The Lincoln Project: Trump’s Enablers Must Pay a Price

Max Boot, a former Republican himself, has a great piece on the Lincoln Project in the Washington Post.  He notes that the Lincoln Project founders - and I suspect many who have made donations to the project - still hold deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy, and the national debt while the bulk of the GOP has shown all it ever has cared about is power and that it will prostitute itself to any lengths in order to retain power. The Projects ultimate goal?  To destroy the Republican Party that is now the party of Trump, white supremacists and "Christian" extremists in the hope that a new center right party can emerge that actually values what most Republicans only pretend to care about. Hence the targeting of Republican senators who have sold their souls to Trump and sold out average Americans in the process.  Here are highlights that give deserved kudos to the Lincoln Project:

“The once-mocked ‘Never Trump’ movement becomes a sudden campaign force” — Post headline, July 11

If you want any more evidence of the validity of that conclusion, look no further than the frenzied attacks on the Lincoln Project, a political action committee formed last year by four Republicans (George T. Conway III, Steve Schmidt, John Weaver and Rick Wilson) disenchanted with President Trump. With its razor-sharp videos, the Lincoln Project has drawn blood — and counterattacks mainly from the Trumpified right but also, surprisingly, from a section of the self-defeating left.

The most common charge is that, as Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel put it, the organization has a “record of grift” and “profiting off attacking President Trump.” This charge has been faithfully repeated with no evidence by the lap dog conservative press, e.g., the National Review and Ben Shapiro.

This is pretty rich coming from Trump’s acolytes, since there is no more glaring example of grift in our politics than the Trump campaign and the Trump White House. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the Trump campaign and affiliated committees have spent $22 million at Trump properties since he entered politics in 2015.

Now that’s corruption. What the Lincoln Project is doing is simply politics as usual. There is no reason to believe, the Daily Beast writes, that “Lincoln Project executives are simply pocketing the money that’s channeled through their political consulting firms.” If those working on the Lincoln Project are compensated, well, they deserve it. They’re turning out brilliant videos at a relentless pace that puts most political organizations to shame.

The attacks on the Lincoln Project’s finances are a thinly disguised attack on its tactics — which are to attack Trump and the GOP from a perspective likely to appeal to middle-of-the-road voters. Right-wingers are especially perturbed that the group has targeted vulnerable Republican senators. . . . This would seem to refute a charge heard from the far left — namely that the group is a bunch of unrepentant warmongers who haven’t really broken with the GOP.

In fact, the Lincoln Project’s founders have impeccable Republican credentials, but they are thoroughly disenchanted with the Party of Trump. One of the consultants affiliated with the Lincoln Project — Stuart Stevens — has written a forthcoming book called “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump” that explains in coruscating and compelling terms why he is done with a party he has served his whole life.

He calls the GOP “a white grievance party,” and writes that “there is an ugly history of code words and dog whistles in the party.” The rest of the Republican platform he dismisses as a convenient fiction: “How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy, and the national debt in a matter of months? You don’t. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren’t deeply held.… [I]t had always been about power. The rest? The principles? The values? It was all a lie.”

Stevens is particularly scathing about all the Republican politicians — many of them his clients — who have made common cause with Trump. “The most distinguishing characteristic of the current national Republican Party is cowardice,” he writes.

If you accept Stevens’s searing critique of the Republican Party — and I do — then it is incumbent on the Lincoln Project to target not just Trump but also his enablers. That’s just what it has done with commercials such as this one urging the defeat of Republican senators.

Does that mean the Lincoln Project favors a Democratic takeover of the Senate? Yup. But that doesn’t mean, as Trumpites blare, that it’s gone over to the far left. Its members have stayed on the center right while the Republican Party has been taken over, as Stevens writes, by “paranoids, kooks, know-nothings, and bigots.”

If we are ever again to have a sane and sober center-right party in America — something we desperately need — then the Trumpified GOP must first be demolished. That is what the Lincoln Project is trying to accomplish, and more power to it. By leading the charge against the Republican Party, its founders have shown greater fealty to conservative principles than 99 percent of elected Republicans.

The Republican Party That is Dead and Gone

From time to time throughout history nations have faced a point where they have to determine who they are and what they stand for.  An obvious example is 1930's Germany when everyday Germans failed the test and chose evil and depravity.  Now, America stands at a point where a similar decision must be made.  As it now exists, the Republican Party is the enemy of decency, morality and Americans must decide if they will go the way of the 1930's Germans or defeat the GOP and disavow its agenda.  Sadly, the Republican Party was not always a toxic threat.  A piece by Joe Scarborough, a former Republican member of Congress. reminisces about the days when the GOP was responsible and had not become a force that at best shrugs its shoulders at inhumanity towards others.  Scarborough, myself, Steve Schmidt, Jennifer Rubin, and many other former Republicans supported the Republican Party of yesteryear. Now, its defeat is an existential test for Americans as Scarborough notes.  Here are column excerpts:

There was a time when conservatives supported limited government, balanced budgets and less debt. Not so long ago, conservatives also championed free trade, lower tariffs and the spread of democratic institutions across Europe and the world. And yes, conservatives spent the past generation championing an American exceptionalism with values casting our great country as a city shining brightly on a hill for all the world to see. 

