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Republicans, It’s Time to Say "Enough" With Trump

Never in my lifetime have the stakes of the pending presidential election been so high.  Indeed, the continuation of America's democracy and the rule of law are at risk should Donald Trump regain the White House.  Trump has promised retribution against his critics and called for the execution of some (Liz Cheney is the latest such target) while shredding the rights of millions of Americans.  Yet far too many Republicans continue to drink the MAGA Kool-Aid, seemingly driven by racial hatred and contempt for immigrants seeking a better life just as was the case of every American who is not of Native American heritage. Judge J. Michael Luttig who served on  the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 1991 to 2006 after being appointed by President George H.W. Bush and a life long Republic makes one last call for Republicans to reject Trump and put country over party in an op-ed in the New York Times.  Here are column highlights:

We Americans live in faith with our Constitution and with the past generations of Americans who swore to protect it and fought to defend it. One week from today, we will decide whether Donald Trump is fit to be president of the United States again. He is not. When we entrusted our Constitution and our democracy to him before, he betrayed us. Campaigning for the presidency again, he now promises to exact vengeance against his fellow Americans whom he deems “the enemy from within,” those who have dared to challenge his betrayal, an enemies list that includes Republicans and Democrats alike.

There could be no higher duty of American citizenship than to decisively repudiate a man who betrayed the nation when he was previously entrusted with the highest office in the land and now threatens the persecution of American citizens who have crossed him. In the almost 250 years since the founding of the nation, no president before Donald Trump has ever so betrayed America.

This is not a difficult decision for voters, though my fellow Republicans and conservatives will finally have to decide what they have long hoped they would never have to decide — whether to put their country above their party. Republicans and conservatives have always proudly claimed they would be the first to put the country above all else when the time came. That time has come. If Republicans are unwilling to put America before their party now, they will never do so. They must be honest with themselves.

This election is anything but politics as usual, no matter how desperately Donald Trump and the G.O.P. have tried to make it that.

As a lawyer and a judge, I have devoted my entire life to America’s democracy, Constitution and rule of law. I took solemn oaths to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign as well as domestic. While most Americans do not literally take oaths to preserve and defend the Constitution, all Americans freely assume those same oaths and they should take their obligations seriously every single day of their lives without any reservation. The reason America is still the envy of the world after almost two and a half centuries is because so many of its citizens do take seriously their obligations as citizens.

Through his words and deeds, Donald Trump has over and again demonstrated his palpable contempt for those cornerstones of America’s grand experiment in democratic self-government. He has proved himself to be an anti-democratic, anti-Constitution candidate for the presidency of the United States.

I am 70 years old and I have always voted for the Republican candidates for president because I never doubted they would honor their sacred obligations to our democracy and our Constitution. I have never doubted the Democratic candidates for the presidency would honor their obligations, either. But today, I do not recognize the Republican Party that I have known across my lifetime. It is not the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln or Ronald Reagan and neither is it conservative, as that term has been inspiringly invoked by conservatives since the founding. Today, the party of Lincoln and Reagan stands only for one man and that man’s disfigurement of both Republicanism and conservatism.

As I wrote in August when I endorsed Kamala Harris for president, Mr. Trump drove a stake through the heart of America’s democracy and Constitution on Jan. 6, 2021, . . . . in an attempt to overturn the presidential election he knew he lost to Joe Biden and prevent the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in almost 250 years.

For his grave offenses that dark January day nearly four years ago, he will forever have the ignominious distinction of being the first American president since the founding to be charged with crimes against the United States. With the assistance of a willing Supreme Court, he succeeded in delaying trial and accountability for his betrayal of the nation until after this election. Now, as he wished, he will never be held accountable for his offenses unless the American people first hold him accountable at the ballot box on Nov. 5.

Yet, to this very day, the former president; his running mate, Senator JD Vance; and much of the Republican Party persist in the fraudulent claim that the 2020 election was stolen from them and, in breathtaking defiance of American democracy and the Constitution, that they can be trusted to ensure a peaceful transfer of power only if Donald Trump wins. That is not democracy and the rule of law. It is autocracy and lawlessness.

America’s democracy and the rule of law are the only truly consequential stakes in the 2024 presidential election. Yes, there are important policy issues about which we disagree. But that has always been the case and always will be. In this election, these policy differences are comparatively inconsequential, if consequential at all.

Ms. Harris is the only candidate who can be trusted to honor the president’s sacred obligations to America’s democracy, Constitution and rule of law. The vice president understands and cares about what Donald Trump does not. She calls on Americans to “stand up for the rule of law. For our democratic ideal. And for the Constitution of the United States.” She believes we “have the power to chart a new way forward, one that is worthy of this magnificent country that we are all blessed to call home.”

America has never heard those words from Donald Trump. And it never will.

The choice for America next Tuesday could not be clearer.

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Trump's "Racist Carnival" and The Sell Out Washington Post

First, an apology for not posting. The husband and I have taken many cruises on a number of cruise lines and never, ever have I had such absolutely horrible Internet service.  It has been so slow and unreliable, that it has been impossible to upload posts on Blogger, the platform I use, despite numerous efforts.  Trying to deal with office emails has been a similar nightmare.  Despite this, I have been following politics and events in the USA from Europe where most locals we talk with are appalled that Donald Trump is even a possible contender to return to the White House.  Most have sad that while America has made some grave mistakes in the past, overall it is viewed here as a positive force in the world and people ask "what has happened to America."  All of which brings me to Trump's Madison Square Garden rally where the only thing lacking was the crowd being dressed in KKK robes.  Politico (I can't give the hyperlink because of the crappy Internet) referred to Trump's rally as a "racist carnival"  and described it this way:

If Donald Trump loses on Nov. 5, the racist carnival he curated at Madison Square Garden could be remembered as the day that cost him this margin-of-error election.

