What Donald Trump's Popularity Reveals About the South

At this point I have lived the majority of my life in the South, including four years in Alabama.   While the Hampton Roads area of Virginia is less and less part of the South due to the influx of people from Northern states, there remain pockets that are very Southern when it comes to claimed religiosity, racism and hypocrisy.  The South can display charm and supposed hospitality, but depending where you are, beneath the veneer of graciousness lucks a would be KKK supporter.  As a column in Politico notes, the rise of Donald Trump's popularity in the South has done much to display the reality that while much has changed, the stain of racism and a fear of modernity and those who are different is still alive and well.  Folks may sit in the pews on Sunday morning, but they make a mockery of the Gospel message the rest of the week.  Here are excerpts:

The Republican South so far has rallied behind Donald Trump, a northerner without any of the grassroots evangelical credibility that is supposed to bind conservatives here—a candidate whose main appeal, in fact, has been coded appeals to the same hatred that drove [Dylnn] Roof to pick up a gun.

Make no mistake, Trump’s embrace by millions of people in my region isn’t solely about economic angst. It is also about the kind of pent-up fear—made up of barely submerged racism and profound ignorance—that a reader in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, expressed to me shortly after Barack Obama’s election: “I think he’s gonna enslave us,” he said. “Look what we done to ya’ll.”

Trump was, in many ways, the optimal antidote for that fear, and the racism behind it. It was Trump who more than anyone kept “birtherism” in the mainstream through the first term of Obama’s presidency, feeding belief in the deep South that this oddly-named president was not even American. And now it is Trump who has brilliantly exploited and drawn out the racism that the civil rights movement drove underground 50 years ago, but which is now resurfacing.

All this has thoroughly removed the scales from my eyes. I grew up watching the South become more tolerant. My son will have far more opportunities here than my father did. But I now know just how deeply the region is stuck in our ugly past. I now realize that little boy I saw 26 years ago more likely than not grew up to harbor the same racial hatred his parents did. I’m not forced to sit on the back of the bus; I’m not restricted from swimming in some parts of the Atlantic. But too often, that overt progress has been used as an excuse by residents to pretend that further civil rights gains would be “giving” minorities something they don’t deserve.

Trump’s rise in both South Carolina and throughout the South proves why celebrating that change—the removal of a flag that should not have been flying—was in many ways premature, if not misleading.

There’s little reason to pretend, as some are, that the anger Trump has tapped into in the South, which has propelled him to a near sweep of Southern states and to the top of Republican polls, is primarily about white Southerners’ anger about their changing economic fortunes. If that were the case, Southerners would also be embracing Bernie Sanders, another candidate seen as a political outsider running on a populist economic message.

Instead, while Sanders eagerly touts his civil rights past, Southerners—including those who long claimed the principles espoused by their conservative Christian faith influence their every decision—have picked the one presidential candidate who claimed (at first) he didn’t know enough about the Ku Klux Klan to have an opinion about it—the one candidate the Klan has said it is using as a recruiting tool.

They picked the one candidate who initially excused two white men who beat up a homeless Hispanic man, saying they were following Trump’s lead.

They picked the one candidate sued by the Justice Department in the 1970s for telling employees to avoid renting property to black people.

They picked the one candidate who stoked the fires that helped lead to five young black men in New York being falsely accused and convicted in the Central Park jogger case in 1989.

They picked the one candidate who proudly said out loud what they’ve been saying throughout the entire Obama era in email chains and private discussions after Sunday morning church services: That the nation’s first black president isn’t a real American and needed to prove he belonged in a way no other president, or presidential candidate, ever had to do.

According to widely-cited exit polls and other surveys, 70 percent of Trump supporters in South Carolina wanted the Confederate flag to keep flying, compared with 31 percent of South Carolinians overall. Twenty-one percent of his voters in the state either believe whites are superior or aren’t sure; 20 percent don’t like the Emancipation Proclamation.

But none of that can detract from the fact that Trump’s supporters also include white nationalist groups like the American Freedom Party and American Renaissance whether he wants them to or not. To them, Trump has come as close to sounding like former Klan wizard and Louisiana Rep. David Duke that a politician can—and still potentially win high national office. That should give pause to the millions of other Trump supporters, or would-be supporters, who are ignoring his bigotry because they are so desperate to see a political sea change.

