The Dark Magic of Kellyanne Conway

Frank Bruni JAN. 11, 2017

If you happened to watch CNN on Friday morning, you saw a brutal exchange about Russian hacking between a righteous anchor with steam coming out of his ears and a right-wing operative with ice in her veins.

“Chris Cuomo bulldozes Kellyanne Conway,” said a headline in one of the many publications so impressed by the encounter that they reported on it.

If you happened to watch CNN on Monday morning, you saw that Conway was actually back with Cuomo for more.

Surprised? Then you don’t know the first thing about her.

She’s no mere mouthpiece, no measly surrogate. She’s more like the David Blaine of political spin, intent on working feats of magic that few others would attempt and surviving situations that would cripple any ordinary mortal. He catches a bullet in his mouth; she makes Donald Trump sound like a humble servant of the common man. He lasts 44 days in a plexiglass case over the Thames; she lasts 40 minutes with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC.

She reunited with Cuomo not just to pooh-pooh Vladimir Putin’s misdeeds anew but to answer Meryl Streep’s complaint about the way Trump once mocked a disabled journalist. And she came up with that gem about disregarding the president-elect’s words and judging him instead by what’s in his heart, which she apparently knows to be good. She has done Blaine one better. She’s a stuntwoman and a cardiologist.

As the cabinet nominees submit to their inquisitions and Trump holds his first news conference since the election, there’s a surfeit of political spectacle this week.

But for sheer, jaw-dropping wonder, I doubt that any of it will improve on a typical Conway television interview, which is a circus of euphemisms, a festival of distractions and a testament to the stamina of a willed smile. She looks cheery when attacking, even cheerier when attacked and absolutely radiant when descending into a bog of half-truths and fictions. It’s always sunny on Conway’s side of the street.

And it’s always a landslide when her candidate wins. She describes Trump’s victory as a mandate — never mind its narrowness or all that Russian nefariousness — and dismisses his critics by citing their inability to see that heady triumph coming. They had no foresight. Now they have no grounds.

Waving away what Hollywood stars said about Trump at the Golden Globes, she told Cuomo: “That place, this network, frankly, all believed the election would turn out a different way.”

She also questioned why Streep would go after Trump and not the “four young African-American adults in Chicago screaming racial anti-Trump expletives” at a disabled young man in that chilling Facebook Live video. Is this the new bar for taking Trump to task? You can’t do it until you’ve completed a roll call of every bully in the news?

“Saturday Night Live” is transfixed by Conway, but they don’t get her quite right. As portrayed by Kate McKinnon, she experiences pinpricks of horror over abetting Trump’s ascent. The real-life Conway shows no such remorse. She’s exultant to the point of taunting Hillary Clinton’s aides for their defeat, as she did when she appeared with them at Harvard in December for an election post-mortem.

That was the occasion of my favorite Conway-ism. She was asked if Trump’s baseless insistence that he would have won the popular vote except for millions of illegal ballots constituted presidential behavior.

“He’s the president-elect, so that’s presidential behavior,” she said.

Many journalists don’t get Conway quite right, either, assigning her more power in Trump World than she has. When you’re doing that much TV, you can be in only so many meetings.

What she possesses is a showmanship that Trump can’t help appreciating. I know dozens of people who despise her politics but are mesmerized by her performances. She’s the Streep of “Fox & Friends” (of “Morning Joe,” too) and a perfect emblem of these polarized times, when no claim is too laughable or denial too ludicrous if it counters the supposed insidiousness of the other side.

She’s also the gold-haired standard for a rising generation of unflappable partisans. I imagine that Kayleigh McEnany, the Trump apologist on CNN, studies her moves the way a backup quarterback watches the starter. Should Conway go down with a broken fibula, McEnany’s ready to lead the drive.

The Trump booster Anthony Scaramucci is perhaps another of the sorceress’ apprentices. With MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle last week, he was Conway-esque in pivoting from the questions he was asked to the answers he preferred to give.

But he needs practice: I heard nothing at the altitude of Conway’s claim this week that the Democrats demanding more financial information from Trump’s nominees were “political peeping Toms.” What pith. What alliteration. What a year we’re in for.

Sore Feet, Happy Days by Kristof, Nicholas

ON THE PACIFIC CREST TRAIL, Calif. -- Every spring or summer, in lieu of professional help, I ditch civilization for the therapy of the wilderness. I've just been backpacking with my 18-year-old daughter on the Pacific Crest Trail in California, abandoning our material world for an alternative reality in which the aim is to possess as little as possible -- because if you have it, you lug it.

Our lives were downsized to 10 pounds of possessions each, not counting food and water. We carried backpacks, sleeping bags, jackets, hats, a plastic groundsheet, a tarp in case of rain, a water filter and a tiny roll of duct tape for when things break.

Few problems in life cannot be solved with duct tape.

O.K., I know I'm supposed to use my column to pontificate about Donald Trump and global crises. But as summer beckons, let me commend such wilderness escapes to all of you, with your loved ones, precisely to find a brief refuge from the pressures of the world.

This isn't for everybody; astonishingly, some folks prefer beaches and clean sheets. But for me at least, a crazy jaunt in the outdoors is the perfect antidote to the absurdity of modern life.

In the 21st century, we often find ourselves spinning on the hamster wheel, nervously jockeying for status with our peers -- Is my barbecue bigger than my neighbor's? Is my car flashier? -- even as we're too busy to barbecue anything. We're like dogs chasing after our tails.

That's why I find it so cathartic to run away from home. My parents took me backpacking beginning when I was about 7, and my wife and I took our three children on overnight hikes as soon as they could toddle.

Don't tell Child Protective Services, but when my daughter was 4, I took her on an overnight trip on Oregon's Eagle Creek Trail, carrying her most of the first day on my shoulders, on top of my backpack. The next morning, I bribed her: If she would walk by herself all 13 miles back to the car, I would buy her a spectacular ice cream in the nearest town.

