We all know that Trump’s a bully.  What many people don’t seem to know is that bullying is an important attribute of many Trump-like politicians.  I’ll just provide a few examples here.  Let’s start with a recent article in The Economist, discussing Swedish politics:

Many municipalities, like Gothenburg, are already in this situation. The city’s 13-member executive is split between right and left; the odd seat was won by the Sweden Democrats in 2014. They are shunned by other parties. Besides ideology, says David Lega, the city’s deputy mayor, there is a character issue: the Sweden Democrats’ council member was expelled from his party for allegedly bullying subordinates.

OK, that’s just an anecdote.  But on the very same page of The Economist, there’s an article on Slovenia:

But the SDS has been unable to form a coalition. Many parties refused even to talk to it. Instead, five smaller centre-left parties banded together to form a minority government with outside support from the hard left. Other politicians justify their decision to exclude the SDS by arguing that Mr Jansa is a divisive bully. “When someone attacks us so personally and so aggressively, he should expect to see the results during negotiations,” says Vojmir Urlep, Mr Sarec’s economic adviser. Luka Mesec, of Levica, a leftist party, accuses the SDS of “scary anti-migrant discourse.”

OK, that’s just two anecdotes.  But the most powerful figure in Italy’s new government (Salvini) is almost universally viewed as a Trump-like figure, and he’s also a bully.  (In addition to being an overt racist and a fan of Mussolini. In other words he’s even worse than Trump.)

It’s also worth noting that Trump seems to despise polite leaders such as Obama, Trudeau and Merkel, whereas he’s drawn to leaders who are bullies, such as Duterte, Orban, Putin, etc.

However, I see no evidence that Trump voters are any less polite than Trump’s opponents.  When I moved from an anti-Trump area (Boston) to a pro-Trump area (south Orange County), I immediately noticed that people were nicer, on average.)  So why are Trumpian leaders such jerks?

One possibility is that Trumpistas have a more “tribal” view of the world.  People who travel to regions dominated by tribalism, say Afghanistan, often remark on how the people they meet are incredibly generous and kind.  This despite the fact that these societies are often tearing themselves apart with civil war.

Here’s a hypothesis.  The global rise of right-wing authoritarian nationalism is not really about immigration, it’s about Islam.  Consider the following regions, which have seen political developments that seem a bit “Trumpian”:

The USA, Europe, Russia, India, China, The Philippines, Burma, Thailand.

What do they have in common?  The public worries about Islam.

Now think about countries that have not seen such developments (Argentina, New Zealand, South Korea, etc.)

The first two regions with Trumpian problems (USA and Europe) face immigration issues. Maybe Russia to a lesser extent. But in the remainder, immigration is less of an issue. On the other hand, Islam is a big issue in all of the countries in the first list.  In each case, the majority of the population has a rather negative view of Muslims.  In my view, that’s what’s driving the global rise of Trumpism.  That causes even individually polite voters to support bullies—they want someone strong enough to fight against the perceived threat of Islam. (Yes, some Americans supported Trump for tax cuts or Supreme Court picks, but that’s not what got him the nomination.)

Burma is a particularly interesting case.  In perhaps no other country in the world would you less expect a Trumpian leader.  Burma’s leader is an almost universally revered Nobel Peace Prize winner.  Her career is almost a textbook definition of liberalism.  But the forces of anti-Islam in Burma are so strong that even she has turned into a right-wing authoritarian nationalist. If Burma is not safe, then nowhere is safe.  Except, of course, for countries where Islam is not viewed as a threat (like Argentina, New Zealand and South Korea.)  BTW, so much for the “great woman” theory of history.  If Burma doesn’t refute that theory, I don’t know what will.

You may recall from high school that bullies are less likely to be intelligent than non-bullies. A new book by Bob Woodward confirms that even Trump’s closest aides regard him as an idiot.  They see their job as protecting the country from his rash instincts:

The book is said to claim:

• One month after Trump became president, he asked Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford for plans for a preemptive strike on North Korea.
• After a chemical attack in April 2017 was tied to the Syrian regime and President Bashar al-Assad, Trump told Defense Secretary James Mattis that he wanted Assad assassinated, saying, “Let’s fucking kill him! Let’s go in.”
• During Trump’s practice session with his lawyers for a potential interview with special counsel Robert Mueller, he disastrously melted down — which led his then-attorney John Dowd to tell him, “Don’t testify. It’s either that or an orange jumpsuit.”