Too many of us have been convinced that quiet equals peace. That’s the one good thing about the loudmouth that is Donald Trump. It’s hard to remain silent in the face of the ugliness he has highlighted like no other politician has in quite some time.

He isn’t Dylann Roof, deliberately targeting a single African-American church. No, he’s potentially more dangerous because he targets the vulnerable wherever they are. There aren’t enough Americans, in the South or the Republican Party, primarily motivated by hate to have fueled his rise. His presence on the national stage is scary because too many otherwise good people—the kind who would give comfort to a black orphan or pray for a sick Hispanic friend—are turning a blind eye to his peculiar brand of bigotry and angrily following his lead.

Did Trump Really Suggest that Romney Would Have Offered to Give Him a Blow Job?

Just when you think the GOP death spiral can get any more bizarre or ugly, Donald Trump proves you wrong.  In response to Mitt Romney's take down of Trump today, The Donald lashed back and said "“He was begging for my endorsement,”  . . . “I could have said, ‘Mitt, drop to your knees.’ He would have dropped to his knees.”  Trump indeed make junior high play ground bullying look sophisticated and genteel.  The man is crude, vulgar and obnoxious.  Yet, evangelical Christians are flocking to him and, as a result, showing their own hypocrisy and idiocy.  Here are details from The Raw Story:

According to conservative radio host Andrew McKay, Republican evangelical voters should not choose Donald Trump because he suggested that former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney offered to give him oral sex.

“He was begging for my endorsement,” Trump said. “I could have said, ‘Mitt, drop to your knees.’ He would have dropped to his knees.”

Following the speech, MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts asked McKay, who hosts a radio show in Pensacola, for his reaction.

“We live in an area that styles itself as being very Christian, lots of churches, evangelical voters, Baptists, Catholics, this whole area is dominated by religion,” McKay explained. “And I think they have to all ask themselves the question, do they want someone who gets up there and says that a former presidential candidate for their party got down on his knees and offered to blow him?”

“That was the style of the candidate that you want to elect as your nominee?” he asked. “That’s what a lot of people are struggling with.”

The GOP’s Three-Headed Monster

The morning after analysis is going on fast and furiously in the wake of Donald Trump's victory in South Carolina yesterday.  An increasingly desperate GOP establishment which is faced with the issue of how to stop Trump is seemingly left with two choices: the much loathed Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, a/k/a Marcobot.  A piece in Slate looks at the dilemma faced by the GOP establishment, which in some way a choice of which poison you prefer.  Here are highlights:

The results of the South Carolina primary helped the Republican Party winnow the field, effectively, to a three-candidate race. But there’s a long way to go for the GOP to get to two. Donald Trump retains an edge until that happens.

Modern Republican electoral history is black-and-white here: the candidate who does this wins the nomination. Modern Republican electoral history also has a small sample size, though, and there’s still a scenario in which Trump goes down: if he’s faced with a one-on-one contest against either Sen. Marco Rubio or Sen. Ted Cruz. The problem for the anti-Trump majority is how to get from that three-candidate race, which South Carolina’s results reinforced is the true dynamic of the contest, to a two-person race.

[T]he Rubio-industrial complex is touting this double-digit defeat as a dramatic victory for the Florida senator. If he finishes in second, he will have started the nominating contests with 3-5-2 finishes—far away from his pre-voting “3-2-1” strategy, a path that acknowledged the importance of winning an early state. There’s only one early state left. Though Nevada is a caucus state and we shouldn’t hand it to him just yet, Trump is dominating there in a way that he was not in Iowa, the only completed contest so far that he did not win.

Cruz, meanwhile, has claimed at least one win, but hasn’t been able to translate that into gains elsewhere in the country. Cruz was supposed to be an Iowa winner with the resources to build from there, unlike recent winners Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum.

It’s not promising for him that he’s going to finish somewhere in the low-20s in South Carolina after what amounted to a bye week in New Hampshire. It’s also hard to see where Cruz gets his wins now, with the notable exception of Texas. And he needs his wins, soon, since his delegate path involves sweeping through the South on March 1 to build up a lead that positions him as the front-runner heading into the big winner-take-all states coming on March 15. The thing is, South Carolina is very much in the South. And Trump crushed him there.

