Trump Faces Mounting Defections From Older White Voters

With the Covid-19 pandemic worsening in the USA - hence why Americans are banned from traveling to European nations - one wants to find something positive in the news.  The above headline caught my eye since Donald Trump and America's horrifically botched response to the pandemic are irreversibly linked to one another.  Between lies and denials and the total failure of any coordinated federal response Trump made a terrible situation far, far worse as did his boot-licking supporters in the Republican Party such as the governors of Florida and Texas who rushed to reopen their states' businesses over the advice of medical experts in the hope of reviving the economy and Trump's chances of reelection.  Both states now face a crisis thanks to such failed leadership. The irony is that the GOP's most staunch suppers - older white voters - are among those most at risk from the pandemic.  Thankfully, many of this demographic have been paying attention and belatedly realized that neither Trump nor the GOP are their friends. Indeed, fear of death from the virus has - no pun intended - trumped the groups' all too prevalent racism and religious extremism.  The welcome result is that Trump is seeing his support hemorrhaging within this demographic.  A piece in the New York Times looks ate the situation.  What I find remarkable is that none of these voters should have been surprised by Trump's failure of leadership or moral bankruptcy when they pulled the lever for him in 2016.  As for those still supporting Trump, I suspect that if they were honest with themselves and others, it's racism and/or Christofascist leanings that are keeping them loyal to Trump.  This election is truly a choice between morality and immorality. Here are excerpts:

Clifford Wagner, an 80-year-old Republican in Tucson, Ariz., never cared for President Trump.

He supported Jeb Bush in the 2016 presidential primary race and cast a protest vote in the general election for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian nominee. An Air Force veteran, Mr. Wagner described the Trump presidency as a mortifying experience: His friends in Europe and Japan tell him the United States has become “the laughingstock of the world.”

This year, Mr. Wagner said he would register his opposition to Mr. Trump more emphatically than he did in 2016. He plans to vote for Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee, and hopes the election is a ruinous one for the Republican Party.

“I’m a Christian, and I do not believe in the hateful, racist, bigoted speech that the president uses,” Mr. Wagner said, adding, “As much as I never thought I’d say this, I hope we get a Democratic president, a Democratic-controlled Senate and maintain a Democratic-controlled House.”

Mr. Wagner is part of one of the most important maverick voting groups in the 2020 general election: conservative-leaning seniors who have soured on the Republican Party over the past four years.

Republican presidential candidates typically carry older voters by solid margins . . . . Today, Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden are tied among seniors, according to a poll of registered voters conducted by The New York Times and Siena College. And in the six most important battleground states, Mr. Biden has established a clear upper hand, leading Mr. Trump by six percentage points among the oldest voters and nearly matching the president’s support among whites in that age group.

Mr. Trump’s presidency has been a trying experience for many of these voters, some of whom are now so frustrated and disillusioned that they are preparing to take the drastic step of supporting a Democrat.

The grievances of these defecting seniors are familiar, most or all of them shared by their younger peers. But these voters often express themselves with a particularly sharp kind of dismay and disappointment. They see Mr. Trump as coarse and disrespectful, divisive to his core and failing persistently to comport himself with the dignity of the other presidents that they have observed for more than half a century. The Times poll also found that most seniors disapproved of Mr. Trump’s handling of race relations and of the protests after the death of George Floyd.

And as the coronavirus pandemic continues to sweep the country, putting older Americans at particular risk, these voters feel a special kind of frustration and betrayal with Mr. Trump’s ineffective leadership and often-blasé public comments about the crisis.

In The Times poll, seniors in the battleground states disapproved of Mr. Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic by seven points, 52 percent to 45 percent. By a 26-point margin, this group said the federal government should prioritize containing the pandemic over reopening the economy.

Former Representative Carlos Curbelo of Florida, a 40-year-old Republican deeply versed in the politics of the retiree-rich swing state, said many seniors were disturbed by important aspects of Mr. Trump’s record and found Mr. Biden a mild and respectable alternative who did not inspire the same antipathy on the right that Mrs. Clinton did in 2016.

Mr. Trump’s ineffective response to the coronavirus weighed on the thinking of many older voters surveyed in the poll, including Patrick Mallon, 73, a retired information technology specialist in Battle Creek, Mich.

The pandemic set Mr. Mallon firmly against Mr. Trump’s re-election. “The main reason is Donald Trump saying, ‘Don’t wear a mask, this thing is going to go away, we can have large gatherings,’” he said. “Everything he says is incorrect and dangerous to the country.”

Nonwhite seniors in the battleground states currently support Mr. Biden over Mr. Trump by a huge margin, 65 percent to 25 percent. Even among some seniors supportive of Mr. Trump, however, there is an undercurrent of unease about the way he approaches the presidency.

At the moment, Mr. Trump’s unpopularity with older voters appears to be hindering other Republicans in states including Arizona and Michigan.

Gayle Craven, 80, of High Point, N.C., said that while she was a registered Republican, she had not voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 and would reject him again this year. She said she saw Mr. Biden as an “honest man.”

Again, no one should be surprised by Trump's failures in leadership or his grotesque immorality. It was all on open display prior to the 2016 election.  The Access Hollywood tape made Trump's immorality all to visible to anyone who wasn't a racist first and foremost.

