October 22, 2020October 22, 2020 by Edward Champion

Video and Transcript of Leaked Lesley Stahl 60 Minutes Interview with Donald Trump

Today, Donald Trump leaked the 60 Minutes interview. Here is the video. I am working on having a complete transcript ready before the debate and will be updating this post throughout the day as I continue.

On October 22, 2020, Donald Trump leaked his interview with 60 Minutes reporter Lesley Stahl.

I’ve ripped the video from Trump’s Facebook page and put it onto YouTube to prevent Trump from gaining likes and clicks over this.

Here is the video:

Here is the full transcript:

STAHL: Are you ready for some tough questions?

TRUMP: You’re going to be fair.

STAHL: You…I’m going to be fair?

TRUMP: Just be fair.

STAHL: But last time, I remember you saying to me, “Bring it on. Bring iton.”

TRUMP: Yeah. No, I’m not looking for that. I’m looking for fairness. That’s all.

STAHL: You’re going to get fairness. But you’re okay with some tough questions?

TRUMP: No, I’m not.

STAHL: (laughs) You’re not okay with tough questions?

TRUMP: Well, I’m going to be fair. You don’t ask Biden tough questions.

STAHL: Me?

TRUMP: Huh?

STAHL: I don’t…

TRUMP: It’s terrible. It’s terrible. You.

STAHL: (laughs)

TRUMP: You know that. Okay, are you ready?

STAHL: Ready? Everybody ready?

TECH: We’re out.

STAHL: Okay. Can I start?

TECH: Let’s go one second. The door [unintelligible]

STAHL: Mike okay?

TECH: Good.

STAHL: Okay. Ready? So we have the pandemic on your watch. We’ve had racial strife. We’ve had looting. Why do you want this job? Why do you want to be President again?

TRUMP: Because we’ve done a great job and it’s not finished yet and when I finish, this country will be in a position like it hasn’t been maybe ever. The economy is already roaring back. And, uh, other people aren’t going to bring it back. Certainly the person that we’re dealing with is not going to bring it back. They’re going to raise taxes. They’re going to take over your Second Amendment. They’re going to do things that nobody would even believe that’s radical. There’s never been anything like it. You know, there are…

STAHL: Let me ask you…

TRUMP: We are…positioned like never before. We’re going to have a fantastic year next year.

STAHL: Let me ask you what you think your, um, the biggest domestic priority is for you right now?

TRUMP: Uh, well, ultimately, let me — and I’ll tell you. It was happening. We created the greatest economy in the history of our country. And the other side…

STAHL: You know that, you know that’s not true.

TRUMP: It is totally true.

STAHL: No.

TRUMP: Best unemployment numbers. Best em-ployment numbers. 160 million people were working. Highest stock market price. You wouldn’t say that to Biden. What you just said to me. If he had it, you would never say that to Biden. We had the best stock market price ever. That we’re getting close to that price again. We had the best — everything was the best. Our companies were doing better than they’ve ever done before. You could not even think about talking about that.

STAHL: Well, I — I’m not going to fact-check you, you know.

TRUMP: Well, even if you fact-checked me…

STAHL: I’m not going to do that, but…

TRUMP: Excuse me. The stock market was at its highest. The unemployment numbers for African-Americans, for Asian Americans, for Hispanic Americans, for everybody, were the best. Every number. Virtually every number was the best. We had the best economy ever. And what was happening is things we’re coming together.

STAHL: But what I asked you. What your single biggest priority…

TRUMP: Well, no, I’m going to say that. At the other side, we’re starting to call, “Let’s get together.” There was going to be unity. And then we got hit with the plague. And we had to do it again. And we closed it up. And I saved millions of lives. Millions of lives we saved. And now the economy’s growing again. At record numbers. 11.4 million people employed in the last two years.

STAHL: But what is the priority? And also, for all of your things, what….

TRUMP: The priority now is to get back to normal. Get back to where we were. To have the economy rage and be great with jobs and everybody be happy. And that’s where we’re going. That’s where we’re heading.

STAHL: And who is our biggest foreign adversary?

TRUMP: I would say China. They’re an adversary. They’re a competitor. They’re a foe in many ways. But they’re an adversary. Uh, I think what happened is disgraceful. Should never have happened. Should — they should never have allowed this plague to get out of China and go throughout the world. 188 countries. Should never have happened.

STAHL: So they’re…so

TECH: Lesley, one second. Please. (muttering)

TRUMP: What’s wrong?

TECH: The flag is wobbling, and I think because it’s under the other half behind you, Tom.

TECH 2: First one down.

TECH 3: Can you pick up?

TECH: It’s going to be here, right?

TRUMP: It doesn’t look nice blowing in the wind.

STAHL: No. It’s distracting. I can see it.

CUT ON TAPE.

STAHL: I’m going with or without you guys.

TECH: It’s not moving.

TRUMP: Let’s go.

STAHL: Okay. At this stage, four years ago, you were behind in the polls. Where you are now. But you pulled it out. But this time, you have kind of a double migraine. You have unemployment claims going up. You have COVID cases going up. I mean, it’s like the gods have suddenly decided to conspire against you.

TRUMP: I don’t think so at all. No, I think…and we’ve hired.

STAHL: But what about…

TRUMP: We’ve done a great job with COVID.

STAHL: Your unemployment numbers are going up.

TRUMP: Excuse me. 11.4 million people. Why? Because the last poll was just a little bit, a little bit up.

STAHL: No!

TRUMP: And this is for that..

STAHL: Sir, excuse me, cases are up in about forty states.

TRUMP: Okay, you know why cases are up also? Because we do more testing. If we didn’t do more testing, cases would be way down.

STAHL: But why are you saying they’re not up? You know, peop — you’re saying things that people…

TRUMP: No, no, no, what I’m saying to you, Lesley, is the following. We do more testing than any country in the world by far. Second is India. With 1.5 billion people. We do more testing. If we did half the testing, we’d have half the cases. If we did no testing, like many countries, we would have very few cases. Because we do so much testing, the fake news media loves to say cases are up. The fact is we’ve done a very, very good job.

STAHL: Cases are up.

TRUMP: We have done — that’s right. Because we’re doing so much testing.

STAHL: Okay, well, will you at least say cases are up?

TRUMP: Yes, cases are up.

STAHL: Okay.

TRUMP: Because we are doing tremendous testing. And we’re finding that there’s a problem. Testing is a good thing. But it’s also very misleading.

STAHL: When you’re out there, saying we’ve turned a corner, this thing has disappeared.

TRUMP: That’s right.

STAHL: And people can see…

TRUMP: I turned a corner. We turned a corner.

STAHL: People can see cases going up all over. In the Midwest. In the Mountain West. Record numbers of cases.

TRUMP: We have turned a corner.

STAHL: Some say…

TRUMP: We understand the disease. We understand the elderly. And we’re taking care of them at a level like nobody’s ever taken care of the elderly. Especially the elderly with diabetes problems, heart problems. We are taking care of them like nobody’s ever taken care of them. We also understand that youth. 99.9%. As an example, Barron had it. And it was gone in no time. It was just like he had it. It was gone. Hardly knew he even had it. So we are taking care of our people. But, uh, we’ve done a great job with the ventilators, with the equipment, with stocking governors who are not stocked. We’ve made a lot of governors look very good that should have looked good. And that’s okay with me.

STAHL: Okay, let me, let me ask you something about suburban women.

TRUMP: Yeah.

STAHL: You said the other day to suburban women, “Would you please like me please?”

TRUMP: Oh, I didn’t say that. That’s so misleading the way — I say, jokingly, “Suburban women. You should love me.” Because I’m giving you security. And I got rid of the worst regulation. See, the way you said that…

STAHL: Yeah.

TRUMP: Is why people think of you and everyone else as fake news. I say kiddingly, “Suburban women, you should love me.” I got rid of a regulation…

STAHL: You said…

TRUMP: …that would bring low-income housing into suburbia. That is destroying. That will destroy suburbia. And I said that in a joking way. The way you have it, it’s like, “Oh!” Like I’m begging. I, I’m kidding. Play it and I’m kidding. That is such a misleading question, Lesley.

STAHL: But you’re behind the suburban women. In the polls.

TRUMP: I doubt it. I doubt it. I really doubt it.

STAHL: One of the things…

TRUMP: I’m saving suburbia. He’s going to destory suburbia. He’s got a regulation which I terminated that he would put back and even worse — that will destroy, that will bring low-income housing projects into suburbia. And women understand that. And they really learned about it over the last two, three weeks. I terminated the worst regulation you can possibly have. It’s gone. And suburban women appreciate it. They want security. They want safety. Look, I’ve been endorsed by almost every police department, almost every law enforcement group in the country. He’s been endorsed by almost nobody. Suburban women want security.

STAHL: The polls show that you’re behind. And one of the reasons…

TRUMP: You’re not looking at recent polls.

STAHL: One of the reasons is that they don’t feel you’re being up front about the pandemic.

TRUMP: Some…

STAHL: And when you say, you know, there were fewer…we’re rounding the corner. And…

TRUMP: We are rounding the corner.

STAHL: …deliberately like to downplay this.

TRUMP: We are rounding the corner.

STAHL: Are you deliberately…

TRUMP: We are rounding the corner. We’re doing well. We’re doing well. We understand the disease. I saved millions of people. You know, 2.2 million people were supposed to die. If you go back and you look at your models. Models. 2.2 million people. We saved tremendous numbers of people. Plus, I closed it very early from China. Heavily infected. And even from Europe. Heavily infected. We’ve done a good job. We’ve done maybe a great job. What we haven’t done a good job on is convincing people like you. Because you’re really quite impossible to convince. But that’s okay. And the economy now is coming back. And it’s coming back very strongly. And people see that, Lesley.

STAHL: There are more unemployment claims. When the economy has kind of stalled….

TRUMP: Lesley, we just picked up 11.4 million jobs. It’s the largest number in the history of our country in a short period of time.

STAHL: [CROSSTALK] But what about these unemployment claims going on? I mean, how can you ignore that?

TRUMP: Lesley, we just picked up 11.4 million jobs. In a short period of time. It’s the largest number in the history of our country.

STAHL: But what — are you denying that the unemployment numbers have gone up? Is that what…

TRUMP: What I’m saying is…

STAHL: Is that going to happen?

TRUMP: …we got hit by something. Not my fault. Not your fault.

STAHL: Well…

TRUMP: We got hit by something that came out of China. I got stuck with it. And let me tell you. Before it happened, we were doing so good. And now we’re going to be doing and we are. We are doing good. But…

STAHL: Well…

TRUMP: Look at, look at as an example last week. A few days ago. Gallup did a poll. 56% of the people said that they were better off now during a pandemic. Than they were during Obama and Biden. 56%. It was a record number. Right?

STAHL: Yeah. But I want to know if you, if you’re…what? Ignoring the fact that there are unemployment claims?

TRUMP: No, I’m not ignoring it.

STAHL: Okay, well, what, what are you saying?

TRUMP: What I’m saying is that we got hit with somebody. It’s not our fault. We got hit.

STAHL: I know, but what…

TRUMP: And we’ve a good job. Not a good job. We’ve done a great job. Remember that number. A very important number. 56% say they’re happier now than they were four years ago under Biden and Obama. Right? I’ll put his name first. Biden and Obama. And they didn’t have the pandemic. Although Biden did have a big problem with H1N1, which he says in reverse. With the H1N1 swine flu. And it was a disaster. And his own Chief of Staff said it was a total disaster. They didn’t know what they were doing.

STAHL: But can we go back for one second to the pandemic? Because, um, you called Dr. Fauci and other health officials “idiots.”

TRUMP: Dr. Fauci…

STAHL: I’m wondering if…

TRUMP: Wait a call. Wait a call me? [gibberish]

STAHL: I’m wondering if you.

TRUMP: When did I call them an idiot?

STAHL: You called them idiots. I wonder if you…

TRUMP: Well, he’s been wrong a lot. I like him, but he’s been wrong.

STAHL: I wonder if you think that masks don’t work.

TRUMP: Well, Dr. Fauci originally said…

STAHL: Well, what do you say? Do you say…

TRUMP: Well, let me just tell you. You mentioned. Dr. Fauci said, “Don’t wear maaks.” He said he said, “Wear them.”

STAHL: But what do you say?

TRUMP: I say that — I, I feel masks possibly work. But certainly you want to stay away a certain distance. Socially distanced. Etcetera etcetera. But I would say a mask works. And I have nothing against masks. And I tell people to wear masks. I have no problem.

STAHL: Well, tell me then about these rallies you’ve been having.

TRUMP: A lot of people are wearing masks. And they’re outside.

STAHL: People. A lot of people aren’t. I’m, I’m watching all these people jammed in together. And I’m seeing most of them without masks.

TRUMP: Yeah.

