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Have You Ever Seen A More Cynical Political Pivot Than Donald Trump Trying To Avoid Electoral Disaster?

Have You Ever Seen A More Cynical Political Pivot Than Donald Trump Trying To Avoid Electoral Disaster?

Published with permission from AlterNet.

If, like me, you think that a President Trump would be (not to coin a phrase) a total disaster, Hillary Clinton’s widening lead in the polls gave you about five minutes to breathe easier, until Trump replaced his campaign chairman with honchos blunt enough to admit that his ugliness was killing him with undecided voters, and pushy enough to make him pretend to almost apologize for it.

Was last week a true turning point for Trump? Did it signal a transformation from the man-baby who won the Republican primaries to someone with the temperament to be president? In the word of the moment, is this the “pivot” that Clinton’s supporters have most feared?

There are more strata of cynicism in the idea of a pivot than layers of pastry in a mille-feuille.

Start with the presumption of two kinds of Americans. Some of them – political insiders, media junkies, savvy citizens – know the score. They’re hard-boiled enough to get that candidates can sometimes lie with impunity; that everything can come down to image and optics; that in an era of post-truth politics, narratives can matter more than facts.

The other Americans are the useful idiots whose gullibility is what pollsters measure. When a candidate pivots from one message in the primaries (e.g., Blacks are scary), to a contradictory message in the general (Blacks are suffering), or when a nominee torques from bullying (smearing a Gold Star mother, say) to sensitivity (I regret causing personal pain), his or her campaign calculates that the base and the undecideds will just roll with it. They’ll bend themselves into pretzels, believe the character swings, dissolve the flip-flops in the solvent of amnesia.

So when insiders speculate whether the Trump pivot has at long last arrived, what they’re really asking is whether Trump has the discipline to maintain the masquerade that he’s changed. If he doesn’t consistently act as though he can get his id under control, too many voters may conclude that the pathological liar and narcissist they saw in the primaries – whom the elite knows is the real Trump – is in fact the real Trump.

The cynicism of the pivot ploy came into sharp focus when Trump, under the tutelage of his new chieftains — Stephen Bannon and Kellyanne Conway —declared in Charlotte, N.C., “Sometimes, in the heat of debate and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don’t choose the right words or you say the wrong thing. I have done that.”

If you saw him say that, you couldn’t mistake the meaning of the smirk on his face: “This is an act, people. I’m bluffing.” No wonder the crowd laughed at the preposterousness of it. “And believe it or not,” he continued, “I regret it.” Trump’s signature catchphrase is “believe me,” so when he says “believe it or not,” it’s a tell, a hostage video. “Or not” is the equivalent of blinking “I’m lying” in Morse code. The only disclaimer missing was putting air quotes around “regret.” No wonder his mea quasi culpa was met with even more laughter, and a Trump-Trump-Trump chant from the crowd; it was their way of saying they knew he was faking it.

Last Friday’s Morning Joe on MSNBC epitomized the media response to the Trump shakeup. The question on the table wasn’t whether Trump had truly changed; no one on the panel thought his pivot meant anything truthful about his temperament. Instead, it was all about performance, stagecraft, illusion – whether Trump’s new minders can make him stick to the new script, whether they can market it with a straight face, whether the audience will buy it. Joe Scarborough called Conway’s TV debut as campaign manager “the best pundit performance of the year.” “It was quite a performance,” agreed Andrea Mitchell, because “it didn’t have performance written all about it – it was natural.” Eugene Robinson thought Trump’s attempting a pivot would “if not gladden the hearts of worried Republicans, at least calm their night sweats.” Chris Cillizza wondered if Trump, a billionaire who managed to depict himself as a populist in the primaries, had already “damaged himself so badly, image-wise, that a change like this is not able to be sold to a skeptical electorate.” Brand maven Donnie Deutsch said no, it wouldn’t work, because “people are not stupid.” The press needs to stop setting the bar so low, “to stop giving him presidential points because he can read off a teleprompter and he’s not insulting anybody.”

Within hours of his Charlotte speech, a Clinton ad collected video of Trump being asked if he regretted taking shots at the Khans (“I don’t regret anything”); if he regretted denying that John McCain was a war hero (“I like not to regret anything”); if he regretted calling Mexicans rapists (“No, not at all); if he wanted to apologize for anything (“No, I don’t apologize”). Will it work? Trump’s tears may be crocodile contrition, but fact checking, even via video, sometimes can’t keep a good charlatan down.

Nor, maybe, will Trump’s message discipline stick any longer than after other reboots. Yesterday Conway tweeted that Trump “doesn’t hurl personal insults.” But during today’s Morning Joe, Trump took to Twitter to call Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski “two clowns,” adding that she’s “a neurotic and not very bright mess.” So much for temperament transplants.

