Lincoln Project Co-Founder Steve Schmidt Fires Back At Trump And Reduces Him To Charred Cinders

 

-by Noah

For those of you who may still not know, Steve Schmidt is a conservative who worked on several Republican campaigns including those of Arnold Schwarenegger, George Dubya Bush, and John McCain. President Donald J. Biohazard, however, was a bigly bridge too far for a conservative with the smarts of Schmidt. So, patriotic American that he is, he just had to respond when our nutcase Beavis & Butt-head President attacked him as a "Loser" and a "Failure" for forming the Lincoln Project to run advertisements against him that speak truth to such corrupted power as that of Trump and the current Republican Party. What follows is the brilliant combined text of several of Schmidt's tweets back at Trump in response to his endless whining about the ads.

You’ve never beaten me at anything. This is our first dance. Did you like, Covita? We are so much better at this than your team of crooks, wife beaters, degenerates, weirdos and losers.

You are losing. We heard you loved Evita. You saw it so many times. Where will you live out your years in disgrace? Will you buy Jeffrey Epstein’s island? One last extra special deal from him? Or will you be drooling on yourself in a suite at Walter Reed? Maybe you will be in prison?

I bet you fear that. The Manhattan District Attorney may not be around to cover for you or your crooked kids anymore. Eliza Orlins doesn’t believe in different sets of rules for the Trumps. What about the State Attorney General? You know what you’ve done.

Oh, Donald. Who do you owe almost $500 million in personally guaranteed loans to? It's all coming down. You think you and your disgusting family are going to be in deal-flow next year? Are you really that delusional?

You are lucky Chris Wallace interrupted you after Joe Biden said you weren’t smart. You started to melt down. That’s the place that hurts the most. Right? Fred Sr., knew it. You’ve spent your whole life proving it. You aren’t very smart. You couldn’t take the SAT on your own. What was the real score? 970? We both know you know.

Are the steroids wearing off? Is the euphoria fading? Do you feel foggy? Tired? Do you ache? How is the breathing? Hmmm. Are you watching TV today? We will have some nice surprises for you. Everyone is laughing at you. You are a joke. A splendid moron turned deadly clown.

Did you watch Martha McSally in her debate against American hero, fighter pilot, test pilot, astronaut Capt. Mark Kelly? She is so embarrassed by you. She is ashamed and full of self-loathing for the choice she made in following you over the cliff. She is in free fall now. She will lose, like most of them, because of you.

We hear from the White House and the campaign everyday. They are betraying you. They are looking to get out alive and salvage careers and their names. It’s Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner vs. Donald Trump Jr., and Kimberly Guilfoyle on the inside. They are at war over scraps and who gets to command what will be the remnants of your rancid cult.

It’s almost over now. You are the greatest failure in American history. You are the worst president in American history. Disgrace will always precede your name. Your grandchildren and great-grandchildren will grow up ashamed of their names.

One day, I suppose there will be some small and not-much-visited library that bears your name. It will be the type of place where a drunk walks by, staring at the wall for a minute, before deciding it is beneath his dignity to piss on. That’s what is waiting for you.

Joe Biden is a better man. He’s smarter. He’s winning.

Do you remember when you didn’t want to name Donald Trump Jr., Donald because you were worried about him being a loser named Donald? You were right about that. He is.

But it is you who will be remembered as America’s greatest loser. You will be crushed in the election! Shhhhhhhh

Having read Schmidt's response to the baggy-suited, ferret-wearing nutcase who is roaming around the White House and the country spreading his disease, it is clear that Trump will never be in Schmidt's league. Schmidt's writing has an Edgar Allan Poe quality about it. It's certainly time to seal Trump behind a wall.

Trump Was Right To Fire Brad Parscale... But It Won't Help Him Avoid His Destiny

One of the most discussed pieces of reporting over the weekend was Olivia Nuzzi's New York Magazine look inside the chaotic, desperate last-minute Trump 2020 reboot. She goes beyond the reasons why Trump fired his rarely present campaign manager, Jared-puppet Brad Parscale, while noting the " tiny Tulsa rally Parscale had organized-- which followed weeks of massive hype-- preceded a spike in coronavirus infections in the city that, local officials said, was probably born of the event, where the guest list included Herman Cain, who later died... The campaign was in a hole so deep it was actually historic-- a deficit not just bigger, at this point in the race, than any an incumbent had ever overcome, but bigger than any an incumbent had ever even faced."

Nuzzi wrote that "It was July before he 'saw for the first time' that he could be defeated, according to the [senior White House official] official. And he didn’t blame himself. He blamed a cruel world, a crueler media, and the Death Star’s failure to defend him from both. 'They thought they were running one campaign: We’re on cruise control for the president who gave us the greatest economy of all time, and all the messaging would flow from there. Which socialist are we running against? Bop, bop, bop. And everything changed, and they didn’t change,' the senior White House official said. 'The president started to hate the ads. He hated Beijing Biden-- he didn’t come up with that name.' In the West Wing, officials filed away gossip and unflattering data points about the campaign manager as if drafting a dossier. When it was reported that Parscale’s web of companies took in $38 million between Inauguration Day and the spring of the pandemic, according to the Federal Election Commission, the story circulated widely. Though Parscale has declined to make clear what portion of his bills to the campaign amount to his personal salary, the New York Times reported in March that Trump had imposed a salary cap on Parscale of somewhere between $700,000 and $800,000-- enough for him to become in midlife a collector of luxury cars and seaside real estate, or at least a media caricature of one. But it wasn’t only Parscale’s spending on Parscale that worried-- or 'worried'-- some of his colleagues; it was his spending on everything else, too, like the $15,000-a-month payments to Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, and to Lara Trump, Eric Trump’s wife, both of whom crisscross the country as campaign surrogates.





The courtiers surrounding Trump began wondering aloud about what Parascale was even doing aside from milking the campaign for his own accounts. Nuzzi spoke with one of the country's most prominent #NeverTrumpers, Lincoln Project founder George Conway, who told her that the Orange Menace "wonders who’s truly loyal to him and who’s not and who’s making a buck on him," noting that "triggering Trump’s paranoia" is one way to defeat him. "It doesn’t matter who is the captain of the SS Trump, because Trump is the one who is going to run it into the iceberg in the end. If there’s more chaos, all the better. We try to trigger the chaos in Trump’s DNA."

It started eating away at Trump that Pascale was making so much money off him. Three weeks after Tulsa, he was unceremoniously fired-- replaced by Bill Stepien. Right after Trump fired him, Parscale tweeted a Bible verse: "Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them." No one has seen him since.

