I've tried to enunciate this argument a number of times
http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/08/why-im-trump-democrat.html
but Frank Rich really puts it well:
"Far from destroying our democracy, he’s exposing all its phoniness and corruption in ways as serious as he is not. And changing it in the process."
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/09/frank-rich-in-praise-of-donald-trump.html
If you want to see how he is a positive look what happened to Scott Walker yesterday. This was the Koches choice and I think it's pretty fair to say that they were who decided Walker was done and let him know that.
"Scott Walker’s departure from the 2016 presidential race represents not just the end of the Wisconsin governor’s campaign, but a stunning blow to two of the GOP establishment’s most powerful would-be kingmakers: Charles and David Koch. As Walker championed the Kochs’ archconservative anti-union agenda in Wisconsin, the two industrialists and their political network delivered more than $11 million to his campaigns and to groups supporting him in Wisconsin."
"As recently as April, David Koch attended a Republican fundraising event with Walker and told donors there he and his brother believed the governor would be the party’s nominee."
“When the primaries are over and Scott Walker gets the nomination,” Koch told the donors, according to the New York Times. The newspaper reported attendees at the event said Koch went even further, saying Walker should be the nominee.
http://www.ibtimes.com/gop-candidate-scott-walkers-departure-deals-blow-koch-brothers-2016-hopes-whom-will-2107334
Any Kock failure is by definition good news for democracy. If you want to understand how I beat the recall and was re-elected the short answer is: the Koches millions
Back to Frank Rich. He argues that Trump is less like Ross Perot or even George Wallace for which he seems closet than Bullworth:
"What has made him more entertaining than his peers is not his superficial similarities to any historical analogues or his shopworn celebrity. His passport to political stardom has been his uncanny resemblance to a provocative fictional comic archetype that has been an invigorating staple of American movies since Vietnam and Watergate ushered in wholesale disillusionment with Washington four decades ago. That character is a direct descendant of Twain’s 19th-century confidence men: the unhinged charlatan who decides to blow up the system by running for office — often the presidency — on a platform of outrageous pronouncements and boorish behavior. Trump has taken that role, the antithesis of the idealist politicians enshrined by Frank Capra and Aaron Sorkin, and run with it. He bestrides our current political landscape like the reincarnation not of Joe McCarthy (that would be Ted Cruz) but of Jay Billington Bulworth."
The comparison does work on many levels, I agree. He certainly doesn't remind me much of McCarthy-yes that's Ted Cruz all the way. I do think there are some striking similarities with Wallace though. Of course some real differences as well-Wallace was a career and very successful politician.
In the short time since Trump declared his candidacy, he has performed a public service by exposing, however crudely and at times inadvertently, the posturings of both the Republicans and the Democrats and the foolishness and obsolescence of much of the political culture they share. He is, as many say, making a mockery of the entire political process with his bull-in-a-china-shop antics. But the mockery in this case may be overdue, highly warranted, and ultimately a spur to reform rather than the crime against civic order that has scandalized those who see him, in the words of the former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, as “dangerous to democracy.”
I think there's one way you can't deny Trump has been a boon: no way we have 24 million people watching these early debates without him in them.
Rich tries to make his anlaysis bipartisan arguing that Trump has embarrassed Hillary's supposedly lackluster campaign as well. I see this as a reach. I think she is licking her chops at the chance to debate Trump if he really did emerge from the GOP clown show.
But I do think that his candidacy will have lasting effects on the Republican party. In a way Scott Walker wasn't wrong to worry about the effect Trump is having, though we'll see how many GOP pretenders take Walker's bait and end their campaigns too.
So much for all the GOP boasts of a deep bench. That has hardly proved an asset. The Dems tiny bench is the asset-though many seem not to realize it with the call for more debates.
