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Moral Bankruptcy Filed by Donald Trump

Trump Files for Moral Bankruptcy

Over the weekend, Donald J. Trump did what he always does when things go south for him. He walked away. He announced he is not the man at 70 he had been at 59 when he had boasted of sexual assault, and he pledged "to be a better man tomorrow." With that, he effectively declared moral bankruptcy, paying about a dime on the dollar of sincerity.

It was, of course, what Trump had done six times in business, only this time the crisis was not about his finances, but his character. He had been caught talking trash about women. He has been caught boasting about committing the sort of sex crimes transit cops are always on the lookout for. He said he had hit on a married woman soon after he himself had been married. For all of that, he had "regret."


Then, like the angel he thinks he is, he took flight. He left his own body and, looking down, pronounced in his videotaped apology that the Donald J. Trump who said all those repugnant things, the Donald J. Trump who managed to break centuries of newspaper tradition against using certain words, the Donald J. Trump who issued a casting call for the alleged victims of Bill Clinton, the Donald J. Trump who often talked about women in the most despicable terms, the Donald J. Trump who listened to Howard Stern take apart his daughter's physique like she was a Lego creation, the Donald J. Trump who went vile on Megyn Kelly and who has called women "dogs" and "pigs" and who berated a former Miss Universe for gaining weight and who made a tabloid spectacle of his extramarital affair with Marla Maples, that that Donald J. Trump doesn't exist anymore. The man erased his own past.

Anderson Cooper, one of the two moderators at Sunday night's debate in St. Louis, begged to differ. "You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?"

"No, I didn't say that at all," Trump replied. "I don't think you understood what was -- this was locker room talk. I'm not proud of it. I apologize to my family. I apologize to the American people. Certainly I'm not proud of it. But this is locker room talk." And then, forsaking segues and showing contempt for his audience, he veered into the blood-soaked Middle East. "You know, when we have a world where you have ISIS chopping off heads, where you have -- and, frankly, drowning people in steel cages, where you have wars and horrible, horrible sights all over, where you have so many bad things happening, this is like medieval times. We haven't seen anything like this, the carnage all over the world."

Bill Clinton was in the audience. He smiled from time to time, but God only knows what he was thinking. It has been almost two decades since his affair with Monica Lewinsky was revealed and yet the scandal stalks him like a vagrant cat looking for a handout of milk. We have become inured to all this -- the sex, the lying, the slippery definitions of sex, the bouncing tenses -- is, is, was, was -- the tawdriness of it all, the erasure of the line between private and public. Two men in that debate room had much to account for.

Hillary Clinton had the chance to put away Trump. She failed. He was able to pivot, to move on to other subjects, some of which, like her emails, were awkward for her. She did not dwell on the odious tape, 11 years old and stinking with rancid sexism, a dialogue between morons, two men frozen in their adolescence, and she may not have done so because of those alleged Bill Clinton victims sitting in the audience and who had been all over TV just an hour or so earlier. They seemed so pleasant, middle-aged like Hillary. She could not possibly attack them. The whole subject must bring her pain. Best to talk about something else.

And so Trump's diversion worked. He lives to fight another day, to continue to bring embarrassment and shame to the Republican Party and the political careerists who would risk a debacle of a presidency rather than take a stand on principle. Lies spill from Trump's mouth and he exudes bigotry, yet he learned long ago that only suckers pay their debts and take responsibility for what they've done. He simply moves on. If he succeeds this time, then we are not his creditors, but as morally bankrupt as he is.

Moral Bankruptcy Filed by Donald Trump

Trump Files for Moral Bankruptcy

Over the weekend, Donald J. Trump did what he always does when things go south for him. He walked away. He announced he is not the man at 70 he had been at 59 when he had boasted of sexual assault, and he pledged "to be a better man tomorrow." With that, he effectively declared moral bankruptcy, paying about a dime on the dollar of sincerity.

It was, of course, what Trump had done six times in business, only this time the crisis was not about his finances, but his character. He had been caught talking trash about women. He has been caught boasting about committing the sort of sex crimes transit cops are always on the lookout for. He said he had hit on a married woman soon after he himself had been married. For all of that, he had "regret."


Then, like the angel he thinks he is, he took flight. He left his own body and, looking down, pronounced in his videotaped apology that the Donald J. Trump who said all those repugnant things, the Donald J. Trump who managed to break centuries of newspaper tradition against using certain words, the Donald J. Trump who issued a casting call for the alleged victims of Bill Clinton, the Donald J. Trump who often talked about women in the most despicable terms, the Donald J. Trump who listened to Howard Stern take apart his daughter's physique like she was a Lego creation, the Donald J. Trump who went vile on Megyn Kelly and who has called women "dogs" and "pigs" and who berated a former Miss Universe for gaining weight and who made a tabloid spectacle of his extramarital affair with Marla Maples, that that Donald J. Trump doesn't exist anymore. The man erased his own past.

Anderson Cooper, one of the two moderators at Sunday night's debate in St. Louis, begged to differ. "You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?"

"No, I didn't say that at all," Trump replied. "I don't think you understood what was -- this was locker room talk. I'm not proud of it. I apologize to my family. I apologize to the American people. Certainly I'm not proud of it. But this is locker room talk." And then, forsaking segues and showing contempt for his audience, he veered into the blood-soaked Middle East. "You know, when we have a world where you have ISIS chopping off heads, where you have -- and, frankly, drowning people in steel cages, where you have wars and horrible, horrible sights all over, where you have so many bad things happening, this is like medieval times. We haven't seen anything like this, the carnage all over the world."

