Adjective by David Katz   One of the most effective rhetorical devices Donald Trump has used in primaries and in combating Hillary Clinton is to preface every mention of an adversary’s name with an unflattering adjective: Lyin’ Ted, Crooked Hillary, Little Mario, etc.). It’s a good technique, and Democrats should adopt it. What adjective to place before Donald would be most appropriate, and most effective?

I suggest “poor Donald”. It’s easy to say, easy to remember, and has implications on two levels. I think it will drive Trump nuts.

One of the implications is that Donald is to be pitied. Only losers are to be pitied (if not scorned) in Trump’s world view. The assertion that he is a loser is something, I suspect, that he has been battling his entire life.

The other implication is that he is not as rich as he claims to be. There is some evidence for this: his reluctance to release his tax returns; his many bankruptcies; and most tellingly, his meager funding of his own campaign after boasting that he has no need to be obligated to wealthy donors, since he is rich enough to fund himself.

Having alienated more and more segments of the electorate, poor Donald is having a harder and harder time connecting with enough voters to maintain the pretense of a viable candidacy. Poor Donald will soon become even poorer  if the RNC decides to withdraw funding from his presidential race in order to stave off disaster at the House and Senate levels.

Poor Donald may be on track to becoming a loser on the scale of McGovern and Goldwater. He is unlikely to carry even his home state. His campaign manager has a track record of advising oligarchic losers, like Yanukovych in the Ukraine. Poor Donald can’t even pick winners as his advisors.

Thanks, Donald by Gerry Krownstein    As scary as the thought of a Trump presidency may be, he nonetheless deserves a vote of thanks for two services rendered to the American public.

First, after decades of disguised appeals to the electorate to disregard its own economic welfare by the use of racist and xenophobic euphemisms, Trump has torn the mask off the Republican Party by saying out loud what the party’s leaders have long said covertly: fear anyone who is different and regard them as not really Americans. His promise top make America great again is really a promise to restore white privilege, and he has not been shy about making that explicit.

Second, he has shown that the Republican base does not really believe in core Republican policies, especially those of trickle down economics, unrestricted free trade, and small government (“keep your government hands off my medicare and social security”, as one of his followers said). The racist and xenophobic appeals are no longer covering the fact that core Republican economic and governmental philosophies are not attractive to the Trumpian base. The genie of rebellion is loose in the Republican Party. Even if Trump has a disasterous showing in the 2016 election, and even if the party elite manages to reach out to Hispanics, women and non-Christians to try to rebuild popular support, the myth of the viability of those long-standing tenets of Republicanism (and “conservatism”) has been punctured, perhaps permanently.

It is unlikely that the wealthy, the corporate interests, and the think-tank elites will admit that they have been so wrong for so long. Trump has shown, however, that this is the case. The party can continue to live in its alternate reality, or can choose to change dramatically to align itself more closely with reality. The latter position is unlikely to prevail.

All of which raises the question, “is there such a thing as Conservatism”, and if so, how is it defined? Certainly not as the Republican party has been defining it for the past four decades.

Again, thank you Mr. Trump

Issue #75
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New York Stringer Magazine
David Katz
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