Trump Unleashed

The extraordinary dominance of Donald Trump over the Republican Party, showcased by his resounding win in South Carolina and explained in the reporting of Lisa Lerer, is the salient political fact of this election season, offering us another 8 months of torture by news. The article’s teaser noted that Trump “shows no sign of being shaken from his controlling position in the G.O.P. — not in 2024, and not in the foreseeable future.”

Acolytes populate every Republican committee and organization from school boards to Congress, and sometimes dominate them. If they are not more numerous than those just willing to go along, they are much louder and scarier. The predictions about what a second Trump administration might do are indeed frightening. But what if he loses?

Biden might just edge Trump, leaving the partisan divisions and Republican dysfunction in Congress and state houses intact. Or sentiment might shift over these next long-winded months, as some Americans see reason and move away from Republicans as a Party, depriving the disruptors on the right of their power to do anything but scream.

That distinction might not matter, because Trump and his MAGA movement don’t care about the Republican Party outside of themselves. They define the non-MAGA half of the Party as RINOs. At every opportunity, Trump has been promoting his personal victimhood, not just predicting a fixed election, but proclaiming that the fix is already in place. He tells Black voters that he, like them, is suffering from discrimination. The long delayed judicial reckoning with his years of criminal behavior has been turned into “election interference” orchestrated by Joe Biden.

Millions of Americans, already credulous, are being primed to believe that any Trump defeat, close or landslide, must have been created by liberal treason, spread throughout government. They will be more ready for action than were Trump’s believers in 2021. They are more likely to be armed.

Only Trump himself could keep them under control. Given their levels of paranoid mistrust of anything that clashes with their beliefs, a televised Trump statement that he lost a fair election, grudgingly offered days later, would not be sufficient. Trump would have to implore his movement army to stay peaceful, because he really did lose and America goes on.

Is that likely? What would he do after that? Go back to real estate? Hit the New York clubs again? Golf endlessly?

There is no reason for a losing Trump not to encourage his followers’ social, political, economic, and virtual war against the “vermin” who are destroying America. I therefore foresee public violence, but I also believe it will be contained, as happened on January 6. I don’t dismiss the lasting repercussions of violence, however it turns out. Official Republican claims about “hostages” demonstrate the impossibility of any common narrative about that abundantly recorded and adjudicated event.

But below any eruption of violence lies a hot bubbling mass of despair, disbelief, distrust, shading into hatred. It is easier than ever before to bring a mass of angry people to one place and to direct them into action. We will not lack for people who seek personal gain by whipping up their passions. Marjorie Taylor Green, Kari Lake, Kristina Karamo, and hundreds of others at every level of government are not likely to urge Trump or their believers to accept reality, because unreason is their calling card.

I can’t imagine a defeated Trump fading into political unimportance. I think he will fully embrace his role as “proud political dissident” from above, safely ensconced in Mar-a-Lago, teaching ever wilder nightmares about our society to MAGA through TikTok and X. He would no longer be hemmed in by the need to appeal to any but his most idolatrous fans. Rules of governance, international treaties, American history, and the Constitution would all become irrelevant. The media personalities who have made their names by propping him up for years will continue to offer fake news to anyone who will listen. Trump could distort our American lives for another decade.

I hope Biden wins. I fantasize about a national awakening to the conviction that Trump needs to go and the Republican Party remade. But I read “The Monkey’s Paw” by W. W. Jacobs as a child, so I’m careful what I wish for.

Steve Hochstadt

Boston, MA

May 1, 2024

Two Sides of Trump’s Mouth

Ever since January 6, 2021, Republicans have been trying to minimize the shameful events at the Capitol. The made-for-MAGA fantasies about antifa or secret FBI agents or other anti-Trumpers infiltrating the crowd and causing the violence have receded into the background of far-right conspiracy mongers.

More recently, Republicans embarrassed about January 6 have pivoted to denying that there was violence. During a 2023 CNN town hall, Trump described January 6 as a "beautiful day." The rioters have become “hostages”. Trump called for the release of “the J6 hostages” at a rally in Iowa in January, to the loud approval of the crowd.

