What Might a Post-Trump GOP Look Like?

The future of the Republican Party will remain up in the air for some time whether Donald Trump wins in November - a nightmarish thought - or goes down in ignominious defeat - a much more pleasing thought.  The bigger Trump's loss, the better the chances that the party will regain some semblance of a moral compass.  Any true change will require the exiling of Trump's principal base of support: white supremacists and evangelical Christians. Whether or not there will be much of a party left once those boils on the party are excised will remain to be seen given that so many former Republicans may be unwilling to re-associate with a party that has so strongly revealed its moral bankruptcy.  Some hope a stunning Trump loss will bring the remnants of the GOP back to its senses, yet the example here in Virginia suggests that such may well not be the case. After not winning a statewide race in eleven years, the Virginia GOP continues to nominate extremists and recently even replaced a more viable congressional incumbent with and extremist with ties to Liberty University.  A column in the New York Times looks at the possibilities.  Here are highlights:

[I]f Trump loses? Then the future of the party will be up for grabs. It’s time to start thinking about who can grab it, who should, and who will.

Much depends on the margin of defeat. If it’s razor thin and comes down to a vote-count dispute in a single state, as it did in Florida in 2000, Trump will almost surely allege fraud, claim victory and set off a constitutional crisis. As Ohio State law professor Edward Foley noted last year in a must-read law review article, a state like Pennsylvania could send competing certificates of electoral votes to Congress. Interpretive ambiguities in the 12th Amendment and the Electoral Count Act of 1887 could deadlock the House and the Senate. We could have two self-declared presidents on the eve of next year’s inauguration.

But let’s assume Trump loses narrowly but indisputably. In that case, the Trump family will do what it can to retain control of the G.O.P.

Tommy Hicks Jr., the current Republican National Committee co-chairman, is one possible candidate to move up to become chairman, and run the R.N.C., but the likelier choice is Hicks’s good friend Donald Trump Jr. The Trumpers will make the argument that NeverTrumpers cost them the election and are thus responsible for everything bad that might happen in a Biden administration, from crime on the streets to liberal Supreme Court picks to some future Benghazi-type episode.

Something unpleasant might come of this. It tends to happen whenever a large mass of conformists convince themselves that they’ve been betrayed by a nonconforming minority in their midst.

Then there’s the third scenario: An overwhelming and humiliating Trump defeat, on the order of George H.W. Bush’s 168 to 370 electoral vote loss to Bill Clinton in 1992.

The infighting will begin the moment Florida, North Carolina or any other must-win state for Trump is called for Joe Biden. It will pit two main camps against each other. On the right, it will be the What Were We Thinking? side of the party. On the further right, the Trump Didn’t Go Far Enough side. Think of it as a cage match between Marco Rubio and Tucker Carlson for the soul of the G.O.P.

Both sides will recognize that Trump was a uniquely incompetent executive who — as in his business dealings — always proved his own worst enemy, always squandered his luck, never learned from his mistakes, never grew in office. Both sides will want to wash their hands of the soon-to-be-former president, his obnoxious relatives, their intellectual vacuity and their self-dealing ways.

That’s where agreement ends. The What Were We Thinking? Republicans will want to hurry the party back to some version of what it was when Paul Ryan was its star. They’ll want to pretend that Trump never happened. They will organize a task force composed of former party worthies to write an election post-mortem, akin to what then-G.O.P. chair Reince Priebus did after 2012, emphasizing the need to repair relations with minorities, women and younger voters.

The Didn’t Go Far Enough camp will make the opposite case. They’ll note that Trump never built the wall, never got U.S. troops out of the Middle East, never drained the swamp of Beltway corruption, ended NAFTA in name only, did Wall Street’s bidding at Main Street’s expense, and “owned the libs” on Twitter while losing the broader battle of ideas. This camp will seek a new champion: Trump plus a brain.

These are two deeply unattractive versions of the party of Lincoln, one feckless, the other fanatical. Even so, all who care about the health of American democracy should hold their noses and hope the feckless side prevails.

As with the Democrats after Jimmy Carter’s defeat in 1980, it will probably take more than one electoral shellacking for conservative-leaning voters to appreciate the scale of disaster that Trump’s presidency inflicted on the party and the country. It will probably also take more than one defeat for the party to learn that electoral contests should still be waged, and won, near the center of the ideological spectrum, not the fringe.
But everything has to start somewhere. A decisive Trump loss in November isn’t a sufficient condition for the G.O.P. to begin to heal itself. It’s still a beginning.

Revulsion Towards Trump’s Racist Politics is Building

Donald Trump is the antithesis to decency and morality and, as previous posts have focused upon, his sole reelection plan is to double down on racism and hatred in the hope of turning out more of the GOP's shrinking base to the polls come November.   Almost everything the GOP once stood for - fiscal responsibility, support for science and education, and true basic morality (as opposed to Christofascist false piety and hypocrisy) - has been jettisoned as the Party has sold its soul to Trump and the white supremacists and religious extremist who now make up the core party base.  Meanwhile, younger voters who see both Trump and Christofascists as repulsive and educated suburban voters are fleeing the GOP.  As a column in the Washington Post notes, support for the GOP now boils down to racism more than any other factor. The party once identified with so-called country club Republicans now finds its image tied to red neck racists. Some surveys suggest that a wave is building against Trump and the soulless GOP.  Here are column highlights:

Four years ago, Christopher Parker, an African American political scientist at the University of Washington, made the provocative argument that Donald Trump’s candidacy could “do more to advance racial understanding than the election of Barack Obama.”

“Trump’s clear bigotry,” Parker wrote in the American Prospect, a liberal journal, “makes it impossible for whites to deny the existence of racism in America. . . . His success clashes with many white Americans’ vision of the United States as a fair and just place.”

Those words seem prescient today, after four years of President Trump’s racism, from the “very fine people” marching with neo-Nazis in Charlottesville to, in just the past week, a “white power” retweet and a threat to veto defense spending to protect the names of Confederate generals; after a pandemic disproportionately ravaged African American communities while an indifferent president tried to move on; after Trump-allied demonstrators, some carrying firearms and Confederate flags, tried to “liberate” themselves from public health restrictions; after the video of George Floyd’s killing showed the world blatant police brutality; after Trump used federal firepower against peaceful civil rights demonstrators of all colors.

The reckoning Parker foresaw is now upon us. White women, disgusted by Trump’s cruelty, are abandoning him in large number. White liberals, stunned by the brazen racism, have taken to the streets. And signs point to African American turnout in November that will rival the record level of 2012, when Obama was on the ballot. This, by itself, would flip Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to Democrats, an analysis by the liberal Center for American Progress shows.

