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What Constitution? (See 1 below.)
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More military vulnerability? (See 2 below.)
One day, perhaps, Democrats will conclude the first responsibility of any nation is to protect it's citizens. If this ever happens it might mean Democrats will conclude freedom should also be an entitlement.
I am always finding reasons to be critical of Democrats for de-funding the military in favor of entitlement spending.I do not make this stuff up, I just report on it and, once again, there is evidence how costly and dangerous their policies turn out to be. (See 3 below.)
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Democrats have fat cats too so now they are silent. Hypocrisy or just politics or both? You decide. (See 4 below.)
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It must kill Bret to watch this unfold. (See 5 below.)
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Will the Kiwi's move? (See 6 below.)
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Finally, William Galston has been a consistent critic of Trump. That said, I also believe much of his criticism is valid. In this most recent op ed piece I believe Galston gets at the essence of who Trump is, what motivates him, why he acts as he does and, consequently, why Trump may turn out to be a surprisingly good president when judged by his accomplishments and policies but will remain an unliked president incapable of shaking off personal baggage.
Galston portrays Trump as someone who sees everything in black and white. You are either good or bad, right or wrong, for me or "again" me. There are no shades and subtleties.
Whether these character "flaws" stem from insecurities Galston does no say but they are evident and do create issues and provide "tabs" for Trump detractors to attach themselves to and which undercut his abilities and detract from potential increased support.
Consequently, if you hate Trump you are incapable of judging him objectively and if you focus on his accomplishments you are vulnerable to "how you can defend someone so incorrigible."
As for myself, I have never denied Trump has warts but I also believe his negative attributes are similar to those Obama had and were it not for an adoring mass media who protected and defended Obama these negatives would have been more prominent. When it comes to the mass media and Trump he can do not good.(See 7 below.)
Dick
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1)Democrats Abandon the Constitution
The Kavanaugh battle lost, they claim the Electoral College, Senate and judiciary are illegitimate.
Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court has sparked a firestorm of outrage and recrimination on the left. Some attacks seem aimed at intimidating the justices into supporting progressive causes. “The Court must now prove—through its work—that it is worthy of the nation’s trust,” Eric Holder, President Obama’s attorney general, tweeted Oct. 6.
Yet the attacks go beyond ideology. Detractors of Justice Kavanaugh and President Trump are denouncing the Constitution itself and the core elements of America’s governmental structure:
• The Electoral College. Mr. Trump’s opponents claim he is an illegitimate president because Hillary Clinton “won the popular vote.” One commentator even asked “what kind of nation allows the loser of a national election to become president.” The complaint that the Electoral College is undemocratic is nothing new. The Framers designed it that way. They created a republican form of government, not a pure democracy, and adopted various antimajoritarian measures to keep the “demos” in check.
The Electoral College could be eliminated by amending the Constitution. But proposing an amendment requires two-thirds votes in both houses of Congress, and the legislatures of three-fourths, or 38, of the states would have to ratify it.
• The Senate. The complaint here is that the 50 senators who voted in Justice Kavanaugh’s favor “represent” fewer people than the 48 who voted against him. But senators represent states, not people.
Equal Senate representation for the states was a key part of the Connecticut Compromise, along with House seats apportioned by population. The compromise persuaded large and small states alike to accept the new Constitution. It was so fundamental that Article V of the Constitution—which spells out the amendment procedure—provides that “no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.” That means an amendment changing the structure of the Senate would require ratification by all 50 states.
• Judicial independence. Commentators who disapprove of the Supreme Court’s composition have urged, as one law professor put it, “shrinking the power of the courts to overrun our citizens’ democratic decisions.” Some suggest limiting and staggering the justices’ terms so that a vacancy would come up every other year, ensuring that the court follows the election returns. That could be achieved via constitutional amendment, but it would go against the Framers’ wisdom. As Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 78, life tenure for judges is “the best expedient which can be devised in any government, to secure a steady, upright and impartial administration of the laws.”
Some of Justice Kavanaugh’s detractors have demanded that if Democrats take the House next month, they open an investigation into the sex-crime allegations Senate Democrats failed to substantiate. But although Congress has wide oversight powers with respect to the executive branch, it has no such oversight authority over the judiciary. The only way the House can legitimately investigate a sitting judge is in an impeachment proceeding.
