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The Lack of Seriousness of the House Republicans

Governing a nation the size of America with all its complexities at home and abroad requires a high level of seriousness and some level of cognizance that legislation must cover the needs and interest of all citizens and a recognition of America's importance in the world.  Sadly, such seriousness is sadly lacking in the House Republican caucus which puts performance to thrill the party's knuckle dragging base which is ever motivated by hate and grievance with a heavy dose of religious extremism.  All of these shortcomings when it comes to actual governing are embodied in Mike Johnson, the least experienced individual to rise to the Speakership in 140 years and a man with a bizarre history pushing Christofascist causes and married to a "Christian therapist" who has claimed (she just scrubbed portions of her website) that she can turn gays straight - some believe Johnson himself is a closeted gay himself allegedly "cure" of homosexuality.  With the federal government set to run out money later this month and threats to democracy around the globe now is not the time for a MAGA performance artist to be running the House of Representatives.  An editorial in the Washington Post looks at where the nation finds itself and whether the House GOP can get its act together.  Here are excerpts:

The House passed on Thursday night a proposal by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) that pairs $14.3 billion in emergency funding for Israel with $14.3 billion in cuts to the Internal Revenue Service, but the unserious plan will go nowhere in the Democratic-controlled Senate. And President Biden has promised a veto if it somehow winds up on his desk. What happens after the show vote will become the first test of Mr. Johnson’s capacity for national leadership since taking the gavel on Oct. 25.

The hopeful view of this help-Israel-and-cut-the-IRS gambit is that it’s cynical: Mr. Johnson follows in the footsteps of previous speakers, from both parties, who have brought up extreme legislation to appease party hard-liners before moving on to something more pragmatic. If that’s his play, it can serve as the prelude to what would become a good-faith negotiation to fund the United States’ most important ally in the Middle East as it defends itself from an Iran-backed terrorist movement guilty of horrific atrocities.

The more unsettling possibility is that the neophyte speaker wants to embody the role of “MAGA Mike Johnson,” as former president Donald Trump dubbed him on social media, in an effort to consolidate power inside the House GOP conference. In that case, Mr. Johnson is engaging in legislative obstructionism and brinkmanship even at the risk of undermining key bipartisan foreign policy objectives.

In addition to cutting help for Ukraine and resources to increase border security from his bill, the speaker also cut out the White House’s proposals for humanitarian assistance for Palestinians.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) argues poignantly that supporting the self-defense of Ukraine against Russia and Israel against Hamas are interconnected struggles for freedom against authoritarianism. But Mr. Johnson, who received backing from a wing of the party that openly scorns Mr. McConnell, says he is determined to consider funding for Israel and Ukraine separately.

That could be defensible, barely, if he were to bring separate bills on each piece of Mr. Biden’s emergency supplemental request to the floor. Instead of doing that, Mr. Johnson is injecting a tax-policy poison pill. Even if the speaker were to do this to offset the cost of helping Israel, defunding the IRS would be counterproductive. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said on Wednesday that Mr. Johnson’s plan would lead to a $26.8 billion decline in revenue. The head of the tax agency estimates that the proposal would ultimately increase the deficit by $90 billion over 10 years. It’s obvious that fewer tax collectors, and less technological modernization, will mean less revenue gets collected.

This posturing comes in the context of Mr. Johnson’s having ascended to the speakership after nearly a month of chaos and the rejection of three other GOP nominees. He benefited from the Republicans’ sheer fatigue and a lack of enemies. Mr. Johnson is the least experienced House member to get the gavel since 1883.

Reasons to be nervous abound. During Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Mr. Johnson recruited 125 House Republicans to join him in signing an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to throw out the results in four states won by Mr. Biden. He has supported efforts to ban abortion nationally, opposed a bill last year to codify same-sex marriage rights and has referred to the “so-called separation of church and state.”

[E]very House seat will be on the ballot again a year from now, so Mr. Johnson has incentives to govern in a way that will not imperil his party’s five-seat majority. The GOP must defend 18 seats next year in districts carried by Mr. Biden in 2020, so part of the new speaker’s job is not alienating moderate suburbanites.

