“Facts” in the Trump 2.0 era: Trump said it and I believe it!

One of my longtime Facebook friends who seems to be a bit, uh, uncritical about Trumpista claims, did a post there welcoming people to disagree with what she says. This is a somewhat edited version of what I posted in response.

I would say these days that we all have to keep in mind that misinformation and “alternative facts” are more easily accessible than ever. But exchanging opinions about claims that are badly reported and/or disconnected from reality isn’t especially meaningful.

For instance, Trump has recently been claiming he has secured commitments of 15 or maybe 17 trillion dollars in new investments in the US. I’ve heard that reported and have seen from at least two legitimate news sites video of Trump making the claims. So it was not an AI fake or something. And I’ve heard one or two usually-careful commentators dismissing the number as frivolous because the amount would be half or more of US GDP. I at least looked up what the current US GDP estimate is, which is between 29 and 30 trillion dollars. So the amounts he stated would be half or more of the GDP. And to me the claim seems extravagantly absurd.

Now, if I were going to do further fact-checking, I would look for some kind of official list of those expected investments via the White House website or maybe Truth Social. I would want to know what the timelines on the investments would be: One year? Five years? Ten years? And I would want to see what kind of investments they are: New factories built? Foreign companies planning to expand their retail facilities in the US? Money expected to be invested in US private equity funds or stocks in American companies? Additional income from tariffs? I assume that most economists would see those latter two as not being all “hard” investments. And actually, tariff income isn’t investment at all, it is income to the federal government – something Trump himself seems genuinely not to understand – and some of that theoretically could go into government spending that would generate more investment.

I would also ask how firm and specific these investment commitments are. Are they signed contracts? Explicit trade agreements? Serious projections? Informal pronouncements?

But if facts are irrelevant, then the only exchange that can happen would be exchanging slogans. And it’s also true (based on decades of polling data) that a big part of Trump’s voting base are fundamentalist Christians, most of whom are very familiar with the bumper sticker showing a Bible and the slogan, “God said it, I believe it, and that’s all there is to it.” In that mode of thinking and believing, facts really don’t matter, only which side someone picks.

Here's a version from Derric Johnson’s Vocal Orchestra, which has a certain amount of dorky whitebread charm. Complete with quotations from the King James’ Bible. (1)



Notes:

(1) God Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It. Derric Johnson’s Vocal Orchestra-Topic YouTube channel 05/18/2025. <https://youtu.be/znAR9swvdCc?si=t7EiVoDU43Qex9Yo> (Accessed: 2025-30-10).

Update on the Christian nationalist right and its partners in political authoritarianism

Frank Schaeffer offers a summary of the current Christian nationalist influence in the Trumpist movement, aka, the Republican Party. He emphasizes the particular influence on the far-right Opus Dei on the Trumpistas. (1)

Putting TechBro authoritarians and dyspeptic Christian nationalist cranks in charge of the country is a really bad idea.

Not surprisingly, the head honcho of the Project 2025 Project, Kevin Roberts:

,,, has close ties and receives regular spiritual guidance from an Opus Dei-led center in Washington DC, a hub of activity for the radical and secretive Catholic group.

Roberts acknowledged in a speech last September that – for years – he has visited the Catholic Information Center [CIC], a K Street institution headed by an Opus Dei priest and incorporated by the archdiocese of Washington, on a weekly basis for mass and “formation”, or religious guidance. Opus Dei also organizes monthly retreats at the CIC. [my emphasis] (2)

Nina Burleigh in New York magazine recently described the CIC group this way:

[The CIC is ] run by Opus Dei (Latin for “the Work of God”), which is not focused on ministering to the masses (and if it were, it would be failing spectacularly, as more Americans are leaving the Catholic Church than joining it, by as much as four to one).Instead, it is focused on marshaling the people who have various forms of authority over the masses (Opus Dei reportedly calls them the “intellectuals”) to its various revanchist causes. The group targets, and attracts, people like Donald Trump’s current running mate, J.D. Vance, a convert to conservative Catholicism by way of Opus Dei–connected clergy and influencers.

