Dear Commons Community,

Business Insider published an analysis yesterday of those colleges that give students the best return on investment, based on post-grad salary and tuition figures.

To do this, it used the most recent available data from the Department of Education’s Scorecard that has figures like cost of tuition, enrollment, and student debt. We created a ratio of median earnings from 10 years after first attending college to the average cost of attendance.

Earnings data is from federally aided students and cost is from “full-time, first-time, degree-/certificate-seeking undergraduates who receive Title IV aid,” according to Department of Education’s notes on the available data. We only included schools that are mainly considered four-year, bachelor degree colleges and have at least 1,000 undergraduate students enrolled.

It is important to note that this is a simple ratio that doesn’t take into account other factors that might influence return on investment from college, such as the type of degree a student earned or whether they are receiving financial aid.

Educational news site Inside Higher Ed notes that colleges that have the best return on investment after 10 years may not be the same as those after 40 years, based on Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce’s own return on investment report. Researchers found public universities had a better return over 10 years than private nonprofit universities, although these private schools had a better return over 40 years. Similarly, a lot of public universities made the top of our list.

The 24 colleges with the best return on investment are listed below, expressed as a percentage based on our calculated ratios of 10-year earnings to average costs. We multiplied our costs by four to get an estimate of a typical four-year cost. Online-only colleges, maritime colleges, and some specialized colleges are excluded from our analysis. We also included the most recent figures of undergraduate student enrollment from the Department of Education.

I am pleased to see eight CUNY colleges in the top 24 with Baruch College capturing the No. 1 position.

I thank my colleague, Meghan Moore-Wilk, for alerting me to this article.

Tony

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Business Insider

The 24 colleges with the best return on investment

Madison Hoff

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• University of Houston-Downtown has a return on investment of 68.0%.

Location: Houston, Texas

Median earnings after 10 years: $45,000

Average cost of attendance: $16,547

Number of undergraduate students enrolled: 12,572

• Dalton State College has a return on investment of 68.0%.

