Trump: How Low Can You Go?

Click here for an article at Slate by William Saletan entitled "Trump Is a Remorseless Advocate of Crimes Against Humanity," chronicling Trump's offenses.

Ridiculous Rudy

Click here for an article in The New York Times Magazine, by Jonathan Mahler, entitled "The Fog of Rudy," subtitled "Did he change -- or did America?"

It's a longish article trying to untangle the mess that is Rudy Giuliani, just as the impeachment trial is about to start.

George Will: "Mea Culpa"

Here is an article at CNN, dated June 26, 2016, by Daniella Diaz, entitled "George Will: Trump's judge comments prompted exit from GOP":

George Will, the conservative commentator and columnist, said Sunday that he changed his voter registration to "unaffiliated" 23 days ago and has left the Republican Party because of Donald Trump.

"After Trump went after the 'Mexican' judge from northern Indiana then (House Speaker) Paul Ryan endorsed him, I decided that in fact this was not my party anymore," Will said on "Fox News Sunday."

Trump attacked Will on Twitter over his decision to leave the GOP Sunday morning, writing: "George Will, one of the most overrated political pundits (who lost his way long ago), has left the Republican Party. He's made many bad calls."

Will responded on "Fox News Sunday," saying: "He has an advantage on me, because he can say everything he knows about any subject in 140 characters and I can't."

He said he'd joined the Republican Party in 1964, inspired by Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, a founder of the conservative movement and a key figure in the party then.

"I joined it because I was a conservative, and I leave it for the same reason: I'm a conservative," Will said. "The long and the short of it is, as Ronald Reagan said when he changed his registration, 'I did not leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me,' " he said.

Will first announced his decision to leave the GOP at a Federalist Society luncheon Friday. He told the audience: "This is not my party," according to PJ Media, a conservative news website.

The Pulitzer Prize-winner confirmed to PJM in an interview after his speech that he had left the party and was now "an unaffiliated voter in the state of Maryland" before switching the subject.

PJM reported that Will cited Ryan's endorsement of Trump is one of the reasons why he decided to leave the party. Will didn't say whether he'd vote for either Democratic presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton or a third-party candidate, such as Libertarian Gary Johnson.

Will, who worked on President Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign, also said at the luncheon that Trump as president with "no opposition" from a Republican-led Congress would be worse than Clinton as president with a Republican-led Congress. When asked by PJ Media about his message to conservatives regarding Trump, Will responded, "Make sure he loses. Grit their teeth for four years and win the White House."

Steve Schmidt: "Mea Culpa"

Click here for an article in Rolling Stone magazine by Andy Kroll, entitled "Ex-Republican Operative Steve Schmidt: ‘The Party of Trump Must Be Obliterated. Annihilated. Destroyed.’" It's an old article, dated June 26, 2018.

The article begins:

Steve Schmidt has worked at the highest levels of Republican politics. He helped run George W. Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign and oversaw the confirmations of Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito. He led Sen. John McCain’s ’08 presidential bid and helped introduce Sarah Palin to the world. The American Association of Political Consultants once named him its “GOP Campaign Manager of the Year.”

But today, Schmidt is finished with the Republican Party. He renounced his membership last week in a series of withering tweets that quickly went viral. Under Trump, he wrote, the party had become “corrupt, indecent, and immoral.” With the exception of a select few, the GOP was “filled with feckless cowards who disgrace and dishonor the legacies of the party’s greatest leaders.” He pointed to the Trump administration’s family separation policy and use of detention centers for young immigrant children – “internment camps for babies” – and the refusal of House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to repudiate the president.

Here's the rest of the article, in its entirety:

Why did you finally decide to leave the Republican Party?
I think it’s fair to say I’ve been estranged from the party on a number of issues going back to my advocacy and support for marriage equality in 2009 and then my opposition to the populism and the nationalism that we’ve seen. The reality that I’ve come to is that the party stands at an hour at which it is irredeemable, where it has died and bled out because of the cowardice and fecklessness of its leaders.

When Trump was elected, there were three parties in Washington: the Trump party, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. The Republican Party had every chance to put a check on his vile personal conduct, his administration’s outlandish corruption, his fetishizing and affinity for autocrats around the world and his undermining of the western alliance.

How did it get to this point?
I think it’s important to understand the history of the Republican Party. It was founded in 1854 because of the moral collapse of the Whig Party, specifically around the question of race and the expansion of slavery into the western territories.

