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Friday, July 22, 2016

I started this on day two of the Republican National Convention, and it just kept growing as the writing came in. Still doesn't cover day four, with Trump's monumental acceptance speech, very well, but you can kind of fill that in given all you already know about Trump. Some late-breaking pieces include Trump Just Rehashed Literally Every Feud He's Ever Had With Cruz, John Nichols: If Trump's Speech Sounded Familiar, That's Because Nixon Gave It First, Charles Pierce: Donald Trump Sold Us Fear. Next Comes the Wrath, Margaret Doris: And Then the Balloons Dropped, and Then the World Started Coming to an End, Nate Silver: Donald Trump Goes 'All-In.' How Will Clinton Respond?, DD Guttenplan: The RNC Is a Disaster -- So Why Can't I sleep at Night, Ben Cohen: The RNC Was Not the End of the GOP, It Was Its Rebirth as a Fascist Party, Andrew O'Hehir: After that diabolical, masterful performance, Donald Trump could easily end up president, and New Media Guru Clay Shirky Drops 'Stop Trump' Tweetstorm on White Liberals. The latter posts may seem alarmist, but 538's Election Forecast has reduced Clinton's "chance of winning" to 58.5% (from 77.2% as recently as on July 11). That suggests that Trump did indeed get a bounce from the Convention, even though I can't recall one that looked more haggard and repulsive. Actually, most of that drop occurred before the convention, following the FBI's report on Hillary Clinton's email server affair.

The links below come from a mix of left, liberal, and mainstream sites -- I don't bother with anything on the far right, although my wife has a weak spot for Fox News (especially on days most embarrassing to the right), so I watched more of that than I would have if it were up to me. In my youth, I used to watch party conventions gavel to gavel, but haven't for many decades, especially as they became ever more tightly programmed for propaganda effect. But also the coverage has changed, so you have a lot more commentary on the side, fewer interviews with delegates, and even some of the speeches get skipped (in part because they've become ever more predictable). I did manage to watch late-night coverage by Stephen Colbert and Seth Myers, much of which could have been scripted before events -- not that I have any reason to think they missed their marks.

One theme you'll see much of below is the notion that Donald Trump is the vilest and scariest candidate any party has ever nominated. Indeed, you'll find Wichita's own mild-mannered centrist Davis Marritt describing the prospect of a Trump triumphant as "democracide." Or as Seth Myers put it: "Donald Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, told reporters that, 'once Donald Trump is accepted by the American people as someone who can be president the race will be over with.' I assume he means the human race."

I can't think of any level on which I admire or even like Trump, but I can't view him as uniquely apocalyptic. Rather, I think the rot has been setting into the Republican Party for decades now, and any of the sixteen original candidates would have been more/less equally atrocious. In strictly policy terms most of the candidates were much worse than Trump -- not that he's consistent enough to trust, but rigor made Cruz perhaps the worst of all. And even in terms of personality and temperament, I'm not not certain that Trump is worse than Carson or Jindal or Huckabee or Santorum or even Chris Christie. Still, there is one area where Trump stands out: he's given vent to, and effectively legitimized, racism to a degree that no American politician, at least on the national stage, has dared since George Wallace. And the effect of his example has been to elicit the worst instincts in his followers -- indeed, diehard racists from all around the world have flocked to his cause. He's especially horrible in that regard, which would be reason enough to oppose him. I doubt that even most of his followers back him there, although they are the sort that can be amazingly blind to racial slurs, and he has clearly earned points with them for refusing to back down any time he offends the imaginary "code of political correctness" -- what we more generally refer to as civil decency.

Then there is the charge that Trump is a fascist, or would be our first fascist president. I don't think it took his Mussolini tweets or his father's Hitler fetish to show that his temperament and belief system leaned that way. There was, for instance, his endorsement of street violence by his supporters, and his more general way with hateful speech. And even before him segments of his party have been obsessed with enforcing their notions of religious morality on the population, and in undermining democracy -- both preventing their opponents from being able to vote and allowing business interests to flood campaigns with money and false advertising. Moreover, Trump's expressed a desire for extraordinary powers, including the ability to purge the government of Democrats. He hardly seems like someone whose oath to "defend and protect the constitution" would be worth much.

