One thing when writing about the Republican Party and the crazy – you can always be certain that it’ll generate new examples. So just when the news that a member of the House accused dozens of Democrats in Congress of being Communists seemed to be going stale, along comes Donald Trump – who is scheduled to appear at a fundraiser with Mitt Romney next week – to spout birther nonsense.
For those of us who believe that there’s something seriously wrong with the Republican Party (and see Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein’s new book; see also my argument that the problem is not about how “conservative” they are, but about their radical style), the big question is whether anything can be done about it. American democracy needs two strong, solid political parties, but currently one of the parties is just a mess – incapable of making coherent policy when it’s in office, and dangerously obstructionist when it’s out of office.
So how can a party recover? I think there are three ways, but two are unfortunately quite unlikely, and the third is at best uncertain.
Some talk about the possibility that the electorate will punish Republicans for their radicalism. Unfortunately, I think that’s unlikely. Note that consecutive blowouts in 2006 and 2008 certainly didn’t make things better. Part of the problem here, too, is that elections generally don’t work that way. It’s true that the impression of ideological extremism can be costly, as Barry Goldwater and George McGovern learned the hard way, but we’re talking here about 2 or 3 percentage points in a presidential election. Direct action by the voters just isn’t enough to do it. After all, as voters, they can only choose between the nominees that they’ve been offered, and if anything voters are more partisan than ever; they’re not likely to defect just because a candidate embraces the crazy, even if they don’t like it, because they would still have a strong preference for that candidate otherwise.
A second possibility is that they’ll wind up with a successful president who sets a strong example of sane conservativism and who is strong enough within the party that he or she can push a lot of the crazies to the fringes and beyond. That could work. Presidents have limited influence in general, but one thing that a popular president can do is to define normality for his or her own party. They can reward some and punish — or at least avoid rewarding — others, creating real and meaningful incentives that can be very different from what came before. The obvious analogy is Dwight Eisenhower’s maneuverings against Joe McCarthy. The problem is that for this strategy to work it takes a skilled and popular president who decides to try it, but Republicans might have to wait a long time before they get another Ike.
So the first method probably can’t work, and the second one is unlikely to happen. That leaves one other possibility: that the Republican coalition itself might demand change. Specifically, that Republican-aligned interest groups – perhaps business, national security or others – might become upset enough with the crazy, or worried enough that the crazy will impede their ability to get things done, that they’ll push to end it. After all, part of the problem with the crazy is that it truly is random; you really never know what nonsense Limbaugh or the Breitbart sites are going to be up to next, and there’s every possibility that it could interfere with groups within the party pursuing their interests. Even worse: Politicians who believe they were elected because their most valuable allies convinced the electorate that the president was a radicalized foreigner are going to be responsive to those supporters, and not to organized party groups. Those groups have enough troubles as it is, since in the current free-for-all campaign finance environment they have to compete with random billionaires who might have all sorts of unorthodox policy preferences.
We’ve seen a little bit of this already. During the healthcare debate, many normally Republican-leaning groups chose to work with the Obama administration and cut their best deal, rather than sticking with the rejectionist GOP. Several companies quit the conservative state lobbying organization ALEC when it became controversial by lobbying for ideological and partisan goals. On the national security side, a break has emerged between the Department of Defense and movement conservatives; both conservatives who care about national security and (on some issues) businesses might choose to stick with the Pentagon. And it’s not quite the same thing, but there’s been a small but steady stream of defectors from the movement.
Nevertheless, something like this would likely play out in nomination politics, with party-aligned groups insisting on candidates who are willing to fight for their interests while rejecting the crazy, and there certainly isn’t any sign of that yet. Will it in 2014 and 2016 if Romney falls short this fall and the crazy gets even worse? I have no idea – but that’s the only path out of this that I can imagine.
Despite the fact that Donald Trump reaffirmed today that he’s pretty sure President Obama “was born in Kenya,” Mitt Romney advisor Kevin Madden defended an upcoming joint fundraiser in Las Vegas today, arguing that Romney shouldn’t be held responsible for Trump’s birtherism.
