John_F Loc: Minneapolis, MN

Gives a different perspective on Trump.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/looking-backward-at-donald-trump?mbid=nl_TNY%20Template%20-%20With%20Photo%20(102)&CNDID=29560471&spMailingID=9645876&spUserID=MTM5MTg0OTQ4NzgwS0&spJobID=1020466884&spReportId=MTAyMDQ2Njg4NAS2

Szalajj Loc: Salem, NH

I tried to correct the link, but it still doesn't copy correctly, so anyone who is trying to get to the webpage from any device other than a computer likely won't be able to read the article. Here is the article in it's entirety.

"Here is a thought experiment: Imagine how the 2016 P**********l e******n would look to someone encountering it for the first time—in particular, imagine the reaction of a Trump innocent, a man or woman who’d never experienced a full dose of Donald J. Trump. Students of American political history may someday understand how the world’s oldest democracy produced such a candidate, and no doubt it can partly be explained by what former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meant when she talked about the other basket—not the “deplorables” but people, as she put it, “who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change.” A simpler explanation may be that Trump’s appeal, as the political historian John Judis argues, has more to do with celebrity and entertainment than with bigotry; after all, as he pointed out during a recent interview with Slate, Trump first appeared on the cover of People in the early nineteen-eighties. Trump has even entertained Democrats, starting with the primaries, during which (with occasional help from Governor Chris Christie) he whacked, politically speaking, one weak competitor after another. For non-Trumpians, taking pleasure in that spectacle was only possible if it was accompanied by a belief that a Trump P**********l victory wasn’t at all possible. This hasn’t been a sustainable position for a while, although his odds are now a question for journalists and the panelists on cable news programs. (If American manufacturers are making less stuff than they used to, this country sure can make panelists.)

I know, and like, several Trump supporters. Some are from upstate New York, where I once lived and still visit, a region populated by generous men and women, many of them farmers and working people, who still welcome strangers into their communities and give them refuge in their homes. It’s a part of the state that, alongside pockets of academic blueness, is very red, and usually v**es for anyone with a Republican label—the favored brand since Lincoln’s time. I’ve listened to people who think it’s time, as one put it, to end “the bulls**t of so many years.” That’s not a carefully thought-out view but, rather, a weary hostility to the status quo, and to those who represent the status quo. It’s hard for Gallup and Quinnipiac to measure how many Americans are vaguely, or big-league, ticked off, which is another reason why, despite polls that are moving in Clinton’s direction, this e******n might still surprise.

It’s been a hard run for Republicans in the past half century. I’ve written about the 1964 e******n, when the Arizona senator Barry Goldwater was overwhelmingly defeated by President Lyndon Johnson, and about a preëlection, off-the-record “Republican Unity Conference,” held at a hotel in Hershey, Pennsylvania. A transcript of that meeting, which mysteriously got into the hands of the Johnson campaign, recorded the views of attendees, including Goldwater, former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Governors William Scranton, George Romney, and Nelson Rockefeller, and others, and revealed a party still capable of intelligent self-analysis and with an ability to mend itself. Former Vice-President Richard M. Nixon, the self-appointed chair, argued for a larger, more inclusive Party, and, like today’s Republican leaders—people like the House Speaker Paul Ryan, or the Party’s chairman, Reince Priebus—referred to “principles to which we are dev**ed [and] an organization to which we are loyal.” But the orthodoxies of today’s Republicans, regarding taxes, Obamacare, and social issues, seem immovable, and their hostility toward Democrats and the Democratic President is implacable. Nixon, in contrast, said something that might get a modern Republican expelled from the Party: “I want all Republicans to win. I am just as strong for a liberal Republican in New York as I am for a conservative Republican in Texas, and I can go and just as enthusiastically campaign for both, because we need both liberals and conservatives to have a majority.” Where, Mitch McConnell, did that Party go?

Tuesday night’s rambling debate, or discussion, or low-key shouting match between the Vice-P**********l candidates—Senator Tim Kaine, of Virginia, and Governor Mike Pence, of Indiana—was a faint echo of the P**********l campaign, with references to Clinton’s lost e-mails and Trump’s reckless musings on nuclear proliferation, although without any mention of Rosie O’Donnell or weight gain by a former Miss Universe. Much of it was occupied by Kaine’s repeated challenge to Pence to defend Trump:

PENCE: I’m happy to defend him, Senator. Don’t put words in my mouth that I’m not defending him.

KAINE: You’re not.

PENCE: I’m happy to defend him. Most of what you said is completely false, and the American people know that.

KAINE: I’ll run through the list of things where you won’t defend . . .

PENCE: This isn’t the old days where you can just say stuff and people believe it.

Pence is wrong about that. This has been a campaign of Trump saying stuff, often poisonous, false, and inflammatory stuff—about Muslims cheering the 9/11 attacks, President Obama’s birthplace, the whereabouts of Senator Ted Cruz’s father when President Kennedy was assassinated—and repeating it whether people believe it or not.

At the end of the night, the moderator, Elaine Quijano, asked Kaine and Pence what they might do to “unify the country and reassure the people who v**ed against you.” Neither had a good answer—Kaine talked about Clinton’s ability to “work across the aisle.” Pence said that, after electing Trump, “the American people are going to stand tall, stand together.” It would have been interesting to hear Pence attempt to examine how someone so detached from his country’s history and values, an embarrassment to what’s left of his party and to the nation, could hope to accomplish anything of the sort. That’s likely to be a question for another candidate, in another, less baleful time.

Jeffrey Frank, a former senior editor of The New Yorker and the author of “Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage,” is working on a book about the Truman era."

John_F Loc: Minneapolis, MN

Everything after Photo%20 should be deleted starting with the (102). How the extra stuff got in mystifies me.