Fever Swamp: A Journey Through the Strange Neverland of the 2016 Presidential Race

by Richard North Patterson

  111. Perhaps 2020, should President Trump flounder. But that contest promises to be a knife fight between contending Republican factions.

  112. Which it did.

  113. In the end, nothing.

  114. He did.

  115. No one did.

  116. Castellanos resolved his own dilemma by becoming a fervent Trump supporter.

  117. I had long since made this point in various pieces—it was glaringly obvious. Yet many establishment Republicans kept insisting that Trumpism is a one-time phenomenon with a sell-by date of November 2016. Good luck with that.

  118. In 2012, I often wondered if Romney believed what he was saying—his public persona had a synthetic quality. But in denouncing Trump he seemed almost happy, like a man freed at last from the shackles of contrivance. He plainly meant every word.

  119. Romney’s speech was comprehensive and telling—and had no discernible effect.

  120. This is where I started raising the question of Trump’s mental fitness for office. For the next three-plus months, it was a pretty lonely place to be—and then not so much.

  121. Carson’s devotion to Trump, often curiously expressed, was one of the small wonders of 2016—even had not Trump once called him a psychopath.

  122. Which is what happened. On Wednesday Rubio bowed out, while emphatically disclaiming any interest in seeking reelection to the Senate.

  123. Here the establishment failed once again.

  124. A major reason why the party is so lost.

  125. In fact, many establishmentarians jumped on the Trump bandwagon—yet another example of the party’s intellectual, ideological, and moral decline.

  126. Trump is where the definitions of megalomania, narcissism, and sociopathy overlap. Symptoms abound—the challenge is picking the most appropriate label.

  127. As much as anything, this characteristic defines Trump’s malady.

  128. This is how Trump organizes his world and the people in it, making him chum for Vladimir Putin.

  129. This helps explain the seemingly unbreakable bond between Trump and many of his followers.

  130. Here, Trump’s ignorance and magical prescriptions for instant success meld with the authoritarian mindset.

  131. During the primary season, incitements to violence increasingly became a component of his campaign, even as he lashed out at a growing list of scapegoats.

  132. Regrettably, Republicans of conscience were overcome by the forces of resentment unleashed by Trump—the primary process kills off what passes for moderates within the GOP.

  133. This piece began as an effort to explain the party to friends who, like the habitually religious, cling to the faith long after events should have exposed its fraudulence.

  134. One can argue that Huntsman might well have done better in 2012 than Mitt Romney to win the nomination; Romney ran too far to the right. But in the hothouse of the GOP primaries, Huntsman never had a chance. This encapsulates the party’s problem in presidential elections.

  135. Throw in automation and globalization. Trump’s promises notwithstanding, these jobs are never coming back. If anything, the end product of his demagoguery will be yet more public cynicism and despair.

  136. This, of course, is amplified by avatars of anger like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and their cousins in talk radio and the alt-right.

  137. With the summer came a new spate of officer-involved shootings that Trump tried to exploit.

  138. This will be a real problem for traditional Republicans, in part because of the populist strain introduced by Trump.

  139. Spurred by Trump, this began to happen. The exodus included movement conservatives, commentators, foreign policy and national security experts, religious leaders, officeholders, and party officials who refused to support Donald Trump. More abandoned him in October, when he was exposed as a self-professed sexual predator. But none of this mattered to Trump’s legions.

  140. Throughout the campaign, the slaughter continued apace.

  141. At one point during the campaign, the NRA was running more ads supporting Trump than his own campaign was.

  142. Money is one explanation. Another is that all but a handful of GOP primaries occur in gerrymandered districts that reward extreme positions and candidates—including with respect to guns.

  143. They were joined by Bernie Sanders, no doubt driven by a politicians usual desire to please the more militant gun owners of Vermont. This became an issue in the Democratic primaries.

  144. Though Trump tried hard. Increasingly, he embraced the NRA’s most extreme positions on pretty much everything.

  145. The problem here is salience. Most voters, including Democrats, care about many things and do not prioritize gun control. For many gun fanatics, gun rights are paramount.

  146. By then it was apparent that Clinton would win the nomination. In candor, one of my concerns was reminding disaffected Sanders supporters that this would be a binary choice, and that the stakes included the direction of the court for a generation—or more. Republicans devoted to judicial conservatism understood this very well.

  147. The social myopia of privileged Republicans is captured by this issue. It simply doesn’t affect anyone they know.

  148. Posner is that increasingly rare breed—a conservative judge with a fully formed judicial philosophy who, nonetheless, eschews political partisanship.

  149. On June 27, 2016, with Justice Kennedy casting the deciding vote, by a 5–3 majority the Supreme Court invalidated the Texas law. To many observers, including me, Kennedy’s vote came as somewhat of a surprise.

