Trump’s Re-election Message: Inflame White Racism

A column in the New York Times lays out what appears to be Donald Trump's reelection strategy  and in the process explains, in my view, white evangelical support for Trump: white racism.  Of course, evangelicals are not the only ones onboard Trump's racism train although evangelicals are perhaps the ones who are still the most angry over desegregation and an end of the Jim Crow laws. Given the economy's collapse and the seemingly out of control Covid-19 pandemic (especially in GOP led states that followed Trump's demands for "reopening"), Trump has little else to run on and has re-embraced what got him elected in 2016: white grievance and white racial animosity toward non-whites. Congressional Republicans and my Republican "friends" who refuse to admit that they fully realize what Trump's all about are lying to themselves and to others.  One can only hope that this renewed shameless pandering to white supremacists and evangelicals (the two go hand in hand) fails in 2020, especially among suburban voters.  Here are column highlights:

A lot of Republicans are acting puzzled about Donald Trump’s re-election pitch. “He has no message,” one Republican source told Reuters. “He needs to articulate why he wants a second term,” said another. Some have expressed hope that Trump would find a way to become less polarizing, as if polarization were not the raison d’être of his presidency.

It’s hard to know if Republicans like this are truly naïve or if they’re just pretending so they don’t have to admit what a foul enterprise they’re part of. Because Trump does indeed have a re-election message, a stark and obvious one. It is “white power.”

[Trump] The president started this week by tweeting out a video that encapsulates the soul of his movement. In it, a man in The Villages, an affluent Florida retirement community, shouts, “White power!” at protesters from a golf cart bedecked with Trump signs. “Thank you to the great people of The Villages,” wrote Trump. Only after several hours and a panic among White House staffers did the president delete the tweet.

Republicans might act as if they don’t know why Trump’s fans are so unfailingly loyal. Some commentators spent the first year or two of his presidency dancing around the reason he was elected, spending so much time probing the “economic anxiety” of his base that the phrase came to stand for a type of willful political blindness.

But Trump understands that he became a significant political figure by spreading the racist lie that Barack Obama was really born in Kenya. He launched his history-making presidential bid with a speech calling Mexican immigrants rapists and adopted a slogan, “America First,” previously associated with the raging anti-Semite Charles Lindbergh. Throughout the 2016 campaign, he won the invaluable prize of earned media with escalating racist provocations, which his supporters relished and which captivated cable news.

Trump, however, seems to grasp that racism is what put him over the top. It’s what made his campaign seem wild and transgressive and hard to look away from.

Now Trump’s poll numbers are cratering, we have double-digit unemployment and our pandemic-ravaged nation has been rendered an international pariah. America is faring exactly as well under Trump’s leadership as his casinos, airline and scam university did. It’s not surprising that he’s returning to what he knows, and what seemed to work for him before.

In fact, Trump appears to think his problem is that he hasn’t been racist enough. . . . . “He truly believes there is a silent majority out there that’s going to come out in droves in November,” a source told Swan.

And so last week, as if to prod that silent majority, Trump tweeted out videos of Black people assaulting white people. . . . . He said he’d veto a $741 billion defense bill over a provision, written by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, requiring that military bases honoring Confederates be renamed. Apoplectic over New York City’s plans to paint the words “Black Lives Matter” on Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower, he called the slogan “a symbol of hate.”

On Tuesday, Trump tweeted that he was considering scrapping an Obama-era housing regulation that required localities to address illegal patterns of residential segregation. . . . . The message to his white supporters seemed clear enough: Trump is going to fight to stop people of color from coming to your neighborhood.

The Times reported on the president’s rationale: “Mr. Trump and his campaign team, already concerned about his weakness in battleground states, have become increasingly alarmed by internal polling showing a softening of support among suburban voters.” Trump sees clearly — more clearly than most of his party — that racism is the main thing he has to offer.

There’s good reason to think that he’s misjudging these suburban voters. Polls show that a growing number of them, particularly women, are repelled by Trump’s race-baiting and divisiveness. But Republicans who complain that the president is undisciplined, that he can’t adhere to a strategy, miss the point: Bigotry has always been the strategy.

The Republicans who support him are yoked to that strategy. Their real frustration isn’t that it’s ugly but that it’s no longer working.

