Rod Dreher's Blog, page 553

Every Picture Tells A Story

Via @streeterryan

Note this too, from Nate Silver, repeat, Nate Silver:

Don't think people are really grasping how plausible it is that Trump could become president. It's a close election right now.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 23, 2016

The Goodness Of Wayne

My wife directed me to this Facebook post by a friend of ours who works for the West Feliciana Parish Sheriff’s Office, headquartered on Highway 61. I’ve taken her name off the top in the screen grab, because the important thing is this man’s deed. Look:

UPDATE: My wife is on her way to Baton Rouge. She sends this photo below of traffic on Highway 61. Officer Gerald’s funeral cortege is passing by. His is the first of three police officer funerals we will have locally in the next few days. This is going to happen with each man — all slain by Gavin Long. Everyone is pulled over to do him honor. One of the great things about living in the South is people here still pull over on the shoulder of the road when a funeral procession goes by.

“All traffic is stopped in both direction,” she tells me. “People have abandoned their cars and are standing there waiting to watch him pass by. There are cars parked on the shoulders of every road for as far as I can see.”

UPDATE.2: My wife just texted from the roadside, where she and our middle son are paying their respects to Ofc. Gerald. They stood next to a black mom and her son doing the same thing. “You could tell she was making sure he understood what he was seeing,” she texts. “Not at all just a white crowd showing respect, thank God.”

Amen to that. May good people of all races show solidarity with each other against the diabolic forces that seek to tear us apart.

Trump: Tribune Of Poor White People

I wrote last week about the new nonfiction book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance, the Yale Law School graduate who grew up in the poverty and chaos of an Appalachian clan. The book is an American classic, an extraordinary testimony to the brokenness of the white working class, but also its strengths. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. With the possible exception of Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic, for Americans who care about politics and the future of our country, Hillbilly Elegy is the most important book of 2016. You cannot understand what’s happening now without first reading J.D. Vance. His book does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book did for poor black people: give them voice and presence in the public square.

This interview I just did with Vance in two parts (the final question I asked after Trump’s convention speech) shows why.

RD: A friend who moved to West Virginia a couple of years ago tells me that she’s never seen poverty and hopelessness like what’s common there. And she says you can drive through the poorest parts of the state, and see nothing but TRUMP signs. Reading “Hillbilly Elegy” tells me why. Explain it to people who haven’t yet read your book. 

J.D. VANCE: The simple answer is that these people–my people–are really struggling, and there hasn’t been a single political candidate who speaks to those struggles in a long time.  Donald Trump at least tries.

What many don’t understand is how truly desperate these places are, and we’re not talking about small enclaves or a few towns–we’re talking about multiple states where a significant chunk of the white working class struggles to get by.  Heroin addiction is rampant.  In my medium-sized Ohio county last year, deaths from drug addiction outnumbered deaths from natural causes.  The average kid will live in multiple homes over the course of her life, experience a constant cycle of growing close to a “stepdad” only to see him walk out on the family, know multiple drug users personally, maybe live in a foster home for a bit (or at least in the home of an unofficial foster like an aunt or grandparent), watch friends and family get arrested, and on and on.  And on top of that is the economic struggle, from the factories shuttering their doors to the Main Streets with nothing but cash-for-gold stores and pawn shops.

The two political parties have offered essentially nothing to these people for a few decades.  From the Left, they get some smug condescension, an exasperation that the white working class votes against their economic interests because of social issues, a la Thomas Frank (more on that below).  Maybe they get a few handouts, but many don’t want handouts to begin with.  

From the Right, they’ve gotten the basic Republican policy platform of tax cuts, free trade, deregulation, and paeans to the noble businessman and economic growth.  Whatever the merits of better tax policy and growth (and I believe there are many), the simple fact is that these policies have done little to address a very real social crisis.  More importantly, these policies are culturally tone deaf: nobody from southern Ohio wants to hear about the nobility of the factory owner who just fired their brother.

Trump’s candidacy is music to their ears.  He criticizes the factories shipping jobs overseas.  His apocalyptic tone matches their lived experiences on the ground.  He seems to love to annoy the elites, which is something a lot of people wish they could do but can’t because they lack a platform.  

The last point I’ll make about Trump is this: these people, his voters, are proud.  A big chunk of the white working class has deep roots in Appalachia, and the Scots-Irish honor culture is alive and well.  We were taught to raise our fists to anyone who insulted our mother.  I probably got in a half dozen fights when I was six years old.  Unsurprisingly, southern, rural whites enlist in the military at a disproportionate rate.  Can you imagine the humiliation these people feel at the successive failures of Bush/Obama foreign policy?  My military service is the thing I’m most proud of, but when I think of everything happening in the Middle East, I can’t help but tell myself: I wish we would have achieved some sort of lasting victory.  No one touched that subject before Trump, especially not in the Republican Party. 

I’m not a hillbilly, nor do I descend from hillbilly stock, strictly speaking. But I do come from poor rural white people in the South. I have spent most of my life and career living among professional class urbanite, most of them on the East Coast, and the barely-banked contempt they — the professional-class whites, I mean — have for poor white people is visceral, and obvious to me. Yet it is invisible to them. Why is that? And what does it have to do with our politics today? 

I know exactly what you mean.  My grandma (Mamaw) recognized this instinctively.  She said that most people were probably prejudiced, but they had to be secretive about it.  “We”–meaning hillbillies–“are the only group of people you don’t have to be ashamed to look down upon.”  During my final year at Yale Law, I took a small class with a professor I really admired (and still do).  I was the only veteran in the class, and when this came up somehow in conversation, a young woman looked at me and said, “I can’t believe you were in the Marines.  You just seem so nice.  I thought that people in the military had to act a certain way.”  It was incredibly insulting, and it was my first real introduction to the idea that this institution that was so important among my neighbors was looked down upon in such a personal way. To this lady, to be in the military meant that you had to be some sort of barbarian.  I bit my tongue, but it’s one of those comments I’ll never forget.  

The “why” is really difficult, but I have a few thoughts.  The first is that humans appear to have some need to look down on someone; there’s just a basic tribalistic impulse in all of us.  And if you’re an elite white professional, working class whites are an easy target: you don’t have to feel guilty for being a racist or a xenophobe.  By looking down on the hillbilly, you can get that high of self-righteousness and superiority without violating any of the moral norms of your own tribe.  So your own prejudice is never revealed for what it is.

