"Trump displays unalloyed masculine strength. His supporters do not care if he is predatory, insulting, or offensive as long as he is never in doubt..."

"... especially if he is kicking the limp Washington establishment around. Trump’s instinct-driven behavior confirms that he is the archetypal alpha-male, the unfiltered reptilian brain, concerned only with sustenance, survival or sex. If anything enters his world, they know he must either eat it, kill it, or mate with it. That’s why they like him. For about half of America, that is terrifying. For the other half, Trump’s strength is the only thing they can count on to protect them from return of the elite bloodsuckers who would devour them.... Trump’s supporters don’t expect his unrestrained id to ponder the details of briefing papers before he eats the red meat in front of him. As long as Trump displays strength and grabs the media, the establishment and America’s adversaries by the pussy, he’s the T Rex many of his supporters want."

Said Alex Castellanos, "a veteran Republican media consultant and Trump loyalist," asked to comment on the subject of "why Trump and his supporters are immune to the attacks of the #MeToo movement," and quoted in "Can Democrats Follow #MeToo to Victory?" (NYT), the column by Thomas B. Edsall discussed in the previous post.

I had to break out that quote for a separate post, because it's so well written! But is it true? It's at least truthy.

"Yeah, I don't think we're in New Testament or Old Testament, we're like in Dante's Inferno, we're in the seventh circle of Hell..."

Raved David Brooks on "Meet the Press" today. He looked weirdly wild-eyed. What set him off that badly?

The moderator Chuck Todd had brought up Trump's response to Khizr Khan — "I was viciously attacked by Mr. Khan at the Democratic Convention, am I not allowed to respond? Hillary voted for the Iraq War, not me." — and Doris Kearns Goodwin had recycled her idea that the question is "temperament" and Alex Castellanos seemed to think he was improving on that by saying "it's a choice between temperament and character." Castellanos honed his utterly dull distinction by redoing it as New Testament/Old Testament:

You know, is it a New Testament election where things are going swimmingly and we turn the other cheek? Or is this an Old Testament election where we could lose it all and an eye for an eye?

I keep hearing all these Trump antagonists portraying Trump as "dark," but calling someone dark is dark, and Brooks looked way too psyched about Hell. Meanwhile, Khizr Khan was on CNN declaring that Trump is "a black soul":

"He is a black soul, and this is totally unfit for the leadership of this country," Khan said. "The love and affection that we have received affirms that our grief -- that our experience in this country has been correct and positive. The world is receiving us like we have never seen. They have seen the blackness of his character, of his soul."

Hillary's new slogan: We Are Stronger Together.

In an interview on "Meet the Press" this morning, Chuck Todd seemed to needle Hillary Clinton about her lack of a big campaign theme:

Bernie Sanders has been talking about a political revolution. A future you can believe in. Obviously, Donald Trump with the Make America Great Again, is one of these slogans that has taken off, for better or for worse. If you could sum up, what is the big idea of your candidacy?

She was so ready with a new slogan that I can't believe there wasn't an understanding between Todd and the campaign that he'd give her an opportunity to unveil a new slogan. She said:

Look, we are stronger together. We are stronger together, in facing our internal challenges and our external ones. We are stronger together if we work to improve the economy. And that's going to mean trying to get the Republicans to do what will actually help produce more jobs, like we saw in the 1990s. We are stronger together when we have a bipartisan, even nonpartisan foreign policy that protects our country. And that provides a kind of steady, strong, smart leadership that the rest of the world expects from us. And I know that, you know, slogans come and go, and all the rest of it. But when I look at where we are in our country together, we need to unify the country. We are stronger together, when we act on a set of plans and priorities that will redound to the benefit of the American people.

What do you think? Bland and generic? Or: a heartfelt reaching out to the Americans who feel that the other candidates are tearing us apart?

Later, a panel discussion addressed the slogan. Alex Castellanos — the "veteran Republican strategist" — said it "sounds a little defensive" and makes us think about the "tremendous amount of political weakness" she's shown — "dragged" around by a "near-octogenarian socialist who honeymooned in Russia" and looking to "her husband... to bail her out on the economy."

MSNBC commentator Joy-Ann Reid was next, and she said she didn't really know what "We Are Stronger Together" means or "how it unites voters." She paused to sneer at Trump's slogan: it evokes "nostalgia that a certain kind of white, particularly white voter, has for a bygone era." And then she revealed her disappointment:

I think that it's good that the Clinton campaign are strategizing. But it's interesting that, in your interview, she seemed so much like a strategist. And so many of her answers felt like this is Hillary, the smart political strategist telling you what she intends to do, and it's still not giving her campaign sort of a driving dream, I think.