The Case for the Repudiation of Donald Trump in November

Former Republican Michael Gerson - who held positions in the Bush administration - makes the case in the Washington Post of why Donald Trump needs to be defeated in November, hopefully in a sting landslide that will trash his ego.  As I continue to state, the choice in November ultimately comes down to one of voting morality and decency or voting for immorality and hatred.  It's that simple and no desire for lower taxes - something I support, especially after having to write a fife figure check for additional taxes - does not justify voting for a man who is the embodiment of the seven deadly sins. Sadly, most evangelicals have shown they are on the side of immorality despite all of their false piety and self-congratulation.  As Gerson lays out, the Trump/Pence regime has proven to be perhaps the most incompetent and ugly in the nation's history and deserves a resounding defeat that might - I'm not holding my breath given the grip the white supremacists and Christofascists have on the party's base - result in some moral regeneration within the GOP.  Here are column excerpts:

The stage is being set for the repudiation of President Trump in November.

This is not merely because he has faced dual crises — the pandemic and the protests — that would have tested any president. It is because his reactions to those crises have been among the worst performances by any president. Trump’s eventual rejection by the electorate (if it comes) will be due to his own conscious choices in the face of challenge.

Without the pandemic and protests, Trump had a serious chance of reelection, which is a disturbing commentary on American politics. But this is now like saying that Herbert Hoover would have been a spiffing president without the Great Depression. Trump has been similarly and permanently marked by failure.

What other president would have played down the advance of a global health crisis to keep stock prices inflated? . . . . This delay in facing reality was an error on the scale of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act signed by Hoover, which set off a global round of protectionism that expanded and deepened the depression.

What other president would have fed populist resistance to public health measures as the coronavirus pandemic continued to spread? It was in mid-April that Trump tweeted “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!,” “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd amendment. It is under siege!” Trump actively undermined advice on lockdowns from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health in favor of the fringe views of a small number of armed protesters. And he chose — amazingly, alarmingly — to equate essential health measures with gun confiscation. I can think of no presidential precedent. It is unique in its recklessness.

When it came to the protests, Trump both cowered and raged. What other president would have employed a quote used by segregationists — “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” — in dealing with a national revolt against deadly discrimination? What other president would have turned tear gas and stun grenades against lawful protesters in order to strut across a park and hold up a Bible for the cameras? Not even Richard Nixon made such a public display of his viciousness and crassness.

Trump’s failure to rally the “silent majority” against social disorder is a hopeful commentary on American politics. Most Americans, silent or not, quickly realized that the overwhelming majority of protesters were enemies not of social order but of social injustice. When Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) eventually joined a Black Lives Matter march, Trump was left discredited and largely isolated in his racism.

This is not to say that a repudiation of Trump would quickly lead to a Republican rejection of Trumpism. The president’s use of economic distress, demographic transition and security threats to scapegoat migrants, Muslims and refugees found a deeper resonance among party regulars than I thought it would. Trump’s exploitation of rapid social change to fertilize evangelical Christians’ fears and harvest their support has been a signature success (though it has badly damaged the reputation of evangelicalism in the process).

A Trump defeat would at least begin a GOP debate on its ideological future. If Republicans lose control of the Senate, that debate will be more urgent. But most Republicans angling to be Trump’s political successor (see Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and even former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley) are embracing key elements of Trumpism — without, presumably, the erratic megalomania.

None of Trump’s flailing and dereliction guarantees reelection defeat. It is not possible to reliably predict presidential weather patterns five months in advance. But on the health of our country, and on the unity of our country, Trump has been a peerless failure. If he loses, it will be because he already belongs on the Mount Rushmore of presidential losers.

Well said.

Colin Powell Endorses Biden:Trump is a Danger to the Nation

Donald Trump and some of the scamvangelists supporting him are having a fit that Colin Powell - and a number of other prominent one time Republicans - are endorsing Joe Biden and otherwise signaling that they will not support Trump's re-election.  Powell said that Trump is a liar and a danger to the nation - something this blog has been saying before the 2016 election.  He also went on to criticize Republicans who continue to remain silent or who are prostituting themselves to Trump.  Like it or not, the 2020 election will be about morality and decency on the one hand and Trump on the other.  A vote for Trump will underscore that one is morally bankrupt no matter how much you talk about your Christian faith or park you backside in a pew on Sunday mornings. Trump and morality and decency are mutually exclusive.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Powell's condemnation of Trump.  Here are highlights:  

Former military leaders kept up a barrage of criticism of President Trump on Sunday for his threat to use military force against protesters, warning the commander in chief’s actions could drive a wedge between the U.S. military and civilians.

The most withering critique came from Colin Powell in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.” The former secretary of state and chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff called Trump a chronic liar who had “drifted away” from the Constitution and become a danger to the country.

Powell said he plans to vote for Joe Biden for president and urged Americans to search their conscience and vote for the candidate who is best for the country as a whole, not only themselves.

“We’re not the country of just the president, we have a Congress, we have a Supreme Court,” said Powell, lamenting the silence from Republican members of Congress and lauding the retired military officials who have spoken out against Trump.

