Trump’s Hurricane of Bullshit Tour, Part Four
Double-header: Baton Rouge, LA and Grand Rapids, MI
Dear Leader-to-be stumped at two rallies on Friday, December 9th, giving me twice as much bullshit to sift through. Thanks, Donald.
If you have not done so already, go back and read through Parts One, Two, and Three of this series, because Trump reprised a lot of those themes today. As always, I’ll try to focus on whatever new insights into the hopes and fears of Trumpland I can dredge from the muck.
Although honestly, I’m not sure how much it matters right now. Not with the CIA bombshell that just dropped. Maybe right now we should be less worried about psychoanalyzing Trump and his fearful, hateful, gullible voters, and more concerned about calling our elected officials and the college of electors to make sure that they DO NOT turn the United States of America into a Russian puppet.
Whatever happens, Republicans will NEVER get to question the patriotism of Democrats ever again. Not after this bullshit. Not after their congressmen and senators have been denying the need for full disclosure, to the public, by our intelligence agencies about what they know about a foreign government’s actions to influence our supposedly free and democratic elections.
If you’re reading this anytime but the weekend: STOP. Go call your senators and congressmen and demand that they resist the presidential transition until we are confident that Trump was the choice of the American people, not the Russian government.
Have you done that? Good. Now back to our story.
Going forward, I’ll spend more words analyzing Trump’s guest speakers than Trump himself, as Trump says fewer and fewer things we have not already heard on this tour.
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
John Kennedy… no, not THAT one
Before Trump arrived in Baton Rouge, State Treasurer and US Senate candidate (now Senator-elect) John Kennedy briefly took the stage. From the small mountain of ore tailings he dumped, a single gem was produced:
There’s undeserving big shots at the top getting bailouts, undeserving people at the bottom getting handouts, and us in the middle paying for it all.
For the moment, let’s set aside the irony of Kennedy castigating “undeserving big shots getting bailouts” while supporting Donald Trump, the serial bankruptcy artist who continues crowing about his tax breaks for the owners of the Carrier plant in Indiana. Kennedy’s quote nevertheless serves as an eloquent encapsulation of Trumpland’s economic and tax policy grievances.
It all ties into that Protestant work ethic that lies at the heart of ‘Heartland’ American culture. Those who toil for their livelihood are the virtuous and deserving. Those who profit from that toil without working hard themselves — whether they live as paupers or princes — are the wicked and undeserving. From this view, Sloth is a greater sin than Greed or Pride.
So the GOP will rail against both sets of the undeserving at campaign (and now post-campaign) rallies, but when it comes time to pass legislation only one of those groups gets hosed: the poorest Americans, as they’re sitting furthest away from the levers of power.
One wonders whether Jesus would recognize what is being taught in conservative American churches. We’ve certainly wandered a long ways from the Sermon on the Mount.
Trump is the MAN of the Year, and Don’t You Forget It
Trump may have won TIME’s Person of the Year award for 2016, but he liked it that title better when it wasn’t so gender-neutral. And apparently he’s not alone. He asked the crowd to rate both titles by show of applause.
“Who would rather have it be Person of the Year?” Only a few isolated cheers from the crowd.
“Who would rather have it be Man of the Year?” Much louder applause for this. “Even the women like ‘Man’ better!” Trump observed from the stage.
As we see here, support for traditional gender roles forms one of the pillars of American conservatism, and particularly Southern American conservatism. Men were the undisputed movers and shakers in the world the conservative elders grew up in. Now the working-class men seem lost in a country where service and tech industry jobs are replacing the old blue-collar manufacturing paradigm — and when men feel lost, they tend to stress out the women around them.
That’s before we even get into the Biblical admonitions against letting women assume any authority over men. Of course, the pastor who gave the invocation at the very beginning of the rally did not forget this. The video I watched skipped over this part, but others watched it and commented:
A lot of Christian voters out there are really freaked out by a world in which gender roles — and even gender identities — are being questioned and redefined. Presumably this explains much of the hostility towards the LGBTQ community as well.
