Tag Archives: Republican party

Day 31: The Empty Shell

3 Oct 2020 By in Politics Tags: , , , , 4 Comments

What are your thoughts on hearing of the unexpected illness of a president who has pitted his fortunes against those of a majority of the American people? After flouting and dismissing measures known to protect the public against COVID’s spread, Trump has gotten the disease himself. He’s in the hospital and said to be doing well, but any outcome is possible. He could recover after just a slight case, or he could worsen; he could die.

Many in Trump’s Republican party mimicked his cavalier approach to the disease. Just as he became sick, so too have a passel of his Republican allies taken ill with COVIDat the same time: GOP party chair Ronna McDaniel; First Lady Melania Trump; Senators Thom Tillis (NC), Ron Johnson (WI), and Mike Lee (UT); Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s close aide Hope Hicks, his campaign manager Bill Stepien, and former Governor Chris Christie, who, with several others listed here, helped Trump prepare for last Tuesday’s debate.

The White House approach to COVID protocols was lax, leading to an outbreak that threatens the stability and security of the United States by sidelining, distracting, and disabling too many of its influential figures at once.

Yet one’s overall impression is how little any sick or healthy Republican cares. It doesn’t matter much to Republicans that the White House can’t do the work of the people, because that long ago vanished as top priority. The Republicans’ main focus since Trump tested positive has been on his suddenly changed situation and what it might mean for them. The party’s agenda consists of two main items: rushing Amy Coney Barrett onto the Supreme Court and making sure (by any means) that Trump wins re-election. No one cares whether Trump misses a few days of work at the White House, because, in all his tenure there, he’s avoided the chore of serving the people.

This has become clear as his schedule over the past week or so has been scrutinized for the bearing it might have on Washington’s contagion. Jetting around to campaign rallies, schmoozing at fund-raisers, preparing for the presidential debate, putting in a ghastly showing in it, and hosting a GOP love-fest for Amy Coney Barrett in the Rose Garden: such are the events that engross Trump most.

In the meantime, millions of Americans are out of work, running out of funds, and going hungry. Many are worried about losing their homes and access to medical care, even as winter comes on and the virus lingers and spreads. Businesses are folding, wildfires rage, and the bright possibilities of vibrant, solvent cities have evaporated. Cities like New York and Chicago, which represent some of the nation’s greatest concentrations of human and real capital, are barely holding together. Some vast piles of money that Congress set aside to help with these problems remain unspent or were spent improperly, attesting to Mr Trump’s ineptitude and indifference when he’s taxed with helping anyone but himself.

Under Donald Trump, the White House has become an empty shell. While he receives Cadillac treatment at Walter Reed, Americans can’t help but notice how little Trump and his ilk care about them.

Image: Currier & Ives print of the White House (1877),
from this source.

Day 34: Filth

30 Sep 2020 By in Candidates and Campaigns Tags: , , , , , 7 Comments

I watched the entire presidential debate because my husband said it was our duty. I wanted to turn it off because the president was so disgusting. His speech and his manners were completely indecent. The polish he used to affect for the sake of “appearing presidential” was missing, exposing a loathsomeness (and screwiness) operating with disturbing force.

What we have in Trump is an imposter-in-chief. And the more Americans look into him, the more they discover what a despicable and self-interested con artist he is. The man who claims to have built up his own fortune was first and foremost the beneficiary of a multi-generational tax dodging scheme. His whole life has been devoted to skirting laws to the greatest extent he can. His ethos is deeply antisocial, in that it subordinates everything, including the presidency, to the goal of enriching himself and his family. The presidency isn’t an honor to Trump; it’s an urgently needed shield against legal prosecution. (Turns out, the White House is the safest place for a crook to hang out.)

Americans are beginning to get the facts. They are reading the nasty things he’s said in private about the military being “losers” and “suckers” and they are aghast. They see him failing to disavow white supremacy, instead giving a shout-out to fascists and throwing over black Americans. As support for Trump dwindles, his coffers thin and poll numbers slump. The closer he gets to losing the election, the more fearful, fantastical, and hostile he becomes.

