Trump's Attack on Socialism Is a Colossal Blunder

By Alex Shephard, The New Republic

07 January 19

It has forced him to wholeheartedly embrace American capitalism, much like Hillary Clinton did in 2016.

onald Trump is perhaps the most unpopular president in recorded history, and he will soon face the most daunting re-election campaign in recent memory. Dogged by investigations and hamstrung by a lack of achievements, he has thus far failed to settle on a sharp message for 2020. “Promises Kept,” though less authoritarian, doesn’t have quite the ring of “Build the Wall” or “Lock Her Up.” But at Tuesday’s State of the Union, Trump unveiled what some advisers believe will be the winning message in November of next year. “Tonight,” he said, “we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.” The Republicans in the chamber—nearly all rich white men—stood and applauded, while many Democrats scowled.

Trump’s allies see this as a crucial argument heading in to 2020. After the State of the Union, Trump’s 2016 communications director, Jason Miller, told Axios’ Mike Allen that the president “elevated the wedge issue of ‘socialism’ in a way nobody else could.” Allen wrote that Republicans “loved ... the endorsement-by-sitting-in-silence when he hammered socialism.” With the border wall in limbo, little progress on a nuclear treaty with North Korea, and the 2017 tax cuts looking worse by the day, Trump doesn’t have any major accomplishments to campaign on beyond his Supreme Court appointments. But he does still have a strong economy. Trump is “trying to frame 2020 as another big, directional election ... betting that [his] people are going to actually like the direction the country is going,” another Trump campaign veteran told Allen.

Trump’s State of the Union paean to capitalism undoubtedly pleased his base, who have been the focal point of his entire presidency. But there are reasons to believe that making 2020 about “America First v. Socialism,” in Axios’ phrasing, might backfire for Trump. While the economy has continued to grow under Trump, there is rising dissatisfaction with income inequality and capitalism itself. Trump may think that red-baiting can make his toxic presidency appear to be the lesser of two evils. But this strategy requires taking greater ownership of a system that an increasing number of Americans think is unfair—and that didn’t work out so well for his Democratic opponent in the 2016 election.

Socialism’s long comeback in America began after the 2008 financial collapse, which made Americans keenly aware of the banking industry’s power and the country’s massive wealth inequality. “The richest Americans,” wrote Brown University economist Mark Blyth in his 2013 book Austerity, “own more assets than the bottom 150 million, while 46 million Americans, some 15 percent of the population, live in a family of four earning less than $22,314 per annum.” Outrage over inequality drove the creation of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City in 2011, and in 2016 it was the foundation of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Sanders’s campaign ultimately failed, but it could be argued that he won in the long term. Today, nearly every major Democratic candidate for president endorses some version of universal health care, which would have been unthinkable even ten years ago. The Democratic primary will be fought over issues like how to reduce inequality and tax the rich, as well as on costly spending programs like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. The party’s most popular young star, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is an avowed socialist. Democrats, by a 10-point margin, now think that socialism is more appealing than capitalism, and that’s significantly more true of people under 30. Polling has even suggested that 70 percent of the country supports Medicare for All, including a majority of Republicans.

Trump’s strategy is commonplace in partisan politics: to define the opposing party by its most extreme members. As The New York Times reported on Wednesday, focusing on socialism “could provide Mr. Trump with a potentially effective weapon in confronting an increasingly aggressive and more liberal Democratic Party, defining it through attacks on Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who describe themselves as democratic socialists, and other members of the party pushing progressive policies like a 70 percent tax rate and ‘Medicare for all.’”

There is historical evidence that Trump’s strategy could work, as red-baiting has been an often effective tool for conservative politicians over the past century. The question is whether that remains true today. As the Times acknowledged, “there is no evidence of any growing public angst about socialism sweeping the United States.” It’s true that Americans broadly see social programs like Medicare for All in a much better light than they do socialism itself. One August NBC/WSJ poll, though something of an outlier, found that only 19 percent of voters viewed socialism positively. Then again, Sanders may end up as the only Democratic candidate for president who defines himself thus.

The bigger flaw in Trump’s anti-socialism strategy, though, is that it’s forcing him to be staunchly pro-capitalism at a time when its popularity is severely ebbing. In doing so, Trump is forgetting one of the most important lessons of his 2016 victory. Hillary Clinton made the case that the economy was strong and that Democratic stewardship over it should continue. Trump railed against a “rigged” system that had decimated rural and Rust Belt communities, and he vowed to fix it. This message, combined with his pledge to protect entitlements like Medicare and Social Security, was vital to his upset victory—helping him to win key the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. (His approval is now underwater in all three states by double digits.)