So we set off for the car. At every rest stop, we conjured that ice cream and how cold it would be, and, fortified, we trundled on down the trail beside glorious waterfalls. When we reached the car, we were both proud of her heroism, and she beamed tiredly as I buckled her into her car seat.

When we arrived at an ice cream shop 20 minutes later, she was fast asleep. I couldn't wake her.

Thus began our hiking partnership, sometimes undertaken with the whole family, sometimes just the two of us. At home we're all busy, but on the trail we're beyond cellphone coverage or email reach and we're stuck with each other.

So we talk. Even as we're disconnected, we reconnect. And on rest breaks and at night, camping under the stars, we read aloud to each other: On this trip, my daughter and I have been reading Adam Johnson's brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "The Orphan Master's Son," and talking about what it means.

No self-respecting teenage girl would normally allow her dad to read to her, but out in the wilderness, it's a bond we share.

It's true that not everybody can get time off, the cost of equipment can add up and it can be a hassle to get to and from a trail. (When I've tried hitchhiking out, drivers see a bedraggled, unshaven hobo and speed up!). Still, costs are modest: While car campgrounds often charge, backpacking in the great outdoors is almost always free. And day after day, there is simply nowhere to spend money.

I can't pretend it's glamorous. We've been scorched by the sun and chilled by rain, hail and snow. Sure, in trail conversations we bare our innermost thoughts, but we also spend plenty of time whining about blisters, rattlesnakes and 20-mile stretches without water. We curse trail designers for PUDS, or pointless ups and downs.

And let's be blunt: I stink. When you're carrying everything on your back, you don't pack any changes of clothing. We bathe our feet in creeks (hoping that anyone drinking downstream is using a water filter), and on this trip we luxuriated in the Deep Creek hot springs beside the trail. We commiserate together, and we exult together in America's cathedral of the wild, our stunning common heritage and birthright.

My daughter and I have now hiked across Washington and Oregon and hundreds of miles of California, and eventually we'll have limped the entire Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada. Nothing is as different from my daily life, nor as treasured, and that is why I suggest the wilderness to friends.

For members of my family at least, these spring and summer hikes are a reminder that what shapes us is not so much the possessions we acquire but the memories we accumulate, that when you scrape away the veneer, what gives life meaning is not the grandest barbecue or the sportiest car. It's each other. 

What Happened on Election Day; Paul Krugman: Our Unknown Country

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/election-night-2016/the-unknown-country

What Happened on Election Day

How the election and Donald Trump’s victory looks to Opinion writers.

Paul Krugman: Our Unknown Country 
10:58 PM ET  

We still don’t know who will win the electoral college, although as I write this it looks — incredibly, horribly — as if the odds now favor Donald J. Trump. What we do know is that people like me, and probably like most readers of The New York Times, truly didn’t understand the country we live in. We thought that our fellow citizens would not, in the end, vote for a candidate so manifestly unqualified for high office, so temperamentally unsound, so scary yet ludicrous.

We thought that the nation, while far from having transcended racial prejudice and misogyny, had become vastly more open and tolerant over time.

We thought that the great majority of Americans valued democratic norms and the rule of law.

It turns out that we were wrong. There turn out to be a huge number of people — white people, living mainly in rural areas — who don’t share at all our idea of what America is about. For them, it is about blood and soil, about traditional patriarchy and racial hierarchy. And there were many other people who might not share those anti-democratic values, but who nonetheless were willing to vote for anyone bearing the Republican label.

I don’t know how we go forward from here. Is America a failed state and society? It looks truly possible. I guess we have to pick ourselves up and try to find a way forward, but this has been a night of terrible revelations, and I don’t think it’s self-indulgent to feel quite a lot of despair.

Could Trump End the Culture Wars?  By DANIEL K. WILLIAMS
9:38 PM ET

Donald J. Trump was elected with a higher percentage of the white evangelical vote than any other Republican presidential candidate has ever received, and he has received strong support from prominent Christian Right leaders. Yet if Mr. Trump delivers on his promises, he will not give the religious right what its leaders have traditionally demanded or what the Republican Party platform calls for. Indeed, he will give them very little national legislation at all, but will instead offer them maximum latitude to pursue their agenda at the state level — a shift that may portend a potential breakthrough in the nation’s polarizing culture wars.

National legislation has long been the goal of the religious right. When the movement emerged in the late 1970s, evangelical leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson sought federal constitutional amendments to ban abortion and restore school prayer, because they wanted to reverse what liberal rights activists had done at the national level through the Supreme Court. In the early 21st century, leaders such as James Dobson continued this trend by persuading President George W. Bush to endorse a constitutional amendment proposal to define marriage as exclusively heterosexual.

In recent years, evangelicals have become so concerned about protecting their own religious liberty against federal mandates or court decisions that they have given less attention to imposing a moral agenda on the rest of the nation. Although the Republican Party platform continues to promise a constitutional amendment protecting human life from the moment of conception, the pro-life movement has not made any serious attempts to pass that amendment since the 1980s. Nor has there been much talk in the last decade of a national ban on same-sex marriage.

Mr. Trump is well positioned to promote a further shift away from national moral regulation. For much of his adult life, he held culturally libertarian views on abortion and gay rights, and he evinced little interest in the religious right’s agenda. Early in his campaign, he expressed discomfort with conservative evangelicals’ opposition to the rights of transgender people to use the public restroom of their choice. But he quickly came to embrace a “states’ rights” position on same-sex marriage and transgender rights, a position that would allow culturally liberal New Yorkers the right to pursue different policies than cultural conservatives in Mississippi or North Dakota. And while Mr. Trump stumbled over abortion during his campaign, the policy that he ultimately reverted to was to leave abortion legalization up to the states — an outcome that he would try to ensure by nominating conservative Supreme Court justices who might overturn Roe v. Wade.

