it. And that’s what happened in their party.”

And then there was Michelle. If you have not watched her speech, you are required by law to stop what you are doing and watch it right now:

Max Boot at Foreign Policy:

Trump’s apologists tried to claim that he wasn’t threatening to jail former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for being his political opponent but, rather, for supposed “felonies committed in office.” But this is exactly the kind of thing that dictators always say; no one ever admits to jailing the opposition for political reasons. The essence of democracy is not to criminalize political differences. That’s something that Trump does not seem to understand. It seems appropriate, then, that during the rest of the debate — while desperately trying to deflect attention from the “pussygate” scandal that has crippled his campaign — Trump alternatively expressed his admiration for dictators and emulated their “Big Lie” techniques for winning and keeping power. If we needed any more evidence, the debate showed just what an unprincipled power-seeker Trump is — how he is willing to say or do anything, to cross any line, to violate any norm of civilized behavior, in order to feed his insatiable ego. He came across as the kind of unscrupulous demagogue that has imperiled other democracies and that the United States has not seen since the heyday of Huey Long and George Wallace.

Gideon Rachman at The Financial Times:

In some respects, Mr Trump has actually introduced some of the malign features of Russian and Chinese politics into the US. One of the strengths of the western democratic system is that a free press and open debate are meant to expose falsehoods. Yet Mr Trump sprays out lies like a skunk trying to repel its enemies. His method seems to be to create such confusion that the truth simply gets buried amid a mass of falsehoods. This is characteristic of the current Russian propaganda system described in an aptly titled book by Peter Pomerantsev: Nothing is True and Everything Is Possible. […]

If Mrs Clinton makes it to the White House there will be relief across the west and a certain disappointment in Moscow and, perhaps, Beijing. But it will be very hard to erase the memory of this campaign. It has presented an image of a troubled, divided and deluded US to the rest of the world. As a result, it has already dealt a serious blow to the prestige and power of the west.

Yoni Applebaum at the Atlantic says Trump’s promise to jail Clinton is a threat to American Democracy:

A candidate who accepted the nomination to chants of “Lock her up!” crosses a dangerous line.
This is not how the presidency works. When Richard Nixon tried to interfere in an ongoing investigation, Attorney General Elliott Richardson resigned. And even if Trump could find a more malleable attorney general, and discard precedent, he’d still lack the power to jail Clinton unilaterally. Presidents are not in charge of the law, but of its faithful execution.

This is also not how democracies work. Elected officials do not jail their foes. The Constitution specifically prohibits bills of attainder—legislation designed to punish individuals, thereby circumventing the judicial process—to bar despotic rulers from persecuting their opponents. The jailing of political opponents is a feature of repressive dictatorships, not vibrant democracies.

But it is fully in keeping with how Trump’s campaign has worked. He accepted the nomination in Cleveland in July. The defining chant of that convention was not, “Make America Great Again.” It was “Lock Her Up!”
And on Sunday, that’s exactly what Trump vowed to do.

Ezra Klein at Vox says Alex Jones latest demon ramblings are disturbing, not because he made them, but because who listens to them.

Trump ally Alex Jones thinks Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are literally demons from hell
For the record, I have interviewed both Clinton and Obama, and I didn’t notice any unusual smells [brimstone, folks, brimstone].

All this would be hilarious if Jones wasn’t, in some way, an actual player in Donald Trump’s informational ecosystem. But among the scariest things about Donald Trump is the sources he chooses to trust. Polls are only legitimate if they show him ahead. Conspiracy theoriesare valid so long as they flatter his view of the world. Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Muslims in New Jersey cheered the fall of the Twin Towers. Climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese. Vaccines cause autism. The FBI hasn’t jailed Hillary Clinton because the system is corrupt. The Clintons perhaps murdered Vince Foster. Obama is a secret Muslim. Antoni Scalia was assassinated. And on, and on, and on.
Jones is nuts, but he’s the kind of nuts Trump listens to, at least when convenient. And Trump takes these ideas and bases his approach off them. If this is the milieu you start from, merely throwing Clinton in jail is a compromise proposal.

Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post:

This is an absolute worst-case scenario for Republicans. Had Trump turned against them months ago — or had his poll numbers dipped then as they have now — extricating themselves from the dumpster fire might have been painful, but it was possible. Now it’s almost certainly too late to do any real distancing from the nominee even as he is promising more unpredictability and more intraparty attacks.

It’s unclear how badly Trump can hurt his chances or those of his party downballot. But, the disaster scenario — an electoral college wipeout, losing the Senate and the House — now has to be on the table.

Martin Longman:

If you’ve been following me all these years, you know my argument about how our divided country stays evenly divided because roughly equally strong forces have been holding up each side of the political wall. This is why we’ve had these fairly stable red and blue states for the last several presidential elections in a row. It’s been as unthinkable that a Democrat would win Texas as it has been that a Republican could win Massachusetts.
But things do not stay the same forever. And when one side loses enough strength, they can no longer apply equal force against the wall and it collapses on them. That’s how a Reagan wins Vermont. And that’s how a Republican could lose Arizona or South Carolina.

I’ve seen the signs and potential for this happening in this election for a long time and have argued that it would not end in a close result. For a long time I was more convinced about this than about who would actually win. Then the polls settled in after the conventions and it began to look like I was wrong. Clinton would win, but win a victory no bigger than Obama’s victories. And this is certainly still a possibility, mainly due to Clinton’s weaknesses as a candidate.
I’ll just say, though, if the spectacle of Trump making open war on his own party less than a month before the election cannot change the fundamentally gridlocked divide in this country, I don’t have a clue what possibly could.
If this election doesn’t tip strongly in the Democrats’ direction, then this is the best the left will do until the slow grind of demographic change tips the wall over. This is it. This is the grand opportunity.

David Brooks on Donald Trump’s sad and lonely life: “Politics is an effort to make human connection, but Trump seems incapable of that. He is essentially adviser-less, friendless. His campaign team is made up of cold mercenaries at best and Roger Ailes at worst. His party treats him as a stench it can’t yet remove.”

“He was a germophobe through most of his life and cut off contact with others, and now I just picture him alone in the middle of the night, tweeting out hatred. Trump breaks his own world record for being appalling on a weekly basis, but as the campaign sinks to new low after new low, I find myself experiencing feelings of deep sadness and pity.”
“Imagine if you had to go through a single day without sharing kind little moments with strangers and friends.”
“Imagine if you had to endure a single week in a hate-filled world, crowded with enemies of your own making, the object of disgust and derision.”

“You would be a twisted, tortured shrivel, too, and maybe you’d lash out and try to take cruel revenge on the universe. For Trump this is his whole life.”

The Atlantic says the Worst of Trump is yet to come: “Herein lies the most potentially devastating effect of Trump’s florid and public propulsion of a ‘rigged system.’ His corps of challengers may very well sow chaos on election day, but the laws allowing them to do so are at least laws—able to be repealed or updated (or kept in place), but at the very least subject to formal legislative governance.”

“Public trust, however—the core of our social compact—is not a matter of legislation: It is a terrible thing to lose, and a difficult thing to regain. And Trump has lately determined that his survival may be contingent its erosion; the last three days, after all, have shown the country how much he’s prepared to risk. It’s a dangerous play for the candidate, but unquestionably, a far more hazardous one for democracy.”

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