A Recession’s Threat to Trump's Re-election

For weeks Donald Trump down played the pandemic facing the globe and bragged that the illness was a hoax and then that his closing of the boarders to those from some nations had kept the nation safe.  Now, with 8,700 known cases in the USA, that claim - like most of what comes from Trump's mouth - was a lie.   Trump's real concern is that an economic collapse and a tanking of the stock market (which has already happened) would deprive him of the one thing to run on for re-election: a strong economy.  Trump's not the only Republican with this worry.  The incredible stupid Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) has more or less said that the economy should not be shut down simply because 3.4% of the population might die.  A piece in Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball looks at why Trump and others in the GOP are terrified of an economic recession or worse.  Here are article excerpts:

The coronavirus pandemic has upended almost every aspect of American life over the past few weeks, and the 2020 presidential election is no exception. We have already seen candidates forced to cancel rallies, hold a debate with no audience present, and shift their campaign staffs to working online. But the biggest impact of the crisis on the 2020 election is likely to be through its effect on the U.S. economy.

With major sectors of the economy grinding to a near-standstill due to the pandemic, many economic forecasters are now predicting that the U.S. will experience a major downturn in economic growth in the current quarter that could continue for at least the next two quarters. Some forecasters are predicting a major recession with the economy shrinking by 5% or more in the second quarter of 2020. That’s significant because, in many election forecasting models, including my own “time for change” model, economic growth in the second quarter is a key predictor of the election results. . . . . So it’s possible that even if the economy recovers later in the year, the most electorally-salient perceptions will nonetheless be formed in the spring and summer.

It takes 270 electoral votes to win a presidential election. The results indicate that, despite the huge boost that Trump is predicted to receive as a first-term incumbent, an economic downturn in the second quarter, combined with a net approval rating in negative territory, would very likely doom Trump’s chances of winning a second term. The only scenario here in which Trump would be favored to win a second term would be modest economic growth combined with a small improvement in his net approval rating, which has been stuck in the vicinity of -10 for many months according to the FiveThirtyEight average. The model suggests that a major recession would likely result in an Electoral College landslide for Trump’s Democratic challenger, especially if it is accompanied by a further decline in [Trump's] the president’s approval rating.

Based on the results of presidential elections since World War II with running incumbents, a president with an upside-down approval rating and an economy in recession would have little chance of winning a second term in the White House. If President Trump’s net approval rating remains where it is now or declines further, and if the recession is severe, with real GDP shrinking by three points or more in the second quarter, the result could well be a defeat of landslide proportions.

A few caveats are in order here. Voters may not hold an incumbent president responsible for a recession brought on by an unforeseeable disaster like the coronavirus pandemic — although they may hold him responsible for the government’s response to the pandemic, which is a story that is still being written.

Overall, one of the best arguments in favor of [Trump’s] the president winning a second term has been strong economic performance for much of his term. The public health crisis seems very likely to depress that performance for at least the next few months. This poses an electoral threat to [Trump] the president, which the model vividly demonstrates.

When Does Republican Partisanship Become Treason?

In my view, the Republican Party long ago lost any shred of basis for claiming to be the party of morality, patriotism or Christian values.  Ditto for evangelical Christians who have betrayed Christ's gospel message and support GOP policies of slashing the social safety net for the poor and elderly, empowering racists and white supremacists, separating families and literally putting children in cages, and embracing the most vile and immoral individual to every occupy the White House.  Now, however, as a column in the Baltimore Sun, Republican partisan ship is moving into a new and treasonous phase as Republicans, especially in Congress who have sworn an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution and protect the nation from foreign enemies, embrace Russian propaganda, attack America's allies, and weaken the nation both domestically and internationally.  The Grand Old Party is fast becoming the party of Putin.  Here are column highlights:

It bears repeating: Donald Trump was not only press-ganging Volodymyr Zelensky in an illegal scheme for partisan gain. He was rewriting the history of 2016 in order to wound enemies (Democrats) and help friends (Vladimir Putin) — as well as to give Kremlin operatives room to strike again.

It is in no way overstating the case to say [Trump] the president of the United States is the head of an international conspiracy to defraud the American people. It has remained to be seen how far the Republican Party is willing to go in defense of Mr. Trump’s conspiracy. Senate Republicans quickly conceded that Russia sabotaged Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, but stopped short of saying the president benefited (because admitting that would be admitting Mr. Trump is an illegitimate president.)

But now, as the impeachment process enters a new and dangerous phase, we are seeing new GOP behavior, though we have witnessed plenty of hints. One reporter wrote recently that Republicans decided the best way to defend the president is to embrace “the claim" of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election. Let’s be clear. There was no Ukrainian interference. That’s according to the special counsel’s report, which cited one and a half dozen national security agencies. That’s according to the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report. That’s according to every career official in the State Department who testified under oath last month.

The idea that the Democrats, not Mr. Trump’s campaign staffers, conspired with foreign operatives is more than “conspiracy theory.” It is a fascist ploy to turn lies into truth. This is why I said recently that Mr. Trump’s crime is so much worse than abuse of power. It’s treason. And the Republicans, like lemmings, are heading for a cliff.

Now, it’s one thing to follow the party wherever it goes. Ordinary partisan activity, however vile, isn’t something I care to debate now. It’s quite another thing, however, to know what you’re doing is wrong and do it anyway. The Republicans can’t not know.

First, because intelligence officials briefed Senate Republicans, telling them explicitly the Ukraine-attacked-us story is pure Putin disinformation. Second, because Fiona Hill, a former member of the White House National Security Council, and a Russia authority, was clear about what House Republicans were already doing. She said: “In the course of this investigation, I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.

And now we have another reason why the Republicans can’t not know they are participating in conspiracy to defraud the American people. Rudy Giuliani, who is not regarded for his discretion, confessed to knowing the Ukraine-attacked-us story was bunk. Not only that, the president’s personal attorney actually said he decided to pursue “evidence” of Ukraine’s attack in order to undercut Robert Mueller’s report. . . . . I can go prove someone else committed this crime. So to defend Mr. Trump is to defend Russia.

Is that where the Republicans want to go? Well, yes, if Tucker Carlson is any indication. The Fox News host is on the bleeding edge of attempts by Trump partisans to expand what the American people think is acceptable behavior. On his show recently he said: “I’m totally opposed to these [US] sanctions [on Russia] and I don’t think we should be at war with Russia and I think we should take the side of Russia if we have to choose between Russia and Ukraine.”