A lot of it is pure disconnect–many elites just don’t know a member of the white working class. A professor once told me that Yale Law shouldn’t accept students who attended state universities for their undergraduate studies.  (A bit of background: Yale Law takes well over half of its student body from very elite private schools.)  “We don’t do remedial education here,” he said.  Keep in mind that this guy was very progressive and cared a lot about income inequality and opportunity.  But he just didn’t realize that for a kid like me, Ohio State was my only chance–the one opportunity I had to do well in a good school.  If you removed that path from my life, there was nothing else to give me a shot at Yale.  When I explained that to him, he was actually really receptive.  He may have even changed his mind.

What does it mean for our politics?  To me, this condescension is a big part of Trump’s appeal.  He’s the one politician who actively fights elite sensibilities, whether they’re good or bad.  I remember when Hillary Clinton casually talked about putting coal miners out of work, or when Obama years ago discussed working class whites clinging to their guns and religion.  Each time someone talks like this, I’m reminded of Mamaw’s feeling that hillbillies are the one group you don’t have to be ashamed to look down upon.  The people back home carry that condescension like a badge of honor, but it also hurts, and they’ve been looking for someone for a while who will declare war on the condescenders.  If nothing else, Trump does that.  

This is where, to me, there’s a lot of ignorance around “Teflon Don.”  No one seems to understand why conventional blunders do nothing to Trump.  But in a lot of ways, what elites see as blunders people back home see as someone who–finally–conducts themselves in a relatable way.  He shoots from the hip; he’s not constantly afraid of offending someone; he’ll get angry about politics; he’ll call someone a liar or a fraud.  This is how a lot of people in the white working class actually talk about politics, and even many elites recognize how refreshing and entertaining it can be!  So it’s not really a blunder as much as it is a rich, privileged Wharton grad connecting to people back home through style and tone.  Viewed like this, all the talk about “political correctness” isn’t about any specific substantive point, as much as it is a way of expanding the scope of acceptable behavior.  People don’t want to believe they have to speak like Obama or Clinton to participate meaningfully in politics, because most of us don’t speak like Obama or Clinton.

On the other hand, as Hillbilly Elegy says so well, that reflexive reverse-snobbery of the hillbillies and those like them is a real thing too, and something that undermines their prospects in life. Is there any way for it to be overcome, other than getting out of the bubble, as you did?

I’m not sure we can overcome it entirely. Nearly everyone in my family who has achieved some financial success for themselves, from Mamaw to me, has been told that they’ve become “too big for their britches.”  I don’t think this value is all bad.  It forces us to stay grounded, reminds us that money and education are no substitute for common sense and humility.  But, it does create a lot of pressure not to make a better life for yourself, and let’s face it: when you grow up in a dying steel town with very few middle class job prospects, making a better life for yourself is often a binary proposition: if you don’t get a good job, you may be stuck on welfare for the rest of your life.

I’m a big believer in the power to change social norms.  To take an obvious recent example, I see the decline of smoking as not just an economic or regulatory matter, but something our culture really flipped on.  So there’s value in all of us–whether we have a relatively large platform or if our platform is just the people who live with us–trying to be a little kinder to the kids who want to make a better future for themselves.  That’s a big part of the reason I wrote the book: it’s meant not just for elites, but for people from my own clan, in the hopes that they’ll better appreciate the ways they can help (or hurt) their own kin. 

At the same time, the hostility between the working class and the elites is so great that there will always be some wariness toward those who go to the other side.  And can you blame them?  A lot of these people know nothing but judgment and condescension from those with financial and political power, and the thought of their children acquiring that same hostility is noxious.  It may just be the sort of value we have to live with.  

The odd thing is, the deeper I get into elite culture, the more I see value in this reverse snobbery.  It’s the great privilege of my life that I’m deep enough into the American elite that I can indulge a little anti-elitism.  Like I said, it keeps you grounded, if nothing else!  But it would have been incredibly destructive to indulge too much of it when I was 18.  

I live in the rural South now, where I was born, and I see the same kind of social pathologies among some poor whites that you write about in Hillbilly Elegy. I also see the same thing among poor blacks, and have heard from a few black friends who made it out as you did the same kind of stories about how their own people turned on them and accused them of being traitors to their family and class — this, only for getting an education and building stable lives for themselves. The thing that so few of us either understand or want to talk about is that nobody who lives the way these poor black and white people do is ever going to amount to anything. There’s never going to be an economy rich enough or a government program strong enough to compensate for the lack of a stable family and the absence of self-discipline. Are Americans even capable of hearing that anymore? 

Judging by the current political conversation, no: Americans are not capable of hearing that anymore.  I was speaking with a friend the other night, and I made the point that the meta-narrative of the 2016 election is learned helplessness as a political value.  We’re no longer a country that believes in human agency, and as a formerly poor person, I find it incredibly insulting.  To hear Trump or Clinton talk about the poor, one would draw the conclusion that they have no power to affect their own lives.  Things have been done to them, from bad trade deals to Chinese labor competition, and they need help.  And without that help, they’re doomed to lives of misery they didn’t choose.  

Obviously, the idea that there aren’t structural barriers facing both the white and black poor is ridiculous.  Mamaw recognized that our lives were harder than rich white people, but she always tempered her recognition of the barriers with a hard-noses willfulness: “never be like those a–holes who think the deck is stacked against them.”  In hindsight, she was this incredibly perceptive woman.  She recognized the message my environment had for me, and she actively fought against it.

There’s good research on this stuff.  Believing you have no control is incredibly destructive, and that may be especially true when you face unique barriers.  The first time I encountered this idea was in my exposure to addiction subculture, which is quite supportive and admirable in its own way, but is full of literature that speaks about addiction as a disease.  If you spend a day in these circles, you’ll hear someone say something to the effect of, “You wouldn’t judge a cancer patient for a tumor, so why judge an addict for drug use.”  This view is a perfect microcosm of the problem among poor Americans.  On the one hand, the research is clear that there are biological elements to addiction–in that way, it does mimic a disease.  On the other hand, the research is also clear that people who believe their addiction is a biologically mandated disease show less ability to resist it.  It’s this awful catch-22, where recognizing the true nature of the problem actually hinders the ability to overcome.  

Interestingly, both in my conversations with poor blacks and whites, there’s a recognition of the role of better choices in addressing these problems.  The refusal to talk about individual agency is in some ways a consequence of a very detached elite, one too afraid to judge and consequently too handicapped to really understand.  At the same time, poor people don’t like to be judged, and a little bit of recognition that life has been unfair to them goes a long way.  Since Hillbilly Elegy came out, I’ve gotten so many messages along the lines of: “Thank you for being sympathetic but also honest.”