Surprisingly high Democratic turnout in recent contests in Wisconsin, Georgia, Kentucky and Colorado points to the possibility of a building wave. The various measures of Democratic enthusiasm suggest “turnout beyond anything we’ve seen since 1960,” University of North Carolina political scientist Marc Hetherington predicts. If so, that would mean a historic repudiation of Trump, who knows his hope of reelection depends on low turnout. He has warned that mail-in ballots and other attempts to encourage more voting would mean “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

That may not be wrong. Trump has accelerated a decades-old trend toward parties redefining themselves by race and racial attitudes. Racial resentment is now the single most important factor driving Republicans and Republican-leaning movers, according to extensive research, most recently by Nicholas Valentino and Kirill Zhirkov at the University of Michigan — more than religion, culture, class or ideology. An ongoing study by University of North Carolina researchers finds that racial resentment even drives hostility toward mask-wearing and social distancing. Conversely, racial liberalism now drives Democrats of all colors more than any other factor.

Consider just one yardstick, a standard question of racial attitudes in which people are asked to agree or disagree with this statement: “It’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites.”

In 2012, 56 percent of white Republicans agreed with that statement, according to the American National Election Studies. The number grew in 2016 with Trump’s rise, to 59 percent. Last month, an astonishing 71 percent of white Republicans agreed, according to a YouGov poll written by Parker and conducted by GQR (where my wife is a partner).

The opposite movement among white Democrats is even more striking. In 2012, 38 percent agreed that African Americans didn’t try hard enough. In 2016, that dropped to 27 percent. And now? Just 13 percent.

To the extent Trump’s racist provocation is a strategy (rather than simply an instinct), it is a miscalculation. The electorate was more than 90 percent white when Richard Nixon deployed his Southern strategy; the proportion is now 70 percent white and shrinking. But more than that, Trump’s racism has alienated a large number of white people.

“For many white Americans, the things Trump is saying and getting away with, they just didn’t think they lived in a world where that could happen,” says Vincent Hutchings, a political scientist specializing in public opinion at the University of Michigan. Racist appeals in particular alienate white, college-educated women, and even some women without college degrees, he has found: “One of the best ways to exacerbate the gender gap isn’t to talk about gender but to talk about race.”

This is what Parker had in mind when he wrote in 2016 that Trump could be “good for the United States.” The backlash Trump provoked among whites and nonwhites alike “could kick off a second Reconstruction,” Parker now thinks. “I know it sounds crazy, especially coming from a black man,” he says, but “I think Trump actually is one of the best things that’s happened in this country.”

The Trump Campaign’s Lies and Use of a Nazi-Era Symbol

Far right extremists, not Antifa, are the number one threat per DHS.

While Donald Trump may be ignorant of many historical facts and what is common knowledge to a majority of Americans - per John Bolton, Trump did not know the United Kingdom is a nuclear power - his campaign is not.  Thus, the recent use of a Nazi symbol that caused Facebook to take down Trump ads cannot be written off as mere ignorance.  The use of the symbol - a badge worn by Nazi political prisoners in concentration camps was no doubt used to send a message to the Neo-Nazis and white supremacist who make up the core of the Trump base of support (along with white evangelicals who belong to historically racist denominations). The other troubling aspect of the use of the symbol was that it was used to attack Trump's mythical boogeyman, Antifa, when the Department of Homeland Security's own documentation shows that neo-fascists - the antithesis of Antifa - is what posed the largest threat to law and order.  In short, the Trump campaign sought to deflect blame from its own base and blame a different group when the facts simply do not support the claim.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the use of the Nazi symbol and the active lying being advanced by the Trump campaign.   Here are excerpts:

President Trump’s campaign is under fire for employing a symbol once used by Nazis in a new batch of Facebook ads — a red inverted triangle that appeared alongside a warning about the dire threat posed by “antifa,” a loose motley group allied against neo-fascist activity.

An internal Department of Homeland Security document — which I obtained from a congressional source — makes the Trump campaign’s use of this symbol, and its justification for it, look a whole lot worse, by undercutting the claim that antifa represents any kind of threat in the first place.

After Facebook removed the ads amid an outcry, the Trump campaign continued to defend use of the image — which was used by Nazis to identify political prisoners — by claiming it’s a “common Antifa symbol.”

Meanwhile, Trump and his top officials have continued to blame unrest and violence at protests on antifa, to cast the violence more broadly as primarily left-wing in orientation.
But the DHS document I obtained undercuts this series of claims.

The [DHS] document — which is an assessment of ongoing “protest-related” threats to law enforcement dated June 17 — makes no mention at all of antifa in its cataloging of those threats.

The DHS document states that “anarchist and anti-government extremists pose the most significant threat of targeted low-level, protest-related assaults against law enforcement.” It bases this assessment on “the observed ideologies of recent attackers and the body of reporting of tactics noted by violent opportunists used over the last two weeks.” Thus, as of this week, “anarchist and anti-government extremists” pose the most serious ongoing threat, according to Trump’s own Homeland Security department.

The document defines “anarchist extremists” as:

groups or individuals who facilitate or engage in acts of unlawful violence as a means of changing the government and society in support of the belief that all forms of capitalism and corporate globalization should be opposed and that governing institutions are unnecessary and harmful to society.

Not only does this document not name antifa, this description of generic “anarchist extremists” does not remotely describe what we’ve come to understand “antifa” to be. While there might be some loose and occasional overlap between antifa and anarchists, antifa isn’t even a group, and adherents are characterized by specific resistance to perceived neo-fascist movements, which is wholly different from this definition of what motivates anarchist extremists.

This document shows that the government itself does not view antifa as a significant threat in the homeland,” Juliette Kayyem, a former DHS official who reviewed the document at my request, told me.

“The document shows how absurd the Trump campaign’s justification for using the symbol really is,” Kayyem added. “It undercuts their defense.”

The Anti-Defamation League has harshly criticized the Trump campaign for employing a symbol that “is practically identical to that used by the Nazi regime to classify political prisoners in concentration camps.”

The document also notes that “overall protest-related violence" has been "decreasing significantly during the last week,” which also undermines continued Trump fearmongering.

Notably, the continuing threat to law enforcement has been thrust to the forefront by the charging of Steven Carrillo for the alleged killing of one security officer and the wounding of another. Carrillo is an alleged adherent of the “boogaloo boys,” an extremist movement trying to exploit protests to incite race war.