STAHL: And I’m wondering the message that you’re sending with these pictures coming out.

TRUMP: Take a look. Yesterday, we were in Arizona. Record setting rallies. Numbers of people like nobody’s seen before.

STAHL: Well, you used to have big rallies.

TRUMP: [CROSSTALK] Many, many. I watched it. What?

STAHL: You used to have bigger rallies.

TRUMP: No, these are much bigger than I’ve ever had.

STAHL: I don’t want to bicker over that.

TRUMP: You know, you’re so negative.

STAHL: Tell me about the masks here.

TRUMP: You’re so negative. These are the biggest rallies we’ve ever had. You just come in here with that negative attitude. These are the biggest rallies we’ve ever had. And we are having numbers like we’ve never had.

STAHL: Well, tell me about the masks.

TRUMP: There is one — excuse me. You made a statement. There is more enthusiasm right now for us than we ever had before. Ever. And you will see that in a short period of tiem.

STAHL: Well, what about the masks?

TRUMP: A lot of people are wearing masks. I mean, I looked yesterday. A lot of people were — and it’s outdoor. They want it outdoor. And we’re doing it outdoor.

STAHL: But I can’t believe that after what happened in the Rose Garden here, after the announcement, with all the people getting sick…

TRUMP: Yeah.

STAHL: That you are not being more strongly encouraging about wearing masks in the Oval Office.

TRUMP: I told people that…

STAHL: Well, you don’t.

TRUMP: Lesley, we hand out thousands of masks.

STAHL: But you look out and you’re not wearing them. And you don’t say, “Please wear a mask.”

TRUMP: Well, you’ve been looking yesterday. Take a look at — take a look yesterday in Arizona. Everybody behind me has masks on.

STAHL: But I’m looking at other places. Um, I’m looking at Wisconsin. Which is a hot spot right now.

TRUMP: Right. Right. A lot of people had masks on.

STAHL: A lot of people without masks.

TRUMP: That was outside.

STAHL: And you don’t get up there and say, “Look…” Come on.

TRUMP: Okay. Go ahead.

STAHL: “I don’t want you to get sick.”

TRUMP: What’s your next question, Lesley? We’re outside. The rallies are bigger than they’ve ever been. There’s more enthusiasm than we’ve ever had. There has never been anything like what you’re witnessing now. And you’ll see that soon.

STAHL: Okay, but I’m asking about masks. Not about the size of your rallies. I’m asking where you…

TRUMP: You commented on the size of the rallies.

STAHL: I know.

TRUMP: You said they’re not as big as they used to be. And I’m telling you they’re much bigger.

STAHL: Okay, but I’m asking you now about the masks. Why aren’t you getting up there and saying, “I have it. I don’t want you to get it. So please put your mask on.”

TRUMP: Lesley, we hand out masks to everybody who comes to the rallies. We tell them to wear their masks.

STAHL: But you don’t. And they love you.

TRUMP: Oh, I don’t know, Lesley.

STAHL: If they heard you say it…

TRUMP: I have no problem. No problem.

STAHL: They love you. They would pay attention.

TRUMP: Next question. Go ahead.

STAHL: To anything you said.

TRUMP: I don’t know about that. I hope you’re right. Go ahead.

STAHL: Okay, um. This is important. Um, okay, I’ll ask you another health question. Okay?

TRUMP: Go ahead.

STAHL: Um, you promised that there was going to be a new health package. Healthcare plan.

TRUMP: Yeah.

STAHL: Um. You said that it was going to be great. You said that it was ready. It’s going to be ready.

TRUMP: It will be.

STAHL: It’s all ready. It will be here in two weeks. It’s going to be like nothing you’ve ever seen before. And, of course, we haven’t seen it. So why didn’t you develop the health plan?

TRUMP: It is developed. It is fully developed. It’s going to be announced. Very soon.

STAHL: When?

TRUMP: When we see what happens…

STAHL: [CROSSTALK] You’re saying that over and over.

TRUMP: …with Obamacare, which is not good. And when we see what happens with Obamacare.

STAHL: But if the Supreme Court…

TRUMP: And it will be much less expensive than Obamacare. Which is a disaster. And it will take care of people with pre-existing conditions.

STAHL: But your plan was to reel into place and, if the Supreme Court finishes Obamacare, there will be all these people stranded.

TRUMP: No, they won’t.

STAHL: There’s no replacement.

TRUMP: We will make a deal and we will have a great healthcare plan.

STAHL: But you keep saying that.

TRUMP: With less expensive. Less expensive and a much better plan.

STAHL: Why haven’t we seen it?

TRUMP: You have seen it. I’ve been putting out pieces all over the place. And we actually have plans. And we have 180 million people right now, have a plan. And you haven’t been watching. You haven’t been watching.

STAHL: But what about the pre-existing? People with pre-existing conditions. If the Supreme Court…

TRUMP: Are protected. Will be totally protected.

STAHL: How?

TRUMP: They’ll be protected, Lesley.

STAHL: How? How?

TRUMP: People with pre-existing conditions are going to be protected.

STAHL: How?

TRUMP: As they are now.

STAHL: How?

TRUMP: In any plan we do.

STAHL: But there isn’t…

TRUMP: They will be protected. Lesley, people with pre-existing conditions would be always protected. Always.

STAHL: But if, if the Supreme Court ends this, with Obamacare, um…

TRUMP: Well, we’ll have to see what happens. It’s got a way’s to go. We’ll see what happens. I think, I think it will end, uh — I think, I hope that they end it. It will be so good if they end it.

STAHL: But if they end it…

TRUMP: We will come up with a plan, which will be a…

STAHL: Will.

TRUMP: Yeah, we will.

STAHL: But you said it would already.

TRUMP: We have large sections of it already done. And we’ve already come up with plans. Take a look at your various secretaries. Various plans that we’ve already come up with. And also, you know, a large part of this country has private health insurance.

STAHL: Yes.

TRUMP: 180 million people. And under that, Biden, he doesn’t have any clue. But under that, 180 million people will lose their healthcare. And they’ll go to socialized medicine. And that’s not going to be acceptable.

STAHL: Okay.

TRUMP: 180 million people, Lesley, will go to socialized medicine.

STAHL: And then…

TRUMP: It will not be accepted.

STAHL: And if the Affordable Care Act is determined to be unconstitutional…

TRUMP: Then we’re going to have a new, we’re going to have new and it’s going to be very different.

STAHL: You keep saying that and don’t show it to us. And so people with pre-existing conditions…

TRUMP: We’ve come up with many plans, Lesley, and we have — they’re already in existence. If, I’ll tell you what, after this interview, I will show you short-term, longer-term. I’ll show you different plans. We’ve come up with many plans. And we’ve cut the individual mandate out. You know, the individual mandate has died. That was the worst part of Obamacare. That’s gone.

STAHL: Okay. All of that, I grant you. All of that. But if, if there’s no plan, and, uh, a replacement plan.

TRUMP: Right.

STAHL: And the Supreme Court says that Obamacare goes away, people with pre-existing conditions will be stranded.

TRUMP: No, no.

STAHL: And that’s just a fact.

TRUMP: It’s wrong.

STAHL: No!

TRUMP: It’s wrong. A new plan.

STAHL: But will.

TRUMP: We won’t do anything. Will and is. We won’t do anything. And no plan unless we have pre-existing conditions covered. And the individual mandate, which you don’t want to mention, was terminated. It was terminated. Individual mandate was terminated. That is the biggest thing that’s happened. And that actually makes Obamacare not Obamacare. Because under that, you would pay a fortune for the privilege of not having to pay for bad health insurance. We got it terminated. Terminated. Through the legislature. Signed, done. That means Obamacare is no longer Obamacare. We got rid of the most important element of Obamacare. And was the worst element of Obamacare that nobody wanted. Nobody liked. So Obamacare essentially was terminated as we know it. Now we have the carcass of Obamacare.

STAHL: Well, part of the carcass is pre-existing.

TRUMP: Lesley, we’ve managed it well. You know, I had a choice to make. When we get rid of these individual mandate, nobody believed we could do that and I did it. I had a choice to make. Do I manage the remainder of whatever’s left of this whole thing called Obamacare, which is no good? Do I manage it well or do I manage it badly? If I manage it well, mmmrrr, politically that’s not good.

STAHL: What would you want to leave it?

TRUMP: I decided to manage it well.

STAHL: Do you want to leave it? I mean, pre-existing’s the problem with it.

TRUMP: [CROSSTALK] No, I don’t want to leave it. I want to see what happens. Here’s what happens.

STAHL: No, but Obama…

TRUMP: We may be stuck with it if we lose in the Supreme Court. In which case, we’re wasting a lot of words. If we win, we will come up with a much — and we will do that — come up with a much better healthcare for much less money always protecting people with pre-existing conditions.

STAHL: Um, are you going to say — you didn’t say this. Because I saw you say this.

TRUMP: Go ahead. You’re, you’re only trying to — I wish you would, I wish you would interview Joe Biden like you interview me. It would be so good. You know what?

STAHL: You like this, I thought. I thought you liked sparring.

TRUMP: I don’t mind. I don’t mind. But when I watch him walk out of a store, he’s in the midst of a scandal. His family is corrupt. Okay. He’s corrupt. He’s a corrupt politician. And he’s walking with an ice cream. And the question the media asks him is “What kind of ice cream? What flavor ice cream do you have?” And he’s in the midst of a scandal.

STAHL: He’s not.

TRUMP: And he’s taking — of course he is.

STAHL: He’s not. No. Come on.

TRUMP: Of course he is. See that? So you’re like, like…

STAHL: You have the Seante Committee Republicans.

TRUMP: You’re like Big Tech. You’re protecting him. And everyone is. Except for…a few people.

STAHL: Yeah but you’re exag — you’re taking something that was investigated.

TRUMP: Lesley!

STAHL: By a Republican Committe

TRUMP: You think it’s okay for the Mayor of Moscow’s wife to give him millions and millions of dollars — three and a half million dollars — to give his family [mumbling]. Do you think it’s okay for Hunter Biden to say, to say that we’re giving, we’re giving the Big Guy 10% of this massive amount of money that we’re taking in. Do you think it’s okay for all of these horrible things that you’ve seen? Where they getting [sic] hundreds of thousnads and millions of dollars, when China gives them a billion and a half dollars to manage, the family, a billion and a half dollars and he’s supposed to negotiate? Let me tell you. It’s the biggest — second biggest scandal.

STAHL: So…

TRUMP: The biggest scandal was when they spied on my campaign. They spied on my campaign.

STAHL: There is no real evidence of that.

TRUMP: Of course there is.

STAHL: No.

TRUMP: It’s all over the place. Lesley…

STAHL: Sir.

TRUMP: They spied on my campaign and they got caught.

STAHL: Can I just say something? You know, this is 60 Minutes and we can’t put on things we can’t verify.

TRUMP: But you won’t put it on because it’s bad for Biden. Look, let me tell you.

STAHL: We can’t put it on things we can’t verify…

TRUMP: Lesley, they spied on my campaign.

STAHL: We can’t verify that.

TRUMP: It’s been totally verified.

STAHL: No.

TRUMP: It’s been. Just go down and get the papers. They spied on my campaign. They got caught.

STAHL: No.

TRUMP: And then they went much further than that. Then they got caught. And you will see that, Lesley. And you know that. But you just don’t want to put it on the air.

STAHL: No. As a matter of fact, I don’t know that.

TRUMP: Okay.

STAHL: And you’re out there…

TRUMP: So why don’t you get back to your interview and let’s go?

STAHL: I’m going to look. Alright. So you said in the Briefing Room, “Nobody likes me. I…it can only be my personality.”

TRUMP: I said that jokingly. That is sarcastic. Nobody likes me. It must be my personality. I say it all the time. Nobody likes me. It must be my personality. I say it all the time, Lesley.

STAHL: Do you think that your tweets and your name calling are turning people off?

TRUMP: No, I think I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have social media because the media is, uh…

STAHL: The name calling, the…

TRUMP: In my opinion, the media is corrupt. But the media…

STAHL: You know, you’ve told…

TRUMP: …is fake and frankly if I didn’t have social media, I’d have no way of getting out my voice.

STAHL: You know what you told me a long time ago? When I asked why you keep saying “fake” in the media.

TRUMP: Yeah. Yeah.

STAHL: You said to me, “I say that because I need to discredit you. So that when you say negative things about me, no one will believe you.”

TRUMP: I don’t know if they discredit you.

STAHL: But that’s what you told me.

TRUMP: You discredited yourself.

STAHL: You told me.

TRUMP: Lesley, you’ve discredited yourself. When you say that you’re not going to cover Biden. You’re going to ask him what flavor ice cream he has. Okay?

STAHL: That’s not what I mean.

