Rolling Stone Analyzes Trump's Success

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Let's face it: Donald Trump has enjoyed a lot of success running for President as a Republican candidate, though Party faithfuls detest him.  In a recent article, Matt Taibbi of the Rolling Stone Magazine explains why this is working so well.

Of course, the recent history of the party, the disaster of George W. Bush and his Iraq War, and various other factors have helped Trump, but Matt Taibbi details the events of the past year or so, and we begin to see a more complete picture of how Trump manages to keep himself ahead of the other hopefuls.

In addition to factual completeness, the Taibbi article is fun to read, because it uses the rhetoric that I would use if I knew how to use rhetoric.  Though it is unfortunate, my ordinary language is not mean enough to express how much I dislike or detest the various denizens of the Republican stable, but Matt Taibbi fills in beautifully.

I could never vote for Donald Trump, if he means what he says.  No national leader should talk that way.  I could never vote for Donald Trump if he does not mean what he says, because nobody that cynical should be allowed to speak for any nation.  So I could never vote for Donald Trump.  But according to Matt Taibbi, some of the facts Trump has been claiming are at least partly true, or at worst, exaggerations.

He doesn't owe anything to anybody, in particular: Oil Companies, Insurance Companies, Energy Companies, and Automobile manufacturers and Banks.  This is largely true; if he did, we would hear about it.  So Trump says that if he gets into office, he will pin them down and make them do what's best for America.

Well, we just don't know; Trump will do what is best for him.  Will he do what is best for the people?  He could.  But he might not.  This would be a page from Bernie Sanders's book, but the Donald has never been in office; we just don't know whether he can handle it.  Why does Hillary Clinton accept such enormous fees ($675,000) to speak at Goldman Sachs, which has been described by Matt Taibbi (in other articles) as the great Vampire Squid (that sucks the life from small businesses)?  Taking money from Big Business is a way of life for bigtime political types; this is why it is so hard to curb the influence of Lobbyists.

One piece of information that must be common knowledge to everyone except me, is that Insurance companies enjoy an exemption from the anti-trust law, which enables them to avoid competing with each other too much in every state.  In other words, they can agree among themselves to carve up the US into little territories in each of which only a few of them compete.  Apparently neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have ever considered ending this little privilege, notably Obama when creating the ACA.  Apparently the insurance industry enjoys too much power for Congress to reverse this loophole, which was put in place around 1945, if memory serves.

A particularly telling couple of paragraphs from the piece is a more general theorem that we would do well to read, understand, and be depressed to:

The electoral roadshow, that giant ball of corrupt self-importance, gets bigger and more grandiloquent every four years. This time around, there was so much press at the Manchester Radisson, you could have wiped out the entire cable-news industry by detonating a single Ryder truck full of fertilizer.

Like the actual circus, this is a roving business. Cash flows to campaigns from people and donors; campaigns buy ads; ads pay for journalists; journalists assess candidates. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the ever-growing press corps tends in most years to like – or at least deem "most serious" – the candidates who buy the most ads.  Nine out of 10 times in America, the candidate who raises the most money wins. And those candidates then owe the most favors.

Meaning that for the pleasure of being able to watch insincere campaign coverage and see manipulative political ads on TV for free, we end up having to pay inflated Medicare drug prices, fund bank bailouts with our taxes, let billionaires pay 17 percent tax rates, and suffer a thousand other indignities. Trump is right: Because Jeb Bush can't afford to make his own commercials, he would go into the White House in the pocket of a drug manufacturer. It really is that stupid.

[Italics are mine - Arch.]

[Added later:]

A lot of people of a variety of political opinions are deeply frustrated at how politically dysfunctional America is becoming.

I believe dysfunctionality is in our future for a long, long time; there are many clever people in the USA, most of them not very public spirited, who are very good at working what we call "the angles."  Shortly after credit cards were invented, there were fellows out there dreaming up clever new ways of ripping people off legally.  Shortly after Health Insurance was invented, we had an industry that figured out how to fleece the American public.  Shortly after Social Security was invented, we got people in Congress figuring out how to use it for their own pork barrel projects.  Shortly after automobiles were invented, there were guys figuring out how to sell them to people who didn't really want them.  And Advertizing.  And Television.  And the movies.  And fashion.  And the Tabloid Press.

Now a breed of politician has figured out how to get elected, just so that they can enjoy the health care that they're denying everyone else, and a fat pension.  So the GOP (and the Dems, too, in the past) are trying to see just how far they can push government dysfunctionality.  They used to think that they had to pretend to serve the people, until someone, somewhere, asked the question: Why?  What have the people ever done for us?  Furthermore, the stupid electorate will forgive its darlings anything.  Memories are short, and Mitch McConnell will be elected repeatedly by a certain beetle-browed sector of the Kentucky electorate no matter how much he contributes to the general foolishness of Washington.

Notice that though the Republican Party has a majority in the Senate and in Congress, they continue to blame Washington for all the ills of the entire nation.  That's chutzpah.  They can have both houses of Congress and the White House, and still blame Washington for everything.  Note that Obama has actually managed to reduce the national debt.  But they will blame him for not reducing it more, and they will start a number of wars for which they will burn up even more money.

If this were just a phase, and civility and cooperation were to return shortly, we could simply endure it for a while until then.  But there is some belief that dysfunction is here to stay.  The Republican Party has given up its leaderships to a gang of reckless fools who are not afraid to escalate the rhetoric of hate and hostility.  The result is success for the individuals, and failure for the nation.

Arch