I think that’s the only way to have this conversation and to make the necessary changes: sympathy and honesty.  It’s not easy, especially in our politically polarized world, to recognize both the structural and the cultural barriers that so many poor kids face.  But I think that if you don’t recognize both, you risk being heartless or condescending, and often both.  

On the other hand, as a conservative, I grow weary of fellow middle-class conservatives acting as if it were possible simply to bootstrap your way out of poverty. My dad was able to raise my sister and me in the 1970s on a civil servant’s salary, supplemented by my mom’s small salary as a school bus driver. I doubt this would be possible today. You’re a conservative who has known poverty and powerlessness as well as wealth and privilege. What do you have to say to your fellow conservatives?

I think you hit the nail right on the head: we need to judge less and understand more.  It’s so easy for conservatives to use “culture” as an ending point in a discussion–an excuse to rationalize their worldview and then move on–rather than a starting point. I try to do precisely the opposite in Hillbilly Elegy.  This book should start conversations, and it is successful, it will.  

The Atlantic‘s Ta-Nehisi Coates, who I often disagree with, has made a really astute point about culture and the way it has been deployed against the black poor.  His point, basically, is that “culture” is little more than an excuse to blame black people for various pathologies and then move on.  So it’s hardly surprising that when poor people, especially poor black folks, hear “culture,” they instinctively run for the hills.  

But let’s just think about what culture really means, to borrow an example from my life.  One of the things I mention in the book is that domestic strife and family violence are cultural traits–they’re just there, and everyone experiences them in one form or another.  I learned domestic strife from the moment I was born, from more than 15 stepdads and boyfriends I encountered, to the domestic violence case that nearly tore my family apart (I was the primary victim).  So predictably, by the time I got married, I wasn’t a great spouse.  I had to learn, with the help of my aunt and sister (both of whom had successful marriages), but especially with the help of my wife, how not to turn every small disagreement into a shouting match or a public scene.  Too many conservatives look at that situation, say “well that’s a cultural problem, nothing we can do,” and then move on.  They’re right that it’s a cultural problem: I learned domestic strife from my mother, and she learned it from her parents.  

But to speak “culture” and then move on is a total copout, and there are public policy solutions to draw from experiences like this: how could my school have better prepared me for domestic life? how could child welfare services have given me more opportunities to spend time with my Mamaw and my aunt, rather than threatening me–as they did–with the promise of foster care if I kept talking?  These are tough, tough problems, but they’re not totally immune to policy interventions.  Neither are they entirely addressable by government.  It’s just complicated.

That’s just one small example, obviously, and there are many more in the book.  But I think this unwillingness to deal with tough issues–or worse, to pretend they’ll all go away if we can hit 4 percent growth targets–is a significant failure of modern conservative politics.  And looking at the political landscape, this failure may very well have destroyed the conservative movement as we used to know it.

And what do you have to say to liberals?

Well, it’s almost the flip side: stop pretending that every problem is a structural problem, something imposed on the poor from the outside.  I see a significant failure on the Left to understand how these problems develop.  They see rising divorce rates as the natural consequence of economic stress. Undoubtedly, that’s partially true.  Some of these family problems run far deeper.  They see school problems as the consequence of too little money (despite the fact that the per pupil spend in many districts is quite high), and ignore that, as a teacher from my hometown once told me, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids, but they ignore that many of them are raised by wolves.”  Again, they’re not all wrong: certainly some schools are unfairly funded.  But there’s this weird refusal to deal with the poor as moral agents in their own right.  In some cases, the best that public policy can do is help people make better choices, or expose them to better influences through better family policy (like my Mamaw).  

There was a huge study that came out a couple of years ago, led by the Harvard economist Raj Chetty.  He found that two of the biggest predictors of low upward mobility were 1) living in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty and 2) growing up in a neighborhood with a lot of single mothers.  I recall that some of the news articles about the study didn’t even mention the single mother conclusion.  That’s a massive oversight!  Liberals have to get more comfortable with dealing with the poor as they actually are.  I admire their refusal to look down on the least among us, but at some level, that can become an excuse to never really look at the problem at all.

In Hillbilly Elegy, I noticed the parallel between two disciplined forms of life that enabled you and your biological father to transcend the chaos that dragged down so many others y’all knew. You had the US Marine Corps; he had fundamentalist Christianity. How did they work inner transformation within you both? 

Well, I think it’s important to point out that Christianity, in the quirky way I’ve experienced it, was really important to me, too.  For my dad, the way he tells it is that he was a hard partier, he drank a lot, and didn’t have a lot of direction.  His Christian faith gave him focus, forced him to think hard about his personal choices, and gave him a community of people who demanded, even if only implicitly, that he act a certain way.  I think we all understate the importance of moral pressure, but it helped my dad, and it has certainly helped me!  There’s obviously a more explicitly religious argument here, too.  If you believe as I do, you believe that the Holy Spirit works in people in a mysterious way.  I recognize that a lot of secular folks may look down on that, but I’d make one important point: that not drinking, treating people well, working hard, and so forth, requires a lot of willpower when you didn’t grow up in privilege.  That feeling–whether it’s real or entirely fake–that there’s something divine helping you and directing your mind and body, is extraordinarily powerful.  

General Chuck Krulak, a former commandant of the Marine Corps, once said that the most important thing the Corps does for the country is “win wars and make Marines.”  I didn’t understand that statement the first time I heard it, but for a kid like me, the Marine Corps was basically a four-year education in character and self-management.  The challenges start small–running two miles, then three, and more.  But they build on each other.  If you have good mentors (and I certainly did), you are constantly given tasks, yelled at for failing, advised on how not to fail next time, and then given another try.  You learn, through sheer repetition, that you can do difficult things.  And that was quite revelatory for me.  It gave me a lot of self-confidence.  If I had learned helplessness from my environment back home, four years in the Marine Corps taught me something quite different.

The other thing the Marine Corps did is hold our hands and prevent us from making stupid decisions.  It didn’t work on everyone, of course, but I remember telling my senior noncommissioned officer that I was going to buy a car, probably a BMW.  “Stop being an idiot and go get a Honda.” Then I told him that I had been approved for a new Honda, at the dealer’s low interest rate of 21.9 percent.  “Stop being an idiot and go to the credit union.”  He then ordered another Marine to take me to the credit union, open an account, and apply for a loan (the interest rate, despite my awful credit, was around 8 percent).  A lot of elites rely on parents or other networks the first time they made these decisions, but I didn’t even know what I didn’t know.  The Marine Corps ensured that I learned. 

