Trump's Grip on the GOP is Causing Republicans to Flee

The Republican Party began its descent into becoming a moral cesspool long before Donald Trump declared he would run for office in 2015. It began with the slow infiltration of the party by Christofascists - perhaps the most racist and morally bankrupt group I've ever encountered - near the end of my time in the GOP and accelerated as white supremacists (often one and the same as the Christofascists) were also made welcome in the party.  Trump merely was the culmination of a moral rot - a cancer, if you will - that had been spreading and metastasizing for years.  Now, the cancer in the form of Trump and his base of support has a complete grip on the GOP.  The result is that, if one has a shred of morality and decency, it is becoming difficult or impossible to remain a Republican.  Those who have remained to date by deluding themselves that the GO still stands for limited government, fiscal and personal responsibility, and personal freedom (something that, in reality is questionable).  Now, the GOP is all Trump, racism, white supremacy and misogyny 27/7.  As a result, record numbers of the Congressional Republicans in the House are heading for the door.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the growing exodus.  Hopefully, Republican "friends" will begin similar soul searching. Here are highlights: 

Republican Rep. Paul Mitchell’s surprise retirement began with a President Trump tweet. 

Moments after Trump’s July 14 missive telling four U.S. congresswomen of color to “go back” to their countries of origin, the congressman from Michigan phoned a fellow House GOP leader and asked him to get Trump to stop. “It’s the wrong thing for a leader to say,” he told the leader, whom he declined to name. “It’s politically damaging to the party, to the country.”

Three days later, Mitchell was awaiting a prime-time CNN appearance when he saw footage of Trump rallygoers chanting “send her back,” aimed at one of the congresswomen, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). Stunned, Mitchell said he scribbled question marks on a notepad to silently ask an aide: “How do I even respond to this on TV?” 

But one of the final straws was the unwillingness of people in Trump’s orbit to listen. Mitchell implored Vice President Pence, his chief of staff, Marc Short, and “any human being that has any influence in the White House” to arrange a one-on-one conversation between him and the president so he could express his concerns.

It never happened. And 10 days after the Trump tweet, Mitchell — a two-term lawmaker who thought he’d be in Congress for years to come — announced his retirement.
“We’re here for a purpose — and it’s not this petty, childish b------t,” Mitchell, 62, said in an interview in early September. Pence’s office declined to comment.

Mitchell is among a growing list of House Republicans — 18 to date — who have announced plans to resign, retire or run for another office, part of a snowballing exodus that many Republicans fear is imperiling their chances of regaining control of the House in the 2020 elections.

And the problem for the GOP is bigger than retirements. Since Trump’s inauguration, a Washington Post analysis shows, nearly 40 percent of the 241 Republicans who were in office in January 2017 are gone or leaving because of election losses, retirements including former House speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), and some, such as Mitchell, who are simply quitting in disgust.

The vast turnover is a reminder of just how much Trump has remade the GOP — and of the purge of those who dare to oppose him. Former congressman Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) lost his June 2018 primary after challenging Trump; he’s now a Republican presidential candidate. Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.), the only Republican to accuse Trump of impeachable acts, quit the GOP in July citing the “partisan death spiral.” His political future is uncertain. The retirement numbers are particularly staggering. All told, 41 House Republicans have left national politics or announced they won’t seek reelection in the nearly three years since Trump took office. That dwarfs the 25 Democrats who retired in the first four years of former president Barack Obama’s tenure — and Republicans privately predict this is only the beginning.

Most of the departing Republicans publicly cite family as the reason for leaving. But behind the scenes, Republicans say the trend highlights a greater pessimism about the direction of the party under Trump — and their ability to win back the House next year. 

[Trump] The president has doubled down on an all-base strategy for his reelection campaign, making some Republicans ask whether Trump has put his own political future ahead of the long-term viability of the party . . . . “If the party doesn’t start looking like America, there will not be a party in America,” said Rep. Will Hurd (R-Tex.), the only black House Republican, who announced his retirement in August.

House Republicans knew Trump was going to be a problem in the suburbs well before they lost 29 incumbents and their majority in the 2018 elections. In a private meeting at Camp David in early 2018, then-House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) tried to explain to Trump why the suburbs were key to the GOP keeping the House. 

“He has not been a net positive for suburban House Republicans, I mean, that’s a truism,” said former congressman Ryan Costello (Pa.), a moderate Republican who retired in 2018 rather than face a difficult reelection in the Philadelphia suburbs. “Down ballot, for the Republicans, you are basically judged by whatever [Trump] the president does, and not by what you do.” 

Even in leadership circles, there’s an admission that Trump isn’t helping the party in the suburbs. No one, however, is willing to say it aloud.

The aide said such knowledge has been driving many of the recent retirements: “I think a lot of members are pretty nervous that Trump doesn’t win reelection. And then we’re in the minority and we have a Democrat in the White House. . . . We’re in the wilderness right now, but if you lose the White House, then that is the extreme wilderness.”

“He’s turned [the GOP] into a personal vessel for his brand,” Curbelo said. “[Trump] The president seems to be doubling down on an all-base strategy; perhaps that can work for him . . . but it certainly makes it very difficult for Republicans to win a majority of seats in the House.”

Hurd, a former CIA official who would have faced a difficult reelection in a Democratic-leaning district, has been increasingly vocal about the direction of the party. He told a Republican LGBTQ group in June that the GOP wasn’t expanding in some places because unnamed people weren’t following “real basic things that we should all learn when we’re in kindergarten”: “Don’t be a racist. Don’t be a misogynist, right? Don’t be a homophobe.”

Hurd said in an interview. “It’s women in the suburbs, minorities and young people — those are going to be the key groups and key voters in 2020.”

