Time to wake up, you white people of good faith.
Look in the mirror.
See Amerikkka for what it is without the gloss.
See something black folks have been trying to tell you.
It’s not “populism” or “economic anxiety.”
Call it by name — White Supremacy.
I thought the black and brown firewall, with a little help from our white friends would hold back the tide.
I was wrong. My bad.
Thanksgiving is coming. A time many of you gather with friends and family.
Killing racism starts at home.
Maybe it’s time for you to start speaking up and fighting back.
Lord knows we black folks have been doin’ it for centuries.
My people survived slavery and Jim Crow.
We’ll survive Donald Trump too — though I’m sure there will be deaths — there always are.
America has a white supremacy problem.
You are either part of the problem, or part of the solution.
Choose.
P.S. I ain’t leaving. The bones of my enslaved ancestors are buried
here. They helped build this place with blood, sweat, tears, and
laughter. I’ll fight on. In their name.
When President Barack Obama was first elected, Republicans made no
bones about their desire to obstruct absolutely everything on his
agenda. They didn’t even care if it was their own agenda. As
soon as Obama adopted it, it was the second coming of communism—from the
Heritage-created, Mitt-Romney implemented Obamacare, to Republican
James Comey’s nomination to the FBI, to traditionally bipartisan
transportation spending, to the Senate’s Gang of 8 immigration reform
effort.
Their obstruction became so blatant, they even refused to perform
their Constitutional duty to advise and consent to Barack Obama’s final
Supreme Court justice pick. And did they suffer anything for it? Of
course not. They won big in 2010, and again in 2014. And they won big
last night.
Not only did obstruction help hamper Obama’s agenda, but just as
importantly, it sent a message to base Republicans that their party
actually gave a shit. It let them know that their party would fight for
them, even if everyone else thought they were being assholes. It didn’t
matter. That singular focus on obstructing Obama and the Democrats said
they cared.
If Trump wants to pass a new Voting Rights Act, or renominate Merrick
Garland, then we can work with him. Anything else, he can go fuck
himself. Infrastructure spending? Let him get the votes from his own
caucus. Anything else he might propose, even if we might agree with it?
Let him get the votes from his own caucus while we hurl metaphorical Molotov cocktails from the sideline.
They broke it, they own it.
Show our people we are fighting for them, and they’ll fight back for us in return. We are the fierce opposition. And as such, we need to oppose. Full stop. From Day One.
It’s
almost over. Will we heave a sigh of relief, or shriek in horror?
Nobody knows for sure, although early indications clearly lean Clinton.
Whatever happens, however, let’s be clear: this was, in fact, a rigged
election.
The
election was rigged by state governments that did all they could to
prevent nonwhite Americans from voting: The spirit of Jim Crow is very
much alive — or maybe translate that to Diego Cuervo, now that Latinos
have joined African-Americans as targets. Voter ID laws, rationalized by
demonstrably fake concerns about election fraud, were used to
disenfranchise thousands; others were discouraged by a systematic effort
to make voting hard, by closing polling places in areas with large minority populations.
The election was rigged by Russian intelligence,
which was almost surely behind the hacking of Democratic emails, which
WikiLeaks then released with great fanfare. Nothing truly scandalous
emerged, but the Russians judged, correctly, that the news media would
hype the revelation that major party figures are human beings, and that
politicians engage in politics, as somehow damning.
The
election was rigged by James Comey, the director of the F.B.I. His job
is to police crime — but instead he used his position to spread innuendo
and influence the election. Was he deliberately putting a thumb on the
electoral scales, or was he simply bullied by Republican operatives? It
doesn’t matter: He abused his office, shamefully.
The
election was also rigged by people within the F.B.I. — people who
clearly felt that under Mr. Comey they had a free hand to indulge their
political preferences. In the final days of the campaign, pro-Trump
agents have clearly been talking nonstop to Republicans like Rudy
Giuliani and right-wing media, putting claims and allegations that may
or may not have anything to do with reality into the air. The agency
clearly needs a major housecleaning: Having an important part of our
national security apparatus trying to subvert an election is deeply
scary. Unfortunately, Mr. Comey is just the man not to do it.
The
election was rigged by partisan media, especially Fox News, which
trumpeted falsehoods, then retracted them, if at all, so quietly that
almost nobody heard. For days Fox blared the supposed news that the
F.B.I. was preparing an indictment of the Clinton Foundation. When it
finally admitted that the story was false, Donald Trump’s campaign
manager smugly remarked, “The damage is done to Hillary Clinton.”
The
election was rigged by mainstream news organizations, many of which
simply refused to report on policy issues, a refusal that clearly
favored the candidate who lies about these issues all the time, and has
no coherent proposals to offer. Take the nightly network news
broadcasts: In 2016 all three combined devoted a total of 32 minutes to coverage of issues — all issues. Climate change, the most important issue we face, received no coverage at all.
The
election was rigged by the media obsession with Hillary Clinton’s
emails. She shouldn’t have used her own server, but there is no evidence at all
that she did anything unethical, let alone illegal. The whole thing is
orders of magnitude less important than multiple scandals involving her
opponent — remember, Donald Trump never released his tax returns. Yet
those networks that found only 32 minutes for all policy issues combined
found 100 minutes to talk about Clinton emails.
It’s a disgraceful record. Yet Mrs. Clinton still seems likely to win.
If
she does, you know what will happen. Republicans will, of course, deny
her legitimacy from day one, just as they did for the last two
Democratic presidents. But there will also — you can count on it — be a
lot of deprecation and sneering from mainstream pundits and many in the
media, lots of denial that she has a “mandate” (whatever that means),
because some other Republican would supposedly have beaten her, she
should have won by more, or something.
So
in the days ahead it will be important to remember two things. First,
Mrs. Clinton has actually run a remarkable campaign, demonstrating her
tenacity in the face of unfair treatment and remaining cool under
pressure that would have broken most of us. Second, and much more
important, if she wins it will be thanks to Americans who stood up for
our nation’s principles — who waited for hours on voting lines contrived
to discourage them, who paid attention to the true stakes in this
election rather than letting themselves be distracted by fake scandals
and media noise.
Those
citizens deserve to be honored, not disparaged, for doing their best to
save the nation from the effects of badly broken institutions. Many
people have behaved shamefully this year — but tens of millions of
voters kept their faith in the values that truly make America great.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on November 7, 2016, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: How to Rig an Election. Today's Paper|Subscribe
A study conducted by
transportation research labs at Stanford, MIT, and the University of
Washington has shown that Uber, Lyft, and taxi drivers continue to
discriminate based on the ride requester’s race, with black customers
waiting significantly longer for a ride and facing more trip
cancellations than white customers. The study took place in Seattle and
Boston and required research assistants to request trips pre-selected by
the researchers to include a variety of neighborhoods.
The numbers
The study found that black male customers using UberX experience
three times more cancellations than white male customers in Boston. In
Seattle, black customers experienced wait times from 16 to 28 percent
longer than white customers on both UberX and Lyft services.
