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. 

Hope for 2018 Despite Trump and an Annus Horribilis

The hypocrisy-filled Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Australia, described 2017 as “annus horribilis” because of euthanasia laws in Victoria, the exposure of child sexual abuse in the Catholic church, and the legalization of same-sex marriage (for Fox News viewers, "annus horribilis" means horrible year.)  Here in America sane, rational and moral Americans likewise largely view 2017 as an annus horriblis thanks to Der Trumpenführer presence in the White House and a Republican controlled Congress that shows less spine and concern for American values of decency than the Roman senate under Augustus Caesar did for at least maintaining the traps of the Roman Republic.  Yet, despite the depressing year, there may be hope that America can clean its house and attempt to restore what has been lost.  A column in the New York Times looks at all the bad that has transpired but also why there is still cause for hope.  Once again, Virginia's election results are seen as one of the beacons of hope.  Here are column highlights:

Many of us came into 2017 expecting the worst. And in many ways, the worst is what we got.  Donald Trump has been every bit as horrible as one might have expected; he continues, day after day, to prove himself utterly unfit for office, morally and intellectually. And the Republican Party — including so-called moderates — turns out, if anything, to be even worse than one might have expected. At this point it’s evidently composed entirely of cynical apparatchiks, willing to sell out every principle — and every shred of their own dignity — as long as their donors get big tax cuts.

Meanwhile, conservative media have given up even the pretense of doing real reporting, and become blatant organs of ruling-party propaganda.

Yet I’m ending this year with a feeling of hope, because tens of millions of Americans have risen to the occasion. The U.S. may yet become another Turkey or Hungary — a state that preserves the forms of democracy but has become an authoritarian regime in practice. But it won’t happen as easily or as quickly as many of us had feared. 

Early this year the commentator David Frum warned that the slide into authoritarianism would be unstoppable “if people retreat into private life, if critics grow quieter, if cynicism becomes endemic.” But so far that hasn’t happened.

What we’ve seen instead is the emergence of a highly energized resistance. That resistance made itself visible literally the day after Trump took office, with the huge women’s marches that took place on Jan. 21, dwarfing the thin crowds at the inauguration. If American democracy survives this terrible episode, I vote that we make pink pussy hats the symbol of our delivery from evil.

And in case anyone wondered whether the vocal anti-Trump crowds and Trump’s hugely negative polling would translate into political action, a string of special elections — capped by a giant Democratic wave in Virginia and a stunning upset in Alabama — has put such doubts to rest.

Let’s be clear: America as we know it is still in mortal danger. Republicans still control all the levers of federal power, and never in the course of our nation’s history have we been ruled by people less trustworthy.

This obviously goes for Trump himself, who is clearly a dictator wannabe, with no respect whatsoever for democratic norms. But it also goes for Republicans in Congress, who have demonstrated again and again that they will do nothing to limit his actions.

The worse things look for Trump, the more closely Republicans tie themselves to him. . . . . And the growing evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia doesn’t seem to have induced any prominent Republicans who weren’t already anti-Trump to take a stand. Instead, we’ve seen erstwhile critics like Lindsey Graham become obsequious toadies promoting Trump properties.  So we can’t count on the consciences of Republicans to protect us.

[A]s long as Republicans control Congress, constitutional checks and balances are effectively a dead letter.

So it’s going to be up to the American people. They may once again have to make themselves heard in the streets. They’ll certainly have to make their weight felt at the ballot box.  It’s going to be hard, because the game is definitely rigged. Remember, Trump lost the popular vote but ended up in the White House anyway, and the midterm elections will be anything but fair.

And even if voters rise up effectively against the awful people currently in power, we’ll be a long way from restoring basic American values. Our democracy needs two decent parties, and at this point the G.O.P. seems to be irretrievably corrupt. . . . it’s going to take a long struggle to turn ourselves back into the nation we were supposed to be. Yet I am, as I said, far more hopeful than I was a year ago. America is not yet lost.

Trump Attacks Women's March Participants

Still smarting from the low attendance turnout for his coronation inauguration, Der Fuhrer attacked those who participated in yesterday's Women's March.  The New York Daily News noted as follows:  

Trump, on his second full day in office, criticized the efforts of participants in Saturday’s Women’s March held in Washington, D.C.

“Watched protests yesterday but was under the impression that we just had an election!” Trump wrote on Twitter Sunday. “Why didn't these people vote? Celebs hurt cause badly.”