On the whole, Rubio has the better argument. With Jeb Bush now officially out of the race and John Kasich living on fumes, he could suck up enough votes (and money) to turn in stronger performances than he has so far. And the calendar will get much more favorable to him—or, at least, much less favorable to Cruz—beginning on March 15.

But even if Cruz does begin trending behind Rubio, what rationale will there be for him to drop out? Most candidates drop out when the money’s gone, and money is not a problem for Cruz.

The “establishment lane” question may now be all but out of the way, but it’s replaced with an even trickier one: Who emerges from the “anti-Trump lane” at this point? The stakes are becoming much higher now than they were in New Hampshire, or even South Carolina. If the Cruz–Rubio collective action problem doesn’t get resolved, Trump will benefit and his prize will be much more than a couple of early primaries. He’ll either win the nomination or head into a convention fight with the delegate lead. In the latter case, wresting the nomination from the delegate leader wouldn’t be a pretty sight.

The Hypocrisy of Evangelicals Supporting Donald Trump

Unlike many on the right, I long ago ceased to view evangelical and similar conservative Christians as nice and decent people.  Instead, I concluded that hypocrisy, hatred of others, and often racism are the pillars of their belief system.  In yet another piece in the Washington Post belatedly lamenting what has become of the GOP in the context of the rise of Donald Trump, Michael Gerson finally seems to be opening his eyes to the hypocrisy of the evangelical crowd that is supporting Trump.  For Gerson, support for Trump is a betrayal of Christian values.  In my view, the phenomenon merely underscores the hypocrisy that has always been main stream among evangelicals.  Here are column highlights:

Of all Donald Trump’s political skills, perhaps the most impressive is his ability to persuade people to support him by suspending their deepest, lifelong beliefs. 

The same can be said of some pro-lifers, who must look past Trump’s previous support for partial-birth abortion and his inability to provide a serious rationale for his pro-life conversion (other than the obvious political imperative).  

Many evangelical Christians are now in a similar position. In considerable numbers (Trump was the presidential choice of 42 percent of them in a recent poll), they are attracted to Trump’s unvarnished populism and his identification with middle-class anxiety and anger. 

The greater problem for evangelicals is found not in the field of biology but of theology. Trump’s defining personal and public characteristic is pride. In making America great again, he offers not a set of political ideals or policies but he himself. He, he says, is better, smarter and tougher than our corrupt and stupid leaders. Pride is his platform.  

It is also, in the traditional Christian view, a vice, and a particularly pernicious one. “The essential vice, the utmost evil is Pride,” wrote C.S. Lewis. “Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison; it was through Pride that the devil became the devil. Pride leads to every other vice; it is the complete anti-God state of mind.” 

Why is pride so dangerous? Because it is never sated, and always breeds conflict. “Pride is essentially competitive,” said Lewis, “while the other vices are competitive only, so to speak, by accident. 

In our personal experience, we know that pride is often at the root of resentment, rivalry, jealousy, antagonism, greed and a desire for revenge. It is the unifying conviction of evangelicals that people eventually come to the end of their ego and need to look upward; upward from the foot of the cross. 

A narcissistic leader is always at enmity with other people and groups, and cannot be a unifying figure. As Abraham Lincoln displayed, the capacity to heal requires humility and empathy. A narcissistic leader is vindictive, keeps lists of his grievances and enemies and is vulnerable to the abuse of power. A narcissistic leader finds it difficult to feel sympathy for those regarded as failures and losers, for the wounded and disabled, for strangers, refugees and the vulnerable. 

The reality is that pride is a hallmark of evangelicals who are narcissistic in their belief that they are better than others - those deemed to be "sinners" - as the selectively pick and choose Bible passages to condemn and denigrate others while ignoring their own lack of morality and decency.   Donald Trump is in perfect company with these hypocritical and hate-filled people.

Authoritarianism - The Leading Trait of Trump Supporters

Some have wonder how the thrice married Donald Trump has manage to attract a significant percentage of the Christofascists in the Republican Party base.  A piece in Politico seems to have found the explanation.  Trump is peddling an authoritarian message akin to what Hitler and the Nazi party pushed in Germany in the late 1920's and early 1930's to a Germany reeling from defeat in World War I and the economic whirlwind that hit Germany.   Meanwhile, no one love authority more than Christofascists provided its harshness is aimed at those they don't like: non-whites, immigrants, and non-Christians.  Here are some article highlights:

I’ve found a single statistically significant variable predicts whether a voter supports Trump—and it’s not race, income or education levels: It’s authoritarianism. 