“But most of all we have the people of the United States, the ones who vote,” Powell said. “The ones who vote him in and the ones who vote him out. I couldn’t vote for him in 2016. I certainly cannot in any way support President Trump this year.”

Trump responded nearly immediately on Twitter, calling Powell “a real stiff” and “highly overrated.”

Powell’s comments came after more than a week of large, national protests over the killing of George Floyd by a police officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes. They come, too, days after Park Police used tear gas to clear peaceful protesters from a park near the White House so that Trump could walk to a nearby church for a photo op.

“The one word I have to use with respect to what he's been doing for the last several years is the word I would never have used before, never would have used with any of the four presidents I worked for, he lies,” Powell added. “He lies about things. And he gets away with it because people will not hold him accountable.”

[M]any retired military leaders worried that the incident could do long-term damage to morale among the rank and file and deal a blow to American leadership in the world and civilian support for the troops.

Retired Adm. James Stavridis, the former supreme NATO allied commander, expressed concern that the confrontation at Lafayette Square “rang echoes of what the founders feared more than anything, which was the use of armed active duty military against citizens.”

Powell,  . . . . worried that respect for America and its values is waning, a trend he attributed to Trump’s refusal to heed the advice of his advisers.

If you truly care about America and morality and decency, voting Democrat in 2020 is the only option.

Former G.W. Bush Staffer: Latinos Must Vote Trump Out

Decent,moral Republicans for the most part have left the Republican party in the age of Trump.  Those who remain are (i) delusional and pretending the GOP is the party it once was several generations ago, or (ii) totally subscribe to the racism, misogyny and xenophobia Trump uses as his stock in trade. Either way, there truly is no excuse for remaining in the GOP, a party I once served more than a generation ago.  The Trump/GOP tax cuts for the wealthy - which created a huge surge in the federal deficit - destroyed any fig leaf for the pretense that one votes Republican "supports fiscal responsibility."  Likewise, the Trump/Christofascist effort to inflict right wing religious beliefs on all shows the falsity of the pretense that the GOP stands for smaller government.  Now, in an op-ed in the Washington Post, an apparent former Republican who served as associate director of public liaison in the George W. Bush White House from 2001-2004 is urging Hispanic Americans to register to vote and go to the polls in 2020 to voted Donald Trump out of office.  Here are excerpts:

Sept. 15 was the start of Hispanic Heritage Month — a time that celebrates a community built on faith, family and a strong work ethic. We are teachers, doctors, lawyers, judges, members of the military, police officers and even astronauts. All contribute greatly to the United States.

The feeling is not reciprocated by today’s Republican Party. It is no place for Latinos. We don’t feel welcome in a party that condones racism and looks away while the president degrades our community and destroys America. The once-proud party of Lincoln, established to abolish slavery, has been transformed into a comatose crew brainwashed by white identity politics and narrow-minded nationalist nostalgia.

I know a little about this. I am a Republican. I worked in the George W. Bush White House. And I say to my fellow Latinos: I’m not asking you to become a Democrat. But I am asking you to vote President Trump out of office.

Some of us have already left the GOP, of course, disgusted by Trump and his accomplices. Others among us remain alienated and aloof, waiting out the Trump tornado.

But the wait-him-out approach is no longer viable. Republicans have lost control of the monster they helped create. Trump hasn’t changed. From day one, Trump spewed his white-supremacist views, promising to halt the invasion of immigrants and spurring a rhetoric of resentment and retaliation against the “other.” No matter our background, we have been vilified as invaders, marked as illegal and degraded as subhuman. The silence from prominent Republicans is deafening. They have allowed Trump to normalize bigotry and use it as a winning strategy for their benefit. They enabled him to turn racist rhetoric into racial conflict, dividing our nation.

Worse than saying nothing or tolerating his tantrums, some even protect Trump, colluding with the devil for fear of political demise.

And now, they have blood on their hands. The Walmart shooting in El Paso on Aug. 3 was the inevitable outcome of 30 straight months of hate speech coming from the White House. Fueled by the president’s vitriol, a killer sought out immigrants to slaughter. The shooting isn’t just a tragedy; it’s a massacre, a direct hit against our community.

Republicans will pay a price for this situation and for their silence. By the 2020 election, Hispanics will be the largest racial or ethnic minority group in the electorate — 32 million will be eligible to vote. At the same time, 1 in 10 eligible voters will be Generation Z, those between the ages 18 and 23, who are socially liberal and more racially and ethnically diverse. A vote against Trump is a stand for human freedom and a future where America is again known for its ideals and not ignorance.

Republicans need to dust off their moral compass and remember what they stand for — and what they stand against. If they do not, they will lose Latinos forever and relegate themselves once more to minority status, likely unable to regain control of Congress or the White House again. If countering racism is not motivation enough for the GOP to act, perhaps its looming political demise will be.

The United States is a great country. Hispanic Heritage Month honors the contributions the community has made — and will keep making — to keep it that way. And without Trump, the United States will be even better.

I urge all decent and moral Americans eligible to vote to register and cast votes against Trump and the GOP in 2020.  We are no longer talking about political differences.  The choice is between morality and decency and immorality and hate.    If you live in Virginia, strike a blow for decency and morality this November: vote a straight Democrat ticket and send the GOP a strong message.