And Justice Kavanaugh cannot be impeached for conduct before his promotion to the Supreme Court. Article III provides that judges “hold their Offices during good Behavior,” so that a judge can be removed only for “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” committed during his term in office.
That puts inquiry into allegations about Justice Kavanaugh’s conduct as a teenager and young adult well outside Congress’s investigative authority, along with any claims that he misled the Judiciary Committee. Such claims could be reviewed only as part of a criminal investigation by federal prosecutors based on a referral from the Senate, the only body that may decide whether his testimony contained “material” misrepresentations. For the House to inquire into this matter would impermissibly encroach on the Senate’s advice-and-consent power.
Michael Barone has observed that “all procedural arguments are insincere.” Those who now complain about the undemocratic nature of the Electoral College and the Senate were quite content when their party seemed to have a lock on the former and held a large majority in the latter. And it is the Supreme Court’s countermajoritarian character that made possible the decisions, such as Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges, that progressives now fear are at risk of being overturned or pared back.
There’s one thing the left could do to make the Supreme Court more liberal without amending the Constitution. Some have suggested a return to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “court packing” plan, which sought to expand the court to as many as 15 justices. Nothing in the Constitution prevents Congress from expanding the Supreme Court’s membership. Article III merely establishes a Supreme Court; it does not say how many justices it should have. Congress has altered the number of justices by statute several times, most recently in the Circuit Judges Act of 1869, which expanded the court from seven members to nine. But this would require a president and House and Senate majorities willing to go down this path, likely at considerable political cost. In other words, progressives would have to win elections. And if they did that, they’d be able to change the court without making it bigger.
The anger and disappointment of Justice Kavanaugh’s opponents is understandable, as would be that of his supporters if the vote had gone the other way. They are perfectly entitled to pursue political remedies, including using his appointment as a campaign issue. They also are entitled to pursue amendments to the Constitution that would make our system of government more responsive to the popular will. What they cannot do is overturn the Connecticut Compromise guaranteeing each state equal representation in the Senate, or launch unconstitutional investigations or impeachment of a sitting Supreme Court justice. The Constitution protects all of us, even Supreme Court justices.
Messrs. Rivkin and Casey practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington. They served in the White House Counsel’s Office and Justice Department under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
Correction
An earlier version of this article misstated the author of Federalist No. 78.
An earlier version of this article misstated the author of Federalist No. 78.
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2) The American Arsenal Is
Vulnerable to Cyberattacks
Vulnerable to Cyberattacks
By Brian E. Finch
U.S. firepower could be crippled by software flaws. The Pentagon has been slow to respond.
Modern American military history is replete with examples of poorly designed weapons. Submarine torpedoes failed to explode after hitting Japanese ships. M16 rifles only could be counted on to jam in the middle of a firefight in Vietnam. Pentagon planners have since spent countless hours and billions of dollars to create acquisition programs that wring the bugs out of U.S. arms before they reach the hands of soldiers and sailors.
Despite the hard work, the U.S. still fields weapons systems with dramatic weaknesses. A new Government Accountability Office audit this month indicates that huge swaths of American firepower could be rendered inert by software flaws. There are solutions to the cyber weaknesses plaguing our arsenal, but bureaucratic inertia at the Defense Department is hampering their implementation. Faster action is needed to clear the logjam and harden America’s weapons before it’s too late.
The GAO could not have been clearer about the threat: “A successful attack on one of the systems the weapon depends on can potentially limit the weapon’s effectiveness, prevent it from achieving its mission, or even cause physical damage and loss of life.” American ships, airplanes, combat vehicles, satellites and other systems have design flaws that leave them vulnerable to debilitating cyber attacks. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is growing more reliant on automation and artificial intelligence.
The threat is far from hypothetical. Over the past decade, adversaries such as China and Russia have electronically stolen the technical plans for essentially every major project undertaken by the U.S. military, including the advanced Patriot missile system, the littoral combat ship and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. With those blueprints, rivals can try to take over U.S. weapons.
They can also try to fool critical military subsystems. Iranian interference with global positioning systems is suspected to be behind the capture of an American drone in 2011 as well as the 2016 “navigational error” that led to the detainment of a U.S. Navy patrol boat.