Parscale’s value, as some saw it, lay not in what he could do for the campaign but in what he could do for Kushner. “Brad was willing to do whatever Jared said and keep quiet about it. Brad was willing to get yelled at by the president and not say to the president, ‘Well, actually, this was Jared’s decision,’ ” the first senior White House official said. “And Jared got to rule from afar because Brad would do whatever he said. In return, Brad made a fuck-ton of money and got to live by the pool in Florida. It was almost like this weird mutual partnership, whether they knew it or not.”

...In the case of the reelection campaign, what appeared to be a civil war at the highest levels of Trumpworld, with anti-Kushner factions inside and immediately surrounding the West Wing positioned against representatives of his interests at campaign headquarters, and a last-minute last chance for a reboot before November, was more like WrestleMania. The drama was both all-consuming and self-contained. Parscale and Stepien were both seen as Kushner allies, yet the regime change was nevertheless regarded as revealing some aspect of Kushner’s shifting status-- even as he remained functionally in charge the whole time. Kushner’s influence is so total that, even when his proxy is removed, he’s just replaced by yet another proxy. After all, if you’re not a “Kushner guy,” the dismissive term for officials perceived to carry out his will, what kind of guy could you even be?

...But while replacing Parscale with Stepien has the look of a reboot, at the strategy level it does not seem much has changed or is likely to. Asked how the campaign can formulate a coherent message, given what life is like for most people across the country today, senior adviser Jason Miller said, “It’s very direct: President Trump built the greatest economy in the history of the world, and he’s doing it again.”

But what about the polls? “I’d push back on that,” Miller said. “I have much more timely data, and much more accurate data, than what you have access to. And it’s improved over the last four weeks, and over the last two weeks, it definitely improved. We’re headed in the right direction.

...If I just woke you up in the middle of the night and told you a guy who is deeply involved in Bridgegate is now calling himself campaign manager for Donald Trump, you wouldn’t have said, ‘You’re kidding me! I’m shocked. How did that happen?,’ ” Stuart Stevens said with a laugh. You’d have said, Of course.

Stevens is a veteran of Republican presidential campaigns whose latest book, It Was All a Lie, is about his newfound realization-- at 67 years old-- that his life’s work was a mistake. As he sees it, Trump has a “management philosophy” that has guided him from the Trump Organization to the 2016 campaign to the White House and now to the campaign for reelection. “What Trump does is take people who are mediocre talent at best, who know they could never have the position they have if it were not for Trump, and it creates this instant loyalty to Trump. When you look at Trumpworld, it’s all these people who weren’t involved in presidential races, and it wasn’t because they didn’t want to be; it was because nobody would hire them. It’s not like Steve Bannon woke up one day and said, ‘I think I’d like to get involved in campaigns!’ Or Corey Lewandowski, all of these people. It’s how you end up with Brad Parscale. Top professionals won’t work for you.”

Almost all Democrats I know-- basically I know progressive Democrats-- abhor Biden's record. They're going to mostly hold their noses and vote for him-- a vehicle for saving the country from Trump and Trumpism. Not the #NeverTrumpers. They're enthusiastic. Biden's lifelong fiscal conservatism is just what they want in a president. Just ask Susan Molinari. "When Joe Biden makes a commitment, he always sees it through," the narrator says in this new Lincoln Project ad. Does that mean that we're about to vote someone in who is going to kill Social Security and Medicare?

Stooges

The first time I recall ever having heard of Jennifer Horn was in 2008 when she ran for Congress against Paul Hodes (D-NH). In 2011 the very conservative Horn was elected chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party. No fan of Trump, though, she was a founder of the Lincoln Project and serves as a communications stagey consultant for the group-- in other words therapy her to write anti-Trump hit pieces like the one that was published by USA Today, Why Trump's Republican Senate enablers must be ousted this fall: Former NH GOP chair, yesterday. It was about Trump Stooge, the ad (up top) that the Lincoln Project produced and is running in Maine, an ad that is extremely damaging to Susan Collins.

"The Lincoln Project," wrote Horn, "generated strong criticism within Republican circles last week for 'going after' a member of the Republican majority in the Senate. We had released an ad comparing Sen. Susan Collins unfavorably to past senators from her state of Maine, including Margaret Chase Smith-- best known for being one of the few Republicans to stand up to Joe McCarthy and McCarthyism. Chase Smith was fearless and will be forever remembered for her 'Declaration of Conscience' speech in which she called out national leadership and declared the rights to protest, criticize and hold independent thoughts as basic principles of 'Americanism.' It is hard for any serious student of history to deny the common themes of McCarthyism and Trumpism. Both are constructed on a foundation of 'us vs. them,' suspicion of those who were not born in America, attempts to silence protest and dissent, and demonizing those who hold independent or unpopular beliefs. Margaret Chase Smith was a heroine of freedom. Susan Collins is not. And neither is any other Republican currently serving in the Senate, with the exception of Utah's Mitt Romney."

Mitt Romney? A hero of freedom? I don't think so, but remember, these #NeverTrump conservatives are... conservatives. They don't like Trump because they find him odious in the way most Americans do, but also because they judge him to not be a conservative.

Living in fear of a mean Trump tweet

The Republican majority in the Senate has become nothing more than protection racket for a president who has repeatedly declared he would accept foreign assistance in his campaigns and was impeached for trying to get a foreign leader to help him win.

And the Republican Party is angry that some of us refuse to go along for the ride. That includes the Lincoln Project, which is dedicated to the electoral defeat of Trump and Trumpism.

Donald Trump’s three-and-a-half years in office have been a relentless assault on the foundational principles of American democracy. He has driven the divides within our communities, undermined our ability to stand as an example to other nations, and battered our Constitution to within an inch of its life.

The president has sought to isolate our nation from our allies, cozied up to tyrants and dictators and defended white nationalists. He has attacked the free press and our right to protest and fired a military colonel for telling the truth about Trump’s corruption.

Last year, in a shocking action during these times of confirmed, corrupt attempts by America’s enemies to influence the outcome of our presidential elections, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, blocked a requirement that political campaigns report offers of assistance from foreign nations to the FBI. Trump thanked her publicly.

Now he is so mismanaging our response to a global pandemic that we have lost over 155,000 American lives.

Rather than strengthening their resolve to preserve the great ideal of America, Republican senators have become progressively more anemic in their response to this wannabe strongman of a president. They have become puny and faint-hearted, spineless and weak-willed. They have proven they are not worthy of the constitutional responsibilities bestowed upon them by their election to the esteemed United States Senate.

