Trump: Good for Dems, Bad for America
By Peter Dreier
trump bad for americaWould having Donald Trump as the GOP nominee be good or
bad for the Democrats — or for the country?
On the one hand, I’m confident that either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders
could beat Trump relatively easily. Current polls show Sanders beating Trump,
and Clinton beating Trump (although by a narrower margin).
Over the course of the campaign, things could change, although even with all of
Trump’s fortune, and that of the Koch brothers and other GOP donors, the Dems
will be able to hold their own in fundraising. Some corporate Dems might go
with Trump if Sanders gets the Democratic nod, but most of them will probably
stick with Sanders. During the campaign, many more outrageous things will
emerge about Trump’s past and present — his womanizing, his bad and corrupt
business practices and bankruptcies, his lies about his past, his chronic
flip-flopping on issues, his ignorance of basic policy — than will come out
about either Clinton or Sanders.
After so many years in the national spotlight, Hillary has already been
thoroughly vetted. She has no skeletons in her closet we don’t already know
about. No doubt Trump will try to resurrect the phony Whitewater scandal or
Vincent Foster’s death, but it is unlikely they’ll get much traction. He’ll
bring up Bhenghazi and the emails, but by mid-summer the voters won’t care.
Trump will call Clinton a “socialist,” just as the Republicans, Tea Party, and
the Limbaugh lunatics and Fox News fanatics tried to pin that label on Barack
Obama for the past seven years. Ultra right-wing voters will believe it, but
most Americans will understand that, like Obama, she’s a liberal, not a
socialist.
Sanders is a democratic socialist, so if he’s the Democratic nominee, Trump and
the GOP billionaires boys club (Adelson, Koch brothers, etc) will spend big
bucks trying to defame him as a Communist, even though that’s a very different
thing — in fact, the opposite thing — from a socialist. Recent public opinion
polls, however, suggest that such “red-baiting” tactics aren’t likely to work,
since the McCarthy era and the Cold War have been over for decades. Polls show
that most Americans don’t care about the “socialist” label one way or another.
In fact, a Pew survey found that under-30 Americans have slightly more
favorable attitudes toward socialism than toward capitalism. And that poll was
taken in December 2011, before Sanders’ campaign began injecting and
popularizing the words “democratic socialism” into the mainstream conservation.
Young people today probably identify socialism with Scandinavia’s more livable
societies rather than with the authoritarian Communist countries like Russia
and China.
If Trump is the GOP nominee, turnout among Republicans will likely plunge
because even many Republicans find Trump distasteful. They won’t vote for
Hillary or Bernie, but they might stay home, even in the swing states
So Trump, the GOP, and the right-wing echo chamber (Fox News, Rush Limbaugh,
etc) will also try to define Sanders as a big-spending radical who will raise
taxes, promote “big government,” and try to turn the United States into Denmark
or Sweden. (By the way, Forbes magazine ranked Denmark as the #1 country for
business. The United States ranked #18). In fact, polls show that a vast
majority of Americans actually agree with Sanders on most key issues, even if
they don’t define themselves as democratic socialists. As I explained in my
article in American Prospect last summer, “Is Bernie Sanders Too Radical for
America?” Sanders is in sync with most Americans. The respected writer David
Cay Johnston said the same thing in his column last week in the New York Daily
News, “You Agree With Bernie Sanders (But You Might Not Know It).”
If Trump is the GOP nominee, turnout among Republicans will likely plunge
because even many Republicans find Trump distasteful. They won’t vote for
Hillary or Bernie, but they might stay home, even in the swing states, which
would help the Democrats running for Senate as well as Hillary or Bernie. And
turnout among Latinos, African Americans, and women (especially young women)
will increase because Trump has gone out of his way to offend those groups.
I doubt that Trump can help Republicans win in the nine battleground Senate
races because his appeal is so narrow, although it will grow somewhat if he’s
the GOP nominee. He’ll increase turnout among right-wing zealots, but they
represent less than 10% of all voters and perhaps 25% to 30% of all Republican
voters. (Self-identified Republicans represent 26% of voters compared with 44%
who identify as independents and 29% as Democrats, according to the latest
Gallup Poll).
Many independent voters will likely be drawn to the polls to vote against
Trump, even if they aren’t enthusiastic about either Clinton or Sanders. Trump
could fracture the GOP, which is good for Democrats. Looking state-by-state, I
don’t see a path by which Trump gets 270 Electoral Votes against either Clinton
or Sanders.
But to Democrats salivating at the idea of running a candidate against Trump, I
say: Be careful what you wish for. You won’t like the country that Hillary or
Bernie (hopefully with a Democratic majority in the Senate. which will allow
the Democratic president to appoint two, three or four Supreme Court justices)
will have to lead.