TRUMP: Instead of “Why did Hunter get three and a half million dollars from Moscow?” Instead of “Why is an energy company paying your son $183,000 a month?” Or whatever they’re paying him. And he has no experience in energy. You know, you discredit yourself. I don’t have to discredit you.

STAHL: So, so this story about Hunter and his laptop. Some repair shop found it. The source is, uh, Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani.

TRUMP: I don’t know anything about that. I just know it’s a laptop. And they happened….

STAHL: And you’re, and you’re making this one of the hottest and most important issuess in the rows.

TRUMP: I don’t know about the two gentlemen you mentioned.

STAHL: I mean, this is the most important issue in the country right now.

TRUMP: It’s a very important issue. To find out whether a man’s corrupt who’s running for President. Who’s accepted money from China? And from Ukraine? And from Russia? Yeah, I think it’s an important issue.

STAHL: All these things have been investigated and discredited.

TRUMP: It’s incredible the way you can try and say this and sit there and look me in the eye and say…

STAHL: A Republican Committee.

TRUMP: He accepted money. His family. From Russia, from Ukraine, from China, and from other places.

STAHL: And a Republican…

TRUMP: His brother, who didn’t have experience, became a big builder in Iraq without experience. Take a look at what’s going on, Lesley. And then you say how that shouldn’t be discussed?

STAHL: I’m saying…

TRUMP: It’s the biggest scandal out there, Lesley.

STAHL: And you think it’s the biggest issue to campaign on.

TRUMP: I think it’s, I think it’s one of the biggest scandals I’ve ever seen. And you don’t cover it.

STAHL: Because…

TRUMP: You want to talk about…

STAHL: Well, because it can’t be verified. I’m telling you.

TRUMP: You want to talk about insignficant things?

STAHL: I’m telling you.

TRUMP: Of course it can be verified. Excuse me.

STAHL: We can’t. We can’t…

TRUMP: They found the laptop. Lesley, Lesley!

STAHL: It can’t be verified.

TRUMP: What can’t be verified?

STAHL: The laptop!

TRUMP: Why do you say that?

STAHL: Because…

TRUMP: Even the family doesn’t…

STAHL: It’s unverified.

TRUMP: The fmaily on the laptop. He’s gone into hiding. For five days, he’s gone into hiding.

STAHL: He’s preparing for your [delinquent?]

TRUMP: Oh, it’s taken him five days to prepare? I doubt it. I doubt it. Okay, go ahead.

STAHL: So let’s get back to the name calling. Okay? I, and whether you think it’s turning people off.

TRUMP: No, I think — it is what it is.

STAHL: You called Biden stupid.

TRUMP: Where are we sitting here? Where are we sitting?

STAHL: In the Rose Room.

TRUMP: Of what?

STAHL: Of the White House.

TRUMP: That’s right. How did I get here? How did I get here? We’re in the White House.

STAHL: And what are you saying? Oh, look, by name calling, you think that’s…

TRUMP: No, not the name calling, but, you know, doing the right thing. And we…we have a great record. I mean, we got hit by a pandemic. It wasn’t my fault. But it wasn’t. It was China’s fault. But, but Lesley…

STAHL: The reason…

TRUMP: We’re in the White House. The press is very biased. Very, very biased. And, and I’m not talking about anyone…

STAHL: You’re trying to discredit us.

TRUMP: No, no.

STAHL: Yes.

TRUMP: I’m not. You’re discrediting yourself.

STAHL: No. You are.

TRUMP: [CROSSTALK] Lesley, you’re discrediting yourself. When you don’t go after Biden. With the corruption in the Biden family.

STAHL: Why are you asking me about going after Biden? You’ve asked me five times.

TRUMP: When you don’t go after, uh, what happened in the Russia witch hunt, which turned out to be a total phony with no collusion. No collusion whatsoever. When you don’t do that, you discredit yourself. The press, you know, is highly discredited right now. You do know that. So you discredit yourself.

STAHL: Half — I don’t even know where to go here — half the country loves you. But the other half doesn’t. And I’m wondering why you don’t —

TRUMP: They were starting to, Lesley. When the economy was prior, just prior to the, you know, to the plague, they were starting to really like — we were all starting to like each other. It was coming together. There was going to be a lot of unificatoin.

STAHL: I’ve heard you say that before and I don’t think we were coming together.

TRUMP: Okay. And I’m just telling you…

STAHL: I think we’ve had disunity on some unfortunate….

TRUMP: [CROSSTALK] People were calling me…people were calling me about coming together. And then we got hit by the plague. And now we’re rebuilding it again. And it’s going well.

STAHL: Well, do you think that you do anything to unify the country?

TRUMP: I do. I think I do unify the country. I think I will unify the country. It’s called success. When our country becomes again…

STAHL: What about the rabid partisanship in the country? Do you take any responsibility with the country being divided against itself? Do you feel that?

TRUMP: I’d like not to. But, you know, perhaps everybody has to take a little responsibility for it. But when people put out phony witch hunts, you know. When they spy on your campaign. You have to fight back. And if you don’t fight back, you’re not sitting here very long and you go back home. You go back home to mommy.

STAHL: I’m, I’m, I’ve been listening to you — I don’t know how long we’ve been here — and it’s just attack, attack, attack, attack, attack.

TRUMP: I don’t think so. I mean, look, it’s not attack.

STAHL: It is.

TRUMP: It’s defense. It’s defense.

STAHL: No.

TRUMP: It’s against attacks.

STAHL: No. You’ve been attacking.

TRUMP: It’s defense against attacks.

STAHL: (nearly laughing) You’re very impressive.

TRUMP: I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t view it that way. I’m defending myself. And I’m defending the institution of the press and it’s very important.

STAHL: Can, can you?

TRUMP: [to Pence off camera] Hi, Mike, are you having a good time, Mike, watching?

PENCE: (laughs) Yeah, I am.

TRUMP: You know Mike, right? Our great Vice President?

STAHL: I do.

TRUMP: You think she should ask questions like this of, uh…

PENCE: (laughs)

STAHL: Wow. You want to put that on there.

TRUMP: You think she’ll ask questions like this of Joe.

PENCE: I don’t think so.

STAHL: Can you, can you, um, can you characterize, uh, your supporters? Can you?

TRUMP: Yeah. I think I can. People that love our country. And people that don’t want to see the, uh, stores get looted and burned down and people that don’t want to see riots and they don’t want to see anarchists. Yeah. I think I can.

STAHL: And…

TRUMP: These people that love our country.

STAHL: You may…

TRUMP: And they don’t like to see…

STAHL: But you don’t seem…

TRUMP: They don’t like to see policemen get shot and not be able to defend themselves. They don’t like to see rioting in the middle of Fifth Avenue or the middle of other streets. In Portland or other places. And they like it when their President gets the endorsement of virtually every police group and frnakly almost everybody having to do with law and order. Positive law and order. But you know what. They’re people who love our country more than anything else. And they like to see our country thrive.

STAHL: But do you think that when you hold rallies and encourage people to say “Lock her up” and…

TRUMP: I don’t encourage them. They say it.

STAHL: And you admit it.

TRUMP: Hillary Clinton.

STAHL: No, listen. They don’t do that.

TRUMP: Hillary Clinton deleted. She deleted 33,000 emails. After she got a subpoena from the United State Congress.

STAHL: Why does, why does that…

TRUMP: No, not, that’s illegal. Now why somebody doesn’t do something about it?

STAHL: [CROSSTALK] I know, but [unintelligible] why is this still an issue? Why do people…

TRUMP: I think it’s an issue.

STAHL: They’re not going to vote on that.

TRUMP: To me, it’s an issue.

STAHL: She ran last time.

TRUMP: Excuse me. When they say “Lock her up,” it’s not me. They say it. It starts..

STAHL: You encourage it.

TRUMP: I don’t encourage it.

STAHL: Yes.

TRUMP: No. If I mention her name about something, they go crazy.

STAHL: Well, what about the Governor of Michigan who had had this plot that people were going to, people, I think…

TRUMP: I don’t know anything about the plot, but I can tell you this.

STAHL: I’m telling you about the plot.

TRUMP: It was our Justice Department that is the one that’s helping her.

STAHL: Yeah.

TRUMP: My Justice Department, before all of that.

STAHL: Yes, I…

TRUMP: It was our Justice Department that’s helping her. And, you know, people aren’t so, they’re not liking her so much. Cause she’s got everybody locked down. And we just won a Supreme Court where it’s unconstitutional. The only one she doesn’t have locked down is her husband, who went sailing and did things that he wasn’t supposed to be doing.

STAHL: You are, uh, very powerful. And the people who love you love you with passion. And if you go after somebody in the way you’ve been going after her.

TRUMP: I haven’t gone after her.

STAHL: You take it to heart and then there are plots and threats.

TRUMP: I haven’t gone after her.

STAHL: And the same with Dr….yeah, you did.

TRUMP: [CROSSTALK] I’ve helped her. It was our Justice Department that’s helping her.

STAHL: And when you criticized her.

TRUMP: Oh, I do criticize her. Yeah.

STAHL: Well, that’s the…

TRUMP: I think the way she locked down Michigan is a disgrace.

STAHL: But when…

TRUMP: The way she closed those churches in Michigan is a disgrace. I…yeah, I think it’s disgraceful what she’s done. I do.

STAHL: You went a lot of…

TRUMP: And, by the way, that’s unclear. That’s other…that’s other governors also. They happened to be Democrats. And they’ve closed up their states. And they’re causing a lot of problems with these lockdowns. Suicide, drugs, alcohol. A lot of bad things are happening. And they should open up their states. Carefully. But they should open up their states.

STAHL: Well, when you say “Open up,” you don’t say “carefully.” You say, “Open up.” You’re not — You don’t have, you don’t have…

TRUMP: Oh, I say “carefully.”

STAHL: A progressive program to say “Open up with masks.” Open up with social distancing. You say…

TRUMP: The governors run their states.

STAHL: No, but the message comes from you.

TRUMP: When the governors run their states…

STAHL: You are…

TRUMP: And the governors have to do what they have to do.

STAHL: But you…

TRUMP: But when they lock down Michigan, she’s doing a tremendous disservice.

STAHL: Well, what about you…

TRUMP: Same thing with Pennsylvania. Same thing with North Carolina.

STAHL: What about these…

TRUMP: These are Democrat governors and they’re doing a great disservice.

STAHL: What about you saying “Let’s open up, but let’s wear masks?” Let’s open up.

TRUMP: Well, let me say.

STAHL: You don’t. You don’t.

TRUMP: I say. I’m not against masks at all.

STAHL: But you’re not for them.

TRUMP: Sure, I am. I wear ’em. Wear ’em. But I also say socially distance. I say all the things. But you know what? Well, look, with you, nothing I said would be any good, Lesley.

STAHL: That’s not true, Mr. President.

TRUMP: That’s okay.

STAHL: That’s not true.

TRUMP: But in the meantime, having a record comeback. Because if you look, we’re the fastest growing nation in the world after this pandemic. By far. And we sunk less than any other nation. Relatively speaking. And we’re coming back very strong. Very, very strong.

STAHL: So you — you don’t want to lock up Governor Whitmore, but you want to lock up…

TRUMP: When did I say “Lock her up?”

STAHL: The Bidens.

TRUMP: I never said “Lock her up.”

STAHL: Obama.

TRUMP: When did I say “Lock her up”? When did I say “Lock up the governor”? I didn’t say “Lock up the governor.”

STAHL: Alright, but you want to…

TRUMP: Why would I lock her up?

STAHL: You…

TRUMP: No, but why did you say “You don’t want to lock up the goveror?” Of course I don’t want to lock her up. Why would I lock her up?

STAHL: Because you were in front of a rally and people saying it and encouraging it.

TRUMP: I never said it, Lesley. I never said to lock her up.

STAHL: So you don’t want to lock up the governor.

TRUMP: Lesley, it’s a vicious thing you just said. I never said, “Lock up the Governor of Michigan.” I would never say that.

STAHL: Well, did you…

TRUMP: Why would I say that? Because…

STAHL: Well, what about the Bidens?

TRUMP: She’s doing lockdowns.

STAHL: You want to lock up the Bidens?

TRUMP: No, I don’t want to lock them up.

STAHL: What about Obama?

TRUMP: But they certainly should be looked at.

STAHL: Obama? Do you want to lock up Obama?

TRUMP: No, I don’t want to lock him up. But he spied on my campaign.

STAHL: Do you want to lock up…

TRUMP: Obama and Biden spied on my campaign. Do you know what that is? Do you know what they did? Do you know how horrible it is what they did?

STAHL: That’s never been verified.

TRUMP: You weren’t there. It’s been totally verified, Lesley.

STAHL: No.

TRUMP: You’ll find out. But it’s been totally verified.

STAHL: Um, you’ve all but said that Attorney General Barr should go after President Obama. I would think you would humor me here. Okay. You muse. How would you feel if then President Biden had gone after you?

