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Another Domino Falls in Georgia

In addition to his malignant narcissism and endless lies, one dominant feature of Donald Trump is that in the final analysis, he has no loyalty to anyone save himself.  Wives, children, supposed friends all give way to his overarching, insatiable ego and now, facing 91 indictments, staying out of prison.  Much to Trump's likely dismay, two domino's fell this past week in the Georgia RICO case based on Trump's insurrectionist efforts in Georgia. Both Sydney "the Kraken" Powell, who was part of White House meetings and a public face of Trump's Big Lie" campaign and Kenneth Chesebro, one of the designers of the fake elector operation copped guilty pleas to avoid conviction for more serious crimes and prison time and agreed to testify against other defendants.  Seemingly, Powell and Chesebro belatedly decided that Trump was not worth prison time and recognized that Trump bore no loyalty to them.  In short, self-preservation won out and both put their personal best interests over continuing to lie for Trump.  One can only wonder if other defendants will follow their example and prove potentially willing to throw Trump under the bus.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at these latest dominos to fall.  Here are excerpts:

Three down, 16 to go.  With the attorney Kenneth Chesebro agreeing to plead guilty to a single felony today, the Fulton County, Georgia, racketeering case against Donald Trump and others for attempting to steal the 2020 election has one more conviction and one fewer defendant.

As part of the deal, Chesebro pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to file false documents. He’ll pay $5,000 in fines, write an apology letter, and face five years of probation. Perhaps most important, he agreed to testify in upcoming trials. Chesebro faced seven counts that portrayed him as central to a scheme to send slates of false electors to Washington, D.C., after the 2020 election and to efforts to disrupt the certification of the election on January 6, 2021, in Congress. He had argued that he was merely offering legal opinions to clients.

The question for anyone watching the proceedings now is whether these pleas portend the sort of falling-dominos scenario that prosecutors hope for in a big racketeering case like this, in which low-level defendants decide to cut their losses and aid prosecutors in convicting the biggest names—in this case, a group including Trump, Rudy Giuliani, the lawyer John Eastman, and the former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark.

Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University who has closely followed the case, cautioned against expectations of a flurry of pleas now. But he told me that the agreements will force other defendants to think carefully about their choices. . . . . “Are [defendants] willing to take the deals of the kind that Powell and Chesebro took, or are they going to fall on their swords for Donald Trump and go down with him?”

This week’s pleas appear to be a win for all parties. Chesebro and Powell both got fairly lenient sentences and, as first offenders, can have their convictions wiped from the record if they comply with the terms of the deals. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, meanwhile, scored two convictions and will now be able to draw on testimony from two people who were deeply enmeshed in the paperwork coup.

The pleas also spare all parties the rigamarole of a trial. . . . Now neither has to deal with the stress—and legal bills—of a trial. Nor do Willis and her team have to go through the exercise and risk revealing their strategy before the other defendants go on trial . . . . “It’s clear to me now that the D.A. sees them as linchpins, and they want them to testify.”

Given that Chesebro has been described as a key architect of the false-elector scheme, he could presumably speak to the actions of the major players, perhaps even Trump’s. But Chesebro’s deposition for the House committee gives few hints of what he might be able to divulge. He said that his main contacts on the campaign included the close Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn, and that he had spoken with Giuliani only once or twice. But in most cases, he invoked both the Fifth Amendment and attorney-client privilege to avoid giving answers, including about whether he had any direct communication with Trump.

That will be different if and when he is called to testify in Fulton County. The judge in the case has already ruled that attorney-client privilege does not apply to some of Chesebro’s communications under an exception that covers the commission of crimes, and having pleaded guilty, Chesebro can’t cite his right against self-incrimination. His role, instead, will be to incriminate others.

