I thought of this last week when I was sitting at dinner and heard everyone there disparage President Trump. I was bothered by my own silence. Here is what I might say next time this happens.
Have you ever studied the character of President Lyndon Johnson? It is pretty clear that he was deeply corrupt, a raging tyrant, and suffering from personality disorders. If you are familiar with Lyndon Johnson, I think that you would be hard pressed to make a convincing case that his personal qualities compare favorably to President Trump’s.
So why are people so much harder on Mr. Trump than on Mr. Johnson? Here are my thoughts, in order of importance.
1. The media environment is different. If we could transport today’s media back to the 1960s, everyone would be keenly aware of Johnson’s cruel temper and ruthless use of power. The journalists and Washington insiders who found Johnson a frightening figure would be much more outspoken and their scary anecdotes would receive much more attention.
2. We know that we survived the Johnson Presidency, but the Trump Presidency is not over, so we are not so sure. Note that I would not say that Johnson’s flaws were without consequences. If you think he managed ok in spite of his personality defects, then come to D.C. some time and let me show you a black granite wall with a bunch of names carved into it.
3. Johnson was a Democrat, and he espoused progressive ideals. As with President Trump, President Johnson had (and still has) a lot of people who were willing to overlook his character because of what he stood for.
4. The culture is more strident now. Back then, people did not expect to be able to “call out” someone and make them unacceptable.
As Martin Gurri would point out, the difference in available information between the two eras is huge. The national media assiduously restricted coverage of Johnson’s negative qualities, just as it did with Kennedy’s. That type of information silo is not possible today.
Also, Johnson was a Washington insider, Trump is not. The political coalition that favors government insiders over outsiders is much larger today than it was in Johnson’s time.
BTW, Sy Hersh passes along in his recent autobiography a revealing anecdote about LBJ that involves NYT reporter Tom Wicker.
Victor Davis Hanson (whom I do know you cite occasionally) has done a good job of reminding us that the list of “what was/is good for X is no good for Trump” is fraught with “intriguing” paradoxes.
Virtue signalling, which has become an integral part of progressive liturgy, helps explain the support of “Trump exceptionalism”: that you must actively fulminate against evil-Trump’s excesses, while ignoring those of his “well-meaning” predecessors.
Intellectual dishonesty, helps explain the denial of “Trump non-exceptionalism”: tghat most of what has been said about Trump’s invidious motivations was also said about Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, George W Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. in varying degrees of invective and with varying degrees of success.
With Donald Trump, I am still trying figure out how he was usually successful at business. I know Trump is mast at marketing himself as an awesome business person and knows many of the ins and outs but frankly I don’t understand how business did well at all. He has declared bankruptcy with four locations and no US banks would loan him money. Many of famous purchases have been sunk cost. All I can think of is:
1) He hit jackpot in right timing of New York Real Estate in the early 1980s.
2) He was well financed and that is big competitive advantage in Real Estate. (I do wonder how much of a role his father’s inheritance played 20 years ago in recapitalizing the Trump Organization.)
3) There are sucker investors globally.
I think a big part of it along with the things you mentioned is his brazen ability and willingness to lie, along with a genuine interest and talent when it comes to real estate and development. See SSC’s review of The Art of The Deal:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/19/book-review-the-art-of-the-deal/
The bummer, is that while Trump may have good instincts on what people want in luxury buildings, I don’t think he has good instincts on actual policy. His core issues: the national-populism anti immigrant and trade, are historic and economic losers.
Thinking back to 2016 the big underestimating of Trump was he had great marketing instincts of himself and really did run in the center economically as he sounded like Midwest Democrat from the Bush era. TBH I think his Immigration campaign might have won the Primary, but the general election was won on trade policy.
(And I really did think HRC did a terrible job of defending NAFTA which Trump called the worst deal ever. I did not understand how HRC simply stated that after NAFTA was signed in 1994 the unemployment would drop to below 4%.)
I agree with this post.
