Will Revulsion Toward Trump Create a Political Realignment?

The election of Barack Obama  in 2008 was hailed as proof that a political realignment was taking place.  The prediction proved premature as the existence of a black president cause the forces of hate and bigotry on the right to rally, first in the form of the Tea Party and then in the form of Donald Trump base of support made up of racists and Christian extremist. Nearly four years later revulsion towards Trump - and most of what his base stands for - may be the fuse needed to make the missed realignment of 2008 become a reality.  Several factors are at play: (i) the shrinking of the pool of older white voters, (ii) the much enlarged pool of younger voters, (iii)the revulsion of moral conservatives - this does not include evangelicals - and (iv) growing numbers of older voters waking to the reality that Trump's/the GOP's response to the Covid-19 pandemic represents a threat to their very lives.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the dynamic.  Here are highlights:

You might fairly conclude that political analysts predicting realignments are not much different from stock market touts whose absolute — and mistaken — certainties about coming bull or bear markets lose a lot of people a lot of money. Since the rise of Ronald Reagan in 1980, many more realignments have been forecast than actually materialized.

But there is another way to look at those 2008 predictions: They were not wrong, they were just premature. As a result, a 77-year-old Democratic presidential nominee may be the unlikely instrument of a new generational alignment.

Why now and not in 2008? The most important reason is the obvious one: The backlash against Trump is the driving factor in this election so far — and there could be no better representative of the politics of the past than the current occupant in the White House. He is stubbornly out of touch with the country’s attitudes on many questions, and especially so on racial justice.

Far from adjusting to different times, Trump is betting — as he did in 2016 and as the tea party did in the Obama years — that the leftover right-wing slogans from the 1960s (see: “LAW AND ORDER!”) and a defense of Confederate “heritage” will win him the overwhelming majorities among older white voters that he needs to carry battleground states.

But this isn’t working, and not only because former vice president Joe Biden is an older white guy who is rather hard to tar as an agent of the revolutionary left. It’s also failing because many older voters are petrified of what Trump’s astonishingly inept handling of the coronavirus pandemic means for their health and their very lives.

But more importantly for the long run, the 2020 electorate is not the electorate of the tea party wave, or even of 2016. The new generations that Obama realignment enthusiasts acclaimed 12 years ago are, at long last, the dominant groups in the electorate.

As a Pew Research Center study showed, members of Gen Z (born after 1996) couldn’t even vote in 2012 and made up just 4 percent of the 2016 potential electorate. But they will account for 1 in 10 eligible voters this year. Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) will constitute 27 percent of this year’s eligible voters. In combination with Gen Xers (born 1965 to 1980), more than 6 in 10 of this year’s electorate will be younger than 55.

Three things are true: (1.) The post-boomer generations are more diverse than the rest of the electorate. (2.) Younger whites are more liberal than their elders on matters of racial justice — as a Washington Post-Schar School poll showed this month — and on social issues. (3.) The share of millennials who vote will be higher than in Obama’s elections simply because they are older than they were in 2008 or 2012.

The 14-point lead Biden enjoyed over Trump in the New York Times-Siena College poll released last week reflects all these factors. Biden is splitting voters over 50 roughly evenly with Trump and then overwhelming the president among registered voters under 35 (59 to 25 percent) and those 35 to 49 (53 to 30 percent).

Nor did Biden’s margins depend solely on the diversity of the younger cohorts. Among whites under 45, Biden led Trump 52 to 30 percent.

Thus could a president who rose to power by exploiting the fears and anxieties of the aging part of the country find himself brought down by the rising generations who have had enough of the past. The United States of Trump’s imagination may simply no longer exist.

Trump and Trumpism Rejected in Virginia

I will admit that I am on a post election win high at the moment.  Last nigh's Democrat blow out victory has helped restore my faith in the decency of Americans - at least Virginians after a depressing year watching Donald Trump trash decency, wage war on LGBT citizens and strive to make the reprehensible normal.  Thankfully, Virginia rejected Trumpism and bitch slapped Republicans who for the most part have prostituted themselves to Trump and all but donned KKK robes as they sought to emulate his racism/hate and bigotry agenda.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the election aftermath.  It correctly notes that yesterday was a first step in taking America back from the forces of hate, division and bigotry.  Trump lost big time even though not on the ballot.  Here column are excerpts:

One year after President Trump rode a campaign of white nationalism into the White House, the American people struck back. Decisive Democratic wins for governor in New Jerseyand Virginia, not to mention the Democratic victories for lieutenant governor and attorney general, are a clear sign of the electorate’s disquiet with Trump’s low-road Twitter presidency.

