Message to the Media: Stop Soft-Pedaling the GOP’s Extremism

I lament frequently about the failings of much of the mainstream media and its obsession with false equivalency and the continued refusal to face the reality that Donald Trump is not just another candidate and that the Republican Party has become a fetid swamp of extremists and religious fanatics.  Now, as much of the media remains locked in orgy of coverage of Joe Biden in the wake of his poor debate performance, little coverage looks at the continued insane and dangerous things Donald Trump is say or just how extreme today's Republican Party has become.  Countless "country club Republicans" have fled the GOP only to be replaced by Christofascist, white supremacists and those who want to unleash vulture capitalists, yet much of the media acts as if the GOP is still the party of Ronald Reagan.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the media's stark failings in exposing the extremism of today's GOP and how the mainstream media is failing the American public. Here are highlights"

The idea that Donald Trump is forcing the Republican Party to moderate its extreme positions on abortion and LGBTQ rights would make for an interesting story. So interesting, in fact, that the story was all over the mainstream press. The only problem with this very interesting story is that it didn’t happen.

On Monday, a draft of the GOP platform began circulating ahead of the Republican convention. The coverage of the platform’s position on abortion was remarkable in its uniformity. . . . These headlines could not be more misleading.

[A]lthough the new platform omits language from the 2016 version opposing marriage equality, it is silent on equal rights for same-sex couples, and certainly does not endorse them. That omission is meaningful, and should not be interpreted as moderation. The Trumpified right-wing majority on the Supreme Court has already taken quiet aim at the decision that granted same-sex couples the right to marry, and some of the sitting justices, such as Samuel Alito, have denounced that decision outright. Once the right-wing bloc on the Court has the numbers and the right case, that decision will likely be overturned.

In other words, the removal of the previous opposition does not amount to a recognition of equal rights for same-sex couples. It is a strategic silence asserted in the belief that the Roberts Court will narrow those rights in its own time without the GOP having to pay a political price for making that happen.

Other language in the new platform refers to being able to “act in accordance with those [religious] Beliefs, not just in places of Worship, but in everyday life.” This is about justifying religious exemptions to anti-discrimination laws, which will target LGBTQ Americans and women, among others. This is an agenda that contemplates second-class citizenship for anyone who is not a right-wing Christian, and elevated status for those who are.

Second, if the party’s stance on marriage equality is a matter of strategic silence, the media coverage of the abortion language amounts to strategic illiteracy. . . . . The key language here is “We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process, and that the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights.” The actual language of the Fourteenth Amendment, plain to anyone who has read it, says, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

The doctrine that a fetus is morally equivalent to a fully born child is called “fetal personhood”; it asserts that a fetus obtains constitutional rights at the moment of conception, and therefore, ending a pregnancy is identical to murder. In its 2016 platform, the Republican Party made this claim by saying that the Fourteenth Amendment’s due-process protections guarantee that “the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed,” and calling for a constitutional amendment to enshrine this understanding.

The wording of the platform restates the same radical position that Republicans took in the 2016 platform, but makes it more confusing. There is no softening of the GOP’s position on abortion here, just a garbled reiteration of the party’s position that abortion for any reason should be illegal everywhere in the United States, hidden behind an irrelevant aside about states’ rights. . . . In the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment adopted by the Republican Party in its platform, abortion rights are unconstitutional because a fetus is a person and therefore entitled to those constitutional protections.

The point, presumably, of the muddled and contradictory language adopted by the platform was to get the media to run with a bunch of headlines announcing that the party was moderating on abortion, while allowing the language to serve as a promise to anti-abortion activists, who fully understand that Donald Trump intends to follow through on their agenda while in office. That includes, as my colleague Elaine Godfrey reported in February, banning abortion through novel enforcement of the 19th-century Comstock Act without any need for Congress.

Trump and the Republican Party have records on abortion that show what they would do with federal power. Trump appointed three of the six justices who issued the decision overturning a national right to an abortion after he promised to do just that. Republican-controlled states acted swiftly to ban abortion as soon as they could, not just enacting draconian bans and restrictions on speech and movement related to abortion, but seeking to criminalize leaving the state to get an abortion or providing information on how to get one.

If Trump returns to the White House, the power of the federal government will likely be focused on restricting Americans’ rights to free expression, travel, and bodily autonomy in the name of preventing abortion. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint for a second Trump administration, which Trump has unconvincingly attempted to disavow despite the plan having been written by veterans of his first administration, details possible avenues for such restrictions. The Project 2025 agenda contemplates allowing employers to deny health-care coverage for contraception to their workers, allowing hospitals to refuse to provide abortion care when someone’s life is at risk, and otherwise limiting access to abortion medication and contraception.

Project 2025 also wants to use the Department of Health and Human Services to force states to track abortions in order to crack down on what it calls “abortion tourism,” that is, women being forced to leave their home state to obtain medical care that they are prevented from getting where they live.

The GOP platform is an obvious bait and switch, and it doesn’t even try very hard to hide the switch. As the writer Jessica Valenti notes, “The platform doesn’t change a single thing about what Trump would do if elected, nor does it mean that there’s an actual rift between his campaign and the anti-abortion movement. This is political theater, and the mainstream press is handing out programs.” The GOP platform on abortion does not show Trump or the GOP “softening” or shifting on abortion rights; it shows them trying to avoid the political consequences of their position on the matter by hiding them in plain sight.

It has been clear from the beginning that Trump regards abortion rights as a political vulnerability for Republicans and would seek to seem moderate on the issue, just as it’s clear that the anti-abortion camp understands that Trump will do its bidding when in office, as he did last time. One reason he may get the chance is mainstream press organizations’ embracing the narrative of Trump as an abortion moderate—despite all available evidence to the contrary.