I am trying to figure out how to talk to my pro-life friends about Trump

 

A common refrain at this week's Republican National Convention was that Donald Trump "is the most pro-life president we've ever had." No matter where you stand on the topic, I think there's a fair case to be made that's the truth. He has appointed judges who emboldened state legislatures to take a fresh run at knocking down Roe v. Wade. The right to abortion may never be entirely stricken from precedent, given how Chief Justice John Roberts likes to operate, but it seems likely to be greatly narrowed into near-oblivion over the next few years. We'll see.

I grew up in small town Kansas. I attended an evangelical Mennonite Brethren college. A number of people I care about -- and love -- are passionately anti-abortion. This makes things uneasy between us: I don't much love abortion and I think the decision carries moral weight, but I think there are substantial issues of women's freedom and autonomy involved. So I end up on the pro-choice side of the ledger. But I respect why my pro-life friends feel the way they do.

This fall, I suspect many or most of them will be voting for Trump.

I think this is a tremendous mistake. Trump's indifference to life beyond the womb is well-documented by now -- his willingness to separate migrant families at the border, his eagerness to downplay COVID-19 testing that could save lives and prevent outbreaks because he thinks the numbers make him look bad, his gleeful defense and pardon of war criminals. Given his history of infidelity and promiscuity, I feel pretty sure his pro-life position is transactional.

Some of my pro-life friends are aware of this. One told me, a couple of years ago, that he knew Donald Trump was a bad person -- "but I also think maybe I should thank him, you know?"

There is no way this friend will ever vote for Joe Biden. I don't think I could ever persuade him too. If you think abortion is murder, how could you ever vote for a candidate or party that supports keeping it legal?

And yet: I am convinced that four more years of Donald Trump will be disastrous. That democracy will be grievously injured and that Americans, particularly minority Americans, will suffer. I'm honestly not sure that's avoidable at this point, anyway, but it feels more certain to me if we have a president who -- it seems obvious to me -- is intent on sowing division for his own advantage over one who might actually cares about things beside himself.

So I want to make the case to my pro-life friends that they should not vote for Trump.

But I am not sure that I can, or that the outcome is possible. They see the same country, the same man, that we do. They will vote for him anyway, because the thing that matters most to them is saving unborn lives. I get that. But I am worried for all of us who are already here. I feel like I share at least 90 percent of my morality with my pro-life friends. But that last few percentage points, whew. Their morality tells them to vote for Trump. Mine tells me to do anything but. I am not sure there is a meeting place between those two points.

The fundamental strategic assumption of the Trump campaign is that you, the voter, are stupid

 So:

Of course, millions more jobs were lost before those three months started. And employers hiring back workers isn't exactly job creation so much as it is job recovery -- a process that still has a long way to go.

But honestly, this isn't even a lie, really, because it's so obvious and stupid. I'm not sure why the Trump Administration can't admit that there are big challenges facing the country when there are obviously big challenges facing the country. They're hoping you're too stupid to notice, I guess.

Destroying the Post Office means destroying rural America

I grew up in a small town of about 3,000 people. I don't want to live there anymore, but I also don't want to see it disappear. I suspect a lot of Americans are like me.

So it alarms me that President Trump seems hellbent on destroying the effectiveness of the Post Office. (In this, he has been aided by years of work from Congressional Republicans.) That will hurt the small, rural towns that provide so much of the president's support. Vox reported on this in April:

The USPS is legally required to deliver all mail, to all postal addresses in all regions, at a flat rate, no matter how far it may have to travel. The service’s accessibility and affordability are especially important to rural communities that live in poverty and to people with disabilities, who can’t afford the cost of a private business to deliver their daily necessities. (In 2017, the rural poverty rate was 16.4 percent, compared with 12.9 percent for urban areas.)

And while some may argue that the USPS is becoming more obsolete as an increasing number of services are becoming digitalized, there’s still a large chunk of people who rely on mail because they have poor (or no) internet service. (The Federal Communications Commission estimates that 14.5 million people in rural areas lack access to broadband.) In fact, 18 percent of Americans still pay their bills by mail, according to an ACI Worldwide report; meanwhile, 20 percent of adults over 40 who take medication for a chronic condition get those pills by mail order, according to a survey by the National Community Pharmacists Association.

Neither Democrats or Republicans are actually all that good at serving rural interests, even though rural red states have disproportionate power. That usually translates into generous farm bills, and occasionally preserving railroad service to small towns. But letting the Post Office go to hell will hurt small towns. If only for their political survival, I don't know why Republicans would let this happen.

More Kris Kobach election news

Politico reports that Republicans are worried they'll lose their Senate majority because Democrats are throwing money into the Kansas race in support of Kris Kobach winning the nomination. “The Senate majority runs through Kansas,” we're told.

I've already suggested that Democrats are playing with fire. Some of my Democratic friends tell me he's not actually all that much worse than Roger Marshall, the GOP establishment pick for the nomination, so it's a wash if he wins. But it seems to me that notion is belied by the fact that Dems are trying to get him nominated -- the things they perceive as making him more obviously politically poisonous will be poisonous if he somehow parlays that Democratic cash into a US Senate seat.