[I]t’s fair for some conservative writers, like Charlie Sykes and Matt Lewis, to characterize the Republicans as dupes and stooges or parroting the Kremlin line. But at some point, we must face what it means for Republicans to know the truth but to advance Kremlin lies anyway, even when doing so slowly burns down the republic.

At some point soon, we must stop calling them dupes, and start calling them the enemy.

Personally, I have seen them as the enemy since Trump's election. Things have only gotten worse since January 2017.

Honor and Morality vs. Trump

One way to think about what we are witnessing as the public impeachment hears unfold is to think of a mix between the movie "The Godfather" and sleazy real estate investors/developers who skirt the laws and often rely on bribes and treats to push their projects along.  Donald Trump - and sadly most of those who have signed on to his administration - embody this combination of criminality and moral haziness, if not out right moral bankruptcy.  As the hearings unfold in contrast to this corruption and lawlessness, one is witnessing individuals cut from the cloth of old school career diplomats who, unlike Trump, put honor, professionalism, and country ahead of squalid personal gain.  An op-ed in the Washington Post co-authored by a law school classmate, Evan Thomas, who has written numerous historical works looks at this stark contrast between Trump world and what ought to be the standard for government service.  If Trump avoids removal from office, it will be a sad day for America.  It will also be a sign that morality has been kicked into the gutter by someone little better than a mob boss and that immorality is now the hallmark of the Republican Party.  Here are column highlights: 

Geography, Napoleon is reputed to have remarked, is destiny, and this axiom came to our minds this week as we watched two very different but neighboring universes collide before the House Intelligence Committee. The ramrod-straight William B. Taylor Jr. and the bow-tied George Kent, two diplomats from the largely WASP ethos of the post-World War II foreign policy establishment, one headquartered at places such as the Council on Foreign Relations’ imposing Harold Pratt House at 68th Street and Park Avenue, found themselves bearing noble witness amid an impeachment imbroglio that may be best understood by an appreciation of the wilder mores of midtown Manhattan. 

Only a few blocks away from the portrait-lined walls and genteel cocktails of the Council lies the real center of gravity in the politics of 2019: the gilded Trump Tower, built on the fluid morals and cutthroat deal-making of New York real estate. The Tower sits cheek-by-jowl (the image is chosen purposely) with the Grand Havana Room, a cigar club frequented by Rudy Giuliani, atop a Fifth Avenue building owned by the family of Jared Kushner. Walk a bit farther south — you don’t even need a Town Car — and you reach Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., home of Fox News and the New York Post.

To Trump supporters, the testimony Wednesday was the “deep state” surfacing briefly from the depths of white papers, institutional knowledge and a facility with U.S. military and diplomatic history. (Kent’s evocation of von Steuben and Lafayette was straight out of a Ward Just novel.)

To Trump’s critics and defenders of constitutional norms, the Republican narrative that the president’s threats to deny security assistance to Ukraine was just the kind of thing tough guys do (and, after getting caught, he didn’t do it!), suggested that tabloid hyperbole, Fox News arcana and New York hardball had replaced the real world.

The story of upended conventions and of a president who careens between self-parody and serious lawlessness is by now familiar, as old as the Age of Trump itself. The distinction is that the impeachment hearings have given us perhaps the clearest example yet of the triumph of political demimonde wise guys such as Trump, Giuliani and the Rogers Stone and Ailes over the latter-day Robert Lovetts and Dean Achesons. And it’s not just Wise Men, of course: Jeane Kirkpatrick, Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice hailed from the establishment world, as do Marie Yovanovitch and Fiona Hill. The moment of decision between the Wise Men and the wise guys on Wednesday was subtle but nevertheless clear. It came when Rep. Michael R. Turner, a Republican, noted that diplomats such as Taylor and Kent “deal in words of understanding. Words of beliefs and feelings, because in your profession, that’s what you work with to try to pull together policy.” Theirs, the lawmaker was implying, was almost a touchingly naive way of life in which one trusted what one was told, assumed the fundamental truthfulness of, say, a presidentially appointed ambassador, and believed that a president himself meant what he said.

No longer: The midtown game of wheeling and dealing, often done over a cigar at the Grand Havana or perhaps an overpriced steak at 21, has now gone global as the denizens of Trump’s neighborhood run shadow foreign policy ops seeking 2020 election help and good paydays.

Had any other president, Taylor was asked, linked official aid in the American interest to private or political benefit? With a stoicism and brevity that would’ve made George Marshall quietly proud, Taylor replied, “No.”

To be sure, the establishment has been far from perfect, its fall from preeminence more than partly self-inflicted. Elite education and conventional expertise don’t guarantee good results, and America has been shaped by the battle between the privileged and the populist since long before Andrew Jackson. Such establishment condescension also fueled the rise of Joe McCarthy and of McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn, who served as lawyer and mentor in the 1970s and ’80s to a young developer from Queens who was looking to make it big in Manhattan. And Donald Trump never forgot a thing Cohn taught him. In midtown Manhattan, Trump learned to dominate the news — in his rise, that meant the New York Post, with its screaming, one-sourced stories, an early harbinger of the presidential Twitter strategy. He learned the power of TV. And he learned that tough guys — or “killers,” in a favorite approbation of Trump’s — like Ailes, who presided over this stew of often-abusive power, money and misinformation, were the kinds of guys he could count on.

For one thing was certain: The Wise Men of 68th Street or the United Nations or any of the traditional institutions of expertise weren’t his guys. The question America now faces in impeachment and, should Trump prevail, in the 2020 election, is whose New York will serve us best in the long run — the wise guys’ or the Wise Men’s?

Be very, very afraid.