The DHS document actually does cite the “Boogaloo movement” as a threat in this context. It notes that Carrillo is likely associated with it, defining it as “a term used by some violent extremists from a variety of movements who seek to incite a race war or the collapse of society.”

And yet, according to CNN reporter Marshall Cohen, Trump has yet to mention this as a threat, even though, as Craig Timberg demonstrates, it’s increasingly obvious this threat is becoming a serious one.

Similarly, another leaked intelligence document earlier this month assessed the greatest threat as coming from “lone offenders with racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist ideologies,” not from antifa.

The new DHS document shows that the non-assessment of the threat of antifa hasn’t changed — even as the claims about antifa continue.

The broader story here, as Isaac Stanley-Becker details, is that the continued fearmongering about antifa by Trump and many top officials seems designed to distort the true nature of these multiracial, largely peaceful and broadly representative national protests in a very fundamental way.

If Trump or his campaign says something, assume it is a lie until documented otherwise.

The "Conservative" Campaign Against Science and Expertise

With the Republican Party base now controlled by Christofascists and overt racists, the GOP is engaged in a war against science, knowledge and expertise because all of this argue against the Christofascists' fairy tale world view and racists' desperate need to feel superior to others.    The Party has gone from one that valued education, knowledge and science to one where ignorance and bigotry is celebrated both among the party base and in the White House. This war on experts and expertise is placing the nation in danger, especially as Trump pushes to reopen the economy despite the dire warnings of health experts.  Trump's sole concern is reviving the economy and his own reelection chances.  How many might die doesn't factor into the equation.  A column in the Washington Post by a former Republican looks at this dangerous and disturbing phenomenon.  Here are highlights: 

It is perhaps inevitable that a problem as large and complex as covid-19 should result in a pandemic of motivated reasoning. It is a human tendency to interpret disasters as confirmation of our existing beliefs. So the coronavirus outbreak proves the need for a border wall. Or it demonstrates the urgency of Medicare-for-all. Or it resulted, in the words of Franklin Graham, from “a world that has turned its back on God.” 

The pandemic has given our health-care system an X-ray, revealing disturbing racial inequities that need to be understood and addressed. But on the whole, we are right to be wary of people who claim great tragedies as the confirmation of pet theories and previous prophesies. The convenience of an argument is often inversely proportional to its credibility.

Motivated reasoning is usually just tiresome. At its worst, it can be dangerous. Sometimes drawing the wrong lesson badly obscures a right and necessary lesson. Sometimes the interpretation of a crisis is so dramatically mistaken, so ludicrous and imprudent, that it can worsen the crisis itself.

Such is the case with conservatives who look at the coronavirus outbreak and see, of all things, the discrediting of experts and expertise. . . . . This argument assumes an intellectual fog that is just lifting. Though we are still relatively early in the pandemic, this much seems clear: The medical experts recommended aggressive social distancing to bend the curve of infections and deaths downward. Americans generally trusted the experts. By all the evidence, aggressive social distancing is bending the curve of infections and deaths downward. And places that were earliest and most aggressive in this approach have seen the best results.

This outcome doesn’t strike me as murky. It is difficult to see how experts whose advice clearly saved tens of thousands of lives can be called discredited. It is easy, however, to see how making this false claim might undermine public adherence to their advice, which still matters greatly in the crisis.

The limits of epidemiologists do not change the realities of epidemiology. The methods of science are the only way we gain access to information about the nature of disease. Judgments based on that information are not infallible. But they are always preferable to the aggregate opinion of the Internet. Even if that opinion stumbles on the truth, there is no way to be confident it is the truth.

The main failures we have seen in the coronavirus response have not been caused by excessive confidence in experts. Our problems have been rooted in the failure of political leaders to treat the warnings of experts with sufficient seriousness, and to act on those warnings with sufficient urgency. It was [Trump] the president who publicly dismissed the disease as a minor annoyance when other members of his administration knew that to be untrue. It was [Trump] the president who characterized pandemic awareness as a political conspiracy during wasted weeks. It was [Trump] the president who spouted misinformation about the disease and its treatment while horrified experts stood beside him.

From the beginning, flattening the curve was going to require heroic measures to achieve mixed results. That is the nature of reality, not a commentary on public health expertise. The experts have earned our trust. And continued progress depends on believing them.

Republicans’ "Thoughts and Prayers" Are a Cruel Joke

Whenever a mass shooting occurs, Republicans are quick to offer "thoughts and prayers" which translates to "we are not going to do anything to stop these events." Sadly, gun lobby money and appeasing an increasingly toxic and knuckle dragging party base are more important than passing legislation that might actually reduce the increasingly regular carnage. The worse hypocrisy, of course, when Trump offers "thoughts and prayers" after inciting extremist followers to vent their hate and suggests violence against those with opposing views or different skin color.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this cruel joke that is the norm in today's GOP. Here are excerpts:

Back-to-back massacres in El Paso and Dayton kill 31. Cue the thoughts and prayers!

“Melania and I send our heartfelt thoughts and prayers,” tweeted President Trump, who vows to veto gun control.

“Elaine’s and my prayers go out to the victims,” tweeted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who blocks votes on gun control.

Do they not realize that “thoughts and prayers” has become a meme, a cynical punchline conveying inaction on guns? It’s what people say when they plan to do nothing.

Republicans’ reflexive response to the endless massacres has become a cruel joke, as effective as a Hallmark sympathy card. They seem to realize how weak it sounds: CNN reported that it invited 50 Republican lawmakers to talk about the shootings; only one accepted. Democrats mentioned thoughts and prayers too — as insufficient. Sen. Ed Markey (Mass.) complained: “My Republican colleagues cut and paste the words ‘thoughts and prayers’ into a tweet and then do nothing on gun violence.”

Trump proposed action, tweeting Monday in support of “strong background checks.” But, as after Parkland, Fla., he quickly dropped the idea, omitting it from his on-camera remarks.  Instead: More thoughts and prayers!

Trump, who last week shared the sentiment that “DEMOCRATS ARE THE TRUE ENEMIES OF AMERICA,” said “now is the time to set destructive partisanship aside.”

Eventually, disgusted Americans will force Republicans to act. Until then, here’s a thought: We don’t have a prayer.

Vote Democrat whenever possible.  Send your "thoughts and prayers" to the GOP.