The Republican Party remained the party of the North and the West culturally in this country until the Civil Rights Act. On the day that LBJ signs the Civil Rights Act, he says, “I feel like I’ve lost the South.” Over time, beginning with Richard Nixon in ’68, with the Southern Strategy and the appeal to white working-class Southerners, the Republican Party is uprooted from the North and the West. That is the party I was born into.

This present strain of know-nothingism has long been in the party’s DNA.
This cancer has always been there. This dormant cancer. But it has become fully embraced in this moment. We’re seeing at this moment a president of the United States do five things. He is using mass rallies that are fueled by constant lying to incite fervor and devotion in his political base. The second thing we see him do is to affix blame for every problem in the world. Many of them are complex, not so different from the issues faced at the end of Agrarian age and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. We see him attack minority populations with words like “invade” and “infest.” The third thing he does is a create a shared sense of victimization caused by the scapegoated populations. This is the high act of Trumpism: From Trump to Sean Hannity to Laura Ingraham, everyone is a victim. The fourth thing he does is he alleges conspiracy by nefarious and unseen hidden forces – the “deep state.” And the fifth thing is the assertion that “I am the law, that I am above it.” He just said immigrants don’t get a hearing; they don’t get a court representation.

So the party’s evolution is as much cultural as it is political or ideological.
The two parties for a long time were not homogeneous ideologically. There were plenty of conservatives in the Democratic Party, and there were no small number of liberals in the Republican Party. Now, culturally, we’re in thrall to theocratic crackpots like Mike Huckabee and Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell, where you’re able to justify the candidacy of a Roy Moore because you want to keep the Senate seat. The theocracy and crackpot sewer conservatism has taken over.

What you’ve seen is this rapid devolution over the last 18 months of the Republican Party becoming a white ethno-nationalist party, a blood-and-soil party that is protectionist, isolationist, that is rooted in resentment and grievance.

The Republican Party isn’t going to die because of Trump. It’s going to die because of Ryan and McConnell. You’re now left with one political party in support of liberal democracy.

Would these same forces have reared their heads if we’d had a Marco Rubio or a Hillary Clinton presidency?
It’s always been there. It’s been there from the Know-Nothing movement in the 1840s. The effect of Trump is the justification it gives to people who are angered by Trump to act more like Trump. To debase themselves into opposition. If you want to oppose Trump, the first thing you should do is say, “I’m not going to do one thing that makes it worse.” Because making it worse helps Trump. Part of the damage of this era is his debasement and his purposeful divisions. That’s unique in all of history.

President Obama said he draws a straight line from McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate to Trump’s election. You helped McCain pick Palin in 2008. Did she usher in the Trump era?
I think people miss the point on Sarah Palin. She’s not the cause. She’s a symptom. The sickness is how people reacted to her after you knew what she was. There’s never been an era absent of demagogues. What there hasn’t been is an ability of those demagogues to gain actual power – certainly not at a national level. We threw the ball down the field [by picking Palin] and it didn’t work. I had no idea what she was and didn’t know until a couple days after we picked her. But by the time the race ends, everybody knows. Yet what happens? Palin gets a million-dollar TV contract on Fox.

Can the Republican Party be saved?
If the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower and Teddy Roosevelt and Reagan is to be redeemed and resurrected, then the party of Trump must be obliterated. Annihilated. Destroyed. And all of the collaborators, the complicit enablers, the school of cowards, need to go down. Maybe something can regenerate from that.

I don’t view it so much differently than I view a forest fire. A forest fire is part of a natural cycle of the forest. The forest burns, and through its burning and destruction, it is regenerated and made healthy again. For the Republican Party and the conservative movement, with its rot, its corruption, its indecency … before there can be any talk of restoration, there must be a season of burning.

Max Boot: "Mea Culpa"

Click here for an article by David Corn, entitled "'We Need to Destroy the Republican Party': A Conservative Luminary Calls for a Clean Start (In which Max Boot says the GOP is racist, the Iraq War was wrong, and Trumpism is a cancer)."

