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Republican Political Nihilism Is Harming the Nation

There was a time when Republicans put the good and welfare of the nation ahead of partisan posturing and pushing what might be called "performance legislation" that has no chance of enactment and which is solely aimed at exciting the grievance and hate-filled base of the party.  When not engaged in performances that thrill the ugliest elements of the base, congressional Republicans, especially in the House of Representatives, engage in obstructionist behavior and block legislation supported by the vast majority of Americans with no goal other than to harm Democrats and most particularly Joe Biden.  Hence, the Republican House caucus seeks to block any meaningful border security bill since they believe it deprives them of a weapon against Biden as they decry the border situation yet they themselves are the ones blocking a solution.   The same holds true of funding for Ukraine given that (i) some Republicans (i) are now de facto accomplices to Putin's war crimes, and  (ii) prefer to place their partisan games above all else.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the harm Republicans are doing.  Here are highlights: 

If House Republicans refuse to fix the border crisis, nobody will be able to deny the obvious: The GOP is more interested in nursing grievances and stoking anger than actually solving problems. That’s exactly what Donald Trump has trained them to do.

Bipartisan Senate negotiators and the White House say they are close to a deal on legislation to alleviate what everyone agrees is an emergency. It would give Republicans much of what they want regarding the southern border — beefed-up security against illegal crossings, tightened asylum rules, provision for more detentions and expulsions, perhaps even limits on President Biden’s authority to “parole” certain groups of immigrants into the country.

The package would also approve billions of dollars in military aid for Ukraine, which the administration says is urgently needed but some House Republicans oppose.

But after Biden met with congressional leaders at the White House on Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) immediately threw doubt on the very idea of an agreement that addresses both the border and Ukraine. His position has been that the border question has to be resolved first, and that any solution has to be based on draconian House-passed legislation that would, among other things, require building 900 miles of Trump’s border wall. For both the Senate and Biden, Johnson’s demand is a non-starter.

Why would House Republicans balk at a chance to ease the crisis at the border that they’ve been braying about for years? Because they would rather have the issue as a cudgel for Trump, the likely GOP presidential nominee, to use against Biden in November.

“Let me tell you, I’m not willing to do too damn much right now to help a Democrat and to help Joe Biden’s approval rating,” Rep. Troy E. Nehls (R-Tex.) told CNN this month when asked about the idea of a border deal. . . . . . Nehls has a habit of blurting out, uncensored, what the Republican Party really thinks.

Partisanship is one thing, but what Republicans are practicing is something very different. It is political nihilism. It’s not about enacting policies or fulfilling responsibilities but, rather, about accentuating voters’ fears, anxieties and resentments — and doing whatever Trump wants them to do.

Rep. Jamie Raskin’s analysis: “Rather than joining Democrats and Biden in good-faith, bipartisan negotiations to make progress on immigration, they are taking orders from Donald Trump and actively obstructing a bipartisan border deal,” the Maryland Democrat said at a House Oversight and Accountability hearing this week.

It’s not just immigration. Some MAGA Republicans are also obstructing $60 billion in aid to Ukraine, which the White House says is desperately needed to sustain Kyiv’s resistance against invading Russian forces.

Not even Greene and her most unhinged colleagues can seriously think their extreme agenda, however thin it might be, could ever be accepted by the Democrats who control the Senate or their not-so-MAGA colleagues in Senate GOP leadership — to say nothing of Biden, who can veto any nonsense that reaches his desk.

If Republicans really cared about out-of-control spending or taking inventory of U.S. commitments abroad or easing the humanitarian crisis at the border, they would negotiate and compromise. Instead, they posture. They issue sound bites. Occasionally, they eat their own.

The GOP is a riot, not a party, and our national interests are being trampled.

