Trump advisers say they hope to turn off young people in particular
Donald Trump keeps peddling the notion the vote may be rigged. It’s unclear whether he understands the potential damage of his words, or simply doesn’t care.
Oh please, it’s very clear that he’s doing it because he wants to. He’s a narcissist, and what he wants is all that counts.
Trump’s claim, made without evidence, undercuts the essence of American democracy, the idea that U.S. elections are free and fair, with the vanquished peacefully stepping aside for the victor. His repeated assertions are sowing suspicion among his most ardent supporters, raising the possibility that millions of people may not accept the results on Nov. 8 if Trump loses.
It’s no skin off his nose. If he loses he can just go back to being the rich asshole. He can destroy the place with no consequences to himself – and he’s bent on doing just that. But the rest of us have to live with a delegitimized president.
As Trump’s campaign careens from crisis to crisis, he’s broadened his unfounded allegations that Clinton, her backers and the media are conspiring to steal the election. He’s accused Clinton of meeting with global financial powers to “plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty” and argued his opponent shouldn’t have even been allowed to seek the White House.
“Hillary Clinton should have been prosecuted and should be in jail,” Trump tweeted on Saturday. “Instead she is running for president in what looks like a rigged election.”
My eyes bugged out when I read that, so I took a look at Trump’s Twitter. It’s a horrible sight.
This election is being rigged by the media pushing false and unsubstantiated charges, and outright lies, in order to elect Crooked Hillary!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 15, 2016
Talk about projection.
100% fabricated and made-up charges, pushed strongly by the media and the Clinton Campaign, may poison the minds of the American Voter. FIX!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 15, 2016
The poison is coming from inside the house.
Back to Julie Pace’s article:
Trump’s motivations for stoking these sentiments seem clear.
One of his last hopes of winning the election is to suppress turnout by making these final weeks so repulsive to voters that some just stay home. Trump advisers privately say they hope to turn off young people in particular. This group leans Democratic but doesn’t have a long history of voting and is already skeptical of Clinton.
Emphasis added. They actually say that!
Republicans have already experienced the paralyzing effect of Trump stirring up questions about a president’s legitimacy. He spent years challenging President Barack Obama’s citizenship, deepening some GOP voters’ insistence that the party block the Democrat at every turn.
Jim Manley, a former adviser to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., recalled the skepticism some Republicans had about Obama. “I’m afraid a President Clinton is going to start off with far too many people raising similar questions,” he said.
Lying liars ruin everything.
Judging by the young people I know, it’s working. I hear all sorts of things from young people that they are either not going to vote, or are going to vote for Gary Johnson. They believe everything that has been said about both candidates, and they think that everything is equivalent. “Hillary deleted e-mails” is listed as a total evil on a par with “Donald grabbed women and kissed them without consent”. In fact, I often feel like the young people I know are more horrified by “deleted e-mails” than “kissed without consent”.
Trying to get people to actually exercise critical thought and judgement these days is a struggle. It’s not just young people. I don’t know what the problem is, but in my line of work I see it all the time. Too much ‘balance’? Too much belief in belief? Too much faith in ‘feelings’? People just fatigued with too much information to process? People just so self-entitled and overly comfortable that they don’t understand how fragile a decent life and society actually is?
iknklast
I don’t think they think everything is equivalent, from what I can see what they figure is that if Hillary Clinton wasn’t running against a serial fraudster and sexual harasser, the shit that has come out about her would be disqualifying.
The Goldman Sachs speeches were bad enough – and she wasn’t the one that released them. The whole “Private versus public opinions” thing was bad enough on its own, the fact that everything the Sanders campaign had to say about how the DNC ran the race was revealed in the private emails of the DNC, the fact that the response from Clinton’s supporters has been reds under the bed – right down to the reds in question being the Russians…
Add in that Clinton’s supporters have done their level best to alienate young voters, and in all honesty the response is to be expected. If I was an American and I didn’t follow news as closely as I do, I would be saying fuck the both of them.
With Clinton’s support for trade deals (only suggesting tweaks to a deal that essentially grants corporations the right to sue governments over laws that impact their expected profits) I would look at her and think my job would be less secure with her in charge.
As an atheist I would be worried about the fact that it was Bill Clinton that signed the Restoration of Religious Freedom Act into law, and the fact that Hillary Clinton keeps saying that phrase “religious freedom.”