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The Roots of Republican Party Dysfunction

The Republican Party of my youth and the first half of my adulthood bears no resemblance to the Party of today. Gone is any semblance of a Party where science, knowledge are respected and where compromise for the common good is scorned.  Instead we have a sectarian party dominated by evangelicals, white supremacists and the obscenely wealthy who manipulate the former two to act against their own best financial interests.  Increasingly, "family values," racial division, homophobia and wild conspiracy theories are used to dupe the gullible and ignorant.  How did this all happen?  Personally, I think there were two causations that stand out - although they were not the sole factors - the first being Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" to court racist southern whites and the second was Ronald Reagan's embrace of evangelicals and the falsely named "Moral Majority."  The GOP has become ever more immoral playing to the two aging white demographics to the exclusion of all else.  Carefully gerrymandered districts have intensified the need and ability to pander to bigotry and a modern day "know nothing" hand selected electorate.  Donald Trump was merely the culmination of the moral rot and dysfunction of these toxic elements of the GOP base.  A column in the New York Times looks at the roots of the Republican dysfunction that currently paralyzes the House of Representatives.  Here are highlights:

The collapse of the House Republican majority into chaos is the clearest possible evidence that the party is off the rails.

Of course, the Republican Party has been off the rails for a while before now. This was true in 2010, when Tea Party extremists swept through the party’s ranks, defeating more moderate Republicans — and pretty much any other Republican with an interest in the actual work of government — and establishing a beachhead for radical obstructionism. It was true in 2012, when many Republican voters went wild for the likes of Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich in the party’s presidential primary, before settling on the more conventionally presidential Mitt Romney. But even then, Romney reached out to Donald Trump — famous, politically speaking, for his “birther” crusade against President Barack Obama — for his blessing, yet another sign that the Republican Party was not on track.

The truth of the Republican Party’s deep dysfunction was obvious in 2013, when congressional Republicans shut down the government in a quixotic drive to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and it was obvious in 2016, when Republican voters nominated Trump for president. Everything that has followed, from the rise of influencer-extremist politicians like Representative Lauren Boebert to the party’s complicity in insurrectionist violence, has been a steady escalation from one transgression to another.

The Republican Party is so broken that, at this point, its congressional wing cannot function. The result is that this period is now the longest the House of Representatives has been in session without a speaker. And as Republican voters gear up to nominate Trump a third time for president, the rest of the party is not far behind. The only question to ask, and answer, is why.

One popular answer is Donald Trump who, in this view, is directly responsible for the downward spiral of dysfunction and deviancy that defines today’s Republican Party. It’s his success as a demagogue and showman that set the stage for the worst of the behavior we’ve seen from elected Republicans.

The problem, as I’ve already noted, is that most of what we identify as Republican dysfunction was already evident in the years before Trump came on the scene as a major figure in conservative politics.

Another popular answer is that we’re seeing the fruits of polarization in American political life. And it is true that, within both parties, there’s been a marked and meaningful move away from the center and toward each side’s respective flank. But while the Democratic Party is, in many respects, more liberal than it has ever been, it’s also not nearly as ideologically uniform as the Republican Party.

Joe Biden, for example, is the paradigmatic moderate Democrat and, currently, the president of the United States and leader of the Democratic Party, with ample support across the party establishment. And in Congress, there’s no liberal equivalent to the House Freedom Caucus: no group of nihilistic, obstruction-minded left-wing lawmakers. . . . If the issue is polarization, then it only seems to be driving one of our two parties toward the abyss.

Helpfully, the extent to which the Democratic Party still operates as a normal American political party can shed light on how and why the Republican Party doesn’t. Take the overall strength of Democratic moderates, who hold the levers of power within the national party. One important reason for this fact is the heterogeneity of the Democratic coalition.

If you take the internal dynamics of the Democratic Party and invert them, you get something like those within the Republican Party.

Consider the demographics of the Republican coalition. The majority of all voters in both parties are white Americans. But where the Democratic Party electorate was 61 percent white in the 2020 presidential election, the Republican one was 86 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. Similarly, there is much less religious diversity among Republicans — more than a third of Republicans voters in 2020 were white evangelical Protestants — than there is among Democrats. . . . . There is, in other words, less geographic diversity among Republicans as well.

