Tag: Donald Trump

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ballot access folly general freedom government transparency national politics & policies political challengers

Trumping Popular Vote?

Donald Trump, president, landslide, election, votes, popular, electoral college

A friend, who loves to talk football, sometimes boasts that his team “crushed” the other team, gaining more yards and rolling up more first downs, before dejectedly acknowledging that his team didn’t score as many points as its opponent. They lost.

When a Democrat gloats that Donald Trump lost the popular vote, I am reminded of my friend’s funny football foible.

It helps to gain yards in football, sure, just as it helps to gain votes in a presidential contest. But you win a game by putting the most points on the scoreboard, just as you’re elected president by winning a majority in the Electoral College.

Going forward, we can discuss whether a state’s votes should be awarded proportionally or winner-​take-​all and whether national popular vote should instead be the metric for victory. But the 2016 rules were the rules.

“I would’ve won the popular vote if I was campaigning for the popular vote,” President Trump told ABC News anchor David Muir this week. “I would’ve gone to California, where I didn’t go at all.”

Still, Mr. Trump should appreciate that not only didn’t he garner a majority, he lost by 3 million votes to Hillary Clinton, who was well short of a majority, herself.

Trump continues to claim “a massive landslide” in the Electoral College. He may have “shocked the world,” but in 58 presidential elections thus far, 45 winners gained a greater percentage in the Electoral College.

Again this week, Pres. Trump repeated his belief that “millions of illegal votes” prevented him from winning the popular vote. Specific evidence? None. But he wants an investigation.

This could be a long four years.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability term limits

Trump’s Trump

Term Limits, Paul Jacob, Donald Trump

President-​Elect Donald J. Trump wasn’t my choice. Yet, as with any president of these United States, I say: work with him when he’s doing right.

And Mr. Trump is doing right by pushing Congress to vote on term limits.

Every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every week, month and year for many decades — going as far back as public polling goes — Americans have firmly and overwhelmingly supported term limits. According to a 2016 Rasmussen poll, 74 percent favor term limits for Congress, with only 13 percent opposed.

The support unites us: 77 percent of Republicans, 67 percent of Democrats and 79 percent of independents together want to limit Congress.

Don’t believe polls? How about election results?

Years ago, syndicated columnist George Will remarked, “To the question ‘Where most recently have term limits passed?’ the answer is: ‘Wherever most recently people were permitted to vote on them.” That remains the case.*

Still, the Washington Post’s Amber Phillips predicted in “The Fix” column that, “Trump’s term limits proposal won’t happen.” Why? Simple, she explained, “Congress doesn’t want it.”

Not to mention that sending the term limits amendment just introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz (R‑Texas) and Rep. Ron DeSantis (R‑Fla.) to the states for ratification requires a supermajority two-​thirds vote of both the House and Senate.

Nonetheless, a clean up-​or-​down vote on a single term limits amendment puts every member of Congress on record. And Mr. Trump is certainly capable of using the bully pulpit of the presidency — and brash enough to remind voters — should their congressman vote against term limits.

It could be Trump’s trump card come 2018.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Support for term limits even brings Mr. Trump and outgoing President Obama together. “I think we want to see new voices and new ideas emerge,” Obama declared after the election. “That’s part of the reason why I think term limits are a really useful thing.”

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Term Limits, Paul Jacob, Donald Trump

 

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Accountability free trade & free markets insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies porkbarrel politics

Crony Carrier

Carrier, crony, cronyism, Trump, corporate, illustration

Sure, I’ve complained about the over-​the-​top anti-​Trump bias of much of the mainstream media (which may actually have improved Trump’s public standing). But, today, I enthusiastically celebrate that supercilious slant.

Why? Because it means much of the media amazingly finds itself on the right side, panning the recent deal to save 1,000 jobs at the Carrier Corporation.

Saving jobs is good per se. We want jobs to stay here in America. But, at what price?

Thus far, the deal remains secret, but according to Politico, “The agreement reportedly includes $7 million in state tax breaks over ten years offered by the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, a quasi-​public entity that doesn’t require legislative approval for its deals.”

“Quasi-​public entities” always make me queasy.

“Can American companies now merely threaten to go to Mexico,” asks Chris Rossini in the Ron Paul Liberty Letter, “in order to get a sweetheart deal for themselves?”

This special arrangement’s costs are not merely monetary: Special deals for some companies at the expense of others undermine the whole concept of equality under the law.

File under: crony capitalism.

Even the socialists at The Nation say the agreement “epitomizes corporate socialism at the expense of American taxpayers.”

“I certainly think that, if President Obama had done something like this, conservatives would have been freaking out,” argues Reason’s Peter Suderman.

Many are. Well, maybe not exactly “freaking out” — but vocally opposing the idea of the not-​quite-​yet-​president picking winners and losers in the marketplace.