Location: Dalton, Georgia

Median earnings after 10 years: $32,300

Average cost of attendance: $11,875

Number of undergraduate students enrolled: 4,715

22. California State University-Stanislaus has a return on investment of 69.0%.

Location: Turlock, California

Median earnings after 10 years: $45,400

Average cost of attendance: $16,442

Number of undergraduate students enrolled: 9,272

21. Georgia Institute of Technology-Main Campus has a return on investment of 69.4%.

Location: Atlanta, Georgia

Median earnings after 10 years: $79,100

Average cost of attendance: $28,501

Number of undergraduate students enrolled: 15,201

20. University of Wisconsin-La Crosse has a return on investment of 69.7%.

Location: La Crosse, Wisconsin

Median earnings after 10 years: $48,000

Average cost of attendance: $17,213

Number of undergraduate students enrolled: 9,517

19. College of Staten Island CUNY has a return on investment of 69.8%.

Location: Staten Island, New York

Median earnings after 10 years: $41,500

Average cost of attendance: $14,857

Number of undergraduate students enrolled: 11,815

18. California State University-Bakersfield has a return on investment of 71.5%.

Location: Bakersfield, California

Median earnings after 10 years: $47,800

Average cost of attendance: $16,714

Number of undergraduate students enrolled: 9,142

17. CUNY York College has a return on investment of 71.8%.

Location: Jamaica, New York

Median earnings after 10 years: $40,800

Average cost of attendance: $14,204

Number of undergraduate students enrolled: 7,126

16. CUNY Lehman College has a return on investment of 75.0%.

Location: Bronx, New York

Median earnings after 10 years: $43,100

Average cost of attendance: $14,359

Number of undergraduate students enrolled: 11,559

15. Augusta University has a return on investment of 75.5%.

Location: Augusta, Georgia

Median earnings after 10 years: $62,300

Average cost of attendance: $20,618

Number of undergraduate students enrolled: 5,146

14. California State University-Dominguez Hills has a return on investment of 77.2%.

Location: Carson, California

Median earnings after 10 years: $44,700

Average cost of attendance: $14,469

Number of undergraduate students enrolled: 13,871

13. The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley has a return on investment of 77.4%.

Location: Edinburg, Texas

Median earnings after 10 years: $41,900

Average cost of attendance: $13,534

Number of undergraduate students enrolled: 24,596

12. California State University-Los Angeles has a return on investment of 77.8%.

Location: Los Angeles, California

Median earnings after 10 years: $46,100

Average cost of attendance: $14,823

Number of undergraduate students enrolled: 24,163

11. CUNY Brooklyn College has a return on investment of 78.4%.

Location: Brooklyn, New York

Median earnings after 10 years: $43,900

Average cost of attendance: $13,991

Number of undergraduate students enrolled: 13,954

10. CUNY City College has a return on investment of 80.2%.

Location: New York, New York

Median earnings after 10 years: $46,300

Average cost of attendance: $14,430

Number of undergraduate students enrolled: 12,503

9. Farmingdale State College has a return on investment of 80.3%.

Location: Farmingdale, New York

Median earnings after 10 years: $51,700

Average cost of attendance: $16,091

Number of undergraduate students enrolled: 9,394

8. Missouri University of Science and Technology has a return on investment of 80.9%.

Location: Rolla, Missouri

Median earnings after 10 years: $71,200

Average cost of attendance: $22,012

Number of undergraduate students enrolled: 6,785

•     Texas A & M International University has a return on investment of 82.3%

Location: Laredo, Texas

Median earnings after 10 years: $45,800

Average cost of attendance: $13,914

Number of undergraduate students enrolled: 6,962

• Brigham Young University-Provo has a return on investment of 82.3%

Location: Provo, Utah

Median earnings after 10 years: $59,700

Average cost of attendance: $18,136

Number of undergraduate students enrolled: 31,441

5. CUNY Hunter College has a return on investment of 84.3%.

Location: New York, New York

Median earnings after 10 years: $47,200

Average cost of attendance: $13,998

Number of undergraduate students enrolled: 16,205

4. CUNY Queens College has a return on investment of 84.4%.

Location: Queens, New York

Median earnings after 10 years: $48,200

Average cost of attendance: $14,281

Number of undergraduate students enrolled: 15,645

3. Utah Valley University has a return on investment of 84.7%.

Location: Orem, Utah

Median earnings after 10 years: $43,800

Average cost of attendance: $12,921

Number of undergraduate students enrolled: 28,278

2. Brigham Young University-Idaho has a return on investment of 87.3%.

Location: Rexburg, Idaho

Median earnings after 10 years: $42,700

Average cost of attendance: $12,223

Number of undergraduate students enrolled: 37,636

1. CUNY Bernard M. Baruch College has a return on investment of 101.8%.

Location: New York, New York

Median earnings after 10 years: $57,200

Average cost of attendance: $14,046

Number of undergraduate students enrolled: 14,629

Senator Tim Scott

Dear Commons Community,

The first night of the Republican National Convention (RNC) was a mixed bag of performances and speeches.

Senator Tim Scott (Republican – South Carolina) was excellent.  He told his story of going from the cotton fields of South Carolina to Congress. He praised Trump and criticized Biden as one would expect at the RNC.  His presentation was genuine, powerful and effective.

Nikki Haley, the former governor or South Carolina and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, showed why many Republicans believe that she is the future of her party, delivering a strong speech that praised Trump while hammering Biden for what she called his socialist views.

“In much of the Democratic Party, it’s now fashionable to say that America is racist. That is a lie. America is not a racist country,” Haley said. “This is personal for me. I am the proud daughter of Indian immigrants that came to America and settled in a small Southern town. My father wore a turban. My mother wore a sari. I was a brown girl in a black and white world. We faced discrimination and hardship, but my parents never gave in to grievance and hate. My mom built a successful business. My dad taught 30 years at a historically black college. And the people of South Carolina chose me as their first minority and first female governor.”

My question to Haley is if Trump was so good why did she quit his administration.

On the down side were Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle.  Both were a bit over the top and not ready for prime time.

Donald Trump Jr. alternated between a more hopeful vision of American greatness and a seething contempt of those that he said were standing in the way of it.

“Joe Biden is basically the Loch Ness Monster of the swamp. For the past half-century, he’s been lurking around in there. He sticks his head up every now and then to run for president, then he disappears and doesn’t do much in between,” said Trump, glossing over Biden’s two terms as vice president.

He continued: “Joe Biden and the radical left are also now coming for our freedom of speech and want to bully us into submission. If they get their way, it will no longer be the ‘silent majority,’ it will be the ‘silenced majority.’”

