What Would You Do If A Sitting Democratic President Became As Morally Deranged And As Dangerous To National Security As Trump Is?

 

The Wall Street Journal's Joe Flint reported, just before Trump's clownish town hall stunt yesterday, that "More than one hundred prominent actors, writers and producers are protesting NBC News’s decision to carry [the thing] opposite a previously scheduled Joe Biden town hall on rival ABC News." That must have triggered the Orange Clown because was was soon carrying on about NBC and pretending the town hall was their idea, not his campaign's. "So you know, I’m being set up tonight, right. I’m doing this town hall with Con-cast. So I’m doing it and it’s NBC. The worst... And so they asked me if I’d do it, and I figured what the hell, we’ve got a free hour on television."

What a disgusting excuse for a human being! During his super-spreader event in Greenville, North Carolina yesterday, Trump, pandering to his crowd said only Jesus is more famous than he is. Someone should tell him the difference between "famous" and "infamous."

I'd trust Caroline Giuliani-- Rudy's daughter-- to do it. Yesterday Vanity Fair published a piece by her urging everyone to vote for Biden and Kamala: "If being the daughter of a polarizing mayor who became the president’s personal bulldog has taught me anything, it is that corruption starts with 'yes-men' and women, the cronies who create an echo chamber of lies and subservience to maintain their proximity to power. We’ve seen this ad nauseam with Trump and his cadre of high-level sycophants (the ones who weren’t convicted, anyway)."

And that brings us right to Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, who has spent 4 years making it perfectly clear that he knows exactly what a dangerous monstrosity Trump is-- dangerous to this country-- and never could muster the guts to do anything about it. Sasse, as you recall, voted against impeachment. Yesterday, right-wing propagandist David Drucker wrote that "Sasse, in a private call with constituents, excoriated President Trump, saying he had mishandled the coronavirus response, 'kisses dictators' butts,' 'sells out our allies,' spends 'like a drunken sailor,' mistreats women, and trash-talks evangelicals behind their backs. Trump has 'flirted with white supremacists,' according to Sasse, and his family 'treated the presidency like a business opportunity.' In what appears to be a conference call with his Nebraska constituents, Sasse said Trump could drive the Senate into the hand of the Democrats and cause permanent damage to the Republican Party. It is unclear when the call occurred, though it had to have happened well into this year because Sasse discusses Trump's handling of the coronavirus... Leading up to the state’s Republican primary earlier this year, Sasse tempered his periodic criticism of Trump, perhaps to keep his longshot GOP challenger at bay. But the senator resumed his occasional tongue-lashing once he secured the renomination. At least, that is how Sasse’s pro-Trump critics on the right have interpreted his public comments regarding the president."

"The debate," continued Sasse, "is not going to be, 'Ben Sasse, why were you so mean to Donald Trump?' It’s going to be, 'What the heck were any of us thinking, that selling a TV-obsessed, narcissistic individual to the American people was a good idea?' We are staring down the barrel of a blue tsunami." Ben Sasse is a traitor to his own principles, to his own constituents and to the United States of America. He thinks he's better than Trump; he isn't.

Spineless by Nancy Ohanian

Yesterday, Bulwark writer Richard Patterson was bemoaning spineless creeps like Sasse, noting that "because Trump is immutably pathological, he’s incapable of growth as a politician or president," implying-- strongly-- that Republicans have had years to figure this out and act as patriots instead of ass-lickers.

How did the GOP find itself in this desperate, seamy dilemma? The short answer is four years of subservience to Trump. But it is nonetheless instructive to consider what the party had become before his advent-- and how he might have helped save it had he been not only a normal person, but the unconventional political genius some conjured from the ether.

By 2012, the GOP had come to rely on a partially overlapping base of evangelicals; whites without college degrees threatened by economic dislocation; and malcontents whose distrust of government partook of paranoia. These folks were not natural allies of the party of business or its wealthy donors. In exchange for pursuing the economic agenda of the wealthy, the GOP increasingly offered up a primal vision rooted in culture wars, contempt for government, and scapegoating blacks, immigrants, Muslims and other minorities.