I would be deeply disturbed that the Democrats are essentially that cartoon dog in a house fire saying “everything is fine.”
I mean the Republicans seem to want to douse the whole thing with kerosene, but with workers working longer hours for less pay, with a massive student debt crisis, with climate change causing natural disasters that cost billions in damage, with police murdering children and the court system unwilling to charge them, or find them guilty when they’re charged, with incarceration rates worse than countries which are not free, with the leading crime in America being wage theft yet CEOs seeming to be above the law, America really isn’t great right now for something like 80% of the population.
The “America’s already great” line comes off as not promising to make things better.
Fortunately I am not an American, and I follow the news quite closely.
I look at Donald Trump and I see President Jacob Zuma, a misogynist dramatically unqualified for office who is constantly dogged by extremely legitimate claims of fraud, who is all things to all people amounting to being a big fat nothing, whose main appeal is as a brick thrown through the windows of the establishment.
Under Jacob Zuma, we’re stuck around 25% unemployment, we’ve got riots the likes we haven’t seen since Apartheid, we have “state capture” by influential rich people, and massive government waste that means our ruling party fiscally cannot meet its mandates.
And people don’t come to their senses when things go bad. We have #sciencemustfall for fuck’s sake. Rationality is ultimately discredited in the irrational state.
It really does matter that Trump is a dishonest nitwit, but I don’t think one can really get that across to people who haven’t experienced what a Trump-like figure can do. It doesn’t help that Clinton’s campaign has embraced the Bush family because they’re the nearest analogue to what I’m talking about that young Americans could relate to.
The fact that Trump is an ignorant asshole has been pretty well established, but there needs to be at least some explanation as to what having an ignorant asshole president would mean for America, not just in terms of embarrassment, but the ways he would change day-to-day American life.
It is not that the two are equivalent in the eyes of the youth, it is that I don’t think the youth of America really gets how important it is to have a president who is at the very least rational and somewhat qualified. They don’t really get what the degree of rottenness at the core of Trump really means, that the US presidency is not a popularity contest but a choice with serious consequences.
Bruce – I agree that there are problems with Clinton. I don’t hear from my friends about speeches, about trade deals, about any of that. I hear about 2 things: she deleted e-mails (and when questioned, they have no concept any further than that, like what was in the e-mails, etc) and, of course, Bill was unfaithful. They make it very plain to me that they see Bill’s unfaithfulness as a mark against Hillary that is the equivalent of Trump’s contempt for women and his sexually predatory nature – why? Because if he was unfaithful, she must have been cold.
They also see Hillary’s deleted e-mails as a bigger ethical lapse than Trump not paying his employees. They are willing to buy the “they weren’t worth it”, apparently not understanding contract law at all. In the end, they have no idea what was in the e-mails she deleted, they are unaware she has been investigated, and they think that doing something that wasn’t a crime at the time she did it should put her in jail, because they apparently have no comprehension that the Constitution forbids ex post facto laws.
How do I know this? Because I follow up conversations. I talk to, and listen to, people, and don’t try to assume what they do or don’t know. I have talked to a total of three people who are even aware of the trade deals, or that trade deals even exist, let alone what Hillary thinks about them. They might know that she has taken money for giving speeches, but don’t know to whom, nor do they care.
You are not an American, and you follows the news closely. I am an American, and I follow the news closely. I also talk with other Americans every day.
iknklast
I suspect we just know different young Americans.
From what I’ve seen the”ignorant American youth” trope has been a bit of a myth. The gap seems to be more one of getting the implications more than getting the info.
But most of the Americans I know are involved in at least some form of activism in one way or another, and that probably colours my perceptions a lot.
Bruce Gorton, oh dear. It’s one thing when lefties criticize Clinton’s policies, but I wish more people would see through rightwing shade.
Those released emails were a lot of noise with little to no signal (and yes, security experts think the Russians were likely behind them.)
To the point: Clinton won the nomination fair and square. She got more votes. Period. The DNC may have preferred her–understandable given that she has been a Democrat for decades and Sanders hasn’t–but that doesn’t imply wrongdoing.
If you’re going to allege machinations by the party, you’ll have to account for this: Sanders did better than Clinton in the caucuses. Caucuses are run by the DNC. Clinton did better in the primary elections. Elections are run by the states.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-system-isnt-rigged-against-sanders/
As for “private versus public opinions”–I doubt anybody could be an effective politician without making such distinctions. Case in point: Lincoln, whom Clinton was using as an example when she made that remark.
