Trump Celebrates Assault Of Reporter

Donald Trump has been an apologist for the brutal Saudi regime that by all evidence had Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi murdered and dismembered. And, as the Washington Post is reporting, Trump supporters have mounted a whispering campaign against Jamal Khashoggi that is designed to protect President Trump from criticism of his handling of the dissident journalist’s alleged murder by operatives of Saudi Arabia. These efforts include highlighting his association with the Muslim Brotherhood in his youth and raising conspiratorial questions about his work decades ago.  The goal?  To telegraph the message that his murder was justified.  It is all part and parcel with Trump’s contempt for the free press which is the last backstop to keeping dishonest politicians and authoritarians honest and accountable.  If you doubt this, look at Trump's praise for Congressman Greg Gianforte's physical assault on a reporter at a rally last night in Montana.  Just as frightening, the crowd cheered.   All of this is reminiscent of Hitler's war against the free press as he rose to power - as is the behavior of far too many Americans who ought to know better if they are the moral people they pretend to be.  Here are highlights from ABC News on Trump's foul behavior:

Donald Trump kicked off a western tour in Montana on Thursday ostensibly to support Matt Rosendale as he attempts to unseat Sen. Jon Tester, but it was his praise for Congressman Greg Gianforte's physical assault on a reporter that stole the show.

Gianforte is running for re-election as the state’s lone seat in the House of Representatives, and made national headlines during a special election for assaulting a reporter in a moment caught on audio tape.

"Any guy that can do a body slam, he is my type!" Trump said to cheers.  "I was in Rome with leaders when I heard about it, and I heard that he body-slammed a reporter," Trump said.  Trump said he was afraid Gianforte would lose after the moment, but then recalled, "Wait a moment, I know Montana."

Gianforte pleaded guilty and was sentenced to community service for the incident. He apologized on the night of his election victory, saying, "When you make a mistake you have to own it."

For Trump, the Montana Senate race is personal. Trump came to Montana on the attack against Tester, a two-term Democratic senator, who is in a close race against Matt Rosendale, the current state auditor.

[Trump] The president has made it his mission to unseat Tester, whose office publically released information about alleged misconduct that led to White House physician Adm. Ronny Jackson’s failed nomination to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs. Jackson denied allegations of misconduct and that he overprescribed medications, but eventually withdrew his name from consideration. Trump never forgot.

[Trump] The president spoke at length about immigration and falsely said that Democrats are supporting a caravan of immigrants traveling up from Central America. . . . “As you know, I’m willing to send the military to defend our Southern border if necessary all because of the illegal immigration onslaught brought by the Democrats because they refuse to acknowledge or to change the laws -- they like it,” Trump said. While Trump comfortably won the Big Sky state by 20 points, Tester, a moderate Democrat, maintains a slight lead in what has become one of the most expensive political contests in the small state’s history as millions of dollars have poured into Montana. It’s the president’s third trip to Montana, and Tester is only a few points ahead of Rosendale in recent polls.

Praising violence against journalists and playing on racial hatred - all perfectly fine with Trump supporters, including evangelical Christians who like the Pharisees of the Bible make a show of their feigned religiosity even as they betray Christ's message.  

The Toxic Ethnonationalism of Today's GOP

As the Republican Party has devolved into something ugly, current and former members of the Party have reacted in differing ways.  Some, like me, walked away convinced that the Party could not be saved from within.  Others stayed and simply threw away their morality and integrity and embraced the ugliness - sadly, I know a number of such people.  A third group has stayed and appears to be fighting a losing rear guard battle as the power of the Christofascists and open racists and white nationalists over the party surges as best embodied by the rise of Donald Trump, a man devoid of honor, morality and basic decency.  I continue to believe that the only way the GOP will be reformed and perhaps brought back from the abyss is through repeated electoral defeats. That said, whether the mindset of the Christofascists, open racists and white nationalists who ignore objective reality can be defeated remains to be seen.  I am not optimistic.  One way or another, the Republican Party in its current incarnation must be defeated.  An op-ed in the New York Times by an establishment Republican looks at how some remain to try to work against the Trump cancer within the GOP.  Here are excerpts:

A year after President Trump’s stunning electoral victory, the Republican Party is in a very strange place. It’s politically dominant but increasingly unpopular, particularly among young people and nonwhites of all ages, whose level of unhappiness with Mr. Trump and his administration is toxic.

Republicans have all the power but can’t seem to get much of anything done. There are huge internal fissures that are growing rather than shrinking. . . . “Right now it’s a season of war against the G.O.P. establishment.”

