Im-Politic: Georgia Evidence that Trump-ism Needs to Transcend Trump

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CCP Virus, conservatives, coronavirus, COVID 19, Covid relief, election 2020, election integrity, establishment Republicans, Georgia, Georgia Senate runoff, GOP, Im-Politic, Populism, Republicans, Trump, Wuhan virus

Good luck to anyone (including me!) in trying to figure out what the results of yesterday’s Georgia Senate runoff elections will mean for American politics – especially since there are so many reasons to waffle, and lots of them are very compelling. For example, although as of this morning, it looks like a Democratic sweep, but because the margins are so close, and non-trivial numbers of military and other mail-in ballots won’t be counted until 5 PM EST Friday, the final verdict may not be known until Friday. Largely as a result, recounts are practically certain.

In addition, so much about this entire national election cycle was unusual, and not at all sure to cast long shadows – especially the CCP Virus pandemic and its damaging economic consequences. As a result, on top of events’ impressive abilities to throw curveballs, it’s intimidating to try predicting two years out (when the 2022 midterm elections will be held) much less the outcome of the 2024 presidential and congressional races.

Weirdly, however, despite these yawning uncertainties, today at least I’m feeling more confident about a big question I found tough to answer shortly after the election: whether it’s best for the kind of Trump-ian populist policies I generally support strongly for the President to run for reelection the next time around, or call his political career quits.

Many of my reasons for equivocation still matter greatly. But the passage of two months, and particulary the apparent Democratic Georgia victories, have now convinced me that both Trumpers and therefore country will better off if with Trump-ism without Trump. And even though America’s pollsters overall still need to work hard to get their acts together and rebuild their reputations, it’s been the Georgia Senate exit polls that have mainly tipped me into the anti-Trump column, and two sets of findings in particular.

Several of these surveys are available; I’m using the one conducted by Fox News and the Associated Press because it featured what I regard as more of the most pertinent questions. As for the two sets of findings?

First, it’s clear that Georgia voters back the kind of unorthodox mix of policies that have marked Trump-ist economics. For example, by a whopping 72 percent to seven percent margin, respondents said Congress is doing “too little,” rather than “too much” to help the “financial situation” of “individual Americans” during the CCP Virus crisis. (Twenty-one percent credited Congress with doing “about the right amount.”) This sounds like a strong endorsement of the President’s (last-minute) call for $2,000 virus relief checks, and equally strong disagreement with the opposition of most traditional Republican politicians.

Ratings of Congress’ efforts to help small businesses were nearly identical to the individuals’ results. By 52 percent to 28 percent, however, these Georgia voters felt that Congress was providing “large corporations” with too much rather than too little support. (Twenty-eight percent viewed these efforts as about right.)

Yet by an almost-as-impressive two-to-one, respondents favored “reducing government regulation of business.” Nothing was asked about one of Mr. Trump’s signature issues – trade – but with China so deeply and increasingly unpopular among Americans, it’s tough to imagine that most Georgians would object to his tariffs and other crackdowns on Beijing’s economic predation. Immigration is a tougher call. Only four percent viewed it as “the most important issue facing the country,” but answers to this question understandably were dominated by “the coronavirus pandemic” (43 percent) and “the economy and jobs” (27 percent).

All told, though, these Georgians look like they’d be entirely comfortable with at least much of Trump-ism. But the President himself? Not nearly so much. Thus:

>Mr. Trump himself earned 51 percent-to-47 percent unfavorable ratings from the sample, which consisted of 52 percent Republicans or Republican-leaners, 42 percent Democrats or Democratic-leaners, and seven percent Independents; and 43 percent self-described conservatives, 34 percent moderates, and 23 percent liberals.

>The greater concerns expressed above about the CCP Virus than about its economic consequences clashes with the President’s clear priorities over the last year.

>Indeed, they also endorsed mandatory mask-wearing outside of the home by 74 percent to 26 percent. 

>Moreover, by 62 percent to 38 percent, respondents expressed confidence that, nation-wide, November’s presidential votes “were counted accurately” (with 56 percent “very confident”) and by 61 percent to 39 percent, they think Joe Biden “was legitimately elected president.”