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Trump's Base Wants Revenge on Other Americans

Donald Trump is an anger-filled, self-absorbed malignant narcissist who some have even described as a sociopath.  Thus, it is little surprise that on the campaign trail and in courtrooms Trump is making threats and promising revenge on anyone or anything that has slighted in his mind his mentally ill ego - even when the slights comprise simply telling the truth about Trump or holding him accountable for misdeeds and crimes.  What is much more disturbing in some ways is the millions of MAGA cult members who likewise want revenge, if not actual physical violence against their fellow citizens for perceived insults - no matter how well deserved - or threats to their white privilege.   Much, if not a majority of the MAGA base, is comprised of far right religious extremists and/or white supremacists who bear hatred towards millions of other citizens and even their neighbors.  Never in my lifetime other perhaps during the civil rights struggle of the 1960's do I recall so many bearing so much ill will towards others.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the hatred being embraced by Trump's followers, many of whom are evangelicals who bear more resemblance to biblical Pharisees than those following Christ's gospel message.  Here are excerpts:

Donald Trump is the presumptive GOP nominee, and he has vowed revenge on his political enemies. His voters want revenge as well—on their fellow citizens.

he Republican base actively embraces Trump’s grievances; it emulates his pettiness; it supports his childlike inability to accept responsibility. These voters are not sighing in resignation and voting for the lesser of two or three or four evils. They are getting what they want—because they, too, are set on revenge.

These voters are not settling a political score. Rather, they want to get even with other Americans, their own neighbors, for a simmering (and likely unexpected) humiliation that many of them seem to have felt ever since swearing loyalty to Trump.

A lot of people, especially in the media, have a hard time accepting this simple truth. Millions of Americans, stung by the electoral rebukes of their fellow citizens, have become so resentful and detached from reality that they have plunged into a moral void, a vortex that disintegrates questions of politics or policies and replaces them with heroic fantasies of redeeming a supposedly fallen nation.

Poll numbers on this issue are dispiriting. A third of Republicans—and four in 10 voters who have a favorable view of Trump—agree with the statement that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” But violence against whom? We are not under foreign occupation. When people talk about “resorting to violence” they are, by default, talking about violence against their fellow citizens, some of whom have already been threatened merely for working in their communities as election volunteers.

In Iowa, 19 percent of 502 likely GOP caucus attendees said Trump’s statement that he might have “no choice” but to lock up his political opponents made them more inclined to vote for him. One out of five might not seem like a lot, but another 43 percent said they didn’t care one way or another. Trump’s ranting about “terminating” parts of the Constitution made only 14 percent more likely to vote for him, but again, 36 percent didn’t care. What a triumph: Only one in eight Iowa GOP caucus voters supports trashing the Constitution.

The words of actual Trump supporters are even more unnerving than looking at raw poll numbers. . . . Kris, “a 71-year-old retired nurse in orthopedic sneakers” who watches Trump rallies on Rumble or FrankSpeech (a platform launched by the MyPillow founder, Mike Lindell) and believes that the 2020 election was “most definitely” stolen. . . . . “I hope he’s guiding the military to be able to step in and do what they need to do. Because right now, I’d say government’s very tyrannical.” If the Democrats try to steal the election again in 2024, she told me, the Trump-sympathetic elements of the military might need to seize control.

What can turn an ordinary person—a father, the pleasant older lady who lives down the street—into the family powder keg, or even a deluded seditionist who hopes the U.S. military will seize control of the country?

The usual answer, when Trump ran the first time, was that these were “forgotten” voters, people “left behind” by globalization and a leftist political culture, who were hurling out a giant primal yawp of opposition. These were never empirically sustainable explanations, but empathetic reporters and deeply concerned politicians went on listening tours to diners and gas stations anyway. When ordinary Americans would say shocking, indecent, and un-American things, their flummoxed interlocutors remained steadfast in the belief that more listening and more empathetic nodding would put things right in a few years.

And yet, nothing worked. Trump and his right-wing media courtiers—who tend to the anger of the older, white middle class the way florists lovingly raise orchids—fed the GOP base a continual stream of rage, especially as Trump started to pile up electoral defeats. These voters now want to get even with their fellow citizens not for what’s been done to Trump but for what they feel has been done to them. They were certain that 2016 would finally bring them the recognition and respect they craved.

