A Post of Quotes

I generally hate blog posts consisting entirely of quotes, but I have found other places saying what I was trying to say so much better than I ever could that I will devote this post entirely to quotes explaining why there is simply no comparison between Hillary and Trump.

I outsource to:

Matt Yglesias:

Hillary Clinton, for all her flaws, has demonstrated a basic level of competence. She understands how policy and government work. She's not openly racist; she hasn't encouraged street violence. There's no risk that she would disrupt the international order or cause an economic crisis out of pique.

That's a really, really low bar. But it's the only bar she has to clear in this contest. Almost irrespective of what you think of Clinton's politics or her policies, she is manifestly more prepared to run the federal government than Donald Trump.

Conor Friedersdorf:

Hillary Clinton also violates a bunch of norms, they’ll say. She used a private server to evade future Freedom of Information Act requests; violated various rules governing how classified information ought to be handled; accepted donations at the Clinton Foundation that created conflicts of interest while she was Secretary of State; and gave special access to rich folks in return for their backing. 

. . . . . .

But it is absurd to compare her shortcomings to her opponent’s, because so many are in wholly different categories. I’ve been a professional journalist since 2002. Every government agency I have ever covered—local, state, and federal—has tried to evade public records laws at one time or another. Half of Washington doesn’t follow the rules governing how classified information is stored, in part because those rules are broken. Conflicts of interest and special access for donors are ubiquitous. . . .

Absurdly, many seem to have convinced themselves that Trump, who won’t release his tax returns, as every presidential candidate has for decades, will be better on transparency; that a man whose finances we don’t even know, who used his charitable foundation to illegally funnel money to an attorney general investigating him for fraud, will be better on conflicts of interest; that an erratic man who blurts all manner of things out on Twitter and has shady ties to Vladimir Putin will somehow be a more trustworthy guardian of classified information.

Trump is likely to be worse across all those metrics! 

Trump as redeemer for this basket of civic ills is absurd. And even if he were better on them—he isn’t—that would hardly matter given his aforementioned shortcomings: 1) deliberately stoking ethnic tensions, and even inspiring hate crimes; 2) having zero experience, embarrassingly little knowledge, and no sign of the impulse or ability to learn; 3) epitomizing the sort of personality that can’t be trusted with nukes; 4) constantly insulting women, plus multiple allegations of sexually predatory behavior of a type corroborated by the candidate in his own words.

And David Frum:

The Clintons sold access to a present secretary of state and a potential future president in pursuit of personal wealth. Hillary Clinton does indeed seem a suspicious and vindictive personality. For sure, a President Clinton will want to spend and regulate even more than the Obama administration has done. 

Like Henny Youngman, however, the voter must always ask: compared to what? 

One of only two people on earth will win the American presidency on November 8. Hillary Clinton is one of those two possibilities. Donald Trump is the only other. 

Yes, I fear Clinton’s grudge-holding. Should I fear it so much that I rally to a candidate who has already explicitly promised to deploy antitrust and libel law against his critics and opponents? Who incited violence at his rallies? Who ejects reporters from his events if he objects to their coverage? Who told a huge audience in Australia that his top life advice was: "Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard. I really believe it”? Who idealizes Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein, and the butchers of Tiananmen as strong leaders to be admired and emulated? 

Should I be so appalled by the Clinton family’s access-selling that I prefer instead a president who boasts of a lifetime of bribing politicians to further his business career? Who defaults on debts and contracts as an ordinary business method, and who avoids taxes by deducting the losses he inflicted on others as if he had suffered them himself? Who cheated the illegal laborers he employed at Trump Tower out of their humble hourly wage? Who owes hundreds of millions of dollars to the Bank of China? Who refuses to disclose his tax returns, perhaps to conceal his business dealings with Vladimir Putin’s inner circle?

To demonstrate my distaste for people whose bodies contain mean bones, it’s proposed that I give my franchise to a man who boasts of his delight in sexual assault? Who mocks the disabled, who denounces immigrant parents whose son laid down his life for this country, who endorses religious bigotry, and who denies the Americanism of everyone from the judge hearing the fraud case against Trump University to the 44th president of the United States? 

I’m invited to recoil from supposedly fawning media (media, in fact, which have devoted more minutes of network television airtime to Clinton’s email misjudgment than to all policy topics combined) and instead empower a bizarre new online coalition of antisemites, misogyists, cranks, and conspiracists with allegedly ominous connections to Russian state spy agencies? 

Is this real life?

Delegitimization of the Opposition

Suppose Bernie Sanders had forged a working alliance with Black Lives Matter and various immigrant's right activities, swung the black and Hispanic vote his way and won the Democratic nomination.  Can anyone doubt what would be happening now?  Republicans would be denouncing the Democratic nominee as a wild-eyed radical -- a former Socialist, for Pete's sake -- who posed an intolerable threat to all we hold dear.  Every riot, every murder of a police officer, every Black Lives Matter excess would be laid at his door.  And there really have been some ugly things by Sanders supporters that will give the finger-pointing some degree of plausibility.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is a perfectly typical Democratic nominee, ideologically almost indistinguishable from Obama, only somewhat more hawkish in foreign policy.  Republicans refer to electing Hillary as "a third Obama term."  But our economy is finally completing is slow and painful recovery.  Unemployment is under 5%.  Wages are finally beginning to rise.  We are not fighting any large-scale ground wars.  Crime has mostly continued its 25-year fall.  The Administration has avoided any major scandals.  In short, a third Obama term just doesn't seem all that bad.  What's a Republican to do?*

And the answer appears to be, argue that things aren't so bad now, but we are on a course toward complete and utter catastrophe unless stopped RIGHT NOW!!!!!!