Bill Clinton was in the audience. He smiled from time to time, but God only knows what he was thinking. It has been almost two decades since his affair with Monica Lewinsky was revealed and yet the scandal stalks him like a vagrant cat looking for a handout of milk. We have become inured to all this -- the sex, the lying, the slippery definitions of sex, the bouncing tenses -- is, is, was, was -- the tawdriness of it all, the erasure of the line between private and public. Two men in that debate room had much to account for.

Hillary Clinton had the chance to put away Trump. She failed. He was able to pivot, to move on to other subjects, some of which, like her emails, were awkward for her. She did not dwell on the odious tape, 11 years old and stinking with rancid sexism, a dialogue between morons, two men frozen in their adolescence, and she may not have done so because of those alleged Bill Clinton victims sitting in the audience and who had been all over TV just an hour or so earlier. They seemed so pleasant, middle-aged like Hillary. She could not possibly attack them. The whole subject must bring her pain. Best to talk about something else.

And so Trump's diversion worked. He lives to fight another day, to continue to bring embarrassment and shame to the Republican Party and the political careerists who would risk a debacle of a presidency rather than take a stand on principle. Lies spill from Trump's mouth and he exudes bigotry, yet he learned long ago that only suckers pay their debts and take responsibility for what they've done. He simply moves on. If he succeeds this time, then we are not his creditors, but as morally bankrupt as he is.

Everyone Won At The Vice presidential Debate Except Donny T Trump

On Tuesday night, Tim Kaine was an effective surrogate for Hillary Clinton, and Mike Pence was an effective surrogate for conservatism rather than the defender of Donald Trump..

Tim Kaine wore a red tie at the Vice-Presidential debate in Virginia on Tuesday night, and Mike Pence a blue one, and those colors offered a pretty good reading of the emotional temperature of the night: Kaine ran hot, while Pence was cool.

In his opening statement, the Democrat was a chaos of motives: he tried, in a rush, to introduce himself, to make reference to a local civil-rights leader, to praise his running mate, and to signal the instability of Donald Trump, and it all got tangled in an anxious scrum. Pence was polished and clearer, and he quickly assembled a simple case for his and his running mate’s candidacy, arguing that the country was less prosperous and the world less secure than they’d been eight years ago, and that electing Hillary Clinton would mean keeping current policies in place. Kaine tried to push back. “Governor Pence doesn’t think the world’s going so well, and he is going to say it’s everybody’s fault,” Kaine said. Here, Pence cut in sharply. “Do you?” he asked. There was a flicker, at this point, of an alternative debate, one that Republicans had been looking forward to long before Trump got in the race, in which they could run against Clinton by running against the status quo. In the early going, Pence accused Clinton of being behind a “war on coal” four times—possibly with the voters of southern Ohio in mind. But Pence’s interest in this approach was only temporary, and soon that alternative debate faded away.

On the Democratic side, there had been other potential Clinton running mates—for instance, Elizabeth Warren—who might have given a sharper argument than Kaine did for why the world is in fact going pretty well. But the case for Kaine was always that he is a loyalist. In preparation for the debate, he had taken five days off the campaign trail, and sequestered himself with the Washington superlawyer Bob Barnett. (The candidates on the Democratic ticket are nothing if not try-hards.) And while Kaine has told his own story better before, on other nights, in other venues, his was not the story he arrived last night to tell. “I can’t imagine how Governor Pence can defend the insult-driven, selfish, me-first style of Donald Trump,” Kaine said, early on. Kaine explicitly challenged Pence to “defend” Trump nine times during the evening, using sheer force of repetition to move the debate on to questions that Clinton’s campaign preferred. Beneath the tactical sparring there was a deeper probe into how far the Republican Party, with Pence as its avatar, would go to defend the casino billionaire.

Pence was good at pricking liberalism. He mentioned Clinton’s insistence that “implicit bias” was at work in police shootings, and wondered how the African-American police officer who recently shot Keith Scott in Charlotte could possibly be guilty of implicit bias. He was also good at pricking Kaine. Early on, Pence picked up the overpracticed sound of the Democrat’s attacks. “Did you work on that one a long time?” Pence asked, after Kaine had rattled off a long sequence of critiques. (The answer was, obviously, yes.) “Because that one had a lot of good lines in it.” The debate had not been much anticipated, by the press or the public, and the general agreement going into Tuesday night was that it was likely to be a relatively tame affair, full of courtesies, in which two middle-aged Christian men enumerated their differences while seated. But that expectation did not account for how barbed the language of fellowship could be. “I’m going to see if you can defend any of it,” Kaine told Pence, after singling out Trump’s praise for dictators and casual talk about nuclear war.

The truth was that Pence couldn’t defend it—not much of it, anyway. On certain issues, he delivered the standard Party lines. Trump had not avoided paying his fair share of taxes over the years, Pence said; he had simply taken all the deductions available to him. (He made it sound as though claiming your father-in-law as a dependent might earn you a nine-hundred-million-dollar write-off.) But mostly Pence did not try. When Kaine pressed him to defend Trump’s statement that women needed to be “punished” for having abortions, Pence just said, weakly, “Look, he’s not a polished politician like you and Hillary Clinton.” When Pence was asked to explain Trump’s admiring talk about Vladimir Putin, he abandoned his running mate, and argued for his own, very different perspective on Russia instead. “I just have to tell you,” Pence said, “that the provocations by Russia need to be met with American strength.”

