Coronavirus Is Forcing the GOP to Admit Its Ideology Is Delusional

The Republican Party discarded a belief in facts, logic and knowledge over two decades ago, first when it welcomed Christofascists into the party and, worse yet foolishly voted many of them onto local city and county committees, a move that forced many moderates to flee the party and its new members who embraced ignorance. Then, of course, there was the rise of the so-called Tea Party crowd which (i) overlapped significantly with the Christofascist set, and (ii) sought to gut the federal government.  Lastly, especially under Donald Trump, the Party embraced unabashed racists and white supremacists who sought to take the nation back to the days of segregation and white privilege writ large.  The ideology that emerged stressed (A) a hatred of foreigners, especially non-whites, (B) a mindset where the federal government needed to shrink and agencies needed to be dissolved, and (C) that the free-market should reign supreme. Now, as a lengthy piece in New York Magazine looks at how the coronavirus and the economic collapse it is triggering shows the delusional nature of the GOP agenda when confronted with a unrivaled crisis and inconvenient objective facts.  Here are article highlights:

As the coronavirus pandemic shutters America’s storefronts and fills its ICUs, the GOP is camouflaging a whispered confession beneath a cough. . . . But listen carefully to recent directives from the Trump administration and its allies and you’ll hear unmistakably: Our theory of governance is a lie.

The modern conservative movement holds these truths to be self-evident:

1. Undocumented immigrants are a scourge of American society, a nefarious invading army that’s depriving native-born workers of precious jobs, filling our cities with crime, and leeching off our welfare programs.

2. Uncle Sam has grown badly bloated and could govern more effectively if a wide swath of federal agencies were gutted.

3. The market is (a largely) apolitical sphere ruled by the impartial dictates of an invisible hand. Thus the superrich do not owe their astronomical market incomes to any set of politically ordained laws or institutions; rather, they earn their gains in a fundamental, metaphysical sense, and the state must therefore meet a heavy burden before it can justify coercively redistributing the wealth that billionaires have rightly earned. By the same token, the working poor cannot blame their low pay on political powerlessness but the objectively low value of their contributions to society.

Before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Donald Trump made a halfway-convincing show of governing as though these claims had some correspondence with reality. . . . . Trump downsized the federal bureaucracies — first by neglecting to fill vacant positions, then by purging the “deep state” of experts who would privilege their official duties over personal loyalty to the commander-in-chief. Finally, the White House has affirmed the moral premises of laissez-faire by prioritizing tax cuts, inveighing against socialism, opposing an increase to the federal minimum wage, and slashing regulations that attempt to price the social costs of economic activity that market signals fail to capture.

A theory of government assembled out of the self-affirming delusions of the reactionary rich — and seething, amnesia-laden nostalgia of white cultural traditionalists — is bound to be a poor compass for guiding the ship of state. This was true before the coronavirus reached our shores. But the pandemic has brought the tension between the verities of CPAC and exigencies of governance to such vertiginous heights Republicans have been forced to (tacitly, quietly) make three startling admissions:

1. Undocumented immigrants are among the most indispensable contributors to the American economy.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the U.S. to determine whose labor it can and cannot live without. In much of the country, nonessential businesses have been forced to shut their doors . . . Unfortunately for Trumpism, undocumented agricultural workers are among our economy’s most valuable players.  . . .  his [Trump’s] administration has never before formally acknowledged the fact that undocumented workers are essential for keeping America fed.

By some estimates, roughly three-quarters of all crop hands in the U.S. do not have a legal right to be in this country. This is no accident. Since the early 1920s, when nativists enacted ethnic quotas restricting the inflow of Asian and European immigrants, America’s large growers have relied on Mexican migrants to provide the cheap, physically grueling seasonal labor that their business models demand.

There is little evidence that these workers are taking jobs from native-born Americans. When the Trump administration and the Federal Reserve implemented full-employment fiscal and monetary policies before the pandemic, the unemployment rate went to historic lows even as the undocumented population remained millions strong. Rather, undocumented farmworkers are mostly just aiding U.S. consumers by accepting the low wages that keep food prices down and subsidizing Social Security recipients by paying into that program despite their own ineligibility for benefits.

