Tag Archives: GOP

An Insider Analysis

Some of the most distressed observers of our national plunge into the very unAmerican, neo-fascist nightmare we’re experiencing are the political strategists who spent years working to elect Republicans. A number of them are now “Never Trumpers” who are wrestling with hard questions: how much of GOP rhetoric was simply PR? What was it in the GOP incentive structure that took the party down this disastrous path? What were the danger signals they failed to see?

One of those Never Trumpers is Stuart Stevens, and a while back, he wrote an essay in the Bulwark in which he tried to trace how the “law and order party had become the party of Jeffrey Epstein.” As he began,

Let me begin with a question that a lot of us are asking ourselves. How did we get here? How is it that right now, as we speak, there are American citizens that haven’t been charged with a crime, much less convicted, sitting in a concentration camp in Florida while one of the most notorious, evil, child sex traffickers of our time has cut some sweetheart deal so that she has been transferred from a prison in Florida to a Club Fed in Texas?

Stevens noted that Maxwell’s transfer violated clear Prison Bureau guidelines, and questioned how America had gotten to so lawless a place. “How did it happen? Well, the easy answer is that we elected Donald Trump. But that’s really a cop-out because it’s not just Donald Trump.”

When Trump first started to dominate the Republican Party, many of my Bush-era Republican friends talked about how Donald Trump had hijacked our party. This never made sense to me. The hijacker on the plane is not popular with the passengers. No one is thanking the hijacker for the chance to go to Cuba instead of grandma’s house. But Donald Trump quickly became the most popular figure in the Republican Party by a wide margin.

That, of course, is the question all sane Americans are constantly asking ourselves–especially those (like yours truly) who spent years in the Republican Party, assuming that the party’s political rhetoric accurately reflected its political and philosophical beliefs. As Stevens glumly concludes, “Trump didn’t hijack the Party, he revealed it.”

It’s hard to disagree with that conclusion; as Stevens writes, “People don’t abandon deeply held beliefs in a matter of months… What the party called ‘bedrock principles’ turned out to be nothing more than marketing slogans.”

As Stevens probes the reason for the GOP’s enthusiastic embrace of Trump, he comes to the same conclusion I did. It all goes back to America’s original sin: racism.  He points to the telling homogeneity of today’s Republican Party.

Race is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. This isn’t new to the Trump era. In 1956, Eisenhower got 39% of the Black vote. In 1964, Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act and received 7% of the Black vote. In 2020, Trump got 12% of the Black vote, a number he improved to 13% in 2024. That’s a six-point increase in 60 years.

In the Bush 43 years, in what seems like a long time ago in a galaxy far away, the party admitted it had failed to attract Black voters and took responsibility for the failure. In 2005, the Chairman of the Republican Party, Ken Melman, gave a speech at the NAACP convention apologizing for the Southern Strategy, which leveraged white racist anger to maximize Republican votes. Does it mean anything that you apologized? I think it does. It’s an acknowledgement that what had happened is wrong and that the party had to endeavor to earn more Black support.

That all ended in 2016 with Donald Trump’s openly racist campaign.

Today’s parties have sorted themselves into White Nationalists versus everyone else.

As Stevens notes, the homogeneity of the Republican Party makes it much easier to message to core voters than it is to message to the far more diverse Democratic Party. And Stevens ties that observation to the fecklessness of Congressional Republicans, pointing out that a “party that spends 60 years relying on candidates who can win by maximizing white voters inevitably draws a different kind of candidate than a party that requires appealing to a more diverse electorate.” That observation goes a long way toward explaining the current Republican politicians who exhibit “a North Korean-style supplication to their leader.”

It’s hard to discount Stevens’ “insider analysis.”

His essay answers the persistent question–why on earth would anyone vote for a pathetic, delusional ignoramus in possession of not a single redeeming human quality? That answer is depressingly simple. For far too many voters, primal hatreds overcome humanity and rational self-interest.

But who knew there were so many of them?

