I turned 36 in a Presidential election year. At first I said I would run an honest campaign. "It's legal for me to run," being my only statement. Soon my friends were chiming in, and it became a blatantly thuggish kleptocracy. It was satirical humor. Now it's a reality.
Reading Mr. Egger’s writing today reminded me that JVL (whomever that is) was right again. I sighed and nodded my head yes (for some reason) and surrendered the idea that Jonathan V Last got it right again.
He said former President Trump needed to ramp up the rhetoric to retake the narrative and win the election.
More evidence the world is turning upside down: Bill Kristol has become Little Miss Sunshine. Love seeing him feeling good! And love hearing about the live Bulwark audiences.
There is only one way to deal with repeated incitement to violence: jail the inciter. Someone needs to tell Trump that if MAGA violence breaks out this year he will be immediately arrested and the DOJ will argue for indefinite detention. Anything less virtually guarantees MAGA violence.
Why are Bulwark journalists letting main stream media off the hook, of equally covering both Kamala Harris comprehensive policy positions in her campaign as well as the continued idiocy of Donald Trump in the true perspective of an unworthy candidate for any position except federal prisoner and/or mental patient in a sanatorium.
Bill Kristol should be publicly chastising so-called major media for such incompetence of full and equal coverage.
I used to feel a little dizzy when I found myself agreeing with David Frum or George Will. Now I'm perfectly blasé about agreeing with Dick Cheney. Weird.
I saw a video of Trump admitting that he lost the 2020 election "by a whisker". First time I've read that he admitted losing. Then I saw a video of the reprehensible Nick Fuentes castigating Trump for lying about losing because blah blah all those fine January 6 people were conned blah blah. Why aren't there headlines in the NYT and other media screaming that Trump has admitted he lost? I don't understand why this isn't bigger news given that most Republicans apparently believe the Big Lie.
The answer to the question in the sub-headline - "Is our press corps up for this moment?" - is clearly no. What are we getting from the paper of record? Stories such as the one about YouTube as a platform for Trump allies to court the "tech bro" vote. And the one about Black voters in Georgia who have their doubts about Kamala. I guess in an effort to look "balanced" - which has come to mean merely counter to expectations - The Times looks for stories about voters who are supporting Trump when you might not expect them to and voters who are not supporting Kamala when you might expect them to. Apparently they do not see their job as reporting about anything Trump actually says, including things he actually says about what he would actually do if elected. It's all purely meta bullshit now, stories about "narratives" of the election, not the reality of the election itself. Even the characterization of what, for anyone else, is merely a bald-faced lie is repurposed, apparently, as "willing something into existence," implying some mystical power Trump has to make things happen, another favorite trope of the current media. Lying about the existence of something is not the same as "willing it into existence." As far as optimism is concerned, in the best characterization of the current situation, about half of American voters want the guy who would be the worst possible choice to be President among the entire US population who are natural born citizens who will have attained the age of 35 by inauguration day. At some point we all have to grapple with the fact that many tens of millions of Americans like him because of who he is, not despite it. The puzzling thing to me is that so many on the not-quite-anti-Trump right look at this phenomenon as the inevitable result of the decadence and turning away from institutions like religion on the part of the left (yes, I'm looking at you, Ross Douthat, and your buddy David Brooks), when the decadence and outright blasphemy of Trump world is kind of at "Golden Calf" level on the end-of-an-ordered-society scale. Trump's message is that you can do or say anything you want or have anything you want (an overturned Roe but with free IVF and blah-blah-blah maybe abortion in your state, a balanced budget due to 100% tariffs that you won't have to pay for, etc.). The decadence of the left was that maybe women could have their own lives, which would include having sex with men of their choosing every once in a while (which, these days, is not very often) without worrying about getting pregnant with a kid society had zero interest in helping her raise, and that maybe Black people could start getting a fair shake after 400+ years of slavery and Jim Crow. That's definitely so much more decadent than worshiping the Orange God King.
I got into an argument with a group of friends a couple months back about how I thought that newspapers should be running headlines every day, until the election, detailing the danger that Trump poses to our democracy. And my friends argued that the newspapers wouldn't be impartial if they did that. Like it's some regular presidential race like Bush vs. Mondale (I miss boring people)!
This. is. not. a. normal. race.