2. The administrative state needs to be reconstructed.

For the White House, this confession has been more tacit than explicit. But the pandemic has forced the Trump administration to confront the fact that much of America’s “administrative state” is less bloated than it is emaciated. In part, this is a mess of Trump’s own making; the president dissolved the National Security Council’s pandemic task force and pushed for cuts to the CDC and NIH budgets that plausibly undermined the initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Similarly, Trump’s understaffing of the Treasury Department has undermined the administration’s management of the present economic crisis. But other difficulties besetting the White House are more damning for the conservative movement ideologically than the president personally.

Unlike many less-wealthy nations, the U.S. lacks the state capacity necessary to rapidly deposit cash relief into citizens’ bank accounts or cover the wage bills of struggling firms. As a result, the Trump administration was forced to structure its small-business bailout as a forgivable-loan program implemented through private banks, rather than a grant program implemented by the federal government. This has vastly increased the logistical difficulty of getting public funds into small-business owners’ hands. Similarly, our underfunded IRS (and large unbanked population) has made getting cash-relief checks to all working-class Americans a months-long endeavor. Meanwhile, our nation’s sclerotic unemployment-insurance systems have been failing to process the tidal wave of new jobless claims, preventing laid-off workers from accessing their new enhanced benefits.

The White House’s allies defended its efforts to the Post by citing the “daunting set of tasks” that the pandemic has created for the White House. But what makes those tasks so daunting is precisely that wide swathes of America’s administrative state are in sorry need of reconstruction.

In Florida, the GOP has confessed this point more forthrightly. As the Sunshine State’s deliberately underfunded unemployment-insurance system crashed last week, an adviser to Republican governor Ron DeSantis described the government office as a “shit sandwich.”

3. The “free market” is a big government program.

Markets, money, and corporations are all creations of the state. The distribution of income is not determined by an invisible hand’s objective appraisal of each worker and investor’s marginal utility but by the politically constructed laws and institutions that structure economic activity in a given society. These are plain facts. But they are inconvenient ones for a party that exists to oppose the progressive redistribution of economic power in a heinously unequal society. If Republicans were to concede that there is nothing natural or inherently just about the market distribution of income, then they would have to affirmatively defend deliberately increasing the superrich’s share of GDP growth at a time when the top 0.1 percent of households own as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent combined.

And yet, even as some congressional Republicans flail to uphold the fiction of an apolitical marketplace, the Trump administration’s bailout policies have torn it to shreds. With Treasury Secretary Mnuchin’s eager approval, the Federal Reserve has set about directly financing U.S. corporations for the first time in its history. Which is to say: A government institution is deciding which firms to keep alive with cheap credit and which to let die. Meanwhile, the federal government is (however haphazardly) attempting to compensate firms and workers for their losses as it demonstrates its capacity to prioritize human welfare over economic growth.

The GOP’s tacit confessions of ideological obsolescence have been hushed, limited, and inconsistent. A reflexive aversion to contravening the prerogatives of capital is still undermining the White House’s response to the pandemic and recession. The Trump administration has stubbornly honored the conservative principle that the federal government must never coerce private industry into manufacturing public goods unless those goods can be used to kill foreigners.

Nevertheless, COVID-19 has called many of the conservative movement’s biggest bluffs. Perhaps the GOP will therefore emerge from this crisis an ideologically revitalized center-right party that’s committed to an evidence-based conservatism that would favor deregulation where appropriate (such as, say, for physician’s licensing requirements), heightened state capacity where needed, and respect for all hard-working Americans.

But it seems infinitely more likely that the same affinity for self-affirming delusions and memory-obliterating nostalgia that birthed movement conservatism will ensure that it remains a plague on our body politic long after we’ve kicked COVID-19.

Ex-GOP Chairman: Republicans Have Abandoned their Principles.