Comments

The Guy In The Mirror

Welcome to what seems like a very bad dream…

Congressional Republicans have passed a spending bill that contradicts every principle that party has endorsed over the years.  Furthermore, it’s a measure that will disproportionately hurt their own voters–and we know that they are aware of that fact, because they carefully timed some of the bill’s most egregious elements, like the draconian cuts to Medicaid, to take effect after the midterms.

Those GOP “defenders of liberty” who sport “don’t tread on me” t-shirts and insist that the government lacked even the authority to require masks during a pandemic are nevertheless cool with providing massive new funding for ICE, whose masked thugs display a terrifying similarity to Germany’s SS.

The Republicans in Congress passed this monstrosity because they are in thrall to an ignorant buffoon with tacky taste and the vocabulary, intellect and emotional control of a developmently-delayed five-year-old.

It has become increasingly clear that on the ground, the MAGA movement is the reappearance of the old Confederacy. The voters who continue to support Trump are motivated by fear–fear of losing their status as the “real Americans,” fear that those “others” will actually manage to attain civic equality. But what can we say about the Senators and Representatives those voters sent to Washington? Some–like Indiana’s Jim Banks–are as ignorant and bigoted as those who voted for them, but it’s obvious that many others actually know better, actually realize that their submission to Trump is cowardly, and that they are rewarding the votes of their constituents by robbing them of the little security they have.

What explains those Senators and Representatives–those presumably “traditional” Republicans who talked endlessly about fiscal discipline and limited government, but who obediently bend the knee to a would-be autocrat who routinely trashes those principles?

A recent article by Jonathan Last in the Bulwark took a stab at answering that question. 

A sizable portion of elected Republicans hold on to a residual image of themselves as avatars of a green-eyeshade, business-first party that no longer exists. They’re like a middle-aged man standing in front of a mirror, sucking in his gut and smiling, imagining that he still looks pretty close to his college days.

It’s a lie they tell themselves.

The article raised an interesting question: why didn’t the Republicans just choose to have it both ways–extend the tax cuts for their deep-pocketed donors, but keep Medicaid funded, and just push the debt even higher. After all, they were willing to add over three trillion to that debt–why not just add another 930 billion, and avoid sticking it to their own voters?

This, finally, is the root of the problem. Some Republicans still view themselves as the good guys in the movie. They need to imagine that they’re on the side of the angels. That they are something other than what they’ve become. It’s the guy in the mirror, again.

Trump has no illusions. That is his strength. Some congressional Republicans are reluctant to embrace their roles as kleptocrats and pillagers. That is their weakness. And it’s why they haven’t said, “Fuck it. Let’s just spend all the money.”

Last reminds us that when things go wrong in a cult, no one blames the cult leader. (He points to an example, a MAGA-supporting man in detention due to Trump’s hardline immigration policies, who nevertheless blames the Biden administration for his arrest.)

When millions of Trump voters lose their Medicaid, they aren’t going to blame Trump, either. They’ll blame Congress.

And what does Donald Trump care if a bunch of Republican losers get tossed out of Congress? He has no use for congressional Republicans. He is an aspiring autocrat who rules by fiat. Passing legislation is not anywhere near his list of priorities. Whether or not the House and Senate are controlled by Republicans is of little importance to him.

All of which is why Trump’s party is about to stab millions of Trump-loving Republican voters in the back instead of just throwing more money at the problem.

Trump knows who he is, what he wants, and how to get it. His party, on the other hand, is a bunch of delusional sad sacks. Which is why he will win and they will lose. Again.

At least we can take some satisfaction from the prospect of those “delusional sad-sacks” looking in their mirrors and seeing a greying and flabby reality looking back.

I wonder if any of them will regret providing the Kool-Aid to the cult members who elected them…

Comments

Speaking Of Propaganda…

In the wake of passage of Trump’s reverse Robin Hood bill, the Social Security Administration sent out an email to most recipients. Here is the text of that email:

The Social Security Administration (SSA) is celebrating the passage of the One Big, Beautiful Bill, a landmark piece of legislation that delivers long‑awaited tax relief to millions of older Americans.