That’s right, Trump’s electoral strength—and his staying power—have been buoyed, above all, by Americans with authoritarian inclinations.

My finding is the result of a national poll I conducted in the last five days of December under the auspices of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, sampling 1,800 registered voters across the country and the political spectrum. Running a standard statistical analysis, I found that education, income, gender, age, ideology and religiosity had no significant bearing on a Republican voter’s preferred candidate. Only two of the variables I looked at were statistically significant: authoritarianism, followed by fear of terrorism, though the former was far more significant than the latter.

Authoritarianism is not a new, untested concept in the American electorate. Since the rise of Nazi Germany, it has been one of the most widely studied ideas in social science. While its causes are still debated, the political behavior of authoritarians is not. Authoritarians obey. They rally to and follow strong leaders. And they respond aggressively to outsiders, especially when they feel threatened. 

 

From pledging to “make America great again” by building a wall on the border to promising to close mosques and ban Muslims from visiting the United States, Trump is playing directly to authoritarian inclinations.

 

[A]uthoritarians have steadily moved from the Democratic to the Republican Party over time. He hypothesizes that the trend began decades ago, as Democrats embraced civil rights, gay rights, employment protections and other political positions valuing freedom and equality. In my poll results, authoritarianism was not a statistically significant factor in the Democratic primary race, at least not so far, but it does appear to be playing an important role on the Republican side. Indeed, 49 percent of likely Republican primary voters I surveyed score in the top quarter of the authoritarian scale—more than twice as many as Democratic voters.

Trump was the only candidate—Republican or Democrat—whose support among authoritarians was statistically significant.

 So what does this mean for the election? It doesn’t just help us understand what motivates Trump’s backers—it suggests that his support isn’t capped. In a statistical analysis of the polling results, I found that Trump has already captured 43 percent of Republican primary voters who are strong authoritarians, and 37 percent of Republican authoritarians overall.

[T]hose who say a Trump presidency “can’t happen here” should check their conventional wisdom at the door. The candidate has confounded conventional expectations this primary season because those expectations are based on an oversimplified caricature of the electorate in general and his supporters in particular. Conditions are ripe for an authoritarian leader to emerge. Trump is seizing the opportunity. And the institutions—from the Republican Party to the press—that are supposed to guard against what James Madison called “the infection of violent passions” among the people have either been cowed by Trump’s bluster or are asleep on the job. 

 

It is time for those who would appeal to our better angels to take his insurgency seriously and stop dismissing his supporters as a small band of the dispossessed. Trump support is firmly rooted in American authoritarianism and, once awakened, it is a force to be reckoned with.

Why We Should Celebrate The Trump-Cruz Ascendancy

Following up on the last post is excerpts from a Washington Monthly piece that argues that sane Americans should welcome, if not, celebrate a Trump Cruz contest and what it may do to the Republican Party.  Additionally, the piece makes the totally accurate case that a Trump or Cruz nomination would drive a wooden stake through the false media driven myth that both the Republican Party and the Democrat Party are equally extreme.  The fact is that the GOP is now fully immersed in lunacy that is irreversible unless and until the Christofascists and white supremacists are driven from the party. The problem is that to rid the party of this cancer, one would likely have to kill the patient.  Sort of a case of having to use Agent Orange to kill weeds in your yard and then finding everything in it is now dead. Here are article highlights:

As we enter the third week of January—just two short weeks away from the Iowa caucuses—it is beginning to dawn even on the most stolid political media figures that Donald Trump is the likeliest bet to win the Republican presidential nomination. It is also becoming apparent even to those most in denial that in the event of Trump’s failure Ted Cruz, the most hated man in Washington and 2nd most unelectable of the GOP candidates in November, will almost certainly become the nominee.

