MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd: Trump ‘Is Doing What Demagogues Have Done’
PHILADELPHIA — MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd, attending the Democratic National Convention this week, says that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is “doing what demagogues have done — appealing to people’s fears.”
Dodd, who is a super delegate at the convention, said that he doesn’t “recall any mainstream candidate of either party using the kind of rhetoric, being so uninformed, and lacking what appears to be the desire to be informed.”
Dodd, who served 36 years in the House and Senate, got a shoutout from Vice President Joseph Biden on Wednesday night as he sat with the Connecticut delegation. He is a longtime friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Bill Clinton tapped him to serve as chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1995 to 1997.
When talking about the 2016 campaign, Dodd paraphrased a quote from Jack Nicklaus, commenting on Tiger Woods: “He plays a game I am unfamiliar with.”
“I thought, that is sort of how I feel when I am watching here. It is not a game, but I am unfamiliar with this. There are fringe candidates who talk like this — Donald Trump does,” Dodd said.
Dodd said he wasn’t reluctant to speak out about Trump, given the stakes as the head of a trade association, because “this is not about being partisan. This is not about partisanship. If it were a Democratic candidate doing what he is doing, my language would not have changed one syllable in terms of what I have said to you.”
He noted Republicans like John Kasich and Presidents George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush who skipped the Republican Convention.
“I have a great relationship with people like Orrin Hatch and Bob Goodlatte and John Thune, to mention just a few,” he said. “Just go down the list of people I work with every day. I have a great relationship with them, and our industry does. And I will keep that alive. But I can’t resist telling you how disappointed and concerned I am about where Donald Trump could take the country.”
Dodd said that Trump was engaging in a complete rejection of 20th century American history, where generation after generation in this country, when confronted with fears, not only overcame them but defeated them. “He’s saying to a generation, ‘You can’t do it. We can’t do it. Fear is winning.’ No it’s not. I regret that there are people who subscribe to that, but they are not unique historically. Other nations and other generations — we’ll educated and well informed people, have succumbed to demagogues who are appealing to people’s fears. That’s all he’s doing.”
Trump has bashed China over currency manipulation, trade and, in his acceptance speech, piracy. Dodd said that there is “more than a grain of truth to what he is saying,” but “what he is suggesting here is exactly the wrong path. If you are looking to improve the market, eliminate the problems we have doing business in that country, there are a lot of ways of doing it.”
Trump and Hillary Clinton are opposed to the Trans Pacific Partnership, a trade pact that the MPAA lobbied heavily for because of its intellectual property provisions and uniformity in copyright terms. Dodd said that given the opposition that has arisen during the campaign, “it may be beyond life support.”
“I have never seen a better trade agreement than this one — on the environment, on human rights, on child labor, on human trafficking, just across the board,” he said. “It is stunning what was achieved in this trade agreement, and I am disappointed that they are blaming trade. It is not the fault of technology, but technology is unfortunately sweeping a lot of these jobs away.”
He said that the TPP created a “great opportunity” for content industries, especially entertainment, which looks to the Pacific region for growth.
He acknowledged that he felt like he was in the minority in supporting the TPP at the convention, as some Bernie Sanders delegates have been holding No TPP signs.
Dodd also is convinced that Russia was behind the hack of DNC emails.
“It is more than a suspicion,” he said. “I talked to some people who are here any this convention, in a secure place, literally spending 24 hours a day defeating efforts to hack in to the systems. Their job is to determine by the ‘fingerprinting’ that is going on, [and say] there is no question where this is coming from. The hack of the DNC was Russia. These are people with no ax to grind, and they are saying categorically, Russia is trying to influence the outcome of the presidential election by hacking into this organization.”
He said that he has respect and appreciation for Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who resigned as chairwoman of the DNC in the wake of the hack, but said that she made the “right decision” in resigning on the eve of the convention.
“She made a tough decision, and I think she made the right decision in light of what as at stake here at this juncture,” he said. “We didn’t want this convention to turn into that debate for four days.”
He also doesn’t fault Bernie Sanders supporters who still are withholding their support. Dozens of delegates walked out on Tuesday after Sanders asked that Clinton’s name be approved by acclamation.
“To go out and work day and night on behalf of this guy, and then to come here and say, well, you came close but I am sorry, now act like a bunch of 60 year olds, and get in line,” he said. “Now come on, give them a break. So the fact that some of them felt strongly about it, they wanted to walk out, I am sorry they did. But understand why they did, and you will never hear a complaint from me on the fact that they did do it.”
Dodd’s first convention was in 1960, when he was a page in Los Angeles when John F. Kennedy was nominated. His father, Thomas Dodd, was among those who seconded Harry Truman’s nomination at the 1948 convention, also in Philadelphia.
Dodd himself ran for president in 2008, and is self deprecating about that campaign. In that cycle, Paul Simon went on the campaign trail for him. He sang “Bridge Over Troubled Water” to the DNC on Monday.
“I missed him Monday night but we texted back and forth,” Dodd said. “And he said, ‘Maybe if my set list was different we may have made a race of it.’ So I told him there were a lot of problems with that campaign, including the candidate — the set list was not one of them.”
Dodd believes that Clinton will be elected. “I’m confident in Hillary’s win, but not so confident that you should sit back and think it’s over. It’s not. They’ve got a lot of work to do,” he said.
Like many people at the convention, Dodd is focusing on the historic significance of the first female presidential nominee.
The other night, he said asked his 11-year-old daughter what she thought about the race and if she is excited about Hillary. ‘She said ‘I am. Except I would like to be the first female president of the United States.’ So it is a great moment.”
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