The White House – after remaining silent on the topic Saturday – released a statement earlier Sunday addressing the march, bemoaning the lack of attention surrounding the anti-abortion March for Life scheduled for Friday, Jan. 27.

A column in the Washington Post looks at the march and more importantly why the momentum must continue to fight and oppose every effort of Der Fuhrer and Congressional Republicans to roll back time and eliminate civil rights.  Here are excerpts:

Some descended on Washington’s Mall very early, and some joined later. Some stood in long lines outside Metro stations to get downtown. Others walked a long way.

The signs were almost all homemade. Many were clever, channeling humor and whimsy (“There will be hell toupee,” “Things are so bad even introverts have to protest”), as well as anger, determination and commitment.

And the crowd got so big that it broke into tributaries, marching in different directions. The tributaries eventually joined up to form a mighty stream of protest. No matter how much President Trump and his administration try to lie and spin, every objective indication is that far more people showed up to register dissent over his rise to power than to celebrate it.

It was a diverse crowd in many ways, more white than African American and Latino but with a fair representation across racial lines. It tilted young but included many among the middle-aged and the senior set. 

For many, it was a multi-generational day, a family affair: grandparents, parents and children, some in strollers. Women predominated, but a large minority was male, and a fair number of men carried signs suggesting, in various formulations, that real men, good men, supported the rights of their sisters and wives and mothers.

[I]t was at least as much a message to Trump and to the country: Less than 24 hours after the new president took the oath of office, hundreds of thousands of Americans came together to say that they would not stand by in silence if the new administration threatened basic freedoms or the advances of the past eight years, and the last 50.

The message of the Washington March was echoed by large crowds that gathered in cities and towns across the country. In their different ways, the marchers were saying that they would not be cowed into silence or demobilized into a sullen difference.

The anger and dismay over Trump was a dominant emotion, and judging by the signs, its sources were multiple: his attitude and behavior toward women especially, given the theme of the day, but also Russia’s role in the election and Trump’s bromance with Vladimir Putin.

There were loud calls for the defense of free speech and freedom generally. If Trump didn’t talk about freedom in his inaugural address, this crowd picked up the slack.

There was an acceptance of the reality that Trump is president but a stout rejection of who he is and what he stands for. That included expressions of a desire to drive him from office, with the inevitable breakout of “Hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go” chants.

The politics of the next few months and years will depend a great deal on whether the energy displayed on Saturday is sustained through the hard work of political activism. I can imagine skeptics reading this and saying one day of protests will be very easy for Trump and the Republican Party to absorb (even if one can imagine Trump’s fury at not getting even a day’s peace).

But there is reason to believe this was not a one-off. First, there was not a single march in Washington but demonstrations all over the country. As the tea party showed, change comes from local actions coordinated nationally. There is clearly a large national base of opposition, community by community.

Second, the reaction to Trump is unprecedented. No other president faced such a wave of rallies immediately after he took office. No other president so quickly mobilized so many people against him. Trump really is special.

Third, the march here (and such evidence I have seen suggests this was true elsewhere) was strikingly nonsectarian. There were not people pushing very narrow ideological agendas or political subgroups insisting that they and only they had, in old left parlance, “the right line” on the future. Different parts of the anti-Trump coalition were generally happy to reinforce one another’s messages.

Finally, Trump’s election jarred many progressives and moderates from quiescence. If these marches were for women and against Trump, they were also marches against complacency. That may have been their most important message.

What I have found encouraging is that so many people I know who have not been political activists in the past turned out in March, including one of my sisters and both of my daughters.   The momentum must continue and Trump must be driven from office.

Trump's Fact Free World and Why It Matters

Frighteningly, we are already seeing evidence where Trump, a/k/a Der Fuhrer, lives in a fact free fantasy world where objective reality and empirical facts simply do not matter.  Worse yet, he wants the rest of us to inhabit the same bizarre world that only serves to satiate his ego and narcissism. Something as simple as the size of the inauguration crowd on January 20, 2017, is open to debate - at least in Der Fuhrer's mind.  By all reports and based on countless photos, transit system numbers and other provable measures, Trump had a lousy turn out for his inauguration yet the man boasts that it was the largest turn out ever.  His claim, like most of what Trump says, is an outright lie.  To admit the reality that he is NOT liked and NOT popular with a majority of Americans is impossible for a narcissist like Trump.  Meanwhile, unprecedented numbers of protesters turned out yesterday in Washington, DC, that dwarfed the inaugural turn out. What is most frightening is the fact that this rejection of fact and reality will spill over into everything this dangerous sociopath does while in office.  A piece in NPR looks at the lies being put out by Der Fuhrer's henchmen.  Here are highlights:

The Trump Administration spent its first full day in office taking shots at the media and arguing about crowd sizes at Friday's inauguration.

