Trump’s Racism Will Bring the GOP Down with Him

The title of this post states what hopefully - and deservedly - will happen to the GOP.  By extension, it hopefully applies to white evangelical Christians - 49% of who attend church weekly or more frequently say Trump was "anointed by God" according to the Christian Post - as well since their racism strongly overlaps with that o the GOP and the white supremacists key to Trump's base of support.  In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, explains why Trump and his racism (against all non-whites) should be the Republican Party's undoing.  Especially when combined with Trump's massive failure on the Covid-19 pandemic which is alienation older voters some of who rightly believe the GOP is willing to allow them to die in exchange for reopening the economy.  Here are column highlights:   

President Trump can’t help himself. The former reality-TV host was warned by White House staff, his campaign team, financial contributors and Republicans on Capitol Hill that his afternoon news conferences were causing political damage. But after a weekend of tweeting out conspiracy theories about former presidents and insults aimed at cable-news pundits, the president was at it again Monday.

And, true to form, Trump burned himself.

His coronavirus “update” ended abruptly after he hurled a bigoted remark toward an American journalist who grew up in West Virginia. When CBS News’s Weijia Jiang asked Trump about his misleading testing comments, the president blurted out: “You should ask China.” Jiang’s family emigrated from China when she was 2. For what it’s worth, Trump’s own mother immigrated to the United States when she was 18, and his wife, Melania, gained an “Einstein Visa,” reserved for those of “extraordinary ability,” in 2001. After Trump’s snarling China comment, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins pressed Trump until he abruptly retreated from the presidential podium.

As he stumbled away, one couldn’t help but be reminded of Trump’s racist 2016 attacks aimed at Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel. The then-candidate said he couldn’t trust Curiel because he was “Mexican,” but Curiel is an Indiana native; his parents immigrated there from Mexico before he was born.

Four years later, Trump’s Republican Party has become numbed to its party leader’s daily outrages — the racist attacks, the 18,000 lies (and counting), the petty insults, the breaches of constitutional norms, and the gross incompetence that has worsened the covid-19 crisis in the United States and has driven America to the edge of a depression. These GOP politicians have long believed that ignoring Trump’s unfitness for office is their best political play, but the Democratic Party’s historic landslide in 2018 along with their Southern gubernatorial victories last year suggest just the opposite. Public and private polls are looking worse for Republicans than they have since 2008.

If Democrats win back the White House and control of the Senate in 2020, much of that will be because black and Hispanic voters continue to reject Republican candidates. But Monday’s ugly display also brought into sharp relief another glaring problem for the Party of Trump: Asian Americans. . . . By 2014, Democrats were winning 49 percent of Asian Americans, and after two years of Trump in the White House, that number jumped to 77 percent. With outbursts such as Monday’s, one wonders how much worse things will be for Trump’s Grand Old Party this fall.

Republican incumbent senators in Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Maine and North Carolina face serious threats from their Democratic opponents in recent polls. Once-safe states such as Kansas and Georgia are in play, and Trump himself is losing head-to-head matchups with presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida. Recent polls show the two are even tied in traditionally Republican strongholds like Georgia and Texas.

With the prospects of a historic Democratic landslide building with every Trump news conference, every deranged tweet, every racist remark, wouldn’t now be the time for Republican candidates to stand up, speak out and finally stop following a man so ill-equipped for the presidency?

To quote Trump himself, with control of Congress and the White House slipping away: “What the hell do they have to lose?”