LA Progressive
Progressive Media Advocates
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LAP Live!
Trump: Good for Dems, Bad for America
By Peter Dreier
27
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1
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trump bad for americaWould having Donald Trump as the GOP nominee be good or
bad for the Democrats — or for the country?
On the one hand, I’m confident that either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders
could beat Trump relatively easily. Current polls show Sanders beating Trump,
and Clinton beating Trump (although by a narrower margin).
Over the course of the campaign, things could change, although even with all of
Trump’s fortune, and that of the Koch brothers and other GOP donors, the Dems
will be able to hold their own in fundraising. Some corporate Dems might go
with Trump if Sanders gets the Democratic nod, but most of them will probably
stick with Sanders. During the campaign, many more outrageous things will
emerge about Trump’s past and present — his womanizing, his bad and corrupt
business practices and bankruptcies, his lies about his past, his chronic
flip-flopping on issues, his ignorance of basic policy — than will come out
about either Clinton or Sanders.
After so many years in the national spotlight, Hillary has already been
thoroughly vetted. She has no skeletons in her closet we don’t already know
about. No doubt Trump will try to resurrect the phony Whitewater scandal or
Vincent Foster’s death, but it is unlikely they’ll get much traction. He’ll
bring up Bhenghazi and the emails, but by mid-summer the voters won’t care.
Trump will call Clinton a “socialist,” just as the Republicans, Tea Party, and
the Limbaugh lunatics and Fox News fanatics tried to pin that label on Barack
Obama for the past seven years. Ultra right-wing voters will believe it, but
most Americans will understand that, like Obama, she’s a liberal, not a
socialist.
Sanders is a democratic socialist, so if he’s the Democratic nominee, Trump and
the GOP billionaires boys club (Adelson, Koch brothers, etc) will spend big
bucks trying to defame him as a Communist, even though that’s a very different
thing — in fact, the opposite thing — from a socialist. Recent public opinion
polls, however, suggest that such “red-baiting” tactics aren’t likely to work,
since the McCarthy era and the Cold War have been over for decades. Polls show
that most Americans don’t care about the “socialist” label one way or another.
In fact, a Pew survey found that under-30 Americans have slightly more
favorable attitudes toward socialism than toward capitalism. And that poll was
taken in December 2011, before Sanders’ campaign began injecting and
popularizing the words “democratic socialism” into the mainstream conservation.
Young people today probably identify socialism with Scandinavia’s more livable
societies rather than with the authoritarian Communist countries like Russia
and China.
If Trump is the GOP nominee, turnout among Republicans will likely plunge
because even many Republicans find Trump distasteful. They won’t vote for
Hillary or Bernie, but they might stay home, even in the swing states
So Trump, the GOP, and the right-wing echo chamber (Fox News, Rush Limbaugh,
etc) will also try to define Sanders as a big-spending radical who will raise
taxes, promote “big government,” and try to turn the United States into Denmark
or Sweden. (By the way,Forbes magazine rankedDenmark as the #1 country for
business. The United States ranked #18). In fact, polls show that a vast
majority of Americans actually agree with Sanders on most key issues, even if
they don’t define themselves as democratic socialists. As I explained in my
article in American Prospect last summer,“Is Bernie Sanders Too Radical for
America?” Sanders is in sync with most Americans. The respected writer David
Cay Johnston said the same thing in his column last week in the New York Daily
News, “You Agree With Bernie Sanders (But You Might Not Know It).”
If Trump is the GOP nominee, turnout among Republicans will likely plunge
because even many Republicans find Trump distasteful. They won’t vote for
Hillary or Bernie, but they might stay home, even in the swing states, which
would help the Democrats running for Senate as well as Hillary or Bernie. And
turnout among Latinos, African Americans, and women (especially young women)
will increase because Trump has gone out of his way to offend those groups.
I doubt that Trump can help Republicans win in thenine battleground Senate
races because his appeal is so narrow, although it will grow somewhat if he’s
the GOP nominee. He’ll increase turnout among right-wing zealots, but they
represent less than 10% of all voters and perhaps 25% to 30% of all Republican
voters. (Self-identified Republicans represent 26% of voters compared with 44%
who identify as independents and 29% as Democrats, according to the latest
Gallup Poll).
Many independent voters will likely be drawn to the polls to vote against
Trump, even if they aren’t enthusiastic about either Clinton or Sanders. Trump
could fracture the GOP, which is good for Democrats. Looking state-by-state, I
don’t see a path by which Trump gets 270 Electoral Votes against either Clinton
or Sanders.