For that matter, President George W Bush entangled the US in not one but two evidently permanent but counterproductive wars at a cost of $7 trillion. Trump appears to want to avoid foreign entanglements, which might also be considered a form of imperialism.
For that matter, among his many misdeeds President Nixon dropped a couple hundred million cluster bombs on Laos. Those bombs have been maiming people ever since.
But people revile President Trump.
But he eats his steaks WELL DONE. With KETCHUP!
Golly, how on earth could we elect someone who eats steak inappropriately! How did he re-do NAFTA, get NATO countries to pay more, create effective zero unemployment, reduce everyone’s taxes, etc….
No- not everyones. Not looking forward to filing this year
Regarding that, I did not have to itemize deductions this year, for the first time in over 30 years. That makes things a lot simpler for a lot of people.
If you think this is people’s problem with Trump you fail the ideological Turing test.
I wonder if any of it has to do with demographics.
The aging of the population strikes me as particularly relevant. In 1970 the median age of the population was 28, in 2017 it was 38. People today are likely to have experienced two additional election cycles and thereby have become more jaded and have less hope that a political figure can actually accomplish anything. Johnson left office in 1969 so I am just using 1970 as the closest year ending in 0.
People are more likely to have education credentials today. The chief function of education credentials appears to be to embue the holder with a sense of moral and intellectual superiority to everyone else in the world. Pandering to individual’s notions of superiority is big business generally but particularly in the entertainment and opinion shaping industries (ie. media, education). In 1970 about 8% of women and 14% of men had degrees, in 2017 35% of women and 34% of men do so. There is very little to show for this enormous expenditure and so perhaps a greater amount of bitter clinging to sunk cost fallacies. The ability to despise Trump makes it all seem worth while.
The ascendancy of the education industry as chokepoint for employment and breeding opportunities has, of course, had other pernicious influences on society. I have been reading Richard Wrangham’s The Goodness Paradox on how beta males feminize culture by forming packs to drag down alpha males. Several additional generations of wider exposure to the hyperfeminizing influence of the education credentials industry has no doubt made the world an increasingly hostile place for alpha males like Trump.
The opinion shaping industries have also tended to become increasingly specialized with academics tending to focus in the most narrow of subdisciplines. This in turn has tended to reward hedgehog thinking (in a famous essay Isaiah Berlin described hedgehogs as seeing the world through the lens of a single, defining idea) in which every professor adds a brick to the wall with a different name on it, but the wall itself has one purpose, to proclaim white males are bad. Trump, as a white male, is in the dominant culture inherently evil simply for who he is, even before adding on the anti-capitalist bigotry lingering from earlier times.
Johnson in many ways contributed to Trumps predicament by fostering government programs to foster hate groups. His “civil rights” programs established the foundation of the current administrative state that identity group representation is the be all and end all of all social programs. The immigrant population in the US has never been higher and “diversity” immigration is used in a concerted effort to simultaneously eliminate any homogeneity in the population while instilling the notion that every identity group has a grievance whenever a white occupies a position of status. In 1970 5% of the US population was foreign born, today 15% is. That additional 10% contributes to the overall hostility to Trump as surveys vary but indicate about 70-80 percent disapproval rate among foreign born US residents.
And from a psychiatric epidemiological perspective, rates of depressive disorders have skyrocketed. People today are less hopeful, optimistic and happy than they were in Johnson’s day and for good reason. Individuals like Trump can no longer credibly advocate for a better future they way that Johnson could. The future of US politics is in convincing hate group coalitions that you can transfer resources and status from the other group to your group. Consciously or subconsciously, people today realize that the future of the US is terminal with little chance of medium term survial and a profound likelihood that overwhelming debt and bureacratization have eliminated any prospects for comfort in the hospice.
There’s certainly truth to this, but it seems like a strange point to try to make because there was a LOT of hate directed at Johnson back in th 60s. Up to and including mass demonstrations and riots.
