I have to give Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort credit. Does anyone, other than his boss, pack as much crazy and danger into so few words. Is there an award for Most Outrageous Statements in A-One-Photo-Caption-Sized Quote?”

In an interview this week, Manafort managed, in 106 words, to dismiss women and minorities from the vice presidency, to show contempt for Trump’s “long list” of possible V.P.s, and, at the same time, to suggest that one of these people with “major problems” will be given unprecedented authority in a way that would likely produce multiple constitutional crises.

Here’s what Manafort said in an interview this week:

“He needs an experienced person to do the part of the job he doesn’t want to do. He seems himself more as the chairman of the board, than even the CEO, let alone the COO.

“There is a long list of who that person could be,” Manafort added, “and every one of them has major problems.

“The campaign probably won’t choose a woman or a member of a minority group, he said. “In fact, that would be viewed as pandering, I think.”

It might be futile to take anything that the Trump campaign says too seriously, except that Trump is only one unpopular seventy-year old woman away from the presidency, so, yeah, everything his campaign says should be taken seriously.

Manafort states that Trump will be the metaphorical Chairman of the Board of his administration while the Vice President handles the parts of the job he doesn’t want to do!” He doesn’t elaborate on what those parts of the job will be, but I’ll bet it’s a long list.

There is a dangerous logic to this.  It gives cover to Trump supporters who are too embarrassed to admit it. Or need some re-assurance that their decision is actually a sound and prudent one. And maybe it persuades some Republicans who don’t like Trump, but have a hard time voting for Hillary.

I think back to 1980 when people were concerned that Reagan was too old or not engaged enough to be president. The idea then was that he’d be like the CEO and hire great people around him and everything would be fine. Except that Reagan had been a two-term governor of California and, as it turns out, was much more engaged and hands-on than his critics wanted to believe.

And Reagan did bring in great people.  He’d been part of Republican and conservative politics for decades. I don’t get the sense that Trump’s got people like George Schultz, Casper Weinberger, David Stockman, and Jim Baker lining up to join his team.

And the CEO metaphor betrayed an ignorance of exactly how engaged and hands-on and essential a CEO is to a company.

But, Trump’s taken the metaphor to the next level.  He’s going to be the Chairman of the Board. Which means no real involvement in the day-to-day strategy or operations of the company.

The idea of Trump spending much of his presidency in Mar-a-Largo while his vice president runs the country has undeniable appeal. It might even get him elected if he can find a serious Republican to take the job.

The Trump as Chairman idea also explains why someone as serious as Bob Corker would take a meeting at Trump Tower to discuss the Vice Presidency.  You sorta have to take a meeting with someone who wants to give you unprecedented, extra-constitutional power.  But, I’m sure someone as canny as Corker—who also made his fortune in real estate—recognizes Trump as a guy who negotiates a contract for steel or cement or dry wall and then when the bills come due doesn’t pay them, and then 120 days later re-opens negotiations on the price.

I’m not qualified to assess whether such an arrangement would be constitutional.  Trump dipping in and out of his presidency when the spirt moves him, and Bob Corker running the government except when he doesn’t. And no one knows when he is or isn’t.

It almost doesn’t matter. Even if some kind of legal action could be brought, it would go to a Supreme Court that is less “supreme” than it used to be. A court either still split 4-4 or that has a Trump-appointed replacement for Scalia. John Roberts recognizes his responsibility to protecting the role of the Court.  He would likely step in and declare the arrangement unconstitutional.  But, then what? President Trump, “Well, John Roberts is a loser. He failed on Obamacare. He’s not liked by many people. I don’t trust him . . . “

I’m straying into future-history fiction, but my point was that if professional politicians and voters don’t take the institutions of government seriously, then they will break. Manafort’s off-hand comments make it clear how close we are to that breaking point.

Watching Donald Trump on the stump in New Mexico this morning, I’m reminded of Robert Deniro in Goodfellas when Spider briefly and fatally stands up to Joe Pesci’s character, Tommy.  “Good for you. Don’t take no shit off nobody, “Deniro tells him, seconds before Tommy shoots Spider a bunch of times in the chest.

One of Trump’s appeals is that “he don’t take no shit off nobody.” Not even the Republican governor of New Mexico in her own state.