Finally, what did watching Donald Trump’s speech last night make you think about this fall campaign, and the future of the country?

Well, I think the speech itself was a perfect microcosm of why I love and am terrified of Donald Trump.  On the one hand, he criticized the elites and actually acknowledge the hurt of so many working class voters. After so many years of Republican politicians refusing to even talk about factory closures, Trump’s message is an oasis in the desert.  But of course he spent way too much time appealing to people’s fears, and he offered zero substance for how to improve their lives.  It was Trump at his best and worst.

My biggest fear with Trump is that, because of the failures of the Republican and Democratic elites, the bar for the white working class is too low.  They’re willing to listen to Trump about rapist immigrants and banning all Muslims because other parts of his message are clearly legitimate.  A lot of people think Trump is just the first to appeal to the racism and xenophobia that were already there, but I think he’s making the problem worse.

The other big problem I have with Trump is that he has dragged down our entire political conversation.  It’s not just that he inflames the tribalism of the Right; it’s that he encourages the worst impulses of the Left.  In the past few weeks, I’ve heard from so many of my elite friends some version of, “Trump is the racist leader all of these racist white people deserve.” These comments almost always come from white progressives who know literally zero culturally working class Americans.  And I’m always left thinking: if this is the quality of thought of a Harvard Law graduate, then our society is truly doomed.  In a world of Trump, we’ve abandoned the pretense of persuasion.  The November election strikes me as little more than a referendum on whose tribe is bigger.

But I remain incredibly optimistic about the future.  Maybe that’s the hillbilly resilience in me.  Or maybe I’m just an idiot.  But if writing this book, and talking with friends and strangers about its message, has taught me anything, it’s that most people are trying incredibly hard to make it, even in this more complicated and scary world.  The short view of our country is that we’re doomed.  The long view, inherited from my grandparents’ 1930s upbringing in coal country, is that all of us can still control some part of our fate.  Even if we are doomed, there’s reason to pretend otherwise.

—

The book is Hillbilly Elegy. You really, really need to read it.

A Post-Convention Correction

Yesterday, having read an advance copy of Trump’s convention speech, I pronounced it “really good,” and said that it made me think for the first time that he might win in November.

That was the speech on paper. The one he actually delivered was  not the same speech. It had big parts of the published version, but it seemed that he broke it up with constant riffing that dissipated its force.

He got the same message out, but unlike the written version, it had little coherence. It sounded like an angry man ranting (“And another thing…”). I gave up on the speech at one point. We were something like 40 minutes into the thing, and I knew how much more he had to go to complete the script. Couldn’t take any more of that guy shouting at me.

Trump might yet win, because he has powerful themes to work with. But after last night, watching him screw up the most important speech of his life with his inability to stay focused, I am much less confident in his ability to make the sale to the American people. Last night was his golden opportunity to re-introduce himself for the fall campaign. Had he simply stuck to the script that had been written for him, he would have made a strong impression.

But it would have been a false impression. What we got last night was the real Trump: a man so in love with the sound of his own voice that he can’t control himself when it counts. His personal lack of discipline is going to sink him in the general.

What did you think?

UPDATE: Reading the comments, I think some of you are missing my point. I don’t expect Trump to be Cicero. But the delivery is the message here. The fact that Trump could not do something as simple as stick to the speech he was supposed to give, and instead went off on a long, meandering rant, tells us something important about the man and the kind of leader he would be. Reading the advance copy of the speech was one thing; listening to how he riffed incessantly off of it in the actual delivery was very much another. It was like listening to a shouted recitation of a tweetstorm. It did not cohere, and that tells us something about Trump’s scattered, impulsive mind. Sure, no politician at his level writes his own speeches. But the fact that Trump could not remain disciplined long enough to give the most important speech of his life, and instead drifted off into ranting, gives an important clue into the kind of leader he would be.

The ability to communicate clearly and persuasively is a critical component of leadership in an age of mass media. Trump knows how to communicate in the sense of pushing buttons inside people who tend to agree with him already, and activating their passions. But that’s where it stops.

Trump’s Speech Is Good. Really Good

The Federalist publishes an advance copy of Trump’s remarks. These aren’t the remarks I, a follower of the man Swinburne contemptuously called the “pale Galilean,” would have liked to hear tonight. But from a strictly political point of view, this one is a winner that’s completely in touch with the cultural moment. Excerpts:

Our Convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation. The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life. Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country.

Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities. Many have witnessed this violence personally, some have even been its victims.

I have a message for all of you: the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end. Beginning on January 20th 2017, safety will be restored.

The most basic duty of government is to defend the lives of its own citizens. Any government that fails to do so is a government unworthy to lead.

Let me take a time out from the speech to repeat an e-mail a friend in a major American city sent to me this afternoon:

I went to the gun range today. Thursdays in the early afternoon, around 2, is my usual range time. Usually there are 3-5 people shooting. Two weeks ago I was the only one. Today I was first in line when someone finished, which was 45 minutes later. Every alley was full, and there were groups of people in line behind me. One group had 8 people. Of those, only 2 had ever shot. The other 6 want to learn.

I talked to one of my buddies there, and [he] said Monday at 10:00, they open at 9:00, they were already putting people in line, and it has stayed that way all week. He said people are scared, learning to shoot, and trying to get their LTC [license to carry] as quickly as possible.

Trump is definitely speaking to the moment. He may not be speaking to you, but he is speaking to many, many people in the country right now. Back to the Trump address:

The most important difference between our plan and that of our opponents, is that our plan will put America First. Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo. As long as we are led by politicians who will not put America First, then we can be assured that other nations will not treat America with respect. This will all change in 2017.

The American People will come first once again. My plan will begin with safety at home – which means safe neighborhoods, secure borders, and protection from terrorism. There can be no prosperity without law and order. On the economy, I will outline reforms to add millions of new jobs and trillions in new wealth that can be used to rebuild America.

A number of these reforms that I will outline tonight will be opposed by some of our nation’s most powerful special interests. That is because these interests have rigged our political and economic system for their exclusive benefit.

Big business, elite media and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place. They are throwing money at her because they have total control over everything she does. She is their puppet, and they pull the strings.

That is why Hillary Clinton’s message is that things will never change. My message is that things have to change – and they have to change right now. Every day I wake up determined to deliver for the people I have met all across this nation that have been neglected, ignored, and abandoned.

I have visited the laid-off factory workers, and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals. These are the forgotten men and women of our country. People who work hard but no longer have a voice.

I AM YOUR VOICE.