Much like Trump himself, these voters are unable to accept what’s happened over the past several years. Trump, in so many ways, quickly made fools of them; his various inanities, failures, and possible crimes sent them scrambling for ever more bizarre rationalizations, defenses of the indefensible that separated them from family and friends. If in 2016 they suspected, rightly or wrongly, that many Americans looked down on them for any number of reasons, they now know with certainty that millions of people look down on them—not for who they are but for what they’ve supported so vocally.

Strings of losses, including the 2018 Democratic-wave election, Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, and the “red wave” that never happened in 2022, forced MAGA voters to construct an alternate reality in which the patriotic, hardworking majority has been repeatedly thwarted by schemes so complicated that SPECTRE would have struggled to execute them. Worse, a culture (especially in the media) that for a time was desperate to understand their views now either ignores them or treats them as dangerous curiosities.

The only good thing that came out of Iowa last night is that we are now spared further public performances from Vivek Ramaswamy. And it is a hopeful sign that nearly half of the caucus-goers chose someone besides Trump. But we are fooling ourselves if we think that the coming year will be just another peaceful competition between two political parties. Trump wants payback; so do millions of voters who have no one to blame for their sense of humiliation but themselves.

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The Ruin That Another Trump Presidency Would Bring

While a number of pundits are panning Trump's "win" in Iowa and saying as a former incumbent, he should have had a stronger showing than a mere 56,000+ votes and it bodes ill for him in November, 2024, it still is clear to many that Trump will be the Republican nominee as Republicans opt for moral bankruptcy as they wallow in racism, grievance and hatred of others.  Another Trump presidency would mean disaster for the so-called free world because Trump has made it clear that he will betray allies and likely try to destroy NATO to the delight of Trump's puppeteer, Vladimir Putin.  Worse yet, come the end of a second Trump term, he would likely refuse to leave office and American democracy would be dead.  Most maddening is the fact that many leading Republicans and his primary opponents know the ruin Trump would cause to the nation, yet out of fear for Trump and/or the ever more ugly MAGA base, they continue to refuse to condemn him or, worse yet, are endorsing him.  There is no statesmanship and no honor the Constitution or even basic morality.  It is only about remaining in office/power at any cost, even if that means destroying democracy.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at this horrible reality.  Here are excerpts:

In 2016, Republicans could profess some uncertainty about the kind of president Donald Trump would be. Maybe the office would change the man? Maybe the party elite could bend Trump to its will?

But in 2024, there’s no uncertainty. Trump’s party is signing up for the ride, knowing exactly what the ride is. Pro-Ukraine senators are working to elect a president who will cut off Ukraine, knowing that he will cut off Ukraine. Pro-NATO senators are working to elect a president who will wreck NATO, knowing that he will wreck NATO.

Many top Republicans have been hoping for a way out of their Trump dilemma. That’s why Nikki Haley has raised tens of millions of dollars and Ron DeSantis has raised hundreds of millions. It’s why, even now, more than half of the Republican senators have not endorsed a primary candidate.

But the exits are blocked. The many criminal and civil legal processes against Trump were too slow to rescue his party from him. The thesis that Trump might be disqualified under the Fourteenth Amendment awaits a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Republican contest will be over within weeks.

That heralds potential disaster for American allies, for the United States’ standing in the world, and above all for the invaded democracy of Ukraine. The risk is apparent already from House Republicans, who have blocked Biden’s request for emergency aid to Ukraine, to Israel, and to border enforcement for nearly 100 days, since October 20, 2023. But until now, the Republican Party in the Senate has tried to keep its distance from Trump’s pro-dictator foreign policy. The ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has been an especially stalwart friend of Ukraine. Senator James Risch has voted for every assistance package for Ukraine—and criticized the Biden administration for not sending more, faster.