Susana Martinez is the governor of New Mexico and head of the Republican Governors Association for this election cycle. Which means she’s in charge of the national efforts to raise money for Republican’s running for governorships across the country.  It’s the kind of position an ambitious politician takes to rack up IOU’s across the country from candidates who might support her when she runs for national office. Chris Christy had this job for the last cycle, and it was going pretty well until the thugs on his staff closed the George Washington Bridge (and two interstate highways) for three days.

Martinez gets a lot of potential VP talk. Although, she and her staff apparently got staggeringly drunk last year in a hotel suite, throwing bottles of beer out the window into the street and being so rowdy that the hotel had to call the police to break it up. But, such an episode might actually make her a more attractive candidate for Trump.  But, not after yesterday.

Trump was in New Mexico yesterday, and Governor Martinez found some other pressing duties to attend to and avoided appearing on stage with him or even meeting him. This kind of thing happens all the time when you have an unpopular candidate and is a sure sign that for all the stories about Republicans closing ranks behind Trump, they don’t really mean it. Let’s see how many of them actually want to be photographed with the guy.

Again, this kind of thing happens all the time. Think back to when there were still Democratic governors and senators in the deep south. Any time a Democratic president or presidential candidate showed up in their state, the Democrats in those states would regrettably inform President Clinton or Senator Kerry that there was a county fair four-hundred miles away that they were just committed to attend. Really sorry that they couldn’t make it, but next time, for sure.

But, Trump reacted to Martinez’s demurral by just ripping into her in front of a Republican audience in her own state.  It’s remarkable. She’s the sitting Republican Governor of an increasingly Democratic state. She’s Latino and a woman. And she’s head of the Republican Governors Association. And he just rips into her like she was Hillary Clinton.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L5qtzJs-80

Which brings me to my larger point. Anyone who has worked on a political campaign, whether for a presidential candidate or for some small local office, knows that the great joy of politics is the connections you make with other people.

My father, he and my mother are local politicians in Western Pennsylvania, once was quoted in the local paper as saying, “everyone should run for office once in their lives.”

A political campaign is one of the purest forms of community. Disparate people working for a common goal. People you flat-out come to love. People you hate but have to work with. People you know weren’t on your side in that last primary and won’t be in the next one, but you are together with them for a few months this time, and, really, they aren’t that bad a person. Shared ecstatic moments when you win. And broken hearts shared with people you might never meet again, but who you’ll never forget.

Trump has none of this. He elides all that’s warm, and human, and joyful about politics.  Hillary will have quite a team out there working for her: Obama, Biden, Bill, eventually Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, and a plethora of senators and governors and congress people all over local television and showing up at endless barbecues and Fourth of July parades.

Trump has a few people on the payroll and his statuesque wife and daughters, but he’s otherwise all alone in his well-upholstered plane or sitting on the sofa in Trump Tower eating candy, watching all the news channels at the same time, and firing off tweets.

No team. No friends—lasting or even just for the moment. Nothing that makes politics so much fun and so essentially human.

One possibly amusing diversion in what is sure to an otherwise especially cruel and humorless election campaign, is to watch Republicans who should otherwise know better appear on television and try to defend Trump’s antics and pretend that everything they’ve worked for all their lives hasn’t just been usurped by the Grand Wizard of Wrestling.

Here’s a clip of Haley Barbour on Morning Joe this morning. I’m obviously not a big fan of a former Republican governor of Mississippi who is also a former head of the RNC. But, I do admire his considerable political gifts and his deep-south-as-it gets accent.  And suspect he would be someone I wouldn’t mind having a beer with. Or a couple or three bourbons at an airport bar along with a basket of fried catfish and some hush puppies.

Watch this usually glib, fast-talker just twist himself in knots trying to make sense of the Trump campaign.  Skip ahead to 2:00 minutes in the clip where Joe Scarborough (remember, a former Republican congressman from Florida) asks him about Trump’s re-surfacing the Vince Foster murder insinuations.  And then, right after that, Mark Halperin (another Republican), asks him what he thinks of Newt Gingrich as Trump’s possible running mate.

His answer is basically, “Newt Gingrich is a living person, and I have met him on more than one occasion.”

http://on.msnbc.com/245PghV

 

I’m starting to think that Hillary is the best candidate that the Democrats could possibly run against Trump. He showed during the primaries that he could emasculate a wide range of governors and senators like the journeyman school -yard bully he is.

Bush, the wimpy rich kid; Little Marco, the short, sweaty little forensics kid; Christie, the fat kid; and, well, he just came out and called Carly an ugly girl.