Then there's his goal of "making America great again" -- a claim, a project, that reeks of war and imperialism, although it is far from clear how he intends to accomplish that, or even what he means. (Clinton, on the other hand, will counter that "America has never not been great," and will embrace American exceptionalism on her way to continuing the same world-hegemonic ambitions of her predecessors, even though the entire project has been patently absurd for decades now. Trump may be less predictable and more dangerous because of his combination of ignorance and petulance, but she is more certain to continue the bankrupt policies of the last fifteen years.) For one thing, he fancies himself more the dealmaker than the conquistador, and sees America's interests as more economical than ideological.

However, there is one area of American life where near-totalitarian power exists, and that is Trump's area: business. Not since the 1920s, if ever, have businesses had more control over their employees than they have now -- a fact that Trump has flaunted on his TV show given the flourish with which he fires underlings who in any way displease him. No doubt he will expect the same powers as President -- indeed, his plans may depend on them -- and he will certainly promote them. Anyone concerned about Trump's potential for fascism should start by looking at the culture he comes from. Indeed, that culture is a rich source of reasons why Trump should not be president.

Next week, we move on to the Democratic Convention, where Hillary Clinton will be nominated as the only realistic alternative to Donald Trump. One hopes that she will be able to present herself as a much different person than Trump, and also that she will show that America need not be the dystopia that fires the desire for a Führer like Trump. That's going to be a tall order.

Some links:

• Ezra Klein: Donald Trump's speech introducing Mike Pence showed why he shouldn't be president:

  Back in May, E.J. Dionne wrote that the hardest thing about covering Donald Trump would be "staying shocked." Watching him, day after day, week after week, month after month, the temptation would be to normalize his behavior, "to move Trump into the political mainstream."

  But today helped. Trump's introduction of Mike Pence was shocking. Forget the political mainstream. What happened today sat outside the mainstream for normal human behavior. [ . . . ]

  Even when he did mention Pence, he often managed to say exactly the wrong thing. "One of the big reasons I chose Mike is party unity, I have to be honest," Trump admitted midway through his speech, at the moment another candidate would have said, "I chose Mike because he'll be a great president." Trump then segued into a riff on how thoroughly he had humiliated the Republican establishment in state after state. Thus he managed to turn Pence from a peace offering into a head on a pike, a warning to all who might come after.

  When Trump finally stuck to Pence, at the end of his lengthy speech, he seemed robotic, bored, restless. He recited Pence's accomplishment like he was reading his Wikipedia page for the first time, inserting little snippets of meta-commentary and quick jabs as if to keep himself interested.

  The final humiliation was yet to come: Trump introduced Pence and then immediately, unusually, walked off the stage, leaving Pence alone at the podium.

  When Trump initially picked Pence I was pretty upset. The one thing I always gave Trump credit for was his rejection of the economic nostrums that had were the bedrock of the conservative movement, that obviously had proven so hurtful to the vast majority of the Republican base but were locked into Republican dysfunction by the donor class. Yet picking Pence tied him to the same program of devastation that his voters had just rejected -- the only saving grace was that Pence seems never to have had an original thought, unlike figures like Gingrich, Brownback, and Cruz who have pioneered new ways of degrading America. But what I hadn't realized was how utterly colorless Pence was -- Trump needn't have denigrated him so, as he was quite capable of humiliating himself. Indeed, in his speech he uttered the best joke line of the convention: "Trump is a man known for his large personality, a colorful style and lots of charisma, so I guess he was looking for some balance." Funny line, but he made it seem pathetic.