Risch has warned that America’s global stature depends on the outcome of the Ukraine war:

If you think Xi [Jinping] isn’t watching every single thing that goes on as far as our commitment to see this thing through, you’re badly mistaken. He is watching this—and I have reason to believe that for a fact—very, very closely, and watching every utterance that comes out of the United States Congress, out of the administration, and out of the American people as to what kind of a stomach we’ve got to see this thing through.

Thanks in large part to Republicans such as Risch, U.S. aid to Ukraine flowed in 2022 and 2023. The impending Trump renomination signals that pro-democracy Republicans such as Risch are losing the argument inside their party. Last week, Risch endorsed Trump for the GOP presidential nomination . . .

When so-called Team Normal Republicans submitted to Trump’s nomination in 2016, they tended to take refuge in wishful thinking: The system would constrain him; things wouldn’t be so bad.

Eight years later, there can be no illusions. Risch himself called the events of January 6, 2021, “unpatriotic and un-American in the extreme.” He had reason for disgust: His own Senate suite was trashed that day by the attackers. One of them defecated on the floor in a room adjacent to Risch’s office.

None of this is hard to explain. Republicans who get crosswise with Trump lose their career. There aren’t many volunteers to follow Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, or Mitt Romney.

Still, if this is not hard to explain, it’s hard to face: After the Iowa caucus, the Republican Party is all but certain to renominate Trump for the presidency. He will be the GOP’s first three-time nominee since Richard Nixon (in 1960, 1968, and 1972)—and the first ever Republican former presidential incumbent to be renominated after losing reelection.

Even after Trump consolidates the nomination, the choice will not literally be binary. Republican-friendly donors will support third-way choices—the super PAC for anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy received $5 million, more than half its total fundraising through June, from a single GOP mega-donor—not because any can win, but in hope of draining votes from Biden for Trump’s benefit. But the choice will be binary in that only one of two people can plausibly be the next president: Biden or Trump.

What kind of people are Americans, anyway? Trump has made clear, without illusions, that his ballot issue in 2024 is to rehabilitate and ratify his attempt to overturn the election of 2020. He is running to protect himself from the legal consequences of that attempt. But even more fundamentally, he is running to justify himself for attempting it. In 2016, Trump opponents warned that he might refuse to leave office if defeated.

If he should return to the presidency in 2025, we have no reason to expect him to leave in 2029. So maybe the issue on the ballot in 2024 is not a choice at all, but a much more open-ended question. We know who Biden is. We know who Trump is. Who are we?

Sadly, too many Americans are acting like the "Good Germans" who either did nothing to oppose Hitler, or worse yet, supported his rise to power and the ruin - see the image above - it would eventually bring. 

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The Iowa Caucuses Have Become Ridiculous

As one would expect, much of the so often worthless mainstream media is bloviating about Trump's "landslide victory" in Iowa ad nausea,  What one isn't hearing and seeing is who the voters attending the caucuses represent a tiny sliver of the registered Republican voters in that state who themselves make up slightly more than a third of the total registered state electorate.  The Republicans who participated in the caucuses totaled 15.34% of that roughly one-third of voters who are registered Republicans with Trump only receiving 56,000 votes out of the states over 2 million registered voters.  In short, the caucuses results are not a fair sampling of Iowa voters or even necessarily Iowa Republican voters.  Caucuses and nominating conventions - the latter especially so at least here in Virginia - always favor the more extreme candidates who have the most rabid and insane followers and never capture the more expanded vote one gets in a primary election.   One can only wonder when the Iowa caucuses will cease being blown out of importance.   One other thing came out of the actions in Iowa yesterday evening:  evangelicals continued to sell their souls to Trump.  A piece at Salon looks at the real message from the Iowa vote:

Despite the best efforts of the mainstream media to portray the Republican Iowa caucus as a real competition between Donald Trump, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, the result was exactly what anyone reading the polls expected: A massive win for Trump. It usually takes at least an hour to call the Iowa caucus, but the state was called by the Associated Press in fewer than 40 minutes after the caucuses began. Despite all the hype about Haley's last-minute gains, or the possibility that the weather might tilt the outcome (Monday's was the coldest caucus ever), the result was what all statistical odds showed: Trump walked away with it. 