In an interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, Madden noted that Romney has publicly repudiated the birther myth in the past, and would do it again, but stopped short of saying that the candidate will do it in Trump’s presence.
When Mitchell asked if Romney will “stand up next to Donald Trump and disavow that [myth],” Madden replied, “He’ll stand up next to Donald Trump and he’ll talk about why he wants to be president.” “Any time the subject goes off of that, or if something where … Governor Romney would disagree, he’s going to make that very clear,” Madden added, without saying whether that clarification would be to Trump’s face or after the event.
The twice-bankrupt casino mogul has managed to insinuate himself into the Romney campaign, even as he continues to push the entirely false and racially tinged birther myth. If Trump has his way, he’ll play an even bigger role in the Romney campaign going forward, potentially speaking at the GOP convention or even snagging the vice-presidential nod, for which he nominated himself this week.
The standard the Romney campaign seems to be advancing here is that it’s OK for the candidate to appear on the same stage as a loon, as long as that loon doesn’t say the thing that makes him loony in the candidate’s presence. And if he does, the candidate can merely disavow it later. But it’s hard to imagine that the right would be comfortable with Obama appearing on the same stage as, say, Bill Ayers or Jeremiah Wright, even if neither said anything controversial in that moment.
Yesterday it was funny: Mitt Romney announced he was having a fundraising contest to let supporters win a dinner with the farce that is Donald Trump. President Obama has raffled off dinners with George Clooney and former President Bill Clinton; Mitt’s got Trump. Any questions? Do you see a stature gap between the two campaigns? Do you want to have dinner with two guys who like to be able to fire people? Whatever floats Mitt’s boat.
Today it’s appalling: puffed up by Romney’s flattery, the preening, orange-haired narcissist doubled down on his idiotic birther claims against the president, telling the Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove: “Look, it’s very simple. A book publisher came out three days ago and said that in his written synopsis of his book, he said he was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia. His mother never spent a day in the hospital.”
If you haven’t been following the story, and I tried not to, the addled spawn of Andrew Breitbart found a dusty 20-year-old catalog from Obama’s former literary agency that said he was born in Kenya. An assistant quickly said that she wrote down incorrect information. Trump doesn’t believe her.
“That’s what he told the literary agent,” Trump told Grove. “That’s the way life works … He didn’t know he was running for president, so he told the truth. The literary agent wrote down what he said … He said he was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia … Now they’re saying it was a mistake. Just like his Kenyan grandmother said he was born in Kenya, and she pointed down the road to the hospital, and after people started screaming at her she said, ‘Oh, I mean Hawaii.’ Give me a break.”
Give us a break, Mitt. It was already embarrassing that you were using Trump as a fundraising lure – why not raffle off a dinner with Dick Cheney, who’s hosting a fundraiser for you in July? At least Darth Vader has gravitas; Trump is a joke. Pretending to run for president, Trump made birtherism his big issue, and ultimately Obama responded by prevailing on the state of Hawaii to release his long-form birth certificate – a truly sad moment for this country, when the overwhelmingly elected president, a black man, has to show a nasty rich white guy his papers.
If you ever want an example of the vicious political double standard that helps Republicans in this country, here it is: Democrat Hilary Rosen said something inartful about Ann Romney being a stay-at-home mom, and the entire Democratic Party had to denounce her; Obama campaign leaders tripped over themselves to be the first to push her under the bus; Rosen immediately apologized. But Romney has been able to keep his ties to Trump as well as misogynist Rush Limbaugh without political penalty — so far.
This is a moment for the presumptive Republican nominee to stand up for sanity and distance himself from the crackpot birther fringe, and tell Trump he’s going to have to cancel their dinner date. Maybe he’s got to wash his hair that night. Or one of Ann Romney’s cars.
Does Romney have the integrity and courage to do that? I don’t think so, but I’d love to be surprised.
Businessman and real estate developer Donald Trump (L) greets Mitt Romney after endorsing his candidacy for president at the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada February 2, 2012. (Credit: Reuters/Steve Marcus)
So. Donald Trump again? Are we really doing this again? I guess we are!