Mitch McConnell: Women protesting Kavanaugh Were "Clowns" and It Will "All Blow Over"

If one wants evidence of the contempt that today's Republican Party holds towards women, look no farther than GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the man who other than Donald Trump, has done more to destroy American constitutional government than anyone else.  McConnell in effect has labeled all survivors of sexual assault and women who are tired of GOP misogyny as "clowns" and has suggested that the whole Kavanaugh outrage as something that will "blow over," the inference being that women are shallow, gullible and of short memory capacity.  A piece in Daily Kos looks at McConnell's contempt for women and survivors of sexual assault.  Here are article highlights:

Nothing could exemplify the wholesale contempt the Republican Party has for women than the words of its own Senate Majority Leader, fresh off of successfully installing an accused attempted rapist and hard-right political operative onto the Supreme Court. . . . he considered them useful idiots too. “Harassing members at their homes, crowding the halls with people acting horribly, the effort to humiliate us really helped me unify my conference,” McConnell told the New York Times. “So I want to thank these clowns for all the help they provided.”

There used to be a time in this country when someone in as important a position as McConnell would, after a bitter political fight, attempt to mend fences with his opposition, particularly in a circumstance fraught with such a raw and emotional issue as rape.  There would be some act of simple grace in the acknowledgment of the validity of the other sides’ sentiments, even in defeat. That is the way the U.S. government worked for well over two hundred years, and it is in part what has kept us together as a nation.

More than anyone in the Congress and Senate, Mitch McConnell has worked to undermine those traditions, preferring instead to tear the fabric of this nation in two for the sake of imposing his party’s reactionary agenda on us all. So it’s not unexpected that rather than acknowledging their trauma, even in disagreement, he would instead belittle those rape victims, who protested and painfully told us their stories, as “clowns.”  Donald Trump has now made it acceptable to cruelly mock one’s political opponents, giving no quarter to the fact that they may represent the views of more than half the nation. McConnell’s remarks here simply signal that in the age of Trump the Republican Party has no decency left to spare . . . . .

Even here the undercurrent of misogyny is instructive. Demeaning and diminishing the victims of sexual assault, raising doubts about their truthfulness, was  the GOP’s tactic from the get-go in the Kavanaugh hearings. McConnell’s smug self-assurance that the anger and emotions poured out over the last two weeks will just “blow over” is simply another way of minimizing the experience of those who have had to deal with the trauma of sexual assault and its aftermath. It’s another way of saying that rape, in the end, is really not that big of a deal.

For those women and men who take a different view of sexual assault than that of the Republican Senate Majority leader, November 6 is now [less than] only thirty days away.

Is Trump Driving Women Away From the GOP for Good?

Both of my daughters grew up working on Republican campaigns, doing literature drops, working the polls with me, and going to "victory parties" on election nights.  One happily related to me that she voted a straight GOP ticket the first time she was old enough to vote.  What are they doing now?  Using social media to encourage people to register to vote and voting Democrat in the 2018 midterm elections.  What happened?  Two things, in my view: (i) the take over of the GOP base by Christofascists - and now white supremacists - and (ii) the election of Donald Trump and the mainstreaming of misogyny within the GOP.   Polls suggest that they are unique and some pundits are now wondering if the GOP has lost the majority of women long term.  A piece in Politico Magazine suggests that what my daughters - both Millennials - have experienced is not unique even among much older one time Republican women.   Here are article highlights: 

President Donald Trump has historically low favorability among women, with the Pew Research Center now reporting that 63 percent of women disapprove of how he is doing his job—compared with 30 percent who approve. That might not be surprising, given the range of things that Trump has said and done that might be seen as offensive to women. There’s the famous “Access Hollywood” tape that gave rise to thousands of pussy hats, the 22 women who have publicly accused him of sexual harassment and assault, and the hush money his personal lawyer has admitted to paying to cover up marital indiscretions. There is Trump’s tendency to insult women, from Carly Fiorina to Megyn Kelly to Mika Brzezinski. Most recently, there was his rally in Mississippi, during which the president mocked Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations . . . . 

Trump’s election and performance in office have clearly pushed independent and Democratic women into action, resulting in record numbers of women running for office, and surges of women involved in local political organizing for the first time. But what about Republican women? Is it possible that Trump—and the Republican politicians who enable him—are not just alienating left-leaning women, but are permanently damaging the GOP’s female ranks, driving some splintering portion of women away for good?
 Republican women still overwhelmingly support the president—84 percent of them, according to a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll this week. But that statistic overlooks a broader trend: Fewer and fewer American women identify as Republicans, and that slow migration is speeding up under Trump. . . . . According to pollsters on both sides of the aisle, that doesn’t bode well for the Republican Party either in this fall’s midterms—which are likely to bring a record gap between how men and women vote—or for the party’s long-term future.
 Only more recently did women start actively leaving the GOP. For two decades now, they have been leaking away from the Republican Party, very slowly becoming independents, while independents have been drifting toward the Democrats. In 1994, according to Pew, 42 percent of women identified as or leaned Republican, as did 52 percent of men. By 2017, only 37 percent of women and 48 percent of men still did. In 1994, 48 percent of women and 39 percent of men identified as or leaned toward the Democrats. By 2017, those numbers were 56 percent of women and 44 percent of men.
 Trump’s election put this gender shift “on steroids,” Greenberg says. According to Pew, the share of American women voters who identify with or lean toward the Republican Party has dropped 3 percentage points since 2015—from 40 percent to 37 percent—after having been essentially unchanged from 2010 through 2014. By 2017, just 25 percent of American women fully identified as Republicans. That means that when, say, 84 percent of Republican women say they approve of Trump and his actions, or 69 percent of Republican women say they support Kavanaugh, or 64 percent say they, like Trump, don’t find Ford very “credible,” those percentages represent a small and shrinking slice of American women.
 [W]omen have voted in higher numbers and at higher rates than men for decades. In 2016, according to Dittmar, 9.9 million more women than men voted, and about 63 percent of eligible females voted, compared with 59 percent of eligible males. If more women than men vote in November, women’s shift toward the Democrats is likely to be over-represented on Election Day—especially in an election like this one, in which women are highly mobilized and motivated. The Cook Political Report’s Amy Walters recently noted: “The most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal survey found that [white college-educated women] support a Democrat for Congress by 22 points—58 percent to 36 percent.
 “Once you give up that party label, you’re less inclined to easily take it back,” says University of Virginia political scientist Jennifer Lawless. Liam Donovan, a lobbyist and former National Republican Senatorial Committee staffer, notes that the Republican loss of college-educated white women “is not balanced out by a huge spike among white men—on net, that’s a real problem for the Republicans.” Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, of all people, put it more starkly this summer: “The Republican college-educated woman is done. They’re gone. They were going anyway at some point in time. Trump triggers them.”
 In recent weeks, I sought out women who had crossed over from Republican to Democrat, to understand what motivated their shift and how permanent they think it will be. . . . . Some had voted straight-ticket Republican all their lives; others had crossed the line occasionally but remained proud Republicans until Trump. . . . Each woman’s experiences and motivations were different, but some clear themes emerged about their disillusionment with the Republican Party.

