Happy Days are Here Again: Trumpland Uber Alles

Driving in, listening to NPR reporters interviewing people in a small town outside Pittsburgh, Lafayette County, I was somehow strangely cheered to hear the voices of people who had always been Democrats, who had voted for Obama, then for Trump,  but they did not sound like those deplorables you saw at Trump rallies. They simply said they were coal miners and too old to be retrained to learn anything new and they just wanted their jobs in the mines back and in the factories. They didn't give Trump a deadline. They just clearly wanted to try something different, so they voted Trump.
There was a lawyer who is the Democratic Party organizer for the county and I remember when they interviewed him last Spring and he said he was not optimistic about his county going blue in the Fall election, because people wanted a change and Ms. Clinton did not look like change to them.  This time he said he didn't blame Ms. Clinton, but she was given the nomination because people thought she was next in line, but there would have been better choices if the Dems wanted to win his county.

Trumpland

So, it all made sense, at last. Part of the shock and depression of the news of President Trump is the sense of the surreal. How could anyone other than a Ku Klux Klanner vote for Trump? Well, now we know.


My many fans seemed to like the last poem, so here's another:

So long sad vibes

Get lost bad tribes

We are rid of all that bad gas

Just got what Trump prescribes

Feel swell from his jibes

All those down feelings are past.

Happy days are here again

The skies above are clear again

So let's all sing a song of cheer again

Happy days are here again.

Altogether shout it now

Heard it on the radio
There's no one who can show
Those jobs are not coming back pronto.


Coal miners going back to work now
Steel workers, soda jerkers and how
We'll be burning  coal again
Clean air's no longer a goal, no sin
Polluting things again
Happy days are here again.

Infrastructure's gonna boom

Gonna make the heartland bloom

Nobody has to learn anything new,

Heard it on NPR that's a clue

We went to red from blue

Finally the heartland gets its due

Happy days are here again.

No more factories in Mexico

Oh, oh, we're not letting our factories go

No more sending our jobs down below

Factory jobs

Are back in gobs

Bring out that banjo

No more Muslims coming in

No more Mexicans with brown skin

No more rapists flooding in

No more abortions anywhere

Terrorists just wouldn't dare

Mess with us again

Happy days are here again!

Why Citizens United Does Not Matter

 "First off, it’s the biggest election upset in the history of the American republic. Eric Cantor was the House majority leader and raised $10 million. He spent, between himself and outside groups, $8 million to hold a congressional district. He ran against a professor who was an evangelical Christian and a libertarian economist. He ran against a professor who raised in total $175,000. In fact, the bills from Eric Cantor’s campaign at a elite steak house in Washington, DC, was over $200,000. So they spent more than $200,000 over the course of the campaign wining and dining fat cats at a steak house in Washington than the entire opposition had to run."

--Stephen Bannon

Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump. Googling the actual numbers, it is not clear by what factor. Some estimate she spent as much as 50 times what Trump spent.

For years, the Koch brothers have claimed they spend on elections and outspend candidates and they lose.


If Democrats want to win another election, we had better figure out how that happens.
Steve Bannon is a Tea Party Republican. We have told ourselves the Tea Party collapsed. It just won the Presidency.
It won the House and the Senate in 2010 and never relinquished either.
Tea Party justices will soon sit in the Supreme Court.
These are people who are intent on destroying government.
In New Hampshire, they would be called Free Staters.

Of course, they have to deal with the President they elected, who, at least on some occasions believes in preserving Social Security and Medicare and who believes in spending government money on infrastructure.
That's the Republicans' problem.
What do you think is the problem for the Democrats?

Trump's Win Wasn't An Accident: Bannon Had An Insight

"The central thing that binds that all together is a center-right populist movement of really the middle class, the working men and women in the world who are just tired of being dictated to by what we call the party of Davos. A group of kind of — we’re not conspiracy-theory guys, but there’s certainly — and I could see this when I worked at Goldman Sachs — there are people in New York that feel closer to people in London and in Berlin than they do to people in Kansas and in Colorado, and they have more of this elite mentality that they’re going to dictate to everybody how the world’s going to be run."
Steve Bannon




Michael Moore tried to tell us.  Trump and Bannon were focused on working stiffs in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin all along. They knew that "Blue Wall" was not impregnable, and in fact it was the Achilles heel of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, who had long ago lost the paycheck to paycheck crowd.