Most of the political and journalistic class see the prospect of a Trump/Cruz nomination as so unthinkable that they have spent months denying its very possibility in the face of overwhelming evidence. That’s understandable for two reasons. First, the history of recent Republican elections strongly suggests that Republican voters flirt with anti-establishment candidates before choosing the traditionally sober candidate. Those who believe that this election represents a realigning paradigm shift—even if, as with the those who predicted the housing bubble calamity, they are ultimately right—are presumed wrong and unserious by default. Second, the mere notion that a majority of the GOP electorate would walk into a voting booth in cold blood and choose Trump or Cruz as their nominee would upend the accepted journalistic narrative in which both parties are presumed equally extreme, and destructive partisan rancor is blamed not on the will of the voters but on the political culture of Washington.

The prospect of either Ted Cruz or Donald Trump actually taking the oath of office is understandably terrifying to many people on both sides of the aisle. Their exclusionary, divisive and even totalitarian-inspired politics show an extreme lack of judgment and poor temperament for the office that should give any reasonable voter pause regardless of their views on the issues of the day. And even though both Trump and Cruz are the least electable of the leading GOP candidates in a general election, the vagaries of campaign gaffes, scandals, and unforeseen events could easily throw the race to a Republican underdog. The danger is therefore quite clear.

Even so, the Trump/Cruz ascendancy on the right is nonetheless a good thing for American politics. There are two principal reasons why:

1) It disempowers the conservative economic and media tycoons who created the malaise that fuels the anger of the GOP base. The American middle class has suffered greatly at the hands of the same corporate leaders who have propped up establishment conservative politics for the last several decades.
[A] rogue’s gallery of conservative tycoons from Koch to Walton to Adelson has been buttressed by the likes of ruthless media figures like Roger Ailes and conscience-free consultants like Karl Rove, and feeds an increasingly dangerous and poisonous electoral monster that cripples the possibility of progressive change, particularly via low-turnout midterm elections. Now that monster has turned on its creators. 

No longer can the Republican party of the Bushes and Romneys count on an attack dog to do their dirty work for them on election day so they can implement policy that benefits only economic elites while keeping a sunny, smiling Reaganesque face. The monster has broken free of its chains and it is demanding at long last to be fed. 

No matter how dangerous the outside possibility of Trump or Cruz winning a general election may be, we should all celebrate the panic and desperation of clueless economic elites . . . . 

If you’re a Republican, the disempowerment of the generation of leaders who left the Republican Party a legacy of failure in economics and foreign policy should be welcome even at the expense of temporary embarrassment. If you’re a Democrat you should fear the dangerous beast that is the Trump-Cruz ascendancy, but watching it gorge on the flesh of the malevolent wizards who created it is not only a source of pleasant schadenfreude, but ultimately good for the country.

2) The Trump-Cruz electorate is shrinking, but the power of concentrated wealth is growing. It’s no secret that even as Republican electoral fortunes depend increasingly on aged whites who constitute a smaller percentage of the total population every year, so too do Cruz and Trump rely particularly heavily on these voters within the GOP coalition. Barring the nightmare scenario of a Trump victory followed by a totalitarian consolidation of authority, the likelihood of a Trump-Cruz power coalition surviving more than a four-year cycle is quite low.
If you believe, as most progressives and even many conservative activists do, that the combination of big business interests and crony-capitalist Washington Consensus lobbyists are the biggest challenges facing the country, then a future led by Rubio/Bush is far more to be feared than one led by Trump/Cruz. A similar dynamic exists on the left in the Democratic nomination fight between Clinton and Sanders. A very large number of Americans feel that the system is so broken that it needs an outsider’s wake-up call from any direction—and there is copious evidence to suggest that they are right.

Is the Trump-Cruz ascendancy in the GOP scary? Of course it is. But we should celebrate and encourage it nonetheless. The country is likely to be better for it in the end.

Has Trump the Bully Hit a Wall?