"MAGA Bomber" - A Portrait of a Growing Segment of the GOP

When the first pipe bombs sent to CNN and prominent Democrats who are constantly targeted by Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, began to be discovered, many on the right - think Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, et. al. -  claimed they were a "false flag operation" backed by liberals. Indeed, Der  Trumpenführer twisted reality into claiming that he was the victim, not the addressees on the bomb-containing packages.  They had no evidence, of course, but nowadays, evidence and facts are devoid for what passes for news and discourse on the right.  Deliciously, when Fox News tried to secure the rights to use a photo of Cesar Sayoc's van covered with pro- Trump and anti-CNN and liberal stickers, the couple who had taken the picture replied they "won't allow you guys to use it [the photo] because you aren't a reliable source of what's going on in our country today. Sorry!"  Now, as facts about Sayoc have emerged, as disturbed as he is, he is a portrait of the core base of the GOP: inspired by hatred and extremism and blindly eating up Trump's lies.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the right's crumbling and dishonest effort to disavow Sayoc and the causation of Trump rhetoric that he subscribed to whole-heartedly.  Here are article highlights:

Rush Limbaugh, the most influential conservative talk show host in the country, and a man whom Republicans made an honorary member of the 1995 freshman class in recognition of his role in helping them win the House majority, explained recently that the still-anonymous bomber could not be on the political right. “Republicans just don’t do this kind of thing,” he explained. “From the Haymarket riot to the Unabomber, bombs are a liberal tactic,” added Ann Coulter.

The discovery that the person suspected of mailing bombs to various figures Donald Trump has described as enemy threats is in fact a Trump-supporting Republican has necessitated a change in emphasis. Whereas before conservatives insisted the bomber’s method told us everything we needed to know about his ideology, now they insist it tells us nothing at all about his ideology. “Crazy person attacks Republican Congresspeople: blame the crazy. Crazy person sends bombs to Democrats: blame the Republicans,” tweets right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro, whose analysis was recirculated by Donald Trump Jr.

It is of course true that the overwhelming majority of Republicans are not violent. . . . . Nonetheless, the relationship between the two parties and violence is not symmetrical, and the fact that alleged bomber Cesar Sayoc had a strong identification with Trump and his partisan message is not a coincidence. The Republican Party encompasses an extremist fringe that nurtures violence in a way the Democratic Party does not.

Political violence — when it is attached to political ideology at all, as opposed to simple mental illness — is associated with Manichean, paranoid, illiberal thought. That is a description of a large and steadily growing wing of conservative politics. . . . . Sensible conservatives roll their eyes at this sort of nuttery, but by this point in history, such modes of delusional thought have gained such deep inroads in the party that purging them is a hopeless task.

Even figures as deranged as Limbaugh have long since found themselves outflanked by even more deranged minds like Alex Jones, who has received respectful attention from President Trump, himself an avid conspiracy theorist. Trump has praised a member of Congress for assaulting a reporter; pardoned ranchers who inspired a right-wing militia attack, the right-wing conspiracist Dinesh D’Souza, and lawless authoritarian racist Joe Arpaio; literally today, at an event in which he was attempting to project some measure of dignity and decorum, Trump invoked a far-right conspiracy theory by attacking George Soros as a “globalist” and chuckling appreciatively at an audience member shouting “Lock him up!”

The left certainly has illiberal, paranoid modes of thought. The difference is that the left-wing version resides outside the boundaries of two-party politics, because the Democratic Party is fundamentally liberal not radical. . . . . The street-fighting cult antifa lies outside of, and is primarily hostile to, Democratic politics. Left-wing violence from the 1960s likewise came out of radical groups who viewed the Democratic Party with contempt.

The Republican Party, on the other hand, has followed a course that has made its rhetoric amenable to extremism. Republican radicalism enabled the rise of a conspiratorial authoritarian president, and that president has expanded the bounds of the party’s following farther out to the fringe. It is getting harder and harder to distinguish the “normal” elements of conservatism from the “kook” parts. That some of those kooks would resort to violence is not an accident but a statistical likelihood. Trump’s party is a petri dish for diseased minds.

Decent, moral people ought to be embarrassed to admit they are Republicans.   The fact that people don't speaks volumes about them and none of it good.

The Republican Party Has Abandoned Conservatism

A column in The Atlantic written by a professor at Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies an a former Counselor of the Department of State voices what I concluded some years ago.  Namely, that the Republican Party no longer embraces or embodies true conservative principles.  Rather, it now embraces and is controlled by the bigotry, embrace of ignorance and tribalism of its Christofascist/white supremacist base. Knowledge, science, reason, and logic mean nothing any more.  Viciousness, hatred of others and misogyny now prevail.  Sadly, far too many formerly decent Republicans deliberately close their eyes to the reality of what the GOP has become and pretend - despite all the evidence to the contrary - that the party is still that of their childhoods or young adulthood.  Like myself, the author counts himself as a former Republican.  Here are highlights of the piece that correctly looks at the rise of Trump and now the effort to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as proof of the GOP's abandonment of conservative values:

I have always been a conservative. I voted Republican most of the time, affiliated with the GOP, and served proudly as a political appointee under two Republican presidents. I bitterly opposed Donald Trump’s candidacy and dropped my Republican affiliation once he won in 2016, figuring that the party would soon fall in line. I said as much in public, and my predictions were borne out. But it is only now that I have concluded that the break between conservative beliefs and the party that claimed to uphold them is complete and irreversible. 

