Trump Off Message

Donald Trump is holding a winning hand, but he is discarding his best cards.

I have made the point repeatedly that Donald Trump is far more formidable a candidate than my progressive readers understand.   He could win.

Trump has a popular, winning message.   A great many people believe the country is on the wrong course and that change of some kind is needed.   Hillary Clinton represents continuity; Trump represents shaking things up.  Democrats had an 8 year turn and there is some natural sentiment to try something new.

In addition, Hillary Clinton says there is a lot of xenophobia, misogyny and racism in the American psyche and Donald Trump is very adept at denying it exists and then appealing to that very xenophobia, misogyny, and racism.   A lot of white males are frustrated with the way things are and Trump has helped them locate the source of their problem: bad trade deals and politically correct bending over backwards to help everyone except people like themselves.

And Trump is a master at manipulating the media.  Even news outlets that actively and overtly dislike him focus story after story on him.   MSNBC is all-Trump-all-the-time.   So is the Huffington Post.

So what is the problem?   Trump is a flawed messenger.  He cannot seem to resist a fight, even a wrong fight.   

Trump's message is that he can fix the problems of the world--a powerful message.  Hillary's message is that Trump is psychologically unfit to be president--a pretty good message.   Whenever Trump is talking about fixing the economy or making the average middle class frustrated person better off, or safer from bad guys, he is winning.   Whenever the subject is temperament and mental health Hillary is winning.

Trump:   "Unstable Hillary Clinton"

Yesterday, in New Hampshire, Trump himself brought up mental health and fitness for the office--Hillary's home turf and her best subject to put at issue.   "She took a short circuit in the brain.   She's got problems," he said.   He called her "unstable", "unbalanced", "totally unhinged", "incompetent", "melting-down", and "brainwashed."    Trump just put up an ad in which Hillary mis-speaks a couple of times asking, "Is Robot Hillary Melting Down?".  Watch it here:  30 Second Trump Ad

Trump is raising this issue in tweets, in the Windham, NH speech, and on the air.  I consider this suicidal message discipline, but Trump could not resist a fight.   Hillary has problems and inadequacies as a candidate, but competence and self control are not them.  Indeed, as I observed up close in Portland, Oregon and in multiple occasions in New Hampshire, Hillary presents as the straight laced, over-prepared, A-student valedictorian, the person you would trust to be the designated driver.   Hillary may not be fun and certainly is not free-spirited, but she is careful and self disciplined.    Trump is attempting to sell an idea that is implausible on its face, and, worse, it continues to put at issue Trump's own vulnerability.

Newt:  Trump's behavior is "very self destructive"

Trump's problem of lack of message discipline is no secret.   Trump's friends tell him, in public and frantically, to stay on message.   Trump's failure to do this is news.   Indeed, the headline after a recent Trump speech was not the subject of the speech but the fact that Trump actually rose to an occasion and acted responsibly on his own behalf and stayed on message.

But the fact that Trump does not do it, implies that he simply cannot do it.  This isn't just a problem, it is problem-squared, because he cannot help himself.   He must fight, even the wrong fight.   Fighting the wrong fight (i.e. the war with Iraq) was supposed to the Trump's excellent issue.   Trump claims he opposed the war and Hillary voted for it, and Libya.  Trump's supposed brand is that he knows when to fight and when not to, yet here he is fighting with Hillary over self discipline after having just fought with the Khan family over the loyalty and Americanism of a self-sacrificing soldier and having ambiguously--was he joking?--over a crying baby.

Trump's campaign may consider this a "swift boat" style attack.  Criticize the opponent at a point of strength.  The idea could be to assert that both the candidates are crazy, so there is nothing to choose from between the two candidates on the issue of crazy, so the focus can return to winning issues for Trump.    But the problem with this is that Trump is so vulnerable on the issue of un-presidential lack of self-discipline that Trump is doomed to compare unfavorably with Hillary if the issue is mental self discipline.

Objectively and apparently in both candidates' speaking style Hillary is controlled (and boring in comparison) and Trump is extemporaneous (and frankly entertaining.)   No amount of salesmanship will change that.

Trump is revealing an important vulnerability:  he cannot resist a stupid fight.  It hurts his brand and helps Hillary in comparison.

Failing the Temperament Test

We are experiencing a Revolution of Rising Expectations

A theory of political revolutions, voiced by sociologist James Chowning Davies, is that revolutions do not happen when things are miserable and getting worse.  They happen when things generally are getting better, then there is a setback:

Davies:  "Revolutions are most likely to occur when a prolonged period of objective economic and social development is followed by a short period of sharp reversal. People then subjectively fear that ground gained with great effort will be quite lost; their mood becomes revolutionary."