>Therefore, Mr. Trump’s handling “of the results of the 2020 presidential election” were disapproved by a 56 percent to 44 percent margin.

And more signs that the President himself turned off many Georgia runoff voters – especially with his election challenges: According to the RealClearPolitics averages, as his protests of the presidential votes continued, both Georgia Democratic Senate candidates, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock gained momentum at the expense of their Republican (incumbent) opponents David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, respectively.

None of this is to say that creating a politically successful Trump-less Trump-ism will be easy. As I wrote right after the presidential vote, the President’s charisma-based ability to excite a large mass of voters is not yet remotely matched in Republican ranks. Yet the Georgia runoff results strike me as more evidence that his disruptive instincts represent a growing liability, and Mr. Trump’s insistence that he was the actual 2020 winner virtually rules out the chance that he’ll change spots that he obviously believes won him both election and reelection.

Right now, therefore, it seems clear that, as someone wrote someplace yesterday (unfortunately, I can’t find the quote), Republicans can’t win with Trump, and they can’t win without him.

Yet going forward, I suspect that two truths will begin weakening the President’s support. First, the fact that (as I’ve seen first-hand during my working life), the founders of movements tend to be lousy managers and sustainers of those movements. Second, any movement so heavily dependent on a single personality won’t likely be a lasting movement. So for those reasons, along with the Mr. Trump’s age, the sooner his supporters and leaners can choose a successor, or identify a group of plausible successors, the better.

But don’t think for a minute that I’m highly confident that this transition can take place in time for the 2024 campaign cycle’s kickoff. In fact, I am highly confident that the process will be loud and heated and messy – that is, pretty Trump-y.

Im-Politic: Still Clueless – About Trump – After All These Years

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conservatives, election 2020, GOP, Im-Politic, Jeff Stein, Jonathan Martin, Maggie Haberman, Mainstream Media, Populism, Republicans, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Trump

Since a U.S. Presidential election year is now underway and since the Mainstream Media, for all its credibility problems, still supply the news coverage that so many voters rely on in whole or in part, it seems important to present some evidence that, nearly four years after Donald Trump’s victorious presidential run, at least two newspapers arguably at the top of the journalistic heap still have no clue as to what or why it happened.

Both examples deal with President Trump’s capture of the Republican Party, and the most disturbing of the two examples comes from The New York Times. The title of its December 21 piece – “Fear and Loathing: How Donald Trump Took Over the Republican Party” – tells you pretty much all you need to know about its perspective. Authors Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman do refer in passing to “Mr. Trump’s deviations from longstanding party orthodoxy on issues like foreign policy and tariffs,” but they apparently believe that they’ve had nothing whatever to do with the GOP’s transformation.

Instead, they portray the post-2016 party as nothing but a cult of personality, comprised of voters and a majority of office-holders so blindly devoted to and terrified of Mr. Trump, respectively, that they’re determined to overlook supposedly dispositive proof of the President’s unfitness for the White House as his Ukraine policies.

In fact, Martin and Haberman are so incapable of attributing the President’s success to the policy disasters spearheaded by the political establishment’s right wing (Google “financial crisis” and “Great Recession”) that one of their sources for this claim is no less than the head of the Club for Growth – a leading anti-Trump orthodox conservative organization.

And when they encounter a more convincing explanation – an observation by a North Carolina Republican Congressman that Mr. Trump “has a complete connection with the average Republican voter and that’s given him political power here” – they simply leave it hanging.

Somewhat better – but more bewildering – is Jeff Stein’s December 27 Washington Post report on “Trump’s quest to shatter GOP economics reached its culmination in 2019.” Let’s give Stein his due for focusing on the substance (even though he seems to forget that major Trump departures from Republican dogma began on his first day in office – when the President pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement).

But his two paragraphs could not be weirder – even from a standard political standpoint:

“Whether [the Trump era shift] will permanently remake the Republican Party, on the other hand, remains an open question.

“‘Republican lawmakers privately still believe the deficit is a problem and support free trade — but they’re not going to say that publicly, because it’s not where their voters are,” said Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the libertarian-leaning Manhattan Institute. ‘I’m not sure Trump has changed the minds of Republican lawmakers as much as he has won over the base and lawmakers understand crossing the president is political suicide.’”

