More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
September 5 - September 6, 2020
To the Deep State patriots who are defending America
As much as I’d love to go to bed at night reassuring myself that Donald Trump was some freak product of the system—a “black swan,” as his ludicrously unqualified son-in-law says—I can’t do it. I can’t keep lying to myself to ward off the depressing reality that I had been lying to myself for decades. There is nothing strange or unexpected about Donald Trump. He is the logical conclusion of what the Republican Party became over the last fifty or so years, a natural product of the seeds of race, self-deception, and anger that became the essence of the Republican Party. Trump isn’t an aberration
...more
So the Nixon White House laid out the path to electoral success by maximizing white grievance and suppressing the African American vote through a combination of manipulation, lies, and legal challenges. It was this road that the Republican Party took to the Trump White House. There is nothing new about Donald Trump. He hasn’t invented a new politics or executed a brilliant and novel strategy. Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and even Ronald Reagan played the same race-based politics of resentment. It is precisely Trump’s predictability and, alas, inevitability that is so
...more
To understand how white evangelicals could embrace Donald Trump, consider him the ultimate white megachurch preacher. The congregation has been conditioned to accept leaders who are lying, philandering frauds who live extravagant lifestyles far above their own means. But even the larger-than-life flaws and sins of these men—and they are all men—serve to convince the flock that they are unworthy to judge such men. Their followers proudly claim they favor “authenticity” as a virtue but are drawn to the most elaborately artificial of men who cosmetically, chemically, and surgically alter their
...more
The average American household has a net worth of $82,600, versus $827,000 for farm households.19 About half of the billions in farm subsidies go to farmers with household income over $150,000. If Republicans—or Democrats—were remotely serious about cutting the deficit, wouldn’t it be a logical step to cut out what amounts to farming welfare for rich farmers?
“Welfare” is what the poor get because they are, well, poor, and being poor is a choice because in America anyone can succeed. Or something close to that. But “grants,” “tax breaks,” and “incentives” are the language businesses use to describe the corporate welfare they demand in exchange for doing what they usually have to do or want to do anyway, like build a new data center or factory or, in the case of sports, a new stadium.
How about cutting the defense budget? Of the so-called discretionary spending—that is, the part of the budget that is not increasing on automatic formulas—around 50 percent goes to the military budget. When’s the last time you heard a Republican talking about cutting the military? Republicans ridiculed President Obama and Senator Bernie Sanders for claiming that the United States spends more on the military than the next twelve countries combined. Well, it’s true—or mostly true, depending on the year. Sometimes it has dipped as low as only the next eight or ten countries. The next ten would
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
But have we forgotten? President Eisenhower cut defense spending by 27 percent after the Korean War. President Nixon cut the budget by 29 percent from the peak of the Vietnam War. There was a stretch of eleven years, from 1987 to 1998, in which Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton used the end of the cold war to control defense spending.26 Donald Trump is the most isolationist president since Herbert Hoover, attacking NATO and ridiculing America’s need to support allies. But he still supports increased military spending and, in a typically boastful lie, claims that when he became president,
...more
The losing Buckley argument was one that would continue to be a touchstone of the Republican credo on race until today: that in America, race doesn’t matter; anyone can succeed. It is the essence of the “color blind” assertion that is perversely racist but reassuring to white people. It has the benefits of sounding antiracist—we are all people, or, as it were, “all lives matter”—but is in practice deeply racist because it ignores the reality of the impact of race in every element of American society.
The avowed hatred of government that is such a Republican bedrock principle is offensive and alienating to much of the country. A constant crowd-pleasing refrain of Ronald Reagan’s sums it up: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ”8 For most white Americans of the middle class, that strikes them as both funny and poignant. (It is also a practice of the white middle class to be completely blind to the vast help they get from the government in all aspects of their lives.) But how does a black person hear these same words,
...more
Not many Americans know Myron Magnet or his work, but they know Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Alex Jones, Lou Dobbs, and an endless stream of professional nuts and cranks who roam the internet selling conspiracies, bitterness, grievance, and anger, in search of an argument. When Donald Trump tweets out a defense of “conservative thinkers like James Woods banned from Twitter, and Paul Watson banned from Facebook,” the immediate instinct is to burst out laughing at the image of a cranky old actor and a maladjusted British weirdo whose mentor is Alex Jones elevated to some intellectual standing.14
...more
Once you convince yourself that racism has been defeated and that the real problems in America are the crisis of the family structure, it’s a short walk to the impeached Alabama judge and defeated Senate candidate Roy Moore’s passionate claim that blacks were better off during slavery. America was great, Moore claimed, because “families were united—even though we had slavery. They cared for one another. People were strong in the families.”