Today, Trump is not only embracing the “rigged” system, but further owning his own unpopular economic policies, notably the $1.5 trillion tax cut he signed into law in December of 2017, which largely benefitted corporations and rich Americans. In the State of the Union, Trump boasted that “we are considered far and away the hottest economy anywhere in the world.” But many Americans still aren’t feeling that heat, just as they weren’t in 2016. Most of the economic gains have gone to the top 20 percent, and wage growth, while ticking upward over the past six months, has been largely flat throughout most of the economic recovery. This, much more than Sanders, is why more Americans have warmed to socialism. “The prime mover of millions of Americans into the socialist column has been the near complete dysfunctionality of contemporary American capitalism,” argued Harold Meyerson in The Guardian.

That’s not to say that Trump’s strategy won’t yield any benefits for him. Howard Schultz, the former Starbucks CEO contemplating an independent run, has already discerned that dividing the Democratic Party is the best path to victory. The response to Trump’s attacks on socialism has been relatively quiet on the left thus far, but the Democratic Socialists of America did release a statement on Tuesday decrying Speaker Nancy Pelosi for tepidly applauding. “Nancy Pelosi clapping at Trump’s remark about socialism, while children in Flint drink poisoned water, tens of thousands die for lack of health insurance every year, and we are headed off a climate cliff because big oil refuses to give up their profits. is peak capitalism,” the statement read. “The American People will not stand for it.”

But any such infighting on the left is likely to be semantic, and largely forgotten once Democrats nominate a candidate. We can fairly predict that the nominee will support universal health care, taxes on the rich, economic reform, and an infrastructure stimulus—all policies that will appeal to the millions of Americans who have been left behind by the economic recovery, and who fear they’ll fall even further behind when the economy inevitably turns for the worse. Trump, by contrast, will be shouting “better dead than red” and insisting that the economy is the greatest, ever. He thinks he set a trap for Democrats with his State of the Union jab, but in reality he has just trapped himself.

Trump's Big Speech Failed at Every Level

By Frank Rich, New York Magazine

07 January 19

Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today, what to make of the State of the Union, the continuing blackface scandal in the Virginia statehouse, and a leaked accounting of Donald Trump’s “executive time.”

n the State of the Union, Donald Trump called for unity while taking many partisan shots. How do you determine the success of a speech like Trump’s?

Even looking at the 80-minute-plus laundry list from Trump’s point of view, the speech seems to have failed at every level.

If Trump’s number-one political goal was to get his wall built, he didn’t advance the cause but signaled his surrender. His incessantly repeated pre-speech threat that he might declare a “national emergency” to circumvent Congress and get his way evaporated entirely last night. Why? He’s a paper tiger. He’d only been blustering about declaring an emergency in the first place to drum up phony suspense that might draw viewers to tune in. Even he has figured out that too many Republicans in Congress are openly opposed to that legally dubious power grab for him to try it now. Nor will the GOP happily sign on to another politically self-immolating government shutdown. So when Trump declared “I’ll get it built” last night, that can be translated to mean: “I have surrendered and will claim that whatever compromise Congress puts forth by the February 15 deadline means ‘I got my wall.’” Nancy Pelosi has won.

If Trump’s biggest personal goal was to impede what he called “ridiculous partisan investigations,” he has no more chance of accomplishing that than Richard Nixon did when he made a similar pitch in the 1974 State of the Union, seven months before Watergate drove him out of office. If anything, the investigations are metastasizing: Witness the sprawling subpoena that descended on the Trump Inaugural Committee from the Southern District of New York just as Trump was preparing to give his speech. In addition to the ever-growing body of evidence that Trump is a witting Russian agent, there are more criminal investigations of him, his business, his family, and his crime syndicate of a Cabinet than we can easily count. Let’s not forget that in the end it was simple tax evasion, not capital crimes, that brought down Al Capone.

If Trump’s stylistic goal was to somehow reset his image two years into his nasty presidency, his efforts were risible. Having purported to deliver a “message of unity” in his 2017 address to Congress, and having called for summoning “the unity we need to deliver for the people” in 2018, this time he came out for “cooperation, compromise, and the common good.” It is hard to imagine that a single American — whether Trump supporter or foe — bought this bunk any more than they buy his annual promise of an infrastructure push. His efforts to milk the touching real-life stories of the White House’s invited spectators were also disingenuous. He called for a $500 million budget over ten years to fight childhood cancers — less than 10 percent of the $5.7 billion he wants to build his wall this year. His tender words about Holocaust survivors were outrageous coming from a man who refused to condemn Charlottesville neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us” and countenanced anti-Semitic iconography exploited by his campaign.