Car parked at Tea Party Convention in SC

Voters are feeling frustrated.  There is a mood of political revolution on the right and left.  The economy has worked its way out of the worst of the crash of 2008 and its recession aftermath.   Things are better now.   Homes mortgages are no longer under water.   Unemployment is down to 4.9%.  Gasoline is inexpensive.  America is approximately energy independent.  Crime is down.   What is the problem?   It is a period of rising expectations but there are still problems and attention focuses on those problems: shootings in San Bernardino and Orlando and Paris.  Bombs in Boston.  Police shootings in Dallas.

There is a political revolution, expressed in the form of voters being ornery.  The signs of it are the Tea Party on the Right and Bernie's revolution on the left.   Eric Canter was defeated in a primary.  Trump won the GOP nomination.  Bernie nearly drew Hillary to a draw.  

Tea Party Convention Attendee

Donald Trump is the agent of change.  He was the "mad as hell and not going to take it anymore" candidate.  Trump had the right message, but he is the wrong messenger now. Lucky for Hillary.

Remember the movie "Network", a movie that came out in 1976.   Peter Finch was a television anchor who struck a chord with the public with angry ravings about the state of the world.   IMDb describes it this way:  "A television network cynically exploits a deranged former anchor's ravings and revelations about the news media for its own profit."

The public loved watching the TV anchor.  He was bold and exciting and he unabashedly expressed the frustration many people were feeling.  He ranted at the failures and hypocrisy of the period.  The TV anchor had a message that resonated, but there was a problem, which is revealed in the brief synopsis of the movie.  The ravings and revelations were from a man defined as "deranged."    Here is a short clip from the movie:   It will sound eerily familiar:   "Everyone is out of work and scarred of losing their job.   Banks are going bust!"

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Donald Trump is not "deranged" and he is not clinically diagnosed as being mentally ill with an official DSM condition.   But Trump has long had an acknowledged problem with seeming "un-presidential", and the situation has gotten worse.   Critics from the left are predictable.  Trump's recent problems, which I argue have caused a bad turn for his campaign, is that he appears to be un-coachable and a major frustration to fellow-Republicans.   Criticism from his own team bites him much harder than does criticism from the left or from the media.   Newt Gingrich saying Trump needs to change, McConnell and Ryan being critical of him, Mitt Romney withholding his support, former CIA people saying Trump is mentally unfit: these are the charges that hurt.   They don't say he is "crazy."   But they say he isn't thinking correctly about the campaign.

Trump voices a more timely message than does Hillary.   Trump says we can win; Hillary says we need to struggle.   Trump says he will fix everything now, cutting through the gridlock; Hillary hopes to move the needle in the direction of progressive change, Congress willing.   The pendulum after 8 years of Obama is ready to swing back toward change of some sort.  Trump has the right message to address the frustration of rising expectations not being met.  But the messenger is not just undisciplined and un-coachable.  It goes beyond that.  He has a screw loose.

Frequent Guest Post writer Thad Guyer thinks I am wrong and that talk of Trump's being mentally unsuitable to be president is an artifact of the progressive echo chamber.   I consider some of Trumps GOP critics, the GOP endorsement holdouts, and voices strictly within the GOP orbit (National Review, RedState.com, and multiple Republican opinion writers) to be well outside the left echo chamber.    

But let's hear from Thad Guyer.

The Left’s Self-Delusional Echo Chamber

Democrats latching on to a “Trump is mentally ill” rant simply demonstrates to me the self-delusional power of the left’s “giant echo chamber”, the term used (as I quoted her in my recent comment) by the New York Times public editor, Liz Spayd. There is no serious discussion of Trump being mentally ill. There is only political hype to that effect. As a litigator I’ve worked regularly with psychologists and psychiatrists, and while a CNN talking head with a Ph.D might use the term “mental illness”, no credible mental health professional would. They clinically discuss very specifically defined “disorders” listed in the Diagnostic Services Manual—there isn’t one called “mental illness” or “crazy”. Such generalization does not exist within the discipline. It exists only in politics and media. The Clinton campaign has been effective with the “crazy” line—for a news cycle or two. But seeing the media buzz as a “serious” discussion of mental illness confuses politics and reality. Democrats latch on to these rhetorical fads as “real”, while establishment Republicans merely fret about down ballot races. Its self-delusion vs. political calculation.