The bill ensures that nearly 90% of Social Security beneficiaries will no longer pay federal income taxes on their benefits, providing meaningful and immediate relief to seniors who have spent a lifetime contributing to our nation’s economy.

The new law includes a provision that eliminates federal income taxes on Social Security benefits for most beneficiaries, providing relief to individuals and couples. Additionally, it provides an enhanced deduction for taxpayers aged 65 and older, ensuring that retirees can keep more of what they have earned.

Social Security remains committed to providing timely, accurate information to the public and will continue working closely with federal partners to ensure beneficiaries understand how this legislation may affect them.

“This is a historic step forward for America’s seniors,’ said Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano. ‘… By significantly reducing the tax burden on benefits, this legislation reaffirms President Trump’s promise to protect Social Security and helps ensure that seniors can better enjoy the retirement they’ve earned.”

I may throw up.

In this blog, I frequently complain about propaganda, assuming that most readers know what propaganda is–misinformation and outright lies intended to sell a bill of goods to people who wouldn’t buy what was being sold if they knew the truth. This email is a perfect example; it should be Exhibit A in classes devoted to the subject.

Allow me to list the lies and intentional misdirections in this example of autocratic BS.

There was no full repeal of Social Security taxes. The law does not eliminate federal income taxes on Social Security benefits. Instead, it introduces a temporary increase in the standard deduction—up to: $6,000 for individuals aged 65+, and $12,000 for married couples filing jointly. Furthermore, the deduction begins phasing out at incomes above $75,000 for singles and $150,000 for couples, and it vanishes entirely at higher income levels.

What’s more, the measure isn’t targeted solely at Social Security benefits; it applies to all taxable income–and it’s temporary,
expiring around 2028. And lest you still somehow think it’s a big deal, or at least a modest help to low-income folks, permit me to introduce you to reality: most low- and middle-income seniors already pay zero federal tax on their benefits.

As one CPA of my acquaintance put it, the claim that the bill eliminates taxes on Social Security benefits for most recipients is simply false. In reality, it merely increases the general standard deduction for seniors for a limited time, indirectly reducing taxes for some of them. It does not repeal or reduce Social Security taxation.

Sometimes, the English language is insufficient to convey the bizarre reality of a situation. In this case, only Yiddish can adequately communicate the sheer shamelessness on display. That word is chutzpah. Chutzpah is nerve or gall on steroids. (An often-used example is a person who kills his mother and father and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan.)

America has a mentally-ill gangster in the White House. He is aided and abetted by craven Congressional Republicans, and they have colluded to pass legislation that will–literally–kill lots of old people by throwing them off Medicaid (among many other terrible things). They know that most Americans–including their own voters– will hate this bill once they actually know what’s in it, so they are trying to pre-empt the spread of accurate information by using our tax dollars to disseminate propaganda–here, by sending out an email that will confuse and mislead the elderly Americans who rely on Social Security.

Talk about chutzpah! We knew they lacked any integrity; now we know that these despicable people have no capacity for shame. 

Comments

Listing The Obscenities

On Tuesday evening, I participated in a Zoom hosted by Indivisible of Central Indiana. It was focused on Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” and if you can stand yet another enumeration of that insult to Americans, I’m posting my comments below.

__________________-

As Heather Cox Richardson has said, the Republicans’ “One Big, Beautiful Bill” is MAGA’s attempt to replace the government we’ve had since the 1930s with one that reflects the goals of Project 2025.

It is also an effort to rob the poor to further enrich the wealthy.

The Bill is 1000+ pages, but in this brief presentation I want to highlight the major elements—and alert you to the fact that, despite the fact that it is billed as a “budget,” it has numerous, damaging non-fiscal provisions which should be ruled non-germane in the Senate, but may not be.

