• Tag Archives Trump

  • RNC Rules to Stifle Ron Paul in 2012 Could Come Back to Bite in 2016

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    The Republican National Committee, or RNC, may use the tactics it used to stifle Ron Paul in 2012 to handle a possible floor fight over Donald Trump.

    The first order of business at the Republican Convention this coming June will be to ratify new rules. What this means is that the rules the RNC agreed on after the Convention in 2012 will expire as soon as the gavel drops to open the new meeting.

    Now, usually this is mainly procedural – the party affirming the parts of the Convention rules that are still applicable, maybe changing around some things for the benefit of also-rans or the standard bearer.

    However, in recent years there’s been a push to use the rule changes to undercut the party’s more extreme, populist and anti-government wings.

    In 2012 there was a very real chance that Ron Paul’s supporters would upend the entire Convention by forcing a fight over their candidate. Rick Ungar has a good breakdown of what happened, but here’s a quick play-by-play of the situation.

    Paul’s supporters were going to use pluralities in five states to force Paul’s name onto the ballot through Rule 40 (B). The rule specified that that be the threshold for placing a candidate’s name on the ballot.

    In other words, 40 (B) said that any candidate with the largest share of delegates in five states could be placed on the ballot for nomination. If Paul, for example, had 30 percent but no one had higher, he would have a plurality.

    As a way to stop the insurgency against Romney and ensure his victory, the RNC changed the rule to a majority of delegates in eight states. Now a candidate needed to win at least 50.1 % of delegates from eight states to be on the ballot. And that’s still the way it is, and the way it will be until the 2016 Convention.

    Under these current rules, there’s no way of determining a clear delegate winner until Super Tuesday, at least. By switching from plurality to majority, it makes New Hampshire, Iowa, and South Carolina relatively meaningless. All three states will see a roster of candidates over ten deep. Getting a majority of those delegates is near impossible by primary voting.

    The problem for the RNC only gets worse when you consider the threat of Donald Trump’s poll numbers. If there’s one candidate right now who seems poised for majority delegate dominance, it’s Trump. This leaves the RNC with two options, and neither are good.

    First, the RNC can leave the nominating rules in place. This would either put Trump forward as their sole nominee, or, in another twist, would put no-one forward if no-one reached the berth.

    Second, the RNC could change the rules in an attempt to get another nominee. This would make a Trump independent run at least more probable.

    Source: RNC Rules to Stifle Ron Paul in 2012 Could Come Back to Bite in 2016


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  • Waking Up to the Reality of Fascism

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Donald Trump is on a roll, breaking new ground in uses for state power.

    Closing the internet? Sure. “We have to see Bill Gates and a lot of different people… We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that Internet up in some ways.”

    Registering Muslims? Lots of people thought he misspoke. But he later clarified: “There should be a lot of systems, beyond databases. We should have a lot of systems.”

    Why not just bar all Muslims at the border? Indeed, and to the massive cheers of his supporters, Trump has called for the “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

    Internment camps? Trump cites the FDR precedent: Italians, Germans, and Japanese “couldn’t go five miles from their homes. They weren’t allowed to use radios, flashlights. I mean, you know, take a look at what FDR did many years ago and he’s one of the most highly respected presidents.”

    Rounding up millions of people? He’ll create a “deportation force” to hunt down and remove 11 million illegal immigrants.

    Killing wives and children? That too. “When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families.”

    Political Vocabulary

    This litany of ideas has finally prompted mainstream recognition of the incredibly obvious: If Donald Trump has an ideology, it is best described as fascism.

    Even Republican commentators, worried that he might be unstoppable, are saying it now. Military historian and Marco Rubio adviser Max Boot tweeted that “Trump is a fascist. And that’s not a term I use loosely or often. But he’s earned it.” Bush adviser John Noonan said the same.

    The mainstream press is more overt. CNN’s Chris Cuomo asked Trump point blank if he is a fascist. The Atlantic writes: “It’s hard to remember a time when a supposedly mainstream candidate had no interest in differentiating ideas he’s endorsed from those of the Nazis.”

    There is a feeling of shock in the air, but anyone paying attention should have seen this last summer. Why did it take so long for the consciousness to dawn?

    The word fascism has been used too often in political discourse, and almost always imprecisely. It’s a bit like the boy who cried wolf. You warn about wolves so much that no one takes you seriously when a real one actually shows up.