Shouting and pointing from the podium into an empty room, Kimberly Guilfoyle, the former Fox News personality said Democrats “want to destroy this country, and everything that we have fought for and hold dear. They want to steal your liberty, your freedom. They want to control what you see and think and believe, so they can control how you live. They want to enslave you to the weak, dependent, liberal, victim ideology, to the point that you will not recognize this country or yourself.”

The evening also featured a number of presentations from individuals from around the country giving their personal stories. Some of them were effective such as the former football player Herschel Walker, others were not.

However, as one pundit said afterwards, “the elephant in the room at Monday’s convention, so to speak, was the more than 177,000 Americans who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. The death toll went unmentioned, as did the number of Americans who have contracted the virus, approaching six million.

In a taped segment introducing a panel of health care workers and first responders, Trump made clear that he believes he bears no blame for the number of Americans who have perished or been infected by the virus.

Part Two tonight!

Tony

Areas of the Country (in Red) Affected by the Zoom Outage

Dear Commons Community,

A widespread outage on the video call service Zoom caused problems for millions yesterday and especially for students, teachers and professors around the United States, the first day of classes for many schools and universities that are reopening online because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The partial outage, which lasted almost four hours, took place just as working and school hours began on the East Coast and affected the wide variety of people who now rely on Zoom as a lifeline. Businesses could not make video calls to clients, courthouses could not conduct hearings, and city and county governments had to postpone meetings.

Zoom said it had begun receiving reports of users’ being unable to start or join meetings at about 8:50 a.m. on the East Coast. About two hours later, the company said that it was “deploying a fix across our cloud,” and at about 12:40 p.m. it said it had resolved the issue. “Thank you all for your patience and our sincere apologies for disrupting your day,” the company said on Twitter.

Below is an explanation of the outage from Velchamy Sankarlingam, Zoom President of Product and Engineering.

Tony

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Dear Valued Zoom Customer,

As you may know, at 4:56 am PDT today, August 24, Zoom experienced a partial disruption of our Meeting, Webinar, and website services. We largely restored service by 8:26 am PDT. We have determined that the cause of this service disruption was related to an application-level bug in our system, which resulted in a web login issue for customers.

We always take very seriously our responsibility to keep you connected, and we know that you are relying on us during this particularly challenging time. We deeply regret this incident and sincerely apologize. I’m personally disappointed that we have let you down and I am sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.

I am proud of our dedicated team working to enable our customers’ work, schooling, and social lives during the global health crisis. We are intensely focused on scaling our collaboration and cloud technology to help Zoom reliably connect the world now and in the future. I’m here to get this right and will personally do my best to prevent disruptions like this from happening in the future. Zoom’s availability and reliability is a top priority and we appreciate all of your support.

Sincerely,
Velchamy Sankarlingam
President of Product and Engineering

Former Republican Senator Jeff Flake

Dear Commons Community,

Former Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) is endorsing Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden along with more than two dozen former Republican lawmakers.

The Biden campaign announced the endorsements (see list below) yesterday morning. The list includes other former members of Congress who had previously announced their support for Biden, including former Sens. John Warner (R-Va.) and Gordon Humphrey (R-N.H.), who is now an independent, and Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.).

Other former lawmakers on the list include former Reps. Steve Bartlett (R-Texas), Tom Coleman (R-Mo.), Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), Chris Shays (R-Conn.), Alan Steelman (R-Texas) and Jim Walsh (R-N.Y.).

“These former members of Congress cited Trump’s corruption, destruction of democracy, blatant disregard for moral decency, and urgent need to get the country back on course as a reason why they support Biden,” an official with the Biden campaign told Fox News. “These former Members of Congress are supporting Joe Biden because they know what’s at stake in this election and that Trump’s failures as President have superseded partisanship.”

Flake, who retired in 2019, previously said in April that he would not vote for President Trump’s reelection. At the time he suggested he would not support Biden either, saying “This won’t be the first time I’ve voted for a Democrat – though not for president. Last time I voted for a third-party candidate. But I will not vote for Donald Trump.”

The announcement comes after several Republicans, including former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, former Rep. Susan Molinari (N.Y.) and former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, spoke at the Democratic National Convention last week. Former Hewlett-Packard CEO and onetime Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina has also announced her backing of Biden.

Tony

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Dear Commons Community,

Kellyanne Conway, one of President Donald Trump’s most influential and longest serving advisers, announced yesterday that she would be leaving the White House at the end of the month.  As reported by the Associated Press and the Washington Post.