True, I am a data driven lawyer, and I am inordinately fascinated with legal and political data. The data shows that despite a frenzied media and establishment (left and right) assault on Trump, the needle has not moved as we hoped on political perception of him. Today’s LA Times poll shows Clinton and Trump tied, and while a lesser known pollster gives Clinton an anomalous 15 point lead, the Real Clear Politics (RCP) average of polls as of today records 47.4 % support for Clinton, and Trump with 40.7%. (FiveThirtyEight calls the averages as of today at 49.1% for Clinton and 42.6% for Trump). Thus, a week after the DNC convention, $100 million of anti-Trump and pro-Clinton ads (Trump still doesn’t advertise), and a near psychotic media, here’s the result: Clinton struggles to reach even a 50% RCP polling average. Dukakis was up 17 points in the polling average over Bush I in the summer of 1988 before being wiped out in a humiliating landslide in November. It’s that remarkably resistant data that political scientists and the political right are talking about, while the left barely acknowledges it. How is it possible with such a tsunami against Trump, that Clinton shares with him the same statistical tranche—the 40th percentiles? With the three most decisive months to go, here’s what Democrats need to be asking: If rhetorical blows like “insanity”, “bullying grieving parents”, “777s might crash”, and “he hates babies”, combined with a near black-out of negative Clinton news in the mainstream media, then what more is there to throw at Trump between now and the election? Like the inflated confidence of the left in the UK over Brexit, in the last 30 days before the referendum the “stay in the EU” advocates had exhausted their credibility, and two things happened: (1) the British public decided that the Trump-like “buffoon” Boris Johnson was right in tagging the liberal campaign as “Project Fear”; and (2) young voters stayed home, believing the leftist "the majority will never vote for that" hype. If this project fear against Donald Trump continues at the center of our strategy against him, we can expect the same outcome—defeat. 

Inflection Point

"How did you go bankrupt?"     "Gradually, then suddenly."

It is too soon to call this week a turning point in the 2016 election, and way too soon to say that Hillary has this election wrapped up.

But something happened this week.

I don't think the big thing is Trump's foolishly tangling with Mr. Khan, nor the Purple Heart incident, nor the imagined video, nor failure to endorse Paul Ryan, nor his offhand remark that he didn't like the structural integrity of a Boeing 777, nor any of the other odd incidents of the week, although they did not help.

The important thing is that there is now discussion of Trump's mental health not as a matter of partisan polemics but as a matter of serious discussion.  On CNN Dr. David Perry objected strenuously to people linking Donald Trump and mental illness because it stigmatizes mental illness.   Read for yourself   That's right, Trump's behavior gives mental illness a bad name, he said, and Trump should be understood for being undisciplined and immature, not for being mentally ill; calling Trump crazy is unfair to the mentally ill.

Predictable and Partisan

Some of this comes from clearly partisan sources.  Lawrence O'Donnell at MSNBC says  "It's becoming more and more clear that the biggest disqualifying factor as Donald Trumpas president is his mental health."    A Democratic Congresswoman Karen Bass has started a petition at Change.org to demand an evaluation of Donald Trump.   Another Congressman, Ruben Gallego, did the same thing.   These are the predictable partisan attacks.  This blog has criticized Hillary Clinton and her campaign on numerous occasions over the past year, observing that she was flat-footed politically, that she was defensive, that she seemed tone deaf to the political winds, and that she missed opportunities to define her opponent.

This is a new Hillary, a Hillary who is running a competent campaign, redefining Trump as crazy, not the Trump explanation of Trumpism, that his is a "courageous truth teller" and "out of the box" change agent who will shake things up.  The people questioning Trump's sanity have extended outward from obvious partisans.  I am presuming that the Clinton campaign is sponsoring and encouraging this.  Some of this took place at the Democratic Convention.  The effort is working.  Trump isn't courageous, he is crazy.  That's the explanation!

Rob Reiner asks, "Is he a "pathological liar?  

"Breaking Bad" actor Brian Cranston questioned whether he was a "supreme narcissist."  

Political independent and multi-billionaire, Michael Bloomberg, at the Democratic Convention urged we "elect a sane, competent person" rather than Trump. 

Robert Kagan, a foreign policy advisor to both Republicans and Democrats,  said,  “We can leave it to the professionals to determine exactly what to call it. Suffice to say that Donald Trump’s response to the assorted speakers at the Democratic National Convention has not been rational.”


What counts is that the Trump campaign and supporters and Fox News are now needing to defend Trump's sanity.   This puts the issue of Trump on the table as a legitimate question.   If the discussion is "Is Trump sane?" then every second of the discussion hurts Trump, even people who say "Totally sane." 

Article from back in January, 2016

 (Similarly, when the discussion was"Just how corrupt is Hillary?" then every second of the discussion hurt Hillary, even when people were saying "Not corrupt."  The very fact that corrupt--or crazy--is the subject of the debate means that it is a loser subject.)

The stories about Trump's mental health have been going around for months, but until recently they were barbs and attacks from detractors.   They weren't mainstream.  Fox had not needed to explain them away. Now they do.

Trump's mental fitness became a matter of serious discussion this week, questioned with a straight face.     Obama brought it up a couple of weeks ago, saying he is "Unfit to be president."     Obama was asked about it in yesterday's press conference, the question asking whether Trump was fit to receive classified information, as is required by federal law.  Obama didn't say he was fit but did say that federal law required he get it.  