George Conway: Trump is a Racist President

As a post yesterday noted, the time has truly come for my Republican "friends" to decide once and for all who they are.  Are they decent, moral people, or are they with Donald Trump and the Klansmen and alt-right figures cheering his racism and cut from the same foul, racist cloth as Trump. It's time they condemned both Trump and the political party that refuses to condemn his overt racism and walk away from that political party all together.  Doing nothing is not a moral option.  If they fail to walk away from Trump and the GOP at all levels, they are complicit in that very same racism and, frankly, might as well start wearing a KKK or Neo-Nazi lapel pin so that the rest of us know at a glance just how toxic they are and can avoid them whenever possible. Similarly, those of us who make some true effort to follow the Gospel message can then point them out to our children and grandchildren and tell them such people are who they never want to emulate or even socialize with.  In a column in the Washington Post, George Conway, husband of Kellyanne Conway, part of Trump's equivalent to Hitler's Reich Minister of Propaganda - how they remain married baffles me - calls out Trump for what he is: a outright racist. By extension, he calls out all of those who continue to support Trump and/or try to conveniently look the other way.  Here are column highlights: 

To this day, I can remember almost the precise spot where it happened: a supermarket parking lot in eastern Massachusetts. It was the mid-1970s; I was not yet a teenager, or barely one. I don’t remember exactly what precipitated the woman’s ire. But I will never forget what she said to my mother, who had come to this country from the Philippines decades before. In these words or something close, the woman said, “Go back to your country.”

I remember the incident well, but it never bothered me all that much. Nor did racial slurs, which, thankfully, were rare. None of it was troublesome, to my mind, because most Americans weren’t like that. The woman in the parking lot was just a boor, an ignoramus, an aberration. America promised equality. Its constitution said so. My schoolbooks said so. The country wasn’t perfect, to be sure. But its ideals were. And every day brought us closer to those ideals.

How naive a child could be. The woman in the parking lot — there were many more like her, it turned out. They never went away. Today they attend rallies, and they post ugliness on Facebook or Twitter. As for the victims of historic racial oppression, no matter how much affirmative action (or reverse discrimination, or whatever you want to call it) the nation offered, they, too, had resentments that never went away — in part because of people like the parking-lot woman. Those resentments often led to more, not fewer, charges of racism as the years passed — charges of institutional racism and “white privilege.”

Which, in turn, bred another kind of resentment: Why, asked many an unaffluent white parent, who may never have uttered a racial slur or whose ancestors may never have held anyone in bondage, does my child have to check a box to her detriment, or be accused of “white privilege,” when the only privilege she has received came from the sweat of my brow? Why are people like me being called racist, when all I’ve done was mind my own business?

And how naive an adult could be. The birther imaginings about Barack Obama? Just a silly conspiracy theory, latched onto by an attention seeker who has a peculiar penchant for them. The “Mexican” Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel incident? Asinine, inappropriate, a terrible attack on the judiciary by an egocentric man who imagined that the judge didn’t like him. The white supremacists’ march in Charlottesville? The president’s comments were absolutely idiotic, but he couldn’t possibly have been referring to those self-described Nazis as “good people”. . . .

No, I thought, President Trump was boorish, dim-witted, inarticulate, incoherent, narcissistic and insensitive. He’s a pathetic bully but an equal-opportunity bully — in his uniquely crass and crude manner, he’ll attack anyone he thinks is critical of him. No matter how much I found him ultimately unfit, I still gave him the benefit of the doubt about being a racist.

But Sunday left no doubt. Naivete, resentment and outright racism, roiled in a toxic mix, have given us a racist president. Trump could have used vile slurs, including the vilest of them all, and the intent and effect would have been no less clear. Telling four non-white members of Congress — American citizens all, three natural-born — to “go back” to the “countries” they “originally came from”? That’s racist to the core.

What’s just as bad, though, is the virtual silence from Republican leaders and officeholders. . . . the Republicans don’t want to give succor to their political enemies; because, knowing how vindictive, stubborn and obtusely self-destructive Trump is, they fear his wrath.

But none of that is good enough. Trump is not some random, embittered person in a parking lot — he’s the president of the United States. By virtue of his office, he speaks for the country. What’s at stake now is more important than judges or tax cuts or regulations or any policy issue of the day. What’s at stake are the nation’s ideals, its very soul.

As I watch this horrible man spread hatred and division, I again get a sense of what decent Germans may have felt as Hitler rose to power.  Sadly, too many looked the other way rather than fight hatred.  That failure to act turned out very badly for many Germans, their country and the world.  Have we really forgotten the lessons of WWII and the bigot who helped bring it about?

Trump Hands Democrats a Gift with Effort to Kill Obamacare

I often make the statement that Trump and the Republican Party want to create a new Gilded Age where the wealth of the richest Americans soared to obscene levels - thinks of the Rockefellers, Goulds, Vanderbilts, etc. - while the majority of Americans struggled to survive.  One study found as follows as to what happened to life expectancy during the rise of the Gilded Age:

"an average white ten-year-old American boy in 1880, born at the beginning of the Gilded Age and living through it, could expect to die at age forty-eight. His height would be 5 feet, 5 inches. He would be shorter and have a briefer life than his Revolutionary forebears.” “Infant mortality worsened in many cities after 1880.”

Part of the problem of the Gilded Age was a lack of safety and environmental regulations - things that were eventually remedied.  Yet now, Trump and the GOP are steadily rolling back such regulations so that big business can reap larger profits. Now, Trump has declared war on the Affordable Health Care Act and seeks to deprive millions of access to healthcare.  Even before this latest action, as a Washington Post story reported, the USA was going backwards in terms of diminished life expectancy and infant mortality.  Here are excerpts:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, reported in November [2018] that life expectancy for the average American ticked downward for the third year in a row. The news attracted a storm of attention . . . . Other trends, however, passed by more quietly. In health care, for example, maternal deaths inched up slightly this year to 20.7 per 100,000 live births, according to data from the United Health Foundation. In fact, giving birth in the United States has become increasingly deadly over the past few decades, placing our country in the same category as developing nations such as Afghanistan and Swaziland. And the rates are even worse for mothers of color.

The latest CDC data released this year shows that U.S. infant mortality rates, after steadily falling over the past few decades, haven’t decreased significantly for five years. Today it stands at 5.9 deaths per 1,000 births, far higher than the average rate of 3.9 deaths for developed countries. Again, it’s even worse for infants of color.

Given these statistics, increasing access to health care would be the moral thing to do.  Sadly, to Trump and Republicans (and evangelical Christians), most of us simply do not matter.  Indeed, it appears that they'd prefer that Americans - especially minorities and the poor - simply die while the rich rake in an ever larger share of the nation's wealth. How else to explain the Trump administration's latest effort to destroy health care access for millions.  A piece in Politico looks at this disgusting development and the Democrat response to such immorality.  Here are highlights:

House and Senate Democrats on Tuesday seized on the Justice Department’s endorsement of a federal court ruling to eliminate Obamacare in its entirety, immediately renewing attacks on the GOP for trying to gut the law’s popular protections and rip health coverage from more than 20 million Americans.