TRUMP: Oh, he probably will. Because I think he’s a very dishonest guy. And he will probably look for something. He probably will. We’ll see. But you know what? Attorney General Barr has been very nice. That’s all I can tell you. He’s been very nice.

STAHL: And you…

TRUMP: He’s been very respectful.

STAHL: You have critcized him.

TRUMP: No, I didn’t criticize him. It’s just a different personality. They’re very lucky. They’re very lucky. Cause the evidence is overwhelming. And Attorney General Barr is a great gentleman. He’s a great gentleman. They are very lucky.

STAHL: I…

TRUMP: I can’t tell you what’s going to happen. I don’t know.

STAHL: I know…

TRUMP: Because I purposely like to stay out of it. You know what? I don’t like to get involved. I can if I want, but I don’t like to get involved. But I think they’ve been very, very lucky. Attorney General Barr is a gentleman.

STAHL: You know, I, I didn’t want to have to this kind of…

TRUMP: Of course you did.

STAHL: No, I didn’t. No, I didn’t.

TRUMP: Of course you did. Well, you brought up a lot of subjects…

STAHL: Well, I said..

TRUMP: …that were inappropriately brought up.

STAHL: ..that I would ask you tough questions.

TRUMP: They were inappropriately brought up.

STAHL: But…

TRUMP: Right from the beginning. No, your first question was “These are going to be tough questions.” No.

STAHL: It is.

TRUMP: You set up the interview. Your first statement was…

STAHL: You’re President. Don’t you think you should be…

TRUMP: Excuse me. No, no, no.

STAHL: …accountable to the American people?

TRUMP: Listen. Your first statment to me, “This is going to be tough questions.” Well, I don’t mind that. But when you set up the interview, you didn’t say that. You said, “Oh, let’s have a lovely interview.” And, and here’s what I do say.

STAHL: So why?

TRUMP: You want to ask Joe Biden. I saw your interview with Joe — the interview with Joe.

STAHL: I never did a Joe Biden interview.

TRUMP: It was a joke. The interview. 60 Minutes. I see Joe Biden given softball after softball. I’ve seen all of his interviews. He’s never been asked a question that’s hard.

STAHL: Okay. But forget him for a minute.

TRUMP: No, you start with me.

STAHL: You’re Presidnet. You’re…

TRUMP: Excuse me, Lesley, you started with me. Your first statment was, “Are you ready for tough questions?” That’s no way to talk. No way to talk.

AIDE: Lesley, one, one second, we’re, we’re, uh, this is the first warning. I think we have five minutes until we have the Vice President step in. Is that about right?

TRUMP: Well, I think we have enough. It really — we have enough.

AIDE 2: I think we’re ready for the Vice President now.

TRUMP: I think we have enough of an interview here. Okay? That’s enough. Let’s go. Let’s go. In fact, uh, let’s go meet for two seconds, okay? Thanks. I’ll see you later. Thanks.

January 15, 2020January 15, 2020 by Edward Champion

The Shameful Gaslighting of Bernie Sanders

Last night’s Democratic primary debate was a travesty in moderation and an affront to journalism. It demonstrated that the fine line between assumptive zealotry and objectivity is taking its cues from social media and being shamefully eroded.

PHILLIP: So Senator Sanders, I do want to be clear here. You’re saying that you never told Senator Warren that a woman could not win the election?
SANDERS: That is correct.
PHILLIP: Senator Warren, what did you think when Senator Sanders told you a woman could not win the election?

I must confess that CNN’s Abby Phillip’s “moderation” in last night’s Democratic presidential debate angered me so much that it took me many hours to get to sleep. It was a betrayal of fairness, a veritable gaslighting, a war on nuance, a willful vitiation of honor, a surrender of critical thinking, and a capitulation of giving anyone the benefit of the doubt. It was the assumptive guilt mentality driving outrage on social media ignobly transposed to the field of journalism. It fed into one of the most toxic and reprehensible cancers of contemporary discourse: that “truth” is only what you decide to believe rather than carefully considering the multiple truths that many people tell you. It enabled Senator Warren to riposte with one of her most powerful statements of the night: “So can a woman beat Donald Trump? Look at the men on this stage. Collectively, they have lost ten elections. The only people on this stage who have won every single election that they have been in are the women. Amy and me.”

Any sensible person, of course, wants to see women thrive in political office. And, on a superficial level, Warren’s response certainly resonates as an entertaining smackdown. But when you start considering the questionable premise of political success being equated to constant victory, the underlying logic behind Warren’s rejoinder falls apart and becomes more aligned with Donald Trump’s shamefully simplistic winning-oriented rhetoric. It discounts the human truth that sometimes people have to lose big in order to excel at greatness. If you had told anyone in 1992 that Jerry Brown — then running against Bill Clinton to land the Democratic presidential nomination — would return years later to the California governorship, overhaul the Golden State’s budget so that it would shift to billions in surplus, and become one of the most respected governors in recent memory, nobody would have believed you. Is Abraham Lincoln someone who we cannot trust anymore because he had run unsuccessfully for the Illinois House of Representatives — not once, but twice — and had to stumble through any number of personal and political setbacks before he was inaugurated as President in 1861?

Presidential politics is far too complicated for any serious thinker to swaddle herself in platitudes. Yet anti-intellectual allcaps absolutism — as practiced by alleged “journalists” like Summer Brennan last night — is the kind of catnip that is no different from the deranged glee that inspires wild-eyed religious zealots to stone naysayers. There is no longer a line in the sand between a legitimate inquiry and blinkered monomania. And the undeniable tenor last night — one initiated by Phillip and accepted without question by Warren — was one of ignoble simplification.

Whether you like Bernie or not, the fact remains that Phillip’s interlocutory move was moral bankruptcy and journalistic corruption at the highest level. It was as willfully rigged and as preposterously personal as the moment during the October 13, 1988 presidential debate when Bernard Shaw — another CNN reporter — asked of Michael Dukakis, “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”

But where Shaw allowed Dukakis to answer (and allowed Dukakis to hang himself by his own answer), Phillip was arguably more outrageous in the way in which she preempted Sanders’s answer. Phillip asked Bernie a question. He answered it. And then she turned to Warren without skipping a beat and pretended as if Sanders had not answered it, directly contradicting his truth. Warren — who claims to be a longtime “friend” of Sanders — could have, at that point, said that she had already said what she needed to say, as she did when she issued her statement only days before. She could have seized the moment to be truly presidential, as she has been in the past. But she opted to side with the gaslighting, leading numerous people on Twitter to flood her replies with snake emoji. As I write this, #neverwarren is the top trending topic on Twitter.

The Warren supporter will likely respond to this criticism by saying, with rightful justification, that women have contended with gaslighting for centuries. Isn’t it about time for men to get a taste of their own medicine? Fair enough. But you don’t achieve gender parity by appropriating and weaponizing the repugnant moves of men who deny women their truth. If you’re slaying dragons, you can’t turn into the very monsters you’re trying to combat. The whole point of social justice is to get everyone to do better.

After the debate, when Bernie offered his hand to Warren, she refused to shake it — despite the fact that she had shaken the hands of all the other candidates (including the insufferable Pete Buttigieg). And while wags and pundits were speculating on what the two candidates talked about during this ferocious exchange, the underlying takeaway here was the disrespect that Warren evinced to her alleged “friend” and fellow candidate. While it’s easy to point to the handshake fiasco as a gossipy moment to crack jokes about — and, let’s face the facts, what political junkie or armchair psychologist wouldn’t be fascinated by the body language and the mystery? — what Warren’s gesture tells us is that disrespect is now firmly aligned with denying truth. It isn’t enough to gaslight someone’s story anymore. One now has to strip that person of his dignity.

Any pragmatic person understands that presidential politics is a fierce and cutthroat business and that politicians will do anything they need to do in order to win. One only has to reread Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes or Robert A. Caro’s Lyndon B. Johnson volumes to comprehend the inescapable realpolitik. But to see the putatively objective system of debate so broken and to see a candidate like Warren basking in a cheap victory is truly something that causes me despair. Because I liked Warren. Really, I did. I donated to her. I attended her Brooklyn rally and reported on it. I didn’t, however, unquestionably support her. Much as I don’t unquestionably support Bernie. One can be incredibly passionate about a political candidate without surrendering the vital need for critical thinking. That’s an essential part of being an honorable member of a representative democracy.

Bias was, of course, implicit last night in such questions as “How much will Medicare for All cost?” One rarely sees such concern for financial logistics tendered to, say, the estimated $686 billion that the United States will be spending on war and defense in 2020 alone. Nevertheless, what Abby Phillip did last night was shift tendentiousness to a new and obscene level that had previously been unthinkable. When someone offers an answer to your question, you don’t outright deny it. You push the conversation along. You use the moment to get both parties to address their respective accounts rather than showing partiality.

This is undeniably the most important presidential election in our lifetime. That it has come to vulgar gaslighting rather than substantive conversation is a disheartening harbinger of the new lows to come.

March 1, 2017 by Edward Champion

Trump Will Never Be a Normal President

Do not mistake tone for sanity. Trump will continue to remain a threat to the health of the United States. It is our duty not to normalize him.

Last night’s State of the Union speech was a masterstroke of psychological warfare against the American public. Donald Trump lightened his bellicosity after forty days of unbridled and imperious madness, speaking in a notably softer tone remarked upon by nearly every media outlet. Even when he had little to do with their laudable triumphs, Trump pointed to the frail and the weak, including Megan Crowley, who was diagnosed with Pompe disease at the age of fifteen months, and used this as a way to assail the Food and Drug Administration for its “slow and burdensome approval process.” (Never mind that the FDA approved Lumizyme in 2014 for Pompe patients.)

Instead of taking responsibility for his brash and reckless handling of the botched Navy SEAL mission in Yemen, which resulted in the needless death of Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens, Trump manipulated the hoi polloi by having Owens’s widow stand up and weep before the crowd, exonerating himself by claiming that a raid currently being investigated by the Pentagon for malfeasance, had been a success because a general had declared it so. A cult leader typically earns trust from his followers by modulating his fiery bluster so that any subsequent quiet words appear sane by comparison. He offers testimonials rather than facts, phony comforts instead of genuinely inclusive commitment he can back up. Trump’s address before the joint session was the subtle and deadly act of a dangerous and incorrigible demagogue, a gesture that proved so emotionally potent that progressive commentator Van Jones committed an unfathomable act of spineless treachery on live television, stating, “That was one of the most extraordinary moments you have ever seen in American politics, period.”

That Jones bought so easily into the cheap lie of national unity with such an astonishing declaration of hyperbole says much about where we now are as a nation and why partisan hacks need to tell the truth right now or lose their jobs. The manic energy of Trump’s near bipolar tweets, his Islamophobia and his callous war on non-criminial immigrants, his crazed inventions about “illegal voters” and terrorist plots in Sweden, and his colossal diplomatic missteps, to say nothing of his criminal appointments and his Cabinet’s likely collusion with Russia, is enough for any sane human being to curl under the blanket for the next four years or, heaven forfend, the next eight. It has created a landscape of fatigue where normalcy is an elixir, an ideal whereby opposing parties can again, theoretically at least, reach across the aisle and broker compromises. It accounts for former President George W. Bush, hardly a paragon of liberalism, being lionized for his anti-Trump remarks in a television interview. And it also accounts for why the Democratic Party, which has become a gutless and ineffective husk that no longer represents its progressive origins, opted for softball chair Tom Perez instead of the restorative brimstone that might have been consummated under Keith Ellison.

Trump is not, and never will be, a normal President. And as such, it is our duty to continue resisting this poisonous cancer in all forms, even when the regular acts of protest exhaust us. A putative leader who speaks in dulcet tones, wherever he may come from, must ultimately be judged by his policies, his ideas, and the full range of facts, not how he appears on camera. Previous Presidents have lied to us, but Trump’s fuzzy relationship with the truth is an unprecedented pox upon the marketplace of ideas. Trump’s failure to countenance objective facts or other perspectives is, if anything, an approach which creates national division rather than unity. As Hannah Arendt once observed:

Seen from the viewpoint of politics, truth has a despotic character. It is therefore hated by tyrants, who rightly fear the competition of a coercive force they cannot monopolize, and it enjoys a rather precarious status in the eyes of governments that rest on consent and abhor coercion. Facts are beyond agreement and consent, and all talk about them — all exchanges of opinion based on correct information — will contribute nothing to their establishment. Unwelcome opinion can be argued with, rejected, or compromised upon, but unwelcome facts possess an infuriating stubbornness that nothing can move except plain lies. The trouble is that factual truth, like all other truth, peremptorily claims to be acknowledged and precludes debate, and debate constitutes the very essence of political life. The modes of thought and communication that deal with truth, if seen from the political perspective, are necessarily domineering: they don’t take into account other people’s opinions, and taking these into account is the hallmark of all strictly political thinking. Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them….The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusions, my opinion.

