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rachelramirez

Tea Party Turns on 'Megalomaniac Strongman' Donald Trump - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...ac-strongman-donald-trump.html

trump tea party politics

shared by rachelramirez on 10 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Tea Party Turns on ‘Megalomaniac Strongman’ Donald Trump
  • Now, “may” is the operative word, since rumors of Trump’s demise, as you might have noticed, have been a touch overstated.
  • Rep. Dave Brat, a Virginia Republican who defeated then-Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a shocking primary upset due in large part to his tough-on-undocumented-immigration stance, also criticized Trump’s approach.
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  • Taylor Budowich, executive director of the Tea Party Express, also said the real estate baron’s stance is incompatible with the Constitution.
  • That said, it remains to be seen if Trump supporters will share Tea Party leaders’ views of their idol.
Javier E

A new poll shows Trump's magical lying powers are failing him - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...l-lying-powers-are-failing-him

trump strategy crisis media politics policy

shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • A new poll from NPR, PBS News Hour and Marist finds that only 37 percent of Americans have a good deal of trust in the information Trump tells them about coronavirus. By contrast, 60 percent have little to no trust.
  • Meanwhile, the poll also finds that 50 percent have a good deal of trust in the news media’s information about the disease, versus 47 percent who lack trust
  • a great deal is at stake here. Our national response to a crisis with extraordinarily far-reaching destructive potential is more or less under the control of a megalomaniac who, with the eager backing of his media allies, vastly prioritizes protecting his reelection chances over protecting the country.
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  • The Post reports that Trump propagandists like Sean Hannity have stampeded in herd-like fashion from initially attacking the media for supposedly hyping coronavirus to claiming its dire nature actually displays Trump’s heroism.
  • First Trump and his propagandists falsely accused the media of exaggerating the threat to protect his initial instinct to downplay it himself, all to avoid rattling the markets, to buoy his reelection hopes.
  • when it became obvious the crisis was very serious indeed, Trump attacked the media to falsely discredit its aggressive reporting on his failure to respond to it competently and with urgency. And now, Trump’s propagandists are supplanting that accurate reporting with their own narrative — one in which the very same crisis they previously downplayed now showcases Trump’s decisive and “bold” leadership.
  • another report, from the New York Times, ferrets out alarming new behind-the-scenes details that underscore just how unfit Trump is to the task at hand. It shows that Trump’s refusal to accept the seriousness of coronavirus, and his failure to lay down clear chains of command and elaborate a real long-term plan, created a situation in which officials scrambled to address the crisis almost behind his back.
  • it’s somewhat heartening that the new NPR poll finds that 44 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the crisis, while 49 percent disapprove of it.
  • While 85 percent of Republicans approve, crucially, only 40 percent of independents do, while 50 percent disapprove.
  • One bit of bad news: 46 percent of Americans say the federal government is doing enough to combat coronavirus, which is obviously not the case, while 44 percent say it is not.
  • However, 70 percent are concerned that coronavirus will spread to their communities, a massive swing from 44 percent last month, in spite Trump’s efforts to downplay it
  • Meanwhile, only 37 percent of Americans trust what Trump tells them about coronavirus, while 60 percent do not, and among independents, that’s an even worse 35 percent to 62 percent. Among women it’s a staggering 31 percent to 66 percent.
  • All this comes as we are confronting very grim new realities. The White House appears to have been jolted by new research out of Britain demonstrating that if the government and individuals do nothing to combat coronavirus’s spread, up to 2.2 million Americans could die.
  • Conversely, that research also shows that doing what is necessary to seriously curtail such numbers will require sustained, drastic disruptions — and with them, a potentially severe economic downturn.
  • All this means that in addition to the threat it poses to the country, coronavirus also poses an existential threat to Trump’s presidency. This Trump-protection project will only grow more urgent
  • Trump and his propagandists have absolute faith in the power of their magical lies to discredit the news media and to substitute their own version of reality for the one the media is reporting. And Trump has kept up the attacks on the press for precisely this purpose.
Javier E