This is true after Johnson escalated U.S. involvement in Vietnam, but not before. I think Arnold’s point is that there was plenty not to like about Johnson even before that escalation, but that information was not as readily available to the public as similar information about Trump was in 2016.
That’s a fair point.
That’s true, but my impression is that Johnson’s image has kind of been rehabilitated in the years since then, at least for many on the left, because it was his signature on the The Civil Rights Act and whatever the bill was that created Medicare. As the bitterness and anger over the war issue faded with time, the legacy of those two achievements came more to the forefront and now LBJ has, I think, attained the status of flawed hero among younger generations of progressives.
Yea, most Democrats think the US greatest accomplishment in the Post War Era was the Civil Rights Movement and LBJ, a Dixiecrat no less, did lead the passing of The Civil Rights Act in 1965. That means a lot to Democrats. We forgot the impact segregation had on our society in the past and I bet if you polled 20-something year old in 1961, if there would be an African-American President in their lifetime, I bet only 20% would have agreed with you.
(FYI I think most conservatives think the US greatest accomplishment in the Post War era was winning the Cold War. I would place that second after the Civil Rights Movement.)
Why was Civil Rights an accomplishment?
What did it require you to do? What actions did you take that you consider an accomplishment?
I mean if I build a fence I’ve accomplished building a fence. What did we accomplish with civil rights?
My father marched for Civil Rights, but nearly fifty years on it seems like a failure. The idea behind Civil Rights was “these people are just like us, and only if we remove these terrible impediments they will join us white middle class bourgeois in the brotherhood of man.”
The reality was shortly after Civil Rights blacks destroyed most of our inner cities and went on a fifty year bender of rapid sociological decline marked by the breakdown of marriage, drug use, unemployment, and other vices. Whites had to flee the cities and then largely provide the tax dollars to fund black vice.
We were told that all problems in the world were the fault of the same white people that ceded their homes and earnings to a largely hostile group that contributes little. Per Charles Murray it seems that none of black peoples tribulations are white peoples fault, which just makes the blame game even worse.
This isn’t what my father envisioned when he marched for civil rights. What was the accomplishment here? The talented tenth of blacks were able to get affirmative action sinecures at large institutions, move to white suburbs, and help white liberals talk about “I have a black friend.”
Well, LBJ portion was small but I still find the Civil Rights Movement absolutely wonderful history and was the first major political success for minority citizens. Just think there are people alive today that had to look separate public bathrooms in the 1950s and with Civil Rights it also impacted the lives of other Hispanic- and Asian- minorities as well.
1) In the US we did not have true free market for minorities and they could not thrive economically. (Asian-Americans were having some success in California but it was limited.)
2) Without Civil Rights, there was lots of whataboutisms for Communist Soviet bloc and it did impact the mistrust of our foreign policy at the time. (There were times it did feel like the US was losing in the 1960s especially after Cuba falling.)
3) There was always dangerous inner cities as the hotbed of crime. And the inner city minority collapse still might have happened in anyway as manufacturing jobs were disappearing at the time late 60s and 70s.
4) There is still something about “All men created equal” that feels different after the movement.
5) And for whatever reason, many of the inner cities have improved since 1992 when nobody was claiming crime would decrease to historic lows over the next 30 years. And in 2019, the weirdest reality is the Opoid Crisis is first drug epidemic that hitting white citizens the most now that limited economically has moved towards semi-rural communities.
And yes history is messy here.
One aspect that is under-rated about the Civil Rights Movement is it really was a Christian Church movement led by a Baptist minister.
My kids are right now taking American History in the 20th century and I find it weird that they spent as much time on McCarthyism than the Civil Rights Movement.
I’m going to leave aside a lot of that as I think it’s beside my question, though of course that doesn’t mean I agree to it.
What about civil rights was “an accomplishment”. How many divisions did The South field in 1964? What political, economic, and social power did The South have compared to the rest of the country?