At least rhetorically, he also espouses a traditional Reaganesque view of national security that emphasizes the importance of U.S. global leadership. His congressional district includes Barksdale Air Force Base, headquarters of the Air Force Global Strike Command, and Fort Johnson, the Army post formerly known as Fort Polk.

In a new job with such a steep learning curve, Mr. Johnson deserves a minimum of grace and patience — but not an infinite amount. Now that this defund-the-IRS bill has passed the House, with only 12 Democratic votes, Mr. Johnson should allow Congress to pass Mr. Biden’s supplemental funding proposal so that Israel, Ukraine and our own southern border get the help they need.

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The GOP, Israel, the IRS. and the Big Grift

Even more that pandering to the extreme "Christian" Right, the main agenda of  today's Republican Party has been allowing the super wealthy to pay as little in taxes as possible while the rest of us foot the nation's financial bill.   I call it the "Reverse Robin Hood" agenda because the entire goal is to take from  average Americans, often through slashing social programs that benefit them, and giving ever more tax breaks to the very rich.  With elections on Tuesday here in Virginia, one hears endless GOP ads about "cutting taxes" but the vast majority of the cuts would go to the wealthy while the tax cuts to average Virginians would be chump changes.    Sadly, voters continue to fall for this con artist act of Republicans.  Things are even worse at the federal level where the urge to aid the wealthy is ever present.  Indeed, the House GOP has just passed a bill - which will die in the Senate or fall to Biden's veto pen - that ties emergency funding to Israel to cuts to the funding of the IRS which will aid tax cheats from paying their fair share of taxes.  The lie to justify this trade off is that aid to Israel must be "paid for" even though the slashes to IRS enforcement is projected to result in lost revenues almost equal to the total funding to Israel. The GOP con game is never ending as a column in the New York Times lays out:

Historians of propaganda are familiar with the concept of the Big Lie, a claim so extreme that many people end up accepting it because they can’t believe that authority figures would make up something so at odds with reality.

It often seems to me that we need a term to describe a somewhat similar phenomenon in policy debates, which we might call the Big Grift. What I mean are policy proposals so corrupt, so obviously designed to benefit an undeserving few at everyone else’s expense, that many voters balk at the notion that seemingly respectable politicians actually advocate such things.

A case in point is the current demand by House Republicans that funding for Israel in this moment of crisis be tied to budget cuts that would undermine the ability of the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on wealthy tax cheats. This should be a major scandal, but my suspicion is that many voters just won’t accept the idea that G.O.P. leaders would do something so cartoonishly villainous.

Some history: Way back in 2001, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, House Republicans passed a bill responding to the emergency by … cutting corporate taxes. At the time, my sources told me that when political consultants tried to describe the bill to focus groups of voters, they refused to believe that the legislation was being described accurately.

A decade later, when Mitt Romney endorsed Paul Ryan’s budget plan — which called for both tax cuts on high incomes and the conversion of Medicare into an underfunded voucher scheme — a focus group found voters simply unwilling to believe that this was Romney’s actual position.

The latest G.O.P. proposal is, by any reasonable standard, even worse than these earlier initiatives. I mean, holding national security hostage unless we make it easier for wealthy tax cheats to break the law? Who would do that?

Yet I fear that the proposal’s very awfulness may protect it from scrutiny, because voters will be incredulous about claims that this idea is even on the table.

[T]he idea that cutting the I.R.S. budget would somehow help pay for aid to Israel is utterly wrong. America has a huge “tax gap” — taxes legally owed but not paid. The bulk of that tax gap probably comes from wealthy Americans underreporting their incomes, which they can get away with because the I.R.S. lacks the resources to fully enforce the law.

As a result, cutting I.R.S. funding would actually increase the deficit by enabling more tax evasion, a conclusion confirmed by the Congressional Budget Office on Wednesday in its score of the House proposal.

Republicans, however, often claim that tax cuts do great things for the economy, and maybe even pay for themselves. There’s not a shred of evidence for that belief. Still, starving the I.R.S. of funds is in a way a kind of tax cut.