Trump Supporters: Maybe They’re Just Bad People

Photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times

The previous post looked at what is in my view the moral bankruptcy of Bill White and his husband, Bryan Eure who have sold out the LGBT community out of sheer ego and perhaps narcissism by hitching their star to Donald Trump.  The immorality of Trump and the harm he and Mike Pence are doing to members of the LGBT community means nothing to them as long as their are on guest list along with other Trump sycophants who live for perks and perceived privileges that stroke their egos.  But White and Eure are hardly alone in their willingness to suck up to Trump displaying an attitude of what's in it for me and to hell with everyone else or the good of the country.  Columnist Michelle Goldberg makes this point in a recent column.  I've been involved in politics for decades not for what it might bring to me monetarily or in terms of status, but because I want to make a difference and I worry about the future of the country that my grandchildren will be living in.  My gay rights activism stems for wanting to make sure younger generations avoid the hell that so many of us older gays endured.  But for White, Eure and I suspect most Trump supporters, it is only about power and satiating overwhelming egos - the same motivations that drive Der Trumpenführer.  In today's America, supporting Trump requires rejecting true morality, decency and true Christian/gospel values (which I view as positive even if I reject the Christian label).  Here are column excerpts:

Seven years ago, a former aide to Ralph Reed — who also worked, briefly, for Paul Manafort — published a tawdry, shallow memoir that is also one of the more revealing political books I’ve ever read. Lisa Baron was a pro-choice, pro-gay rights, hard-partying Jew who nonetheless made a career advancing the fortunes of the Christian right. She opened her book with an anecdote about performing oral sex on a future member of the George W. Bush administration during the 2000 primary, which, she wrote, “perfectly summed up my groupie-like relationship to politics at that time — I wanted it, I worshiped it, and I went for it.”

It’s not exactly a secret that politics is full of amoral careerists lusting — literally or figuratively — for access to power. Still, if you’re interested in politics because of values and ideas, it can be easier to understand people who have foul ideologies than those who don’t have ideologies at all. Steve Bannon, a quasi-fascist with delusions of grandeur, makes more sense to me than Anthony Scaramucci, a political cipher who likes to be on TV. I don’t think I’m alone. Consider all the energy spent trying to figure out Ivanka Trump’s true beliefs, when she’s shown that what she believes most is that she’s entitled to power and prestige.

Baron’s book, “Life of the Party: A Political Press Tart Bares All,” is useful because it is a self-portrait of a cynical, fame-hungry narcissist, a common type but one underrepresented in the stories we tell about partisan combat. A person of limited self-awareness — she seemed to think readers would find her right-wing exploits plucky and cute — Baron became Reed’s communications director because she saw it as a steppingstone to her dream job, White House press secretary, a position she envisioned in mostly sartorial terms.

It’s tempting for those of us who interpret politics for a living to overstate the importance of competing philosophies. We shouldn't forget the enduring role of sheer vanity.

That brings us to Monday’s New York Times article about Bill White and his husband, Bryan Eure, headlined “How a Liberal Couple Became Two of N.Y.’s Biggest Trump Supporters.” The answer: ego.

This story, like Baron’s book, is arresting in its picture of shameless, unvarnished thirst. White and Eure mouth some talking points about disliking “identity politics” and valuing “authenticity.” Like a lot of Trump apologists, White insists the president isn’t racist because African-American employment figures have improved during his administration. But the lurid opportunism that’s driving him and his husband to embrace Trump is obvious. Such opportunism is far from rare; it’s just not often that we see it exhibited so starkly.

Trump is hardly the first politician to attract self-serving followers — White and Eure, after all, used to be Clintonites.

But Trump is unique as a magnet for grifters, climbers and self-promoters, in part because decent people won’t associate with him. With the exception of national security professionals sticking around to stop Trump from blowing up the world, there are two kinds of people in the president’s orbit — the immoral and the amoral.

There are sincere nativists, like Bannon and senior adviser Stephen Miller, and people of almost incomprehensible insincerity.

As I keep stating, my Republican friends are running out of time to demonstrate that they are not among the ranks of the immoral and amoral.  The choice is between continued support for a pathological liar who endorses using tear gas- or worse - against women and small children and simple morality and decency. They cannot have it both ways.  And, I'm sorry, but wanting lower taxes does not justify embracing immorality.

Stephen Miller's Uncle Unleashes on Miller's Racist and Anti-Immigrant Hypocrisy

Stephen Miller - who reminds me of Josef Goebbels - and Der Trumpenführer.  

One of the goals of this blog is to expose hypocrisy.  Nowadays, thanks to the Republican Party and its "conservative Christian base," the Trump/Pence regime, and, of course, the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy, there is almost an unlimited supply of material.  Interestingly, Stephen Miller, seen by many as the guiding force behind Der Trumpenführer's anti-immigrant jihad - Mike Pence likely applauds it while pretending to "know nothing" - today finds himself being lambasted for his hypocrisy by his own uncle in a piece in Politico.  Miller's uncle recounts the immigrant history of Miller's own family in America, which is hundreds of years shorter than that of many blacks and Hispanics, and calls Miller out as a foul hypocrite. Yet, Miller's hypocrisy is no less than that of many Trump supporters whose families came to America as immigrants far more recently than the ancestors of many of those whom they hate and deride.  Here are highlights from the Politico piece (as you read the entire piece, think of similar hypocrites in your own social circles): 

Let me tell you a story about Stephen Miller and chain migration.  It begins at the turn of the 20th century, in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl of subsistence farmers in what is now Belarus. Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in the Czar’s army, the patriarch of the shack, Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America.