Look at the real election maps which the brilliant folks at the New York Times put together:
This is where the Clinton voters were:

This is where the Trump voters were:

This is entirely consistent with what we saw canvassing in New Hampshire, and what David Brooks reported from Idaho and what Anon reported from North Carolina: If you looked at territory, Trump signs and Trump voters held an enormous lead. All of Clinton's strength was concentrated, geographically in the cities.


But the electoral college is all about the geography, about territory and states. Thus Clinton is swamped by geography, even as she wins the popular vote.


America was designed by people from Jefferson to Hamilton who valued property and land more than individual human beings. In fact, only 3/5 of Black people counted, where the Constitution was concerned.


This was no fluke. This was a well conceived, well planned strategy.
And nobody, of all the talking heads on CNN, or MSNBC or PBS News Hour or even Fox could see the essential truth that Stephen Bannon and Trump saw: There are simply more white voters than there are Brown or Black voters. 


As a member of the White, East Coast elite, I was guilty of listening to "experts" who told me what I wanted to hear, who reinforced each other constantly but had no new information and who were intellectually lazy.


My brother had a cartoon in his office which showed a dozen little stick figures chanting "No! No! No!" In the second frame a big sun like figure rises over the horizon and says, "Yes!" the third frame shows all the little stick figures chanting, "Yes! Yes! Yes!" 


I've been wasting my time listening to those little guys.
Unless I miss my bet, Mr. Trump is a tabula rasa. Government, government policy has never really interested him. He's interested in making money and government only interests him to the extent government could  help him make more or would prevent him from making more money.
On some level, he knows he's a lightweight and he needs help. Nixon was like this. So Nixon turned to Kissinger to be his wise man, his shaman.
Trump is now turning to Bannon to play this role for him. He'll get cogent, pithy, convincing direction from this guy, and it behooves us to read everything we can about what Bannon thinks.  Patton read Rommel's books before he ever met Rommel on the field of battle. We ought to learn from that.

Trump v Hillary: Shades of 1968

Oh, gather round children, and you shall know
What today we suffer
Is mere ebb and flow
Of history, for today's  no rougher
Than what once brought us low. 

Today we forget tricky Dick Nixon and his rants
Who demonized Helen Gahagan Douglas
As pink down to her underpants.
Trump is simply his spiritual heir
And Roy Cohn, who they both share
As unctuous and seething and slimy as Bannon
Guiding  all to  despair
As in darkness they both lay their plan in.

Old Dick ran against Lyndon Johnson's successor
And beat him by just 500,000 votes 
Painting the Democrat the transgressor
Promising a secret plan to end the war with end notes
And two years later bombed Cambodia just for show
And Kent State left four dead in Ohio.

Hate is a spider wasp
Which eats from the inside
Unseen from the surfaces
Until it emerges
Only then does the body subside.

Obama's Last Waltz

There he was, at the lectern in the West Wing, giving his last press conference, or at least the last before he headed off to Europe, graying now, but still lean and youthful looking, thoughtful, pausing to pick just le mot juste, wry, funny in a low key way, humble, careful, saying exactly what he means and nothing more, nothing less.  In short, everything the 45th President is not going to be.

Mr. Bannon looking for the ideal woman, the Lebensborn

Mr. Bannon's ancestral inspiration

And on the way home, on NPR, I hear Stephen Bannon, President-elect Trump's "Chief Strategist" in a past interview saying that "the women who we want leading us into the future are Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, real women with kids, not some dykes from Seven Sisters schools in New England."

