Finding a way to trump a congenital liar

A few weeks ago, across this page, my friend and former partner Jaime Watt smacked smart-aleck progressives for insults about short fingers, long ties and dim bulbs as their Trump attack strategy. He’s right: Insult and satire are rarely effective tools in shifting political allegiances. As Jaime pointed out, they can even solidify one’s base if they believe they are from a social class that gets no respect either. As he added last week, there’s also the “cry wolf” risk. But here’s the rub. We need to figure out a better way to open the eyes of the millions of Trump voters who are about to be badly hurt by a congenital liar. In the past two weeks, he has proposed a massive transfer of wealth in a tax cut for the wealthy while slashing an array of spending programs that many poor and rural families depend on. Oh, and probably committed a criminal obstruction of justice offence.

He rammed through a bill that contains a dozen toxic pills for the poor and the elderly, most egregiously a cut in Medicaid by $880 billion (U.S.), a 25 per cent reduction. Next will come a series of regulatory changes to labour codes, environmental and health and safety rules, none of which are designed to improve the lives of the weakest and most vulnerable Americans, many of them Trump voters.

Trump has lied and lied to those who voted for him and is so far getting away with it.

Big victories in American politics, even those won by more truthful politicians than this nasty clown, are almost inevitably followed by a mid-term disappointment. On historical form, the GOP is due to lose about 35 seats in 2018 — even if things are going well. If Trumpcare crashes in the U.S. Senate — a likely prospect — and tax reform fails there too, the number of new Democratic congressmen is likely to be higher still. The GOP majority is vulnerable.

That loss of the House could unlock very damaging consequences for a more stabile Trump administration. Not least among them would be the Democrats power to name a special prosecutor, who could then subpoena Trump’s tax records, and much else besides. His determination to keep them hidden can only mean one thing: they will not present a pretty picture of his ethics or business practices. Let alone his insalubrious choice of business partners — from the American to the Russian mob.

However, the Democratic Party cannot afford to run the same campaign that the GOP used against Obama in 2010, where he got clobbered significantly over his health care plan. The reasons so many white working-class voters defected to Trump have not changed. The Democrats are still absent a coherent vision of how they could restore hope for an increasingly stressed class of voters that includes many key elements of their traditional base. Their leadership is old and sounds it.

Respected U.S. academic Joan Williams has just written what sounds like a very impressive analysis of white workingclass anger at the Dems.

The Democrats have failed in addressing three transformative changes: jobkilling artificial intelligence, globalization’s undermining of national economic decision-making, and climate change. The last is the hardest for progressives, in that the level of public support for the dramatic changes of direction required is weak. Worse still, they have communicated a snobbery towards fat, racist, opioid-wounded, angry, white, workingclass voters.

Each of these failures has contributed to most damaging defeat for the postwar consensus of every progressive government: greater equality must always be a priority. Until recently, even conservatives accepted the wisdom of a progressive tax system. Until recently, memory of real poverty and its impact on children, families, and society itself was still powerful for most leaders. Today’s progressive elites have few such memories let alone experience.

The progressive failure to articulate a believable vision created a huge opening for the same dishonest political frauds that ruined the first half of the last century.

That 60 per cent of Americans who cannot abide their president is less important than that nine out of 10 Trump voters would vote for him again today!

Those numbers make it impossible to disagree that sneers are not a strategy. The harder part is developing a more effective one. We must get started.