Writing at the Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria, after outlining the various election outcome prediction models, makes an impassioned plea:
And as people focus more closely on this race, they will surely come to recognize that Trump is not a generic Republican candidate but rather an unscrupulous and vulgar narcissist, a pathological liar, a bigot and a xenophobe. That will overwhelm what any model would predict. Because, in the end, we do think.
Three of the first four charges (unscrupulous, narcissist, and pathological liar) Mr. Zakaria makes apply to both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. I’ll leave the question of whether Hillary Clinton is vulgar to the reader. I don’t think that makes a bit of difference. “Vulgar” is derived from the Latin word for the crowd, the common people. Being vulgar might even be an asset.
To the other two charges (bigot and xenophobe) let’s throw in fascist for good measure. Here’s where the lesson of the Aesop’s fable “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” comes in. Democrats have been accusing Republicans of being fascists since 1960 and of being bigots and xenophobes since 1970 or thereabouts. At this point I’m not sure whether any of them are anything more than noise at this point.
As I’ve stated numerous times I won’t vote for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton under any circumstances. All of Mr. Zakaria’s charges against Mr. Trump may well be true. Sec. Clinton is an unscrupulous narcissist and a pathological liar. She is also a criminal and far too likely to lead the country into war for me to vote for her.
Over the next several months I strongly suspect that the polls will go up and down. One candidate will get a boost from this or that, then the other. When it comes down to the wire in October and to the horror of many elites (like Mr. Zakaria), I also strongly suspect that it will be too close to call and the polls will suggest that some states, e.g. Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, that Democrats are taking for granted will be within the range of error.
However, as the late Mayor Daley once said regardless of how things look now somebody will be elected.
I don’t think either of them are pathological liars or narcissists. Hillary Clinton’s main problems are narrowness and greed. Trump’s main problems are stupidity and the good fortune to be born rich. If he was just a bit less dumb or had he actually made his money, he might have a genuine shot at winning. Right now, he’s going to lose to the person who gets 600K for a stupid speech.
Interesting fact–I believe this is the first presidential election in which the major party candidates all have children with spouses with a parent convicted of major financial crimes.
I guess vulgar doesn’t matter if you are OK with a POTUS who discuses his penis size in pubic. Yes, Clinton and Trump are both narcissists, just like Michael Jordan and I both played basketball. One of us was a world class basketball player. So they are similar, but Trump is a much more exaggerated model of the same creature.
People on the left have used the term fascist way too often, but I do feel it is mostly confined to the further out left, at least until Trump. Every Dem candidate has been called a Marxist, and you hear it even from fairly mainstream Republicans.
I agree it is likely to be a close campaign, unless Clinton is actually indicted.
Steve
It’s a lesser of two evils election, at least for folks who tend to be on the right.
I have little respect for those who refuse to pick the lesser of two evils, since that is LESS EVIL. Less evil is a good thing, is it not? I know that when I have to choose between less evil and more evil, I go for less evil 90-95% of the time.
Sometimes it is time to get up on your hind legs, pretend to be a man, and make a decision.
Back in 1964 Daniel Schorr, a newscaster as mainstream as you can get, accused Barry Goldwater of being a Nazi. So did California Gov. Pat Brown.
Does Gore Vidal count as the “far left”? In 1968 he called William F. Buckley a “crypto-Nazi”. Buckley sued him over it.
There really is no lack of prominent Democrats calling Republicans Nazis and fascists. It’s a common trope. Just like Republicans calling Democrats “commies”.
As the late Mayor Daley is correct, and the candidates are not attractive along the lines cited, the issue becomes more narrow. Trump will be a change agent. Hillary will be anything but.
If you like where the country is and is headed then you might vote for HRC. If not, Trump. That said, neither will be able to make a sea change, in any direction. I happen to think a HRC presidency will leave the people overall poorer, for a selective few richer and therefore the income divide greater, the national finances shakier, major governmental efforts like education less effective, and foreign policy more bizarre. That really is the Obama legacy and one could expect more of the same.
Dave-Your reaching back to 64 and 68 to find mainstream Dems using the term actually kind of supports my case.
“Trump will be a change agent.” Meh, not so much. His proposals on taxes are the same as every other Republican, just worse. No change there. On essentially everything else, you have no idea what he intends. He may crack down on immigration, though his supporters hint that he is not serious about the wall. On foreign policy he has contradicted himself so many times it is not possible to know what he will do. He is so stunningly ignorant on basic policy and history I think there is a good chance that, much like Bush, he will be captive to his advisors. Throw in a bad temperment, and you have the makings of something awful.
Steve
Stop being pedantic. I used that to illustrate how far back it goes. It’s pretty darned easy to produce examples from last week. Or 2012 when Democrats were calling Mitt Romney a fascist after his 47% remark.
“Somebody Will Be Elected”
That’s what I’m afraid of.
Dave- You conflate fascism and Hitler. Bear in mind that I am not talking about people writing on blogs, but elected officials or well respected people in the mainstream. You can find Dems who did compare Bush to Hitler or Romney or Reagan, but then you have a lot of Republicans also calling Obama Hitler, and referring to his supporters as brownshirts. Hitler is just used as an insult equating the person with evil, or accusing them of being an authoritarian. Both sides do that quite freely. However, it is pretty uncommon, at least until Trump, to hear a mainstream Dem refer to a Republican as a fascist. It is pretty common to hear mainstream Republicans refer to Dems as communists and Marxists. Just like you hear Republicans maintain that people on the left are not real Americans.
Since we are into history, it should be noted that it was the Republican senator from Wisconsin who went on a witch hunt for commies. You just don’t find a corollary on the other side where you have Dems looking for fascists, at least not as far as I know.
Steve
Dan Schorr and Pat Brown didn’t equate Goldwater with Hitler. They equated him with Nazis.
To say that someone is a Nazi is to say that he’s a fascist since Naziism is a variety of fascism. Similarly, to say someone is a Leninist or a Maoist is to say he’s a communist.
Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush were all equated with Nazis by very garden variety Democrats—far from left wing whackos. All I can say is that Google is your friend. I’m not denying that Republicans engage in comparable hyperbole which, as it works out, tends to insulate Democrats from the charge that they’re communists. The charge is still flung. It just doesn’t stick.
While waiting for a patient to arrive, I did spend an hour or so on Google. You can find people comparing just about every president from JFK to Obama to Hitler. Supporters of presidents are called brownshirts. Lots of goose-stepping comments. Cannot find people calling, until Trump, people fascists. There are actually some Nazi comments, but those are applied pretty frequently to Democrats also.
So it seems pretty clear to me that calling someone Hitler or a Nazi doesn’t reflect an ideology, it is just calling that person evil. When Republicans call Dems communists and Marxists I think they are much more likely to believe that Democrats hold communist values and beliefs.
Steve