The real causes of blue-collar woes were globalization, the Great Recession, the housing crisis, and an information society which marginalized the undereducated. About this, the GOP elite did nothing-- not about student debt, stagnant wages, dwindling benefits, diminishing job security, retraining for the new economy, or the widespread unaffordability of quality medical care. The epitome of their nihilism was Ted Cruz: a grandstanding opportunist who tried to shut down the government while assembling a stunted coalition of evangelicals, gun fanatics, nativists, climate-change deniers, and Tea Party atavists.

By the primary season of 2016, that covered most of the GOP base. The party’s only realistic alternative to Cruz was an incendiary and ideologically unmoored interloper-- Donald Trump.

Had the RNC’s then-Chairman Reince Priebus and foresighted party officials and consultants gotten their way, this trajectory would have been different. After Mitt Romney lost in 2012, these seasoned professionals concluded that the GOP was headed for demographic oblivion. The result was the widely-touted “autopsy” which called for a comprehensive rethinking of Republican electoral strategy.

Its analysis was unsparing-- and proactive. The GOP had been “continually marginalizing itself,” said Sally Bradshaw, one of the autopsy’s authors. “We have lost the ability to be persuasive with or welcoming to those who don’t agree with us on every issue.”

The party, she added, “needs to do better with women” and to become “inviting and inspiring.” Another of the autopsy’s authors warned that “if our party isn’t welcoming and inclusive, young people and increasingly other voters will continue to tune us out.” Among the solutions proposed was an extensive outreach to women, African-Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and LGBT voters which included embracing “comprehensive immigration reform.”

But that last, in particular, ran athwart the nativist passions roiling much of the GOP base. Faced with their fury for his cosponsorship of an immigration reform bill, Marco Rubio folded. Broadening the party’s appeal, it seemed clear, would require a nominee with the vision and gifts to propitiate its restive electorate.

Enter Donald Trump. In 2013, he tweeted: “New @RNC report calls for embracing ‘comprehensive immigration reform.’ Does the @RNC have a death wish?”

Smart Republicans foresaw the consequences. Said Jon Huntsman in 2016: “The party itself is less consequential than ever before, and... the tribal differences are increasingly irreconcilable... If Trump prevails, he will have single-handedly upended the old Republican order and built a new movement in its place. The question then will be, is it sustainable?”

...Particularly problematic is that Trump’s appeal-- while fatally limited-- has among the base a visceral depth which transcends loyalty to the party, its elected officials, or whatever threadbare ideas it retains. The party of Trump has become a cult of personality suffused with authoritarianism.

...As president, Trump has pushed the boundaries of our constitutional democracy to achieve unprecedented executive power. Not only do his followers support this, but elected Republicans have done nothing to stop him.

The GOP is no longer about ideas like limited government, or the higher ideals of inclusiveness and an American Dream open to all. Its toxic compound of raw anger and nativist passion is, at bottom, about subjugating the demographic “other.”

Before Trump, the GOP’s better angels were already enfeebled. In 2016 he killed them off.

It is barely possible now to imagine the GOP had Trump been different. He came without ideology, propelled by a gift for embodying a potent but undefined populism. He might have become an agent of constructive reinvention, eschewing racism and xenophobia in favor of offering embattled middle-class and blue-collar workers genuine economic uplift. He could have reinstated fiscal responsibility by disdaining tax cuts for the wealthy. He might even have taken steps-- if not to drain the swamp-- at least to reform it.

But that would have required real talent, sustained attention, and a genuine interest in governance. Instead this irredeemably vicious, vacant, and narcissistic demagogue unleashed white identity politics and the endless overreach of Republican donors. This leads inexorably to the deadest of ends-- a demographic death knell for his party and, for our democracy, the most grievous of wounds.

Take a bow, Governors Charlie Baker (R-MA) and Larry Hogan (R-MD). This morning, the Washington Post reported that Hogan voted already-- and not for Señor Trumpanzee. And in a statement released yesterday by his office, Baker said "The governor cannot support Donald Trump for president and is focused on seeing Massachusetts through the pandemic."