The researchers weren’t able to study how cancellations affected Lyft
riders, because the two services offer different information about the
rider to the drivers. “A Lyft driver sees both the name and a photo of
the passenger prior to accepting or denying a ride, while UberX drivers
see this information only after accepting a request,” the researchers
wrote. “We find no effect on cancellations for African-American riders
of Lyft because, we surmise, that given that names and photos are
visible to the driver prior to acceptance, any discrimination occurs
prior to accepting the initial request.”
While Uber drivers can get penalized for canceling too many requests, researcher Don MacKenzie wrote on his blog
that “in some cases, drivers would not officially cancel the trip, but
would make no attempt to actually pick up the traveler using a ‘black’
name, or would even drive in the opposite direction for 20 minutes or
more, until the research assistant canceled the trip.”
The researchers also found that female customers were treated
differently than men and were “taken on significantly longer routes than
males for the same origin and destination,” according to MacKenzie. He
added that women in such situations experience “higher fares, wasted
time, and perhaps personal unpleasantness with overly ‘chatty’ drivers.”
Still, the researchers were clear that Uber and Lyft weren’t
distinctly worse than taxis. They asked their research assistants (RAs)
to hail taxis in certain taxi-heavy parts of Seattle and Boston and
count how many available taxis passed them by before one stopped. “The
first taxi stopped nearly 60 percent of the time for white RAs, but less
than 20 percent of the time for African-American RAs.
The white RAs
never had more than four taxis pass them before one stopped, but the
African-American RAs watched six or seven taxis pass them by in 20
percent of cases.”
There’s a little bit of evidence that UberX has improved wait times
for riders over taxi services—the researchers’ paper points out that a
2015 study funded by Uber showed that UberX offered shorter wait times
than taxis for customers requesting rides in low-income neighborhoods in
Los Angeles. A second study in 2016 looking at neighborhoods in Seattle
came up with similar results.
Build a better ride-sourcing app
The researchers admit that “solving” discrimination within Uber and
Lyft is difficult. The ride sourcing companies could omit personal
information about riders completely, but Stephen Zoepf of Stanford’s Center for Automated Research
suggests that this might lead to discrimination manifesting in other
ways, such as prejudiced drivers giving lower ratings to black riders
after picking them up and skewing how those riders' ratings appear to
other, non-prejudiced drivers.
Also, the researchers strained to offer solutions to discrimination
based on drivers refusing to drive into certain neighborhoods.
MacKenzie also suggested that ride-sourcing services like Uber and
Lyft could offer pre-set fares for given rides in an attempt to keep
drivers from taking riders on indirect routes to increase their fares.
This is something Uber began rolling out earlier this summer.
Zoepf also warns that Uber and Lyft can’t yet be considered a
replacement for public transportation, in spite of what some cities are
saying. In Centennial, Colorado, for example, city authorities teamed up with Lyft
to offer free rides to and from a light rail station. At that point,
Zoepf argues, municipal governments run the risk of violating the Civil
Rights Act. “If, on average, a black Uber passenger waits 15 seconds
longer for a ride than a white passenger, does that constitute
discrimination? What about 30 seconds? Two minutes? At what point do we
say that a dis-aggregated system is inadequate to provide service to our
collective communities?”
In a statement e-mailed to Ars, Uber head of North American
Operations Rachel Holt stated, “Discrimination has no place in society,
and no place on Uber. We believe Uber is helping reduce transportation
inequities across the board, but studies like this one are helpful in
thinking about how we can do even more.”
Lyft did not respond immediately to Ars’ request for comment.
Zoepf noted that a first step toward smoothing out car hailing
iniquities would be for private companies like Uber and Lyft to make
their data available to qualified academic institutions. He wrote that
this project initiated 1,500 rides and cost $100,000 to complete. “With
the collaboration of transportation providers, we could have focused our
efforts on analysis rather than data gathering, and our results would
have been undoubtedly more revealing and compelling.”
Filmmaker Brian Gersten writes, "'The Hollerin' Contest at Spivey's
Corner' is a documentary short about the history, characters, and sounds
of the National Hollerin' Contest.
Hollerin' itself is considered by
some to be the earliest form of communication between humans, and the
competition has been held annually in the small town of Spivey's Corner,
NC since 1969. The film follows the stories of three former champions
as they attempt to reclaim their titles, and keep the oft-forgotten
tradition of hollerin' alive."
"This past summer it was announced that the hollerin' contest would be
ending after 47 years. Former hollerin' champions Robby Goodman and Iris
Turner have decided to carry on the tradition and launch their own
'World Wide Hollerin' Festival.'
To honor the tradition of hollerin' and
to celebrate the inaugural Hollerin' Festival, we've decided to release
our documentary on vimeo."
Workers picket across from the Callowhill SEPTA Depot on Tuesday in Philadelphia.
Jacqueline Larma / AP
While commentators digest the latest announcement
from FBI Director James Comey, a story with the potential to have more
of an impact on the election is playing out with little notice in
Philadelphia. Last Tuesday workers for the city division of the regional
transportation authority, SEPTA, began a strike over a new contract. The strike has shut down the city’s buses, subways and trolleys, and snarled the city’s roads since then.
Last Friday, a Philadelphia judge declined to issue an injunction
ending or suspending the strike, but she scheduled a hearing for 9:30
a.m. Monday to take up the strike’s potential impact on the election.
The evidence on the effects of prior transit strikes is limited, but
given what we know about Election Day in Philadelphia, the people who
rely on the city’s public transit network, and about voting in general,
the potential impact on residents’ ability to vote could be substantial.
And that impact is likely to be concentrated on residents of color, as
well as on Philadelphia’s poorer residents.
The nation’s fifth-largest city, Philadelphia is the largest city in
any swing state. There is also no city as populous as Philadelphia with a
larger share of residents in poverty.
It is not surprising, then, that Philadelphia relies heavily on its
public transit network. As it is elsewhere, that reliance is
particularly heavy in poorer communities and communities of color.
Below, for instance, data from the 2014 American Community Survey shows
the relationship between the share of census tract residents who are
black and who ride public transit to work in Philadelphia. The
relationship is substantial: If we go from a census tract with no black
residents to one that is entirely black, we should expect the share of
people using public transit to get to work to rise by 27 percentage
points.
Or consider how the percent riding public transit correlates with a
census tract’s median household income (the panel on the right). Here,
the correlation is strongly negative: As census tracts become wealthier,
they become less dependent on public transit. Imagine moving from
Philadelphia’s first-quartile census tract (with a median household
income of $25,600) to its third-quartile Census tract (where median
household income is $52,270) — public transit ridership should drop by
9.6 percentage points. This relationship is likely to make sense to
people familiar with the city’s demographics, as some of the wealthiest
neighborhoods are in and around the city’s commercial center. The
effects of any Election Day disruption to transportation are likely to
be felt disproportionately in the city’s outlying neighborhoods.
The impacts of the strike are predictable: Without the buses, subways and trolleys — yes, there are really trolleys — people commuting into Center City get up earlier
to drive, bike or walk to work.
But that strategy also has the
potential to mean that many voters on Tuesday will face an unenviable
choice: Vote when the polls open at 7 a.m. or get a jump on the trip
downtown. They’ll also know that lots of other people are facing the
same choice, a fact likely to produce lines at many polling places. Will
that, in turn, dampen voter turnout?