I view both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz with revulsion.  Both would be an unmitigated disaster for America in the White House.  Trump is in many ways little more than a loud mouthed bully who excels at insults and nasty sound bites, but to date has offered zero in terms of any real substantive policies.  And when it comes to attacking his GOP rivals, he tends to prefer personal insults rather than debate and differences over policies and proposed initiatives.  Like a classic school yard bully, Trump has attracted those who like seeming confidence, especially when pandering to existing prejudices in his audience.  Ted Cruz, to my view, is equally despicable, but as a piece in Politico, Cruz just may be the one who can damage the Trump juggernaut.  Personally, I'd like to see both self-destruct.  Here are article excerpts:

Like all accomplished bullies, Trump understands that the real target is his opponent’s honor. Obeying the maxim that you haven’t gone far enough until you’ve gone too far, Trump slagged Bush’s wife last July, using Twitter to post a quotation from a tweet that said Bush “has to like Mexican Illegals because of his wife.” Trump deleted the tweet, which implied that Columba Bush was not in the country legally. Bush took personal umbrage over the tweet, which was deleted 24 hours after it was posted. “He’s doing this to inflame and incite and to draw attention,” Bush sputtered in the manner of someone whose honor has been wounded. The point of Trump's tweet was to lure Bush into defending Columba, his Spanish-speaking wife and the mother of his three children, thereby boxing him in as conflicted over immigration. It was a brilliant bully move.

When discussing the art of the verbal bully, you really can’t spend too much time on honor. The bully undermines his foes by stripping them of whatever esteem, standing and face they may have acquired. When a man’s mother, wife or daughter is disparaged in most cultures, he must defend her honor or risk losing his manliness. This prompted only more Bush sputtering that Trump must apologize to Columba; Trump’s resopnse (“I won’t apologize, I didn’t do anything wrong”) sliced Bush’s cojones right out of his trousers. 

So how do you beat a verbal bully? We’re actually starting to see it happen. Stanley Elkin sketched a strategy in his 1964 short story, “A Poetics for Bullies.” In it, a young bully named Push torments and leads all the kids in the neighborhood until he is undone by a princely newcomer John Williams, whose accent can’t be mocked, whose skin has no blemish, whose intelligence is impervious to insult. 

Nobody would ever mistake Ted Cruz for John Williams. No Adonis, he looks like a broken-nosed character actor in a film noir. He even whines when he talks. But inside his own head, Cruz is John Williams. He has been polishing the Cruz act for his entire life, making himself a perfectly smooth, unchanging object upon which no New York bully can get a grip. Although Trump may have bested Cruz on several topics in last night’s presidential debate as they fought toe-to-toe for the first time, the mogul seems unable to get under Cruz’s skin the way he has with Bush, Carson, Rand Paul (ridiculing him for being short, just 5’8”!), and the other candidates.

Like Trump, Cruz commands an alpha male’s ego. When towel-snapped, he does not shriek. When denigrated or teased, he does not frown or wince. He does not have to be perfect because he already thinks he’s perfect, which is just one of the reasons why the rest of Congress despises him.

The best way to beat a trash-talking bully is to convincingly pretend you cannot hear him. Donald Trump, you have met your John Williams.

   

Will America Succumb To Trump's Fascism?

I was a history major in college and continue to read a great deal of works of history.  A period that I find both frightening and at the same time fascinating is Germany in the late 1920's and early 1930's when Hitler was working to bring the Nazi Party to power in Germany.  The parallel's with Donald Trump - and, Vladimir Putin, especially on foreign policy - are stunning.  Like Hitler did in Germany, Trump is blaming the alleged woes of America on outsiders (i.e., Muslims and Hispanic immigrants) and Americans who have betrayed American as embodied in particular by Barack Obama. Also, like Hitler, Trump offers no detailed solutions.  Rather it is all about sound bites and pandering to the prejudices of his most ardent fans - poorly educated whites eager to blame anyone but themselves or the party Trump seeks to lead for the root of their problems.   As for ego, Trump certainly rivals Hitler in terms of his own self-perceived brilliance Meanwhile, the world watches the American spectacle with shock and likely a good amount of fear.  A piece in Huffington Post looks at this issue.  Here are excerpts:

In his State of the Union address to Congress on Tuesday night, President Barack Obama never mentioned Donald Trump.

But the president’s speech, stressing optimism, tolerance and good will, was from beginning to end a dismissal and rebuttal to everything the billionaire real estate bigot is and says.

Trump, no one should ever forget, has called millions of immigrants from Mexico drug dealers and rapists, and has proposed an immediate and indefinite ban on immigration to this country of all Muslims seeking to enter from other countries.