Corn kicks things off as follows:

David Corn: You were a golden boy of conservative punditry. You joined the Wall Street Journal editorial page in 1994 at 24. You were the op-ed editor four years later. You became a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard and a blogger for Commentary. You were in neocon heaven—a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, an adviser to John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. You were one of the major voices in favor of the Iraq War. And in your forthcoming book, you write with great introspection and humility, “I can finally acknowledge the obvious: It was all a big mistake. Saddam Hussein was heinous, but Iraq was better off under his tyrannical rule than the chaos that followed. I regret advocating the invasion and feel guilty about all the lives lost.” I mean, Max, this is almost, maybe it is, an apology. What brought you to that point?

Corn quotes Boot as saying:

“I am now convinced that coded racial appeals—those dog whistles—had at least as much, if not more, to do with the electoral success of the modern Repub­lican Party than all of the domestic and foreign policy proposals crafted by well-­intentioned analysts like me. This is what liberals have been saying for decades while accusing the Republican Party of racism. I never believed them. Now I do.”

How did he fail to see what was going on with the Republican party, right under his nose? Boot says:

I was in my conservative bunker, and I thought this was a gross libel against the Republican Party to claim that we were catering to racism, or that it was a libel on America to claim that America was a pervasively racist society. And then Trump came along and I realized, “Wait a second. There is a much larger constituency for racism and xenophobia than I had realized.” And it made me think, “Oh, my goodness. This is why a lot of people were voting Republican.” It wasn’t because they loved supply-side economics. It wasn’t because they supported NATO. It was because they were looking for a candidate who would champion the interests of white people. And Donald Trump did that more unabashedly and more unapologetically than previous Republican candidates had done. That was a wake-up call.

And: "It makes me realize how much of American politics is tribal and how little of it has to do with principles or ideas. The reason why so many people are Republicans is because they hate Democrats; the actual substance of what Republicans stand for almost doesn’t matter. And that’s been a shocking realization."

Later in the article, he says: "Within the grassroots, a lot of people really love the Trump message, the racism, the xenophobia, the nonstop insults against liberals. That’s actually what they like most about him."

When Boot started to become more skeptical, he saw racist treatment of African Americans by police officers differently, and the injustices of the male establishment towards women: “Hey, feminists have a point when they talk about the abuses of patriarchal society and the suffering that women endure in America.”

On the subject of race, Boot says:

I can talk about my own blindness. I thought, “I’m not racist. And I’m a Republican. So it seems like a gross libel to accuse Republicans and conservatives of being racist if I personally am not racist.” And what I’ve realized is there are a lot of racists that the Republican Party is appealing to. There’s also been a disconnect between what Republicans do in office and what they do on the campaign trail. Because going back to 1964, when the parties basically switched positions on civil rights, Republicans have been appealing for white votes with coded racial appeals. Whether it was Nixon’s Southern strategy, or in 1980 Ronald Reagan kicking off his general election campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, or the Willie Horton ad from George H.W. Bush.

He adds this tidbit: "Before Donald Trump, the Republican Party was a majority conservative party with a white nationalist fringe. Now it’s a white nationalist party with a conservative fringe."

What is wrong with the leaders of the party? "These people that I used to admire have sold out their principles. Nobody’s more shocked and surprised than I am. This is a movement to which I dedicated my whole life. And now I realize, what the hell was that about? Who were these people? They’re not who I thought they were."

Again, how did he fail to see what liberals saw, what was becoming of the Republican party? He says:

I think it’s crazy that Republicans are opposed to all gun control when we have such a rampant problem with gun violence. But I just never tackled it. Or when Republicans deny climate change, which is a scientific fact, I didn’t deal with it. I just stayed in my lane, foreign policy and national security policy, and ignored the craziness all around me. I went with the tribe. I took the path of least resistance, and now it’s making me realize, no, I’ve got to think for myself, and that’s something very few people do, because being part of one of these political tribes, as much as anything, is a substitute for thought.

What can be done to change the party? Boot says:

"... my hope is that the Republican Party will suffer massive and repeated drubbings at the ballot box. That’s why I urge everybody to vote straight-ticket Democratic even though I have a lot of disagreements with Democrats. I’m not a Democrat; I’m an independent. But for the health of our republic, I think we need to destroy the Republican Party. We need congressional oversight of Donald Trump, which you’re never going to get out of Republicans. I think you need to punish the Republicans for taking these appalling positions, abusing minorities, championing white nationalism, isolationism, protectionism. The only way to wean them from that is to punish them electorally."

How does he feel about the future?