A political pivot is a con that wins wolf whistles from people who think they’re too smart to fall for it.  I wonder what it would take to motivate some connoisseurs of that fakery to volunteer a little time on the vice squad cleaning things up.

Photo: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks during a Hispanic Small Business Leaders round table meeting at the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S., August 26, 2016. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri

No, Trump Is Not Really Changing His Racist Tune

No, Trump Is Not Really Changing His Racist Tune

Published with permission from AlterNet.

Soon after Donald Trump’s August 17 announcement of a new campaign leadership team came word that he would reconsider his position on creating a “deportation force” to remove undocumented immigrants, and make a concerted pitch to African Americans for their support.

But Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, has a funny way of reaching out to non-white voters—for instance, dropping an ad last week showing hordes of brown people coming into the country and posing a threat to the nation’s security, telling African-Americans their lives are miserable, or hiring a campaign chief who presides over a website which “has become a haven for white nationalists,” according to journalist Sarah Posner.

For her report at Mother Jones, Posner interviewed newly minted Trump campaign CEO Stephen K. Bannon, who has taken a leave of absence from his position as chief executive at Breitbart News, about the evolution of the site since he assumed the lead role in the wake of founder Andrew Breitbart’s death.

“We’re the platform for the alt-right,” Bannon told Posner, who interviewed him at an event that took place in Cleveland during the Republican National Convention.

Posner explains the “alt-right” this way:

By bringing on Stephen Bannon, Trump was signaling a wholehearted embrace of the “alt-right,” a once-motley assemblage of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, ethno-nationalistic provocateurs who have coalesced behind Trump and curried the GOP nominee’s favor on social media. In short, Trump has embraced the core readership of Breitbart News.

If you’ve any doubts about the racism inherent to the alt-right movement, just peruse the Twitter hashtag #altright, and see what comes up.

Since Posner’s report was published on Monday, the white nationalist website The Daily Stormer, which describes Trump as “our glorious leader,” has unleashed a torrent of anti-Semitic invective on Posner, who is Jewish. Other Jewish reporters and political consultants have come in for the same treatment in alt-right Twitter assaults over the course of the Trump campaign. The candidate, whom Fortune magazine reported has retweeted the Twitter postings from known white-supremacist accounts some 75 times, has yet to condemn them.

So what of Trump’s foreshadowed “pivot” on matters of race? I’m not to the first to observe that if such a pivot ever does take place, it will be a bid for the ballots of white, suburban swing voters. And that’s likely why Trump, as he appointed the race-baiting Bannon to lead his campaign, also elevated Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway to the role of campaign manager. On the August 21 edition of CNN’s State of the Union Sunday talk show, Conway suggested that Trump might change his tune on his promised “deportation forces.” Campaign-watchers took this to mean he would unveil a tweaked immigration strategy during a speech scheduled for Thursday that was to have been devoted to the topic of immigration. Then the speech was canceled.

Scheduled for the same day, Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic opponent, has scheduled a speech devoted to the topic of the alt-right

Trump, many say, is trying to have it both ways: appeal to swing voters while not losing his core base of racists and misanthropes. But he’s likely trying to have it more ways than those. Trump is, above all, a businessman with a strong belief in the lowest common denominator, and as such, is likely looking past the election and assessing the possibility that he may lose. That core base, as The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent has pointed out, could form a ready-made audience for a post-election media enterprise. In that case, his campaign partnership with Bannon and adviser Roger Ailes (the recently ousted Fox News director who is reportedly advising Trump) makes a whole lot of sense.

But Trump being Trump, he’s also unlikely at this point to see the election as a lost cause—because, well, that would make him a loser, and you know how he feels about those kind of people. His campaign operatives are telling the press that Clinton’s support among African Americans is soft; that if you remind black voters about Bill Clinton’s crime policies, which led to massive levels of incarceration for black men, they’re less inclined to vote for Hillary Clinton (who expressed support for the policy at the time, but has since expressed regrets).

Roger Stone, the longtime GOP operative and dirty-trickster advising Trump put it this way, according to The Washington Post:

“Black voters have no affinity for Hillary Clinton,” Stone said. “She’s done nothing for them. … Bill Clinton has an affinity to black voters, and it’s stylistic: He slips on the shades, plays the saxophone, how cool. But most black voters don’t know about the 1994 crime bill, and they need to be educated.”

Depress the turnout among African Americans, the thinking goes, and Trump has a shot at winning by plurality, if not an outright majority, especially if Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson pulls additional votes from Clinton.