That’s rhetorical gold. All of it. I have never heard Trump or any other politician since Pat Buchanan put it so succinctly. More:

And when a Secretary of State illegally stores her emails on a private server, deletes 33,000 of them so the authorities can’t see her crime, puts our country at risk, lies about it in every different form and faces no consequence – I know that corruption has reached a level like never before.

When the FBI Director says that the Secretary of State was “extremely careless” and “negligent,” in handling our classified secrets, I also know that these terms are minor compared to what she actually did. They were just used to save her from facing justice for her terrible crimes.

In fact, her single greatest accomplishment may be committing such an egregious crime and getting away with it – especially when others have paid so dearly. When that same Secretary of State rakes in millions of dollars trading access and favors to special interests and foreign powers I know the time for action has come.

I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves. Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.

Again, this is Grade-A red-meat populism, which has the great advantage of telling a true thing about Hillary Clinton and the Establishment. Whether or not Trump can or will do a thing about it is another question. But this is a really good speech on these themes. Trump will go on:

America was shocked to its core when our police officers in Dallas were brutally executed. In the days after Dallas, we have seen continued threats and violence against our law enforcement officials. Law officers have been shot or killed in recent days in Georgia, Missouri, Wisconsin, Kansas, Michigan and Tennessee.

On Sunday, more police were gunned down in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Three were killed, and four were badly injured. An attack on law enforcement is an attack on all Americans. I have a message to every last person threatening the peace on our streets and the safety of our police: when I take the oath of office next year, I will restore law and order our country.

I will work with, and appoint, the best prosecutors and law enforcement officials in the country to get the job done. In this race for the White House, I am the Law And Order candidate.

Straight-up Nixon ’68. Henceforth, every incident of violence against the police, every left-wing riot outside Trump campaign stops, and every campus disturbance this fall, will be a Trump commercial.

Here’s the love letter to Milo part:

Only weeks ago, in Orlando, Florida, 49 wonderful Americans were savagely murdered by an Islamic terrorist. This time, the terrorist targeted our LGBT community. As your President, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBT citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology.

There’s so much more, but here’s how he winds the thing down:

But now, my sole and exclusive mission is to go to work for our country – to go to work for all of you. It’s time to deliver a victory for the American people. But to do that, we must break free from the petty politics of the past.

America is a nation of believers, dreamers, and strivers that is being led by a group of censors, critics, and cynics.

Remember: all of the people telling you that you can’t have the country you want, are the same people telling you that I wouldn’t be standing here tonight. No longer can we rely on those elites in media, and politics, who will say anything to keep a rigged system in place.

Instead, we must choose to Believe In America. History is watching us now.

It’s waiting to see if we will rise to the occasion, and if we will show the whole world that America is still free and independent and strong.

My opponent asks her supporters to recite a three-word loyalty pledge. It reads: “I’m With Her”. I choose to recite a different pledge.

My pledge reads: “I’M WITH YOU – THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.”

He’s going to deliver those lines in a couple of hours, and they’re going to bring the house down.

Read the whole speech. Or listen to it tonight. You may well hate this address, and it won’t be remembered in the annals of eloquent oratory, but give Trump his due: this thing gets the job he wants done done, and with great force. Ross Douthat earlier today called it “Buchananism without religion.” He’s right — and it’s Trump’s conspicuous lack of Christian virtue that worries me a very great deal about him in the White House.

But I’m not writing about that here. I’m writing about this speech, the biggest of Trump’s life. You know I’m not a Trump guy, but having read this address in advance, I think, for the first time, that Donald Trump could win this thing.

Spin Of The Year

Via the Episcopal News Service, a press release revealing that the ultramegaliberal Episcopal Divinity School is winding things down:

Episcopal Divinity School will cease to grant degrees at the end of the upcoming academic year, the seminary’s board of trustees decided July 21 on a 11-4 vote. During the next year, the board will explore options for EDS’s future, some of which were suggested by a specially convened Futures Task Force to make plans for EDS’s future.

“A school that has taken on racism, sexism, heterosexism, and multiple interlocking oppressions is now called to rethink its delivery of theological education in a new and changing world,” said the Very Rev. Gary Hall ’76, chairman of the board, in introducing the resolution. “Ending unsustainable spending is a matter of social justice.”

Translation: “Having abandoned anything to do with orthodox Christianity, we find that we have made ourselves completely irrelevant. If we spin our theological and financial bankruptcy as a sign of our virtue, maybe we won’t look so bad.”

A sampling of courses from the current EDS catalogue:

HB CS 4152 Liberating Bible Interpretations, Antiracist, and White Identity: Approaches to Reading Scripture

What makes an interpretation of the Bible liberating? For whom? When? Where? We will explore how various stages of racial identity development and awareness present challenges to our reading of the texts and each other, in order to develop antiracist and other anti-oppression strategies for preaching and teaching from scripture. Critical Race Theory and Critical White Studies shall inform our primary focus on racial identity of “white” readers while also looking at other culturally dominant features of identity in the interpretive process of biblical texts. G

PT L 1420 Unleashing Our Voices: Voice, Identity, and Leadership

A course for the courageous, who wish to explore first-hand the liberatory [sic] and transformative power of their voices in community. Using the classroom community as a laboratory, the course will combine: (1) practical work on voice production and the body/mind/soul as human instrument with (2) in-class discussion and small team exploration of readings on voice, identity/community membership, and leadership. Voice work will include group exercises for freeing the body and voice, as well as individual work in front of the group using prepared spoken texts and/or sung pieces. Readings will be drawn from writings on the physical voice and voice as an element of social location from womanist, feminist, anti-white supremacist, and other anti-oppression perspectives. Participants will engage questions of voice and power in pastoral, liturgical, theological, educational, and spiritual contexts.

L 3020 Challenging the Liturgical Traditions, Postcolonial, and Queer Perspectives

A critical exploration of intersections between a cluster of contemporary theologies—for example, feminist, queer, postcolonial, “child theology”—and liturgical theology and practice.

T PT 2165 Mission, Ministry, and Sacraments: Re-visioning the Church Inside-Out

This course seeks to construct a theology of the church the essential nature of which is its “inside-turned-outness” for the life of the world. In the light of this basic stance of a church as a people—externally focused and God’s- Reign oriented—a theological re-visioning of the central elements of the church’s sacramental life, worship, wit- ness, and ministry is undertaken. A central question is how we can recover the basic calling of the church to be a sign and instrument of a God-intended “alternative humanity” and an agent of transformation in a world characterized by oppressive, exclusivist, and fragmenting forces. Faith-filled resistance, compassionate solidarity, and creative hope shall serve as significant categories in such a re-visioning. Participants will explore the practical and pastoral implications of such a re-visioning for the empowerment of local congregations as change agents.