He set foot on Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 to his name. Though fluent in Polish, Russian and Yiddish, he understood no English. An elder son, Nathan, soon followed. By street corner peddling and sweatshop toil, Wolf-Leib and Nathan sent enough money home to pay off debts and buy the immediate family’s passage to America in 1906. That group included young Sam Glosser, who with his family settled in the western Pennsylvania city of Johnstown, a booming coal and steel town that was a magnet for other hardworking immigrants. The Glosser family quickly progressed from selling goods from a horse and wagon to owning a haberdashery in Johnstown run by Nathan and Wolf-Leib to a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores run by my grandfather, Sam, and the next generation of Glossers, including my dad, Izzy.

In the span of some 80 years and five decades, this family emerged from poverty in a hostile country to become a prosperous, educated clan of merchants, scholars, professionals, and, most important, American citizens.

What does this classically American tale have to do with Stephen Miller? Well, Izzy Glosser is his maternal grandfather, and Stephen’s mother, Miriam, is my sister.

I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.

I shudder at the thought of what would have become of the Glossers had the same policies Stephen so coolly espouses— the travel ban, the radical decrease in refugees, the separation of children from their parents, and even talk of limiting citizenship for legal immigrants — been in effect when Wolf-Leib made his desperate bid for freedom.

The Glossers came to the U.S. just a few years before the fear and prejudice of the “America first” nativists of the day closed U.S. borders to Jewish refugees. Had Wolf-Leib waited, his family likely would have been murdered by the Nazis along with all but seven of the 2,000 Jews who remained in Antopol. I would encourage Stephen to ask himself if the chanting, torch-bearing Nazis of Charlottesville, whose support his boss seems to court so cavalierly, do not envision a similar fate for him.
 True, Jews were excluded from many occupations, couldn’t buy homes in some towns, couldn’t join certain organizations or attend certain schools or universities, but life was good. As in past generations, there were hate mongers who regarded the most recent groups of poor immigrants as scum, rapists, gangsters, drunks and terrorists, but largely the Glosser family was left alone to live our lives and build the American dream. Children were born, synagogues founded, and we thrived. This was the miracle of America.
 Acting for so long in the theater of right-wing politics, Stephen and Trump may have become numb to the resultant human tragedy and blind to the hypocrisy of their policy decisions. After all, Stephen’s is not the only family with a chain immigration story in the Trump administration. Trump's grandfather is reported to have been a German migrant on the run from military conscription to a new life in the United States, and his mother fled the poverty of rural Scotland for the economic possibilities of New York City. (Trump’s in-laws just became citizens on the strength of his wife’s own citizenship.)
 These facts are important not only for their grim historical irony but because vulnerable people are being hurt. They are real people, not the ghoulish caricatures portrayed by Trump. . . . I meet these statistics one at a time through my volunteer service as a neuropsychologist for the Philadelphia affiliate of HIAS (formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), the global nonprofit that protects refugees and helped my family more than 100 years ago. I will share the story of one such man I have met in the hopes that my nephew might recognize elements of our shared heritage.
 In the early 2000s, Joseph (not his real name) was conscripted at the age of 14 to be a soldier in Eritrea and sent to a remote desert military camp. Officers there discovered a Bible under his pillow which aroused their suspicion that he might belong to a foreign evangelical sect that would claim his loyalty and sap his will to fight. . . . “They smashed my face into the ground, tied my hands and feet together behind my back, stomped on me, and hung me from a tree by my bonds while they beat me with batons for the others to see.”

Joseph was tortured for 20 consecutive days before being taken to a military prison and crammed into a dark unventilated cell with 36 other men, little food and no proper hygiene. . . . When he was too weak to stand, he was taken to a civilian clinic where he was fed by the medical staff. Upon regaining his strength, he escaped to a nearby road where a sympathetic driver took him north through the night to a camp in Sudan where he joined other refugees. Joseph was on the first leg of a journey that would cover thousands of miles and almost 10 years.

Before Donald Trump had started his political ascent promulgating the false story that Barack Obama was a foreign-born Muslim, while my nephew, Stephen, was famously recovering from the hardships of his high school cafeteria in Santa Monica, Joseph was a child on his own in Sudan in fear of being deported back to Eritrea to face execution for desertion. He worked any job he could get, saved his money and made his way through Sudan.

He endured arrest and extortion in Libya. He returned to Sudan, then kept moving to Dubai, Brazil and eventually to a southern border crossing into Texas, where he sought asylum. In all of the countries he traveled through during his ordeal, he was vulnerable, exploited and his status was “illegal.” But in the United States, he had a chance to acquire the protection of a documented immigrant.