First is their dislike of Trump himself, whom these women see as offensive, impulsive and dangerous to America’s standing in the world. “He is just the most amoral person,” said Jennifer Pate, a recently married 31-year-old devoted churchgoer in San Antonio, raised in that city by what she called “very conservative” parents in a church where women still can’t be pastors. “He is everything—I don’t have kids yet—everything I don’t want my kids to grow up to be.

“His honesty is in question,” said Julie Vann, a 68-year-old in Beavercreek, Ohio. She points to Trump’s company’s multiple bankruptcy filings. “That was just his way of doing business,” she says. “And that’s the same way he thinks now. He doesn’t care who gets hurt as long as he wins.”
 Another born-and-raised Republican, Kansas teacher Janea Lawrence, 54, is dismayed because she believes Trump handed out Cabinet positions to unqualified “friends or people who could buy their way in”—because of wealth or, she assumes, campaign donations. She finds that approach shockingly counter to what she calls her Midwestern ethos of working hard and doing right.
 Cate Kanellis Zalmat of Plano, Texas, a 61-year-old grocery store manager and grandmother, has been a Republican since she first voted for Ronald Reagan. “I haven’t felt as angry about politics in my life as Trump makes me,” she told me—angry, among other things, at Trump’s instability, at what she sees as the GOP’s pandering to the religious right, at what she described as Republicans’ anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant bias.
 That brings us to another reason these women are disillusioned: Under Trump, they say, many Republicans are peddling intolerance and exclusion. “It’s become normal to be a racist and a bigot, and those are not normal things,” said Jennifer Hackel Thrift, 43, a corporate headhunter in Austin, Texas. She had never voted for a Democrat until 2016—and now compares Fox News to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
 Karen Winslow, 66, a former Navy nurse who now lives in Austin as well, worked furiously at her consulting business after her first husband died so that her three daughters would be able to get excellent educations and travel widely. Now she is appalled at how Trump slanders Latinos—a group that includes two of her sons-in-law—and how the party treats women. In Charlotte, North Carolina, 58-year-old CPA Beth Monaghan said that in 2016, when her state senator, Dan Bishop, helped sponsor HB2, the North Carolina “bathroom bill,” she took it as an attack on the entire LGBTQ spectrum and was furious that the government was “telling my son he’s less-than because he’s gay.” Trump alone didn’t push these women to shed their Republican labels; other GOP politicians’ unquestioning support for Trump did that. Several told me they were angry that an all-Republican government has become the party of fiscal waste, deficits, trade wars and rebates for the wealthy. Zalmat said she is angrier at the “spineless Republicans in the Congress” for “enabling [Trump’s] crazy” than she is at [Trump] the president himself.
 Sentiments like those are telling, says UVA’s Lawless. “If the Republicans had stood up to [Trump], not necessarily on substance, but in terms of style and rhetoric,” she says, the reactions among voters might be, “I’m still a Republican, but I’m not supporting Donald Trump.” Instead, she continues, “because the Republicans have been complicit in a lot of what Trump has done,” many women no longer feel they can consider themselves Republican. And that’s a big step out the door.
 Whether or not their mothers drift away from the Republicans for good, in other words, young women might be signing up for the other team. “If millennials vote three times for the same party, they hold that identification their whole lives,” Lake says. “So, this is a very, very critical erosion. The Republicans could pay the price for decades.”

Personally, I am hoping for a massive Democrat turnout next month.  Similarly, I hope educated women - which almost by definition excludes evangelical women - turn out in force to punish the GOP.  Women, racial minorities, LGBT individuals, and  and Millennils have the most to lose if the GOP doesn't experience a bloodbath at the polls. I will be waiting with baited breath to see the outcomie of the November 6, 2018 vote. 

Trump and His Base - Cruelty Is the Point

A dark, but accurate, in my view, piece in The Atlantic looks at Trump and his supporters and the joy of inflicting cruelty on others which binds them together.   The piece starts out with descriptions of photos of grinning whites at the brutal lynchings then fast forwards to Trump and his appeals to white supremacists and Christian extremists who long to bring back the bad old days when blacks were official less than full citizens, gays were forced to remain in the closet and invisible, and women were largely relegated to homemaking and subordinate to men.  For me, I have a hard time understanding how decent, moral people could revel in harm being done to others, yet that seems to be the bond that ties Trump to his cheering base.  Even harder to comprehend is how/why self-respecting, moral  women - including some I know - can support Trump and his misogynistic male cheerleaders.  Are these people/women really so racist and/or homophobic that they applaud inhumanity towards others?  Sadly, "yes" seems to be the only answer.  Here are article highlights:

The Museum of African-American History and Culture is in part a catalogue of cruelty. Amid all the stories of perseverance, tragedy, and unlikely triumph, there are the artifacts of inhumanity and barbarism: the child-size slave shackles, the bright red robes of the wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, the recordings of civil rights protesters being brutalized by police.

The artifacts that persist in my memory, the way a bright flash does when you close your eyes, are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, where a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. There’s the undated photo from Duluth, Minnesota, where grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street—one man is straining to get into the picture, his smile cutting from ear to ear. There’s the one of a crowd of white men huddled behind the smoldering corpse of a man burnt to death, one of whom is wearing a smart suit, a fedora hat, and a bright smile.