• Ezra Klein: Donald Trump's nomination is the first time American politics has left me truly afraid: I've always been more focused on policy, so I found the extreme ideological neoconservatism of McCain and the equally extreme ideological neoliberalism of Romney, combined with the eagerness of both to kowtow to the neofascist Christian right, scarier than the scattered heterodoxy and opportunism of Trump, but Klein crafts a pretty strong case, with sections on (follow the link for details):

  • Trump is vindictive.
  • Trump is a bigot.
  • Trump is a sexist.
  • Trump is a liar.
  • Trump is a narcissist.
  • Trump admires authoritarian dictators for their authoritarianism.
  • Trump is a conspiracy theorist.
  • Trump is very, very gullible.
  • Trump doesn't apologize, and his defensiveness escalates situations.
  • Trump surrounds himself with sycophants.
  • Trump has proven too lazy to learn about policy.
  • Trump as run an incompetent campaign and convention.
  • Trump is a bully.
  • Trump has regularly incited or justified violence among his supporters.

  Not specifically on the convention but on the candidate, see Jane Mayer: Donald Trump's Ghostwriter Tells All -- based on the co-author of Trump's Art of the Deal, which he now feels would be better titled Sociopath. (James Hamblin examines the evidence for that claim in Donald Trump: Sociopath?.) Mayer recounts Schwartz's attempts to elicit information for the book from Trump:

  After hearing Trump's discussions about business on the phone, Schwartz asked him brief follow-up questions. He then tried to amplify the material he got from Trump by calling others involved in the deals. But their accounts often directly conflicted with Trump's. "Lying is second nature to him," Schwartz said. "More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true." Often, Schwartz said, the lies that Trump told him were about money -- "how much he had paid for something, or what a building he owned was worth, or how much one of his casinos was earning when it was actually on its way to bankruptcy." [ . . . ]

  When challenged about the facts, Schwartz says, Trump would often double down, repeat himself, and grow belligerent. This quality was recently on display after Trump posted on Twitter a derogatory image of Hillary Clinton that contained a six-pointed star lifted from a white-supremacist Web site. Campaign staffers took the image down, but two days later Trump angrily defended it, insisting that there was no anti-Semitic implication. Whenever "the thin veneer of Trump's vanity is challenged," Schwartz says, he overreacts -- not an ideal quality in a head of state.

  Trump's response to this piece, unsurprisingly, has been to threaten to sue Schwartz. See Mayer's follow-up, Donald Trump Threatens the Ghostwriter of The Art of the Deal.

• George Saunders: Who Are All These Trump Supporters?: Many anecdotes in the article, including some about how some Trump supporters seem to relish violence, but this is close to a fair definition:

  The Trump supporters I spoke with were friendly, generous with their time, flattered to be asked their opinion, willing to give it, even when they knew I was a liberal writer likely to throw them under the bus. They loved their country, seemed genuinely panicked at its perceived demise, felt urgently that we were, right now, in the process of losing something precious. They were, generally, in favor of order and had a propensity toward the broadly normative, a certain squareness. They leaned toward skepticism (they'd believe it when they saw it, "it" being anything feelings-based, gauzy, liberal, or European; i.e., "socialist"). Some (far from all) had been touched by financial hardship -- a layoff was common in many stories -- and (paradoxically, given their feelings about socialism) felt that, while in that vulnerable state, they'd been let down by their government. They were anti-regulation, pro small business, pro Second Amendment, suspicious of people on welfare, sensitive (in a "Don't tread on me" way) about any infringement whatsoever on their freedom. Alert to charges of racism, they would pre-counter these by pointing out that they had friends of all colors. They were adamantly for law enforcement and veterans' rights, in a manner that presupposed that the rest of us were adamantly against these things. It seemed self-evident to them that a businessman could and should lead the country. "You run your family like a business, don't you?" I was asked more than once, although, of course, I don't, and none of us do.

  It seems like a lot of liberal writers have this fixed idea of Trump's supporters as an ignorant, embittered white lumpenproletariat, ground down by globalized business and lashing out at the blacks and immigrants who they see as gaining from their misfortune and the overeducated urban liberals who help them. (For example, see Davis Merritt: The day of GOP's democracide arrives: "Consider that [Trump] has drawn millions of votes from America's unhappiest, most dispossessed people by inflaming their righteous grievances and deepest fears for their future.") But in fact Trump's supporters are relatively well off -- I've seen a study that indicates that their average family income is about $20,000 over the national average. Of course, some of that is that they're white and they're mostly older, and both of those skew the median up. I see them as basic conformists: the kind of people who get promoted at work not just because they work hard but because they suck up to the boss and adopt his worldview, as well as conforming to the time-tested verities of faith and patriotism. Such people believe that they earned their success, and that others could do the same if only they conformed to the social order like they did. There's nothing terribly wrong with this -- my recommendation for anyone who wants to succeed in America is to adopt a conservative lifestyle -- but several factors work to twist their worldview. One is that their success isn't generalizable: their success, their promotions, etc., depend on bypassing other people, deemed less worthy mostly because they are less able to conform. Second, these people tend to live in homogeneous suburbs where they rarely encounter diversity -- of course, when they do see other kinds of people as human like themselves, they make exceptions, but not often enough to shed their generalizations. Third, they experience the distant world through a media that is finely tuned to flatter themselves and shock them with the horrors of the outside world -- especially those that threaten their worldview.

  That media, of course, is a key part of a political project launched by the conservative business class in the 1970s, aimed at making sure that as America declined in the world the pinch wouldn't be felt by themselves. Richard Nixon came up with the basic concept in what he called the "silent majority" and sought to agitate them into becoming a loyal political force. Later, under Reagan, they were rebranded the "moral majority." After Clinton won in 1992 -- conservative economic ideas were already proving to be disastrous for America's once vast middle class -- the media effort went into overdrive with its scorched earth attacks on "liberal elites," and that only intensified after Obama's win in 2008 (following the incompetence revealed in eight disastrous years of Bush's aggressive conservative agenda). Many of us have had no trouble rejecting this agenda, but much of the targeted audience have bought it all, bringing electoral success to a party which seems bound and determined to dismantle much of the framework that makes our country and world livable. Saunders has an explanation for this:

  Where is all this anger coming from? It's viral, and Trump is Typhoid Mary. Intellectually and emotionally weakened by years of steadily degraded public discourse, we are now two separate ideological countries, LeftLand and RightLand, speaking different languages, the lines between us down. Not only do our two subcountries reason differently; they draw upon non-intersecting data sets and access entirely different mythological systems. You and I approach a castle. One of us has watched only "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," the other only "Game of Thrones." What is the meaning, to the collective "we," of yon castle? We have no common basis from which to discuss it. You, the other knight, strike me as bafflingly ignorant, a little unmoored. In the old days, a liberal and a conservative (a "dove" and a "hawk," say) got their data from one of three nightly news programs, a local paper, and a handful of national magazines, and were thus starting with the same basic facts (even if those facts were questionable, limited, or erroneous). Now each of us constructs a custom informational universe, wittingly (we choose to go to the sources that uphold our existing beliefs and thus flatter us) or unwittingly (our app algorithms do the driving for us). The data we get this way, pre-imprinted with spin and mythos, are intensely one-dimensional.

  I don't get the castle example, but you can substitute many other concepts/events and see clear divides -- torture comes to mind, as I'm currently reading James Risen's Pay Any Price. Still, the left/right breakdown doesn't depend solely on one's chosen ideological envelope: one chooses that envelope based on other factors, perhaps most importantly whether you can see yourself or can empathize with the victim of some act. The RNC made it very clear that Republicans are deeply moved by violence against police, yet their only concern about police who kill unarmed black is the racism they perceive in the Black Lives Matter demonstrators.

