If Donald Trump Said That Pigs Can Fly

Donald Trump really does have an extraordinary ability to lie convincingly, with complete sincerity, and in a way that can be remarkably hard to refute.  But his speaking style is also remarkably easy to caricature.  So maybe a little mockery is the best way to show up his lies.

Suppose Donald Trump decided that pigs can fly.  (Some of his statements are only marginally less absurd).  He would probably say something like this:

Pigs can fly, I tell you.  You see them flying around all time time.  I get all sorts of calls from voters all over the country complaining about the pig droppings falling out of the sky.  One of them landed not two feet away from me when I was coming out of the building just a few days ago.  Nowadays I never go out without a steel umbrella.

So what do you say to that?  How do you refute it?  Proving a negative can be extraordinarily difficult, even so obvious a negative as that pigs cannot fly, that Trump has not been getting complaints from voters all over the country about flying pigs, that he was not almost hit by pig droppings any time recently (or ever) and that he does, in fact, often go out without a steel umbrella.

Well, that last, I suppose, will be the easiest because it is not an attempt to prove a negative.  All you need is photographs of Trump going out for the last few days without a steel umbrella.  But what about the rest?  What do you do?  Ask aerodynamic experts to prove, in excruciatingly dull detail, why it would be impossible for pigs to fly?  Have the Russians or Wikileaks hack Trump's emails to prove that none of them so much as mention flying pigs?  (The Russians and Wikileaks seem uninterested in cooperating).  Interview everyone who has accompanied Trump out of a building lately to see if any of them saw any pig droppings narrowly miss him?

And doesn't the mere fact that he has people investigating any refuting anything so ridiculous mean that he has won already?

Trump, CEO Politicians, and Corruption

In 1953, President Eisenhower nominated Charlie Wilson, CEO of General Motors, as Secretary of Defense.  At his confirmation hearing, the potential for conflict of interest came up.  He assured the Senate that he had no problem going against the interests of his company, and that in any event, he did not believe a conflict would come up because, "[F]or years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa.”  This got morphed by Democrats into "What's good for General Motors is good for America" -- clearly an accusation of corruption on his part.  But what kind of corruption were they accusing him of?  I have always assumed it was the broader kind, i.e., that "General Motors" meant big business in general and that they were accusing him of equating the public good with the interests of the 1%.  But I have occasionally heard it suggested that they were accusing him of the narrower kind of corruption -- of giving special primacy to his own company.

Which leads us back to Donald Trump (of course).  And once again, to the point that while we have had CEO politicians before and even one CEO President, but none of them have been anything like Donald Trump.

Herbert Hoover made his fortune in mining.  Ross Perot founded a data processing company.  Herman Cain ran various restaurant chains.  Carly Fiorina was CEO of Hewlett-Packard.  Mitt Romney worked in finance.  And, of course, Donald Trump's made his mark in real estate development.

So what, one may say?  There are many fields of business.  All provide useful services.  Why should one be any more or less honorable than any other?  Well, there is the way one conducts business.  So far as I know, there is not much to criticize on how Hoover, Perot or Cain did business.  Fiorina's tenure as HP CEO is generally regarded a failure, but an honest one.  Romney ran for President as head of a financial company at a time when finance was decidedly unpopular, and one involved in some of the less winsome aspects of finance, such as leveraged buyouts and general "vulture capitalism."  I do not pretend to know enough about finance to know if his activities served a useful purpose.  But certainly no one accused Romney of any sort of fraud or illegality, even in his less winsome business activities.

Trump, by contrast, appears to have built his entire business career essentially on fraud.

Before running for President, Romney had been Governor of Massachusetts.  Hoover had been Secretary of Commerce.  Fiorina had run for Governor of California.  Perot had never held office before, but he took a serious interest in policy and cared and had strong positions on important issues of the day.  Cain had been a lobbyist, but was ultimately ignorant of policy beyond a narrow range of matters involving business regulation.

But not even Cain was as aggressively, proudly, and utterly ignorant as Trump.  With Cain, one at least hoped that given enough time, he might learn something.  Trump appears to be incapable of focusing on anything for more than a few minutes and thus of being brought up to speed.  Besides, with Cain one could hope that he would know enough to realize his own ignorance, choose advisers who knew something, and listen to their advice.  Trump has left no grounds for hope on any of those points.