Much of the "maybe someone else will win" hype was driven by capitalism, of course. As with sports, the uncertainty of outcome drives cable news ratings and news site clicks, creating financial pressure on journalists to sell the Iowa caucus as a nail-biter instead of a preordained outcome. But in truth, I think a lot of journalists half-convinced themselves that voters would break to a non-Trump alternative at the last minute for a simple reason: The Republican Party in Iowa is controlled, more than in most states, by evangelical voters. 

Over the past 8 years, we've all watched as evangelicals have grown ever more fanatical in their love of Trump, a thrice-married adulterer who bragged about committing sexual assault. Still, many pundits cling to this fantasy that American evangelicals are morally upright people who actually mean all that talk about chastity, charity, and Christian values. It was always a silly notion, of course, as the evangelical movement has long shown itself more interested in right-wing politics than in feeding the poor and healing the sick.

Iowa does have a long history of choosing Republican candidates who offer a snapshot of how conservative Christianity sees itself at the time. In 2000, George W. Bush won with a "compassionate conservative" message that papered over the sadism that fuels anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ politics with paternalism. In 2008, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee won with his aw-shucks persona barely concealing the malice that fuels him. By 2012, evangelicals were done pretending there was kindness in their authoritarian worldview. They granted former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum — who couldn't conceal his enmity if he tried — the victory. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz beat Trump in 2016. Both men are hateful trolls, but Cruz doesn't cheat on his wife, and in 2016, evangelicals were still wary of being accused of hypocrisy. 

Just like every Republican winner of the Iowa caucus for over two decades, Trump is an avatar for the current mood of white evangelicals. They are done pretending to be "compassionate." The mask is entirely off. Evangelicals are not the salt-of-the-earth types idealized by centrist pundits. They are what feminists, anti-racists, and pro-LGBTQ activists have always said: authoritarians who may use Jesus as cover for their ugly urges, but have no interest in the "love thy neighbor" teachings of their purported savior.

Forget Jesus. The real lord of the evangelical movement has shown his grimacing orange face to the world, and it is a nasty one. There's a temptation among pundits, who want to retain their view of the humble Iowa evangelical, to write this alliance between Trump and the Christian right as purely transactional . . . . But this image of evangelicals as reluctant Trump supporters doesn't comport with reality. Trump often gets a rapturous reception with evangelical audiences and is frequently memorialized in fan art that depicts him in a near-messianic light.

For years, progressive academics and activists have argued that the "evangelical" identity in white America was constructed less around spirituality and more around a very racist, sexist set of political preferences. It's why evangelicals are rabidly anti-abortion and hostile to birth control and sex education, even though the Bible doesn't even mention those topics. It's why they center homophobia in their theology, even though same-sex relations are treated as roughly as sinful as getting a tattoo in the Bible. It's why they hype patriarchal marriage as the end-all, be-all of their faith, even though Jesus explicitly regarded it as a secondary concern to salvation. 

Trump may not believe in faith or salvation, but he sure believes in racism and sexism. That Iowa evangelicals turned out to back Trump isn't a betrayal of their values. It reveals the values that always fueled their movement. It's just the last bit of plausible deniability has faded away. 

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11th Circuit Hands DeSantis a Stinging Defeat

Ron DeSantis' game plan for his now sputtering presidential campaign was to endear himself with the evangelical/Christofascist and white supremacists who now dominate the Republican Party base.  Censoring accurate history about slavery and race, pushing bills to erase LGBT individuals' existence from  public schools, and censoring elected public officials who object to his racist and Christofascist agenda all followed.   DeSantis' agenda has harmed Florida tourism driven teachers and professors from Florida's public schools and universities.  Meanwhile, his campaign is on near life support and he appears to place third in the Iowa caucuses on Monday. In addition, DeSantis has seen courts stay parts of his ugly legislation and this past week the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of an elected district attorney that DeSantis suspended for not embracing DeSantis' agenda and more or less gave DeSantis a resounding bitch slap in its ruling.  What makes the ruling more notable is the fact that the 11th Circuit has a reputation for being "conservative" - read reactionary - yet trashed DeSantis.  A piece in Salon looks at the spanking given to DeSantis.  Here are excerpts:

In the last gasps of his presidential campaign, Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis continues to brag that he made his state the place where “woke goes to die.” He has made his war on woke a central plank in his ongoing effort to secure the Republican nomination.