It's so far beyond politics, issues, the economy, etc. and it's so f**king disappointing to see how few people in the mainstream media are willing to take a stand and tell the truth. What is journalism for? Apparently it's to make the toxin go down a bit smoother.
It's been astonishing to watch moral anomie being placed at the heart of what now passes for "conservatism" - starting with the weird notion that the most valiant defender of "conservative values" should not be expected to exemplify them himself, followed by attacks on anyone who says that character should still matter.
This is such an important comment from Mark Leibovich's article in The Atlantic's "One Article to Read Today" email this morning:
"[Leibovich following Trump around in 2015]: But I was struck by one theme that Trump kept pounding on over and over: that he was used to dealing with “brutal, vicious killers”—by which he meant his fellow ruthless operators in showbiz, real estate, casinos, and other big-boy industries. In contrast, he told me, politicians are saps and weaklings …
“They might speak badly about me now, but they won’t later,” Trump said. They like to say they are “public servants,” he added, his voice dripping with derision at the word servant. But they would eventually submit to him and fear him. They would “evolve,” as they say in politics. “It will be very easy; I can make them evolve,” Trump told me. “They will evolve.”
Like most people who’d been around politics for a while, I was dubious. And wrong. They evolved."
And I would include a lot of journalists (and pundits) in mainstream media. They've evolved. They submit to him by postulating there's ANY good in him and they fear him because of what might happen if/when he gets elected.
If I had a nickel for every fine conservative mind that once spoke forcefully about the moral degeneracy of Trump, but then pivoted to claiming that the real "corruption" is opposing Trump.
Leibovich's piece is a must read. Anyone not actively resisting Trump and Trumpism will be destroyed by Trump and Trumpism. "Do not submit in advance." Timothy Snyder's lesson one in On Tyranny. Submission is death. That may sound hyperbolic but as soon as one gives in to this heinous bullshit, one's self goes away. One becomes a zombie. Maybe, one becomes an Orc. Submission is death.
Many people painted themselves into a corner with their initial decision that Trump must always be defended against his critics, and to portray those critics as agents of an evil greater than any of his faults. The more they invested in defending the latest outrage, the more resistant they became to admitting that perhaps the critics had been right while they were wrong - not just mistaken, but morally wrong.
This is fear manifest for DJT. Nothing more. Never mind the vile chicanery he will employ post-election whatever the result, he is now laying the groundwork for the savagely desperate embarrassment he may face after the reality of the election, so he is trying to get out in front of it now. Like a boisterous playground child, he spouts threats and bluster, but nothing has even happened yet. He truly is in the wrong game though. Think about it: controlling others in one's business empire your entire life is one thing, but having the public control his fate via election is beyond his psychological capacity. One wonders why he ever ran in the first place. He was in over his head in 2016 and the same applies now.
I did have a sobering thought though. If he's as insane as we all know he is, who really IS behind him that he just might win? We really need one of the streaming services to run a bunch of those old films about political chicanery like The Manchurian Candidate, Dr. Strangelove, All the King's Men, The Best Man . . . with a great commentator fronting them with context comments and maybe a panel after the movie viewing to hammer the similarities home.
We should make a list and commit to watching and sharing.... I think I'll save Strangelove to the end. All the King's Men . . . I haven't watched the Sean Penn version, I'm more familiar with the older one. We'd better steer clear of some of those Spencer Tracy movies where he's the lone wolf fighting against the political machine, like in State of the Union. Trump would probably say HE's the Tracy character. Born Yesterday is a great comedy for those days where the news is just too awful. Or maybe watch IT instead of the debate, especially the original with the great Judy Holliday. Too bad Melania's probably never seen it, she could have cut Trump off at the knees if she'd emulated THAT character.
There's also the Madame Secretary TV series. That's tempting. I watched every single episode when it was on prime time. Never watched The West Wing--did you?
I turned 36 in a Presidential election year. At first I said I would run an honest campaign. "It's legal for me to run," being my only statement. Soon my friends were chiming in, and it became a blatantly thuggish kleptocracy. It was satirical humor. Now it's a reality.
He has no idea what tariffs are, does he?
Reading Mr. Egger’s writing today reminded me that JVL (whomever that is) was right again. I sighed and nodded my head yes (for some reason) and surrendered the idea that Jonathan V Last got it right again.