But three other signs come to mind in the afterglow of Election Day 2017. Here are my quick thoughts.

Borrowing pages from Trump’s white-nationalist playbook will hurt you.

Nothing was more disturbing and degrading of the presidency than Trump’s both-sides nonsense in response to the ugly white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, where Heather Heyer was allegedly killed by a racist who plowed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters. That Ed Gillespie adopted Trump’s rhetoric on monuments to Confederate generals and tried to scare voters with loose talk of Latino gangs clearly was a bridge too far the people of the commonwealth. 

No, Democrats don’t need to have a progressive, Bernie-anointed candidate to win.

Tom Perriello lost the primary to now-Governor-elect Ralph Northam, a centrist anchored in the establishment. Perriello was endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who ran for president in the Democratic Party in 2016 but doesn’t see fit to join the party. But Perriello didn’t disappear. He worked hard on Northam’s behalf and not grudgingly. . . . Thus proving that a vanquished primary opponent who works hard to help his victor during the general election is essential.

The American people are not afraid of self-correction.

When the election was called for Northam, I was sitting in the same spot on my sofa where I watched in horror the dawn of Trump nation a year ago. The American people broke my heart that night. Everything that I knew to be true — hoped to be true — about my country was voided by voters who responded positively to the most racist, xenophobic and misogynistic campaign for president in recent memory. The fear his election unleashed was raw and palpable. But the ugliness and incompetence that followed Trump into the White House had an impact.

The Democratic gubernatorial victories in New Jersey and Virginia are the first sign of correction. Another is the successful run of Justin Fairfax, the newly-elected lieutenant governor of Virginia who will become only the second African American to win that seat. L. Douglas Wilder won the post in 1985. He went on to become the commonwealth’s and the nation’s first black governor. And yet another is the election of Danica Roem to the Virginia House of Delegates. She becomes the first openly transgender state legislator in the United States by defeating the homophobic and anti-transgender Republican incumbent Bob Marshall.

Zac Petkanas, former rapid response chief for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, summed it up best in a tweet after the race was called for Northam. “The #resistance began on November 9, 2016,” he wrote. “The #revolution began tonight [Nov. 7].”

Onward to taking our country back from the marauding forces of division and hate in 2018. This is not over.

Is GOP Support for Trump Starting to Crack?

Having grown up in a family that always discussed politics around the dinner table and at family gatherings - and usually voted Republican - I've heard about politics since I was a child.  Never in my recollection, however, do I recall as much concern about a lawless president who frankly appears to be mentally ill.  Not even during the height of Watergate was there the level of concern that seems to increase daily with Trump as he makes it increasingly clear that he views himself above the law.  His suggestions that he wants an FBI that reports directly to him and, by implication, is loyal only to him smacks of being the beginning of a secret police that would protect Trump at all cost and intimidate citizens and other elected officials. The level of his desperation over the Russiagate investigations increasingly suggests that money laundering and other serious crimes must have occurred.  One simply does not act this way if there is nothing to hide.  And then there is the issue of the company Trump has kept: Mafia figures, Russian mobsters, and Russian oligarchs.  One has to wonder if and when Congressional Republicans will cease averting their eyes to the Frankenstein monster in the White House.  A column suggests that perhaps support for Trump is beginning to crack.  Here are excerpts:

Again and again over the past year, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan have had to decide what kind of behavior they are willing to tolerate from Donald Trump. Again and again, McConnell and Ryan have bowed down to Trump.

They have mumbled occasional words of protest, sometimes even harsh ones, like Ryan’s use of “racist” last year. Then they have gone back to supporting Trump.

The capitulation of McConnell and Ryan has created an impression — especially among many liberals — that congressional Republicans stand behind the president.

But don’t be fooled: Republican support for the president has started to crack.

Below the leadership level, Republicans are defying Trump more often, and McConnell and Ryan aren’t always standing in their way. You can see this defiance in the bipartisan Senate investigation of the Russia scandal. You can see it in the deal on Russian sanctions. And you can see it in the Senate’s failure, so far at least, to pass a health care bill.

I think many political observers are missing the ways that parts of Trump’s own party have subtly begun to revolt.

