Political Irony

Donald Trump seems to have just set a speed record for flip flops. As Electoral Vote hilariously put it:

Donald Trump sat for an interview Friday with Face the Nation. By that point, it had been more than 24 hours since he had explained his deeply-held views on abortion rights, so it was time for him to switch positions again. Thus, The Donald explained to moderator John Dickerson that while he believes abortion constitutes murder, “the laws are now set.” It would be difficult — impossible, perhaps — to craft a worse position on this issue, at least from a political perspective. In one fell swoop, the GOP frontrunner managed to alienate pro-choice folks by calling them murderers while at the exact same time alienating pro-life advocates by telling them “tough luck.”

After the inevitable blowback that came once excerpts of the interview were published, Trump got a head start on his Saturday flip-flop, and switched to abortion position #5 late Friday, declaring that he would “change the law through judicial appointments.” Now, he’s got the whole weekend to shift gears to position #6, whatever it may be.

This is not the first, nor will it probably be the last, multiple major flip flop on the part of Trump. In fact, Face The Nation has put together an online quiz. “Can you keep track of Trump’s shifting responses to policy questions?” Click the link to find out.

How was Donald Trump as a businessman? Well, most of his business has been buying and selling real estate. Things he did as a landlord might be indicative of how he treats people and how he might act as president.

In 1981, Trump purchased a 14-story building facing Central Park in New York City. His plan was to demolish the building and replace it with luxury condos. The only problem was that there were tenants in the current building with leases. They were rent stabilized, so he couldn’t just raise the rent to get rid of them.

Trump’s first step was send out “lease violation” letters to the tenants. The previous owner had given tenants permission to renovate their apartments, including moving interior walls. Trump reversed that permission and gave the renters 10 days to replace the walls or face eviction. The tenants hired a lawyer and according to documents at least some of the lease violation notices were put on hold.

So what did Trump do next? He cut off the tenants’ hot water and heat in the middle of the winter. He stopped all building repairs. He let the service elevator fill with garbage, and then ordered tenants to use it instead of the main elevator. He did nothing about a rodent infestation.

Trump also sued a tenant for not paying rent, even though he had paid it. A judge blasted Trump for his “spurious and unnecessary” lawsuit according to an article in the New York Times.

But Trump kept up. The building superintendent swore in court that Trump’s building managers ordered him to not do anything for the building: no repairs, no cleaning, not even any accepting of packages. Apartments developed water leaks. One leak went unrepaired for 10 months; so long that mushrooms started growing in the carpeting. The building managers also ordered the super to spy on the tenants.

Then, Trump turned really nasty. He bought several newspaper ads offering to shelter homeless people in the apartment building, in order to get the last of the tenants to move out so he could demolish it. Trump claimed “I just want to help with the homeless problem.”

Trump may dish it out, but he doesn’t seem to be able to take it. In 1973, the US Justice Department sued Trump Management Corporation for racial discrimination (Donald Trump was the company’s president). Trump was charged with quoting different offers to tenants based on their race, and lying to blacks that apartments were not available:

According to court records, four superintendents or rental agents confirmed that applications sent to the central [Trump] office for acceptance or rejection were coded by race. Three doormen were told to discourage blacks who came seeking apartments when the manager was out, either by claiming no vacancies or hiking up the rents. A super said he was instructed to send black applicants to the central office but to accept white applications on site. Another rental agent said that Fred Trump had instructed him not to rent to blacks. Further, the agent said Trump wanted “to decrease the number of black tenants” already in the development “by encouraging them to locate housing elsewhere.”

Donald Trump’s response was to hold a press conference and call the charges “absolutely ridiculous“. He even took the bizarre step of suing the Justice Department for defamation (asking for $100 million in damages). He also called up the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division and demanded that they fire the lawyer handling the lawsuit against him. But a judge dismissed the suit filed by Trump (accusing Trump of “wasting of time and paper”), and Trump ended up settling the suit against him.