T CS 1710 Feminist Theories and Theologizing

This course introduces the student to varieties of feminist and gender theories and theorists, e.g., liberal feminism, radical feminism, Marxist feminism, post-colonial feminism, womanist theorists, and Asian American feminism, in order to provide a theoretical foundation for theologizing on behalf of women. is course fulfills the feminist theory requirement for the MATS student concentrating in FLT. G

T 2010 Contemporary Christologies

Who is Jesus Christ for us today? is course will explore a number of contextual christologies, including the Black Christ, the feminist Christ, the womanist Christ, the Asian Christ, the Asian feminist Christ, the Latina Christ, the queer Christ, and the disabled Christ. is course will also explore the intersections of postcolonial and queer theory with contemporary christological reflection.

T 2160 Third World Feminist Theology

A critical study of the challenges and the contributions of ird World feminist theology to the theological discipline. The works of Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Elsa Tamez, Ivone Gebara, Chung Hyun Kyung, and Mary John Mananzan will be studied. G

T PT 2323 Spirituality of Healing

This course explores the spiritual foundations of healing, including mind and body connections, breaking the cycle of violence, and developing life-affirming spiritual practices. Particular emphasis will be on healing from internalized racism, homophobia, and other forms of structural oppression. There will be opportunities to study Chinese approaches to healing.

Gosh, I cannot imagine why they can’t sustain enough interest among the faithful to stay open. Last year, EDS’s president, an abortion rights activist and lesbian who married her partner at Boston’s Episcopal cathedral, resigned. She once stood outside an abortion clinic and saying that “abortion is a blessing.”

If I were a billionaire, I would buy the EDS buildings in Cambridge, Mass., and turn them over to the Anglican Archbishop of Nigeria. After an exorcism, naturellement. 

God Help Charles Kinsey

This one is not even remotely a close call. What kind of out-of-control police officer shoot at an autistic man and the caretaker trying to help him — a caretaker who was clearly in no position to hurt a soul?! From the Miami Herald:

When a 23-year-old autistic man carrying a toy truck wandered from a mental health center out into the street Monday, a worker there named Charles Kinsey went to retrieve him.

A few minutes later the autistic man was still sitting cross-legged blocking the roadway while playing with the small, rectangular white toy. And Kinsey was prone on the ground next to him — a bullet from an assault rifle fired by a police officer having struck his leg.

“He throws his hands up in the air and says, ‘Don’t shoot me.’ They say lie on the ground, so he does,” Kinsey’s attorney Hilton Napoleon said Wednesday. “He’s on his back with his hands in the air trying to convince the other guy to lie down. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Cellphone video footage obtained by Napoleon clearly shows the heavy-set autistic man sitting and playing with his toy while Kinsey, dressed in a yellow shirt and shorts, obeys police orders to lie down on his back.

The video, taken before the officer fired his weapon, shows Kinsey on his back with his hands in the air telling police he didn’t have a weapon and asking them not to fire. At one point the autistic man appears to yell at Kinsey to shut up. A second brief video shows officers who are carrying rifles physically patting down Kinsey and the autistic man while they are lying on the ground.

In an interview with WSVN-Channel 7, Kinsey said that after he was shot, officers approached and flipped him over and handcuffed him.

“Sir, there’s no need for firearms,” Kinsey told the news station he said to police before he was shot. “It was so surprising. It was like a mosquito bite.”

Kinsey said when he asked the officer why he fired his weapon, the cop responded, “I don’t know.”

Read more here. The police aren’t saying anything at the moment.

Again: I thank God that neither Charles Kinsey nor the autistic man was hurt killed (that’s what I meant to say) by this trigger-happy uniformed officer.

The Benedict Option Still Stands

I want to thank you readers who drop me letters, especially when you send me things to look at. You can’t possibly know this, but I’m inundated with e-mail daily right now, more than usual. It’s coming at a time when I am under a lot of pressure to finish the Benedict Option book, for an August 5 deadline. I’m also trying to move house (well, Julie is managing all of that, and doing all the heavy lifting, so to speak, but it’s still a major stressor). And trying to keep up with my blogging responsibilities during this intense political season.

It’s also true that I am very, very distressed by the situation in our country. I believe that a Hillary Clinton presidency would be a catastrophe for the thing I care about most: religious liberty. Yet I believe a Trump presidency would be a different kind of catastrophe, one that would, among other things, make war more likely. (For example, even though I believe it was foolish to bring all those countries on Russia’s borders into NATO, I think it is foolish for Trump to put NATO’s security guarantees to them up for grabs. If Trump is sworn in, I foresee Putin sending tanks into the Baltics soon thereafter.) One of the core reasons that I am a conservative is fear of the mob. It’s why I loathe and despise what Black Lives Matter and other SJWs do on campuses, and this week, what Republicans aligned with Trump have been doing in Cleveland and beyond. American politics has entered a stage where the passions of the mob increasingly rule both sides, because emotional extremism is rewarded. I want no part of any of it.

I said earlier this year, when I reached an agreement with Sentinel, the conservative imprint of Penguin Random House, to write The Benedict Option, that I wouldn’t be speaking in much more detail about it on this blog. What you don’t see, by design, is how my thinking on the Ben Op has changed and deepened as a result of, well, deliberation, but also by interviewing so many people, and reading so many new things. Because of circumstances beyond my control — long story — I was not able to travel at all to report the book. I did go to Norcia, as you know, and I got to visit Clear Creek because they had a conference and paid my way to speak there. Otherwise, alas, I had to do this from home. I don’t think it will have made much difference in the end. I’ve got so much material I could easily have written a book twice as long as The Benedict Option is going to be.

So, to get to the point of this post: one of you readers sent me this morning this post from the Orthodox priest Father Stephen Freeman, reflecting on the Benedict Option. It delighted me because it reflects where my thinking has gone as I’ve been writing the book. I haven’t gotten into any of this on the blog these past few months, because I’m saving it for the book. Here are some excerpts:

Morality asks questions of right and wrong. What constitutes right action and why? Virtue asks an even deeper question. What kind of person is able to think and act in a right way? In terms of the gospel, we can see virtue as lying at the heart of Christ’s statement, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” For someone who lacks virtue (is not “pure in heart”) even their reason and perception will be distorted. They will not only fail at doing the good, they will not even be able to see what the good is.