Being a conservative has always meant, to me, taking a certain view of human nature, and embracing a certain set of values and virtues. The conservative is warier than her liberal counterpart about the darker impulses and desires that lurk in men and women, more doubtful of their perfectibility, skeptical of and opposed to the engineering of individual souls, and more inclined to celebrate freedom moderated by law, custom, education and culture.  She knows that power tends to corrupt, and likes to see it checked and divided. Words like responsibility, stoicism, self-control, frugality, fidelity, decorum, honor, character, independence, and integrity appeal to most decent people. They come particularly easily to the admirers of thinkers from Edmund Burke to Irving Kristol.

The GOP threw frugality and fiscal responsibility away long ago, initially in the Reagan years, but now on a stunning scale involving trillion-dollar deficits as far as can be forecast. It abandoned most of its beliefs in fidelity and character when it embraced a liar, cheat, and philanderer as its nominee and then as president. But something else snapped this week.

Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s judicial philosophy as expressed in various statements and conclusions was, for the most part, pretty standard conservative fare, save for one tell-tale element: his ascription of very high levels of immunity and discretion to the executive. In this respect, what passes today for conservatism is anything but. Where traditionally, conservatives have wanted “ambition to check ambition” as Alexander Hamilton put it, Republicans are now executive-branch kinds of people. It is not surprising that Kavanaugh himself worked at a high level in a Republican White House.

It was, however, in the epic clash over the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford that the collapse of conservatism in the Republican Party became most evident. Eleven men, most of them old, hid behind a female prosecutor wheeled in from Arizona because they could not, apparently, trust themselves to treat a victim of sexual assault with consideration and respect. So much for courage. . . . . when they did summon up the nerve to speak (during Kavanaugh’s turn) their questions consisted almost exclusively of partisan baying at the opposition. Genuine conservatives might have snarled initially, but would have, out of regard for the truth, tried to figure out exactly what happened to Ford 35 years ago, and whether the character of the man before them was what it was said to be.

Perhaps the collapse of modern conservatism came out most clearly in Kavanaugh’s own testimony—its self-pity, its hysteria, its conjuring up of conspiracies, its vindictiveness. . . . we should expect stoic self-control and calm from a conservative judge, even if his heart is being eaten out. No one watching those proceedings could imagine that a Democrat standing before this judge’s bench in the future would get a fair hearing. This was not the conservative temperament on display. It was, rather, personalized grievance politics.

Real conservatives have always prided themselves on their willingness to stand up to their own kind in the name of moral principle. . . . . William F. Buckley took on the John Birch Society in the middle of the 20th century, and the anti-Semites in the conservative camp later on. In 1993, when Buckley had to choose between loyalty to Joseph Sobran, his long-time protégé and colleague at the National Review, and rejection of bigotry, principle won and he fired his friend.

During the Ford and Kavanaugh testimonies, Americans watched the cranky maunderings of Senator Chuck Grassley and the spitting, menacing fury of Senator Lindsey Graham. The combination of calm strength and good humor that characterized the modern conservative icon, Ronald Reagan, was nowhere to be found.  . . . [and] has been replaced by the sour meanness of a party chiefly of men, who build walls to keep the world out, erect tariffs to destroy free trade, despise the alliances that keep Americans secure, and sanction the deliberate plucking of babes from their mothers’ breasts in order to teach illegal immigrants a painful lesson. In such a world, decorum and courtesy are irrelevant.

There has always been a dark side to American conservatism, much of it originating in the antebellum curse of a society, large parts of which favored slavery and the extermination of America’s native population, the exclusion of immigrants from American life, and discrimination against Catholics and Jews. Many of us had hoped that the civil-rights achievements of the mid-20th century (in which Republicans were indispensable partners), changing social norms regarding women, and that rising levels of education had eliminated the germs that produced secession, lynching, and Indian massacres. Instead, those microbes simply went into dormancy, and now, in the presence of Trump, erupt again like plague buboes—bitter, potent and vile.

It is impossible at this moment to envisage the Republican Party coming back. Like a brontosaurus with some brain-eating disorder it might lumber forward in the direction dictated by its past, favoring deregulation of businesses here and standing up to a rising China there, but there will be no higher mental functioning at work. And so it will plod into a future in which it is detested in a general way by women, African Americans, recent immigrants, and the educated young as well as progressives pure and simple.