 The Wall Street Journal--an unabashedly Republican and anti-Obama newspaper--began asking the question and its Deputy Editor said Trump was "manifestly unfit."

Defending Trump.   He isn't crazy!

And now Howard Kurtz, who has a Fox News TV show "On the Media", is forced to defend Donald Trump, minimizing Trump's unusual behavior, citing the big branded business that Trump built as evidence that it was Trump's detractors, not Trump, who "had a screw loose."

This blog is not attempting to resolve the actual question of Trump's personality.  What it does attempt to look at is messaging.    Democrats have managed to put Trump's mental health onto the political table for open discussion.  

They have created a frame for Trump's behavior, some of which is patently self-destructive.  GOP leaders are openly saying that Trump must change, but Trump resists coaching or advice.   They are frustrated with Trump but he does crazy things like campaign in Maine, not Pennsylvania and Florida, and he picks crazy fights.  

Why?  Why does he do such crazy things?   Because he is crazy, Democrats say.   

It is now a sufficiently widespread meme that Fox News has to deny it.  Crazy is a tough rap to beat.   How does one prove oneself sane once the idea is out there that one is crazy?

When the Wall Street Journal throws in the towel on a Republican it is evident that a change has taken place.   This is the week they decided the world has accepted the Democratic interpretation of Trump.   He may be a crazy-mad political genius, but that means that he is crazy first.

This week is a turning point. 

Hillary Clinton did something right in the campaign, aided by Trump's behavior recently.   And Donald Trump has been doing something eccentric  and out of the box for a year and this week Americans, both left and right, are wondering if they don't now understand why:  He has a screw loose. 

The Vietnam Draft and the Purple Heart

Men My Age have a Story

The politics of this are tricky for Trump.    He can get away with being a draft dodger.  But he screwed up with the Purple Heart.   

He needed to have spoken respectfully about it.  Then about the man who gave it to him.   Then given it back.     He didn't.

I am returning to the subject of Trump and the draft, even though the issue may no longer have wide appeal.  Indeed, I suspect that people under the age of 55 scarcely understand the fuss, a controversy 50 years remote in time.

History Lesson to young folks:   But it is important to people my age, men in their 60s and early 70s, but to review:   America took over for the French their war to keep Vietnam a western aligned country.  It was previously a French colony and it was headed by a puppet government installed and preserved by the French.   We considered Vietnam a bulwark against the spread of Chinese communism, under the idea that there was a lineup of standing dominos and that one might fall causing another to fall and then another.  Vietnam wasn't just about Vietnam, therefore.  It was the first potential domino to fall adjacent to China and if it fell then Communism might spread across the world.

The war was unpopular at home.   The puppet government had negligible legitimacy, the local Vietnamese army was reluctant, and the people we were allegedly protecting seemed conflicted.  America needed to coax the "hearts and minds" of the South Vietnamese people even as we fought the Viet Cong (i.e. North Vietnamese) soldiers and their widespread collaborators within Vietnam.   Americans were getting injured and killed, there were stories of ugly encounters where non-combatants were considered enemies because friend, foe, and people who just wanted to stay alive all "looked alike".   American soldiers called everyone there a "gook", i.e. Vietnamese-Asian.  It was messy.

Plus, in order to attempt to show progress in the war the on-site generals began a system of "body counts".  Essentially Americans were directed to pacify and control the countryside and keep track of how many enemy soldiers were killed.   Everyone killed (again friend, foe, noncombatant) was considered an enemy.   The nightly news reported supposed progress: say 140 enemies (i.e. Asians) and only ten Americans.   The typical ratio was about ten to one--a great tradeoff, except that there were two billion Asians of the "gook" variety, reproducing at fifty million a year: five million Americans a year to break even. 

I wrote two days ago that there was a complicated draft program with lots of loopholes, exceptions, and randomness.   Men with a lot of social capital (middle class, friendly doctors, college access) frequently found some way to avoid the draft.  Men drafted were people who lacked that social capital, plus some unlucky people of all varieties.

"Over the top" into machine gun fire. Don't be a victim of stupidity.

It was not shameful at the time to finagle the system.   The idea was:  don't be a victim.  Don't let stupid generals send you off to your death for nothing simply because they lacked the imagination to realize this was a hopeless cause.  And maybe an evil one, with Americans killing people because they were "gooks", not because they were enemies.   Americans sympathized with veterans home from Vietnam, but with a mixed heart.   Were they serving America, or were they just tromping around under orders, killing innocent people.    Veterans who returned from Vietnam were not treated as heroes.   They were treated as suspects.

It was an ugly time.   

