Progressives Should Welcome Anti-Trump Republicans

Anti-Trump Republican John Kasich.

Often Democrats - especially those on the far left of the spectrum - are often their own worse enemies and put the so-called idealism over practicality and sometimes seem to prefer to see an opponent who is the antithesis of what the claim to support rather that set away from at times ridiculous "purity" tests. They'd rather cut off their nose to spite their face.  With the coming November 2020 election 100 days away, no one is more against the progressive agenda than Donald Trump.  Defeating Trump through any means possible out to be goal number on and anyone who will assist in achieving that goal should be deemed and ally and welcomed into the anti-Trump resistance.  Yet some on the far left remain hostile to the Lincoln Project and other anti-Trump groups filled with former Republicans. It's idiocy of the highest magnitude and ignore the reality comes to defeating Trump and Trumpism, the saying "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" at least through the presidential election.  NOTHING is more urgent that making Trump a disgraced one term president = and hopefully sending a number of Senate Republicans into forced retirement.  A column in the Washington Post makes the case that progressives should embrace the anti-Trump Republicans.  Here are excerpts: 

Those who genuinely embrace a creed or hold passionately to a point of view are, in principle, always looking for converts. Yet the old believers are often suspicious of the new arrivals.

Sometimes, the converts are annoyingly rigid and sectarian. This can bother those who are long comfortable in their faith and thus at ease with pluralism. But there is also the opposite fear: that the new allies haven’t really changed their thinking and are only trying to sow heretical notions among the orthodox.

It is the second anxiety that animates an unease among some progressives about anti-Trump Republicans and conservatives. This has fostered a limited but vocal backlash against the idea that John Kasich, the Republican former Ohio governor, might address the scaled-back Democratic National Convention on behalf of presumptive nominee Joe Biden.

The easy answer to this apprehension is to say that if you believe (as I certainly do) that defeating President Trump is the prerequisite for anything good happening again in American politics, you should welcome everyone willing to help get the job done. And in light of Trump’s threats to challenge the results if he loses, the health of our democracy may depend on Biden’s winning by a landslide that would leave not a smidgen of doubt about what the voters were saying. This is an all-hands-on-deck proposition.

If the race tightens, the Republican converts could be essential to getting Biden over the line.

Finally, for a progressive program to have any chance in Congress, the Democrats will have to take over the Senate. The bigger Biden’s margin, the better the chances of this happening.

To these progressives, I’d argue that the point of this election, besides defeating Trump, is to shift the country’s political dynamic as decisively in their direction as Ronald Reagan did toward conservatives in 1980. And doing so requires not only welcoming new partners, but also nurturing their second thoughts about a conservative project to which many of them dedicated their lives.

[H]e [Reagan] pulled politics and the intellectual center of gravity to the right by splitting the old New Deal alignment. . . . . . Now, a similar opportunity beckons the left and center-left.

Yes, some Biden Republicans just want to beat Trump and then get back to business as usual. (I still welcome their votes and appreciate their moral revulsion over what my Post colleague George F. Will recently called a “gangster regime.”)

But others are angry at the entire GOP. They are willing to acknowledge, in the wake of the Trump follies and the pandemic, that endless rounds of tax cuts for the wealthy and knee-jerk deregulation have damaged our society. Many of them accept that we need a new and far more equitable social contract That Trump and Trumpism create a national emergency is reason enough to pitch a very big tent. But this election could also open the way for a durable shift in the nation’s dominant public philosophy toward social decency and greater equality. A transformation of that sort requires the witness of converts.

Trump’s Potemkin Plan of Action and Recovery

As Donald Trump states that some states are not at risk from COVID-19 and lies and claims he never said the pandemic would be over by April, the grim reality is that every state now as cases of those sick with the virus, in just two weeks 10 million Americans have filed for unemployment - expect another big number next week - and Trump has insanely put his grifter and equally dishonest son-in-law in charge of the response to the national emergency.  Thankfully, the majority of the nation's governors are stepping up and leading in the vacuum coming from Washington. D.C.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at Trump's fantasy world that discounts facts, goes against the advice of true experts, and seeks to gas light Americans.  Worse yet, Trump appears to be playing favorites in doling out desperately needed supplies, favoring states with Republican governors while stiffing those lead by Democrats.   Here are column highlights: 

[I]t now appears that the Trump administration may be playing favorites, distributing supplies to political allies and states important for the president’s reelection campaign. How bad will the fallout be?