In 2015 Congress directed the Pentagon to develop plans to mitigate the cyber vulnerabilities of its weapons systems. In response, the Pentagon has been conducting vulnerability evaluations, but the GAO found the evaluations limited in scope and in need of monitoring and coordination.
The Pentagon has to pick up the pace dramatically and deploy measures to improve the cyber security posture of its weapons systems significantly. One such example is the Comply to Connect program, which Congress directed the military to implement in 2016. C2C tracks which devices are connected to Pentagon networks and assesses if those devices pose a security risk, allowing military officials to decide whether to upgrade each device’s security or remove it from the network.
C2C is no “moonshot” program. It was piloted by the Marines and Air Force at least five years ago, with terrific results that led to sporadic implementation in pockets of the Pentagon. In each case, C2C tools enabled cyber security officials to identify thousands of previously undetected network-connected devices quickly and remove them or bring them into compliance with security requirements. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security has successfully installed its version of C2C, the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program, on nonmilitary systems across the U.S. government.
Yet the Pentagon remains slow in deploying the C2C across all systems, so much so that Congress was forced to reissue its directive to implement the program in the latest defense authorization bill.
Expediting C2C’s deployment is just one way the Pentagon could close the gaping holes in its cyber defenses. Centralizing cyber security programs for weapons systems in a single office would also be helpful, along with ensuring programs like C2C cover more devices as the Internet of Things grows.
Securing weapons systems for the sprawling behemoth that is the Pentagon is a massive undertaking, but it must become a top priority. Anything less will put Americans in uniform at risk.
Mr. Finch is a partner at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, where he is a leader of the firm’s cyber security team. His clients include cyber security vendors that may support the U.S. Defense Department under Comply to Connect.
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3)
3)
Fighters Downed by Hurricane
By The Editorial Board
Why America’s best military aircraft couldn’t fly to escape a storm.
Hurricane Michael did terrible damage in Florida last week, and that may include some of the world’s most capable military aircraft left in its path. But why can’t Air Force F-22 jet fighters, of all things, escape a storm? Answer: They lack the parts to be operational and so were stuck in hangars to take a beating.
Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said Sunday that the damage to an unspecified number of F-22s on Tyndall Air Force Base was “less than we feared.” But maintenance professionals will have to conduct a detailed assessment before the Air Force can say with certainty that the planes will fly again. Press reports estimate that at least a dozen planes were left on the base due to maintenance and safety issues.
Welcome to a fighting force damaged by bad political decisions and misguided priorities. Of the Air Force’s 186 F-22s, only about 80 are “mission capable,” according to a July analysis from the Government Accountability Office. The average across the Air Force in 2017 was that about 7 in 10 planes were mission capable, which is still too low for meeting increasing demands.
Part of the F-22 problem is upkeep on a coating that helps the planes evade radar. Another issue is the supply chain for parts now that the U.S. no longer produces the airplane, and “some original manufacturers no longer make the parts or are completely out of business,” GAO notes. Air Force officials told GAO that a simple wiring harness requires a 30-week lead time for finding a new contractor and producing the part. Ripping out parts from planes that work, or “cannibalizing,” is now common practice in military aviation.
Then there’s scale, or lack thereof. The Air Force in the 1990s planned for about 650 F-22s, which were designed to replace the F-15. That number fell to about 380 over time, according to GAO, but in 2009 President Obama and Defense Secretary Bob Gates convinced Congress to shut down the production line.
At the time Messrs. Obama and Gates argued that the U.S. had to focus on defeating unconventional enemies (Islamic State), whereas the F-22 is designed for air dominance against conventional national forces, which could also be handled by the new F-35.
This now looks like a mistake, as Russia and China improve their military technology and the F-35 continues to have a cascade of problems. The Pentagon last week grounded the entire F-35 fleet for a fuel tube issue, though most were cleared to fly again as of Monday. Now the F-35 is the only fighter show in town. The Air Force looked at restarting the F-22 production line and predicted it’d cost billions to launch. That isn’t happening.
The larger mistake of the Obama years was cutting defense willy-nilly to pay for entitlements and other priorities, which meant military units in all branches were crunched for training, flight hours and maintenance. Budget uncertainty through “continuing resolutions” from Congress compounded the pain.