And, looking back, what a bunch of terrible politicians. One of the good things about the extended American election campaign is that it sorts out who is tough enough to be president. I get that no one saw Trump coming, but I think that JFK, or Bill Clinton, or Reagan, or Obama, or even the first Bush could have handled this guy, because they were all cooler and tougher than the bully.

JFK, wealthy, handsome, war hero, dismissing him with an existential smirk. Reagan, “there-you-go-again-ing” him. Clinton, like he did with Bob Dole, walking over and leaning on Trump’s podium, maybe even covering the microphone, while he leans over and whispers a threat in Trump’s ear. Obama, like he’ll do this fall, the cool, smart kid making the other kids laugh at Trump.

Hillary doesn’t have the political skills of JFK, or Reagan, or Clinton, or Obama. But, unlike “little” Marco or Jeb!, she’s a tough customer. Go back and watch the last few hours of the Benghazi hearings if there’s any doubt about that. They came at her with everything they had for over 12 hours, and, to quote Robert Deniro in The Untouchables, “You have an all-out fight, you wait until the fight is over, one guy (or woman) is left standing. And that’s how you know who won.”

It’s kind of cute when reporters refer to Trump’s “war room” because he’s still just tweeting and doing phone calls from his bath tub.  Yesterday, Trump reiterated his suggestions that Bill Clinton is a rapist and, in an interview with the Washington Post, resurrected insinuations that Bill and/or Hillary had a role to play in the death of Vince Foster.

This is all Trump’s got? A seventy-year old man’s thirty-year-old sexual indiscretions? Vince Foster? Even Gingrich didn’t go after this when it might have made a difference in 1993.

I’d remind Mr. Trump that voters knew all this stuff when they re-elected Bill in 1996. And, that Hillary’s approval ratings soared all through the Monica and Gennifer Flowers stories. She’s saving this one up for later in the campaign. That moment when, with dignity and disgust, this grandmother reminds the over-the-hill playboy that she doesn’t need him to lecture her about infidelity. We’ll put that moment up there with Lloyd Bentsen’s take down of Dan Quayle.

Hillary’s disapproval numbers by voters are already at 60%, historically bad for a presumptive nominee of a major party; except for the jackass who is the presumptive nominee for what we once called the Republican Party.

People have made their decisions about her a long time ago. She’s had millions of dollars spent over twenty-five years to destroy her. It’s going to take a lot more than tabloid-level insinuations from Donald Trump to take her down. She really might be the ideal person to take this guy down.

Lost in the circus maximus of Donald Trump’s Candidacy for President of the United States—it’s still impossible to write that and not believe that I’m living in an X-Men comic from the eighties, with a demagogue candidate running for president on an anti-mutant platform.  And, me not buying the story because it’s not believable.  Our politics has moved beyond basic verisimilitude.

Lost in all this, is that Trump’s candidacy is an ideal vehicle for certain elements of the Republican Party to complete their decades-long project of destroying the federal government. Grover Norquist once famously said that he wanted to shrink the federal government to a size that it could be drowned in a bathtub. That hasn’t happened, but that which can’t be made smaller, can be broken beyond repair.

We take our institutions of government for granted.  No matter how much we gripe about them or laugh at comedians who ridicule them, through war and peace, the executive, legislative, and judicial branches have continued doing the nation’s business.

Until recently.  It’s well documented that the Republicans have broken the legislative branch, and I’ll probably do a longer post on this. The House is run by a so-called “Freedom caucus” that’s only agenda is to stop the government from functioning.

Breaking the senate required a series of maneuvers.  The senate only functions with the unanimous consent of its members. Legislation only moves forward without the objection of a single senator. When you read accounts of how the senate worked in the twentieth century, it’s remarkable that senators from both parties routinely provided unanimous consent to allow legislation that they opposed to move to the floor. It was a professional courtesy and an acknowledgement that the senate can’t function otherwise.

Republicans, desperate to stop Obama, abandoned unanimous consent without regard to the harm it would do to the institution of the senate.

This year, the GOP broke the Supreme Court. This week, the court declined to hear an important case that involved contraception under Obamacare. They sent it back to the lower courts because there was no point in a 4-4 divided court hearing the case. Expect to see a lot more of this kind of thing.

We will have a full year without a functioning Supreme Court.  Gee, what happens if this year’s presidential election ends up in front of the court?  Like Bush v Gore did?  Unlikely, but not impossible. What happens then?

It’s likely that Hillary wins the presidency and the Republicans narrowly retain the senate. Scalia’s seat needs to be filled. And we will enter the next four years with three justices over eighty-years old. At least one and probably more will need to be replaced. But, why would a Republican congress approve any justice that Hillary proposes?  What stops them from just refusing to approve or even meet with anyone she nominates? Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kennedy will likely have to stay on the job until they expire. Think William O. Douglas post-stroke being wheeled into the chamber.

So, legislative branch:  wrecked. Judicial branch: wreckage in process.

Executive branch:  Mr. Trump, enter, stage right.

I’m inadvertently live blogging the Ryan/Trump meeting. As I post this, the two of them are meeting. The air crackles with excitement. Work grinds to a halt across the nation as people tune into cable news. It’s hard to get a waiter in a restaurant to refill your coffee.

There are lots of things at stake in this, of course. For Trump, is this the first occasion in the campaign season where he actually has to act like a professional politician and statesman? Act like a grown up?  Shed the clown suit?

Ryan will address the press after the meeting and take questions.  Will Trump? How will Trump look sharing the stage with Ryan after the meeting? Can Trump sustain an extended conversation through the media with Ryan? Can he discuss policy differences?

If Ryan is playing a long (six-month) game to force Trump to prove he has the temperament to be president, will Trump be up to it?

Trump has built his entire campaign through Twitter and big rallies. That’s it. No town halls. No round table meetings with voters (can you imagine? Trump in listening mode? Feeling your pain?)  Like watching video of Vladimir Putin being nice to little kids.

The tweets and rallies are exactly Trump’s biggest weakness in trying to look presidential.

Nothing about 140 character messages from your bath tub tends toward reasonableness and statesmanship.

Nothing about large rallies tends itself to moderation and thoughtful discussion.

The question, then, is will this bring Trump down?  Or does he just look at the Weimar Republicans and say, “well, these meetings have been very useful, but the people are on my side, Lyin’ Ryan?”

Trump’s also meeting today with Mitch McConnell and the white men who make up the Republican senate leadership.  They’ll all support him.  They might even “endorse” him. The question is, will they ever be seen again in the same room together between now and November?

Can’t resist going once more into the Living Room Campaign.  This time to the Ford / Carter campaign in 1976. What’s most interesting is that you can see Ford struggling to bring together key elements of what would become the Reagan coalition.  Carter was clearly not the type of candidate they expected to be running against. He wasn’t very liberal. He was from the deep south, and he made his evangelical Baptist faith a cornerstone of his campaign.

So, the Ford campaign seized on Carter’s famous interview with Playboy in which he said that he had experienced lust in his heart.  And produced this strange ad featuring A. S Criswell, who was head of the Southern Baptists.

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1976/criswell

The 1976 race was only four years after Nixon had unveiled his Southern Strategy, to use Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislation as the means to move the solid Democratic south to the Republican Party. But, Carter was from Georgia, and 1976 was to be the last hurrah for the Solid South.  Carter carried all the southern states, including Texas! California back then was a reliably Republican state, and Ford carried it.

The Ford campaign eschewed subtly in appealing to white southerners. They rolled out this spot, featuring Strom Thurmond directly addressing racist voters. He accuses Jimmy Carter, in the service of big union bosses, of being willing to eliminate “our States Rights away clause.”  I have no idea what he’s actually talking about there, but everyone watching sure knew what Strom meant when he was talking about States Rights. This one does belong in a museum. “See, kids, that was what a segregationist looked and sounded like.”

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1976/strom-thurmond

Finally, this anthemic spot for Ford doesn’t need much set up. It’s like watching a team of high school students try to make a presidential spot. The song was surely rejected by R.C. Cola as being too vapid to represent their fine product.  For some reason Ford has a ship’s wheel leaning against the wall of the Oval Office. No one bothered to mount it. He wasn’t going to be there that long, why put holes in the wall?

Clearly everyone on the campaign team was using cocaine.  Ford himself looks stoned as he leans back in his chair, gestures in the air and pretends to work for the camera.

They are making all kinds of efforts to be diverse, though.  Which makes the Reagan Morning in America spot all the more striking for its broad-shouldered, car-pooling, hard-working whiteness.  Here’s the link.  Be careful, the song is catchy:

“We’re living here in peace again

“We’re going back to work again”

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1976/peace

 

Any political junkies needing a break from this election need look no further than The Museum of the Moving Image’s web site, The Living Room Candidate. The site’s been up for a while and so the interface is dated, but the content is fascinating.  The site presents every general election television campaign commercial since 1952.

The link is here:

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/

You can spend a lot of time with the site, revisiting not only candidates, but glimpses at the pressing issues of the day, and also how these ads have changed.  And haven’t.

Because of the way the site is built, I can’t link to individual ads within the site.  And so, the links below are from YouTube, which has a few, but not most of the spots.

Morning in America

Any review of presidential television spots has to start with Reagan’s Morning in America spot in 1984.  It still holds up as a masterpiece. Although, clearly, diversity wasn’t an issue in 1984. The spot could have been shot in a gated community in Johannesburg, with only a couple of children, maybe, vaguely, non-white.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU-IBF8nwSY

Meanwhile, contrast the Mondale ads.  The only one on YouTube focuses on deficit reduction and is testament to how much Reagan’s Keynesian deficits tied the Democrats in knots.  Mondale—the liberal—running on a platform of “cut spending”, “close tax loopholes”, and “ trust fund”, which is to put new taxes in a trust fund to pay off the Reagan deficits.  How did the country not rally behind this clarion call to action?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCk3WaEUks4

Dark Knight in America

The ads from 1972 are particularly interesting. Many of them still have an earnestness that we usually associate with newsreels from the fifties and early sixties, but some of the spots show the influence of films made in the late sixties and early seventies.

And, it’s 1972.  Probably the nadir, so far, of the American spirit.

Here’s a Democrats for Nixon spot in which the Nixon campaign claims that McGovern has introduced a bill in congress that would put 47 percent of Americans on welfare. It’s notable that this seemingly random number, 47, is also the percent of American’s that Mitt Romney would famously describe as the “takers” in our society in 2012. I welcome any comments from members of the Masons or Illuminati.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7XJH8uI9YI

And here’s McGovern’s “Democrats for McGovern” ad. Amazingly, this ran the week of the November election.  It features a blue-collar guy in the voting booth with two choices: Nixon or McGovern. And his internal deliberations about who he should vote for:  “All the fellas say they are voting for Nixon.” “My dad would roll over in his grave if I voted for Nixon.” “This hand voted for Kennedy . . . “

It’s an ad that only the early seventies could have produced. And, it shows the New Deal coalition unraveling inside one man’s head.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av_nDxp4iXE

The rest of McGovern’s ads are worth watching.  Several spots with the senator and, mostly short so that McGovern would loom tall, blue collar workers, in urban settings, talking about crime and Vietnam. There’s a rawness to it that none of the other ads on the site even attempt to replicate. A reminder of how bad a place the early seventies were.

From time to time I will check out right wing blogs like Redstate.com, just to see what the other side is saying. It’s usually like stepping into the Mirror Universe Start Trek world.

Here at In At The End of The World, we spend time discussing the fate of the Democratic Party and liberalism under either Hillary or Bernie, and the future of those factions of the party. One can only imagine the hand wringing, head banging and soul searching happening on the right.

Fortunately, you don’t have to. Now that Mr. Trump is the Republican nominee for president, a quick scan of Redstate.com shows headlines like:

“It’s Time to Assume We Are All Dead”

“Vichy Republicans Welcome Donald Trump to Paris.”

“I Burned My Delegate Card”

“Never Trump Means Never Trump Ever’

The Restate team opposes Trump because he’s not a conservative, but I have to give them props for opposing Trump because he’s not qualified to be president and is a danger to the republic.

Redstate.com editor Ben Howe was on MSNBC and other networks yesterday calling Trump unqualified for the office and saying it would be better for the country if Hilary were elected, even though she represents everything he opposes in politics.

Erick Erickson, former Redstate.com CEO and one of the most influential conservative voices, has been particularly strong on the issue.  I generally loathe everything the man writes, but he’s been forceful and compelling in making the case against Trump, not on policy differences, but for the sake of the country.

Here’s one of his better articulations of the case:

“Some Republicans may decide it is time to be a team player, but I will put my country before my party and decline to help the voters in this country commit national suicide. For those who lament the loss of the Supreme Court with Hillary Clinton’s now inevitable re-election, I would counter that it is obvious the United States now has far bigger problems than judges.

“That bigger problem begins with Republicans now losing any sense of shame and surrendering to their lesser angels in the name of unity around a man unfit for Presidency.”

The full essay is here:  http://theresurgent.com/where-should-the-line-be-drawn/