Trumpism

  • Like Deer in the Headlights

    Trump might eke out a victory, but it looks like Biden wins the White House and the GOP holds the senate. The country, in other words, chooses stasis and the continued gridlock that makes us ungovernable–a failed state in the making. Fear makes us stupid, and people are really scared. As a country, we're like

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  • Whence the Republicans?

    The Republican Party as currently constituted is a minority party representing a demographically narrow segment of the American electorate. It needs stasis — institutional and constitutional — to survive. Democrats do not. Just the opposite, they need a political system that can grow with and respond to change within our society. Progressive government is necessarily

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  • Quote of the Day: Richard Rorty

    [M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to

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  • On Courage and Prudence

    One of Trump’s spokespeople derided the Biden event as “an episode of Mister Rodgers Neighborhood.” (In authentic Trump style, she misspelled the name.) If this was meant to suggest that the evening was all smiles and saccharine—well, it only showed that the spokesperson had never watched the classic children’s program hosted by Fred Rogers. Rogers

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  • Quote of the Day: David Frum

    It was pandemonium. But it was revealing pandemonium. Who and what Trump is could not have been more vividly displayed in all the psychological reality. Debate one was not Donald Trump versus Joe Biden, or red versus blue. It was zookeepers versus poop-throwing primates. David Frum in The Atlantic Pretty much sums it up.

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  • On Chickens Coming Home

    Why did the chickens cross the road? Why did Caesar cross the Rubicon?  First answer: to come home to roost. Second answer: to have his army with him to fight the aforementioned chickens, i.e., those in the Roman Senate who were about to throw the book at him. Donald Trump is not Julius Caesar, but

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  • Has “Trump’s America” Jumped the Shark?

    When I spoke to former NBC colleagues of Mr. Zucker about his tenure there, the show they brought up most often wasn’t “The Apprentice”; it was “Fear Factor,” in which contestants were tossed in their underwear into a pit full of rats, among other grotesque stunts. USA Today described it as perhaps “the most vile

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  • This Moment is Different

    I know plenty of Trump supporters, and I know many of them to be people of integrity in important areas of their lives. Indeed, some are friends I cherish. But if there is a line Donald Trump could cross that would forfeit the loyalty of his core supporters—including, and in some respects especially, white evangelical

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  • Trump Enchantment Syndrome

    Evil has a way of chewing up and spitting out the people it uses once they become useless for it. This is especially true when they are egregiously empty channels like Trump. During the time Evil uses them, they have this ability to cast spells, but at a certain point the magic stops working. They

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  • Quote of the Day: Thomas Edsall

    "In God We Divide", by Thomas Edsall in today's NYT …the “most powerful simple way to understand the electorate” is as composed of “white Christians (half), white seculars (a quarter) and voters of color (a quarter).” Citing data from Pew, he noted that white Christians favored Trump 67 to 27, while white seculars favored Clinton

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