After the debate was over, the line on Twitter was that Pence had done a great deal to help the Pence 2020 campaign—that he had been working on his own behalf. But political loyalty is more complicated than that. Pence is the one who has never really been embraced by his running mate. As the debate began Tuesday night, you could not even find a biography of Pence on Trump’s Web site. But if Pence is dispensable to the candidate he is essential to the candidacy. The Trump campaign needs the enthusiasm of Republican Party regulars and the funds of its donors, and to both of these groups Pence’s presence on the ticket functions as a promise that a Trump Administration will be conservative. To see Pence backing away from some of Trump’s darker and weirder declarations, and prosecuting the case against Clinton for failing to strike a deal to keep American forces in Iraq, must have been heartening for many Republicans, because the Indiana governor was making the Party’s case as they had always imagined it would be made. In Pence, they had a loyalist of their own.

The Vice-Presidential debate started with Kaine and Pence arguing against each other, but it ended in a more diffuse dynamic, in which Kaine was an effective surrogate for Clinton and Pence was an effective surrogate for conservatism. One good way to score the debate is to say that everybody won except for Donald Trump himself. What you make of that probably depends on how you think about political loyalty.

Everyone Won At The Vice presidential Debate Except Donny T Trump

On Tuesday night, Tim Kaine was an effective surrogate for Hillary Clinton, and Mike Pence was an effective surrogate for conservatism rather than the defender of Donald Trump..

Tim Kaine wore a red tie at the Vice-Presidential debate in Virginia on Tuesday night, and Mike Pence a blue one, and those colors offered a pretty good reading of the emotional temperature of the night: Kaine ran hot, while Pence was cool.

In his opening statement, the Democrat was a chaos of motives: he tried, in a rush, to introduce himself, to make reference to a local civil-rights leader, to praise his running mate, and to signal the instability of Donald Trump, and it all got tangled in an anxious scrum. Pence was polished and clearer, and he quickly assembled a simple case for his and his running mate’s candidacy, arguing that the country was less prosperous and the world less secure than they’d been eight years ago, and that electing Hillary Clinton would mean keeping current policies in place. Kaine tried to push back. “Governor Pence doesn’t think the world’s going so well, and he is going to say it’s everybody’s fault,” Kaine said. Here, Pence cut in sharply. “Do you?” he asked. There was a flicker, at this point, of an alternative debate, one that Republicans had been looking forward to long before Trump got in the race, in which they could run against Clinton by running against the status quo. In the early going, Pence accused Clinton of being behind a “war on coal” four times—possibly with the voters of southern Ohio in mind. But Pence’s interest in this approach was only temporary, and soon that alternative debate faded away.

On the Democratic side, there had been other potential Clinton running mates—for instance, Elizabeth Warren—who might have given a sharper argument than Kaine did for why the world is in fact going pretty well. But the case for Kaine was always that he is a loyalist. In preparation for the debate, he had taken five days off the campaign trail, and sequestered himself with the Washington superlawyer Bob Barnett. (The candidates on the Democratic ticket are nothing if not try-hards.) And while Kaine has told his own story better before, on other nights, in other venues, his was not the story he arrived last night to tell. “I can’t imagine how Governor Pence can defend the insult-driven, selfish, me-first style of Donald Trump,” Kaine said, early on. Kaine explicitly challenged Pence to “defend” Trump nine times during the evening, using sheer force of repetition to move the debate on to questions that Clinton’s campaign preferred. Beneath the tactical sparring there was a deeper probe into how far the Republican Party, with Pence as its avatar, would go to defend the casino billionaire.

Pence was good at pricking liberalism. He mentioned Clinton’s insistence that “implicit bias” was at work in police shootings, and wondered how the African-American police officer who recently shot Keith Scott in Charlotte could possibly be guilty of implicit bias. He was also good at pricking Kaine. Early on, Pence picked up the overpracticed sound of the Democrat’s attacks. “Did you work on that one a long time?” Pence asked, after Kaine had rattled off a long sequence of critiques. (The answer was, obviously, yes.) “Because that one had a lot of good lines in it.” The debate had not been much anticipated, by the press or the public, and the general agreement going into Tuesday night was that it was likely to be a relatively tame affair, full of courtesies, in which two middle-aged Christian men enumerated their differences while seated. But that expectation did not account for how barbed the language of fellowship could be. “I’m going to see if you can defend any of it,” Kaine told Pence, after singling out Trump’s praise for dictators and casual talk about nuclear war.

The truth was that Pence couldn’t defend it—not much of it, anyway. On certain issues, he delivered the standard Party lines. Trump had not avoided paying his fair share of taxes over the years, Pence said; he had simply taken all the deductions available to him. (He made it sound as though claiming your father-in-law as a dependent might earn you a nine-hundred-million-dollar write-off.) But mostly Pence did not try. When Kaine pressed him to defend Trump’s statement that women needed to be “punished” for having abortions, Pence just said, weakly, “Look, he’s not a polished politician like you and Hillary Clinton.” When Pence was asked to explain Trump’s admiring talk about Vladimir Putin, he abandoned his running mate, and argued for his own, very different perspective on Russia instead. “I just have to tell you,” Pence said, “that the provocations by Russia need to be met with American strength.”