Worst of all, for over a year, Trump has ignored U.S. intelligence assessments that Russian President Vladimir Putin may be paying bounties to the Taliban for killing our soldierson the battlefield. Every day, hundreds of thousands of America’s sons and daughters wake up prepared to give their lives in defense of our nation, in defense of you and me and our families, and Republican senators remain feeble and limp before this president, living in fear of a mean tweet.

No heroic senators running this year

Throughout our history, our leaders have been the most eloquent and persuasive voices for freedom in the world. From Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence to Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation to Martin Luther King’s “content of character” speech, they have woven together the story of independence and freedom, inspiring Americans to rise up together, to fight and sacrifice for together, in defense of what makes our nation unique among all others.

When freedom and Americanism fall under attack by our own president, it is incumbent upon our leaders, regardless of party, to become defenders of liberty and voices for freedom. Margaret Chase Smith was one such American leader, responding to the attacks on liberty from within our own country; her voice will be heard throughout history as a guardian of freedom and democracy.

There are no such heroic voices among the Republican senators up for reelection today.

They have been cowed by this president. They have been silent when the country needs them to speak, weak when our nation needs their strength. And every one of them should expect to be held accountable one way or another. The Susan Collins ad will not be the Lincoln Project's last one reminding voters of these Republican senators' fealty and weakness.

Voting against a bill that would have failed anyway, opposing a procedural motion and dismissing the president’s threatening tweets as “jokes” does not excuse their feebleness in face of the grave danger Trump poses.

Elections are about leadership and accountability. Republicans will pay a price for lacking both.

Yesterday, Kyle Kondik at Sabato's Crystal Ball listed the dozen most likely Senate seats to flip, in ranked order. My list is a little different-- and a bit less optimistic . Democrats are not going to beat Cornyn (TX) and Ossoff is too weak a candidate to seriously take on Perdue (GA). The other Georgia Senate race is a jungle ballot with the top 2 candidates facing off January 5 if no candidate gets 50%, which isn't possible. In fact, there's a chance-- albeit a slim one-- that the runoff will be between appointed, corrupt incumbent Kelly Loeffler (R) and crackpot wingnut Doug Collins (R) with Raphael Warnock (D) and the son of the odious Joe Lieberman splintering the Democratic vote. Anyway, here's my list of most endangered to least endangered (albeit still endangered):

• Martha McSally (R-AZ)
• Cory Gardner (R-CO)
• Doug Jones (D-AL)
• Susan Collins (R-ME)
• Thom Tillis (R-NC)
• Steve Daines (R-MT)
• Joni Ernst (R-IA)
• Dan Sullivan (R-AK)

And, if God intercedes to teach the Republicans a lesson: David Perdue (GA) and Lindsey Graham (SC).

The Lincoln Project Goes After Another GOP Scalp-- In Alaska

As you may know, I love the work the Lincoln Project does, especially their attacks on Trump, which are very harsh and very effective and, by all reports, driving Trump insane. The Lincoln Project, I should mention, is made up of conservative Republicans (and in some cases, conservative ex-Republicans) who, generally speaking, would like to overturn women's Choice, slash government regulation of predatory businesses, Make War Not Love and gut Social Security and Medicare. Other than that... I love these guys. They're doing a better job than the DNC eviscerating Señor Trumpanzee.

And they've been going after Republican senators too. Those ads seem, generally, more half-hearted and less... bloodthirsty. There was an exception with their Arizona ads against weak, appointed incumbent Martha McSally. Those were the kind of killer, vicious ads we expect from these GOP operatives-turned-anti-GOP. But most of the Senate ads were more like this Steve Bullock ad-- decent but not awesome-- nor even memorable. They don't even mention his opponent, Steve Daines, just flash a photo of him. The overall, anti-Republican senators ad was good and up to their high standards, but the specific ones... not so much. And they released another one like that today. This ad-- up top-- against for Independent Al Gross looks like it will be very effective in a soft, friendly way, but... no mention of Sullivan, Gross' Trump-loving GOP opponent. (I just saw the ad they released attacking Susan Collins this morning. This is what I call kickass)

I understand that they bought almost 2,000 points of prime airtime that will saturate Alaska all week, sure to knock the already unpopular Sullivan on his ass, especially with Gross running his own very powerful ad right now as well (below). An average voter has to see an ad at least 10 times for it to have an impact; the Lincoln Project's 2,000 points will amount to an average of 17 points. That has some meaning, especially with a candidate like Gross who hasn't run for office before and has relatively low name recognition.

I'm just spitballing here but I was wondering why the Lincoln Project did such good ads against McSally and and a pretty strong one for Gross, while just going through the motions on many of the other Republican senators. Then one of the principals' name popped in my head, Steve Schmidt. He's probably the one overseeing the ads; that's his specialty. And he was de-facto McCain campaign manager. He probably loathes the fact that McSally is sullying McCain's old seat with her supine, spineless obeisance to Trump... but what about Sullivan? That's more interesting and nuanced.

Schmidt's worst moment was the "credit" he gets for persuading McCain to make the absolutely catastrophic Sarah Palin running mate choice. That became the blackest mark against Schmidt in his entire political career. And, on one level, it was Dan Sullivan's fault. I'm guessing that this ad was the payback, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Schmidt asked his cool pal Karl Rove for his suggestion for a running mate. Rove, who is close to Sullivan's wealthy parents in Ohio, suggested Schmidt talk to their son, who was serving under like known Alaska Governor Palin as her Attorney General. Schmidt called Sullivan who persuaded him Palin would be a solid candidate... and that was the end of the McCain campaign and, for some time, Schmidt's reputation.

How lucky is Al Gross! I can't wait for the follow up to the soft one. I suspect the next Lincoln Project ad in Alaska is going to be more...cutting edge (and throat cutting for Dan Sullivan). I notice they put down another $580,000 in TV ad buys and I bet it isn't for this soft, getting-to-know-you ad. (So that's a cool million bucks Steve Schmidt is throwing against the guy who foisted Sarah Palin on him! And a million bucks on Alaska media is a lot of money.)