Wait, Opus Dei, you say? That menacing group of self-flagellators to which albino assassin-monk Silas belonged that lies at the center of the web of conspiracies in The Da Vinci Code? In the Tom Hanks movie, Paul Bettany played Silas. The group was admittedly fictionalized to up the drama in the thriller, but it does, in fact, exist and has for nearly a century, one of the more exotic of the many factions within the vast Catholic Church. It would seem to be precisely the kind of mysterious clique with tentacles into the elites that would pique MAGA’s conspiratorial fever. But the CIC, which doubles as the Opus Dei office in Washington, and the national network of wealthy and powerful right-wing Catholics affiliated with it are among the most effective forces in MAGA world and the American Christian-nationalist movement. It is allied with Protestant Evangelicals in many of its goals but is more hierarchical and often more institutionally organized. Opus Dei can marshal centuries of intellectual heft of the Church behind it. [my emphasis] (3)

The vibes around Opus Dei are at the least “weird,” to use a newly trendy word, thanks to Tim Walz. A 1995 article by James Martin from the Jesuit magazine America with the bland title of “Opus Dei in the United States” (4) provides a careful report illustrating that. (For those not current on the position of Catholic orders, if Opus Dei falls on the hard right of the political-theological spectrum, the Jesuits are on the other end.) If anything, Opus Dei has become even “weirder” over the last three decades. I mean, they are partnering closely with the Trumpistas, after all!

Notes:

(1) The (Opus) DEI Candidates. Frank Schaeffer YouTube channel 09/24/2024. <https://youtu.be/w545gH-bnYE?si=2IHO1YHs3LnigsTb> (Accessed: 2024-26-09).

(2) Leingang, Rache & Kirchgaessner, Stephanie (2024): Kevin Roberts, architect of Project 2025, has close ties to radical Catholic group Opus Dei. Guardian 07/26/2024. <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/26/kevin-roberts-project-2025-opus-dei> (Accessed: 2024-26-09).

(3) Burleigh, Nina (2024): How Opus Dei Conquered D.C. New York 09/26/2024. <https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/opus-dei-members-catholic-washington-dc-politicans-jd-vance.html> (Accessed: 2024-26-09).

(4) Marin, James (1995)Opus Dei in the United States. America 02/25/1995. <https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/1995/02/25/opus-dei-united-states-james-martin> (Accessed: 2024-26-09).

Jennifer Silva study on working-class voters in Pennsylvania

The Jacobin Show podcast for 02/10/2021 takes a look at the rural/urban divide in US politics, including an interview with the author of We're Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America (2019), Pain and Politics in Rural America w/ Jennifer Silva:

I haven't yet read her book. But her project seems like a very useful complement to the much discussed study by Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016). I've criticized Hochschild's book that focuses on white people in the Lake Charles, Lousiana, area because she took too credulous a view of common white supremacist narratives. Silva, also a sociologist like Hochschild, focused on working-class people in Pennsylvania. Her study also apparently relies heavily on examining people's personal narratives of themselves and their lives but also takes a critical view of how closely those narratives reflect their larger social reality.

Silva is also the author of Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty (2013), which is also briefly discussed in the interview and discussion with host Jen Pan and Ariella Thornhill that begins in the video after 55:00. It deals with the perennial political dilemma for the left of how is it so that many poor and working-class people decide to support candidates who pursue an economic agenda that primarily, or even overwhelmingly, favors the narrow material interests of the very wealthy.

In this interview, she has some worthwhile reflections on how social powerlessness can make conspiracy theories attractive.

One point that comes out in the discussion here is that Silva's working-class subjects were often proud of the way that had overcome real hardships in their lives and learned from the experience. The discussion suggests that this could be a reason Trump fans among this group were not put off by his bankruptcies because they understood in the context of their own life lessons of learning from failures.

And while it's an interesting point, we have to also remembers that reality matters. Trump's repeated bankruptcies were part of his own often dishonest, even criminal, approach to business. And risk and setbacks are qualitatively different for a trust-fund baby like Trump who benefitted from some $300 million in funds given to him by his father than they are for the average children of coal miners or factory workers in Pennsylvania.