Republicans in Congress and the Trump Administration this year accepted Democratic demands to spend more on income transfers to get a bump in defense spending that included some $47 billion to get planes flying. But Democrats are promising to cut defense again if they win the House. They pretend that a vote for free health care is affordable, but damaged planes on the tarmac is one more lesson that more spending on entitlements eventually means too few planes that can fly.
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4) Democrats for Big Money
By The Editorial Board
Whatever happened to the corrupting influence of billionaires?
Democrats are still expressing confidence that they’ll retake Congress in November, and perhaps they will. One reason for their optimism is the gusher of campaign money coming their way this year, and notice how you don’t hear liberals complaining about the corrupting power of money in politics.
Democrats are rolling in cash as liberal interest groups, unions and rich liberals are fired up, while business lobbies hedge their bets in case Nancy Pelosi is the next Speaker. Mrs. Pelosi remembers who gives—and who doesn’t.
The abortion-rights lobby is dumping cash into House races, including a recent $1 million ad buy from NARAL that targets GOP Members in swing districts such as Peter Roskam in Illinois and Kevin Yoder in Kansas. (The GOP agenda “harms and silences women,” the ad says.) Planned Parenthood said last month the group will spend $20 million on voter turnout.
Then there are billionaires like Mike Bloomberg, who is spending $80 million to turn the House and another $20 million to make Chuck Schumer Senate Majority Leader. And don’t forget Tom Steyer, the West Coast impeachment campaigner who plans to spend more than $100 million through various proxies. Mr. Steyer is spending more than $5 million alone for Andrew Gillum, the progressive Democrat running for Governor in Florida.
Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke, known mostly for gushing media profiles, announced an extraordinary fundraising total of $38.1 million last quarter. He’s been dining out on the fact that he doesn’t take donations from political action committees, which can spend on his behalf without his approval. Mr. O’Rourke’s windfall shows how much national Democrats want to defeat Senator Ted Cruz, who is still leading in the polls.
Money isn’t destiny in politics but it does have consequences. It has helped House Democrats expand their list of targeted seats as more than 60 of their candidates raised more than $1 million in the last quarter. That money edge is forcing less-flush Republicans to practice political triage and cut off some incumbents who are trailing in the polls.
The money flood also exposes the liberal canard about the threat to democracy from “dark money.” Donations to candidates and parties must be reported, and Democrats benefit as much as Republicans from groups that do issue advertising and can in some cases keep their donations secret. How do you think liberals know enough to complain about the campaign donations of the Koch brothers or Las Vegas businessman Sheldon Adelson?
We believe campaign spending is a form of political speech, but remember this year’s cash boom the next time Democrats bemoan Citizens United as the Supreme Court decision that destroyed democracy. Democrats will cash all of Mr. Bloomberg’s checks and anyone else’s this year. And if progressives win control of Congress, their best friend will have been their supposed biggest enemy: money in politics.
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5) Democrats Are Blowing It, Again
Liberals have become Donald Trump’s unwitting allies.
By Bret Stephens
Michael Kelly, the legendary journalist who died covering the invasion of Iraq in 2003, once wrote that the “animating impulse” of modern liberalism was to “marginalize itself and then enjoy its own company. And to make itself as unattractive to as many as possible.”
“If it were a person,” he added, “it would pierce its tongue.”
I thought of that line while reading a tweet from Nate Cohn, The Times’s polling guru: “Take everything together, and, on balance, it’s been a good 10 days of state/cd polling for the GOP in a lot of important battlegrounds.”
The “cd” refers to congressional districts, where Republicans now have at least a fighting chance of holding on to a majority despite the widely anticipated blue wave. Even better are Republican chances of holding the Senate. On Sept. 30, RealClearPolitics gave the G.O.P. a lock on 47 seats, with 9 tossups. Now it’s 50 and 6, with races in Tennessee, Texas, and North Dakota increasingly leaning right. Donald Trump’s approval rating is also up from a month ago.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not during a midterm when the opposition party almost always gains seats. Not after 21 months of Trumpian chaos. Not after a year of #MeToo. Not after Christine Blasey Ford’s emotional testimony and Brett Kavanaugh’s angry retort.
And yet it is. Predictably. Once again, American liberalism has pierced its own tongue.
It pierced its tongue on CNN this week, when Hillary Clinton told Christiane Amanpour that “you cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about.” And when former Attorney General Eric Holder said Sunday, “When they go low, we kick ’em.”