The exodus of traditional, moral, thinking Republicans from the Republican Party - which in my view has become a moral cesspool - continues.  One can only hope that as these individuals leave the GOP they will either (i) stay home on election day in November, 2018, or (ii) hold their noses and vote for Democrats.  As I have long argued, only through sustained electoral losses will today's Republican Party either wither away to permanent minority status or find the moral gumption to eject the Christofascists - who, in my view, triggered the party's descent into madness - and the white supremacists from the party ranks.  Under Trump/Pence, the Republican Party has become nothing less than evil and dangerous.  USA Today has an op-ed by a former Ohio POP county chairman who sums up why so many decent people are leaving the GOP.  Hate, bigotry and the open embrace of lies and ignorance are not the principles the GOP once stood for.  Here are column highlights: 

My tweet last month was simple enough:  “I remain a proud conservative and Republican, but I resigned today as Belmont County Ohio GOP Chairman. I did so as a matter of conscience, and my sense of duty.”

That was all I wrote. Little did I know 6.2 million people would view this otherwise innocuous tweet. Not Beyoncé-level worthy, admittedly. But it was nonetheless remarkable that so many souls cared that a Republican county chairman, from a rural county in southeastern Ohio, had resigned to protest President Donald Trump’s capitulation in Helsinki. Interview requests from Fox, CNN, MSNBC, BBC and NPR poured in, as did quotes in The New York Times and The Washington Post. I was even mentioned in a Vanity Fair piece.

Amid the sudden notoriety, I quickly realized my resignation had become a political Rorschach test. To some, I was a patriot, standing tall in a true Profiles in Courage moment. To many others (i.e. most Republicans), I was traitor, a RINO or an obvious "Never Trumper." 

As the Twitter war raged, I saw my fellow Republicans, the heirs to Ronald Reagan’s conservative revolution, repudiating the very foundational and aspirational principles he used to truly "Make America Great Again" in the 1980s.

I looked in the distance and thought I saw Reagan’s ‘Shining City on a Hill,’ so I headed that way. It shone in the early morning, glowing in freedom’s unmistakable light. It was fortified, not with a wall, but with the strength that comes from moral clarity, the rule of law and the unwavering demand for truth. It prospered from its embrace of free markets, equal opportunity for all and the celebration of human aspiration.

Sadly, today, President Trump would beat Ronald W. Reagan, head-to-head, in a Republican primary — and I’m not sure it would be close.

Republicans, do you care that Ronald Reagan would no longer be welcome in Donald Trump’s Republican Party? According to Gallup, 89% of my fellow Republicans are just fine with this reality, as they approve of the president's job performance. In the space of a generation, have 89% of Republicans really forgotten the powerful force for good that was the Reagan Revolution? Perhaps even more disheartening, this same 89% are content, if not intent, on driving away anyone not fully on board on the Trump Train, branding them traitors to America in the process.

Well,” as Reagan would begin, to my fellow Republicans, to those who hate me because of what I did, to those who consider me a RINO or worse, I say to you: You need me, and people like me. Proud conservatives. Proud Reagan Republicans. Even more so, President Trump and Congressional Republicans need people like me to survive both the midterms and in 2020. The electoral math is that simple. “Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.” Or, has hate already won, and Reagan is lost?

McCain, Palin and the GOP Descent into Insanity

When John McCain selected Sarah Palin - the idiot of Wasilla - as his vice presidential running mate, he likely sealed his own defeat in 2008.  For many now former Republicans, Palin's selection began the exodus from the GOP and her proud embrace of ignorance, religious extremism and dog whistle calls to white supremacists embodied what has now come to define the Republican Party.  McCain in his twilight still does not fully accept his responsibility for paving the way for Donald Trump and transformation of the Republican Party into something foul and toxic.  But as a piece in New York Magazine notes, history may see McCain's horrible mistake as a pivotal moment in setting the course for the train wreck now consuming the nation.   I had long respected McCain who had been held prisoner at the "Hanoi Hilton" with a long time friend of mine, but his selection of Palin was just too much to stomach and helped confirm my support for Obama. Here are article highlights:

When historians — or, really any of us — look back at President Trump’s ascent to the presidency, they will identify many moments over the years, big and small, that could be identified as warning signs of the catastrophe to come.