Energy Policy: Fossil Fuels Forever
It should not come as a surprise that Trump would play up his energy policy in Louisiana. Nor should it come as any surprise that Trump said not a single word about building renewable energy capacities in a Gulf state, seeing how reliant their economy is on offshore drilling. He promises that they’ll build lots of new refineries and pipelines there. As I’ve discussed previously, Trump and his supporters would rather Make America Great Again the way it was in the past instead of Making America Great in some new or different way.
Are Republicans worried about climate change in Louisiana? Not as much as they probably should be. There is something darkly ironic about listening to this crowd chant “BUILD THAT WALL” instead of “BUILD THAT DIKE.” They see immigrants as a greater threat than sea-level rise and hurricanes, even after Katrina.
About That Wall…
Trump said, “We fight for other countries so they can have a border, but we won’t fight for our own border.” The message here operates on two levels:
- We shouldn’t worry so much about defending the borders of, say, Ukraine and the Baltic States against Russia. (Nope, no foreign influence here, no sir.)
- We SHOULD worry about immigrants crossing our own border, because that constitutes an invasion.
About that second point: Apparently if enough Mexican and Latin American immigrants choose to live in OUR country, it’s not really OUR country anymore. At least that’s how Trump’s voters seem to see it. Never mind that those immigrants are coming here precisely because they like our economy and system of government better than those of their countries of origin. They want to be part of our country, not annex it for Mexico. But Trump voters are not big on subtle nuances like that. I guess if America becomes too brown, it’s not their America anymore.
Grand Rapids, Michigan
Before diving into the speakers’ bullshit, I’ll just point out that Trump’s choice of venue is rather telling. For all his talk about revitalizing “the inner cities,” he seems rather reluctant to stump over in Detroit — probably because he would have had even more protesters for security to contend with on his event floor.
Terry Bowman, President of Union Conservatives, Inc.
A bit of background: Bowman’s also a 20-year UAW-Ford autoworker and a co-chair of the Michigan Donald Trump campaign. His message was straightforward: union leaders are now “on notice” from the rank-and-file workers that they can no longer be counted on to vote Democratic. (Exit poll data somewhat backs this assertion; Clinton only carried the union vote in Michigan by a 13% margin, down from a 33% lead for Obama in 2012.) His refrain, taken up the crowd as a chant: “Get on the [Trump] train, or feel the pain.”
In particular, Bowman called out the union leaders’ unwavering support of a “hard-left social agenda.” Apparently civil rights for women, people of color, and the LGBTQ population are not “real issues” for workers — never mind that all of those demographic groups are over-represented in working-class job sectors, and workplace discrimination is a real fucking problem, still, especially in places like automobile factories.
To push back against this attitude — that civil rights issues are not working class issues— Democrats need to raise public awareness and understanding of intersectionality over the next several years, especially as it relates to members of the Midwestern working class.
Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education
After he took the stage and went through his usual thank-yous to Michigan voters and veterans — including his pledge to protect the flag from burning, always a crowd pleaser at these events — Trump spoke briefly about education before introducing Betsy DeVos, who spent 28 years lobbying for the privatization of the Michigan school system.
If you want to know why her approach will probably not go well for the nation, read this article from the Washington Post. The crowd ate it up though, as expected.
As a product of our public school system, I’ll be the first to say I’m not a huge fan of it. But there are good reasons and bad reasons for wanting to opt out of public schools, and there are good ways and bad ways to reform that system.
You don’t want your kids to go to public school because they’ll interact with too many non-white children? Or because they’ll have to learn about evolutionary theory in science class and receive comprehensive sex education? Sorry, but wanting to stick your kids’ heads in the sand is a pretty bad reason. Historically speaking, it also happens to be a major driver behind the private school and home-schooling movements in this country. Many of the influential devout, including DeVos, would rather not see so many children have to learn things that challenge their interpretations of the faith.
The push for privatization of schools must also be understand in the context of Republican zeal for privatization in general. Among many in the GOP, it is an article of faith that government solutions will always be less efficient than market-based solutions. Unfortunately, it does not always work out this way in practice. Often the public gets screwed while the corporations who are supposed to be providing a public good focus on their profit margins instead. We see this in the health insurance market as well as charter school test results.