It seems unlikely that Trump could make a credible pitch to non-whites at this stage of the campaign he has built of racial resentment. Hence his recent shout-out to black voters—asking what they had to lose if they voted for him—delivered at a rally whose audience was almost entirely white. From a report in The Washington Post:

“Look,” he added, “it is a disaster the way African Americans are living, in many cases, and, in many cases the way Hispanics are living, and I say it with such a deep-felt feeling. What do you have to lose?”

Stephen Colbert, host of CBS’s The Late Show, boiled the message down to this: “You’re already on fire so you may as well shoot yourself in the head.”

NBC News reports that the Trump campaign made a $4 million TV buy for his threatening-brown-hordes ad in Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, where it was scheduled to begin airing on August 19, and continue through August 29. So much for the grand pivot.

When Trump repudiates his racist followers and stops stoking their fears, we’ll know he’s serious about reaching out to non-whites.

Adele M. Stan is AlterNet’s senior Washington editor. Follow her on Twitter @addiestan.

Photo: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump arrives for a campaign rally in Tampa, Florida, U.S., August 24, 2016.   REUTERS/Carlo Allegri

Trump Hires A Woman To Clean Up His Mess

Trump Hires A Woman To Clean Up His Mess

Kellyanne Conway has the hardest job in American politics today, perhaps an impossible one.

She will attempt to temper Donald Trump. Which means reining in his penchant to retaliate for each perceived slight and to escalate any dispute. Trump needs to appear kinder, humbler and more deferential toward a crucial voting bloc — women.

Conway, who replaces Paul Manafort as the honcho of Trump’s campaign, already seems to have gotten to work. On Thursday, Trump issued a public mea culpa for all the “personal pain” he has caused with his vitriolic rhetoric. Conway insists the apology was Trump’s idea, not hers.

The longtime pollster’s new role in Trump’s campaign calls to mind a well-worn adage: It falls to a woman to clean up the mess that men have made.

The 2016 campaign season is shaping up to be the most misogynistic political season ever. Contrary to what the supposedly chastened Donald says, we’re likely to hear more sexist insults, especially if he continues to slide in the polls. His anger and self-regard are too hard to restrain.

Perhaps it’s the price American women have to pay to reach the pinnacle of American politics, but it’s outrageous that it should be this way: that the election in which gender equality comes to fruition in American politics is also one distinguished by the regression of one party and candidate to gross contempt for women.

This is the price of female advancement. Some will be made to pay. Some, like Conway, will try to repair the damage.

Ironically, her new position as Trump’s campaign manager is yet another first for women. As Gender Watch noted, Conway is the first female campaign manager to serve a GOP presidential contender. She is only the fourth woman to lead any major party’s quest for the White House.

Yet this achievement comes with an asterisk. Some observers speculate she is less the boss of the campaign in a traditional sense than she is a high-profile handler with the job of keeping Trump in check.

Conway’s decades of pollster experience studying women voters has prepped her well. She’s been a regular for years on cable TV. But her resume includes a sorry list of politicians, such as Missouri’s Todd Akin. Remember him? His run for the U.S. Senate imploded during an interview when he tried to discuss abortion and wound up making the case that something he termed “legitimate rape” rarely gets a victim pregnant.

She’s also worked with Ted Cruz, Newt Gingrich and Dan Quayle.

Whatever Conway manages to do for Trump, who at this point seems destined for defeat, may turn out to be a favor for the Republican National Committee. If she can keep Trump on a leash, she might be able to prevent more damage to the GOP’s image among women voters.

About 10 years ago, Conway paired up with a well-known Democratic pollster, Celinda Lake, to write a book, “What Women Really Want: How American Women Are Quietly Erasing Political, Racial, Class and Religious Lines to Change the Way We Live.”

The lengthy title aptly sums up the book’s thesis. It rejoiced in the many ways that women are forming alliances, arguing that “a newly defined, united power base among women is reshaping the state of our nation much more than the two-sided politics of Left and Right.”

It’s a lovely vision, one that would please many women voters. Maybe Conway’s time saddled up alongside Trump — who is the antithesis of such collaboration — will persuade her to revert to more research for a sequel.

She, like women across America, will survive this campaign season and go on to better days (and candidates) ahead.

Mary Sanchez is an opinion-page columnist for The Kansas City Star. Readers may write to her at: Kansas City Star, 1729 Grand Blvd., Kansas City, Mo. 64108-1413, or via e-mail at msanchez@kcstar.com.

Photo: Campaign Manager Kellyanne Conway (L) and Paul Manafort, staff of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, speak during a round table discussion on security at Trump Tower in the Manhattan borough of New York, U.S., August 17, 2016. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri