National Politics

The Republican Party’s Ronald Reagan idolatry worship died last night.

32 years after the 1984 Reagan reelection campaign gave us the hopeful imagery of a sun rising on “morning in America,” the new leader of the GOP, Donald Trump, says the sun has set, replacing Reagan’s imagery with a dark dystopian vision of “midnight in America.” In acceptance speech, Trump’s America is a dark and desperate place. And his sycophant convention delegates cheered him.

Perhaps the Republican Party officially died last night as well.

As Tom Toles of the Washington Post says, The GOP is now a personality cult built around a man who doesn’t have one.

A careful analysis of Donald Trump’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad, too long speech reveals some truths about the man. Trump is an ego-maniacal sociopath who projects himself as a “strongman” and sees himself as a tin-pot dictator of a banana republic, unburdened by a Congress and the courts in a democratic system of co-equal branches of government. America would be Trump’s banana republic.

Read more

I recently posted that Donald Trump revives Richard Nixon’s 1968 playbook. You saw this play out on the first night of the RNC Convention.

Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort expressly confirmed this strategy this week. Trump’s Campaign Manager Says He’ll Channel ‘Law And Order Richard Nixon:

As Donald Trump searched for a template for his acceptance speech, the model he chose was Richard Nixon’s infamous 1968 “law and order” speech on behalf of a silent and sullen middle class. [See Richard Nixon Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination (1968)]

At a somewhat similar time of stress and struggle in America and the world, Trump chose that speech as a starting point, his campaign chief told reporters at a Bloomberg breakfast Monday morning.

“We started on the speech a couple of weeks ago,” said Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. “We looked at previous conventions speeches; the one he focused on, though, was Nixon in 1968.”

In that speech, given only months after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy and amid rioting in many U.S. cities, Nixon cited the fears and resentments of “forgotten Americans” and vowed to return “order” to the streets and country.

The speech was aimed largely at white middle-class voters in border and Midwest states whom Alabama Gov. George Wallace was also appealing to in an openly racist way.

As a third-party candidate, Wallace was destined to win the Deep South in the fall, but the Nixon team devised a “law and order” theme ― a vow to restore order in the cities of the North ― that would appeal to the same voters and bring them into the Republican camp.

The aim was not to “unite” America, as Nixon claimed, but to target enough white middle-class support (as well as support from a smattering of other groups) to win.

Read more

Day three of the RNC Convention was set aside for the remainder of the GOP Clown Car Primary opponents of Donald Trump, who had not already appeared at the convention, to come out and lay prostate before the delegates and to swear their allegiance to “The Donald.” The “showcase” speech was to be for the VP nominee, Mike Pence.

One by one Trump’s former opponents came out and swore their allegiance to “The Donald” (with their fingers crossed behind their back).

And then came Senator Ted “Calgary” Cruz from Texas, the “most hated man in the U.S. Senate.”  “Calgary” decided to make himself the “most hated man at the 2016 RNC Convention.”

Rather than lay prostate before the delegates and swear his allegiance to “The Donald,” “Calgary” came out to bask in the applause of his delegates, and then to effectively announce:

“I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.”

Not only did “Calgary” not endorse “The Donald,” but he used the opportunity to declare his candidacy for the 2020 GOP nomination for president. “Calgary” hijacked The Trump Sow, and bedlam ensued.

I have been watching conventions for some 50 years, and I have never seen anyone be so blatant in this way. Ted “Calgary” Cruz is the only candidate who is as big an ego-maniacal sociopath as Donald Trump. Team Trump should have seen this coming.

Read more