Trump's Racism Is Nothing New

For the second weekend in a row Donald Trump has been tweeting racist rants directed at non-white members of Congress and, by extension, all non-whites.  Yes, his white supremacist coddling base loves it, but decent people ought to find Trump's behavior appalling and dangerous. Some argue that Trump is merely playing to his base, but a look at Trump's life and business career make it clear that he has been a racist for a long, long time and that we are merely glimpsing the real Donald Trump. Lest we forget, Trump's father was arrested for participating in a KKK march in Queens, New York in 1927.  His anti-minority mindset never changed and was a constant in his business efforts and handed down to his son.  A piece in New York Magazine reminds us of this reality.  Here are excerpts:

For the second July weekend, President Trump has tweeted offensive slanders about nonwhite Democratic House members who anger him. The latest installment involves claims that Representative Elijah Cummings, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, comes from a district that is a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.

Yet these impulsive thumb-rants amount to some of the most important and revealing communications of Trump’s presidency. For one thing, they convey the beliefs that have undergirded his career. As Victor Blackwell points out, Trump reserves terms like “infest” and “infestation” — which most people use only to describe diseases or vermin — exclusively for nonwhites. As much hate as he might generate for a target like, say, the mainstream media or transnational institutions, he would never describe the New York Times as an infestation.

Trump’s professional career began in his father’s and his systematically discriminatory housing empire. Excluding African-Americans was the basis of the Trump business model. He did not merely engage in periodic acts of discrimination, but insistently violated federal law and went to war with the Department of Justice rather than amend his ways. Trump’s association of African-Americans with crime and filth, and the assumption they must be cordoned off from other Americans, is a conviction so deep it cannot be uprooted.

As Michael Cohen testified, Trump once commented to him as they drove through a poor Chicago neighborhood, “only the blacks could live like this.” This is a window into to Trump’s obsession with urban blight. It is not a rousing call for better municipal governance curiously misdirected at the wrong branch of government, as he and his supporters tried to suggest in their post-tweet clean-up. It is an expression of his belief that urban poverty is a reflection of black inferiority. . . . He is saying that Cummings is black, the kind of person who would live that way, as a means of discredited him via his race.
 Trump has brought his lifelong patterns of thought with him to the presidency. One of the many oddities of his term in office is that he never observed the traditional break between campaigning and governing, and as a result never adopted even the pose of representing the entire country.

Since he continues to go to war against his enemies in perpetual campaign fashion, and since many of his enemies are domestic, this places Trump in the strange position of frequently disparaging parts of his own country. This is surely unique in American history. American presidents simply do not call American cities filthy and dangerous. George W. Bush may not have enjoyed much support in places like Baltimore, but he wouldn’t go around calling Democratic neighborhoods disgusting hellholes. It does not occur to Trump that the patriotic requirements of his office require representing the whole of it.

It is not merely that Trump is unfit for his job. He refuses, almost literally, to be president of the United States.

Virginia GOP Fear Mongering Ahead of Special Session, November Elections

On July 9, 2019, a special session of the Virginia General Assembly will take place in the wake of the mass shooting in Virginia Beach.  The purpose? To try to enact some common sense gun control measures that will (i) make it more difficult for those with questionable backgrounds to purchase guns, (ii) hopefully limit the number of guns one can buy in a given month, and (iii) end Virginia role as being the main source of illegal guns in New York State and the Northeast in general.  To hear the shrieks and lies of the Virginia GOP and their allies at the NRA and in white supremacist and Christofascist groups (the two are largely synonymous), it's the end of the world.  Indeed, they whine that Democrats are going to "take our state away from us" as if the rest of us have no claim to our home state  and no right to be free from constant fear of gun violence. In the lead up to the November, 2019, elections here in Virginia, expect the shrieking to become even louder and the lies to become even more disingenuous.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the GOP fear mongering which will only intensify and, which as the norm for the GOP in Virginia, involves attacking LGBT Virginians.  Here are article highlights: 

One evening, one city still reeling from mass gun violence, two separate gatherings. At a recreation center, residents fearful of too many guns. At a hotel conference room, National Rifle Association members worried about gun restrictions.

The dueling messages have been playing out around Virginia as lawmakers and the NRA rally opposing camps ahead of next week’s General Assembly special session on gun control. Gov. Ralph Northam (D) ordered the July 9 session after a gunman killed 12 people at a Virginia Beach municipal building on May 31.

The issue has crystallized what’s at stake in elections this fall, when Republicans try to defend their razor-thin majorities and Democrats try to seize control of the General Assembly for the first time in more than two decades.

Republicans are sounding an alarm, warning that the consequences this fall could be extensive. The NRA rally in Virginia Beach on Monday night was closed to the media. But at a similar NRA gathering last week in Fredericksburg, a recording of which was obtained by The Washington Post, the message was dark.

“They want our state,” Del. Margaret B. Ransone (R-Westmoreland) told an audience of mostly gun rights supporters in Fredericksburg. . . . They intentionally want to turn it blue. Gun control, abortion rights, social justice — they’ve named their three; that’s what they want.” “We are on the cusp of changing things, and we need all of you to help this year,” Democratic Senate candidate Missy Cotter Smasal told an audience of about 50 gun-control advocates Monday night at a recreation center in Virginia Beach.

As Smasal spoke in the recreation center, the Republican she is trying to unseat, Sen. William R. DeSteph Jr., addressed nearly 200 at a closed NRA meeting in a hotel near the oceanfront. Smasal called DeSteph’s appearance at that event “disrespectful and contemptuous” coming so soon after the mass shooting.

“We’re the counterweight to what’s happening in our town right now. We’re the counterweight to that NRA town hall,” Sibel Galindez, who helps run the Hampton Roads chapter of Moms Demand Action, told Smasal’s gathering at the rec center.

Galindez and her group offered to help people travel to Richmond next week for the special legislative session to express support for the gun-control measures outlined by Northam. Those include bans on military-style weapons, high-capacity magazines and devices to help guns shoot faster or quieter; limiting handgun purchases to one per month; a “red-flag law” allowing authorities to seize weapons from someone deemed a danger; and requiring people to report lost or stolen firearms.

Sen. Bryce E. Reeves (R-Spotsylvania) [who in my view is bought and paid for by the gun lobbt]. . . . described overhearing a Democratic colleague, Sen. Adam P. Ebbin (Alexandria), sitting in his office and telling someone that “we will radically change Virginia when we take control.”

He said Ebbin is “from Northern Virginia. He’s really liberal left; he’s . . . the [only] openly gay senator in our Senate.” And Reeves said Ebbin’s agenda “means infanticide is coming, all the gun bills. We’re going to lose the right to work. . . . Minimum wage — just minimum will be $15, but I heard him talking about $20 to $25.”

