Trump is a disaster, Part 1

Trump is a disaster. Period. Anyone who wasn't an active supporter who says there is an upside to his election is full of crap. Okay, they are probably self-deluded and not intentionally selling crap, but you still should not be led to believe his election is anything but a disaster. I stayed quiet online for almost a week to avoid exploding. I'm nowhere near not exploding, but I'll risk making some preliminary observations.

Observation 1. Who is Trump?

Trump is a petty, mysogynistic, racist, narcissist lacking in any trace of human empathy. But what does he believe? At the top, he "believes" in anything that profits Donald Trump or makes him look good. Some people will point out that, in the past, he has said and done some things that do not fit with the extreme ideological right. During the primaries, the far right siezed on these statements to say he wasn't one of them. Now, the naive middle siezes on these statements to say he won't be as bad as all that. They are both wrong.

Trump only cares about Trump. Having said certain things in public, he'll stand by them as much as he feels he must to keep his followers. He will surround himself (and is) with extremists. His campaign rhetoric attracted extremists. The best way to keep them loving Trump is to give them what they want and put their idols in positions of power. He has no incentive to defy the people who elected him. He is not going to moderate his campaign positions unless he sees it as a way to improve his position. Extremism forever.

Trump is also a visciously petty and vindictive man. So are his followers. He will explore the possibilities of using the power of the federal government to settle personal scores. His advisors might convince him not to try it without us ever hearing about it in public, but don't think the conversations aren't happening.

NEXT: Part 2, The environment

Ryan's SUPER SECRET plan to steal the election

Lately, I've seen a couple articles explaining how Republicans could keep Trump out of the White House without using convention shenanigans. It would have the added bonus of also keeping the Democratic nominee out. The secret lies in a little known provision of the Constitution to throw the election to the House. There are two versions. Both are pretty ridiculous speculation. They involve the Electoral College...

Most people know that the president is not chosen by a popular vote, they're chosen by the Electoral College (fun fact: the phrase "Electoral College" is not in the Constitution). That same most people probably don't think about what that means very often, if ever. When we vote for in November, we are not voting for our preferred presidential candidate. We are voting for a slate of people who promise to vote for that candidate five weeks later in Washington. If no one gets a majority in that election the House of Representatives holds its own election. Each state gets one vote. To get that, the state delegations hold a mini-election. The winner of that vote is the state's vote in the House vote. Got that?

Here's version one, from Huffington Post. Faced with Trump being their candidate, panicking establishment Republicans slap together a third party team that takes enough electoral votes from both sides that neither one has a majority. The election is thrown to the Republican dominated House who elect their chosen third party team. There are several glaring flaws in this clever scheme. In many states, it's already too late to get onto the ballot. More importantly, getting votes is not enough; they need to take entire states to collect electors. In 1992, Ross Perot (remember him?) gained 19 million, votes but didn't win a single state. Even more difficult is the fact that these states have to draw from both sides of the aisle to throw the vote to the House. It's hard to imagine Democratic leaning states to flock to the banner of a hand-picked, Republican establishment team.

Version two is from the Washington Post. This one is not only unlikely, it has the added feature of causing a major constitutional crisis. Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the Constitution says: "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors... [italics mine]." In the early days of the Republic, many states did not allow the voters to choose the electors. The manner they directed was for the legislature to hold a vote for the electoral slates. This was based on the general fear of mob rule held by the upper classes. This is why many states originally only extended the vote to property owners and why Senators were not elected by a popular vote until 1913.

The version two clever scheme is that a bunch of states will change their laws returning the election of electors to the legislatures. The majority of states have Republican legislatures making it possible to steal the election from both Trump and the Democratic candidate. The result would be be multiple constitutional crises at both the federal and state level, endless lawsuits, hundreds of recall elections, and probably violent protests. Changing electoral law in the middle of an election is the worst election idea in the history of bad election ideas.

Basically, if Trump comes to the convention with a majority of the delegates, or even a good plurality, the Republicans have to go with him. Yes, his candidacy is almost guaranteed to be a disaster, but all the alternatives are worse.

Would you vote for a man who never punched anyone in the face?

As everyone knows, there are two things that Americans do better than any nation on earth: make pizzas and punch faces. Face punching is an under-appreciated quality in presidents. Reagan punched people in the face all the time. "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." POW! "Hey Ortega!" POW! "How do you like your fancy sunglasses now?" Kennedy was also an enthusiastic face puncher. "So, you want to put missiles in Cuba?" POW! "I didn't think so." Woodrow Wilson didn't even need a reason to punch people in the face; he did it for the pure American joy of it. FDR wanted to be a face puncher, but he could only reach the faces of people 5' 2" or shorter. Jimmy Carter never punched faces. That's why he was voted out after one term.

It's a shame Jim Webb dropped out of the race. I have no doubt he would have punched first and asked questions later. Sanders isn't on record doing much face punching, but I'm sure he has the gumption to step up and be a great Face Puncher in Chief.

The next round of debates need to test the pizza making skills of all the candidates. An informed populace is the foundation of democracy.

Walker just dropped out. That's not good

Scott Walker dropped out of the Republican primary race today. Last week, Rick Perry dropped out. Most of my liberal friends on Facebook and Twitter cackled gleefully and made fist-pumping “oh, yeah” noises over each of those. They enjoyed the schadenfreude of watching two people they disliked being humiliated and slinking home with their tails between their legs. They shouldn't have enjoyed it. Walker and Perry dropping out is bad for us.

The more people there are in the primary, and the longer they last, the better it is for us. The worst thing that could happen for us is for all of them to drop out (except, presumably for one. No one running as a Republican would be very good for us). There are two simple points involved. One is financial/economical and the other is sociological.

The money issue is the easiest to explain. Lots of candidates eat up a lot of money. Money spent running against other Republicans in the primaries is money not available to spend running against the Democratic candidate in the general election. I want the big donors to spend it all in the primaries. Walker in particular was positioned to waste a lot of money. He was the Koch brothers' anointed. They have publicly promised to spend almost a billion dollars this cycle to create a government to their liking. The longer he looked viable, the more of that money he would have sucked up. Now they are free to decide whether to spend that billion on another presidential candidate or to spread it around buying as many congressional seats as possible (which is what I would have done from the beginning). Allowing the money to become more focused is bad for us.

The sociological issue is almost as simple. The longer the primaries remain competitive without a clear front runner, the more divided the party is going into the general election. After the convention, they'll need to spend valuable time uniting the party rather than running against our candidate. The sooner someone emerges from the pack as the obvious winner, the sooner they can focus their money and supporters on defeating our candidate. Bringing the party together is a major strategic issue. The longer a party remains divided between viable candidates, the more supporters become dedicated to their candidates. The more they become dedicated to their candidate, the more they begin to see other candidates as the enemy. If the enemy wins, their enthusiasm for supporting them approaches zero. An actual convention battle would guarantee hundreds of thousands of supporters, if not millions, either staying home or voting for third parties in November. In 2008, Obama's greatest challenge wasn't defeating McCain, it was regaining the support of the Clinton bitter-enders.

My conservative/Republican friends seem to understand this calculus far better than my liberal/Democratic friends do. We look at every Republican joining the race as mere entertainment. They look at every Democrat joining the race as bad news for Clinton. We need to learn from them. If Carson and Fiorina keep up with Trump, that's great. If Jeb!, Kaisich, and Cruz stay viable, that's even better. If Jindal and those other guys look viable, that means we've all suffered major head injuries and need someone to get us to the ER as fast as possible.

To summarize: lots of Republicans = good, one Republican = bad.