Why did I stay up late — on my vacation, even — to watch Monday’s debate?
Why do I know what’s been said on both sides about this latest scandal, the beauty queen and what he said about her?
Why do I keep reading like an intern trying to break the big story, clicking every damn headline that has the word “Trump” in it?
He looked into building in Cuba during the embargo. His foundation doesn’t have the proper paperwork. He might have drunk the blood of puppies to get that lovely orange glow. (This isn’t verified, but he would deny it, which basically makes it true.)
Unless you’re new around here, you probably know that I basically made up my mind in this election months ago, when it became clear that Trump would win the Republican nomination. Notice I said when it became clear he would win, not before the primaries ever took place. I tend toward the liberal side of the spectrum, but I might have — and possibly even probably would have — voted for a Marco Rubio or a Jeb Bush over Clinton, who, whether it’s justified or not, does not have a reputation for trustworthiness.
But as soon as Trump became the Republican running man, the Democrats could have put up a trained chimp, for all I care.
Fine and good. I, like most, have made up my mind, and at this point, that opinion might as well be cast in stone.
And yet, like a suburbanite to a Starbucks, I keep coming back. I don’t know why. And that kind of scares me.
Because, in my heart of hearts, I still believe that Trump might not actually want to win this thing. I still suspect, as I have from the beginning, that his campaign is about increasing his own visibility and putting his name in people’s mouths. The “no such thing as bad publicity” principle.
Which means that anything we say to one another only helps this man to get what he wants. And I am not okay with that. Which is why I’ve been relatively silent on the matter for a while.
But dammit, this sharknado is coming to a head, now. It looks very much like the news cycle will consist of Donald Trump first and everything else happening in the world second from now until the election, even though by all accounts, the two sides in this election are fixed in amber. Clinton supporters aren’t going to switch and go for Trump. Trump supporters aren’t going to switch and go for Clinton. All that’s left is the (somehow) undecided people in the middle.
But here’s the problem with that. (For non-Trump supporters.)
With a normal candidate, any strike, any ding on their record, any scandal can do serious damage to their image and their perception. But not Trump. There are so many scandals, so many scars, so many warts all over him already — what harm can another scandal possibly do? How much difference does a single grain of sand make when added to the Gobi desert?
I know the irony is rich here, but I just want to draw attention to the fact that I think any attention drawn to Donald Trump is a mistake. Which is why I won’t be doing it again.
There’s a simple thought experiment in game theory known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Perhaps you’ve heard of it:
Two criminals are apprehended on suspicion of a crime and separated so that they cannot communicate with one another. The police know that both individuals are involved in the crime, but not in what capacity; therefore they offer each prisoner a deal. Rat on your friend and you will go free while he gets five years in prison, or remain silent and get one year in prison. If each prisoner rats the other out, however, both prisoners will get three years. Each prisoner being offered the same deal results in the following outcomes:
A rats out B, B stays silent: B serves five years, A serves zero. Total: 5 years in prison.
A stays silent, B stays silent: Both serve one year. Total: 2 years in prison.
A rats out B, B rats out A: Both serve three years. Total: 6 years in prison.
A stays silent, B rats out A: A serves five years, B serves zero. Total: 5 years in prison.
It’s a simple and perhaps unlikely scenario, but it shows the obvious benefits to working together and the disadvantages in being selfish. The logical thing — if we assume that time spent in prison is a bad thing and we want to minimize the damage to ourselves — is to always, ALWAYS take the team play, staying silent and serving one year while counting on your partner to do the same. (Staying silent also ensures that you won’t have an angry, embittered ex-friend coming after you when he gets out of prison in five years.)
In practice, though, it doesn’t work out that way, because — spoiler alert — we aren’t always logical creatures. In fact, even the best of us are egotistical in this problem. To many, the chance of getting off scot-free blinds them to the fact that their partner is likely thinking the exact same thing, so they turn on their friends in a heartbeat. Or, an even more cynical approach: they know (or fear) their friend will take the deal and rat, so to avoid getting beaten to the punch and serving five, they rat first. Either way, the Prisoner’s Dilemma gets resolved in a deeply illogical and counter-intuitive way. If the prisoners hope for the least unpleasant outcome, they should stay silent, yet their desire for the least unpleasant outcome is exactly the reason they do not stay silent.