Ebbin, when told of Reeves’s remarks at the town hall, said he never made any of the comments attributed to him. “Apparently I’m a radical homosexual who’s misquoted,” Ebbin said sarcastically.

“I did speak to him once on, ‘Couldn’t we agree on universal background checks,’ but I’ve never talked to him about radically changing the course of Virginia,” Ebbin said. “I’ve never heard any Democrat in Virginia or elsewhere that I recall talking about a minimum wage over $15.”

Ebbin said he was most upset that Reeves would invoke his sexual orientation.

Expect Reeves, DeSteph - who I have no use for - Ransome and other Republics to lie through their teeth booth about the special legislative session and the November elections. I was at a CLE course where Tommy Norment, GOP Senate majority leader, was the presenter and even in that venue he lied non-stop on gun control issue.  Today's Republicans have something in common with the "professional Christians" of the "Christian Right": if their lips are moving, it's almost a 100% guarantee that they are lying.

Lindsey Graham’s Shamelessness

Lindsey Graham, a/k/a the Palmetto Queen - a study in hypocrisy.

One of the things that has been illuminating about Donald Trump and his candidacy and toxic and pathologically lying regime is just how morally bankrupt so many Republicans have proven to be.  For reasons I still cannot grasp - other than fear of the increasingly ugly GOP base - those who once pretended to have some basic understanding of both decency and constitutional and legal norms have shown themselves only too eager to prostitute themselves for Trump.  Among the worse is Senator Lindsey Graham who flatly stated the standard for removal of a president from office during the Clinton impeachment debacle.  Indeed, under Graham's own enunciated standard an indictable crime was not a prerequisite for use of impeachment to "cleanse the office" and "restore honor and integrity to the office [of the presidency]."  Now, faced with far more egregious conduct by Trump, Graham has thrown aside his own standard and is only too willing to look the other way and whine a far different song.  A column in the Washington Post looks at Graham's shameless hypocrisy.  Here are highlights: 

One difficulty about a career in politics is that the longer you’re in the business, the longer a track record of quotes and video your opponents can scour to undercut you. It’s something former vice president Joe Biden is contending with as he enters the Democratic primary, and it’s an obstacle his old Senate colleague Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) has run into in the wake of the Mueller report.

On CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Graham spoke to host Margaret Brennan; naturally, much of the interview focused on Attorney General William P. Barr’s planned testimony to Congress this week. As the new chair of the Judiciary Committee, Graham has shown enthusiasm for thoroughly investigating some scandals through to the end, such as the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server. He showed the same enthusiasm during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, when he was one of the House’s prosecutors during Clinton’s trial in the Senate.

But Graham’s doggedness has disappeared when it comes to a Republican White House, replaced by a deliberate ignorance. “From my point of view, I’ve heard all I need to really know,” he told Brennan. He reiterated the sentiment again and again, especially regarding Trump’s ordering then-White House counsel Donald McGahn to fire Mueller. “It doesn’t matter,” he told Brennan. “I don’t care what he said to Don McGahn. … I don’t care what happened between him and Don McGahn. … No, I’m — I’m done.”
 Asked what he wants the Barr hearings to focus on, Graham replied, “Does the report support his summary? Does the report actually indicate there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians?” Graham left out, of course, that Mueller made no finding regarding the nonlegal concept of “collusion,” only one regarding the higher standard of criminal conspiracy. And he left out that there was significant evidence that individuals associated with the Trump campaign conspired with WikiLeaks over the release of stolen Democratic emails.

Democrats are suggesting that a president who orders his staff to obstruct an independent investigation maybe shouldn’t be president — hardly a crazy standard.

Then Graham had to face his past, as Brennan played his words from the Clinton impeachment trial:

The point I am trying to make is you don’t even have to be convicted of a crime to lose your job in this constitutional republic, if this body determines that your conduct as a public official is clearly out of bounds in your role. Thank God you did that, because impeachment is not about punishment. Impeachment is about cleansing the office. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office.

Graham tried to reconcile his hypocrisy. “What President Clinton did was interfere in a lawsuit against him by Paula Jones and others, hide the evidence, encourage people to lie. So, to me, he took the legal system and turned it upside down.”

Note the words “encourage people to lie.” Note that Graham didn’t say, “People lied with his encouragement.” That Clinton allegedly told people to lie was enough for Graham (then and now), regardless of whether the Democratic president’s entreaties were successful. But this president is a Republican, so Graham’s standard changes.

Graham is far from the first hypocritical politician. But the South Carolina senator particularly prides himself on being no-nonsense and on his legal experience. That he has opted for such an obvious double standard is especially shameless.

The New Culture War: The Fight Over "Masculine" Men

Those on the far right and the base of today's Republican Party - i.e., Christofascists and angry white males - seem to always be looking for something to hold up as a threat to their "values" and have found a new rallying cry over the growing recognition that some aspects of "traditional masculinity" are downright toxic and harmful not only to the males who subscribe to it, but also to women and to the larger society. Last week, the American Psychological Association released guidelines addressing "toxic masculinity" and the right wing outcry was loud and clear.  Adding fuel to the fire, Gillette ran an add with a simple message that men can be better and should embrace values like kindness and empathy towards others and what might be described as subscribing to the so-called "golden rule" - basically a concept in keeping with Christ's gospel message.  From the push back from the right and the farcically named "men's rights movement" one would have though Gillette had proposed raping nuns on the high altar at St. Peter's Basilica.  A column in the New York Times looks at this new culture wars battle ground.  Here are excerpts:

How you see the role of men and women at work and at home has become an integral element of contemporary political conflict.

Until recently, most of the attention has been focused on partisan evaluations of problems confronting women. A 2017 Pew Research report found, for example, that by nearly 3 to 1 (73-25 percent), Democrats believe women face “significant obstacles that make it harder for them to get ahead than men,” while Republicans believe those obstacles are largely gone (63-34).

Last week, however, the American Psychological Association entered the fray with the release of its long-planned “Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men.”

The A.P.A. guidelines argue that the socialization of males to adhere to components of “traditional masculinity such as emotional stoicism, homophobia, not showing vulnerability, self-reliance and competitiveness” leads to the disproportion of males involved in “aggression and violence as a means to resolve interpersonal conflict” as well as “substance abuse, incarceration, and early mortality.”