Mr. Trump has gone further than any previous Republican presidential nominee in a generation in insisting that the religious right should enact its agenda at the state, rather than federal, level. Although this was the policy position of many Republicans during the 1970s (including President Gerald Ford), religious right activists persuaded the G.O.P. in the early 1980s to abandon its states-rights approach to abortion and other social issues, and promise national legislation to implement the religious right’s agenda. Mr. Trump is leading the party back to its more traditional stance.

While many liberals will find this outcome unsatisfactory — since it offers them no opportunity to secure national protection for individual rights that they consider inalienable — it may be the only compromise solution that can give both conservatives and liberals the freedom to pursue their own agenda at the local level without fear of a national backlash.

If a socially libertarian New Yorker can deliver this compromise to the conservative white rural evangelical voters who put him in office, both conservatives and liberals should see that for what it is: a landmark opportunity to move beyond the culture wars.

Daniel K. Williams is a professor of history at the University of West Georgia and the author of “God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right.”

All We Arabs Ask, Mr. Trump, Is to Leave Us Alone   By MARWAN BISHARA
9:31 PM ET

Just when the people of the Middle East thought things couldn’t get any worse, Donald J. Trump is elected president of the United States. Now, their apprehension about the president-elect dwarfs their disappointment with President Obama.

It could be a blessing in disguise.

America, in one magic moment, you’ve revealed how you’ve changed. For the worse. Poor you, you feel so insecure, vulnerable and fragile. Like the rest of us.

So, instead of reaching for your famed “can-do” spirit, lifting yourselves up by the bootstraps, you turned to a strident, bellicose type of nationalism. The kind usually associated with strutting generalissimos of Third World nations with their chests covered with made-up, self-awarded medals.

Maybe the people of the Middle East will look and realize that you are no longer the Great Democracy to emulate. That your modern style of empire and your role as keeper of the world order for the world’s own good are stumbling and failing, even in your own eyes; and that we in the Middle East should not be turning to you for rescue.

For as long as I can remember, you’ve been on a self-assigned mission to change the Middle East. Indeed, the world. Now, it seems as if the change has flowed the other way.

You’ve voted to reduce your liberties. To narrow the range of people entitled to justice and equality before the law. To live in a place where the police should not be criticized; where fighting political correctness is more important than fighting racism; where Muslims are suspected and people who appear Hispanic can be rounded up if they’re not carrying their papers.

In this election you’ve revealed that your people — like Russians, Hungarians, Iraqis, Iranians and others whose politics you normally look down on — will choose a narrow, nonsensical nationalist ethos when they feel threatened by uncertainty. Your imperial outreach allowed you to experience other cultures, but now you’ve chosen to shrink your outlook, with the expectation that the world will continue to revolve around you. It won’t.

Like the rest of us, you’re now divided between those who want to make their nation great again alone and those who want to make it great together.

O.K., enough about you; let’s talk about us. We in the Middle East can’t decipher what exactly your incoming president wants from us. I don’t think he knows, either.

Mr. Trump said he would bring back torture and ban Muslims from entering America, and he compared the threat of “radical Islam” to Soviet Communism. He wants less engagement in the region, and fewer “free riders” like the Saudis who don’t pay enough for American protection. And he wants the United States to abandon the costly nation-building in the Middle East.

What nation-building? In Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia, civil wars continue unabated. The Arab and Muslim worlds only hope the United States stops contributing to the destruction. Mr. Trump does not exactly seem concerned for the wishes of Middle Easterners and their right to live in peace. It sounds more like what he really wants to do is pal around with other strutting, authoritarian types. Expect him to cozy up to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, and join him in supporting Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad.

Expect America’s new president to work closely with Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr. Trump has embraced Mr. Netanyahu’s positions on Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and on abandoning the two-state solution. Instead of Americanizing the Middle East, Mr. Trump seems set on “Israelizing” America, stirring fear of Muslims and trying to wall out “the other.”

Arabs, and Middle Easterners in general, should take one quick look and figure out how to be less dependent on the United States, and how to resolve their conflicts within their own, regional frameworks. Finally, some good news. President Obama has assured us that the sun will rise tomorrow, regardless. And if the Trump presidency is as bad as I expect it to be — though not so bad that it demolishes democracy entirely — he can be voted out in four years.

Meanwhile, fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a hell of a ride.

Marwan Bishara is senior political analyst at Al Jazeera and the author of “The Invisible Arab: The Promise and Peril of the Arab Revolutions.”

Angela Merkel’s Message to Trump   By CAROL GIACOMO
9:28 PM ET

A commitment to human rights has been a fundamental precept of NATO since the alliance was created a half century ago. You would not expect that a founding member would have to be reminded of that fact. Certainly not the United States, for all those years the leader of NATO and an inspirational embodiment of its core values.

Yet this is where we find ourselves now, the day after Donald Trump won the presidency: In congratulating him on his victory, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany felt compelled to set conditions for cooperation.

“Germany and America are connected by values of democracy, freedom and respect for the law and the dignity of man, independent of origin, skin color, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political views,” she said in a statement, adding: “I offer the next President of the United States close cooperation on the basis of these values.”

Mr. Trump’s behavior during his campaign was antithetical to those values. He has threatened to ban Muslims from the United States, refuse refugees, deport 11 million undocumented workers and build a wall on the border with Mexico. He has disparaged African Americans, Mexican Americans, women and people with disabilities.

Moreover, Mr. Trump has called into question America’s commitment to NATO and displayed a befuddling penchant for defending Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, who is waging war in eastern Ukraine and destabilizing other parts of Europe by supporting far-right groups.

He received no pushback on Wednesday from Theresa May, the British prime minister, who simply congratulated Mr. Trump on his win. The two leaders’ reactions were further proof that, after Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, we will have to look to Mrs. Merkel not just to lead Europe but to replace America in leading NATO as well.