    Lefties since the late 1930s have tended to call non-leftists fascists — which has led to a discrediting of the word itself. As time went on, the word became nothing but a vacuous political insult. It’s what people say about someone with whom they disagree. It doesn’t mean much more than that.

    Then in the 1990s came Godwin’s Law: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 100 percent.” This law provided a convenient way to dismiss all talk of fascism as Internet babblings deployed in the midst of flame wars.

    Godwin’s Law made worse the perception that followed the end of World War II: that fascism was a temporary weird thing that afflicted a few countries but had been vanquished from the earth thanks to the Allied war victory. It would no longer be a real problem but rather a swear word with no real substance.

    Fascism Is Real

    Without the term fascism as an authentic descriptor, we have a problem. We have no accurate way to identify what is in fact the most politically successful movement of the 20th century. It is a movement that still exists today, because the conditions that gave rise to it are unchanged.

    The whole burden of one of the most famous pro-freedom books of the century — Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom — was to warn that fascism was a more immediate and pressing danger to the developed world than Russian-style socialism. And this is for a reason: Hayek said that “brown” fascism did not represent a polar opposite of “red” socialism. In the interwar period, it was common to see both intellectuals and politicians move fluidly from one to the other.

    “The rise of Fascism and Nazism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period,” wrote Hayek, “but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.”

    In Hayek’s reading, the dynamic works like this. The socialists build the state machinery, but their plans fail. A crisis arrives. The population seeks answers. Politicians claiming to be anti-socialist step up with new authoritarian plans that purport to reverse the problem. Their populist appeal taps into the lowest political instincts (nativism, racism, religious bigotry, and so on) and promises a new order of things under better, more efficient rule.

    Last July, I heard Trump speak, and his talk displayed all the features of fascist rhetoric. He began with trade protectionism and held up autarky as an ideal. He moved to immigration, leading the crowd to believe that all their economic and security troubles were due to dangerous foreign elements among us. Then came the racial dog whistles: Trump demanded of a Hispanic questioner whether he was a plant sent by the government of Mexico.

    There was more. He railed against the establishment that is incompetent and lacking in energy. He bragged about his lack of interest-group ties — which is another way of saying that only he can become the purest sort of dictator, with no quid pro quos to tie him down.

    Source: Waking Up to the Reality of Fascism


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  • 5 Times Trump Told You He Loves Big Government

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    We all know them: friends and relatives, even media personalities, who we thought were hardline conservatives are now swooning over Donald Trump, the next great savior of the Republic.

    Over Thanksgiving dinner and many texts since, one relative explained his allegiance to Trump with exuberance. Appeals to how his belief in property rights doesn’t match Trump’s enthusiasm for eminent domain, requests for explanations on why Trump has contributed to the successful elections of such far-Left Democrats as Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, or why Trump used to be a Democrat, met obfuscation.

    Perhaps if the Trump fans heard it from the Donald himself, they might be willing to reconsider their support. So here are five instances Trump told us all he is actually a liberal.

    Cradle to Grave Nanny State

    Trump expounded on his favorite subject, immigration, during the CNN Republican primary debate. Sandwiched in between many “right-wing” fantasies was a seemingly conservative idea, but upon closer examination, it reveals a very liberal premise: “A woman gets pregnant. She’s nine months, she walks across the border, she has the baby in the United States, and we take care of the baby for 85 years? I don’t think so.”

    I guess we (the taxpayers via the government) are supposed to take care of everyone from the moment they’re born to the moment they die.

    A conservative or libertarian would recognize that welfare is as much a drag on the economy as anti-immigrant activists claim immigration is, if not more so. Yet Trump accepts our welfare state as an unchangeable, natural part of how the government cares for its people.

    Socialized Healthcare

    In an interview on “60 Minutes” this September, Trump opened up on his not-so-conservative ideas for healthcare reform. Maintaining that Obamacare, which gave the federal government much greater control over the health insurance industry, was a disaster, he said about healthcare that “the government’s gonna pay for it.”

    Here’s an excerpt, as covered by John Nolte from Breitbart (emphasis his and mine):

    Donald Trump: Obamacare’s going to be repealed and replaced. Obamacare is a disaster if you look at what’s going on with premiums where they’re up 40, 50, 55 percent.

    Scott Pelley: How do you fix it?

    Donald Trump: There’s many different ways, by the way. Everybody’s got to be covered. This is an un-Republican thing for me to say because a lot of times they say, ‘No, no, the lower 25 percent that can’t afford private. But–‘

    Scott Pelley: Universal health care.