According to the A.P.A., the persistent commitment of many boys and men to the norms of traditional masculinity helps explain why . . . .Men commit 90 percent of homicides in the United States and represent 77 percent of homicide victims. They’re the demographic group most at risk of being victimized by violent crime. They are 3.5 times more likely than women to die by suicide, and their life expectancy is 4.9 years shorter than women’s. Boys are far more likely to be diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder than girls, and they face harsher punishments in school — especially boys of color.

Republicans and Democrats have sharply polarized views on such findings.  According to an October 2017 Pew Research report, a quarter of Republicans said the country has not done enough to insure equal rights for women, while 54 percent said the country has done enough and 18 percent said the country has gone too far. Among Democrats, 69 percent said the country has not done enough, 26 percent said the country has done enough and 4 percent said the country has gone too far.

Even Gillette has joined the debate with its new television commercial, “We Believe: The Best Man Can Be,” a critique of toxic masculinity:  “It’s been going on far too long,” the narrator declares. “We can’t laugh it off.”

In a Jan. 7 National Review article, “Grown Men Are the Solution, Not the Problem,” David French, one of the most outspoken critics of the A.P.A. guidelines, wrote “We are in the middle of an intense culture war focused around men.”

There is a major difference between the two parties regarding the basic nature versus nurture issue that plays such a prominent role in the debate about men. Edward M. Adams, past president of Division 51 on Men and Masculinities of the American Psychological Association, emailed that the guidelines espouse positive manhood to include living in cooperation, respect, appreciation, courage, and fearlessness about being fully human. We do not see negativity, shame, unwarranted violence and aggression, gender domination, or hate and prejudice as ways to promote a better quality of life for any one of us.

The men most negatively affected by changing economics, according to Hibbing, are also those most often inclined to reject the fact that “government is the best source for providing assistance and retraining in the face of these changes.” Instead, these men “resist such assistance and feel they are entitled to the arrangements of the past.”

In this heated debate, Judith Butler, a prominent feminist and a professor of comparative literature at Berkeley, provided a strong case for the progressive argument in behalf of expanding gender norms. Butler argues “that feminism has opened up possibilities for boys to play football or to pursue the arts, or even to do both.”

The larger point, she wrote, is to let boys find their way toward activities and passions that more fully express who they are and let them flourish apart from any social judgments about what is appropriate for their gender. Indeed, the only prescription that most feminist positions make is to treat people with dignity, to honor the equality of the sexes, to accept gender diversity, and to oppose all forms of violence against people, whether young or old, on the basis of their gender or sexuality.

Many Republicans believe gender roles to be distinct and that categorical denial of hormonal or biological underpinnings to sex differences is erroneous — while simultaneously voicing doubts about the legitimacy of the science of evolution.

The current era has been marked by a continuous series of challenges to once indisputable truths about sex and gender. Ubiquitous contraception, for one thing, has altered the fundamentals of reproductive roles. The alteration of these fundamentals has been followed by a series of transformations and dislocations — women’s rights, reproductive rights, gay rights, transgender rights, new forms of family formation and dissolution, and vastly altered patterns of fertility. Challenges to core understandings of masculinity — and femininity — are inescapable.

The immensity of these upheavals should not be underestimated. That people are seeking political solutions to rapid societal changes is no surprise. That these solutions erupt in political conflict is also inevitable. For some, new horizons in matters of sexuality and sexual identity offer opportunity; for others, discomfort and fear predominate.

Shutdown’s Economic Damage: $1 Billion a Week

The current federal government shutdown derives from one thing only: Donald Trump's desperate desire to have a "win" to keep his racist, religiously extreme, white supremacist base loyal.  Nothing else really matters in Trump world - including the damage being done to federal workers and their families or the larger U.S. economy.  A majority f Americans recognize this reality and the question becomes one of when Mitch McConnell ceases his political fellatio of Trump and yields to demands of the American public and Republicans who are coming under growing pressure from angry constituents.  A piece in Politico looks at the growing economic cost of Trump's temper tantrum.  Here are excerpts:

As federal workers face the prospect of missed paychecks during the partial government shutdown, their financial reality is rippling into the broader economy.

The roughly 800,000 government employees who are either furloughed or working without pay will be forced to start slashing their consumer spending when paychecks don’t appear this week. Private-sector contractors and other workers tied to the government are already seeing damage from lost business.

And a hit to the nation’s financial standing is on the horizon with a warning from Fitch Ratings on Wednesday about downgrading the government’s credit rating if the shutdown persists.

Estimates from President Donald Trump’s chief economist peg the cost to the overall U.S. economy at about $1.2 billion for each week the shutdown persists.

The shutdown — now in its 19th day — could also cost the U.S. government more than a billion dollars in lost productivity for 350,000 workers who are forced to stay home.

The government will likely give back pay to furloughed workers in addition to those forced to perform their duties without pay during the partial shutdown. The Obama administration estimated that the payroll cost alone for the 16-day government shutdown in October 2013 cost $2.5 billion, not counting lost revenue from government entities like national parks that were unable to collect fees.

The shutdown comes at a time when the U.S. economic outlook was already highly uncertain.

Global growth is slowing, trade tensions are simmering, the effects of the Fed’s steady interest rate hikes are starting to take hold, and the manufacturing and housing sectors are showing some signs of weakness.

All those factors were already leading economists to predict slower growth in 2019 than last year, which still might fall short of Trump’s 3 percent goal.

The jobs number could be a lot weaker in January if the shutdown continues through next week, when the department conducts its payroll survey; most of the furloughed workers would be counted as unemployed.

Additionally, jobless claims of private contractors have probably already increased by as much as 15,000, according to Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist at JPMorgan.

That all means monthly jobs could decline in January for the first time since 2010.