Trump has demonstrated, more than any other President, that he does not possess this “enlarged mentality” of considering all standpoints. He bans media outlets that he does not agree with. He refuses to face the White House Correspondents at their yearly dinner. He fires acting Attorney General Sally Yates for acting upon the law. This is tyrannical fascism rather than the promise of a democratic republic. It is contrary to every known act of politics. Those who normalize this or who remain silent or who soft-peddle their stances and inquiries in this highly volatile time are a direct threat to the future of the United States. We must always remember that Trump is not normal and we must regularly protest him until we have some government that is close to normal.

November 15, 2016November 15, 2016 by Edward Champion

The Silver Lining: A Potential Bipartisan Senate Blockade to Stop Trump

There still remains a chance to stop Trump in the Senate. It all comes down to a Louisiana runoff race and a coalition between Democrats and moderate Republicans. This may just be possible in an age of right-wing extremism.

Many agonized observers have been so paralyzed by the shocking appointment of white supremacist Steve Bannon as Trump’s key strategist, to say nothing of a potential paleoconservative Cabinet and the renewed commitment to xenophobia, deportation, and anti-choice sentiments that Trump expressed in an aloof appearance on 60 Minutes, that it has been difficult to remember that politics is a game that Trump may not quite know how to play. Sure, he can whip up the fury of a thoughtless mob to reenact Nuremburg, win votes, and inspire a spate of hate crimes after the election. But being a successful demagogue does not necessarily make one a successful politician. And while the House of Representatives and likely the Supreme Court appears to be on a fearsome rightward trajectory, there is one silver lining to this despotic cloud that Trump and his cohorts have not considered: the power and dynamics of the United States Senate.

As it presently stands, the Senate is likely to be composed of 52 Republicans and 48 Democrats. However, that number could change. There remains a chance to reduce that number to a 51-49 split in favor of the Republicans. The opportunity presents itself with an experienced Louisiana fighter for the people named Foster Campbell. Campbell is running for a Senate seat in Louisiana in a runoff race with Republican State Treasurer John Kennedy (no relation to the 35th President) that is scheduled to take place on December 10, 2016. If Campbell can win, that means the Republicans will only have one majority vote.

That one vote may seem like Trump can push anything he wants through a Republican-controlled Senate, but don’t be so certain. Liberals (myself included) may be looking at this situation the wrong way. Because we keep forgetting that the American political landscape isn’t what it was last week. The new normal isn’t Republican politics as usual, but old Republican politics locked in a potent and quite volatile struggle against the alt-right extremism that Trump and his willing lieutenants will usher in, a strain that a good chunk of the population, including those who voted for Trump, will come to reject once they realize that the “outsider” is a man hobnobbing with insiders and a man who may be unable to deliver on his promises. This brand of right-wing politics is so utterly beyond anything we have seen before, even with Mitch McConnell’s hijacking of the Merrick Garland nomination or anything plotted by Grover Norquist, that we have failed to consider that some Republicans may very well reject it, especially if their phone banks are jammed with constituents regularly calling them.

Politics, as we all know, makes strange bedfellows. And while a moderate Senator created gridlock with Democrats in pre-Trump times, there’s a greater likelihood that moderates will side with Democrats if the full monty of Trump’s extremism streaks through the Senate chambers. There may be some bipartisan options to not only deadlock the Senate on key bills, but that could prevent the Senate from confirming one quarter of the 4,000 new positions that the Trump administration needs to fill before January.

Senator Susan Collins may be a Republican from Maine, but her positions resemble a more conservative Democrat. (Indeed, Newsweek called her one of the last moderates in the Northeast.) She’s pro-choice, willing to raise taxes on any income bracket, supports gun restrictions and same-sex marriage, and, according to someone who called her, was willing to support the DREAM Act (a key piece of legislation for immigrants) as a standalone bill. Senator Harry Reid has cut bipartisan deals with her in the past. So there may be a possibility to work with her in the future.

Another dependable moderate Republican-Democratic alignment may be with Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski, who expressed dismay over the radical direction of the Republican party in 2012 and has also expressed a desire to do something about climate change. Like Sen. Collins, Sen. Murkowski has some progressive positions. She supported the DREAM Act and she did reject Trump’s call to deport Muslims last year. She also had tough words for Sarah Palin and Joe Miller.

Politics is a numbers game. And if Senators Murkowski and Collins are willing to work with the Democrats in an age of Trump extremism (and I think they will, provided the alt-right doesn’t get to them), then there’s a possibility that many Trump-inspired bills and confirmations will receive a 51 nay with 49 Democrats in the Senate. This does leave Collins and Murkowski in positions of great influence, and they will certainly use this to their advantage, possibly playing both sides against each other, but it’s a two year buffer that may just hold somewhat if the Democrats can succeed in winning back the Senate during the 2018 midterm elections. Historically speaking, there hasn’t been a tie-breaking vote cast by a sitting Vice President since March 13, 2008. (Joe Biden never cast a tie-breaking vote.) It’s possible that Vice President Mike Pence will overturn John Adams’s 28 tie-breaking vote record under a Trump Administration. This is, after all, an unprecedented moment in American political history in which anything can and will happen. But if Pence does this, this may create friction and animosity between the White House and the Republican Senators, who in turn may revolt against the Trump Administration’s autocratic tactics.

Everything I’ve suggested here is contingent upon Foster Campbell winning the Louisiana Senate seat. A Senate composed of 48 Democrats will create stalemates. A Senate composed of 49 Democrats will create possibilities for a formidable blockade with one or two moderate Republicans on their side.

So can Foster Campbell become Senator? For one thing, he’ll need donations. But here’s the math based on the November Senate race:

Republican candidates received the following votes:

John Kennedy (25%); Charles Boustany (15.4%); John Fleming (10.6%); Rob Maness (4.7%); David Duke (3%); Donald Crawford (1.3%); Joseph Cao (1.1%); Charles Marsala (0.2%).

TOTAL REPUBLICAN PERCENTAGE: 61.3%

Democratic candidates received the following votes:

Foster Campbell (17.5%); Caroline Fayard (12.5%); Derrick Edwards (2.7%); Gary Landrieu (2.4%); Josh Pellerin (0.4%); Peter Williams (0.4%); Vinny Mendoza (0.3%).

TOTAL DEMOCRATIC PERCENTAGE: 36.2%

This is quite a margin of voters for Foster Campbell to win over. Trump won 58% of the state in the election. However, the Times-Picayune reported that there was a dropoff this year in African-American voter participation. Polling expert Edward Chervenak pointed out in the article that voters in overwhelmingly white precincts were more likely to vote than voters at overwhelmingly black precincts. If African-American voters (and other Democrats) show up to vote for Campbell in droves during the December 10, 2016 election, then Campbell may stand a chance of winning this seat and creating a quasi-blockade in the Senate. And if it can be done, and it does appear to be a Hail Mary pass at this point, then there remains a very good possibility that the Democrats can stop Donald Trump from enacting his extremist policies with the help of a few moderates.

November 11, 2016 by Edward Champion

Loser: A Report from the Trump Tower Protests

2016 Election, America, Politics, Protests, Racism, trump-donald
2016 election, apathy, donald trump, gary johnson, Hillary Clinton, loser, New York, protests, Racism, trump tower
Leave a comment

On Thursday, November 10, 2016, I attended the protests that had unfolded across the street from Trump Tower after Donald Trump had been elected the 45th President of the United States. I talked with anti-Trump activists, people who voted for Gary Johnson, people who voted for Trump, and people who didn’t vote at all in an attempt to understand how these unfathomable election results happened. (Running time: 32 minutes, 9 seconds)

Loser: A Report from the Trump Tower Protests (Download MP3)

This text will be replaced

September 27, 2016September 27, 2016 by Edward Champion

Trump Interrupts

A supercut of all the moments in the presidential debate when Donald Trump interrupted Hillary Clinton

July 10, 2016July 10, 2016 by Edward Champion

Ghostbusters: The Compromise Candidate of Summer Blockbusters

Like Schrödinger’s Cat, the new Ghostbusters remake is neither dead nor alive. But the more important question is whether it needs to be big enough to defeat Hollywood sexism and the backlash of absolutist fans.

When Sony announced that it would be remaking the rightly beloved 1984 Ghostbusters movie, with women wearing the proton packs and Bridesmaids‘s Paul Feig on board to direct, you didn’t have to look too hard at the galleon being craned up for a retrofit to see the unsavory barnacles of terrified white manboys clutching onto the hull for dear life. Fan entitlement, long rooted in a patriarchal sense of childhood nostalgia that the Daily Beast‘s Arthur Chu shrewdly pinpointed as “‘pickup artist’ snake oil — started by nerdy guys, for nerdy guys — filled with techniques to manipulate, pressure and in some cases outright assault women to get what they want,” once again failed to do a little soul-searching and reflection on what its inflexible stance against the natural evolution of art truly means.

Just as some vocal fans protested the excellent film Mad Max: Fury Road for being “a piece of American culture ruined and rewritten right in front of their eyes,” the Ghostbusters absolutists knew that the studios wanted their dollars and that they could still get away with voicing their reactionary sentiments through the same cowardly anonymity that allowed Donald Trump to emerge as presidential candidate.

Much as a “silent majority” had propped up Trump under the illusion that a billionaire’s outspoken sexism and bigotry somehow represented an anti-establishment “candidate like we’ve never seen before,” these fans downvoted the new Ghostbusters trailer in droves when it was released online in April. One month later, a smug bespectacled mansplainer by the name of James Rolfe put a human face to this underlying sexism, posting a video (viewed by nearly two million), shot in what appeared to be a creepily appropriate basement, in which he vowed not to review the new remake:

You know what everybody’s been calling it? The female Ghostbusters. I hear that all the time. The female Ghostbusters. Does that mean we have to call the old one the male Ghostbusters? It doesn’t matter. But I can’t blame everybody for identifying that way. Because there’s no other way to identify the movies. There’s no other name for it.

Maybe you’d view movies this way if you’d spent a lifetime refusing to live with your shortcomings, carving the likenesses of Stallone and Schwarzenegger onto your own personal Mount Rushmore when not ordering vacuum devices or getting easily duped by Cialis scams. But the crazed notion that gender isn’t just the first way to identify a remake, but the only way to do so, speaks to a disturbing cultural epidemic that must be swiftly remedied by more movies and television starring women in smart and active roles, unsullied by the sexualized gaze of a pornographic oaf like James Rolfe.

It’s worth observing that Sony — a multinational corporation; not the National Organization of Women, lest we forget — had been in talks with the Russo Brothers well before Feig for an all-male remake, a fact also confirmed in a leaked email from Hannah Minghella. The Hollywood machine only cares about gender parity when it is profitable. It continues to promulgate superhero movie posters that are demeaning to women. It erects large outdoor ads flaunting violence against women. (Deadline Hollywood reported that the infamous X-Men Apocalypse ad featuring Mystique in a chokehold was approved by a top female executive at 20th Century Fox.) And when the studios do flirt with “feminist” blockbusters — such as Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch — the results are dismayingly objectifying.

Despite all this, I entered the press screening of the Ghostbusters remake with an open mind and the faint hope that there could be at least a few baby steps towards the game-changing blockbuster that America so desperately needs to redress these many wrongs.

I’m pleased to report that the new Ghostbusters movie does give us somewhat reasonable depictions of women as scrappy scientists, at least for a mainstream movie. The film is refreshingly devoid of Faustian feminist bargains such as Sandra Bullock floating around in her underwear in Gravity or Dr. Carol Marcus flaunting her flesh in Star Trek: Into Darkness. We are introduced to Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) practicing a lecture in an empty Colubmbia University classroom, having to contend with an embarrassing pro-ghost book (Ghosts from Our Past: Both Literally and Figuratively) that she co-wrote years before with her friend and academic peer, Abby Yates (played with the expected enjoyable verve by Melissa McCarthy). Erin, who dresses in wonderfully dorky plaid suits that the dean cavils about, is up for tenure and is understandably queasy about anything that stands in the way of her reputation. Leslie Jones plays Patty Tolan, an MTA inspector with a necklace telegraphing her name who serves as a counterpart to Winston from the original film, and has far more scenes to establish her character than poor Ernie Hudson ever did. Screenwriters Katie Dippold and Feig deserve credit for making Patty more than a token African-American, active enough to ensconce herself with the founding trio and provide some New York know-how in a way that Winston, confined to “Do you believe in God?” car banter and doing what he was told, never quite received in the original.