The 2016 Election  A great many men who are now senior leaders in their political parties and in the media were, forty and fifty years ago, young men with social capital.   There is no constituency for saying "Donald Trump is a Draft Doger.  For Shame!!!   There are too many people who did essentially what he did.  (Mitt Romney avoided the draft because he was in France, doing a mission for the Mormon Church.   Cheney had student deferments.  GW Bush got a placement in the Air National Guard in Alabama.  France, college, and Alabama were safer than the jungles of Vietnam.)  Democratic leaders, too: Bill Clinton, as I wrote earlier.  And me, happy at Harvard then getting draft number 202, just barely high enough.   Whew.)

So:  Donald Trump is safe on that count.

He is not so safe, however, in how he handled the Purple Heart gift.   There remains in America conflicted feelings and guilt regarding Vietnam and heroism.  Too many people believe they "got off easy" with either war-avoidance or comfortable duty in Germany or elsewhere.  People are sensitive to the idea that the lucky privileged people should not appropriate the benefits earned through danger, toil, injury, and death by soldiers who did hard duty.   Mr. Khan's accusation that Trump did not sacrifice might have disappeared into memory had Trump not picked a fight.   Trump publicly accepting the gift of a Purple Heart and saying "I always wanted one" is a pure example of the expropriation of sacrifice that is a political hazard.   

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Trump could hardly have constructed a worse scenario: privileged rich boy draft avoider treating a Purple Heart as an acquisition to enjoy by gift or inheritance, not by real sacrifice. It dovetails with the Trump-the-Hypocrite meme.   Trump talks about American jobs and America First but sources his ties in China and his suits in Mexico, and he builds ultra-luxury golf courses in Scotland, and his bankruptcies save himself but crush small contractors.

This was another self inflicted wound for Trump.


Feelings are strong and emotions run high in this area:  To give a feel for the depth of emotions the Vietnam war and draft elicit I will put here two comments this blog received recently from two readers who are close age cohorts of mine, Peter C in Virginia who was born about 1946 and Thad Guyer born in 1950.  Both were draft-eligible. 

Peter Coster writes:

 Scared the hell out of me. One day, the hawks in Congress decided that there were too many kids in college who were only there to avoid the draft. Bunch of draft dodgers they said. So, they decided to test everyone. I think it was in 1966. Anyway, one Saturday morning every man in college had to report to a college testing room and take the test. It was sort of an SAT type test. There was even a booklet with a helmet on the front to prepare you for the test. The deal was, if you flunked the test, you lost your 2S deferment. Talk about pressure. Pass or die. Well, we all took the test and waited for the results. Then the debates started. What if you were a music major or an art major or philosophy major? How would the test apply to them? They might flunk it, but still deserve to be in college. So, finally it was decided to drop the test. No one ever got their results. It was like it never happened. Strange times. There was only one way to on avoiding the Vietnam Draft

If Trump is saying he wants to put lots of troops on the ground and if the voters think this is a very good idea, then I hope they are prepared to bring their sons and daughters back in a box.

Thad Guyer writes:

As a combat Vietnam war veteran, I'm with Peter C's comment: "War is simply old men sending young men to fight and die. The young men have to trust the old men that it's for a good reason. For Vietnam, no one ever answered the question 'What are the fighting for?' That's why it was a bad war." Whether Trump or Hillary, or McCain or Kerry, or any other politician served in the military or dodged the draft, is irrelevant to me. Trump likes the "guys who didn't get captured". Personally, I like "the guys who didn't go" as much as those who did. If there is a candidate who was an active protestor against Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan, that's the candidate who will get some extra points with me. I'm not a traumatized old soldier, I'm lucky that way, but I do have a lot of guilt, which is why I am living in Saigon now. I call it "my apology tour". For those of you like Peter C and Peter Sage, (and candidates Clinton and Kaine, and Trump and Pence), you should never have any regrets that you didn't serve in Vietnam and stand over the grotesquely mutilated corpses of young Vietnamese men and women who you killed in the jungles of their own homeland. I promise you, you would not feel better about yourself or your country if you had. Avoiding the draft by college or bone spurs in your feet, or by hanging out in Canada, that was the right the thing to do if you did not want to have blood on your hands, on your boots and clothes, or the sound in your ears of crying little people in straw hats who had no idea whatsoever why we were killing their children. 

The politicizing of military service in which the USA killed Vietnamese, Iraqis,and Afghanis in their own lands, after installing corrupt puppet regimes, for ideology, oil or whatever, is exactly that-- politics. The politics of war against these three peoples is an atrocity almost as bad as the ones I was sent to commit at age 19. I consider every bullet from our M16s, M60 machine guns, ball bearings from our Claymore ambush mines, rockets from our helicopters, artillery barrages from our navy out in the South China Sea, and bombs from our high tech aircraft, aimed at little peasants, themselves often conscripted, to have been atrocities. 