This feels a lot like some very powerful people who didn’t have to deal with blacks much telling some very weak people who have to deal with blacks a lot that they have to accept a bunch of demands. Those they imposed those demands on were powerless to resist.
Shortly after the implementation of these demands our cities blew up, damaging white and black alike, and it’s hard to locate enough positive developments that offset that damage. From a pragmatic material view, it’s hard to see the accomplishment.
But that is a little beside the point. As I noted in the first paragraph, civil rights required little from the people who implemented it. The end of slavery involved winning battles and charging people with bayonets. That is an accomplishment. What does calling other people racist require? Nothing.
“I think that you would be hard pressed to make a convincing case that his personal qualities compare favorably to President Trump’s.”
Trump supporters always hide behind the idea that other leaders were corrupt or dishonest and that he is no different. Johnson often did act just as badly as Trump, and some of his decisions on Vietnam caused more human suffering than anything Trump has done so far.
What is different is that Johnson was not sociopathic. He was ego-maniacal, crude and often out of control, but he also believed he had responsibilities, and he cared about the country more than himself. He could feel shame.
Unlike Johnson, Trump has nothing inside him pushing back against his darker instincts. Trump has zero sense of responsibility. He thinks worrying about the truth is for losers. Laws and rules are for losers too. The Presidency is simply a mechanism to affirm his greatness.
“So why are people so much harder on Mr. Trump than on Mr. Johnson?”
People are brutal to every President, but Trump actively seeks out conflict. He wants it this way. He has behaved this way in public for 40 years.
Tom, you’re full of BS here. You should specify actions or laws signed by Trump to demonstrate any of your points, rather than merely parrot the Trump haters’ claims of “no responsibility”, etc.
Trump pushed thru tax cuts and deregulation, the Rep “magic wand” to free capitalism and increase the number of jobs. He is fighting against ObamaCare — with a Rep establishment that has failed failed failed to promote any single alternative Rep based health care policy. He is building the Wall (slowly).
He was NOT colluding with Russians (tho the Dems were.)
Look at Trump tweets — he does look for bad attacks on him and does fight back. Here’s a recent one:
Donald J. Trump Verified account @realDonaldTrump Apr 6
So, let’s get this straight! There was No Collusion and in fact the Phony Dossier was a Con Job that was paid for by Crooked Hillary and the DNC. So the 13 Angry Democrats were investigating an event that never happened and that was in fact a made up Fraud. I just fought back….
Dems hate him both because he’s a Rep (and most Dems hate all Reps), and especially hate him because he’s fighting back with truth about the Dem PC lies.
Regarding your comment about Johnson, the following is a passage from Robert Caro’s first (of four) volumes of his Johnson biography:
“But the aspect of Lyndon Johnson’s character most remarkable to other students was his lack of embarrassment when caught out in an exaggeration or an outright falsehood. ‘You could catch him in a lie about something, and it was like he didn’t care,’ Richards says. ‘The next day he’d be back lying about the same thing again.’ Says Clayton Stribling: ‘He never seemed to resent [being found out]. He just didn’t care. He wouldn’t get mad. He’d be back the next day talking the same as ever.'”
One of the key threads of Caro’s books on Johnson is that this element of Johnson’s personality never changed.
Interesting, I agree with this and your other comments elsewhere about the lack of information/public insight on these guys characters being a major factor.
It’s been a while since I read the Caro books, but I do remember reading about the Senate race against Coke Stevenson, and how LBJ would do something unethical, Coke would call him out on it, and LBJ would basically just turn it right back on Coke. Meanwhile voters were left with, “politicians… they all do it” and it was tough for them to tell what was going on.
Still not sure that’s a good reason to withhold criticism of Trump though. Regardless of what the media enviromnent was when LBJ was in office, we can see what Trump is like now. Reading Caro was the nail in the coffin for me in terms of viewing politicians as admirable people that we might want to look up to. Saying, “well Trump’s only about as bad as LBJ” is a very, very low bar.
Still not sure that’s a good reason to withhold criticism of Trump though.