Furthermore, enabling tax evasion doesn’t help all businesses equally; it biases the economy toward activities, often unproductive, where tax fraud is relatively easy, such as real estate speculation. Did I mention that the Trump Organization has been convicted of tax fraud?

And making it easier to cheat on taxes by defunding the tax police probably has spillover effects that go beyond the direct adverse effect on enforcement. The more we become a society that rewards people who evade their fiscal obligations, the more likely it is that people who don’t cheat on their taxes will feel like chumps and losers. If Americans start to believe, as Leona Helmsley put it, that “only the little people pay taxes,” the damage to our society will surely be moral as well as fiscal.

Yet starving the I.R.S. has long been a Republican priority; what’s new is the party’s willingness to serve that priority by endangering national security.

Where does this priority come from? I don’t pretend to have a full answer. I will note, however, that, as the historian Rick Perlstein has pointed out, there has long been a close association between right-wing conspiracy theorizing and financial grifting.

And now that conspiracy theorists have effectively taken over the G.O.P., it kind of makes sense that one of their overriding policy priorities is to deprive the government of the resources it needs to crack down on grifters and financial fraud.

In any case, don’t be skeptical about news reports that Republicans are willing to sacrifice crucial national interests unless we make life easier for tax cheats. That is, in fact, exactly what is happening.

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Mike Johnson is a Christian Nationalist - Be Very Afraid.

The Republican Party claims to be the party of "family values" and "Christian values" although the latter in today's Republican Party have little or nothing to do with the New Testament or Christ's social gospel.  Instead, it is all about carefully cherry picked Old Testament passages that denigrate and condemn others and revel in violence.  Mike Johnson, the new Republican Speaker of the House is the personification of this warped and dangerous religious dogma.  Indeed, as the Christian Post reports, Johnson said his favorite bible verse is about god killing the evil enemies of the righteous.  In Johnson's view, those evil forces are gays, liberals, racial minorities and non-evangelical Christians, particularly Muslims.  Worse yet, he opposes the concept of separation of church and sate and has edited out the prohibition against an established religion completely out of the First Amendment.  He is also a virulent supporter of gun rights seemingly so that the righteous - i.e., far right "Christians" can defend themselves against those who are "evil" (see the above listing for who those are) as he pushes to make America a "Christian nation" regardless of the wishes of a majority of Americans.   A column in the Washington Post looks at Johnson's extremism.  Here are excerpts:

The day after he was elected speaker of the House, which was also the day after 18 people were shot to death in Lewiston, Maine, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) smoothly executed the rhetorical three-point turn that Republicans often use after mass shootings: (1) invoke prayer; (2) declare that now is not the time for politics; and (3) dismiss the foolish notion that gun violence is related to guns. To that point, Johnson told Sean Hannity, “At the end of the day, it’s, the problem is the human heart.”

In a statement, the Biden administration rejected “the offensive accusation that gun crime is uniquely high in the United States because of Americans’ ‘hearts’” and instead blamed congressional Republicans’ fealty to gun industry lobbyists.

No doubt gun industry donations have shaped Republicans’ uncompromising position on gun-control legislation. But there’s another force at work here, too.

The House will ignore calls to ban assault weapons — a ban the majority of Americans want — not only because its new speaker is a Republican but also because he is a Christian nationalist.

A Christian nationalist is someone who, like Johnson, believes the United States is a Christian nation and does not believe in what Johnson dismisses as the “so-called ‘separation of church and state.’”

Indeed, Johnson got right to work mixing church and state in his first speech after he won the speakership.

“I believe that scripture, the Bible is very clear: that God is the one that raises up those in authority,” he said from the pulpit — er, the House rostrum. “And I believe that God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific moment.”

Johnson must have been so surprised when God brought together a majority to pass the Respect for Marriage Act last year! He himself voted no, of course, since, as he once opined, “Experts project that homosexual marriage is the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.”

Experts project that this kind of nonsense will spew from the Capitol now that the most powerful man in Congress is someone who has said that “every Christian should seek to bring industry, government and society as a whole under the sway of the principles of righteousness,” as Johnson told a campaign rally — er, a Shreveport, La., congregation, in 2016.