Trump's business career also shows his fondness for thuggish, mob-like practices. His political mentor was Roy Cohn, who after his service as counsel for Joe McCarthy's redhunting Senate Subcommittee went on to prosperity and success as a mob lawyer in New York City. Jesse James or Pretty Boy Floyd or Bonnie and Clyde understandably make entertaining folk heroes, especially once they are dead and gone. But do you really want to put Al Capone in charge of the government you depend on to save your neighborhood and city during a sudden pandemic?

Trump certainly provided a real-world experience of what that looks like!

The question the video discussion addresses is variously framed but comes down to asking, "Why do so many working people vote against their own economic interests?" It's actually gets at a multifaceted phenomenon. That formulation of the question can easily create the hope that there is some "magic bullet" answer.

But there's not. One thing that is especially good about the interview with Silva is that it brings out the contradictions and inconsistencies in the way people express political opinions and attitudes. That's true of everybody to some extent, of course. This requires organizers and political campaigners to look for key areas they can use to mobilize voters and activists to their cause. And even if we take economic class and socially-constructed gender roles as being the basic formative forces of political consciousness, at any given time and place, political alignments do not correspond exactly to those categories. Factors like racism, authoritarian personalities, religion, and general social atomization are all factors at work. And timely access to relevant information on political issues and elections is also extremely important.

It's also important to remember that even though individuals may express a variety of opinions and attitudes that seem to be spread out all over the left-right political spectrum, voting behavior is more consistent. People have an inclination to vote or not to vote. And in the US, voters tend to lean Republican or Democratic from one election to the next. Navigating the working-people-voting-for-oligarchic-interests problem involves longer-term organizing and development of political identity, not just elevating the importance of single issues. We've recently seen state ballot initiatives on the minimum wage win a notably larger vote than the Democrats win in those jurisdictions. Which means some minimum-wage-increase advocates also voted for Republican politicians that are dead set against it.

In Jen Pan's opening commentary at the start of the program, she plays a portion of a CBS news report from 2017 on political polarization which indulges a basic failure of the corporate press, the Both Sides Do It trope. The Pew study referenced in that 2017 report showing 81% of people saying that cannot agree on basic facts is only meaningful in the context of what facts are being talked about.

The partisan polarization in the US is distinctly asymmetric, with the Republicans in a decades-long process of radicalization and the Democrats slowly dragging themselves out of the neoliberal bog. But if One Side says that space-alien lizard people are conspiring with George Soros to import Central American refugees, and the Other Side says, well, no, that's not true at all and it's also crazy and anti-Semitic, then Both Sides would be part of the 81%. But one side's reality-testing abilities are functioning far better than the other's in that case.

Jen Pan in her commentary also references this Jacobin article by Meagan Day, The Indifferent and the Defiant 02/08/2021, which looks at the question of Trump's increased percentage of the Latino vote in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas in 2020, a surprising and much-discussed outcome of the election.

Timothy Snyder on the trajectory of Trumpism (1 of 2): "Gamers" and "Breakers"

Confirmed: There is no looming GOP "reckoning" over Trump, and there will never will be, no matter how many times naïve news outlets suggest otherwise.

For five years, the press has gotten this story wrong. Why? Today's Republican Party represents an unwieldy challenge for news outlets. It spent the winter wantonly trying to invalidate election results, while simultaneously endangering the masses during a public healthy crisis by deliberately misinforming Americans about the Covid-19 pandemic. It has also taken no disciplinary action against a new Congresswoman who previously supported the killing of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

Yet the press remains committed to portraying the GOP as a mainstream, center-right entity. That's why it keeps botching the "reckoning" story — reporters assume there is a Republican breaking point with Trump and the politics of hate and revenge he represents. But there never is.

- Eric Boehlert, Memo to media: the GOP's Trump "reckoning" is never coming Press Run 01/29/2021

I mentioned recently the Republican ritual of distancing themselves from previous Republican Presidents and failed Republican Presidential candidates.