That’s certainly the fear of city officials. On Sunday night, the city filed suit to suspend the strike
and voiced the concern that an “Election Day strike will make it
practically impossible for many Philadelphians to participate in this
election.”
Extensive research on voter turnout suggests that the city is right, and that voters are more likely to vote when it is more convenienttodo so. Voting is to some extent a habitual
behavior, so people are less likely to vote when their habits are
disrupted. When Los Angeles County consolidated its polling places for
the 2003 gubernatorial recall election, for example, in-person voting dropped by a sizable 3.03 percentage points
in precincts that were relocated compared to those that were not. That
decline was partially offset by increased absentee voting, but
Pennsylvania has no early voting, and the deadline for absentee ballot
applications has come and gone.
Philadelphia has actually had a strike during an election before, in
2009. At the time, voters were choosing a district attorney and
controller, as well as several judicial posts. In 2009, some 122,946 voters
cast ballots for district attorney, a number that was actually up from
the 120,424 voters who cast ballots for district attorney in 2005. But
both were paltry turnouts for low-profile elections, and turnout
dynamics in more prominent elections can be very different, as Temple
University professors Kevin Arceneaux and David Nickerson have demonstrated.
For every one Philadelphia voter in 2009, there were 5.6 in the 2012
presidential cycle, and absent a strike, we might expect a similar
number this Tuesday. The 2009 election is accordingly a poor guide to
the would-be impacts of the current strike.
When voting gets easier, turnout increases disproportionately among people who don’t always vote, as evidence from all-mail elections demonstrates. On the flip side, when voting gets harder, those who aren’t habitual voters are more likely to stay home. Poorer voters are less habitual voters. So a disruption as significant as an ongoing public transit strike poses a real threat to turnout on Tuesday.
Dan Hopkins is an associate professor of government at the
University of Pennsylvania, and his research focuses on American
elections and public opinion.
On Friday, FBI Director James Comey set off a political blast when he informed congressional leaders
that the bureau had stumbled across emails that might be pertinent to
its completed inquiry into Hillary Clinton's handling of emails when she
was secretary of state. The Clinton campaign and others criticized
Comey for intervening in a presidential campaign by breaking with Justice Department tradition
and revealing information about an investigation—information that was
vague and perhaps ultimately irrelevant—so close to Election Day.
On
Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid upped the ante. He sent Comey a
fiery letter
saying the FBI chief may have broken the law and pointed to a
potentially greater controversy: "In my communications with you and
other top officials in the national security community, it has become
clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and
coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian
government…The public has a right to know this information."
Reid's missive set off a burst of speculation on Twitter and
elsewhere. What was he referring to regarding the Republican
presidential nominee? At the end of August, Reid had written
to Comey and demanded an investigation of the "connections between the
Russian government and Donald Trump's presidential campaign," and in
that letter he indirectly referred to Carter Page,
an American businessman cited by Trump as one of his foreign policy
advisers, who had financial ties to Russia and had recently visited
Moscow.
Last month, Yahoo Newsreported that US intelligence officials were probing the links between Page and senior Russian officials. (Page has called accusations against him "garbage.") On Monday, NBC News reported
that the FBI has mounted a preliminary inquiry into the foreign
business ties of Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chief. But
Reid's recent note hinted at more than the Page or Manafort affairs. And
a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who
specialized in Russian counterintelligence tells Mother Jones that
in recent months he provided the bureau with memos, based on his recent
interactions with Russian sources, contending the Russian government
has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump—and that the FBI
requested more information from him.
"This is something of huge significance, way
above party politics," the former intelligence officer says. "I think
[Trump's] own party should be aware of this stuff as well."
Does this mean the FBI is investigating whether Russian intelligence
has attempted to develop a secret relationship with Trump or cultivate
him as an asset? Was the former intelligence officer and his material
deemed credible or not? An FBI spokeswoman says, "Normally, we don't
talk about whether we are investigating anything." But a senior US
government official not involved in this case but familiar with the
former spy tells Mother Jones that he has been a credible
source with a proven record of providing reliable, sensitive, and
important information to the US government.
In June, the former Western intelligence officer—who spent almost two
decades on Russian intelligence matters and who now works with a US
firm that gathers information on Russia for corporate clients—was
assigned the task of researching Trump's dealings in Russia and
elsewhere, according to the former spy and his associates in this
American firm. This was for an opposition research project originally
financed by a Republican client critical of the celebrity mogul. (Before
the former spy was retained, the project's financing switched to a
client allied with Democrats.)
"It started off as a fairly general
inquiry," says the former spook, who asks not to be identified. But when
he dug into Trump, he notes, he came across troubling information
indicating connections between Trump and the Russian government.
According to his sources, he says, "there was an established exchange of
information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual
benefit."
This was, the former spy remarks, "an extraordinary situation." He
regularly consults with US government agencies on Russian matters, and
near the start of July on his own initiative—without the permission of
the US company that hired him—he sent a report he had written for that
firm to a contact at the FBI, according to the former intelligence
officer and his American associates, who asked not to be identified. (He
declines to identify the FBI contact.) The former spy says he concluded
that the information he had collected on Trump was "sufficiently
serious" to share with the FBI.
Mother Jones has reviewed that report and other memos this
former spy wrote. The first memo, based on the former intelligence
officer's conversations with Russian sources, noted, "Russian regime has
been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years.
Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in
western alliance." It maintained that Trump "and his inner circle have
accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on
his Democratic and other political rivals." It claimed that Russian
intelligence had "compromised" Trump during his visits to Moscow and
could "blackmail him." It also reported that Russian intelligence had
compiled a dossier on Hillary Clinton based on "bugged conversations she
had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls."
The former intelligence officer says the response from the FBI was
"shock and horror." The FBI, after receiving the first memo, did not
immediately request additional material, according to the former
intelligence officer and his American associates. Yet in August, they
say, the FBI asked him for all information in his possession and for him
to explain how the material had been gathered and to identify his
sources. The former spy forwarded to the bureau several memos—some of
which referred to members of Trump's inner circle. After that point, he
continued to share information with the FBI. "It's quite clear there was
or is a pretty substantial inquiry going on," he says.
"This is something of huge significance, way above party politics,"
the former intelligence officer comments. "I think [Trump's] own party
should be aware of this stuff as well."
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment regarding the memos. In the past, Trump has declared, "I have nothing to do with Russia."
The FBI is certainly investigating the hacks attributed to Russia
that have hit American political targets, including the Democratic
National Committee and John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton's
presidential campaign. But there have been few public signs of whether
that probe extends to examining possible contacts between the Russian
government and Trump. (In recent weeks, reporters in Washington have
pursued anonymous online reports
that a computer server related to the Trump Organization engaged in a
high level of activity with servers connected to Alfa Bank, the largest
private bank in Russia. On Monday, a Slateinvestigation
detailed the pattern of unusual server activity but concluded, "We
don't yet know what this [Trump] server was for, but it deserves further
explanation." In an email to Mother Jones, Hope Hicks, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, maintains, "The Trump
Organization is not sending or receiving any communications from this
email server. The Trump Organization has no communication or
relationship with this entity or any Russian entity.")