But in purely political terms, one other moment leaps to mind: the day in 2008 when John McCain upended expectations by picking then-Alaska governor Sarah Palin to be his vice-presidential running mate. It’s not as if Republicans hadn’t worn the badge of anti-intellectualism before (see: Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush). But Palin personified a dangerous new strain. She (infamously) didn’t read much; put forth few policy positions beyond “drill, baby drill”; excelled at whipping up crowds into a frothing frenzy; and attacked Barack Obama in brazen, personal terms. Stylistically, she seemed to be almost completely at odds with McCain, a deeply conservative traditionalist who prefers military wars to cultural ones.

But by and large, the GOP base adored Palin. Its loving embrace of such an unhinged figure was an early sign that the Republican Party was far more willing to tolerate qualities once thought to be disqualifying for public life than many people understood.

Throughout the campaign, and since, McCain has steadfastly defended Palin. But in a story reported from his Arizona ranch, . . . . reports that McCain does have regrets about his VP pick. The reason for his discontent — which he has elaborated on in an upcoming book and movie — is that he wishes he had trusted his instincts and picked Joe Lieberman instead.

[I]it’s striking that, even at this late stage, McCain won’t admit that Palin represents the same variation of grievance politics he now abjures.

McCain, who President Trump has taunted in grossly personal terms (“I prefer war heroes who weren’t captured”) has been one of the few Republicans to consistently take on the president. He has attacked Trump’s “spurious, half-baked nationalism” and furiously criticized his continuous praise of Vladimir Putin. And while he often votes for the president’s priorities, making his everlasting “maverick” label something of a joke, he was the deciding “no” to kill Obamacare repeal in the Senate, an act of apostasy that has earned Trump’s perpetual ire.

[McCain is] also out of sync with the GOP base in most other ways. He’s a national-security hawk in a time of Republican isolationism, a centrist on immigration in a party full of America Firsters. Beyond his policy positions, McCain is out of step in another important way: he wants Republicans to step back from the toxic, grievance-based ideology that now dominates the party.

McCain framed the problem as a bipartisan one. But it’s the Republican party where “the bombastic loudmouths” have really gained control in recent years, culminating in the party’s surrender to President Trump. John McCain has always called himself a maverick, but he’ll end his life as all but an outcast.

It is facile to draw a straight line from Palin to this sad state of affairs. But it is striking that, even now, McCain cannot, or will not, fully reckon with the forces he helped unleash.

The Roots of Republican Dysfunction and Insanity

Today's Republican Party bears no resemblance to what it was even 15 years ago, although the roots of the party's current dysfunction and championing of hate and bigotry began much further back in time.  Richard Nixon's implementation of the so-called "Southern Strategy" put out the welcome mat for racists and white supremacists, but for many years the "adults in the room" in the party leadership were able to keep the more virulent racists under control and largely out of view other than dog whistle messaging. Next, the Christofascists were made welcome in a low key manner under Reagan and the insanity of the party base began in earnest.   Foolishly, George W. Bush threw the doors to the party wide open to religious extremists when he and Karl Rove used same sex marriage as tool to secure Bush's reelection in 2004.  From that point on, the party's embrace of ignorance and bigotry became raging torrent.  This insanity and war against modernity reach its apogee with the election of Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the GOP's descent to the ugly reality that it has become, something too many otherwise decent Republicans - I could name names but I will not - refuse to recognize as they continue to support a party that in fact no longer exists except in their own minds.  Here are column highlights:

[A]fter nine months of party control of Congress and the White House, the Republicans have accomplished essentially nothing. They have become a party without a consensus.

It would be easy to simply blame the president for the party’s disarray. Donald Trump’s aversion to policy detail, his chaotic management style and his combustible personality have all contributed to the party’s failures this year.

Yet it would also be a mistake to pin the party’s problems on Mr. Trump alone. He is not their root cause. Instead, he is an avatar of the party’s pathologies, the culmination of its cynical and shambolic trajectory over the last two decades.

Many of those issues can be traced back to the administration of George W. Bush, which functioned as an enormous political bait and switch. The 43rd president campaigned on humble foreign policy and prudent conservative solutions, but his presidency quickly became oriented almost exclusively around a political defense of the Iraq war.