"Trump also sounds like Hal Phillip Walker, the unseen candidate of the “Replacement Party” whose campaign aphorisms percolate throughout Robert Altman’s post-Watergate state-of-the-union comic epic, Nashville(1975). His platform includes eliminating farm subsides, taxing churches, banning lawyers from government, and jettisoning the national anthem because “nobody knows the words, nobody can sing it, nobody understands it.” (Francis Scott Key was a lawyer.) In résumé and beliefs, Trump is even closer to the insurgent candidate played by Tim Robbins and reviled as “a crypto-fascist clown” in the mockumentary Bob Roberts(1992) — a self-congratulatory right-wing Wall Street success story, beauty-pageant aficionado, and folksinging star whose emblematic song is titled “Retake America.” Give Trump time, and we may yet find him quoting the accidental president played by Chris Rock in Head of State(2003): “If America was a woman, she would be a big-tittied woman. Everybody loves a big-tittied woman!”
I agree, and think that Rich's piece is the best analysis I've seen on Trump. Like Rich I don't think he will be President-though whether he will be the GOP candidate is an interesting question.
Even Hugh Hewitt now puts that at 25%.
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/09/hugh-hewitt-donald-trump-chances-213881
http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/08/why-im-trump-democrat.html
but Frank Rich really puts it well:
"Far from destroying our democracy, he’s exposing all its phoniness and corruption in ways as serious as he is not. And changing it in the process."
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/09/frank-rich-in-praise-of-donald-trump.html
If you want to see how he is a positive look what happened to Scott Walker yesterday. This was the Koches choice and I think it's pretty fair to say that they were who decided Walker was done and let him know that.
"Scott Walker’s departure from the 2016 presidential race represents not just the end of the Wisconsin governor’s campaign, but a stunning blow to two of the GOP establishment’s most powerful would-be kingmakers: Charles and David Koch. As Walker championed the Kochs’ archconservative anti-union agenda in Wisconsin, the two industrialists and their political network delivered more than $11 million to his campaigns and to groups supporting him in Wisconsin."
"As recently as April, David Koch attended a Republican fundraising event with Walker and told donors there he and his brother believed the governor would be the party’s nominee."
“When the primaries are over and Scott Walker gets the nomination,” Koch told the donors, according to the New York Times. The newspaper reported attendees at the event said Koch went even further, saying Walker should be the nominee.
http://www.ibtimes.com/gop-candidate-scott-walkers-departure-deals-blow-koch-brothers-2016-hopes-whom-will-2107334
Any Kock failure is by definition good news for democracy. If you want to understand how I beat the recall and was re-elected the short answer is: the Koches millions
Back to Frank Rich. He argues that Trump is less like Ross Perot or even George Wallace for which he seems closet than Bullworth:
"What has made him more entertaining than his peers is not his superficial similarities to any historical analogues or his shopworn celebrity. His passport to political stardom has been his uncanny resemblance to a provocative fictional comic archetype that has been an invigorating staple of American movies since Vietnam and Watergate ushered in wholesale disillusionment with Washington four decades ago. That character is a direct descendant of Twain’s 19th-century confidence men: the unhinged charlatan who decides to blow up the system by running for office — often the presidency — on a platform of outrageous pronouncements and boorish behavior. Trump has taken that role, the antithesis of the idealist politicians enshrined by Frank Capra and Aaron Sorkin, and run with it. He bestrides our current political landscape like the reincarnation not of Joe McCarthy (that would be Ted Cruz) but of Jay Billington Bulworth."
The comparison does work on many levels, I agree. He certainly doesn't remind me much of McCarthy-yes that's Ted Cruz all the way. I do think there are some striking similarities with Wallace though. Of course some real differences as well-Wallace was a career and very successful politician.
I would say that Trump is Bullworth but has some Wallace thrown in.
I fully agree with Rich about taking Trump a little lighter which is what I prefer to do. A lot of people disagree, certainly many progressives disagree. Obviously I don't agree with anything Trump has said about immigration or all his baiting on Birtherism.
Still I agree with Frank that he's campaign doesn't necessarily connote the End Times-as many do, like Digby here.
http://www.salon.com/2015/09/21/donald_trump_is_americas_mad_prophet_how_hes_ushering_in_a_terrifying_new_age_of_politics/
I also think that many are a little selective in their outrage over Trump.
http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-selective-outrage-over-trump.html
It's great for Jeb Bush to agree that the President is a citizen but I didn't hear this criticism of the GOP establishment when Romney played it Birther back in 2012.
