Tag Archives: Donald Trump

Michael Hoexter, Ph.D. The Presidential election campaign of 2016 has been nauseating in the ugliness of its tone and content as well as how discussion of important issues about government policy has been sidelined in the public debates and the public sphere more generally.  The media seem to be encouraging the personalized ugliness in ways that are perhaps predictable as they have for years now reported politics as a horserace and soap opera and not as the conflict of ideas.  If we were to...

It is tiring to hear voters complain about having to stump for a lesser evil. The whole notion of purity in life — but especially in politics — is Manichean at best, and sophomoric at worst. Every choice in life and politics is a shade of grey. Pretending that any political candidate is anything other than a mesh of good and ill — much of it unintentional — is facile. Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein and Gary Johnson are shades of grey. Policies that appear to be unadulteratedly pure and...

By William K. Black Trump’s bigotry de jour was quadrupling down on his claim that the judge hearing the fraud lawsuit against the Trumphemistically-named “Trump U” (which was not a university and involved solely Trump’s wallet rather than his “leadership”) was biased against Trump because the judge, while born here, was of Mexican descent.  Trump’s free-floating bigotry is, of course, simply the norm, so the story here is the reaction of GOP leaders who have made public their support for...