Crime Is Rampant In Cities With Republican Mayors

How does the most failed and hated president in U.S. history, who can't get beyond his mostly ignorant and brain-washed base, run for reelection? Short answer: fear and loathing plus racism, chaos and gaslighting... and domestic terrorism. Listen to this NPR report from Steve Innskeep with lifelong Republican and former Homeland Security Department assistant secretary of counterterrorism and threat preventionl Elizabeth Neumann who asserts, credibly, that the Trump regime is "creating the conditions for domestic extremism to flourish in the United States... and paving the way for even more violence." She told Innskeep that "It's his style. His style is chaos itself. And when you have chaos at the top of the federal government, that creates chaos throughout every other level of government. That means we cannot perform our security functions well. The first and primary job of a president, the first and primary job of the federal government, is to protect us."



AP reporters Steve Peoples and Zeke Miller wrote that "After struggling for much of the year to settle on a clear and concise reelection message, President Donald Trump appears to have found his 2020 rallying cry. Four years ago, it was 'Build the Wall,' a simple yet coded mantra to white America that nonwhite outsiders threatened their way of life. This week, Trump has re-centered his campaign on another three-word phrase that carries a similar racial dynamic: 'Law and Order.' For much of the summer, the Republican president flirted with the bumper-sticker slogan championed by Richard Nixon and George Wallace in 1968. But Trump sharply increased his focus on law and order after a white police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, multiple times last week as Blake’s three children watched, sparking protest-related violence.

And, of course, he's blaming Democrats-- particularly Democratic mayors and, by extension, Biden-- for the breakdown of his somewhat warped version or law and order. But let's put aside the kind of crime his regime is steeped in and just take his own idea of crime into account. Cities have crime-- everywhere in the world. That's hardly news. Tulsa and Oklahoma City both have violent crime rates that are very high-- 1040.83 violent crimes per million residents in Tulsa and 787.34 violent crimes per million residents in OK City, higher than violent crime rates in New York (538.90 violent crimes per million residents) and San Francisco (715.0 violent crimes per million residents). Tulsa mayor G.T. Byrum and OK City mayor David Holt are Trumpist Republicans. New York and San Francisco both have Democratic mayors. Tulsa also has an extraordinarily high property crime rate. So do Miami, Omaha and Fresno, which also have Republican mayors. Their property crime rates are significantly higher than Chicago's, Dallas', or Los Angeles', all of which have Democratic mayors.

No one in their right mind blames the high crime rates in Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Miami, Omaha and Fresno on their Republican mayors. But Trump blames crime in even "safer" cities on Democrats. That's who Trump is and how he tries manipulating voters. If the election is decided on his own record-- as a kind of referendum-- he will lose and lose big. There are very few states were his job approval numbers are higher than his disapproval numbers. And nationally, he is drowning in a toilet of disapproval. A recent poll for Politico by Morning Consult asked registered voters if they approve of disapprove. 24% said they strongly approve, 17% said they somewhat approve, 10% said they somewhat disapprove and 46% said they strongly disapprove. More important in terms of the election, among independent voters 12% said they strongly approve, 21% said they somewhat approve, 17% said they somewhat disapprove and 45% said they strongly disapprove.

Yesterday, Utah Senator Mitt Romney (R) said that Trump's "comments and tweets over the past few days, including a retweet of a 2019 video clearly intended to further inflame racial tensions, are simply jaw-dropping." And not jaw-dropping in a good way.

And, according to the NY Times with Biden vigorously, pressing his argument that Trump is failing the country with his handling of the coronavirus, and his irresponsible plans to rush into dangerous school reopening, Trump needs voters to focus on his cockamamie, manipulative version of crime in the streets rather than an actual pandemic that is impacting peoples' lives (and deaths).

Reporting for Reuters after a new Ipsos poll came out yesterday, Chris Kahn, wrote that it isn't working for Trump. "Trump’s attempt to make civil unrest a central theme of his re-election campaign," he reported, "has yet to boost his political standing, as most Americans do not see crime as a major problem confronting the nation and a majority remain sympathetic to anti-racism protests."

[T]he poll showed the majority-- 78%-- remain “very” or “somewhat” concerned about the coronavirus. Nearly 60% said Trump is at least partly responsible for the protracted school and business closures due to the virus, as well as for the high number of coronavirus cases in the United States. More than 6 million Americans have been infected with the virus, more people than in any other country.

By contrast, most Americans do not see crime as a major priority and do not think it is increasing in their communities, the poll showed.

Only about 8% of American adults listed crime as a top priority for the country, compared with 30% who said it was the economy or jobs, and 16% who said it was the healthcare system.

"Fargo" Revisited by Nancy Ohanian

And 62% of registered voters, including 62% of Democrats and 65% of Republicans, said crime was not increasing in their communities.

According to the poll, 53% of American adults said they remain sympathetic to people out protesting against racial inequality, nearly unchanged from 52% in a similar poll that ran in late July.

While support for the protesters has declined overall since the immediate aftermath of the police killing in May of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which sparked a national conversation on race, the poll showed more than half of suburban Americans and more than half of undecided registered voters are still sympathetic to them.

Trump and his Republican allies tried to re-focus the country’s attention on crime in America during their convention last week, as new confrontations erupted following the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a crucial battleground that will help decide November’s election.

Trump also has attempted to stoke fears, especially among suburban white voters, about crime-ridden cities and falsely asserted that Biden would “defund the police.” Biden has rejected that position.

“No one will be safe in Biden’s America,” Trump said last week at the Republican national convention.

Biden has pushed back, accusing Trump of stirring up racist fears in the U.S. in hopes of reviving his campaign.

“The simple truth is Donald Trump failed to protect America. So now he’s trying to scare America,” Biden said in Pittsburgh this week.

Republicans Starting To Panic As Public Anger Grows Over The Post Office

This week's most predictible endorsement went to Biden and Harris yesterday from the National Association of Letter Carriers, a 300,000 member union. With Trump and the congressional Republicans full steam ahead on trying to destroy the post office-- Trump so he can prevent widespread voting and the congressional Republicans as part of their privatization mania.

It isn't just the big postal workers union endorsement-- this whole war against the post office is hurting Trump. Otherthan doctrinaire Republicans, the public doesn't like it. As Jonathan Bernstein put it in his Bloomberg News column yesterday "The thing is that Trump, by opposing money for the U.S. Postal Service and supporting 'reforms' that have slowed it down, is just handing former Vice President Joe Biden yet another easy campaign issue. Democrats may or may not be able to overturn new procedures that are causing significant problems, but they certainly can make sure that anyone who’s waiting on a letter or a package thinks that Trump is responsible when it doesn’t show up on time. And that’s not the kind of thing politicians want voters to blame them for."

Erin Cox, Elise Viebeck, Jason Bogage a d Christopher Ingham reported that Trump's corrupted Postal Service warned 46 states-- as it slows down mail deliveries-- that some votes sent my mail may not be counted. "Anticipating an avalanche of absentee ballots, the U.S. Postal Service recently sent detailed letters to 46 states and D.C. warning that it cannot guarantee all ballots cast by mail for the November election will arrive in time to be counted... The letters sketch a grim possibility for the tens of millions of Americans eligible for a mail-in ballot this fall: Even if people follow all of their state’s election rules, the pace of Postal Service delivery may disqualify their votes. The Postal Service’s warnings of potential disenfranchisement came as the agency undergoes a sweeping organizational and policy overhaul amid dire financial conditions." Those dire financial conditions were entirely and purposefully created by conservatives.

"Cost-cutting moves," the Post quartet continued, "have already delayed mail delivery by as much as a week in some places, and a new decision to decommission 10 percent of the Postal Service’s sorting machines sparked widespread concern the slowdowns will only worsen. Rank-and-file postal workers say the move is ill-timed and could sharply diminish the speedy processing of flat mail, including letters and ballots."

Yesterday, when asked by Ayman Mohyeldin on MSNBC if the American people will have a free, fair and credible election in November, Pelosi say "Not if the president has anything to do with it... a domestic assault on our Constitution."

Petrified of the growing anger of voters-- and his open conference-- Kevin McCarthy lied his ass off, telling the public that Republicans do not support withholding funding from the Postal Service. "The Postal Service will have the funding that it needs. We will make sure of that. We want to make sure we have an accurate election. I think any Republican that gets their ballot in the mail should vote and make sure their vote is counted." People are wise to his word games as he licks Trump's boots, as even members of his own caucus are saying now.

Jessica Piper reported for the Bangor Daily News that Susan Collins-- losing her reelection bid and absolutely desperate to show she isn't joined-at-the-hip to Trump (which she is)-- found something she can oppose him on. Trying to sound like she just woke up and is suddenly on Mainers' side, she said that "efforts by the U.S. Postal Service to cut costs could backfire amid reported mail delays in Maine and across the country and reiterated support to increase funding to the embattled agency." Has she told Trump and McConnell?

Mitt Romney, somewhat more credibly than Collins, broke with Trump on this too, telling the Sutherland Institute that "politicians"-- a reference to McConnell and Trump-- "attacking the vote by mail system are threatening global democracy but stopped short of criticizing President Donald Trump, who has been openly against an expected surge of mail-in ballots. The United States must stand as an example to more fragile democratic nations to show that elections can be held in a free and fair manner, Romney said. He urged the federal government to make every effort to ensure that people are able to vote in the general election this November... Romney said he has seen no evidence that voting by mail has led to fraud and that this voting method may be even more secure than electronic voting because it’s less likely to invite hacking interference by foreign entities. He said he would support providing additional funds to states to strengthen their voting systems."

And this is the letter my friend Rod wrote to each of them this morning. Maybe you want to consider doing one like it too?

Gentlemen of the USPS Board of Governors:

Mr. DeJoy is engaged in a blatantly partisan exercise to cripple the institution you oversee ahead of November 3. With it, he seeks to effectively destroy American democracy. It is incumbent upon you to intervene to halt this treasonous activity.

Please do your job and remove him immediately!

One very concerned citizen,

Rod Colburn

P.S. You each appear to be white males. You don’t look at all like America, do you?!

Shutting Roger Stone Up With A Commutation Of His Sentence-- Few Republican Elected Officials Seem To Mind

"The most corrupt act in recent history," is what Trump detractors are calling the big Roger Stone commutation. Legal author and CNN contributor Jeffrey Toobin said, specifically, that it was "the most corrupt and cronyistic act in perhaps all of recent history." After all, just hours before Trump announced it, Stone had admitted to Howard Fineman that he has the goods on Trump. Will it matter? The mask-free young woman in this Facebook video is a very typical Trump fan-- something she proudly admits. [Basically she is ALL Trump supporters rolled up into one-- the absolute essence of populist Trumpism.] Watch it a couple of times. Do you think anything about this commutation will bother her or her boyfriend or any Trumpist?

South Carolina closet queen Lindsey Graham, whose career Trump could destroy with one tweet, pulled his head out of Trump's ass Friday long enough to tweet that that Trump's commutation of Roger Stone would be justified because "Mr. Stone is in his 70s and this was a non-violent, first-time offense," apparently a dry run for the Republican congressional party line on what was about to happen. But it seems to have bothered Utah Senator Mitt Romney, quite a bit... enough to have stuck his neck out to tweet this:

I read yesterday that Trump may bring Flynn out on the road to his COVID-KKK rallies. I hope he brings Roger too. I asked some of the candidates for Congress what the Republicans they're running against are saying about the Roger Stone commutation. Or if Trump has anything on them too? Like many candidates, Kara Eastman pointed to Donald J. Bacon’s "silence on this travesty as an amplification of his complicity. He’s a Donald Trump rubber stamp and Trump’s top enabler in Congress in his shambling journey towards autocracy."

Like Kara, this is Julie Oliver's second swing at a ghastly Trump-devoted incumbent. She told me last night that "Political corruption in Congress isn't new. We see it anywhere from corporate lobbyists writing gigantic tax cuts in the margins of a Republican tax bill that incentivized shipping jobs overseas, to the pharmaceutical industry charging $3,000 for a treatment that American taxpayers subsidized. But commuting the sentence of a political ally who was convicted of 7 felonies, conspired with foreign spies to disrupt a U.S. election and helped cover it up seals Donald Trump's reputation as the most corrupt president in history. And those who have enabled this corruption, like Roger Williams, can never live this down." Neither Williams nor Bacon has said a word about Trump's blatant corruption in regard to Roger Stone-- or anything else. Neither deserves to be reelected.

History professor and Riverside County progressive congressional candidate Liam O'Mara said "It's just business as usual to forgive corruption in your own camp, so it is honestly surprising that any Republicans have spoken out. (I almost hate that I need to give respect to Mitt Romney and former GOPer Justin Amash for standing on principle, given how terrible many of their ideas are for America, but I do respect it.) People in both parties reflexively defend their own-- this is why so many New Dems and Blue Dogs hate progressives so much. But we all know the corruption is far worse in the Republican party, and has been for decades (look at all the indictments in Reagan's administration). That Republicans never care is just par for the course. Most Republicans stuck with Nixon all the way to the resignation, remember. Calvert won't say a word about this, because as much shady crap as he's been in, he might need a get-out-of-jail-free card himself some day. Or at least, he should, if this country's politicians cared half as much about graft and corruption as they claim."

#NeverTrumper Bill Kristof wrote late Friday night that members of Congress shouldn't be mute about this outrage. "Democrats certainly will not be. But what of Republicans? Will they cower? Probably. Or will some-- a few, a happy few-- step forth now, in light of this extraordinarily corrupt exercise of presidential power, and say: No second term for this president. Will some elected Republicans make clear that Donald Trump’s America is not their America, not our America, nor the America of patriots, not the America of our future? A healthy Republican party would feature dozens of members of Congress stepping forward to say this... Republicans had their chance a few months ago to vote to impeach, and then convict, Donald Trump. With one (one!) honorable exception, they chose not to stand up for the rule of law. Now Trump has carried through on promises even Nixon never had the nerve or opportunity to carry out. Trump has gone further than Nixon ever did. Will no elected Republican now stand up and say to the president: You chose Stone; I choose Biden."

So is it a done deal? Have Trump and Stone gotten away with this (at least outside of the history books?) Well, where better to seek an answer than from Ben Wittes at Lawfare? He wrote that "the predictable nature of Trump’s action should not obscure its rank corruption. In fact, the predictability makes the commutation all the more corrupt, the capstone of an all-but-open attempt on the president’s part to obstruct justice in a self-protective fashion over a protracted period of time. That may sound like hyperbole, but it’s actually not. Trump publicly encouraged Stone not to cooperate with Robert Mueller’s investigation; he publicly dangled clemency as a reward for silence; and he has now delivered. The act is predictable precisely because the corrupt action is so naked. In a normal world, this pattern of conduct would constitute an almost prototypical impeachable offense. But this is not a normal world. Congress is unlikely to bestir itself to do anything about what Trump has done-- just as it has previously done nothing about the obstruction allegations detailed in the Mueller Report."

Now, with Trump’s commutation, Stone has received the precise reward Trump dangled at the time his possible testimony was at issue.

“Roger Stone is a victim of the Russia Hoax that the Left and its allies in the media perpetuated for years in an attempt to undermine the Trump Presidency,” the White House said Friday evening. In the White House’s telling, Stone was targeted by out-of-control Mueller prosecutors for mere “process” crimes when their “collusion delusion” fell apart. He was subject to needless humiliation in his arrest, and he did not get a fair trial. “[P]articularly in light of the egregious facts and circumstances surrounding his unfair prosecution, arrest, and trial, the President has determined to commute his sentence. Roger Stone has already suffered greatly. He was treated very unfairly, as were many others in this case. Roger Stone is now a free man!”

Indeed he is. But the story may not be over.

“Time to put Roger Stone in the grand jury to find out what he knows about Trump but would not tell. Commutation can’t stop that,” tweeted Andrew Weissman, one of Mueller’s top prosecutors, following the president’s action.

That’s most unlikely while the Justice Department remains in the hands of Attorney General Bill Barr. But it’s far from unthinkable should Trump leave office in January. What’s more, the commutation means that the story Mueller tells about potential obstruction vis a vis Stone did not end with the activity described by the Mueller Report. It is a continuing pattern of conduct up until the present day. That potentially makes it easier for a future Justice Department to revive at least one of the obstruction questions that Barr squelched when he closed the cases Mueller intentionally did not resolve. In addition to all of the facts reported by Mueller, including facts that have been redacted until recently, Trump has now consummated the deal he dangled before Stone.

That’s something the Justice Department may want to examine anew-- someday.

Collaborators-- In The Enabling Sense Of The Word

Next month Anne Applebaum's new book, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism will be available. I can't wait, but until then, we'll have to satisfy ourselves with a long, learned essay she wrote for The Atlantic this weekend, The Collaborators-- History Will Judge The Complicit. You can tell from the title it's going to be about Trump and his Republican enablers, right? Well, her essay is much more than that-- starting with "a cold March afternoon in 1949," as a young man from the Communist elite was escaping from Russian-occupied East Germany and another was rising in the ranks of the Stasi to become East Germany's top spy, remaining "an enthusiastic collaborator while the other could not bear the betrayal of his ideals." Applebaum wanted to know why.

In English, the word collaborator has a double meaning. A colleague can be described as a collaborator in a neutral or positive sense. But the other definition of collaborator, relevant here, is different: someone who works with the enemy, with the occupying power, with the dictatorial regime. In this negative sense, collaborator is closely related to another set of words: collusion, complicity, connivance. This negative meaning gained currency during the Second World War, when it was widely used to describe Europeans who cooperated with Nazi occupiers. At base, the ugly meaning of collaborator carries an implication of treason: betrayal of one’s nation, of one’s ideology, of one’s morality, of one’s values.

Since the Second World War, historians and political scientists have tried to explain why some people in extreme circumstances become collaborators and others do not. The late Harvard scholar Stanley Hoffmann had firsthand knowledge of the subject-- as a child, he and his mother hid from the Nazis in Lamalou-les-Bains, a village in the south of France. But he was modest about his own conclusions, noting that “a careful historian would have-- almost-- to write a huge series of case histories; for there seem to have been almost as many collaborationisms as there were proponents or practitioners of collaboration.” Still, Hoffmann made a stab at classification, beginning with a division of collaborators into “voluntary” and “involuntary.” Many people in the latter group had no choice. Forced into a “reluctant recognition of necessity,” they could not avoid dealing with the Nazi occupiers who were running their country.

Hoffmann further sorted the more enthusiastic “voluntary” collaborators into two additional categories. In the first were those who worked with the enemy in the name of “national interest,” rationalizing collaboration as something necessary for the preservation of the French economy, or French culture-- though of course many people who made these arguments had other professional or economic motives, too. In the second were the truly active ideological collaborators: people who believed that prewar republican France had been weak or corrupt and hoped that the Nazis would strengthen it, people who admired fascism, and people who admired Hitler.

Hoffmann observed that many of those who became ideological collaborators were landowners and aristocrats, “the cream of the top of the civil service, of the armed forces, of the business community,” people who perceived themselves as part of a natural ruling class that had been unfairly deprived of power under the left-wing governments of France in the 1930s. Equally motivated to collaborate were their polar opposites, the “social misfits and political deviants” who would, in the normal course of events, never have made successful careers of any kind. What brought these groups together was a common conclusion that, whatever they had thought about Germany before June 1940, their political and personal futures would now be improved by aligning themselves with the occupiers.

...Here is another pair of stories, one that will be more familiar to American readers. Let’s begin this one in the 1980s, when a young Lindsey Graham first served with the Judge Advocate General’s Corps-- the military legal service-- in the U.S. Air Force. During some of that time, Graham was based in what was then West Germany, on the cutting edge of America’s Cold War efforts. Graham, born and raised in a small town in South Carolina, was devoted to the military: After both of his parents died when he was in his 20s, he got himself and his younger sister through college with the help of an ROTC stipend and then an Air Force salary. He stayed in the Reserves for two decades, even while in the Senate, sometimes journeying to Iraq or Afghanistan to serve as a short-term reserve officer. “The Air Force has been one of the best things that has ever happened to me,” he said in 2015. “It gave me a purpose bigger than myself. It put me in the company of patriots.” Through most of his years in the Senate, Graham, alongside his close friend John McCain, was a spokesperson for a strong military, and for a vision of America as a democratic leader abroad. He also supported a vigorous notion of democracy at home. In his 2014 reelection campaign, he ran as a maverick and a centrist, telling The Atlantic that jousting with the Tea Party was “more fun than any time I’ve been in politics.”

While Graham was doing his tour in West Germany, Mitt Romney became a co-founder and then the president of Bain Capital, a private-equity investment firm. Born in Michigan, Romney worked in Massachusetts during his years at Bain, but he also kept, thanks to his Mormon faith, close ties to Utah. While Graham was a military lawyer, drawing military pay, Romney was acquiring companies, restructuring them, and then selling them. This was a job he excelled at-- in 1990, he was asked to run the parent firm, Bain & Company-- and in the course of doing so he became very rich. Still, Romney dreamed of a political career, and in 1994 he ran for the Senate in Massachusetts, after changing his political affiliation from independent to Republican. He lost, but in 2002 he ran for governor of Massachusetts as a nonpartisan moderate, and won. In 2007-- after a gubernatorial term during which he successfully brought in a form of near-universal health care that became a model for Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act-- he staged his first run for president. After losing the 2008 Republican primary, he won the party’s nomination in 2012, and then lost the general election.

Both Graham and Romney had presidential ambitions; Graham staged his own short-lived presidential campaign in 2015 (justified on the grounds that “the world is falling apart”). Both men were loyal members of the Republican Party, skeptical of the party’s radical and conspiratorial fringe. Both men reacted to the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump with real anger, and no wonder: In different ways, Trump’s values undermined their own. Graham had dedicated his career to an idea of U.S. leadership around the world-- whereas Trump was offering an “America First” doctrine that would turn out to mean “me and my friends first.” Romney was an excellent businessman with a strong record as a public servant-- whereas Trump inherited wealth, went bankrupt more than once, created nothing of value, and had no governing record at all. Both Graham and Romney were devoted to America’s democratic traditions and to the ideals of honesty, accountability, and transparency in public life-- all of which Trump scorned.





Both were vocal in their disapproval of Trump. Before the election, Graham called him a “jackass,” a “nutjob,” and a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” He seemed unhappy, even depressed, by the election: I happened to see him at a conference in Europe in the spring of 2016, and he spoke in monosyllables, if at all.

Romney went further. “Let me put it very plainly,” he said in March 2016, in a speech criticizing Trump: “If we Republicans choose Donald Trump as our nominee, the prospects for a safe and prosperous future are greatly diminished.” Romney spoke of “the bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third-grade theatrics.” He called Trump a “con man” and a “fraud.” Even after Trump won the nomination, Romney refused to endorse him. On his presidential ballot, Romney said, he wrote in his wife. Graham said he voted for the independent candidate Evan McMullin.

But Trump did become president, and so the two men’s convictions were put to the test.

A glance at their biographies would not have led many to predict what happened next. On paper, Graham would have seemed, in 2016, like the man with deeper ties to the military, to the rule of law, and to an old-fashioned idea of American patriotism and American responsibility in the world. Romney, by contrast, with his shifts between the center and the right, with his multiple careers in business and politics, would have seemed less deeply attached to those same old-fashioned patriotic ideals. Most of us register soldiers as loyal patriots, and management consultants as self-interested. We assume people from small towns in South Carolina are more likely to resist political pressure than people who have lived in many places. Intuitively, we think that loyalty to a particular place implies loyalty to a set of values.

But in this case the clichés were wrong. It was Graham who made excuses for Trump’s abuse of power. It was Graham-- a JAG Corps lawyer-- who downplayed the evidence that the president had attempted to manipulate foreign courts and blackmail a foreign leader into launching a phony investigation into a political rival. It was Graham who abandoned his own stated support for bipartisanship and instead pushed for a hyperpartisan Senate Judiciary Committee investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden’s son. It was Graham who played golf with Trump, who made excuses for him on television, who supported the president even as he slowly destroyed the American alliances-- with Europeans, with the Kurds-- that Graham had defended all his life. By contrast, it was Romney who, in February, became the only Republican senator to break ranks with his colleagues, voting to impeach the president. “Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office,” he said, is “perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine.”

One man proved willing to betray ideas and ideals that he had once stood for. The other refused. Why?

To the American reader, references to Vichy France, East Germany, fascists, and Communists may seem over-the-top, even ludicrous. But dig a little deeper, and the analogy makes sense. The point is not to compare Trump to Hitler or Stalin; the point is to compare the experiences of high-ranking members of the American Republican Party, especially those who work most closely with the White House, to the experiences of Frenchmen in 1940, or of East Germans in 1945, or of Czesław Miłosz in 1947. These are experiences of people who are forced to accept an alien ideology or a set of values that are in sharp conflict with their own.

Not even Trump’s supporters can contest this analogy, because the imposition of an alien ideology is precisely what he was calling for all along. Trump’s first statement as president, his inaugural address, was an unprecedented assault on American democracy and American values. Remember: He described America’s capital city, America’s government, America’s congressmen and senators-- all democratically elected and chosen by Americans, according to America’s 227-year-old Constitution-- as an “establishment” that had profited at the expense of “the people.” “Their victories have not been your victories,” he said. “Their triumphs have not been your triumphs.” Trump was stating, as clearly as he possibly could, that a new set of values was now replacing the old, though of course the nature of those new values was not yet clear.

Almost as soon as he stopped speaking, Trump launched his first assault on fact-based reality, a long-undervalued component of the American political system. We are not a theocracy or a monarchy that accepts the word of the leader or the priesthood as law. We are a democracy that debates facts, seeks to understand problems, and then legislates solutions, all in accordance with a set of rules. Trump’s insistence-- against the evidence of photographs, television footage, and the lived experience of thousands of people-- that the attendance at his inauguration was higher than at Barack Obama’s first inauguration represented a sharp break with that American political tradition. Like the authoritarian leaders of other times and places, Trump effectively ordered not just his supporters but also apolitical members of the government bureaucracy to adhere to a blatantly false, manipulated reality. American politicians, like politicians everywhere, have always covered up mistakes, held back information, and made promises they could not keep. But until Trump was president, none of them induced the National Park Service to produce doctored photographs or compelled the White House press secretary to lie about the size of a crowd-- or encouraged him to do so in front of a press corps that knew he knew he was lying.

It takes time to persuade people to abandon their existing value systems. The process usually begins slowly, with small changes.

The lie was petty, even ridiculous; that was partly why it was so dangerous. In the 1950s, when an insect known as the Colorado potato beetle appeared in Eastern European potato fields, Soviet-backed governments in the region triumphantly claimed that it had been dropped from the sky by American pilots, as a deliberate form of biological sabotage. Posters featuring vicious red-white-and-blue beetles went up all across Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia. No one really believed the charge, including the people making it, as archives have subsequently shown. But that didn’t matter. The point of the posters was not to convince people of a falsehood. The point was to demonstrate the party’s power to proclaim and promulgate a falsehood. Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie-- it’s to make people fear the liar.

These kinds of lies also have a way of building on one another. It takes time to persuade people to abandon their existing value systems. The process usually begins slowly, with small changes. Social scientists who have studied the erosion of values and the growth of corruption inside companies have found, for example, that “people are more likely to accept the unethical behavior of others if the behavior develops gradually (along a slippery slope) rather than occurring abruptly,” according to a 2009 article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. This happens, in part, because most people have a built-in vision of themselves as moral and honest, and that self-image is resistant to change. Once certain behaviors become “normal,” then people stop seeing them as wrong.

...The built-in vision of themselves as American patriots, or as competent administrators, or as loyal party members, also created a cognitive distortion that blinded many Republicans and Trump-administration officials to the precise nature of the president’s alternative value system. After all, the early incidents were so trivial. They overlooked the lie about the inauguration because it was silly. They ignored Trump’s appointment of the wealthiest Cabinet in history, and his decision to stuff his administration with former lobbyists, because that’s business as usual. They made excuses for Ivanka Trump’s use of a private email account, and for Jared Kushner’s conflicts of interest, because that’s just family stuff.

One step at a time, Trumpism fooled many of its most enthusiastic adherents. Recall that some of the original intellectual supporters of Trump-- people like Steve Bannon, Michael Anton, and the advocates of “national conservatism,” an ideology invented, post hoc, to rationalize the president’s behavior-- advertised their movement as a recognizable form of populism: an anti–Wall Street, anti-foreign-wars, anti-immigration alternative to the small-government libertarianism of the establishment Republican Party. Their “Drain the swamp” slogan implied that Trump would clean up the rotten world of lobbyists and campaign finance that distorts American politics, that he would make public debate more honest and legislation more fair. Had this actually been Trump’s ruling philosophy, it might well have posed difficulties for the Republican Party leadership in 2016, given that most of them had quite different values. But it would not necessarily have damaged the Constitution, and it would not necessarily have posed fundamental moral challenges to people in public life.

In practice, Trump has governed according to a set of principles very different from those articulated by his original intellectual supporters. Although some of his speeches have continued to use that populist language, he has built a Cabinet and an administration that serve neither the public nor his voters but rather his own psychological needs and the interests of his own friends on Wall Street and in business and, of course, his own family. His tax cuts disproportionately benefited the wealthy, not the working class. His shallow economic boom, engineered to ensure his reelection, was made possible by a vast budget deficit, on a scale Republicans once claimed to abhor, an enormous burden for future generations. He worked to dismantle the existing health-care system without offering anything better, as he’d promised to do, so that the number of uninsured people rose. All the while he fanned and encouraged xenophobia and racism, both because he found them politically useful and because they are part of his personal worldview.

More important, he has governed in defiance-- and in ignorance-- of the American Constitution, notably declaring, well into his third year in office, that he had “total” authority over the states. His administration is not merely corrupt, it is also hostile to checks, balances, and the rule of law. He has built a proto-authoritarian personality cult, firing or sidelining officials who have contradicted him with facts and evidence-- with tragic consequences for public health and the economy. He threatened to fire a top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official, Nancy Messonnier, in late February, after her too-blunt warnings about the coronavirus; Rick Bright, a top Health and Human Services official, says he was demoted after refusing to direct money to promote the unproven drug hydroxychloroquine. Trump has attacked America’s military, calling his generals “a bunch of dopes and babies,” and America’s intelligence services and law-enforcement officers, whom he has denigrated as the “deep state” and whose advice he has ignored. He has appointed weak and inexperienced “acting” officials to run America’s most important security institutions. He has systematically wrecked America’s alliances.

His foreign policy has never served any U.S. interests of any kind. Although some of Trump’s Cabinet ministers and media followers have tried to portray him as an anti-Chinese nationalist-- and although foreign-policy commentators from all points on the political spectrum have, amazingly, accepted this fiction without questioning it-- Trump’s true instinct, always, has been to side with foreign dictators, including Chinese President Xi Jinping. One former administration official who has seen Trump interact with Xi as well as with Russian President Vladimir Putin told me that it was like watching a lesser celebrity encounter a more famous one. Trump did not speak to them as the representative of the American people; he simply wanted their aura-- of absolute power, of cruelty, of fame-- to rub off on him and enhance his own image. This, too, has had fatal consequences. In January, Trump took Xi’s word when he said that COVID‑19 was “under control,” just as he had believed North Korea’s Kim Jong Un when he signed a deal on nuclear weapons. Trump’s fawning attitude toward dictators is his ideology at its purest: He meets his own psychological needs first; he thinks about the country last. The true nature of the ideology that Trump brought to Washington was not “America First,” but rather “Trump First.”

...In the spring of 2019, a Trump-supporting friend put me in touch with an administration official I will call “Mark,” whom I eventually met for a drink. I won’t give details, because we spoke informally, but in any case Mark did not leak information or criticize the White House. On the contrary, he described himself as a patriot and a true believer. He supported the language of “America First,” and was confident that it could be made real.

Several months later, I met Mark a second time. The impeachment hearings had begun, and the story of the firing of the American ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, was then in the news. The true nature of the administration’s ideology-- Trump First, not America First-- was becoming more obvious. The president’s abuse of military aid to Ukraine and his attacks on civil servants suggested not a patriotic White House, but a president focused on his own interests. Mark did not apologize for the president, though. Instead, he changed the subject: It was all worth it, he told me, because of the Uighurs.

I thought I had misheard. The Uighurs? Why the Uighurs? I was unaware of anything that the administration had done to aid the oppressed Muslim minority in Xinjiang, China. Mark assured me that letters had been written, statements had been made, the president himself had been persuaded to say something at the United Nations. I doubted very much that the Uighurs had benefited from these empty words: China hadn’t altered its behavior, and the concentration camps built for the Uighurs were still standing. Nevertheless, Mark’s conscience was clear. Yes, Trump was destroying America’s reputation in the world, and yes, Trump was ruining America’s alliances, but Mark was so important to the cause of the Uighurs that people like him could, in good conscience, keep working for the administration.

Mark made me think of the story of Wanda Telakowska, a Polish cultural activist who in 1945 felt much the same as he did. Telakowska had collected and promoted folk art before the war; after the war she made the momentous decision to join the Polish Ministry of Culture. The Communist leadership was arresting and murdering its opponents; the nature of the regime was becoming clear. Telakowska nevertheless thought she could use her position inside the Communist establishment to help Polish artists and designers, to promote their work and get Polish companies to mass-produce their designs. But Polish factories, newly nationalized, were not interested in the designs she commissioned. Communist politicians, skeptical of her loyalty, made Telakowska write articles filled with Marxist gibberish. Eventually she resigned, having achieved nothing she set out to do. A later generation of artists condemned her as a Stalinist and forgot about her.

We can protect the country from the president. That, of course, was the argument used by “Anonymous,” the author of an unsigned New York Times op-ed published in September 2018. For those who have forgotten-- a lot has happened since then-- that article described the president’s “erratic behavior,” his inability to concentrate, his ignorance, and above all his lack of “affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people.” The “root of the problem,” Anonymous concluded, was “the president’s amorality.” In essence, the article described the true nature of the alternative value system brought into the White House by Trump, at a moment when not everybody in Washington understood it. But even as they came to understand that the Trump presidency was guided by the president’s narcissism, Anonymous did not quit, protest, make noise, or campaign against the president and his party.

Instead, Anonymous concluded that remaining inside the system, where they could cleverly distract and restrain the president, was the right course for public servants like them. Anonymous was not alone. Gary Cohn, at the time the White House economic adviser, told Bob Woodward that he’d removed papers from the president’s desk to prevent him from pulling out of a trade agreement with South Korea. James Mattis, Trump’s original secretary of defense, stayed in office because he thought he could educate the president about the value of America’s alliances, or at least protect some of them from destruction.

...In authoritarian regimes, many insiders eventually conclude that their presence simply does not matter. Cohn, after publicly agonizing when the president said there had been “fine people on both sides” at the deadly white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, finally quit when the president made the ruinous decision to put tariffs on steel and aluminum, a decision that harmed American businesses. Mattis reached his breaking point when the president abandoned the Kurds, America’s longtime allies in the war against the Islamic State.

But although both resigned, neither Cohn nor Mattis has spoken out in any notable way. Their presence inside the White House helped build Trump’s credibility among traditional Republican voters; their silence now continues to serve the president’s purposes. As for Anonymous, we don’t know whether he or she remains inside the administration.

...Many people in and around the Trump administration are seeking personal benefits. Many of them are doing so with a degree of openness that is startling and unusual in contemporary American politics, at least at this level. As an ideology, “Trump First” suits these people, because it gives them license to put themselves first. To pick a random example: Sonny Perdue, the secretary of agriculture, is a former Georgia governor and a businessman who, like Trump, famously refused to put his agricultural companies into a blind trust when he entered the governor’s office. Perdue has never even pretended to separate his political and personal interests. Since joining the Cabinet he has, with almost no oversight, distributed billions of dollars of “compensation” to farms damaged by Trump’s trade policies. He has stuffed his department with former lobbyists who are now in charge of regulating their own industries: Deputy Secretary Stephen Censky was for 21 years the CEO of the American Soybean Association; Brooke Appleton was a lobbyist for the National Corn Growers Association before becoming Censky’s chief of staff, and has since returned to that group; Kailee Tkacz, a member of a nutritional advisory panel, is a former lobbyist for the Snack Food Association. The list goes on and on, as would lists of similarly compromised people in the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and elsewhere.

Perdue’s department also employs an extraordinary range of people with no experience in agriculture whatsoever. These modern apparatchiks, hired for their loyalty rather than their competence, include a long-haul truck driver, a country-club cabana attendant, the owner of a scented-candle company, and an intern at the Republican National Committee. The long-haul truck driver was paid $80,000 a year to expand markets for American agriculture abroad. Why was he qualified? He had a background in “hauling and shipping agricultural commodities.”

A friend told me that each time he sees Lindsey Graham, “he brags about having just met with Trump” while exhibiting “high school” levels of excitement, as if “a popular quarterback has just bestowed some attention on a nerdy debate-club leader.”

I must remain close to power. Another sort of benefit, harder to measure, has kept many people who object to Trump’s policies or behavior from speaking out: the intoxicating experience of power, and the belief that proximity to a powerful person bestows higher status. This, too, is nothing new. In a 1968 article for The Atlantic, James Thomson, an American East Asia specialist, brilliantly explained how power functioned inside the U.S. bureaucracy in the Vietnam era. When the war in Vietnam was going badly, many people did not resign or speak out in public, because preserving their “effectiveness”-- “a mysterious combination of training, style, and connections,” as Thomson defined it-- was an all-consuming concern. He called this “the effectiveness trap”:

The inclination to remain silent or to acquiesce in the presence of the great men-- to live to fight another day, to give on this issue so that you can be “effective” on later issues-- is overwhelming. Nor is it the tendency of youth alone; some of our most senior officials, men of wealth and fame, whose place in history is secure, have remained silent lest their connection with power be terminated.

In any organization, private or public, the boss will of course sometimes make decisions that his underlings dislike. But when basic principles are constantly violated, and people constantly defer resignation-- “I can always fall on my sword next time”-- then misguided policies go fatally unchallenged.

In other countries, the effectiveness trap has other names. In his recent book on Putinism, Between Two Fires, Joshua Yaffa describes the Russian version of this syndrome. The Russian language, he notes, has a word-- prisposoblenets-- that means “a person skilled in the act of compromise and adaptation, who intuitively understands what is expected of him and adjusts his beliefs and conduct accordingly.” In Putin’s Russia, anyone who wants to stay in the game-- to remain close to power, to retain influence, to inspire respect-- knows the necessity of making constant small changes to one’s language and behavior, of being careful about what one says and to whom one says it, of understanding what criticism is acceptable and what constitutes a violation of the unwritten rules. Those who violate these rules will not, for the most part, suffer prison-- Putin’s Russia is not Stalin’s Russia-- but they will experience a painful ejection from the inner circle.

For those who have never experienced it, the mystical pull of that connection to power, that feeling of being an insider, is difficult to explain. Nevertheless, it is real, and strong enough to affect even the highest-ranking, best-known, most influential people in America. John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, named his still-unpublished book The Room Where It Happened, because, of course, that’s where he has always wanted to be. A friend who regularly runs into Lindsey Graham in Washington told me that each time they meet, “he brags about having just met with Trump” while exhibiting “high school” levels of excitement, as if “a popular quarterback has just bestowed some attention on a nerdy debate-club leader-- the powerful big kid likes me! ” That kind of intense pleasure is hard to relinquish and even harder to live without.

LOL nothing matters. Cynicism, nihilism, relativism, amorality, irony, sarcasm, boredom, amusement-- these are all reasons to collaborate, and always have been. Marko Martin, a novelist and travel writer who grew up in East Germany, told me that in the 1980s some of the East German bohemia, influenced by then-fashionable French intellectuals, argued that there was no such thing as morality or immorality, no such thing as good or evil, no such thing as right or wrong-- “so you might as well collaborate.”

This instinct has an American variation. Politicians here who have spent their lives following rules and watching their words, calibrating their language, giving pious speeches about morality and governance, may feel a sneaking admiration for someone like Trump, who breaks all the rules and gets away with it. He lies; he cheats; he extorts; he refuses to show compassion, sympathy, or empathy; he does not pretend to believe in anything or to abide by any moral code. He simulates patriotism, with flags and gestures, but he does not behave like a patriot; his campaign scrambled to get help from Russia in 2016 (“If it’s what you say, I love it,” replied Donald Trump Jr., when offered Russian “dirt” on Hillary Clinton), and Trump himself called on Russia to hack his opponent. And for some of those at the top of his administration, and of his party, these character traits might have a deep, unacknowledged appeal: If there is no such thing as moral and immoral, then everyone is implicitly released from the need to obey any rules. If the president doesn’t respect the Constitution, then why should I? If the president can cheat in elections, then why can’t I? If the president can sleep with porn stars, then why shouldn’t I?

This, of course, was the insight of the “alt-right,” which understood the dark allure of amorality, open racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny long before many others in the Republican Party. Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian philosopher and literary critic, recognized the lure of the forbidden a century ago, writing about the deep appeal of the carnival, a space where everything banned is suddenly allowed, where eccentricity is permitted, where profanity defeats piety. The Trump administration is like that: Nothing means anything, rules don’t matter, and the president is the carnival king.

My side might be flawed, but the political opposition is much worse. When Marshal Philippe Pétain, the leader of collaborationist France, took over the Vichy government, he did so in the name of the restoration of a France that he believed had been lost. Pétain had been a fierce critic of the French Republic, and once he was in control, he replaced its famous creed-- Liberté, égalité, fraternité, or “Liberty, equality, fraternity”-- with a different slogan: Travail, famille, patrie, or “Work, family, fatherland.” Instead of the “false idea of the natural equality of man,” he proposed bringing back “social hierarchy”-- order, tradition, and religion. Instead of accepting modernity, Pétain sought to turn back the clock.

By Pétain’s reckoning, collaboration with the Germans was not merely an embarrassing necessity. It was crucial, because it gave patriots the ability to fight the real enemy: the French parliamentarians, socialists, anarchists, Jews, and other assorted leftists and democrats who, he believed, were undermining the nation, robbing it of its vitality, destroying its essence. “Rather Hitler than Blum,” the saying went-- Blum having been France’s socialist (and Jewish) prime minister in the late 1930s. One Vichy minister, Pierre Laval, famously declared that he hoped Germany would conquer all of Europe. Otherwise, he asserted, “Bolshevism would tomorrow establish itself everywhere.”

To Americans, this kind of justification should sound very familiar; we have been hearing versions of it since 2016. The existential nature of the threat from “the left” has been spelled out many times. “Our liberal-left present reality and future direction is incompatible with human nature,” wrote Michael Anton, in “The Flight 93 Election.” The Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham has warned that “massive demographic changes” threaten us too: “In some parts of the country it does seem like the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore.” This is the Vichy logic: The nation is dead or dying-- so anything you can do to restore it is justified. Whatever criticisms might be made of Trump, whatever harm he has done to democracy and the rule of law, whatever corrupt deals he might make while in the White House-- all of these shrink in comparison to the horrific alternative: the liberalism, socialism, moral decadence, demographic change, and cultural degradation that would have been the inevitable result of Hillary Clinton’s presidency.

The Republican senators who are willing to express their disgust with Trump off the record but voted in February for him to remain in office all indulge a variation of this sentiment. (Trump enables them to get the judges they want, and those judges will help create the America they want.) So do the evangelical pastors who ought to be disgusted by Trump’s personal behavior but argue, instead, that the current situation has scriptural precedents. Like King David in the Bible, the president is a sinner, a flawed vessel, but he nevertheless offers a path to salvation for a fallen nation.

The three most important members of Trump’s Cabinet-- Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Attorney General William Barr-- are all profoundly shaped by Vichyite apocalyptic thinking. All three are clever enough to understand what Trumpism really means, that it has nothing to do with God or faith, that it is self-serving, greedy, and unpatriotic. Nevertheless, a former member of the administration (one of the few who did decide to resign) told me that both Pence and Pompeo “have convinced themselves that they are in a biblical moment.” All of the things they care about-- outlawing abortion and same-sex marriage, and (though this is never said out loud) maintaining a white majority in America-- are under threat. Time is growing short. They believe that “we are approaching the Rapture, and this is a moment of deep religious significance.” Barr, in a speech at Notre Dame, has also described his belief that “militant secularists” are destroying America, that “irreligion and secular values are being forced on people of faith.” Whatever evil Trump does, whatever he damages or destroys, at least he enables Barr, Pence, and Pompeo to save America from a far worse fate. If you are convinced we are living in the End Times, then anything the president does can be forgiven.

I am afraid to speak out. Fear, of course, is the most important reason any inhabitant of an authoritarian or totalitarian society does not protest or resign, even when the leader commits crimes, violates his official ideology, or forces people to do things that they know to be wrong. In extreme dictatorships like Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia, people fear for their lives. In softer dictatorships, like East Germany after 1950 and Putin’s Russia today, people fear losing their jobs or their apartments. Fear works as a motivation even when violence is a memory rather than a reality. When I was a student in Leningrad in the 1980s, some people still stepped back in horror when I asked for directions on the street, in my accented Russian: No one was going to be arrested for speaking to a foreigner in 1984, but 30 years earlier they might have been, and the cultural memory remained.

Republican leaders don’t seem to know that similar waves of fear have helped transform other democracies into dictatorships.

In the United States of America, it is hard to imagine how fear could be a motivation for anybody. There are no mass murders of the regime’s political enemies, and there never have been. Political opposition is legal; free press and free speech are guaranteed in the Constitution. And yet even in one of the world’s oldest and most stable democracies, fear is a motive. The same former administration official who observed the importance of apocalyptic Christianity in Trump’s Washington also told me, with grim disgust, that “they are all scared.”

They are scared not of prison, the official said, but of being attacked by Trump on Twitter. They are scared he will make up a nickname for them. They are scared that they will be mocked, or embarrassed, like Mitt Romney has been. They are scared of losing their social circles, of being disinvited to parties. They are scared that their friends and supporters, and especially their donors, will desert them. John Bolton has his own super PAC and a lot of plans for how he wants to use it; no wonder he resisted testifying against Trump. Former Speaker Paul Ryan is among the dozens of House Republicans who have left Congress since the beginning of this administration, in one of the most striking personnel turnovers in congressional history. They left because they hated what Trump was doing to their party-- and the country. Yet even after they left, they did not speak out.

They are scared, and yet they don’t seem to know that this fear has precedents, or that it could have consequences. They don’t know that similar waves of fear have helped transform other democracies into dictatorships. They don’t seem to realize that the American Senate really could become the Russian Duma, or the Hungarian Parliament, a group of exalted men and women who sit in an elegant building, with no influence and no power. Indeed, we are already much closer to that reality than many could ever have imagined.

In February, many members of the Republican Party leadership, Republican senators, and people inside the administration used various versions of these rationales to justify their opposition to impeachment. All of them had seen the evidence that Trump had stepped over the line in his dealings with the president of Ukraine. All of them knew that he had tried to use American foreign-policy tools, including military funding, to force a foreign leader into investigating a domestic political opponent. Yet Republican senators, led by Mitch McConnell, never took the charges seriously. They mocked the Democratic House leaders who had presented the charges. They decided against hearing evidence. With the single exception of Romney, they voted in favor of ending the investigation. They did not use the opportunity to rid the country of a president whose operative value system-- built around corruption, nascent authoritarianism, self-regard, and his family’s business interests-- runs counter to everything that most of them claim to believe in.

Just a month later, in March, the consequences of that decision became suddenly clear. After the U.S. and the world were plunged into crisis by a coronavirus that had no cure, the damage done by the president’s self-focused, self-dealing narcissism-- his one true “ideology”-- was finally visible. He led a federal response to the virus that was historically chaotic. The disappearance of the federal government was not a carefully planned transfer of power to the states, as some tried to claim, or a thoughtful decision to use the talents of private companies. This was the inevitable result of a three-year assault on professionalism, loyalty, competence, and patriotism. Tens of thousands of people have died, and the economy has been ruined.

This utter disaster was avoidable. If the Senate had removed the president by impeachment a month earlier; if the Cabinet had invoked the Twenty-Fifth Amendment as soon as Trump’s unfitness became clear; if the anonymous and off-the-record officials who knew of Trump’s incompetence had jointly warned the public; if they had not, instead, been so concerned about maintaining their proximity to power; if senators had not been scared of their donors; if Pence, Pompeo, and Barr had not believed that God had chosen them to play special roles in this “biblical moment”-- if any of these things had gone differently, then thousands of deaths and a historic economic collapse might have been avoided.

The price of collaboration in America has already turned out to be extraordinarily high. And yet, the movement down the slippery slope continues, just as it did in so many occupied countries in the past. First Trump’s enablers accepted lies about the inauguration; now they accept terrible tragedy and the loss of American leadership in the world. Worse could follow. Come November, will they tolerate-- even abet-- an assault on the electoral system: open efforts to prevent postal voting, to shut polling stations, to scare people away from voting? Will they countenance violence, as the president’s social-media fans incite demonstrators to launch physical attacks on state and city officials?

Each violation of our Constitution and our civic peace gets absorbed, rationalized, and accepted by people who once upon a time knew better. If, following what is almost certain to be one of the ugliest elections in American history, Trump wins a second term, these people may well accept even worse. Unless, of course, they decide not to.

...What would it take for Republican leaders to admit to themselves that Trump’s loyalty cult is destroying the country they claim to love?

...Could some similar combination of the petty and the political ever convince Lindsey Graham that he has helped lead his country down a blind alley? Perhaps a personal experience could move him, a prod from someone who represents his former value system-- an old Air Force buddy, say, whose life has been damaged by Trump’s reckless behavior, or a friend from his hometown. Perhaps it requires a mass political event: When the voters begin to turn, maybe Graham will turn with them, arguing, as Jaeger did, that “their will was so great … there was no other alternative.” At some point, after all, the calculus of conformism will begin to shift. It will become awkward and uncomfortable to continue supporting “Trump First,” especially as Americans suffer from the worst recession in living memory and die from the coronavirus in numbers higher than in much of the rest of the world.

Also in The Atlantic a few days ago, Ron Brownstein looked into why Republicans still can't quit Trump, even with Señor Trumpanzee sagging in the polls against Biden. Republicans are now more focussed on what a post-Trump GOP might look like. Brownstein pointed out that even if Trump loses in a landslide and costs the GOP the Senate, "which more Republicans are now bracing for... there’s no guarantee" that the GOP will change course. Sure, Republicans who have been most skeptical about his message and agenda will be emboldened "to more loudly press their case. Yet many remain dubious that whatever happens in November, those critics can assemble a majority inside the party by 2024-- one that’s eager to reconsider the racial nationalism and anti-elite populism that has electrified big segments of the Republican base but alienated young people, minorities, and a growing number of previously Republican-leaning suburbanites. That means a Republican Party committed to Trump’s strategy of maximizing support among the white voters most uneasy with America’s demographic and social changes may endure for years, even as the nation’s racial and religious diversity inexorably grows."

The paradox facing Republicans who fear that Trump may be leading the GOP into an electoral dead end is that the changes to the party’s coalition that he’s precipitated tend to be self-reinforcing. If the voters most resistant to Trump’s tone and messaging leave the party, those who remain necessarily tilt even more toward him. Win or lose, the general election is likely to accelerate this dynamic. Even if Trump manages to squeeze out an Electoral College victory, polls show that he is likely to lose more ground in and around the country’s major cities and rely even more on non-college-educated and evangelical white voters centered in exurban and rural America. That would make those Trump-friendly groups an even larger share of the GOP primary electorate in the 2022 midterm elections and the 2024 presidential contest. And that would make the climb that much tougher for future GOP candidates who want to steer the party toward more inclusive messaging.

Stanley B. Greenberg, the veteran Democratic pollster and author of the 2019 book R.I.P. GOP, says the re-sorting process is well under way. In his polling since 2016, the share of the GOP coalition that comprises Trump’s base-- evangelical Christians, conservative Catholics, and those who identify with the Tea Party movement-- has grown from 60 percent of the total to 67 percent. As Trump has “pushed … out of the party” college-educated suburban voters, he “has left a party that is totally dominated by Tea Party [conservatives] and evangelicals,” Greenberg argues. “That bloc is just not going away.”

...[B]oth the House and Senate GOP caucuses now tilt heavily toward districts and states with fewer racial minorities, college graduates, and urban centers. House Republicans hold only one-fourth of the seats with more college graduates than average, fewer than one-fifth of the seats with more minorities, and only about one-ninth of those with more immigrants than average. In the 20 states that voted for the Democrat in the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections, Republicans hold just two of the 40 Senate seats-- and both of those incumbents, Susan Collins of Maine and Cory Gardner of Colorado, are highly endangered in November.

This reconfiguration has produced a GOP coalition that’s united around key pillars of Trumpism. In a national poll last year, the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute found big majorities inside the GOP for building Trump’s border wall, imposing his Muslim travel ban, and limiting legal immigration. Large majorities also endorsed the beliefs that discrimination against white people is now as big a problem as discrimination against minorities, and that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.” In separate polling from Pew last year, nearly four-fifths of Republicans said that people alleging racial discrimination where it doesn’t exist was a bigger problem than people not seeing it where it does. Annual surveys by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that the share of Republicans who describe large-scale immigration as a “critical” national-security threat rose from three-fifths in 2004 to almost four-fifths last year.