It’s the Cruelty, Stupid

There are several characteristics that link Donald Trump to his hard core supporters. The first two are related: hatred towards others and a willingness - perhaps even a delight - in inflicting cruelty on these that they see as "other."  These traits are true of white supremacists and for evangelical Christian extremists as well as ultra-far right Catholics.  A third trait applies to some of my affluent Republican "friends" who are indifferent to the hate and cruelty that motivates the hard core Trump base: for them support of Trump comes from greed.  Greed in the form of wanting to avoid taxes at any cost, including countenancing cruelty to others and allowing the less fortunate to suffer. Nowhere do any of these Trump supporters embrace Christ's social gospel message.  They may feign piety and religiosity, but to the extent they do so, it is to parse Old Testament passages to condemn others while preening in their own self-bestowed self-righteousness. Am I too harsh?  I think not and, as a column in the New York Times notes, history will judge Trump and his followers harshly.  But the rest of us will be judged too based on how vigorously we opposed hate and cruelty and whether we spoke out against cruelty or simply looked the other way.  Here are column highlights:

There are tanks in the nation’s capital and concentration camps on its border. The slide of this nation into a nearly unrecognizable state continues unabated. Donald Trump is recreating America in his own image: an abominable one.

He brags about trading valentines with the ruthless North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, saying at a political rally in September: “I was really being tough. And so was he. And we’d go back and forth. And then we fell in love, O.K.? No, really. He wrote me beautiful letters. And they’re great letters. We fell in love.. . . .

According to Human Rights Watch, North Korea under Kim not only “restricts all civil and political liberties, including freedom of expression, assembly, association and religion,” it systematically extracts “forced, unpaid labor from its citizens,” and “women in North Korea suffer a range of sexual and gender-based abuses” that include “rape and other sexual violence and torture in detention facilities, sexual exploitation, or forced marriage of North Korean women in China, and sexual and gender-based violence and discrimination.”

And this says nothing of the hundreds of people Kim is thought to have had executed since coming to power in 2011.

And this is the man that the president of the United States brags about being in love with.

Last month Trump joked with Russia’s Vladimir Putin about getting “rid of journalists.” According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 28 journalists have been killed in Russia since Putin took office in 2000.

Last week in Osaka, Japan, Trump said of the Saudi crown prince: “It’s an honor to be with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, a friend of mine, a man who has really done things in the last five years in terms of opening up Saudi Arabia.”

Let’s be clear: That friend is believed to have ordered the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. And, murder may in fact be too antiseptic a word. Turkish officials claim that after Khashoggi was killed, his body was hacked up with a bone saw, then disposed of.

Not only has Trump never delivered a full-throated condemnation of the Saudi leader, he plans to reward the kingdom with more arms sales unless Congress is able to stop him.

Why does the American president have such an affinity, a fetish even, for the world’s dictators while at the same time spurning many of America’s traditional allies? And how does this turn to the darkness reposition this country in the annals of history?

I believe that it speaks to a blindness, or more precisely, an indifference to cruelty. This also crops up in domestic policy, where the indifference is particularly acute when those who suffer are somehow other: black or brown, female or trans, Muslim or migrant.

I do not believe that a parent seeking asylum — which is still legal in this country, it bears repeating — should have a child ripped from his or her arms. I don’t believe that people — including children — should be caged like animals and deprived of basic human necessities and basic human dignity.

What is happening at our border is unconscionable, a violation of basic human rights, a complete moral violation. And yet the president on Thursday will make a mockery of the country’s freedom celebration by turning it into a muscle-flexing political pep rally.

Stop thinking that this is only about partisanship or polarization. It’s the cruelty, stupid. It has always been about cruelty: racial cruelty, gender cruelty, religious cruelty. It has always been about bending the rest of America, the rest of reality, really, into subordination to the white supremacist patriarchy.

If the emerging culture of the world has to be put under boot for the established culture to maintain power, so be it. This is the white supremacist mantra; this is the Trump message.

Trump cares nothing about the suffering of racial minorities here — other than to increase the pain — nor does he care about the suffering of nonwhite people abroad.

[H]istory is sitting in judgment, that when this dark era draws to a close, an accounting must be made, a record made. None of us will be immune.