Apparently, Trump did not live up to the settlement, because three years later the Justice Department sued him again for the same thing. And on top of that, the New York City’s human rights commission started investigating Trump’s discriminatory rental practices. Trump complained to the New York Times that the investigation against him was a “form of horrible harassment.”

The state of Florida used to be the poster child for how not to run an election. But their crown is in serious danger of being passed to another state, Arizona, whose recent primary election was an unmitigated disaster. In fact, the Arizona Secretary of State even confirmed that election fraud did happen, and that failures “took place at virtually every level of government.”

First, and most importantly, the Arizona legislature failed to provide any funds for the primary. They left it out of the 2015 budget, promising to fix the oversight later, but never did. As a result, the number of polling places was slashed. For example, Maricopa County contains more than four million people (it includes Phoenix). In 2008 it had 400 polling places, but for this election there were only 60. Not only that, but the remaining polling places had as few as six voting booths. And for some reason, poll workers purposely left voting booths empty, in what appears to be deliberate voter suppression.

As a result, many people waited in lines as long as six hours to vote. Others never got the chance.

It gets worse. One poll worker testified that the election system tried to force her to give Republican ballots to Democratic party voters repeatedly throughout the day. The computer system made other errors, including showing 100% of precincts reporting, along with obviously false election results, at least six hours before the last person even voted.

There is also strong evidence that the voter database was hacked, changing the party affiliation of voters. The Secretary of State admitted this, saying “This is something that I know happened, and I know it happened to people in this room. It is not hearsay. It happened to someone in my own office.”

There should be an immediate federal investigation into this election. This obscene level of corruption and incompetence cannot be tolerated in a democracy.

Recently the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center published an analysis of the tax plans that each current presidential candidate has promised to enact (note that John Kasich has not published a tax plan). Mind you, it is Congress, not the president, who sets tax rates, but the president does have a fairly powerful bully pulpit from which to influence Congress on taxes. But regardless of that, this is each candidate’s stated goals, and it will be what the candidates will be judged on by voters in the election.

The friendly folks at Vox have taken all these numbers and turned them into graphs. In this graph, it shows how each candidate’s tax plans will affect the taxes paid by the top 0.1%, which is households that earn more than $3.7 million per year. The numbers are how much more each household will pay in taxes.

Clearly, the Republicans plan on dramatically cutting taxes for the wealthy (Cruz by $2 million per household), while the Democrats plan on raising taxes on them. But there is also a sizable difference between Clinton and Sanders. Sanders proposes that households whose income exceeds $3.7 million will pay an average of $3 million in additional taxes, while Clinton proposes they pay half a million more. Indeed, Clinton’s proposal is the most moderate and least disruptive proposal of all the candidates from either party. According to the calculations, “Under the Sanders plan, those at the top of the income scale would see their after-tax income fall by almost 45 percent”.

To make these numbers more meaningful, the tax plan proposed by Sanders would raise $596 billion just from the top one percent of households, which is more than the entire military spending budget in 2015 $583 billion). Clinton’s plan would raise $89 billion from the same group, which is more than the cost of the federal food stamp program ($78 billion). Cruz’s program would give $463 billion to the top one percent of households. Trump’s program would give $312 billion to the same group, which is less than Cruz’s plan, but Trump refuses to cut any spending, so he wins the “award” for the plan that would drive up the deficit the most.

Finally, this graph shows how much the tax rate (in percent) would change for the top 0.1% under each candidate’s plan (in absolute change):

So for example, if a (wealthy) household is paying 30% of their income in federal taxes, Sanders would (on average) change that to have them pay 59.5%.

I’m seeing quite a few articles around the web trying to answer the vexing question of how Donald Trump became popular enough to be a serious contender for the presidency. After all, he is supremely unqualified for the job and he not only lies consistently, but isn’t even consistent in his lies (often contradicting himself within hours).