It isn’t. But it’s a good reason not to treat Trump as an unprecedented evil or think that he represents a nadir in the history of the presidency (either with respect to policies or character).
Saying, “well Trump’s only about as bad as LBJ” is a very, very low bar.
I wouldn’t say that — LBJ was notably worse in both character and policy (Vietnam was easily the worst political decision in the post-war era). As were Nixon and Wilson.
LBJ was vilified to the point that he did not run for a second term. Initially, he was seen as an unfortunate necessity to balance the ticket of an East Coast, Harvard elite, Catholic. The assassination of JFK led to a period of memorializing that included the passage of Medicare and the Civil Rights Act. While this was happening, many liberals saw LBJ as a semi acceptable surrogate. During the 1964 election, Goldwater was considered the prowar candidate and served as a lightning rod for liberal disdain. When the war continued to be prosecuted, the chorus of “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today” started.
By 1968 Johnson had a 35% approval rating.
Trump has 90% (!) or somethimg approval among Republicans. Thats why he is running again.
Crying about how ppl are so mean to Trump is really sad.
I forgot about this. Trump has solid support from his party. LBJ had a splintered party with Eugene McCarthy and especially RFK taking a large part of the Democrats.
There was some truth to LBJ lack of popularity for not running but LBJ started getting heart diseases and would pass away in less than 5 years. (He died 2 days after Nixon 1973 inauguration.) So I do believe LBJ was getting sense he could not handle another four years as President.
Johnson inherited the presidency from Kennedy, who was revered. People didn’t want to attack him too strongly because they felt in a time of crisis (post Kennedy assassination) that doing so would put them against the side of JFK, which people were united behind as a result of the assassination.
That point is salient. LBJ succeeded after an assassination that traumatized the nation. Trump was elected in an election that divided the nation, or at least the chattering classes, with perhaps 90% of the opinionating journalists thinking he was a Bad Person ™.
Kling nails it. It’s mostly #3 and then #1+#4. The culture makers collectively present political allies as heroes and political rivals as villains. The cultural left doesn’t see Trump’s “character” as a problem, it simply fights against political rivals, particularly those that fight back in the culture war.
Nah, Trump is our Nixon. His saving grace, he will nonchalantly cause large structural changes.
Not sure whether this is a significant factor for many, but for me the most immediate issue with Trump is simply that if you read transcripts of him talking, to anyone, for an extended period of time, it becomes clear his thinking is bafflingly wandering and incoherent, and he doesn’t notice or care enough to try to order it.
Say what you want about the tenets of LBJ and how nasty he is in recordings, at least he presents as tethered to reality. The same for Nixon, albeit he didn’t always seem tethered, but that’s just as worrying.
I skimmed the transcript you linked. I really don’t see a man who is incoherent or untethered from reality as you claim. I read a hostile interview, and some defensive answers. Nothing terribly exciting, interesting, funny, there. But I don’t see signs of incoherence or a disconnect from reality. Maybe some political deflection and defensive answers, sure.
The NYT has a goal of making Trump look bad, while pretending to be unbiased. Look at Trump’s first answer:
Well, we’re getting closer. It’s a big deal. It’s a big deal. And we’re going comprehensive. We’re not just — He announced that he was buying — today — a tremendous amount of soybeans and various farm products. And I think you’ll be given that information in a little while, too. But he announced. What he did was the vice premier came in. He was here for two days having meetings. He’s leaving tomorrow. They’re meeting again now. And negotiations are going very well.
Trump is NOT talking like an academic, nor like most other boring diplo-deniable politicians. He talks more like a salesman, or a guy among friends having a beer.
It’s a big deal. The Chinese are buying more soybeans & farm products. Here two days, things going very well.
But my dad was a salesman, and I don’t like listening to them. So I can get why academics don’t like listening to Trump; I support his policies, but don’t like listening him for too long. I prefer his tweets.