Most important, where nearly half of Democrats identify themselves as either “moderate” or “conservative” — compared with the half that call themselves “liberal” — nearly three-quarters of Republicans identify themselves as “conservative,” with just a handful of self-proclaimed moderates and a small smattering of liberals, according to Gallup. This wasn’t always true. . . . Now the Republican Party is almost uniformly conservative. Moderate Democrats can still win national office or hold national leadership. Moderate Republicans cannot. . . . moderate Republican politicians are virtually extinct.

But more than the number of conservatives is the character of the conservatism that dominates the Republican Party. It is, thanks to a set of social and political transformations dating back to the 1960s, a highly ideological and at times reactionary conservatism, with little tolerance for disagreement or dissent.  . . . The Republican Party exists almost entirely for the promotion of a distinct and doctrinaire ideology of hierarchy and anti-government retrenchment. . . . as the historian Geoffrey Kabaservice has observed, “The conversion of one of America’s two major parties into an ideological vehicle” is a “phenomenon without precedent in American history.”

It is the absence of any other aim but the promotion of conservative ideology — by any means necessary, up to and including the destruction of democratic institutions and the imposition of minority rule — that makes this particular permutation of the Republican Party unique. It helps explain, in turn, the dysfunction of the last decade. If the goal is to promote conservative ideology, then what matters, for Republican politicians, is how well they adhere to and promote conservatism. The key issue for conservative voters and conservative media isn’t whether a Republican politician can pass legislation or manage a government or bridge political divides; the key question is whether a Republican politician is sufficiently committed to the ideology,

The demographic homogeneity of the Republican Party means that there isn’t much internal pushback to this ideological crusade. . . . . Worse, because the institutions of American democracy give a significant advantage to the current Republican coalition, there’s also no external force pushing Republican politicians away from their most rigid extremes. Just the opposite

It is not simply that the Republican Party has politicians like Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene. It’s that the Republican Party is practically engineered to produce politicians like Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene. And there’s no brake — no emergency off-switch — that might slow or stop the car.

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Jim Jordan Should Never Be Speaker

Jim Jordan has twice failed to secure the votes to become Speaker of the House of Representatives yet in his typical bull-headed, ego and thirst for power driven way, a third vote will likely betaken today.  Hopefully, there will be even more Republican defections from Jordan so that (i) his humiliation will be worse and (ii) it will be clear that he needs to cease his quest for a position for which he is utterly unfit.  In his 16 years in the House, Jordan has never passed a single bill.  Rather that being a constructive force to get things done to benefit America and average Americans, Jordan has been an obstructionist and destroyer.   Worse yet, Jordan was in the midst of the plot to overthrow the 2020 election and still faces questions of the cover up of sexual abuse during his time employed at Ohio State.  Yet in today's morally degenerated Republican Party/right wing media world Jordan is a star - something that speaks volumes about the party's moral bankruptcy.  As this ego driven drama drags on, America's image in the world suffers as Republicans put on display the reality that they are unable to govern as noted in a piece Politico even as  voters - including some Republicans - seem to be fully awaking to this reality.  A column in the Washington Post looks at Jordan's unfitness (a similar column is here).  Here are excerpts:

In the melodrama that saw Jim Jordan coming all too close to being elected speaker on Tuesday and Wednesday, the country witnessed some of the best of what the U.S. House of Representatives used to be — and the worst of what it is becoming.

It does not say much for the narrow Republican majority’s capacity to govern that it is entertaining the idea — much less that nearly 90 percent of its members voted in favor — of putting in the speaker’s chair a man who prides himself on having one of the thinnest legislative records in Congress.

Even more shocking was that so many were willing to hand power to a conspiracy theorist who worked to overturn an election, who encouraged an insurrection and who, less than three weeks ago, voted to shut down the government. . . . This reckless lurch by the vast majority of House Republicans would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Trumpism has seized the House.

And yet, as Jordan fell short of a majority in votes by the full House this week, it was heartening to see a handful of his GOP colleagues stand up not only against their increasingly destructive colleagues but also the pressure of the right-wing noise machine — including the fury that was unleashed on Jordan’s behalf by Fox News megahost Sean Hannity.