Today the intellectual leaders of the Republican Party are the paranoids, kooks, know-nothings, and bigots who once could be heard only on late-night talk shows, the stations you listened to on long drives because it was hard to fall asleep while laughing. When any political movement loses all sense of self and has no unifying theory of government, it ceases to function as a collective rooted in thought and becomes more like fans of a sports team. Asking the Republican Party today to agree on a definition of conservatism is like asking New York Giants fans to have a consensus opinion on the
...more
Stripped of any pretense of governing philosophy, a political party will default to being controlled by those who shout the loudest and are unhindered by any semblance of normalcy. It isn’t the quiet fans in the stands who get on television but the lunatics who paint their bodies with the team colors and go shirtless on frigid days. It’s the crazy person who lunges at the ref and jumps over seats to fight the other team’s fans who is cheered by his fellow fans as he is led away on the jumbotron. What is the forum in which the key issues of the day are discussed? Talk radio and the television
...more
Trump holds to a theory that there is some vast left-wing conspiracy in the tech world illuminati to personally slight him at every opportunity. But that’s just one of the many conspiracies that Trump embraces. There is a “Deep State” cabal out to get him. The Deep State seems to be driven by Trump’s annoyance that there was a government that existed before he came to power and there is a government that will exist afterward. (The latter may be overly optimistic.) He lost the popular vote due to massive voter fraud. He agreed with Infowars’ Alex Jones that Hillary Clinton might have taken some
...more
Donald Trump’s mind is that tabloid you see at the checkout counter of the grocery store claiming that aliens impregnated Chelsea Clinton so the offspring could become president and turn the United States over to the Federation. Few Republicans challenge Trump on his conspiracy obsessions, treating him like an addled senior citizen who calls his congressman’s office demanding to know why the CIA is talking to him through his dentures. The shrug and smile that so many Republican leaders have adopted has allowed Trump to dismiss those who challenge his lunacy as “angry Democrats,” because it is
...more
These days the branding of Fox News as “Fair and Balanced” often seems primarily to serve the purpose of proving that irony is not dead. But there is a long history within the far right of right-wing media positioning itself as the only true and honest media. To promote a world viewpoint distinct from that shared by the majority, it was critical to assert that everyone else simply didn’t have the correct information on which to base decisions. That is a far easier task than accusing most of the country of being crazy. So in the 1950s, if your neighbor didn’t believe that Communists had
...more
Like his defense of segregation in the National Review, the McCarthy book is a reminder for those who today, in the age of Trump, like to cast William Buckley as the lost soul of true conservatism: that for all his well-crafted sentences and love of language, Buckley was often a more articulate version of the same deep ugliness and bigotry that is the hallmark of Trumpism.
The Trump era’s consistent denial that you did not hear what you heard and did not see what you saw has managed to make George Orwell one of the most relevant authors of the day. When Donald Trump tweets, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” Orwell’s 1984 is the perfect framework in which to understand his mentality: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
If the Republican Party had been in charge in 1776, we’d all still be celebrating the queen’s birthday. They would have timidly said, “What are we going to do, fight England? Fight the king? The most powerful army in the world?” and then set about to negotiate how much of their dignity they could pretend to keep in a pathetic effort to please. Cowardice is one of the least appealing of human qualities, and a deeply damaged Cowardly Lion leads the Republican Party. To willingly follow a coward against your own values and to put your own power above the good of the nation is to become a coward.
The transition of the National Rifle Association is a perfect parable: over a couple of decades, it evolved from a gun-safety education organization to a thuggish gang that rewards those at the top with millions of dollars based on proven ability to muscle elected officials into doing what they mostly know is wrong. Today the leaders of the Republican Party follow Donald Trump’s lead and routinely attack the foundations of law enforcement, from the FBI to the Justice Department to the judiciary. At first glance it seems stunning to witness a party that once defined itself as a “law-and-order
...more
No single political figure better illustrates the predicate for Donald Trump than Newt Gingrich. Both men are deeply damaged psychological cripples from dysfunctional families. In The Atlantic, McKay Coppins described Gingrich’s stepfather as “a brooding, violent man who showed little affection for ‘Newtie,’ the pudgy, flat-footed, bookish boy his wife had foisted upon him.” His mother “struggled with manic depression, and spent much of her adult life in a fog of medication.”4 Donald Trump’s relationship to his family is so tortured he has the bizarre need to reinvent their origins, claiming
...more
Like Trump, Gingrich spent decades in the pursuit of what he considered “trading up” in wives, starting with his high school geometry teacher and ending up, as of this writing, with a former intern he was having sex with while leading the impeachment against Bill Clinton for lying about having sex with an intern. That the former House intern, Callista Gingrich, is now the American ambassador to the Vatican is further evidence both that irony is dead and that God has a sense of humor. In most normalized societies, Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump would be considered nonserious comic figures to be
...more