The administration’s surprise decision — a shift from its prior stance that only parts of the Affordable Care Act should be thrown out — offered a unifying moment for Democrats still grappling with the news that Mueller would not charge President Donald Trump with any crimes and comes as the party readies a fresh legislative offensive on health care.

“It’s disgusting. It’s horrible,” said Rep. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, the No. 4 House Democrat. “It’s what they were trying to do during the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, it’s what Republicans were doing when they filed the lawsuit. The president’s been clear about his position the whole time.”

And even as Democrats decried the move, they also saw it as a political gold mine.

[L]awmakers were privately ecstatic about the Trump administration’s decision to essentially to trample all over its own good news cycle and turn the attention back to an issue that Democrats used to win back the House.

“It’s really outrageous. I don’t understand if Republicans weren’t present for the last election, but if there was an issue that was deeply critical, it was health care,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said after the meeting. . . . It’s “not only immoral, it’s a really bad political decision for them,” she added.

“We’re going to introduce a bill to protect and strengthen the ACA. That’s the responsible thing to do,” said Rep. Donna Shalala (D-Fla.). “They’re being irresponsible, and they’re putting 20 million people in this country at risk.”

Indeed, House Democrats had planned a pivot to health care even before the Trump administration late Monday announced its support for a federal judge’s December ruling that the entire ACA should be invalidated because Congress eliminated its individual mandate penalty in the GOP tax law.

Democrats are rolling out a wide-ranging Obamacare package aimed at shoring up the law’s benefits while reversing several of the Trump administration main health priorities — a bid to follow through on the campaign-trail vows that helped propel them into the House majority.

The package is largely a rehash of policies that Democrats pitched last year, like expanding the Obamacare subsidies meant to help Americans afford health coverage and restoring outreach funding that Trump slashed over the past two years. It would also rescind regulations expanding cheaper, skimpier health plans that the administration has touted for providing greater choice, but Democrats have derided as “junk” insurance.

Their plan gained new significance in the wake of the Trump administration’s legal action, providing vulnerable Democrats with concrete legislation to hype for their swing-district voters and a powerful tool to use against Republicans who refuse to endorse any Obamacare-related measures even as they insist they want to protect patients with pre-existing conditions.

For Republicans, meanwhile, the Justice Department’s move threatens to put them back on the defensive just days after what was arguably their biggest victory of the Trump era.

[M]ost Republicans have so far remained fairly quiet in the aftermath of the DOJ filing in a case that few view as politically advantageous — even as Trump appeared to celebrate the decision. . . . GOP lawmakers who did have an initial reaction expressed exasperation at the disconnect between the Trump administration and the Hill on health care.

[T]he issue is a new headache given the new Senate map: Democrats have gone from defending 10 states that Trump won in 2018 to launching campaigns against incumbents in places like Colorado, Iowa, North Carolina and Maine. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) has been particularly outspoken in opposition to the administration’s support of the lawsuit.

[N]either the Trump administration nor Republicans in Congress have any ready replacement for Obamacare if it is ultimately wiped out. . . . with a serious battle for Senate control developing in purple and blue states, Democrats say they have the political upper hand on an issue their House counterparts used to devastating effect in 2018.

This move by the Trump administration to take away health care will prove far more detrimental to the administration and the Republican Party than any gains they might have made by the [findings] of Mr. Barr’s letter,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

Even Doug Jones of Alabama, by far the most endangered Senate Democrat next year, was singing the same tune as party leaders. “I’m outraged. It’s going to hurt my state really bad if that were to go forward,” Jones said in an interview. “They couldn’t do in this chamber what they wanted to do, which is completely dismantle and disintegrate it. So they’re trying to blow it up in any way possible.”

Being a Republican and being a decent and moral person are becoming increasingly mutually exclusive.

A Republican Challenge to Trump?

As often noted, I grew up in a family of Republicans and even held a precinct seat on the City Committee of the Republican Party of Virginia Beach for eight years (if you check the Virginia State Corporation Commission records I was the incorporator of that body).  I left the GOP when it became clear to me that (i) the party no longer grasp the concept of separation of church and state and (ii) increasingly stood for racism and policies diametrically opposed to Christian principles.  The irony, of course, is the latter shift directly correlated with the rise of evangelical Christians in the party, perhaps the most un-Christian folks one will ever encounter.  Donald Trump is the outcome of that ugly transformation of the party.  With polls indicating the 58% of Americans say they will vote against Trump if he runs in 2020 and his support eroding even among his Christofascist and white supremacist base (in my view, the two are one and the same), there are noises that Trump - assuming he's still in office - will face a primary challenge for the 2020 nomination.  Such a move might save the GOP from a form of suicide and might allow the party to again claim some semblance of support for common decency and morality.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the growing chances of a primary challenge.  Here are excerpts:

Donald Trump’s job approval rating now stands at a paltry 39 percent, according to a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, while his disapproval rating is 53 percent — a net decline of seven percentage points from last month when the government shutdown began.  No surprise there.

What’s surprising, and potentially more hope-inspiring, is that [Trump's] the president’s support from his base is also beginning to tumble, according to the same poll. It’s down since last month by a net of 10 points among Republicans, a net of 13 points among white evangelicals, and a net of 18 points among suburban men. Even white men without college degrees — the very core of his base — are turning on him, with 50 percent approving of his performance and 35 percent disapproving, down from 56 to 34.

All of which raises the question: Might the waters be getting a little warmer for a potential Republican primary challenge to Trump?

Larry Hogan, the recently re-elected centrist Republican governor of Maryland, isn’t about to announce — but neither will he rule out a run. “I’m very frustrated and concerned about the direction of the Republican Party and the country,” he tells me in a phone interview on Friday.

Hogan is attracting notice partly because he just romped to re-election over the progressive Democrat Ben Jealous — becoming the first G.O.P. governor to win re-election in Maryland since 1954 — and partly because he’s one of only three Republican governors in deep-blue states (Massachusetts’s Charlie Baker and Vermont’s Phil Scott are the other two). His approval rating is 68 percent in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 to 1.

But mostly Hogan makes no secret of his disdain for [Trump] the president, though he goes out of his way to avoid mentioning his name. . . . . his father, the late Congressman Lawrence Hogan, was “the first Republican to come out for the impeachment of President Richard Nixon.”