These 20 or so Republicans might pay a price for the fact that they have genes of rationality and responsibility in their mitochondrial DNA. Those in deeply red districts might draw challenges in next year’s Republican primaries. The country owes them a debt.

They had different reasons for their refusal to buckle. For some, particularly those vulnerable members who represent districts that Joe Biden won in 2020, it was a calculation of political survival.

Others — including a handful of institutionalists on the Appropriations Committee — saw in Jordan’s speakership the prospect of regular government shutdowns and budget cuts so deep they would threaten national security at a time when the world is a particularly dangerous.

The selection of a speaker is something that traditionally has been a rote exercise and an insider’s game. But everyone should have seen this debacle coming. In January, it took McCarthy 15 rounds of voting to win the gavel, which was the first time something like that had happened since the Civil War era. He was the first speaker ever to lose his job by a vote of the House.

The backlash against the members who voted to remove McCarthy has been so intense that “I have a hunch you won’t see another motion to vacate in this Congress,” former speaker Newt Gingrich told me last week.

I don’t share Gingrich’s confidence that the Republicans in the House will settle down any time soon. It’s more likely that this experience will only increase the belligerence of small factions within the party.

These hard-right members and their ideological allies didn’t succeed in their efforts to install one of their own as second in line for the presidency, but that doesn’t mean they will give up on their radical goal of undermining the processes of legislation by consensus for which Congress was designed.

Some on both sides of the aisle are trying to cobble together an agreement under which Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.) will have the power to bring at least some legislation to the floor, particularly aid that is urgently needed by Israel. But the fact remains that the Republican majority has ushered the House into an era unlike any it has ever experienced — one in which lurching from crisis to crisis is the only way it operates, when it operates at all.

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Hamas Is to Blame for Every Death in the Israel War

The carnage unfolding in Israel and the Gaza Strip is horrifying and in the final analysis is the result of Islamic religious extremism in the form of Hamas, an organization that has as it raison d'etre the murder of Jews and by extension anyone who opposes it's ISIS-like religious dogma.   While I am not a fan of Israel's denial of unequal rights for Palestinians living in Israel, that injustice in no way justifies the barbaric slaughter unleashed a week ago by Hamas.  Now, with Israel posed to invade  Gaza, Hamas has made it clear that it places no value on the lives of Palestinian civilians within Gaza and under its brutal rule.   The lives of innocents, regardless of their religious faith, simply do not matter to the Hamas extremist/terrorists who seemingly welcome the deaths of Palestinians since it furthers their agenda of death and a hideous form of Islam which seeks to insure peace and co-existence never comes to the Middle East. As the war unfolds some - indeed some American student groups have already done so - will seek to blame Israel of the loss of life, but the reality is that widespread deaths was always party of Hamas' callous and horrific plan.  A piece in the New York Times cautions Americans and others not to fall for Hamas' evil plan to shift blame to Israel even though Hamas set the entire nightmare in motion.  Here are column highlights:

On Friday the Israeli government gave civilians in the northern Gaza Strip 24 hours to evacuate to the southern part of the territory, in anticipation of a major military offensive. Hamas, for its part, “told Gaza residents to stay put, despite Israel’s deadline,” Reuters reported the same day.

Reasonable people can criticize Israel for not allowing enough time for civilians to get out of harm’s way: There are, especially, elderly, disabled and sick Gazans — and those who help them — who may be effectively homebound.

Reasonable people can also oppose other measures that Israelis have taken in response to the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. It seems neither right nor smart for Israel to cut off water and electricity to Gaza until Hamas’s hostages are returned — not because Israel shouldn’t do whatever it takes to obtain their release but because the people who suffer most from the action are the ones who have the least say over the fate of the hostages.

But what reasonable people cannot debate is the cynicism with which Hamas is conducting its side of the war. It’s a cynicism the wider world should not reward with our credulity, lest we once again turn ourselves into Hamas’s useful idiots.

