Category: trump

From Trump’s interview with Wall Street Journal

[The short version is that he’s rambling, incoherent, and counter-factual. You should read the whole thing, but you have to have access.]

President Trump: We have money that is pouring into our treasury right now, and on January 1 it’ll become much more so. And here’s the story: If we don’t make a deal, then I’m going to put the $200 — and it’s really $67 — billion additional on at an interest rate between 10 and 25 depending.

Mr. Davis: Including even iPhones and laptops and things that people would know?

President Trump: Maybe. Maybe. Depends on what the rate is. I mean, I can make it 10 percent and people could stand that very easily. But if you read that recent poll that came out, we’re only being – most of this is being – the brunt of it is being paid by China. You saw that.

Mr. Davis: Right. Right. I mean, well, you know –

President Trump: On the tariffs.

Mr. Davis: It depends, like, who –

President Trump: Look, I happen to be a tariff person.

Mr. Davis: Yeah.

President Trump: I happen to be a tariff person because I’m a smart person, OK? We have been ripped off so badly by people coming in and stealing our wealth. The steel industry has been rebuilt in a period of a year because of what I’ve done. We have a vibrant steel industry again, and soon it’ll be very vibrant. You know, they’re building plants all over the country because I put steel – because I put tariffs, 25 percent tariffs, on dumping steel.

Right-wing propaganda and being clever about resentment

Tucker Carlson on the protestors of Kavanaugh.  It’s kind of rhetorically brilliant.

One of the rhetorical problems that the Right Wing Propaganda Machine faces is that it is fueled by resentment–all of its rhetoric relies heavily on telling “real” Americans that they don’t work as hard, but get more; they look down on real Americans; they are living off the hard work of real Americans, while continually screwing them over. It’s called producerism, the notion that there are producers, and there are parasites, and it’s long been a staple of right-wing toxic populism (a rhetoric not limited to Republicans, as this book shows).

Producerism is a kind of tricky rhetoric to use unless you’re arguing for unions, and it’s especially tricky if you’re using it to you argue for policies that actively hurt the working class. And if you’re trying to use it to argue for a political party that is giving massive tax cuts to the rich, and you’re irrationally and blindly obedient to probably the laziest President in American history, how do you do that?

Carlson can’t argue that those are the children of rich kids, and thereby condemn rich kids, because there are rich kids in the White House, who are openly using their position in the White House to make themselves richer.

So, he picks two professions in the elite that his base likely hates: orthodontists and lawyers.

One of many fascinating things about the very calculated turn on professors (it started in the late 90s) is that it wasn’t just on the basis of professors being communists or atheists (since it’s easy enough to show that most professors aren’t communists or atheists) but as rich people who don’t really work. They are, as the interviewees in Cramer’s Politics of Resentment say, people who sit down to work, and who shower in the morning. That’s true of bankers, too, or hedge fund managers, or CEO, or Trump. The RWPM needs the rage of resentment, and needs it carefully turned away from being resentful of unjust tax cuts, Trump’s corruption, Graham’s allowing Trump to buy his compliance, so it has picked targets who can’t really fight back, aren’t really the problem, but about whom it’s easy to build up rage.

This is projection–there are people who are screwing over the working class, but it isn’t professor, orthodontists, or lawyers (well, lots of them are lawyers, so maybe I have to modify that). It’s a specific kind of projection: scapegoating. And it works.