Trump is running campaign for president on dystopian fantasy
President Joe Biden recently went to New York to appear on “Late Night With Seth Meyers.” On the show he was the same guy whom those of us who’ve spoken with him have seen: not a spring chicken, obviously, but lucid, well informed and moderately funny. The contrast couldn’t be greater with Donald Trump, whose ranting has become increasingly incoherent; after mixing up Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi a few weeks back, he has now once again appeared to confuse Biden with Barack Obama.
But not to worry: Trump recently assured an audience, “There’s no cognitive problem. If there was, I’d know about it.”
Republicans aren’t going to acknowledge either Biden’s lucidity or Trump’s increasingly more noticeable lack thereof. But the reaction to the “Late Night” appearance that I found most revealing wasn’t about presidential age; it was about what happened next. Biden and Meyers went for ice cream after the show, and Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama fired off a post on social media hoping Biden enjoyed his ice cream “while the rest of the city is afraid of crime and migrants.”
Reporters and readers were quick to point out that according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2021 Alabama had a homicide rate more than three times as high as that of New York state, and, as Bloomberg’s Justin Fox notes, New York City is among the safest big cities in America. Tuberville has become known for getting crossed up on the issues but his comment illustrated two larger aspects of our politics.
First, there’s a striking double standard in the ways politicians are allowed to talk about different regions of America. Voters from rural states often complain about not getting enough respect but can you imagine the reaction if, say, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, were to describe Alabama — which in 2021 had an extraordinarily high rate of firearm mortality — as a place where everyone runs around shooting one another and themselves?
Second, and more important, I’m always struck by the extent to which today’s right-wing politics is driven by a grim, dystopian image of America, especially U.S. cities, that just isn’t grounded in reality.
New York really was a dangerous place a few decades back: There were 2,262 murders in 1990. Last year, however, with the pandemic-era bump in crime rapidly receding, there were only 391 — still too many — and early indications are that violent crime is continuing to fall.
Nationally, violent crime, at least according to the FBI, is approaching a 50-year low.
I remember New York in the bad old days, and it’s nothing like that now. Polling on crime is remarkable, especially when broken down by partisan affiliation: According to Gallup, 78% of Republicans say that crime is an extremely or very serious problem for the nation but only 16% say it’s a serious problem where they live. That’s not because Republicans live in safer places: Only 15% of Democrats say that local crime is a serious problem.
Crime isn’t the only subject where Republicans seem to be living in the past. In another recent speech, Trump declared: “We’re like a Third World nation. Look at our airports. … I mean, how bad are the airports?”
He may have been thinking of La Guardia in the 1970s. I recently landed at Newark, New Jersey’s new Terminal A, and it was a striking reminder of just how gentrified America’s major airports have become.
Trump has also been going on lately about “migrant crime” being “through the roof,” singling out New York (naturally).
But as I’ve already noted, homicides in New York — where 36% of the population is foreign born — have been falling rapidly.
And while there have, of course, been violent crimes committed by immigrants, including those here illegally, an analysis by NBC News found that “despite several horrifying high-profile episodes, there is no evidence of a migrant-driven crime wave in the United States.”
None of this says that we should have an open border. Indeed, this year Democrats and Republicans in the Senate agreed on a bill that would have greatly stiffened border security; Republicans then backed out at Trump’s behest, pretty clearly because Trump wants to keep the fear factor going.
Trump and his party appear to be running not against America’s rising problems but against problems that have actually become much less dire.
Can a political party really win a national election on the strength of dystopian fantasies?
Unfortunately, current polling suggests that it can.
Paul Krugman is a columnist for The New York Times.
On Oct. 7, Hamas invaded Israel and filmed itself committing scores of human-rights atrocities. Some of the footage was later captured by the Israeli military and screened to hundreds of journalists, including me. The “pure, predatory sadism,” as Atlantic writer Graeme Wood described it, is bottomless.
Yet Hamas denies that its men sexually assaulted Israelis, calling the charges “lies and slanders against the Palestinians and their resistance.”
And Hamas’ fellow travelers and useful idiots in the West, most of them self-described progressives, parrot that denialism in the face of powerful and deeply investigated evidence of widespread rapes, documented most recently in a United Nations report released on Monday.
The interesting question is, why? Why the refusal to believe that Hamas, which butchered children in their beds, took elderly women as hostages and incinerated families in their homes, would be capable of that?
I’ll get to that in a moment but first it’s worth looking at the forms this denialism takes.
One method is to acknowledge, as one recent article put it, that “sexual assault may have occurred on Oct. 7,” but nobody has really proved that it was part of an organized pattern.
Another is to raise questions about various details in stories to suggest that if there’s even a single error, or a witness whose testimony is at all inconsistent, the entire account must also be false and dishonest. A third is to treat anything an Israeli says as inherently suspect.
And finally, there is the point that there are barely any witnesses to the assaults. Where are the women who were allegedly raped? Why aren’t they speaking out?
The answer to that final question is the grimmest: Overwhelmingly, the women who could have spoken out are dead, for the simple reason that any Israeli who got close enough to a terrorist to be raped was close enough to be murdered.
As for the credibility of Israeli witnesses, who else — other than the early responders who encountered the victims at first hand — should be interviewed and quoted by anyone investigating this? In the misogynistic courtrooms of Iran, the legal testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man. In the Israel-hating corners of the left, the worth of Israeli witnesses seems to be even lower.
But it’s the first two types of denialism that are in some ways the most shocking, because they are also the most hypocritical.
Wasn’t it progressives who, during the Brett Kavanaugh saga, stressed that occasional discrepancies in the memory of traumatic events are absolutely normal? And since when have progressives insisted that the burden of proof for demonstrating a pattern of sexual assault lies with the victims, most of whose voices have, in this case, been silenced forever?
How quickly the far left pivots from “believe women” to “believe Hamas” when the identity of the victim changes. If, God forbid, a gang of Proud Boys were to descend on Los Angeles to carry out the kinds of atrocities Hamas carried out in Israeli communities, I’m pretty sure no one on the left would devote any energy trying to poke holes in who got raped, much less how or when.
It’s in this ideological climate that we get the U.N. report.
In some ways it’s a landmark, if only because the U.N. is never sympathetic to the Jewish state and was outrageously slow even to notice the early evidence of sexual assaults.
For anyone who maintains a reasonably open mind but is still in doubt, the report notes, among other details, “at least two incidents of rape of corpses of women,” “bodies found naked and/or tied, and in one case gagged,” and “clear and convincing information that sexual violence, including rape, sexualized torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment occurred against some women and children” during their time as hostages.
That should be more than enough. It won’t be. A large and expanding corner of the West refuses to accept that Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip is a response to evil, or that Israelis might be victims in any way. It disturbs the narrative of the war in Gaza as a case of strong against weak, the settler-colonialist Israelis against righteous and indigenous victims.
Honest critics of Israel’s policies can raise serious objections while also candidly acknowledging the horrific circumstances that set those policies in motion.
What we are seeing instead are dishonest critics, dishonestly disputing those circumstances so they can take aim at the existence of Israel itself.
Bret Stephens is a columnist for The New York Times.