Today, at 30, Joseph lives in Pennsylvania and has a wife and child. He is a smart, warm, humble man of great character who is grateful for every day of his freedom and safety. . . . He hopes to become a citizen, return to work and make his contribution to America. His story, though unique in its particulars, is by no means unusual. I have met Central Americans fleeing corrupt governments, violence and criminal extortion; a Yemeni woman unable to return to her war-ravaged home country and fearing sexual mutilation if she goes back to her Saudi husband; and an escaped kidnap-bride from central Asia.
 Trump wants to make us believe that these desperate migrants are an existential threat to the United States; the most powerful nation in world history and a nation made strong by immigrants. Trump and my nephew both know their immigrant and refugee roots. Yet, they repeat the insults and false accusations of earlier generations against these refugees to make them seem less than human.
 Most damning is the administration's evident intent to make policy that specifically disadvantages people based on their ethnicity, country of origin and religion. No matter what opinion is held about immigration, any government that specifically enacts law or policy on that basis must be recognized as a threat to all of us. Laws bereft of justice are the gateway to tyranny. Today others may be the target, but tomorrow it might just as easily be you or me.
 As free Americans, and descendants of immigrants and refugees, we have the obligation to exercise our conscience by voting for candidates who will stand up for our highest national values and not succumb to our lowest fears.

From time to time, all of us find ourselves in situations where we must choose between supporting good or supporting evil.  Sadly, the Trump/Pence regime and its Republican enablers and sycophants now are the face of evil.  If one is decent and moral, there is no option but to oppose their agenda and vote to defeat Republicans in order that a Democrat controlled Congress can blunt the worst of the Trump/Pence/Miller evil.  If one choose to nonetheless vote Republican, than you deserve to be viewed by others with contempt and deemed a hypocrite. 

The GOP's Other Inconvenient Truth

Slowly some Republicans are condemning Donald Trump's defense of white supremacists and Neo-Nazis who perpetrated domestic terrorism in Charlottesville as "fine people."  But for the most part, Republican elected officials are dancing around the issue and refusing to condemn Trump even as they make spineless remarks about opposing racism and Nazis.  One radio host raised the question this way: what does it say about the GOP base that GOP senators, congressman and others are seemingly afraid to condemn such people because they fear it could hurt them at the ballot box.  The sad truth is that for decades now - ever since Richard Nixon launched the "Southern Strategy" - the Republican Party has pandered to the people that Trump describes as "fine people."  This pandering was once discrete and utilized dog whistle calls to racists.  Trump - and here in Virginia, GOP gubernatorial primary candidate Corey Stewart - have made the calls explicit.  The only thing that has changed is the willingness of more Republicans to explicitly pander to hate-filled people.  A column in the New York Times looks at the phenomenon:

Donald Trump chose Trump Tower, the place where he began his presidential campaign, as the place to plunge a dagger into his presidency.

Trump’s jaw-dropping defense of white supremacists, white nationalists and Nazis in Charlottesville, Va., exposed once more what many of us have been howling into the wind since he emerged as a viable candidate: That he is a bigot, a buffoon and a bully.

He has done nothing since his election to disabuse us of this notion and everything to confirm it. Anyone expressing surprise is luxuriating in a self-crafted shell of ignorance.

And yet, it seems too simplistic, too convenient, to castigate only Trump for elevating these vile racists. To do so would be historical fallacy. Yes, Trump’s comments give them a boost, grant them permission, provide them validation, but it is also the Republican Party through which Trump burst that has been courting, coddling and accommodating these people for decades. Trump is an articulation of the racists in Charlottesville and they are an articulation of him, and both are a logical extension of a party that has too often refused to rebuke them. [I]n the modern age one party has operated with the ethos of racial inclusion and with an eye on celebrating varied forms of diversity, and the other has at times appealed directly to the racially intolerant by providing quiet sufferance.

It is possible to trace this devil’s dance back to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the emergence of Richard Nixon. After the passage of the act, the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln to which black people felt considerable fealty, turned on those people and stabbed them in the back.

In 1994 John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser and a Watergate co-conspirator, confessed this to the author Dan Baum:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.  . . . Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

The era Ehrlichman referred to was the beginning of the War on Drugs. . . . . The object of disrupting communities worked all too well — more than 40 million arrests have been conducted for drug-related offenses since 1971, with African-Americans being incarcerated in state prisons for these offenses at a rate that is 10 times greater than that for whites, according to Human Rights Watch.

In 1970, Nixon’s political strategist Kevin Phillips told The New York Times, “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.”

The Republican Party wanted the racists. It was strategy, the “Southern Strategy,” and it too has proved wildly successful. From there this cancer took hold. . . . . the white supremacy still survives and even thrives in policy. The stated goals of the Republican Party are not completely dissimilar from many of the white nationalist positions.

If you advance policies like a return to more aggressive drug policies and voter suppression — things that you know without question will have a disproportionate and negative impact on people of color, what does that say about you?

People think that they avoid the appellation because they do not openly hate. But hate is not a requirement of white supremacy. Just because one abhors violence and cruelty doesn’t mean that one truly believes that all people are equal — culturally, intellectually, creatively, morally. Entertaining the notion of imbalance — that white people are inherently better than others in any way — is also white supremacy.