“Conway, Trump’s campaign manager during the stretch run of the 2016 race, was the first woman to successfully steer a White House bid, then became a senior counselor to the president. She informed Trump of her decision in the Oval Office.

Conway cited a need to spend time with her four children in a resignation letter she posted Sunday night. Her husband, George, had become an outspoken Trump critic and her family a subject of Washington’s rumor mill.

“We disagree about plenty but we are united on what matters most: the kids,” she wrote. “For now, and for my beloved children, it will be less drama, more mama.”

She is still slated to speak at the Republican National Convention this week. Her husband, an attorney who renounced Trump after the 2016 campaign, had become a member of the Lincoln Project, an outside group of Republicans devoted to defeating Trump.

The politically adversarial marriage generated much speculation in the Beltway and online. George Conway also announced Sunday that he was taking a leave of absence from both Twitter and the Lincoln Project.

Kellyanne Conway worked for years as a Republican pollster and operative and originally supported Sen. Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican primary. She moved over to the Trump campaign and that August became campaign manager as Stephen Bannon became campaign chairman; Bannon was indicted two days ago for fraud.

Conway cited a need to help her children″s remote learning during the coronavirus pandemic as a need to step away from her position. She had remained a trusted voice within the West Wing and spearheaded several initiatives, including on combating opioid abuse.

She was also known for her robust defense of the president in media appearances, at times delivering dizzying rebuttals while once extolling the virtues of “alternative facts” to support her case. Conway was also an informal adviser to the president’s reelection effort but resisted moving over to the campaign.

Her departure comes at an inopportune time for Trump, who faces a deficit in the polls as the Republican National Convention begins on Monday.”

I find it interesting that she is leaving now so close to the election!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Republican National Convention (RNC) will begin tonight and last through Thursday, August 27th. The convention was originally planned for the week of July 13th, but was delayed due to the pandemic.  

Tonight delegates will actually cast their votes for Donald Trump in Charlotte. The following three days will feature a variety of events and speeches. Melania Trump will speak on Tuesday, Mike Pence on Wednesday and Donald Trump on Thursday ― when he will accept the nomination from the White House. Trump also made the last-minute decision to speak at the end of every night of the convention.

Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel told Fox News that the convention will have live programming every night, with keynote speakers and “surprises.” McDaniel told the network’s Bill Hemmer that live events will run throughout the day while prime-time events will occur from 8:30 p.m. to 11 p.m. ET.

Viewers can find the programming on the RNC’s livestream, on social media platforms, and on several cable news networks and news websites.

Below is the full lineup of speakers.

Tony

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Monday

• Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.)
• House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.)
• Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.)
• Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio)
• Former U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley
• Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel
• Georgia state Rep. Vernon Jones (R)
• Amy Johnson Ford
• Kimberly Guilfoyle
• Natalie Harp
• Charlie Kirk
• Kim Klacik
• Mark and Patricia McCloskey
• Sean Parnell
• Andrew Pollack
• Donald Trump Jr.
• Tanya Weinreis

Tuesday

• First lady Melania Trump
• Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
• Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)
• Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R)
• Florida Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nunez (R)
• Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron (R)
• Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi (R)
• Abby Johnson
• Jason Joyce
• Myron Lizer
• Mary Ann Mendoza
• Megan Pauley
• Cris Peterson
• John Peterson
• Nicholas Sandmann
• Eric Trump
• Tiffany Trump

Wednesday

• Vice President Mike Pence
• Karen Pence
• Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.)
• Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa)
• South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R)
• Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas)
• Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.)
• Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.)
• Former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell
• White House adviser Kellyanne Conway
• Vice presidential national security adviser Keith Kellogg
• Jack Brewer
• Sister Dede Byrne
• North Carolina Republican congressional candidate Madison Cawthorn
• Scott Dane
• Clarence Henderson
• Ryan Holets
• Michael McHale
• Burgess Owens
• Lara Trump

Thursday

• President Donald Trump
• Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson
• Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)
• Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.)
• House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.)
• Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.)
• Ivanka Trump
• White House domestic policy adviser Ja’Ron Smith
• Ann Dorn
• Debbie Flood
• Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani
• Evangelist speaker Franklin Graham
• Alice Johnson
• Wade Mayfield
• Carl and Marsha Mueller
• Dana White

Dear Commons Community,

The Observer, the student newspaper at the University of Notre Dame, had a front-page editorial on Friday entitled, “Don’t make us write obituaries.”

The accompanying text said it all (see below).

Tony

The Observer

Editorial: Don’t make us write obituaries.