Because Donald Trump, Mike Pence, and the hacks and grifters around them lie about everything, there’s no way to come up with an empirical answer as to how much such petty politics, let alone the sheer incompetence, complete lack of planning, and rank corruption, are making this nightmare worse. Everything is a ruse. The administration’s promised numbers of coronavirus tests, masks, and ventilators were all fiction. The real mission of the Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort that Trump dispatched from Norfolk was to give him a photo op; it sits in New York Harbor idle, having admitted only 20 patients because of bureaucratic barriers. Even the origins of the White House’s estimated death toll of 100,000 to 240,000 are being questioned by the nation’s leading disease forecasters, reports the Washington Post. Remember Trump’s inaugural address, with its dark portents of “American carnage”? Well, that turns out to be the only Trump prophecy that is literally coming true.

The crucial electoral state of Florida — whose mini-Trump of a governor, Ron DeSantis, endangered the entire country by refusing to call off spring break — has all the medical equipment it has asked for. Desperate states like Colorado, Maine, and North Carolina are reduced to begging for help from a federal government with a depleted stockpile. What these three states have in common is that their governors are Democrats.

No matter. We know from Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair that the latest corona czar, Jared Kushner, has declared that “New York doesn’t need all the ventilators.” The next number that the Trump administration will be lying about is the inventory of available body bags.

But the catastrophic failure of the Trump White House to mobilize government to procure and distribute medical essentials where needed is just the most visible piece of this Boschian landscape of chaos and horror. Now that Congress has enacted a $2 trillion stimulus package, we’re sure to see the Trump family and its kleptocratic cohort play political and personal favorites with economic relief as well. The Trumps are nothing if not impressive in their ability to help themselves and their fellow grifters to every buck not nailed down. . . . . inquiring minds want to know if the administration scheme to have FEMA bid against states for PPE, thereby driving up prices, was sheer dereliction of duty or a concerted effort to benefit war profiteers in or close to the White House.

In the same vein, this week The Atlantic reported that the nonexistent Google testing website hawked by Dr. Deborah Birx in a White House press briefing was assigned not to Google but to a company whose co-founder is Jared Kushner’s brother. (That company quietly scrapped the project even as American casualties spiked in part for lack of the administration’s promised testing.) The Times now reports that the Trump Organization, among other financial machinations, is leaning on Palm Beach County to waive monthly payments on land it leases for its golf club.

Meanwhile, in what is likely to become a national paradigm of unequal relief efforts to come, ordinary Floridians can’t file for unemployment benefits because of an inadequate system and crashing website, both the work of the state’s previous Republican governor (and current senator), Rick Scott. That calamity is surely a preview of the soon-to-arrive train wreck as the Trump administration fails to deliver on Steven Mnuchin’s promise of a speedy distribution of checks to individual households and loans to small businesses.

At this time of emergency and medical need, it is impossible to know which is inflicting the most damage on a suffering American public: the president and his administration’s complete lack of a plan, the incessant lying to create a Potemkin simulation of action, or the politicization and corruption of the various ad hoc schemes Trump and his lackeys are creating on the fly. Trump has taken to speaking of himself as a “wartime president,” but as I’ve said before, the bone spurs that exempted him from military service have now migrated to his brain.

Everyone knows by now that unless Anthony Fauci is speaking, these daily episodes of Trump reality television, running nearly as long as The Irishman (but less well acted), are founts of misinformation that may be dangerous to your health with digressions for self-aggrandizement, political hit jobs, press bashing, and utter drivel.

Network news organizations have started to cut away from them more and more, as they should. Pointing a camera at a news event is not the same thing as reporting on it. Networks can broadcast any effusions that are newsworthy on slight delay — with immediate fact-checking — and go back to reporting actual news happening elsewhere throughout a nation on the ropes. Those who want the whole unedited feed can turn to Fox News while waiting for the next open-mike night from Jeanine Pirro.

The situation is terrifying as is the fact that Trump's base continues to believe the lies Trump propagates and which Fox News (now facing a consumer fraud lawsuit) amplifies. One can only hope that the 12 Republican lead states with no social distancing orders in place suffer exponential increases in virus cases that will perhaps force the willfully ignorant and brainwashed to at last wake up.