COVID Is Bringing Down Trump

A new poll from ABC News and the Washington Post shows that Trump's handling of the pandemic is viewed favorably by far fewer American voters than it was previously. In March 51% approval. As the realization of his incompetence and narcissistic perspective kicked in, by May, the number had failed to 46%. Today it's 38%, which still seems awfully high considering how horrifying the results have been. "Only 34 percent of Americans place a great deal or good amount of trust in what he says about it, while 64 percent trust him not so much or-- in the case of nearly half the public-- not at all. There’s also a disconnect in terms of priorities, with Americans by 63-33 percent-- again nearly 2-1-- saying it’s more important to control the spread of the virus than to restart the economy, a goal Trump has stressed. That 30-point preference for controlling the spread has widened from 20 points in late May."



But what I found especially interesting was how even among self-identified Republicans, trust in Trump to handle the pandemic has slipped significantly. In May, while most independents and Democrats had lost whatever faith they had in his ability to handle the emergency, 90% of Republicans still had confidence in him. By yesterday the Republican cohort was down to 79%-- an 11 point drop.

On Wednesday the U.S. reported 72,005 new cases. On Thursday it was another +73,388 new cases and yesterday another 74,987, bringing the total a horrifying 3,770,021-- 11,390 per million Americans, the worst, by far, of any developed country. By way of comparison the worst-hit European countries show 7,610 cases per million Swedes, 6,573 cases per million Spaniards, 5,202 cases per million Russians, 4,319 cases per million Brits, 4,035 cases per million Italians and 2,676 cases per million Frenchmen. In Canada the number is just 2,901 cases per million.

What's worse is that the states that took Trump's lead after the first spike, are-- with one exception-- the ones with the most horrifying results. The exception is California, where a cowardly governor took a disastrous go-slow and spineless approach. The most one-day reports on Thursday and ---> Friday.

• Florida +13,965 ---> +11,466
• Texas +10,243 ---> 9,496
• California +9,269 ---> 9,608
• Georgia +3,441 ---> 3,908
• Arizona +3,259 ---> +3,910
• Tennessee +2,479 ---> +2,279
• Louisiana +2,278 ---> +2,179
• North Carolina +2,074 ---> +2,011
• Alabama +2,021 ---> +2,003
• South Carolina +1,838 ---> 1,977

CBS News reporter Sarah Ewall-Wice took on the impact the #NeverTrump Republicans are having in their campaign to get voters to not just avoid voting for Trump, but to vote for Biden and-- with some of these groups-- to abandon Trimp enablers in Congress. Trump enablers in Congress basically equals all Republicans in Congress. She wrote that these groups are appalled by Trump's presidency and "are spending millions on television ads and digital campaigns and weighing ground efforts in an election year that has seen a global pandemic and major economic crisis following the impeachment trial of the president earlier this year." Remember anything like this ever happening before? Ever? It's probably extremely unhealthy for the Democratic Party, which is bound to absorb untold numbers of conservatives and go even further in that direction. But it will help elect Biden and a conservative Democratic Senate and lots of conservative Democrats to the House.

"We haven't really ever seen anything like this before in a general election," said Mitchell West, of Kantar/Campaign Media Analysis Group. "In primaries, there's always one Republican group that supports one specific Republican candidate and will obviously bash some others, but in terms of a general election, usually you don't see anything like this."

From April through June, The Lincoln Project raised more than $16.8 million, rivaling several prominent Democratic PACs after raising less than $2 million in the first quarter of 2020. The Lincoln Project, whose founders include George Conway, a prominent Trump critic who is married to White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, views this president as an existential threat to the nation, a "clear and present danger to the Constitution and our Republic."

The Lincoln Project's recent financial filing shows donations flooded in from all over the country. According to the group, the average contribution was around $56.

Its first anti-Trump ad aired in March, but it was the Mourning in America ad in early May that really launched the group, attacking Mr. Trump's handling of the economy and coronavirus. The spot was a twist on President Reagan's 1984 reelection campaign ad and attracted the attention of the president when it appeared on Fox News. Mr. Trump blasted the group on Twitter, inadvertently helping the Lincoln Project raise about $2 million in 24 hours.

"He saw the ad, it did what we wanted it to do, and we have been the beneficiaries organizationally of his inability or unwillingness to not respond to things that we know are his weak points," said The Lincoln Project co-founder Reed Galvin. The group has since churned out videos on the coronavirus response, Confederate flags, reported bounties on U.S troops and more. "That's the advantage of being independent of everybody… we say we think this going to move, this is going to hit, and we go do it."

According to Kantar/CMAG, The Lincoln Project has spent nearly $4 million on advertising since March. Now as the general election nears, the group plans to take the fight directly into battleground states to target "soft Republican" and conservative-leaning independent voters. While it plans to continue with targeted advertising, the group also has a rapidly growing army of volunteers including some 3,000 in Michigan.


 


"I think we will be contacting voters directly," Galvin told CBS News. "I think the effectiveness of our messaging creates a potent combination to get in front of these voters who you can convince to make sure they get and vote for Joe Biden, and if they're not going to vote for Joe Biden, then leave Donald Trump blank."

At the same time, Republican Voters against Trump is also going after similar voters, but with a slightly different approach, one that seeks to make Republican voters comfortable with the idea of not supporting their party's incumbent nominee, even if they voted for him in 2016.

"I've been a Republican for more than 30 years in western North Carolina, and I find myself for the first time in many years not able to vote for a Republican," said Steve in one video on the project's website. The project has been compiling hundreds of testimonials from GOP voters in all fifty states.

"I voted for Donald Trump four years ago because I didn't trust Hillary. That was a mistake," said Craig from Colorado in another video. While some voters focus on what's made them turn their backs on Mr. Trump, other voters talk about why they'll be voting for Biden.

"What people were most persuaded by was real stories from real people, so basically we decided to build a project around that for 2020," said Republican Voters against Trump founder Sarah Longwell. The initiative, which is a project of Defending Democracy Together-- the organization founded by conservatives including Bill Kristol-- is now using the videos in its $10 million campaign to digitally target voters in five states: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Arizona. Testimonials have also been used as TV ads.

But while a series of recent polls have shown Biden with at least a slight edge, these groups are aware that the president retains a strong base of unshakable Republican support. According to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday, Mr. Trump would have the support of 84% of Republicans.

Where Anti-Trump Republicans see an opening is in the three states won by the president in 2016 by the slimmest of margins over Hillary Clinton. The presumptive Democratic nominee helps . According to Longwell, early focus groups viewed far left Bernie Sanders as a "nonstarter," but Biden is "not nearly as big a lift for a lot of these right-leaning independents." He puts the crucial suburbs into play.

"A lot of the women who would consider themselves Republican or right-leaning, who voted for Mitt Romney, who voted for John McCain-- those are the people who are moving out of the party fastest, or moving away from Donald Trump the fastest," said Longwell.