However inappropriate it is to use popular sympathy for real hostages to win votes, that word is the logical conclusion of the Trump thought train. When Tucker Carlson spliced together a video collage that made January 6 look innocuous, and said, “These were not insurrectionists. They were sightseers,” Trump said it was “irrefutable” evidence that rioters have been wrongly accused of crimes. He called for the release from custody of people who were convicted or pled guilty in court.

That’s one side of Trump’s mouth, pointed towards the MAGA base that has an outsized influence on our politics. They apparently will believe anything, if he says it.

But Trump says other things. At the Supreme Court, where Trump’s personal political future is at stake, his lawyers cannot depend on fantasies. One of the key issues in Trump’s case is whether he should be prevented from running for President, because he aided an insurrection. Justice Ketanji Jackson asked Trump’s lawyer Jonathan Mitchell whether January 6 qualified as an insurrection. Mitchell thought it would weaken his argument, if he offered Trump’s campaign statements instead of the truth. He replied, "This was a riot. It was not an insurrection. The events were shameful, criminal, violent, all of those things, but did not qualify as an insurrection as that term is used in Section 3. What we said in our opening brief was President Trump did not engage in any act that can plausibly be classified as insurrection." An insurrection needs to be an "organized, concerted effort to overthrow the government of the United States through violence. This was a riot. It was not an insurrection.”

Even where truth matters most in our society, in courts of law, Trump is willing to spout fictions, castigate officers of the law, impugn judges, and repeat the same lies that got him convicted. I don’t think this speaks of rational calculation, but of preposterous narcissism and faith in the gullibility of his fans.

But more than he wants to inhabit the godlike persona he has cultivated for years, Trump wants to win. So his defenders at the Supreme Court admitted the obvious, implicitly calling Trump and other Republicans liars, so Trump could escape the label of “insurrectionist”.

Where truth matters, even in courts of law dominated by conservatives, Trump will speak the truth, or at least approach the truth, if it’s in his interest.

Will it matter that Trump tells two contradictory stories to suit his personal interests? Will American Jews who support any Republicans, thus support Republican talking points, thus the “hostage” rhetoric, admit that their political choices stoke antisemitism? Will they say out loud that Trump himself is an antisemite and thus not fit for American office? What more will it take?

Steve Hochstadt

Boston

March 7, 2024

Trump is not an Asshole. He’s Much Worse.

 

A few years ago, I explained in a video why I thought Trump was an asshole. Apart from any political issues, his treatment of other people exactly fitted the definition of asshole that our society developed as I grew up. I was hardly original: Trump has been called an asshole in the finest publications.

But I take it back.

The media deliberately portray assholes, fictional and real, because we apparently like to watch asshole behavior. Mostly they are harmless: annoying, disruptive, repulsive, and eventually sad creatures. But someone who steals your money, grabs your body, wants to put you in jail, and insults your religion or heritage, has gone beyond being an asshole.

Donald Trump is the most disgusting person in American public life. This has nothing to do with politics or policies. Nothing here is news. Individual elements are damning – the sum is a fatally flawed human being.

A central part of Trump’s business model is cheating people. He cheated workers across the country, hundreds of them, who had to sue him to get their pay. He cheated people who signed up for “Trump University”, and had to repay $25 million to former students.

Trump’s charity was a fake, a charity for him. He cheated poor children, Black college students, and many other needy people, including veterans trying to reenter civilian life through the Army Emergency Relief.

He used donors’ money to pay his debts, fund his campaign for President, and to buy a $10,000 painting of himself to display in one of his hotels. Another drop out of Trump’s bucket: he had to pay $2 million to the eight charities he cheated.

At a time when “thank you for your service” has become a nearly universal way of extending respect to past and present members of the armed forces, Trump repeatedly says, “I disdain your service.” His political disagreement in 2015 with John McCain led him to disparage the service of all men who had been captured, imprisoned, and sometimes tortured. “He’s not a war hero. I like people who weren’t captured.”

Even less worthy of respect in Trump’s eyes are those who didn’t survive. Trump accompanied his chief of staff, retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, to Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day 2017 to visit the grave of Kelly’s son Robert, killed in 2010 in Afghanistan. Trump said to Kelly, "I don't get it. What was in it for them?" Refusing to visit an American cemetery near Paris in 2018 in the rain, he expressed contempt for all dead soldiers: “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” Trump called the 1,800 Marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood “suckers”.