The team game is a winning strategy. The individual game, the selfish game
So. What does it have to do with the election? I’m glad you asked!
Donald Trump is closing in on the Republican nomination like a wolf stalking a wounded squirrel. If things proceed on their present course, he will be the nominee, no question about it.
The remaining candidates, then, face a dilemma. They must decide what’s more important: an individual victory, vis-a-vis their own path to the presidency, or a party victory, vis-a-vis dropping out of the race and forming ranks behind one of their competitors.
The correlation isn’t a perfect one, but it’s pretty darn close.
You can insist that your opponents can’t win and that you’re the one to beat Trump, hoping your opponents will drop out and preserving your shot at the presidency. (The partner serves five, you serve zero.)
Or you can meet with your compatriots, choose a champion to fight against Trump, and concede your own chance. (Everybody serves one year, except for one lucky guy.)
Trump is winning a lot of support: taking states in last night’s primaries with as much as 40% of the vote. 40% is a plurality, but not a majority. The other guys are scrambling and stomping on each other for 25, 30 percent, or scooping up the scraps for 6 and 7. The difference is, people either love Trump or hate him. His 40%, if he dropped out, would probably not throw their support behind another candidate, nor is it likely that if another candidate dropped out, their supporters would jump on the Trump train. Supporters of other candidates don’t (I think) feel nearly so do-or-die about their guy, and will probably take the party candidate, whoever it is — especially if their first choice throws his support behind another. In other words, I can see Cruz supporters going for Rubio if Cruz were to drop out much more easily than I can see them going for Trump.
The solution? The Republicans need to cut the crap and form up behind one guy. If the candidates in the race sit back and take a hard look, it’s not hard to see a couple of candidates that need to go yesterday. Then the ones left standing need to have a good hard talk about who can possibly win an election in November.
But let’s not forget (as if we needed reminding) that we’re dealing with politicians. Egomaniacs to the stars. They know exactly what the situation is: a Republican field of five candidates ensures a Trump nomination. But each one apparently still believes that he (and none of the others!) is the guy to beat Trump. So you’re going to see each of them calling for the others to drop out of the race for the good of the party.
But none of them is going to drop out, because that would mean a personal loss.
Give up my shot at the presidency? Nonsense. The OTHER guys should drop out — this is MY race to win!
Everybody rats each other out, and everybody loses.
(As told by a guy who knows of politics only what he learned a long, long time ago in a freshman government class far away)
I seem to be saying it a lot lately, but this is the part where I say that mine is not a political blog; it’s just that politics are, for better or worse, a part of life, and as such, well, they dwell in the mind from time to time. This little post snowballed on me.
TL;DR version: Trump might win the Republican primary — and that should be exactly what non-Republicans want.
We’re exhausted over here in America. In recent decades, our election cycle has bloated and fed upon itself to the point that it stretches out, without blinking an eye, well over a year. I remember seeing on the Daily Show or something similar several months ago that Canada had just gone through an election cycle. It had lasted about a month, and none of the Canadians could believe how long it had taken. Ha! If that’s democracy, you’re doing it wrong. Silly Canadians. No, our elections are interminable affairs; in fact, if you happen to be a fan of the losing party during an election year, have no fear, because the pundits in your corner will begin immediately discussing the ways they can turn the electorate in their favor four years off.
To that end, the current election cycle feels like it’s been about seven years long so far. Quite a lot of people have been really surprisingly upset about our president ever since his election and all through his re-election, and I can clearly remember interviews with high-ranking Republicans wherein running in 2016 was referenced even a full year or two ago. Now we’re within a year of the election, and people are really freaking the fargo out.
Let’s calm the hell down. The president has not nearly as much power as anti-Obama types would have you think; he’s hamstrung by the checks-and-balances system established by those founding forefathers that pundits so love to idolize.
Second, if you think this election cycle — featuring over 20 presidential hopefuls at one point (and maybe still? surely some other backwoods senator has wandered into the light and declared a presidential bid since lunchtime) — is anything other than idolatry and pandering at this point, you are deluding yourself.
Take Trump. (No, seriously. Take him. To Saturn, if you have the means.)
I’m going to go ahead and put my dollar down: he will not be the next PotUS.
Never gonna happen.