For Johnson, those principles include protecting not just fertilized eggs and children at risk of learning that gay people exist but also guns. Especially guns.

“At the end of the day, we have to protect the right of the citizens to protect themselves,” he told Hannity, “and that’s the Second Amendment.”

This should surprise no one. According to a 2018 study by the sociologists Andrew L. Whitehead, Landon Schnabel and Samuel L. Perry, “Americans who desire that religion, specifically Christianity, be officially promoted in the public sphere are deeply opposed to federal gun control laws.”

A 2021 survey Perry and a colleague conducted found that “among Whites who said America should be a Christian nation, more than 4 in 10 named the right to keep and bear arms as the most important right. Not freedom of speech. Not even freedom of religion. Gun rights.”

Why? Because they think violence is good.

In “The Flag and the Cross,” Perry’s book with Philip S. Gorski, the authors show that the higher White people rate on the Christian-nationalist scale, the more likely they are to agree with the notion of “righteous violence” — specifically that “the best way to stop bad guys with guns is to have good guys with guns.

Those with a casual knowledge of Christian theology might have trouble squaring this pro-violence stance with Jesus’ reported instruction to “turn to them the other cheek.”

Johnson has an answer for that. . . . . “We serve the Lion of Judah, not some sort of namby-pamby little king. … ‘Our weapons are for pulling down strongholds’ — this doesn’t sound like a namby-pamby gospel.”

No. It doesn’t sound namby-pamby. It sounds like exactly the sort of ideology that might encourage rioters, who were told Christianity was under threat, to charge the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, carrying twin symbols of Jesus and guns.

On the same day he became House speaker and 18 Mainers were gunned down with a weapon that most Americans want outlawed, the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute released a survey about threats to democracy in advance of the 2024 election. It found growing support for political violence, especially among people who believe that the United States is a Christian nation, that the country has changed for the worse since the 1950s and that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.

Is charging the gates of hell a figure of speech? Will Johnson fight like a lion by genially ignoring calls to bring a gun-control bill to a vote? Or should Americans, accustomed to enduring political inaction when it comes to guns, begin to fear something even worse?

This man is very dangerous.

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Trump's Attorneys May Prove to Be His Achilles Heel

I have never understood how a moral or ethical attorney could represent Donald Trump, a man seemingly incapable of ever telling the truth.  Yet many attorneys have decided to represent the devil and of the number have found themselves struggling to get paid their legal fees and more recently a number have found themselves facing criminal charges of their own and their legal careers likely in ruins.  Think Michael Cohen, Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro and Jenna Ellis, all of whom have either been convicted of crimes or have negotiated guilty pleas in the hope of avoiding more serious convictions and/or jail time.  Anyone who has followed Trump's career and the number of attorneys who lived to regret their alliance with him should show little surprise of where these four attorneys now find themselves, yet greed and a lust for power seduced them to their ruin.  Candidly, it is difficult to feel any sympathy for them given Trump's track record.  Now, however, in saving themselves, they may prove to be Trump's Achilles heel and may be setting the stage for others who have been indicted to decide self-preservation is more important than loyalty to a man who has no loyalty to anyone.  A column in the New York Times looks at how Trump's attorneys may be his ultimate downfall.  Here are highlights: 

When Jenna Ellis last week became the most recent lawyer to join in an accelerating series of guilty pleas in the Fulton County, Ga., prosecution of Donald Trump and his co-conspirators, she offered a powerful repudiation of the “Big Lie” that could potentially cut the legs out from under Donald Trump’s defense, make her a star witness for prosecutors and a potent weapon against the former president’s political ambitions.

Ms. Ellis admitted that the allegations of election fraud she peddled as an advocate for the effort to overturn the 2020 election were false. Two other plea deals, from Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, have been important, but Ms. Ellis is in a unique position to aid prosecutors in the Georgia case and possibly even the parallel federal one — as well as Mr. Trump’s opponents in the court of public opinion.