Today's New York Times has an op-ed by Ted Gup entitled "Why Trump Is Not Like Other Draft Dodgers" in which he proclaims: "Men like me who didn’t fight owe a debt to those who did." What debt is that, the one you owe me for taking the life a 22 year old woman Viet Cong along with her three comrades in the Central Highlands in May 1970? Or is it the debt for killing a father and his 12 year old son as collateral damage by a coastal riverside as they did their laundry of peasant rags? No, the only debt you owe me and other hapless draftees for what we did to the Vietnamese is to never think what we did to them was honorable. And the primary debt we owe to our soldiers who killed Iraqis and Afghanis, is to let them speak for themselves.  

The Election is Rigged!!

Donald Trump does not argue point-counterpoint.   He de-legitimizes the opposition.

We are watching another iteration of the Trump technique.   It has been working for him.

I will review quickly a point I have made repeatedly because we have seen it repeatedly.  Trump does not disagree.  He de-legitimizes.    

He had ample opportunity to have disagreed with the Khan family by noting first off that their sacrifice was enormous, their son was a hero, that the war itself was wrong.  Instead his instinct was to attack the legitimacy of the Khans by speculating that she was silent because she was required to be under some weird foreign disgusting form of female repression.  His instinct was to make them seem "other", therefore not a valid accuser to judge his sacrifice and service versus their son's sacrifice and service.

We are seeing it again today in Trump's announcement that the election is "rigged."  He is attempting to de-legitimize the election.    This would be a very, very big deal if the American democracy was more fragile or if Trump's relationship to the military were better.  It is unthinkable to me that, in the aftermath of an election night loss for Trump, that Trump would call on the police or military to refuse to accept the election results because they were rigged or fraudulent and that the military should provide order and security under Trump's command.   That won't happen.  Our democracy is not that fragile.

But what we are seeing is troubling and it is exactly the prelude to authoritarian governments in Egypt and Turkey and other places:  a questioned election, mass disorder, and the military steps in to restore order.   The system of federalism helps assure this will not happen.   Each election takes place state by state.   There is no "national" election to rig.  And each state has its own police power.  If there is widespread disruption in America then the local police forces and state National Guards are empowered to deal with it.   And the armed services of the USA are in different branches.   Bottom line:  we are not in danger of a military coup.

But Trump is openly de-legitimizing the election and the results are still unknown and he has a significant chance of winning it outright.

Avoiding the Vietnam Draft

Is Donald Trump's draft record a big deal?   Depends on where you get your news.

In the late 1960s there was a military draft.   Men about my age have the rules seared into their minds, but readers younger than 60 may not have a clear understanding of the situation.  Here's a quick summary.

The system in place at the time openly endorsed the notion of "channeling", in the words of General Hershey, head of the draft.  The draft rules were intended to encourage certain behaviors and discourage others, thus the word channeling.   Attending college was good behavior, so young men making steady progress in college got a deferment, potentially until the war was over.   Men who dropped out of college or even dropped a single class and therefore failed to make steady progress toward a degree lost their deferments.    

Getting arrested was bad.  Judges gave young men the choice of jail or immediately volunteering for the service.  

There were complicated medical rules.  1-A meant fully healthy, 1-Y meant small impairment, 4-F meant unsuitable.    Young men with financial means often got friendly doctors to give them a diagnosis of a problem and elevated it up to something serious.  At the time there was a widespread--but far from universal--attitude that the war was a mistake and it would be a shame for some nice young man to serve and possibly be killed for a mistake.   

Bottom line:  finagling and conniving to beat the draft was commonplace. Some viewed it as sensible and even patriotic to avoid the draft; after all, being drafted was defined as the punishment for mis-behavior.  Others saw it as selfish, but a necessary evil; let someone else be the sucker.   Others saw it as "cheating" and wrong.   The country was conflicted.

When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1972 his draft record became a subject of criticism--deferments in college, then a Rhodes scholarship to Britain, and then a begging letter to his draft board asking to be exempted.   This behavior was commonplace, but not highly regarded, especially in hindsight and especially for someone running for Commander in Chief.   He was criticized strongly.

Dick Cheney received 5 deferment during his period of draft eligibility and was quoted as having said that he had "other things" he hoped to do other than serve in the military.   He was a hawk and was former Secretary of Defense.   There was little criticism of him.

Donald Trump was exactly of the age to be subject to the Vietnam draft.  He got student deferments and had, he reports, bone spurs in his heels which got him a student and then medical exemption.  The bone spurs sufficient to exempt him from the draft cured themselves and now Trump cannot even remember which foot--or possibly both--had them.