The sole disappointment among the new quartet is Kate McKinnon as weapons expert Jillian Holtzmann. McKinnon mugs artlessly throughout the film, almost as if she’s channeling William Shatner or Jim Carrey at their worst, too smitten with an impressionist’s toolbox of overly eccentric tics. While McKinnon’s performances have worked in five minute doses (especially in her very funny impressions of Hillary Clinton on Saturday Night Live), this is not an approach that is especially suited for ensemble work on an IMAX screen. McKinnon quavers her bottom lip and enters each shot with a distracting “funny” walk that contributes nothing whatsoever to her character or the scene. The effect is that of an actor exceedingly ungenerous to her colleagues, one that not even the continuity person can track. (Jillian’s glasses disappear and reappear several times during any given scene.)

McKinnon seems to be doing a caffeinated and charmless impression of Lori Petty from Tank Girl. She’s a terrible stage hog throughout the film, whether by her own choice or by Feig’s design. Even accounting for the script supervisor’s absenteeism, one gets the suspicion it’s more of the latter, perhaps shoehorned into this movie because of a studio note. How else can one explain an early moment in the film where McKinnon stands passive before a ghost and says, “You try saying no to these salty parabolas” while chomping potato chips? This line, which sounded more like bottom-of-the-barrel Madison Avenue than a honed sentence written by Parks and Recreation alumni, justifiably did not get much of a laugh, not even among the ringers who were planted in the middle rows at the screening I attended. And when your source text has indelible lines like “Back off, man, I’m a scientist” and “You….you’ve earned it,” it’s probably best to work interactive human behavior rather than commentary upon a snack.

I’ve long maintained a loose theory that you can tell a lot about a comedy movie by the way it refers to food. Weird Al Yankovic’s gloriously underappreciated UHF celebrates its benign strangeness with a Twinkie wiener sandwich (and the original Ghostbusters, of course, features Harold Ramis holding up a Twinkie with some class). Zoolander revels in its splashy flash with an orange mocha frappuccino. Shaun of the Dead features a completely invented snack called Hog Lumps, suggesting the mad invention pulled from cultural reference.

The Ghostbusters remake features a tired repeat gag of Abby constantly complaining about the lunch delivery man not including enough wontons in her soup. And there’s really no better metaphor to pinpoint what’s so wrong about this movie. Because while I loved 75% of the ladies here (and grew to tolerate McKinnon’s annoyingly spastic presence as the film went on), there weren’t enough dependable wontons floating in this movie. Not the dialogue, which isn’t as sharp and snappy as it needs to be. Not the generic CGI look of the ghosts (including Slimer), which can’t top the organic librarian and taxi driver in the original film. Not the story of a bellhop who hopes to unleash a torrent of trapped spirits into New York (although this is better than Ghostbusters II‘s river of slime). And based on the exasperated sighs and silence I heard around me, I wasn’t the only one. It says something, I think, that the Ghostbusters end up fighting a giant version of their own logo at one point.

I really believe that there’s a very smart story buried somewhere within this somewhat pleasing, if not altogether funny, offering. For example, Dippold and Feig have replaced the original film’s EPA as meddlesome government entity with the Department of Homeland Security, which wants the nation to believe that the Ghostbusters are cranks. This is an interesting and timely premise to pursue in a reboot made in a surveillance and smartphone age. (Indeed, there’s even an appropriate selfie stick gag halfway through the film.) It’s moments like this where the Ghostbusters remake wins back your trust after a clunky moment. But there comes a point when the movie decides to throw its hands in the air, becoming yet another loud, boring, and predictable romp featuring the destruction of Manhattan. Again?

And there are cameos. Annoying, purposeless, time-sucking cameos from the surviving members of the original Ghostbusters cast. This not only adds needless bulk to the story, but it isn’t especially fair to the new cast trying to establish themselves, especially in a movie that is already on somewhat shaky ground. Bill Murray as a famous debunker is the only cameo that is fun (and it also buttresses the film’s half-hearted exploration into belief). But instead of confining Murray to a walk-on role, the filmmakers have Murray show up at Ghostbusters HQ (a Chinese restaurant instead of a firehouse), where one can’t help but be reminded of the original’s considerable strengths.

Feig and his collaborators have forgotten what made the first film become a classic. It was the funny human touches of Rick Moranis parroting William Atherton’s pointing as Louis was possessed by Vinz Clortho or Bill Murray wincing as he opened up the lid of Dana’s leftovers or Janine peering around a partition in the back (a shot repeated in the remake, but with tighter focus and less art and subtlety) as Venkman and Walter Peck squared off at the firehouse. There simply isn’t enough of this in the remake. Today’s filmmakers — even somewhat decent ones like Feig — seem to have turned their backs on why we identify with characters and why we go to the movies. And who the hell needs to pay a babysitter and bust out the credit card for a far too large tub of popcorn when there are far more interesting characters on television?

I want to be clear that I am not here to write a hit piece. This remake isn’t awful in the way that Ghostbusters II was, but it’s far from great in the way the original film was. This should have been a groundbreaking motion picture. It damn well needed to be to beat back the James Rolfes and the Gamergate trolls and any other boneheaded atavist with a keyboard and an Internet connection.

We sometimes have to vote for compromise candidates in two party political races. But when the summer gives us several dozen blockbusters to choose from, is the half-hearted Ghostbusters remake really the progressive-minded movie we should accept? Is an incremental step forward in mass culture enough to be happy with? Or should we demand more? I’ve thought about this for the past few days and I’ve increasingly come around to believing that audiences — and women in particular — deserve far better soup and a hell of a lot more wontons.

April 8, 2016April 8, 2016 by Edward Champion

A Conversation with Thomas Frank

In his new book, Thomas Frank argues that the Democratic Party is to blame for income inequality and our national ills. In this lengthy Q&A, we flesh out and argue over Frank’s thesis, examining the historical trajectory that has led to the present crisis of weak-kneed liberals and “the party of professionals.”

No matter what kind of liberal or centrist you are, there’s a good chance you’re likely to look to recalcitrant Republicans blocking Obama’s appointment of a Supreme Court Justice or a redfaced fount of colossal stupidity and cartoonish arrogance who is currently running for President as prominent harbingers of our national ills. But in his new book, Listen, Liberal, Thomas Frank, co-founder of The Baffler and author of What’s the Matter With Kansas?, has boldly pinpointed the blame for our growing woes at a Democratic Party that has increasingly turned its back on the working class, cleaves to austere notions of meritocracy, is more likely to serve Wall Street than Main Street (despite campaign rhetoric from years back), and continues to adopt policies popularized under the Clinton Administration that have drastically altered the way seemingly liberal politicians serve the people.

I caught up with Frank as he was racing around the country on a book tour. He was gracious enough to respond to my whirlwind of questions — for his book is very much an argument that begets argument — while adroitly pushing his way through the publicity cyclone. Our lengthy conversation touched on the professional class, progressive Democrats who don’t fit within Frank’s theory, the degree to which one should hold a grudge against a politician, and the kind of bold experimentation that may be necessary to reverse income inequality.

EDWARD CHAMPION: Your book opens with an epigraph from David Halberstam’s excellent book, The Best and the Brightest, suggesting that Obama’s capitulation to corporate interests can be likened to some natural trajectory originating from Roosevelt’s Brain Trust to the many technocrats populating John F. Kennedy’s Cabinet who couldn’t handle Vietnam to the current “best and the brightest” Cabinet enforcing a “meritocratic” economy that has left many working-class people in the cold.

You point to Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter calling Russia “unprofessional” when Putin launched airstrikes against Syria in the fall of 2015, as if bombing the bejesus out of another nation was akin to some middle manager throwing a tantrum over the room temperature during a pivotal board meeting.

I’m fascinated by this idea of any remotely dissenting comment being considered “unprofessional.” It seems a close cousin to the outrage culture that has popped up on social media, whereby any group outraged over an “inappropriate” remark proceeds to demand the immediate firing of those who uttered the sentiment. Both developments stifle necessary discourse that is needed to argue out a difficult subject. But I’m wondering how this relates to income inequality. Perhaps many Americans, from Obama on down, have become indoctrinated in a kind of voluntary censure of any remotely disagreeable opinion. And it cuts both ways. Obama did suggest in September that students were too “coddled” for complaining about offensive viewpoints. In all fairness, is this something that we can entirely level at corporate America? I doubt very highly that any brightly painted break room with pinball machines and Guitar Hero in the corner is going to transform workers into Babbitt-like conformists. So where are Americans learning these cues? What accounts for young voters rejecting the Faustian bargain with their support for Bernie Sanders (curiously unmentioned in your book) or, for that matter, mainstream Democrats who often vote against their own interests by endorsing an endless wave of centrist candidates?

THOMAS FRANK: What makes professionals interesting to me is that they are a privileged social class. They are not the billionaire Koch Brothers, but their top ranks include some of the richest people in the nation. Depending on how you define them, certain kinds of investment banking personnel are professionals, as are Silicon Valley CEOs, and most corporate managers, and so on. My goal in Listen, Liberal is to understand what happens when our left party is dominated by this cohort and dedicated to advancing their interests. The answer is: Income inequality grows and grows.

Basically, professionals are inequality on the hoof. They are inequality walking and breathing and singing little songs to itself about how noble and right it is that the tasteful and deserving people are on top and the boorish stupid ones are on the bottom. And then taking a break to smack their lips over a particularly piquant IPA or a delicately iced artisanal cupcake.

That professionals do these things —- that they sing their own triumph -— in a very nice and polite language really shouldn’t surprise you. The Victorians were the same way. The only thing that’s new is that this slice of our upper class has persuaded itself that their politeness is some kind of left-wing political virtue, that it somehow excuses or inoculates their class privilege, and that the bad manners of the lower orders disqualifies any grievances they might have against the system.

Bernie Sanders isn’t mentioned in Listen, Liberal because it’s a book about Democrats and he didn’t identify as a Democrat until very recently, which (by the way) seems to cause no end of annoyance for Democratic party leaders. I was fully aware of his existence, however, and in 2014 I conducted a long interview with him for Salon —- asking his opinion about Democrats, even.

The young voting for Sanders makes perfect sense to me. They are the new proletariat, saddled with crazy student debt and facing a world where the old middle-class dream is suddenly impossible. They did exactly what they were told to do —- go to college! study hard! —- and look at what happened. Look at what a shitty trick the adult world pulled on them. As soon as they were old enough to sign those student loan papers, we put them in debt.

CHAMPION: Your book spends a great deal of time quibbling with the way in which “the best people” are selected for prominent positions and for more lucrative jobs. But I don’t know if professionals can be entirely blamed for the vagaries that you ascribe to them. They may not be suffering like those who were victimized by lenders during the subprime crisis, but they too are motivated by the need to keep food on the table and must play the game if they hope to survive. If the professionals are being nice and polite, tweaking their LinkedIn profiles and marketing themselves at networking functions as “the best,” aren’t they merely succumbing to the rules and folkways of a ruthless capitalist system that no longer welcomes outliers or innovators? To what extent are professionals responsible for this apparent synthesis (to use a “professional” buzz word) between playing it safe and growing income inequality? When did this impulse start? Would you go out on a limb and call these professionals “willing executioners” (a la Goldhagen) in an altogether different nightmare?

FRANK: This is the biggest question of all, isn’t it, and it needs to be asked because I have sketched out a picture of a country in which invisible and even unmentionable forces like class interest seem to pull people this way and that. It is particularly noticeable because the people I’m describing are the ones we always think of not as being part of a “class” but merely as being “the best”: The highly educated people at the top of our system of status and respect.

I think they do have free will and agency, or else I wouldn’t write books like this one —- which is addressed to the very class I’m criticizing, with a big old index finger pointing at them from the cover of the book.

So I think they are culpable to some degree. They should know better. These are highly educated people we’re talking about and they should understand that much of their worldview is based not on fact but on superstition and prejudice —- their unquestioning attitude toward trade deals, for instance, or their knee-jerk contempt for working-class people. You mention their fixation on creativity and innovation, and it has always intrigued me that the literature of creativity and innovation is complete rubbish and yet they eat it up anyway, tuning in to the TED talks and going about their utterly un-innovative business.

The story has some complications, too. We have a powerful political party given wholeheartedly to the interests of professionals, but it seems not to notice that certain professions are crumbling (journalism, the humanities) and others are in danger of being corrupted altogether (accountancy, medicine, real-estate appraising). The professionals who have seen their livelihoods thus ruined are angry and even sometimes come to identify with blue-collar workers who have seen their cities destroyed by the Democrats’ great god “globalization.” But the party of the professionals doesn’t listen to these unfortunate members of its own precious cohort.

The ones out front keep playing the game, as you put it, weirdly unconcerned while the devil takes the hindmost. The devil will get to them too, eventually, but in the meantime the winners do not show any sign of awareness. That blindness fascinates me.