[P]eople who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death—and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to each other.

The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track. This week alone, the news broke that the Trump administration was seeking to ethnically cleanse more than 193,000 American children of immigrants whose temporary protected status had been revoked by the administration, that the Department of Homeland Security had lied about creating a database of children that would make it possible to unite them with the families the Trump administration had arbitrarily destroyed, that the White House was considering a blanket ban on visas for Chinese students, and that it would deny visas to the same-sex partners of foreign officials.

At a rally in Mississippi, a crowd of Trump supporters cheered as [Trump] the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who has said that Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump has nominated to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, attempted to rape her when she was a teenager. “Lock her up!” they shouted.

[M]ocking of her testimony renders all sexual-assault survivors collateral damage. Anyone afraid of coming forward, afraid that they would not be believed, can now look to [Trump] to see their fears realized. Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.

The cruelty of the Trump administration’s policies, and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets before his supporters, are intimately connected. As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanaugh incident in Slate, adolescent male cruelty towards women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt. The white men in the lynching photos are not merely smiling because of what they have done, but because they did it together.

We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when [Trump] the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that they enjoy this cruelty, it is that they enjoy it with each other. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to each other, and to Trump.

Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.

[Trump] The president who demanded the execution of five black and Latino teenagers for a crime they didn’t commit decrying “false accusations,” when his Supreme Court nominee stands accused; his supporters who fancy themselves champions of free speech  meet references to Hillary Clinton or mentions of a woman whose only crime was coming forward to offer her own story of abuse with screams of, “Lock her up!” The political movement that elected a president who wanted to ban immigration by adherents of an entire religion, who encourages police to brutalize suspects, and who has destroyed thousands of immigrant families for violations of the law less serious than those of which he and his coterie stand accused, now laments the state of due process.

This isn’t incoherent. It reflects a clear principle: Only [Trump] the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.

Trump’s only true skill is the con, his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. [Trump’s] The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.

Truly disturbing and frightening.  I do not recognize what America is becoming. It's as if we are living a parallel to what happened in Germany in the 1930's.

Trump/Pence Continues Its Brutal Treatment of Immigrant Children

One of the mysteries in politics is how the Republican Party continues to claim it is the party of "Christian values."  The same applies to evangelicals who continue to support a self-confessed serial adulterer and sexual molester.  Yet much of the main stream media never confronts the Republican lies much less the falsehoods and acceptance of evil by right wing religious "leaders" such as Tony Perkins, Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell, Jr. - and many more - who are 100% on board with the GOP's anti-Gospel message policies.  Polls have shown that roughly half of evangelicals want Brett Kavanaugh confirmed even if he is guilty of the various allegations against him.  But nowhere is the moral bankruptcy of today's GOP and its base more telling than in the manner in which detained immigrant children are being treated.  Such treatment underscores the reality that to the GOP base - including the hypocrisy-filled evangelicals who fill church pews - only whites are human.  Everyone else is to be treated like animals.  A piece in Think Progress looks at the continued mistreatment of detained immigrant children.  Here are excerpts:

Migrant children separated from their parents at the border under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy have been subjected to harsh conditions in U.S. detention facilities, an unpublished report by the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office of Inspector General found.

The report, obtained by The Washington Post, found at least 860 migrant children were held in Border Patrol holding cells longer than 72-hours, the maximum length of time mandated by the U.S. courts. One child was held for 12 days and another for 25.

The Border Patrol holding cells are notoriously torturous, earning the nickname of “hieleras,” or “ice box,” among the immigrants who have spent time in the frigid spaces with few — if any — blankets.

The holding cells were designed as a temporary stop for minors as they wait to be transferred to shelters run by Health and Human Services (HHS). Aside from their frigid temperatures, many of them also lack adequate beds, have zero shower facilities, and are essentially chain-link holding pens. Reports of harsh physical conditions were outlined in a court filing earlier this summer and based on interviews between immigration lawyers and detained children, about their time in the holding cells and contractor-run detention facilities for unaccompanied minors.

“There is no privacy. It is dirty and they don’t clean it,” a Guatemalan boy named Erick said, describing his first three days in Border Patrol custody. “The room is always cold. The guards took my sweater. I sleep on the floor. There are 3 mattresses, but the boys from Honduras have taken them.”

The DHS OIG report also describes just how poorly mismanaged the zero tolerance policy was — how it left parents with little-to-no information on their children’s whereabouts and no plan for how to reunite them.

DHS investigators discovered that officials shared minor’s files via Microsoft Word email attachments because the government’s internal systems were unstable. “Each step of this manual process is vulnerable to human error, increasing the risk that a child could become lost in the system,” the report stated.

Border Patrol agents separated children who could not yet speak from their parents and did not provide wrist bracelets or any other form of identification to the children, nor were they ever fingerprinted or photographed to ensure they were linked to the correct case file. Though the abusive family separation practice was technically ended through executive order months ago — the Trump administration effectively reversed its own previous policy — hundreds of children remain separated from their parents, most of them deemed “ineligible for reunification by the federal government.” 136 children are still in custody, 3 of whom are under the age of 5. Many of their parents say they were deported before they could be reunited with their children, and some claim they were pressured to give up their right to reunification by officials who used English-only documents and confusing instructions.

Proud to be an American?  I am not - I am ashamed.  Next time you hear some Trump supporter pontificating and, worse yet, spreading misogyny, please throw this reality in their face.  If they support these policies, know for certain that they are NOT true Christians.  They are evil. 

Democratic Voters are Angry and Energized

Trump, Ryan and McConnell: the triumvirate of evil.