Much like Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury, the book portrays President Trump as detested and scorned by many of his top advisers, who are said to see themselves as working to protect the country from someone they see as ignorant and irresponsible.

• White House Chief of Staff John Kelly purportedly called Trump an “idiot” and “off the rails,” and said “we’re in Crazytown.”

• Mattis is described as telling associates that Trump acted like, and had the understanding of, “a fifth- or sixth-grader.”

• Former National Economic Council director Gary Cohn purportedly took trade-related documents off Trump’s desk to prevent him from signing them and causing crises.

• Dowd is described as believing Trump to be a “fucking liar.”

In fairness to Trump, he’s a bit better at noticing flaws in others:

Trump himself, meanwhile, is described insulting current or former aides such as Reince Priebus (“like a little rat”), H.R. McMaster (“like a beer salesman”), Jeff Sessions (“mentally retarded, he’s this dumb Southerner”), Wilbur Ross (“past your prime”), and Rudy Giuliani (“you’re like a little baby”).

The new Italian government is even more of a clown show than the Trump administration.  (The ruling party was literally founded by a clown.)  Because Italy has much weaker public finances than the US had when Trump took over, their crazy fiscal proposals threaten to cause a crisis, which might eventually blow the eurozone apart.

There’s another interesting trend in global Trumpism.  In almost every case the populist movement started as a “liberal” party (in the international sense of favoring small government.) In some cases it was a new party (the AfD, etc.)  In other cases they took over an existing party (the GOP).  As far as I can tell, the movement against Islam was almost always associated with a move away from small government ideology in the realm of economic policy.  These parties now favor high government spending.  It’s not obvious to me why these two trends are connected, but they seem to be. I’d be interested in your thoughts.  (This means Corbyn is not as far from Trump as many people assume.  He’s a bigot who talks about going after the “fake news” media.)

I am not interested in your thoughts on whether I was right about Trump.  The fact that his closest advisors have exactly the same view of Trump as I do seals the deal in my mind.  Case closed.  If you still can’t see it, then no amount of debating on my part will help you.

PS.  McCain’s body wasn’t even cold before Lindsey Graham starting kowtowing to Trump.  Sometimes these things just take one’s breath away.

PPS.  Trump’s not the first bully to reach the Presidency, LBJ and FDR also qualify.

Has there ever been a better time for consumers of news?  In a single day, Trump will do three or four different things that are more bizarre or more appalling that Obama on his worst day in office:

1.  I’ve argued for quite some time that Trump’s a banana republic-type leader, but now he doesn’t even seem to be hiding that fact.  The President now describes convicted felons as “good people”, but only when they don’t cooperate with law enforcement.  If they do cooperate with authorities, then they are bad people.  The “no snitching” movement has moved from neighborhoods dominated by criminal gangs all the way to the White House.

2.  Trump unleashes a non-stop torrent of insults at his Attorney General, but they refuses to fire him.

3.  Trump campaigns on the idea that the US should not focus on namby-pamby issues such as human rights, rather we should focus on Making America Great Again, and cozy up to tyrants like Putin.  Then Trump suddenly tells the Secretary of State to look into doing something about the treatment of South African farmers.  Huh?  Of all the hundreds of oppressed groups around the world, why would Trump suddenly care about South African farmers? After all, most of the South African farmers than are being murdered are black, and he’s never shown the slightest interest in the welfare of blacks.  The Economist has a theory:

On August 23rd, after watching a Fox News segment, President Donald Trump tweeted about illegal “farm seizures”, which the ANC opposes, and the “large scale killing” of farmers, by which he presumably does not mean the black farm workers most likely to be victims of rural crime.

I wonder where the Economist got that idea?

[S]tories about the dastardly plot against white farmers (which, again, doesn’t actually exist) have shown up on alt-right, white nationalist, and neo-Nazi websites including AltRight.com (which is run by white nationalist Richard Spencer), VDare, American Renaissance, and Stormfront.

Lauren Southern with the European alt-right group Identity Evropa made a documentaryabout the subject. An alt-right podcast called White Rabbit Radio has an episode about it. So does American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor’s podcast. It’s also a hot topic on the pro-Trump Reddit forum r/TheDonald.