There’s no question that the long-term future of conservative, Trump-ian populism is still up in the air – if only because its triumph has been so sudden, and because largely as a result, its ability to create the institutional underpinnings needed for durability can’t be taken for granted.

But does Riedl really believe that Republican lawmakers matter to the party more than the base? That may be convenient for someone in a weakening establishment struggling to avoid the ash heap of history. But does Stein buy it? Or does his use of Riedl’s statement indicate that, like so many Mainstream Media reporters, he identifies with that weakening establishment, too?

Im-Politic: Why CNBC’s GOP Debate Performance Really was That Bad

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Bernie Sanders, CNBC, Donald Trump, economists, GOP, Im-Politic, Jeb Bush, Mainstream Media, Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, political class, presidential debates, Republicans, special interests

As both a former journalist and an analyst who has worked closely with them, I’ve long shed any illusions about the smarts, the energy, or the integrity of the vast majority of this profession’s members, and especially those that work for national, Mainstream Media outlets. Nor do I have any more doubts about the mounting danger to American democracy’s health posed by the combination of Big Journalism’s immense influence, its near perfect isolation from the lives and concerns of Main Street Americans, its fierce protectiveness of self-serving elitist groupthink, and its almost complete lack of accountability.

And for all this cynicism, I am still slackjawed over the appalling conduct of the three CNBC moderators of last night’s Republican presidential debate in Colorado. (Here’s the full transcript, if you’re a masochist.)

Make no mistake. This complaint isn’t about “tough questions” – or coddling thin-skinned politicians. This is about an unforgivably imperious effort to decree virtually an entire major political party to be devoid of presidential candidates remotely fit for office, and its rank and file to be all but subhuman in intellect. More troubling – because largely unwitting – this course reflected less deliberate partisanship than an instinctive protectiveness of the current political class and its excessive status and privileges.

If you think I’m being too harsh, consider the following questions:

For (still?) front-running businessman Donald Trump: “Is this a comic book version of a presidential campaign?”

For Florida Senator Marco Rubio: “You’ve been a young man in a hurry ever since you won your first election in your 20s….Why not slow down, get a few more things done first or least finish what you start?”

For former Florida Governor Jeb Bush: “Ben Bernanke, who was appointed Fed chairman by your brother, recently wrote a book in which he said he no longer considers himself a Republican because the Republican Party has given in to know- nothingism.”

For former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee: “As a preacher as well as a politician, you know that presidents need the moral authority to bring the entire country together. The leading Republican candidate, when you look at the average of national polls right now, is Donald Trump. When you look at him, do you see someone with the moral authority to unite the country?”

And then there was this question (to Trump) – less obviously insulting, but just as revealing of the “pull up the drawbridge” mentality: “I talked to economic advisers who have served presidents of both parties. They said that you have as chance of cutting taxes that much without increasing the deficit as you would of flying away from that podium by flapping your arms.”

Let’s leave aside how a Trump (or Ben Carson, or Democrat Bernie Sanders, for that matter) presidency would kneecap the access to power responsible for the livelihoods not only of establishment journalists but of the policy world’s politically ambitious economists. Let’s also therefore leave aside that the vast majority of the economists that national journalists would consult with are driven not only by such career considerations, but by agendas that are either hopelessly partisan or determined by the special interests that fund them.

Let’s focus instead on the operative assumption that anyone can forecast to any useful extent the impact of tax rate changes on a $16-plus trillion economy with some 142 million (nonfarm) workers, nearly 93 million working age Americans outside the workforce, 123.2 million households, and nearly 7.5 million businesses. Yes, it’s widely believed that the economics profession boasts these powers. But simply articulating this premise, as opposed to accepting it mindlessly, reveals how looney it is, even when it comes to intellectually honest analysts.

The CNBC moderators actually did ask some serious and therefore necessary questions that exposed inconsistencies, factually dubious claims, and unreasonable assumptions in some of the candidates’ proposals. But follow-up was limited – and many issues ignored completely – because it was obviously imperative to leave sufficient time for mudslinging and incitement.

Ironically, CNBC was hoping that last night’s broadcast would attract big new audiences to its daytime finance and economics coverage. If there’s any justice, most of these new viewers turned off their sets vowing, “Never again.”