This meant that domestic policy, and the realm of domestic policy expertise, became an afterthought at best, an opportunity for cynical political maneuvering at worst.

But Mr. Bush’s post-Sept. 11 popularity instilled the administration with an arrogance that extended far beyond the war itself. The president’s inner circle became convinced that the Republican Party was destined for years of unbroken political domination; the ambition-spoiling concerns of the “reality-based community” no longer needed to be taken into account.

National security fear-mongering and culture war controversies, especially over same-sex marriage, were employed to rally the base and ensure its loyalty, even as dissatisfaction with Mr. Bush’s governance continued to grow.

The Bush presidency, then, was both a failure and a fraud. Instead of foreign policy restraint and modest conservative governance, the Bush administration delivered a pair of endless deficit-financed wars, cynical posturing over social issues, soaring federal spending and, eventually, a large-scale emergency intervention in the economy.

Arguably as important as the particular failures themselves, however, was the way the party infrastructure — its leaders and functionaries, its activists and operators — formed a partisan phalanx around the president, playing down his flaws, if not refusing to acknowledge them. . . . by excusing Mr. Bush’s errors, Republicans radically expanded the trust deficit, creating a yawning gap between the party’s base and its elites, one that has persisted, and grown, in the years since. . . .

Mr. Bush left many voters on the right angry, resentful and suspicious — of war, of policy, of ideology, of the very idea of political solutions and leadership.  It attracted hucksters and manipulators, in the media and in the activist sphere, and embraced a cast of unconventional and unqualified candidates. Republican Party elites were only too happy to exploit this inchoate energy as long as it was useful.

The defeats of both Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney left the party leaderless, and Mr. Bush’s shredded reputation meant it could not follow the course he had laid out. So the party became defined by what was left: its resentments and suspicions, its antagonisms and obsessions, its anger and its differences. It retreated into tribalism and anti-intellectualism. Eventually, the sideshow became the main event.

Mr. Trump, of course, is the biggest sideshow of them all. He exploited the gap between the base and the elites, embodying the dysfunction and disarray that already existed.

Mr. Trump’s goals have more to do with Twitter feuds and personal aggrandizement than any particular policies. Under Mr. Trump, the party’s chief internal debate is not so much about which governing vision to pursue but whether there should be one at all.

Republican voters, meanwhile, were attracted to shallow political entertainers and obviously unqualified candidates long before Mr. Trump threw his hat in the ring.  Mr. Trump didn’t cause any of this. He just took advantage of it. He is the most successful huckster of the bunch.

GOP Convention, Day 2 - Another Night of That Ought to Strike Fear

Watching the GOP convention, part of me keeps asking "how do people become this insane and blind to reality."  Then I remember that much of the GOP base consists of evangelical Christians which by definition means that one is not living in objective reality.  Add to that the Paul Ryan's of the GOP who would seemingly sell their mothers or daughters into prostitution in order to cling to power. Facts, the truth, and decency towards others simply no longer matter in today's Republican Party.  I find it mind numbing how decent people (including a number of our social friends) - apparently who refuse to pay attention to what is happening - continue to cling to the GOP when the party they remember no longer exists.  A column in the Washington Post looks at day to of the hate fest in Cleveland.  Here are highlights:

The second night of the GOP convention was like “1984,” periodically interrupted by infomercials for Trump wines. The evening started with an uncomfortable explanation of why the rules obliged Alaska to vote for Donald Trump and went downhill from there.

Supposedly the theme of the second night in Cleveland was “Make America Work Again.” Those were the words displayed behind the stage. That was what was announced. But judging by the speeches, the actual theme was “Make America Salem Again.” Or, “Don’t Worry! Hillary Clinton literally worships Lucifer, but on the bright side, Donald Trump’s winery makes excellent wine and his children love him!”

The night’s prime-time speakers included Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, Tiffany Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Ben Carson.

Ryan’s speech was upbeat and cheerful. This seemed odd, given that he had just handed the nomination to someone whose words he had called “the textbook definition of racism,” but it quickly became apparent that this Paul Ryan was just visiting from another, happier timeline and had no idea what was happening around him. He spoke of the Republican Party as a lively, exciting, aspirational party of ideas . . .