Crony capitalism didn’t make America great. Our revolution’s justification prompts the antithesis.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Carrier, crony, cronyism, Trump, corporate, illustration

 

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Accountability free trade & free markets insider corruption national politics & policies responsibility

United States of Corruption

Romney, Trump, crow, corruption, dinner, illustration

When Hillary Clinton assured her insider sponsors (as we learned through WikiLeaks) that there would be a crucial difference between what she tells the people and what her actual policies would be, she was not merely admitting to a private and a public face.

The President is legally, and by honor, bound to serve the American people, not Goldman-​Sachs. What she was confessing to was more than the mere appearance of a conflict of interests.

She boasted a plan of betrayal.

In that light, President-​elect Donald Trump’s international business deals seem … what? His first diplomatic meeting — with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — included his daughter and partner-​in-​business Ivanka.

It seems to at least wander into conflict-​of-​interest territory, if not stake claim and hoist up a flag proclaiming Trumpistan America!

So I was very pleased, yesterday, when the President-​elect vowed to step out from the running of his global business and branding empire.

Earlier, he had brushed off conflict-​of-​interest concerns, saying he could run his empire and … ours.

Apparently, his new White House appointees have convinced him that this business dealing while President was a huge problem. “I feel it is visually important,” he explained Wednesday morning, “as president, to in no way have a conflict of interest with my various businesses.”

Thanks, Steve Bannon?

Or, maybe, Mitt Romney, with whom he dined* the night before?

I hope Mr. Trump follows through with this, as well as distance himself from business partner Ivanka as unofficial policy advisor.

Americans did not reject Corrupt Hillary only to wind up with a Corrupt Trump set.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability First Amendment rights government transparency media and media people national politics & policies

Prestige, Trump & the Media

Donald Trump, media, journalism, twitter, tweet, direct, illustration

“Donald Trump’s election has really undermined America’s democratic prestige in China,” offered Claremont McKenna College Professor Minxin Pei on a recent hour of The Diane Rehm Show, public radio from our nation’s capital. When Pei added that it has “set back the prospect of democracy in China for years,” Mrs. Rehm let out an audible moan.

Then Diane asked her guests, “as members of the press” what they “make” of President-​Elect Trump’s “rejection of his meeting with The New York Times.”

“It seems,” bemoaned James Fallows, the Atlantic’s national correspondent, “a continuation of his not having any normal press conferences, dealing entirely outside normal press channels and seeming not to recognize the legitimacy of this part of the democratic fabric.”

“I don’t know anything about the specific details about the New York Times meeting,” admitted the Financial Times’ Geoff Dyer. Still, that didn’t stop Dyer from announcing that, “But it’s part of a pattern … to a much more conflict-​ual, antagonistic, almost bullying relationship with the media.”

Elizabeth Economy, with the Council on Foreign Relations, found it “disturbing” that Donald Trump thinks “he can be his own media, he can simply tweet out whatever he wants, he can make his homegrown videos and sort of impart his information directly to the American public, without the mediating influence of the media.”

Let’s welcome Elizabeth to America.

“We are all recognizing we’re on new terrain now and need to find some way to keep telling the truth, or our best approximation of it, in very different circumstances,” concluded Fallows ominously.

Trump, as you’ll recall, did wind up attending that meeting at The Times.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Donald Trump, media, journalism, twitter, tweet, direct, illustration

 

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ideological culture national politics & policies political challengers

Double Bubble America

bubble, Trump, election, reasons, explanations, illustration

The “unexpected” Donald Trump presidential victory has put the folks at The Gray Lady a bit out of sorts.

Heather Wilhelm at the National Review pokes and prods at the absurdities of the New York Times’s cultural cluelessness. And ably enough. So I’ll stick to The Times’s recent “six views” of America’s ideological divide:

Julie Turkewitz recognizes two well-​insulated informational bubbles at play. Nothing too controversial — or very deep.

Campbell Robertson muses upon the dominance of the “elites” against which Trump’s insurgents rebel, noting that “the elites are the still the ones who get to decide who gets to be elite.”

Laurie Goodstein takes on religious culture, making much of divergent spiritual outlooks, left and right.

Julia Preston peers at immigration and the prospect of sending a message by building a “wall.”

In the manner of the other five, Sheryl Gay Stolberg digs up real-​world people — as does our speechifier-​in-​chief, Barack Obama — to lightly probe questions of assimilation versus multiculturalism.

Manny Fernandez concludes with a (yawn) discussion of giving and taking offense.

They all miss the underlying structural basis for the divide.

On one side: folks working in the private sector — or local governments and charities, or at home — who have seen the world pass them by in terms of income and security.

On the other: government workers and consultants (and other college grads) who make more, on average, than their “real world” counterparts.

The latter has advanced as a class; the former remain in stasis … at best.

A mystery?

No — it’s the predictable result of what Thomas Jefferson called “the parasite institutions now consuming us.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Original (cc) photo by diana MĂRGĂRIT at Flickr