This account describes the process in an aunt and uncle who were once reasonable Republicans:

At the outset, they supported Jeb!, then drifted to Rubio as Jeb flamed out. Finally to Cruz and/or Kasich. All the while, they hated Trump. They called him an incompetent, a moron, an imbecile. My aunt promised me point-blank "I will never vote for that idiot." 

And then, at some point around the Convention, my aunt began posting soft pro-Trump messages—mostly in the form of digs against Hillary. These were mixed in with paradoxical articles with titles like "A Christian Case for Trump." (They're evangelical.) 

When I confronted her and my uncle about her broken promise, she said "we're not voting for Trump, we're voting against Hillary." I think this is how many Republicans are justifying their awful choice. They'll never admit that they'd voted for such an historically terrible candidate, but will always frame it as voting against something. This logic completely frees them of any moral responsibility for Trump, and they can argue that they never supported his horrifying behavior. 

Yet in order for this logic to make sense, Hillary has to be worse than Trump. So my aunt, normally a reasonable person, has bought into an increasingly perverse version of who Hillary is. Only a year ago, she told me how much she respected Hillary, despite their political differences. Now, Hillary's supposed crimes define her. And, by the logic, the crimes must be true, otherwise why would my aunt have voted for Trump?

Thus the election is compared to a hijacked airplane with one desperate chance to storm the cockpit or die, or to a dead elephant in the road on swerving one way will take you over a sheer cliff.  The alternative, no matter how bad, is necessarily better.**  Thus I am inclined to agree with this assessment:

Many partisans will always find a way to persuade themselves that the other party’s candidate is bad enough to clearly justify their support for their party’s candidate. Therefore, their opinion of the opposing candidate is partly shaped by the quality of their party’s nominee—insofar as he or she is unusually hard to support, the opposing candidate will come to be regarded as even more unusually evil or dangerous. This enables them to support a person they regard as embarrassing or unworthy. Anything can be justified when you’ve got a gun to your head. 

Is that what is happening to some conservatives? They would clearly dislike and oppose Clinton regardless, but is it possible that if they liked their own nominee more, enough to feel that he deserved their vote, they would tell themselves less apocalyptic stories about the consequences of a Hillary Clinton, even if they still opposed it?

Many Republicans have convinced themselves that a Hillary Clinton presidency would be inherently illegitimate because she should be serving time for sending State Department e-mails on a private server.  Definitely they will undertake massive investigations (even more than they have been doing for the past four years).  Many think they should start impeachment proceedings on day one.

Many Republicans convinced themselves that the Bill Clinton presidency was illegitimate because he never got a majority of the popular vote and every Ross Perot vote should have gone to Republicans instead.  And they saw him as a uniquely sleazy womanizer.  Many supported his impeachment on trivial matter because they regarded him as a dangerous radical.  In the clear light of hindsight, that looks foolish.  But always they convinced themselves that it was personal.

No respectable Republicans actually believed the theory that Obama (who clearly got a majority of the vote) was not legitimate because he was a non-citizen, but many clearly did see him as extremely radical and possible disloyal.  Some even accepted Dinesh D'Souza's hypothesis that Obama was not a typical Democrat, but consumed with a desire to destroy Western civilization.  By the end of his second term, a lot of the wilder talk about Obama's radicalism looks rather foolish, too.  A narrative of Bernie Sanders as crazed radical would have some degree of plausibility.  But ultimately no one seriously disputes that Hillary Clinton is just a generic Democrat.

Which is particularly dangerous because a lot of Republicans are finally beginning to admit to themselves what has been apparent to me since the Bill Clinton Presidency.  Which is that their insane loathing about every single Democratic President has nothing to do with any of the individuals involved.  Republicans' attempts to deligitimize every single Democratic President is actually an attempt to delegitimize the Democratic Party.  It is most obvious with the Supreme Court.  The one argument reasonable and respectable Republicans who hated and despised Trump and everything he stood for was that at least it would be a Republican nominating justices for the Supreme Court.***  This went along, of course, with the Republicans' newly discovered principle that if a Supreme Court vacancy occurs in the last year of a presidential term, the next President should be allowed to name the successor.  Then John McCain made a rather off-the-cuff remark, presumably not meant literally, that if Hillary is elected, a Republican Senate will block all her Supreme Court nominees.  He was challenged on the remark and hastened to walk it back, but the Overton Window had been shifted. Soon a serious conservative constitutional scholar was arguing for just that.  And it is rapidly becoming a basic ideological litmus.  The theory here is that the Democrats' theory of governance is so extreme and unconstitutional that no Democratic nominee should ever be allowed on the Supreme Court to enact it.

And isn't it obvious where this is headed? If Democrat's governing theory is so unconstitutional that it should be barred from the Supreme Court even if the Supreme Court dwindles away, then why should the advocates of such an outrageously unconstitutional approach be allowed to hold elective office, either.  Why should Democrats in Congress be allowed to pass unconstitutional legislation, or Democrats in the White House be allowed to use the coercive machinery of the state to unconstitutional ends?  And if you regard the Democratic Party as basically unconstitutional -- well, where will it end?

The Republican Party was founded as the party of opposition to any expansion of slavery in the territories.  When the Supreme Court came out with the Dred Scott decision in 1857, it held that Congress could not restrict slavery in the territories.  It held, in short, that the Republican Party was unconstitutional.  Three years later, a Republican won the Presidency.  Some people argued that the Republicans should take steps to reassure nervous southerners, but there was nothing the Republican Party could do to reassure the Southerners, short of disbanding itself and ceasing ever to run candidates again.  And, well, we all know how that ended up.