CEO's are more autocratic than US Presidents and may have difficulty adapting themselves to the give and take of democratic partisan politics.  As I understand it, there were some complaints of that sort when Romney was Governor of Massachusetts, but he learned.  And certainly there is nothing to suggest that he was ignorant of such basic concepts as the rule of law, the separation of powers, or basic democratic norms.  Hoover, though a brilliant administrator, was a poor politician and some have suggested that this was responsible for his disastrous failures.  (I disagree).  The others have not held office.  Cain appears at least a likeable guy, though how he would have behaved as President is anyone's guess.  Fiorina, as I understand it, was indeed abrasive and overly authoritarian as a CEO, traits that were part of her undoing, and that would serve her even worse in the White House.  And Perot appeared truly ignorant of our basic form of government and regarded us as a sort of elective dictatorship.  He showed plenty of signs of paranoia, which serves as an uncommonly ill omen for his future as President.

But if once I would have placed Trump marginally ahead of Perot in this regard, as Trump spirals out of control he is making even Perot's most autocratic tendencies and paranoid ravings look rational by comparison.  Perot, after all, merely wanted to be dictator.  Trump's warnings have become so apocalyptic and his promises so extravagant that it is hard to tell whether he thinks he is running for dictator or for messiah.

But above all (and this leads back to my original point), while some of these other CEO's may have believed that what is good for General Motors is good for America in the broader sense that what benefits the 1% benefits the economy as a whole, none of them ever showed any sense of adhering to that doctrine in the narrower sense, i.e., of thinking it acceptable to use the office to advance their own personal fortunes.  Trump shows no evidence of having any concept of the distinction.  And increasingly, he is losing the concept of any distinction between his political fortunes and the country's or between political opposition and criminality.

This is a very dangerous man, and he is going completely off the deep end.

Trump Goes Completely Off the Deep End

Remember how I said that Donald Trump might, after all, be preferable as President to Ross Perot because, although an ignorant blowhard, an authoritarian, and a narcissistic buffoon, at least he showed no signs of outright clinical paranoia?  I may have to retract that.

Brief Comment on the Second Debate

I guess my reaction to the second debate is similar to my reaction to the first.  Trump impersonates a wonk pretty well.  He is good at coming out with facts that sound impressive, whether true or not.  Hillary was not good enough at calling him out when he spouted nonsense.  His behavior was more restrained this time, i.e., he did not make obviously clownish faces and the like.  I actually thought he had a good point when he pointed out that there are no good guys in the Syrian civil war, and that arming rebels is not a good idea, given what they turn out to be.  Very true!

Still wouldn't make me trust him with the Presidency, though.

A Very Brief Comment on Trump and the "Pussy" Tape

The whole business about Trump and the "pussy" tape positively cries out for an Onion headline: "Donald Trump Caught on Tape Acting Like Donald Trump.  Everyone in an Uproar."

Trump and Corruption

I want to discuss a little the idea held by some people that the system is so corrupt that we should elect Donald Trump to shake it up because any change would be an improvement.

I guess that raises two questions.  First of all, just how corrupt is our present system.  And second, just how corrupt is Donald Trump.

As for corruption in our present system, there are several ways to look at it.

One interpretation of corrupt is the crudest sense of corruption, i.e., are our politicians being flat-out bribed?  Well, there was William Jefferson and his fridge full of money, but so far as I can tell, this is an unusual case.  For the most part, there isn't that much flat-out bribery going on.  Corruption in our political system is something more subtle.

At the other end of the spectrum is the politiphobe definition of corruption, which basically amounts to the existence of politics at all:

[Politiphobes] believe that obvious, commonsense solutions to the country’s problems are out there for the plucking. The reason these obvious solutions are not enacted is that politicians are corrupt, or self-interested, or addicted to unnecessary partisan feuding. Not surprisingly, politiphobes think the obvious, commonsense solutions are the sorts of solutions that they themselves prefer. 

Only slightly less sweeping is the concept of corruption implied in the whole uproar over the Hillary Clinton e-mails, which roughly defines corruption as networking.  I noticed much the same thing all the way back in 1997 at the time of the Southeast Asian economic crisis.  The general consensus seemed to be that the Asian economies crashed because of corruption and "crony capitalism."  These terms were roughly defined to mean people making decisions based on their personal relationships, rather than cold-blooded calculations about the bottom line. In other words, acting like actual flesh-and-blood people, rather than the soulless Homo economicus that inhabits textbooks everywhere.

