Friday, July 22, 2016

Trump

Vox did a Fact check: Donald Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention, not that it will sway anyone.

FactCheck.org did theirs too, FactChecking Trump’s Big Speech

Matt Yglesias points out Donald Trump’s law and order acceptance speech didn’t feature any actual crime policies.

Donald Trump devoted all of one sentence to his solution for what he cited as the biggest problem facing the nation in his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination:

I will work with, and appoint, the best prosecutors and law enforcement officials in the country to get the job done.

That’s it.

He’s been running for president for more than a year, and crime has never been part of his program. He and his campaign manager just ginned it up over the past couple of weeks as an opportunistic reaction to the shootings of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge. There’s nothing all that unusual about campaigns pivoting to new issues rapidly. But when a normal campaign decides it wants to talk about an issue, it has the team put together some policy ideas.

Usually there’s a PDF, a short-form summary, and then some bullet points that can be referenced in speeches or television ads or picked up by surrogates. But to do that, you need a candidate who’s willing to put in the work. He needs to build a campaign team. He needs to consult with experts. He needs to decide what he thinks. Trump can’t be bothered.

The reason Trump doesn’t have anything to say about any of this is that he’s too lazy to look into it and come up with anything. And that’s why even his one lame idea — hire the best people and work with them — can’t be counted on. The president really does have to do a lot of hiring of people and a lot of managing of the interagency and intergovernmental process, and, like a lot of presidential stuff, it can all get a little tedious.

And given his picks so far, of his staff and of his convention speakers, he hasn't demonstrated the ability to hire the best people. This follows Matt's piece from yesterday Donald Trump's New York Times interview reveals a dangerously lazy mind at work.

The problem with Trump is not just the specific things he says but the casual way in which he says them and the comical “logic” that ties them together. Most of all, it’s the repetition — the fact that it keeps happening without Trump showing any capacity for growth or any interest in doing the work that would make him better at answering questions. For better or worse, Trump is now the GOP nominee, and there are hundreds of professional Republican Party politicians and operatives around the country who would gladly help him become a sharper, better-informed candidate. It doesn’t happen because he can’t be bothered. It’s terrifying.

And today he says This week we saw that the Republican Party — not just Trump — is the problem.

But these establishment speeches were, on their own terms, fairly bonkers. Their slams on Clinton veered, repeatedly, into tinfoil hat territory. They were completely out of touch with the state of the economic recovery. They relied heavily on the idea that President Obama could defeat ISIS through rote incantation of magic words. And while they avoided most of Trump’s big crazy policy ideas, they did so mostly by avoiding speaking about any policy ideas at all.

The problem wasn’t Trump’s relatives or Scott Baio; it was largely the delegates themselves. Rank and file activists reared on a generation’s worth of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News sat through a pathetic conclave in which governors and senators stooped to talk-radio antics in a desperate quest for applause, only to be trounced by Laura Ingraham — a real deal talk radio host who, even more than Trump himself, perfectly captured the mood of a party that’s become completely indifferent to the work of governance.

Andrew Prokop says Donald Trump is a con artist, and his RNC speech is his biggest con yet.

Trump’s speech hinges on the idea that crime is surging to terrifying levels. But this simply isn’t borne out by the evidence. So to make his case, Trump uses a combination of cherry-picked and out-of-context statistics, incomplete data, and flat out erroneous information to invent a crisis.

Usually when I read [Donald Trump’s Convention Speech Rings Terrifying Historical Alarm Bells](https://theintercept.com/2016/07/21/donald-trumps-convention-speech-rings-terrifying-historical-alarm-bells/) it's referring to Germany in the 1930s, not Plato's *Republic* from 2,400 years ago.

Tyranny, says Socrates in The Republic, is actually “an outgrowth of democracy.” And would-be tyrants always in every instance claim to be shielding regular people from terrible danger: “This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears above ground he is a protector.”

And today's Trump press conference was crazy. Trump Goes Nuts in Post-Convention Press Conference

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