Then Chris Christie took the stage. Christie had honed his speaking style in Salem, 1692, and he opened by announcing that he had seen Goody Clinton with the Devil. . . . “Let’s do something fun tonight,” Christie suggested: specifically, hold a mock trial of Clinton. The crowd loved this idea and began chanting “Guilty!” when prompted. 

Yes, this is the party of hope and fresh ideas, the one shouting, “GUILTY!” and “LOCK HER UP!” as it holds a mock trial of its opponent in absentia.

Fortunately, the next speaker was Tiffany Trump, who reassured us that her father had written encouraging messages on her report cards when she was young, so, I guess, that was good. I am just saying, for future reference, if you don’t want to give off a Possible Dictator vibe, having your children speak up on your behalf and say that you have always been very nice to them IS NOT ACTUALLY REASSURING. Dictators tend to be nice to dogs and children. 

Then Donald Trump Jr., took the stage. . . . He spoke inspiringly of a Horatio Alger-style rags-to-riches, up-by-the-bootstraps tale. Unfortunately, he was supposed to be speaking about his father, Donald Trump. If there is the opposite of a Horatio Alger novel, it is Trump’s biography. This did not keep his son from complaining about the people with Harvard and Wharton degrees who had stood in the way of his father (who only has a Wharton degree). He lamented the “new aristocrats and self-satisfied people at the top,” apparently without irony, perhaps mistaking himself for someone who was not literally Donald Trump Jr.

Not to be outdone by Christie’s fantasy mob trial of Clinton, Ben Carson announced that he had seen Goody Clinton with the devil . . . .

And that was the second night. I did not think I would conclude my recap of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland by quoting Ramsay Bolton, but then again I did not think that the evening would include references to Lucifer, a mock trial of Hillary Clinton, conducted by Chris Christie, with loud cries of “GUILTY!” and, of course, praise of Trump wines.

But “if you think this has a happy ending,” as Ramsay Bolton said, “you haven’t been paying attention.”

Be very, very afraid.

The GOP Convention's Ugly First Night

In some ways watching the GOP National Convention is akin to self-inflicted torture, but it should be required viewing because it puts a spotlight on just how insane and out of the mainstream the GOP has become.  If one isn't a right wing Christian fanatic, white supremacist, conspiracy theory devote, a not tethered to objective reality Hillary hater, or simply insane, there really is not much place for you in today's Republican Party.  All of this was on open display last night and reinforces my view that I did the right thing when I decided to escape the insane asylum the GOP has become years ago. A column in the Washington Post looks at some of the insanity and the freaks who Donald Trump is making mainstream within the GOP.  Here are highlights:

Welcome to the Donald Trump Republican National Convention.

Roger Stone, longtime confidant and informal adviser to Donald Trump, . . .  chose this moment, when the party presents itself to the nation, to team up with Alex Jones — the conspiracy theorist and radio host on whose show Trump has often appeared — as “co-hosts” of the rally for a couple thousand Trump supporters. Like the Trump campaign itself, the convention has elevated those who bring the crazy.

Many Republican officials are avoiding Cleveland this week entirely. Others are tacitly supporting the Trump ticket, swallowing their reservations; a last-ditch rebellion on the floor Monday afternoon by anti-Trump delegates was easily put down.

This vacuum gives voice to Trump’s proudest and loudest supporters, those who, before Trump, resided on the fringes. It has legitimized people like Jones.

Jones is famous for asserting, among other things, that the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks and the Oklahoma City bombing. Trump, who appeared frequently on Jones’s show to promote his theory that President Obama wasn’t born in America, told its host in December that “your reputation is amazing.” . . . He [Jones] said that “Hillary is a foreign agent of the communist Chinese, the Saudi Arabians and others.” Noticing a disruption in the crowd, he denounced these “anti-freedom scum who need to get their ass to North Korea.”

Police on the perimeter and in a boat could witness a few participants openly carrying handguns, the droning of the kudu horns, the guy carrying an eight-foot wooden cross, the woman who botched the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the primary challenger to John McCain who said, “We don’t need frail, fearful, old people representing us.”