While Congressional Republicans - actually, Republicans at most levels, including Republican Women's clubs - shamelessly prostitute themselves to Donald Trump and throw away any shred of credibility of supporting "Christian values," across the country, Democrat voters are angry and energized. What is fueling the energy?  As a piece in CNN points out, the number one sea anchor on Republicans is Donald Trump, the cult leader to whom the very same Republicans are selling their souls. And, as the CNN piece notes, none of the damage to the GOP flows from the Mueller investigation.   And if Trump's own foul personal behavior were not bad enough, his policies are alienating more and more citizens outside of hardened racist, religious extremist, and vulture capitalist circles.  A column in the Washington Post by a former Republican looks at the phenomenon.  For locals, UVA's Larry Sabato now has Virginia's 2nd Congressional district as a "toss up." - with luck we may be rid of Scott Taylor.  Here are highlights:

Republicans’ prospects for holding on to the House majority, already dim, have gotten bleaker of late. Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball notes: “We’re making 17 House ratings changes this week, all in favor of the Democrats.  … One of those comes in OH-12, where the last nationally-watched special House election is taking place in a couple of weeks.”

Large turnout in 2017 and 2018 special elections generated more enthusiasm, which in turned opened the campaign donation spigots. The availability of money and sunny prospects for Democrats encouraged solid Democratic candidates to run — and Republican incumbents to retire.

There are more specific factors as well: the failure of tax cuts to result in higher wages; economic pain inflicted by President Trump’s trade wars; the #MeToo movement (which gets energy with each Republican’s misogynistic insult); rising health-care costs (which in part can be attributed to Republicans’ assault on the Affordable Care Act); Republicans’ continued indulgence of Trump’s erratic, dishonest and unhinged conduct, coupled with a sense that Trump needs to be checked, not enabled; and the disgust felt by college-educated voters, women and millennials over Republicans’ assault on human decency (e.g. family separations, “dreamers”).

In 2018, voters will either want Congress to support Trump’s turn-the-card-table-over style of governing, or they want to see Congress as a check on Trump.” She [ Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter] finds, “Right now, polls suggest more voters want Congress to provide a check on Trump.” [V]oter intensity may be the most critical factor for Democrats. With each new perceived outrage (e.g., Trump’s betrayal in Helsinki, insults directed at Democratic women, the prospect of reversing Roe v. Wade, new lies about the Russia investigation), members of the Democratic base are reminded how desperately they want to end their Trumpian nightmare. If they cannot get rid of him in 2018, they can at least rid themselves of many of his enablers and apologists. For Republicans, the outrage machine seems to have played out. Each “Fake News” or “Russia hoax” tweet has less impact than the previous one; the inability to come up with new hot-button issues leads Trump to go back to tired retreads. (NFL players not kneeling!).

To put it in TV terms that Trump would surely appreciate, his presidency has lost its novelty; getting his fans to tune in becomes a chore — and everyone else would be delighted if the show got canceled.

Could a Democrat Score an Upset in Arizona?

Democrat challenger Hiral Tipirneni, MD

If nothing else, Donald Trump's election has ignited a fire in many women, especially college educated women, who are horrified by both Trump's election and the reverse Robin Hood and misogynistic agenda of today's  Republican Party. Women have been throwing their hats into the political ring in record numbers and now a Democrat is within potential striking range of scoring an upset in a reliably Republican district in Arizona.  Combined with the ongoing teacher strike in Arizona - Arizona has among the lowest teacher pay in America - Democrat Hiral Tipirneni strong campaign suggests that Arizona may be on its way to joining Virginia in as a purple or even blue state in the near future.  A column in the New York Times looks at the changing scene in Arizona.  Here are column excerpts:

On Tuesday, there’s a special election in Arizona’s Eighth Congressional District, which Donald Trump won by 21 percentage points. It’s to replace Trent Franks, the abortion opponent who resigned amid reports that he tried to create his own personal version of “The Handmaid’s Tale” by pressuring female employees to serve as gestational surrogates.

In the past two elections, Democrats didn’t contest the district, which encompasses suburbs northwest of Phoenix. This time, a Democrat named Hiral Tipirneni, a former emergency room physician and first-time political candidate, is running against a Republican state senator, Debbie Lesko. Though Lesko is expected to win, some polls show the race in a dead heat, and Republicans have spent more than $1 million on the campaign.

On Thursday, public school teachers in Arizona, among the lowest paid in the country, are planning to walk out, following the lead of teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky. For 15 years, “we’ve continued to get cut and cut and cut,” Theresa Ratti, who teaches high school in Mesa, told me. “My A.P. government textbook that I teach from, the new president is George W. Bush.” These two events — an unexpectedly competitive Eighth District election and a rare labor action by teachers — are connected. Partly this is because Lesko is a villain to many local champions of public education. . . . . Lesko has been an advocate of vouchers and privatization and pretty much anything she can do to destroy the public school system.” But there’s a deeper link. Both the walkout and the surprising viability of Tipirneni’s campaign are manifestations of the explosive activist energy, particularly among women, set off by the catastrophe of Trump’s election. Since Hillary Clinton’s defeat, “college-educated women have ramped up their political participation en masse,” . . . . women who were once politically disengaged felt demeaned by Trump’s victory. Overcome by a need to do something in response, they’d turned to local politics, which had gradually come to consume their lives.

Save Our Schools, a prominent grass-roots organization supporting the walkout, is an outgrowth of an Arizona group called Stronger Together, which itself is a spinoff of the pro-Hillary Clinton Facebook group Pantsuit Nation. . . . .  before the election, Republicans had more than 3,000 precinct committeemen in the county, and Democrats only 600. Since 2016, he said, the Democrats’ total has grown to 1,700.

Even with this new infrastructure, local activists realize that winning on Tuesday is a long shot. Unlike the pro-Trump district that the Democrat Conor Lamb won in Pennsylvania, Arizona’s Eighth has no Democratic roots. It’s both very white and, because of a high concentration of retirees, very old.

But whatever happens this week, politics in Arizona, which Trump won by a mere 3.5 percentage points and which is key to the Democratic dream of retaking the Senate, is changing fast. Though our national politics remains a horror show, here, among so many indefatigable women, it’s easy to be hopeful.