Ms. Ellis pleaded guilty to a felony count of aiding and abetting the false statements made by co-defendants (including Rudy Giuliani) to the Georgia Senate about supposed voting fraud in the 2020 presidential election. These included that “10,315 or more dead people voted” in Georgia, “at least 96,000 mail-in ballots were counted” erroneously and “2,506 felons voted illegally.”

These lies were at the cutting edge of Mr. Trump’s assault on the election. Both the state and federal criminal prosecutions allege that Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators knowingly deployed falsehoods like these in their schemes to overturn the election.

Unlike Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell, in pleading guilty Ms. Ellis spoke in detail about her “responsibilities as a lawyer.” Tearing up, she talked about the due diligence that “I did not do but should have done” and her “deep remorse for those failures of mine.” The judge, a tough former prosecutor, thanked her for sharing that and noted how unusual it was for a defendant to do so.

Trials are about the evidence and the law. But they are also theater, and the jury is the audience. In this case, the jury is not the only audience — the Georgia trials will be televised, so many Americans will also be tuned in. Ms. Ellis is poised to be a potent weapon against Mr. Trump in the courtroom and on TVs.

That is bad news for her former co-defendants — above all, Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Trump. Ms. Ellis was most closely associated with Mr. Giuliani, appearing by his side in Georgia and across the country. If her court appearance last week is any indication, she will be a compelling guide to his alleged misconduct. She will also add to what is known about it; she and Mr. Giuliani undoubtedly had many conversations that are not yet public and that will inform the jury. And because Mr. Giuliani was the senior lawyer on the case, her pointed statement that she was misled by attorneys “with many more years of experience” hits him directly.

Ms. Ellis’s likely trial testimony will also hit Mr. Trump hard. She has now effectively repudiated his claims that he won the election — an argument that is expected to be a centerpiece of his trial defense. Coming from a formerly outspoken MAGA champion, her disagreement has the potential to resonate with jurors.

It also builds on substantial other evidence against the former president, which includes voluminous witness testimony collected by the House Jan. 6 committee indicating that many advisers told him the election was not stolen — and that in private he repeatedly admitted as much.

Ms. Ellis’s testimony may also compromise one of Mr. Trump’s main defenses. He has made clear he intends to claim he relied on advice of counsel. But that defense is available only if the lawyers are not part of the alleged crimes. Ms. Ellis’s plea puts her squarely within the conspiracy, as do those of Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell. That will hamper Mr. Trump’s effort to present a reliance-on-counsel defense.

In comparing Ms. Ellis to the two other lawyers who pleaded guilty, it is also critical to note that she is promising full cooperation with Ms. Willis.

Ms. Ellis took the additional step of also agreeing “to fully cooperate with prosecutors,” which could include doing interviews with prosecutors, “appearing for evidentiary hearings, and assisting in pretrial matters.”

To our knowledge, Ms. Ellis is not yet cooperating with prosecutors in the federal case led by the special counsel Jack Smith, but if she does, she would have a comparative advantage for the prosecution over Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell: They are identified as unindicted co-conspirators in that case and would be more problematic for Mr. Smith to deal with.

But because he has not named Ms. Ellis among Mr. Trump’s alleged federal co-conspirators, he may feel more free to extend immunity to secure her valuable testimony. (He has reportedly done just that with Mark Meadows, a former Trump White House chief of staff.)

Ms. Ellis’s guilty plea may also have political reverberations. It is riveting to see a MAGA champion who helped lead the election assault tearfully admitting she and that effort misled the American people. Her court appearance was live-streamed and repeated in a loop on television and social media.

With Mr. Trump showing no signs of backing down from his claims of 2020 election fraud and a new election upon us, Ms. Ellis’s plea — like the televised Jan. 6 committee testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, another Trump insider who turned on him with powerful effect — could be a potential turning point in the court of public opinion. When Mr. Trump’s lies are repeated in the future, in whatever venue, expect to see Ms. Ellis often.