For example, the recent article “Why Donald Trump?” in fivethirtyeight.com is a good read, but it pretty much fails to answer its own question. Yes, it points to the “frustration and anger” at our current elected politicians, and of course Trump “is not that”. But there are lots of people who are not that. Why is Donald Trump the one? Especially when he is so obviously and transparently a charlatan (“a person falsely claiming to have a special knowledge or skill; a fraud”) and a huckster (“a mercenary person eager to make a profit out of anything”)?

A slightly better answer comes from Paul Krugman in an article that points out the hypocrisy of the GOP establishment who denounce Donald Trump, asking:

In fact, you have to wonder why, exactly, the Republican establishment is really so horrified by Mr. Trump. Yes, he’s a con man, but they all are. So why is this con job different from any other?

Yes, Trump “talks complete nonsense on domestic policy”, but how is this different from the rest of the GOP who still propose budgets full of voodoo economics and tax cuts, while throwing even more money at our bloated military? Yes, Trump “believes that foreign policy can be conducted via bullying and belligerence”, but it was Cruz who wanted to “carpet bomb” the Middle Rast. Yes, Trump is racist, but the rest of the GOP is the party of Nixon’s “Southern strategy“, of “Reagan’s invocations of welfare queens” and ginning up fear of “Willie Horton“.

Can anyone ever solve this important mystery?

So I was overjoyed when I found a real answer. Indeed, it is science that came to the rescue! Here is a fascinating and must-read article that provides the best answer I’ve seen to our questions about Trump. If you are at all interested in this, I recommend you read the whole thing. But here’s a shorter version.

The answer comes from the study of people who, under the right conditions (such as destabilizing social change, stress, or danger), look for an authority figure to solve their problems. In a reverse case of Godwin’s law, this field originally tried to answer the question of how someone like Hitler came to power with such an extreme and hateful ideology. What they found was that a large number of people, when they are faced with physical threats or dramatic changes to the status quo, flock to authority figures who, through decisive action, seem to offer protection from their fears.

A big problem was that it is difficult to measure whether people seek strong authority figures in times of stress. After all, you can’t just ask people if they are like sheep ready to follow anyone who decisively promises to solve all their problems, even if that person is a racist demagog. The big breakthroughs came in the early 1990s, when the study of authoritarian tendencies was decoupled from the study of fascism. In other words, they eliminated Godwin’s law from their studies. This allowed them to measure authoritarian tendencies by asking people non-political, non-controversial questions. They came up with four seemingly straightforward questions about childrearing, in order to measure how much the person values hierarchy, order, and conformity. These questions ask if the person thinks it is more important for a child to:

1. Have independence or respect for elders?
2. Be obedient or self-reliant?
3. Be considerate or well-behaved?
4. Have curiosity or good manners?

This simple test turned out to be highly reliable. Just after Donald Trump won the New Hampshire primary, a large poll was taken to measure the effect of authoritarian tendencies on the current election. What they found was dramatic. Authoritarianism was the single best predictor of support for Trump. They also found that the more someone was scared by foreign threats like ISIS, Iran, or Russia (as opposed to much more dangerous threats, like car accidents and gun violence), the more authoritarian they became and consequently the more likely they were to support Trump.

Why would the public become so scared of ISIS, Iran, or Russia? Because conservative politicians (like Trump) and media (like Fox News) have been beating into their heads that the US is under attack from these dangerous outside forces.

It seems that humans are still herd animals, and a herd wants a strong leader who promises (however vaguely) to protect the herd from outsiders. And make us great … again.

UPDATE: The NY Times just published an article that provides yet another reason for the popularity of Trump – the fact that the Republican party abandoned blue-collar workers and become completely dominated by the “donor class” (epitomized by Mitt Romney, who made his money buying struggling companies, stripping their assets and firing their workers). Their conclusion? The GOP is collapsing and if Trump hadn’t come along, someone else like him would have. It was just a matter of time.