Just listen to Trump himself. “It’s very sad that Republicans,” he wrote in a weekend Twitter rant, “do very little to protect their President.” In a historical sense, he is right. Members of Congress usually support a new president of their own party much more strongly than Republicans are now.

They typically understand that a young presidency offers the rare opportunity for sweeping legislation — like the Reagan tax cut, the George W. Bush tax cut, the Clinton deficit plan and the Obama stimulus, health bill and financial regulation.  . . . . partisan loyalty is the norm.

Matt Glassman, another political scientist, is one of the sharper observers of the White House-Congress relationship, and I asked him to put the current situation in context. Glassman said that many progressives have made the mistake of comparing how they want Congress to treat Trump with what it is doing. The more relevant yardstick is how Congress’s treatment compares historically.

“The current congressional G.O.P. seems less supportive and more constraining of the Potus than basically any in history,”

Many of today’s Republicans avoid going on television as Trump surrogates. They mock him off the record, and increasingly on the record, too. In recent weeks, eight senators have publicly stood in the way of a health care bill. Republican senators are also helping to conduct an investigation of Trump’s campaign and have backed the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel.

One reason is that they don’t fear Trump. About 90 percent of Republican House members won a larger vote share in their district last year than Trump did . . . . Since he took office, Trump’s nationwide net approval rating has fallen to minus 16 (with only 39 percent approving) from plus 4.  So it’s not just Republican politicians who are inching away from Trump. Republican voters are, too.

None of this is meant to suggest that congressional Republicans have been profiles in courage. They haven’t been.

In the months ahead, unfortunately, that level of resistance is unlikely to be sufficient. Trump has made clear that he isn’t finished trying to take health insurance away from millions of people or trying to hide the truth about his Russia ties. “The constitutional crisis won’t be if Trump fires Mueller,” as the A.C.L.U.’s Kate Oh put it. “The constitutional crisis is if Congress takes no real action in response.”

A Road Map to Trump's Collusion with Russia

Anyone who follows the Trump/Pence regime's tactics can readily see a pattern: when news on Russiagate heats up, Trump engages in inflammatory behavior to distract the news media and cable TV networks.  This past week was no exception, when Trump engaged in attacks on Morning Joe anchors, launched new attacks on the legitimate news media, and, of course, launched its dubious voter fraud commission.  Meanwhile, stories had broken that might be finally laying out a road map of how the Trump campaign colluded with Vladimir Putin and Russian intelligence operatives to swing the 2016 presidential election to Trump.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at this possible road map.  Here are excerpts:

Most of the commentary surrounding the Russia scandal has treated the possibility that Donald Trump’s campaign deliberately colluded with Moscow as remote, unfounded speculation. The new reporting that has broken this weekend suggests instead that this collusion likely did take place. It provides a road map to the, or perhaps a, likely avenue through which this occurred.

The figure carrying out the operation in question was Peter W. Smith, who died at the age of 81 earlier this year. Smith is hardly a lone kook. He’s an established Republican donor with a demonstrated history in financing ethically murky investigations, such as paying Arkansas state troopers for stories of Bill Clinton’s sexual dalliances.

Smith surfaced earlier in the week in an explosive Wall Street Journal report by Shane Harris, which Harris followed up on Friday night. What really underscores the significance of Harris’s reporting, though, is a detailed account, also published Friday night, by Matt Tait, a British cybersecurity expert who dealt extensively with Smith. Tait’s report makes it clear that Smith had access to Michael Flynn, at the very least, and was working not only to obtain stolen Clinton emails but also to hide the Trump campaign’s involvement.

Smith tried to hire Tait for his project and showed him a document creating an independent-looking organization to try to acquire the stolen emails. The document, Tait reports, “detailed a company Smith and his colleagues had set up as a vehicle to conduct the research: ‘KLS Research’, set up as a Delaware LLC ‘to avoid campaign reporting,’ and listing four groups who were involved in one way or another.” This certainly appears like an attempt to mask the Trump campaign’s involvement in the plot.

The document listed a series of high-level Trump campaign officials: Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Sam Clovis, Lt. Gen. Flynn, and Lisa Nelson.

The key to understanding the significance of this report is to put it together with a sentence from Harris’s first story on this in the Journal, which reports that U.S. investigators “have examined reports from intelligence agencies that describe Russian hackers discussing how to obtain emails from Mrs. Clinton’s server and then transmit them to Mr. Flynn via an intermediary.”

So, according to Harris’s reporting, Russians were trying to transmit emails from Clinton’s server. Tait is describing in detail a Republican operative trying to obtain stolen emails from Russia. So we have evidence both of the campaign’s request and Russian efforts to fulfill the request.

Smith is deceased (at an old age, there is no grounds for suspicion about the cause of his death), but Michael Flynn, a figure he reportedly worked for, is very much with us and facing significant legal jeopardy. Flynn’s lawyer has said he has “a story to tell.” This might be part of the story.

The Trump Obstruction Case is Gaining Momentum

With all the noise over the Senate Republican's Dickensian "healthcare reform" bill - it does everything short of instituting work houses for the poor and debtor's prisons - and the daily lies by Der  Trumpenführer aimed at distracting the media and duping his base (the New York Times has a must read compilation here), something noteworthy has failed to get adequate coverage: the case against Trump for obstruction of justice is gaining momentum.  The biggest question remains one of whether and when Vichy Republicans will put the rule of law and the nation ahead of their own party. Things will likely get very nasty and it will be incumbent on true patriots to demand that Congressional Republicans cease their own obstruction and allow Trump to suffer the consequences of his actions against Comey and others.  Here are highlights from a piece in Vanity Fair:

It’s a very long walk, inside the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building, from Rachel Brand’s fifth-floor office to Rod Rosenstein’s space on the fourth floor. But the more important gap—in relative power—between the associate attorney general and her boss, the deputy attorney general, could shorten in a hurry.

Rosenstein has become an unexpectedly pivotal figure in the Donald Trump-Russia mess. Two weeks after joining the administration, the mild-mannered career prosecutor wrote a three-page memo that the president used to justify firing F.B.I. director James Comey. After Trump, on national television, revealed the memo to be a ruse, Rosenstein responded by appointing special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Those twists pretty much guarantee that Mueller will eventually call Rosenstein as a witness in the investigation—at which point, goes the conventional wisdom, Rosenstein will recuse himself from all things Russia-related.

But the break could come sooner. “It really depends on Rod’s exact role in the firing of Comey, and what Trump told him,” a Department of Justice insider says. Mueller will also want to know about any communications between Jeff Sessions and Rosenstein regarding the firing, and if he establishes those links through other witnesses, Rosenstein may need to step aside even before he’s scheduled to answer the special counsel’s questions himself.

Or he could be given a shove toward recusal by a summons from the newly energized Senate Judiciary Committee. Its rival, the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been faster out of the investigatory gate, reeling in Comey and Sessions for dramatic, headline-making hearings.

Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, a former federal prosecutor, has loudly speculated that he believes that Michael Flynn, Trump’s short-lived, highly compromised national security director, has already started cooperating with Russia investigators.

On Wednesday, the committee’s leaders met with Mueller to coordinate their probes. Afterward, Grassley proclaimed that Judiciary would now take the Senate lead on allegations of obstruction of justice—which would mean calling Rosenstein, among others, to testify, an appearance that could trigger the deputy A.G.’s recusal.

That would leave the previously obscure, 44-year-old, Dutch-clog-dancing Brand in charge to make what could be administration-toppling decisions. . . . If Brand’s role increases, she could face some wrenching choices: whether to go along if Trump ever tries to fire Mueller, and, if he doesn’t, what to do when Mueller eventually delivers his report, especially if it recommends criminal charges against high administration officials. “She’s got a good reputation as a solid lawyer, committed to the rule of law,” says Matthew Miller, who was an aide to former attorney general Eric Holder. “But so did Rod Rosenstein. People have a way of sacrificing their good reputation for Donald Trump, for some reason. Hopefully, we’ll never find out how she would

Brand would also be making those decisions in a political atmosphere that’s growing ever more poisonous. So far, the attacks on Mueller’s credibility have been scattershot and seemingly freelance: Trump’s nasty tweets, Sean Hannity’s nightly diatribes. The Washington Post acquired a set of anti-Mueller talking points distributed by the Republican National Committee. handle that test.

Trump dropped plans to assemble a White House “war room” to push back against the Russia allegations, but are the president and his allies beginning to mount a coordinated effort to undermine the integrity of the Russia investigation? “Could be,” a Democratic operative says. “To the extent that this White House is organized, which is questionable.”