That's what some former George W. Bush administration officials also believe. At the beginning of July, they launched 43 Alumni for Joe Biden PAC. The galvanizing moment for the PAC founders was the attack on protesters in Lafayette Park in June.

"Our goal is to really give those folks who either still identify themselves as Republicans or those who have left the party or view that the party has left them permission to vote for Joe Biden, given the circumstances the country is in right now and needing to move in a new direction," said John Farner.

The PAC aims to be a grassroots volunteer-based effort that uses the substantial Bush alumni network to engage Republicans and independents who have traditionally voted for Republicans. Those signing up to get involved online are asked how they would like to help-- on fundraising, field operations or online. The PAC expects to have a strong digital push as well as a get-out-the-vote effort, depending on what the coronavirus landscape looks like in the fall.

"There are a lot of people who have never voted for a Democrat for president before," said Kristopher Purcell. "We feel we can talk to those voters very well."

Yes they can-- and President Biden has more in common with many of them than he has with progressives-- and will feel far more comfortable talking with them than talking with progressives.

Getting Ready For A Biden Presidency-- It Can't Be As Bad As Trump's Presidency

In an off-the-record talk with a top Florida elected official, I was informed that Debbie Wasserman Schultz no longer has any power inside the Florida Democratic Party. "She has zero influence. The consultants who make money loosing elections have all the influence... The current chair's career experience (Terrie Rizzo) is that she’s a yoga instructor. And the executive director (Juan Peñalosa) was comms director for Joe García's failed reelection campaign and then worked at Mercury, the [sleazy] Republican lobbying firm" (Mar 2015 – Feb 2018). Last week the Biden campaign announced it had taken on Peñalosa as a senior advisor for Florida. Currently Rizzo and Peñalosa are involved in a high octane dispute with dozens of Florida candidates, which comes right on top of a scandal that forced the shabby state party to return at least $780,000 in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) small-business loans after Democratic lawmakers and candidates flipped out over the party's unethical and probably illegal money grab.

As I've said for years, the Florida Democratic Party is saved from being the worst state party in the country by only one thing: the Ohio DemocraticParty, the model of how to destroy a political party from within. Funny that right in the middle of the fight between Peñalosa and the party's grassroots candidates over the way the party squeezes hard-pressed campaigns for VAN access, making it close to impossible for working-class candidates to run in Florida and the shady PPP scam, the Biden camp decides to hire Peñalosa.

"This," a prominent Florida Democratic elected official told me, "is what happens when you hire a novice and a shady lobbyist to run your party... Ethics? What ethics? Congresswoman Donna Shalala pretty much ordered Rizzo and Peñalosa to return the money.-- which they reluctantly did. State Senator Jason Pizzo (D-Miami): "Forget the legality for just a second and consider what should have been a huge ethical dilemma. They are taking financial resources from someone who might have food or housing insecurity in the middle of a pandemic. I don’t know who possibly thought that was a good idea. " Pizzo knew exactly ho thought it was a good idea and said he alerted Biden’s daughter Ashley, to the problem-- at which point the Biden campaign rewarded Peñalosa with the senior advisor job while he stays on as party executive director.

At the same time, Aída Chávez reported for The Intercept that "More than 50 candidates signed onto a letter on Thursday demanding that the Florida Democratic Party share access to its voter files and resources. For access to VAN, the widely used Democratic voter file technology firm, the party is charging about $3,500 for a congressional campaign, $1,500 for state Senate, and $750 for House-- fees that many candidates can’t afford before their campaigns get off the ground. State Democratic parties in New Jersey, Idaho, Kansas, and Nebraska... do not charge candidates to access their voter data." Other crummy state parties like Florida charge as well. Congressional candidate Adam Christensen noted that "If these candidates had the voter files, the data, the information on where to canvass, who to canvass, not only would it increase the amount of Democrats in Florida, it would in turn increase donations, it would increase the amount of races that are won in Florida. But right now the Democratic Party is more concerned with making money off candidates, who they essentially see as suckers, and they will not call them back, they will not give them any actual backing... They have gone out and hired a bunch of field organizers and they give them access to VAN, they give [Democratic Executive Committees] access to VAN, they give everyone access to VAN except for the candidates. And at the end of the day the candidates are the ones who not only use the data, but update the data. They fix most of the data rolls to begin with because they’re the ones that actually make contact with voters and find people who are persuadable enough."

Biden's guy-- not Christensen-- Peñalosa.

On Monday morning, The Week published an OpEd by Ryan Cooper: Democrats can't afford to let former Republicans co-opt the party. And by "Republicans," he also means sleazy lobbyists and corporate shills, who already have far too much influence inside the Democratic Party. It isn't news that everyone loves the hard-hitting and vicious ads that conservative Republican #NeverTrump groups are running against Trump. Democratic groups-- which have no balls and no spines-- are afraid to run ads like that, so now everyone is excited about how the ethics-free Republicans are doing their dirty work against Trump. This is the newest from the Lincoln Project:





And this is a recent one from Republicans for the Rule of Law:





I'm not seeing ads like this from the DNC, the DCCC, the DSCC or the Biden campaign. But what Cooper and others-- myself included-- worry about is the cost of these ads. "The faction of so-called Never Trump Republicans," he wrote, "has scented opportunity. Some such conservative exiles have formed a group called the Lincoln Project, which is running rude ads mocking Trump for his disastrous presidency. Many Democrats are celebrating the ads for contributing to Trump's downturn in the polls and welcoming these apostates into the party fold. Yet should Biden win, it would be a great mistake to grant these conservatives much credit, and a greater mistake still to allow them to influence a Biden presidency. America needs better than former Republican operatives who learned about anti-racism last week." But that is exactly what Democrats-- and America-- will get when Biden is elected.

[I]t is primarily Trump's own failures that are dragging down his poll numbers. He is presiding over a pandemic that has killed over 136,000 Americans at time of writing, and a resulting economic collapse that is worse than any since the Great Depression. Other rich countries are cautiously emerging from the pandemic, while the U.S. outbreak is only accelerating. Trump is utterly incapable of doing his job, and the result is a humiliating, world-historical catastrophe. A couple viral ads are not making much difference against this background.

Meanwhile, it seems Trump has completely misjudged the political valence of the George Floyd protests. By some counts this has been the largest protest movement in American history, but Trump has reacted as usual by digging in even further with inflammatory racist screeching. The result is a further backlash against racism and police brutality-- support for Black Lives Matter has skyrocketed probably in part because Trump can't stop running his mouth.