As Kamala Harris visited a Puerto Rican restaurant in Pennsylvania, talking about her “Puerto Rican Opportunity Economy Task Force,” Trump was at Madison Square Garden, where Tony Hinchcliffe, the host of Kill Tony podcast, called the U.S. territory a “floating island of garbage.” It was a split screen the Harris campaign welcomed. Nearly half a million people of Puerto Rican descent live in battleground Pennsylvania, and lots more elsewhere were certainly absorbing the headlines.

And Harris won the day.

Trump entered Sunday with all the makings of a win: . . . . Even Melania Trump, who rarely appears with Trump on the trail, showed up.

Instead, speakers trafficked in racist and vulgar rhetoric. Punchlines targeted Black and Jewish people. Latinos “love making babies, there’s no pulling out, they cum inside, just like they do to our country,” Hinchcliffe said. David Rem, a Trump friend, called Harris "the anti-Christ.” Radio host Sid Rosenberg spoke of "fucking illegals." Another speaker suggested Harris had “pimp handlers.”

The campaign tried to beat back the comparison that Tim Walz drew earlier in the day to the infamous 1939 Nazi rally at the same venue. They even posted a photo of a Holocaust survivor in attendance.

But there was a lot of racism on the stage, while outside the Garden, a projection from Democrats read: “Trump praised Hitler.”

The rally — which felt in some ways like a Republican National Convention rerun, including some of the same speakers — seemed to backfire. Blowback was not only swift but bipartisan. Rep. Anthony P. D'Esposito, also of Puerto Rican descent, and one of the New York Republicans Trump's visit was supposed to boost, posted to X, “Stay on message.” Republican Rep. María Elvira Salazar of Florida called Hinchcliffe’s joke “racist,” while Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida said the joke was “not funny” and “not true.”

Trump’s campaign said Hinchcliffe’s “joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.” Left untouched by the campaign, though: any of the former president's own long record of racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric.

But it all looked like a fiasco for the former president.

Back in Philadelphia, even before the rally, Harris subtly shifted her cautious tone — no longer was she talking about herself as an “underdog.” Instead, she said, "the momentum is with us."

Sadly, I have concluded that vile and open racism is what attacks the MAGA core - including a number of Republican "friends" and acquaintances - to Trump. 

Meanwhile other despicable billionaires were spiking editorial pages that would otherwise have endorsed Kamala Harris, including the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post where the publications' owners seemingly struck deals either to line their pockets or avoid retribution should Trump somehow win.   Like many others, I have cancelled by subscription to the Washington Post and will likely cancel my Amazon Prime account to send my own "f*ck you" to Jeff Bezos.  Even the Post notes the blowback:

For a time this fall, the mood in The Washington Post’s newsroom showed signs of lightening.

The buyouts of some 120 journalists at the end of 2023 were in the rearview mirror. Stories about the new publisher’s alleged involvement in a British newspaper phone-hacking scandal earlier in his career, an episode in which he’d vigorously denied wrongdoing, had fallen off the front pages. The paper was breaking news with its coverage of a once-in-a-lifetime presidential campaign, instead of being the subject of news stories.

And, crucially, subscription numbers, which had tumbled since the end of the Trump administration, were ticking up ever so slightly.

That momentum came to a halt over the weekend, after Friday’s surprise announcement by Publisher William Lewis that The Post’s editorial section would cease its long tradition of endorsing a presidential candidate — a decision he made public just 11 days before Election Day.

The outrage at the decision has been swift — from Post readers, journalism leaders, politicians and dismayed employees. A cancellation movement swept through social networks. Instead of using an internal analytics tool to check traffic to their own stories, some Post journalists used it to chart the soaring number of subscribers visiting the customer account page that allows them to cancel their subscriptions.

On social media, sharing screenshots of Post subscription cancellation confirmations became more than just a thing. It was a political statement primarily coming from the American left, enraged by reports in The Post and elsewhere that the newspaper’s editorial writers had drafted an endorsement of the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, over her Republican opponent, former president Donald Trump.

The statements were also coming from within The Post. On Sunday, Michele Norris — the former NPR anchor and best-selling author who had been a Post reporter early in her career — became the second opinion contributor at the newspaper to resign in protest, following Friday’s resignation by contributing editor and columnist Robert Kagan.

The decision to end endorsements was made by owner Jeff Bezos, according to reporting by The Post and other news organizations.

Norris found that . . . . move is “a terrible mistake” in an “election where core democratic principles are at stake.”

Since Friday’s announcement, Lewis has sought to tamp down speculation that Bezos’s decision was meant to help Trump.

Within hours of Lewis’s announcement, 11 Post opinion columnists had co-signed a column that was published on the paper’s website condemning the decision as “an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love. This is a moment for the institution to be making clear its commitment to democratic values, the rule of law and international alliances, and the threat that Donald Trump poses to them.” By Sunday, the list of co-signers had grown to 19.

One can only hope that the cancellation movement grows.  As for Lewis' pitiful explanations, they are consistent with the decline in the Post under his leadership.  He needs to go.

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