But the conspiracy theory quickly moved from the darker corners of the internet into the slightly-more-mainstream-but-still-pretty-seedy corners of the internet: As Wilson notes, Ann Coulter tweeted in June 2017 that the “only real refugees” are “White South African farmers facing genocide.” Breitbart has covered it extensively, as has the Russian government propaganda outlet RT. And, of course, so has Fox News’s Tucker Carlson.

Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that it would make its way to Trump sooner or later.

4.  As if that’s not enough, yesterday we also discover that Trump’s friend Pecker (how do CNN anchors keep a straight face when reading the news?) has a safe at the National Enquirer full of stories they bought and then refused to publish in order to protect Trump.  An actual, physical safe.

The crazy news stories are now coming so fast they pile up on each other, reducing the impact.  Like Venezuelans under Chavez, we are becoming numb to the insanity.

Admittedly these examples are a hodgepodge.  The 2nd and 4th examples are not important, merely weird.  The first example shows that Trump’s got the ethics of a third world dictator, or a Mafia don.  And the third story shows he’s a white nationalist, but we have dozens of other reasons to already believe that.   In any case, following the news has become vastly more interesting than under Obama.  And in politics, “interesting” generally does not end well.

Let’s consider Paraguay, a country that has traditionally been dominated by two parties, the Colorados and the Liberals.  I’ll make up a hypothetical set of facts, and you tell me the most plausible way to interpret this imaginary scenario:

1.  Manuel Suarez of the Colorado Party is elected president.

2.  Almost all Liberals view Suarez as a dishonest, vindictive demagogue.

3.  The leading Colorado intellectuals and pundits view Suarez as a dishonest, vindictive demagogue.

4.  Roughly 80% of former leaders of the Colorado party (who are now retired from politics) view Suarez as a dishonest, vindictive demagogue.

5.  Roughly 10% of current Colorado politicians criticize Suarez as if he were a dishonest, vindictive demagogue.

6.  In private, most Colorado politicians view Suarez as a dishonest, vindictive demagogue, even while supporting him publicly in order to please their constituents.

7.  Most Colorado voters do not view Suarez as a dishonest, vindictive demagogue.  These voters support Suarez on virtually all issues, regardless of whether his views represent traditional Colorado positions.

Suppose you were a French, Australian or Egyptian political scientist, examining the political situation in Paraguay.  You have no emotional tie to either the Colorados or the Liberals.  You are examining the situation as dispassionately as one might study an ant farm.  Which hypothesis would you regard as most plausible:

A.  Suarez is a dishonest, vindictive demagogue.

B.  Suarez is not a dishonest, vindictive demagogue.  Rather he’s very much misunderstood by the elites in Asuncion, of both parties, who follow him most closely.  Only his cult-like following among ordinary voters of one political party see him for what he is.

PS.  AP had a good piece on how GOP politicians view the Trump cult.  I almost broke out laughing when I read the concluding paragraph:

“The Trump phenomenon is going to end at some point in time. That might be six years, that might be two years, that might be sooner. No one knows,” the former Ohio GOP chairman said. “When it does end, it’s the job of a lot of us … to make sure that the party is still populated by good, honest, decent candidates and officeholders who we can continue to be proud of.”

“still”?

It’s now enough to simply present the words of Trump and his associates.  First, John Kelly shows prosecutorial discretion:

On the recording, Mr. Kelly says Ms. Manigault Newman could be facing “pretty significant legal issues” over what he alleged was misuse of a government car. She denied misusing it.

“I’d like to see this be a friendly departure,” Mr. Kelly says on the tape. “There are pretty significant legal issues that we hope don’t develop into something that, that’ll make it ugly for you.”

“But I think it’s important to understand,” he adds, “that if we make this a friendly departure, we can all be, you know, you can look at, look at your time here in, in the White House as a year of service to the nation. And then you can go on without any type of difficulty in the future relative to your reputation.”

Then Trump explains the qualities he looks for in White House officials:

Now I understand what Trump meant by hiring the best people—he meant the people who a best at praising him.

There are no American nationalists.  They don’t exist.  There are people like Laura Ingraham, who present themselves as American nationalists.  But they are not at all convincing.  On the other hand, there are lots of American white nationalists, including our current president.  So how can we tell the difference?  First let’s look at how Laura Ingraham perceives “the problem”:

Ingraham said on Wednesday that “in major parts of the country, it does seem that the America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted on the American people and they’re changes that none of us ever voted for and most of us don’t like.”