He has said that the “the American dream is dead”; that Obama’s actions -- or lack of action -- created ISIS; that the entire decision-making process of Washington is corrupt and useless; that the American economy (the strongest in the world) is a hopeless shambles; and that only he -- by virtue of his alleged brilliance and leadership skills -- can, singlehandedly, bring America back to life.

The depth of accumulated unreality and even insanity represented by these stands have propelled Trump into the lead in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

Two other GOP candidates are rising to challenge him, primarily by parroting Trump and Trumpism to the extent that they can. Indeed, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida appear to be, at least at this moment, the only two challengers capable of stopping Trump -- and they are, in many ways, as hair-raising as he is.

From time to time, America has given in to the darker implications of its historic, unique and vital role as a “nation of immigrants.” . . . In wartime, especially, that dark side of the “nation of immigrants” tradition has led to nightmarish consequences: violence at times against German-Americans in World War I; the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II.

Religious prejudice has played a major role as well. A large portion of American politics in the 19th century was based on a fear of Catholics and the idea that the pope would have more temporal power here than the president.

But never before has a prominent candidate for president -- indeed several prominent candidates, all of the same party -- made xenophobia, racial and religious antagonism, and fear the organizing principles of their entire effort.

[W]hat signal will other countries with more tribal histories -– a Germany, a France, a Turkey, a Sweden -- take from America’s failure to live up to its ideals?

That is the big question framing the 2016 election, not only for the U.S. but for the world.  We know that the world is watching: Social media statistics for 2015 show that the U.S. election was the most followed news story on the planet -- and it wasn’t even officially the election year yet.

He [Obama] added that this was “not a matter of political correctness,” but based on an understanding that the U.S. as a society and an economy thrives and is durable because of “diversity and openness.”
To reject those principles, he said, “betrays who we are as a country.”

That is the central issue in the 2016 campaign, and the world is waiting to see what we do.

No one in 1930 - including the millions of Jews and others who ended up losing their lives - could have believed that Germany, a civilized nation, would descend into the barbarism and genocide that followed Hitler's rise to power.  Are we seeing America poised at a similar crossroads?  If so, I sincerely hope that Americans do not repeat the mistakes made by Germans 80+ years ago.

Ted Cruz Is Not Eligible to be President

At the outset, I will concede that I loath Ted Cruz.  He embodies many of the worse aspects of today's so-called conservatives.  In addition, he is a foul hypocrite in that he whips up anti-immigrant bigotry and makes less than subtle calls to racism.  The irony is that the very birther mindset that Cruz has whipped up is now deliciously biting him in his ample ass.  Yes, Donald trump is one of the main purveyors of the claims that Cruz is not eligible to hold the office president of the United States.  A piece in the Washington Post by a constitutional historian makes the case that perhaps Trump - shockingly, I know - may be right.  Here are column excerpts:

Donald Trump is actually right about something: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) is not a natural-born citizen and therefore is not eligible to be president or vice president of the United States.

The Constitution provides that “No person except a natural born Citizen . . . shall be eligible to the Office of President.” The concept of “natural born” comes from common law, and it is that law the Supreme Court has said we must turn to for the concept’s definition. On this subject, common law is clear and unambiguous. The 18th-century English jurist William Blackstone, the preeminent authority on it, declared natural-born citizens are “such as are born within the dominions of the crown of England,” while aliens are “such as are born out of it.” The key to this division is the assumption of allegiance to one’s country of birth. The Americans who drafted the Constitution adopted this principle for the United States. James Madison, known as the “father of the Constitution,” stated, “It is an established maxim that birth is a criterion of allegiance. . . . [And] place is the most certain criterion; it is what applies in the United States.”

Cruz is, of course, a U.S. citizen. As he was born in Canada, he is not natural-born. His mother, however, is an American, and Congress has provided by statute for the naturalization of children born abroad to citizens. 

Article I of the Constitution grants Congress the power to naturalize an alien — that is, Congress may remove an alien’s legal disabilities, such as not being allowed to vote. But Article II of the Constitution expressly adopts the legal status of the natural-born citizen and requires that a president possess that status. However we feel about allowing naturalized immigrants to reach for the stars, the Constitution must be amended before one of them can attain the office of president. Congress simply does not have the power to convert someone born outside the United States into a natural-born citizen.

Let me be clear: I am not a so-called birther. I am a legal historian. President Obama is without question eligible for the office he serves. The distinction between the president and Cruz is simple: The president was born within the United States, and the senator was born outside of it. That is a distinction with a difference. 