Trump is better than a veteran. He said that marching around at the New York Military Academy gave him “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military.” He called the real military leaders in his administration “a bunch of dopes and babies” and “pussies”.

Who makes fun of someone who is disabled? Trump.

Who makes public fun of everyone he doesn’t like? Trump.

E. Jean Carroll is the first of a dozen women who have accused Trump of sexual assault to win a judgment against him: out goes another $83.3 million. “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

How about his own daughter? His aides said Trump “regularly made lewd comments about his daughter Ivanka and fantasized about what it would be like to have sex with her.” Long before he ran for President, Trump said the same things to radio host Howard Stern. He told Stern that it was perfectly fine to refer to Ivanka as “a piece of ass” in 2004, chatted with Stern about about the size of her breasts in 2006.

Many people have performed the public service of collecting and numbering Trump’s lies. He has never stopped duping his supporters. In his New Hampshire victory speech, Trump said he’d won the state in 2016 and 2020, but Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden both beat him there. Constant lying is a sin of small-mindedness, a personal reveal rather than a public danger, demonstrated by the unique George Santos.

A President’s lies could be dangerous, but Trump is far worse than a liar. His soul is unique in American public life. None of the radical right-wing Freedom Caucus, not even Marjorie Green, is close to as repellent a human as Trump.

A central American question disturbs and confuses me: why do so many American adults praise, support, donate to, and even worship such a worthless man?

Here is a possible answer. His supporters know Trump is awful. They can yell “fake news” all they want, but the truth about Trump stares everyone in the face. So they concoct stories about how liberals are even more horrible. How else to explain the ridiculous popularity in the MAGA world of the Pizzagate claim that the Clintons were running a pedophile ring in Washington, DC? Even more popular is its crazier spawn, QAnon: “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan worshiping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation”. A majority of Republicans believed this about their country and the rest of us in 2020. In late 2023, another survey showed that 29% of Republicans are now QAnon believers. When Trump describes politicians and people who oppose him as “vermin”, he offers supporters a lifeline: you know how awful I am, but our enemies (meaning most Americans) are much worse.

QAnon is especially believed by less educated Republicans. What about the most politically educated, the leadership of the Republican Party? Republican office holders across the country are making the same deal: we’ll be silent about Trump’s obvious unfitness, if we can keep our jobs.

Imagine at the first Republican presidential debate this past August that seven of the candidates on stage, leaving out, say, Vivek Ramaswamy, each declared Donald Trump personally unfit to serve, and said that they rejected his serial adultery, business cheating, constant lying, and sexual assaults. Imagine that seven said that Trump’s illegal attempt to stay in power after losing the 2020 election was sufficient alone to disqualify him as a candidate and as a Republican.

None of them had to disagree with any of Trump’s policies. They only had to talk about his personal human failures. It may have taken a while for the MAGA adherents to recognize the depth of their delusions. Some Republican leaders who declared Trump a national danger might suffer politically. But what a public service to America and Americans.

If Trump is guilty above all of always putting himself in front of country, what about the leading Republicans who are racing to fall in line? Aren’t they guilty of the same moral flaw?

Steve Hochstadt

No thanks, Elise. I’d rather defend myself.

 

On Long Island, my Mom and I golfed at public courses. We couldn’t afford country club memberships, and they wouldn’t have taken us anyway.

When I entered the Ivy League in 1966, its institutional antisemitism was finally breaking apart. For decades, Brown University and the other private Ivies had deliberately limited Jewish admissions. Allowing Jews to matriculate beside the Christian private school elite in numbers representing their academic merit was unthinkable. Brown had a Jewish fraternity, because brothers in the long established fraternities did not want to mingle with the few Jews outside of class.

Much was changing among young people in 1966. I remember no antisemitic interactions with my classmates. My fraternity welcomed me as the third Jewish member. I also remember no institutional efforts to admit past antisemitism, much less to deal with that legacy or oppose antisemitism at home or abroad. I was simply pleased by the absence of overt prejudice.

Although I had no plans to make the history and nature of antisemitism a major focus when I began graduate school, for the past 40 years I have studied and written about antisemitism and its consequences.