It pierced its tongue last week when New York’s Representative Jerrold Nadler pledged to use a Democratic House majority to open an investigation into Kavanaugh’s alleged perjury and the “whitewash” investigation by the F.B.I. A party that can’t change its mind and won’t change the subject meets the classic definition of a fanatic.
It pierced its tongue last month when Cory Booker and Kamala Harris turned Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing into audition tapes for their presidential bids, complete with “I am Spartacus” histrionics and bald misrepresentations about Kavanaugh’s views on racial profiling and contraception.
It pierced its tongue when Minority Leader Chuck Schumer chose to make Kavanaugh’s confirmation the year’s decisive political test, rather than run a broad referendum on Trump’s inglorious tenure. As I wrote in July,the political strategy was guaranteed to hurt red-state Democrats, as they were put “to the choice of looking like political sellouts if they vote for Kavanaugh, or moral cowards if they don’t.”
It pierced its tongue when The New Yorker violated normal journalistic standards by reporting Deborah Ramirez’s uncorroborated allegation against Kavanaugh, and much of the rest of the media gave credence to Julie Swetnick’s lurid one. The pile-on wound up doing more to stiffen Republican spines against an apparent witch hunt than it did to weaken their resolve in the face of Blasey’s powerful accusation.
It pierced its tongue when Susan Collins and other female Republicans who supported Kavanaugh’s confirmation were denounced as “gender traitors” in an eye-opening op-ed in this newspaper. Approximately 30 million women voted for Trump in 2016, and many of them (along with at least a few Clinton supporters) surely felt just as Collins did. Are they all “traitors,” too?
There’s more. Maxine Waters urging protesters to hound Republicans out of restaurants and pursue them at department stores and gas stations. A #MeToo movement that moved all-too swiftly from righteous indignation against undoubted predators like Harvey Weinstein to a vendetta culture based on rumors and whisper networks based on self-censorship. Twitter mobs getting people fired and speakers canceled.
Much of this is now making its way into the G.O.P.’s ad campaign for the midterms. That’s natural because the left has given Republicans so much material to work with.
Coverage and analysis of the midterm elections
Much of this also merely echoes the uncivil politics that have been practiced by Trump and his followers from the moment he started campaigning for the presidency. But if the most liberals can say for their political tactics is that they aren’t as bad as Trump’s, they are indicting themselves twice — for imitating the wrong model, and for doing it worse.
I write all this as someone who is on record hoping Republicans get pummeled in the midterms — a fitting electoral rebuke for their slavish devotion to an unfit president and their casual abandonment of long-held conservative principles. America desperately needs a party that stands for sanity and moderation, not extremism and demagoguery.
In 2018, Democrats had a chance to become that party. Once again, they’re flubbing it. It’s a pity both sides can’t lose, but maybe a midterm disappointment might teach liberals that they won’t beat Trump in 2020 by out-clowning him.
Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post.
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6) Australia considering recognizing
Jerusalem as Israel's capital and moving
embassy
By JTA Staff
Australia’s prime minister is considering officially recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving the Australian Embassy there.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement issued Monday night in Israel that he had thanked Scott Morrison for his remarks during a phone call.
Morrison also was set to announce that he will reconsider Australia’s support of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and have his country’s United Nations ambassador vote against Palestine becoming the chair of the G77 group of developing nations, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.
Morrison credited former ambassador to Israel Dave Sharma as influencing his thinking on the Jerusalem issue. Sharma is running in a special election on Saturday to fill the Wentworth seat in the House of Representatives left vacant following the resignation of Malcolm Turnbull, a Liberal Party lawmaker and former prime minister.
Morrison would lose his one-seat majority in Parliament, leading critics to accuse Morrison
of playing politics with the country’s foreign policy.
Morrison, who took office in August, said that by moving the embassy to Jerusalem, “we could potentially, should we end up going down that path, be able to advance the two-state solution process. The other one hasn’t been working that well,” the newspaper reported.
On the subject of a government review of the Iran nuclear deal, Morrison said: “These are obviously existential questions for countries like Israel and so I want to be satisfied — it’s been three years now and I think it’s timely to look at those issues and review our position and do that in a fairly systematic way.”
The United States announced in December that it recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moved its embassy to the city in May — the same month it pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal.