Let's face facts.  Treating one's personal relationships as primary is simply human nature.  Yes, treating important public policy decisions simply as an exchange of favors between friends is inappropriate and often corrupt.  That is why there are so many elaborate disclosure and anti-corruption rules, to keep basic human nature from asserting itself.  But in the end, such rules can only go so far.  People will network, do favors for friends, exchange one favor for another, grant access based on past association and so forth.  There is simply no way to prevent it short of taking humans out of government altogether and replacing them with computers.

Another extremely broad definition of corruption is acting on one's own private interests instead of for the public good.  Here again, given the difficulty in figuring out what the public good is and how it is best served, as well as the mind's extraordinary ability to rationalize what it wants, it seems a reasonable assumption that corruption of this kind is impossible to eliminate.  I realize that at this point libertarians would agree and say that is all the more reason to hold government to the absolute bare minimum (roughly, a criminal justice system and civil courts to enforce contracts), to prevent that sort of corruption and abuse of power.  My only response can be that I think libertarians seriously underestimate how much corruption and abuse of power can take place outside government.

My answer, instead, is that if you can't eliminate corruption of this kind, your better bet is to broaden or, if you will democratize it.  My own hypothesis is that the broader the corruption, the more people who benefit, the broader the interest being promoted, the less it differs from the public good, and the less noxious the corruption.

Consider some points of comparison.  At the time this country was founded, corruption was rife in Great Britain.  One form this corruption took was in representation in Parliament.  Representation was not in proportion to population.  Some district had only a handful of eligible voters (rotten boroughs).  Election from this district could be achieved simply by bribing a handful of electors. In other districts, one wealthy proprietor permanently had power to bribe or coerce the view eligible voters ("pocket boroughs" because they were in a proprietor's pocket) to ensure his election to Parliament.  Bribery of this crude sort was not possible in districts with large populations.  This is not to deny that bribery is possible.  A longstanding US tradition has been for representatives to bribe their constituents with "earmarks" and pork barrel projects, i.e., bringing popular public works to the district.  This, too, is a form of bribery, but it is one in which a fairly broad swath of the population benefits and therefore, I would say, a less noxious one.

The US Congress in 1995 under the leadership of Newt Gingrich is another case in point.  Republicans had denounced the Democrats as the party of special interests and taken power proudly boasting that they had no such corruption.  They then proceeded to attempt to turn Congress into a wholly owned subsidiary of the Chamber of Commerce and introduced legislation to block the introduction of modern anti-bacterial methods of food inspection, to make it easier for companies to dip into employee pension funds, to sell National Forests to mining and timber interests, and so forth. My mother commented at the time that this showed that Republicans were just as must the party of special interests as Democrats, their interests were merely narrower.  The AARP (America Association of Retired Persons) represents only a sub-portion of the population (retirees) whose interest can legitimately conflict with the interests of working age people.  But it is a much broader, and therefore less noxious, interest than the ones who wanted to dip into employee pensions and so forth.

All of which leads to a specific kind of corruption of this kind. Namely, elites the world over (the 1%, if you will) have a marked tendency to confuse their own power and privilege with the common good.  The US is no exception.  In the US, this means a tendency for our elites to believe that whatever maximizes profits maximizes the public interest.  It informs the Republican Party's insistence that cutting taxes as the top and gutting regulations should always be top priorities. Critical here is many people's belief that the 1% have captured our politics altogether and that popular voices have been completely shut out.

This is very much the fear of people on both sides of the aisle.  Followers of Bernie Sanders and followers of Donald Trump share it, though in different ways.  To Democrats (myself included) the all-consuming hegemony of the 1% is shown in the Republican obsession with cutting taxes at the top and gutting regulation, and the obsession of Very Serious People in balancing the budget by cutting entitlements.  To Republicans, the all-consuming hegemony of the 1% is shown in Republican willingness to admit more immigrants who will add cheap labor, in the Supreme Court ruling in favor of same sex marriage, and in the current atmosphere that treats people to oppose same sex marriage and giving transgenders access to the restroom of their choice as outside of all bounds of reasonable discourse.  And people on both sides of the aisle see it manifested in this endless insistence on intervening in wars in the Mideast long after such interventions have proven fruitless.