He said former President Trump needed to ramp up the rhetoric to retake the narrative and win the election.
The answer is “No, and their publishers don’t want to be.”
The answer is “No, and their publishers don’t want to be.”
More evidence the world is turning upside down: Bill Kristol has become Little Miss Sunshine. Love seeing him feeling good! And love hearing about the live Bulwark audiences.
trumpism is just repackaging of the america first movement lead by Pat Buchanan with some authoritarianism tossed in
There is only one way to deal with repeated incitement to violence: jail the inciter. Someone needs to tell Trump that if MAGA violence breaks out this year he will be immediately arrested and the DOJ will argue for indefinite detention. Anything less virtually guarantees MAGA violence.
“100 percent tariff ... It’s not going to be a cost to you ....”
It'll cost twice as much but it won't cost me more because? ... the extra will be paid by an anti-matter me in a parallel dimension?
Why are Bulwark journalists letting main stream media off the hook, of equally covering both Kamala Harris comprehensive policy positions in her campaign as well as the continued idiocy of Donald Trump in the true perspective of an unworthy candidate for any position except federal prisoner and/or mental patient in a sanatorium.
Bill Kristol should be publicly chastising so-called major media for such incompetence of full and equal coverage.
.
I used to feel a little dizzy when I found myself agreeing with David Frum or George Will. Now I'm perfectly blasé about agreeing with Dick Cheney. Weird.
Hard nyet on the Jill Stein referendum.
I saw a video of Trump admitting that he lost the 2020 election "by a whisker". First time I've read that he admitted losing. Then I saw a video of the reprehensible Nick Fuentes castigating Trump for lying about losing because blah blah all those fine January 6 people were conned blah blah. Why aren't there headlines in the NYT and other media screaming that Trump has admitted he lost? I don't understand why this isn't bigger news given that most Republicans apparently believe the Big Lie.
The answer to the question in the sub-headline - "Is our press corps up for this moment?" - is clearly no. What are we getting from the paper of record? Stories such as the one about YouTube as a platform for Trump allies to court the "tech bro" vote. And the one about Black voters in Georgia who have their doubts about Kamala. I guess in an effort to look "balanced" - which has come to mean merely counter to expectations - The Times looks for stories about voters who are supporting Trump when you might not expect them to and voters who are not supporting Kamala when you might expect them to. Apparently they do not see their job as reporting about anything Trump actually says, including things he actually says about what he would actually do if elected. It's all purely meta bullshit now, stories about "narratives" of the election, not the reality of the election itself. Even the characterization of what, for anyone else, is merely a bald-faced lie is repurposed, apparently, as "willing something into existence," implying some mystical power Trump has to make things happen, another favorite trope of the current media. Lying about the existence of something is not the same as "willing it into existence." As far as optimism is concerned, in the best characterization of the current situation, about half of American voters want the guy who would be the worst possible choice to be President among the entire US population who are natural born citizens who will have attained the age of 35 by inauguration day. At some point we all have to grapple with the fact that many tens of millions of Americans like him because of who he is, not despite it. The puzzling thing to me is that so many on the not-quite-anti-Trump right look at this phenomenon as the inevitable result of the decadence and turning away from institutions like religion on the part of the left (yes, I'm looking at you, Ross Douthat, and your buddy David Brooks), when the decadence and outright blasphemy of Trump world is kind of at "Golden Calf" level on the end-of-an-ordered-society scale. Trump's message is that you can do or say anything you want or have anything you want (an overturned Roe but with free IVF and blah-blah-blah maybe abortion in your state, a balanced budget due to 100% tariffs that you won't have to pay for, etc.). The decadence of the left was that maybe women could have their own lives, which would include having sex with men of their choosing every once in a while (which, these days, is not very often) without worrying about getting pregnant with a kid society had zero interest in helping her raise, and that maybe Black people could start getting a fair shake after 400+ years of slavery and Jim Crow. That's definitely so much more decadent than worshiping the Orange God King.
I got into an argument with a group of friends a couple months back about how I thought that newspapers should be running headlines every day, until the election, detailing the danger that Trump poses to our democracy. And my friends argued that the newspapers wouldn't be impartial if they did that. Like it's some regular presidential race like Bush vs. Mondale (I miss boring people)!