Carol Giacomo is a member of the editorial board.

The Example of Ronald Reagan   By GIL TROY
9:19 PM ET

“I am scared that if Ronald Reagan gets into office, we are going to see more of the Ku Klux Klan and a resurgence of the Nazi Party,” Coretta Scott King said in November, 1980. “I’m afraid things are going to blow sky high during this next term,” a nursing student said. He’s a “nitwit,” added a Democrat. “He’s shallow, superficial and frightening,” one of that year’s historic numbers of “undecideds” insisted.

Ronald Reagan “seems not to relish complexity and subtlety,” the New York Times editorial endorsing President Jimmy Carter’s re-election proclaimed. “The problem is not a loose lip but the simple answer.” While fearing what Reagan’s own running mate, George H.W. Bush, had dismissed as Reagan’s “voodoo economics” during their primary fight, the editorial board feared “voodoo diplomacy,” too.

From coast to coast, half of a divided nation abhorred — and underestimated — the president-elect. “The American people,“ Hamilton Jordan, a key Carter aide, said, "are not going to elect a 70-year-old, right-wing, ex-movie actor to be president.”

Pollsters reported in 1980 that “More voters held negative attitudes toward each presidential candidate than in any campaign since polling began” — a record we just broke in 2016. The economic dislocation of galloping inflation and the energy crisis produced a nasty campaign. Feeling neglected by Washington, millions embraced Ronald Reagan’s populism.

Despite the Democratic panic, Ronald Reagan left America richer and safer after two terms as president. Reagan defied expectations by turning toward the center. He acted as president of the United States, not president of the Republican Party. Reagan used the transition period to heal wounds while claiming a broad policy mandate, despite winning only 50.7 percent of the popular vote. He vowed to “rebuild a bipartisan base for American foreign policy.”

His cabinet choices were so moderate that Pat Buchanan, the conservative flamethrower whose rhetorical bluster anticipated the advent of Donald Trump, lamented: “Where is the dash, color, and controversy — the customary concomitants of a Reagan campaign?” Just weeks into Reagan’s first term, conservatives were demanding that his aides had to “Let Reagan be Reagan,” meaning: stop being so reasonable.

But in adjusting, in tempering, Reagan was being Reagan. He knew the Constitution limited presidential powers — and he faced a Democratic Congress led by the formidable speaker of the House Tip O’Neill to remind him further. Illustrating Richard Neustadt’s lesson that the power of the president is mostly “the power to persuade,” many of Reagan’s achievements were symbolic. Rather than shrinking government as he promised, for example, he only lowered the federal government’s growth rate.

History is not destiny. And Reagan had both a lighter touch than Mr. Trump, and eight years’ experience as governor of California. Still, history is full of shifts and surprises. Mr. Trump must be a healer and unite America, as he tried doing in his victory speech. If he fails, the checks and balances that sometimes help crusading ideologues become effective leaders can ultimately impose a necessary gridlock.

When asked about conservatives’ frustration with him, Reagan kindly insisted it was only a “very few” critics. He said: “There are some people who think that you should, on principle, jump off the cliff with the flag flying if you can’t get everything you want.” Reagan recalled that “If I found when I was governor that I could not get 100 percent of what I asked for, I took 80 percent.” So far, Mr. Trump, the political amateur and sputtering demagogue, has lacked Reagan’s magnanimity or his flexibility. Can the reality-show star turned president-elect mimic the actor turned president?

Gil Troy is a professor of history at McGill University and the author of "Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s.”

Smoothing the Transition from Obama to Trump   By JAMES R. JONES
9:06 PM ET

In 1968, there was a demand among voters for change, especially regarding Vietnam and foreign policy, and there was a backlash against some of the Great Society programs. Then, as now, the Democratic candidate was tied to the departing administration and hamstrung to differentiate a new set of policies.

As a result, the Democratic presidential nominee, Hubert H. Humphrey, narrowly lost to the Republican, Richard M. Nixon, a candidate who was despised by a large percentage of the electorate.

One positive outcome of that election was the first organized transition from the departing to incoming governments. President Lyndon B. Johnson always believed that, after an election, Democrats and Republicans should come together to do what’s right for the country.

At the time, I was President Johnson’s appointments secretary, the position that has since evolved into the White House chief of staff. Right after the 1968 results came in, the president put me in charge of organizing a transition process, something that had never been done. “Nixon is an S.O.B., but he’s the only president we’ll have,” Johnson told me. “I want him and all of his team to be fully prepared to govern after the Inauguration at 12 noon on January 20.”

A few days later, Johnson and Nixon met at the White House along with Nixon’s top advisers, including H. R. Haldeman and John Mitchell. There we mapped out a program in which all of the Johnson cabinet and major White House staff members would brief their incoming counterparts as often as was desired by the new administration.

My charge was to work with Haldeman, who became my successor at the White House, to make sure these briefings occurred across the new administration and in a timely fashion. One surprise was that Nixon told me that Mitchell could speak for him in all matters if he was not available. Johnson would have never delegated such authority, but that was the difference in the management style of the two men.

While a smooth transition was important to Johnson, he didn’t stop being president. He was issuing orders and making appointments right up to the morning of the Inauguration. In fact, the day before the Inauguration the president told me to find out how many vacancies existed on commissions and boards and find good people that he could nominate. He kept Nixon waiting in the Blue Room on Inauguration morning while he signed those nominations (which required Senate confirmation) and had them delivered to the Congress before noon.

It is a positive sign that President Obama invited Donald J. Trump to meet at the White House two days after this most contentious election. Today transitions are much more institutional now than our first one in 1968. But this process can heal many wounds and start bringing our country closer together. That’s imperative if we want to make our government work for the people again.

Back in 1968, Johnson and Nixon left the White House together, along with Senator Everett Dirksen and me. We jumped into the car and headed to the Capitol. Surprisingly, Nixon wanted only to discuss how disappointed he was to have lost Texas (Johnson’s home state) and how determined he was to win it in1972.