But I also oppose judging him based on what the Rep-hating press so often mischaracterizes him as saying. See below on Nate, difference between “allowing” and “without consent”.
Come on. He *is* bafflingly incoherent. That is a very good characterizations of his ramblings. What is hilarious is, you quote his word salad and it proves the opposite of your point! I’m no academic, and I’m no liberal- but I know rambling when I hear it.
But it’s not incoherent. I know what he was saying and could translate it into conventional prose, and so could you. Something like this for example:
“We’re getting closer to a deal, and it’s going to be a big, comprehensive deal. Just today, the Chinese delegation announced that they will be buying a large quantity of soybeans and other farm products. I assume you will see an official notice soon, but it was announced today. This came during two days of productive meetings which will wrap up tomorrow, and so far, negotiations have been going very well.”
We’ve had a lot of politicians who eschew conventional, educated language (and would *never* use a word like ‘eschew’). Trump’s use of language appeals to the base. They like it because he’s not putting himself above them and maybe even more so because it drives their political opponents nuts. GW Bush reportedly lost his first political race in Texas partly because his opponent was able to paint him as over-educated Yale Man. He never left himself open to that again.
And remember this experiment?
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2015/12/british-accent-almost-makes-trump-sound-smart.html
translate this: (and even if you can map his ramblings to your speculation on what it might mean, the *President on the United States* maybe should have a bit more gravatas, and not sound like a drunken bar lout, no? )
I have broken more Elton John records. He seems to have a lot of records. And I, by the way, I don’t have a musical instrument. I don’t have a guitar or an organ. No organ. Elton has an organ. And lots of other people helping. No, we’ve broken a lot of records. We’ve broken virtually every record. Because you know, look, I only need this space. They need much more room. For basketball, for hockey and all of the sports, they need a lot of room. We don’t need it. We have people in that space. So we break all of these records. Really, we do it without, like, the musical instruments. This is the only musical – the mouth. And hopefully the brain attached to the mouth, right? The brain. More important than the mouth is the brain. The brain is much more important.”
“translate this: (and even if you can map his ramblings to your speculation on what it might mean, the *President on the United States* maybe should have a bit more gravatas, and not sound like a drunken bar lout, no? )”
If you watch the clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vcor6_CRPZQ
(which I had not seen before) it’s obvious that he’s talking about breaking attendance records with his rallies and not needing an instrument or a stage full of other players to do it (and being able to fill the extra space with even more supporters). The whole thing is very Rush Limbaugh like with his ‘Talent on loan from God’ shtick (part joking self-deprecation, part real braggadocio). Not my cup of tea (nor is Rush), but I understand what they’re up to and can see the response they get from from their audiences/supporters.
And, BTW, one of the disadvantages of democracy is that masses of voters (who themselves are not among the educated elite) may prefer leaders with a common touch, foibles, and gauche, kitschy tastes like their own over leaders with refined sensibilities and ‘gravitas’.
Hell, for Trump, it’d probably be a clever political move to hang a Thomas Kinkade painting in the White House (and sure enough, now that I look, Trump tweeted positively about Kinkade when he died in 2012).
Johnson was as seasoned as any politician in history and was far more skilled at wielding his executive power, putting together multilateral deals and advancing his legislative agenda. His legislative successes gave the media (and later, the historians) something to talk about other than how un-Kennedy-like he was.
I’m slowly working my way thru Robert Caro’s four (5?) volume biography of LBJ.
LBJ was much, much worse than Trump ever was. No comparison. He’s the only American political figure I know of who ever favorably compared himself to Hitler.
The Caro books make it clear how bad LBJ was, but did he ever get caught on tape bragging about grabbing women by the pussy without their consent? Yeah I know he had a mistress (along with JFK, Bill Clinton, etc etc) but I don’t think it’s that weird at all that people are “hard” on Trump.