But that is happening now only to a very limited extent. And it's getting a lot of pushback from the majority Republicans. (Nick Reynolds, Wyoming Capitol crowd cheers on Gaetz, seeks replacement for Cheney Casper Star-Tribune 01/28/2021)

That disavowal ritual has been part of the continuous radicalization of the Republican Party over the last four decades. It's not because the radicalization process has stopped. Nomiki Konst and her two guests in this clip looks at a recent comment by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the topic, AOC: GOP Is Full-On White Supremacist Party 01/29/2021:

Frank Luntz, who now calls himself a former Republican pollster, suggests in this long interview that Trumpism reflects the political radicalization of the Republican base. "These are not your parents' Republicans." (Trump's American Carnage: Frank Luntz (interview) PBS Frontline)

Part of the restraint on criticizing Trump is surely a horse-race one. Trump is still around, he has a fanatical following in the Republican base, and he is still eligible to run for President in 2024.

But Timothy Snyder's essay earlier this month offers a useful way to look at divisions within the Republican Party post-Capitol-riot, The American Abyss New York Times Magazine 01/09/2021. He sees today's Republican Party as an alliance between two political mentalities, which he labels the "gamers" and the "breakers". I might have picked Players and Destroyers, as the labels, but he doesn't.

In his schema, Mitch McConnell is emblematic of the Gamers and Trump of the Breakers. But he does not see this as a difference in basic policies and goal. Or even in their commitment to democracy, at least not in the sense of popular rule. Those he calls the Gamers are "concerned above all with gaming the system to maintain power, taking full advantage of constitutional obscurities, gerrymandering and dark money to win elections with a minority of motivated voters."

In other words, gaming major undemocratic elements of the system like the Electoral College, the structure of the Senate, and Supreme Court elimination of controls on campaign donations and of civil rights legislation to prevent disenfranchisement of voters based on race, to maintain dominant national power even when they cannot win a majority of votes nationally. "They have no interest in the collapse of the peculiar form of representation that allows their minority party disproportionate control of government." They want to maintain the forms of democracy and Constitutional government, in other words, even while they cheat the democratic system.

Wisconsin is one of the Gamers' success stories. "In 2012, the first election with the new [severely gerrymandered legislative districts] in place, Republicans won less than half the votes, but conquered 60 of the state’s 99 assembly seats. The Republicans grew their majority in 2014 and 2016, despite earning just over 50% of the statewide vote." (Sam Levine, Wisconsin: the state where American democracy went to die The Guardian 04/10/2020; my emphasis).

Snyder writes:

In the four decades since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have overcome the tension between the gamers and the breakers by governing in opposition to government, or by calling elections a revolution (the Tea Party), or by claiming to oppose elites. The breakers, in this arrangement, provide cover for the gamers, putting forth an ideology that distracts from the basic reality that government under Republicans is not made smaller butsimply diverted to serve a handful of interests.

At first, Trump seemed like a threat to this balance. His lack of experience in politics and his open racism made hima very uncomfortable figure for the party; his habit of continually telling lies was initially found by prominent Republicans to be uncouth. Yet after he won the presidency, his particular skills as a breaker seemed to create a tremendous opportunity for the gamers. Led by the gamer in chief, McConnell, they secured hundreds of federal judges and tax cuts for the rich.

Trump was unlike other breakers in that he seemed to have no ideology. His objection to institutions was that they might constrain him personally. He intended to break the system to serve himself — and this is partly why he has failed. Trump is a charismatic politician and inspires devotion not only among voters but among a surprising number of lawmakers, but he has no vision that is greater than himself or what his admirers project upon him. In this respect his pre-fascism fell short of fascism: His vision never went further than a mirror. He arrived at a trulybig lie not from any view of the world but from the reality that he might lose something. [my emphasis]

In other words, Snyder is agreeing with those who have been commenting that we got lucky in that Trump was too stupid to actually pull off a coup. And I think this is right, although we are finding out more all the time about how close he actually came, and we will know a lot more eventually.