I hope the ride to the Capitol next January will be more substantive on policy.

James R. Jones is a former congressman from Oklahoma who served on the Guantánamo Task Force.

The Democrats' Deadly Error   By SARAH JAFFE
9:05 PM ET

If anything has been made clear by the results of this election, it is that the political and pundit class have underestimated the degree of anger and pain in the United States, the degree to which “recovery” has been recovery for a few and stagnation and decline for many more.

One exit poll has been haunting me since I saw it: The Reuters/Ipsos early exit poll found that 75 percent of respondents agreed “America needs a strong leader to take the country back from the rich and powerful.” Only slightly fewer agreed that “the American economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful,” and — perhaps the kicker — 68 percent believed that “traditional parties and politicians don’t care about people like me.”

There’s a lot to unpack in those statements. They may conceal white resentment of the perceived advancement past them of black and Latino people. But they also reveal the sentiment that has been there since the 2008 financial crisis laid bare the lines of power in the country and the world — when, as the protest chant went, “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out.”

The downward trends have been with us for decades: the divergence of productivity gains from workers’ incomes, the substitution of credit card debt for raises, the shift of good union jobs and family wages and pensions into low-wage service jobs, and the attendant slashing of the social safety net. But the past eight years sped all that up and made it impossible to ignore.

If Donald J. Trump stood out to voters from the rest of the Republican Party, aside from a willingness to say directly the kinds of things usually carefully dogwhistled, it was in his rants about trade and his lack of interest in dismantling the remnants of the welfare state. For white Americans anxiously looking at their disappearing stability, Mr. Trump was a bomb they were willing to throw at a system they felt was failing them. He emotionally echoed their outrage and gave them a place to direct their anger, the age-old right-wing populist trick of refracting it both upward at elites and downward at minorities.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the mainstream Democratic Party were woefully unprepared to greet this wave. When your response to a cry of “Make America Great Again!” is “America Is Already Great!” you’d better be sure that it feels true to a majority of voters. The results show that it did not.

To be sure, Democrats had an uneasy line to walk, between maintaining continuity with a still-popular, twice-elected Barack Obama — a continuity that won Mrs. Clinton the Democratic primary — and reaching the people who wanted and needed change. But the party’s wholehearted backing of Mrs. Clinton was a colossal misreading of a moment when rage at the establishment (of both parties) was simmering everywhere.

That rage should have been visible as Mr. Trump ran away with the Republican nomination process despite the opposition of that party’s grandees, and as Bernie Sanders pushed Mrs. Clinton much harder than anyone had expected a gray-haired socialist from Vermont to do. But Mrs. Clinton opened her arms to disaffected Republicans rather than wooing the disaffected within and around her own party. Most of the television ads she ran were more about painting Trump as a dangerous aberration, an outsider unfit for office, than pitching any plan of her own for change.

Democrats failed to realize that for many Trump voters, that was exactly what they liked about him.

Sarah Jaffe is a reporting fellow at the Nation Institute and the author of “Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt.”

The Majesty of Trump   By WILL WILKINSON
8:32 PM ET

It may not be an exaggeration to say that Donald Trump both knows and cares less about the details of public policy than anyone ever elected president of the United States. This just goes to show that “politics is not about policy,” as Robin Hanson, the futurist and social theorist, likes to say.

Mr. Trump’s playbook against Hillary Clinton broke with the hard-won norms of liberal democracy, went back to demagogic, authoritarian political basics, and updated them for the reality television, social media age.

Politics is, at bottom, about factions vying and coordinating to choose leaders in whom to invest authority. Throughout the campaign, Mr. Trump displayed an uncanny and unnerving mastery of the primal politics of authority, and the game of legitimizing his own and delegitimizing his rivals’ claims to authority.

In Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump drew a general election opponent pre-weakened by a decades-long Republican campaign of delegitimization. He took advantage of it with shameless audacity, making the most of our culture’s lingering sexism and the popular perception of Mrs. Clinton as a member of an arrogant and corrupt elite that believes it is above the law.

But tearing down his opponents was only half of Trump’s equation. The pundits and pollsters so badly botched their predictions in no small part because they failed to grasp the intense, reality-distorting power of Donald Trump’s fame. But Mr. Trump seems to have an intuitive understanding that glamour, celebrity and gaudy wealth are key ingredients in majesty — which is inherently authoritative and underwrites its own claim to legitimacy. Trump’s self-branded personal jet was more than a convenient means of transportation for a very rich man. It was a purple silk, ermine-fringed cape, Air Force One in waiting, and he knew how to use it.

The United States, the world’s first nation founded on principled opposition to the pre-Enlightenment politics of majesty and unified authority, has deep-seated norms of republican modesty and propriety. Casting those norms aside and banking heavily on the atavistic political appeal of majestic celebrity gave Mr. Trump an advantage few us were prepared to acknowledge, allowing him to attract the support of an unforeseen numbers of black, Hispanic and female voters, despite his campaign’s naked racism and his scandalously misogynistic and abusive personal history.

Because Mr. Trump’s strategy was so indifferent to matters of policy substance, it is incredibly difficult to say what policies Mr. Trump will actually support in office. I don’t think we’ve ever known less about what an incoming president really wants to do with his power.

But we do have a clear indication of how he’s likely to wield it. He will cleverly burnish his claim to authority and relentlessly and effectively discredit his opponents, inside and outside the Republican Party, with all the tools of an executive branch that has never been more powerful and less constrained by the constitutional system America’s founders designed specifically as an alternative to and a bulwark against unitary authority.

Will Wilkinson is the vice president for policy at the Niskanen Center and a columnist at Vox.

