I had collected such an insane amount of material since my last general-interest post that I had the luxury of separating out the most sharply anti-Trump stuff and posting it here.
When a liar meets a skilled, prepared journalist
When Trump went on, for example, about how he’d give the death penalty to drug dealers, [Fox News’ Bret] Baier interrupted to note that Trump had pardoned a drug dealer named Alice Johnson, who, under his new plan, would have been executed. “Huh?” Trump responded, with evident confusion. “No, no. No. Under my, oh, under that? Uh, it would depend on the severity.” But Baier pressed on: Johnson had run a major cocaine ring. Trump groped around until he conjured up an assertion that if his notional death penalty for drug dealers had existed, Johnson would never have dealt drugs. Problem solved.
Tom Nichols, *Donald Trump Seems to Be Afraid, Very Afraid *
Another take:
Trump kind of says what you’d expect him to say (various things that are probably crimes to declare, Biden has more secret documents than I do, the economy, etc.).
A Trump-trained artificial intelligence could do it all at this point.
Vote for the Decent Man
The Atlantic has endorsed only three candidates in its 163-year history: Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Hillary Clinton. The latter two endorsements had more to do with the qualities of Barry Goldwater and Donald Trump than with those of Johnson and Clinton. The same holds true in the case of Joe Biden. Biden is a man of experience, maturity, and obvious humanity, but had the Republican Party put forward a credible candidate for president, we would have felt no compulsion to state a preference. Donald Trump, however, is a clear and continuing danger to the United States, and it does not seem likely that our country would be able to emerge whole from four more years of his misrule. Two men are running for president. One is a terrible man; the other is a decent man. Vote for the decent man.
The Atlantic’s Endorsement: Against Donald Trump – The Atlantic, October 22, 2020.
If my home state, Indiana, polls ambiguously on a 2024 Trump v. Biden election, I just might vote, with heavy heart, for Biden. But not since 2008 has Indiana really been “in play” in the POTUS race, so my vote likely will be for Peter Sonski. Heck, maybe even Cornel West.
Bad Theodicy
No one predicted evangelicals would go from piously denouncing Bill Clinton’s moral failings to swooning for a thrice-divorced, porn-star-screwing real-estate mogul from Manhattan …
But evangelicals being evangelicals, they couldn’t just leave it as a Machiavellian maneuver. They had to concoct a whole theodicy to make it sound theologically admirable, with Trump serving as God’s vessel in the world to achieve his own ends ….
Could I have been dogmatically wrong about Florida Man?
I have a different take on Trump’s behavior: Oppositional Defiant Disorder, which begins in childhood, explains most of his deviancy. The distinct feature of this disorder is the refusal to follow any directions requested by anyone. Those with ODD see an order or request as someone trying to control them, and it feels like life or death.
I have a nephew who manifested this condition as a child — and now, at 55 years old, he hasn’t changed a whit. If you ask him a simple thing like to pick a piece of paper off the floor, he would refuse. He would not outright refuse, but he would avoid doing it and just ignore the request. God forbid you asked him why; he would say you were a controlling person and sulk off. He has been divorced twice because his behavior drove the women crazy.
Trump could not draw his sword at military school, and he cannot return the boxes, because to be controlled feels like life or death in his psyche. It really is a mental disorder — but that excuses nothing, especially in a president.
A reader responding to Andrew Sullivan.
UPDATE: I realized after posting this that I hadn’t explained the headline. I have insisted until now that Trump’s fundamental flaw, his fundamental disqualification for office, is narcissism. ODD may very well be a better explanation.
The GOP endorsement pledge
Readers too young to remember the Before Times may find the following hard to believe, but I swear it’s true.
Back in the day, Republican presidential candidates weren’t asked to formally pledge their support for the party’s nominee in advance.
There was no need. It went without saying that contenders who disliked each other would set aside their differences in the end for the good of the country and support the winner of the primary. Any Republican president would govern more conservatively than any Democrat would, therefore any Republican nominee was worth endorsing in the general election.
In the After Times, what’s best for the country in the general election is … less clear-cut.
And so, not coincidentally, the After Times are when the RNC began pushing loyalty pledges on primary candidates.
In the past week three different Republican contenders have chafed at having to commit to endorsing the GOP nominee, keenly aware of who that nominee is likely to be. Their reasons for doing so differ, as does their thinking on whether to sign the pledge anyway knowing that the RNC intends to bar those who refuse from the GOP primary debates.
But the fact that so many are struggling with the prospect of supporting Trump again highlights an ominous evolution in the nature of the process since 2016. During that cycle, the pledge aimed to bind a plainly unfit demagogue to support the Republican Party in the general election.
In this cycle, it aims to do the opposite.
…
The idea of Donald Trump keeping a promise because he signed a piece of paper pledging to do so must have seemed very funny at the time to building contractors in the tri-state area. True to form, he abandoned the pledge in early 2016.
Wishcasting?
There is no path to the White House for Republicans with Mr. Trump. He would need every single Republican and independent vote, and there are untold numbers of Republicans and independents who will never vote for him, if for no other perfectly legitimate reason than that he has corrupted America’s democracy and is now attempting to corrupt the country’s rule of law. No sane Democrat will vote for Mr. Trump — even over the aging Mr. Biden — when there are so many sane Republicans who will refuse to vote for Mr. Trump. This is all plain to see, which makes it all the more mystifying why more Republicans don’t see it.
J. Michael Luttig, It’s Not Too Late for the Republican Party
We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 