Tag Archives: Trump

Question And Answer

In a recent column for the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson asks THE question: how on earth is this election close?

The choice between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump should not be a tough call. Harris is a former prosecutor; Trump, a felon. Harris gives campaign speeches about her civic values; Trump rants endlessly about his personal grievances, interrupting himself with asides about sharks and Hannibal Lecter. Harris has outlined a detailed set of policy proposals for the economy; Trump nonsensically offers tariffs as a panacea, describing this fantasy in terms that make it clear he doesn’t understand how tariffs work.

Also, Harris never whipped thousands of supporters into a frenzy and sent them off to the Capitol, where they smashed their way into the citadel of our democracy, injuring scores of police officers and threatening to hang the vice president, in an attempt to overturn the result of a free and fair election. Trump did.

This is the conundrum that drives most rational people crazy. Even without January 6th, 32 felonies, multiple sexual assaults and the horrified testimonies of people who worked in Trump’s administration, who listens to the childish rants of a mentally-disturbed man with a third-grade vocabulary and thinks, “Yep, that’s the guy who should have charge of the nuclear codes.”? Who wants this ignorant name-calling bully to be a role model for America’s children?

How can this election possibly be close?

Robinson suggests some possibilities. First, Kamala Harris is a woman, and many Americans harbor a deep-seated misogyny. He notes that Trump desperately wants to have a fight over gender and race–and that Trump and Vance  “are trying hard to win the votes of men who equate manhood with cartoonish machismo — men who somehow feel that their status and prospects are threatened because they are men.”

Another reason might be that the 71 million people who voted for Trump in 2020 are loathe to admit that they backed a loser, let alone an embarrassing buffoon utterly unfit for office. (Large numbers of these voters, after all, still believe the “Big Lie.”)

And Robinson notes that Trump does best among uneducated Whites–the demographic most responsive to his vicious demagoguery on immigration — “the lies he keeps telling about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs, for example.” He constantly tells working-class Whites that immigration is a threat to their jobs and communities. As Robinson says, those tribal appeals aren’t likely to win over many new voters, but will likely motivate turnout of his base.

Still, though, how does any of this overcome Trump’s manifest unfitness? How does any of it erase his pathetic performance in the debate? How does it nullify the fact that he awaits sentencing by a New York judge after 34 guilty verdicts in a criminal trial? If the answer is buried somewhere in some poll, I can’t find it.

I have wrestled with the question Robinson poses, and I consistently return to one answer: the “through” line in Robinson’s analysis is bigotry. Racism. A yearning for patriarchy. A simmering hatred of the Other.

Robinson identifies anti-woman, anti-immigrant strands of what we have come to identify as White Supremacy or White Christian Nationalism, but–at least in this essay– he fails to connect the dots, fails to call out the intense White grievance that lies at the heart of the MAGA movement.

When Trump won (barely–and only in the antiquated Electoral College), a number of pundits attributed economic motives to his voters. Research has soundly debunked that assumption; numerous studies confirm the association of “racial resentment” with support for Trump and MAGA. I have previously quoted my youngest son’s observation that there are two kinds of people who vote for Trump–and only two kinds–those who share his racism, and those for whom his racism isn’t disqualifying.

Beginning with that first campaign, Trump jettisoned “dog whistles” in favor of explicitly hateful, racist rhetoric. He asserted that there are “very fine people” who chant “Jews shall not replace us.” He tried to keep Muslims from coming into the country. He said Black immigrants came from “shithole” countries (unlike those nice White folks from Norway…) His supporters want to roll back gay rights, and they persistently wage war on trans children.

This election isn’t about the economy, or national security, or other policies. It’s about culture war.

His MAGA supporters agree with the only clear message Trump has delivered: making America great again requires taking America back to a time when White Christian heterosexual males were in charge, and the rest of us were second class citizens.

This election is close because too many voters share that worldview. The rest of us had better turn out.

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The Theocracy At The Center of Project 2025

A writer for The Guardian recently read the entire 900+/- pages of Project 2025, rather than relying on what she called “snippets.” What she found was even more appalling than the various excerpts most of us have seen.

Basically, the Project lays out a road to theocracy.

The document repeatedly characterizes America as a country poisoned by “wokeness.” And it proposes, as an antidote to “wokeness,” remaking the government in accord with a fundamentalist version of Christianity.

Across multiple agencies, it would make access to abortion infinitely more difficult. It would change the name of the federal health and human services department to the “Department of Life”. It would criminalize pornography. There would be mass deportations and curtailments of legal immigration programs, including Daca. It would dismantle the Department of Education.

Throughout the manifesto, authors also recommend ways to increase funding for religious organizations by giving them more access to government programs – largely through increased use of school vouchers that could go to religious schools or by modifying programs like Small Business Administration loans to make religious groups eligible for funding.