Her Loss   By LINDY WEST
8:20 PM ET

I got up on Election Day and burst into tears — not a genteel twin trickle but a great heaving burst, zero to firehose. Tears spattered the inside of my glasses, dripped from my lips, and left mascara-tinged rosettes blooming black in my cereal milk.

“Honey,” my husband crooned to me. “Honey, it’s going to be O.K. The numbers are still good. It’s O.K.”

But it wasn’t the numbers. I wasn’t sobbing because I was afraid Hillary Clinton was going to lose. That would come later. I was sobbing Tuesday morning because, as I poured my coffee, I’d caught a glimpse of a cable news interview with Mrs. Clinton just after she voted for herself in Chappaqua, N.Y. She seemed breathless, exhilarated, a little overwhelmed. Over her shoulder, Bill Clinton stared at his wife and beamed.

My husband stares at me like that sometimes. It’s not just love — we expect husbands to love their wives — but something less traditional, more conditional and gendered. It’s professional respect. It’s pride.

We’re accustomed to that pride flowing the other direction, from wife to husband, because men in our culture get to be more than just bodies, do more than just nurture. Men get to act and excel and climb and aspire and thrive and win and rule and be the audacious, hungry fulcrum of public life. It is normal for men to have ambition. It is normal for women to stand aside.

I thought about Bill Clinton meeting Hillary Rodham at Yale in 1971, and how tenacious and intense she must have been even back then, how undeniable and potent. Mr. Clinton describes the moment in his memoir. “She conveyed a sense of strength and self-possession I had rarely seen in anyone, man or woman,“ he wrote. "She was in my face from the start.” He says he once told her, during those years, “I have met all the most gifted people in our generation and you’re the best.”

And then I thought about Mr. Clinton rising steadily through his political career, on the track we have built for charismatic, competent white men. He must have known, every second, how good his wife was. Not just good, but “the best.” Better than everyone he’d ever met; better than him, even. And he watched her stand next to him and wait, and wait, and wait, underestimated and degraded and excoriated for wanting more out of life than cookies.

And she didn’t quit! She swallowed slander and humiliation and irrational hatred for three decades and she didn’t quit, and here she was, just a hair’s breadth from the presidency of the United States — the first woman ever to be trusted with the rudder of the world. He must be so proud of her, I thought. It made me cry.

I cried because I want my daughters to feel that blazing pride, that affirmation of their boundless capacity — not from their husbands, but from their world, from the atmosphere, from inviolable wells of certainty inside themselves. I cried because it’s not fair, and I’m so tired, and every woman I know is so tired. I cried because I don’t even know what it feels like to be taken seriously — not fully, not in that whole, unequivocal, confident way that’s native to handshakes between men. I cried because it does things to you to always come second.

Whatever your personal opinion of the Clintons, as politicians or as human beings, that dynamic is real. We, as a culture, do not take women seriously on a profound level. We do not believe women. We do not trust women. We do not like women.

I understand that many men cannot see it, and plenty more do not care. I know that many men will read this and laugh, or become defensive, or call me hysterical, or worse, and that’s fine. I am used to it. It doesn’t make me wrong.

But maybe this election was the beginning of something new, I thought. Not the death of sexism, but the birth of a world in which women’s inferiority isn’t a given.

That grain of hope glowed inside me until around dinner time on Tuesday, the final day of an election so openly misogynist that the question “Sexual assault: good or bad?” was credulously presented for debate.

Today doesn’t feel real. It is indistinguishable from fresh, close grief. But if there’s one lesson we can take from Mrs. Clinton, politics aside — and even Donald Trump acknowledged it in the second debate — it’s the limitlessness of human endurance. Those of us who have been left in the cold by this apparent affirmation of a white supremacist patriarchy (and sorry, white women who voted for Mr. Trump, but your shelter is illusory) are tough.

We have been weathering this hurricane wall of doubt and violence for so long, and now, more crystalline than ever, we have an enemy and a mandate. We have the smirking apotheosis of our oppression sliming, paw-first, toward our genitals. We have the popular vote. We have proof, in exit polls, that white women will pawn their humanity for the safety of white supremacy. We have abortion pills to stockpile and neighbors to protect and children to teach. We have the right woman to find. We have local elections in a year.

The fact that we lost doesn’t make us wrong; the fact that they don’t believe in us doesn’t make us disappear.

Lindy West is a columnist for The Guardian and the author of the memoir “Shrill: Notes From a Loud Woman.”

Here's What Happened with the Latino Vote    By ROBERTO SURO
7:40 PM ET 

If you are in shock over the election results, don’t blame Latinos.

They favored Hillary Clinton by better than two to one, according to the exit polls. They did not turn out in big numbers to protest Donald J. Trump, but it probably would not have mattered.

It turns out that Latinos were the election’s biggest losers and not just because Mr. Trump won the presidency after a long campaign of slinging threats and insults at them. The bitterest loss was dealt by the 59.5 million mostly white people who voted for Mr. Trump. That was a rejection by their own countrymen.

According to the exit polls — a rough measure of turnout at best — Latinos accounted for 11 percent of the votes cast Tuesday the same as 2012. If those numbers hold, there was little or no Trump effect, and however much the number of Latino votes increased was just a result of demography.

You may have been convinced that it would be otherwise. Years of reckless commentary, news stories and advocacy insisted that Latinos would be the great demographic firewall that would safeguard progressive politics with surging population numbers. But, the firewall only stands in a few states, and the biggest of them, California, New York and Texas, are already decided. Mr. Trump concentrated instead on the old industrial states where Latinos are a sparse presence. When he demonized Mexico and unauthorized immigrants, he gained more in the Electoral College by mobilizing white voters than he lost by alienating Latinos.

The national exit polls show that Mrs. Clinton drew 65 percent of the Latino vote compared with 29 percent for Mr. Trump. That is a landslide by any measure, and it is about the same margin in the exit polls for 2008 (67 percent vs. 31 percent). The disappointment sets in when you compare the outcome to 2012. President Barack Obama took 71 percent of the Latino vote in the exit polls that year compared with 27 percent for Mitt Romney.

