The Donald Trump Version of Washington's Farewell Address

Wow. Whoa. That is some group of people. Thousands.  Good, you'll get your checks at the end of the day.

I won two presidential elections -- unanimously. Nobody else's victory will ever be that huge.

It's a time for gratitude.  You owe me, America. I've gotten older in the service of this country, but don't believe the haters. This hair and these teeth -- they're mine! These past two terms have been a huge sacrifice.  I'm really rich, and I could have spent all this time getting even richer.

But money isn't about money.  It's about keeping score. And America's score is amazing: we're bigger and better and stronger than ever before. That's why you all love me.

So let's look back on what I've done for you. First, there was the Revolutionary War,   Things didn't go well at first.  There was that Nathan Hale guy.  He was  no hero; he was a lightweight who got caught spying. I like people that don't get captured.  And our ragged, dirty soldiers disappointed me. Those morons looked like they couldn't even buy a pair of pants.

But then we won at Saratoga.  Huge, huge victory.  Someday, it will be a great place to put a casino and a racetrack.

And then we won the whole thing, mostly because of me.  King George -- what a zero!  I hear that when he pees, it comes out blue!  These Brits can't win at golf, and they can't win at war. We ought to put a wall at the Canadian border -- and make the Brits pay for it!

When the war was over, I went back to Mount Vernon -- beautiful place, great view.  But then the dummies in the government messed everything up, and I had to come in and run the Constitutional Convention. I went in and punched and punched and beat the hell out of people, and I ended up getting it done.

Then they made me president.  Of course.  And I was great.  I fixed problems, like the losers who wouldn't pay taxes on whiskey.  Bunch of drunks should go up to Canada, where the cold weather will sober them up.

Let me say a couple of words about foreign affairs -- and I've had a lot of them.  Just kidding.  Hey, can't take a joke?  Don't be so PC.  Anyway, a foreign alliance is just like a marriage:  it never lasts, so get a prenup.

Then there's religion.  When you go to church to eat your little cracker and drink your little wine, say a prayer.  Thank God that I'm president.  He'll be happy to hear that.  He's grateful for me, too.

Okay, so this is billed as my Farewell Address, right?  Well, farewell to that!  I'm not going anywhere!   Adams, you fat, bald moron, you will just have to sit in your little vice presidential chair and wait longer.

Okay that's about it. Remember: I cannot tell a lie, and if you say that I do, I'll sue your ass off.

Picking Your Opponent

In an excerpt from her memoirs, Senator Claire McCaskill gleefully admits that she sought to help Todd Akin win the GOP primary to run against her in 2012:

My consultants put together a $1.7 million plan. Four weeks out we would begin with a television ad boosting Akin, which my campaign consultant Mike Muir dubbed “A Cup of Tea.” The production costs were pretty low, about $20,000, because we didn’t have to film anything. We just used pictures and voice-overs. We would spend $750,000 at first and run it for eight or nine days. Then we’d go back into the field and test to see if it was working. If it was, we’d dump in more “McCaskill for Senate” money, and we’d add radio and more TV in St. Louis and Kansas City. The second TV buy would approach $900,000. We hoped that some of our friends watching the TV ads would catch on and some of the outside groups would augment the last week with mail and radio. Sure enough, a radio ad calling Akin “too conservative” that went on the air in the closing days of the primary was paid for by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. We would later find out that their rural radio buy was $250,000.

As it turned out, we spent more money for Todd Akin in the last two weeks of the primary than he spent on his whole primary campaign.

Outsiders and the Ruling Class

Glenn Reynolds writes at USA Today:

But Trump and Sanders are just symptoms. The real disease is in the ruling class that takes such important subjects out of political play, in its own interest. As Angelo Codevilla wrote in an influential essay in 2010, today’s ruling class is a monoculture [see also Charles Murray on this topic] that has little in common with the rest of the nation:

“Never has there been so little diversity within America's upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time, America's upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. TheBoston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another.

“Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the ‘in’ language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector.”

To this ruling class, the rest of the country is sometimes an annoyance or obstacle, sometimes a source of necessary funds or votes, but always the “other” — not our kind, dear. Too ignorant, too unpolished, too unconnected to the right institutions and pieties to really count. With ruling-class Republicans having more in common with ruling-class Democrats than with the people they rule, it’s unsurprising that, as Codevilla predicted in a later essay, millions of voters feel orphaned. Democracy doesn’t do much for technocratically set policy that always seems to reflect ruling-class preferences, and people feel they’ve lost control of their own fates.

Greg Robb reports at MarketWatch:

Donald Trump said Monday that he agrees with Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders' opposition to President Barack Obama's trade policy. Sanders "has struck a nerve. He knows the problem at least," Trump said in an interview on MSNBC. The difference between them is that Sanders is "is not going to do anything about it" while Trump said he could negotiate good trade agreements with the Chinese. Asked about three ideas to restore the economy's health, Trump said he would trim the fat of the federal government, simplify the tax code and give incentives to spur investment in depressed inner cities. He said he would like to simplify taxes to the point where H&R Block Inc. HRB, -1.13% would be out of business.

Sanders and Trump Spurn Their Own Parties

At Politico, Michael Kruse and Manu Raju write:

The most surprising thing about the independent Vermont senator’s surprisingly successful campaign so far is not that he’s doing it as a self-described democratic socialist. It’s that he’s seeking the nomination of a party he caucuses with in the Senate but is not a part of, isn’t a registered member of and has never been a registered member of—a party he’s spent his 40-year career beating at the polls and battering in the press.

He started as a politician in the 1970s as a perennial protest candidate with the anti-Vietnam War Liberty Union Party, offering voters an alternative to the two major parties, which he considered ineffective and equally beholden to corporate lords.

To become mayor of Burlington in 1981, he ousted a veteran centrist Democrat. To build power, his progressive allies in subsequent elections wrested away city council seats, relegating local Democrats to diminished, third-party status. In a series of statewide races in the late ’80s and into the early ’90s, he outdid even that—getting Democrats to all but wave a white flag when he ran.

He has never before chosen to run in a Democratic primary, but here he is, challenging Hillary Clinton—and doing it as an independent, technically permissible but highly unusual. How he’s trying to do this is how he always has—a calculated alchemy of outsider edge and insider smarts, provocation plus pragmatism, all learned and honed over what’s become a unique career in modern American politics.

As Timothy Noah pointed out in Politico a couple of weeks ago, Trump's connection to the GOP is almost as tenuous:

In 1999, Trump quit the Republican Party, saying “I just believe the Republicans are just too crazy right.” Trump was then conferring with political consultant Roger Stone about a possible presidential run as a candidate of the Reform Party, the political organization founded by his fellow billionaire Ross Perot.

In 2001, Trump quit the Reform Party to register as a Democrat. “It just seems that the economy does better under Democrats,” he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in 2004. The Clintons attended Trump’s Palm Beach wedding to former model Melania Knaus in 2005. The following year Trump gave $26,000 to the House and Senate campaign committees.

By the late aughts, though, Trump’s political giving had started shifting back to the GOP, and in 2009 Trump registered again as a Republican. Two years later he registered as an independent while contemplating a third-party bid.

Fiorina Would Not Be a Good Nominee

Carly Fiorina has gotten good reviews for her performance in the undercard debate this past week. As a result, her fundraising is picking up.

But there are two reasons why she still would make a poor nominee for president or vice president.

The first is her complete lack of government experience. Every president from Washington through Obama has had experience in elected office, appointed office, or the military. Fiorina does not. Yes, many people say that they want somebody from outside the Washington establishment, but at some point in the fall of 2016, they will start focusing on issues of basic qualification.  In 2014, Pew reported on survey results: "And despite a decline in regard for extensive Washington experience, a presidential candidate who has never held any elected office would have little appeal: 52% say this would make them less likely to vote for a candidate compared with just 9% who say this would increase their likelihood of supporting a candidate."