In some parts, the project takes a more explicit Christian worldview. In the chapter about the Department of Labor, the manifesto suggests a communal day of rest for society because “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest”. One way to enforce this idea would be for Congress to require paid time-and-a-half for anyone who works on Sundays, which the project calls the default day of Sabbath “except for employers with a sincere religious observance of a Sabbath at a different time”.

In nearly all chapters, there is a mention of driving out any forces that seek to increase diversity in the federal government. And whenever LGBTQ+ rights are mentioned, it is to say there should be fewer of them.

Heritage might just as well have named Project 2025 “Project Christian Nationalism.” The document doesn’t stop with the enumeration of goals, either–it outlines the practical steps that would enable a Trump Administration to reach those goals.

Achieving the goal of “Christianizing” America would be the task of loyalists who would replace civil servants–as has been reported, Project 2025 advocates reclassifying thousands of federal jobs as “political” rather than non-partisan, in order to replace the civil servants who are currently doing those jobs with Trump loyalists.

The effort would also require taking control of the census.

The census helps decide how federal resources should be allocated to communities, but, for our purposes here, it’s most relevant that census data is used to decide how to divvy up seats in the US House and make electoral maps during decennial redistricting done by states. The census can alter the balance of power in statehouses and in Congress.

Given its influence, the project suggests an incoming conservative president needs to install more political appointees to the census bureau and ensure ideologically aligned career employees are “immediately put in place to execute a conservative agenda”. The next census isn’t until 2030, but plans for it are already under way.

That conservative agenda includes adding a citizenship question, something Trump tried to do for the 2020 census but was blocked by the US supreme court. The project says “any successful conservative Administration must include a citizenship question in the census.”

The project also suggests reviewing and possibly curtailing plans to broaden the race and ethnicity categories because “there are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”

There is much more, of course, but the quoted material is enough to raise the hair on the back of my neck, and probably the necks of most rational Americans.

Those of us tempted to dismiss Project 2025 as a theocratic fever dream unlikely to be realized even in a Trump administration need to understand that the people committed to imposing their beliefs on the rest of us are nothing if not patient. They worked for fifty years to overturn Roe v. Wade. If Trump wins, their wait will be shorter–as the article notes, to the (very limited) extent that Trump has enumerated any policies (or would recognize one if he encountered it), they’ve aligned with those in Project 2025. Even if he loses narrowly, they will be encouraged to dig in.

Even a massive loss–a Blue Wave–will only slow them down. They will bide their time and continue trying to “return” the country to a place that existed only in their twisted imaginations. Americans who want to protect our constitutional system will need to stay perpetually alert.

As the saying goes, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

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A Different Kind Of Homelessness

I recently had breakfast with two former faculty colleagues. The bulk of our conversation focused on the upcoming election, and thinking back on it, a couple of things struck me: despite MAGA folks’ belief that all college professors are left-wing socialists or communists, in a former, more rational time, all three of us would have been considered somewhat right of center.

But of course, the center has moved. A lot.

In 1980, I ran for Congress as a Republican. I won a Republican primary. I was pro-choice, and (to the extent it even came up then) pro-gay rights. For a couple of years after I lost the general election, people came up to me and said things like “I just couldn’t vote for you because you were so conservative.”

My husband and I met as officials in a Republican city administration; when we married, a reporter who covered the city (we had those back then) told me “the press guys like both of you, but you are both kinda right-wing.”

I don’t think I was ever “right-wing” –my positions were more consistent with what was then the GOP mainstream than with the Rightwing fringe of the party–but I was a traditional Republican.

Since 1980 I’ve changed positions on a few issues, because I learned more about them, but my basic political philosophy and approach to policy has not changed–yet today, I’m considered “far Left.”

I stood philosophically still, but the Overton window moved.

Part of the problem is political vocabulary. Americans talk about Liberals and conservatives, but those terms don’t describe our contemporary politics. MAGA and Trump are anything but Conservative as that term has historically been understood. (For that matter, they lack any coherent political philosophy at all, unless grievance and animus can be considered political positions.)

That reality has left genuine conservatives politically homeless. There’s a reason so many prominent conservative Republicans have endorsed Kamala Harris. (When George Will supports Harris, you know the GOP has jumped the shark.)

To the extent Trump has any policy positions, they are anathema to real conservatives. When the GOP was a genuine center-right party, it championed free trade, not tariffs and protectionism. Conservatives wanted limited government– Barry Goldwater insisted that “Government doesn’t belong in your boardroom or your bedroom.”  As Reagan left office, he made a speech about the importance of immigration. In foreign affairs, conservatives were strong supporters of NATO and opponents of dictators–and they understood the importance of joining with liberals in a unified approach to issues beyond the “water’s edge.”