When we try to win back those segments of the working class that voted for Trump, this is good ground to meet them on. We can turn that populist anger against faux-populist GOP elites working to screw over a conservative working class they see as rubes.
Andrew Liveris: Sing, O Muse, of Trump’s Rhetorical Genius
Demonstrating that immigrants are just fine as long as they’re rich and can pass for white, Trump also introduced DOW Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris as his pick for head of the American Manufacturing Council, which advises the Secretary of Commerce on behalf of manufacturers in the private sector. Liveris, an American citizen, originally hails from Australia.
Liveris astutely pointed out an aspect of Trump’s candidacy that I have often overlooked in favor of picking apart the content of his public statements: it’s not just what Trump says that matters, but how he says it. Liveris praised the musicality of Trump’s public speaking.
Policy wonks like you, me, and Hillary Clinton may be more persuaded by logos — appeals to logic and reason — as most observers who judged her the winner of the debates generally cited her deeper expertise and knowledge of policy issues. Unfortunately, most elections are not decided by logos; ethos and pathos play a larger role in winning over most voters. Both candidates, perhaps unfairly, were seen as ethically questionable by overwhelming majorities of the public, and biased news sources were all too successful at muddying those waters.
So Trump’s win is perhaps best understood as a victory grounded in rhetorical pathos — appeals to emotion. Voters tend to feel more than they think. Trump’s rhetoric, and those widely-shared news stories (fake or real) playing up the severity of Clinton’s scandals, tapped into feelings of anger and fear far more effectively than Clinton tapped into any feelings at all.
Pathos can tap into positive emotions as well as negative. Obama, too, displayed a finer command of rhetorical pathos when he successfully ran against Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary. If Democrats want to win again, we’re going to need more candidates with that kind of rhetorical skill and a deep understanding of their constituents’ most primal feelings.
The Donald’s Greatest Hits Collection
Trump did not change up his pitch very much between Louisiana and Michigan. However, there was a lull between the opening speakers and The Donald’s appearance at the rally, and the event organizers filled that lull with a recording of statements he made during various interviews during the run-up to his candidacy and election. They picked out a few interesting one-liners for us:
Politicians, media, and so-called leaders all reacted in horror… [but] I didn’t need anybody else’s money.
This was true enough during the primaries, though most of his general election funding came from other donors. Still, that was a huge part of his appeal to primary voters: a sense that Trump could not be bought.
One wonders how many of those voters will react if Trump really was a beneficiary of Russian meddling.
I don’t have time for political correctness.
Sorry Donald, I wasn’t aware that it requires a Herculean effort on your part to not be an asshole when talking about people from disadvantaged circumstances. That’s all we’re asking for.
Or at least, that’s all we liberals should be asking for. Nobody wants to think of themselves as a bigot. If you call somebody a bigot — or even imply it — they tend to go defensive and shut any hopes of a constructive conversation right down. [Note to self: try follow that advice more often.] When attempting to educate our less cosmopolitan brethren, perhaps we should take greater pains to distinguish between making a dick move and being a dick. Or to put it like the Christians do: “Love the sinner, hate the sin.”
So to rephrase my prior admonition into a better example: Donald, I’m sure you’re not really an asshole, so why don’t you knock off that little pantomime routine, yeah? How would you feel if you had a kid with a neurological problem and saw some asshole doing that? I bet you’d want to punch his fucking lights out.
Our country needs “a president with common sense and business acumen” to lead us “back to what made us great in the past.”
For the moment I’ll set aside my opinion that Trump possesses neither common sense nor business acumen in any great capacity. Let’s look at why those qualities appeal to voters instead.
There’s a widely-prevalent belief that somebody who can succeed at running a business can succeed at running any other type of enterprise, be it teaching a class, providing spiritual support to a congregation, or serving as the commander-in-chief and head of the executive branch of our government. The assumption underlying this belief is that the key skills are 100% transferable between these different executive roles.