Is this true?  Well, I believe that the 1% have a much stronger grip on our body politic than before, partly be campaign donations, and partly by the decline of many interest groups that represented people outside the 1%, like labor unions.  But it would be false to say that our political class are completely unresponsive to pressure from below.  For instance, Trump supporters still act as if the Republican establishment favored unrestricted immigration, when that simply is not so.  By now securing our border and opposing any path to legalization are essential ideological tests for a Republican almost as much as tax cuts at the top.  And make no mistake, this is the result of pressure from below.  The same applies to guns.  Another basic ideological marker for Republicans is opposition to any sort of restriction on firearms ownership, also the result of pressure from the rank-and file.  The same applies to church members and abortion.

On the Democratic side, raising taxes on the top rates seems unlikely to be the result of the views of the donor class.  And while it does seem fair to say that the donor class are lock-step in favor of same sex marriage and trans-genderism, that, too, ultimately came about from pressure from below.  So, too, Black Lives Matter is a seeking to exercise influence from below.  In short, it is still possible to exert pressure from below and influence politicians; it is just more difficult than in the past.

Another aspect of our political system that is both a source of corruption and a limitation on the power of the 1% is that the 1% is by no means a monolith.  Not only do elites tend to identify their interests with the common good, but they are divided into sub-factions that each equate its own particular interests with the common good.  For instance, the finance industry identifies the common good (savers!) with maximum return on passive investments (raise interest rates); extractive industries identify the common good with repealing environmental regulations; real estate developers identify the common good with repealing land use regulations; manufacturers (often) identify the common good with protectionism, and so forth.  Furthermore, these interests are not just interests of the 1%.  Many people work in all these industries and share vertical ties with the people at the top; thus the whole industry from top to bottom shares common interests. (There are also conflicts within industries as well, of course, such as labor-management conflicts).  This might be seen as combating one form of corruption (the horizontal interest of the 1%) with another kind of corruption (the vertical interest of particular industries).

So what about Donald Trump?  Well, I just finished watching his second debate, and he has definitely put emphasis on this -- that Hillary is captive to her donors, while he is too rich to buy.  And he took her to task for the fact that she had been in government for 30 years, yet the country still has problems.  If he were elected President, he would fix all of them.  That is, quite simply, an appeal to the politiphobe view of corruption, that the mere existence of politics is corruption, and that if we could set aside the failings of politicians, everything would be fixed.  It is, of course, a fantasy.

But the thing about Donald Trump is that his record indicates him to be corrupt in the narrowest possible sense, and therefore the most dangerous.  He is not a candidate who equates the public good with the interests of the 1% or the interests real estate development.  He gives no evidence of having any concept of the common good apart from his own interests.  He is a candidate who takes advantage of the Brexit to pitch for his golf courses in Scotland.  He is a candidate whose campaign routinely buys Trump products and uses Trump buildings and pays Trump enterprises inflated prices for the privilege.  He is a candidate whose concept of putting his wealth in blind trust is turning his business empire over to his children to manage.

This is, I think, what most people think of when they talk about political corruption, certainly what many fear is what our system has become.  And Trump is running as the candidate who will put an end to this type of corruption -- by embracing it whole-heartedly.

Reflections on the First Debate

OK, I know it is a bit late to be weighing in on the debate, but let me put my two cents' worth anyhow.  Which is, I don't think Trump did so badly as conventional wisdom has it.  Not that I think he did great or anything, but I didn't think he was an epic disaster.

I might as well confess my biases here.  I tend to favor debaters who appear to know what they are talking about, have a good command of facts and serious understanding of policy.  Even if I don't agree with candidates, I am inclined to cut them some slack if they make a good, evidence-based case for what they want to do.

Thus to me Ronald Reagan's performance against Carter is sort of the gold standard of debate.  A number of people have commented that, although there was pervasive discontent with how the country was doing, many people were afraid Reagan was a crazy fanatic.  The debate convinced them otherwise.  Speaking for me, I was quite impressed when he regularly countered Carter's accusations and attempts to paint him as extremist with calm facts, even to the point of chuckling and says "There you go again," after several such accusations.  Not everyone agreed with me.  My civics teacher at the time said he would never trust anyone who chuckles while talking about nuclear war.  But there you have it.