To suggest that we live in a culture in which virtue is absent is thus a very serious charge. It means that we are unable to agree on even the most mundane matters about what is right and wrong. Worse still, we have become the kind of people who are unable to even know the answer to such questions. MacIntyre’s next book, Whose Justice, Which Rationality, pushed his analysis even further. His work sits like a prophetic word over the modern landscape of moral discourse.

But After Virtue’s last paragraph remains. The Benedict Option has passed into current religious conversation, at least among those who think his analysis is correct. If virtue itself has collapsed, and our ability as a culture to understand and agree about the moral project has disappeared, how do we even begin to recover? Or, more poignant still, how do we even survive such a disaster?

The problem can be stated in terms of a circle. Virtue itself is a requirement for right action. How can people who lack virtue ever come to know what virtue itself is, much less go about creating a community of virtue? I’ve always thought of this under the guise of “take’s one to know one.” Obviously, something from outside is required in order for virtue to be nurtured.

More:

This, actually, is one way of understanding the gospel itself. If no one is pure in heart, then who can teach us about God? The answer is, Christ Himself. Christ is the one who is pure in heart. He Himself is the man of virtue. And so it is that Christ establishes the Church. Human beings do not actually live as individuals (despite all the modern rhetoric to the contrary). We belong to communities. If the communities to which we belong no longer know or are capable of virtue, then we ourselves cannot become virtuous.

The Church, however, is the living and abiding remembrance of virtue – the character of Christ Himself. The Church is the birth, in the world, of the living presence of the character of Christ. This is the heart of the “Benedict Option.” The monastic communities of Late Antiquity (the “Dark Ages”) were formed and shaped according to the character of Christ. “Character formation” was at the very heart of their life. In broader terms, we describe that formation as salvation itself.

It is worth noting, however, that these communities were not the result of people looking around and saying, “Gee, the Empire has fallen and the process of forming virtue has collapsed. Let’s start some monasteries and survive this thing.” The Benedict Option, in its original form, was God’s work, not man’s. This is necessarily the case.

Read the whole thing.

This is absolutely the case. As I repeat in the book’s manuscript, Benedict did not leave the world for the sake of saving it. He left the world for the sake of saving his own soul. He knew that to put himself in a position where he was open to the Holy Spirit required living life in a certain way, in community. Hence the monastery. The monastic calling is a special one given to a relative few men and women, but the principle that believers need a community, a culture, and a way of life to keep themselves open to the formative (re-formative) power of divine grace is true for all of us.

It has always been true, but it is a truth we Christians in this chaotic time and place need to lay claim to urgently. This week, I interviewed Mark Gottlieb, a modern Orthodox rabbi (N.B., “modern Orthodox” Jews are Orthodox, but not like the haredim, the black hats), about what we Ben Op-oriented Christians can learn from the Jewish experience. One thing he said was that we Christians have to rediscover the power of regular daily prayer. He spoke of how participating with the community in morning, afternoon, and evening prayer, day in and day out, structures a believer’s entire reality. It does so by keeping one ever aware that we live and move and have our being in the presence of God. There is no substitute for praying like this. St. Benedict calls it opus Dei — the work of God.

Some folks like to say, “The Benedict Option sounds like nothing more than the Church being the Church.” To which I say, “Yes! Absolutely! But the Church — not just the institution, but you and me — hasn’t been the Church for a long, long time. And it shows.”

But “being the Church” requires taking on certain practices, and ceasing to do other practices. For most of us, it cannot be simply continuing to do what we’re doing now, and hoping for the best. To be clear, we aren’t Pelagians; we don’t believe that we can perfect ourselves. Any good thing that happens within ourselves is by the grace of God. But certain practices make us more open to that grace, and more resilient within that grace. And certain institutions make it more possible than others to live that grace-filled life in community. You’ll see what I mean more fully when the book comes out.

Father Stephen Freeman adds:

The true and ever-present Benedict Option remains whether anyone thinks about it as such or not. It is the long, slow, patient work of acquiring the virtues (theosis) by actually living the fullness of the Tradition as we have received it. It’s success is not for us to know or to foresee.

Go to Church. Say your prayers. Teach your children. Shop less. Share your stuff. Keep the commandments as we have received them. Pray for the grace to suffer well. Help those around you who are suffering. There is no need to wait for someone else to do it.

There is nothing more I can say to this than, “Amen and amen.”

Well, there is something more I can say to this, and I’m saying it in a book that, inshallah, will be published in February. I would appreciate your prayers as my editor and I are in the final round here. My health is not so hot.

Trump’s gonna Trump. Hillary’s gonna Hillary. We can’t stop any of that. What we can do is take the Benedict Option, because really, for faithful Christians, there is nothing else.

How Ted Cruz — Ted Cruz! — Saved His Honor

Erm, has that ever happened before? A major speaker at a national party convention pointedly refusing to endorse its nominee? That’s what Ted Cruz did tonight. I do not like Ted Cruz one bit, but I think this is going to serve him well in the long run. Let me tell you why.

Here’s a small but telling point, via ABC News:

Cruz’s wife, Heidi, was seen leaving the arena when the booing started getting very loud. Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli told ABC News that he escorted Heidi Cruz out of the convention hall because “it was volatile and the Trump folks were physically approaching and confrontationally yelling,” he said via text.

“People behind her were getting very ugly, and physically approaching her and Raphael, and it was not a pretty situation,” Cuccinelli told ABC. “The decision was instantly made to not talk to media and get immediately out of the arena.”

“People from my own delegation were physically approaching her while yelling at her. So, I physically moved media out of her way, and got in the way of my own delegation so she could clear by and get out of the arena,” he said.

That’s so Trump. And so is that lunatic prosperity preacher with his Hail-Caesar benediction, and then the crackpot Ben Carson, telling the convention audience (and the folks watching from home) that Hillary Clinton is in league with Lucifer. A Christian friend in DC wrote me to say:

I was listening to both that opening prayer last night and the remarks by Carson, and the first thing I thought was, Oh (*%$%, this is going to make the radical Left redouble their efforts to go full steam ahead on a lack of reasonable compromises for religious organizations. This isn’t even an appeal to be “winsome” — it’s just not strategic or even true. It makes reasonable arguments– of which there are many — impossible!

At least in my world…

It’s like the Trumpified GOP allowed Salon’s caricature of what Christians are to take the stage and broadcast their insanity to a national television audience.