Politicians frequently take public positions that are often markedly different from private opinions. It’s one of the things that makes a politician successful. It’s also one of those things that makes non-politicians suspicious of them, because most people can’t compartmentalise that well.
[Note: not all politicians actually enter politics. There are plenty of people in management, science, religion, journalism and the local book group who are politicians by nature if not profession.]
Often a politician has to accept that if they publicly supported a particular position their political influence, if not career, would be shot. When their public position coincides with ours we laud them for having ‘done the right thing’ despite their personal views. When it doesn’t we revile them. Arguably one set of people are acting rationally and the other isn’t…
Oh, and about those supposedly awful Goldman Sachs speeches–
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/10/17/i-read-hillary-clintons-speeches-to-goldman-sachs-heres-what-surprised-me-the-most/?tid=hybrid_collaborative_1_na&utm_term=.2a5e36cebb5a
(No, I haven’t read them myself, so if anybody does and finds anything actually discreditable, let me know!)
Lady Mondegreen
The DNC leaks showed that the DNC was actively trying to influence the press in Clinton’s favour over Bernie Sanders – including leaking negative info on Sanders to the Wall Street Journal.
They also showed that media outlets were running columns by the DNC for approval. If I did that at my job, I would be fired and disgraced for it.
Now was this enough to mean that Clinton wouldn’t have won without the DNC doing it? Probably not. And I would go further to say that Clinton was not at fault, she probably didn’t want the DNC doing this sort of thing.
But if I was an American sort of only half following the news, this is the sort of thing that would put me off of voting for her.
On the Goldman Sachs speeches, I would rather take the Guardian’s take on it than the WaPo, because WaPo was one of the outlets named in the DNC leaks.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/16/wikileaks-hillary-clinton-wall-street-goldman-sachs-speeches
What went into those speeches wouldn’t be damaging at this point, if Clinton had released the speeches during the primaries. It does however feed into the larger narrative that Clinton is not tough on Wall Street, and is the “ultimate establishment insider”.
There is really no way those speeches were going to come off well, but being reminded of them just a few weeks before the election is not good for Clinton.
As to Russia, the trouble here is Russia is the bad guy in every 80’s movie. The fact is that you have a generation of people who grew up on scare stories about reds under the bed being scare stories, now being told to be afraid of the Russians? There is an instinctive “yeah sure” about that which is difficult to overcome.
My point isn’t that you shouldn’t vote for Clinton, in fact I think not doing so could result in a global catastrophe, but that it is understandable that some young people wouldn’t given what they’re hearing about Clinton.
The problem here isn’t that young people don’t have information on both candidates, nor that they don’t see that Trump is worse than Clinton, but rather that a lot of the stuff that is anti-Clinton is hyper-inflated to the point where the two almost look comparable.
Worse there is not the same sense of reality when explaining the consequences of Trumpism, that there is explaining the consequences of Clintonism. Thus for example, you have people who think the emails story is worse than Trump not paying his staff.
The worst consequence of Clinton being loose with email security for most Americans is increased government transparency, which is a good thing. The consequence of Trump not paying his staff, is that he’ll enter into deals without any regard for whether they’re economic, because he thinks keeping his side of the bargain is optional.
Further, having a president who is a wage thief, isn’t exactly going to discourage your boss from stealing your wage, or your client deciding they aren’t happy enough with your work to pay you for it.
Bruce, that Guardian piece is just as exculpatory as the WaPo.
Certainly this sort of propaganda puts off people “only half following the news”–especially if they’re political naifs to begin with. (And let’s face it: her being a woman doesn’t help.)
Which is why it’s a very very bad thing to have an under- and mis- informed electorate, open to “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” insinuations.
That sort of thing sucks, though at this point, given all the lies and insinuations peddled by the Wikileakers and their favored audience, I need to see it to believe it. Will google when I have time.
Lady Mondegreen
Wikileaks hasn’t been shown to have actually lied. The emails from Wikileaks so far as we know are real.
Personally the way I’d go about discrediting them is to remind people of past email scandals like the Climate Research Unit controversy – things where we were all shown very selective snippets designed for maximum damage, but when you looked at the full context actually didn’t mean what they appeared to mean.