Editorial Board 

Friday, August 21, 2020

When we learned the institutions within the tri-campus community intended to have students return for the fall semester, we experienced a variety of emotions — excitement to reunite with our friends, relief to return to the classroom following the difficulties of remote instruction and reluctance to acknowledge that the in-person semester we were promised could be taken away at a moment’s notice.

Two weeks into the semester, our worries are close to reality.

The University administration has largely blamed the COVID-19 outbreak on students attending off-campus parties. While this isn’t entirely misplaced, it has been used to deflect responsibility from the very administrations that insisted they were prepared for us to return to campus.

Clearly, they were not.

Flaws in testing, contact tracing and isolation and quarantine accommodations have since proven inefficient. At Notre Dame, the almost two-week gap between the return to campus and the implementation of surveillance testing, scheduled to begin today, represents a gross oversight on the part of the administration and has put the health and safety of the tri-campus and South Bend communities in serious danger. Experts warned this was likely, but University President Fr. John Jenkins insisted it was worth the risk. Presidents Katie Conboy and Fr. David Tyson seemed to agree.

Since our return, a dashboard has provided the Notre Dame community with updates regarding the coronavirus on campus, but it leaves much to be desired in comparison to other institutions’ initiatives, such as that of the University of North Carolina. As the events on campus have drawn national scrutiny, information regarding hospitalizations, recoveries and available quarantine and isolation space should be made public as well as a breakdown in the demographics of students testing positive. The community’s understanding of the seriousness of the situation depends on it.

Saint Mary’s and Holy Cross have provided even less information than Notre Dame. While we would like to know more about cases and testing on campus, we also call upon both Colleges to provide the same information we are asking the University to release. The lack of transparency from our administrations only compounds the worry and anxiety felt by students, faculty and staff alike.

If we’ve learned anything in the past months, it’s to take nothing for granted. The expectation that everyday life will continue as it always has can no longer exist. As redundant as it sounds, the next two weeks will shape the trajectory for the rest of the semester and perhaps the ones to follow.

The blame for this does not lie with just one party. We — as students, faculty, staff and administrators — need to share responsibility for the outbreak on our hands. We longed to return to South Bend while in quarantine last semester. Now, we are at risk of hurting the community we’ve come to know and love.

We implore members of the tri-campus community to do everything within their power to approach this virus in an appropriate and serious manner. Otherwise, we fear the worst is yet to come.

Don’t make us write a tri-campus employee’s obituary.

Don’t make us write an administrator’s obituary.

Don’t make us write a custodian’s obituary.

Don’t make us write a dining hall worker’s obituary.

Don’t make us write a professor’s obituary.

Don’t make us write a classmate’s obituary.

Don’t make us write a friend’s obituary.

Don’t make us write a roommate’s obituary.

Don’t make us write yours.

Dear Commons Community,

The article below appeared in Education Dive and was sent to me by my colleague, David Bloomfield.  He is quoted in the piece.   As reported, a federal judge in Washington state temporarily blocked Education Secretary Betsy DeVos from enforcing a controversial rule that directs states to give private schools a bigger share of federal coronavirus aid than Congress had intended.

Tony

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Education Dive

Judge blocks Ed Department from giving increased CARES funds to Washington private schools

Author Naaz Modan

Published

Aug. 22, 2020

Dive Brief:

• A federal court in Washington has ordered a preliminary injunction against the U.S. Department of Education and its secretary, Betsy DeVos, from implementing an interim final rule on distribution of Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act funding, which the judge said would cause public schools in the state “great” and “irreparable” harm.
• The interim final rule, issued in late June, compelled districts to choose between a poverty-based and an enrollment-based formula in their distribution of CARES funds. The former would require districts to fund only Title I schools, while the latter would require districts to allocate money for private schools proportional to their enrollment if they choose to provide emergency aid to all public schools.
• In her decision, Judge Barbara J. Rothstein rejected DeVos’ claims that the Education Department’s interpretation is equitable and aligns with the intention of the law, calling the rule “a stretch” and its claims “remarkably callous, and blind to the realities of this extraordinary pandemic.”

Dive Insight:

When the interim final rule was released, districts and education organizations immediately expressed concern that funds would be misdirected to private schools. Rothstein said as such in her decision, adding the department’s rule was “forcing the State to divert funds from public schools,” which “ignores the extraordinary circumstances facing the State and its most disadvantaged students.”