  For an example of how absurd this can get, see Kansas Senate president: Obama 'has stoked the fires of anger and hostility' toward police. Susan Wagle is rarely the dumbest Republican in Kansas, yet she took the prize this time attempting to reap political gain from a tragic shooting. Of Obama, she said: "He's our national leader. We take his responses very seriously, and I think his role should be one of being an encourager for people to get along and for people to build relationships and for police to be fair in their treatment of all people and for the public to appreciate their role in our communities." It's obvious to me that that's exactly what he's always done, yet she refuses to recognize that and goes further to accuse him of the opposite, based on absolutely nothing but her visceral hatred of the man. That sort of carelessness about facts and views and the motives of people is endemic in her party.

• Christine Aschwenden: There's Probably Nothing That Will Change Clinton or Trump Supporters' Minds: Another iteration of Saunders' conclusions (with gratuitous equivalencies about Clinton -- the author is evidently one of those "both sides do it" middle-of-the-roaders):

  To his ardent supporters, Donald Trump is an exemplar of power and status. Donald Trump is going to make America great again. He'll put America First. He refuses to be silenced by the thought police. He's so rich, he can't be bought. He speaks his mind. He'll get the job done.

  To those who oppose him, he's a racist, misogynistic, narcissistic buffoon. Repeated lies, racist statements and attacks on women have led many people, including some prominent conservative donors, to conclude that Trump is unfit to be president, yet these missteps don't seem to bother his supporters much. Trump told a campaign rally in January that, "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's incredible."

  Trump's claim might seem like an exaggeration, played up for drama, but research suggests that once people board the Trump train, there's little that can prod them to jump off. (You could probably say something similar about Hillary Clinton supporters.) As much as we like to think that we use reason to evaluate evidence and come to conclusions, "It really goes back assward, a lot of times," said Peter Ditto, a psychologist at University of California, Irvine. "People already have a firm opinion, and that shapes the way they process information." We hold beliefs about how the world works and tend to force new information to fit within these pre-existing narratives.

  There's also this, which reminds me of Goebbels' "big lie" principle:

  Detractors shake their heads over Trump's habit of repeating lies that have already been publicly debunked. (PolitiFact has documented at least 17 times when Donald Trump said one thing and then denied it, and they've found that only five of the 182 Trump statements they evaluated were true, while 107 of them were false or "pants on fire" false.) But this strategy might not be as foolish as it seems. Work by political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler has shown that once an incorrect idea is lodged in someone's mind, it can be hard to overturn and corrections can actually strengthen people's belief in the misperception via the "backfire effect." When presented with information that contradicts what they already believe about controversial issues or candidates, people have a tendency to counterargue. They draw on the available considerations, malign the source of unwelcome information and generate ways to buttress the position they are motivated to take. As a result, they can end up becoming surer of their misconceptions, Nyhan said.

• Jeff Carter: Terrifying politics aside, let's take a moment to lavish in the supreme weirdness of the RNC spectacle:

  Say what you will about Donald Trump's almost infinite ignorance about every issue confronting the country, there is nobody, absolutely and unequivocally nobody, who can stage a Trump adore-a-thon better than Donald Trump. It's going to be huge! The best convention ever convened! The best speakers ever gathered! It will have the best platform ever conjured forth by a political party (not that Trump will ever read it or know what's in it, but it'll be great!). Xenophobes, Klansmen, White Nationalists, misogynists, Birthers and other Republican constituency groups will be gathered as one to sing hosannas to Donald Trump.

• Heather Digby Parton: Fear and loathing of Clinton:

  After Melania Trump left the stage people began filtering out of the hall since she'd been billed as the main attraction but the speeches went on and on afterwards with a bizarre, rambling speech from retired general Michael Flynn that sounded like it too was plagiarized -- from "Dr. Strangelove." Senator Joni Ernst spoke to a hall that was two thirds empty and there were even more people speaking late into the night after she was done. For a convention that was supposed to be showbiz slick, the first night certainly had a haphazard feeling to it.

• Tierney Sneed/Lauren Fox: Gloomy Old Party: GOP Clings to Themes of Threats, Violence, and Betrayal:

  The night's other prevailing theme -- besides America is going to hell -- is that Hillary Clinton is going to prison.