New questions about Trump's ugly Bible stunt hint at some dark truths - The Washington ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...le-stunt-hint-some-dark-truths

trump bible stunt causes history

shared by Javier E on 16 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • Disturbing new details are emerging about the violent crackdown on protesters that preceded President Trump’s Bible photo op near the White House
  • What was supposed to capture Trump bravely standing up for “law and order” is rapidly coming to typify his megalomania, his terror of looking weak, and — perversely enough — his profound contempt for the rule of law
  • a crucial fact: Trump and his handlers have gone to extraordinary lengths to showcase this moment as a great triumph.
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  • At the core of the new Post report are two questions: Who issued the order to clear away the protesters, and to what degree was it linked to the decision to hold that photo op?
  • The administration has defended itself by claiming the two were not linked, and that the removal action carried out a decision to expand the security perimeter around the White House that had been made in advance.
  • But numerous other officials, including the chiefs of the D.C. police and National Guard Bureau, have now challenged this claim. They say they had no advance notice that the U.S. Park Police would commence forcible removal. That undercuts the notion that it was part of a pre-planned effort.
  • at the time, Trump was in a rage inside the White House about reports that he was hunkered down, the report documents. White House officials were discussing expanding the perimeter, but they were also discussing holding an event to showcase Trump in control — the visit to the church.
  • ven if the perimeter expansion had been discussed, there was never any firm indication of a time when it would happen. And then, right after Trump made the decision to walk to the church, this was relayed to the Secret Service on the ground, whereupon the crackdown suddenly ensued, including chemical gassing and violent shoving with shields.
  • there’s still another revelation here: The clearing away of the protesters might have violated a 2015 court settlement between the Park Police and the Justice Department.
  • That 2015 settlement set new rules for how federal law enforcement engages with protesters, requiring three audible warnings about pending dispersal, plus the identification of avenues for protesters to disperse themselves peacefully.
  • there was already a strong case that the protesters’ First Amendment rights were violated.
  • “The government can impose reasonable time, place and manner restrictions on speech in public forums, and in some circumstances it can clear protesters to protect public safety or the safety of public officials,”
  • “But the First Amendment requires that the restrictions be reasonable,” Jaffer said. “They went from zero to 60 in a matter of seconds.”
  • The 2015 settlement more clearly defined what law enforcement must do to protect protesters’ rights in a situation like this, yet this appears to have been violated as well,
  • “These limits were totally disregarded here,
  • this episode stands as the precipitating moment at which some of the darkest and most seminal truths about the Trump presidency emerged. Trump’s abuses led military officials to feel the need to signal to the country that something is very wrong, that our values and ideals are under serious threat.
  • We are now learning that the crackdown might have been more tightly tied to Trump’s desire to stage a messianic and megalomaniacal photo op than previously known — and that the abuses undertaken to facilitate it might have been worse than we thought.
Javier E

Opinion | The Brotherhood of the Philandering Oligarchs - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-berlusconi.html

trump megalomaniac narcissism leader power politics history culture

shared by Javier E on 16 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • I covered Silvio Berlusconi.That was from 2002 to 2004, during the second of his four stints as prime minister of Italy. He was arguably at the peak of his power. And he was Trump before Trump, a harbinger of Trump, a dress rehearsal of Trump, nearly as hubristic, similarly nationalistic, contemptuous of norms, disdainful of the law, a creature of show business awash in creature comforts, loud, lewd — all of it.
  • The Times on Tuesday, Mattia Ferraresi sketched the many parallels between the two tycoons, noting, for example, that Berlusconi and his businesses were constantly drawing the attention of prosecutors, that he claimed to be the victim of rigged elections, that he bellowed about his persecution and that he cozied up to Vladimir Putin. Berlusconi and Trump are a Venn diagram that’s all overlap.
  • it’s worth dwelling a bit longer on those shared traits, because they point to verities bigger than the both of them — to dynamics that will play out in Western politics for some time.
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  • Another Berlusconi-Trump lesson is that vulgarity can be an asset, not a liability, because as soon as it’s derided as such — the minute detractors tsk-tsk and curl their lips — it positions a politician in opposition to “the elites.
  • Trump, too, has benefited from a congenital affinity for television. But he also took to more recent inventions, to changes in the information ecosystem that suited him as well as “The Apprentice” did. He spotted the internet’s fertility for lies. He saw that the greatest currency on social media is spite
  • One of those is that ultimate power and ultimate persuasion depend on an intuitive, visceral understanding of the age’s media
  • Another: Voters will put up with narcissism because many of them will interpret it at least in part as a perk of success and as confidence’s sufferable sidekick.
  • And there’s an authenticity to artifice. Trump embodies that oxymoron the same way Berlusconi did.
  • Few among us have gone to the amoral lengths of a Trump or a Berlusconi to preserve ourselves (and I don’t mean cosmetically) at any cost. That’s the real secret binding these braggarts.
  • If you don’t care about how thoroughly you’re degrading your country, if you’re willing to sacrifice its future on the altar of your own greedy here and now, you can scheme with abandon, lie with conviction and vilify anyone and everyone who gets in your way. Shamelessness is its own reward.
  • The Trumps after Trump are taking notes.
Javier E