Real conservatives venerate the Constitution and its checks and balances. They celebrate freedom of speech and a free press. When the GOP was conservative, it stressed the importance of respect for democratic processes and institutions, for law and order. Trump and MAGA constantly attack the very foundations of a working democracy– the press, the Department of Justice, the FBI, even our military leadership and especially the integrity of the electoral system. The old GOP might have disagreed with Democrats and liberals about how these principles should be applied, but they endorsed the principles.

Let’s be accurate: whatever else today’s GOP may be, it is not conservative.

As an essayist in USA Today recently put it,

As someone who works in the world of words, I understand that their meaning – and use – can change over time. Yet, something I greatly resent is how the Republican Party has conflated Donald Trump with conservatism… To me, conservatism means a belief in free markets, individual liberty and limited government.

As a result of the party’s move toward neo-fascism and theocracy, authentic conservatives have found themselves homeless. Thoughtful conservatives–appalled by what the GOP has become and unwilling to call themselves Democrats–have nowhere to go. Many of them will vote Blue this year rather than holding their noses and voting for Trump (or, in Indiana, for our Hoosier Christian Nationalists). Some won’t vote at all.

The disaffection and homelessness of genuine conservatives will help Democrats this year, and in a year where our choices really are between good and evil, that’s something to celebrate. But going forward, the transformation of one of the major parties in a two-party system into an anti-democratic cult is a disaster, and not just for real conservatives.

Good policy requires negotiation and compromise among good-faith advocates of varying perspectives. Civic peace requires respect for democratic institutions. This country needs two adult parties equally committed to the democratic process.

It is increasingly doubtful that the GOP can be redeemed from its current status as the new Confederacy, but unless that happens– or a third party somehow emerges– genuine conservatives will remain homeless.

NOTICE: TOMORROW evening at 7:00 P.M. I will introduce a Zoom event featuring four candidates who have the ability to shift four seats in the Indiana House from Republican to Democrat and break the super-majority’s stranglehold:  Josh Lowry, District 24; Tiffany Stoner, District 25; Victoria Garcia Wilburn, District 32 (incumbent); and Matt McNally, District 39. I will begin the event by explaining why one-party rule keeps dragging Indiana in the wrong direction.

You can register here. There is no charge.

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The Depressing Truth

Yesterday, I wrote about my swings between optimism and pessimism as we approach November. I’ve now read a depressing article suggesting that even a “best-case” election result will not erase America’s Trumpist plague.

An article from The Bulwark began with the following quote from Philip Bump:

The Trump era is about Trump in the way that the War of 1812 was about 1812: a critically important component and a useful touchstone but not all-encompassing. Turning the page on the era requires more than Trump failing to get an electoral vote majority.

Perhaps a more accurate time span to consider is something like 15 years. The election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 was hailed as a signal moment in the evolution of American politics and demography, but it also triggered a remarkable backlash. Ostensibly rooted in concerns about government spending, it was largely centered on the disruption of the economic crisis (which triggered an increase in spending) and that overlapping awareness of how America was changing.

The author went on to agree. As he recounted, he’d originally viewed Trump as an aberration–after all, he’d gotten through the Republican primaries with pluralities, not majorities, of Republican votes, and he’d underperformed his poll numbers in virtually every primary. Large numbers of Republican voters hated him. He trailed Hillary Clinton in all of the polling. All of these data points led him to conclude that Trump would lose the 2016 general election, that in the wake of that loss the GOP establishment would take measures against those who’d supported him, and the Party would go back to being the Party  of Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and Marco Rubio.

As the author candidly admits, he was wrong on all counts.

My first mistake was not understanding that Trump had turned the mild tilt of the Electoral College into an enduring 3-point advantage.

By trading suburban, college-educated voters for rural, high-school educated voters, Trump maximized the GOP’s Electoral College efficiency. This trade turned the GOP into a permanent minority party, making it extraordinarily difficult for it to win a national popular majority. But it tilted the Electoral College system to Republicans by a minimum of 3 points in every election.

This was a true innovation. Prior to Trump, no one had viewed minority rule as a viable electoral strategy.

His second mistake was his belief that party elders would expel or neuter those who had supported Trump. As he now recognizes, that mistake wasn’t simply because Trump won. “It was wrong because the real war was not the general election, but a Republican civil war between traditional Republicans and those who wanted “grievance-based political violence.”

The grievance aspect was important because it meant that Trump could deliver to his voters even if he lost. Trump understood that Republican voters now existed in a post-policy space in which they viewed politics as a lifestyle brand. And this lifestyle brand did not require holding electoral office…

So no, there were never going to be recriminations against conservatives and Republicans who had collaborated with Trump. The recriminations would run in the opposite direction: The forces of Trumpism would continue to own the Republican party and anti-Trumpers would continue to be driven out. (Unless they chose to convert.)

That led to a third mistake: believing that the Republican Party would revert to its previous identity as a normal, center-Right political party. He now believes there is no going back.