Before getting to the truly horrifying fiscal mischief, let me share with you some of the most egregious non-fiscal provisions:

  • A measure to cripple the courts by prohibiting any funding from being used to carry out court orders holding executive branch officials in contempt. Passage of this measure would enable Trump and his officials to defy court orders at will.
  • The addition of billions to various parts of Trump’s deportation efforts, ramping up those efforts to the tune of an additional trillion dollars That includes $45 billion for construction of immigration jails (more than 13 times ICE’s current detention budget.) In addition, it would allow the indefinite detention of immigrant children and would charge families $3,500 to reunite with a child who arrived alone at the border. Asylum seekers will be charged an “application fee” of at least $1,000.
  • The administration would be given authority to label nonprofits as “terrorist-supporting organizations,” and terminate their tax status- an open invitation to suppress the free speech and activism of climate and civil liberties organizations, among others of which Trump and MAGA disapprove.
  • The bill would eliminate the National Weather Service, making local weather reports far less accurate.
  • One provision would allow the administration to sell off national parks.
  • A particularly ugly provision repeals the $200 excise tax on the sale of gun silencers, which have no lawful purpose other than concealing shootings.

Other bits of “fine print” more directly support the major goal of the bill, which is, as I’ve noted, to protect the extremely wealthy against efforts to get them to pay their fair share of taxes–basically, the bill exempts rich people from paying their dues to the country that made their accumulation of wealth possible. (For example, the bill would basically eliminate an Estate Tax that is already massively favorable to the top 1%.)

The “guts” of the bill are the fiscal provisions. Basically, the bill is an effort to fund the extension of Trump’s tax cuts for the rich by eliminating health care for the poor and middle class.

The Congressional Budget office estimates that as many as 16 million people would lose health insurance under the House-passed version of the bill. The annual cuts to Medicaid would average over 70 billion dollars a year—the same amount millionaires and billionaires would gain in tax cuts. The media has focused on those Medicaid cuts, but a number of analysts have explained that measures that have been minimized as “technical revisions” would essentially repeal Obamacare.

Not only would millions of individuals lose their health insurance, the consequences of these cuts would close many, if not most, rural hospitals and would have a dramatically negative impact on local economies, ironically mostly in Red states like Indiana. Economists have estimated that depressed local spending under the House bill would force the loss of 850,000 jobs. (Health care is the largest employer of any sector of the economy; it employs 18 million workers.)

Republicans who claim that they’re just adding “work requirements” to Medicaid are lying—the budget cuts 715 billion from Medicaid and 335 billion from Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act). And prior experience in the states has demonstrated that work requirements do nothing but erect paperwork barriers that throw eligible people off Medicaid; as we’ve learned from those previous efforts, Medicaid recipients who are able to work are already working—most Medicaid recipients are disabled, elderly or children.

There’s much more. The bill weakens the Child Tax Credit, by lowering the eligibility income threshold, so millions of children will suddenly become ineligible. It expands school vouchers–continuing the GOP effort to destroy public education and shift tax dollars to religious institutions, in violation of the First Amendment. It includes a variety of “Stealth Cuts’ to the Affordable Care Act that will increase out-of-pocket costs and make insurance more expensive for those people who are fortunate enough to retain it.

As if the assault on poor folks wasn’t mean-spirited enough, the bill also has deep cuts to SNAP. The House-passed version would cut nearly $300 billion from SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, according to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates. That would be by far the largest cut to SNAP in history, and it would mean that millions of low-income families would lose some or all of the food assistance they need to afford groceries and feed their children.

SNAP has been the nation’s most effective anti-hunger program, and the bill cuts it by roughly 30 percent. These extreme cuts are actually deeper than the $230 billion in cuts the original budget resolution called for because the bill adds tens of billions of dollars in new spending for farm programs, and pays for those dollars by taking more food assistance away from people with low incomes.

And despite the GOP’s purported concerns about budget deficits, the bill blows up the budget deficit. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill will increase borrowing by a total of $2.4 trillion by 2034, because the $1.3 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and other programs don’t even come close to canceling out $3.7 trillion in tax cuts for the rich. Just the tax cuts going to the richest 5 percent outstrip the cuts to Medicaid and food stamps by 300 billion. If you add in interest costs, the total debt the bill creates exceeds $3 trillion.