...[I]t will be critically important for a Biden administration-- if it cares to keep the Democratic Party in power-- to both address the growing concerns about bigotry and restore economic security. Attacking racism is plainly popular and necessary, and what's more, as Bouie rightly argues in another article, egalitarian economic policy is vital for fixing the problem of police brutality and mass incarceration. On the other hand, failing to fix the coronavirus depression (as President Obama failed to fix the Great Recession) leaves open the future possibility of a more skilled and competent demagogue following in Trump's footsteps. If unemployment and production are still in the toilet in November 2022, Biden and the Democrats will be blamed for it.

Figures in the Lincoln Project are suitable for neither of these tasks. Before their dislike of Trump got them crosswise with the conservative mainstream, they were committed Republicans who generally disliked if not hated Barack Obama, and pushed austerity and deregulation-- precisely the opposite of what is needed to fix the economy. Indeed, Steve Schmidt, one of the groups co-founders, was John McCain's senior strategist for the 2008 campaign, and convinced him to pick Sarah Palin as a running mate-- the most important forerunner for Trump's brand of emboldened stupidity. Stuart Stevens, an adviser for the organization, was similarly a senior strategist for Mitt Romney on the 2012 campaign, which eagerly sought and received Trump's endorsement. Others have done worse-- Ben Howe, reportedly the project's video whiz, once boasted on Twitter that he would have shot Michael Brown of Ferguson himself if given the chance.

Howe now says he regrets those comments, as does Stevens, but these are still not particularly credible messengers for either economic populism or racial justice. It would be hard to produce a stronger impression of a bunch of conservative opportunists who expected Trump to lose and got routed out of their own party when he didn't, and are now rooting around for a place in the other party. If they simply want to help defeat Trump, that's fine, but if they want anything more than that, it should be earned with considerably more self-searching than has so far been in evidence.

The only way Biden can win-- hatred for Trump

In terms of electoral politics, Joe Biden has had the tremendous stroke of luck of his opponent turning in just about the worst presidential performance in American history. That will give him unusually wide latitude to pick who we wants aboard his political bandwagon. But if he takes power, he will have to clean up the worst mess since 1933. We have seen the horror of pre-Trump conservatism-- and few more closely than Biden, because in 2009 he and Obama inherited the mess from the previous Republican disaster. A bunch of conservative washouts are far more likely to hinder than help Biden's attempts to put the country back on two legs.

Why Are So Many Republicans So Comfy With Backing Biden? Expect Trump Enablers In Congress To Get Badly Burned In November

Only an extremist conspiracy-theorist would accuse Fox News of released polls based against Trump. The new Fox poll is likely to elicit that kind of response on the fringes of society. Among registered voters, Trump approval rating is just 44% (55% disapproval) and just 38% say they would vote to reelect him. (50% say they will vote for Biden.) Enthusiasm for Trump among his supporters is high (62%), while Biden has no enthusiasm (just 31%-- down from Hillary's 44%).

A big majority of Biden voters (63%) are motivated by fear that Trump will be reelected. I think that will be enough-- even if the calculus turns off voters like myself who only vote for candidates and-- rejecting the lesser of two evils theory the American political establishment is completely wedded to-- not against candidates. I'd never consider voting for a conservative like Biden, But he doesn't need me or people like me. He has plenty of Republicans who are perfectly happy voting for him instead of Trump. And that number is growing as Republicans look at his right-of-center career long record and feel more and more comfortable with it. A case can easily be made that he is the more traditionally conservative than Trump.

Yesterday, writing for Newsweek, Adrian Carrasquillo wrote that more Republicans are backing Biden in an unprecedented rebuke of a sitting president. And it's now appearing to be going beyond the #NeverTrump partisan elites. "The coordinated efforts," he wrote, "far surpass the high-profile defections that occurred during Donald Trump's candidacy in 2016 and come amid his plummeting public support and intense scrutiny of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and police reform protests, both major domestic crises. Peter Jeffrey Kuznick, a professor who specializes in 20th- and 21st-century presidents at American University, told Newsweek that the rejection of a sitting president by his own party is 'unprecedented' in modern American history, and "extremely unusual" overall. Parties have rarely splintered in such a way, he said, citing Teddy Roosevelt running as a progressive as one example."

The latest super PAC of Republicans for Joe Biden, The Right Side PAC, includes short-lived former Trump communications director Anthony Scaramucci and launched Wednesday. Scaramucci told Newsweek he plans to go into swing states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, in predominantly white areas that voted for Trump, to spread his message of why it's against their interest to continue to support him. The group will use digital, phone, and mail to reach voters and rely on major donors.

Scaramucci said that while Trump's idea of leadership is "throwing Molotov cocktails," Biden wants to unite the country.

"Trump has hijacked this party, but there's going to be a reckoning," he said.

The creation of that PAC follows the new 45 Alumni for Biden PAC of former Bush administration officials that began this month. Former President George W. Bush will not support Trump, and his spokesman Freddy Ford told Newsweek he is also not involved in the PAC. But the group, which will fundraise for Biden, quickly gathered close to 200 supporters.

The fundraising efforts come on top of high-profile GOP defections, like former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who said June 7 that Trump "lies" and he will vote for Biden. Cindy McCain, the widow of former Senator John McCain, plans to support Biden but may not be public about it because of her son's political career, the New York Times reported.

Then there are the groups like The Lincoln Project, started by veterans of past Republican campaigns, which spent $1.4 million against Trump through March and raised another $1 million after the president attacked the group in May for their ad on his coronavirus response. Bill Kristol's Republican Voters Against Trump is also stocked by GOP operatives and is releasing searing ads against him, like one featuring Senator Lindsey Graham. The ad received widespread media coverage and attention on social media after showing Graham slamming Trump during the 2016 campaign and then lavishing praise on Biden.

Trump, however, has been opposed by establishment Republicans before. In 2016, GOP leaders were more likely to say they weren't backing Trump, than to take the next step and say they were supporting Hillary Clinton. Trump lost support at various times-- when he was slow to denounce former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, when he attacked a Latino judge in the Trump University case, and when he attacked a Gold Star family. But many Republicans publicly abandoned him in October, just weeks before the election, after an Access Hollywood tape emerged of his lewd comments about women.

...[Hurting Trump] is that his presidency "became real," something they said was never more clear than in the last five months as he faced a pandemic and protests that swept the country. A CBS News poll after the protests showed that 49 percent disapproved of Trump's handling, while 32 percent approved of it. A FiveThirtyEight analysis also showed that Trump's approval rating of the pandemic's management has slipped. About 54 percent of Americans now disapprove of his pandemic leadership.