There has been nothing subtle about DeSantis’ effort to promote himself as a leading culture warrior or to take credit for slaying the woke dragons. . . . . “We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never ever surrender to the woke mob.”

In debate after debate over the last several months, DeSantis has faulted his rivals for being unwilling to “stand up and fight back against what the left is doing to this country” and boasted of many victories over the woke mob.   Among them, DeSantis lists wins over the teachers union on school choice, over Dr. Anthony Fauci on COVID policies, and over George Soros after the Sunshine State governor “removed two of his radical district attorneys.”

On Wednesday, DeSantis suffered a stinging defeat when a three-judge panel of the notoriously conservative  11^th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Andrew Warren, one of those district attorneys in a suit he filed last year. That suit alleged that DeSantis had suspended him “in retaliation for exercising his right of free speech….” and asked “the court to declare the suspension unconstitutional and require that DeSantis reinstate him.’

The court agreed.

Warren drew the ire of DeSantis when he publicly voiced his opposition to the governor’s efforts to limit the rights of transgendered people and of women seeking abortions. 

As Judge Jill Pryor recounts in her 11^th Circuit opinion, “In the summer of 2021, Warren signed… (a statement) expressing concern about ‘bills targeting the transgender community,’ especially transgender youth access to gender affirming care…’” and pledging  “‘ to use their settled discretion and limited resources on enforcement of laws that will not erode the safety and well-being of their community.’”  

A year later, Pryor says, Warren “joined nearly 70 elected prosecutors nationwide in signing… (a statement) addressing the criminalization of abortion after the Supreme Court decided Dobbs vs Jackson Women’s Health Organization.” That statement included an acknowledgment that prosecutors have a responsibility “to refrain from using limited criminal justice system resources to criminalize personal medical decisions.”

As the New York Times reports, an investigation of the circumstances surrounding DeSantis’ suspension of Warren, revealed that the governor’s office “seemed driven by a preconceived political narrative, bent on a predetermined outcome, content with a flimsy investigation and focused on maximizing media attention for Mr. DeSantis.”

When Warren signed the statements on transgender and abortion rights, the judge said, he “spoke as a private citizen.” His “speech occurred outside the workplace, and he never distributed the advocacy statements inside the workplace or included them in internal materials or training sessions. He employed no workplace resources and never marshaled the statements through his process for creating policies.” 

Moreover, Pryor noted that “neither statement referenced any Florida law that would go on unenforced.”

She scolded the governor for punishing Warren for purely partisan reasons. She called him out  for seeking political benefit from “bringing down a reform prosecutor,” and reminded DeSantis that “the First Amendment protects government employees from adverse employment actions based on partisan considerations.”

The judge also noted that despite the governor’s imperial pretensions, “Voters elected Warren; DeSantis did not appoint him.” She explained that “If alignment with DeSantis’s political preferences were an appropriate requirement to perform the state attorney’s duties, there would be little point in local elections open to candidates across the political spectrum.” 

And, in language that has particular resonance in 2024, Judge Pryor wrote, “Elections mean something. Majorities bestow mandates.” In a democracy, the job of elected officials, including prosecutors, is to translate those mandates into policy.

At the time he was suspended, Warren got it right when he labeled what DeSantis had done as “part of the authoritarian playbook,” and “something you’d expect to see in Russia. Not in the United States.” He was right again this week when he called the 11^th Circuit’s free speech decision crucial to “the protection of democracy.”

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