According to several national security experts, there is widespread
concern in the US intelligence community that Russian intelligence, via
hacks, is aiming to undermine the presidential election—to embarrass the
United States and delegitimize its democratic elections. And the hacks
appear to have been designed to benefit Trump. In August, Democratic
members of the House committee on oversight wrote
Comey to ask the FBI to investigate "whether connections between Trump
campaign officials and Russian interests may have contributed to these
[cyber] attacks in order to interfere with the US. presidential
election."
In September, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Adam Schiff, the
senior Democrats on, respectively, the Senate and House intelligence
committees, issued a joint statement
accusing Russia of underhanded meddling: "Based on briefings we have
received, we have concluded that the Russian intelligence agencies are
making a serious and concerted effort to influence the U.S. election. At
the least, this effort is intended to sow doubt about the security of
our election and may well be intended to influence the outcomes of the
election." The Obama White House has declared Russia the culprit in the hacking capers, expressed outrage, and promised a "proportional" response.
There's no way to tell whether the FBI has confirmed or debunked any
of the allegations contained in the former spy's memos. But a Russian
intelligence attempt to co-opt or cultivate a presidential candidate
would mark an even more serious operation than the hacking.
In the letter Reid sent to Comey on Sunday, he pointed out that
months ago he had asked the FBI director to release information on
Trump's possible Russia ties. Since then, according to a Reid spokesman,
Reid has been briefed several times. The spokesman adds, "He is
confident that he knows enough to be extremely alarmed."
It’s possible that no previous presidential candidate, at least in
contemporary American history, has exhibited the range of aberrant,
offensive and outrageous behaviors Donald Trump has. Belligerent,
unstable and anything but presidential, Trump has turned much of the
country into armchair psychotherapists. His behavior is so undisciplined
and erratic, he’s even prompted licensed clinicians to break with
orthodoxy—not to mention rules—to declarehe suffersfrom a personality disorder.
Despite
all this, Trump rose to the top of the Republican ticket, and as
recently as September, posed a real and viable threat to Hillary
Clinton’s candidacy. Even with his chances of a successful Hail Mary
growing slimmer by the day, Trump seems poised to collect about 40
million votes, a sizeable segment of the voting populace. Those numbers
should force those of us who oppose Trump to understand what motivates
those who support him.
One contributing factor is how
ideologically, economically and socially divided America is. Those
factors are compounded by elevated—if not unprecedented—levels of
anxiety, fear and trauma.
Much of the country’s wealthiest and most
highly educated citizens live along its coasts and in its major cities.
Trump supporters not only live outside those areas, they feel as if
they’re foreign in nearly every conceivable sociocultural way. This goes
hand-in-hand with a number of other social ills: a raging opiate
epidemic, persistent gun violence, the disappearance of manufacturing
jobs. It’s no wonder America now finds itself coping with a troubling
trend of middle-aged white, mostly working-class men and women prematurely succumbing to the wages of despair: drug abuse, alcoholism and suicide.
Trump
has expertly exploited the pervasive pain, anger and marginalization of
millions. From the outset—and far more than most of us realized 18
months ago—Trump recognized that politics is an emotional business, and
that people’s political thoughts and allegiances are often shaped by
fear, lack of knowledge and trauma. Trump’s overt expressions of racism,
misogyny and homophobia have been ugly, naked appeals to those
feelings.
Much of Trump’s campaign is fear based. For a variety of
reasons, many people are fearful of many things, and their fears are
egged on by a news media that thrives on creating anxiety. Advertising,
political ads, news coverage and social media all send the constant
message that people should be afraid, very afraid. The result is that
many people are fearful of the wrong things, which makes our society
ripe for militarism, spying and Trump’s own messaging. These fears often
have little to do with the things people should really be afraid of.
But the constant fear-mongering explains a lot of Trump’s appeal. As
AlterNet said last year, “People
cannot think clearly when they are afraid. Fear is the enemy of reason.
It distorts emotions and perceptions, and often leads to poor
decisions.”
The best way to make sense of the Trump campaign’s
success is by examining its impact on millions of Americans’ mental
states. When Donald Trump says some outlandish thing and then denies it
in the same breath, how does that affect our perceived reality? If a
presidential debate starts to feel like a sick twist on The Most Dangerous Game,
how can we name and cope with the unsettling feelings we experience?
Why does fact-checking mean absolutely nothing to a wide swath of the
American populace? And perhaps the most obvious question of all: are we
watching an illogical fool or a masterful psychopathic, narcissistic,
master manipulator at work? Or perhaps both?
We’ve created this
handy guide to identify the brain games we’ve witnessed over this
seemingly eternal race. We begin with the psychopathic and narcissistic
personality, which includes traits Trump so often exhibits. Then, we’ll
look at some of the realities of life for so many Americans, which make
them vulnerable to Trump’s appeals. We take apart the tactics and
defense mechanisms used to cope with the economic and social changes
that have changed the nature of life in America for so many.
Here’s your useful political glossary of psychological terms for the 2016 presidential election.
Psychopathology and Sociopathology
Though both fall under the designation of antisocial personality disorder, psychopathology and sociopathology differ in critical ways.
The general consensus is that psychopaths are born, while sociopaths are made. That is, while psychopaths are hardwired, sociopaths are products of their (often troubled) upbringings and environments.
While
psychopaths and sociopaths share some traits—a disregard for laws and
societal rules; lack of conscience; little concern for others’
well-being; frequent use of lies and deception; impulsivity—they present
in highly different ways socially. Sociopaths, according to
psychologist Scott A. Bonn, “are likely to be uneducated and live on
the fringes of society, unable to hold down a steady job or stay in one
place for very long.” People may categorize them as “disturbed,” and in
some cases, they exist as the stereotypical “drifter.” They’re able to
form social and emotional bonds, though with greater difficulty than
most people.
Psychopaths don’t have deep, meaningful connections
to others; they lack the empathy to do so. That said, they’re able to
convincingly mimic those feelings, so that those around them might be
oblivious to their disconnectedness. They often appear to be more
charming and engaging than the average person, and often attain high
levels of education and career success.
For
the record, while Trump outranked Hitler when Oxford University ranked
the candidates according to the standard Psychopathic Personality
Inventory, he wasn’t the only one who scored high numbers. According to
the UK’s Telegraph, the study placed Clinton somewhere “between Napoleon and Nero.”
Narcissism
Narcissism isn't all
bad; most of us possess some narcissistic traits that ensure we have
healthy levels of self-confidence and positive self-images. The
unhealthy kind of narcissism happens when self-assuredness grows out of
control, resulting in grandiosity and what might be dubbed a superiority complex, serving to mask an otherwise astoundingly fragile ego.
"Narcissists feel superior to others," Stanford University developmental psychologist Eddie Brummelman explained to Psychology Today, "but they are not necessarily satisfied with themselves as a person."
For
this reason, narcissists desire control to maintain their precarious
sense of self, and the illusion of being the best. They may be bullies,
making others feel small to make themselves feel big (or bigly).
They’re self-absorbed, concerned with appearances, prone to
overestimating their competency at any number of things, and often
vicious in response to the tiniest perceived criticisms, which threaten
their shaky self-image.
