Tag Archives: Trump

A No-Win Choice

The Washington Post recently ran a story about the 91-year old Republican woman who is a plaintiff in the Colorado case that removed Donald Trump from that state’s ballot.

In one way, the piece was just one more reminder of how very far today’s GOP is from the political party it used to be. The woman being profiled, Norma Anderson, was described as a trailblazing former GOP legislator, and she joins people like Liz Cheney and other “Never Trumpers” in reminding us that what is on display these days is a very far cry from both conservatism and what the Grand Old Party used to be.

But that article is only one commentary on a critically-important and unprecedented issue: should Trump be barred from the ballot under the very clear language of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment?

That Section reads as follows:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

The Guardian was among several media outlets that have reported on an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court by some of this nation’s most eminent historians. Twenty-five historians of the civil war and Reconstruction argued in support of the Colorado decision to remove Trump from the ballot.

“For historians,” the group wrote, “contemporary evidence from the decision-makers who sponsored, backed, and voted for the 14th amendment [ratified in 1868] is most probative. Analysis of this evidence demonstrates that decision-makers crafted section three to cover the president and to create an enduring check on insurrection, requiring no additional action from Congress.”

Sean Wilentz of Princeton is a well-regarded historian who did not participate in the Supreme Court brief, but he too has dismissed arguments for allowing Trump to remain on the ballot.

“By their reasoning,” Wilentz writes, “Trump’s misdeeds aside, enforcement of the 14th amendment poses a greater threat to our wounded democracy than Trump’s candidacy. In the name of defending democracy, they would speciously enable the man who did the wounding and now promises to do much more.”…

 “Whether motivated by … fear of Trump’s base, a perverted sense of democratic evenhandedness, a reflexive hostility toward liberals, or something else, [commentators who say Trump should stay on the ballot] betray a basic ignorance of the relevant history and thus a misconception of what the 14th amendment actually meant and means. That history, meanwhile, has placed the conservative members of the Supreme Court in a very tight spot.”

No kidding. And they’re ducking and weaving…

“Textualists” and “original intent” devotees on the Court are faced with unambiguous language buttressed by reams of contemporaneous evidence submitted by the historians. The hearing Thursday telegraphed the Court’s reluctance to give the Fourteenth Amendment language its obviously intended effect. The decision is likely to be another nail in the coffin of this Court’s eroding legitimacy.

It’s true that a decision following the clear Constitutional language would run the risk of unleashing a violent reaction from the populists and neo-Nazis who support Trump.  Recognition of that probability has led some pundits to argue that the Court should punt–that it should “save democracy” by leaving Trump’s fate to the tender mercies of the voting public.

I understand that desire, which the Court clearly shares.

I truly believe that the likely match-up between Biden and Trump will result in a massive repudiation of Trump and his cult–that Trump’s intensifying and increasingly obvious mental decline, on top of his ignorance, narcissism and generally repulsive persona will lead to a massive rejection of the GOP at the polls. (Discount the polling averages that seem to show Trump even with or defeating Biden; as several scholars have noted, those averages include a large number of low-quality, partisan polls with which GOP propagandists have “flooded the zone.”)

It would be far more satisfying to defeat Trump at the polls, but America is facing a crucial test of our commitment to the rule of law. Are we, as John Adams famously proclaimed, a “nation of laws, not men”? Or are we a nation of scofflaws, ready to abandon rules when we find them inconvenient or unpopular?

The Court appears ready to place us among the scofflaws.

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The Stakes

Bret Stephens is a regular opinion writer for the New York Times. He is a self-described conservative who shares a Monday column with liberal Gail Collins. Stephens is a “never Trumper”–and very clear-eyed about the threat posed not just by Trump, but by the current GOP, and he has a wicked way with words. A few days ago, when Collins asked him what the remaining sane Republicans would do about the immigration bill, his response was dead-on perfect:

So-called sane House Republicans are basically passengers in a car being driven at high speed by a drunk. There’s no getting out of the car. And they don’t dare tell the driver to slow down because who knows what he’ll do then.

As Hoosiers are being inundated with advertisements from the candidates vying for the GOP nomination for Governor, the accuracy of Stephens’ description is evident. 

On the one hand, we have the MAGAs. Mike Braun is promising to fix problems that are matters of federal jurisdiction (why not stay in the Senate, Mike, if those are your issues?) and repeatedly reminding voters that he is Trump’s choice. Creepy Eric Doden is quoting the bible,  promising to “protect life” and “always back the Blue.” And we have Brad Chambers– the least scary of the lot (which isn’t saying much)–trying to avoid climbing into the drunk driver’s speeding car by focusing on job creation and his “outsider” claims.

I’ve missed ads from Lt. Governor Susanne Crouch and disgraced former Attorney General Curtis Hill–I assume we’ve been (mercifully) spared those due to the lack of zillionaire status that allows the others to spend lots of their own and their families’ money.

All of them support Indiana’s abortion ban. And that raises a question: how much weight will Hoosier voters place on the abortion issue when it is one issue among others on the candidates’ agendas?