I am not suggesting that the Republicans are there yet.  But I am saying that that is the logical outcome of their refusal to accept any Democratic nominee for Supreme Court.  And Donald Trump is willing to push a lot further in that direction than anyone would have suspected only weeks ago.

_________________________________________
*This is not to deny that there are problems.  Crime, after falling for a quarter century, ticked up last year and no one knows yet if this is a trend or a fluke.  Obamacare premiums are spiking.  Mideastern terrorists no longer have the capacity to do large-scale attacks, but little one or two man rampages are impossible to stop.  ISIS is on the run, but actual peace in the Middle East is as remote a prospect as ever.  And Black Lives Matter signals a rise in racial tensions.  But we are far from the hellscape Trump and his followers are claiming.
**Nor is it just the crazy types, either.  My boss is a Republican, though a reasonable one, the kind who admires John Kasich and thinks Tim Kaine isn't so bad.  Certainly he is no fan of Donald Trump.  But he has concluded that Trump is a clever plan by Divine Providence to insure that a Democrat is in power when all the disasters Obama is leading us into finally come to roost, as they will any time now.
***Some have disputed that, saying that Trump cares nothing for conservative theories of the Constitution, only for interpretations that enhance his own power.  But I think their argument is sound for two reasons.  For one, despite all conservatives claim to be all upset about an out-of -control executive, those fears began the day Obama was inaugurated (just look at what they said about Bush and the "unitary executive"!) and will end the day a Republican takes over.  The other is that Trump is so ignorant about possible candidates for the Supreme Court and so unlikely to have the patience to sit through a briefing that his advisers should be able to get whoever they want.  The big question will be who his advisers are.

Is Donald Trump's Crazy Tax Plan Just What the Doctor Ordered?

This post is inspired by a piece by Kevin Drum about low inflation.  The problem is one most people never expected to have.  Our inflation rate is too low, and the Fed seems powerless to raise it.

And no, that is not as crazy as it sounds.  Yes, we really do need a certain amount of inflation so that next time our economy falls into recession we will not have outright deflation, and so that the Fed will have room to lower interests rates, if necessary, to below the inflation rate.  Recall that the Great Depression began after a period of growth with negative inflation.  Arguably that was one of the factors that made it so severe -- with inflation rates negative even in good times, there was buffer to prevent the economy from falling into double-digit deflation.

But what can be done?  Drum explains:

I suspect we're learning something new: central banks can squash inflation by raising interest rates and causing a recession, but no central bank has ever tried to raise inflation. It's simply been assumed that they have the power to affect inflation in both directions. But they don't—at least, not in practice. . . . Pretty much every central bank in the developed world would like inflation to be higher, but not a single one has been successful at doing it. This suggests to me that in practical terms, inflation is a one-way ratchet. Central banks can reduce it, but they can't raise it.

Cleaning up after the world's worst inflation

(Emphasis in original).  On the one hand, this is ridiculous.  Of course central banks can raise inflation, to effectively unlimited heights.  Look at Weimar.  Look at Zimbabwe.  Even those do not set the real record.  That dubious distinction belongs to Hungary, which experienced inflation of 41.9 quadrillion percent in one month!   So obviously central banks can raise inflation rates.  And you don't even have to look at such extreme examples.  Just consider the double digit inflation of the 1970's as central banks first tried to boost the economy heading into an election and later overcompensated for a supply shock from increased oil prices.

But it may be more difficult to raise inflation when the economy hits the zero lower bound (i.e., central banks lower interest rates to zero and still can't bring the economy to full employment), or during secular stagnation.  Here Drum offers some useful insights into what central banks are up against.  Paul Krugman has suggested that all they have to do is promise to keep cranking out more money until inflation hits a suitable target.  But how do central banks crank out money.  The answer is by buying up government debt, i.e., by replacing government bonds with cash.  Just how much will it take?

[I]t seems likely the Fed would have to increase its balance sheet by, say, 8x, to have any chance of producing substantially higher inflation. In dollars, that means $28 trillion in additional asset purchases. They would run out of treasuries to buy long before they hit that mark and would start gobbling up every corporate and MBS bond in sight. That's really not a tenable suggestion.

For what it is worth, US GDP for 2015 has been estimated that US GDP in 2015 was just under $18 trillion.  If this rough estimate is correct, then printing money in an amount exceeding the total size of the U.S. economy would raise inflation by only a few percentage points!  To produce serious inflation what is needed is not just printing money, but an attempt to push the economy past capacity.  That normally takes the form of immense budget deficits.  I was not able to find suitable information in a brief Google search, but I do recall seeing estimates of Weimar deficits.  In the most fiscally responsible month, tax revenues covered about 28% of total spending.  In the final and most disastrous month, tax revenues covered about one-tenth of a percent of the total budget.  Clearly central banks can't raise inflation rates unless government cooperate by running large deficits to give them plenty of treasuries to buy.

Apparently last year's total budget was $3.8 trillion.  Of this, about $3.18 trillion was raised by taxes and $583 billion from borrowing.  That just isn't enough to get the inflation meter going.  But have no fears.  Donald Trump is proposing a trillion dollar tax cut, together with major infrastructure upgrades, a big military buildup, and no cuts to Social Security or Medicare.  Now that should give the Fed the chance to buy up more treasuries and raise inflation.

Update

Starting in late October, about the 27th or 28th, Nate Silver started showing Hillary Clinton's chances dropping like a rock, seemingly in free fall -- even as she maintained a fairly steady three-point lead  in the popular vote and her Electoral College firewall appeared to hold, even as all the swing states went over to Trump.