There were stories, recently, in the usual places, about how Trump was being seriously considered for a major speech at the Republican Convention. I did not dwell on the story much, because I assumed that these rumors were a product of Donald Trump’s prodigious vanity and powerful imagination. Ha ha ha, sure, the Republicans will definitely want the stupid make-believe TV mogul who pretends to fire people for a living, at their big party.
Now that “Celebrity Apprentice” is done, Trump is back to pretending to be a major political player. He just announced his intention to start his own super PAC, because he is a weird attention-hungry idiot with a bit of money to burn (though not as much money to burn as he would like you to think he has to burn).
He is just, essentially, begging the party to let him be on TV at their convention. But Maggie Haberman wrote today that while Trump is just definitely not going to be anyone’s running mate, the Republicans might actually have him speak at their convention. Because Romney is actually getting a lot of use out of Trump:
He’s been a surrogate for Romney, recorded robocalls for him and pushed him on the Fox News airwaves and over Twitter. He’s also raised money for him, and both Ann and Mitt Romney have thanked him in public for his help. There is no question that he has an appeal to some voters and that Romney has been better off having Trump with him than against him.
“Some voters.” Awful voters. The worst voters. But yes, it is basically true: Romney embraces Trump because there’s very little downside. He gets support from horrible people, and he is not really taken to task by non-horrible people (or, for the most part, journalists) for associating with him. This is how Trump will end up at the convention, despite being the most prominent birther in the nation.
In fact, the Romney campaign is auctioning off dinner with Donald Trump, in case you have a couple thousand dollars and some sort of horrible grudge against someone. That does not suggest that anyone at the Romney campaign is particularly wary of the guy.
Here’s another line from Trump’s Newsmax interview, just so we understand that this Donald Trump is not any less invested in conspiratorial race-tinged dog-whistle Jerome Corsi nonsense than he was last year:
He adds: “If you’re going to look at that, on something that I don’t believe ever happened, you have to look into Barack Obama saying that he was heavy into drugs, heavy into alcohol, was a total disaster, was a horrible student. Then you have to say if he was a horrible student, how did he get into Columbia? How did he get into Harvard?
Suspicious! How did Obama get into Harvard? (Maybe his father was secretly … Charles Kushner!)
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene
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How arrogant and out of touch are Donald Trump’s sons? Let’s put it this way – this is a story in which their father comes off as the subtle, nuanced thinker.
It seems Donald Jr. and his brother Eric went to Africa on a hunting trip last year, and their tour company, Hunting Legends, decided recently to brag of the men’s prowess on their Web site, complete with graphic photos of the brothers and their kills. And here’s a shocker – there’s something about rich white men smiling with the carcasses of the African animals they’ve killed that a lot of people just don’t like.
The photographs are intense – images of the men proudly hoisting a dead leopard, smiling and holding a sawed off elephant’s tail next to the animal’s body, posing with a dead bull and waterbuck and an enormous, strung-up crocodile.
PeTA unsurprisingly jumped at the opportunity to get a little free press from the episode, sending out a statement that “Like all animals, elephants, buffalo and crocodiles deserve better than to be killed and hacked apart for two young millionaires’ grisly photo opportunity.” And even Donald Sr. told “Access Hollywood,” “I’ve never liked it (hunting). I’ve never liked that they like it… I’m going to talk to them about it. I’m not a fan of the whole situation.”
Yet the younger Trumps stand by their actions. In a joint statement, the brothers defended themselves, explaining, “We are both avid outdoorsmen and were brought up hunting and fishing with our Grandfather who taught us that nothing should ever be taken for granted or wasted. We have the utmost respect for nature and have always hunted in accordance with local laws and regulations. In addition, all meat was donated to local villagers who were incredibly grateful. We love traveling and being in the woods — at the end of the day, we are outdoorsmen at heart.”
Those of us who eat meat– and have respect for cultures where hunting is necessary for survival – understand that the cow that made your lunchtime burger didn’t peacefully stroll onto your plate. Most of us are deeply disconnected from the vivid reality of slaughter. The animals we eat had to die, and that means somebody had to kill them. So if the Trump brothers’ escapade put food on the table for the locals, is that such a bad thing?