In this election cycle, numerous pundits have declared that Cruz is eligible to be president. They rely on a supposed consensus among legal experts. This notion appears to emanate largely from a recent comment in the Harvard Law Review Forum by former solicitors general Neal Katyal and Paul Clement. In trying to put the question of who is a natural-born citizen to rest, however, the authors misunderstand, misapply and ignore the relevant law.

[W]hen one reviews all the relevant American writings of the early period, including congressional debates, well-respected treatises and Supreme Court precedent, it becomes clear that the common-law definition was accepted in the United States, not the newfangled British statutory approach. 

When discussing the meaning of a constitutional term, it is important to go beyond secondary sources and look to the law itself. And on this issue, the law is clear: The framers of the Constitution required the president of the United States to be born in the United States. 

Cruz ignores the further reality that Obama was born in Hawaii - a U.S. territory/state.  Canada is NOT part of the U.S. and Cruz's mother's citizenship doesn't change that fact.

Trump’s Campaign Is Damaging His Brand

Donald Trump's most vocal political followers are best described as poorly educated white males who are angry and upset that their America is changing and that they are being left behind in the march of history.  These are exactly the opposite of those whose support Trump's business brand needs to court to thrive in the market place.  As a piece in Politico reports, as Trump's political campaign continues to soar, his business brand is taking a beating that could have long term consequences as Trump alienates the upper income consumer market.  Here are article highlights:

If Donald Trump is nothing else, he’s an American brand. The Trump name adorns luxury condominiums, hotels and golf courses around the world; it has sold a TV show, millions of books, a line of cologne and even, briefly, an airline.

And that brand, according new data published here in Politico Magazine for the first time, is taking a major hit in the wake of his presidential campaign.

But as Trump the candidate has ascended, hitting the top of the polls and staying there thanks to a series of controversial statements and a groundswell of Republican populist support, the opposite has happened to Trump the brand: Among the people Trump’s business depends on—the consumer making over $100,000 a year—the value of the Trump name is collapsing.

A December survey of American consumer opinion, fielded by the BAV Consulting division of advertising and marketing giant Young & Rubicam (and the largest and longest running study of brands in the world), found that since Donald Trump’s run for president, the Trump brand has lost the confidence of the people who can afford to stay at one of his hotels, play at one of his country clubs or purchase a home in one of his developments. It is also rapidly losing its association with the gilded traits Trump has long promoted as the essence of his business.

In categories such as “prestigious,” “upper class” and “glamorous” the Trump name has plummeted among high-income consumers. Within the same group, it is also losing its connection with the terms “leader,” “dynamic” and “innovative”—quite a blow for a man who criticizes others for being “low energy” and considers himself an industry trailblazer.

As a private corporation, the Trump Organization is not obligated to report any such a decline—or to report it accurately—but any CEO will tell you that a brand deterioration like this is likely to have a significant financial impact, affecting sales, borrowing and even efforts to attract high quality employees. 

The first visible signs of the commercial cost associated with Trump’s extreme politics came after his inflammatory comments about undocumented Mexican immigrants, which he made as he announced his candidacy last June. 

Less visible, but no less important, are hits Trump has taken among his target consumer base: the luxury, or “aspirational” market of those making over $100,000 a year. The wealthiest respondents in the BAV survey—those with incomes over $150,000—judge Trump the harshest of any income bracket. In this group, as measured by BAV’s consumer opinion index, Trump’s reputation for being “obliging” and “upper class” has declined by more than 50 percent since the outset of the campaign, followed by “leader” (with a 41 percent decline) and “prestigious” (down by 39 percent). The next lower income level—households making between $100,000 and $150,000—wasn’t much kinder, with a 56 percent decline for “obliging,” a 45 percent decline in “prestigious” and a 38 percent drop for “upper class.”

Donald Trump, as a 69-year-old whose fortune is counted in the billions, will very likely remain wealthy and comfortable—a success as he defines it—for the rest of his days. But those like his children who may have counted on the brand to sustain them further into the future cannot be so certain. 

Then again, they could move into the part of the consumer market where no real damage has been done. Perhaps a Trump brand of smokes, or maybe canned meat?