After the debate was over, the line on Twitter was that Pence had done a great deal to help the Pence 2020 campaign—that he had been working on his own behalf. But political loyalty is more complicated than that. Pence is the one who has never really been embraced by his running mate. As the debate began Tuesday night, you could not even find a biography of Pence on Trump’s Web site. But if Pence is dispensable to the candidate he is essential to the candidacy. The Trump campaign needs the enthusiasm of Republican Party regulars and the funds of its donors, and to both of these groups Pence’s presence on the ticket functions as a promise that a Trump Administration will be conservative. To see Pence backing away from some of Trump’s darker and weirder declarations, and prosecuting the case against Clinton for failing to strike a deal to keep American forces in Iraq, must have been heartening for many Republicans, because the Indiana governor was making the Party’s case as they had always imagined it would be made. In Pence, they had a loyalist of their own.

The Vice-Presidential debate started with Kaine and Pence arguing against each other, but it ended in a more diffuse dynamic, in which Kaine was an effective surrogate for Clinton and Pence was an effective surrogate for conservatism. One good way to score the debate is to say that everybody won except for Donald Trump himself. What you make of that probably depends on how you think about political loyalty.

Donald Trump Teflon Tower Tramp: 19 Reason fans want a fake Ceo in the White House that defies even their own peabody intelligence.

 Trump’s Teflon Popularity? 10 Reasons Fans Want a Faux-CEO in the White House

Trump’s mystique lies in how reality TV conflates fact and fictitious people.

Fans of “The Apprentice” franchise form Trump’s base, and their dogged allegiance and huuuuge numbers have mystified pundits. Despite constant gaffes, lies, tasteless quips, and insults from the Donald, his base pushes, pulls and sometimes punches, to put their reality TV star into the Oval Office.

Perplexed millions read his latest outrage and ask, how is this even happening? But for citizens of the United States of TV, Trump was no surprise.

Liberals missed the viability of Trump’s candidacy because it developed far outside public discourse, in faithful viewers’ minds.

“There is new evidence,” wrote CNN’s David Axelrod, President Obama’s chief campaign strategist, “Trump’s 14 years as ringmaster of ‘The Apprentice’ and ‘The Celebrity Apprentice’ were a nice foundation for his latest venture—at least in the minds of those who watched the show.”

“The Apprentice” ranked No. 1 in its time slot in its first season. An average of 20.7 million viewers watched Trump torment contestants vying for a job in his empire. The Season 1 finale entertained almost 30 million. The show’s popularity dropped every year, but even after a decade almost 5 million tuned in every week.

After 14 seasons, he is as familiar as a fat old uncle (with a duck-beak hairpiece). Fans feel connected to Unca Donald. Trump, once New York’s bombastic clown, has gradually become America’s favorite imaginary friend.

Trump’s mystique lies in how reality TV conflates fact and fictitious people. Out of its formulaic format, its “real-fantasy” doublespeak, comes Trump. Fans love this abrasive scripted business suit, America’s CEO. But do they imagine the presidency is a reality TV show: "The White House Years"?

Here are 10 reasons for this man’s puzzling popularity.

1. Fans feel “fired!” and Trump alone can give them back their place in America.

Trump supporters feel robbed. Culturally and economically, they feel America betrayed them. Bewildered and wounded, they apparently turned to TV to explain it all. And a TV hero has stepped up to make it right. Fans need Trump to come to their rescue, because they feel powerless and silenced.

Trump’s bloc wants a voice and their avatar is a loudmouth. They don’t split hairs over what he says, as long as it’s really loud. But who are Trump’s supporters? Aggrieved millions, mourning in America. Polls show that age, class, race, education and anxieties about ethnically dissimilar people all count for less than this profound sense of grief for the voice and place in society they never had, but felt they deserved.

So they’re not primarily racist, sexist or xenophobic. Fear in general—of ideas, changes and other people—is trumped by the anxiety of impotence.

2. Fans don’t know what hit them (but TV won’t tell them).

Trump fans, overall, lack education.Derek Thompson reports in the Atlantic, “Trump's support skewed male, white, and poor…the single best predictor of Trump support in the GOP primary is the absence of a college degree.” That absence exacerbates their sense that someonedissed them.

In contrast, college graduates are more likely to read for news and fun, and spend less time with their flatscreen. The blogsite Collision Detection reports, “Increasing educational level is almost perfectly inversely correlated with daily TV consumption.”

A weak education hobbles many Americans. Less education correlates with lower income, more frequent jobless periods, particularly in recessions, and slower economic recovery when jobs are more plentiful. Trump’s fans apparently haven’t read how education could open richer, more satisfying relationships and careers to them. They were busy watching TV.

3. Fans feel the grass is greener on the other side of the looking glass.

When life feels lousy, TV offers better stories to “live inside.” Katherine Wheeler studied campus-wide TV use at Georgia Southern University. Her work suggests that people who feel swamped, lonely and uncertain tend to self-medicate with TV.

And the worse they feel, the more likely viewers are to binge-watch. Wheeler’s binge-viewers felt depressed and left out of college life. But Netflix et al. didn’t cause their woes. They “streamed” as a temporary emotional analgesic.

Comfort-bingeing apparently crosses all boundaries.

When freshmen at the historically black college where I teach told me how much they love reality TV, I was frankly surprised. “Duck Dynasty”? As a white northerner, I wondered, Why would young African Americans watch this stuff?