GOP Leaders Won’t Tolerate Trump’s Chaos Much Longer

The Republican Party of my grand parents, parents and even the first 2/3's of my life is dead and gone and, in my view, will never return given the grip Christofascists and white supremacists have on the party base.  The days when intellect, knowledge, science and some modicum of respect for morality and decency are long gone best embodied by the election of Donald Trump, a Manchurian candidate if there ever was one. Yet, as a piece in New York Magazine argues, at some point the Vichy Republicans who have colluded with Trump's assault on America - likely at the direction of Vladimir Putin - will reach a breaking point when their desire for self-preservation outweighs their fear of being subjected to a primary challenge by someone base and immoral enough to be fancied by the Christofascists and white supremacists who rule the party.  Here are column highlights:

The beginning of the end of the Trump presidency came and went a long time ago. I have never wavered from my oft-stated convictions that (a) Trump will not finish out his term, and (b), the end will be triggered by a presidential meltdown that forces the Vichy Republicans in Washington to mount an insurrection — if only to save their own asses, not the country. This week was a big step toward that endgame, and surely one of the most remarkable weeks in American history. We have a president of the United States who is moving to shut down the government at the same moment that he is inviting America’s adversaries to breach its defenses. The withdrawals in Syria and Afghanistan, combined with the exit of the last top administration official who aspired to serve the national interest rather than Trump’s, invites hostile moves against the United States from ISIS, Russia, China, North Korea, and the Taliban. This has even grabbed the cynical Mitch McConnell’s attention: He has declared himself “distressed” by Mattis’s resignation, a major step in rhetorical escalation in a party where Susan Collins’s pathetic periodic expressions of “concern” are what pass for criticism of an outlaw president. [M]ore outrage from more GOP leaders will follow. What will move them is not necessarily Trump’s hara-kiri isolationist agenda but the damage his behavior both abroad and at home is inflicting on the financial markets. The sheer uncertainty of a chaos presidency is pushing the Dow to its worst December since the Great Depression. McConnell and his humiliated departing peer Paul Ryan have tolerated Trump’s racism, misogyny, and nativism, his wreckage of American alliances, his kleptocracy, and his allegiance to Vladimir Putin. They have tolerated as well his con job on the coal miners, steelworkers, and automobile-industry workers of his base. But they’ll be damned if they will stand for a president who threatens the bottom line of the GOP donor class. The Mattis resignation is huge. It’s not that he was the last “adult in the room” but that as a retired military man and a secretary of Defense with access to both foreign intelligence and the inner workings of the White House, he knows treason when he sees it. His resignation letter stops just short of saying that Trump is actively serving the “interests” of China and Russia as they try “to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model.”

[W]ho knows where America will be or who will be in charge by the time we get to Mattis’s announced February departure date, more than two months from now. The country is going to be riveted by the televised testimony of lawyered-up Trump lackeys as they face the inquisitors of Nancy Pelosi’s Congress.

What we are likely to see in the meantime: further indictments of Trump family members and other close associates; a complete halt to governance in Washington whether there’s actually a government shutdown or not; new overt and covert threats to national security; a further effort by Trump to destabilize the Federal Reserve and assault its chairman; and perhaps, at last, an intervention by those Vichy Republicans, in the financial sector as well as in the capital, who see their own necks on the line.

But meanwhile, we have more than two weeks in store of watching an isolated madman rampaging through the gilded rooms of Mar-a-Lago, wreaking whatever damage he can on the country as the walls of justice continue to close in on him. Happy New Year!

Why the GOP Cannot Change Even After a Historic Loss

After the major politico debacle of losing 40 seats in the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections it would seem rational for Republicans to consider retooling their message and seeking to once again attract the voters that they lost.  Yet, as a column in the Washington Post lays out, do not expect this to happen.  Rather, expect a doubling down of the GOP's embrace of racists and religious extremists.  Why?  First, look no further than the misogynist who occupies the White House.  Second, the GOP hard core base has become so insane that rational thought and analysis simply doesn't come into the mix.  The 2018 U.S. Senate race in Virginia is perfect example.  The GOP base insanely belied - and still believes - that the reason the party hasn't won a statewide election since 2009 is because the party's candidates are not "conservative enough."  And by "conservative, that means a white Christian extremist who embraces white nationalism, hence Corey Stewart's nomination and horrific defeat. Further proof: when Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, proposed legislation in early 2018 to prohibit militia-style groups from marching and brandishing weapons in Virginia, the Republicans who control the legislature were having none of it. The same pattern applies at the federal level.  Here are column highlights:

Republicans suffered a historic defeat in the 2018 election, losing a net of 40 seats in the House, six governorships, hundreds of state legislative seats and six state legislative chambers. Yet as the New York Times reports, if you were viewing from the outside, you’d think they were convinced that everything is fine and dandy:

Yet nearly a month after the election, there has been little self-examination among Republicans about why a midterm that had seemed at least competitive became a rout.

President Trump has brushed aside questions about the loss of the chamber entirely, ridiculing losing incumbents by name, while continuing to demand Congress fund a border wall despite his party losing many of their most diverse districts.

I’m sure there are liberals who would look at this and say, “Ha ha, what a bunch of dopes.” But I have some sympathy for the quandary Republicans find themselves in, because even if they wanted to change course to appeal to a broader electorate in a country that grows more diverse by the day — and some of them do — it’s almost impossible for them to do so. They’re trapped.

The first reason is that parties are not dictatorships, where someone can just decide that a new approach is needed and then implement it. There are a variety of different people and forces within the party . . . As we’ve seen with the GOP’s struggles on immigration over the last decade or so, the party’s leaders can have a clear idea about where they want to go but be overruled by voters who don’t buy in.

When parties do change, furthermore, it usually happens as the result of a process that plays out over years. The best recent example is what happened in the Democratic Party in the 1980s and 1990s. After Walter Mondale’s defeat in the 1984 presidential election, a group of centrists decided that the party had become too liberal and too complacent, and mounted an effort, centered around the Democratic Leadership Council, to pull it rightward. . . . It may be hard to remember now, but at the time it seemed that Republicans had a lock on the White House; by the time President George H.W. Bush’s term was over, the GOP had controlled the executive branch for 20 of the previous 24 years.

Most of the time, parties don’t have to change after a defeat; all they have to do is wait for circumstances to change. For instance, in 2008 the Republicans suffered terrible losses: Not only was Barack Obama elected president, but also they lost a net of 21 seats in the House and eight in the Senate. They didn’t respond with some kind of ideological reorientation; instead, they just worked to get their base as angry as possible at Obama, which led them to a huge victory and a retaking of the House just two years later.

That’s one of the biggest reasons why a genuine change of course is so hard for Republicans: As a result not only of the recent intensification of polarization but also trends in party membership dating back to the post-civil rights realignment that began in the 1960s, there just aren’t many moderates left in the party to make the case. And the typical Republican in Congress represents a deeply conservative district or state, where the only thing they fear is a primary challenge from their right.

After the 2018 election that’s even more true than it was before, , , , , Their voters are also under the influence of an immensely powerful conservative media apparatus whose business model depends on stoking rage and resentment, which further prevents moderates from gaining a foothold.