CHAMPION: But the Democratic Party is also the party of Elizabeth Warren, Barbara Lee, John Conyers, Robert Reich, and Donna Edwards, among other progressives. For all the justifiable criticisms leveled against Democrats for hewing too closely to mainstream neoliberalism — or, for that matter, the recent viral videos of Hillary Clinton refusing to address Black Lives Matter’s Ashley Wlliams on mass incarceration or angrily responding to Greenpeace’s Eva Resnick-Day — we are nevertheless dealing with a political climate in which “socialism” is no longer a dirty word. You criticize Reich’s The Work of Nations for endorsing the “symbolic analysts” even as he criticized income inequality and even as you point to his ongoing work against economic injustice. But is this really on the level of Deval Patrick joining the board of leading subprime lender Ameriquest in 2004 after fighting on behalf of the marginalized and the impoverished? Effective political reform is often about compromise. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson have argued that standing doggedly for one’s principles and refusing to compromise is an endorsement for the status quo. Is there an acceptable level of compromise that can reconcile this disparity between an indignant working class that feels left out of the process and what you identify as a lack of awareness from the “party of professionals”?

FRANK: I acknowledge of course that there are exceptions to my theory, and that there are lots of good Democrats out there. There may even be good Republicans out there. Robert Reich is one of the good guys today —- one of the best guys, actually -— but The Work of Nations, which he published way back in 1991, really got the problem of inequality wrong. It heaped praise on what he called “symbolic analysts” (one of many terms of endearment Democrats have made up for white-collar professionals) and announced that, in the future, we would all either have to join their ranks or serve them.

You ask if that’s as bad as one of the missteps of Deval Patrick. I truly have no idea how I would make such a judgment. One is an influential book of economic theory, the other is a promising Democratic politician signing up with a notorious subprime lender. They are analogous deeds, in a way, but also in different categories.

Nor do I really know what the acceptable level of compromise is in some abstract way. I will say this, however: The entire history I trace is one of ordinary people’s interests being systematically ignored and overruled by a clique of upper-class liberals who are in love with their own virtue. They have no trouble with compromise in one direction. Leading Democrats are forever trying to strike a deal with the Republicans in Congress on Social Security and the budget —- think of Obama and his pursuit of the “grand bargain,” a phrase which was my working title for the book. But when it comes to people on the left, Democrats usually invite them simply to shut up. These are people they can’t stand. On this, see: The works and achievements of Rahm Emanuel.

CHAMPION: How does splitting hairs over a neoliberal position taken twenty-five years ago by someone who you now acknowledge to be a bona-fide progressive help us to understand how the Democratic Party has changed or what we need to do to combat it? Let’s contend with bigger fish. You heavily criticize Bill Clinton in your book. And I would tend to agree with you. Bill Clinton’s alliance with Dick Morris, his signing of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, his deregulation of telecom and interstate banking, and his willful repeal of Glass-Steagall all feel very much like the actions of a “bad Democrat” and the kind of narrative that gets swept under the rug in these discussions on how many Democrats aren’t terribly dissimilar from Republicans. I’m sure you’re familiar with the infamous story behind Bill and Hillary Clinton’s first date, which involved the pair crossing a picket line and offering themselves as scabs so they could see a Rothko exhibit at the Yale Art Gallery. This aligns neatly with the problems you’re identifying. But it also suggests that the more pernicious qualities of compromise lie dormant inside any politician who aspires to great power. You also observe that Obama’s three great achievements — the 2009 stimulus package, Dodd-Frank, and the Affordable Care Act — are undermined by Democrats who follow up with a professional-minded consensus. If we’re going to call out the “party of professionals,” don’t we need to consider the full narrative of how the more prominent figureheads have stood against the working class instead of singling out comparatively minor indiscretions from those who are now fighting against income inequality?

FRANK: You’re talking about Robert Reich and The Work of Nations again. My understanding of history is that we are supposed to seek the truth about how the past unfolded regardless of whether historical actors later change their minds or express regret for what they did. Bill Clinton has apologized several times for the 1994 crime bill as well as for many other things; that might make us think more highly of him as a person but it doesn’t undo the crime bill or erase its consequences from history. Similarly, The Work of Nations was an essential document of its time. It was very influential in the early years of the Clinton Administration. Its author was made Secretary of Labor. That Reich has changed his views since then is commendable —- and I think very highly of what he’s doing now -— but his conversion to a different point of view in recent years doesn’t change the political culture of the 1990s.

I most definitely think we need to underscore how prominent Democratic figureheads have stood against the working class, and in particular we need to look at their ideas and their legislative deeds. This is why I go into such detail on the legislative history of the Clinton years, focusing especially on the five items his admirers actually celebrated him for: NAFTA, the crime bill, welfare reform, deregulation of banks and telecoms, and the balanced budget. All of these were disasters for working people, either directly or indirectly.

The issue of compromise and consensus is a fascinating one. Democrats have been far more earnest seekers of consensus than Republicans, and I wanted to know why. This is one of the biggest differences between the two parties, and the “party of the professionals” hypothesis explains it perfectly. The politics of professionalism is technocracy, an ideology in which the solution to every problem is known to educated people and the correct experts. When they look at Washington, technocrats know that politics is just a form of entertainment that gets in the way of the right-minded; it blocks the educated people from doing what everyone knows is the right thing; and therefore technocrats always gravitate to the same answer: try to reach a grand bargain with the smart folks on the other side. Thus Obama on the budget, and thus Clinton on Social Security.

CHAMPION: History is certainly about understanding how powerful figures alter their viewpoints and adjust their positions. But if Reich was willing to change, why then is a putatively liberal government so unwilling to adjust its course? You point to how FDR employed experts — such as Harry Hopkins, Marriner Eccles, Henry Wallace, and Harry Truman — who were all outliers in some way, many with a lack of academic credentials that led to bold ideas and off-kilter policies. But Roosevelt’s response to financial paralysis was also famously guided by the mantra “Above all, try something.”

It was certainly “bold, persistent experimentation” that Roosevelt called for in 1932, but some historians have argued that it was both the law of averages and Roosevelt’s centralized authority that allowed for his much needed reform to happen. If we want to repair income inequality, is our only remedy some autocratic figure operating in the FDR/Hamilton mode who is granted supreme authority and willing to employ any tactic to do so? Or are there other remedies that aren’t teetering perilously towards such absolutism? To cite one example of the Beltway dynamics in play here, it remains to be seen whether Republican senators will change their mind on potential Supreme Court Justice Merrick Garland, but the legislative opposition suggests that “bold, persistent experimentation” isn’t going to be allowed anytime soon and that any future Democratic President is fated to be hamstrung by the very technocratic compromise that you’re understandably condemning. On the other hand, “bold, persistent experimentation” — as recently documented by journalist Gabriel Sherman — is precisely what has allowed Trump to sink his talons into the 2016 election as much as he has. Trump is a perfect example of politics as “a form of entertainment that gets in the way of the right-minded” and this didn’t even come from technocratic Democrats. So is there any real hope for repair? Do you feel that there’s any truth to Susan Sarandon’s recent suggestion to Chris Hayes, mired in controversy, that a potential Trump Presidency might inspire more people to take a gamble on a progressive revolution (if that is indeed what is needed here)?

FRANK: As it happens, there was a golden moment for boldness and experimentation in recent years, and it came and went in 2009 after the collapse of Wall Street and its rescue by the Federal government. Many things were possible in that moment that weren’t possible at other times. But that particular crisis went to waste. Obama deliberately steered us back toward the status quo ante, and worked hard to get everything back like it was before. “The Center Held,” to slightly modify the title of Jonathan Alter’s second Obama book.

Regarding Trump: I am a big fan of Franklin Roosevelt, and I don’t think that Trump is comparable in any way. Being willing to go before the cameras and say anything, like Trump, does not really put a politician in the same category as FDR, any more than does being a jazz musician who is a great soloist or a comedian who’s really good at improv.

Your concern about the present situation possibly requiring an autocrat or an absolutist is very intriguing, however, and it’s a common fear. But flip the question around a little bit. The way I see it, autocracy is already here —- economic autocracy, I mean -— and democracy is the solution. It is true what you say about Roosevelt wielding power like few other presidents, but the things that really turned this country around involved economic democracy more than they did the heavy hand of the state. I am thinking in particular here of two things that we identify with FDR, antitrust and organized labor. Both of them involved challenging oligarchy by empowering countervailing forces, either competitors or workers.

Let’s talk about unions for a moment. They are profoundly democratic institutions even when they aren’t full democracies themselves (a common problem) because they extend the idea of democratic rights and voice into the workplace. For decades Americans thought of unions as a normal part of civil society, and yet today they are dying, thanks to the one-sided power of corporate management -— and the indifference of their friends in the Democratic Party. What’s awesome about unions is that they would help enormously to reduce inequality, and they would do it without the heavy hand of the state. No need for massive redistribution by Washington: just allow workers to have a voice, let them negotiate a contract with their employer, and they will take care of it automatically. More democracy will solve the problem.

CHAMPION: But is democracy enough to combat economic autocracy? We’re dealing with a strong plutocratic base of mainstream Democratic voters and whatever fallout we’re going to have in this post-Citizens United political landscape. The “fight for $15” battle, arguably labor’s greatest recent development, is part of the conversation only because workers made this happen at the local level. There are also pragmatics to consider. Bernie Sanders gave a recent interview to the New York Daily News Editorial Board that has made the rounds. Aside from the stunning revelation that Sanders is unfamiliar with subway MetroCards (which is understandable), the larger concern was that Sanders appeared unable to pinpoint a precise method for breaking up the banks. At the beginning of the book, you describe a Seattle firefighter asking you if there was any economic savior that would prevent the middle class from sinking into poverty. You write, “I had no good answer for him. Nobody does.” If you’re asking the so-called “symbolic analysts” to jump on board the bus passing through Decatur, they’re going to need an answer. They’re going to need more than a loose theoretical idea of what the Fed can do to rein in JP Morgan Chase and corporate greed. What can you possibly tell them to shake them out of their status quo stupor? Is this a struggle where working and middle class liberals are fated to fight in their respective corners? How might technocrats be persuaded to become more inclusive beyond revisiting the historical record?

FRANK: There are all sorts of practical things that can be done to address inequality and halt the deterioration of the middle class; I mentioned two of the biggest in my last answer. Doing something about runaway financialization is also a good idea, even if Bernie Sanders couldn’t name the exact legal method by which he would do it in that one interview. Inequality is not an insoluble problem. What that firefighter was asking, however, was what kind of band-aid will be tossed to working people under our present course and our existing system. Clearly the answer to that is . . . nothing.

Well, maybe something. Maybe, under President Hillary Clinton, there’ll be microloans for all. Good times.

However, to make something real happen will require a major political reversal, a reversal in which politics once again reflects the interests of the country’s working-class majority. This will only happen if such people themselves demand it, and it heartens me to see that we are moving decisively closer to that this election year.

The main thing required of the comfortable liberal class in such a situation is to take a good long look at themselves and their happy world and understand that they aren’t the bearers of virtue and righteousness that the media constantly assures them they are. They need to understand that a good chunk of their political worldview is based on attitudes that are little more than prejudice toward people who didn’t follow the same university-based career path as them.

What they need is a moment of introspection. What they need is to understand that those people in Decatur are their neighbors, their relatives, their fellow Americans, and that’s why I wrote this book.

March 31, 2016March 31, 2016 by Edward Champion

In Defense of Susan Sarandon: How the Pro-Hillary Media Distorted a Vital Dialogue

Susan Sarandon’s recent remarks on “revolution” have been distorted by a terrified cadre of pro-Hillary media types that have willfully overlooked important observations about how to rectify a broken system.

If you learned about Susan Sarandon’s remarks on Monday night’s installment of All In from a sensationalist Slate article written by Michelle Goldberg, you might have believed that the famed actress and lifelong progressive had called for balaclava-wearing Bernie Sanders supporters to throw Molotovs and overturn burning cars on live television. You might have believed that Sarandon had willfully aligned herself with the #NeverHillary campaign recently launched by Karl Rove’s super-PAC, basking in the prospective anarchy from a clueless tableau of Hollywood privilege. But after seeing Chris Hayes’s interview with Sarandon, I was stunned not so much by Sarandon’s remarks, which were observational and pragmatic and hardly evocative of Yippies levitating the Pentagon, but by the way in which Sarandon’s thoughtfulness had been so deliberately mangled by a “journalist” who had announced, only one month before, that she would be voting for Hillary Clinton.

Goldberg painted Sarandon as “a rich white celebrity with nothing on the line” and insinuated that she was part of a group of “posturing radicals on social media who pretend Clinton would be no better than Trump.” But Goldberg’s superficial remarks failed to fairly and accurately represent the far more important dialogue about what electing a compromise candidate to the White House really means. Can’t one have doubts about Hillary Clinton as President even as one simultaneously recognizes the threat of Trump? Why should such a position be shocking?

