The Sickness that Is Donald Trump

It seems that with every passing day Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Fuhrer on this blog, reveals in yet another way in which he played the so-called working class white voters as complete fools.  One has to wonder what sort of mental affliction one needs to suffer from in order to fall for the snake oil and lies of this dangerous narcissist.   While too slow in standing up against GOP misogyny that set the stag for a candidate as foul and unprincipled as Trump, columnist Kathleen Parker saw the pathology of Trump sooner than some of her conservative brethren.  In a column in the Washington Post she looks at the sickness now headed towards the oval office.  Here are highlights:

In the Trump movie now playing in the American theater, connecting all the dots requires the artistry of a mapmaker and the insight of a psychic.

Or, perhaps, the critical eye of a movie reviewer.

The leading man, President-elect Donald Trump, is gradually revealing himself to be a hybrid of Daniel Plainview (“There Will Be Blood”), Keyser Soze (“The Usual Suspects”) and Gordon Gekko (“Wall Street”) — each a Machiavellian, sociopathic narcissist bent on reshaping the world in his own image.

Whomever people thought they were voting for, sayonara to all that. The Trump of Fifth Avenue has returned to his palace. He’s the star of his own movie, and everyone else, especially the Republican base he so skillfully seduced, is mere crowd scenery. Sorry.

It must have been a supreme test of will to keep his true intentions to himself and his gaze steady upon the prize until, by some miracle (or however you say that in Russian), he won.

As the transition unfolds, new stars cascading into a constellation of superpower, the moviegoer willingly suspends disbelief in passive acceptance of whatever’s to come. Trump instinctively understands that he must feed the suspense, both to hold his audience’s attention and to keep them distracted while he’s busy masterminding his biggest deal ever — to Russia with love.

All the while, Trump was focused on his future with Russia and Vladimir Putin, whose leadership the president-elect has publicly admired. In July, during the last news conference Trump has held, he openly requested Russia’s help in defeating Hillary Clinton.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said, referring to messagesdeleted from Clinton’s personal server.Trump later dismissed the comment as a joke, but you know what they say about truths cloaked in jest. Recently, the CIA affirmed that Russia did interfere with the election by hacking the Democratic National Committee’s computers and releasing damaging information via WikiLeaks.

True to character, Trump called the report “ridiculous” and said the whole thing was a fabrication by Democrats. 

To the critic’s eye, a Trump-Putin-Exxon alliance — the autocrat and plutocrats assisted by generals — does not suggest a triumph of altruism. But, relax, it’s just a movie. And centralized casting is watching you.

#NotMyPresident

Media Lameness, a Gullible Public, and GOP Political Whores Enable Russian Propaganda

Yes, I view Donald Trump as a dangerous, foul and unprincipled individual.  The same holds for his buddy, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB thug who appears to have encouraged the murder of his political opponents, assuming he didn't order the murders himself.   Yet despite the un-savoriness of both men, one is president elect of the United States and the other seems to have actively worked to throw the election to Trump.  How did this happen?  A piece in Salon suggests that Russian covert action was added and abetted right here in America by a lazy and largely irresponsible media - the same folks now trying to normalize the Trump nightmare - ignorant and gullible voters (mostly Trump voters) and unprincipled Republicans only too happy to sell their soles to Trump and, by extension to Putin.  Here are article excerpts:

Much attention has been paid in the past month to the role that fake news — a combination of conspiracy theories from places like Infowars and stories from hoax websites — influenced the course of the U.S. election, helping Donald Trump win the presidency. But over the weekend, we were reminded that sometimes effective propaganda can be misleading without being fake at all.

The Russian government, according to the CIA, pulled off an astonishing bit of psy-ops on the American electorate without ever technically lying to anyone. CIA agents reportedly presented a formal analysis to lawmakers last week, arguing that the Russian government hacked the email accounts of Democratic Party leaders and then used WikiLeaks to strategically release the emails, sowing conspiracy theories and paranoia to dampen voter turnout for Clinton.

Assuming this was the Russians, their strategy worked because too many power players in the American political ecosystem were too short-sighted, lazy and selfish to look past their own immediate self-interest and consider the big picture. What the Russian email hack ended up doing was illustrating the various weaknesses in our political systems and culture, weaknesses that Trump, likely with Vladimir Putin’s assistance, was able to exploit to claw his way into the White House.

Here’s a short list of the various political weaknesses that Russian hackers were able to take advantage of.

Mainstream media outlets are more interested in appearing fair than actually being fair. Trump is so corrupt that he coughs up more genuine scandals before breakfast than most dirty politicians can come up with in a lifetime. Hillary Clinton, in contrast, is a clean politician, which we know because she’s been under some kind of dogged investigation for the better part of three decades, without a speck of real dirt coming up on her.

But to report this basic truth — that one candidate was irredeemably corrupt and the other was not — would have drawn accusations from the right that the media was in the tank for Clinton. So, in order to appear fair, mainstream media outlets embraced a policy of being incredibly unfair to Clinton, blowing every non-scandal out of proportion.

WikiLeaks and its Russian buddies were able to exploit this media bias towards “balance” over truth by slowly releasing emails regarding the Clinton Foundation, Democratic National Committee strategy, and other hot-button topics.

Most people don’t really read the news, but just glean general themes from headlines and cable TV. Those who actually bothered to read the stories under the blaring headlines about the email leaks would generally find that the headlines were wildly misleading. As Matthew Yglesias at Vox wrote, one hacked email chain “doesn’t raise the question of whether Clinton Foundation staff got special access to passports from the State Department. It answers the question. They didn’t, as the story says.”