Ronald Reagan launched his historic 1980 presidential campaign with the Statue of Liberty as his backdrop . He framed America’s relationship with immigration in 1981 this way: “Our nation is a nation of immigrants. More than any other country, our strength comes from our immigrant heritage and our capacity to welcome those from other lands.” Reagan took a position on immigration that most Republicans today would consider heresy, yet voters rewarded him with a decisive victory and a landslide reelection a few years later. Far less popular has been President Trump’s politically toxic policy of ripping children from their mothers’ arms. That depraved stance, adopted as a bargaining chip to use against Democrats, garnered support from only 17 percent of Americans . But it did earn him the antipathy of our closest allies, Pope Francis and every living former first lady . With the incarceration of more than 2,300 infants, toddlers and children unresolved, Trump’s policy of breaking up families remains an open wound on America’s character and a political crisis for the few Republicans who still believe they can salvage November’s midterm elections. A conservative former intelligence operative grimly recounted to me on Thursday how much the handling of these displaced children reminded him of the CIA facilities where terrorists were secretly held and interrogated after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001: “This reminds me of our black sites, except we were holding 100 or so adult terrorists for the killing of American citizens. Now 2,300 kids are held in unknown locations with unknown individuals inside and absolutely no outside observation.” [Trump’s] personal cruelty and political ignorance have created a crisis that will kill conservative immigration reform and lead to future Democratic majorities. More troubling is the harsh reality now staring Americans in the face: Their president is a brutish political boss who has cheapened conservatism, sullied the office of the presidency and called into question the very character of a country once seen as the envy of the world. That so many Republicans still support this depraved man and his malignant movement could be the most damning element of this tragic American tale. 

 When Christian religious extremists and white supremacists are the base of a major political party it underscores that something is seriously wrong with America/Americans.  Each of us has an obligation to reclaim our nation and oppose Trump, Pence, Sessions, Ryan, McConnell and others who are destroying America's soul.  Sitting on the sidelines is not an option.  Inaction equals complicity in evil. 

Will Sanders Back Clinton When He Drops Out?

I vented in a prior post about Bernie Sanders supporters who are vowing to stay home on election day rather than vote for Hillary Clinton.  The result of such action, of course, would be the to position the GOP to retake the White House and put in place policies that would be the antithesis of what Sanders claims to support.  Now, a column in the Washington Post argues that Sanders himself will back Hillary after he drops out of the Democrat nomination contest.  If Sanders truly cares more about the causes he has championed rather than his ego, I believe the column is on point. , Here are column highlights:

Eight years ago, I spent an election night in a basement gymnasium in Manhattan, watching Hillary Clinton and her campaign advisers create an alternate reality.

It was June 3, 2008, and Barack Obama had just clinched the Democratic presidential nomination, making official a victory that had seemed inevitable for months. But Terry McAuliffe, then the campaign chairman and emcee of this Clinton “victory” party, recited a list of Clinton’s primary wins and introduced her as “the next president of the United States.”

Clinton, too, made no mention of her defeat, boasting that she had won “more votes than any primary candidate in history.”

Yet four days later, Clinton graciously bowed out of the race. In a concession speech at the National Building Museum in Washington, she said she and her supporters would “do all we can to help elect Barack Obama the next president of the United States.” Some in the hall booed — but Clinton delivered her supporters to Obama in November.

Recalling this serene end to the bitter 2008 Democratic primary battle, I’m not inclined to join in all the hand-wringing about the damage Bernie Sanders is doing to Clinton’s chances in November by remaining in the race.

It doesn’t matter if Sanders continues his candidacy until the last votes are cast in June. What matters is that he quits gracefully, and there should be every expectation he will, for a simple reason: Sanders is not a fool.

Sanders sounded like an extortionist Monday night when he answered a college student’s question about whether he would encourage his supporters to back Clinton if she secured the nomination. He said Clinton would have to earn their support by embracing single-payer health care, free college tuition and a carbon tax — all things Clinton rejected in her (successful) campaign against Sanders. 

But seconds later, the forum’s moderator, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, rephrased the question: “If it’s incumbent on her, what role do you have?” And Sanders gave a very different answer. “I will do everything in my power to make sure that no Republican gets into the White House in this election cycle,” he said.

That’s the crucial point. Sanders wants to exert maximum leverage to the very end to move Clinton toward his populist policies. But he is a practical man, and he certainly doesn’t wish to see a President Trump or President Cruz. This is why there’s no cause for all the fuss over him remaining in the race until he is mathematically eliminated.

Even before Tuesday night’s results from the Northeast, he needed to win 59 percent of remaining delegates, or 71 percent if you include super delegates. That isn’t going to happen.

And so it will happen this time. Sanders, when he quits the race, can justifiably declare victory in moving the debate — and Clinton — in his direction on trade, Wall Street, income inequality, campaign finance and energy. His campaign has exceeded all expectations, and he isn’t about to jeopardize his movement by handing the presidency to Trump.