  "Hillary Clinton is unfit to be president. We all know she loves her pantsuits. Yes, you know what's coming. We should send her an e-mail and tell her she deserves a bright orange jumpsuit," said Colorado Senate candidate Darryl Glenn, merging two of the GOP's favorite Hillary memes into one.

  Later in the night the convention crowd broke out into chants of "lock her up."

  The rhetoric provided a theme around which the fractured Republican Party could rally. They may not all see Trump as their white knight, but they were united in fear about the state of the world and the country.

  Incarcerating Clinton may actually be a minority position among GOP delegates. There is, for instance, this: Trump Adviser: Clinton Should Be 'Shot for Treason' Over Benghazi Attack. But really, judging from the tone of the speakers and the crowd chants, many won't be satisfied until they see her head on a spike. And while Trump is amazingly quick to recant any time he says something that offends conservative orthodoxy, he has never shied away from his followers' penchant for racism and violence, even here: The Trump Campaign Is Now Wink-Winking Calls to Murder Clinton:

  Calls for violence or the killing of a political opponent usually spurs the other candidate to totally disavow the person in question. Frankly, it's a pretty new thing for a prominent supporter of a prominent politician to call for killing opposing candidates at all. But the Trump campaign is still "incredibly grateful his support" even though "we don't agree" that Clinton should be shot.

• Emily Plitter: Trump could seek new law to purge government of Obama appointees: When I first read this headline, I wondered whether Trump was jealous of Turkish president Erdogan, who has started a massive purge of the Turkish military and bureaucracy to get rid of anyone who had gone along with the coup attempt (or more generally, anyone hostile to the ruling AKP party). Turns out this is more focused at a small number of appointees whose jobs are reclassified as civil service. Still, such a law would be a step toward such a purge, and could be used to further politicize the civil service -- as, e.g., GW Bush did when he fired a couple dozen federal prosecutors who weren't adequately following his partisan program.

• Lauren Fox/Tierney Sneed: 'I Feel Like I Am Living a Dream': The GOP Convention From the Inside:

  [Mary Susan Rehrer, a delegate from Minnesota] said she was floored so many in the media had walked away from Monday night's convention with the similarities between Melania's speech and Michelle Obama's in 2008 as their headline.

  "I'm in business, OK, and I speak for a living as one of the things that I do. All the best stuff is stolen and there is nothing original, so it's all hocus pocus," Rehrer said. "We're supposed to share."

• Daniel Victor: What, Congressman Steve King Asks, Have Nonwhites Done for Civilization?: From one of those panel discussions that have filled up the airways during the RNC, this one on MSNBC chaired by Chris Hayes with Iowa Rep. King as the only far right voice:

  "If you're really optimistic, you can say this was the last time that old white people would command the Republican Party's attention, its platform, its public face," Charles P. Pierce, a writer at large at Esquire magazine, said during the panel discussion.

  In response, Mr. King said: "This whole 'old white people' business does get a little tired, Charlie. I'd ask you to go back through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you are talking about? Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?"

  "Than white people?" Mr. Hayes asked.

  Mr. King responded: "Than Western civilization itself that's rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America, and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world. That's all of Western civilization."

  I see this mostly as an example of how Trump's ascendancy has loosened the tongues of white supremacists. But I can't say as it's helpful to have their opinions freely expressed again -- and make no mistake that such opinions had a long run as freely spoken, to extraordinarily cruel effect. But even if his assertion is true -- and you can't say "western civilization" without conjuring up, at least in my mind, Gandhi's quote that "that would be a nice idea" -- what does King think that means? That white people deserve due respect? Sure. That white people are entitled to special privileges in our democracy? Not really. I think that Pierce is wrong: that white Republicans would rather go down with the ship than diversify, clinging to their control of "red states" even if they cease to be competitive nationally. Of course, a different kind of Republican Party could incubate in "blue states" but it's hard to see how they gain traction after the party has so totally succumbed to conservative extremism. If the core idea of Republicanism is to help rich business interests against labor and the poor, that isn't a very promising platform on which to build a political majority: that's why they've had to resort to racism, religious bigotry, and militaristic jingoism in the first place. What else do they have?