I watched with anxiety, seeing her chances drop by three points or more each day and accelerate, looking almost like a sheer drop, with Trump favored to win if trend continued.  And I kept thinking, this has to stop some time.  There has to be a bottom.  Well, it appears that about Friday the drop leveled out and perhaps began a VERY minimal recovery.  And, for what it is worth, the decline had begun before James Comey dropped his bombshell.  And the stabilization has begun even as Hillary's victory in New Hampshire (part of her firewall) is being called into doubt.  So I don't get it.

But as far as I can tell, this late in the game small shifts carry a disproportionate weight because there is very little time for them to reverse.

So Hillary is favored to win.  But by a razor-thin Electoral College margin and only 3% of the popular vote.  And the Senate remains very much a tossup.

This country has truly lost its senses.

Trump and Corruption Redux

I want to get back to the subject of Trump and corruption, because it is truly mind-boggling that his biggest advantage is claiming that Hillary is corrupt and that, if elected, he will clean up corruption in Washington.  Trump has built his entire business career on fraud.

Trump's General History as a Sleazy Businessman

I will set aside matters like groping women, making crude remarks about his own daughter, and  refusing to pay his nephew's medical expenses as private matters and unlikely to affect the broader public.  But his business career does legitimately rate as "public," and it displays a staggering lack of honesty that dwarfs anything one could say about Hillary.  So, how do they stack up?

Well, for starters, the complaints about Hillary deal entirely with her tenure as Secretary of State and after.  Why?  Well, because everything she did before then was examined with a microscopic to look for any sort of scandal and none turned up.  And let us not forget the reason for the whole e-mail scandal in the first place.  Congressional Republicans were investigating the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, looking for dirt to dig on then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  Ultimately, they failed to find anything she had done wrong at Benghazi, but did find that she had improperly made State Department e-mails from a private server.*

Trump, by contrast, has quite a past.  He began working in New York construction in the 1970's and was strongly suspected of Mafia ties.  Well, one may say, everyone knows that in New York in the 1970's the construction industry was rife with Mafia and anyone who didn't make certain payoffs would never be able to build anything.  But there is ample evidence that Trump's connections went beyond what was necessary.  He was one of the few New York construction magnates to use ready-mix concrete.  This was highly significant because any delay in pouring the concrete would cause it to harden and halt construction.  Avoiding such delays meant being on good terms with the concrete union which was, of course, Mafia controlled.  Trump paid inflated prices, presumably the payoff that kept him on good terms.  When the Mafia-controlled concrete union called a general strike, the Trump Tower was spared.  When Trump moved into Atlantic City casino construction, he was suspected of further Mafia payoffs to to purchase the necessary land.  Trump also made use of illegal Polish immigrants to work twelve-hour days conducting demolitions with sledge hammers and then stiffed them of much of their pay.  New York unions did not protest these abuses, probably because of the Mafia payoffs.

Well, one may say, so Trump made Mafia payoffs at a time when there was no other way to get anything done in construction.  But he has moved past that by now.  And, indeed, as the Mafia's power waned, Trump stopped working with them.  But he continued making a general practice of fraud.  USA Today has famously documented his habit of stiffing contractors, knowing that if they sue they will be up against someone to large to fight and will have to settle for a fraction of what is actually owed.  Is this a common practice in the construction industry?  How commonly did he do it? Well, the New Jersey casino commission found that he owed $69.5 million to 253 sub-contractors for the Trump Taj Mahal.  Is this a common practice in the industry?

Developers with histories of not paying contractors are a very small minority of the industry, said Colette Nelson, chief advocacy officer of the American Subcontractors Association. But late or missing payments can be devastating for small businesses and their employees.

To give some idea of just how not-typical Trump is in the field, USA Today compared him with five other major real estate executives and found that Trump had more lawsuits than the other five combined.

Then there is the matter of Trump's bankruptcies, not all of which I can follow.  Two things matter, though.  For one, when Trump's Atlantic City casinos proved unsustainable, he turned them into a publicly traded company.**  This gave him a fiduciary duty to shareholders.  He nonetheless ended up looting the company, using it to pay off his private debts and pay himself a huge salary and bonuses.  When the company failed, he shareholders were left holding the bag.  The other is that he claimed a nearly one billion dollar loss from the whole operation.  This was legally dubious because the immense losses were offset by comparable levels of debt forgiveness.  This is supposed to be taxable income, but Trump apparently exploited a loophole that allowed him to exchange debt forgiveness for equity in his partnership.  Except, says a tax expert the loophole was not so much "exploited" as "stretched beyond any recognition."  Since losses of this type can be offset against future income, Trump has probably used it to avoid paying taxes for years on end.  No wonder he has been under audit by the IRS for years on end!

Well, all right, the Trump supporter might say, so Trump's Atlantic City days were sleazy.  But he has gotten out of the casino business by now, so those days are behind him.  And that is true.  Trump has moved on now to entertainment.  And that is true.  Having failed at making actual, physical things, Trump has moved on to reality TV and to monetizing his name as a brand.  What he has not done is move on to running an honest business.  That impassioned foe of illegal immigrants stealing jobs from Americans brings in models on a tourist visa, without a work visa, and then takes back most of their pay by charging exorbitant and fees.  Since they are working here illegally, the models dare not protest.  Once again, this is a common practice in the industry, but one seasoned model says of the Trump Agency,  "Honestly, they are the most crooked agency I've ever worked for, and I've worked for quite a few."  And he runs plenty of other scams bilking the gullible, most notably Trump University, which claimed to teach the secret of how to get rich quick, but actually just took people's money and taught nothing of any value whatever.  Trump Institute is essentially the same thing by a different name.  And so forth.  Indeed, twenty days after the election, trial will proceed in a suit by Trump University payors wanting their money back.  The judge very properly postponed trial until after the election lest it (1) take too much of his attention away from the campaign and (2) bias the results.  If only the FBI would do the same!