“It’s all new to us here in college,” one student told me. “We watched with our families. It’s like we’re not so far from home.”

Another student added, “Don’t you think Honey Boo-Boo is cute? It makes you feel good just to see her!”The genre of reality TV allures broadly across many types of content, it now seems to me. Viewers enjoy the ego-stroke of comparing themselves to “those people.” “Lowdown” figures exalt viewers. Swamp people. Kardashians.

Students told me, “You feel like, at least I’m not that bad!”

And when celebrities are involved, “You feel, I’m likethem!”

“But those shows,” I said. “They seem…”

“Racist? Stupid?” Students laughed, “They’re ridiculous!”

Reality TV clearly appeals to a broad swath of Americans, but not everyone falls for Donald Trump. My students at Alabama State University avidly watched the first presidential debate. And they felt offended by Trump’s implication that some of his best friends were African American.

“Who’s he trying to fool?” one student said. “He said that because he needs us.”

But Trump’s persona still offers comfort to his TV-generated base. For them, is he a grownup Honey Boo-Boo? The line between celebrity as a familiar face and as imaginary friend is perilously narrow.

4. Donald Trump, a dream come true.

When Trump took his abusive CEO schtick on the campaign trail, people felt like they already knew him. TV watchers who relate strongly to characters, but know they are fictional, experience something called “parasocial involvement.” But when viewers feel their favorite TV folk know them, respond to them and even like them, they’ve slid into a “parasocial relationship,” essentially an imaginary friendship.

Katherine Wheeler's study found that people most alienated from their real lives are prone to fall into parasocial relationships with TV figures. For them, Donald Trump is a dream come true. Their favorite TV boss has stepped off the screen to fight for them.

Do they know who their hero is, really? Fans think they already know him—or they choose not to probe deeper. Fourteen seasons ago when Trump stepped into that reality TV limbo, the gap between show role and celebrity persona faded, and TV-induced Stockholm syndrome began to take hold of viewers.

Fans don’t judge Trump by the mores of a civil society. We need to follow etiquette TV characters can blithely ignore. That loud, volatile lout has spent more time in their homes than any real friend. And fans happily forgive Trump’s lack of manners because he is theirCEO.He would never treat them badly, right?

5. Trump (magically! manfully!) turns pain into anger and fear into aggression.

Their hero has already helped them! Fans’ fear felt weak and painful, but their newfound anger feels strong. Trump has already helped his white-male-skewed avid TV fan-base feel powerful.

But pain doesn’t morph into anger all by itself. Trump leverages power by stoking (often imaginary) fear, then twisting it into fury against anyone who stands up to him.

“Pain combined with anger-triggering thoughts motivates you to take action, face threats and defend yourself by striking out against the target you think is causing you pain,” explains Harry Mills on MentalHelp.net. And Trump offers up plenty of targets: Obama, Hillary, Mexicans, Arabs: his list of “losers” gets longer every week.

Pundits didn’t take Trump seriously as a political force, but his power trick is a time-honored favorite among tyrants. Hitler fomented fear to bond his ersatz-tribe of “Aryans,” and with an easy target, he converted their anxiety to rage. Hitler’s scapegoats—Jews, gays, blacks, artists, intellectuals, liberals, women—look a lot like the people Trump vilifies. And like der Fuhrer, Trump urges action against them. This ploy has already provoked violence. In other words, it’s working for him.

6. Fans feel better already!

It’s also working for fans. America’s imaginary friend, Unca Donald, helps people feel better about their lives. He may not share his plans for ISIS, but we know his plans for America’s losers. 

TV CEO Trump is a textbook abuser. Fans enjoy watching someone else get the kind of abuse they get in real life. It must be especially fun to watch an otherwise untouchable celebrity get yelled at by management. Trump enacts fans’ fantasies of power.

And now this bully may step into the realm of real power. In a few months, Trump will “put down” the forces that have allegedly robbed America of greatness. Will fans get to take part, too, acting out some new (reality TV) version of Krystallnacht?

7. Fans feel Trump knows them and responds to them personally.

He knows them, fans think. Better still, he embodiesand speaks for them. OnUSA Today’s webpage “Trump Nation,” a 43-year-old “businesswoman and mom,” says, “I see him as a candidate that is actually giving the people a voice and listening to what people want.” He is exactly the candidate she sees him as. He is whatever she needs or wants him to be. In other words, he validates her.

So when he opens his mouth, does she almost feel that she is speaking? His loud and whiny voice is hers. His unsubstantiated claims and blatant lies are her truths.

8. And anti-Trump people just seem ignorant.

Non-fans try and mostly fail to make sense of this strange phenomenon: a TV character might be president.

“It’s clear enough to those of us who don’t like Trump why we don’t like him,”George Saunders opined in the New Yorker. “What isn’t clear is why it isn’t clear to those who like him.” But (funnily enough) Trump supporters don’t care what the anti-Trump camp thinks. To fans, non-fans just seem ignorant.

Mainly, they’re ignorant of the wholeness that TV (finally!) offers. TV gave us Fox News, a kind of ideological mayo to glue together and smooth over the lumpy potato salad of Trump impromptu nonsense, outright lies and vague talking points. Together, Fox and Trump reflect a seamless world in which waning middle-class frustrations, privations, and fears finally make sense.

The erosion of privilege that undereducated white fans have endured is not their fault. Trump blamed someone else.