This. is. not. a. normal. race.
It's so far beyond politics, issues, the economy, etc. and it's so f**king disappointing to see how few people in the mainstream media are willing to take a stand and tell the truth. What is journalism for? Apparently it's to make the toxin go down a bit smoother.
It's been astonishing to watch moral anomie being placed at the heart of what now passes for "conservatism" - starting with the weird notion that the most valiant defender of "conservative values" should not be expected to exemplify them himself, followed by attacks on anyone who says that character should still matter.
Hear! Hear! Very powerful, sir.
This is such an important comment from Mark Leibovich's article in The Atlantic's "One Article to Read Today" email this morning:
"[Leibovich following Trump around in 2015]: But I was struck by one theme that Trump kept pounding on over and over: that he was used to dealing with “brutal, vicious killers”—by which he meant his fellow ruthless operators in showbiz, real estate, casinos, and other big-boy industries. In contrast, he told me, politicians are saps and weaklings …
“They might speak badly about me now, but they won’t later,” Trump said. They like to say they are “public servants,” he added, his voice dripping with derision at the word servant. But they would eventually submit to him and fear him. They would “evolve,” as they say in politics. “It will be very easy; I can make them evolve,” Trump told me. “They will evolve.”
Like most people who’d been around politics for a while, I was dubious. And wrong. They evolved."
And I would include a lot of journalists (and pundits) in mainstream media. They've evolved. They submit to him by postulating there's ANY good in him and they fear him because of what might happen if/when he gets elected.
If I had a nickel for every fine conservative mind that once spoke forcefully about the moral degeneracy of Trump, but then pivoted to claiming that the real "corruption" is opposing Trump.
Leibovich's piece is a must read. Anyone not actively resisting Trump and Trumpism will be destroyed by Trump and Trumpism. "Do not submit in advance." Timothy Snyder's lesson one in On Tyranny. Submission is death. That may sound hyperbolic but as soon as one gives in to this heinous bullshit, one's self goes away. One becomes a zombie. Maybe, one becomes an Orc. Submission is death.
Many people painted themselves into a corner with their initial decision that Trump must always be defended against his critics, and to portray those critics as agents of an evil greater than any of his faults. The more they invested in defending the latest outrage, the more resistant they became to admitting that perhaps the critics had been right while they were wrong - not just mistaken, but morally wrong.
This is fear manifest for DJT. Nothing more. Never mind the vile chicanery he will employ post-election whatever the result, he is now laying the groundwork for the savagely desperate embarrassment he may face after the reality of the election, so he is trying to get out in front of it now. Like a boisterous playground child, he spouts threats and bluster, but nothing has even happened yet. He truly is in the wrong game though. Think about it: controlling others in one's business empire your entire life is one thing, but having the public control his fate via election is beyond his psychological capacity. One wonders why he ever ran in the first place. He was in over his head in 2016 and the same applies now.
I did have a sobering thought though. If he's as insane as we all know he is, who really IS behind him that he just might win? We really need one of the streaming services to run a bunch of those old films about political chicanery like The Manchurian Candidate, Dr. Strangelove, All the King's Men, The Best Man . . . with a great commentator fronting them with context comments and maybe a panel after the movie viewing to hammer the similarities home.
Check out "A Face in the Crowd" with Andy Griffith as a media demagogue.
Okay, added to the list!
Add to the list - The Dead Zone (movie, not series) with Christopher Walken.
Done
Awesome idea, Valerie!
We should make a list and commit to watching and sharing.... I think I'll save Strangelove to the end. All the King's Men . . . I haven't watched the Sean Penn version, I'm more familiar with the older one. We'd better steer clear of some of those Spencer Tracy movies where he's the lone wolf fighting against the political machine, like in State of the Union. Trump would probably say HE's the Tracy character. Born Yesterday is a great comedy for those days where the news is just too awful. Or maybe watch IT instead of the debate, especially the original with the great Judy Holliday. Too bad Melania's probably never seen it, she could have cut Trump off at the knees if she'd emulated THAT character.
There's my Fall watch list! Thank you, ma'am.
There's also the Madame Secretary TV series. That's tempting. I watched every single episode when it was on prime time. Never watched The West Wing--did you?
I didn't. I'm hearing so much about this that I think I better though. Is it good?