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America: A Crisis of Moral Clarity

America now finds itself with a lunatic Christian nationalist - he believes dinosaurs were on Noah's ark and that the earth is 6,000 years old - as Speaker of the House and the majority of Republicans, in a sharp turn around from when Bill Clinton was in office, no longer believe that personal morality is important in America's leaders.  Indeed, evangelicals and Christofascist who want to inflict a version of "morality" on the nation based on cherry picked bible verses and motivated by hatred of others view Donald Trump as "a person of faith" despite Trump being the living embodiment of the seven deadly sins. In contrast Democrats and liberals - those the right claims are destroying the country view morality as something that matters and push policies much more in keeping with Christ's social gospel than the GOP's reverse Robin Hood agenda.  The nation is in an upside down world where those who claim to be the morality police embrace the most immoral politicians and those they depict as immoral are the true guardians of true morality. How did this bizarre situation come to be?  I continue to blame evangelicals and Christofascists (a great many of whom are white supremacists) on the moral bankruptcy of today's GOP.  Their only true god is power and the ability to harm those they hate - namely anyone who thinks or looks different from themselves.  A long column in Salon looks at the absence of morality on the political right.  Here are excerpts: 

In response to Israel’s war against Hamas, President Joe Biden and the now criminally indicted leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump have demonstrated very different models of leadership. The stark differences between the two leaders are another example of how America’s democracy crisis is not “just” a political problem: It is a moral and cultural sickness that is far greater than any one political leader, political party, or political movement.

President Biden has given a series of speeches and interviews where he condemned Hamas’ barbarism, reinforced America’s commitment to Israel, emphasized the need to find a long-term solution to peace in the region, attempted to calm worries that the war could spiral into a larger regional conflict, cautioned against the temptations of antisemitism and hatred in their various forms, and spoke directly about the need to protect the human rights of the people of Gaza, the majority of whom have no connection to Hamas. . . . Ultimately, whatever one may think about America’s foreign policy as it relates to the Middle East and Israel, Biden’s leadership style and demeanor in this time of crisis are most certainly “presidential." By comparison, how have Donald Trump and the other leading Republican fascists and members of the right-wing movement behaved in response to the horrible events of October 7? Their reactions and behavior have, for the most part, been partisan, tribal, petty, egomaniacal, narcissistic, conspiratorial, dishonest, irresponsible, hateful, willfully ignorant, and more generally contrary to the principles of responsible governance. 

In a time not too long ago, America’s mainstream political leaders, on both sides of the partisan divide, followed an informal rule that politics and partisanship stopped at the ocean. In the Age of Trump and ascendant neofascism, that rule has been jettisoned by the right wing because getting political power at any cost with the goal of ending America’s multiracial pluralistic democracy is more important than standing in unity in a time of crisis.

On the same weekend that Israel was attacked by Hamas, Donald Trump wallowed in his malignant narcissism and megalomania. He attacked Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for supposedly not taking his advice while president, praised Hamas as “very smart," and suggested that the group would not have dared to attack Israel if Trump were still president. Trump even managed to connect the Big Lie about the 2020 election and how it was “stolen” from him and his MAGA movement to the crisis. Taking their cues from Trump, leading Republicans, and other right-wing propagandists and influential, used the October 7 terrorist attacks as an opportunity to tell lies like the Democrats "hate” Israel and support Hamas via Iran. . . . Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, told NBC's "Meet the Press" last Sunday that Palestinians “are all antisemitic” to argue against allowing refugees from Gaza into the United States.

Donald Trump and the other Republican fascists and members of the white right are also using October 7 as a chance to amplify their white supremacist paranoia and conspiracy theories about “invaders” and “terrorists” (in this iteration “Hamas”) who have supposedly infiltrated the Southern Border and are operating in secret terrorist cells, waiting for their moment to attack (White) America. Of course, this is a lie. Nonetheless, a large percentage, if not majority, of Trump and Republican voters (and right-wing independents) believe such fictions, which are reflections of the larger white supremacist great replacement conspiracy theory.

Last Thursday, the Washington Post editorial board summarized the contrasting leadership styles and behavior of President Biden and Donald Trump in the following way:  At a time when the United States, and the world, desperately need decency and moral clarity, President Biden has provided both. His words regarding the wanton atrocities Hamas has committed against hundreds of Israeli civilians, as well as many Americans and citizens of other countries, in the past week have been unequivocal.