The first thing those of us who are vocal critics of Mr. Bannon and Mr. Trump need to recognize and fully reckon with is that Mr. Trump’s victory in the Republican primaries was not an aberration so much as a culmination, an apotheosis of sorts. Underlying currents and powerful passions animating the base of the party that had been building for years burst forth when Republicans nominated Mr. Trump.

As the world now knows, these feelings of powerlessness, resentment and grievance are widespread, and as a candidate Mr. Trump tapped into them perfectly. Many Republican voters have, at least for now, jettisoned traditional conservatism in favor of the Trump-Bannon brand of ethnonationalism. . . . . they have embraced white identity politics as a matter of course and they have developed a disdain for the hard, intricate work of governing.

But the reasons for the rise of Mr. Trump lie still deeper than that. There is a nihilistic strain coursing through the veins of a significant number of people on the American right. They delight in Mr. Trump’s effort to annihilate truth and peddle conspiracy theories, and they draw energy and purpose from the unsettling effect he has on the nation as a whole. For them, Mr. Trump is a “fighter,” and politics needs to be weaponized in order to be enjoyed. . . . . As a result, they are bending their will to his ways, seeing the world as he does.

Republicans, then, are faced with an existential question. Will Mr. Trump and his most ardent supporters succeed in their effort to reconceive the party? Can they be stopped? Certainly, if they don’t encounter more spirited resistance than they have so far, they may well pull it off.

Some so-called establishment Republicans, alarmed by the rise of the ethnonationalist wing of the party, comfort themselves with the belief that this movement can be domesticated, absorbed into the traditional coalition with its sharp edges sanded off. According to this narrative, the Republican Party will weather this storm and emerge in a modified but recognizable form. There are bound to be tensions, but civil war can be averted.

Count me skeptical. Many of Mr. Trump’s supporters, who get their news from Breitbart and Alex Jones, from conservative talk radio and Fox News, want a revolution, not accommodation. . . . . They want to burn the village down. Until now all the energy has been with them, and it is laughable to think that passing tax cuts will satiate them.

That’s why, for many of the lifelong Republican conservatives who never boarded the Trump train, it is particularly disappointing that the Republican leaders we know who have deep disagreements with Mr. Trump and Mr. Bannon are for the most part unwilling to make the counter-case in a forceful and comprehensive fashion. Nor are his private critics rushing to go public with their often mordant analyses of Mr. Trump’s movement.

I can’t help but feel that they are badly underestimating the gravity of the moment. They are willfully ignoring the danger Trumpism and Bannonism pose to many of the principles they claim to hold dear, and they are deluding themselves into believing that a rapprochement is possible with those who are determined to destroy them.

What this points to is the need for an energetic public case for a conservative politics as an alternative to their case for a revolutionary politics; for Republicans who don’t share Mr. Bannon’s manias to say so and to offer an alternative, in the area of policy but also in temperament and disposition. Thankfully that’s beginning to happen. In the last week, former President George W. Bush, in whose White House I served, and Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, offered a philosophical alternative to Trumpism.

In the short term, there may well be a cost to challenging the ethnonationalist wing of the Republican Party. But while the leaders of this wing are politically formidable, they are hardly invincible.

Beyond that, though, there’s really no choice about challenging the blood-and-soil nationalists. If they were to triumph — if the tribalistic, angry, anti-government wing of the party turns out to be the vanguard rather than an ugly and unfortunate parenthesis — then the Republican Party would collapse intellectually and morally, and a lot of lifelong Republicans would head for the exits.

[L]et me venture a guess. Much of America, including some large number of Republicans waiting to be mobilized, is thirsting for leaders of courage and purpose who, in a fractious and intemperate age, believe — and can help others believe — that one of the high callings of politics is to heal our wounds rather than to inflict new ones, to appeal to our best instincts rather than our worst.

For many of us, Mr. Trump, Mr. Bannon and Mr. Moore represent the politics of dissolution and dehumanization, of resentment and enmity, of half-truths and anti-truths. Republicans who do not want their party to be defined by them need to understand they can’t avoid this fight. They have to decide how they want to wage it and how they are going to win it. I’m not sure if it’s a winning one, but I’m certain it’s an ennobling one. And that should be enough.

Is The Only Problem in American Politics the GOP?