Mr. Trump was supposed to be the bucket of cold water that aroused the sleeping giant, producing not only a stronger preference for the Democratic candidate but also, more important, a spike in turnout. In 2012, with immigration reform on the line, more than 12 million Latino voters stayed home, producing a turnout rate of 48 percent compared with 64 percent for whites and 67 percent for blacks.

The much ballyhooed and chronicled “Trump Effect” was supposed to have produced a surge in naturalizations and voter registration over the past year, and news organizations were churning out stories about the “surge” in Latino voting even after the polls closed Tuesday.

While more time and data is needed to get a full picture of Latino turnout this year, at first glance it appears Latino numbers were up, and perhaps significantly in some places, but that in fact the giant was barely stirred.

Four million more Latinos were eligible to vote Tuesday than in 2012. So, no matter who was running and no matter how low the turnout, the number of Latino votes counted Tuesday was virtually certain to be higher than 2012. In fact, demographic growth alone would have guaranteed Mrs. Clinton an additional 1.3 million votes (about 1 percent of the total votes cast), even if turnout remained at the same dismal rate as 2012, and she got two-thirds of the Latino votes.

In Colorado and Nevada, Latino voters surely helped keep the states blue, and under different scenarios those states could have served as the much-advertised Latino firewall. The one real bright spot for Latino Democrats Tuesday came with the election of Catherine Cortez Masto to the Senate in Nevada. That vote may illustrate what it takes to wake up the Latino electorate: a charismatic and qualified candidate, strong mediating institutions, in this case the hospitality workers’ unions in Las Vegas, and well-organized political operation like the one created by Senator Harry Reid, the retiring Democratic leader.

Meanwhile, something may have happened in Texas that needs a closer look. Mr. Trump won handily, but only by a 9 percent margin. President Obama lost the state by nearly 16 points in 2012 and by almost 12 points in 2008. A lot of non-Latino newcomers have begun to change the political complexion of the state in recent years, and that formula — newcomers plus Latinos — is what flipped Colorado and Nevada in the past.

Florida is the one place where Latinos might have been able to change the results of this election and didn’t. In the exit polls, Latinos accounted for 18 percent of the total vote compared with 17 in 2012, and the split was slightly more favorable to Mrs. Clinton than it was for President Obama four years ago. Mrs. Clinton’s vote tally was more than 200,000 higher than President Obama’s, but Mr. Trump’s was more than 400,000 higher than Mr. Romney’s.

And therein lies the result that Latinos will have to live with for the next four years. In a state that has vividly benefited from immigration and trade, a state where Latinos have for the most part prospered and contributed to the prosperity of their neighbors, white voters mobilized to elect a candidate who would angrily erase everything Latinos represent. No one else suffered that kind of defeat on Tuesday.

Roberto Suro is a professor of public policy and journalism at the University of Southern California.

Republicans Talk the Talk, Gail Collins, Sep 17, 2015

Collins, Gail

 Sep 17, 2015

 Our national attention span is ... short. The Republican presidential primary debate on Wednesday was ... long. Really, if you throw in the earlier loser debate, it was the longest ever.

The Lincoln-Douglas debates would go on for three hours. But that was back when in many towns, the most exciting public activity of the year was pole-raising.

Are people going to remember the shallow, sassy Donald Trump from the first half-hour? ("I wrote 'The Art of the Deal.' I say not in a braggadocio's way I've made billions and billions of dollars.")

Or the middle-section Trump who clearly didn't have a clue about how to critique President Obama's Syrian policy? ("Somehow he just doesn't have courage. There's something missing from our president.")

And then there was the completely, unbelievably irresponsible Trump of the finale who claimed he knew people whose daughter got autism from a vaccine shot. (This happened, he said, to "people that work for me just the other day.")

Remember when the vaccination issue destroyed Michele Bachmann's political career? One can only hope.

Of course everyone wanted to hear Jeb Bush take on the front-runner. Smackdown! Bush got his opportunity very early. Where would he go? Immigration? Taxes? Foreign affairs?

Bush accused Trump of giving him campaign donations in order to get casino gambling in Florida.

"Totally false," said Trump. "I promise if I wanted it, I would have gotten it."

Do you think that's what Bush was practicing over the last couple of weeks? There were six or seven people on the stage who sounded more forceful than he did. A recent poll in Florida suggested that only 52 percent of Florida Republicans want their former governor to continue running for president. At times on Wednesday, that seemed like overenthusiasm.

Bush perked up a little in the middle, when he volunteered that he'd smoked marijuana in his youth. Then at the end, when he was asked what woman he'd like to see on the 10-dollar bill, he said ... Margaret Thatcher.

Nobody wanted to deal with the global warming issue. Virtually everybody made up a Planned Parenthood scenario that never existed. Ah, Republicans ...

And in other activities, Carly Fiorina managed to yet again drop the name "my good friend ... Bibi Netanyahu." Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin repeated his previous debate trick of vanishing entirely into the scenery. Walker's poll numbers are vanishing, too, and it appears his only playing card is to remind people that he fought against public employee unions. Lately he's been desperately upping the anti-union ante so much that his next step would have to be demanding that federal employees be prohibited from talking with one another outside of work.

Marco Rubio -- remember Marco Rubio? The senator who vanished all summer except the time he hit the kid in the head with a football? He definitely looked rested.

Ben Carson, at one point, appeared to be accusing Trump of socialism.

Chris Christie did pretty well. Too bad he's such a terrible governor. New Jersey would rather have another traffic crisis at the George Washington Bridge than vote again for Chris Christie.

What do you think it is about governors in this race? Florida is deeply unenthusiastic about Jeb Bush, Wisconsin seems to hate Scott Walker, and if Louisiana had a chance to get its hands on Bobby Jindal, God knows what would happen.