I am repelled by today’s apparently widespread need, by both Jews and non-Jews, to perform public anti-antisemitism. I do wish that everyone would oppose antisemitism, but I don’t want to constantly hear the voices of people who never before had anything useful to say about antisemitism. Being Jewish doesn’t make one an expert on antisemitism, which contributes to the impassioned and often thoughtless arguments among Jews about our current crisis. The sudden use of public anti-antisemitism as a political tool to win votes alarms me, because of where the loudest voices come from: a Republican Party which collectively doesn’t like American Jews.

That’s not an exaggeration. Trump is their spokesman and a prime example. He has repeatedly exhibited his distaste for American Jews. Inviting a famous public antisemite, Kanye West, and his Holocaust-denying friend, Nick Fuentes, to dinner at his home is simply the worst recent expression of Trump’s snide and patronizing attitude toward American Jews.

But he skated away unscathed in his own Party. After the dinner, PBS asked dozens of Congressional Republicans if they thought the meeting was appropriate. 39 out of 57 gave no response. The few who commented avoided direct criticism, except the known anti-Trumpers like Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney. Kevin McCarthy claimed falsely that Trump condemned Fuentes.

Other Republican leaders have voiced their antisemitism publicly. In 2018, Kevin McCarthy and Tom Emmer each denounced three prominent Jewish philanthropists, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, and Tom Steyer, and nobody else, for “buying” Congress for the Democrats. The House Judiciary Committee tweeted “Kanye, Elon, Trump” in October 2022, then two months later deleted the tweet after Kanye “launched a lengthy antisemitic tirade” on Alex Jones’ show. Then chair Jim Jordan lied about it. Marjorie Green’s repeated public antisemitic displays, including cozy gestures to Holocaust deniers, were supported by 199 House Republicans, who voted against removing her from committees for her racist actions and remarks. There are no internal penalties for overt antisemitism among Republicans. But liberals like Ilhan Omar are welcome targets.

Suddenly Elise Stefanik promotes herself as the scourge of antisemitism. She “didn’t utter a peep of protest” about Trump’s dinner with West and Fuentes. When challenged on Trump’s association with antisemites, Stefanik excused him on the grounds that he had recognized Israel’s illegal occupation of Syria’s Golan Heights. The Anti-Defamation League criticized Stefanik as one of the propagators of the “great replacement theory”, saying her campaign’s posts “strategically play on extremist rhetoric to stoke growing fears that white Americans are under attack and minorities seek to eject them.” She said nothing when Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar promoted an antisemitic website that denies the Holocaust and praises Adolf Hitler as “a man of valor”. Now she’s outraged at university leaders who never said or did anything antisemitic in their lives. Ironically but characteristically, Stefanik plagiarized three paragraphs of a letter that criticized college presidents written by Rep. Kathy Manning, a Jewish North Carolina Democrat.

In the decades since I went to college, liberals, not conservatives, some of the Republicans, have gradually dismantled antisemitic structures with long American traditions. Academics have explained the sources and power of antisemitic prejudice and practice in America.

But today’s Republicans don’t like liberals or America’s universities. We vote for the wrong people and teach the wrong things. We talk about the structural racism of Christian antisemitism as the cause of the Holocaust. We talk about white supremacy and structural racism as fundamental to American history.

Republicans have been denying the existence of racism in contemporary America, both anti-Black and anti-Jew, for decades, and opposing every attempt to combat it. Antiracist programs in American higher education are a particular target of Republican politicians at the federal and state levels.

Republican anti-antisemitism is fake, a ploy of the moment to take particular advantage of the difficulty of finding a reasonable position on the war in the Middle East. The clumsiness of academic leaders has allowed Congressional Republicans to perform love of Israel for their voters. But those voters consistently say that white Christians are the real targets of discrimination in America.

I practice and support anti-antisemitism as both self-defense and moral righteousness. I don’t look to suddenly “woke” Republicans and evangelical conservatives, dreaming of the Second Coming and the final convert-or-die choice for the world’s Jews, to dismantle antisemitism.

Republicans are not anti-antisemites, they are anti-liberal and anti-university. Republican leaders traffic in antisemitism and their colleagues excuse it. Neo-Nazis and white supremacists are not “very fine people”.

With friends like Stefanik and Trump, who needs enemies?

Steve Hochstadt