This is passive white supremacy, soft white supremacy, the kind divorced from hatred. It is permissible because it’s inconspicuous. But this soft white supremacy is more deadly, exponentially, than Nazis with tiki torches.

This soft white supremacy is the very thing on which the open racists build.  The white nationalists and the Nazis simply take the next step (not an altogether illogical one when wandering down the crooked path of racial hostility) and they overlay open animus.

White supremacy, all across the spectrum, is what lights the way to the final step as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. articulated in his “The Other America” speech in 1967:

“In the final analysis, racism is evil because its ultimate logic is genocide. Hitler was a sick and tragic man who carried racism to its logical conclusion. And he ended up leading a nation to the point of killing about six million Jews. This is the tragedy of racism because its ultimate logic is genocide. If one says that I am not good enough to live next door to him, if one says that I am not good enough to eat at a lunch counter, or to have a good, decent job, or to go to school with him merely because of my race, he is saying consciously or unconsciously that I do not deserve to exist.”

Republicans, these people and this “president” are your progeny. That is the other inconvenient truth.

Perhaps as a gay man I am more conscious of the reality of what King said: Christofascists for years - and still - say that I and millions of others in the LGBT community do not deserve to exist.  When one lives with this ever present atmosphere of hate lingering in the background, you become much more sensitive to all forms of hate and bigotry.  Decent Republicans need to decide whether they will embrace white supremacy or leave the GOP.  The GOP will not change from within, so do not delude yourselves.

Good Versus Evil: The Battlefield for American Values

I will upset Trump voters, but instead of "protecting American values" they have actively damaged America's better values.  Indeed, every day that they continue to support Der Trumpenführer, they continue the assault on decency and morality.  How voting for a racist, narcissistic, pathological liar who thinks sexually molesting women is "locker room talk" could ever be an act of supporting American values is, to me, utterly baffling.  Trump embodies the very worst of American society and is an affront to morality and decency.  He also embodies  the larger battle for American values.  On the one side stand those who believe in the nation's founding Enlightenment values and on the other stand the racists, white supremacists, xenophobes, Christofascists (including the 81% of evangelicals who voted for Trump) and general misogynists.  As an op-ed in the New York Times argues, we saw these battle lines drown last week on a light rail train in Portland, Oregon.  Here are column excerpts:

America may seem leaderless, with nastiness and bullying ascendant, but the best of our nation materialized during a moral crisis on a commuter train in Portland, Ore.

A white man riding on that train on Friday began screaming anti-Muslim insults at a black 16-year-old girl and her 17-year-old Muslim friend wearing a hijab. One can imagine people pretending not to hear and staring fiercely down at their phones; instead, three brave passengers stepped forward to protect the girls.

The three were as different as could be. One was a 23-year-old recent Reed College graduate who had a mane of long hair and was working as a consultant. Another was a 53-year-old Army veteran with the trimmest of haircuts and a record of service in Iraq and Afghanistan. The third was a 21-year-old poet and Portland State University student on his way to a job at a pizzeria. What united the three was decency.

When they intervened, the man harassing the girls pulled a knife and slashed the three men before fleeing. Rick Best, the veteran, died at the scene. Taliesin Namkai-Meche, the recent Reed graduate, was conscious as he waited for an ambulance. A good Samaritan took off her shirt to cover him; she recounted that some of his last words were: “I want everybody on the train to know, I love them.” He died soon after arriving at the hospital.

Another passer-by stanched the bleeding of the student poet, Micah Fletcher, and called his mother to tell her to go to the hospital — but played down the injuries to avoid terrifying her. Fletcher underwent two hours of surgery to remove bone fragments from his throat and is recovering.

Police arrested Jeremy Christian, 35, a white supremacist, and charged him with the murders. The train attack doesn’t fit America’s internal narrative of terrorism, but it’s a reminder that terrorism takes many forms. Last year Americans were less likely to be killed by a Muslim terrorist (odds of one in six million) than for being Muslim (odds of one in one million), according to Charles Kurzman of the University of North Carolina.

In tragedy, we can sometimes find inspiration. In that train car, we saw that courage and leadership are alive — if not always in Washington, then among ordinary Americans converging from varied backgrounds on a commuter train, standing together against a threat to our shared humanity.

Trump’s overseas trip marked an abdication of American leadership, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel concluding that Europe can no longer rely on the United States. The Trump budget was intellectually dishonest and morally repugnant, with cuts in global AIDS funding alone that may cost one million lives. Today’s White House seems to stand for nothing loftier than crony capitalism and the scapegoating of refugees, Muslims and immigrants. To me, Trump “values” are primarily narcissism, nepotism and nihilism. And this is infectious: Cass Sunstein of Harvard cites psychology research indicating that Trump has made it more acceptable for Americans to embrace xenophobia. I wrote last year that “Donald Trump is making America meaner,” prompting bigotry in rural Oregon where I grew up, and around the country. . . . . when a president incites hatred, civilization winces.

If all that is one thread of America, another is represented by those three men who stepped forward on that train. It’s also represented by the good Samaritans who helped them when they were stabbed, by the countless people who joined vigils to honor the victims and who donated more than $1 million in a few days for the families of those killed and for the survivor.