The NY Times, Washington Post, and the online portal Huffington Post have front page articles on Donald the Draft Dodger.   Meanwhile, Fox News, Breitbart, the Washington Times have nothing whatever on the subject, not even stories buried deep.   The experience with Cheney suggests that having a history of finagling on the draft only hurts a person politically if it appears to confirm a political charge of dovishness or weakness.   Cheney the hawk was given a political pass.  Trump, with a bellicose stance toward ISIS, is also given a pass by the conservative press, at least so far.

Liberals and doves are uncomfortable with bringing up the subject.   Too many of their own have done more or less what Trump did.   They live in glass houses. 

If the story has the potential of hurting Trump is has to do with the angle of "privilege", not patriotism.   Trump stirred up a hornet's nest with criticism of the Khan family who charged that Trump had not sacrificed for this country, with Trump saying that yes he had, by by being in business and building great structures.   Trump's populist campaign is built around criticism of crony capitalism, of pay-to-play donations by special interests, of the outsized power of money to rig the system.   The Democratic counter to Trump's populism is to note points of hypocrisy: the ties made in China, Trump "university", etc.   

Trump's behavior was commonplace, but it was the commonplace behavior of the privileged classes who had friendly doctors and who could sit out the Vietnam war in Ivy League colleges while the unlucky poor guys went to serve in their place.   I was at Harvard at the time.   I saw the behavior and personally lived it.  I stayed in school and was darned glad to be there.   I worked the system.   

So did Trump.

Grieving Parents Accuse Candidates

Each Convention had a Grieving Parent.   Let's look closely at how Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump addressed their attackers.

Pat Smith spoke at the Republican convention.  She is the mother of Sean Smith who was one of the four embassy workers who died in Benghazi.  Pat Smith said she blamed Hillary Clinton, personally, for her son's death.   Smith said that Hillary lied to her face about the cause of the attack saying it was stimulated by an anti-Muslim video when it was in fact, Smith said, a planned terrorist attack.

I watched and heard Hillary Clinton respond to this attack when Hillary was interviewed on Chris Wallace's show on Fox.   Hillary expressed empathy and sympathy.  She also disagreed with Pat's memory, noting that two of the other parents who were there in the room at the same time, remember it very differently from Smith and corroborate Hillary's version, that she described the cause of the Benghazi raid accurately.

Hillary:  

Chris, my heart goes out to both of them. Losing a child under any circumstances, especially in this case, two State Department employees, extraordinary men both of them, two CIA contractors gave their lives protecting our country, our values. I understand the grief and the incredible sense of loss that can motivate that. As other members of families who lost loved ones have said, that’s not what they heard, I don’t hold any ill feeling for someone who in that moment may not fully recall everything that was or wasn’t said.

I believe my description is accurate, but you need not trust my description.  Watch Hillary yourself.  It's two minutes.  You decide what she said and how she said it:  Click here: It takes you to a Youtube clip of the Interview on Fox

As has now been repeated all over the media, Trump handled a similar situation differently, only this time Mr. Khan condemning Trump for his blanket distrust of Muslims, which would have included their Muslim son killed in action.   Trump raised questions about the otherness of the Khan family.  It was classic Trump: apparently unstudied, it reaffirmed his anti-immigrant brand, and Trump attempted to de-legitimize the attacker.  Trump's genius is that he uses a technique that the media accepts as valid.  He doesn't disagree with his critics position; he de-legitimizes the critics by attacking an element of their person.  Lying Ted, Little Marco, Weak Bush, Crooked Hillary, and now Mr. Kahn, a Muslim who apparently/probably/maybe oppresses his wife by silencing her, and who, moreover, makes unprovoked attacks on Trump.  

Thad Guyer, below says it was obvious that Trump was goaded into this attack on Mr. Khan.   As I wrote yesterday, I am not at all certain it was self-destructive: Trump's "brand" is anti-outsider, a light form of white resentment xenophobia.  Trump could have handled it like Hillary did, but did not.   Hillary is empathetic and respectful and it is a mixed blessing for her.   Some think diplomatic talk is "weak".  Some read it as hypocrisy.   Other critics describe it as hostile.  This is not a big win for Hillary.   Meanwhile Trump is bellicose and gets criticized for it, but it has its plusses.

Hillary is Hillary, Trump is Trump.

Meanwhile, Thad Guyer asserts in a comment that the NY Times has a liberal bias and that it is hurting the newspaper.  I offer an alternative view.

1.  The American population has sorted ourselves into political regions and neighborhoods.  The Republican Party has claimed the rural heartland, the places where people farm and ranch and carry guns and have wells and septic tanks.   Urban city people, with mass transit and apartments and row houses and pedestrian shopping is Democratic Party areas.   The NY Times is headquartered in the centerpiece of urban America, so its perspective is urban.   It may only seem Democratic because it is urban, with urban sensibilities and values.