Even Republicans don't believe that can happen, apparently. But I don't love this kind of political maneuvering -- call me naive if you want. At the very least, I'm a Kansas voter -- and I don't want Kobach occupying any of my mental space over the next few months.

Is Trump burning everything down?

Back in 1991, as the Iraqis were being routed from Kuwait by US and coalition forces, they set fires to a number of oil wells along the way. There was not strategic purpose to that action, as far as I can tell. It was simply a churlish and cruel decision that signaled: "If Saddam can't have this, nobody can."

Which brings me, naturally, to Donald Trump.

Big story in the NYT this morning asks: "Does Trump Want to Save His Economy?" It tries to explain the seemingly inexplicable -- while this president is dithering on getting a new economic package passed for Americans who have lost their jobs and face losing their homes because of the pandemic.

Lobbyists, economists and members of Congress say they are baffled by Mr. Trump’s shifting approach and apparent lack of urgency to nail down another rescue package that he can sign into law.

The president’s strategy to help the economy “is hard to decipher,” said Michael R. Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who has urged Congress to provide more aid to people, businesses and hard-hit state and local governments. “It seems to me there isn’t a clear strategy to support the economy right now coming from the White House.”

Perhaps -- as this story suggests -- Trump is just engaging in another round of magical thinking, believing that if he speaks a recovery into existence without doing the hard work of actually making a recovery happen. Donald isn't big into hard work, after all.

But what if Trump -- dispirited by polls that show him losing badly to Joe Biden -- has simply decided to burn things down?

There is one rule we can be certain of with this president: He does not do anything for the greater good, only for his own benefit. He is entirely transactional, and only in the most material sense -- he doesn't seem to have a sense of enlightened self-interest. It's why he can't see the harm done by accepting and soliciting assistance from foreign countries, for example. It's why -- as Vanity Fair reported yesterday -- administration officials were happy to let the coronavirus rage as long as it was contained to blue states. 

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.

So it's not unreasonable, I think, to speculate that Trump has forseen he may soon no longer derive benefits from being president. In that scenario, he might decide -- or instinctively move -- to use his remaining power and platform to set fire to American institutions. He's not the kid who takes the ball and goes home. Worse. He's the kid who takes your ball and chucks it into the river.

If you contemplate the "burn it all down" strategy, it becomes easier to understand why Trump seems uninterested in the economy, or why he continually tries to undermine confidence in elections, or why -- even now -- he does so little to combat the pandemic. He never had much interest in the governing part of being president, anyway, as far as I can tell. 

This might not be a correct take on the president's behavior. But again: He does so little for the good of the country. But I think we start with the idea that his behavior is selfish, and seek explanations from there.

The easiest prediction I've ever made about Donald Trump

Even if he wins in November, he will claim the vote was rigged against him. How do I know? He's done it once already.

Donald Trump and the 'Bradley Effect'

David Graham on Donald Trump's increasingly racist reelection effort:

While it’s true that a lot of the media coverage made a Clinton victory seem like a foregone conclusion, there were warning signs of her weaknesses for some time, and Biden is already doing better on several of those fronts. The presumptive Democratic nominee holds a larger lead, and a more consistent one, and he’s eating into Trump’s edge in key demographics including white voters and older voters.

The reason for this, as I wrote last week, is that voters are horrified by Trump’s handling of race issues and of protests. The president’s unfavorability rating remains high, though within its normal range, and voters still give him high marks on the economy, but there’s been an immense shift in opinion on race. White voters have changed their minds, and they’re no longer with the president—but he’s sticking to the same talking points.

I wonder if we're seeing an inversion of the "Bradley Effect" here.

The Bradley Effect is a phenomenon in which black politicians underperform their polling when voters actually cast their votes. The idea is that white voters tell pollsters they'll vote for the black candidate because they don't want to look racist but maybe are secretly a little bit racist when they go into the voting booth.

The idea is that racism and discomfort with racism can coexist in the same person. (We're large, we contain multitudes.) Republicans have exploited that discrepancy over the years by running meta-campaigns on crime and welfare while studiously avoiding going full N-word. As long as there was a plausibly non-racist explanation for a Republican candidate's position, the GOP got the benefit of the doubt. Voters could vote for the Willie Horton ad guy and still feel OK about themselves.

Donald Trump is a blunt object, though, given to saying the quiet part loud. Voters who might support a subtly racist candidate can do so and tell themselves that they're not supporting a racist candidate. But Trump is, increasingly, foreclosing that option to those voters. He is plainly trying to divide America along racial lines, defending the Confederate flag and racist team names, praising "Manifest Destiny," even going after NASCAR's one black driver -- and all of this in the last 24 hours. Voters who can look past somewhat subtle expressions of racism are finding that Trump's expressions aren't all that subtle anymore. They don't like it. And so Trump is failing.

Then again, if the Bradley Effect possibility holds, it could be that voters are telling pollsters they don't like Trump and his racism -- but will give him their support in the privacy of the voting booth. There's only one way we'll find out.