And, by the way, although Trump is ultra crass and IMO offers very little redeeming features for conservatives, especially compared to a replacement level republican, I think it’s possible/likely that George W Bush will end up doing more net harm overall, with just how large of disaster Iraq was. The negative effects of Trump are subtler, e.g. politicizing the fed or the FBI, or being such a poor candidate that betting markets put even Bernie Sanders — who would have very little chance against someone like Romney — has a > 55% of beating him.
What’s much more puzzling to me than LBJ vs Trump is that Trump has a 90% approval rating among republicans, especially when he isn’t particularly conservative on issues like trade or government’s role in private enterprise and where companies should put their factories.
I think the professional forecasters were initially confused by this too, which is why Trump’s odds of getting impeached (according to betting markets) were initially about 55% all through his first year. Once it became obvious that most republicans (really I think a lot driven in part by Fox News) were going to stand behind him no matter what — and of course since more time has passed too — those odds have slowly dropped, to 20% ish before the Mueller report was finished, and even lower now that it’s out.
Nate, you say it is “without their consent”. We should look at the actual quote, and context. And how Dems treat “sexual harassment”, especially from Clinton’s 1998 perjury impeachment.
Trump is bragging to Billy Bush (in 2005) about how lovely beauties ALLOW the rich and famous to do anything. (see NYT)
T: I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.
BB: Whatever you want.?
T: Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything. (Laughter…)
Trump is saying he does kiss them AND they let him do it. Letting him is consent. No means No — but they don’t say “No”. To the kiss. Mostly. Earlier he was talking about one woman who did NOT let him have sex with her. So obviously Trump does take No for answer, if the woman says No. (Unlike Clinton with Juanita Broaddrick).
Remember, Trump exaggerates. So when he says “Grab’em by the pussy”, he’s exaggerating the extreme of what the cute babe allows. While he’s not quite claiming that he does that, just that they let him, others have accused him of it. And it certainly is pretty gross.
Where are the women actually accusing Trump of grabbing them from the front? Well, here’s a list of 23:
https://www.businessinsider.com/women-accused-trump-sexual-misconduct-list-2017-12#jessica-leeds-1
Groping up a skirt, 3 years later calling her a c* (what the Dems called Sarah Palin in 2008).
Non-tender violative sex with first wife Ivana (not rape in a literal sense).
Kristin Anderson: ” He did touch my vagina through my underwear, absolutely. And as I pushed the hand away and I got up and I turned around and I see these eyebrows, very distinct eyebrows, of Donald Trump, … Okay, Donald is gross.”
[Jill] Harth sued Trump in 1997 both for sexual harassment and for failing to uphold his end of a business deal
[Lisa]Boyne says that Trump looked up their skirts and commented on their underwear and genitals. (walking across a table to leave in 1996)
…
So, lots of credible, mild, sexual harassment, at a time when Dems were supporting a Clinton who was perjuring himself in a sexual harassment lawsuit.
Trump as an alpha-male is as bad as Clinton, or LBJ (where are the comments about Jumbo, LBJs name for his porn sixed member?), or JFK. Tho as President, I doubt that he’s slept with others.
Trump denies these, but he’s probably lying (political speech).
There really IS a question – if a man kisses a woman, but she wasn’t ready for it, and she doesn’t want it, is that criminal sexual harassment? Today, probably yes, but 30 years ago probably no.
That’s part of the #MeToo movement — which has made far more alpha-male Dems resign than Reps, so far. Since the press has long been hounding Reps but allowing Dems to avoid public outrage.
Since Dem media have allowed Dems to “get away” with sexual harassment, most Reps don’t take most sexual harassment as seriously. That fact is also causing some Dems to claim, 20 years later, that they should NOT have supported Clinton’s perjury & sexual harassment. But they did, then. So the Reps, who hate double standards, aren’t going to be condemning Trump so hard on charges that were completely accepted by Dems when prior Dems did it.