Consider: Hamas launched an attack with a wantonness like what the Nazis showed at Babyn Yar or ISIS at Sinjar. It did so knowing that it would provoke the most furious Israeli response possible. Why put millions of Palestinians at risk? Because Hamas has learned that it profits at least as much from Palestinian deaths as it does from Israeli ones — the more of each, the better.

Murdering Jews is an end in its own right for Hamas, because it believes it fulfills a theological aim. The original Hamas covenant invokes this injunction: “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them.

Hamas also achieves practical and propagandistic goals by putting Palestinians in harm’s way. More civilians in combat zones mean more human shields for its forces. More dead and wounded Palestinians mean more sympathy for its side and more condemnation of Israel.

That’s why Hamas turned Gaza’s central hospital into its headquarters during the 2014 conflict. It’s why it stored rockets in schools. It’s why it has used mosques to store guns. It’s why it fires rockets from Gaza’s densely populated areas.

The cynicism doesn’t stop there. During a previous round of fighting, Hamas’s political leader, Khaled Meshaal, denounced Israel for committing a “Holocaust” against Palestinians. That, from the head of a terrorist group that has denied the Holocaust. Hamas also pleads for international sympathy on account of what it says is Gaza’s unfathomable poverty. In fact, Gaza’s per capita gross domestic product, at $5,600 in 2021 in terms of purchasing power, is not much lower than India’s.

A Hamas that wanted a more prosperous Gaza — one that did not make its neighbors put up fences around it and towers to guard them — could have it, simply by desisting from its ideological aims. If Gaza is the open-air prison that so many of Israel’s critics allege, it’s not because Israelis are capriciously cruel but because too many of its residents pose a mortal risk. For proof, just look at the Oct. 7 pogrom.

As I write, Israeli forces appear to be on the cusp of launching their ground assault into Gaza. With that invasion, the balance of global sympathy, along with the weight of diplomatic pressure, will undoubtedly turn against Israel. That has always been part of Hamas’s strategy: Like the boy who murders his parents and then, through his lawyers, pleads for the court’s mercy because he’s an orphan.

Hamas wants the benefits of being a perpetrator and the sympathy of being a victim at the same time. Whether it gets away with it will depend, in part, on the international community — which, in this case, includes you, the reader.

We ought to be able to get this right. The central cause of Gaza’s misery is Hamas. It alone bears the blame for the suffering it has inflicted on Israel and knowingly invited against Palestinians. The best way to end the misery is to remove the cause, not stay the hand of the remover.

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The Source of America’s Political Chaos

The mainstream news media continues to engage in promoting false equivalency between the Democrat Party and the Republican Party when the reality is that the former remains a largely disciplined party focused on policy issues and trying to improve the lives of America's citizens, while the GOP is now the party of chaos and misogyny.  Indeed, the Republican Part is beyond dysfunctional and is now made up of circus-like clowns focused solely on garnering coverage by toxic right wing "news" outlets that are willingly aiding and abetting the clown show that is today's GOP.  Too often, the short sighted mainstream media fails to examine how America got to a point where political chaos on one side of the aisle is the norm.  Worse yet, both parties are given equal coverage but with little or no push back against Republican lies and untruths.  In my view, the GOP descent into chaos and depravity first began with Newt Gingrich in 1994 and then accelerated with the rise of the grievance driven "Tea Party" that was the precursor to today's Christofascist/white supremacist party base that cares only about imposing its extreme religious agenda and/or turning back time to the 1950's. This, plus tax cuts for the wealthy and holding power at any cost are the sole focus the GOP.  There is no true goal of responsible governance as the circus in the House of Representatives makes crystal clear.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the descent of the GOP to becoming the party of chaos.  Here are excerpts:

Most of America’s current political environment can be traced back to one moment: the election of Donald Trump. The bedlam continues—and, to understand the stakes in 2024, imagine how different the world would look if he’d lost.

Regret about “what might have been” is not a particularly productive emotion. Counterfactual history, however, is quite useful. I have used it for years in teaching international relations, to help students see that not everything in history is inevitable, that accidents and sudden turns can change the destiny of nations.

Also, as a science-fiction fan, I’m a sucker for the alternate-history genre, the kind of stuff where the Roman empire never rises or America loses the Revolutionary War.