If nothing else, perhaps a Trump presidency would disprove this assumption once and for all, though I shudder at the potential collateral damage incurred with this lesson.
And to repeat myself yet again: Trump and his voters share a set of blinders. They think we can only Make America Great Again if we recreate the circumstances of some idyllic past — idyllic for them, at least. They cannot seem to imagine an America that is great for them in some new way. Maybe we can help them with that.
If we liberals want to share our vision for a better future with this type of conservative or reactionary voter, we need to learn what they loved so much about the past and then show them how we can recreate some of those beloved conditions without the bullshit that originally came along with them. For example, if they loved the financial security and pride of that manufacturing job they used to have before the factory closed, we should try to sell them on other ways they could have that security and pride again: like a Universal Basic Income that would free them up to attend that seminary and become a pastor like they always wanted to do before, but never had the time.
Listen Also For What Is NOT Said
Speaking of factory jobs: a big part of Trump’s appeal in Rust Belt states like Michigan was his promise to bring those jobs back. Many of his policies, like the infamous border wall and punitive tariffs on companies that move operations abroad, operate on the presumption that cheap immigrant labor and foreign competition are the primary drivers of domestic job loss in the manufacturing sector.
In Michigan as elsewhere, Trump has not said a damn thing about the role of automation in putting people out of work.
That sweet Carrier deal he likes to crow about? Soon those saved jobs will be automated anyway. The tax breaks Carrier got will even let them invest more into the automation process. What then?
Consider also why Trump says nothing about automation. There’s not much he can do about it, for starters. That border wall isn’t going to keep the robots out; if anything it will hasten their arrival.
The bottom line here is that Trump could not win many votes by railing against automation like a latter-day Luddite. There’s no person or group of people he can effectively blame. There’s no malignant outsider he can rally the native proletariat against. Automation is a systemic problem, not an us-versus-them problem.
Most people, including Trump’s core voters — and possibly Trump himself — suck hard at systems-level thinking. When something goes wrong in their world and they can’t see a systemic cause, they start looking for somebody to blame for the problem. Like Mexicans, or the Chinese. Shut out the people, and you solve or prevent recurrences of the problem, or so their wishful thinking goes.
Did a Muslim terrorist shoot up a gay nightclub in Orlando? Stop any more Muslims from coming into our country! Never mind that the shooter was born, radicalized, and armed on American soil. We should have kept his father out! And never mind those Christians that blew up that federal building in Oklahoma City. They had other issues.
The best way that liberal politicians can fight back against this sort of tribal scapegoating is to promote other simple narratives that explain the source of the problem and hint at its solution. We tried to start another gun control discussion after Orlando, which definitely fits the simple-narrative criteria but is a hard sell to conservatives for Second Amendment reasons. Perhaps focusing on the radicalization rather than the Islam may have worked better. We have much work to do in persuading people that most Islam is not radical violent Islam, just like most Christianity is not radical violent Christianity. It’s the radical part we have to solve, whatever the faith.
More Bullshit Ahead
Trump is making three more stops this week:
- West Allis, Wisconsin on Tuesday, December 13th;
- Hershey, Pennsylvania on Thursday, December 15th; and
- Orlando, Florida on Friday, December 16th.
I can only hope that Orlando is the last stop, because I’d really like to take a break sometime soon. Maybe I can do that after giving my readers a gift-wrapped summary of lessons learned from watching this tour, just in time for Christmas.
In the meantime, how about you call your fucking representatives in Congress so I don’t have to keep writing about this bullshit after January 20th? This goes double for you if you have Republican senators or congressmen! I’m just barely old enough to remember the good old days when Republicans would spit fire and brimstone if there was even a hint of Russian influence in one of our presidential candidates. Let’s bring that kind of conservatism back.
That’s all I want for Christmas: to watch Trump get dunked on by the safeguards that our system of government is supposed to have against the installation of Banana Republican presidents.
When he’s not writing, Dave sleeps. Or tries to. Night shifts mess with that something fierce.
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