“Despite tremendous political pressure,” Hogan said of his dad, “he put aside partisanship and answered the demands of his conscience to do what he thought was the right thing for the nation that he loved.”

The downside of any primary challenge is that it is guaranteed to be nasty: Nobody emerges from an encounter with Trump without feeling soiled. It’s also likely to be losing: With the qualified exception of Lyndon Johnson in 1968, no incumbent president who sought his party’s nomination has failed to win it since Chester A. Arthur in 1884.

Then again, there are upsides to a potential challenge. Three in particular.

First is the fact that Trump is losing his showdown over the shutdown. Having volunteered — on camera, no less — that he was “proud to shut down the government for border security,” he cannot disavow the consequences. . . . . it will cost [Trump] the president political support that a bold primary challenger could reap.

Second, it is no longer mere wishful thinking that Trump either won’t serve out his term or won’t be on the ballot next year. . . . . there is no question the president's legal jeopardy is increasing. A Republican who challenges him early could reap benefits in fund-raising and visibility, not to mention personal honor.

Most important, though, is the future of the G.O.P. itself. Every democracy is bound to have a party that represents society’s conservative instincts. The question is: What kind of conservatism? As Jerry Taylor of the Niskanen Center puts it, “The party deserves a choice about whether it wants to continue down the path of Le Pen-style blood-and-soil nationalism or return to its noble origins as the party of Lincoln.”

Larry Hogan isn’t the only Republican who understands the need for that choice. But he is one of the few who can offer a serious and meaningful alternative to the corroded conservatism we have in Washington today. Stepping forward now would mean stepping fully into his father’s shoes.

Why the 2018 Midterm Elections Matter

In response to my earlier post today, some of my Republican" friends posted laughing emojis on the cross posting on Facebook.   Not surprisingly, these individuals tended to be white, heterosexual males and all from privilege.  I can only assume they lack much, if any, empathy for others and are only concerned with tax cuts and/or protecting their "white privilege."  Protecting the rule of law and maintaining some semblance of morality and decency seems to matter not so much.  It's very disheartening.  Confirming that I am not alone in lamenting what is occurring under the Trump?Pence?GOP misrule, The Economist, a staid British publication not known for hysteria, makes the case of why the 2018 midterm elections are so important and why, at a minimum, Democrats must retake control of the House of Representatives.  Here are article highlights:

Toxic federal politics is America’s great weakness. It prevents action on pressing real issues, from immigration to welfare; it erodes Americans’ faith in their government and its institutions; and it dims the beacon of American democracy abroad. The mid-term elections are a chance to begin stopping the rot—and even to start the arduous task of putting it right.

Mr Trump did not begin this abasement. But he has embraced it as enthusiastically as anyone and carried it to new depths of his own devising. All politicians stretch the truth. Mr Trump lies with abandon—over 5,000 times since he was inaugurated, according to the Washington Post. His deceit is so brazen and effective that many of his supporters take his word above any of his critics’, especially those in the media, and seemingly in the face of all the evidence. That suits Mr Trump because, once nobody is believed, he cannot be held to account. But it is disastrous for America. Once reasoned debate loses its power to win arguments, democracy cannot function.

Mr Trump is also wilfully divisive. All politicians attack their opponents, but presidents see it as their duty to unite the country after a tragedy. Only Mr Trump would think the Tree of Life synagogue shooting a chance to hit back at the media and the Democrats for criticising him (see article). Only he would suggest that, rather than tone down his explosive rhetoric, he might just “tone it up”. Such divisiveness matters because, when your opponents are simply bad people, the compromise that is the foundation of all healthy politics becomes hard within parties and almost impossible between them.

America’s democracy is robust—it was designed to be. However, one by one, its institutions are being infected with toxic polarisation. Congress caught the bug in the 1990s, when Newt Gingrich was Speaker. The media have also fallen victim to partisan scepticism—certainly among audiences, if not also among contributors. Just 11% of strong Trump supporters believe the mainstream media, whereas 91% of them trust Mr Trump, a CBS News poll found in the summer. Among Democrats those beliefs tend to be reversed. Now the Supreme Court is perceived to be partisan, too. Democrats see the recent confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the court as the ramming through of a partisan who has lied, possibly about a sexual assault, and who will be incapable of putting the law above his party. 

A dishonest executive, conniving with a fawning legislature and empowered by a partisan judiciary: were it to come to that, America truly would be in grave trouble.

What is to be done? Just as American politics did not sour overnight, so the route forward is by many small steps, beginning with next week’s elections. And the first of those steps is for the House, at a minimum, to switch to Democratic control.

This matters because Mr Trump should be subject to congressional oversight. He shows contempt for the norms that, to varying degrees, constrained past presidents—whether by refusing to release his tax returns, mixing official and private business, or bullying officials working in, say, the justice department who should be independent. Congress should hold hearings to investigate such behaviour. . . . a continued Republican majority in the House would eventually imperil the rule of law.

For Democrats to win control of the House would, in the long run, benefit both parties. Defeat would encourage some Republicans to start putting forward a conservative alternative to Trumpism. Defeat in the Senate, too, would turbo-charge that effort, though it looks unlikely. The status quo, by contrast, would cement Mr Trump’s takeover of the party.

America will not mend its politics in a single election. At a minimum, progress will take more votes, a renewal of the Republican Party and a different president with a different moral compass. But the right result next week could point the way.

Well said.  A second necessary step is to drive animus motivated, ignorance embracing evangelical Christians back into the political wilderness, hopefully, forever. 

A Defector From Conservatism's Take on Trump’s Rise

Perhaps being gay helped push me to be ahead of the curve in leaving the Republican Party. Once the Party began to embrace out right lying - something that in my view directly correlates to the rise of Christofascists in both the Party base and local committees - as what I like to think as a moral person I felt I had two choices: leave and fight against lies and untruths or stay and become part of the problem and complicit in the wrongful and immoral behavior. That many of the lies and hatred being ginned up for political expediency certainly made the decision to leave the GOP easier for me.  Others, however, chose to remain in the GOP and, sadly, some are happily drinking the "Kool-Aid" and busily disseminating right wing trash and lies - two "friends" on Facebook embody the phenomenon.  Then there is a third group that remained in the GOP until the rise of Trump at which time they could no longer countenance the Party's rank racism, embrace of ignorance, homophobia and desire to brutalize the majority while showering tax breaks and riches on the wealthy.  Some of the more notable of  these include Joe Scarborough, David Frum, Jennifer Rubin, Andrew Sullivan, and Max Boot.  In a piece in New York Magazine, Boot's ultimate defection from the GOP as laid out in his book The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right.   Here are article highlights that lay out why the rise of Trump should have been the breaking point for thinking, moral conservatives:

When Max Boot was a young conservative apparatchik on the make, the key moment in his career occurred when he got a meeting with Robert Bartley, editor of The Wall Street Journal editorial page, one of the movement’s most prestigious and influential organs. To Boot’s surprise, Bartley offered him a job as economics editorialist. The prospect “horrified” him, he writes in his new memoir and critique, The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right, because he “had never taken a class in the subject and had no interest in it.” Boot later learned that Bartley sought out conservatives unfamiliar with economics for such jobs. “He did not want to hire an economist because most professional economists disdained supply-side economics,” which is to say, an inability to see through the pseudo-economic nonsense was a cherished attribute. 