Every presidential candidate stuck to that system until 2008, when Barack Obama, after routinely pledging to accept federal funding, realized how much money he could raise and decided to reject federal funding. John McCain stayed in the system with the result that he had $83 million for his campaign and Obama had more than $300 million for his. As is always the case with campaign finance reforms, once the system was broken, it proved impossible to put the genie back in the bottle, and subsequent candidates rejected public funding. Today some defend the decision by then senator Obama to blow up
...more
In 2008, Barack Obama raised more money from the financial industry—that’s shorthand for really rich, mostly white people—than any candidate in American history. (In 2012, Mitt Romney raised more.) But Obama also received a record number of African American votes. (Actually, he received more votes in 2008 than any presidential candidate in American history.) Ask a hedge-fund Obama donor his or her view on taxes, and you’ll likely get a different answer from that of a sixty-five-year-old teacher who donated to Obama. Ask a Republican hedge-fund donor his or her view on taxes, and it is likely
...more
In the 2016 election, Donald Trump consistently benefited from the inability to imagine him winning. That belief shaped the Republican primary. The driving dynamic for the primary was the competition between the non-Trump candidates to narrow the race to one on one with Trump. It seemed obvious that the Republican Party would not nominate someone who was a bankrupt casino owner who lost the Reform Party nomination for president to Pat Buchanan in 2000, was a maxed-out donor to Anthony Weiner, had attacked Republicans for being against abortion, had bragged that his building was now the tallest
...more
In the spring of 2016 when it became apparent that Donald Trump was going to be the Republican nominee, I approached a number of individuals encouraging them to run as a “favorite son” candidate in their home states. The idea was simple: if a third-party candidate with an appeal to the center right ran and took votes from Trump, it would block his path to victory. I spoke to each person under strict confidentiality and so will not reveal names or states, but they were high-profile conservatives who believed that Trump was a disaster for the party and it would be better to lose one election
...more
As the Mueller Report makes clear, Trump would likely be indicted for obstruction of justice, were he not a sitting president. He has used the White House as a corporate branding tool for his personal gain; is the first president in modern history to refuse to release his tax returns (after promising repeatedly to do so); praised a congressman for assaulting a reporter; attacked the foundations of the American criminal justice system at its highest levels with attacks on the Justice Department, FBI, and CIA; and encourages staffers to break laws both large and small, from refusing to respond
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Trump, who went to great lengths to avoid serving in the military, where he might encounter actual violence, gleefully urges his supporters at rallies to “beat the crap out of” protesters, just “knock the hell…I promise you I will pay for the legal fees. I promise, I promise.” He’s praised a congressman who attacked a reporter, saying, “Any guy who can do a body slam, he is my type!” In a speech in front of law enforcement officers, Trump urged them to get “rough” on gang members.21 When the Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough asked Trump in 2015 about Vladimir Putin’s record of killing
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
In the Trump years, Republicans have sent a message that lying is useful and productive, racism is acceptable, the press is the enemy, and a strong-man authoritarian head of government is the ideal.
After he won on November 8, 2016, Donald Trump became the first winner of a presidential race to attack the legitimacy of his own victory. Weeks after the election, Trump tweeted, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”11 It’s easy to dismiss this as another boastful lie from a pathological liar, like his claim on 9/11 that he now owned the tallest building in New York. But it’s much more. Trump doesn’t seem to realize that if millions of voters were actually illegal, it would invalidate his
...more
as I write this in the autumn of 2019, a coalition of civil rights groups is suing the State of Florida for passing legislation signed by the Republican governor that the suit claims is an attempt to institute a new poll tax. And they are right. The new legislation follows a 2018 amendment to the Florida Constitution that granted voting rights to the estimated 1.4 million Floridians with a prior felony conviction. The follow-up legislation requires those who had been convicted of a felony to pay all court fees and fines that are outstanding before they are allowed to vote. The intent of this
...more
the looming threat of some socialist takeover of America or Sharia law becoming the new Supreme Court standard is all nonsense. And most Republican elected officials know it’s nonsense, just as they know Donald Trump is an unqualified idiot. But what many Republican politicians actually do believe is that they represent the “real” America, and they are somewhere from uncomfortable to frightened by America’s changing landscape. Instead of embracing the change that renews America and defines America, Republicans have more often than not reacted like the white neighborhood that feared property
...more
Illegal voting has long been a felony, and the idea that of all the felonies possible to commit, someone would risk the consequences of a felony conviction to vote is one of the more almost-charming absurdities imaginable. Our problem in America is getting people to vote, not stopping illegals.
in the Trump Republican view, Americans are suckers, victims, the mark for a hostile world. Everyone is out to get America, from the Canadians to the Chinese. Anger has replaced gratitude. In a view of the world that has America under siege, extreme measures are needed, and good men and women must do what it takes to defend America. This means electing Republicans, and how you elect them is of less importance than the necessity of winning. The voter suppression that is increasingly embraced by a Republican Party unburdened by a watchful Voting Rights Act is not a subversion of democracy but a
...more