Opinion | This Is Why Autocracies Fail - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...why-autocracies-fail.html

autocracy authoritarian liberal democracy comparison russia china

shared by Javier E on 21 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • Joe Biden correctly argues that the struggle between democracy and autocracy is the defining conflict of our time. So which system performs better under stress?
  • when it comes to the most important functions of government, autocracy has severe weaknesses
  • it’s an occasion for a realistic assessment of authoritarian ineptitude and perhaps instability. What are those weaknesses?
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  • The wisdom of many is better than the wisdom of megalomaniacs. In any system, one essential trait is: How does information flow? In democracies, policymaking is usually done more or less in public, and there are thousands of experts offering facts and opinions
  • People want their biggest life. Human beings these days want to have full, rich lives and make the most of their potential. The liberal ideal is that people should be left as free as possible to construct their own ideal. Autocracies restrict freedom for the sake of order.
  • To me, the lesson is that even when we’re confronting so-far successful autocracies like China, we should learn to be patient and trust our liberal democratic system.
  • They don’t hire the smartest and best people. Such people might be threatening. They hire the dimmest and the most mediocre. You get a government of third-raters.
  • Ethnonationalism self-inebriates. Everybody worships something. In a liberal democracy, worship of the nation (which is particular) is balanced by the love of liberal ideals (which are universal). With the demise of communism, authoritarianism lost a major source of universal values. National glory is pursued with intoxicating fundamentalism.
  • Government against the people is a recipe for decline. Democratic leaders, at least in theory, serve their constituents. Autocratic leaders, in practice, serve their own regime and longevity, even if it means neglecting their people.
  • Organization man turns into gangster man. People rise through autocracies by ruthlessly serving the organization, the bureaucracy. That ruthlessness makes them aware others may be more ruthless and manipulative, so they become paranoid and despotic
  • When we are confronting imperial aggressors like Putin, we should trust the ways we are responding now. If we steadily, patiently and remorselessly ramp up the economic, technological and political pressure, the weaknesses inherent in the regime will grow and grow.
Javier E

'The Magic Mountain' Saved My Life - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...680400

