RATIONAL RESISTANCE
October 28, 2016
When the “Taxed Enough Already” protest signs started appearing just after Barack Obama’s first inauguration, we should have seen this coming. When those protest signs turned into a conservative political coalition called the Tea Party, we should have seen this coming. When Donald Trump presided over the “birther” freak show, we should have seen this coming.
August 11, 2016
It took just twenty-four hours for Donald Trump to torpedo his latest “reboot.” One day after an economic speech intended to put his campaign back on track, Trump suggested “Second Amendment people” might be able to stop Hillary Clinton from appointing “judges.” While his comment could be viewed as ambiguous in a sanitized context, it’s hardly a stretch for someone to interpret it to mean an armed uprising against a U.S. president. Even if it was just a joke, and even if we can debate the meaning, the problem is not the intent, the problem is that it was said at all.
August 4, 2016
In the week after the two conventions, Donald Trump is suffering from an existential crisis of candidacy, something you’d expect to happen during primary season, resulting in an exit from the race. The only problem for Trump is that he actually won the Republican primary and was nominated by his party to be our next president. So what else can explain Trump’s post-convention failings? Is it just Trump being Trump? I guess for most of his supporters nothing has changed, save for the “lamestream media” being unfair to their candidate, as they’d like us to believe. His supporters have already established that in their minds Trump can do no wrong, and some actually say this out-loud. The problem for Trump, however, is that he needs to win over people less inclined to believe he can do no wrong, and he is failing miserably.
May 6, 2016
The normal state of mind for the average Democratic voter is despair. Democrats and liberals fear their candidate will lose, always. But as it turns out, at least in presidential years, this fear of loss is a catalyst that gets Democrats and liberals to the polls. That has led to popular vote wins for Democrats in five of the last six presidential elections. The only exception was in 2004 when George W. Bush won the popular vote, giving him a second term as president. Unfortunately that pesky electoral college (and a controversial Supreme Court ruling) led to Bush, a Republican, winning in 2000 even though he lost the popular vote to Al Gore, a Democrat. For some reason this fear of loss doesn’t fuel Democrats to the polls during non-presidential years, a topic we’ll bookmark for another day.
May 4, 2016
On Tuesday, Donald Trump won the Indiana GOP primary, and with that, his quest to conquer the Republican Party is complete. That’s because Ted Cruz bowed out of the presidential contest last night, and today John Kasich also dropped out. That leaves Donald Trump, the bigoted, hateful, misogynist, loudmouth, xenophobic symbol of American white supremacists, as the presumptive nominee of the Grand Old Party.
April 4, 2016
Keyed-up patrons of the bloviating orange-hued candidate regularly say Donald Trump “tells it like it is.” But what does that even mean? Taken at face-value, a person who “tells it like it is” should be a person speaking the truth, right? But given Trump’s propensity to turn reality to a putty his tiny hands find malleable, why do his defenders continue to insist he “tells it like it is”?
March 28, 2016
If you move beyond the nationalism and xenophobia fueling his rise, another reason Donald Trump has been so successful is because he doesn’t get bogged down in the details. He refuses to get into the weeds because he knows that is not the purview of his audience. Donald Trump instead promises outcomes like an authoritarian strongman. All of his campaign speeches, once you get past his personal congratulatory rhetoric, revolve around a set of results absent any explanation for how they will be achieved. Here are 15 “explain it as a child” outcomes The Donald promises during his stump speeches.
March 25, 2016
Well, at least so far.
March 22, 2016
In an interview on All In with Chris Hayes, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said (in response to Trump protesters) that he is “not a great fan of disrupting rallies.” Not only does that not sound like a revolution, it sounds peculiarly like weak-kneed liberals who have called protests of Donald Trump, unproductive.
March 12, 2016
At a rally today in Ohio, Donald Trump said in response to protesters, “We cannot let our First Amendment rights be taken away from us folks.” This is an appeal to people (yes, white people) who feel persecuted. Of course, they are not being persecuted, but often people believe disagreement, particularly from an out-group, is the same as persecution.