Ah, well. We always seem to do this in America, Bald, pale, gray, tired Eisenhower gives way to tanned, vigorous Kennedy; sweaty, twitchy Nixon gives way to sunny, toothy Carter; George W. , who had that dull boy's insecurity gives way to the easy confidence of a man who knows he's very bright. And now the cerebral Obama gives way to the boisterous, bluster of the bloviatator.  It's just the pendulum inexorably in swing. 
We'll get by it. 

And I loved Obama describing Trump, after a pause as "gregarious." That is truly the most generous description of the man anyone could possibly summon.
 It took the special brilliance of Obama to come up with that. 

There is brilliance out there, still. Witness Kate McKinnon opening "Saturday Night Live" the first show after the election. (Who knew she could play piano and sing like this?) The selection could not have been more appropriate. Leonard Cohen died the night before the election, thankfully for him. And the song, an elegy perhaps for our Republic, but then she turns to the camera and tells us what it means to her:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG-_ZDrypec

Trump and the Republicans: Deer in the Headlights?

"Trump’s Keynesianism was mostly defense spending and tax cuts, but it included a huge infrastructure push — soon nicknamed “TrumpWorks” — that doubled as a jobs program for his core constituency, blue-collar men. The assumption that the economy had hit full employment in the later Obama years proved to be an artifact of work-force dropouts and increasing illegal . With TrumpWorks hiring, a wall rising (albeit haphazardly) on the southern border and millennials’ entry into the housing market sparking a sudden construction boom, both wages and the work-force participation rate began to sharply climb."
--Ross Douthat, on Trump in 2020, an anti apocalyptic vision Articles appearing from living rooms in the Rust Belt are quoting voters who really, actually believe Donald Trump can and will stop factories from closing and moving to Mexico and China.
If President Trump can do this, then maybe they weren't as stupid as we here in the East think. 
Factories with 3000 robots and 300 employees won't do. He's talking about making air conditioners with the same people whose  jobs are going to Mexico, no robots.

Riding the elevated subway around New York City, I see construction booming, workers everywhere, the visible signs of a thrumming economy. 

Here in the East we don't see the empty factories and the boarded up Main Street. 

Out there, in Ohio. Michigan, Wisconsin, rural Pennsylvania, it's different. 

Hillary spoke of "retraining."  I'm guessing that held no appeal to workers who really do not believe they can be retrained or if they can that will mean jobs. They want the job first and the training later.

Anyone who watched, "Making of a Murderer," saw rural Wisconsin, and likely rural Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.  The people you saw there looked no different from people in Alabama, Tennessee or West Virginia. 

If President Trump can find jobs for these people, he'll do better than Hillary could have done with a Republican Congress and Supreme Court.  

It will be interesting to watch.

Trump's Goon Squad

Bannon

Goebbels

“That’s one of the unintended consequences of the women’s liberation movement––that, in fact, the women that would lead this country would be feminine, they would be pro-family, they would have husbands, they would love their children. They wouldn’t be a bunch of dykes that came from the 7 Sisters schools.”
--Stephen Bannon


Even Donald Trump, who seemed to run his campaign alone, cannot govern alone.
He is now gathering around him a veritable rogues' gallery of unappetizing deplorables,  and the number will only grow.
Chief among them is this shaddowy, psychopath Stephen Bannon. If you really want to generate a profound nausea in the pit of your stomach, go on line and read about him. I have to do it in small doses. But, over the next week or so, I promise I'll pick through the dog droppings which are Mr. Trump's men.
So far, we have only a few.
Mr. Trump's minister of propaganda appears, for the moment to be Mr. Bannon. Rush Limbaugh is having too much fun and is too effective where he is to move into the West Wing. So, it's Bannon.  He is Trump's Goebbels.

His foreign minister, his Goering is, of course Newt Gingrich, who managed to bring the government down, temporarily, during his last term in government.

His hatchet man, the guy who shows up when the dirty work needs doing, his Himmler, is Rudolph Giuliani, who tried to build his career on the 9/11 catastrophe and has been looking for a new catastrophe ever since. Apparently, he has now found one.