Criminal versus Civil Wrongs

Well, all right, the Trump supporter may say, these things are crooked.  But Trump is merely facing civil liability for them.  No one has charged him with an outright crime.  Hillary sending State Department e-mails on a private server was criminal.  Suffice it to say that if you can make the argument that all the Trump actions described above were bad but not criminal, the same can certainly be said of Clinton's e-mails.  Bush Administration lawyer Jack Goldsmith explains:

The prosecution would be entirely novel, and would turn in part on very tricky questions about how email exchanges fit into language written with physical removal of classified information in mind. Though he did not say so explicitly, Comey might have concluded that a conviction in this context was, for many reasons, unlikely—a clear reason not to prosecute.

He also says that Clinton's actions are clearly grounds for non-criminal punishment such as loss of access to classified information or firing.  Or, as this veteran national security reporter explains:

People simply don't get indicted for accidental, non-malicious mishandling of classified material. I have followed leak cases for a very long time, both at the Washington Post and since starting Lawfare. I have never seen a criminal matter proceed without even an allegation of something more than mere mishandling of senstive information. Hillary Clinton is not above the law, but to indict her on these facts, she'd have to be significantly below the law.

He goes on to approvingly quote FBI Director James Comey:

In looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts. All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here.

And finally:

A common refrain in discussions of the Clinton case has been that “anyone else” would have been charged in similar circumstances. Yet if you look closely at the supposedly parallel cases where lower-ranking individuals have been prosecuted for mishandling, you find that invariably the circumstances aren’t similar. You’ll find prosecutions involving classified material knowingly and intentionally provided to uncleared persons (as in the case of Gen. David Petraeus), or where large quantities of documents were literally removed from secure facilities, but I haven’t turned up any cases where conversations about classified subjects on an insecure line have been treated as a criminal matter. In a country where literally millions of individuals hold top secret clearances, we may safely assume this is not because such indiscretions never occur, but because they had not been understood to be criminal acts, and were dealt with as matters of administrative discipline.

In short, as with Trump, the actions are wrong but not criminal.  And if Trump were subject to the degree of scrutiny that Clinton has been -- to four years of Congressional investigation intended to dig something up, and now to hacking by Russia and publication by Wikileaks, it is entirely possible that they might reveal something criminal as well.

Deleted E-mails

But Hillary did make efforts to obstruct justice, a Trump supporter might say.  What about the 33,000 e-mails she deleted?  These appear to have been e-mails she believed were personal and that she was therefore not required to turn over.

To determine which emails were work-related, a member of Clinton’s legal team did four things: she automatically deemed any email sent from or to a .gov and .mil address as related to work; she searched the tens of thousands of emails for names of senior State Department officials, lawmakers, foreign leaders and other government officials; she conducted a keyword search for work-related terms; and she looked at the sender, recipient and "subject" of every email for other potentially work-related emails, but she did not read the contents of those emails.

Nonetheless, the process was not infallible.  Of the 33,000 emails Hillary deleted, the FBI has recovered some 17,000 and found that "many" were work related.  (Exact figure not given).  The total she did turn over were 30,000, consisting of about 55,000 pages.  Given the volume, it is certainly plausible that that error, not intentional deception, was at work.  In the meantime, it would appear that Trump Enterprises is in the regular habit of destroying e-mails and documents it is under court order to produce, and has been doing this sort of thing since 1973.  (Obviously there were no e-mails back then, only documents).  And, granted, this has been in civil rather than criminal, investigations.  But honestly, any claim of superior ethics by Trump is starting to look mighty thin by now.

Foundation Scandals

Well, what about that sinister Clinton Foundation and its corrupt dealings?  All right, I don't really have time to get into the weeds here, so this is just a thumbnail sketch.  The Clinton Foundation is unusual in that it does not normally give grants.  It employs its own front line charity workers, finances other charities under its umbrella, and seeks to arrange partnerships between other organizations, including some that are for-profit.  That is what it does.  How is it financed?  Mostly by donations, some by the Clintons (obviously), many by wealthy donors, and a non-trivial number by foreign individuals, entities and governments.  The basic, underlying scandal here is that Hillary raised funds for her foundation while serving as Secretary of State, she met with many donors, any this creates at least the appearance that donors may be buying access in exchange for donation (although there is no evidence that any of them have been given any specific favors beyond a meeting).  Is any of this sinister? I outsource to Inside Philanthropy:

The latest red-hot story from the Associated Press is a case in point. It breathlessly reports that over “half the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state gave money — either personally or through companies or groups — to the Clinton Foundation.” 

A tweet by the AP boiled the point down further: “More than half those who met Clinton as cabinet secretary gave money to Clinton Foundation.” 

How many people is the AP talking about here? All of 85, out of 154. Okay, now just take a moment to think about how absurdly misleading this claim is: Did Hillary Clinton really only meet with 154 people during her years at State that were “outside the government?” Of course not. She probably met with thousands, starting with innumerable foreign officials as she circled the world.
. . . . . .

Weirdly, it never occurred to the AP reporters to cross-check the donors to the Clinton Foundation with the donors to Hillary’s political career. There’s huge overlap here, since it turns out that many of the people who have faith in the Clintons as political leaders also believe in their nonprofit work. Certainly, there are some donors in this mix with more transactional motives. Welcome to the world of politics, which, in the case of the Clinton Foundation, has become enmeshed in the world of philanthropy. 

The obvious potential for conflicts here is why the Clinton Foundation probably should have been mothballed long ago, and should be soon, if Hillary wins the presidency. As I’ve said before, balancing the foundation’s fundraising with Clinton’s presidential ambitions was a very bad idea. 