The debate went on for so long it was a wonder no one fainted. And think about the viewers who made it all the way from the first segment -- the one where the CNN preview featured a zipper at the bottom of the screen announcing, "PATAKI ARRIVES AT DEBATE HALL."

"The first four questions are about Donald Trump!" former Gov. George Pataki complained. Senator Lindsey Graham repeatedly slid in the fact that his parents ran a bar and a poolroom. Graham insists he's really enjoying himself, although when someone keeps saying "I'm running because I think the world is falling apart," it's sort of a downer.

Former Senator Rick Santorum and Governor Jindal tried so hard to break through the barrier of national indifference they sounded like rabid otters.

Yes, some political junkies watched Republicans debating for almost five hours Wednesday. This should be a message to the Democrats. Right now the party is engaged in a fight about whether its schedule of three debates in 2015 is too puny. There are a number of democratic nations in the world where you could easily overcome this argument by pointing out that the election is not until 2016.

But the American people are fine with more debates. Honest, there can be one every night as long as the American people are not actually forced to watch them. It could be a kind of endurance contest. Last person standing gets the nomination.

Iran Deal Report Card, Friedman, Thomas L, Sep 16, 2015

Friedman, Thomas L

Sep 16, 2015

The Iran nuclear deal is now sealed -- from Washington's end. But since this has been one of America's most important foreign policy shifts in the last four decades, it's worth looking back and grading the performance of the key players.

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Grade: A.

His prediction last week that Israel won't be around in "25 years" was perfectly timed to complicate President Obama's effort to get the deal through Congress. Khamenei is a bad guy. When I asked a Middle East expert friend to explain Khamenei's behavior, he invoked a Yiddish curse on the Iranian: "May all his teeth fall out, except the ones that hurt."

But he's also a clever guy. Through this deal Khamenei gets Iran out from under crippling sanctions, which his people want, by pushing the breakout time for Iran to make a nuclear bomb from two months to a year -- for 15 years -- but getting the world to bless Iran's "peaceful" nuclear enrichment program, even though it cheated its way there. And he's done it all while giving his hard-line base the feeling that he's still actually against this deal and his negotiators the feeling that he's for it. So all his options are open, depending on how the deal goes.

Hat's off, Ali, you're good. When I sell my house, could I give you a call?

But here's a note to his parents: "Ali got an A, but he has a tendency to get cocky. He is confident that he can pull off this deal without any transformation in Iran's domestic politics. I suggest you buy him a good biography of Mikhail Gorbachev."

Dick Cheney. Grade: F.

I cite Cheney because his opposition to the deal, which he's been peddling along with a new book, was utterly dishonest, but in a way that summed up much of the knee-jerk Republican opposition: This is a bad deal because Obama was a wimp.

No, this deal is what it is because it reflects the balance of power, and the key factor in that balance is that the Iranians came to believe America would never use force to eliminate their nuclear program. But that's not all on Obama. Republicans, and Cheney personally, played a big role in the loss of U.S. credibility to threaten Iran with force.

After briefing Congress on Sept. 10, 2007, Gen. David Petraeus told Fox News that Iran was supporting and directing Iraqi Shiite insurgents who have "carried out violent acts against our forces, Iraqi forces and innocent civilians." Iran was cited for making specially shaped roadside bombs responsible for killing hundreds of U.S. troops. Yet, even though our commanders said that publicly, their bosses -- George W. Bush and Dick Cheney -- refused to ever order retaliation against Iranian targets. Iran noticed.

Ditto on nukes. As Peter Beinart wrote for The Atlantic last week, Cheney stopped by "Fox News Sunday" to bash Obama's nuclear deal, "but moderator Chris Wallace, to his credit, wanted to ask Cheney about his own failings on Iran. On the Bush administration's watch, Wallace noted, Iran's centrifuges for enriching uranium 'went from zero to 5,000.' Cheney protested, declaring that, 'That happened on Obama's watch and not on our watch.' But Wallace held his ground. 'No, no, no,' he insisted. 'By 2009, they were at 5,000.' Cheney paused for an instant, muttered, 'right,' and went back to his talking points."

Note to his parents: "Dick has a problem telling the truth, and he's not alone. Some G.O.P. critiques of this deal should be looked at, but they'll never be taken seriously if the party isn't straight about its own role in our loss of deterrence vis-à-vis Iran."

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: Grade C.

No one had more impact in getting the world to impose sanctions and take Iran's nuclear threat seriously than Netanyahu. But his reckless spat with Obama, which went beyond substance to openly endorsing Obama's G.O.P. rivals and colluding with G.O.P. House leaders to address Congress -- without the president's support -- hurt him, Israel and the deal.

Had Bibi hugged Obama, he could have made Israel effectively the sixth party in the P-5 side of negotiations with Iran and stiffened every spine. Instead, Netanyahu marginalized Israel. And by calling elections in the middle of it all, and forming a far-right cabinet with extremist Jewish settlers, Netanyahu is playing right into Iran's hands: Iran wants a one-state solution, where Israel never leaves the West Bank and is in permanent conflict with Palestinians and Muslims, so Iran can better delegitimize and isolate Israel.

Note to Netanyahu's parents: "Bibi won't be punished for any of his mistakes; domestic U.S. politics will ensure that. But beware: That will only increase the odds that he'll lead Israel into a permanent, corrosive occupation of the West Bank, make support for Israel an increasingly Republican cause and lose the next generation of American Jews."

President Obama. Grade: I (Incomplete).

Note to Obama's parents: "This deal makes sense; it can keep Iran away from a bomb. But Barack should go to bed every night for the next 15 years worrying whether Iran is living up to it. That's the best way to ensure that he, his party and his successors will stay vigilant and put in place an effective deterrence to Iran ever building a bomb. I hope he gets an A, but only history can give it to him."