Even if she [Tipirneni] comes up short, the work she’s done to build up the Democratic Party in her district will have a lasting impact, she said: “It’s going to be incredible to see what Arizona looks like after November.”

I will keep my fingers crossed and hope for a Democrat upset. 

GOP Candidate Attacks Parkland Teen Emma Gonzalez

GOP igot Leslie Gibson

Sadly, nowadays if one hears foul and disgusting (not to mention often totally untrue) attacks on minorities, LGBT individuals or non-Christians, it is a safe bet that the individual or individuals launching the attacks are either (i) a Christofascist, or (ii) a Republican.  Demonstrating the veracity of such assumption is Leslie Gibson, a Republican candidate for the Maine House of Representatives, who has attacked Emma Gonzalez, one of the student activists from the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on February 14, 2018.  Gibson attacked Gonzales and called her a "skinhead lesbian."  As an "out" bisexual, a Hispanic, and an opponent to unrestricted gun ownership, Gonzales is a trifecta of those hated by today's Republican Party.  NBC News looks at Gibson's rank bigotry.  Here are excerpts:

A Republican candidate for the Maine House of Representatives has used Twitter to attack two students who survived a mass shooting at a Florida high school, calling one of them, who is openly bisexual, a "skinhead lesbian" and the other a "bald-faced liar." Gibson is the only declared candidate for the 57th District . . . Pat Fogg, a Democratic organizer in the town of Greene, Maine, said, "That sort of stupidity really turns people off." Fogg added that she hopes someone will jump into the race to challenge Gibson.

Gibson has since deactivated his Twitter account, but multiple news outlets have taken screen shots of his offending remarks.

Meanwhile, furor over Gibson's comments has erupted on social media, with some, like Fogg, calling for another candidate to join the race just to oppose him.  Gonzalez has not yet responded to Gibson's remarks.

And yes, the everyday bigotry of Republicans is being noticed internationally.  The London Daily Mail reports om Gibson's foul 

Many Americans Exited the GOP in 2017

When I left the Republican Party a good many years ago - my extended family followed me soon there after - there were two motivations: (i) that I could not in good conscience remain in a party that ignored the separation of church and state and that was rapidly becoming the captive of right wing religious extremists and racists, and (ii) there was basically zero chance of reforming the GOP from within given the manner in which the party grassroots was being hijacked by  right wing religious extremists and racists.  The only plausible way, therefore, to "save the GOP" was to work to see it defeated in as many electoral contests as possible.  Ironically, now that the GOP holds the White House and both houses of Congress, more and more Republicans are coming to the realization that I came to a good 15 or more years before them: the only way to retain one's moral integrity and basic decency is to leave the party. A piece in the Washington Post looks at the exodus from the Republican Party in no small part thanks to Der  Trumpenführer (a post yesterday looked at the reasoning behind one evangelical Republican's decision to disassociate from both groups).  Here are article excerpts:

For much of 2017, President Trump’s poll numbers have been pretty consistent. In its most recent weekly average, Gallup has Trump at 36 percent approval . . . . Trump is where he is because, although Democrats hate him and independents generally view him negatively, he continues to enjoy high approval ratings from Republicans. Eighty-two percent of those in his own party approve of Trump, as of last week. That’s pretty good, but not good enough to keep Trump’s overall approval from being historically low for a modern president.

The problem for Trump may not just be that only Republicans like him, but that there are fewer Republicans than there were a year ago.

Last week, Gallup reported that the gap in partisan identity between Republicans and Democrats was 7 points — narrower than during the summer but still wider than it was at this point last year. In other words, the percentage of Americans who say that they are Democrats, or independents who tend to vote Democratic, is 7 percentage points higher than the percentage who identify as Republican or Republican-leaning.
 “Democrats’ edge has expanded this year mainly because of a decline in Republican affiliation,” Gallup’s Jeffrey Jones wrote. “A year ago, 44% of Americans identified as Democrats or leaned Democratic, the same percentage as now. However, Republican identification and leaning is five points lower than it was a year ago.” . . .  Women are 5 points less likely to identify as Republicans relative to last November. White women are 7 points less likely to.

This raises the question of why Americans were giving up on the party. Was it a function of the president?

Gallup found slips in Trump’s approval across the board since his inauguration, but polling from Marist conducted last December and in November of this year seems to reinforce the idea that some Republicans soured on Trump specifically. Asked whether they view Trump favorably — a different metric than approval — Trump’s numbers have dropped six percentage points over that 11-month period. 

You’ll notice that the Democrats have fairly consistently had an advantage in terms of party identification. Republicans are more reliable voters, generally speaking, since voting propensity correlates to age and income, which both also correlate to Republican Party membership.

If partisan identification shows a wide advantage for the Democrats in November of 2018, that suggests that the party could see an advantage in the polls.

If Republican leaders think Trump is to blame for that shift, deservedly or not, Washington politics could get very interesting very quickly.

Trump is hardly the only reason to exit the GOP, but he is a malignancy that shows no sign of going away voluntarily and albeit belatedly more and more Republicans seem to be realizing that the man is a liar, sexual predator, and possible traitor.  And that doesn't even begin to look at the GOP's  war on average Americans as embodied by the versions of the GOP tax bill or the growing effort to grant special rights to Christofascists to discriminate against others at will. 

Continued GOP Insanity: 82% of Trump Voters Still Support Him

Tuesday's fiasco at the polls for Republicans across the country, not just in Virginia, has caused some in the Republican Party to start having a debate that, in my view, should have begun 20 years ago, and which is all the more need with the toxic regime of Der Trumpenführer damaging the national fabric daily.  Yet a new poll indicated that 82% of Trump voters would vote for the man again despite the fact that he has passed none of the legislation he had promised and is sharply diminishing America's stature in the world.  As a post the other day indicated, the main motivation for these Trump supporters is their animus towards others - blacks, Hispanics, gays, non-Christians, etc., etc. Perhaps the only positive news is that, if one does the math, only 58% of registered voters voted in 2016 and Trump got roughly 47% of that vote which equates to 27.26% of voters.  Thus, more than 70% of Americans did NOT vote for the hate, bigotry and misogyny embodied by Trump.  A piece in Politico looks at these Trump supporters versus sane voters while another piece in Bearing Drift looks at  the mindset of "NeverTrump" Republicans who realize the GOP must change or begin what hopefully will be a precipitous road towards death.  First, highlights from Politico:

One year after the 2016 presidential election, the vast majority of Donald Trump voters have no regrets.