Anita Vangelisti, a UT Austin psychologist, told Psychology Today
that “tactics in the narcissist’s toolbox include bragging, refocusing
the topic of conversation, making exaggerated hand movements, talking
loudly, and showing disinterest by ‘glazing over’ when others speak.”
Psychologists Nicholas Holtzman and Michael Strube, also speaking to the site,
have found that “subjects who scored higher in narcissism engaged in
more disagreeable verbal behaviors, arguing and cursing more—and using
more sexual language than their more modest counterparts.”
If this
reminds of you of behavior you’ve seen on the campaign trail, you’re
not alone. Several mental health clinicians interviewed by Vanity Fair expressed the same thoughts.
“Remarkably
narcissistic,” said developmental psychologist Howard Gardner, a
professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, [about Donald Trump].
“Textbook narcissistic personality disorder,” echoed clinical
psychologist Ben Michaelis. “He’s so classic that I’m archiving video
clips of him to use in workshops because there’s no better example of
his characteristics,” said clinical psychologist George Simon, who
conducts lectures and seminars on manipulative behavior. “Otherwise, I
would have had to hire actors and write vignettes.
He’s like a dream
come true.”
Narcissists also lack empathy, a trait Joe Biden pointed to when he noted that for years, Trump delighted in firing people on national TV.
Projection
This
defense mechanism, first recognized by Sigmund Freud over 100 years
ago, projection causes people to deny negative aspects of themselves and
instead attribute them to others. Virtually everything Trump says,
particularly during debates, is a projection.
When Trump—the man you can “bait with a tweet”—says Hillary Clinton does not have the temperament to be president, that’s sheer projection. He tweets that Clinton is “pandering to the worst instincts in our society,” a classic example of projection. Telling his base
that Clinton is "running a hate-filled and negative campaign with no
policy, no solutions, and no new ideas,” is the ultimate projection.
Then there are the one-word, catchphrase-style projections: Hillary is a
crook, crazy, etc.
Wikipedia
notes that projection “is more commonly found in the neurotic or
psychotic personalities functioning at a primitive level as in
narcissistic personality disorder.” As we know from this glossary,
psychopathic and narcissistic personality traits seem to accurately
capture Donald Trump's personality disorders, and he has often often
operated on a primitive level unprecedented in modern presidential
campaigns.
Displacement
For Trump voters,
and millions of Americans of all political stripes, much of the fear and
anxiety of this moment can be boiled down to one powerful psychological
and emotional experience: displacement.
Displacement is defined
as “the moving of something from its place or position.” In physics,
displacement occurs when an object is submerged in water, causing an
equal volume of water to be displaced to make room for it. Freud’s
psychological definition of displacement suggests that when we cannot
express fear or anger at a person or situation, our minds unconsciously
transfer/reassign that anger to a safer target. For example, a worker
who’s angry at his boss might displace his feelings by taking out his
anger on his family. A teenager who experiences abuse by a parent might
become a school bully, redirecting misplaced aggression toward fellow
students.
The concept is particularly relevant in the context of
our current reality. When millions of immigrants, legally documented and
otherwise, flock to the U.S., some—often white Christians—perceive that
these new arrivals take up space they believe is rightfully theirs.
It’s easier to express rage, rancor or blame toward powerless others
than to consider the complexities of issues that can feel out of one's
control. Many have embraced Trump's anti-immigration stance and the
fantasy of building a “big,
beautiful, powerful wall.” Few have likely given real thought to what
it would require to track down and forcibly remove 11 million people
from the country, as Trump says he'll do.
Arlie Hochschild, author of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Rightwrites that
displacement among Trump supporters “reflects pain” rooted in the
feeling that “you've done everything right and you're still slipping
back.”
The displacement defense “focuses blame on an
ill-intentioned government,” Hochschild writes. “And it points to
rescue: The Tea Party for some, and Donald Trump for others.”
Robert P. Jones, the founding CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of The End of White Christian America, explained in an AlterNet interview
that “conservative white Christians, who could see themselves in [a]
mythical depiction of 1950's America...are having a more difficult time
seeing their place in a rapidly changing country.” For tens of millions
of people, this displacement reflects feelings of loss—of culture, jobs,
community, religion, economics, identity, and hope for the future.
Jones says Trump has transformed these “self-described ‘value voters’”
into “nostalgia voters,” casting their ballots less for any one
candidate than for a return to a past in which their place in the social
order was secure.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Trauma
is the emotional response to a distressing life event. For many victims
and survivors of trauma, such as sexual abuse, personal violence, war
combat, natural disasters and beyond, remnants of the pain, anguish and
suffering from the original incident remain within. Post-traumatic
stress disorder, or PTSD, is a mental health condition that develops
when bygone traumas continue to live on in the psyche. They can be
triggered by any number of factors, causing the person to re-experience
the feelings they had during the traumatizing event.
PTSD kick starts our innate drives toward fight-or-flight, or even freeze. It
is likely that both severe trauma and PTSD are under-reported and affect
a much broader slice of the population. This article,
in the British Journal of Psychiatry, showed that life events and
divorce are likely to cause more symptoms of PTSD than recognized
triggers such as car accidents or brushes with death.
Psychology Today
notes that, "It has long been established that stress-related
illnesses, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) trigger changes
in brain structure, including differences in the volume of gray matter
versus white matter, as well as the size and connectivity of the
amygdala.”
Long-term stress affects the brain by “decreas[ing] the
number of stem cells that mature into neurons and might provide an
explanation for how chronic stress also affects learning and memory.” It
also raises the level of cortisol, dubbed the “stress hormone.”
Researchers indicate this can lead to a “domino effect that hardwires
pathways between the hippocampus and amygdala in a way that might create
a vicious cycle by creating a brain that becomes predisposed to be in a
constant state of fight-or-flight.”
It’s true that our electoral politics are often drive by fear. But as we've previously noted, “on the other hand, there are many millions of people who are afraid for very real reasons.”
These
include bad policies and messed-up priorities resulting in half the
country living on the economic margins or in poverty; widespread PTSD
from our wars; and massive militarization of local police departments
who use their equipment, gear and racist attitudes to treat citizens as
if they were terrorists. These are real and valid fears. But they tend
to be the ones politicians and the wealthy elites deny or ignore.
Triggers
Long
after a traumatic event has ceased, the imprint—of the fear, sadness or
panic it caused—may remain buried within. A trigger is an action or
event that causes survivors to return to their initial trauma, causing
those feelings to resurface, sometimes as viscerally as the moment in
which they were first felt.
Trump, who has campaigned on hate and
misogyny, has triggered millions of survivors with the toxic masculinity
and sexism he has continuously put out for the last 18 months. Though
many were already deeply troubled by Trump’s anti-women rhetoric
throughout the primaries—he has insulted women in every way and at every
turn—his leaked boasts about sexually assaulting women caused many to re-experience their trauma. During the second presidential debate, as
Trump skulked creepily across the stage, lurking behind Clinton in
vaguely menacing ways, calls to a national sexual assault hotline increased by a third.
