After 5 weeks of travelling, staying in equally-many rental apartments, and dealing with jet lag as well, twice earlier this week I woke up at night trying to remember where I was, and it took me a few minutes to realize that I was actually in my own bed. Now the vacation’s over and we’re back to real life, a mountain of mail, work projects to settle back into — and the realization that Trump 2016 is unfortunately also a part of real life, not just a bad dream.
And what a miserable convention to return home to — one speaker after then next unable to truly promote Trump for his policies and left with bashing Hillary instead. Though I have to admit I haven’t watched all too much of the speakers.
But Trump’s recent interview with the New York Times? Ugh. Makes it pretty difficult to stick your head in the sand and say, “surely he wouldn’t be that bad!”
Consider that, rather than raising the concerns that everyone else has with Erdogan’s upping up the authoritarianism in Turkey, he shrugs with an “eh, who am I to judge?” Not kidding.
SANGER: Erdogan put nearly 50,000 people in jail or suspend them, suspended thousands of teachers, he imprisoned many in the military and the police, he dismissed a lot of the judiciary. Does this worry you? And would you rather deal with a strongman who’s also been a strong ally, or with somebody that’s got a greater appreciation of civil liberties than Mr. Erdogan has? Would you press him to make sure the rule of law applies?
TRUMP: I think right now when it comes to civil liberties, our country has a lot of problems, and I think it’s very hard for us to get involved in other countries when we don’t know what we are doing and we can’t see straight in our own country. We have tremendous problems when you have policemen being shot in the streets, when you have riots, when you have Ferguson. When you have Baltimore. When you have all of the things that are happening in this country — we have other problems, and I think we have to focus on those problems. When the world looks at how bad the United States is, and then we go and talk about civil liberties, I don’t think we’re a very good messenger.
Then he discusses his attitude towards NATO: he’d discard longstanding US military commitments based on the claim that that a country under attack hadn’t been pulling its own weight by reimbursing the U.S. for our costs in maintaining military bases abroad.
If we cannot be properly reimbursed for the tremendous cost of our military protecting other countries, and in many cases the countries I’m talking about are extremely rich. Then if we cannot make a deal, which I believe we will be able to, and which I would prefer being able to, but if we cannot make a deal, I would like you to say, I would prefer being able to, some people, the one thing they took out of your last story, you know, some people, the fools and the haters, they said, “Oh, Trump doesn’t want to protect you.” I would prefer that we be able to continue, but if we are not going to be reasonably reimbursed for the tremendous cost of protecting these massive nations with tremendous wealth . . .
And he rambles on about Korea and seems to suggest that if we hadn’t had our military there, then there would have been a unified Korea or — well, to be honest, I can’t make much sense out of this rambling:
SANGER: Well, keeping the peace. We didn’t have a presence in places like Korea in 1950, or not as great a presence, and you saw what happened.
TRUMP: There’s no guarantee that we’ll have peace in Korea.
SANGER: Even with our troops, no, there’s no guarantee.
TRUMP: No, there’s no guarantee. We have 28,000 soldiers on the line.
SANGER: But we’ve had them there since 1953 and ——
TRUMP: Sure, but that doesn’t mean that there wouldn’t be something going on right now. Maybe you would have had a unified Korea. Who knows what would have happened? In the meantime, what have we done? So we’ve kept peace, but in the meantime we’ve let North Korea get stronger and stronger and more nuclear and more nuclear, and you are really saying, “Well, how is that a good thing?” You understand? North Korea now is almost like a boiler. You say we’ve had peace, but that part of Korea, North Korea, is getting more and more crazy. And more and more nuclear. And they are testing missiles all the time.
Incidentally, here’s data on military spending by NATO countries, where the target is 2%:
and, of key non-NATO countries, per the World Bank, South Korea spends 2.6%, and Japan 1.0% — but, then again, Japan’s constitution, which the US dictated to them after World War II, prohibits having a military, so they call theirs “self-defense forces.”
So Trump is nuts. He’s a wild card, he’s got no comprehension of foreign policy and just throws out crackpot ideas as if he’s been listening to Rush Limbaugh without paying much attention, and maybe that crazy history teacher that spends class time rambling on about conspiracy theories, with a dose of Bernie Sanders in there. The best case scenario is that he’s not actually interested, and delegates the whole thing to Pence.
But — I just can’t vote for Hillary.
For all that appears to be the grown-up in the room — well, it’s not as if she has a compelling foreign policy track record. As much as Trump seems to be fond of Putin, it was Hillary who came to Moscow with the infamous Reset Button. And she was part and parcel of the Iraq withdrawal and the failed Arab Spring that gave us today’s refugee crisis. As much as Trump’s seriousness in immigration enforcement is questionable, Clinton has outright said that she will not take any enforcement actions against anyone, hasn’t she? And as far as domestic policy is concerned, it’s not a selling point to tell me that she’ll manage to accomplish things that Trump won’t, since all of the things that Hillary wants to accomplish are things I disagree with.
Beyond which, the corruption issue matters. The private server shows wanton disregard for national security in order to advantage herself. The Clinton Foundation, and the money flowing into it from all manner of sketchy sources? Sure, the line repeated by Clinton supporters is that if she truly was corrupt, she’d have been caught by now, but the world doesn’t work that way.
Which leaves me hoping for — well, a miracle isn’t really the right word, but some dramatic change between now and November. It’d be wrong to say that one hopes for a sudden heart attack, so maybe instead let’s hope that Trump wakes up one morning and realizes that in no way is he ready to be president, nor does he actually want to put in the work that the job requires, and hastily calls a press conference to bow out of the race.
Of course, that’s unlikely to happen.
Which leave me with, well, not voting. Or, at least, only voting for the down-ballot races.
And don’t tell me that refusing to vote is helping to elect X; it’s not.
So if you’ll excuse me, I have a busy night lined up: walk into town to get a treat with the boys, then pull weeds until it gets too dark or buggy, then send my youngest off to bed and read until I finally suck it up and take care of cleaning up the kitchen and running a load of laundry. And, yes, I’ll check on the reports in the morning.
UPDATE:
So I read the speech late last night; nothing new or surprising in it. What I wrote pre-speech stands.
Image: from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump; By Michael Vadon [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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