According to a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll conducted on the eve of the first anniversary of Trump's historic election, 82 percent of those who say they supported Trump last year would vote for him again if they had to do it over.

Trump’s supporters have largely rallied around the president, despite his poor overall approval ratings, the chaos of his first year in office and the ongoing investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

But there are worrying signs for Trump that voters are less inclined to give him a second term three years from now if he decides to run for reelection.

Those red flags go beyond the natural, downward trajectory of most new presidents. Like Trump, Barack Obama and George W. Bush saw their parties lose governorships in both New Jersey and Virginia the year after their first elections as president. But both Obama and Bush had job-approval ratings over 50 percent at this point.

Roughly twice as many Trump voters (16 percent) are undecided about whom they would support in 2020 as Clinton voters (7 percent), suggesting Trump's support is softer than it appears on the surface.

Similarly, 84 percent of Democratic voters would choose the Democratic candidate, but just 74 percent of GOP voters would back Trump, the poll shows. Nine percent of Democrats are undecided, compared with 17 percent of Republicans.

[A] CNN poll conducted by the firm SSRS, a remarkable 62 percent of registered voters said Trump does not deserve to be reelected in 2020. Only 35 percent of voters said he deserves reelection.
 In another ominous finding from the POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, voters have questions about whether Trump will even complete his term in office. The Constitution sets the president's term into January 2021, but only a narrow majority of voters, 52 percent, think it’s likely that Trump completes his four-year term as president — 37 percent believe it’s more likely he will leave office early.
 The POLITICO/Morning Consult poll finds voters are split on whether they are better off financially now than they were a year ago when Trump was first elected. Just over a quarter, 26 percent, say they are better off now, but 28 percent say they are worse off. A 41 percent plurality say their financial situation is about the same as it was a year ago. . . . . The problem, again, for Trump: Just 23 percent of voters strongly approve of his job performance.

In the end, it is worth remembering that only because of the flawed Electoral College system that failed to protect America from an unfit president as contemplated by the Founding Fathers do we have  Der Trumpenführer in the White House.   The piece noted above in Bearing Drift suggests that more and more Republicans realize that Trump could be the death of the GOP brand.  Here are excerpts (the bold face is the author's):

We’re a few days removed from the recent unpleasantness, and we’re starting to see some narratives come together about what happened and why.

 Here is why this narrative from the President and Corey Stewart is weak bullshit:The idea that Gillespie didn’t embrace Trump enough and the result was Trump supporters stayed home is wrong.  What happened was Ed Gillespie broke the record for GOP turnout in a Governor’s race – his nearly 1.2 million votes in the election was more than any GOP governor candidate in history.  In fact, it was more than any successful gubernatorial candidate in Virginia history…other than Ralph Northam. 

Northam’s 1.4 million votes was unprecedented.  No statewide candidate in the history of Virginia has ever gotten that many votes in a non-presidential election.
 The Democrats deserve the credit they’ve earned – they finally cracked the code on how to beat the normal off-year election ennui that tends to infect their party.  All it takes is the most hated sitting president since Richard Nixon, coupled with a white supremacist murdering an innocent woman on hallowed Virginia ground in Charlottesville.
 When it comes down to it, many Republicans hate the Republican Party right now – either because they don’t like Trump or they don’t like the establishment, or they don’t like that we control everything in Washington and nothing is getting done.  That translates into people either leaving the party, or independents who tend to vote Republican not doing so to “send a message”.  You also have the fact that the entire Democratic party, from the middle to the far left, hates Trump so much they will crawl over broken glass to give him the finger, and if they can’t do that, they’ll give it to you and tell you to send him the message.
 Trump cost Republicans the large majority they’ve enjoyed in the House of Delegates for nearly a generation.  Candidates from across the entire political spectrum on the GOP side, from moderates to super conservatives, lost.
 [Y]ou can expect that any Republican held districts where Hillary outperformed Trump in 2016 are going to flip, if they haven’t already done so.  Statewide, it’s going to be extremely difficult for Republicans to win so long as Trump is as unpopular as he is.
 As for next year’s Senate race, if Corey Stewart wants it, I say let him have it.  Watching him get destroyed by the Democrats’ Pretty Hate Machine – which he helped build, thanks to his Confederate statues idiocy – will be almost as much fun to watch as Bob Marshall losing to a transgender woman.

What is most delicious is that the author is a former Northern Virginia GOP chairman.  Oh, and on those coming to Roy Moore's defense, the author tweeted this:

For those GOPers making those arguments, please look in a mirror and ask yourself if you'd be okay with a 32 year old man trying to "date" your daughter. And recognize that no, you wouldn't. At least, not if you've got a soul.

 I left the GOP years ago because I could not sell my soul to the forces of hate and extremism.  More and more Republicans will find themselves having to make the same choice I did.

Why Evangelicals Will Stand By Roy Moore

Once again the political area is posing a moral test for Evangelical Christians, the same group that bears responsibility for putting Donald Trump, a self-professed sexual predator.  This time, the test revolves around GOP senatorial candidate Roy Moore in Alabama.  Moore who has made a career out of Bible thumping and spreading hatred against gays, non-Christians and minorities now faces accusations by four (4) women that he engaged in sexual molestation.  One accuser was 14 years old at the time while Moore was in his 30's.  The Alabama of 30+ years ago when I lived in Mobile would not have stood for such a candidate.  But that was before the rise of the Christofascists who now control the Republican Party in Alabama. A piece in the Washington Post looks at why the evangelicals who continue to support Trump will support the repulsive Roy Moore.  Here are excerpts:

Roy Moore won the Republican nomination for the Senate seat in Alabama this year on the strength of his long-standing advocacy for hard-right conservative and evangelical values.