[T]he minute he discovered that the economics line for the conservative movement was being set by an institution so hostile to rigorous thinking that it treated a lack of qualifications as a qualification, Boot probably should have rethought his career choices. Instead, he accepted a different job (op-ed editor) from Bartley. And he was on his way, moving through columnist spots and jobs as speechwriter or policy adviser to Republican presidential candidates like John McCain and Marco Rubio.

It came to a halt with the rise of Donald Trump. Boot, like most conservative intellectuals, reacted with incredulous disdain when a demagogic reality-television performer registered at the top of opinion polls in 2015. Most of those conservatives eventually reconciled themselves to Trump, either after Trump had sewn up the nomination, following his election, or after one of his many partisan skirmishes, at which point they could declare that the liberals had “forced” them to Trump’s side by criticizing Trump too harshly, opposing Brett Kavanaugh, or some other offense. Boot did not. Instead, he has written one of the most impressive and unflinching diagnoses of the pathologies in Republican politics that led to Trump’s rise.

Boot is hardly a surprising candidate for ideological defection. Having immigrated to the United States as a child from the Soviet Union, he gravitated toward the more stridently hawkish Republican Party, as many refugees from communist countries did. He never surrendered either his sense of outsiderness (having had to learn English and assimilate to strange American culture) or his intense pro-American idealism.

Of all the intellectual tribes of the right, neoconservatives (like Boot) mounted the deepest and longest resistance to Trump.  The core neocon worldview is a moralistic vision in America as a beacon of democracy and staunch foe of dictatorships (sometimes, as the Bush administration illustrated, to the point of delusion.)

[W]hat makes Boot’s argument admirable is that he doesn’t simply follow his ideology in a mechanical fashion. Instead he treats the rise of Trump with the seriousness an event of such magnitude demands. If you discovered your best friend was working on a plan to kill hundreds of people in a terrorist attack, you wouldn’t simply condemn his plan while continuing to appreciate his non-terrorist qualities. You would question your entire relationship and what it is about this person you missed in the first place. Likewise, when your political party has elected an ignorant, viciously bigoted, compulsively lying authoritarian crook as president, you need to raise fundamental assumptions about that party’s makeup, rather than treat it as an unfortunate turn of events one must muddle through.
 He describes his rise within the movement as “a process of indoctrination — largely self-indoctrination, I should add — that took decades and that I am only now escaping.” Boot recounts the social pressures to toe the party line, and the rewards (career advancement, lavish parties) that came with faithful adherence. At one point he commissioned an op-ed criticizing supply-side economics by Paul Krugman, who was not yet a New York Times columnist but was a famous economist with a punchy prose style. Bartley not only killed the op-ed but also came close to firing Boot for his apostasy.

Boot recounts briefing Sarah Palin, in his capacity as a McCain 2008 campaign adviser. (Unsurprisingly, he “found her to be nonresponsive and uninterested in foreign policy issues.”) After he began criticizing Trump, Boot describes the president of a conservative think tank expressing private agreement, but admitting he could not say so publicly for fear of offending his board of directors. When a friend got an appointment in the administration, she crossed Boot off the guest list for a party lest she be associated with a turncoat.

[T]the truly radical act in The Corrosion of Conservatism is its clear-eyed excavation of the movement’s history. The right has spent decades regurgitating a potted version of their own history that is so selective and sanitized that it amounts to an upside-down version of reality.

Boot acknowledges that he, too, subscribed to this myth. But revisiting that past, he discovers something very familiar. Conservatism trafficked all along in anti-intellectualism, bigotry, ideological radicalism, and loopy conspiracy theories. The conservative movement was a revolt against the moderation of mainstream Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower while fiercely defending the vicious lies of Joe McCarthy. Buckley renounced the president of the John Birch Society while continuing to endorse the organization itself, which was a large and powerful constituency. While most mainstream Republicans at the time supported civil rights, conservatives opposed those mainstream leaders for that very reason. Conservatives understood very clearly at the time that their project of turning the Republican Party into a vehicle for conservatism required prying millions of white segregationists from the Democratic Party.

Boot is not so reductive as to depict Trump as the inevitable historical consequence of conservatism’s historical arc. He is able to acknowledge that Trump is both a freakish outlier and an authentic outgrowth of conservatism. The movement had cultivated an atmosphere congenial to his bigoted demagoguery, and a freakishly dangerous figure walked through the door conservatism had opened for him.

But it is hard to see any choice between Boot’s radical surgery, which will require ripping the party’s conservative dogma out by the roots, and disaster for the brand of center-right values he espouses. The disaster may take the form of Trump and his party continuing their lurch into authoritarianism, which increasingly offers the only avenue for imposing unpopular policies on taxes, spending, and regulation demanded by its plutocratic base. Or it may involve the Republican Party discrediting itself irrevocably, as polarization allows Democrats to move farther and farther left without losing the loyalty of a base that will never forgive the party of Trump. A disaffected foot soldier from the conservative movement can now clearly see that the party’s salvation lies in prying it free of conservative control.

What upsets me the most about "friends" who have drunk the Trump/GOP Kool-Aid is that the have chosen to embrace immorality and the deliberate harm to and demonizing of others.   This is not mere a difference in political views, rather it goes to morality and decency themselves. In my view, one can no longer claim to be moral and decent yet support today;s Republican Party.  The two are mutually exclusive.

Have Trump and GOP Caused the Forces of Decency to Awaken?