Which produced the filthy spectacle I witnessed last night. A rude moron, who is supposed to be serving the nation and protecting its welfare, instead shirking his responsibility and spouting lies. Making wild promises about delivering a COVID vaccine. Claiming he has helped people get health insurance when he is taking it away. Claiming that he cares about making the air and water clean, after rolling back every environmental regulation he can. Insulting his opponent by taunting him and trying vainly to dispel his dignity. Trump’s heart is a cesspool. When this nation needs a hero, he turns coward–and doesn’t even have the tact to be ashamed.

This is the president: he can’t accept facts; he can’t follow simple rules; he can’t concentrate; he can’t empathize with suffering, he can’t handle dissent; he can’t be a good sport; he can’t be just; he can’t tolerate rivalry; he can’t admit unpleasant realities. To have such a person heading up our nation, which is premised upon compromise, openness, and interdependence, is, as Bob Woodward put it, a calamity.

Trump is dragging the nation through an existential crisis, daring us to figure out how to get free of a person so arrogant, so inept, so deceitful and vile.

RELATED:
“People who follow Trump’s advice and hang around watching polling places will be prosecuted, Nevada’s attorney general says.” (Business Insider)
“The People v. Donald J. Trump: The criminal case against him is already in the works — and it could go to trial sooner than you think.” (NY Magazine)

Day 49: The People Without A Party

15 Sep 2020 By in Candidates and Campaigns Tags: , , , , , , 5 Comments

The national struggle to defeat Donald Trump in November is going forward amid an exodus from the Republican Party and a paradoxical crisis in the two-party system.  The paradox is that, even as the parties and their candidates raise more and more money and draw the battle lines between one another more sharply, they excite more animus and aversion in the population at large.  It’s hard to be mindful of the huge swath of the American population that is withdrawn and disenchanted, unaffiliated and uncertain, especially given the hype that keeps Democrats and Republicans ever before our eyes.

This hype inadvertently sustains Trump’s power, a president whose popularity ratings are shockingly low relative to every other modern president.  Trump’s “base”– the amoral and low-information voters who continue to approve of him–lacks the geographic spread to prevail.  Meanwhile, legions of prominent and rank-and-file Republicans have either left the party, gone silent, or endorsed Trump’s Democratic challenger, Joe Biden.

The pool of voters available to put Biden in the White House is unusually large.  Let’s remember this as we work to get out the vote against Trump.  Innumerable voters besides those who are Democrat want Trump to go.

The millions of people currently without a party are something like “a silent majority.”  They do not need to be convinced to join a party: they only need to be persuaded to vote once for Biden and, by ending Trump’s disastrous presidency, save what’s left of our Constitutional system.  For that matter, the Senate Republicans (with the exception of the noble Mitt Romney) have so failed in their duties to the Constitution and the nation that the voters must try to depose them, too.

Image: Albert Levering’s “Republican Voters Revolt” (1910),
from this source.

Day 53: The State of the Race

11 Sep 2020 By in Candidates and Campaigns Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments


There’s no sure-fire way to know the mind of the electorate, but this map from 270 to Win expresses where pollsters and other experts think the race for the White House is going, based on the information on hand now.

To win, Donald Trump will have to hold the states of Texas and Iowa and swing all the toss-up states (Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, and Arizona) into his column.  In addition, he must recapture pivotal northern states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that he narrowly won last time but that are trending for Biden now.

Trump is a shrewd campaigner, but, as president, he has alienated and outraged so many Americans that it is hard to imagine him winning their votes.  He’s likely to do poorly anywhere with sizable minority communities.  The black population, in particular, is highly energized against Trump and eager to destroy him at the polls.  His predatory and retrograde treatment of women dooms him with this crucial demographic, too.  From day one, Trump has treated his political opponents as enemies, spoiling any hope now of making new “friends.”

Underneath Trump is a Republican party that is rotting away.  The compromises its leaders have made for Trump’s sake have driven thousands of reputable and influential followers away.  Hundreds of high-ranking Republicans have washed their hands of Trump, declared their support for Biden, and counseled rank-and-file voters to do the same.