The most we can do is point out the truths as we see them, and cheer on those who can do the necessary work. It is supposedly inconceivable that a genuinely conservative party could emerge, but then again, who thought the United States could be where it is now? And progressives, no less than bereft conservatives, should want this to happen, because the conservative virtues remain real virtues, the conservative insights real insights, and the conservative temperament an indispensable internal gyro keeping a country stable and sane.

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?

Washington Post Endorses Democrat Ticket in Virginia

I concur 100% with the Post's endorsements

The Washington Post has endorsed the entire Democrat statewide ticket in the Virginia Elections a little over a week away.  In doing so it lays out criticisms of the Republican ticket that largely define why I left the Republican Party years ago.  Whenever the choices are between hate and bigotry versus decency and/or between exclusion versus unity and cohesion, today's GOP always embraces the toxic and divisive.  As the Post lays out, Ed Gillespie had many opportunities to run a moral and forward looking campaign and every time he chose to do the wrong thing, including his pie in the sky tax cut proposal which would bankrupt Virginia.  John Adams is perhaps the most extreme and ugly of the three statewide GOP candidates which says a lot given that Jill Vogel wanted to subject women to invasive ultrasounds as part of pre-abortion counseling.  In contrast, the Democrat ticket seeks to unite Virginia and move it further into the 21st century rather than take it backwards to a foul version of the 1950's.  To me the choice is to vote Democrat, especially if one has children and grandchildren.  Here are highlights from the Post editorial:

Mr. Northam, whose knack for working across the aisle once prompted Republicans in the state Senate to ask him to switch parties, mounted a campaign largely true to his reputation for decency and good sense. Unfortunately, Mr. Gillespie chose a different path. Faced with a choice of highlighting his undeniable command of policy or pandering to vile and racially inflammatory tendencies in his party’s base, the Republican opted for the latter. In so doing, he shocked even some admirers.

It is not that Mr. Northam is qualified and Mr. Gillespie unqualified. It is that Mr. Northam can convincingly promise to be governor for all Virginians, while Mr. Gillespie, even while asserting the same, has disqualified himself from any such credible claim. We support Mr. Northam.

Having used massive TV advertising buys to whip up the fears and hatreds of his party’s extremists — by equating illegal immigrants with violent Hispanic gangs; by embracing Confederate monuments weeks after they were the rallying cause for neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville; by distorting the facts on rights restoration for a convicted sex offender — the Republican candidate has swapped his cloak as a problem-solver for a demagogue’s mantle. 

 

Mr. Northam has maintained relatively consistent stances, Mr. Gillespie, trying to play to both right-wing and centrist factions in the GOP, has hopscotched from one side to the other on many issues.

 

Before he tilted toward incendiary social issues, the centerpiece of Mr. Gillespie’s campaign platform was a pie-in-the-sky tax cut that would slash state revenue, by about $1.4 billion from an annual tax-supported budget of $20 billion — even as he proposed dozens of costly new programs and initiatives. Asked to name state programs he might cut to pay for his tax plan, Mr. Gillespie did not name any.

 

On climate change, Mr. Northam would continue Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s (D) innovative initiative promoting low-carbon energy technologies with efficient, market-based policies. Mr. Gillespie has condemned the plan, in keeping with his and his party’s effort to promote coal, an outdated, dirty energy source that has struggled to compete in recent years.

In the down-ticket races, which feature four lawyers, the choices are equally clear. For lieutenant governor, Democrat Justin Fairfax, the much better choice, is a bright, competent, well-versed former federal prosecutor turned corporate attorney. His opponent, State Sen. Jill Holtzman Vogel (R-Fauquier), opposed the 2013 transportation bill, then acknowledged it did wonders for her district. Her campaign website touts her sponsorship of radical tea party legislation that would have empowered states to overturn federal laws and regulations they disliked; now she seems utterly unaware of the bill. She objected to what she called President Barack Obama’s “heavy-handed” federal mandate on transgender bathrooms, but sponsored a far more heavy-handed measure that would have forced most women seeking abortions to undergo mandatory vaginal ultrasounds.

For attorney general, we favor the incumbent, Democrat Mark Herring. Mr. Herring won the office four years ago by assailing the partisanship of his arch-conservative Republican predecessor, Ken Cuccinelli II. Once in office, he was attacked for being almost equally activist as a champion of leftist causes. Yet Mr. Herring plausibly argued that his highest-profile decision — refusing to represent the state, his client, in a lawsuit challenging its ban on same-sex marriage — was a principled decision tantamount to declining to defend segregated schools in mid-20th-century Virginia. The Republican candidate, John Adams, an intelligent corporate lawyer, attacks Mr. Herring for spurning his own client, acknowledges that he, too, would have refused to defend segregation; but discounts the analogy. Advantage Mr. Herring.