As I continue to watch the GOP flail about—House Republicans have now chosen the execrable Representative Jim Jordan for speaker, replacing Steve Scalise, whose nomination lasted 48 hours—I have been thinking about an alternate history of a United States where Donald Trump lost the 2016 election. I am convinced that the chaos now overtaking much of the American political system was not inevitable: The source of our ongoing political disorder is because of a razor-thin victory in an election in 2016 decided by a relatively tiny number of voters.

I recognize that others will depict Trump’s victory as the inexorable result of long-term trends. Some, perhaps, would identify 1994, when Newt Gingrich proved that political nastiness was an effective campaign strategy, as the Year of No Return, or the election of 2010, when Americans rewarded the flamboyant jerkitude of the Tea Party with seats in Congress.

There’s a lot of truth to such explanations. Long-term trends matter, because over time, they frame debates and shape the choices available to voters. The Republicans have been moving further and further to the right, but I have always argued that 2016 was a fluke, a perfect storm with epochal consequences: The GOP field was fractured and feckless; Trump was a well-known celebrity; the Democrats ran Hillary Clinton instead of supporting Joe Biden for a shot at what would have been Barack Obama’s third term. And it was close, because of the structure of the Electoral College.

Trump’s win set up a series of cascading failures. Winning in 2016 turbocharged Trump’s claims of leading a movement. His victory encouraged other Republicans to go into survival mode and adopt the protective coloration of Trumpism just to win their primaries, a process that led directly to the crap storm deluging the House at this very moment.

At the least, a Trump loss would have let other Republicans avoid sinking in the populist swamp. Elise Stefanik might be a relentless political opportunist, but without Trump, she and other GOP leaders could have pronounced Trumpian extremism a failure and stayed in something like a center-right lane. On the Earth Where Trump Lost, Fox-addicted voters might still have sent irresponsible performance artists such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz to Congress, but the institutional Republicans would have had every incentive to marginalize them.

Had Trump lost, someone might even have bothered to read (and act on) the so-called Republican National Committee “autopsy” of 2013, which argued that the future of the party relies on better appeals to immigrants, women, minorities, and young people. With Trump’s win, that kind of talk went out the window. Instead, the Trump GOP chained itself to the votes of older white Americans—a declining population. Republicans thus had to squeeze more votes out of a shrinking base, and the only way to do that was to build on Trump’s bond with his personality cult and defend him at all costs.

Perhaps most important, a Trump loss would have prevented (or at least delayed) the normalization of violence and authoritarianism in American politics. This is not to say that the Republicans would today be a healthy party, but Trump’s victory confirmed the surrender of the national GOP to a sociopathic autocrat.

An irony in thinking through the 2016 counterfactual case is how many people, including Trump and the herd of sycophants who coalesced around him, would have been better off if Trump had lost. Excellent books by the Washington Post reporter Ben Terris and by my Atlantic colleague Mark Leibovich have described the kind of people who formed up behind Trump, and it is striking how many of them are now facing personal and political ruin. . . . think of Matt Schlapp, Peter Navarro, or even the pathetic Rudy Giuliani—would all have been better off had Trump had flamed out.

[N]o one should wish for the Guardian of Forever to open a gate back to 2016 more than Trump himself. Had he lost, he could have fulfilled what was likely his true wish, to go back to his life in New York as a faux-capitalist fraudster while traveling the country as a pretend president, holding rallies and raking in money from credulous rubes. Instead, he faces humiliation, financial failure, and criminal indictments.

Measures such as impeachment that could have taken Trump out of American political life were destined to fail because of 2016. The 2020 election proved Trump’s toxicity, but by then, too many Republicans had made too many compromises and they could no longer just walk away. Their fates (which for some might include prison) are sealed.

All of this chaos and misery was avoidable—and all of it stemmed from one election and the choices of a tiny number of Americans who could have averted these disasters. As Trump tries to regain his office, voters should remember that nothing is inevitable: Choices matter. Elections matter. A single day can matter.

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