But let’s not pretend that this foundation is somehow a unique example of the corruption of philanthropy by politics. These two worlds intersect all the time.

 Examples, some far more blatantly political, follow.

Meanwhile the Trump Foundation, besides fairly conventional charitable giving, has used foundation funds to pay charitable donations Trump has been ordered to pay in lieu of fines and to bid on Trump memorabilia in charity auctions.  And, as before, this is not just how business is done.  A lawyer who gives tax advice to charities calls these examples of self-dealing "really shocking" and says, “I represent 700 nonprofits a year, and I’ve never encountered anything so brazen.”  And then there is the matter of the $25,000 donation the Trump Foundation made to the Florida Attorney General at a time her office was considering whether to investigate Trump University.  Days later, the Attorney General decided not to investigate.  Now obviously it can be just about impossible.  Yet the uproar over corruption in the Clinton Foundation is over the possibility of the mere "appearance" of impropriety.  That appearance is a whole lot stronger here.  Furthermore, it clear is that (1) a charitable foundation is not permitted to make donations to political campaigns and, (2) the donors knew that donations of this kind are forbidden and attempted to disguise it as a charitable donation.***

Double Standards

To many Trump supporters, the real complaint about Hillary and the e-mails is that she did anything particularly heinous as that she got away with it, while little guys are prosecuted for less heinous offenses.  Hence there is a double standard -- our ruling class gets away with things that regular folks are prosecuted for.  I have dealt above with why that is not the case for Hillary Clinton.  To which I would add, and for this you want to elect DONALD TRUMP?!?!?!  His whole career has been based on being too big and powerful for little guys to fight.  He has stiffed small contractors, hired illegal immigrants, destroyed, documents, manipulated the tax code, and taken countless other actions that, at best, stretch the law to an unrecognizable degree, all secure in the belief that he had enough resources to outlast and outfight any attempt to call him to account.  Anyone who is angry (and I think there is good reason to be) that our ruling class is not bound by the same laws as the little guy, then Donald Trump is the very embodiment of this failing, not the person to fight it.

Trump has Turned Over a New Leaf

The usual response to this by Trump and his followers is that sure, he knows more about gaming the system than anyone else, and that makes him the perfect person to catch all the people who game the system and fix it so it can't be gamed again.  Maybe it is overly cynical to argue that you can't teach an old dog new tricks and a leopard won't change its spots, although it is Trump who has been warning about the dangers of trusting a snake, since it cannot be other than what it is.  Still, like the bleeding heart that I am, I believe that people can change.  But anyone making the claim to have changed in such a spectacular degree, that he will abandon a long career of ripping off the little guy and champion the little guy instead had better offer some sort of evidence to support that claim.  Well, Trump threatens to investigate judges who rule against him and to bring libel and anti-trust actions against media outlets that criticize him; he overpays with his donors' money to use Trump products on his campaign; he continues to sue foreign guest workers at his resort; and he stiffs people working for his campaign from child musicians to his own pollster.  So, no, this old dog is still playing the same tricks.  This leopard hasn't changed its spots.  This snake will bite you if you take it in.  And to believe that Trump hasn't changed now but miraculously will by January 20, 2017 goes beyond naive folly to sheer madness.

National Security.

The final refuge of Trump supporters to all this is that, okay, Trump may be crooked and corrupt, but at least his actions never endangered national security.  To this I would have to say, you have me there.  Trump has never endangered national security.****  That is because he has never had the opportunity.  One reason he has never had the opportunity is that Trump is such an obvious security risk that it would be sheer madness to allow him anywhere near classified material.  Or let's put it this way.  Hillary's mishandling of classified material has been held to be "extremely careless."  Now imagine our national security depending on Donald Trump's carefulness.  (Shudder!)

I would have the same response, by the way, to a few of Hillary's left wing critics who see Trump as the lesser evil.  Their basic reasoning is that Hillary has been Obama's Secretary of State, supported his most interventionist policies, and argued for even more interventionist ones.  She therefore has blood on her hands.  Trump, by contrast, has never had any role in foreign policy whatever and his hands are therefore clean.  Look, I agree with people who dismiss the whole idea that we should never consider people's past but only the future.  Otherwise there would be no need for a criminal justice system.  What people have done in the past is a reasonable predictor of what they will do in the future.  If I had to make an apples-to-apples choice between two candidates who had had comparable influence on US foreign policy in the past and who advocated similar policies in the future, I would choose one who had advocated a less bloody approach rather than one who advocated a more bloody approach.  Possibly I might even reject one who had a bloody past but had seen the error of his/her ways because of that past, although it would depend on the alternative.  But if the choice was between someone who had made some very bad decisions in the past and might make more in the future and someone who obviously had no experience or meaningful knowledge of foreign policy and was such a loose cannon as to make almost anything possible -- well, I would go for the former.

Tu Toque

In the end a Trump supporter -- or others as well -- might finally accuse me of the tu toque fallacy.  Whatever Trump's failings, they still don't excuse Hillary's e-mails.  And granted.  But when choosing a President, we have little choice but to grade on the curve.  If you are arguing that one person's transgressions are justified, pointing out someone else's transgressions is irrelevant.  But when choosing which of two people to elect as President (and, given the binary nature of US politics, two is all you have to choose from) then, yes, it matters whether one candidate's transgressions are more serious than the other's.  And in this case, I think there can be no doubt about it.