“Symptoms
of PTSD result when a person has been frightened to the degree where
they frequently have no words,” Gail Wynn, a sex therapist and professor
in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA,
said during an interview for a related piece.
“They have no behavior, no response that they know of that they can use
to stop whatever is happening, that is frightening them and terrorizing
them. This is the body’s way of registering to an individual that
whatever they’re experiencing is really beyond what the body can
process. The body frequently goes back to those same symptoms and those
same kinds of reactions with other experiences that may be similar to
what they went through, or even where the same language might be used.”
Triggers
set off responses that are beyond the control of those who experience
them. They tend to take the form of fight-or-flight, or the survivor may
freeze, immobilized by the overwhelming rush of feelings they’re
experiencing. Survivors describe reactions from sleeplessness to
flare-ups of chronic pain to uncontrollable crying. Many went offline or
turned off their televisions when Trump and other related election
stress became too much to bear.
Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive
dissonance is what we call the tension and anxiety that result from
holding, and attempting to reconcile, two contradictory or conflicting
ideas, thoughts or opinions. We all experience cognitive dissonance at
some point; think of it as a kind of internalized, nagging discomfort
over our own hypocrisy. Vegans who wear leather, or joggers who smoke
cigarettes, could possibly experience cognitive dissonance. In the case
of the election, patriot hawks supporting a five-time draft dodger; pious evangelicals voting for a thrice-married philanderer who publicly cheated on his first twowives; conservative moralists boosting a man who brags about grabbing women “by the pussy”; and long-time Kremlin critics rooting for the guy who can’t say enough good things about Putin could likely be afflicted with cognitive dissonance.
The
ways we cope with cognitive dissonance include rationalizing the
schisms in our thinking; for example, dismissing a candidate’s vivid
description of sexual assault as mere locker-room talk. It might also
include modifying our opinions to eliminate discrepancies in thinking.
Case in point: a recent study by
the Public Religion Research Institute found that just five years ago,
only 30 percent of white evangelical Protestants and 36 percent of
Republicans agreed that “an elected official can behave ethically [in
public office] even if they have committed transgressions in their
personal life.” In the age of Trump, that number has more than doubled
to 72 percent among white evangelicals, and increased to 70 percent
among Republicans overall—the largest gains among any demographic
groups.
Dunning-Kruger Effect
A
psychological phenomenon first identified in 1999 by Cornell
University’s David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the effect describes the
tendency of those who lack information on a subject or topic to
erroneously overestimate their knowledge or skill in said area. In other
words, to know how bad you are at something, you need to have some
knowledge of what it takes to be good at it, without which, you’re
likely to be overconfident about your competency. (Conversely, if you
have a lot of knowledge about a certain thing, and a fairly good
understanding of its complexity, you’re more likely to underestimate
your abilities.) The principle might be regarded as the inverse proof of
the famous Einstein truism, which states, “The more I learn, the more I
realize how much I don't know.” It also brings to mind the old adage,
“A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.”
In a recent op-ed for Politico titled,
“The Psychological Quirk That Explains Why You Love Donald Trump,”
Dunning concluded that the effect extends to “political judgment”:
“In
voters, lack of expertise would be lamentable but perhaps not so
worrisome if people had some sense of how imperfect their civic
knowledge is,” he writes. “If they did, they could repair it. But the
Dunning-Kruger Effect suggests something different. It suggests that
some voters, especially those facing significant distress in their life,
might like some of what they hear from Trump, but they do not know
enough to hold him accountable for the serious gaffes he makes. They
fail to recognize those gaffes as missteps…[T]he key to the
Dunning-Kruger Effect is not that unknowledgeable voters are uninformed;
it is that they are often misinformed—their heads filled with false
data, facts and theories that can lead to misguided conclusions held
with tenacious confidence and extreme partisanship, perhaps some that
make them nod in agreement with Trump at his rallies.”
Throw in a little confirmation bias—a
cognitive bias that makes people interpret new information, including
facts that directly contradict what they believe, in a way that confirms
their preconceived ideas—and we're off to the races.
The numbers bear this out. In studyafterstudy,
researchers find that college-educated voters are statistically far
more likely to vote for Clinton than for Trump. What’s more, Fox News
watchers are the most misinformed of television news consumers, scoring even lower than those who consume no news at all, and Fox viewers mostly fall into the Trump camp.
Gaslighting
The term gaslighting comes from the classic 1944 psychological thriller Gaslight,
starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman as a married couple. Boyer
plays an unscrupulous husband who secretly dims and brightens a
gaslight, then denies any change has happened when his wife questions
him about the shifting light levels. He follows up the gaslight trick
with a number of other manipulations, all while maintaining that his
spouse is imagining the changes around her. The maddening ruse has its
intended effect, with Bergman’s character growing to doubt her own eyes,
judgment, and ultimately, her sanity.
Psychotherapist and author Christine Louis de Canonville describes gaslighting
as "a form of psychological abuse used by narcissists in order to
instill in their victims an extreme sense of anxiety and confusion to
the point where they no longer trust their own memory, perception or
judgment."
Most often, gaslighting is used in romantic relationships by
one partner trying to manipulate the thinking of the other. Think
cheaters attempting to make their spouses doubt evidence of infidelity,
controlling lovers who wield confusion and blame to crush their
partners’ self-esteem, leaving dependence and over-reliance in its
place. By pretty much every measure, Donald Trump is the king of
gaslighting, a mind game he’s employed on a massive scale to disorient
tens of millions of people in his quest for the presidency.
Trump
has deftly used gaslighting throughout his campaign to avoiding
responsibility for pretty much anything, employing topsy-turvy “logic”
to instead place blame on everyone else. So, the media is out to get
him, the election is rigged and debate moderators are unfair. New Republic's
Brian Beutler highlights Trump’s attempted gaslighting of voters to
deny his use of “birtherism and other forms of racist agitation to build
a political base for himself" by pointing the finger at Hillary
Clinton’s long-term adviser Sidney Blumenthal. Even electronics do not
escape unscathed: Trump's debate mic was purposely sabotaged, and a “lousy earpiece” is to blame for his refusal to disavow David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan.
Perhaps
Trump’s most blatant use of gaslighting came just after the leak of the
2005 Access Hollywood video. Following the revelations, a number of
women—at least 11
so far—have publicly stated, using detailed examples of Trump’s alleged
sexual abuse, that Trump behaves in real life as he described on the
tape. Trump’s response has been to dub all the women liars, accuse Clinton, a Mexican billionaire and a globalist conspiracy of trying to destroy him, and suggest that he’ll sue them all. According to
Paul Rosenberg, Trump’s reaction "was not surprising: a wholesale
denial, accusing everyone else of lying, secrecy and bad faith, thus
creating an alternate reality and claiming it to be true." In other
words, textbook gaslighting. Rosenberg cites psychotherapist and
political analyst Leah McElrath, who writes that “Trump’s statement is
an eerie replica of psychological manipulations made by abusers after
episodes of abuse.”
