Let me begin a very distressing post by affirming my belief that there are still some Republicans who are good people, although their percentage is clearly dwindling. (Why good people remain Republican is something I have trouble understanding, but that’s a different issue.)
What has become very clear, however, is the descent of what was once a traditional right-of-center political party into a rabid, hateful, and thoroughly unAmerican cult. That descent is playing out right now in Iowa.
Permit Jake Tapper to share the evidence.
CNN anchor Jake Tapper was stunned by a poll published this month showing former President Donald Trump’s Nazi-echoing speeches about “poisoning the blood” and eliminating “vermin” from the U.S. overwhelmingly help him with Republicans in Iowa.
Trump is under fire once again — including from Tapper — after he delivered another Hitler-echoing rant at a rally in Durham, New Hampshire, on Saturday in which he accused several groups of non-White immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.”
But newly-released results from an NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll — taken December 2-7, before the most recent speech — show those Hitler-esque speeches help him with Iowa GOP voters by nearly two-to-one.
The Des Moines Register polled Iowa voters, asking those it identified as likely Republican caucus-goers for their opinions about a candidate who said that immigrants “poison the blood of America.” Forty-two percent of Iowa Republicans said it would make them more likely to support that candidate. Only twenty-eight percent said it would make them less likely, and the remaining twenty-nice percent indicated that it would not matter to them.
So–forty-two percent of Iowa Republicans agreed with a message lifted verbatim from Hitler, and another twenty-nine percent did not find the message troubling, let alone disqualifying. Seventy-one percent of the Republican respondents either endorsed that vile message or were untroubled by it.
As one of the panel members on Tapper’s show put it,
Republican or Democrat, anybody who spent time in Iowa around the caucus knows the term Iowa nice. Iowa voters are the nicest people in the world. But what we’ve seen in the Trump era is that part of the Republican base is not so nice. And another part of the base, so you combine these two, anything that Donald Trump says they’ll just say, yes, give me more of that, whether they think about it or not. And what troubles me isn’t just the language that Trump uses, but if he’s using it and then wins, what is he going to do within that rhetoric?
What are the actions that follow the rhetoric? And that’s what gets us to a very, very un-American place.
Political scientists and pundits have traced the “sorting” of Americans into various categories: fundamentalists versus more mainstream religious folks, religious versus secular, urban versus rural, educated versus not, blue versus red…Perhaps a more relevant set of categories would be humane versus execrable.
What sorts of people think it is perfectly appropriate to refer to other human beings as “vermin”? What kind of person looks at would-be immigrants–often people enduring dangerous travels and trusting treacherous companions in an effort to flee intolerable situations so they can give their children a chance for a better life–and sees someone “poisoning the blood” of the “real Americans” whose ancestors, more often than not, made similar treks.
For that matter, what sort of performative “Christian” posts a lengthy rant purported to be his “Christmas message” focusing on “Crooked Joe Biden,” “Deranged Jack Smith,” and those who are “looking to destroy our once great USA” and ending with “MAY THEY ROT IN HELL.” (Caps in original.)
And a Merry Christmas to you, too.
Reasonable people of good will can disagree about immigration law. They can draw different conclusions about how to handle the mess at the nation’s southern border. People of good will can debate the optimum number of people to be admitted to this country, and the proper bases for admitting them or turning them away.
But Republicans who agree that these desperate people are “vermin,” who think it is appropriate to accuse them of “poisoning the blood of Americans” are most definitely not people of good will. They are the raw material from which Storm Troopers are fashioned.
A week or so ago, a reader reminded me that it was Maya Angelou who counseled “when someone tells you who they are, believe them.”
The GOP is telling us who they are, and what that once “Grand Old Party” has become. Believe them.
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