Twice elected chief justice of Alabama’s Supreme Court, he left that role both times on behalf of his religious beliefs. In 2003, he was removed from office for refusing to take a monument of the Ten Commandments out of a state building. In 2016, he was suspended for refusing to uphold the Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriages.

On Thursday afternoon, The Washington Post published a story detailing allegations from four women who say they were pursued by Moore when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s. One, Leigh Corfman, described how Moore had initiated sexual contact with her when she was 14 and he 18 years older.

Republicans on Capitol Hill — many of whom supported Strange in the primary, it’s important to note — quickly called for Moore to drop out of the Senate race, a move that seems unlikely. 

Recent history, though, suggests that he might not lose substantial evangelical support. That recent history is Donald Trump. . . . . The result for Trump? He won more support from evangelical voters than any Republican since the question of religious identification began being asked.

 

Nearly half of Trump’s support — 46 percent — identified as white evangelical Protestant. . . . More than any other religious group, evangelicals said that someone who acts immorally in their personal lives can still serve morally in office.

 

Moore’s political background is predicated on engaging in the sort of fights that evangelical voters would like to see fought.  Moore is aware of this.

The allegations against Moore are decades old and, for those interested in dismissing them, dismissible as pitting his word against the women’s. It seems unlikely, then, that evangelical voters would, at this point, reject his candidacy, especially with Moore denying the charges as fervently as he is.

If Donald Trump — a one-time New York Democrat on his third wife with little connection to religious faith before his political run — can keep the support of the evangelical community, it seems unlikely that a conservative Alabama judge who lost his job in defense of the Ten Commandments is at much risk of seeing that support evaporate.

As I have noted many times before, given evangelical support of Trump, Moore and other morally bankrupt politicians,  when I meet anyone who announces themselves as an evangelical or fundamentalist Christian, the first thing that crosses my mind is that they must be (i) liars and hypocrites, (ii) modern day Pharisees, and (iii) morally bankrupt and not decent and moral individuals. 

Are "Conservatives" Their Just Comeuppance?

I put the word conservative in the title to this post in quotations because what today's media describes as conservatives are anything but what that term encompassed in the past.  Nowadays, the term conservative is used for Christofascists, white supremacists and avowed racists, and Neo-Nazis.  I suspect that a majority of old time conservatives now see themselves either as moderates or at times liberals simply because so-called conservatism has become so ugly and misogynistic.   Nonetheless, it is delicious to see Der Trumpenführer causing conniption fits among what the media now calls conservatives.   That said, it doesn't mean I have changed my opinion that Trump - and by extension, Mike Pence - is unfit for office  and nothing less than dangerous.  I am merely enjoying watching the angst of those who threw away what little decency and few principles they had to support such a foul and toxic individual.  A column in the New York Times sums up my thoughts on matters at the moment.  Here are highlights:

Uh-oh. I’m starting to enjoy Donald Trump’s presidency.

I enjoy the rage it inspires in Laura Ingraham. On news that the president had struck a tentative deal with Democrats to help the beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in exchange for zero funding for his border wall, the radio host and Trump groupie fumed, “On what planet are you living on?”

I enjoy the whiplash it inflicts on Ann Coulter. Within the space of a year, the right-wing literary giant has gone from writing “In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!” to tweeting, as she did Thursday, “At this point, who DOESN’T want Trump impeached?”

I enjoy the paroxysm of Representative Steve King, the Iowa Dixiecrat who warns that if Trump strikes his immigration deal with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi it will leave the president’s base “blown up, destroyed, irreparable and disillusioned beyond repair.”

I enjoy the self-abasement of Jeff Sessions, who endured private harangues and public humiliation from his boss because the attorney general saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to use his office to get tough on illegal immigration.

And then there’s the joy of watching Sean Hannity trying desperately to pin the blame for the president’s border wall betrayal on congressional Republicans.

Who are the “cuckservatives” now?

I use the epithet — “cuck” is short for cuckold — since it’s the one Trump’s most vociferous supporters hurled at mainstream Republicans they accused of caving in to the moral bullying of liberals, especially on the subjects of race and immigration.

But now it’s the president who is doing exactly that, making the case for DACA beneficiaries in terms his base most condemns: as “good, educated and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military” and who don’t deserve to be thrown out of the country simply because their parents brought them to the United States as children. It’s the kind of thing Nancy Pelosi — or, worse, John McCain — might say.

Trump’s move toward the Democrats on DACA — just as his earlier move toward them on the debt ceiling — isn’t about pragmatism. It’s not even about the plasticity of his convictions.

It’s about his addiction to betrayal, his contempt for those who bend their knee to him, his disdain for “losers” (especially when they’re on his side) and his desperate need to be admired by those who despise him most simply because they have the wit to see through him. This is a presidency whose defining feature isn’t ideology, much less policy. It’s neurosis.

In other words, there is no “pivot” at work in the presidency, in the mold of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s leftward turn during his governorship of California. There’s a mood swing.

That might comfort the Trump true believers who fear their president is abandoning them. It shouldn’t: He feels about as much loyalty toward them and their convictions as he’s felt toward his several wives.

All of this is fun, since it’s always delightful to see blowhards and bigots get their comeuppance at the hands of their idol. The ideologues of the right are left to make do with their jester and his antics. I hope they have a sense of humor about it.

But there’s also a lesson for conservatives who mistook Trump’s bluster for seriousness. Not least among the conservative “Never Trump” objections to the candidate is that he would be a disaster to the Republican Party — not just because his beliefs, such as they were, were anathema to the party’s best traditions, but because at heart he was a destructive opportunist with no core convictions beyond his own immediate advantage.

The president’s newfound good sense on DACA is good news for the country, provided it lasts. Nobody should count on it whipping any sense into those conservatives who fell for him, also known as cucks.