“He tells it like it is!” say citizens of Trump Nation. Actual history doesn’t matter. For example, Obama was just another American kid when wealthy, stealthy white men tugged on the thread that sewed the middle class together. Nixon knitted together the economies of the U.S. and China, Reagan unraveled financial protections, President Bill sewed up NAFTA, and George W. blanketed us all with the Patriot Act. But now fans can overlook how white male privilege (not Obama) frayed the middle class.

9. The rich, straight, white man card.

From cowboys to cops to the Donald, American TV culture teaches us to identify with wealthy white males. No one wants to be a “loser” in a country that mocks the poor, for example. People can’t blame the rich for poverty if they want to bethe rich. It has always been easier to persecute the “other” poor.

And Trump relentlessly plays that “straight white rich man” card, implying a brotherhood of wealthy men. And he has friends. Lots of beautiful, successful friends. Just ask Sean Hannity.

Fans feel a part of that awesome (implied) fellowship. But to buy into Trump’s world, fans must see themselves as he sees them: losers. After all, in his ideology, people who pay taxes, give money to charity or honorably serve their country, especially real war heroes, are all pathetic losers.

Paradoxically, self-loathing helps them share in his heights of glory. In their minds, they are already in the reality TV White House. When Trump asked, "How stupid are the people of Iowa?” his devotees, who often praise his outspokenness, happily overlooked his implicit message about them: “Gimme a break! People who promote a knucklehead must be very stupid!”

10.Bottom line: Fans like him.

Fans believe in him, facts be damned. A Trump Nation member, a middle-aged man, comments, “He must be a successful businessman because he could not have gotten where he is today if he wasn’t.” Politics excites skepticism, but fandom inspires unquestioned acceptance of its idol. Skeptics ask, “If he’s successful, why doesn’t he release his tax returns?” Fans don’t care about evidence of success. They likehim. That’s all the evidence they need.

In devotees’ progressive narrative, even epic failures can be “written off” as steps toward Trump’s ultimate success: the White House. Out on the campaign trail, George Saunders ironically expresses Trump’s apotheosis when he says, “He is blessing us… with his celebrity, promising never to disappoint us.” But Trump fans won’t read the New Yorker,much less note the irony.

Certainly, logic and reason have nothing to do with fandom’s passionate loyalty. Inside that seamless emotional space, the willing suspension of disbelief for TV’s fictional world morphs into a need to believe that their favorite TV character is the real person running for president. In November, maybe they will just turn on their flatscreen and curl up safe inside a manufactured fantasy of power.

Michele Obama South Lawn Vegetable Garden and Israeli Netafim Drip Irrigation Technology

Michelle Obama sets her garden in stone
The first lady makes it harder for a future president to scrap her South Lawn legacy.

First lady Michelle Obama is making sure that whoever inhabits the White House next doesn’t rip out her iconic vegetable garden — at least not without a big fuss.
Obama Wednesday afternoon unveiled a much bigger version of the garden that uses cement, stone and steel to make it a more permanent fixture on the South Lawn. The updates are seen not just as preserving Obama’s garden — recognized globally as a symbol of local food — but also as a way to dissuade, say, a President Donald Trump from scrapping it the way Ronald Reagan tore out Jimmy Carter's solar panels after he moved into the White House.

“I think people would be really upset,” said Marta McDowell, a landscape historian who recently wrote a book on White House gardens. She called Obama’s preservation plan “brilliant,” adding, “If it were taken out, it would truly just be a political statement.”

Unlike Obama's sweeping school nutrition reforms, the garden has largely escaped GOP ire, but it has not been without controversy. Just days after she planted the garden in 2009 — the precursor to her childhood obesity campaign — the pesticide lobby was piqued by media reports calling it organic and wrote the first lady, urging her to use conventional agriculture techniques. The White House did not write back.

The White House has already made arrangements with the National Park Service for the future upkeep of the garden, which has served as the backdrop of meetings with world leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel. It has even managed to secure a private $2.5 million funding stream for maintenance to defray the cost to taxpayers.The Garden uses Israel Netafim Drip Irrigation Technology who have and will continue to be a full partner in the South Lawn Garden. 

“I take great pride in knowing that this little garden will live on as a symbol of the hopes and dreams we all hold of growing a healthier nation for our children,” Obama said in an emotional speech Wednesday afternoon before an audience of advocates, food industry leaders and others who have helped with Let’s Move!, her signature childhood obesity campaign.

"I am hopeful that future first families will cherish this garden like we have," she added.

During a background briefing on the garden changes, White House officials were peppered with questions about whether the preservation actually prevents a future president from removing the legacy plot,

The short answer is no. “It is up to the next administration how they would like to manage the garden,” a White House official said, declining to answer the question directly. “The National Park Service will continue to maintain it.”

Neither presidential candidate, nor their spouses, have offered any indication of their intentions about the garden.Hillary Clinton has committed herself to maintaining Michele Obama's Garden  which is part of her campaign to fight Obesity in the United States especially among children. Both Hillary and especially Chelsea Clinton have supported Michele Obama's Campaign on numerous occasions . Chelsea Clinton has a Master's Degree in Public Health and is an Associate Professor at Columbia University and has published extensively on this subject. She also has a Phd from Oxford University.  

“If Trump were elected president, he'd probably dig up Michelle Obama's vegetable garden in favor of a putting green,” joked a recent piece in the Miami New Times.

