Regarding the much-discussed Tulsa, Oklahoma Trump Rally last night, Heather Cox Richardson reports:
The other big story today was, of course, Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, designed to jumpstart his campaign and reunite him with the crowds that energize him. His campaign manager, Brad Parscale, along with the president himself, has spent days crowing that almost a million tickets had been reserved, and the campaign had built an outside stage for overflow crowds.
But far fewer than the 19,000 people Tulsa’s BOK Center could hold showed up: the local fire marshal said the number was just under 6,200. Young TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music (so-called “K-Pop stans”), along with Instagram and Snapchat users, had quietly ordered tickets to prank the campaign. The technological savvy of their generation has turned political: they knew that the Trump campaign harvests information from ticket reservations, bombarding applicants with texts and requests for donations. So they set up fake accounts and phone numbers to order the tickets, then deleted the fake accounts. They also deleted their social media posts organizing the plan to keep it from the attention of the Trump campaign.
And while it’s great to make this President, corrupt as he is, look this bad, it makes me wonder about the character of future contests. More of the no-holds-barred corruption of each others’ events? Or will technology be developed to stop it?
Or will everyone who’s actually an American just stop being assholes?
There is a hidden blessing in the reduced attendance, artificial or not: that’s fewer people available to catch and spread Covid-19, in a space that’s not as crowded as anticipated. It’s not worth breathing the traditional sigh of relief, but it’s still a slight blessing, saith the agnostic.
But worst of all, it sounds like Trump’s schtick is boring. Apparently he can’t even get much applause when he attacks Joe Biden.
Rayne on EmptyWheel notes another potentially impeachable offense:
He’s made comments before about the number of tests correlating to the number of cases. Comic Sarah Cooper has famously riffed on this.
But this time he’s expressed an intent to withhold health care from the public for personal aims — to keep the reported number of cases artificially low, without regard to the effect this would have on actual reduction of COVID-19 cases.
Aside from revealing again he’s so utterly toxic, this statement needs investigation. It’s impeachable if he both demanded a reduction or slow-down in tests, especially if he did so for the purposes of improving his polling numbers.
More generally, the campaign is not drawing rave reviews. Here’s National Review’s Andy McCarthy:
It’s an old story: fighting the next war with the last war’s battle plan, as if prior success guarantees future victory. So here was President Trump after the Supreme Court gave him another thumping on Thursday, vowing to release “a new list of Conservative Supreme Court Justice nominees” in September — i.e., around the back stretch galloping toward the Election Day finish line.
The president reasons: “Based on decisions being rendered now, this list is more important than ever before (Second Amendment, Right to Life, Religious Liberty, etc.).” Lest we miss the characteristically Trumpian subtlety, he adds, “VOTE 2020!”
If you needed a laugh to get you through just-another-day-at-the-Apocalypse, our “Conservative” president then proceeded to post no fewer than 21 tweets describing the combined hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure spending he plans to shovel out to states he hopes to win in November.
By the way, with Trump in the White House and the McConnell-led Republican Senate having slyly buried periodic public debates over the debt limit, the nation is now over $26 trillion in the red. If you’re keeping score, that’s an increase of over $6 trillion since January 20, 2017. Obama spending was unprecedented, but Trump is on pace to exceed it. And don’t tell me about the unforeseen coronavirus crisis; debt was already accumulating mountainously before the lockdown, and the president keeps saying more infrastructure spending is imperative — it may be the only thing he and congressional Democrats can agree on.
And Steve Berman on the conservative The Resurgent (home of Erick Erickson) with an early historical overview of the debris field of President Donald J. Trump:
President Trump’s irresistible urge regarding institutions is to smash them. Whatever useful purpose they serve is only important to Trump when those purposes serve him. One example, the “police” as a concept is great when Trump is preaching Law & Order, but the FBI (and by extension, the DOJ) is a Deep State hive of Obamaites shovel-ready to bury the glorious reign of MAGA.
Another: the Supreme Court is the most important institution in America, carving legal protections for Americans besieged by liberal activist judges who create rights out of whole cloth. That is, until “but Gorsuch” sides with the enemy, forcing us to navel gaze at our conservative values as we are betrayed by the institution.
Gotta love the lead-in, as well as the finish:
Trump’s presidency will, in hindsight, likely be framed as the old man kicking down the last of the fences established by the WWII veterans who craved order, institutions, and traditions to guide our culture. In turn, the mobs against Trump are fed by the same streak of hedonism and anti-institutional need to smash. This is the fruit of Trump’s tree.
Against this, the institutions, and those who maintain them, are pushing back for their very survival. This president, who needs the institutions to defend, protect and preserve the Constitution, continues to spend his days undermining the very thing he swore to protect.
Which all comes out to me as a description of Trump as an immature, self-centered brat. Back in 2016 when he was running, an old friend noted, rather in horror, that Trump exhibited all the characteristics of a pathological narcissist, and it appears that time has borne her out.
This truth is apparent to those who force themselves to stare at this President. But what about those who don’t, who still think he’s a heckuva President? CNN had interviews with three 2016 Trump supporters, and I was struck by how they seem unmoved by Trump’s missteps and failures. I think the first interview would be particularly useful for study by Democrats:
“We put Democrats in office and she turned around and forgot completely about us,” [Scott] Seitz told Van Jones back in 2016. “We are what makes this world go ’round. We built the tanks and bombs that won this country’s wars and for you to come through here and completely neglect us, we would have rather vote for anybody instead of her.”
Today, he’s very troubled by Trump’s reaction to the protests and walk to St. John’s Church.
“I think he handled it like an arrogant businessman that he is, showing lack of compassion for people. What he did out in front of the church and making those folks move and smoke bombs and tear gas or whatever it was. Just so he can get to that vista and have that shot of him holding that Bible up with that prop. … If he’s any form of religious guy like he says, then he wouldn’t have done that,” said Seitz, adding, “that was about the last straw for a lot of folks.”
Still, Seitz says while he has reservations, he plans to vote for Trump.
“I dislike Biden that much and don’t feel he’s going to lead our country. I only support him about 10%. Trump’s only about 25%,” he said.
Addressing his concerns might go far to bring his and his fellows to the Democratic side of things – but it can’t be empty. Just as black community concerns about police and system racism cannot be given a hand wave in the event of a Democratic win in November, neither can this guy’s.
And it’s worth talking about previously forbidden topics, such as nullifying free trade agreements. I recall the mainly libertarian arguments from years ago that free trade would reduce duplication of effort and accelerate the development of new technologies as nations specialized and concentrated on what they did well. While the accounting for these attributes holds up well, I believe, it’s time to ask if they are worth the unaccounted for negatives, and even if they are positives as well. Some factors include concerns Covid-19 has exposed about supply lines collapsing; the collapse of local farming communities as cheap foreign food floods markets; and the failure to retrain workers in local sectors that have been flooded with foreign goods.
Underlying much of this is the existence of a fabulously cheap cargo transit system which contributes to anthropogenic climate change.
All of these factors and more need to become part of a discussion that includes these dispossessed workers. Is free trade just another tool for the ultra-rich to simply increase the definitional lower limit of their category, leaving everyone else with little or nothing in their mad quest to accumulate more and more? It’s time to sit down and soberly tot up the results, good & bad, of free trade.
And I say this as someone who thought free trade sounded good when NAFTA was proposed.