magic mountain lifeline humanism humanity democracy love

shared by Javier E on 06 Nov 24 - No Cached
  • I had never noticed the void before, because I had never been moved to ask the questions Who am I? What is life for? Now I couldn’t seem to escape them, and I received no answers from an empty sky.
  • a “moist spot” on one of his lungs. That and a slight fever suggest tuberculosis, requiring him to remain for an indeterminate time. Both diagnosis and treatment are dubious, but they thrill Hans Castorp: This hermetic world has begun to cast a spell on him and provoke questions “about the meaning and purpose of life” that he’d never asked down in the flatlands. Answered at first with “hollow silence,” they demand extended contemplation that’s possible only on the magic mountain.
  • I fell under the spell of Hans Castorp’s quest story, as the Everyman hero is transformed by his explorations of time, illness, sciences and séances, politics and religion and music.
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  • he climactic chapter, “Snow,” felt as though it were addressed to me. Hans Castorp, lost in a snowstorm, falls asleep and then awakens from a mesmerizing and monstrous dream with an insight toward which the entire story has led him: “For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts.”
  • Hans Castorp remains on the mountain for seven years—a mystical number. The Magic Mountain is an odyssey confined to one place, a novel of ideas like no other, and a masterpiece of literary modernism.
  • Mann analyzes the nature of time philosophically and also conveys the feeling of its passage, slowing down his narrative in some spots to take in “the entire world of ideas”—a day can fill 100 pages—and elsewhere omitting years
  • As I made my way through the novel by kerosene lamplight, I took Mann’s bildungsroman as a guide to my own education among the farmers, teachers, children, and market women who became my closest companions, hoping to find myself on a journey toward enlightenment as rich and meaningful as its hero’s
  • Mann has something important to tell us as a civilization. The Mann who began writing the novel was an aristocrat of art, hostile to democracy—a reactionary aesthete. Working on The Magic Mountain was a transformative experience, turning him—as it turned his protagonist—into a humanist
  • What Hans Castorp arrives at, lost and asleep in the snow, “is the idea of the human being,” Mann later wrote, “the conception of a future humanity that has passed through and survived the profoundest knowledge of disease and death.”
  • In our age of brutal wars, authoritarian politics, cultures of contempt, and technology that promises to replace us with machines, what is left of the idea of the human being? What can it mean to be a humanist?
  • For Mann, the Great War was more than a contest among rival European powers or a patriotic cause. It was a struggle between “civilization” and “culture”—between the rational, politicized civilization of the West and Germany’s deeper culture of art, soul, and “genius,” which Mann associated with the irrational in human nature: sex, aggression, mythical belief.
  • The kaiser’s Germany—strong in arms, rich in music and philosophy, politically authoritarian—embodied Mann’s ideal. The Western powers “want to make us happy,” he wrote in the fall of 1914—that is, to turn Germany into a liberal democracy. Mann was more drawn to death’s mystery and profundity than to reason and progress, which he considered facile values
  • This sympathy wasn’t simply a fascination with human evil—with a death instinct—but an attraction to a deeper freedom, a more intense form of life than parliaments and pamphleteering offered.
  • Mann scorned the notion of the writer as political activist. The artist should remain apart from politics and society, he believed, free to represent the deep and contradictory truths of reality rather than using art as a means to advance a particular view
  • Settembrini, like Heinrich, is a “humanist”—but in Mann’s usage, the term has an ironic sound. As he wrote elsewhere, it implies “a repugnant shallowness and castration of the concept of humanity,” pushed by “the politician, the humanitarian revolutionary and radical literary man, who is a demagogue in the grand style, namely a flatterer of mankind.”
  • As an artist above politics, Mann didn’t want simply to criticize “civilization’s literary man,” but to show him as “equally right and wrong.” He intended to create an intellectual opponent to Settembrini in a conservative Protestant character named Pastor Bunge—but the war intruded.
  • He published his wartime writings in the genre-defying Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man in October 1918, one month before the armistice. Katia Mann later wrote, “In the course of writing the book, Thomas Mann gradually freed himself from the ideas which had held sway over him … He wrote Reflections in all sincerity and, in doing so, ended by getting over what he had advocated in the book.”
  • The war that had just ended enlarged the novel’s theme into “a worldwide festival of death”; the devastation, he would go on to write in the book’s last pages, was “the thunderbolt that bursts open the magic mountain and rudely sets its entranced sleeper outside the gates,” soon to become a German soldier. It also confronted Mann himself with a new world to which he had to respond.
  • Some German conservatives, in their hatred of the Weimar Republic and the Treaty of Versailles, embraced right-wing mass politics. Mann, nearing 50, vacillated, hoping to salvage the old conservatism from the new extremism. In early 1922, he and Heinrich reconciled, and, as Mann later wrote, he began “to accept the European-democratic religion of humanity within my moral horizon, which so far had been bounded solely by late German romanticism, by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wagner.”