Religious and other private schools have asked districts to divvy up the CARES funds with them, saying they also are suffering financially from the pandemic.

“It’s made relationships between public and private entities more strained,” said Sasha Pudelski, advocacy director for AASA, The School Superintendents Association, noting that private schools in some cases have threatened public schools with lawsuits.

Pudelski said the judge’s decision to move forward with the injunction “got it right on the money and hit the right tone.” The order will prevent DeVos’ rule from going into effect until there is a full trial.

The decision to block DeVos’ rule only applies to Washington schools impacted by the lawsuit. But with two additional cases ongoing in California (joined by Michigan) and Washington, D.C., it’s likely this case could have some national influence, said David Bloomfield, a professor of educational leadership, law and policy at Brooklyn College​ in New York.

For the rule to be blocked nationwide, though, either all jurisdictions would have to join in and win lawsuits to stop it from going into effect; the case would have to work it’s way up to the U.S. Supreme Court; or the Education Department could withdraw it, Bloomfield said.

“The administration frequently tries for a far-reaching policy decision, and withdraws it once slapped down by the courts,” the lawyer said, adding its possible the department will “see the handwriting on the wall.”

He added districts nationwide now will likely allocate CARES funds based on student need, rather than enrollment, which will increase the amount available for public schools. And it’s unlikely the Education Department would sue if districts made that decision, he said, because of the federal court decision.

In other places, Bloomfield said, some districts that preferred to distribute funds to private schools, too, “may have shoveled the money out the door as fast as they could.”

However, although this is a win in Washington state for public schools, Pudelski said its likely districts that have already distributed their CARES money based on the rule won’t recuperate them and that private schools will be able to keep the dollars.

Districts under this particular case’s jurisdiction would have the right to sue for reimbursement, Bloomfield said.

The Ed Department did not respond to Education Dive’s request for comment in time for publication.

Dear Commons Community,

New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat, has a piece this morning in which he speculates that regardless of the outcome of the presidential election in November, Donald Trump will still hold power over the Republican Party.   His basic premise is:

“…even if he loses, his power over the Republican Party will probably ebb only slowly, if at all. His allies and sycophants will have every reason to maintain a court in exile. His enemies and frenemies in the mainstream media will continue to elevate him for the sake of ratings and attention. And the man himself will seek the spotlight as assiduously as ever.

The knowledge that Trumpism has delivered — about what is possible in American politics, what Republicans will vote for and accept, what conservatism can accommodate — will not simply disappear. It may go underground for a time, if there is a temporary restoration of Republican politics as usual under a Joe Biden presidency. But the lessons will still be there to be picked up, the truths exposed hard to suppress. Any future Republican who seeks or occupies the presidency will have learned something from the years of Donald Trump.”

I tend to agree with Douthat except that if Trump loses, he is going to be enmeshed in legal battles with courts all over the country but especially in places like New York where he has established his businesses.  This may cause the Republican elite to abandon him.

The entire column is below.

Tony

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New York Times

Win or Lose, Trump Will Hold Power Over the G.O.P.

Ross Douthat

August 23, 2020 

It must pain Donald Trump, deep down in his showman’s soul, to have had his convention taken away from him. The arguable peak of his presidency, the hubristic State of the Union that preceded the coronavirus, raised the reality-television elements of the address to new heights — reuniting a military family! Bestowing a Presidential Medal of Freedom! You can only imagine what brazen gimmicks, what WWE stagecraft, Trump would have rolled out for a convention taking place in normal times.

Alas he has only four days of speeches via streaming video, the absence of cheering crowds itself an exhibit of his administration’s coronavirus failure. And for members of his party privately pining for his evaporation or feeling their way back toward pre-Trump positioning, the diminished convention can’t help but feel like a hopeful thing — instead of a showcase for Trumpian power, a weeklong indicator of its ebb.

That hopefulness is misplaced. Trump could still win re-election, and his convention is irrelevant to a comeback that mostly hinges on what happens with the pandemic between now and Election Day. But even if he loses, his power over the Republican Party will probably ebb only slowly, if at all. His allies and sycophants will have every reason to maintain a court in exile. His enemies and frenemies in the mainstream media will continue to elevate him for the sake of ratings and attention. And the man himself will seek the spotlight as assiduously as ever.

