This will help rile up the base
Obama is reminding the Republicans that he warned them.
On the stump, Obama now regularly links Trump’s candidacy, and the bind he’s created for down-ballot Republicans, to a greater theory about the way the right has practiced politics throughout his presidency.
“For years,” Obama said in Las Vegas, “Republican politicians and the far-right media outlets have pumped up all kinds of crazy stuff about me, about Hillary, about Harry [Reid]. They said I wasn’t born here. They said climate change is a hoax. They said that I was going to take everybody’s guns away.”
Obama went on:
[T]here are a lot of politicians who knew better. There are a lot of senators who knew better. But they went along with these stories because they figured, you know what, this will help rile up the base, it will give us an excuse to obstruct what [they’re] trying to do, we won’t be able to appoint judges, we’ll gum up the works, we’ll create gridlock, it will give us a political advantage. So they just stood by and said nothing. And their base began to actually believe this crazy stuff.
So Donald Trump did not start this. Donald Trump didn’t start it. He just did what he always did, which is slap his name on it, take credit for it, and promote it. That’s what he does. And so now when suddenly it’s not working, and people are saying, wow, this guy is kind of out of line, all of a sudden, these Republican politicians who were okay with all this crazy stuff up to a point, suddenly they’re all walking away. “Oh, this is too much.” … Well, what took you so long? What the heck?
The reality-based community. Ron Suskind, The New York Times magazine, October 2004.
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
The senior adviser was Karl Rove.
Obama’s hope is that the public responds to his barnstorming by defeating Trump in a landslide and taking down as many of his enablers as possible along with him. That may be the only way for the Republicans who survive 2016 to internalize the message that the politics of backlash they’ve practiced aren’t just dangerous, but contrary to their own interests. They’ve been blinding themselves to this same argument for years, after all. Now it will cost some of them their jobs, in an election they could have won, and Obama’s “I told you so” will be the door hitting them on the way out.
Mind you, if the reason they lie so much is because they know the truth wouldn’t appeal to the voters…they’re not very likely to stop lying so much.
H/t G Felis
“Obama’s hope is that the public responds to his barnstorming by defeating Trump in a landslide and taking down as many of his enablers as possible along with him. That may be the only way for the Republicans who survive 2016 to internalize the message that the politics of backlash they’ve practiced aren’t just dangerous, but contrary to their own interests.”
Personally, I am far too jaded for that kind of hope. It seems to me only a matter of time time before Trump or some kind of Trump-esque (but competent, and therefore worse) figure ascends to the White House. The conditions are all there, and they’ll only be exacerbated in the wake of a likely Trump loss. I don’t have much faith in people’s ability to admit mistakes and learn from them, in the absence of major disaster. And losing a few votes isn’t close enough to major disaster. If the GOP implodes, then something worse will take its place.
The only kind of hope I’ll allow myself is the hope that I am wrong.
@#1, I tend to agree, alas.
Thought experiment, in the empirical, reality-based realm on this actual planet:
Supposing what has already happened, actually happened, what are the odds? Negative? No, I give up! :p
O look, a squirrel. :)
Maybe if an entirely new party would emerge from the minority who are appalled by the excesses of both those old bastions, and that somehow doesn’t end up only fractioning the wiser population, leaving more room for the dam’fools? Yeah, maybe. And maybe some wise reforms to the way elections are held. I can only wish.
@1: counterargument: Trump is the apotheosis of the Republican movement for the past several decades, and he’s demonstrating that the Southern Strategy no longer works and will never work again. The Republican party has been left behind by changing demographics. The state of the campaigns and the polling ( http://fivethirtyeight.com/ ) indicates that Trump is not inevitably going to ascend to the White House either now or in the future; he’s set for a loss of historic proportions, he can’t run a campaign, the Republicans cannot choose an electable candidate. Buy popcorn.
#3, sure, Trump might be over. But maybe out of the ashes someone WORSE than Trump, and something WORSE than the GOP will arise, especially if there are some other crises (eg economic, environmental, war / terrorist, influx of refugees) to help it along. I’m not convinced a resounding Trump loss will bring us any closer to sanity. It’s like doomsday cults: when the time thought to be the time that the Lord will return, or the aliens will appear (or whatever), comes and goes, you would expect that everyone would revise their beliefs accordingly, but afaik they actually tend to believe them MORE strongly. They can’t bear the possibility of being wrong after investing so much emotion and effort into their beliefs, so they just go on believing even harder.
@#4, agreed again, alas. There should be some way to re-agruntle the losing side’s voters, so to speak, but it may be elusive. The other day someone somewhere posted a link to a commentary about building an off-ramp for GOP; the need to not rub it in but leave the losers a face-saving exit. And yesterday I followed a link posted here to https://newrepublic.com/article/138123/will-no-trumpism-trump which I hope is correct:
Worst case: The Trump may have already ruptured the American fabric for a loooong time. And the Same Old Party let him.
I can agree with that, but…I fear this particular group will view the very inauguration ceremony is “rubbing it in”. How dare we applaud and have a party, when this castrating b***h stole the election from the most wonderful candidate to come along since (fill in the blank with favorite popular president who is nothing like Trump).
You got me there, I come up blank on the blank ;-)
Yes, they do seem to have a mad, aggressive and self-destructive streak. But at least let them do it to themselves, and let’s not gloat (too much) if we can.
Time will tell. The suspense is horrible.
‘…when we act, we create our own reality….’
Who knew that Shirley Maclaine and Deepak Chopra were Republican consultants? Part of the deep weakness of American progressives is their addled relationship with truth and reason.
Emily: The point is that the core awfulness of Trump–his racism and misogyny and general reality-denialism–all are losing propositions in a country no longer quite as dominated by white male privilege.
The closest I can see in the foreseeable future for a ‘new Trump’ would be someone who actively manages to set aside at least the racism or the sexism (so as to try and draw in either sexist black men or racist white women to the new coalition of the deplorables), but doing either of those would force this hypothetical post-Trump Trump to also set alienate the ‘law and order’ or ‘God and country’ crowds, respectively.
What I’m far more worried about isn’t the national stage. It’s the state and local level. The very demographic concentration that makes the Trumpians a doomed line is also the force that makes them very dangerous in areas where those demographics are dominant. I’m desperately hoping that Hillary both gets several SCOTUS appointments, and that she uses them wisely, because that’s about the only tool we’re likely to have to push back against the constant threatened infringements by the far right on civil rights for women, LGBT folks and non-whites.
I’m wondering if there could be such a thing as a Trump-esque (but competent, and therefore worse) figure. His lack of competence and qualification are such a core part of his Trumpness that a Trump-esque figure without that lack seems like an oxymoron.
It’s been pointed out to me that it’s unlikely there’ll be ‘another Trump’ just because no one else has had the breadth and depth of celebrity for the past 25+ years that he’s been riding on in this election. I recently reread Ishmael, published in 1992, and the narrator casually uses ‘Donald Trump’ to signify wealth and vulgarity–he’s literally been a household name for at least that long.
#9, you’re right: the demographics are against the Trumpians. And hopefully there are sufficient structures in place to prevent or overcome any kind of attempt at violent uprising.
#10: HAHAHA.
Oh lookee here: https://theconversation.com/a-new-breed-of-post-trump-populist-leaders-could-put-the-us-on-the-path-to-fascism-67645