What the three men in Oregon understood, but the White House doesn’t, is that in a healthy society, Islamophobia doesn’t disparage just Muslims, racism doesn’t demean blacks alone, misogyny hurts more than women, xenophobia insults more than immigrants. Rather, we are all diminished, so we all have a stake in confronting bigotry. Best, the veteran, had three teenage children and a 12-year-old daughter, and I hope his kids understand that their dad died challenging a venomous intolerance that threatens our social fabric. He fell on the battlefield of American values. He deserves the chance to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

One thing I’ve learned in my reporting career is that side by side with the worst of humanity, you find the best. The test for all of us is whether we can similarly respond to hatred and nihilism with courage and, in the dying words of Namkai-Meche, with “love.”

I do not believe that it is overly dramatic to describe this battle as one of good versus evil.  Trump and his racist, bigoted, xenophobic supporters - as well as Republicans who seek to destroy the social safety net - represent evil.  They must be defeated if America is to remain a decent and moral country. Working to stop this people tells much more about one's morality than does sitting in a church pew each Sunday.  Failing to act becomes an act of complicity. 

How Brexit Convinced One Republican to Endorse Hillary Clinton

Perhaps people have thought this throughout time, but today America and the world do seem to be a crossroads where a decision will be made as to whether increased tolerance, an embrace of modernity and efforts to find peaceful coexistence with others will continue to set mankind's agenda or whether, instead, racism, nativism, xenophobia and unbridled bigotry will grow.  From Islamic extremists attacking and murdering those of other faiths and those who accept modernity and modern knowledge (with a corresponding decline in adherence to religious dogma) to American white supremacists and Christofacists rallying to Donald Trump's standard, to those in the United Kingdom who voted to "Leave," the forces of reaction and ignorance can be seen across the globe trying to take all of us backward in time.  Looked at in this context, the 2016 presidential election is part of this larger struggle between what I see as good and what is evil when stripped of all of the lies and smokes screens loved by the forces of reaction.  A piece in Politico by a Republican who will be supporting Hillary Clinton looks at this contest and how Brexit was the last straw for her.  Here are excerpts:

Last Friday, people across the United Kingdom woke up shocked to learn that their nation had actually voted to leave the European Union. More than a million people now reportedly would like to change their vote from “leave” to “remain”; more than 3 million signed a petition for a second referendum. EU institutions and major corporations based in London announced they would move operations and jobs from Britain to EU countries.

My reaction was a little different: I decided to endorse Hillary Clinton for president.  It wasn’t an easy decision. As a conservative, I find Hillary Clinton stands for the opposite of a number of things I believe strongly . . . I have deep misgivings about a Clinton presidency, but the anguish of British voters who cast a protest vote thinking it wouldn’t matter — that their vote wouldn’t be decisive — convinced me that something much bigger is at stake in this election. The unthinkable, I realized, was actually possible this year.  . . . And I realized I didn’t want to wake up on November 9 to find Donald Trump elected president and wish I had done more to prevent it.

As one of the signatories of the national security experts’ “never Trump” letter, I genuinely believe the erratic statements Donald Trump has made would be disastrous if adopted as American policies. His candidacy is itself bad for our country. . . . .

It is impossible to imagine Donald Trump doing the things an American leader is called to do in an insecure world . . . . Trump’s emphatic support for torturing terrorists and killing their families will be a huge victory for ISIL, Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, compromising our claim to be different and better than what we are protecting ourselves from. The American military, bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice that holds individuals culpable if they carry out an illegal order, would refuse—resulting in a civil-military crisis that would fragment our own nation and delight our adversaries.

His historically retrograde ideas about trade policy (like that 45 percent tariff on Chinese goods) would extinguish supply chains on which nearly every American business relies—to say nothing of his claim that our military embezzled money in Iraq, and his proposal for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S.

All of Trump’s manufactured melodramas distract from the important work our country needs to be doing to better prepare American workers for the ways our economy is changing, pay down our national debt, strengthen our alliance relationships to handle challenges from Russia, China, and metastasizing terrorist organizations, improve our children’s education, revise the Tax Code to be fairer and make our country a more attractive place to do business. Moreover, his comments about our fellow Americans are profoundly offensive. He's not only damaging to our country in foreign and defense policy, he's damaging to the social fabric of our republic, which relies of creating one out of many—e pluribus unum.

Before the Brexit vote, I was desperately hoping for a contested convention, or the emergence of some worthier candidate . . . I was planning to cast a protest vote in November: write in Mitch Daniels or one of my terrific nephews, and vote Republican down-ballot to support strong Republican voices in Congress and help rebuild the party in the long run. But that approach is only satisfactory if Trump has no chance of winning. I’m genuinely concerned now that Trump could get elected, and that is why I’m voting for Hillary Clinton.

She will not be a president to my liking. . . . But there is no question that Hillary Clinton's are a safer pair of hands than are those of Donald Trump. She colors inside the lines; he goes all the way off the drawing board. Presidential contests are two-person races in the United States, and the only candidates who have a serious prospect of victory are the party standard-bearers. Protest votes are more satisfying than voting for the lesser of two evils, but they could result in Donald Trump being elected, just as British protest votes created an outcome many who cast those ballots realized, only too late, they never wanted at all.