Donald J. Trump out for a ride on his horse, Democracy
Donald Trump had a big weekend. On Saturday, he told a rally of his supporters in Birmingham, Alabama that “we have to surveil the mosques.” After a half-dozen white attendees at that rally knocked a Black Lives Matter protestor to the ground and kicked him for a while, Trump went on This Week and told George Stephanopoulos that “maybe he should have been roughed up.” In the same appearance, he called for the return of waterboarding and said he would “not at all” rule out a database of Muslims living in the United States. Sunday afternoon, he tweeted “statistics” claiming that 81% of white murder victims are killed by blacks. According to the FBI as reported by the Daily News, it’s actually about 15%.
Three people who could become president and Carly Fiorina
About an hour into last night’s Republican debate, Ohio Governor John Kasich excoriated Donald Trump’s mass-deportation plan, calling the idea that we might deport 11 million undocumented immigrants “not an adult argument.” We have to do it,” Trump replied. “We have to.” But how would he do it? Once he had removed the immigrants from their homes, would he put them in camps while he determined their countries of origin? Or would he just deport them all—Guatemalans, Uighur Chinese, Nigerians, French—to Mexico? Will the deported immigrants fly commercial, or will there be some kind of train? These are the questions no one asked at the fourth GOP debate, while we waited for a real candidate to take the stage. But this is it. These vague, impossible ideas are not ciphers for real policy different Republicans will tell us about later. There is no one behind the curtain.
As anyone whose words are broadcast will tell you, Americans don’t trust the media. It probably started around Watergate, when we lost faith in institutions after Woodward and Bernstein uncovered corruption that went all the way to the president. We’ve hated reporters ever since. Instead of numbly accepting the mainstream media’s lies as they penetrate our ears and pert mouths, we invest our trust in politicians, for example the brave senator from Texas, Ted Cruz.
That was his answer to a question about the debt ceiling. It’s clear why Americans no longer trust the media, with their gotcha questions about whose tax plan would bankrupt the government and which candidacies are fictional. In your ordinary American life, whom do you trust? You trust your friends. And who are you friends? They’re the people who tell you what you want to hear.
If you apply this rule of thumb, it’s easy to see why Cruz, Ben Carson, and Donald Trump all enjoy such sterling reputations for trustiness. Cruz knows we’re sick of the media talking about what he did. Carson’s going to give us all 25-point tax cuts and balance the budget. And Trump is an inherently genuine person. That’s what people want to hear—not a bunch of media elites grousing about what cannot be done.
You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent, in which I applaud Senator Cruz and his fellow Republicans for finally acknowledging that Americans have lost confidence in their reporters. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.
Victorian street pundits wait for Mr. Rubio to bring them a Christmas.
We can now safely close the voting for Quintessential Headline of the 2016 Election with Slate’s entry, Pundits Have Long Been Saying Rubio Is on the Rise. Now There’s Finally Some Evidence to Back That Up. Both political betting markets and pundits seem to consider Rubio the favorite to win the Republican nomination, which is strange, since he hasn’t polled above 11% since Donald Trump entered the race. But now Rubio has been endorsed by Senator Corey Gardner of Colorado and Senator Steve Daines of Nilbog. He’s also been backed by billionaire Paul Singer, although Singer has not technically given him a bunch of money yet. And it turns out the Gardner/Daines endorsements move Rubio up to fourth place on Five Thirty-Eight’s endorsement tracker, which seems like less than the favorite position. But the Republican phenom for which there was no evidence now enjoys scant evidence. Pundits rejoice! Further deflation after the jump.
The most striking feature of the Republican debate last week was the candidates’ hostility to CNBC. In the course of not answering a question about the debt ceiling, Ted Cruz won cheers by saying no one trusted the media. The same audience booed Carl Quintanilla when he followed up on a question about Ben Carson’s involvement with the sketchy supplement company Mannatech, causing Carson to remark smugly, “they know.” The candidates were so upset about CNBC’s perceived hostility that they met Sunday to demand more control over future debates. Nearly all of them were mad at cosmic imp and Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus. The RNC had organized the debates so far, but according to one anonymous campaign manager, “Major question is if the RNC should be involved at all.” It would appear that the conservative Republican candidates of 2016 have lost faith in an institution.