  Article includes several reaction tweets. My favorite, not included, is from Jason Bailey: "Steve King must have the shittiest iTunes library."

• Scott Eric Kaufman: Ted Cruz refuses to endorse Trump: To quote him: "Vote your conscience, for candidates you believe will be faithful to the Constitution." Mario Rubio also tiptoed through his speaking slot without offering a Trump endorsement, while Nikki Haley offered a "tepid semi-endorsement." Other GOP luminaries didn't bother to attend, especially Ohio Governor John Kasich, who was reportedly offered the vice-president slot and who could have justified attending just to promote home-state business, also the Bush clan. But Cruz was widely reviled afterwards, although I don't see how imploring folks to "vote your conscience" implicates one who has none. My main question about Cruz (and for that matter Kasich) is why if he's so adamantly opposed to Trump did he fold up his tent after losing Indiana? Surely there were still Republican voters, especially in California, prepared to resist Trump? The most likely reason is that his billionaire backers pulled the plug, and he was so totally their creature he didn't have the guts to continue on his own. Aside from Trump and Carson, that was the situation with all the Republicans: they ran because they lined up rich backers, and quit as soon as the money ran dry. Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, could hang on to the bitter end because his supporters backed his program, rather than looking for an inside track on favors if he won.

  Martin Longman, by the way, saw the Cruz speech thus: I Thought Trump Sabotaged Cruz. He makes a pretty good case that Trump, who had seen the speech two hours before, timed the disruption to highlight Cruz's treachery, even if it turned him into a martyr:

  In other words, he simply didn't say anything at that particular point in the speech that would logically inspire a spontaneous stomping protest of outrage. On the other hand, if you had read the speech ahead of time and were planning to boo Cruz off the stage, that was the logical point to do it. It was the point in which he failed to say the magic words. That was knowable with the speech in hand, but not knowable if you were just listening to the speech and had no idea what was coming next or how it would end.

  To me, it's clear that Trump coordinated the whole thing, told the New York delegation when to protest, timed his entrance for just that time, prepped his running mate and others to have their talking points ready, and "loved" the result, as he said.

• David E Sanger/Maggie Haberman: Donald Trump Sets Conditions for Defending NATO Allies Against Attack: Details Trump's latest pontifications on foreign policy, which among other things questioned why the US should foot much of the bill for NATO.

  "This is not 40 years ago," Mr. Trump said, rejecting comparisons of his approaches to law-and-order issues and global affairs to Richard Nixon's. Reiterating his threat to pull back United States troops deployed around the world, he said, "We are spending a fortune on military in order to lose $800 billion," citing what he called America's trade losses. "That doesn't sound very smart to me."

  Mr. Trump repeatedly defined American global interests almost purely in economic terms. Its roles as a peacekeeper, as a provider of a nuclear deterrent against adversaries like North Korea, as an advocate of human rights and as a guarantor of allies' borders were each quickly reduced to questions of economic benefit to the United States.

  The neocons went beserk over this, with Lindsey Graham, John Kasich, John Bolton, and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg prominent. (Trump flack Scott Brown assures us there's nothing to worry about because Melania "is from that region.") More worrisome to me is that counterattacks have also sprung up among liberals (as opposed to the left, as they frequently are): e.g., in TPM Sara Jerde: The 3 Most Dangerous Things Trump Said in Bonkers NYT Foreign Policy Interview. I don't doubt that the interview was bonkers, but what's so dangerous about these three things? -- "America's role in assisting NATO allies," "Reining in US bases abroad," and "Solving Islamic State unrest through 'meetings'"? In the first place, the US has never actually assisted any allies through NATO. The US uses NATO to threaten Russia, exacerbating tensions that could more easily be reduced through neutrality, trade and openness (as has happened within Europe). Why the US does this is more complex, some combination of neocon "sole super power" supremacism, subsidies for the US defense industry, and providing a fig leaf of international support for America's wars in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and North Africa -- but there's not a single good idea in that mix. Moreover, Trump's right that most US bases abroad are no more than economic subsidies, tolerated because they pay their own way. One could go further and point out that major US base complexes in Germany and Japan, while largely inoffensive to those countries, are critical way stations for America's wars in Asia and Africa. Shutting them down would make it harder for the US to try to solve problems by warfare and would (horror of horrors) make it more important to hold "meetings." (In fairness, I don't think Trump proposed meetings with ISIS; rather, he was talking about Turks and Kurds, and Jerde took license to poison the argument.)