On the other hand, Sarah Palin is a sort of anti-gold standard.  Hers was the most painful debate performance I have ever seen.  My impression watching the Biden-Palin debate was that it was between two candidates, one of whom had a serious, in-depth understanding of policy, and the other one of whom was reciting canned talking points.  And, in fact, some accounts afterward say that that was exactly what she was doing.  Not everyone agreed with me.  Palin supporters thought she did great.  But a majority clearly saw Biden as the winner.  To me, it looked like a high school athlete trying to compete against pros.

Well, Trump wasn't Ronald Reagan.  But he wasn't Sarah Palin, either.  Hillary started with what sounded to me like a lot of glittering generalities without much substance behind them, while Trump came out with what sounded like facts, even if some of them actually were not true.  On the other hand, if you had turned the sound off, Hillary would look like a normal person, while Trump's facial expressions and body language were exaggerated and clownish and did not look worthy of a leader of the free world.  And as the evening wore on, Trump started shouting and showed that he could be provoked.  Clinton stayed calm.  And while the audience was told to be quiet there were some lines that got laughter and some that got applause.  Trump drew first blood on applause, saying he would release his tax returns when Hillary released her e-mails.  But I would call the most noteworthy event of the night Trump saying he had the better temperament after a rant that rather strongly proved the contrary.  That got a good laugh too, but not an intended one.

So I would say advantage Trump earlier on and advantage Clinton later.  But never a real blowout. My side, obviously, exaggerated every one of Trump's errors and failing.  But even Trump's side seems to think he should have prepared better.

The big question, of course, is now what.  There are two more debates to go.  What will happen?

The cynical take is that whoever lost the first debate will necessarily have to be declared the winner of the second, with the original winner making a comeback in the third. That is how the media always spin debates in order to maintain drama  and suspense.

My prediction for the narrative, based on every election since 2000, is that Trump will be deemed to have improved substantially in the second debate, and then Clinton will be seen as pulling off a needed comeback in the third. Note that this is my prediction for the narrative. It doesn’t matter if Trump spends the second debate yelling into his cell phone about how he won’t pay construction workers, or if Clinton suffers a stroke in the third debate. In the second debate it is necessary that Trump be seen as redeemed, so if he spends the entire debate ignoring the moderator and yelling about his refusal to pay a bill he’ll be called “bold and unconventional” for doing so. In the third debate, if doesn’t matter if Clinton goes into a coma, the narrative demands a comeback, so she’ll be seen as “incredibly graceful as she soldiered on until medical personnel intervened.”

On the other hand -- well, Trump's supporters say that he has to prepare better, but it is not clear whether he is even capable of preparing.  Remember all those comments how he has an incredibly short attention span and is incapable of focusing for more than a few minutes on subject other than his own self-aggrandizement.  That makes debate prep really hard.  And the next debate will consist of ordinary citizens asking questions.  I have seen debates of that type and don't like the format much. Ordinary citizens' questions tend to be quite narrowly focused on issues that affect them personally rather than ones of national importance.  But the result is to give a clear advantage to the wonk who had an incredibly fine-tuned knowledge of policy.*  Others (cannot find link) have suggested that the town hall format plays especially poorly for the sort of temper and dominance displays that are Trump's stock-in-trade.

And finally, there is the question of how much it matters at all.  After all, the general consensus is that debate rarely do more than briefly move the needle.  Hillary's debate bump is already looking to be smaller and shorter-lived than her convention bump.  On the other hand, we are now in the home stretch, with just over a month to go, at a time when every little flicker in opinion polls really does matter.  Complacency (or despair) is still premature.  But it is nowhere near as premature as it was a few months ago.

General forecast:  A very stressful month ahead.

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*This approach also may have an inherent bias toward Democrats.  Can't find the link, but when reporters switched which side they covered, they were particularly impressed by that.  Democratic voters have specific concerns that they want the candidates to address, while Republican find the whole idea of government addressing people's problems repugnant and address ideological generalities instead.  The town hall format focuses on people with specific concerns they want the candidates to address.