It was Chris Hayes who transformed the Sanders/Sarandon notion of revolution into “Leninist” with his leading question, not Sarandon. And it was Goldberg, cavalierly cleaving to Hayes’s framing, who trotted out the wholly inapplicable Ernst Thälmann parallel used so frequently to illustrate how German progressives failed to unite to stop Hitler’s election as Chancellor. Never mind that the German election of 1933 did not involve a two party election and that, should Hillary clinch the nomination, it is doubtful at this point that any Bull Moose-style third party will emerge to reproduce these conditions.

As Orwell once wrote, “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” And the truth Sarandon was telling involved how income inequality, the erosion of the middle class, and the failure of career politicians lacking the spine to sign on for the Fight for $15, have caused a not inconsiderable number of Americans to place their stock in outsiders like Trump and Sanders. As I argued in December, one doesn’t have to be a Jacobin subscriber to comprehend that this is a perfectly natural response to an establishment that has failed to rectify serious injustices in any substantial way. We are living in circumstances that call for far more drastic progressive action than the Democratic status quo. This isn’t even that “revolutionary” of an idea, but it is revolutionary by weak-kneed American political standards. And if this quieter form of American “revolution,” which has been seen quite prominently with young voters flocking in droves to Bernie Sanders, is delayed this election cycle, then perhaps there is a stronger likelihood of a revolutionary front emerging after the atavistic horrors of a potential Trump presidency. That’s how revolutions work, you see. They revolt against an establishment. They don’t even have to be that extreme. But Chris Hayes and Michelle Goldberg refused to entertain these fine distinctions. For all their pro-Hillary pragmatism, they couldn’t seem to understand that you could play a comparable long game as a revolutionary.

Here is the pertinent transcript from the interview:

HAYES: Right, but isn’t the question always in an election about choices, right. I mean, I think a lot of people think to themselves well if it’s Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and I think Bernie Sanders probably would think this…

SARANDON: I think Bernie probably would encourage people because he doesn’t have any ego in this thing. But I think a lot of people are, “Sorry, I just can’t bring myself to do that.”

HAYES: How about you personally?

SARANDON: I don’t know. I’m going to see what happens.

HAYES: Really?

SARANDON: Really.

HAYES: I…I cannot believe that as you’re watching the, that Donald Trump…

SARANDON: Some people feel Donald Trump will bring the revolution immediately. If he gets in, then things will really, you know, explode.

HAYES: Oh, you’re saying the Leninist model of “heighten the contradictions.”

SARANDON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some people feel that.

HAYES: Don’t you think that’s dangerous?

SARANDON: I think that what’s going on now — if you think it’s pragmatic to shore up the status quo right now, then you’re not in touch with the status quo. The statue quo is not working, and I think it’s dangerous to think that we can continue the way we are with the militarized police force, with privatized prisons, with the death penalty, with the low minimum wage, with threats to women’s rights, and think that you can’t do something huge to turn that around. Because the country is not in good shape. If you’re in the middle class, it’s disappearing.

And you look, if you want to go see Michael Moore’s documentary, you’ll see it’s pretty funny the way they describe it. But you’ll see that health care and education in all these other countries, we’ve been told for so long that it’s impossible.

HAYES: Canada.

SARANDON: It’s like we’ve been in this bad relationship and now we have to break up with the guy ’cause we realize we’re worth it. We should have these things. We have to stop prioritizing war. And I don’t like the fact she talks about Henry Kissinger as being her goto guy, for the stuff that’s happened in Libya and other things I don’t think is good.

“I don’t know.” Not #neverhillary. “I’m going to see what happens.” A reasonable statement given that the final election is still a little less than eight months away and that there is still plenty of time to deliberate. “Dangerous.” The idea of even remotely considering how our present system isn’t good enough to help out the working and the middle classes, even under a Hillary Clinton administration, and using the probability of a Trump presidency to consider future momentum.

This really shouldn’t be that shocking. Thomas Frank’s recent book, Listen, Liberal, of which I will have more to say about in a forthcoming dispatch, doesn’t mention Bernie Sanders at all, but points to several examples of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama failing to honor the needs of the working class and willfully distancing themselves from the New Deal. It is no great secret that the last three decades of mainstream Democratic politics have been less about providing a safety net for hard-working Americans and more about enforcing conditions in which they will have to go into debt and willfully acquiesce to an unchecked plutocracy. And it is shameful that any criticism or uncertainty expressed about this Faustian bargain, which uproots lives and diminishes American potential, is now considered by apparatchiks like Goldberg to be akin to pissing in the pool.

I get it. The 2016 presidential election has become so preposterously cartoonish that it almost seems as if Donald Trump will soon act out grotesque scenes from Pasolini’s Salò before an appreciative crowd. Trump is a highly frightening individual who believes the Geneva Convention to be a problem and who seriously suggested that women should be punished for abortion, statements that were so unthinkingly extreme that two pro-life groups issued statements denouncing Trump’s comments. It is enough for any sane and rational individual to clamber inside her own shell, pointing to the problematic Kissinger pal going out of her way to tone down hard truths as the lover you’ll settle for.

Let’s talk about the “gormless unreality” of Senator Elizabeth Warren hitting the Senate floor denouncing oligarchy, corruption, and Citizens United. Or how Los Angeles has led the charge to raise minimum wage, causing California Governor Jerry Brown to propose similar reform at the state level. Or the nonpartisan efforts of Rootstrikers calling for Wall Street reform. Or how the Sanders campaign learned important lessons from Occupy Wall Street on how to build a movement.

These are developments that allow any progressive to maintain some lingering faith in a feral political system and that demand higher dialogue, not clickbait snipers distorting and demeaning radical ideas for a paycheck.

December 8, 2015December 8, 2015 by Edward Champion

On the Rise of Trump, the Failure to Reach the American People, and the Importance of “Great”

Donald Trump continues to surge in the polls and voice outlandish and reckless statements, but the key to defeating him may involve the use of the word “great.”

It is all too easy to dismiss a Donald Trump voter as a mere xenophobic bigot or to assert that this flailing mass of supporters, which hangs upon the tyrant’s every terrible word, is little more than a blank uneducated slate with which to imprint the most sinister hatreds and sordid hypocrisies seen from an outsider presidential candidate since George Wallace. There are certainly polls which suggest that the Trump base is overwhelmingly white, with little more than high school education. But when you leave a person for dead, cut adrift without resources in a callous American wasteland, and when your answer to his unsavory entreaties is to leave him out of your Weltanschauung or to block him on Twitter, do not be surprised if he turns to a demagogue in anger. Do not be astonished when he turns furious when there are no jobs and his life is discounted and he is very much afraid and his griefs, which can be reckoned with if caught early enough, transform into a hateful cancer. Do not be shocked when a tyrant comes along who grants the illusion of inclusiveness and who plays into a voter’s fears with the most extraordinary and unthinkable statements imaginable. Because you, with your gluten-free meals and your yoga mats and your blinkered sunbeam privilege, were never there for him.

We have been here before with Ross Perot and the Tea Party and even John Anderson in 1980. But we have also been here with Occupy Wall Street and Ralph Nader and, presently on the Left, the promise of Bernie Sanders. Populism is an amorphous and intoxicating serpent, epitomized by the infamous 1829 inauguration of Andrew Jackson, in which a drunken mob stormed the White House shortly after this twisted Jeffersonian offshoot was sworn in as a “great” patriarchal protector, a throng that could only be coaxed from the inner sanctum by bowls of spiked punch stationed on the outside lawn. But like it or not, we must accept that the American people have been told repeatedly that their individual viewpoints matter, that an everyman’s perspective is just as valid as that of a statesman, and that the playing field, even after nearly every study has demonstrated that income inequality is worse now than it was during the Gilded Age, is level. It is a distressing mirage, an insurmountable dream that even our most level-headed politicians continue to prop up. But who can blame anyone for wanting to believe in it? If we didn’t have that promise, if we continued to accept doom and gloom and mass shootings as the new American normal, then we’d have no reason to participate in politics.

Trump understands all this. And he is willing to spout forth any prevarication if it will carry the public through the murk and into his manipulative hands. Trump has endured, despite his shocking proposal to block all Muslims from entering the United States, and has maintained a 20 point lead in the polls not so much because of his beliefs, but because no other politician, with the possible exception of Sanders, has sustained the image of a formidable leader who is well outside the tentacles of a broken establishment and who will fix every problem through the sheer force of his inflexible (if deeply problematic) will. That it has come down to some sordid and superficial yahoo who boasts of possessing “the world’s greatest memory” speaks to the ravenous American hunger for something great.

When populism has excelled in our nation, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats and his many personal visits to workers employed through the Civilian Conservation Corps or the WPA (even if this came with the double-edged sword of internment camps), it was established on an intimacy between leader and follower, but one in which the follower had some real sense that his views were being considered. This was a relatively benign relationship predicated on national pride, of a belief in America as a nation of greatness. And if we listen to why voters are gravitating towards Trump, it becomes very clear that all they want is someone, anyone, who is aware of their existence and who will do something about it. They want someone who will “make America great again” or to make “America the way we once were.” The first sentiment is taken directly from a Trump supporter who is parroting the slogan on Trump’s website, that is indeed purchasable as a baseball cap, and that is inherently no different from Obama’s “Hope” campaign in 2008. And while it’s tempting to view this notion of “greatness” as something that is a regressive throwback due the “way we once were” qualifier, what voters are really communicating is that they want to be part of something great, which need not be rooted in recycling the past but in ensuring that greatness, previously experienced, is a palpable quality of our future. The promise of hope and change is simply not enough anymore. The American people rightfully demand a leader who will create results, even if this ideal is completely at odds with the realities of political compromise and brokering deals.

It is clear that Trump cannot be stopped through reasonable denouncements or a rhetorical standoff or pundits repeatedly limning his lies. What’s needed to sustain the American faith and reach the people is a voice that can speak stronger and with greater empathy and inclusion: a principled leader who won’t leave a single person behind (including Muslims) and whose very power will deflate all the air out of Trump’s balloon, exposing him for the hollow carnival act he really is. The Democrats have not had any presidential frontrunner willing to substantially include a voting bloc outside its centrist, middle-class demographic (that is, “working class,” blue-collar, the unemployed, or the homeless) since Mario Cuomo’s famous 1984 speech at the National Democratic Convention. This has been a serious mistake, especially given the nimble methods that Republicans have employed to scoop up this abandoned group of people. What made Cuomo’s speech so stirring was not just its remarkable truth-telling, but Cuomo’s insistence that he was not afraid to stand up to Reagan’s myth of America as “a shining city on a hill.” It was very much the principled outsider responding with a sense of history and a sense of honesty and a sense of profound need that would, in turn, create a great nation. Indeed, the word “great” is mentioned many times in Cuomo’s speech: “on behalf of the great Empire state,” “thank you for the great privilege,” “Today our great Democratic party,” “We would rather have laws written by the patron of this great city,” “to occupy the highest state, in the greatest State, in the greatest nation,” and, perhaps most importantly, “for love of this great nation.”

I illustrate Cuomo’s use of the word “great” to demonstrate that using “great” need not be a reductionist Faustian bargain or a capitulation to sloganeering if it is used reasonably. Cuomo believed, in ways that many Democrats have not since, that our nation was capable of being truly great. His sense of greatness was convincing not only because of the nimble way he weaved it into eloquent rhetoric, but because the modifier actually stands as a reliable measure for American opportunity. Stacked next to Cuomo, Trump’s ideas about “great” are little more than cheap fizz skimming off the beer keg.

Anyone who wishes to defeat Trump, whether as a Republican contender or the leading Democratic candidate, might wish to observe how the word “great” has struck a chord with his supporters. “Great,” which is tied in our notions of the “Great American Dream,” the “Great American Novel,” and even Great American Cookies, clearly has enough life left in it to change the course of the next eleven months. The time has come to reappropriate “great” from Trump and use it with a more meaningful greatness that wins back voters. America is too important a nation to have its notions of “greatness” be defined by a man hawking snake oil and hate. And failing that, for the cynics and the skeptics understandably tired of all these platitudes, there’s always the giddy nihilistic prospect of “great” becoming meaningless through overuse. Which would reveal Trump’s notion of “making America great again” for the shallow mantra it truly is.

Reluctant Habits

a cultural forum in ever-shifting standing

Tag / donald trump

Video and Transcript of Leaked Lesley Stahl 60 Minutes Interview with Donald Trump

The Shameful Gaslighting of Bernie Sanders

Trump Will Never Be a Normal President

The Silver Lining: A Potential Bipartisan Senate Blockade to Stop Trump

Loser: A Report from the Trump Tower Protests

Trump Interrupts

Ghostbusters: The Compromise Candidate of Summer Blockbusters

A Conversation with Thomas Frank

In Defense of Susan Sarandon: How the Pro-Hillary Media Distorted a Vital Dialogue

On the Rise of Trump, the Failure to Reach the American People, and the Importance of “Great”