Every state that has voted on the issue of reproductive rights in a stand-alone vote has upheld those rights, even deep-red states. Pundits argue, however, that voters will be less likely to vote against candidates whose anti-choice positions are only one position among many. When  the issue is separated from a campaign for public office, presumably, it is simpler for voters to understand what’s at stake and to register an “up or down” preference.

That belief may have been what  has convinced pro-Trump groups to formulate an “Anti-Abortion Plan for Day One.”

In emerging plans that involve everything from the EPA to the Federal Trade Commission to the Postal Service, nearly 100 anti-abortion and conservative groups are mapping out ways the next president can use the sprawling federal bureaucracy to curb abortion access.
 
Many of the policies they advocate are ones Trump implemented in his first term and President Joe Biden rescinded — rules that would have a far greater impact in a post-Roe landscape. Other items on the wish list are new, ranging from efforts to undo state and federal programs promoting access to abortion to a de facto national ban. But all have one thing in common: They don’t require congressional approval.

“The conversations we’re having with the presidential candidates and their campaigns have been very clear: We expect them to act swiftly,” Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life, told POLITICO. “Due to not having 60 votes in the Senate and not having a firm pro-life majority in the House, I think administrative action is where we’re going to see the most action after 2024 if President Trump or another pro-life president is elected.”

The Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project — a coalition that includes Students for Life, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and other anti-abortion organizations — is drafting executive orders to roll back Biden-era policies that have expanded abortion access, such as making abortions available in some circumstances at VA hospitals. They are also collecting resumes from conservative activists interested in becoming political appointees or career civil servants and training them to use overlooked levers of agency power to curb abortion access.

The linked article details the plans, and makes it very clear that the the right of a woman to choose to terminate a pregnancy will be at the very center of the 2024 federal election.  It will also be at the center of Indiana’s election for U.S. Senate–a contest that will likely pit “anti-woke” culture warrior Jim Banks, who supports a national ban with zero  exemptions, against Marc Carmichael, who wants to codify Roe v. Wade.

In November’s election, we’ll see whether voters understand that they are choosing between “forced birth” candidates and those who will protect women’s health and equality.

I’m pretty sure they will.

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An Accurate Description

I have previously cited observations and analyses from David French, a genuine conservative with whom I often agree. (Tomorrow, I will post about a significant disagreement with him, so it isn’t all sweetness and light.) French recently published a very perceptive essay in the New York Times, considering the worst possibilities of a second Trump term in office.

French began by recognizing that a second term wouldn’t be characterized by the internal divisions of the first, which saw an effort by responsible aides and appointees to contain Trump’s worst impulses. He recognized that, in a second term, there would be sufficient numbers of “pure Trump sycophants” to completely staff the White House–and “his MAGA base would replace the Federalist Society as the screener of his judicial appointments.” But he has an even more ominous fear.

I dread the division and conflict of a second Trump term, and I don’t minimize the possibility of Trump doing permanent political damage to the Republic. But the problem I’m most concerned about isn’t the political melee; it’s the ongoing cultural transformation of red America, a transformation that a second Trump term could well render unstoppable.

To put the matter as simply as possible: Eight years of bitter experience have taught us that supporting Trump degrades the character of his core supporters. There are still millions of reluctant Trump voters, people who’ve retained their kindness, integrity and good sense even as they cast a ballot for the past and almost certainly future G.O.P. nominee. I have friends and family members who vote for Trump, and I love them dearly. But the most enduring legacy of a second Trump term could well be the conviction on the part of millions of Americans that Trumpism isn’t just a temporary political expediency, but the model for Republican political success and — still worse — the way that God wants Christian believers to practice politics.

I will inject here my assumption that French’s own (genuine) Christianity is what has allowed him to continue dearly loving those in his family who support Donald Trump. Not being a Christian of any sort–and being blessed with a family utterly devoid of Trumpers–I will admit that I can conceive of no way I could continue to respect a family member who failed to see Donald Trump for the ignorant, self-absorbed and increasingly mentally-ill specimen he is. And in the absence of respect, love comes hard…

As French writes, he has never before seen extremism penetrate a vast American community so deeply, so completely and so comprehensively.

As the Iowa caucuses approached, Trump escalated his language, going so far as to call his political opponents “vermin” and declaring that immigrants entering America illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country.” The statement was so indefensible and repugnant that many expected it to hurt Trump. Yet a Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll found that a 42 percent plurality of likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers said the statement would make them more likely to support Trump — a substantially greater percentage than the 28 percent who said it would make them less likely to support him.

French notes with alarm that  numerous “Christian” Republicans believe Donald Trump is God’s chosen man to save America. Trump himself shared a video modeled on Paul Harvey’s famous video “So God Made a Farmer,” that proclaims “God Made Trump.” The result–as French quite accurately notes–is “a religious movement steeped in fanaticism but stripped of virtue.”

