Tag: 2016 candidates
Will Trump Get Away With It?

Will Trump Get Away With It?

For argument’s sake, let’s say you ran into this Trump character in a bar. First off, he’s boasting about how incredibly smart, rich and good looking he is. He’s a big, big winner. He’s even got his own TV show, and you don’t.

Next he starts in on what a HUGE success he is with the ladies, partly because of his, ahem, prodigious masculine endowment. American Pharoah, the race horse, has got nothing on The Donald.

Trump says you wouldn’t believe how many supposedly happily married wives he’s debauched. Top women, Trophy Wives, not that flat-chested specimen with “the face of a dog” sitting with you.

Next he tells you about his hot daughter, the one with the amazing body whom he’d probably date if his Super Model wife wasn’t even hotter.

Okay, enough.

In actual life, most people couldn’t get away fast enough; they’d flee the orange-haired ape as if he had Ebola. And yet millions are thinking about voting for Trump for president — essentially because television news networks now depict U.S. political contests as the biggest “reality TV” show of them all.

And the last thing people expect of reality TV is well, realism. What’s wanted is spectacle, illusion and melodrama. Less C-Span than pro wrestling. And in that arena, a figure like Donald J. Trump can be made to appear almost normal.

On CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and the rest, there are now only three big news stories: the 2016 presidential election, terrorism, and sporadic natural disasters — tornadoes, floods, and earthquakes. It’s been that way pretty much since Trump declared his candidacy last June.

It follows that broadcast ratings, broadcasters’ careers and many millions of dollars depend upon keeping people entertained. That, in turn, depends upon suspense. To keep viewers watching, the election needs to be depicted as a cliffhanger. So far, so good.

If nothing else, the man gives good TV. His exaggerated mugging and insult-comic act can even be funny. As long as people can be persuaded that his enemies are also their enemies, he’s their man.

However, there should be limits. People who brag a lot also tend to lie a lot. What then if large numbers of voters figured out that Trump’s proudest boast of superior political judgment turned out to be pure fiction — the one about how he alone among Republican presidential candidates recognized the folly of the Bush administration invading Iraq in 2003, and spoke vigorously against the war?

The myth-making began during a televised GOP debate last September.

“I have to say something because it’s about judgment,” Trump said. “I am the only person on this dais, the only person that fought very, very hard against us…going into Iraq. Because I said going into Iraq —That was in 2003, you can check it out, I’ll give you 25 different stories — What I said was you’re going to, you’re going to destabilize the Middle East, and that’s what happened.”

Bob Somerby checked it out on Nexis. No evidence of a single story, much less twenty-five, could be found. Trump alibied that the press failed to record his opposition because he wasn’t then in politics.

Yeah, well neither were the Dixie Chicks. Many of the same people currently attending Trump rallies were busy burning the group’s CDs back then. Had Trump said a single word against George W. Bush’s folly, torch-bearing mobs would have marched on his casinos like Transylvanian peasants in a vampire movie. His TV show “The Apprentice” would never have gotten off the ground.

If you recall, France’s ambassador did say in the United Nations essentially what Trump now pretends he said. As a result, French fries temporarily became “Freedom Fries.” Indeed, I cherish a photo of an Arkansas truck stop vending machine offering “Freedom Ticklers” for fifty cents.

Then last fall, Trump began claiming that the Bush White House had actually dispatched emissaries begging him to tone his criticism down. Washington Postfact checkers could find no evidence that ever happened either.

Quite the opposite. History records that Trump was an Iraq war hawk, full stop. BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski obtained an audio recording of a March 21, 2003, Fox News interview where he declared the invasion “a tremendous success from a military standpoint.” As a result, Trump predicted, “Wall Street’s just gonna go up like a rocket.” He was eager to see Saddam Hussein’s mighty arsenal.

In short, Trump made the whole judgment thing up. Unless, that is, you read the increasingly laughable New York Times, where the candidate’s fantasies drew the attention of Clinton-hating columnist Maureen Dowd. She invited readers to envision “a foreign policy debate between Trump and Clinton that sounds oddly like the one Obama and Clinton had in 2008, with Trump playing Obama, preening about his good judgment on Iraq.”

So the question becomes, can he get away with it?