    Donald Trump: I am going to take care of everybody. I don’t care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.

    Scott Pelley: The uninsured person is going to be taken care of. How? How?

    Donald Trump: They’re going to be taken care of. I would make a deal with existing hospitals to take care of people. And, you know what, if this is probably–

    Scott Pelley: Make a deal? Who pays for it?

    Donald Trump: –the government’s gonna pay for it. But we’re going to save so much money on the other side. But for the most it’s going to be a private plan and people are going to be able to go out and negotiate great plans with lots of different competition with lots of competitors with great companies and they can have their doctors, they can have plans, they can have everything.

    Of course, this is nothing new from Trump. The Donald has supported Hillary’s single-payer ideas in the past, and though he downplayed his support for single payer during the GOP Fox debate by saying “it could have worked in a different age,” (15 years ago, when he stated his support for single payer in the United States) when he’s pressed, he betrays his true convictions about the role of government in our lives.

    Oh, and if they like their plans and doctors, they can keep their plans and doctors. Sound familiar?

    In 2007, Trump responded to Wolf Blitzer’s prompt on Hillary’s most recent iteration of universal healthcare: “I think it was very good. It’s a very very complex setup for things going on right now in terms of healthcare, but she came out with an idea, sounds like a pretty good idea, and a lot of people like it and embraced it. “

    Also, too, from one of Trump’s books (“The America We Deserve”), he confesses his affinity for a single-payer system like that of Canada: “The Canadian plan also helps Canadians live longer and healthier than America…We need, as a nation, to reexamine the single-payer plan, as many individual states are doing.”

    Some call Trump’s plans a “clash with Republican orthodoxy,” but it’s not just that—it’s an embrace of liberal orthodoxy.

    Trump Thinks Eminent Domain Is ‘Wonderful’

    In an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, Trump opined on the subject of eminent domain,(the power of government to seize private property, with compensation, and give it to another private party for development): “Eminent domain for massive projects, for instance, if you’re gonna create thousands of jobs, and you have somebody that’s in the way, and you need a house in a certain location…because you’re going to build this massive development and going to employ thousands of people…that without this little house you can’t build the factory, I think eminent domain is fine.”

    As long as the developer believes he’s going to improve the local economy, it’s totally fine to take someone’s private property.

    In other words, as long as the developer believes he’s going to improve the local economy, it’s totally fine to take someone’s private property. Not for building a highway for public use, mind you, which is the other example Trump said was “wonderful,” but for another private entity to take and develop for private purposes. Such a position is neither constitutional (according to a literal reading), nor conservative.

    More Government Can Solve Immigration

    Want illegal immigrants deported? You can have all of them sent packing, never to return, for one low price of $400 billion!

    What does your package include? According to Reason, around 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers that would constitute yet another layer of expensive and tedious bureaucracy. For every new “frontline” enforcement officer, there is a chain of command involving even more salaried and pensioned employees, and plenty of bureaucratic red tape holding it together.

    You can have all of them sent packing, never to return, for one low price of $400 billion!

    Trump’s official position paper quotes the president of the ICE Officers Council on immigration:

    “Only approximately 5,000 officers and agents within ICE perform the lion’s share of ICE’s immigration mission…Compare that to the Los Angeles Police Department at approximately 10,000 officers. Approximately 5,000 officers in ICE cover 50 states, Puerto Rico and Guam, and are attempting to enforce immigration law against 11 million illegal aliens already in the interior of the United States…Since 9-11, the U.S. Border Patrol has tripled in size, while ICE’s immigration enforcement arm, Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), has remained at relatively the same size.”

    Those who actually believe one of government’s core problems is inefficiency and believe in the power of free markets should recognize that Trump’s policy is based on his faith that government can make it all better. Government can save your job, government can root out all the criminals, government can. But in fact, in most areas of our lives, government cannot.

    Make America Great Again

    You’re probably thinking, “What? This isn’t liberal, it’s American!”

    Let me tell you why. Vague slogans take on different meanings depending on what we read into them. Into Trump’s campaign slogan, you can read “deport the illegals,” “give everyone healthcare,” or “boost the economy.”

    But the most accurate way to read the slogan is by contextualizing it in everything else the candidate has said and done. Trump’s “Make America great again” slogan is fundamentally liberal. It’s “Yes, we can” all over again.

    Source: 5 Times Trump Told You He Loves Big Government


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