But to Democrats salivating at the idea of running a candidate against Trump, I
say: Be careful what you wish for. You won’t like the country that Hillary or
Bernie (hopefully with a Democratic majority in the Senate. which will allow
the Democratic president to appoint two, three or four Supreme Court justices)
will have to lead.
In his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, Philip Roth imagines that aviator
Charles Lindbergh defeats President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 election.
Lindbergh was an anti-Semite, sympathetic to Adolph Hitler and the Nazis, and
an “America First” supporter who opposed U.S. entry into World War 2. In Roth’s
novel, the Lindbergh presidency makes anti-semitism more acceptable and
catalyzes a wave of persecution against Jews and, one would expect, Blacks and
other minority groups.
Although I doubt that Trump can win the presidency, even in defeat, he would be
extremely dangerous for America, similar to Roth’s counter-factual fears about
Lindbergh as a winning candidate.
If he wins the GOP nomination, he would have a huge megaphone to give
legitimacy to all the worst aspects of American culture and society, including
racism, sexism, nativism, xenophobia, vulgar nastiness, indifference to policy
nuances, and ignorance of basic economic and budget realities. His very
presence as the GOP standard-bearer would poison the national political
culture. He would provoke hatred — perhaps even physical violence — against
Muslims, Mexican immigrants, and women. His every outrageous statement would be
on the nightly news. He would get more media coverage than either Clinton or
Sanders, whose policy ideas would look dull and un-newsworthy compared with
Trump’s daily bombastic comments. (Ted Cruz is even more conservative than
Trump, but he is less charismatic and effective at dominating the media cycles
and mobilizing public opinion).
The presidential debates would turn into wrestling matches, no matter how much
Clinton or Sanders try to steer the conversation to substantive issues. Either
Democrat would destroy Trump in a debate if the moderators could contain
Trump’s bullying and force him to stick to the issues, but that’s a big “if.”
The good side is that the debates would attract a huge TV audience and most
Americans (even a significant slice of Republicans) would realize that Trump —
even if he’s on his best behavior — is not fit to be president. The bad side is
that the debates would attract a huge TV audience and a sizable slice of
Americans would identify with and cheer on Trump’s incendiary rhetoric,
megalomania, and macho madness.
There are, of course, other scenarios.
•If Sanders or Trump are the nominees of their respective parties, New York
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has threatened to enter the presidential contest. (I
doubt Bloomberg would run for president if Clinton is the Democrats’ nominee).
Could Bloomberg beat Sander and Trump by spending his fortune and enlisting his
corporate friends to bet on him?
•If Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, or even Jeb Bush or John Kasich win the GOP
nomination, Trump might enter the race as an independent (third party)
candidate. That scenario would guarantee an even bigger Democratic victory in
November, since Trump would take votes away from the Republican candidate.
•But what if Rubio, Cruz, Bush or Kasich get the GOP nob, Sanders wins the
Democratic nomination, and Trump runs as an independent? Would Bloomberg enter
the fray and make it a four-person race? There hasn’t been a presidential
contest with four credible candidates since 1948, when President Harry Truman
(the Democrat), New York Governor Thomas Dewey (Republican), former Democratic
Vice President Henry Wallace (running on the Progressive Party ticket), and
Democratic South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond (running on the
segregationist States Rights, or Dixiecrat, ticket) vied for the White House.
Truman won by a slim margin.
In a four-person race that included Trump, Bloomberg, Sanders and the GOP
nominee, all bets are off. Unlike the 1948 contest, I don’t know if any of them
could get 270 Electoral Votes. If no candidate receives a majority of Electoral
Votes, then the House of Representatives elects the President from the three
Presidential candidates who received the most Electoral votes. Given the
likelihood that the House will remain in Republican hands after November’s
election, that’s not a pleasant scenario.
The most likely scenario: Either Sanders and Clinton will beat Trump. That will
mean that America will be in a better place, ready to address many of our
problems. But the residue of that presidential contest won’t entirely
disappear. Trump will emerge from his losing campaign as a man on a mission
with a wounded ego and a large following.
peter dreierEven in defeat, Trump won’t fade away, even if most Republicans
disown him for bringing the party down. With his money, his name recognition,
his ego, and his ability to attract media attention, he will continue to whip
up the most ugly aspects of our society, rub raw the sores of hatred and
discontent, and try to stymie Sanders or Clinton from making any headway on
their policy agendas. It won’t be pretty.
Peter Dreier
https://www.laprogressive.com/trump-bad-for-america/?utm_source=LA+Progressive+Newsletter&utm_campaign=4805f8c780-LAP_News_17April12&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_9f184a8aad-4805f8c780-286696793