  150. Instead, all similar laws were effectively invalidated.

  151. On June 16, 2016, apparently deadlocked, the Court returned the case to the lower court with instructions to find a compromise. In this case, Scalia would, indeed, have been the deciding conservative vote.

  152. Together, the two cases illustrated how precarious Roe itself has become, and how much depended on the outcome in November.

  153. In this area, as in the voting rights cases, the GOP’s pretenses are becoming increasingly threadbare. They are not protecting women’s health, any more than they are heading off a wave of in-person voter fraud.

  154. Long before the Republican convention, Trump had signed on for the full pro-life agenda.

  155. However bloody, the story is apocryphal.

  156. After the convention passed without incident, Trump repeated this ploy by charging that the general election would be “rigged” against him.

  157. At the urging of his children, Trump later fired Lewandowski. But Lewandowski never stopped making trouble for his successor, Paul Manafort, who Trump eventually cashiered. Thereafter, Lewandowski reinserted himself as a voice in the campaign.

  158. Just how unhinged surfaced in October, in a videotape where Trump boasted of kissing and groping women without their consent—whereupon a number of women came forward to assert he had done this to them.

  159. As noted, America later learned how true that was.

  160. In September, a former Miss Universe, Alicia Machado, described how Trump belittled her for gaining weight—calling her “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping”—abusive behavior confirmed by a videotape of Trump dragging her to a gym to ridicule her in front of reporters. The nominee’s demented response was to spend four days ridiculing her through Twitter and Fox News, urging his followers to look for a sex tape that did not exist.

  161. Every now and then, one paused in amazement that Trump was getting away with this. The implications for the emotional health of the GOP electorate were alarming.

  162. In October, confronted by a brace of women who accused him of assault, he suggested that several were too unattractive to warrant his attentions.

  163. Never once did Trump exhibit any sign of understanding the fight against ISIS. Yet another instance where his indifference to substance was profoundly disturbing.

  164. Even by the standards of Republican economic voodoo, Trump’s pr
oposals were preposterous. But the GOP’s economic nostrums had long ago decamped from fiscal reality, paving the way for Trump. For the GOP’s economic conservatives, embracing ruinous tax cuts showed that he was with their program.

  165. Over drinks in the early 1980s, Jerzy Kosiński told me that the fictional Chauncey Gardiner had come to be embodied, to a certain degree, by Jimmy Carter. Jerzy died too soon.

  166. In the next two weeks, as predicted, Trump trounced Cruz and Kasich in the northeastern and mid-Atlantic states. He then wiped out Cruz in Indiana despite the fact that Cruz was supported by its governor, Mike Pence—who, nonetheless, tried to ingratiate himself with Trump. These victories clinched the nomination for Trump and drove his remaining rivals from the field. Not so incidentally, the results also left Pence looking for an escape route from Indiana, where his own run for reelection was flagging.

  167. On this date, Trump beat Cruz in Indiana, cementing a foregone conclusion by driving Cruz from the race. And though Bernie Sanders would not yield for another month, as a matter of electoral mathematics there was no way he could catch up with Hillary Clinton.

  168. Subsequently, a federal court of appeals struck down this law, saying that it disenfranchised African Americans with “surgical precision.” By a 4–4 vote, on August 31, 2016, the US Supreme Court rejected North Carolina’s appeal attempting to reinstate the law. But Chief Justice John Roberts and his three Republican colleagues voted to hear the state’s appeal. The late Justice Scalia no doubt would have voted with them—reviving a law that the appeals court said selectively and deliberately targeted minority voters.

  169. Trump has been particularly insidious in suggesting that voter fraud by minorities would steal the election from him. In truth the only “rigging” is being done by Republican-controlled legislatures that, as the court of appeals found with respect to North Carolina,“impose cures for problems that did not exist.”

  170. This is not merely a racial dog whistle—it was more like a police siren.

  171. Really? Republican dominance in the South depends on the white vote and on resisting demographic change. Roberts surely knows this.

  172. I did not attempt here to capture the shock this highly respected jurist expressed for, as he saw it, the transparent shabbiness of Roberts’s “reasoning” in the Shelby County case.

  173. Though if I’m right about the motivations of the Court’s Republicans, that hardly matters.

  174. In June 2016, the Fifth Circuit struck down the Texas law as an unconstitutional denial of voting rights. In the months that followed, federal courts invalidated several other Republican voter ID laws.

  175. Posner again, an honest man.

  176. This fact eludes their more comfortable fellow citizens, awash in ID to go with their credit cards.

  177. This may be where Kennedy began parting company with Roberts on race-based remedies. Note Kennedy’s role in the University of Texas case, discussed here as well.

  178. On June 23, 2016, the Supreme Court upheld the University of Texas by a 4–3 margin. Again, Kennedy was the swing vote; again, Roberts, Alito, and Thomas dissented. Justice Kagan recused herself because of prior involvement as solicitor general.