2.  The NY Times is chock full of Ivy League people.   They think stuff that happens at Harvard and Yale and Columbia is newsworthy.   The GOP, especially under Trump's leadership, is anti-intellectual.   When asked about his foreign policy advisors and sources Trump said he does it himself.   Trump is Andrew Jackson, the rural man of the people, who have risen up against the urban effete elites of the establishment John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay.  We have been here before.  The NY Times may only seem Democratic because it respects learned authority from educated elites and Trump is running against those elites.  Trump in fact was Ivy League, but he describes himself as the scourge of Ivy League elites.   Hillary is part of the elite education set.  She vacations at Martha's Vineyard.  Trump vacations in luxury golf resorts.

3.  The NY Times is anti-racist.   Hillary Clinton asserts that there is a lot of low-level endemic prejudice in America.   Democrats assert prejudice is endemic.  Republicans assert it is not endemic, but then appeal to it and exploit it.   Tolerance and acceptance of a multi-cultural America is a matter of morality and faith to liberals.  It appeals to their moral sense of fairness.  Republicans care about fairness, too, but they also care about group identity and respect for authority.   So liberals and authoritarian conservatives talk past each other, essentially missing each other's point.   Liberals think that profiling blacks as thugs is morally wrong and assert that Black Lives Matter, too..  Conservatives think that it is high time white people express some pride and solidarity and that we rally behind police and military authority.  The NY times considers anti-racism a matter of simple morality.  The GOP, especially under Trump, considers anti-racism a matter of controversy.  The NY Times may only seem Democratic because it is respectful of multiple cultures and diversity while Trump is openly disrespectful of foreign customs and persons (e.g. Mr. Khan).

From NY Times Employee Website

The disparate reactions to their critics--Hillary with Mrs. Smith and Trump with Mr. Khan--demonstrate their different temperament and it helps explain why the purest example of the mainstream press, the NY Times, seems to lean Democratic.  It only seems Democratic because it is unabashedly the voice of educated, urban, urbane, multicultural diverse America.   And Trump has gone to war against that, with an army of approximately half of America's voters. 

Thad Guyer's comments:

The New York Times and virtually all mainstream or “legacy” media have represented Trump as a cruel tormentor of Khizr Khan, the Muslim who told the story at the DNC convention of the death of his son in Iraq—the ultimate sacrifice. I view this frenzied media criticism of Trump to be preposterous. Had Mr. Khan just told of his son’s bravery as a Muslim American, and the heartbreak of his death, any attack on him by Trump would have been outrageous. The highly choreographed DNC convention and the Clinton campaign knew that Trump would almost certainly not stand idly by while Mr. Khan, functioning as a Clinton surrogate, insulted Trump as not having read the constitution, and having “sacrificed nothing” in his life. That insult was planned, vetted, and utterly gratuitous to the father’s memorial to his son. In attracting Trump’s ire, Mr. Khan, the DNC, and Clinton campaign got just what they wanted—headlines bashing Trump. And everyone knows it. 

Mr Khan on CNN, keeping the news on Trump, Trump, Trump

The result is a further eroding of the legacy media’s credibility, the NYT in particular. In a controversial opinion piece, NYT’s new public editor, Elizabeth Spayd, called out her own newspaper’s obvious pro-Clinton bias with a variety of specifics. She says the perception of the NYT’s bias cannot be allowed to continue at the newspaper, because it is already driving away subscribers even on the left, and will undermine “the force of its journalism “. (See, “Why Readers See The Times as Liberal”, NYT July 23, 2016, http://goo.gl/f5Uyzm). Perhaps most significant, Ms. Spayd suggests that this anti-Trump bias may have already caused the NYT’s reporting to “miss ... the groundswell of isolation that propelled a candidate like Donald Trump to his party’s nomination” in the first place. Moreover, she says it’s not just the NYT with its core readers in their “giant liberal echo chamber”, but “part of a fracturing media” generally. 


NPR commentators were not happy about Ms. Spayd’s wake up call. On its Sunday All Things Considered broadcast, The Huffington Post's Ryan Grim, and Politico's Susan Glasser strongly rejected Spayd’s criticism that it is the job of voters, not newsrooms, to “lean into” Trump. Glasser and Grim argued “readers know the difference between opinion and news,” and that readers cannot be warned too often that Trump is a “demagogue” who does not “follow the rules”, and that his candidacy must not be “normalized” by the media. (See NPR, July 31, 2016 “Evaluating The Media's Role This Political Season”, http://n.pr/2aqhgvn). As to readers knowing the difference between and opinion and news, Spayd was blunt: “I’m not so sure all do, especially when our website makes neighbors of the two, and social platforms make them nearly impossible to tease apart”.