"There is indeed a lighter way to look at Trump’s rise and his impact on the country. Far from being an apocalyptic harbinger of the end-times, it’s possible that his buffoonery poses no lasting danger. Quite the contrary: His unexpected monopoly of center stage may well be the best thing to happen to our politics since the arrival of Barack Obama."In the short time since Trump declared his candidacy, he has performed a public service by exposing, however crudely and at times inadvertently, the posturings of both the Republicans and the Democrats and the foolishness and obsolescence of much of the political culture they share. He is, as many say, making a mockery of the entire political process with his bull-in-a-china-shop antics. But the mockery in this case may be overdue, highly warranted, and ultimately a spur to reform rather than the crime against civic order that has scandalized those who see him, in the words of the former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, as “dangerous to democracy.”
I think there's one way you can't deny Trump has been a boon: no way we have 24 million people watching these early debates without him in them.
Rich tries to make his anlaysis bipartisan arguing that Trump has embarrassed Hillary's supposedly lackluster campaign as well. I see this as a reach. I think she is licking her chops at the chance to debate Trump if he really did emerge from the GOP clown show.
But I do think that his candidacy will have lasting effects on the Republican party. In a way Scott Walker wasn't wrong to worry about the effect Trump is having, though we'll see how many GOP pretenders take Walker's bait and end their campaigns too.
So much for all the GOP boasts of a deep bench. That has hardly proved an asset. The Dems tiny bench is the asset-though many seem not to realize it with the call for more debates.
"Trump also sounds like Hal Phillip Walker, the unseen candidate of the “Replacement Party” whose campaign aphorisms percolate throughout Robert Altman’s post-Watergate state-of-the-union comic epic, Nashville(1975). His platform includes eliminating farm subsides, taxing churches, banning lawyers from government, and jettisoning the national anthem because “nobody knows the words, nobody can sing it, nobody understands it.” (Francis Scott Key was a lawyer.) In résumé and beliefs, Trump is even closer to the insurgent candidate played by Tim Robbins and reviled as “a crypto-fascist clown” in the mockumentary Bob Roberts(1992) — a self-congratulatory right-wing Wall Street success story, beauty-pageant aficionado, and folksinging star whose emblematic song is titled “Retake America.” Give Trump time, and we may yet find him quoting the accidental president played by Chris Rock in Head of State(2003): “If America was a woman, she would be a big-tittied woman. Everybody loves a big-tittied woman!”
I agree, and think that Rich's piece is the best analysis I've seen on Trump. Like Rich I don't think he will be President-though whether he will be the GOP candidate is an interesting question.
Even Hugh Hewitt now puts that at 25%.
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/09/hugh-hewitt-donald-trump-chances-213881
I also agree with Rich that Trump's buffoonery passes no lasting danger.
P.S. As for Hillary, I really don't think Trump has her in any way distressed. She herself has said not that he is a threat to the democratic order like the Bush people do but that he is a hoot.
Apparently, the Clinton campaign is kind of obsessed with Trump.
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/09/clinton-campaign-trump-obsession-213770
When she says she'd love to debate Trump I read this as her saying she would love him to win the GOP nomination.
Basically Trump is great for our democracy because thanks to him the GOP is going to split in two. One way or the other, roughly on the lines of the establishment and the base. After Trump no way can the base be forced to support yet another Bush but this is exactly the 'cat food' the GOP wants to sell them.
It would not surprise me at all to see a third party inspired by Trump and quite possibly lead by him in the early days emerge.
This could happen in any number of ways. Maybe Trump gets pissed when the GOP lowers the draw bridge on him during the delegate count between him and Jeb and he starts the party to run for POTUS: after all, he will be able to fairly argue that the party didn't treat him fairly.
Or maybe the base stays home in droves for Jeb this time but starts a third party after this cycle. One way or the other, the Southern Strategy where Southern whites and ethnic whites up North vote for their prejudices rather than their economic interests will not work going forward as it has in the past.
Even the GOP pretensions to be a national party won't be tenable in the future. The base is going to want a candidate like Trump who runs directly on their prejudices.
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