The knowledge that Trumpism has delivered — about what is possible in American politics, what Republicans will vote for and accept, what conservatism can accommodate — will not simply disappear. It may go underground for a time, if there is a temporary restoration of Republican politics as usual under a Joe Biden presidency. But the lessons will still be there to be picked up, the truths exposed hard to suppress. Any future Republican who seeks or occupies the presidency will have learned something from the years of Donald Trump.

But what they learn will make all the difference. Here are three different ways that the G.O.P. could remain the party of Trump long after he is gone.

Trumpism as a governing agenda

First, Trumpism could come into its own as an ideological agenda, a genuine policy alternative to both left-liberalism and the zombie Reaganism that the Republicans offered before Trump’s advent.

In this scenario, Trump’s successors would learn two lessons from his rise. First, that Republican voters aren’t necessarily wedded to ideological nostrums about limited government, and so a politician can succeed in a Republican primary by running, as Trump did, against elements of movement-conservative orthodoxy. Second, that the sustained failures of the establishment center create a practical need for a policy agenda that’s populist in the best sense — it would defend and rebuild the decaying America that exists outside the coastal metropoles, tech hubs and university towns.

This agenda would start with ideas that Trump campaigned on in 2016 and then abandoned or only half-pursued: not just infrastructure spending, but a self-conscious industrial policy to bring back the capacities and jobs that America has lost to Asia. It would follow his rhetoric rather than his administration’s lawyering and make peace with universal health insurance. It would pick up the most populist pieces from his tax bill and build on them, finding ways to transfer tax advantages to working-class families and away from blue-state rentiers. Its watchwords would be “work and family” instead of “you built that,” with real support for wage-earners and child-rearers instead of hazy sentiment about entrepreneurs.

On foreign policy it would follow Trump’s public posture toward confrontation with China rather than imitating his trade-negotiation gestures of appeasement. It would follow his instincts and withdraw (assuming Biden hasn’t already) from Afghanistan and jettison the fixation on regime change in Iran. There would be no grand crusade for democracy: Instead there would be alliances of interest (including, yes, with Russia) aimed at the containment of Beijing.

Finally, this kind of future-Trumpism would shift the grounds of the culture war — with stronger overtures to conservative-leaning minority voters (a strategy Trump has pursued when he isn’t race-baiting) and an aggressive agenda to reshape universities, using the power of the purse and the rhetoric of ideological diversity.

If successful, this strategy could help the Republican Party escape its current demographic trap and win majorities again — as a party of the pan-ethnic middle class, not just a shrinking, aging white base.

Trumpism as permanent minority rule

But just because something makes political sense doesn’t mean that it will happen. And if there’s anything we’ve learned over the nearly 20 years since Ruy Teixeira and John Judis prophesied an emerging Democratic majority founded on demographic change, it’s that the combination of a Democratic Party that keeps being pulled leftward and a Republican Party with strength in rural states — and thus the Electoral College and the Senate — can keep the G.O.P. competitive even if it doesn’t win actual majorities.

Unite this electoral reality with Trump’s anti-democratic tendencies — his obsession with voter fraud at the expense of voting rights, his Twitter authoritarianism — and you can imagine another way that the G.O.P. remains Trump’s party after he’s gone. Instead of developing his populism to build a new majority, it could develop his anti-majoritarianism to sustain its own power even under demographic eclipse.

This kind of evolution would start with opposition to Democratic attempts to admit new states (and new senators), add extra justices to the Supreme Court or expand automatic voter registration and early voting. But Republicans could also mount a counteroffensive to lock in their current advantages — expanding voter-ID laws and making them stricter, pushing for House apportionment to exclude noncitizens, even trying to set up Electoral College-like systems for statehouse elections in states that might trend left.

You can see a dangerous cycle here, where the resilience of a counter-majoritarian Republican Party further delegitimizes the system in the eyes of Democrats, who become more radical in response, pushing us toward some stress point that’s far more serious than this month’s war over the Post Office.

I have spent much of the Trump era arguing that he is too feckless and incompetent, too much of a buck-passer and coward, to represent an authoritarian menace in his own right. But even if there are limits to how far the party will go with him — witness the swift disavowal of his election-postponement speculation — he has clearly habituated many of his supporters to a “caudillo” style, a politics of enmity, a sense that transferring power to Democrats is like letting suicide bombers seize the plane.

So it’s hardly fanciful to imagine a Republican successor who maintains the authoritarian style but drops the fecklessness. Put that kind of figure in charge of a party organized around holding power without majority support, pit it against a Democratic Party nurturing fantasies of an American “color revolution” — in which mass protests and even military intervention force out a right-wing government — and you could have a constitutional crisis sooner rather than later, and a Trumpian legacy that’s very dark indeed.