Chuck swooped in with a slogan of his own: "Change versus steadiness."

But I want to go back to Reid's disappointment: Hillary is "not giving her campaign sort of a driving dream."

Driving dream... To me, that calls up the spirit of Richard Nixon. From his 1970 State of the Union:

But let us, above all, recognize a fundamental truth. We can be the best clothed, best fed, best housed people in the world, enjoying clean air, clean water, beautiful parks, but we could still be the unhappiest people in the world without an indefinable spirit — the lift of a driving dream which has made America, from its beginning, the hope of the world.

"If you disqualify Trump, you could help Ted Cruz and the establishment doesn't want that. If you disqualify Cruz, you could help Trump."

"So a lot of the establishment is just sitting on the sidelines and I think the moment to go after either has passed," said Alex Castellanos on "Meet the Press" today. He's a big establishment type, having worked for GW and Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney and who has been looking for donors for an anti-Trump ad campaign and not finding any.

Chuck Todd, the moderator, prodded him with the non-question "It's too late," and Castellanos echoes the statement — "It's too late" — "And two-thirds of the party is in one of those guys' pocket, one-third is in the establishment lane. That doesn't argue well for the establishment going forward beyond New Hampshire."

Is President Obama, traveling about pushing his jobs bill, on "the campaign trail"?

I had to laugh watching "Meet the Press" today. David Gregory was doing the "roundtable" section of the show, talking to Republican strategist Alex Castellanos, former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, Helene Cooper of The New York Times, and Mark Halperin of Time magazine.

Castellanos said:

[T]he president is running, I think, a very strange campaign for re-election.  He is running around the country, in fact declaring his own impotence, saying that, "I'm weak.  I can't get anything done in Washington. Mommy, mommy, please make these Republicans play fair."

Gregory turned to Cooper and said:

I talked to some Republicans and Democrats on the Hill this week who said, "This seems like more of a political exercise, this jobs bill, than anything else." They haven't dropped the bill, by the way.  They haven't introduced the legislation yet; and yet, former President Clinton is saying, "Well, no.  This is really the key.  He's got a good plan." The chances of it passing are not very high.

And Cooper — who, we're told, is reporting on the White House every day — said:

[O]ne of the reasons they haven't dropped the jobs bill yet in Congress is because President Obama decided that he needed to go out and try to sell it first to the American public.

So... presumably, it's about drumming up public support for the jobs bill, which really is a jobs bill and not — as Gregory just put it — "more of a political exercise... than anything else."

Then Gregory dragged in Granholm — the super-polished Granholm, and she says:

[Obama has] got to put stuff out there that work--that works. ... So he's doing--he's adopting a plan that will create American jobs, both in the public and the private sector.  And that's exactly what he needs to trumpet.  And I just say, if the Republicans continue to say no to this reasonable plan, game on.

Game on? So... it is a political exercise?

Castellanos breaks in to say:

There's a little bit of a problem.  The American people have televisions and the Internet, and they can see what's going on....

Then there's an interlude about the new Ron Suskind book — which I just pre-ordered here — and Gregory lifts out a quote...

 "Over the past few months, [National Economic Council Chair Larry] Summers had said this, in a stage whisper, to [OMB Director Peter] Orszag and others as they left the morning economic briefings ...  `I mean it,' Summers stressed.  `We're home alone.  There's no adult in charge. Clinton would never have made these mistakes.'"

Wow! That's hot. But Halperin lamely obfuscates, and Gregory goes back to Helene Cooper and asks her if "there [is] a broader vision for the economy that the president goes out and, and runs on?" And here's the part that made us laugh here at Meadhouse. Remember Cooper is the one who was careful to say: "President Obama decided that he needed to go out and try to sell [the jobs bill] first to the American public." And remember Granholm had bolstered that with her rejection of the notion that the jobs bill is "more of a political exercise... than anything else." And Cooper says:

I think there is, and he's, he's, he's, he's put that [broader vision] out there with his, his jobs proposal. And he said, "These are the things I think we need to do." But he's, he's very much hampered by the political reality of where we are right now. That said, I wouldn't--I, I was out on the--not the campaign trail, that's a very--but I was out with him this week as he went to try to pass his jobs bill in Columbus, Ohio, and in Raleigh, North Carolina....

Ha ha. It's all about Obama's reelection! As  Castellanos said: The American people have televisions and the Internet, and they can see what's going on. 

"[N]ot the campaign trail, that's a very..."... Cooper couldn't come up with the right euphemism for "campaign trail" or even the right words to follow "that's a very" that would express, with appropriate euphony, the reason why she's sorry she said "campaign trail."

Game on!