He’s gotten a lot of attention in the current cycle for saying some, uh, inflammatory things. People are freaking out because he’s leading in the polls. But there is no cause for concern. (Well, I guess that depends on where you stand politically.) Trump is not going to be president, and the reason for that is that most people don’t care who the president is.
Don’t believe me? Join me in a thought experiment.
You go to the polling place, sign in with the elderly, cheerful volunteer, and wait in line for your chance to do your civic duty. You approach the booth, and go to place your vote — but you find that the names have been blacked out, and all you can do is vote Republican, Democrat, or Other.
Looks a bit too much like a line of urinals, doesn’t it?
I submit that an overwhelming majority of people in this situation would go ahead and vote Republican, Democrat, or Other, without making too much of a stink about being unable to see the name of the person they’re voting for. Hell, I probably would. That’s because we don’t care who the president is, we just want to make sure it’s one of our guys in the White House.
But everybody needs to remember that Trump is not currently running for president. Sure, he says he is, and his campaign literature says he is, but what he’s really running for is to be the Republican Nominee for president. A subtle, but key, difference.
For those of you looking at the American election wind-up and scratching your heads or vomiting in the corner, we have these things called Primaries, wherein hopefuls from each political party battle to the death for the right to represent their party in the national election.
What, sorry? They don’t fight to the death? Oh.
If only.
No: in the primary, candidates do battle with members of their own party for the right to represent that party. In other words, the republican candidates must prove they are the most republican, the democratic candidates must prove they are the most democratic, the libertarians must prove they are the most libertarded.
Thing is, to prove that you’re the best something, you must epitomize every aspect of that something. This will prove to your “base” (the faithful voters who will always vote R or D without a second thought) that you are the right man for the job. So what you end up with is a gaggle of otherwise intelligent politicians scrambling like hell to get as far to the right as they can to appeal to the base: those voters who are really concerned about politics.
And here the Republicans have a problem: what has their party been about for the last seven years (and yes, I’m talking specifically about the Obama presidency) outside of being against everything the democrats, specifically Obama, do and say? Republicans have to contend with the fact that a big swathe of their voters are really pissed off that Obama is the president, and nobody — NOBODY — is more vocal about how pissed off over the Obama presidency he is than Trump.
I’m not going to postulate on why this is the case. I’ll leave that to people much smarter than me. But for every possible Republican stance — clamp down on immigration, free market, women’s (lack of) rights — Trump turns it to 11. No immigration, Mexican or Islamic especially. No regulation of the market. Women? More like crazy PMSing baby factories, amirite? (His words, not mine. Okay, maybe not exactly his words.)
This is why he’s leading in the polls. The Republican core is mad as hell and Trump is expressing thoughts that they agree with. And if you’re a functionally intelligent Republican, then, yeah, I might start getting nervous. Because the challenge that sane Republicans now face is, how are we going to get a majority of our non-zealot population to turn out and vote for just one of these unimpressive faces in the crowd? How can we mobilize people who don’t care all that much about all this against the horde of slavering, racist, sexist, Trump supporters?
It’s a problem the Republicans are going to have to solve very soon, or they’re going to reap exactly what they’ve sown over the last seven years.
But by the same token, I see a lot of Democrats and other non-Republicans getting nervous about the Trump bid. His racism scares them, his intolerance scares them, his flightiness and willingness to say or do anything scares them.
But the fact is, if you’re a non-Republican, a Trump ticket is exactly what you want to see.
Why?
Because even though most people don’t care who the president is, people will still turn out in droves for the general election. Something about deciding the fate of the most powerful man (or woman, Hillary’s running after all, and so is that woman who isn’t Donald Trump on the Republican side) in the world gets our American juices flowing. And on election day? The horde of Trump supporters will be as a speck in a fly’s eye compared to the rest of the electorate. Democrats will never vote for Trump. Most independents will never vote for Trump. Even a lot of Republicans will never vote for Trump; just look at their rhetoric: he doesn’t represent the party, he’s not a Republican, etc. Some will vote 3rd party, others will just stay home; either way benefits the Democrats.
If Trump wins the Republican primary, it’s the closest thing to a guaranteed victory for Democrats that you will ever see.
Insert your own conspiracy theories about how this is exactly what Trump wants below.
Welcome. This is my page for sharing projects associated with my coursework in Media and Technology at the University of West Georgia. Assignments will be posted here as they are completed.
Accidentally Inspired 