Continuing the theme of the previous post, a piece in New York Magazine ask the question of whether or not the only real problem with American politics is the Republican Party.  True, there are far left elements in the Democrat Party, but is the false equivalency that many pundits and self-appointed mavens of the media try to construct between the far right and the far left true?  In view, it is not and I tend to agree with the author that most of the pathology we see in the political realm comes from the far right, the Christofascists and white supremacists who now dominate the Republican Party. Say what you will about the far left, it doesn't seek to disenfranchise, deport or perhaps even kill its political opponents and/or those who look different or adhere to a different faith or no faith.  Like it or not, most of the hatred we see and domestic terrorism comes from and is committed by right wing extremists. Here are column excepts:

Political scientist Lee Drutman argues in a Vox essay that American politics is descending into what he calls “doom-loop partisanship.” Drutman notes that Americans have been “retreating into our separate tribal epistemologies, each with their own increasingly incompatible set of facts and first premises,” . . . Drutman attributes this to winner-take-all elections, the expanding power of the presidency, and the growing influence of money in politics. I think, despite all the very real design flaws in American politics, the problems he describe stem mainly from the pathologies of the Republican Party.

It is certainly true that the psychological relationship between the parties has a certain symmetry. Both fear each other will cheat to win and use their power to stack the voting deck. . . . But while it is not true that Democrats have allowed illegal voting in nontrivial levels, it is extremely true that Republicans have deliberately made voting inconvenient for Democratic-leaning constituencies. The psychology is parallel, but the underlying facts are not.

Likewise, there is a superficial similarity to the terror with which partisans now greet governments controlled by the opposing party. Obama’s presidency made Republicans [wrongly] terrified of rampant socialism and vengeful minority rule. . . . Trump’s presidency has inspired a similar terror among liberals terrified that Trump would take their insurance and deport immigrants.

Liberal fears have had a much closer relationship to reality. The reason is that the Democratic Party is racially and economically heterogeneous. Even if he had wanted to take vengeance upon white America for its sins, Obama had far too many white supporters to make such a course of action remotely practical. (A majority of Obama’s voters were white, in fact.) On economic issues, the Democratic Party relies on support and input from business and labor alike. Whatever terrors of rampant Jacobinism may have gripped the economic elite, there are limits to the fiscal and regulatory pain Democrats can impose on a constituency that has a seat at the table (many seats, actually).

There is little such balance to be found in the Republican Party. . . . [Republicans] have bottomed out on their minority support and proven able to win national power regardless, by using racial wedge issues to pry away blue-collar whites. Advocates for labor or the poor have no voice whatsoever in the Republican elite. It took a massive national mobilization to narrowly dissuade the party from snatching health insurance away from millions of people too poor or sick to afford it.

[T]he fact is that the Democratic Party is fundamentally accountable to the mainstream news media. And that [mainstream] media play[ers] try to follow rules of objectivity that the right-wing alternative media does not bother with.

What matters is that Democratic politicians need to please a news media that is open to contrary facts and willing — and arguably eager — to hold them accountable. The mainstream media have have its liberal biases, but it also misses the other way — see the Times’ disastrously wrong report, a week before the election, that the FBI saw no links between the Trump campaign and Russia and no intention by Russia to help Trump. One cannot imagine Fox News publishing an equivalently wrong story against the Republican Party’s interests — its errors all run in the same direction.

Whatever interest liberals may have in finding congenial media, they don’t dismiss the mainstream media out of hand in the way conservatives have been trained over decades to do. When the conservative news media criticizes Republicans, it is almost always to play the role of ideological enforcer, attacking them for their lack of fervor. One party has a media ecosystem that serves as a guardrail, and the other has one that serves only as an accelerant.

The left has no equivalent to a Rush Limbaugh in influence and sheer lunacy. . . . . There are figures just as crazy as Limbaugh on the left, but they are almost uniformly outside the Democratic Party coalition.

[W]hatever the very real flaws in the American political and electoral system, it is simply impossible to design any kind of a system that can withstand a stress test like a major party captured by a faction as radical as the conservative movement. Its absence of limiting principles to its ideology, indifference to empirical evidence, and inability to concede failings of its dogma lead to an endless succession of failures explained away to the base as faintheartedness.

Republicans are sealed off in a bubble of paranoia and rage, and Democrats are sealed off from that bubble. Democrats fear Republican government because it is dangerous and extreme. Republicans fear Democratic government because they are dangerous and extreme.

 Like the Christofascists who hijacked the GOP base in earnest around the time I left the Republican Party, today's GOP is defined by hatred of others and the embrace of ignorance.  It IS the problem behind so many of the nation's political woes today.