Trump Anxiety
For millions of Americans and people around the world, the
thought of having a race-baiting, sexual assault-promoting, xenophobic,
policy-ignorant demagogue in the White House is a genuinely scary
prospect, one frightening enough to keep them up at night. Back in
April, the Washington Post
spoke with numerous psychologists and massage therapists who reported
seeing a new strain of fear and stress among their patients. They
identified this as Trump Anxiety, a crippling psychological condition
that has everything to do with potential for Trump to become president,
and falls under the umbrella of Election Seasonal Affective Disorder.
All of the factors described above—narcissism, gaslighting, projection,
trauma and PTSD, etc.—contribute to Trump Anxiety.
“Usually it’s
combined with other anxiety triggers that they may be having, and it can
cause sleeplessness, restlessness, feeling powerless,” Kimberly
Grocher, a psychotherapist in New York, told Slate’s Michelle Goldberg. “It can lead to feelings of depression.”
The
pressure seems even more acute among those with histories of personal
or familial trauma. Goldberg spoke to a therapist who said one patient,
from a family of Holocaust survivors, told her “it feels to her like all
the stories she heard from her grandparents.” Grocher, who is African
American, says her patients of color have expressed fear about, “What’s
going to happen in my community if this person is in office?”
The fear and anxiety surrounding Trump’s ascent haven’t only affected adults. A Southern Poverty Leadership Conference survey
found “more than two-thirds of the teachers reported that
students—mainly immigrants, children of immigrants and Muslims—have
expressed concerns or fears about what might happen to them or their
families after the election.”
In the end, many are finding that
their fear has been heightened by the prospect of a Trump presidency,
and the question of what will come next.
Don Hazen is the executive editor of AlterNet.
Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.
Jason Chaffetz, a proud Republican congressman from Utah and a man who
looks like a shit-flecked, tossed-out toilet scrub brush, announced
proudly on his proud Twitter
feed that he was taking a proud stand for America: "I will not defend
or endorse @realDonaldTrump, but I am voting for him. HRC is that bad.
HRC is bad for the USA." He followed this up by adding, "And I won't
suck Mr. Trump's dick entirely, but I will just lick the tip."
Previously, Chaffetz had taken another mighty stand, proudly declaring
that Republican presidential nominee and withered kumquat of doom Donald
Trump was vile when he talked about pussy-grabbing. Said Chaffetz on
CNN just 3 weeks ago, "I'm not going to put my good name and reputation
and my family behind
Donald Trump when he acts like this, I just can't do it," bemoaning
that his 15 year-old daughter might be exposed to such Trumpian
vulgarity.
Today, however, he said, "I don't actually have a good name. Seriously,
have you seen me in action? I'm just a fucked-up, horrible human being
whose only purpose will be to shit all over the presidency of Hillary
Clinton and try to stop government from functioning by tying her up in
endless bullshit investigations."
He added, "My reputation is garbage and I kind of fucking hate my
family, so, yeah, I'm gonna just place the tip of Mr. Trump's dick in my
mouth. But I promise all of my constituents that I will not fully
engorge his cock."
He continued, "Rest assured, people of Utah's 3rd Congressional
District, I will lick a bit around Mr. Trump's prick hole, but I am not
going to deep throat the entire shaft and grab it and jack it off while I
suck and lick. I won't cup Mr. Trump's balls and swallow with a
satisfied moan when he spurts hot jism into my face. I have ethics, as
you all know. Instead, I will spend every waking moment obsessed with
leaked emails, trying to desperately fuck that into a scandal that will
nakedly appeal to Trump's voters so I can get more power."
And now enjoy a photo of Rep. Chaffetz gladly standing next to large purple dongs:
The latest polls are looking good for Hillary Clinton and increasingly so for Democrats further down on the ballot. The ABC tracking poll,
which Nate Silver designates as A plus, was released on Sunday, showing
Clinton with a 12-point lead over Trump. That’s a bigger lead than in
most other polls but the averages across the board have her
percentage up by a comfortable margin that seems to be increasing.
Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com has laid out four possible outcomes to the race at this point, with all but one featuring a Clinton win:
A Trump win, including cases where he loses the popular vote but wins the Electoral College.
A
narrow Clinton win, wherein she wins the Electoral College, but wins
the popular vote by 3 percentage points or less. (Or wins the Electoral
College and loses the popular vote.)
A Clinton win in the “Obama
zone,” wherein she wins the popular vote by 4 to 7 percentage points —
the margins by which President Obama won the elections in 2012 and 2008,
respectively. Clinton is all but certain to win the Electoral College
if she wins the popular vote by this amount.
Finally, a Clinton
blowout, wherein she wins the popular vote by 8 points or more, which
would almost certainly also yield a dominant performance in the
Electoral College.
FiveThirtyEight’s model, which
averages polls, shows that Clinton has an 85 percent probability of
winning and is currently ahead by 6.6 points.
For its part, The New York Times Upshot has
a 92 percent probability of a Clinton win and shows see side-by-side
comparisons of all the predictions. They all have Clinton with 85
percent or higher. Using its customary metaphor, the Upshot compares the
chances of Clinton losing “to the probability that an NFL kicker misses
a 29-yard field goal.” That indeed happens (in fact, it happened on Sunday night) so Democrats should not get complacent.
And
for down ballot races? Well, there always has been a decent possibility
that the Democrats would win the Senate if they retain the White House,
simply because this is a cycle when Republicans are defending more
seats. Still, that outcome is anything but assured, and some analysts
are insisting (without evidence)
that this year will feature lots of ticket splitting (that is, people
who vote for Clinton but also vote for a Republican incumbent senator,
for example).
Still, this cycle is nothing if not unpredictable, so who knows?
Democrats had written off the House from the beginning: GOP gerrymandering all
over the country makes it nearly impossible for Democrats to win a
majority in the House until another round of redistricting after the
2020 census. Still, the possibility, however remote, is starting to be
discussed. Sam Wang from the Princeton Election Consortium said:
I
estimate that Democrats must win the national popular vote by 8% to
have any chance at taking control of the House. This large margin is
driven by two major factors in equal measure: gerrymandering to pack
Democrats into districts, and population patterns which they pack
themselves. Therefore the magic number for House Democrats is a Clinton
win by 8%. In national polls Clinton is currently ahead by 5% (7 polls
starting on October 10th or later), and Obama outperformed his 2012
polls by 3%, so it’s not crazy to imagine. I’d give the House Democrats a
1 in 5 chance of making it over this bar. A long shot . . . but not a
crazy long shot.
So what’s happening to make this
dramatic shift in October? Clinton had been leading throughout the
summer, but on Sept. 26, the day of the first debate,
FiveThirtyEight had Donald Trump with a 51 percent chance of winning.
The candidates were tied nationally at 45 percent, and the trend was
moving in his favor.
The obvious answer is that Trump blew it when
he made a fool of himself in the aftermath of the first debate with his
3 a.m. tweets about the former Miss Universe. Since then he has been
accused by a dozen women of groping and assaulting them against their
will. That “Access Hollywood” tape was a shocker. Most observers see the
huge and growing gender gap as a result of all that grossness.
But
something else happened as well. For about a month before that first
debate the right-wing media and people in or around the Trump campaign had been spreading spurious rumors that
Clinton had brain damage or Parkinson’s disease. This was barely
covered in the mainstream media, but everyone in the media pays
attention to Matt Drudge, who had been relentless with the story, so
they were very much aware of such rumors.