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*To anyone old enough to remember the Bill Clinton presidency, this sounds familiar.  Bill Clinton came into office not long after a real estate bubble had burst, causing many Savings-and-Loans to fail.  The Clintons had invested in one such company, the owner having ended up in jail for dubious financial activities.  Congress started investigating and hired a special prosecutor to find something impeachable.  He never did find anything impeachable involving the Savings-and-Loan, but did learn that Bill had lied in a civil deposition, so Congress impeached for that instead.  The same script is now playing out with Hillary

**This was Trump's only publicly traded venture; all the others have been closely-held, which has allowed him to escape public scrutiny.

***The campaign fundraising organization called itself "And Justice For All" (all initial letters capitalized), a reasonable name for someone running for Attorney General.  Foundation reported on its tax report that the donation was to "Justice for All" (no "And"), a Kansas church group.  Yet the donation was mailed directly to the political campaign.

****I am not one who believes these conspiracy theories about Trump being in the tank for the Russians, although the Russian intelligence service does appear to be in the tank for Trump.

Donald Trump's Reputation as a Bold Truth-Teller

So, that being said, Trump's statements being remarkably out of tune with objective reality, how did he get such a reputation for being a bold truth-teller?

The general answer I get is that he is telling a different kind of truth -- not the truth of matching statements to actual, external facts, but truth of expressing what people secretly feel but don't dare come right out and say.  And Trump's real appeal is that he will free people from those constraints and allow them to come out and say the unspeakable.

For instance:

[Trump supporters] see him as “honest” while simultaneously dismissing many of the things he has actually said, because they assume that the most offensive things he has said are simply deliberate provocations — and they usually feel that the people being provoked deserve to be taken down a peg. 

The logic here is a bit circular, but it’s a familiar two-step to anyone who’s had an argument about “political correctness.” 

On one hand, you should respect Trump because he’s just saying what a lot of people secretly believe — what they say “around the dining room table,” as his surrogates often put it. 

On the other hand, you shouldn’t get too upset about what Trump says because it’s just light talk. It’s locker-room banter. It’s satire. He’s not a polished politician, after all, you shouldn’t assume that he meant to say it exactly the way he did. 

Or another:

This is what Donald Trump — and many of his supporters — imagine constitutes truthfulness and honesty. It’s not about saying something that is true or accurate or factual, but about saying what you truly, sincerely feel. Dishonesty, in this view, entails not a denial of truth or of reality, but a denial of your own emotions. Courtesy, tact, and nuance are all, from this perspective, dishonest because they may not fully reveal the emotions, opinions, fantasies and preferences of the speaker.

Of course, there are some problems with this kind of honesty.  Trump supporters may want to be freed from the dishonest shackles of courtesy, tact and nuance, but they probably do not want to free everyone else from those shackles and allow other people to be entirely honest in expressing opinions that they personally find offensive.*  Or, to continue the first quote, "Not saying things that offend other people is 'political correctness' — not saying things that offend people one knows is just 'etiquette.'"  Yeah, basically.  And that is a problem.

The other problem is that I don't believe the subjective/objective truth distinction is as binary as all that.  People who admire Trump's "truth-telling" regardless of its factual accuracy have probably had experiences of external truth in their lives.  Anyone who has ever gotten a speeding ticket knows that telling the judge it just doesn't feel like you were going that fast when the radar gun says you were is not going to get you very far.  Or telling your boss that you really intended to do that job that you didn't do.  Or telling your landlord or the bank or the utility company that you meant to make that payment.  See how far arguing your subjective intentions will get you.

Of course, you may say, that just drives home the point.  Only authority figures who talk down to you treat truth as external.  Regular folks regard it as internal. Trump is a regular guy who believes in the integrity of internal truth, not one of those snooty authority figures who insists that only actual actions matter.  But I don't really buy it.  How many Trump supporters, after all, would accept as an reasonable excuse that their children wanted to do their chores and give them credit without actually expecting them to do the chores?

Well, you may say, but that is still a matter of only authority figures treat truth as external.  The only difference is that the Trump supporter is now the authority figure -- probably the only opportunity many of them get.  Between peers, truth is internal?

Or is it?  Well suppose a Trump supporter's spouse/intimate partner/coworker/friend made a promise and then broke it.  Do you think that if they assured the Trump supporter that they were very sincere when they made the promise and felt really bad about breaking it, the Trumpling would give them credit for keeping it?  For a minor matter and on rare occasion, maybe.  But if it was for something important, or if the broken promises were habitual, somehow I don't think sincerity would cut it. Actions speak louder than words and all that.

So, yes, I can believe that Trump's reputation as a bold truth-teller may come in part from saying what a lot of people secretly think but don't dare say.  But I don't believe that anyone really has a concept of truth that excludes external reality.

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*On the other hand, I think part of Trump's appeal to his supporters is their basic belief that everyone else has already been freed of those shackles and feels free to express contempt for the white working class, and only the white working class is not allowed to retaliate in kind.  There is just enough truth to that belief that we really need to give it some thought.  

Donald Trump: Liar versus Bullshit Artist

Donald Trump has made any number of statements at variance with objective reality.  That thousands of American Muslims were caught on video cheering on 9-11.  That all the accusations of women who say he groped them have been decisively debunked.  That his massive tax cuts won't hurt revenues.  That he didn't say any number of things he was caught on tape saying.  This has led any number of people to call Trump a liar.

Others have claimed that he is worse than a liar -- he is a bullshit artist.  In this they rely heavily on Harry Frankfurt's essay On Bullshit, in which he claims that a lie is an intentionally false statement while bullshit is a statement made with indifference to whether it is true or false.  He regards this as making bullshit a greater threat to truth than lies:

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

And again:

 Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavor either to describe the world correctly or to describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. Through excessive indulgence in the latter activity, which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person s normal habit of attending to the ways things are may become attenuated or lost. Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

Well, if you will pardon my saying, bullshit!  In fact, in between these quotes the author has a passage discussing St. Augustine's view on lies, which is that lies in this sense are, in fact, very rare.  It is most unusual for anyone to seek out the truth for the purpose of taking a position against it.  Most people who lie do so for the sake of achieving some other goal.  In many (if not most) cases, they would be perfectly happy if their lies were true because it would be more convenient.  So, by this standard, the vast majority of lies are actually bullshit.