Only 31 percent of the people who read online articles, going by statistical averages, read more than a few paragraphs. But the big reveal — that there’s no scandal — usually came well into an article, after the part where most readers had disengaged.

Most Republican politicians put party before country. One of the scariest revelations in the Washington Post piece about the CIA report was that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, in a secret meeting between Democratic and Republican leaders, “raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.”

The threat, and it was a threat, seems like it was effective, because the White House decided against the release. But the whole thing is a neat distillation of the entire Republican attitude towards any Trump-based corruption: They’re happy to look the other way as Trump and his supporters plunder the country, spread racism and bigotry and undermine our democracy, so long as they get a crack at destroying Social Security and Medicare.

20 Million Trump Voters’ Could Lose Ovetime Pay

St. Louis Trump supporters

The examples of Trump voters putting appeals to their racism and bigotry ahead of their own economic interest keep on rolling in.  The latest comes via a story at The Raw Story that looks at likely pay losses that will be suffered by Trump supporters if  Der Fuhrer Donald Trump and the Congressional Republicans keep their promise to repeal a number of executive orders signed by President Barack Obama.  I would be lying if I said I had a shred of sympathy for these people, but I do feel badly for others who will be negatively impacted if this reverse Robin Hood agenda is implemented.  Here are excerpts:

Millions of Americans who voted for Donald Trump are expected to lose overtime pay rights soon after he is sworn in as president.

Tom Bonier, CEO of the polling firm Targetsmart, pointed out on Monday that “almost 20,000,000 Trump voters would lose time and a half overtime” under a Republican plan to reverse regulations put in place by President Barack Obama.
 According to Politico, House Republicans are already plotting the most efficient way to dismantle Obama-era regulations. An overtime rule requiring companies to pay time-and-a-half to workers who make less than $47,000 a year is expected to be one of the first reversals.

“We have heard over the past year that it would have truly dramatically bad effects, not just on employers but on employees across the country,” Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-AL) told Politico. “I can give you the names of a ton of private-sector businesses who will either have to eat that cost or pass that cost on to their customers.”

Exit polls taken during the Nov. 8 election showed that 41 percent of Trump’s 61 million votes were cast by people who make less than $50,000 a year.

I hope these bigots and "low information voters" enjoy losing overtime pay and having to work 70 hour weeks as "salaried" employees.  Oh, and when they lose their healthcare coverage, that will make for a much deserved double whammy.  

Trump's Base: "Low Information Voters"

Today is election day and hopefully before the day is out, Donald Trump will have gone down to a decisive defeat that even a self-absorbed narcissist cannot deny.   Where his supporters will go after today is less clear.  They loathe the so-called GOP establishment and, truth be told, the feeling is mutual.  Trump has unleashed all the hate and bigotry that the post 2012 presidential election post mortem found detrimental to the future of the Republican Party.  A piece in the Washington Post by researchers at the University of Alabama suggests that the key to Trump's rise  is "low information voters."  Those who have limited knowledge of how our government works and who are motivated by emotion rather than logic and facts, something that explains in party why Trump has been so attractive a figure for evangelical Christians who meet both of these standards. Here are article highlights: 

Our research finds that Trump has attracted a disproportionate (and unprecedented) number of “low-information voters” to his campaign. Furthermore, these voters are more likely to respond to emotional appeals — whether about the economy, immigration, Muslims, racial relations, sexism, and even hostility to the first African American U.S. president, Barack Obama. They are the ideal constituency for a candidate like Trump.

We define low-information voters as those who do not know certain basic facts about government and lack what psychologists call a “need for cognition.” Those with a high need for cognition have a positive attitude toward tasks that require reasoning and effortful thinking and are, therefore, more likely to invest the time and resources to do so when evaluating complex issues. Those with a low need for cognition, on the other hand, find little reward in the collection and evaluation of new information when it comes to problem solving and the consideration of competing issue positions. They are more likely to rely on cognitive shortcuts, such as “experts” or other opinion leaders, for cues.

Drawing on data from the 2016 American National Election Studies Pilot Studies, we measured the need for cognition based on whether respondents agreed or disagreed that “Thinking is not my idea of fun” and “I would rather do something that requires little thought than something that is sure to challenge my thinking abilities.” We measured knowledge of government based on a question asking how long senators’ terms were and a question on which of four policy areas the government spends the least (the answer was foreign aid; the other options were Medicare, national defense and Social Security). We focused our analysis on whites because nonwhites were not supporting Trump in sufficient numbers.  

For example, we found that people who did not know either of these questions about government evaluated Trump 20 points more favorably than Clinton, compared with those who knew both of those questions. This was not true in 2012: Knowledge of politics had little relationship with people’s views of Mitt Romney and Obama.

Similarly, people who expressed less “need for cognition” evaluated Trump 12 points more favorably than Clinton . . . . We also found that the effect of political knowledge and need for cognition may affect support for Trump via association with concern about the economy and attitudes toward Muslims, African Americans and immigrants. This suggests that voters who know less about politics may be attracted to Trump for these reasons, which also helps explain why they continue to support him in the face of his many mistruths. If they are willing to believe that Obama is a Muslim and that Muslims are inherently violent, for example, why wouldn’t they believe that the election is “rigged”?

“[L]ow-information voters” are not the entirety of Trump’s base of support. They are, however, a sizable bloc. . . . a core part of his base is made up of low-information voters who appear more susceptible to Trump’s appeals based on race and religion and less prepared to challenge his misstatements and untruths.

It's nice to have research data to back up what many of us felt we already knew about Trump's base.