  What I fear happening here is that liberal hawks (Hillary Clinton certainly qualifies) will seize this opportunity to attack Trump as soft on Putin (and ISIS). I am especially reminded of the 1984 debates between Reagan and Mondale, where Mondale proved himself to be the far more rigorous and militant red-baiter -- a stance that did him no good, partly because most people didn't care, partly because Reagan's own "star wars" dreams were so loony he held onto the lunatic right, and possibly because he turned off anyone actually concerned about peace. Trump's interview suggests that he might actually be saner regarding world war than Clinton. It would be a terrible mistake should she prove him right.

  Note that Lyndon Johnson beat Barry Goldwater bad by convincing people that Goldwater would be the dangerous lunatic, even though it was Johnson who insanely escalated the war in Vietnam. Similarly Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt campaigned on their kill at keeping America out of world wars they joined post-election. Even GW Bush was circumspect when campaigning about the wars he hoped we now know he had every intention of launching. So why would Clinton want to present herself as the warmonger in the 2016 race? Insecurity perhaps, or maybe conviction, but clearly not smarts.

  PS: Jeffrey Goldberg has already fired the first shot of Hillary's campaign to out-warmonger Trump: see It's Official: Hillary Clinton Is Running Against Vladimir Putin. Featured blurb: "Unlike Trump, leaders of countries like Estonia believe that the US still represents the best hope for freedom." So why shouldn't tiny, unstrategic countries like Estonia (or Georgia or Israel) be able to usurp and direct American foreign policy simply by uttering a few magic words?

  Unlike Trump, leaders of such countries as Estonia believe that the United States still represents the best hope for freedom. In his interview with Haberman and Sanger, Trump argued, in essence, that there is nothing exceptional about the U.S., and that therefore its leaders have no right to criticize the behavior of other countries: "When the world looks at how bad the United States is, and then we go and talk about civil liberties, I don't think we're a very good messenger."

  PPS: More liberal hawks: Nancy LeTourneau: Trump's Outrageous Foreign Policy Views (in Washington Monthly), and Kevin Drum: Donald Trump Just Invited Russia to Attack Eastern Europe (in Mother Jones).

• Paul Krugman: The GOP's Original Sin: I'd trace this back a bit further, but lots of bad ideas that fermented in the 1970s only became manifest once Reagan became president.

  What I want to talk about is when, exactly, the GOP went over the edge. Obviously it didn't happen all at once. But I think the real watershed came in 1980-81, when supply-side economics became the party's official doctrine. [ . . . ]

  Yet 35 years ago the GOP was already willing to embrace this doctrine because it was politically convenient, and could be used to justify tax cuts for the rich, which have always been the priority.

  And given this, why should anyone be surprised at all the reality denial and trashing of any kind of evidence that followed? You say economics is a pseudo-science? Fine. First they came for the economists; then they came for the climate scientists and the evolutionary biologists.

  Now comes Trump, and the likes of George Will, climate denier, complain that he isn't serious. Well, what did you think was going to happen?

Bonus link: Michelle Obama's Glorious, Savvy 'Carpool Karaoke' Clip, with James Corden. We've spent much of the last eight years griping about Obama, but will miss her -- and may even miss him. Also see John Stewart Returns to Savage Trump, Hannity: well, he doesn't actually refer to Hannity. Calls him "Lumpy."

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