"I am a lot less optimistic or, if you like, Pollyannaish about the future of America than I used to be. I was this immigrant kid who came here in 1976 from the Soviet Union, and I’ve always believed in America and the goodness and greatness of America, and that’s really been my greatest faith. And that faith has been battered. This is a country that could elect Donald Trump. People like me kind of arrogantly assumed it can’t happen here, that there’s something in the water in America that renders us immune from this kind of threat to our democracy. And lo and behold, we’re not immune. We could easily go the way of countries that are backsliding from their democracy."

Notable Quotes From 2019

Click here for an article in The Washington Post by Aaron Blake entitled "37 quotes that defined American politics in 2019." Here are my favorites: 4. “The DNC server and that conspiracy theory has got to go. If he continues to focus on that white whale, it’s going to bring him down.” -Former White House homeland security adviser Tom Bossert in September on Trump’s theory that Ukraine, rather than Russia, might have interfered in the 2016 election. Trump has since been impeached over the push for the probes.

8. “It is impossible that the whistleblower is a hero and I’m not. And I will be the hero! These morons — when this is over, I will be the hero.” -Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani to the Atlantic. Giuliani added: “Anything I did should be praised.”

12. “I am ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is. He is a racist. He is a con man. He is a cheat.” -Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen, in his testimony to Congress.

16. “So, I guess I’m the Meryl Streep of generals.” -Former defense secretary Jim Mattis, responding to Trump calling him overrated. Mattis noted Trump had also called Streep overrated. Mattis departed over Trump’s announcement that the United States would withdraw from Syria.

23. “It’s never a tough vote for me when I’m standing on principle.” -Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) to The Washington Post’s Seung Min Kim, explaining his opposition to Trump using a national emergency declaration to fund his border wall. Tillis, though, wound up voting to support the decision in the face of a conservative backlash back home.

29. “I worked with John Kelly, and he was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great president.” -White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, who often channels her boss in her public comments, on former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly’s criticisms of Trump.

31. “He sees what’s going on, I guess, if you look at what’s happening in Los Angeles, where it’s so sad to look, and what’s happening in San Francisco and a couple of other cities, which are run by an extraordinary group of liberal people.” -Trump, when asked to respond to Russian President Vladimir Putin saying Western-style liberalism was “obsolete.” Trump apparently thought Putin was referring to liberal politicians in the western United States, rather than the Western world’s belief in the freedom of the individual.

An Argument Against Congressional Term Limits

Click here for an article at Daily Kos by Joan McCarter entitled "https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/1/1/1905279/-No-Tom-Steyer-term-limits-aren-t-the-solution-for-fixing-Congress." She says:

Now we've got another wealthy businessman running for president while calling himself a reformer and, of course, pushing the old, tired, and simplistic notion that kicking the bums out on a rotating basis is the answer. Tom Steyer has an op-ed in Newsweek arguing just that. "I've been proposing congressional term limits of 12 years in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate. If we want bold change, we need new and different people in charge," he writes. He says that term limits "reorient incentives away from campaign donations and toward the actual work of governing." He also argues that term limits would mean "lobbyists must now make their arguments on the strength of their merits, rather than on relationships alone." He says "We need new ideas, new people, new approaches to hard problems—and term limits deliver those incentives."

Sure, that all sounds great, and like every simple solution posed to a complex problem, it's woefully ill-informed. Does he really imagine that only getting 12 years in federal office would keep opportunists and fortune-seekers out? That they wouldn't get in, steal everything that's not nailed down in those 12 years, and get out to go right to a lobbying firm so they can keep on grifting? If so, he hasn't truly been paying attention. His ideas about lobbyists and how lobbying works are embarrassingly naive. He thinks they'll have less influence because they'll have to use their ideas instead of their friendship (and money)? Lobbyists will roll over newcomers because they'll know how to do it, since they'll know how it all works.

This applies not just to lobbyists, but also staff. The only way continual churn wouldn't destroy Congress would be having essentially permanent committee staff that stays in place.

And:

This anodyne and simplistic thinking is a distraction from the kind of reforms that would really solve the problem of an increasingly corrupt and partisan Congress: public financing of campaigns and real campaign finance reform. Start with new laws to overturn the Supreme Courts Citizens United decision, and just keep on going. If you want to get rid of the nefarious influence of big money in politics, get rid of the big money. Then start on the structural reforms that will fix the workings of Congress, like restoring the function of the committees in the legislative process.