Note also Harvey only got nailed AFTER Hillary lost. Not clear it would have been a problem if a Harvey supported Hillary had won. Not at all clear. So the Dem media “rules” are changing, and seem to be changing purely in order to hurt Trump, now. Many, perhaps most Reps don’t feel that’s quite “fair”. Even if they, like me, do NOT like the alpha-male assumption of their own attraction allowing them to kiss first, assuming consent.
Trump’s prior treatment of many women is as a guy wanting to kiss them more than they want to kiss him, assuming consent. Which has only been mostly true, not always.
The Yes means Yes extreme will not work, but No means No will allow an unwanted kiss, butt-grab, up skirt grope, or other touch before the woman says No.
Trump’s old behavior violates current norms. So does that of most alpha-males. We don’t really have new norms yet.
T: “I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there. And she was married. ”
Yeah, just an alpha male pressuring a married woman to commit adultery with him. Nothing to see here, I guess.
Trump derangement syndrome is nothing new either. Read Steven Gillon’s Book, “The Kennedy Assassination–The 24 Hours After”. Johnson was a paragon of sanity, common sense and measured response compared to the Kennedy people who went off-their-dials-crazy after the assassination–especially the awful Bobby–and flat refused to accept that like Johnson’s could ever be THEIR President. Nothing changes with those people.
Having read Robert Caro’s books on LBJ (3/4 of the current ones and here’s praying for the last one soon), I also had experienced the exact same thoughts.
On the other hand, as Caro says, “there’s a bright thread running through the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson..”
The speech to push Congress to pass the civil rights act 1964.. “and we shall overcome” said LBJ. Wow.
No comparison to Trump here. Or to many presidents, given his (LBJ’s) entire voting record was anti civil rights. And here he is using all his political capital and also the freedom song of the civil rights movement.
And we shall overcome.
LBJ voted to carpet bomb rice farmers. How is that civil rights?
He did some bad things. He also did some good things. He wasn’t a good person.
I have him as the seventh largest genocidal killer in modern world history. We should dig him up and publicly hang him 1.9 millions times, once for each innocent person he murdered. We should shut down his think tank. We should use his name that same way we use Hitler, to depict pure evil. Make it a felony to visit the historical library of genocidal killers.
I grew up in the Midwest and there was plenty of vitriol tossed at LBJ. Still, I think you are partially correct. The press then largely overlooked bad personal behaviors on the part of a president. They didnt report on Ike’s affair of on Kennedy’s affairs. That said, you are ignoring, I suspect willfully, a lot of Trump’s appalling behavior. What other POTUS (or POTUS candidate) publicly made fun of a disabled person. Who else ever said that a bunch of people re-enacting a Nazi ritual were fine people? Who else in the modern era set out to deliberately separate families? Who else has been so self-aggrandizing? (And the tis saying a lot since they are all a bunch of narcissists.) Who else lies so often and so obviously, and again they are all liars but he stands out.
Steve
This one stuck with me for a while.
My initial reaction was to argue that Trump was completely shameless in a way that Johnson wasn’t. That was a mistake. Johnson was a creep and did significantly more harm than Trump has. Any sense of responsibility he felt or didn’t feel at any level isn’t that important.
Arnold’s original post made it clear that he was bothered that he had not engaged when he heard the disparagement of Trump. He thought it was important to cite Johnson’s behavior. He chose to discuss why people so much harder on Mr. Trump than on Mr. Johnson.
The lesson I’d want to take away from this is that both conservatives and progressives have allowed monsters to run our country when they want a particular set of policy changes bad enough. We can either accept those rationalizations or not. I would prefer if we didn’t.
I don’t believe that the only way to change history for the better is to use an a-hole to do it. If we believe the only way to get to important change is to ignore our constitutional system and use a monster to ram something through, maybe we should change our system instead.
The foundational idea of our constitutional system was to put checks on the power of the a-holes and monsters who are predisposed to seek power.
If you assume anyone who seeks power to be an a-hole, whether they appear to be in their public persona or not (some are better at masking it), the only differentiating factor then becomes their policy positions.
Or, as the late Milton Friedman observed: “I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.”