Even the author does not believe this.  When he seeks to evaluate Trump, he takes a somewhat different view.  For instance, he rates as actual lies Trump's assertion that thousands of New Jersey Muslims were caught on tape celebrating 9-11, that he knew nothing about David Duke and his ties to the Ku Klux Klan, or some of his more far-fetched statistics.  That is because these are actual factual allegation that can be proven or disproven.  By contrast, his statements that he makes the best taco bowls and Hispanics love him are vague to be actual lies and rate as bullshit instead.  He also rates Trump's promise to deport all 11 million illegal immigrants as bullshit, even though it is something subject to empircal verification, because it is made more with intent to demonstrate a certain outlook than with actual intent for it to translate into real-world actions.  So, that would appear to make a lie something that can be proven or disproven and bullshit something not subject to falsification.

Others have hinted at another distinction -- that lies consist of statements made in the belief that they are false, while bullshit consists of statements made in ignorance of their truth or falsity.  Frankfurt somewhat hints at this latter definition as well -- that one reason there is so much bullshit these days is that knowledge has expanded to the extent that most people know very little of all the information there is out there.  Certainly it seems fair to say that politicians holding forth on the subject of global warning are usually bullshitting in this sense -- they don't know anything about the subject and they are trying to sound as if they do.  But that misses another important point.  Ignorant people very often don't know that they are ignorant and think they know a great deal more than the actually do.  Anyone who actually knows that field (any field) will spot the fakery at once, but ordinary people will fall for it because the bullshitter's confidence seems convincing.  Trump is an absolute master of this.  So by this standard the whole business about the bullshitter being indifferent to the truth fails -- many masters of bullshit quite sincerely believe that they are right.

In any event, although there may be some truth to the definition of bullshit as holding forth on a subject one is ignorant about, my own definition of bullshit would be somewhat different.  If would address the question of the difference between lies and fiction.  The distinction between a lie and fiction is clear enough.  A lie is a factually inaccurate statement made with intent to convince people that it is factually true.  Fiction is a factually inaccurate statement made with the intent to entertain and the clear, unspoken understanding between the teller and the audience that it is not factually accurate and is intended purely to entertain and not to deceive.  Well, bullshit by my definition lies somewhere between a lie and fiction.  It is not factually accurate, and it is told mostly with the intent to entertain, rather than to deceive, but with the suggestion that it contains a grain of truth of indefinite size.  Indeed, part of the fun in bullshit may be the ambiguity about the size of that grain of truth.  It is, if you will, a form of consensual deception.  There may not be any deception at all, if the parties involved know each other well and have a good unspoken understanding about the size of the grain of truth involved in the representation.  Or it may be extremely deceptive and perhaps even a lie if it misleads as to the size of the grain of truth or, indeed, whether there is any grain of truth at all.

By this standard, most politician speeches are bullshit.  They are meant more to express affinity of values than to be taken literally.  Yet that grain of truth is presumed to be there -- that the politician considers this to be the ideal course of action, and will seek to enact something vaguely resembling this.  Patheos gives as one such example born-again Christian candidate Christine O'Donnell when she said, "I was dabbling in witchcraft, I've dabbled in Buddhism. I would have become a Hare Krishna but I didn't want to become a vegetarian. And that is honestly the reason why — because I'm Italian, I love meatballs!"  This statement is not factually accurate.  She did not, in fact, ever spend time as a Hare Krishna, and she would not have become one if only the religion had allowed her to eat meatballs.  But O'Donnell would doubtless be outraged at the suggestion that she was lying.  She would doubtless regard it as a joke, but one with a grain of truth -- that she really did shop around before becoming a born-again Christian.  In other words,  it is bullshit.

Or, consider another example, as applied to Trump in a non-political context.  This lawyer gives an opinion on Trump University:

It sure sounds like Trump University made false statements and promises. But from what I've seen, the best defense (though not necessarily the one that Trump will follow) is that anyone minimally rational would have recognized that all of the Trump University sales patter was puffery, trumpery,* and bullshit, the equivalent of saying your coffee shop offers the most amazing coffee in the universe.

This author would see claims that one's coffee shop makes the best coffee in the universe as bullshit -- something not meant to be taken literally, but intended nonetheless to convey that one's coffee is good.  Presumably Trump University's sales pitch was intended to convey that it had something of value to offer, or why would anyone bother signing up?  Trump (obviously) offers meaningless superlatives of this kind all the time -- NAFTA is the worst trade agreement of all time, the Iran nuclear deal is the biggest giveaway ever, Hillary's corruption is unprecedented in the history of our country, he alone can solve all our problems.  Does he expect anyone to take him at his word?  I won't even venture to guess.

And so I would say that Trump is a master of this kind of bullshit -- he makes wildly inflated statements always implying (usually wrongly) that there is some grain of truth in them.  He is also a major bullshitter in the sense of acting knowledgeable on subject he knows nothing about, which is basically all public policy whatever.  Oh, yes, and he also lies to an extraordinary degree.

In short, Trump goes well beyond the deception of normal politicians, or real estate salesman, for that matter, and takes it to unprecedented heights.  And he stands a good chance of being our next President.

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*Trumpery in this context means nonsense or worthless items.  It has nothing to do with The Donald, but it fits him well.