- Thomas B. Edsall on The Real Trump Mystery, and how base human nature explains this;
- Fareed Zakaria on how Trump’s economic ideas would stunt growth and spur inflation;
- Because Trump doesn’t understand money;
- Short items about Roseanne Barr accusing Democrats of eating babies; how Mike Johnson claims that God endorses Trump… this time; how Elon Musk and others are fighting to restore old sexual hierarchies; how JD Vance once told the truth, about Trump; and how it’s up to us, not God, to fight disease and war.
NY Times, Thomas B. Edsall, 25 Sep 2024: The Real Trump Mystery
The mystery of 2024: How is it possible that Donald Trump has a reasonable chance of winning the presidency despite all that voters now know about him? Why hasn’t a decisive majority risen to deny a second term to a man in line to be judged the worst president in American history?
Another Edsall collection of quotes and links from many sources. Subjects include conspiracy-theorists, denials of truth, some who need to unleash chaos, and so on.
My big picture take: It’s because most people, to this day, live unexamined lives driven by base human nature, which is tribalistic. The “progress” made in recent centuries with democracies overthrowing monarchies and so on was the result of a small minority of elitist thinkers — including the “Founding Fathers” — who came up with an idealistic system to circumvent the worst aspects of tribalism. But over time, it’s become more and more apparent that most people simply don’t believe in those ideals. Those people need something to venerate, and they claim to venerate the Bible and the Constitution, but look closely and they don’t actually follow the highest principles of either source.
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Here’s an item by Fareed Zakaria, whose book TEN LESSONS FOR A POST-PANDEMIC WORLD I greatly admired.
Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria: Opinion | Trump’s big ideas would stunt U.S. growth and spur inflation, subtitled “The damage he would do is much worse than anything an ‘anti-business’ liberal might offer.”
From the start of his entry into political life, Donald Trump has had one enduring advantage. Many see him as a man who knows a lot about how to generate economic growth for the country. After all, he’s a rich businessman and he played a super successful one on prime-time television for years. The feeling is, he must know what creates growth. In fact, almost everything Trump proposes would have the opposite effect.
Take his most important proposals, ones that he repeats constantly: sweeping tariffs on all imported goods and mass deportations of undocumented workers. It is rare to find topics on which economists agree as strongly as they do that both would be bad for growth and cause inflation to spike.
The logic is glaringly obvious. If you raise the price of goods for consumers — which happens because importers will pass the tariffs on to them — and if you reduce the number of workers, you will get fewer people working and fewer people buying stuff.
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Part of the reason for the above is that Trump has no comprehension of money. He’s never had to.
AlterNet, John Stoehr, 25 Sep 2024: Opinion | Trump’s profoundly weird understanding of money
Donald Trump was born a multimillionaire. He never learned what it’s like to earn a living with his labor. He never learned what it’s like to pay for things with those earnings. And because he never had those experiences, and because he has no interest in other people’s lives, he has no idea what the meaning of money is to people who were not born multimillionaires.
Donald Trump was born a multimillionaire. He never learned what it’s like to earn a living with his labor. He never learned what it’s like to pay for things with those earnings. And because he never had those experiences, and because he has no interest in other people’s lives, he has no idea what the meaning of money is to people who were not born multimillionaires.
To someone like Trump, a dollar isn’t a dollar in the ordinary sense of the word. There’s no feeling behind it, because no labor went into earning it. Prices are irrelevant. To him, a $100 grocery bill could be $10,000 could be $100,000 – it makes no difference. $100 is just a number. It’s just an abstraction. It’s as abstract to him as being rich is to a normal person.
With a video clip of him casually tossing $100 bill to a clerk in a Pennsylvania supermarket.
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Short items.
- JMG from Mediaite: More about what “they” do: Roseanne Barr: Democrats “Eat Babies, Love The Taste Of Human Flesh, They Drink Human Blood” [VIDEO]
- Ring Wing Watch: Speaker Mike Johnson Tells Paula White’s Prayer Warriors God Has Chosen Trump to Lead U.S. a Second Time. Can Johnson also explain why God didn’t manage to have Trump lead the U.S. four years ago? You can’t say the election was stolen; we’re talking about God. Really, these people are such simpletons.
- Washington Post, Susanna Schrobsdorff: Opinion | Elon Musk’s response to Taylor Swift shows what this election is about, subtitled “Will women be allowed to run their own lives?”
But Musk’s language – and statements by both former president Donald Trump and Sen. JD Vance — represent a dangerous thread that runs deep in this presidential campaign: the unnamed but ever-present one in which right-wing men are fighting to restore old sexual hierarchies and reassert their control of women’s bodies and priorities. The same sort of guys who fear they will be “replaced” by migrants also fear that smart, capable and, yes, sometimes childless women will end the sweet deal they have long had as so-called alpha males. These retro dudes are watching closely as more women choose friendships, careers and sometimes cats over their peculiar kind of masculinity.
- Washington Post, Peter Jamison: JD Vance, in 2020 messages, said Trump ‘thoroughly failed to deliver’, subtitled “In previously undisclosed messages, the future vice-presidential nominee said Trump had not fulfilled his economic agenda and predicted he would lose to Biden.” At one time Vance told the truth.
- OnlySky, Jonathan MS Pearce, 25 Sep 2024: The future of the fights against disease and war, subtitled “God has had his turn. Securing a future with less disease and war is up to us.” Are we thwarting God’s will to try to cure diseases that God presumably designed into the world? No, because the premise is false.