In a recent interview with Salon, David Rothkopf was much more pointed and direct: They're just not comparable. Joe Biden is a good man, a dedicated and effective public servant who's trying to do a good job, who believes in our institutions, who believes in our values, who believes in alliances, who believes people are fundamentally good, and who is the kind of person that Donald Trump thinks is a sucker. Donald Trump is a bad man; he is all about himself. He doesn't care. He has no moral code whatsoever. He doesn't believe in the rule of law. He doesn't believe in the Constitution. He doesn't believe in American values…. How can those Republicans and others on the right say that they stand with Israel while they support Donald Trump who is an antisemite.

Rick Wilson, who is cofounder of the pro-democracy group The Lincoln Project said this about the profound differences between Trump and Biden as reinforced by their reactions to the terrorist attacks on Israel by Hamas:

President Biden has demonstrated great moral leadership and resolve in supporting Israel in the fight against terrorism and hatred. He understands that freedom and individual rights must be supported through strength, deterrence, international alliances, and, when necessary, force. Stopping authoritarianism abroad helps to prevent it from gaining ground here in the United States.

Trump on the other hand, is a transactional actor only concerned about how he can exploit this movement for his own personal benefit. He cares nothing about human rights and renewing democracy.

[W]hat does the irresponsible, hateful, and morally compromised behavior of Donald Trump and other leading members of the right wing in response to the Israel – Hamas war further “reveal” about their supporters?

In the most basic sense, they have normalized deviance and embraced antisocial and other anti-democratic values and beliefs as a function of what psychologists have described as “malignant normality”. A series of recent public opinion polls offer support for this conclusion.

A 2018 Gallup poll shows that in the Age of Trump, Republicans now believe that presidential moral leadership is increasingly unimportant , , , U.S. Democrats, on the other hand, are more likely to believe moral leadership is important now.

By 59% to 40%, Americans believe Trump provides weak rather than strong moral leadership. Republicans and Democrats diverge greatly on this question, with 77% of Republicans believing Trump provides strong moral leadership and 91% of Democrats saying he provides weak leadership. Seventy-eight percent of Democrats believe his moral leadership is "very weak." Independents are much more negative than positive about Trump's leadership on morals.

A September 2023 poll, also by HarrisX for Deseret News, found that a majority of Republican registered voters believe that Donald Trump “is a person of faith” – this is a higher percentage than for Mike Pence, who is an evangelical Christian.

Whatever one may think about the specific content and morality of the type of White Christianity that is practiced by Michael Pence, it is clear that he is more religious and “a person of faith” than Donald Trump, a man who has repeatedly demonstrated his discomfort with, if not outright disinterest and contempt for, the religiously minded. It Trump is in any way “religious”, it is transactional as a way for him to get votes from the Christian Right.

Racism, white racial resentment, hostile sexism, and other forms of prejudice and hatred in the form of social dominance behavior and authoritarianism have also played a powerful role in why Republicans and other “conservatives” have embraced the moral corruption of Trumpism and American neofascism. This is channeled through a yearning for a return to “the good old days” and “traditional values” and “Making America Great Again”.

[T]he PRRI 2022 American values survey is particularly illuminating: Approximately three-quarters of Americans agree that the country is heading in the wrong direction, but there is considerable division over whether the country needs to move backward — toward an idealized, homogeneous past — or forward, toward a more diverse future. Though most Americans favor moving forward, a sizable minority yearn for a country reminiscent of the 1950s, embrace the idea that God created America to be a new promised land for European Christians, view newcomers as a threat to American culture, and believe that society has become too soft and feminine. This minority is composed primarily of self-identified Republicans, white evangelical Protestants, and white Americans without a college degree.

With their embrace of Trumpism, American neofascism, and hostility to real democracy more broadly, have the MAGA people and other members of the right-wing just forgotten basic standards of human decency, morality, and good leadership? Or have they instead actively chosen Donald Trump and what he represents knowing how destructive and evil such forces are because the power is intoxicating and a way to get what they want in an America they feel increasingly hostile to and alienated from – even if that means ending democracy?

Which of the two scenarios is worse? I am not sure.

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