Press Secretary Sean Spicer delivered a fiery broadside against the Fourth Estate from the White House Briefing Room Saturday evening, claiming that reporters had engaged in "deliberately false reporting" in the past 24 hours since President Trump took the oath of office. And, after berating the press, he walked away without taking any questions.

He blamed new floor coverings on mall areas that "had the effect of highlighting any areas where people were not standing, while in years past the grass eliminated this visual." And Spicer claimed that fences and magnetometers going further back than ever prevented "hundreds of thousands of people from being able to access the mall as quickly as they had in years past." However, CNN reporter Ashley Killough tweeted out a photo showing that floor coverings had in fact been used at Obama's second inauguration.

But then Spicer went on to make his own estimate on the crowd size and incorrectly claimed that the number of people who used the Washington D.C. Metro on Friday had outpaced the number of people who used the service during President Obama's second inaugural.

In 2009, 317,000 people had, in fact, used the Metro by 11 a.m., according to WMATA, as Spicer cited. But the White House press secretary then claimed that 420,000 people had used the Metro on Friday; by 11 a.m. only 193,000 people had ridden Metro. For the whole day on Friday, 570,000 people used the system, but in 2013 there were 782,000 riders and 1.1 million riders in 2009 — both much larger than Trump's inauguration.

Why dispute something that people could see with their own eyes?  It all plays into the insanity of the occupant of the White House and his effort to discredit the media which will otherwise try to hold him accountable and expose the endless tide of lies that we can expect going forward.  An activist friend shared some thoughts on Facebook that seem to describe the coming disinformation campaign:

If you are puzzled by the bizarre "press conference" put on by the White House press secretary this evening (angrily claiming that Trump's inauguration had the largest audience in history, accusing them of faking photos and lying about attendance), let me help explain it. This spectacle served three purposes:

1. Establishing a norm with the press: they will be told things that are obviously wrong and they will have no opportunity to ask questions. That way, they will be grateful if they get anything more at any press conference. This is the PR equivalent of "negging," the odious pick-up practice of a particular kind of horrible man (e.g., Donald Trump).

2. Increasing the separation between Trump's base (1/3 of the population) from everybody else (the remaining 2/3). By being told something that is obviously wrong—that there is no evidence for and all evidence against, that anybody with eyes can see is wrong—they are forced to pick whether they are going to believe Trump or their lying eyes. The gamble here—likely to pay off—is that they will believe Trump. This means that they will regard media outlets that report the truth as "fake news" (because otherwise they'd be forced to confront their cognitive dissonance.)

3. Creating a sense of uncertainty about whether facts are knowable, among a certain chunk of the population (which is a taking a page from the Kremlin, for whom this is their preferred disinformation tactic). A third of the population will say "clearly the White House is lying," a third will say "if Trump says it, it must be true," and the remaining third will say "gosh, I guess this is unknowable." The idea isn't to convince these people of untrue things, it's to fatigue them, so that they will stay out of the political process entirely, regarding the truth as just too difficult to determine.

This is laying important groundwork for the months ahead. If Trump's White House is willing to lie about something as obviously, unquestionably fake as this, just imagine what else they'll lie about. In particular, things that the public cannot possibly verify the truth of. It's gonna get real bad.

A piece in Vox elaborates further on this effort:

Delegitimizing the institutions that might report inconvenient or damaging facts about the president is strategic for an administration that has made a slew of impossible promises and takes office amid a cloud of ethics concerns and potential scandals. 

It also gives the new administration a convenient scapegoat for their continued struggles with public opinion, and their potential future struggles with reality. This kind of “dishonesty from the media,” Spicer said, is making it hard “to bring our country together.” It’s not difficult to imagine the Trump administration disputing bad jobs numbers in the future, or claiming their Obamacare replacement covers everyone when it actually throws millions off insurance.

 Be very, very afraid for the future.