VIEWS Michael Barone That’s the point in time when Donald Trump began using his father’s political connections to move his Brooklyn/Queens real estate business to Manhattan and beyond. And to stamp his last name on casinos, hotels and eventually a reality TV show. When Trump came down the escalator at Trump Tower 13 months ago and announced his candidacy, almost no commentator took his chances seriously – except the Dilbert cartoonist, Scott Adams. The other 16 Republicans largely represented a party consensus: conservative on cultural issues; pro tax cuts, backing military interventions and free trade. Trump was different: perfunctory on cultural issues; against the Iraq War; corrosively critical of trade agreements and illegal immigration. Trump’s victory in the Republican race owes much to $2 billion or so of free media coverage and to his 16 rivals’ unwillingness to risk attacks that might recoil against them. His dystopian picture of America and the world spinning out of control gained credibility after terrorist attacks in San Bernardino and Paris, Orlando and Nice, and even more so after recent mass murder of police officers. This was the centerpiece of his
acceptance speech in Cleveland. Trump didn’t get a majority till he got home to New York on April 19, but by May 4 all his rivals withdrew. It’s widely appreciated that Trump appealed especially to noncollege-graduates and older voters. There’s also an ethnic angle. Groups with high degrees of social connectedness and respect for order – Mormons, Dutch- and German-Americans – were largely immune from his appeal. People without such ties, whom he called Thursday night “people who work hard but no longer have a voice,” were drawn to him. Groups that respond positively to raucous disruptive appeals rallied to Trump: Scots-Irish along the Appalachian spine from western Pennsylvania to northern Alabama; and Italian-Americans, half of whom live with 100 miles of New York City. If you draw a map of counties where Trump topped 50 percent by May 4, the great bulk of them are along that diagonal and within that circle. For 20 years American elections have been battles between two roughly equal-sized armies in a culture war, with results differing little year to year. It’s easy to predict how 40 states will vote, much harder to predict who will win the election. Donald Trump may well disrupt this pattern, too. Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes seem within his range, as well as Ohio’s 16 and Florida’s 29 – which together would have made Mitt Rom-
ney president. Trump seems less competitive in states with younger, more educated populations, such as Colorado (9) and Virginia (13). Heavily German-American Wisconsin (10) seems hostile; low-social-connectedness Nevada (6) quite friendly. It’s not clear that this disruptive convention will help him. Trump’s managers have disrupted the traditions in place for 30 years. These rules had been: only supporters speak, sessions end promptly at 11 p.m., don’t visibly crush dissent, vet speeches carefully. Monday saw a rules rebellion squashed. Tuesday it was controversy over a bit of anodyne plagiarism. Wednesday it was Ted Cruz’s ringing nonendorsement, booed off the stage. But there’s another way of looking at a campaign that has not gone conventional wisdom’s way. Disorder and disarray work against the party in power. Terrorist attacks and police shootings are not what America thought it’d get in the Obama years. As tech billionaire Peter Thiel argued Thursday, disruption is a good thing when old ways – and especially government – aren’t working well. • Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.
ANOTHER VIEW
An opioid bill that’s still good enough to be signed With a new bill, Congress is testing how much can be done to fight opioid addiction without spending any money. But while the legislation is less than what the epidemic demands, it’s still good enough to merit President Barack Obama’s signature. Almost 2 million Americans abused prescription painkillers in 2014, and more than 28,000 died of overdoses. Enough painkiller prescriptions were written in 2012 to give every American adult their own bottle. The bill Congress sent to the
president this week authorizes federal grants to state and local governments to try new approaches to preventing and treating opioid addiction. It does not, however, include funding for those grants. Nevertheless, the legislation is worthwhile. The bill would make it harder for some people on Medicare to abuse painkillers. It would allow pharmacists to partially fill opioid prescriptions, cutting down on excess pills that can be stolen or sold. And, by letting nurse practitioners and
physicians’ assistants prescribe medical treatment for opioid addiction, the bill would make that treatment easier to get. The bill would also tighten procedures at the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is important because veterans are overrepresented among those struggling with opioid abuse. It would expand training for opioid prescribers within the VA, give its health care providers more information about which patients are taking opioids or at risk of abuse, and make overdose-treating drugs such as naloxone more widely avail-
able. These steps won’t be enough to end the crisis. That will require harder changes, such as getting doctors and drug courts to overcome their aversion to treating addiction. Meanwhile, it’s not just the health providers at the VA who need more training, but doctors nationwide. And congressional Republicans can demonstrate their commitment to addressing this epidemic by funding the bill’s grant programs after the summer recess.
Bloomberg View Editorial Board
• Tuesday, July 26, 2016
Disruptive. That’s a good word to describe Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, and to describe the sometimes-ramshackle Republican National Convention his campaign more or less superintended in Cleveland this past week. Apple disrupted the music industry; Uber disrupted the taxi cartels; Amazon disrupted the mega-bookstores. Global competition has been disrupting American manufacturing for decades. The inundation of low-skill immigrants unintentionally produced by the 1965 immigration act has disrupted many communities and big metro areas. Over history, America has mostly been built by disruption. Certainly the Loyalists in the American Revolution thought so. So did the farmers who cheered for William Jennings Bryan’s free silver as industrialization was disrupting the farm economy. The New Deal was disruptive. So was World War II. As Yuval Levin points out in his book “The Fractured Republic,” both the political left and political right see the two post-WWII decades as normal, with high family formation, low crime, strong faith in institutions and relatively smooth economic growth. But that period was the exception, not the rule. Postwar America was massively disrupted by the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations, high crime, urban riots and antiwar protests.
OPINIONS | Daily Chronicle / Daily-Chronicle.com
Is America ready for a disruptive president?
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