This is just a horrible bill, and it needs to be defeated.

Comments

Things That Make Me Crazy

Can those who read this blog indulge me for three very personal rants?

We face so many major problems in this country right now (can we spell LA?) that it seems terribly self-indulgent to focus on a few annoying aspects of civic debate. On the other hand, I think at least a couple of the behaviors I find so exasperating are symptoms of the inability of We the People to productively address the bigger issues. (Anyway, that’s my justification and I’m sticking to it!)

#1. I recently posted about an emerging argument over regulation. Proponents of taking a closer look at our regulatory processes aren’t the knee-jerk GOP scolds who define “free market” as “free” from any government rules; the concern (as I said in that post) is to guard against over-kill. But I immediately got an email from an acquaintance saying, essentially, “finally, people are realizing that we need to get government out of the way!”

Now, I’ve known this particular correspondent for a long time, and he’s not stupid. But he drank the Kool-Aid back when the GOP’s plutocrats were insisting that government just needed to get out of the way and let good-hearted business-people run their enterprises as they see fit.

We’re beginning to see what that would look like, as planes fall from the sky.  Do we really want to get rid of FDA inspections to ensure that supermarket chickens are safe to eat?  Do we want to turn a blind eye to that factory discharging toxic waste into the local river? Stop requiring clinical trials before approving the sale of medications and vaccines?

Bottom line:  We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto! We don’t grow our own fruits and vegetables and go into the backyard to kill one of our own chickens for dinner. In a modern society, government regulations are essential.  As I said in my post, it isn’t an “either/or” proposition; policymakers need to determine what regulations are needed, and how much is too much. That’s a lot harder, of course, than spouting ideological idiocies.

#2. This platform, like so many others, is a place where people with different perspectives but generally similar civic goals come to argue about THE question: what should we do? What actions can citizens take in the face of an existential threat to the America we thought we inhabited? 

Those discussions may or may not be experienced as valuable, but one (probably inevitable) response drives me up the wall. It is the comment–in a lecturing tone–to the effect that such-and-such will clearly be ineffective, that it is simply “virtue-signaling” and unlikely to make any difference. It would be one thing if the person pouring cold water on a proposed activity ever followed up with a helpful, do-able suggestion–if the put-down was ever followed by a thoughtful “here’s what we should be doing instead,” but it never is.

One of the defects of Internet conversations is the absence of tone and body-language. Perhaps if we could see and hear the individuals who post these put-downs, they wouldn’t seem so sneering and self-important–but that is certainly what these “I know better than you and what you propose is stupid” comments convey.

#3.  I am OVER the Democrats who keep wallowing in “what went wrong” and “who was to blame” and “why the approach of those of you on the (insert ideological position) is dooming our chances in the future.” I am especially over the focus on Joe Biden, and the utterly stupid accusations of a “cover up”–as Robert Hubbell has pointed out, a “cover up” of the cognitive state of a man who was appearing daily at campaign events, delivering addresses to Congress where he outwitted the entire Republican caucus, providing interviews to major media outlets, and guiding America through a period of stable foreign relations and successful domestic policy. Biden aged in office –and we all saw that–but he was a transformational and incredibly effective President. Should he have withdrawn sooner? Probably. But for goodness sake, GIVE IT A REST. 

Meanwhile, we have a President whose election was at least partially due to the refusal of the mainstream press to give anything close to equal time to his embarrassing stupidity, his obvious mental illness (not to mention his age-related decline from what wasn’t a high bar to begin with). Even the aspects of his “character” (note quotation marks) that do receive coverage–his racism, his felonies, his rapes, his constant lies (are his lips moving?), his “out and proud” corruption –are still being normalized and sane-washed. WHY?

Okay. I’m done. Thanks for indulging me. I think I feel better.

Comments