Trump, known for his opulent taste, has offered few clues about his interest, or lack thereof, in changing the White House grounds or interior. His penchant for fast food, from McDonald’s to KFC chicken and taco bowls, might make him less inclined in growing kale, sweet potatoes and kohlrabi in the backyard.

“If I were elected I would probably look at the White House, and maybe touch it up a little bit,” Trump told People Magazine last year. “The White House mess needs more variation and Fast Food Chains should be allowed to set up shop in the White House West Wing or Food Hall built for this purpose on the South Lawn perhaps.”

It’s also unclear that the Clintons would adopt the garden as their own, although supporters can’t imagine them bulldozing it, either. During his administration, Bill Clinton kept a small vegetable garden on the roof, but declined requests to put a garden on the lawn.
(Neither the Trump nor Clinton campaign responded to requests about the White House kitchen garden 35 days before the election.)

With all the uncertainty, however, it’s clear that the latest iteration of the first lady’s vegetable garden is built to last. Sawdust pathways have been widened and replaced with blue stone. The garden features a large new, stone-paved seating area and a prominent archway, cemented into the lawn.

Underneath, a large paving stone carries an inscription: “WHITE HOUSE KITCHEN GARDEN, established in 2009 by First Lady Michelle Obama with the hope of growing a healthier nation for our children.”

The White House noted that the new structures incorporate both wood, chosen for “durability,” and steel — “combined to make the elements stronger bonded together than when they stand alone.” The wood comes from all corners of the country, including pine and walnut harvested from the estates of founding fathers Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe and the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr.

None of these changes, however, preclude the next administration from nixing the garden. It is the president’s home and he or she can do whatever their family wishes, in consultation with the Secret Service, the National Park Service and the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts — and plenty of changes have been made over the years.

Bill Clinton had a jogging path installed on the lawn after complaints that his runs were disrupting Washington traffic. George W. Bush removed it. George H.W. Bush set up a horseshoe pit. Bill Clinton scrapped it and then George W. Bush brought it back. The tennis court has been moved twice, according to Jonathan Pliska, author of "A Garden for the President," a book out this week on the history of the grounds from the White House Historical Association.

But historians like Pliska are quick to note that even in an intensely polarized political era, it’s actually exceedingly rare for a president to make a political statement with a change to the White House grounds. The removal of Carter’s solar panels stands out as a glaring example — and even then, they were removed rather quietly.

The Obama administration has sought to eliminate reasons for its removal by preparing for the garden’s future through a cooperative agreement with the park service, which already manages the White House grounds and the University of Virginia School of Architecture, which helped design the updated layout. The National Park Foundation, a nonprofit that supports the national park system, Wednesday announced it has received a $2.5 million in donations from the Burpee Foundation and the W. Atlee Burpee Company, a leading seed and garden supply company, to help maintain and preserve the garden.

“The South Lawn vegetables, fruits, and herbs inspire people across the country to eat locally, mindfully and healthfully,” said George Ball, chairman and CEO of the W. Atlee Burpee Company, in a foundation announcement Wednesday.

It’s not clear how many years of upkeep the funding would actually cover. White House officials said it was impossible to estimate how much the garden costs to maintain since it’s cared for of as part of the grounds. It was widely reported it cost only $200 in supplies to build back in 2009. The garden started out at 1,100 square feet, with 55 varieties of fruits and vegetables, but has grown over the years, to 1,700 square feet.

The new layout is roughly 2,800 square feet, the White House said Wednesday, representing a sizable expansion.

Obama has been widely credited with starting the first significant vegetable garden since Eleanor Roosevelt commissioned a victory garden outside the White House during World War II, but the precedent for presidential vegetables stretches back even further.

“It really goes almost all the way the back, though there are gaps,” said Pliska, who noted that during the Civil War, Mary Todd Lincoln was known to take White House-harvested strawberries and flowers to Union Soldiers in Washington hospitals. There are also records of James Madison ordering cabbage seeds dating back to 1809.

Today, White House chefs use the garden, which produces some 2,000 pounds of produce a year, for state dinners and family meals. Some of the produce is also donated to local nonprofits.

President Barack Obama, for his part, has woven the garden into his diplomacy. He gave Pope Francis a box of seeds from the garden when he visited the Vatican. The Obamas also routinely give heads of state and their wives honey from the first-ever White House beehive, which sits next to the garden.
"My husband will tell you one of the most frequent questions he gets from world leaders is 'How's your wife's garden?'" Michelle Obama said Wednesday.

There is also plenty of precedent for a first lady dedicating a garden. Lady Bird Johnson dedicated a major garden near the East Wing to Jacqueline Kennedy. At the end of her husband's administration, she also dedicated a brand new Children's Garden as a gift to future administrations. Both gardens are still fixtures on the South Lawn.

But whether Obama’s vegetable garden, easily the most well known of the White House gardens, can endure might be a bigger test.

“This is the only one of the first lady gardens that’s visible to the public,” said Eddie Gehman Kohan, who’s exhaustively chronicled the Obama’s food initiatives and is working on a book about the culinary history of the White House. “This is what the public sees.”

The update to preserve the garden is welcome, she said, noting that the vegetables, fruit trees and herbs have already withstood a hurricane, multiple snow storms and some very hot D.C. summers.
“This is adding physical stature to the garden to make it less likely that it will be removed,” she said.

Donald Trump Tax Troll Tower Tramp:Trump not walking the walk on his tax claims. He promises to stick it to the rich, but there’s little in his plan that matches his rhetoric.