Absent public virtue, a republic can fall. And a Trump win in 2024 would absolutely convince countless Americans that virtue is for suckers, and vice is the key to victory. If Trump loses a second time, there is a chance he’ll end up a painful aberration in American politics, a depressing footnote in our national story. But if he wins again, the equation will change and history may record that he was not the culmination of a short-lived reactionary moment, but rather the harbinger of a greater darkness to come.

I’ve quoted liberally from French’s essay, because I think he is absolutely correct–he has identified the (terrifying) stakes of this year’s election, and the consequences of victories for Trump and the MAGA Republicans who idolize and emulate him. (Here in Indiana, that most definitely includes mini-Trumpers Braun and Banks.)

Sociologists, psychologists and political scientists have a variety of theories about why people embrace fascism. We’re still exploring the reasons so many “good Germans” refused to see the writing on those walls.

Whatever the reason, the rest of us absolutely cannot allow America to enter that “greater darkness.” Polls may show a majority of Republicans have lost their way, but a majority of Americans have not. That majority needs to vote.

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An Interesting Analogy

A reader recently sent me a New York Times subscriber newsletter by Nate Cohn that drew an analogy between the upcoming Presidential race and the election in 1948. Most of us remember that election–if we remember it at all–for the iconic picture of a victorious President Truman holding up a newspaper with the headline “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

Cohn goes through a number of ways in which the run-up to that election is strikingly similar to the run-up to this November. For example, voters were sour about the economy, despite the fact that it was doing well–his subtitle was “Americans were angry with Truman because of high prices in the aftermath of World War II, even as other economic signals looked promising.”

If there’s a time that might make sense of today’s political moment, postwar America might just be it. Many analysts today have been perplexed by public dissatisfaction with the economy, as unemployment and gross domestic product have remained strong and as inflation has slowed significantly after a steep rise. To some, public opinion and economic reality are so discordant that it requires a noneconomic explanation, sometimes called “vibes,” like the effect of social media or a pandemic hangover on the national mood.

But in the era of modern economic data, Harry Truman was the only president besides Joe Biden to oversee an economy with inflation over 7 percent while unemployment stayed under 4 percent and G.D.P. growth kept climbing. Voters weren’t overjoyed then, either. Instead, they saw Mr. Truman as incompetent, feared another depression and doubted their economic future, even though they were at the dawn of postwar economic prosperity.

As Cohn notes, the parallels are striking, although today, inflation followed a pandemic rather than a war. But there was a great housing crisis caused by excess demand, as troops returned from overseas, not unlike the shortage of affordable housing that we are facing today. It was also a time of labor unrest–an unrest we are also experiencing. As Cohn reports,”The most severe inflation of the last 100 years wasn’t in the 1970s, but in 1947, reaching around 20 percent.”

Mr. Truman’s popularity collapsed. By spring in 1948, an election year, his approval rating had fallen to 36 percent, down from over 90 percent at the end of World War II. He fell behind the Republican Thomas Dewey in the early head-to-head polling. He was seen as in over his head. The New Republic ran a front-page editorial titled: “As a candidate for president, Harry Truman should quit.”

We’ve been hearing that refrain recently, as well.

In retrospect, it’s hard to believe voters were so frustrated. Historians generally now consider Mr. Truman one of the great presidents, and the postwar period was the beginning of the greatest economic boom in American history. By any conceivable measure, Americans were unimaginably better off than during the Great Depression a decade earlier. Unemployment remained low by any standard, and consumers kept spending. The sales of seemingly every item — appliances, cars and so on — were an order of magnitude higher than before the war.

Truman’s decision to desegregate the armed forces wasn’t exactly met with applause, either.

Again, the similarities are stunning. The essay proceeds to report the results of that year’s polling on a variety of issues, and calling the results “grim” would be a massive understatement. But Harry Truman won, and Cohn goes into considerable detail about the themes of his campaign, and why he eked out a victory.

What Cohn doesn’t address is the single biggest difference between Truman versus Dewey and the likely upcoming contest between Biden and Trump.

The 1948 campaign was waged between a successful but undervalued President and a legitimate and sane contender; the upcoming election will pit a successful and undervalued President against an ignorant, narcissistic, mentally-ill cult leader who is poses an existential threat to the Constitution, democracy and the rule of law.

Thomas Dewey was a traditional candidate with a respectable and relevant resume. He understood government, having served as Governor of New York. There was no reason to fear that his occupancy of the Oval Office would bring about chaos, introduce fascism and/or destroy the Republic. (And after the votes were counted, he didn’t claim he’d “really” won…)

Cohn’s analysis is excellent as far as it goes. What it fails to highlight is what we all know: the biggest asset Joe Biden has in the upcoming election is Donald Trump. I agree with the reported sentiment of a participant in a focus group (of Republicans!): If the contest is between Trump and Joe Biden,  I’ll vote for Biden even if he’s in a coma.

Today is Martin Luther King day. Every vote for Donald Trump is a vote to reject King’s dream.

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When People Tell You Who They Are…

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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