. . .

Ingraham said toward the end of Wednesday’s commentary that she was not talking about race and ethnicity, and complained a night later that the disclaimer was being missed.

On Thursday, she said she had “a message to those who are distorting my views, including all white nationalists and especially one racist freak whose name I won’t even mention, you don’t represent my views and you are antithetical to the beliefs I hold dear.”

Instead of race, she said she was talking about “a shared sense of keeping American safe and her citizens safe and prosperous.

We roll our eyes at her attempt to dig her way out of trouble.  Does anyone seriously think that Ingraham is horrified by blond immigrants from Norway (or Slovenia)?  Her concern about immigration is clearly linked to race, at some level.  But it’s also true that she fears crime, and that she associates crime with immigration.  The problem here is that the violent crime rate in many of the “American” parts of big cities like New York is dramatically higher than in the immigrant areas.

So let’s think about what it would take to avoid “massive demographic change”.  In America, blacks made up 14% of the population in 1860, and 12.6% today.  That ratio is now pretty stable, because the black birth rate is about equal to the overall birth rate, and the rate of black immigration as a share of the total is similar to the share of blacks in the US population.  You can think of recent immigration from Haiti and Nigeria as a way of keeping the black share of the population stable, i.e. a way of preserving traditional America. Is that how Ingraham thinks about Haitian immigration?

In this vision of “American” nationalism, Detroit is a red, white and blue, all-American city, while Orange County is a disturbing foreign place, where whites are only 41% of the population and blacks are almost non-existent.  It’s mostly Hispanic and Asian, many from first or second generation immigrant families.  Is that how Ingraham feels about these two places?  I think we all know the answer, one doesn’t have to be a dog to hear the hidden messages in the white nationalist rhetoric.

I claim there are no “American nationalists”, only “Murican nationalists”.  They believe in Murica, a mythical white country cleansed of the blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans who have lived here for centuries. Ingraham may see herself as an American nationalist, but I don’t believe it for a moment.

Those who believe in Murica blame inner city blacks for their plight (bad culture), while romanticizing the plight of opioid-addicted whites in Appalachia.  It’s all the fault of the Chinese, who stole their jobs.

When Trump asked why we should accept immigrants from “shithole” countries, many people focused on the insult to low-income countries.  That comment was certainly impolite, and not something an American president should be saying about countries we need to deal with; but the real problem was the implication that immigrants from shithole countries are not the sort of people that we want here.  Some whites have trouble seeing the implication of Trump’s comments, but African-Americans (and Central Americans) whose ancestors came from those exact countries certainly know what Trump was implying.  Trump was implicitly saying (to them) “we don’t like the fact that you are here”.  Interestingly, many of our most successful immigrants come from dysfunctional poor countries like India, and even immigrants from Nigeria do about average in terms of income.

Lots of Trump voters don’t care what Trump says about minorities.  But there are still a substantial number of people who vote GOP for tax cuts and Supreme Court nominees, but who would be very uncomfortable if Trump made explicitly racist statements.  Enough to swing a very close election.  These people would rather pretend that Trump’s not a racist, just being a bit politically incorrect on occasion.  So Trump continues to send out dog whistles to his white nationalist supporters, while the moderate, upper middle class Republican voters of Orange County can continue to look the other way.

There was recent speculation that Trump might have used the N-word in private conversation. (Admittedly not from a very credible source.)  Speaking for myself, the truth or falsity of this claim would in no way affect my view of Trump. I already know how he thinks about lower income minorities.  They are people that Trump doesn’t want in “Murica”.  I wish he’d just admit it.

PS.  I moved to Orange County a year ago.  Compared to Boston, it’s culture reminds me much more of the traditional (white) America I grew up in during the 1960s in Wisconsin.  Back then, if one saw an East Asian on the street (then called “Orientals”) the person seemed very foreign looking. Now they no longer look foreign.  Here’s a video from an Orange County 4th of July Parade last month, full of marching Chinese ladies.  Even Laura Ingraham might shed a tear.

PPS.  Play the video until it reaches a pop song, which starts out with rap, transitions to Christina Aguilera (I think), and then samples a Norwegian pop song from the 1980s.  Seeing the middle-aged Chinese ladies dancing to all of that is more than a bit surreal.