If anything, the dynamics inside the party—the self-selection making the party whiter, more rural, and less-educated; the desire for minority rule; the eagerness for political violence; the disinterest in governing—seem likely to push the party further away from what it was.

We can’t control the future. And we can’t control the Republican party. All we can control is ourselves.

Which starts with being clear-eyed about reality and the work ahead.

The essay confirmed my reluctant realization that far more of the American electorate falls into that “grievance-based” category than I want to believe. Americans aren’t simply engaged in a Presidential campaign, but a much longer, more protracted struggle for the soul of the nation.

Even if Kamala Harris and Tim Walz win in November, those of us who define patriotism as allegiance to the philosophy of our founding principles will have to contend with the White “Christian” Nationalists who want to abandon those principles in favor of an autocratic, theocratic vision that accords them social and cultural dominance. (If you don’t believe me about that “vision,” take a look at Project 2025. Or–if you live in Indiana– read statements from Micah Beckwith or Jim Banks.)

November is just Round One. That said, winning it decisively is an absolutely essential first step.

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Project 2025 And Health Care

As we all know, the United States is the only first-world country without a national health-care program. While the approaches differ, most advanced countries consider access to healthcare a human right–not a consumer product. Here in the US, efforts to extend that access–Medicare, Medicaid, and more recently the Affordable Care Act–have been met with hysterical claims that such programs are “socialism” and incompatible with freedom.

I’m not the first person to note that these critics don’t seem nearly as upset by programs that can accurately be labeled “socialism for the rich.” Increasingly, American economic policy, with its generous tax advantages and outright subsidies, seems to be socialism for the rich and brutal capitalism for the poor. But a dissertation on that topic is for another day.

The scolds who resent any effort to make health insurance more affordable or accessible are among those who have produced the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, so we shouldn’t be surprised by the Project’s health care proposals. Neither should we con ourselves into believing that Project 2025 isn’t an outline that Trump will follow if elected–there is ample evidence to the contrary.

So–what health policies would another Trump Administration pursue?

A doctor writing in Time Magazine has recently explained why voters need to understand that agenda–especially when it comes to healthcare– and take it seriously.

Sponsored by the right-wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation, the Project 2025 policy agenda was written by more than 400 conservative experts and published in a book titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. While Trump has publicly disavowed the initiative, he has endorsed (and even tried to implement) many of its core proposals, several of which were penned by his former staffers.

The Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has made life-saving drugs like insulin more affordable. Project 2025 calls for its repeal.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)—signed into law by President Biden two years ago—capped insulin costs at $35 per month for people on Medicare. The data show that this cap increased the number of insulin prescriptions that were filled, ensuring more patients with diabetes got what they needed to stay healthy. The IRA will also cap annual out-of-pocket spending on prescription drugs (not just insulin) for seniors starting next year. And despite aggressive lobbying and legal challenges from drugmakers, the law empowered Medicare to negotiate prices with Big Pharma for the first time in history, achieving significant discounts and saving billions. These are just a few of the many reasons more than 500 health professionals recently signed an open letter to protect the IRA.

Other provisions of Project 2025 would reduce access to Medicaid. Currently, more than 70 million low-income Americans rely on Medicaid for health care. The Project proposes lifetime caps on benefits and the addition of work requirements as a condition for coverage, among other onerous changes.

Unsurprisingly, Project 2025 would not only restrict abortion at the national level, it would also eliminate no-cost coverage for some contraception. (Those Right-wingers really want women to breed….) Of course, once children have been produced, concern for their welfare vanishes.

Project 2025 takes particular aim at the well-being of children. The authors seek to prevent public health agencies from requiring vaccination in school children, which could cause more outbreaks of preventable diseases like measles. They also propose invalidating state laws intended to stem gun violence, a leading cause of death for children in the U.S. Project 2025 would even eliminate Head Start, a critical program for early childhood development, especially in low-income and rural communities.

As the doctor writes, implementation of even a few of these proposed policies would set back decades of progress in medicine and public health.

The Harris/Walz ticket has used the slogan “We Won’t Go Back.” The usual interpretation of that phrase is that it refers to women’s reproductive liberty, but it actually–and accurately– describes what is really at stake in November’s election. MAGA is a movement entirely focused on taking America back–back to a time when women were property, Black and Brown people second-class citizens, LGBTQ+ people closeted, and adequate medical care a consumer good available only to those who could afford it.

I don’t know when opposition to vaccination and common-sense public health measures became part of the ideology of the Right. I don’t know why MAGA folks think the working poor aren’t entitled to health care. I don’t understand their evident belief that government should cater to White Christian males to the exclusion of other citizens.

But I do know they’re stuck in a past that I don’t want to return to. When people say this election poses an existential choice, they aren’t engaging in hyperbole.

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