You know what else is really Trumpy? This, via the Washington Post:

Over the convention’s first two nights, a growing number of Republicans called for Hillary Clinton to be imprisoned. One of Trump’s advisers called for her death. The unprecedented tenor for a national political convention has prompted dismay in some corners of the GOP and even launched a Secret Service investigation into a New Hampshire state representative who said Clinton should be shot by a firing squad.

At least three speakers called for the presumptive Democratic nominee’s imprisonment. “Lock her up!” the convention crowd shouted repeatedly on both nights, a chant not heard before at nominee Donald Trump’s rallies.

On Wednesday evening, the chants continued — echoed onstage.

“Lock her up!” Florida Attorney General Pamela Bondi, her state’s top law enforcement official, said. “I love that.”

Think about that. At a national political convention, the mob routinely demands the imprisonment of the opposition candidate. And worse:

She should be “swinging from the rafters” — a reference to hanging, said Susan Reneau, an alternate delegate from Montana, in an interview in Cleveland. Reneau said she blamed Clinton and her handling of government emails for Islamic State attacks in Paris, Belgium and Istanbul.

“Hillary has jeopardized everyone,” Reneau said. “It’s not even fair to call this her Watergate — Watergate was peanuts by comparison.” She was wearing a black button that said “Hillary for Prison” on her jacket. Outside, vendors said those buttons were selling mainly to women.

Al Baldasaro, a Republican state representative in New Hampshire and an adviser to Trump on veterans issues, said that “Hillary Clinton should be put in the firing line and shot for treason” on “The Kuhner Report,” a conservative radio show hosted by Jeff Kuhner. Trump chose Baldasaro to stand behind him at one of the most combative moments of his campaign, a news conference at which he defended his handling of money raised for veterans groups.

On Wednesday, Baldasaro stood by those comments in an interview with radio station WMUR. He said the death penalty was appropriate for Clinton’s handling of government emails. “As far as I’m concerned, it is treason, and the penalty for treason is the firing squad — or maybe it’s the electric chair now,” Baldasaro said.

What disgusting people. That Trump advisor is calling for the execution of a presidential candidate, and is unapologetic about it. Is this really the kind of country we want? Is this the kind of people we want to be?

Look, I think Hillary is a crook now, and would be a crook if she got into the White House. But still. Good Lord. How, exactly, do we protest against repulsive remarks like those made in USA Today by black commenter Tavis Smiley, in which he called on the nation to respect and understand the oppression that drove black men to assassinate police officers (“How many more disaffected black men have to self-radicalize before we take their claims seriously?”) if Trump advisers are calling for the murder of Hillary Clinton?!

Who would have thought that Ted Cruz, of all people, would uphold moral conscience and basic human dignity at the Republican National Convention?

Let me give you some incredibly sobering reading. It’s a piece from the New Yorker about Tony Schwartz, the man who ghostwrote Trump’s breakthrough 1980s book The Art Of The Deal. Every word in it rings true to the man we have seen on the campaign trail this past year. Here are some excerpts:

“Trump has been written about a thousand ways from Sunday, but this fundamental aspect of who he is doesn’t seem to be fully understood,” Schwartz told me. “It’s implicit in a lot of what people write, but it’s never explicit—or, at least, I haven’t seen it. And that is that it’s impossible to keep him focussed on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes, and even then . . . ” Schwartz trailed off, shaking his head in amazement. He regards Trump’s inability to concentrate as alarming in a Presidential candidate. “If he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it’s impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time,” he said.

In a recent phone interview, Trump told me that, to the contrary, he has the skill that matters most in a crisis: the ability to forge compromises. The reason he touted “The Art of the Deal” in his announcement, he explained, was that he believes that recent Presidents have lacked his toughness and finesse: “Look at the trade deficit with China. Look at the Iran deal. I’ve made a fortune by making deals. I do that. I do that well. That’s what I do.”

But Schwartz believes that Trump’s short attention span has left him with “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance.” He said, “That’s why he so prefers TV as his first news source—information comes in easily digestible sound bites.” He added, “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.” During the eighteen months that he observed Trump, Schwartz said, he never saw a book on Trump’s desk, or elsewhere in his office, or in his apartment.

More:

This year, Schwartz has heard some argue that there must be a more thoughtful and nuanced version of Donald Trump that he is keeping in reserve for after the campaign. “There isn’t,” Schwartz insists. “There is no private Trump.” This is not a matter of hindsight. While working on “The Art of the Deal,” Schwartz kept a journal in which he expressed his amazement at Trump’s personality, writing that Trump seemed driven entirely by a need for public attention. “All he is is ‘stomp, stomp, stomp’—recognition from outside, bigger, more, a whole series of things that go nowhere in particular,” he observed, on October 21, 1986. But, as he noted in the journal a few days later, “the book will be far more successful if Trump is a sympathetic character—even weirdly sympathetic—than if he is just hateful or, worse yet, a one-dimensional blowhard.”

Eavesdropping solved the interview problem, but it presented a new one. After hearing Trump’s discussions about business on the phone, Schwartz asked him brief follow-up questions. He then tried to amplify the material he got from Trump by calling others involved in the deals. But their accounts often directly conflicted with Trump’s. “Lying is second nature to him,” Schwartz said. “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.”

Still more:

In his journal, Schwartz wrote, “Trump stands for many of the things I abhor: his willingness to run over people, the gaudy, tacky, gigantic obsessions, the absolute lack of interest in anything beyond power and money.” Looking back at the text now, Schwartz says, “I created a character far more winning than Trump actually is.” The first line of the book is an example. “I don’t do it for the money,” Trump declares. “I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.” Schwartz now laughs at this depiction of Trump as a devoted artisan. “Of course he’s in it for the money,” he said. “One of the most deep and basic needs he has is to prove that ‘I’m richer than you.’ ” As for the idea that making deals is a form of poetry, Schwartz says, “He was incapable of saying something like that—it wouldn’t even be in his vocabulary.” He saw Trump as driven not by a pure love of dealmaking but by an insatiable hunger for “money, praise, and celebrity.” Often, after spending the day with Trump, and watching him pile one hugely expensive project atop the next, like a circus performer spinning plates, Schwartz would go home and tell his wife, “He’s a living black hole!”

Read the whole thing.

Ladies and gentlemen, your Republican nominee. Your Republican Party. Your America, 2016.

St. Marshall McLuhan, Ora Pro Nobis

Holy Myrrh-Bearers Ukrainian Catholic Church in Swarthmore, PA, which broadcasts live what’s going on at the altar behind the iconostasis, did not get the memo. Is this a thing in Eastern Rite Catholic churches? I’ve never seen it before. It is beyond shocking to Orthodox eyes.