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7) Trump’s Grim Handbook for Governance
By William A. Galston
Everyone has a code of conduct, whether explicit or unacknowledged. Nearly halfway into President Trump’s first term—which some people hope and others fear will be his only one—the contours of his code have become pretty clear.
7) Trump’s Grim Handbook for Governance
By William A. Galston
Unyielding loyalty to the president and scorn for ‘losers’ are among the top rules.
Everyone has a code of conduct, whether explicit or unacknowledged. Nearly halfway into President Trump’s first term—which some people hope and others fear will be his only one—the contours of his code have become pretty clear.
Mr. Trump has a consistent way of judging people. Strong is good, weak is bad. Big is impressive, small is defective: “Little Marco.” Winners are admirable, while losers are contemptible. A corollary is that there is neither dishonorable victory nor honorable defeat, which is why Mr. Trump poured scorn during his candidacy on John McCain for having been captured—never mind McCain’s heroic conduct as a prisoner of war.
Individuals are either attractive or unattractive. If they don’t look good, it doesn’t much matter what they say or do. Appearance is reality: Plato’s Cave inverted. This is why Mr. Trump’s TV stardom mattered more than his checkered business career.
Finally, people are either loyal or disloyal. Loyalty in this case means their willingness to defend Mr. Trump, whatever the cost to their own interests or reputation. In this vein, Mr. Trump favorably compared former Attorney General Eric Holder’s unswerving support for President Obama with Jeff Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the Russia probe.
This brings us to the next feature of Mr. Trump’s personal code—his distinctive understanding of how the world works. Here’s how it goes.
With the possible exception of family, all relationships are at bottom transactional. Every man has a price, and so does every woman.
There’s money, and then everything else. Money and morals are unrelated. Even if a Saudi leader ordered the assassination and dismemberment of a prominent dissident, this is no reason to halt arms sales to the monarchy. If American firms don’t get the contracts, someone else will. Why should we be chumps? If promoting democracy or simple decency costs money, what’s the point?
The core of human existence is competition, not cooperation. The world is zero-sum: If I win, someone else must lose. I can either bend another to my will or yield to his.
The division between friends and enemies is fundamental. We should do as much good as we can to our friends, and as much harm to our enemies.
This brings us to President Trump’s handbook of tactics we should employ to achieve our goals:
Rule 1: The end always justifies the means. Asked whether he had spoken disrespectfully about Christine Blasey Ford, he said, “I’m not going to get into it, because we won. It doesn’t matter; we won.” Case closed.
Rule 2: No matter the truth of accusations against you, deny everything. Bob Woodward’s recent book quotes Mr. Trump counseling a friend who had privately confessed to sexual-misconduct charges against him. “You’ve got to deny, deny, deny, and push back hard on these women,” says Mr. Trump. “If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you’re dead.” The corollary to Rule 2 is that the best defense is a good offense. As the president told his friend, “You’ve got to be strong. You’ve got to be aggressive. Never admit.”
Rule 3: Responding to criticism on its merits is pointless. Instead, challenge the motives and character of your critics. Their criticism isn’t sincere anyway: It’s all politics, the unending quest for dominance. If ridicule works, use it, even if it means caricaturing your adversaries by reducing them to their weakest trait. If Jeb Bush is “low energy,” who cares what he thinks about immigration?
Rule 4: To win, you must arouse your supporters, and deepening divisions is the surest way to do it. Even if compromise could solve important problems, reject it whenever it threatens to reduce the fervor of your base. No gain in the public good is important enough to justify the loss of power.
Rule 5: It is wonderful to be loved, but if you must choose, it is better to be feared than loved. The desire for love puts you at the mercy of those who can withhold it; creating fear puts you on offense. You cannot control love, but you can control fear. And this is the ultimate question of politics, indeed, of all human life: Who’s in control?
Defenders of President Trump’s code of conduct will point to what they see as its unsentimental realism. His maxims are the terms of effectiveness in the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. They may not be pretty, but they work. Politics is not like figure skating. You get no points for style. You either get your way or you don’t. Nothing else matters.
Critics of Mr. Trump’s code—I’m one of them—view the distinction between permissible and forbidden means as essential to constitutional democracy, and to all decent politics. What Mr. Trump’s supporters see as the restoration of national greatness, his critics see as the acceleration of national decline.
This, to no small extent, is what next month’s elections are really about.
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