NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
October 30, 2016
The prospect of millions of Americans voting for Hillary Clinton is causing some Trump supporters to lose their minds. Former Illinois tea party Rep. Joe Walsh posted on Twitter: "On November 9th, if Trump loses, I'm grabbing my musket. You in?" Walsh was bounced out of the house in 2012 after one term — showing the Illinois voters had good sense. But this stupid incendiary remark of his should be disowned and denounced by Trump himself.
It must be enraging to him that he is failing — through his own blunders — and he now has a duty to the Americans who voted for him, and those who didn't, to accept the nation's verdict and show respect for our democracy. The nonsense of a rigged election must cease.
Hillary Clinton has all but measured the drapes for the Oval Office. The editors of the cerebral New Yorker magazine in its issue dated Oct. 31, 2016 have preemptively celebrated the country's escape from Donald Trump that they expect on Nov. 8. His defeat, whether presumed or real, leaves the Republican Party bitterly and apparently irrevocably divided between what Trump has lambasted as a corrupt establishment and insurgent hard-right populists he supports when he feels like it and is not too busy opening hotels and golf courses.
But as Yogi Berra told us "it ain't over till it's over." A prime example is when Chicago was humiliated years before in the presidential election of 1948, when the Chicago Tribune went to press with a splash headline, "Dewey Defeats Truman." The ultimately victorious incumbent, like Trump, had become a national joke. The rock-hard Republican Tribune had enjoyed itself mocking Truman in doggerel, "Look at little Truman now, muddy, battered, bruised — and how!"
The Trib had reason. Truman's approval ratings had peaked at 87% after taking over from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had reached a new low of 32% in 1946. Ten percent of the labor force was on strike and in the midterms, Republicans won the House and took back the Senate. Newsweek polled 50 leading political writers and found not one prediction for Truman. Truman was up to the shock. "I know every one of these 50 fellows," he said. "There isn't one of them has enough sense to pound sand in a rat hole."
And so it proved in the presidential election that fall of 1948. Truman barnstormed across the country, assaulting the "do-nothing Congress" at every whistle-stop of a campaign that covered 20,000 miles. "Give 'em hell, Harry," was the cry from huge crowds, and he did. He won 303 electoral votes to Dewey's 189 (with the Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond scoring 39). The pollsters had done too little late polling, failed to account for the large undecided pool and the lack of real fire among the Dewey supporters — 13% of them stayed at home, a terrifying prospect for the Republican Party Nov. 8 with so many of its leaders disaffected with Trump's serial scandals.
There must have been a few tremors in Democratic hearts last week when a new Bloomberg poll in Florida raised a fear that Trump, even now, might just pull a Truman, assisted by the Obamacare cost increases and more mischievous WikiLeaks. The Florida poll gave Trump a 2 percentage point edge in the Sunshine State, where Clinton had been ahead. I have reservations about Clinton, but I've made my opinion clear that I think a Trump presidency would be a disaster for the United States. I've gone into the reasons in successive editorials on the economy, defense, human rights, foreign policy and our standing in the world.
I've tried to be fair in assessing policy — but Trump policy is baffling. Researchers at NBC News have cataloged his positions on major issues since the start of the campaign. They have found 19 different positions on immigration reform; 15 different positions on banning Muslims; nine different positions on how to defeat the Islamic State group; eight different positions on raising the minimum wage; seven different tax plans; and eight different strategies for dealing with the national debt. And the more or less consistent persistent positions are the scariest — more nukes and denigration of the president of the United States coupled with admiration for the Russian dictator.
It is intolerable that any American citizen would encourage one of the world's leading enemies of freedom, Vladimir Putin, to interfere in our election; and for a presidential candidate to do it is tantamount to treason against our democracy — and at a time when the same Putin is bombing hospitals and relief aid in Aleppo (a distinct failure of Obama policy). Trump didn't even know Russia had invaded the Ukraine.