Rosario Marin, who served as Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush and recently joined the super PAC supporting Biden, said that six months ago people weren't thinking about switching parties, but the coronavirus outbreak "shined a bright light on his deficiencies as a leader and as an administrator."

"But even worse, were the protests. It was something that has been brewing in people's hearts and they realized he's not going to be the healer we need at this time," she said, also chiding Trump for not mentioning racism during his executive order announcing limited police reforms.





...GOP groups who are opposing Trump said that the high-profile defections also provide a "permission structure" for lifelong Republicans to support Biden, and say multiple factors have contributed to the early support for the former vice president. As president, Trump now has a record to critique and no longer has Hillary Clinton, deeply unpopular among Republicans, to use to deflect criticism.

Biden, on the other hand, is a much more respected and palatable candidate for Republicans to back, the groups said.

"Biden's brand positioning makes him a very safe choice," said Tim Miller, an advisor to Republican Voters Against Trump. "When they say 'He's an extremist in the pocket of AOC! He's an ANTIFA supporter!' Really? Joe Biden?"

Miller's group has courted Republican donors and held focus groups with Trump supporters and Republicans who have soured on the president. He told Newsweek that during the primary donors told him they were against Trump, but wouldn't be able to donate money to his group if Senators Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren were the Democratic nominees.





"He's not ANTIFA, he's not Bernie Sanders, he's not even Nancy Pelosi," Jennifer Horn a founder of The Lincoln Project, told Newsweek about how Republicans view Biden. Horn said she spent 10 years as New Hampshire Republican Party chairman using Nancy Pelosi as a boogeyman in her races, but Biden, she said, is "good guy," who works in a bipartisan manner.

Where many in the military gave Trump the benefit of the doubt in 2016, Miller said, there has been a cascade of former military leaders coming out against Trump, whom Republican groups see as the "most credible messengers" in their quest to see Biden defeat Trump.

"This fall, it's time for new leadership in this country-- Republican, Democrat or independent," retired Navy admiral William H. McRaven, who led the Osama bin Laden raid told The Times. "President Trump has shown he doesn't have the qualities necessary to be a good commander in chief."

Former defense secretary James Mattis was joined by former chairs of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen and Marty Dempsey, in criticizing and repudiating Trump's leadership.

"For lifelong Republican voters, military critiques of Trump are extremely persuasive and extremely valuable," Horn told Newsweek... More high-profile Republican endorsements of Biden are coming, she said.

"It would be a relief that [Trump's] no longer going to be there," Marin said, envisioning a Biden victory on election night. "A sigh of relief that they no longer need to make excuses, they no longer need to cover for him."

The Lincoln Project is actively working against Trump enablers in the Senate-- Republicans-- from Joni Ernst (R-IA), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Martha McSally (R-AZ), Susan Collins (R-ME) and Cory Gardner (R-CO) right to the political, spiritual and societal fount of evil himself-- Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the self-proclaimed Grim Reaper:





Don't be surprised to see more Lincoln Project ads against these and other Republicans-- Tom Perdue (GA), Steve Daines (MT), Dan Sullivan (AK), Lindsey Graham (SC)... Meanwhile, Democratic voters should be asking themselves why Republicans seem to very comfortable with Biden. Is it more than their disdain for Trump? Are they just holding their noses and backing Biden because they hate Trump? Or are they more enthusiastic about Biden than many Democrats are? Maybe Democrats better start thinking that unless they want 4 more years of establishing;ishment conservatism running the show in DC, they should replace conservative, status quo Democrats in Congress with actual progressives. This morning, Krystal Ball spoke eloquently on the subject of the Tuesday primaries and I suggest listening to her analysis below. Is it time to contribute to progressive Democrats like the ones you'll find my clicking on the Blue America 2020 thermometer on the right? These are men and women who will hold the feet to the fire of whichever conservative winds up in the White House. It's not too late. But after primary season... it will be.

There Will Never Be A Fort Trump Or A USS Donald J Trump

A few days ago, The Atlantic published an essay by retired general and former CIA director David Petraeus that was a response to a series of Trump tweets from a military perspective. Trump's tweets were more of his racist divisiveness-- this time on the long-overdue renaming of military bases commemorating Civil War traitors. These were the flimsy gaslighting tweets from Trump:

Petraeus wrote that as he has watched Confederate monuments being removed by state and local governments, and sometimes by the forceful will of the American people, the fact that 10 U.S. Army installations are named for Confederate officers has weighed on him. "That number includes the Army’s largest base, one very special to many in uniform: Fort Bragg, in North Carolina. The highway sign for Bragg proclaims it home of the airborne and special operations forces. I had three assignments there during my career. Soldiers stationed at Bragg are rightly proud to serve in its elite units. Some call it 'the Center of the Military Universe,' 'the Mother Ship,' or even 'Hallowed Ground.' But Braxton Bragg-- the general for whom the base was named-- served in the Confederate States Army. The United States is now wrestling with repeated instances of abusive policing caught on camera, the legacies of systemic racism, the challenges of protecting freedoms enshrined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights while thwarting criminals who seek to exploit lawful protests, and debates over symbols glorifying those who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. The way we resolve these issues will define our national identity for this century and beyond. Yesterday afternoon, an Army spokesperson said that Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy is now “open to a bipartisan discussion” on renaming the bases. That’s the right call. Once the names of these bases are stripped of the obscuring power of tradition and folklore, renaming the installations becomes an easy, even obvious, decision." Trump has fired McCarthy, at least not yet.

My life in uniform essentially unfolded at a series of what might be termed “rebel forts.” I made many parachute jumps with the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, and I also jumped with 82nd Airborne paratroopers at Fort Pickett, in Virginia (a National Guard post), and Fort Polk, in Louisiana. I made official visits to Virginia’s Forts Pickett and Lee, to Texas’s Fort Hood, and to Alabama’s Fort Rucker. In Georgia, I visited Fort Gordon, and I attended Airborne School, Ranger School, and the Infantry Officer Basic Course-- rites of passage for countless infantry soldiers-- at Fort Benning. At the time, I was oblivious to the fact that what was then called the “Home of the Infantry” was named for Henry L. Benning, a Confederate general who was such an enthusiast for slavery that as early as 1849 he argued for the dissolution of the Union and the formation of a Southern slavocracy. Fort Benning’s physical location, on former Native American territory that became the site of a plantation, itself illustrates the turbulent layers beneath the American landscape.