If Trump’s rock-bottom goal was to provide television entertainment, here too he failed. The most enjoyable aspect of the entire event was watching Pelosi. Her sarcastic applause when Trump issued his bogus call for compromise – instantly christened the “fuck you” clap by Patton Oswalt – went viral. No less delightful was the sight of her repeatedly thumbing through the pages of his speech on camera as if she were looking for something more substantive, or at least more amusing, to read. It was worthy of a Tina Fey SNL bit. It was also fun to watch the expanded ranks of women in the Democratic caucus seize Trump’s phony embrace of female empowerment and throw it back at him and his party in a spontaneous eruption of joyous victory.

This isn’t to say that Trump achieved nothing. He did drone on so long that he pushed Stacey Abrams’s response to the waning minutes of prime time, almost 11 p.m. in the East. And he did inspire unanimous cheerleading from the Murdoch contingent: Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham at Fox News, Michael Goodwin at the New York Post, and Peggy Noonan at the Wall Street Journal (“a deeply adept speech in terms of policy”). And occasionally those not on News Corp payrolls found bright spots too: On Morning Joe, David Ignatius of the Washington Post declared Trump’s invocation of World War II and the Holocaust “moving and powerful.” Less convinced was Ann Coulter, who tweeted that it was “the lamest, sappiest, most intentionally tear-jerking SOTU ever,” and urged Trump to fire whoever supplied him with such poetic flourishes as his invocation of the “golden beaches of California.” But surely he can’t fire Ivanka.

Prominent voices from both parties have called for Virginia governor Ralph Northam, a Democrat, to resign after he first admitted to, then denied posing in a racist photograph that has surfaced from his medical school yearbook (while unexpectedly volunteering a previously unknown blackface incident). Steve King and Mitch McConnell have recently been chased by similar incidents — if Northam leaves office, will it set a new standard for politicians of both parties?

Now he is considering resurrecting himself as an Independent, according to the Washington Post. Regardless of party affiliation, what’s beyond dispute is that he’s an idiot who has yet to settle on a plausible account of why his 1984 medical school yearbook page looked like a Ku Klux Klan recruitment flyer. Whether he resigns or not, his decision will have no effect on the double standard that’s already in place. Democrats believe that politicians with racist histories should be drummed out of their party. GOP leaders believe that such politicians should be tolerated as long as there might be some political advantage to be gained in keeping them in the tent.

It doesn’t pass the laugh test that Republicans are condemning Northam while embracing a Republican president who ran on birtherism and nativism, speaks of NFL players as if they are slaves, and routinely (as recently as last night) drums up hate against Latino immigrants and Muslims. It took years for GOP leaders to turn on King, the unabashed neo-Nazi congressman from Iowa, and even so, they stripped him of committee assignments only after he had been reelected in the 2018 midterms. The same GOP Establishment that purports to be outraged by Northam looks the other way as Republican governors routinely conduct bogus “voter fraud” initiatives and rewrite state election rules to disenfranchise minority voters. Nor did anyone at the top of the GOP complain when the last Republican governor of Virginia, Robert McDonnell, broke with recent precedent, and not only declared Confederate History Month in 2010 but left any mention of slavery out of his proclamation.

The notion that Virginia or any other swath of America with a racist past can overcome that history overnight is repeatedly proven a fantasy. Chief Justice John Roberts rationalized the maiming of the Voting Rights Act with a declaration that will sully his reputation forever: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Today Virginia’s Democratic attorney general, Mark Herring, confessed that he also donned blackface in college. And by the way, what kind of establishment is Eastern Virginia Medical School, Northam’s alma mater? We’ve now learned that what it calls “troubling” neo-Confederate photos were appearing in its yearbook pages as recently as 2013. We can only hope that its doctors are out-of-network for all medical plans except the KKK’s.

According to a prolific White House leaker, nearly 60 percent of Donald Trump’s schedule is unstructured “executive time,” a euphemism for watching TV and responding to the news.  Is the leak a targeted subversion or more evidence of a disorganized White House?

Actually, it’s both. The White House remains in chaos, and we are entering the Night-of-the-Long-Knives stage in the bunker where it’s every dead-ender for him or herself. It’s hard to imagine in any case that anyone is shocked by this revelation. It would be far more shocking — and worse — news if a leaker told us that Trump had reclaimed this 60 percent of his day for work. The last thing we need is for him to increase the volume of havoc he’s inflicting upon the country and the world.