Trump not walking the walk on his tax claims.
He promises to stick it to the rich, but there’s little in his plan that matches his rhetoric.

Donald Trump, under fire over his taxes, is casting himself as a champion of the little guy when it comes to rewriting the tax code, but there’s little in his plan that matches his rhetoric.

His promises to stick it to the rich notwithstanding, independent analyses agree the top 1 percent would be the biggest beneficiaries of his plans to cut individual, business and capital gains rates.

Though his plan would dole out more than $4 trillion in tax cuts, one study found Trump would actually raise taxes on 38 million low- and middle-income Americans.

And while Trump has railed against the special-interest provisions that pock the tax code, he’s sought to protect breaks important to real estate, the bedrock of his business and one of the most lavishly subsidized industries in the code. Among them: a deduction for interest expenses critical to real-estate developers like himself.

“I don’t think there’s any connection between the rhetoric and what he’s actually proposed,” said Len Burman, head of the centrist Tax Policy Center. “What he’s actually proposed would benefit people like him.”

That sort of sharp difference between what Trump says his tax plan would do and how experts say it would shape tax law has endured throughout the campaign, even as Trump rolled out several versions of his tax reform plans.

But that gap has taken on new urgency after leaked documents from his 1995 tax return show he took a massive $916 million loss that he may have used to avoid paying federal taxes, perhaps for as long as 18 years. Many experts suspect those losses were generated in part by savvy use of tax breaks, particularly for the real estate industry.

Trump has done nothing to dispel that notion, and in fact may be fueling it. In the wake of the New York Times report, Trump has portrayed himself as a shrewd manipulator of the tax code who’s now going to use his hard-won expertise to create justice for average Americans.

“The unfairness of the tax laws is unbelievable,” Trump said at a campaign stop this week. “It’s something I’ve been talking about for a long time despite, frankly, being a big beneficiary of the laws. But I’m working for you now. I’m not working for Trump. Believe me.”

Though he’s heralded plans to go after so-called carried interest, a tax loophole important to wealthy money managers, as evidence of his willingness to turn on the rich, experts say the sting of those changes would be swamped by his other tax cuts.

The top 1 percent would see their after-tax incomes go up by as much as 19.9 percent, according to the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation, more than twice what it projected for those in the middle one-fifth of the income scale.

The Tax Policy Center, reviewing a previous draft of his plan, came to a similar conclusion. The top 1 percent would see an average tax cut of $275,000, the group said, compared with $2,700 for those in the middle of the income spectrum.

Some average Americans would actually see their taxes go up under Trump’s plan, according to an analysis by Lily Batchelder, a former Democratic tax aide now teaching at New York University, whose conclusions were seconded by the Tax Foundation.

That’s because Trump wants to junk personal exemptions as well as the head-of-household filing status, which subsidizes single parents. Trump would simultaneously expand the standard deduction they take, but for some, the losses would outstrip the gains, said Batchelder.

It’s become a major issue in the campaign, with Hillary Clinton — who’s called for big tax hikes on the rich — lambasting Trump’s plan.

“The kind of plan that Donald has put forth would be trickle-down economics all over again,” she said in the first debate. “Slashing taxes on the wealthy hasn’t worked.”

The gap between what Trump says his tax plan would do, and what it would actually do, began more than a year ago, when he first released his plan. Many observers were surprised when Trump, after railing against carried interest and other perks for the wealthy, produced a fairly conventional Republican tax plan. He proposed dropping carried interest as promised, but analysts agreed it was still a top-heavy plan.

Chastened by the analyses, as well as complaints over the plan’s costs, Trump revised his plan, promising to focus more of its benefits on average Americans.

“The tax relief will be concentrated on the working and middle class taxpayer,” he said last month. “They will receive the biggest benefit — it won’t even be close.”

Trump backed off some of his initial proposals, dialing back plans to cut the top marginal tax rate, for example, and proposing new limits on top-earners' tax breaks, such as cracking down on their ability to pass capital gains on to heirs tax-free.

Of course, it’s hardly surprising that a Republican tax plan would mostly benefit the wealthy. They’ve become increasingly boxed in by a tax code that’s quietly become the most progressive it’s been in at least a generation, in part because of tax hikes pushed through by President Barack Obama.

The top 1 percent paid 25.4 percent of all federal taxes in 2013, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, and the top 10 percent paid 69 percent of all taxes.

The middle one-fifth paid 8.9 percent, the agency said in a June report, and those in the bottom fifth of incomes paid 0.8 percent.

“It’s hard to avoid,” said Ryan Ellis, a Republican tax consultant. “Any time you want to cut taxes, almost by definition it is going to be a fairly regressive tax cut because the taxes that are left to cut tend to be concentrated at the top.”

What’s more, Clinton has largely ignored the issue of tax reform. If anything, experts say her plans to raise a host of taxes on the rich and give several targeted tax breaks to the middle class would make the code more complicated. Said Ellis: “I don’t get the sense she’s the least bit interested in tax reform.”

But some note that Trump — even as he says his experience in real-estate tax matters makes him uniquely qualified to tackle a tax-code rewrite — has proposed little in the way of reforming the breaks from which he’s benefited.

“He’s made a big deal in the last week about how we knows all about how people like him take advantage of tax laws, but I don’t think he has any specific provisions that would change the way we tax real estate,” said Burman. “He certainly hasn’t proposed anything that would hurt people like him.”