When Clinton had her
fainting spell at the 9/11 ceremony in New York, the press spent days
feigning anger about her failure to keep them properly informed about
the details of her doctor’s appointments and diagnosis. (That’s despite campaign professionals saying they would never inform the press of anything like that, mainly because such illnesses are so common on the trail.)
Unfortunately
for Clinton, the combined effect of the right’s relentless smears about
some kind of disqualifying terminal illness and the press fulminating
for days over her pneumonia advanced the idea that she lacked the
“strength and stamina” required for the job. Coincidentally or
otherwise, this was the very charge that Trump had been making for
months. By the time of the first debate in late September Clinton had
been off the trail for quite a bit, first recovering from her pneumonia
and then doing debate prep, with Trump nipping at her heels.
When
she showed up looking very healthy, sharp and aggressive, it changed the
narrative overnight. Indeed, her ability to bait him into misbehavior
had her dominating that debate from beginning to end, when she hit him
with the Alicia Machado story that had him reeling for days afterward.
So
it’s true that Trump’s poll numbers have been cratering for a month
now, pointing to what may be a catastrophic loss for the Republicans.
Much of that happened because of revelations about Trump’s horrifying
misogyny and his ongoing inability to behave with any discipline.
But
it’s a mistake to discount the huge effect of the debates, well beyond
Trump’s predictably ridiculous performance. These were the first
occasions since the Benghazi hearings for people to see what Clinton is
made of, and it reminded them of the characteristics that make her a
formidable leader. When she stood there, face-to-face with Trump, it was
clear that one of them was a president.
And it wasn’t him.
Heather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.
1. From the beginning, the tone of last night's third presidential debate
(aka "The Time an Orange Pussy Was Grabbed by a Former Secretary of
State") was set from the first question from moderator Chris "Do You
Still Love Me, Roger?" Wallace. It was about the Supreme Court and how
the candidates view the role of the court and the Constitution. Democrat
Hillary Clinton offered a thoughtful explanation of the Supreme Court
as a check on the powerful. Republican candidate and imploding rage
persimmon Donald Trump took a different tactic.
First, he talked about how one justice had totally dissed him: "Justice
Ginsburg made some very, very inappropriate statements toward me." Then
he veered into the one amendment he apparently has heard of: "We need a
Supreme Court that in my opinion is going to uphold the Second
Amendment, and all amendments, but the Second Amendment, which is under
absolute siege." So don't worry, Third Amendment fans, you still won't
be forced to quarter soldiers. In other words, Clinton said something
that was real and possible and Trump followed up with ego, fantasy, and
lies. That Clinton didn't respond to Trump's every answer with "The fuck
are you saying? Yo, Chris, what the fuck is that? Fuck, fucking
dumbfuck" before kicking him in the taint and sodomizing him with a
dildo on principle is some kind of miracle of self-control.
2. Well, there was that one moment when Clinton said, "Let me translate
that, if I can, Chris" when Trump was rattling off a stream of
not-really-consciousness about the economy.
3. Clinton let her feminist freak flag fly in full last night with her
response on a question about abortion. She gave up the total bullshit
line that abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare" because, let's face
it, it ain't ever gonna be rare. Instead, she offered absolute support
for Roe v. Wade and, when asked about late-term abortions (when Wallace
used the anti-choice dog whistle phrase "partial-birth abortion"),
Clinton made an impassioned and compassionate case for its necessity:
"The kinds of cases that fall at the end of pregnancy are often the most
heartbreaking, painful decisions for families to make." Goddamn, it was
great to see Clinton get her activist dander up for women's rights
again.
3a. Trump responded, in one of his most mentally-challenged moments,
that "based on what she's saying, and based on where she's going, and
where she's been, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb
in the ninth month on the final day. And that's not acceptable." No,
motherfucker, that's not an acceptable abortion. It is a c-section,
however. No doctor is cutting open women and swinging babies around by
their umbilical cords like it's on the end of a slingshot and tossing
them in the garbage. To Donald Trump, compassion is what you show people
who like you. Everyone else can suck it.
4. Trump, dude, fuckin' marry Putin already and move to Russia where he can rub bear oil on your pendulous man nips.
4a. And what the hell was all that dissing of American intelligence
agencies? Trump was on some kind of paranoid rant about how "you don't
know" that Russia wasn't behind email hacks when, like, every
intelligence group says it was Russia. There are lots of reasons to
criticize our spying for its invasion of Americans' privacy (a subject,
like climate change, never brought up in the debates), but to go to the
mat over what country hacked a private email account is a desperate play
for one's lover's attention.
4b. Pendulous. Man. Nips.
5. Yeah, yeah, Clinton still seemed like she's stumbling around when
asked about her email server. But, truly, what the fuck else is there to
say? "I fucked up," she's told us time and again, and, unless you
believe, like Trump, that the FBI is just a big scam to protect Hillary
Clinton, how is the whole thing even relevant except as something,
anything to use to criticize Clinton?
6. Trump said Clinton was responsible for the following things:
a. His use of Chinese steel in his buildings
b. His not paying income tax for 20 years
c. Women saying that he has assaulted them
d. The timing of the attack to take back Mosul
Seriously, if she's this powerful, we better fuckin' elect her or she's
just gonna use her obvious wizard-abilities to murder us all like we're
just Vince Fosters in a park.
7. Trump can't help himself with his misogyny. In addition to his
condemnation of the women who said he tit-groped, force-kissed, and
pussy fondled them, at one point, when Clinton said, "My Social Security
payroll contribution will go up, as will Donald's, assuming he can't
figure out how to get out of it," Trump proclaimed, "Such a nasty
woman." Just to put this in context: By that point, late in the debate,
Trump had said that Clinton had committed high crimes, is "crooked" and
running a "crooked campaign," and shouldn't even have been allowed run
for president. But, sure, implying that Trump, who has said he's proud
he doesn't pay taxes, might weasel out of paying for Social Security,
that's the nasty part. Trump has never been a position where he had to
listen to woman tell him what a piece of shit he is when there was
nothing he could do about it.
8. And, of course, Trump proved how this whole thing is just a fuckin' game to him when he said, in answer to a question
about whether he would "accept" the outcome of the election, "I will
look at it at the time. I'm not looking at anything now. I'll look at it
at the time...What I'm saying is that I will tell you at the time. I'll
keep you in suspense. OK?" And there it is. This is a goddamn sporting
event, a very special episode of The Apprentice: Deplorables Edition to him. You got that sense earlier when he smirked that he should have won an Emmy for his idiot show. He followed up today with a coy "I'll totally accept" the election results "if I win,"
And what does that even mean? Fuckin' hell, Republicans, especially
those in Congress, didn't accept Obama's election twice. Trump just said
it too early. And Trump doesn't have to concede. That doesn't change
the outcome of the election. He can stand there with his dick in his
hands and pretend like some challenge he makes will change the outcome.
But unless a court accepts it, he either has to lead his idiot hordes
into revolution (which he won't and which, with maybe a couple of
exceptions, they won't) or he has to slither back to his golden
penthouse and pretend his entire life hasn't become a huge goddamn joke.