In and of itself, it’s not. The Hunting Legends site, which says that “Africa is God’s country” and that “God doesn’t bless mediocrity, he blesses excellence,” would like to dispel the image that “To often we as hunters are critisized and referred to as killers.” [sic] Hunting Legends says its efforts instead play a role in conservation and wildlife population control. “We create jobs for local hungry people, we feed them,” the company says. It also, tellingly, explains that guests “hunt our old & mature male animals, which are beyond their prime productive time.” But if you want to shoot an old leopard, it won’t come cheap – rates for the experience are around $750 a day and the leopard will run you seven grand. The company will decorously share the cost of an elephant or crocodile upon request.
But there is something wildly smug about the Trumps’ mention of how “grateful” the “villagers” were for their bounty – a sense that the poor natives were lucky those big strong millionaire’s sons came along to feed them. And their noblesse oblige doesn’t play so well when Trump Jr. retweets a fan’s sentiment that “Most of the people hating on you is because you are young, rich and successful. … rock on!”
There’s nothing wrong with feeding people, and wildlife conservation does, realistically, sometimes include population control. That’s a fact of life whether you’re in Zimbabwe or the Trump’s playground of Manhattan. But if you want to feed those locals, maybe you could just, I don’t know, let them do the hunting. And if you call yourself “avid outdoorsmen” when you’re really just picking off the weak in a theme park for geriatric mammals, you’re just pathetic.
The repellent reality television personality has recorded robo-calls for Romney, because nothing makes a person more excited to vote than the sound of Donald Trump invading your personal space and hectoring you for no reason. Citizens across Michigan can look forward to unsolicited phone calls from a recording of the guy who tells D-list celebrities that they’re fired, only instead he will be telling them that the former governor of Massachusetts is “a good man” and former Sen. Rick Santorum is a “career politician.”
Any decent human being with a modicum of shame would be embarrassed to be seen publicly with Mr. Trump, which is partly why Romney refused to be photographed with the grotesque parody of American wealth-worship when meeting with him late last year, but Romney is in desperation mode as he seeks to win the support of a bunch of people who just don’t like him very much. Now Trump is headlining Romney fundraisers and making radio appearances on behalf of the candidate and making sure that Americans know that they can expect Mr. Romney to be as fine a president as Trump University is a (non-accredited for-profit online) college.
Trump made sure his big endorsement coincided with the premiere of the new season of “Celebrity Apprentice,” and he is also counting on the fact that everyone basically forgot exactly how toxic his own pretend run for the nomination eventually became last year. And basically only liberal blogs are even bringing up the fact that Trump’s “platform” as a candidate was dark insinuations about the president’s birthplace and personal history, and that it collapsed entirely after the president actually released his “long-form birth certificate,” which showed that his already released regular birth certificate was genuine and accurate. (Though a couple conservatives have criticized Romney’s open embrace of Trump, more because Trump is extremely unpopular than because he’s a racist fraud.)
Romney indulging Trump by accepting his endorsement was gross, and Romney recruiting Trump to actively campaign for him should be universally declared well outside the realm of “acceptable” national campaign behavior, but it’s maybe too obviously sad and desperate for people to get up in arms about. (And the political press is uncomfortable explicitly calling a ridiculous con artist a ridiculous con artist, even when it’s post-birtherism Donald Trump, so the lack of “nationally reviled untrustworthy clown endorses candidate” headlines at the traditional news organizations is not terribly surprising.) But it’s also gross that NBC renewed Trump’s contract and launched a new season of his terrible show, and it did it for similar reasons as Romney: He gets ratings, and headlines.
It just shouldn’t be forgotten or ignored that the only substantial difference between campaigning with Donald Trump and campaigning with Orly Taitz is that Trump is considered kosher because he’s a major-network TV star. (Well, and Orly has much better hair.)
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene
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Donald Trump (Credit: Reuters/David Moir) 
Businessman and real estate developer Donald Trump (L) greets Mitt Romney after endorsing his candidacy for president at the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada February 2, 2012. (Credit: Reuters/Steve Marcus) 
Donald Trump, Jr. and Eric Trump (Credit: huntinglegends.com) 
Mitt Romney and Donald Trump (Credit: AP/Julie Jacobson) 