Photo: Donald Trump (L) gestures as he stands next to his sister Maryanne Trump Barry, during a break in proceedings of the Aberdeenshire Council inquiry into his plans for a golf resort, Aberdeen, northeast Scotland June 10, 2008.   REUTERS/David Moir  

The Year Of Telling It Like It Is

The Year Of Telling It Like It Is

Less than 24 hours after New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie embarked on a long-shot campaign for the Republican presidential nomination under the banner of “Telling It Like It Is,” Vermont senator and aspiring Democratic nominee Bernie Sanders tweeted, “What this campaign is about is a very radical idea: We’re going to tell the truth.”

Not so radical, actually, in the 2016 race. Practically everybody’s “telling it like it is.” It’s a theme with endless subtextual variations, starting with “Telling It Like I Want It To Be.” “Telling It Like Primary Voters Think It Is.” “Telling It Like A Future Fox News Host.”

Christie’s main claims to this slogan are his blustery persona and call to curb entitlement programs. But that is hardly enough to stand out in a year like this. There are about 20 candidates and many have unfiltered personalities, nothing to lose, or both.

You want blustery? How about Donald Trump? His blithe characterization of Mexican immigrants as rapists, criminals, and drug runners — at his presidential announcement, no less — is the nadir of the telling-it-like-it-is syndrome to date. And it’s costing him what it should financially, as Univision, NBC, and now Macy’s have cut ties with him.

It’s not yet costing him politically; new polls show Trump in second place for the Republican nomination nationally, in Iowa and in New Hampshire. That’s bound to change, but not due to mass condemnation from the GOP. The party’s 2016 candidates for the most part have punted on Trump, perhaps anticipating, hopefully, that he will be ruined without their help. National Review did its part with a report that Trump has skipped the last six presidential primary elections, including 2012, when he urged Florida Republicans via Twitter to get out and vote in theirs.

Few can compete with Trump, but others are going for shock value in their own ways. Former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee, for instance, played the daring, unconventional card by proposing a switch to the metric system — part of the internationalist direction in which he said he’d lead the country. Another Democrat, former Virginia senator Jim Webb, went in a unique direction after the Charleston church massacre. He said on Facebook that the Civil War had a “complicated” history and the Confederate battle flag had “wrongly been used” for racist purposes.

On the GOP side, John Kasich’s history suggests a strong showing in the tell-it-like-it-is sweepstakes when he announces July 21. Politico reported the Ohio governor would “aim to appear less scripted and guarded than the leading candidates.” In fact, he actually IS less scripted and guarded than most of them. To cite one example: Kasich didn’t just circumvent conservatives to jam through a Medicaid expansion under Obamacare, he suggested that they “better have a good answer” when St. Peter asks them what they did for the poor.

So far, Christie’s strongest rival for the tell-it-like-it-is crown is Mr. Establishment himself, Jeb Bush. He made a week-long mess of a question about Iraq, but the Florida governor has been straightforward — almost defiantly so — in other areas.

Not surprisingly, given Bush’s Mexican-American wife, he has been relatively tough on Trump. Asked in Spanish about Trump’s comments about Mexicans at an event in Las Vegas, Bush replied in Spanish that Trump spends his life fighting with people and doesn’t represent the values of the Republican Party, according to Bloomberg News. In English he said that “I don’t agree with him. I think he’s wrong.”

Bush also gets a straight-talk citation for calling the Confederate flag a “racist” symbol — while in South Carolina, no less. In a Winthrop University poll last year, 61 percent — including nearly three-quarters of whites — said the flag should continue to fly on the statehouse grounds. Views are changing, but there’s still risk given the state’s early and influential presidential primary. In 2012, exit polls showed that 98 percent of voters in the GOP primary were white.

On domestic policy, Bush has stuck with his support for Common Core education standards as many other GOP hopefuls have run from them, and he continues to back legal status for many of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country as part of a comprehensive immigration solution.

In a private phone call with Alabama Republicans that was reported by The Washington Post, Bush berated fellow Republicans for abandoning their views and said they should not “bend in the wind.” He says similar things in public. “I’m not backing down from something that is a core belief,” he told the Club for Growth in February. “Are we supposed to just cower because at the moment people are all upset about something? No way, no how.”

The old adage of show, don’t tell applies to the 2016 race in spades. Don’t tell us you’re going to tell it like it is. Just live it. And don’t be surprised to find stiff competition for the title.

Follow Jill Lawrence on Twitter @JillDLawrence. To find out more about Jill Lawrence and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Image: DonkeyHotey via Flickr