  179. Instead, President Trump will reestablish a conservative majority by replacing Scalia with another right-wing ideologue. And given the age of several justices, his further appointments may mold the court for decades to come, transforming American law while diminishing individual rights and advancing the GOP’s partisan interests.

  180. Some of Trump’s and Sanders’s most fervent followers shared the belief that the deck was stacked against them—and their candidates.

  181. By the end of the Democratic primaries, the margin was about 4 million.

  182. As I wrote the previous October. The Sanders demographic never changed that much. Though no one doubted his commitment to minority rights, as a senator from Vermont his attention had gone elsewhere. In the black community he could never catch up.

  183. No doubt that Wasserman Schultz was for Clinton. But her intrusions, such as they were, did not add up to 4 million votes. In any event, Russian hackers got her on the eve of the Democratic convention.

  184. One can but sympathize with Sanders voters frustrated by gridlock, polarization, and income inequality. But envisioning the passage of his agenda required a degree of magical thinking. Presented with the chance to hamstring Sanders, the congressional GOP would have made the Obama years look like the Age of Pericles.

  185. Paul Krugman, no reactionary, expressed consistent bemusement at Sanders’s proposals.

  186. I could never fathom the idea, popular among third-party voters, that voting should focus on personal expression and moral purity. The point of voting, it seems to me, is to help achieve the best possible civic outcome.

  187. In the fall Sanders spoke out strongly for Clinton over Trump, arguing that 2016 was no time for third-party voting.

  188. It is hard to imagine anything much worse than Syria. As a humanitarian disaster it has created millions of dead, displaced, unemployed, and undereducated. And the wave of refugees threatens to destabilize Europe and create a lost generation vulnerable to terrorism.

  189. One can follow the Sanders campaign and hardly realize that ISIS existed. Foreign affairs and national security remained outside his wheelhouse.

  190. Clinton’s problems tended to focus on defending her personal conduct, not her policy positions.

  191. When it came to talking about policy and issues, according to fact checkers Clinton generally hewed to the truth. Despite the common perception that neither was particularly trustworthy, an enormous gulf separated Clinton’s generally responsible statements from Trump’s chronic mendacity.

  192. For too many voters, Clinton’s animating vision never materialized.

  193. This was the campaign’s goal in planning the Philadelphia convention—and, to a considerable extent, it succeeded.

  194. In a piece written for The Huffington Post on May 24, with heady overconfidence I predicted that Clinton would carry the electoral college 347–191. Around the same time, the New York Times also forecast this precise number. In short order, Larry Sabato of the Center for Politics, the Cook Political Report, and the Rothenberg & Gonzalez Political Report landed on or near this forecast. The Times, Sabato, and I gave Clinton all the swing states Obama had carried in 2012, plus North Carolina.

  195. The major problem, it transpired, is that we had underrated Trump’s appeal to blue-collar voters in Rust Belt states—Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Still, until the startling intrusion of FBI director James Comey into the race on October 28, I was pretty comfortable with foreseeing a Clinton win with well over 300 electoral votes. So were the overwhelming majority of prognosticators.

  196. Which was remarkable. The story is infinitely weirder—and more disturbing—than, say, Joe Biden’s uncredited channeling of Neil Kinnock in a speech during his 1987 presidential campaign.

  197. As demonstrated by the fact that, having clinched the nomination, Trump kept repeating these behaviors.

  198. Trump is the latest—and by far the clearest—demonstration that the idea that business success translates into presidential capacity is nonsense. Nor can our complex constitutional democracy ever be “run like a business.”

  199. Any second-rate politician who could pass a Rorschach test would have known better than to denounce the Khan family. That Trump could not help himself was a telling indication of his compulsions.

  200. There was a certain grim amusement in watching Reince Priebus wallow in the mud bath of reality.

  201. An entire book could be written on how the media helped to elevate Donald Trump, especially during the primary season. And no doubt will be.

  202. In this crowd, Ryan looks like Erasmus of Rotterdam. The reality is more second-tier Jack Kemp. Ryan’s stated interest in the poor garnishes conventional supply-side thinking.

  203. For edification and amusement,
try Googling “Paul Krugman and Paul Ryan.”

  204. One problem with the GOP, a rueful Republican leader once told a journalist friend of mine, is that “too many in my party hate poor people.”

  205. Until Trump embraced them. For the general election, he turned over his economic thinking to ossified supply-siders like Larry Kudlow and Stephen Moore. This is how we learned that Arthur Laffer is still alive.

  206. It did. With every extreme statement by Trump, Ryan tried to straddle disagreement and support, until he resembled a man with each foot on two separate icebergs that were drifting apart. As the straddle grew more painful, his stature diminished. In fairness, Ryan was stuck trying to protect the GOP majority in the House while attempting to manage contending forces in his own caucus.