Donald Trump is perhaps the most vile and corrupt individual to ever occupy the White House.  Meanwhile, the Republican Party has become the party of constant lies which may have finally over played its hand with the Trump tax cut that voters are discovering - albeit it a bit belatedly - was a scam and a massive give away to the very wealthy and ruthless large corporation.  Seemingly, other than the 36-37% of the population made up of rabid Christian extremists, gun fanatics and white supremacists who continue to support Trump as their "dear leader," the rest of the country is increasingly recognizing Trump and the GOP for what they are: corrupt and bad people.  The NRA's near full ownership of Republicans in the wake of the Parkland, Florida mass shooting has perhaps been the straw that will break the GOP's back, especially if it cause young anti-GOP voters to surge to the polls come November.  What's powering the surge of opposition to Trump and the GOP?  A column in the New York Times argues that it is people's realization that many share their revulsion toward Trump and Republicans and this is causing them to mobilize to push for a return of decency and some semblance of honesty and an end to politicians bought by special interest such as the NRA.  Here are column highlights:

A funny thing is happening on the American scene: a powerful upwelling of decency. Suddenly, it seems as if the worst lack all conviction, while the best are filled with a passionate intensity. We don’t yet know whether this will translate into political change. But we may be in the midst of a transformative moment.

You can see the abrupt turn toward decency in the rise of the #MeToo movement; . . . You can see it in the reactions to the Parkland school massacre. For now, at least, the usual reaction to mass killings — a day or two of headlines, then a sort of collective shrug by the political class and a return to its normal obeisance to the gun lobby — isn’t playing out. Instead, the story is staying at the top of the news, and associating with the N.R.A. is starting to look like the political and business poison it should have been all along.

And I’d argue that you can see it at the ballot box, where hard-right politicians in usually reliable Republican districts keep being defeated thanks to surging activism by ordinary citizens.

This isn’t what anyone, certainly not the political commentariat, expected.

After the 2016 election many in the news media seemed all too ready to assume that Trumpism represented the real America, even though Hillary Clinton had won the popular vote and — Russian intervention and the Comey letter aside — would surely have won the electoral vote, too, but for the Big Sneer, the derisive tone adopted by countless reporters and pundits. There have been hundreds if not thousands of stories about grizzled Trump supporters sitting in diners, purportedly showing the out-of-touchness of our cultural elite.

[T]hose pink pussy hats [at the Women's March] may have represented the beginning of real social and political change.

Political scientists have a term and a theory for what we’re seeing on #MeToo, guns and perhaps more: “regime change cascades.” . . . . When people see the status quo as immovable, they tend to be passive even if they are themselves dissatisfied. . . . . but once they see others visibly taking a stand, they both gain more confidence in their dissent and become more willing to act on it — and by their actions they may induce the same response in others, causing a kind of chain reaction.

Such cascades explain how huge political upheavals can quickly emerge, seemingly out of nowhere.

[N]othing says that such cascades have to be positive either in their motivations or in their results. The period 2016-17 clearly represented a sort of Alt-Right Spring — springtime for fascists? — in which white supremacists and anti-Semites were emboldened not just by Donald Trump’s election but by the evidence that there were more like-minded people than anyone realized, both in the U.S. and Europe

I nevertheless find the surge of indignation now building in America hugely encouraging. And yes, I think it’s all one surge. The #MeToo movement, the refusal to shrug off the Parkland massacre, the new political activism of outraged citizens (many of them women) all stem from a common perception: namely, that it’s not just about ideology, but that far too much power rests in the hands of men who are simply bad people. . . . Exhibit A for that proposition is, of course, the tweeter in chief himself.

At the same time, what strikes me about the reaction to this growing backlash is not just its vileness, but its lameness.  Trump’s response to Parkland — let’s arm teachers! — wasn’t just stupid, it was cowardly, an attempt to duck the issue, and I think many people realized that.

Or consider the growing wildness of speeches by right-wing luminaries like Wayne LaPierre of the N.R.A. They’ve pretty much given up on making any substantive case for their ideas in favor of rants about socialists trying to take away your freedom. It’s scary stuff, but it’s also kind of whiny; it’s what people sound like when they know they’re losing the argument.

Again, there’s no guarantee that the forces of decency will win. In particular, the U.S. electoral system is in effect rigged in favor of Republicans, so Democrats will need to win the popular vote by something like seven percentage points to take the House. But we’re seeing a real uprising here, and there’s every reason to hope that change is coming.

Personally, I have been surprised to discover some who I never viewed as "liberal" or "progressive" are disgusted by what they are seeing flow daily from the White House and the GOP controlled Congress.  Here in Virginia, the last election cycle underscored that if people get angry and mobilize, they can over come the toxicity of the right and vote the bad guys out of office.  This resolve and motivation needs to go nationwide in 2018 and the GOP needs to become the minority party.  Hand in hand with this is a growing knowledge - which has yet to dawn on much of the media - that evangelical Christians are numbered among the bad guys. They have supported a totally immoral regime and deserve no deference or respect. 

Quotes of the Day: Maureen Dowd Shreds Trump

I have always aspired to be a writer who can slice and dice politicians I dislike with just the right amount of bitchiness and razor sharp tongue.  My blogger friend Pam Spaulding has always exceeded at turning the English language into a polished weapon.  Another such writer is New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd who when in stride can simply amaze with her wit and sarcasm.  In a column yesterday, Dowd took aim at Donald Trump and out did herself.  Here are some wonderful excerpts:

Melania has learned a few things from the master.  The first lady will never be as brilliant at trolling as her husband. He is an idiot-savant who plays in the roiling ocean of Twitter as naturally as a blubbery-necked sea lion.

But the Slovenian Sphinx has her moments.  It started when she seemed to sartorially upbraid Trump for his Billy Bush vulgarities by wearing a pussy-bow blouse to the St. Louis debate. Then, in a master stroke, she chose a first-lady project that could only be interpreted as a wicked rip on her husband: fighting vicious cyberbullies. Last spring, Melania’s personal Twitter account favorited a GIF of her own downcast face at the Inaugural Address with an accompanying crack: “Seems the only #Wall @realDonaldTrump’s built is the one between him and @FLOTUS.”

Last weekend, on the anniversary of the inauguration, Melania Instagrammed a throwback picture of herself in her powder-blue Jackie suit, not with her husband but with a hunky Marine escort. She wore a delighted ear-to-ear smile, the kind she never seems to flash around the Donald. (It would have been even funnier, of course, if she had posted a photo of herself in front of some empty stands and a sparse crowd, but we’re talking more grounds for divorce there.)

After the Stormy Daniels story broke — about Trump cavorting and watching Shark Week with the porn star and telling her not to worry about Melania, at home with a new baby, and then having his lawyer allegedly pay Stormy $130,000 during the campaign to hush her up — a wintry Melania canceled her plan to accompany her husband to Davos.

Instead, . . . . Remembrance Day. This looked like a subtle reproach to Trump for his unspeakable defense of the “very fine people” among the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va., and an allusion to the president’s statement last year on remembrance day, which somehow neglected to remember Jews or anti-Semitism. What a Stephen Miller special that was.

[A]s Stormy Daniels began her media tour on “Inside Edition” and booked an appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel,” Melania was making a stealthy landing in Florida on an Air Force plane.

Trump could humiliate his wife by being a big, horny pig, but he is the one who comes off as the embarrassment. He’s an embarrassing husband and an embarrassing president and an embarrassing leader of the free world. Barack Obama was always calling to our better angels. Donald Trump is paying off porn stars and denigrating struggling countries that send minorities to the U.S. as “shitholes.” How did we drop so far and so fast from class to crass?

Everyone wondered if Melania’s rebellious vanishing act — combined with the simultaneous Times scoop that Trump had already tried to fire Robert Mueller but was blocked by the White House lawyer, Don McGahn — was the beginning of the “unraveling,” as one top Democrat put it. (Surely, the Trump unraveling began with his birth, like Damien in “The Omen.”)

“It’s like ancient Rome where they’re all turning on each other. McGahn is taking out the long knives to stick Trump in the back. At some point, General Kelly may do the same. Bannon is exiled to the outer walls of the city, where he is collecting wayward Roman soldiers to go back and attack Trump. There are orgies and payoffs and mud wrestling, so beyond anything we’ve experienced anywhere.”

It’s a shattering moment for the country, when many of the institutions that gave America its identity as a smart, brave, generous, fair country — the presidency, Congress, sports, faith, Hollywood, big business — seem corroded and immoral.  When we look in the mirror and try to figure out who we are now, elevating a corporate tax cut over our fundamental values is not going to cut it.

Did John McCain Kill Obamacare Repeal?

As noted yesterday, the latest GOP effort to kill Obamacare is perhaps the most heinous to date as noted in a post yesterday.   I still remain disgusted with what the GOP has become and just how vicious its agenda has become.  Thankfully, John McCain has shown that a few in the GOP have not utterly thrown away their integrity and morality.  With his announcement yesterday that he will not support the latest Trumpcare travesty, with luck the GOP repeal effort is dead.  A piece in the New York Times looks at McCain's announcement.  Here are excerpts:

Senator John McCain of Arizona announced on Friday that he would oppose the latest proposal to repeal the Affordable Care Act, leaving Republican leaders with little hope of succeeding in their last-ditch attempt to dismantle the health law and fulfill their longstanding promise to conservative voters.

For Mr. McCain, it was a slightly less dramatic reprise of his middle-of-the-night thumbs-down that killed the last repeal effort in July. This time, the senator, battling brain cancer and confronting his best friend in the Senate, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, issued a statement saying that he could not “in good conscience” support the proposal by Senators Graham and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.

“I believe we could do better working together, Republicans and Democrats, and have not yet really tried,” Mr. McCain said. “Nor could I support it without knowing how much it will cost, how it will affect insurance premiums, and how many people will be helped or hurt by it.”

With two other Republican senators likely to vote no, Mr. McCain’s opposition to the bill could be fatal. With Democrats united in opposition, Senate Republicans can afford to lose only two of their members.

A bill of this magnitude “requires a bipartisan approach,’’ Mr. McCain added.  Those concerns were compounded by the decision of Republican leaders to press forward with a vote next week before the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office could complete a full analysis of the Graham-Cassidy legislation. The budget office is expected to provide a preliminary fiscal assessment early in the week, but it indicated that it would not be able to complete an analysis of the bill’s effects on health insurance coverage or premiums by Sept. 30.

McCain has reminded us that sometimes one person can make a difference.  Each of us needs to remember this as we oppose the ugliness of what the GOP and Der Trumpenführer are seeking to do to America.  Another piece in the Times looks at why the GOP is so hell bent to harm millions:

As more than 40 subdued Republican senators lunched on Chick-fil-A at a closed-door session last week, Senator Cory Gardner of Colorado painted a dire picture for his colleagues. Campaign fund-raising was drying up, he said, because of widespread disappointment among donors over the inability of the Republican Senate to repeal the Affordable Care Act or do much of anything else.

Mr. Gardner is in charge of his party’s midterm re-election push, and he warned that donors of all stripes were refusing to contribute another penny until the struggling majority produced some concrete results.

“Donors are furious,” one person knowledgeable about the private meeting quoted Mr. Gardner as saying. “We haven’t kept our promise.”

The backlash from big donors as well as the grass roots panicked Senate Republicans and was part of the motivation behind the sudden zeal to take one last crack at repealing the health care law before the end of the month.

This was not what Republicans had envisioned. Preparing for the 2018 midterm elections, they had thought they were in a strong position to maintain or expand their majority. Democrats must defend 25 seats — including 10 in states won last year by President Trump — while just eight Republican-held seats will be on the ballot. But their governing struggles — and attacks on congressional leaders by Mr. Trump — have soured their base, leaving the Senate majority feeling desperate.

Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, was even more blunt in a conversation with Vox. “If we do nothing, it has a tremendous impact on the 2018 elections, and whether or not Republicans still maintain control and we have the gavel,” he said.

Republicans say the fund-raising drop-off has been steep and across the board, from big donations to the small ones the party solicits online from the grass roots. They say the hostile views of both large and small donors are in unusual alignment and that the negative sentiment is crystallized in the fund-raising decline.

Republicans are also set to roll out their income tax overhaul plan next week in an effort to build support for it and find something the party can deliver to the president’s desk. They see the tax plan as their best opportunity to win back the allegiance of donors.

With health care repeal teetering yet again, the one thing they know for sure is that they need to show some accomplishments, and they need to do so fast.

What shocks me is that these Republicans seemingly fail to realize that perhaps some of the fund raising drop off is due to the ugliness of what the GOP is trying to pass. Not everyone is like the Koch brothers who happily want to restore the Gilded Age while the vast majority of Americans suffer.