Finally, there’s one gigantic reason Republicans can’t change course: Donald J. Trump. The party is inevitably defined by the president, and this president believes that the only path to political success is feeding the angriest instincts of his base. . . . You might have Republican candidates for other offices who try to run more moderate campaigns, but their message will be overwhelmed by what’s coming from the White House.

So for at least the next two years, the GOP is going to be exactly what it is now: a party devoted to the interests of the wealthy and large corporations, animated by xenophobia, gripped by climate denial and committed to the maintenance of political division. It might become something else someday, but it certainly won’t in the near future.

As some California Republicans have concluded, the GOP needs to die before the rebuilding process can commence.  In the 2019 Virginia elections, voters need to end the GOP grip on the Virginia General Assembly.

Right-Wing Extremists Threaten Violence Over Democrat Wins

According to the FBI, since the launch of the Trump presidential campaign in 2015, hate crimes have increased every year, increasing 17% last year.   [T]he most common bias categories in single-bias incidents were race/ethnicity/ancestry (59.6) percent - principally, anti-black, religion (20.6 percent) -Jews being the favored targets, and sexual orientation (15.8 percent) - namely gays, lesbians and transgender individuals.  Many attribute the increase to the Trump/Pence regime's racist, nativist message and outright calls to violence at Trump rallies. Now, with Democrats winning control of the House of Representatives and underscoring the contempt that a majority of Americans hold for Trump/Pence regime and its racist and religiously extreme base, some right wing extremists are threatening violence.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at this very real threat.  Here are highlights:

Seeking a more lenient sentence for Patrick Eugene Stein’s plot to murder hundreds of Somali immigrants in a small Kansas town, Stein’s attorneys turned to a novel strategy: They blamed the inspiration for his actions on Donald Trump.

“The court cannot ignore the circumstances of one of the most rhetorically mold-breaking, violent, awful, hateful and contentious presidential elections in modern history, driven in large measure by the rhetorical China shop bull who is now our president,” the lawyers wrote.

Stein and his two cohorts planned their attack to take place the day after the November 2016 election. Anticipating a Hillary Clinton victory, the three Kansans wanted to make a violent first strike against her presidency by setting off a set of Timothy McVeigh-style truck bombs at a Muslim immigrant community in Garden City, then gunning down survivors as they fled.

The plot had been exposed, and the men arrested, a few weeks before they intended to carry it out. It took place amid a national environment in which far-right militiamen had been vowing a violent resistance to a potential Clinton administration. That resistance was, at least temporarily, mooted by Trump’s victory.

But those same rumblings can now be heard from the very same far-right factions, likewise threatening violence, in response to this month’s takeover of the House of Representatives by Democrats. There is legitimate reason for concern that right-wing terrorist violence will continue and perhaps increase — and that extremists could soon begin targeting politicians in office, especially if Trump singles them out for scorn.

The question of whether Trump’s rhetoric is inspiring acts of political violence now echoes nationally. Acts of violence in Florida and in Pittsburgh in the run-up to the midterm elections have already been inextricably linked to Trump’s hyperbolic language.

According to Chip Berlet, an expert on the populist right, the phenomenon we’re watching unfold is known to sociologists as “scripted violence.” “If a very popular leader who is high up — it doesn’t matter if it’s political or a political or a movement leader — basically alleges that some group of people is conspiring against the common good, and they harp on that for a long time, it’s only a matter of time before people get killed,” he recently explained.

There’s a long history of this kind of violence, dating from well before the Holocaust and continuing well into recent decades and even the present. In 1990s Rwanda, for example, thousands were massacred when radio talkers targeted communities for lethal violence as part of a tribal/ethnic cleansing campaign.

Trump has tacitly endorsed the tactic.  His rhetoric at home is part of the same violence for which he is writing the scripts.

“Trump clearly isn’t going to tamp this situation down, and he will likely escalate his anti-immigrant and extremist rhetoric as we move toward 2020,” says Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. “Since the GOP is becoming a bastion of older, white males who are angry, that’s the base they will be moving to turn out. This just follows a trend of more than a decade of increasing numbers of terror plots from the far right.

When confronted by reporters about the connection of his rhetoric to this violence, Trump has denied and deflected, accusing the media of fomenting violence instead for their “fake news” . . . . His true believers notwithstanding, the public likely takes a different view: One poll, taken before the mail-bombing attempts and the synagogue shooting, found that a majority of Americans already believe that he enables white supremacists and that many have come to see him as a “legitimizing force” for hate groups.

Critically, those hate groups themselves appear to feel empowered by Trump, in no small part because of his propensity to hesitate to criticize them, embodied by the president’s description of white-nationalist Charlottesville protesters as “very fine people.”

Trump’s far-right devotees, including the white nationalists who have both marched in his name and have used his name while committing hate crimes have taken the example of his bellicose rhetoric and expanded on it in extremists’ inimitable fashion. As they did in the weeks before the 2016 election, militiamen across the nation have referenced violent uprisings and civil war in defense of Trump around the election.

At Gab — the white-nationalist-friendly social media platform allegedly used by Pittsburgh shooting suspect Robert Bowers — speculation about civil war has been part of its site-wide discourse since this summer, . . . . Two young neo-Nazi activists who associated online with Bowers, Jeffrey and Edward Clark of Washington, allegedly planned to follow in the killer’s footsteps, or at least fantasized about it on Gab. Edward, 23, killed himself shortly after the Pittsburgh massacre, reportedly because news reports indicated Bowers was cooperating with police.

Jeffrey Clark, 30, was arrested Nov. 9 after family members warned authorities of his increasingly violent behavior and rhetoric. The brothers had long fantasized about killing Jews and blacks in a “race war,” police say. On Gab, Jeffrey had praised the Pittsburgh killings as a “dry run for things to come.”

Both militiamen and other far-right factions, including white nationalists and street-brawling “Proud Boys,” have been ginning up rhetoric about a “civil war” — depicted, in their telling, as a coming armed struggle between rural conservatives and urban minorities and liberals.

In addition to white supremacists, “Patriot” militias also have been spurred to action by Trump’s demonizing rhetoric targeting Muslims, the press and liberal Democrats.

Acts of domestic terrorism such as those in Pittsburgh and elsewhere in recent weeks come amid a rising tide of hate crimes and bigotry-fueled violence generally. Gutting of anti-terror efforts by the administration, recently reported by NBC News, bode ill for efforts to prevent this kind of violence from spreading.

This is especially so when the president himself is throwing rhetorical lighter fluid on his political targets. He [Trump] , and we, can’t be shocked when someone else provides the match. Indeed, it’s becoming clear that’s exactly the script he intends.