It would be years before I reflected on the individuals for whom these posts were named. While on active duty, in fact, I never thought much about these men—about the nature of their service during the Civil War, their postwar activities (which in John Brown Gordon’s case likely included a leadership role in the first Ku Klux Klan), the reasons they were honored, or the timing of the various forts’ dedications. Nor did I think about the messages those names sent to the many African Americans serving on these installations-- messages that should have been noted by all of us. Like many aspects of the military, the forts themselves were so shrouded in tradition that everything about them seemed rock solid, time tested, immortal. Their names had taken on new layers of meaning that allowed us to ignore the individuals for whom they were named.

In the course of their professional development, soldiers often study the tactical and operational skills of leaders who fought for dubious causes. Learning how to win a particular kind of battle is different than learning how to win a war. Intellectual appreciation of a given general’s tactical genius, however, should not become wholesale admiration or a species of devotion. When I was a cadet at West Point in the early 1970s, enthusiasm for Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson was widespread. We were not encouraged to think deeply about the cause for which they had fought, at least not in our military-history classes. And throughout my Army career, I likewise encountered enthusiastic adherents of various Confederate commanders, and a special veneration for Lee.

It also happens that-- Lee excepted-- most of the Confederate generals for whom our bases are named were undistinguished, if not incompetent, battlefield commanders. Braxton Bragg, for example, left a great deal to be desired as a military leader. After graduating from West Point in 1837, he served in the Second Seminole War and the Mexican War. His reputation for physical bravery was matched by one for epic irascibility. Bragg’s temper was so bad, Ulysses S. Grant recounted in his memoirs, that an old Army story had a superior once rebuking him, “My God, Mr. Bragg, you have quarreled with every officer in the army, and now you are quarrelling with yourself!” Bragg’s inability to cooperate diluted his effectiveness until his resounding defeat at the Battle of Chattanooga, in November 1863, precipitated his resignation from the Confederate army.

Had Bragg, like most of the rebel honorees, not been elevated by the effort to memorialize the “Lost Cause”-- promoted by organizations such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy as well as by some sympathetic historians-- he would probably have been consigned to historical obscurity.

Fort Bragg and most of the other posts in question were established either during World War I, at one peak of the Lost Cause movement, or in the early 1940s, as the country was feverishly gearing up for World War II. Army leaders, to say nothing of political figures at the time, undoubtedly wanted to ingratiate themselves with the southern states in which the forts were located. They bowed to-- and in many cases shared-- the Lost Cause nostalgia that also sponsored so much civilian statuary, street naming, and memorial building from the end of Reconstruction through the 1930s, when the trend tapered off but did not end completely. In many cases, the Army’s sentiments simply mirrored those of the society it served.

For an organization designed to win wars to train for them at installations named for those who led a losing force is sufficiently peculiar, but when we consider the cause for which these officers fought, we begin to penetrate the confusion of Civil War memory. These bases are, after all, federal installations, home to soldiers who swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. The irony of training at bases named for those who took up arms against the United States, and for the right to enslave others, is inescapable to anyone paying attention. Now, belatedly, is the moment for us to pay such attention.

It gives me considerable pause, for example, to note that my alma mater, West Point, honors Robert E. Lee with a gate, a road, an entire housing area, and a barracks, the last of which was built during the 1960s. A portrait of Lee with an enslaved person adorns a wall of the cadet library, the counterpoint to a portrait of Grant, his Civil War nemesis, on a nearby wall.

Lee’s history is, in fact, thoroughly woven through that of West Point and the Army. Before he was the commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, Lee was an outstanding cadet, a distinguished chief of engineers in the Mexican War, and later the West Point superintendent. I do not propose that we erase his role in this history. We can learn from his battlefield skill and, beyond that, from his human frailty, his conflicting loyalties, and the social pressures that led him to choose Virginia over the United States. If we attempt to repress the fact of his existence from our institutional memory, we risk falling into the trap of authoritarian regimes, which routinely and comprehensively obliterate whole swaths of national history as if they never happened at all. What distinguishes democracies is their capacity to debate even the most contentious issues vigorously and in informed, respectful, deliberate ways and to learn from the errors of the past. But remembering Lee’s strengths and weaknesses, his military and personal successes and failures, is different from venerating him.

Confederate memorialization is only the most obvious expression of formerly acceptable sentiments now regarded critically by many Americans. Once unreservedly celebrated figures like Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, to name just three, held convictions and behaved in ways we now find deeply troubling. It is indicative of the complexity of the problem that while the stained-glass window honoring Robert E. Lee in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., was removed, that of Wilson, an ardent segregationist, remains (after a healthy debate).

But Confederate leaders are different from these other examples not simply in degree, but in kind: Plainly put, Lee, Bragg, and the rest committed treason, however much they may have agonized over it. The majority of them had worn the uniform of the U.S. Army, and that Army should not brook any celebration of those who betrayed their country.

A long-standing maxim for those in uniform is that one should never begin a war without also knowing how to end it. And this is a kind of war-- a war of memory. The forts named for Confederate generals were established before the formulation of the rules now codified in Army Regulation 1-33, which sets the criteria for memorializing soldiers. But, as is so often the case when the Army is found to have fallen short of its elemental values, it also possesses the remedy. While the regulation states, “Rememorializing or rededicating actions are strongly discouraged, and seldom appropriate,” it also outlines a clear administrative process to follow when they are. This is the moment to pursue that process.

We could probably disqualify the rebel generals on a technicality: After all, none of them were actually in the U.S. Army when they performed the actions for which they were honored. Nonetheless, I would prefer to disqualify them on the grounds that they do not meet the letter or spirit of the regulation’s second criterion: “Memorializations will honor deceased heroes and other deceased distinguished individuals of all races in our society, and will present them as inspirations to their fellow Soldiers, employees, and other citizens.”

The magic of the republic to which many of us dedicated our professional lives is that its definition of equality has repeatedly demonstrated the capacity to broaden. And America’s military has often led social change, especially in the area of racial integration. We do not live in a country to which Braxton Bragg, Henry L. Benning, or Robert E. Lee can serve as an inspiration. Acknowledging this fact is imperative. Should it fail to do so, the Army, which prides itself on leading the way in perilous times, will be left to fight a rearguard action against a more inclusive American future, one that fulfills the nation’s founding promise.

Maybe Fort Bragg could be rededicated to Billy Bragg? Do you get it? Still no? Perhaps this Ted Talk by Paul Rucker will help clarify matters better: