A Sinking Ship-- Trump's-- Drags Down All Boats With It

 

Kansas is a very red state. In fact, the candidate Schumer recruited to run as a putative Democrat, Barbara Bollier is, in fact, a Republican. She served as a Republican in the state House from 2011 to 2017 and has been in the state Senate since 2016. At the very end of 2018, she switched parties, no doubt with Schumer promising her the U.S. Senate nomination. He forced former United States Attorney for Kansas Barry Grissom to drop out of the race and endorse her as soon as Bollier declared a few months later. A new GOP internal poll shows her beating Trump-aligned Republican Congressman Roger Marshall 45-42%.

The last time Kansas elected a Democrat to the Senate was an exceptional circumstance. Before he triggered the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover picked Kansas Senator Charlie Curtis to be his VP. After Hoover and Curtis were inaugurated, the governor, Clyde Reed, appointed ex-Gov. Henry Justin Allen as interim Senator. When Allen ran to complete the rest of Curtis' term 6 months later, the Republican Depression was in full swing and Allen was defeated (as was the GOP gubernatorial candidate). Democrat George McGill was elected and was reelected in 1932, the last time a Kansas Democrat was elected to the U.S. Senate.

Many voters in traditionally super-red areas think Trump is as bad as the Great Depression. He is losing millions of dependable Republican voters across the country-- and dragging Republicans down the toilet with him. In Kansas' case, Trump beat Hillary 671,018 (56.16%) to 427,005 (35.74%). This year, it's likely Biden will do significantly better than Hillary, though not better enough to win the state's 6 electoral votes. Bollier, an actual Republican just pretending to be a Democrat, could very well win the Senate seat. Why, you ask?

Yesterday, writing for the Washington Post, former top Republican political operative, Stuart Stevens wrote that Republicans have lied so much to constituents about Trump as he led the party to ruin that they are seen as his enablers. Many still have their heads up his ass-- although Stevens politely calls what they're doing as genuflecting. "As he turns his own covid-19 diagnosis into a reality TV show, mocking his administration’s own public health guidance, showing the Americans who have suffered that he doesn’t give a whit for their plight," wrote Stevens, "[t]hey know they’re defending the indefensible, and they know if the president were a Democrat, they wouldn’t hesitate to condemn him. With a straight face in Wednesday’s debate, Vice President Pence claimed, 'From the very first day, President Donald Trump has put the health of America first.'" Wednesday Kansas had 1,095 new cases, bringing the state total to 65,010-- 22,315 cases per million Kansans. And there were 17 more deaths reported, bringing the total to 723. Kansans who heard Pence on Wednesday night, knew he was full of shit and knew Trump had made very wrong decision that could me made during the pandemic. But, as Stevens wrote, Republican officials are "so used to this routine that co-signing Trump’s bad behavior is now habit and shooting straight is completely foreign."

Even after the party’s turn away from time-honored Republican principles, I couldn’t have imagined a party that would abandon any pretense of standing for conservative values, decency or common sense. Having spent four years defending their guy at every turn, they’re stuck. In for a penny, in for a pound: Republicans can’t tell the truth about Trump anymore. Even if they wanted to.


Many GOP candidates know they face near-impossible odds this year. Across the nation, every morning there are campaign team calls on which political professionals try to think of ways their bosses might escape impending electoral doom. I’ve been on calls like this more times than I’d care to remember, and I know they will take on an increasingly desperate tone as reality sinks in. In a week or two, it’ll be all gallows humor from here on out as they mask the pain. Even the normal conversations about where campaign staffers might go to unwind after the campaign will be abnormal: Paris? Nope. How about Serbia?

Their 2020 plans were shattered by a combination of incompetence and fate. What was intended to be an election celebrating a booming economy, waged against an opponent who could legitimately be tagged as a socialist, has turned into a defensive battle for Trump and Republicans: Trying to justify dramatic job losses and business failures against the backdrop of more than 210,000 Americans, so far, dying in a badly managed public health crisis. Instead of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), they drew former vice president Joe Biden, a man so unthreatening that even Trump, the master of nicknames, is reduced to calling him “sleepy”-- a snoozer of a put-down if there ever was one. In recent weeks, Biden’s polling lead has widened. Senate Republicans in once-safe seats are fighting to hang on. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-SC), running in a solid-red state, has been reduced to begging for money on Fox News. Five years ago, he accurately tagged Trump as a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” Now he’s Trump’s semiregular golf patsy.

Instead of covid-19 fading as an election issue, the pandemic has struck the president’s inner circle, a cluster of his family members, favorite White House staffers, his campaign manager, members of his debate prep team and the GOP chair.

...Every day Trump makes it worse: After his first debate with Biden, instead of focusing on jobs and the economy, campaigns had to scramble just to prove that their bosses weren’t fond of a group of thugs founded by the author of How to Piss in Public. After springing himself from a brief hospital stay, Trump’s tweets and videos ham-handedly and disrespectfully implied that those who have fallen to covid-19-- those who didn’t have a president’s access to experimental drugs and round-the-clock care-- are weak. He says he’s calling off coronavirus relief talks with congressional Democrats because he can’t get his way. (Art of the deal, right?) His staged White House return from Walter Reed military hospital created a gold mine for mockery, and I confess it was great fun to pan some of that gold.

Like Americans abroad who can’t speak the language, Republicans are saying the same thing they’ve been saying for at least four years, only louder. In his debate last week with challenger Jaime Harrison, Graham had the gall to babble that “the people running the Democratic Party today are nuts” at the same time that he’s trying to win reelection in a party headed by a man who suggested household disinfectant might cure covid-19.





With the exception of Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), no office-holding Republican with a national profile has even tried to establish an identity separate from Trump. With a combination of cowardice and convenience, Republicans went quietly into the night of Trump’s instability, grievances and immorality. Their occasional gestures at restraining the president-- I have very serious concerns. I wish he’d spend less time on Twitter-- are the stuff of late-night comedy. Their words have only served only to highlight their pathos. There could be no better metaphor for their fecklessness than justifying their enabling ways by touting the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. You think a Justice Barrett will save you, Republicans? You couldn’t even get through her Rose Garden ceremony without a coronavirus outbreak.

Republicans should start telling the truth. They should go in front of the cameras and say what the public knows just from living their daily lives: Trump has failed on covid-19. We need a national strategy. Give me a second chance. I was wrong to put my faith in the president. They should take some responsibility. But you can’t really say you’re quitting drinking while ordering another round at the bar.

So why won’t they? Call it the flight, flee or freeze syndrome wired into our DNA. Most politicians call themselves “fighters,” but in truth, almost all of them are starved for approval. These Republicans would cut and run, but where would they go? On the Trump battlefield, there’s no safe zone. So, they freeze, hoping something will magically save them.

The few Republican consultants who still talk to me begin most conversations with: “What a terrible year,” like farmers who’ve been hit by drought. Behind the scenes, that’s the mood. Everyone sees where we’re headed. No one dares challenge their king.

On Wednesday Greg Sargent, also for The Post, wrote that "When you step back and survey the last two years of U.S. politics, one of the biggest story lines that comes into view is this: One after another, a whole string of deeply corrupt schemes that President Trump has hatched to smooth his reelection hopes have crashed and burned. In all these cases, Trump has either blown up the schemes himself or compounded the damage they did to him when they self-destructed. In some cases he did both... When you view these things in one place, the true scale of Trump’s commitment to winning the election through corrupt means becomes a lot more striking. And, since many of them are doing great damage to the country, his sheer destructiveness also comes into much sharper relief."

And now even sports-prognosticators who think they know more about politics than they do-- and who just a few short months ago were arguing among themselves about how the GOP would probably not win enough seats to win back the House majority-- are on the cusp of admitting that the anti-Trump/anti-GOP wave is going to destroy dozens of Republicans' careers. And it's only early October. Yesterday, Cook, Sabato and Silver all seemed to wake up-- somewhat stunned-- to what's happening to the GOP as it crumbles and starts fall apart. By November 4th or 5th they will all have it-- or most of it-- right.