The questions will come without room for equivocation or adjustment: Where were you when the bodies floated in the Rio Grande? What did you say when this president bragged about assaulting women and defended men accused of doing the same? What was your reaction when he saw very good people among the Nazis? Where was your outrage when thousands died in Puerto Rico?

What did you do? What did you say? And for others in my profession, what did you write?

I for one, will not be silent.  Would that I could do more to rid America of the pestilence that Trump and his supporters comprise. Will my Republican "friends" like this post?  Probably not, but until they take a good look at themselves in the mirror and reject these enumerated traits, America will continue its decline and degradation.  If they vote to re-elect Trump next year, I hope history will be most cruel in it judgment of them.  

2016: House Majority Leader Says "I Think Putin Pays Trump"

The vast majority of Congressional Republicans willingly sold their souls to Donald Trump in their quest to put their party over the best interests of America.  Seemingly, positioning themselves to give a trillion dollar tax cut to the wealthy outweighed all else.  The result was that they backed a morally bankrupt, narcissistic liar and serial sexual predator despite reservations about Trump's possible allegiance to Vladimir Putin.  The best interests and welfare of the majority of Americans simply did not matter.  Now, a tape of a conversation between House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and House Speaker Paul Ryan has come to light in which McCarthy states that he believes that Trump was on Putin's payroll.  After initially lying and claiming the conversation never happened, Ryan and McCarthy are trying to say it was all a joke.  Sadly, what they have foisted on America is no joke and the nation and the world are now threatened by the sociopath in the White House.  The Washington Post looks at Ryan - in my view one of the most despicable and amoral men in Washington - being caught trying to lie about this and how he puts party above country.  Here are excerpts:

A month before Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination, one of his closest allies in Congress — House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy — made a politically explosive assertion in a private conversation on Capitol Hill with his fellow GOP leaders: that Trump could be the beneficiary of payments from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” McCarthy (R-Calif.) said, according to a recording of the June 15, 2016, exchange, which was listened to and verified by The Washington Post. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher is a Californian Republican known in Congress as a fervent defender of Putin and Russia.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) immediately interjected, stopping the conversation from further exploring McCarthy’s assertion, and swore the Republicans present to secrecy.

Before the conversation, McCarthy and Ryan had emerged from separate talks at the U.S. Capitol with Ukrainian Prime Minister Vladi­mir Groysman, who had described a Kremlin tactic of financing populist politicians to undercut Eastern European democratic institutions.

News had just broken the day before in The Washington Postthat Russian government hackers had penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee, prompting McCarthy to shift the conversation from Russian meddling in Europe to events closer to home.

Some of the lawmakers laughed at McCarthy’s comment. Then McCarthy quickly added: “Swear to God.”

Ryan instructed his Republican lieutenants to keep the conversation private, saying: “No leaks. . . . This is how we know we’re a real family here.” The remarks remained secret for nearly a year.

The conversation provides a glimpse at the internal views of GOP leaders who now find themselves under mounting pressure over the conduct of President Trump. The exchange shows that the Republican leadership in the House privately discussed Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election and Trump’s relationship to Putin, but wanted to keep their concerns secret. It is difficult to tell from the recording the extent to which the remarks were meant to be taken literally.

Evan McMullin, who in his role as policy director to the House Republican Conference participated in the June 15 conversation, said: “It’s true that Majority Leader McCarthy said that he thought candidate Trump was on the Kremlin’s payroll. Speaker Ryan was concerned about that leaking.” McMullin ran for president last year as an independent and has been a vocal critic of Trump.

When initially asked to comment on the exchange, Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Ryan, said: “That never happened,” and Matt Sparks, a spokesman for McCarthy, said: “The idea that McCarthy would assert this is absurd and false.”

After being told that The Post would cite a recording of the exchange, Buck, speaking for the GOP House leadership, said: “This entire year-old exchange was clearly an attempt at humor. 

 I guess Ryan's idea of being a "family" is akin to a Mafia family.  The man is a liar and reprehensible.  He is just as dishonest as Trump.