Trumpism as virtual reality

But there is a final potential afterlife for the Trump era, in which it turns out the essential substance of the Trump phenomenon isn’t populism or authoritarianism, but a kind of playacting — all performative nonsense, cable-news illusions, online smoke and mirrors — that might itself be permanently appealing as a style of right-wing government.

Presidential gestures have always mattered, but Trump has demonstrated that you can hold together a political coalition even when those gestures are essentially illusory. You can issue seemingly sweeping executive orders that don’t do what you claim; take credit for real policies that predate your administration and pretend ones that never happen; and fight culture wars that are about symbolic issues rather than anything as real as marriage or abortion.

This style may be especially appealing to conservatives, who have reached a point of cultural marginalization where the kind of victory they seek is much easier to conjure in virtual reality. This is the point of certain kinds of right-wing infotainment, and certainly the point of QAnon, which as Matthew Walther of The Week has pointed out, exists precisely to invent “nonexistent victories” for the right:

Trump has not replaced the Affordable Care Act or saved millions of good manufacturing jobs or remade our trade relationship with China, it is true. But no one expects miracles, after all. Besides, has he not worked tirelessly, if invisibly, to root out corruption, to expose the sinister plots of the cabal behind the Democratic Party, to remove anthropophagic pedophiles from the upper reaches of the federal bureaucracy? Has he not, in accomplishing all these things thanklessly, amid the persecution of his enemies in the liberal media establishment, shown us he cares? Whatever individual Trump supporters might believe about the actual facts of the alleged conspiracy, the bare outline of QAnon — Trump winning for them simply by existing and holding the office of the presidency — is in fact an accurate representation of their feelings about him.

QAnon is thus a perfervid version of a future in which the G.O.P. neither embraces a policy-rich populism nor lapses into constitution-threatening authoritarianism. Instead, the lesson that Republicans might take from the Trump era is that so long as much of the country fears a liberalism that’s increasingly beholden to the left, Republicans can win their share of elections just on the promise to not be Democrats, to hold off liberal hegemony “simply by existing.”

And for Republican voters who want more — well, for them you can just make up some triumphs, whether banal (a new social-media executive order!) or exotic (a secret purge of pedophiles!), and trumpet them as victories worthy of Reagan, Lincoln or F.D.R.

In which case Trump could be a special kind of pioneer, and the party he shaped a digital-age novelty: the first political party to exist entirely as a simulation.

Maryanne Trump Barry

Dear Commons Community,

President Donald Trump’s sister was recorded saying that her brother “has no principles” and “you can’t trust him,” The Washington Post reported yesterday (see the entire Washington Post story here with audio clips).

Maryanne Trump Barry, who was serving as a federal judge at the time, made the slashing comments to her niece Mary Trump, who was secretly recording her, the Post reported. At one point, Barry was discussing Trump’s moves in 2018 to separate immigrant children from their parents.

“All he wants to do is appeal to his base,” Barry said. “He has no principles. None. None. And his base, I mean, my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people — not do this.”

She added: “His goddamned tweet[s] and lying, oh my God. I’m talking too freely, but you know, the change of stories, the lack of preparation, the lying — holy shit.” 

Trump had earlier suggested on Fox News that year that he might “put her at the border” and assign his sister to make immigration decisions. She guessed he hadn’t read her decisions or he would know they wouldn’t likely agree on issues.

“What has he read?” Mary Trump asked her aunt. Barry responded: “He doesn’t read.”

At one point, an exasperated Barry said: “It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.”

Barry also noted: “Donald is out for Donald, period.” When her niece asked Barry what her brother had accomplished on his own, she responded: “Well, he has five bankruptcies,” adding: “You can’t trust him.”

The Post obtained the audio excerpts of the taped conversations after Mary Trump told the newspaper that she learned some of the information in her book — “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man” — from 15 hours of face-to-face talks with her aunt in 2018 and 2019. It was her aunt who told her that the president had paid someone to take the SATs for him, Mary Trump told the Post.

Barry has never spoken publicly about her issues with her brother.

Mary Trump told The Post recently that her uncle is unfit to be president and she aims to do “everything in my power” to elect Joe Biden, the newspaper reported.

Good luck, Ms. Trump!

Tony