Dozens of attendees wore “Hillary for Prison” T-shirts. One sign that said “Latinos for Trump” featured a bumper sticker declaring “9/11 was an inside job.” The flip side had the message “Hillary for Prison” (the first “i” was dotted with a Jewish star and Muslim crescent) and a bumper sticker declaring fluoride “poison in the tap water.”

Trump has “cojones,” Stone said. And Clinton? “A short-tempered, foul-mouthed, greedy, bipolar, mentally unbalanced criminal.”  “She’s a reptile!” somebody added.  “A liar!”

This is the face of Trump’s GOP. “Republicans who do not choose to join our cause: You will be replaced,” Stone said. “Good riddance. This is not about unity.”

Security Fears Mount Over GOP Convention

For many years the Republican Party has courted all of the ugliest elements of American society through its support for Christian religious extremism and the fanning of fears of delusional white supremacist/patriot groups.  Now, with the GOP convention within a few weeks and fascist in chief, Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, many of these lunatic elements plan on coming to Cleveland to either demonstrate or show their support for their version of the the Fuhrer.  Making things more tense is Ohio's "open carry law" - passed by Republicans, of course - that will allow many of the unhinged to come to Cleveland armed.  A piece in Politico looks at the possible circus and security nightmare that will likely ensue and certainly give political cover for GOP politicians who want to avoid the Convention and Trump at all costs.  Here are story highlights:

Hate groups are planning a visible presence among the thousands of protesters at the Republican National Convention. Police departments are raising flags about Cleveland’s preparedness to host the event. The committee organizing the convention recently warned that any last-minute changes to the city’s protest restrictions could make it impossible to guarantee conventiongoers’ safety. Then a judge threw out the plan.

It’s all forming a backdrop of uncertainty and anxiety less than three weeks before delegates congregate to nominate Donald Trump for president.

“It’s more dangerous. It’s going to be far more dangerous for every one of us,” said Regina Thomson, a delegate from Colorado.

The Committee on Arrangements — the Republican Party’s convention-planning body — has yet to issue safety and logistical guidance to delegates, guests and media, who will be arriving in Cleveland en masse in two weeks. But they’ll be walking into the marquee event of a political cycle marked by intense polarization, racial tension and anger. Activists — both pro- and anti-Trump — will flood the streets of downtown Cleveland, sometimes simultaneously, and could create a volatile atmosphere for conventiongoers.

Williams said the city is likely to issue revised boundaries for its protest zone on Wednesday, and details have begun to emerge in local media. The original plan was tossed by U.S. District Court Judge James Gwin last week after the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit, claiming the zone was too restrictive. Gwin said the so-called event zone — where protesters can stage marches and hold rallies — was “unduly large” and imposed overbearing restrictions on the hours in which protesters could demonstrate.

The convention itself, held inside Quicken Loans Arena, will be protected by the Secret Service, which will form a “hard” perimeter in the immediate vicinity of the event. The Cleveland Police Department, with the aid of other departments from around Ohio and the country, will patrol the broader “event zone” throughout the downtown area.

Delegates will be shuttled to and from the arena from hotels that will be staffed with 24-hour security. Craig Dunn, a delegate from Indiana, said he anticipates similar levels of security to the 2012 GOP convention in Tampa, where he recalled passing through multiple security cordons — including one that searched his bus for explosives — and shuttling past boats mounted with machine guns.

It’s the streets themselves where tension will run highest. Cleveland’s protest zone, even in its revised form, will permit demonstrators to roam freely, so long as they don’t block pedestrian or vehicle traffic. That raises the prospect of pro- and anti-Trump groups meeting in the same vicinity. Groups like the anti-LGBT Westboro Baptist Church intend to rally, and a white supremacist group at the center of a violent outburst in California last week has pledged to show up in Cleveland too.

Bresler noted that firearms will be allowed in the “event zone” because of Ohio’s status as an open carry state, even though other more mundane items will be banned — from water guns to tape to sleeping bags.

I for one would not want to be anywhere near Cleveland.  I suspect that many residents are less than pleases to be hosting the convention.