  • in a review of a German translation of Walt Whitman’s selected poetry and prose, he associated the American poet’s mystical notion of democracy with “the same thing that we in our old-fashioned way call ‘humanity’ … I am convinced there is no more urgent task for Germany today than to fill out this word, which has been debased into a hollow shell.”
  • when ultranationalists in Berlin murdered his friend Walther Rathenau, the Weimar Republic’s Jewish foreign minister. Shocked into taking a political stand, Mann turned a birthday speech in honor of the Nobel Prize–winning author Gerhart Hauptmann into a stirring call for democracy. To the amazement of his audience and the German press, Mann ended with the cry “Long live the republic!”
  • Abandoning Pastor Bunge as outmoded, he created a new counterpart to Settembrini who casts a sinister shadow over the second half of the novel: an ugly, charismatic, and (of course) tubercular Jesuit of Jewish origin named Leo Naphta. The intellectual combat between him and Settembrini—which ends physically, in a duel—provides some of the most dazzling passages in The Magic Mountain.
  • Naphta is neither conservative nor liberal. Against capitalist modernity, whose godless greed and moral vacuity he hates with a sulfurous rage, Naphta offers a synthesis of medieval Catholicism and the new ideology of communism. Both place “anonymous and communal” authority over the individual, and both are intent on saving humanity from Settembrini’s soft, rational humanism.
  • Naphta argues that love of freedom and pleasure is weaker than the desire to obey. “The mystery and precept of our age is not liberation and development of the ego,” he says. “What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.” Mann understood the appeal of totalitarianism early on.
  • It’s Naphta, a truly demonic figure—not Settembrini, the voice of reason—who precipitates the end of the hero’s romance with death. His jarring arrival allows Hans Castorp to loosen himself from its grip and begin a journey toward—what? Not toward Settembrini’s international republic of letters, and not back toward his simple bourgeois life down in the flatlands
  • Hans Castorp puts on a new pair of skis and sets out for a few hours of exercise that lead him into the fateful blizzard and “a very enchanting, very dreadful dream.”
  • In it, he encounters a landscape of human beings in all their kindness and beauty, and all their hideous evil. “I know everything about humankind,” he thinks, still dreaming, and he resolves to reject both Settembrini and Naphta—or rather, to reject the stark choice between life and death, illness and health, recognizing that “man is the master of contradictions, they occur through him, and so he is more noble than they.”
  • e’s become one of death’s intimates, and his initiation into its mysteries has immeasurably deepened his understanding of life—but he won’t let death rule his thoughts. He won’t let reason either, which seems weak and paltry before the power of destruction. “Love stands opposed to death,” he dreams; “it alone, and not reason, is stronger than death.”
  • We succumb to the impulse to escape our humanness. That urge, ubiquitous today, thrives in the utopian schemes of technologists who want to upload our minds into computers; in the pessimism of radical environmentalists who want us to disappear from the Earth in order to save it; in the longing of apocalyptic believers for godly retribution and cleansing; in the daily sense of inadequacy, of shame and sin, that makes us disappear into our devices.
  • the vision of “love” that Hans Castorp embraces just before waking up is “brotherly love”—the bond that unites all human beings.
  • he emerged as the preeminent German spokesman against Hitler who, in lectures across the United States in 1938, warned Americans of the rising threat to democracy, which for him was inseparable from humanism: “We must define democracy as that form of government and of society which is inspired above every other with the feeling and consciousness of the dignity of man.”
  • Mann urged his audiences to resist the temptation to deride humanity. “Despite so much ridiculous depravity, we cannot forget the great and the honorable in man,” he said, “which manifest themselves as art and science, as passion for truth, creation of beauty, and the idea of justice.”
  • Could anyone utter these lofty words today without courting a chorus of snickers, a social-media immolation? We live in an age of human self-contempt. We’re hardly surprised when our leaders debase themselves with vile behavior and lies, when combatants desecrate the bodies of their enemies, when free people humiliate themselves under the spell of a megalomaniacal fraud
  • In driving our democracy into hatred, chaos, and violence we, too, grant death dominion over our thoughts.
  • Mann now recognized political freedom as necessary to ensure the freedom of art, and he became a sworn enemy of the Nazis.
  • The need for political reconstruction, in this country and around the world, is as obvious as it was in Thomas Mann’s time.
  • Mann also knew that, to withstand our attraction to death, a decent society has to be built on a foundation deeper than politics: the belief that, somewhere between matter and divinity, we human beings, made of water, protein, and love, share a common destiny.
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