The second is her business record. As Mitt Romney learned four years ago, candidates who've been corporate executives have to answer for unpopular layoffs.  In Fiorina's case, we know exactly how Democrats would attack her on this point, because they've done it before.  In her 2010 Senate race, Barbara Boxer ran these ads:

If Trump Has Lost RedState...

Erick Erickson has disinvited Donald Trump from the RedState gathering. He explains:

As much as I do personally like Donald Trump, his comment about Megyn Kelly on CNN is a bridge too far for me.

In a CNN interview, Mr. Trump said of Megyn Kelly, “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.”

It was not the “blood coming out of her eyes” part that was the problem.

I think there is no way to otherwise interpret Mr. Trump’s comment. In an attempted clarification, Mr. Trump’s team tells me he meant “whatever”, not “where ever.”

... I’ve been very sympathetic to Donald Trump because so many of the people who have led the party astray refuse to even treat him as a legitimate candidate.

But I also think that while Mr. Trump resonates with a lot of people with his bluntness, including me to a degree, there are just real lines of decency a person running for President should not cross.

His comment was inappropriate. It is unfortunate to have to disinvite him. But I just don’t want someone on stage who gets a hostile question from a lady and his first inclination is to imply it was hormonal. It just was wrong.

I have invited Megyn Kelly to attend in Donald Trump’s place tomorrow night.

Rand Paul, Libertarians, and Republicans

Libertarians have a highly consistent political philosophy, favoring less active government across the board:  in economics, social policy, and international affairs.

Carl Cannon writes of last night's GOP debate:

Kentucky’s junior senator pounced on Trump’s answer on party unity, but he later tangled heatedly with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie over civil liberties. “I’m a different kind of Republican,” Paul said near the end of the two-hour debate. He may be understating the problem. Paul is actually a Libertarian, and a principled one, be he’s stuck in a binary political system. He did get off one of the best lines of the night, though, while turning a gay marriage question into a question about religious freedom and the Second Amendment: “I don’t want my religion, or my guns, registered in Washington.”

Paul's basic problem is simple:  he is a libertarian in a party that does not have a significant libertarian wing. His father, Ron Paul, ran twice for president but never won a single primary.  In 2014, Pew reported that only about 12 percent of Republicans identified as libertarians, and many of them did not have consistently libertarian issue positions:

Libertarianism is associated with limited government involvement in the social sphere. In this regard, self-described libertarians are somewhat more supportive of legalizing marijuana than the public overall (65% vs. 54%).

But there are only slight differences between libertarians and the public in views of the acceptability of homosexuality. And they are about as likely as others to favor allowing the police “to stop and search anyone who fits the general description of a crime suspect” (42% of libertarians, 41% of the public).

Similarly, self-described libertarians do not differ a great deal from the public in opinions about foreign policy. Libertarianism is generally associated with a less activist foreign policy, yet a greater share of self-described libertarians (43%) than the public (35%) think “it is best for the future of our country to be active in world affairs.”
...

An alternative way to identify libertarians is the process used to create the Pew Research Center’s political typology, released in June (for more on how the political typology was created, read our explainer in Fact Tank). That study used a statistical technique called “cluster analysis” to sort people into homogeneous groups, based on their responses to 23 questions about a variety of social and political values.

None of the seven groups identified by the 2014 political typology closely resembled libertarians, and, in fact, self-described libertarians can be found in all seven. Their largest representation is among the group we call Business Conservatives; 27% of this group says the term libertarian describes them well. Business Conservatives generally support limited government, have positive views of business and the U.S. economic system, and are more moderate than other conservative groups on the issue of homosexuality. However, they are also supportive of an activist foreign policy and do not have a libertarian profile on issues of civil liberties.

(A slightly different version of this post is at the Besssette-Pitney textbook blog.)