There is also the question of Trump's insensitivity to human decency in the treatment of fellow citizens who happen to be minorities. Famously, Trump has relied on Twitter to unleash a steady stream of juvenile attacks. By The New York Times' running account, he has insulted 282 people, places and things — usually multiple times. That is to say nothing of the half of the population who still do not enjoy the equal rights that many politicians forget, especially Republicans, when they speak about a devotion to our Constitution.
Some of the resistance to Hillary Clinton is based on doubt about her character, but there is still also a subliminal doubt about gender. A new study by the Rockefeller Foundation finds that gender inequality in the workplace is one the biggest issues facing corporate America today. Women hold just 4% of leadership positions in Fortune 500 companies. "[IN 2016] 90% of new CEOs were promoted or hired from roles with profit and loss responsibility and 100% of them were men," according to the study.
Women generally earn 78 cents on the dollar, 64 cents if they are black, 54 cents if they are Latinas. It is well said, by Michelle Obama and others, that Trump's misogyny has taken American women back to a much darker time they thought they'd left behind — a time when their bodies were more important than their minds and the far darker time when their forebears were literally the property of their masters. But this is understating Trump's innate intolerance and selfish disregard for the rights of others.
Many Trumpians will vote for someone they see as a successful businessman. They seem blithely unaware of how Trump does business. He is a brilliant marketer. He has done some things very well, like restoring the Wollman ice skating rink in New York's Central Park, and some things very badly when his reach exceeds his grasp. We have had, for short times, Trump Shuttle, Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump Mortgage, Trump Magazine, a franchise in the defunct United States Football League.
That's fair enough and he may do well to bounce from aspirations to the presidency to imitating Rupert Murdoch at Trump TV with Roger Ailes at his side. But the striking fact is how in all these activities, he insulated himself when he recklessly led his companies into four bankruptcies. He ruined lenders and shareholders who put their trust in his razzle dazzle. He has no shame at stiffing people: They are all losers to him.
"The money I took out of there was incredible," he told The New York Times. He has stiffed so many people. A Wall Street Journal review of court filings from jurisdictions in 33 states found many cheated vendors, including a chandelier shop, a curtain maker and a lawyer. All said that Trump's companies had reneged on paying for goods or services. Hundreds of vendors told USA Today, too, that Trump had stiffed them. A Philadelphia cabinet-maker Edward Friel, contracted to build the bases for slot machines, registration desks, bars and furnishings at Harrah's at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City said Trump never paid the firm the final $83,600 he owed.
In 2005, he launched Trump University, promising that his very own hand-picked instructors would teach students the master's real estate investing secrets. "At Trump University, we teach success," Trump said in a video. "It's going to happen to you." The venture defied New York State orders to stop illegally using the word "university" in its name and a number of Trump University's experts had little to no real estate experience, had never met Trump and failed to deliver the promised education.
Thousands of enrollees are suing after paying between $20,000 to $60,000 for courses that proved worthless. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has labeled Trump University a fraud. Are the Trumpians still yelling at his rallies unaware or don't they care?
What a Trump presidency would look like is neatly captured in another big city newspaper. Here are headlines on a mock front page of the Boston Globe for April 9, 2017:
"Deportations to Begin!"
"ICE Force Riots Continue!"
"Curfews Extended in Multiple Cities"
"US Soldiers Refuse Order to kill ISIS families!"
"Markets Sink as Trade War Looms"
"New Libel Law Targets 'Absolute Scum' in Press"
We could think of more worrying headlines that might erupt from a Trump presidency, but the immediate anxiety threatens to come from the disappointed and demoralized party. A Democratic Senate seems within reach, even possibly containment of the tea party gerrymandered into capricious power in the House. Even that is achievable if voters want change, as they say they do after the polarized years that helped to produce the Trump phenomenon.
There are surely pragmatic bipartisan measures a President Hillary Clinton could pursue with sensible leaders like House Speaker Paul Ryan: Mend but not attempt to replace the Affordable Care Act; agree to the start of her great infrastructure program; legislate a whole new program of retraining.
But if the House Freedom Caucus has its way and we enter gridlock yet again, the opposition will deserve the contempt of the mass of fair-minded people for betraying America's best hopes for a new beginning.
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