This discord isn’t free-floating.  It’s playing out in states.  Former governors and legislators are actually working to defeat their own party’s leader.  Trump’s funding is drying up.  Many Republicans up for election are shaky.  As Trump continues to war against his own party’s establishment, he risks a victory that may doom him, too.

RELATED:
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Co-opt and Corrupt: How Trump Bent and Broke the GOP” (NYR)
Jacob Greber, “James and Kathryn Murdoch Become Some of Biggest Anti-Trump Donors“(AFR).
“Trump’s August Fundraising Lags Biden’s By 150 Million” (NPR)


Image: from this source.

In Truth, No One Knows What Will Happen

4 Dec 2019 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , 17 Comments


We’ve heard a lot of bluster from Republicans lately, much of it pooh-poohing impeachment and the odds of President Trump’s being removed from office.

In Congress, Republicans used the House Intelligence Committee’s recently concluded public hearings to depict impeachment as uninteresting, unpopular, unfair, unnecessary, unsubstantiated, unpromising, and unwise.  The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, likewise prejudged the whole endeavor, saying that should the Senate try Trump on impeachment charges, “It’s inconceivable to me there would be 67 votes to remove the president from office.”

So say the Republicans, with impressive bravado.  Meanwhile, the nation is heading straight at a moment of truth that will show what every Republican in the House and Senate is made of.

The public has received a mass of credible evidence that the president violated his oath of office to pursue a delusional personal agenda at the expense of national security.  Trump enlisted other senior White House officials to further this agenda, explicitly empowering a private citizen, former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani, to orchestrate it.  The House Intel hearings were an effective whodunnit.  A parade of witnesses described a president at ease with sacrificing America’s public interests to those of Russia and to what matters to him personally.  Such are the “goods” Republicans are bent on defending, at the expense of nation, party, and their own place in American history.

For, if the president’s conduct is tolerated, our republic is gone.

Republicans have sought to diminish the gravity of this Constitutional crisis.  They complain mightily about the Democrats, perhaps because it’s painful to admit the turpitude embodied in the leader of their own party.  They evoke the 63 million Americans who voted for President Trump in 2016, as if the mandate he secured then forever freed him from Constitutional limits or Congressional oversight.  Republicans even assert that the riveting testimony given before the House Intel Committee was trivial and boring, whereas this great week of political theater was singularly dramatic, momentous, and often moving.  Americans are far more sophisticated and more concerned with political rectitude than Republican lawmakers care to consider.  No poll can predict what will happen to Republicans who choose to enable Trump’s abuse of power.

Republicans like Jim Jordan and Devin Nunes pander to the sort of voter they imagine forms the unshakable bedrock of Trump’s support: this voter is ill-informed, narrow-minded, and easily hurt.  Republicans point to Trump’s forty-percent approval rating, as though this were a justification for abdicating the responsibilities Congress has to the Constitution.  Congressional Republicans come across as fearful of securing office on their own terms, once this amazing charlatan leaves the public stage (which, given presidential term limits, is destined to happen anyway).

Deference to Trump’s “base” is curious and self-defeating.  Trump is one of the least popular presidents in recent history, on a par with Gerald Ford.  (For graphical comparisons to other presidents, click here and scroll down.)

A simplistic and condescending view of the voter has the Republican establishment running very scared.  Republicans wants citizens everywhere to believe that impeachment is doomed, because otherwise Republican politicians will have to face the crisis of leading their constituents into the post-Trump age.  Will Republicans continue to shirk the responsibility of leading, which, in a republic, involves educating citizens on complex matters and figuring out how to change their constituents’ minds?

Impeachment is now before the House Judiciary Committee.  In the coming weeks, Republicans in power will come under increasing pressure to lead the nation, rather than dither about how hard it is to do the right thing.

Image: Edmund S. Valtman’s “Don’t Put Up Any Resistance! Just Keep In Step,” published 13 April 1973, from this source.

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