But Trump didn't just talk and practice "revolutionary" symbolism. He actually wanted to "revolutionize" the system. Or more clearly, to use pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric and posturing to stage an actual authoritarian coup. Here is some of the putschist rhetoric from the Transcript of Trump's January 6 incitement speech (U.S. News/AP; my emphasis in bold), all part of a long speech in which he recounted fabricated tales of voter fraud and repeatedly invoked the names of Barack Obama and Stacey Abrams, both African-American politicians his white supremacist base despite. I'm including a longish selection, to give some context to Snyder's observation that given Trump's message, the storming of the Capitol "did make a kind of sense: If the election really had been stolen, as senators and congressmen were themselves suggesting, then how could Congress be allowed to move forward?" (my italics)

Trump, January 6:

The media is the biggest problem we have as far as I’m concerned, single biggest problem. The fake news and the Big tech. ...

All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they’re doing. And stolen by the fake news media. That’s what they’ve done and what they’re doing. We will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. ...

And by the way, does anybody believe that Joe had 80 million votes? Does anybody believe that? He had 80 million computer votes. It’s a disgrace. There’s never been anything like that. You could take third-world countries. Just take a look. Take third-world countries. Their elections are more honest than what we’ve been going through in this country. It’s a disgrace. It’s a disgrace. ...

We don’t have a free and fair press. Our media is not free, it’s not fair. It suppresses thought, it suppresses speech and it’s become the enemy of the people. It’s become the enemy of the people. It’s the biggest problem we have in this country. ...

We’re gathered together in the heart of our nation’s capital for one very, very basic and simple reason: To save our democracy. ...

For years, Democrats have gotten away with election fraud and weak Republicans. And that’s what they are. There’s so many weak Republicans. And we have great ones. Jim Jordan and some of these guys, they’re out there fighting. The House guys are fighting. But it’s, it’s incredible. ...

Many of the Republicans, I helped them get in, I helped them get elected. I helped Mitch get elected. I helped. I could name 24 of them, let’s say, I won’t bore you with it. And then all of a sudden you have something like this. It’s like, “Oh gee, maybe I’ll talk to the president sometime later.” No, it’s amazing.

They’re weak Republicans, they’re pathetic Republicans and that’s what happens. ...

But we look at the facts and our election was so corrupt that in the history of this country we’ve never seen anything like it. You can go all the way back. ...

Republicans are, Republicans are constantly fighting like a boxer with his hands tied behind his back. It’s like a boxer. And we want to be so nice. We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. And we’re going to have to fight much harder. ...

Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down.

Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.

Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. ...

The American people do not believe the corrupt, fake news anymore. They have ruined their reputation. But you know, it used to be that they’d argue with me. I’d fight. So I’d fight, they’d fight, I’d fight, they’d fight. Pop pop. You’d believe me, you’d believe them. Somebody comes out. You know, they had their point of view, I had my point of view, but you’d have an argument.

Now what they do is they go silent. It’s called suppression and that’s what happens in a communist country. That’s what they do, they suppress. You don’t fight with them anymore. Unless it’s a bad story. They have a little bad story about me, they make it 10 times worse and it’s a major headline. ...

Today, for the sake of our democracy, for the sake of our Constitution, and for the sake of our children, we lay out the case for the entire world to hear. You want to hear it?

(Audience responds: “Yeah”)

In every single swing state, local officials, state officials, almost all Democrats, made illegal and unconstitutional changes to election procedures without the mandated approvals by the state legislatures.

That these changes paved a way for fraud on a scale never seen before. ...

I’ve been telling these Republicans, get rid of Section 230. And for some reason, Mitch and the group, they don’t want to put it in there and they don’t realize that that’s going to be the end of the Republican Party as we know it, but it’s never going to be the end of us. Never. Let them get out. Let, let the weak ones get out. This is a time for strength.

They also want to indoctrinate your children in school by teaching them things that aren’t so. They want to indoctrinate your children. It’s all part of the comprehensive assault on our democracy, and the American people are finally standing up and saying no. This crowd is, again, a testament to it. ...

The radical left knows ...exactly what they’re doing. They’re ruthless and it’s time that somebody did something about it. ...

As this enormous crowd shows, we have truth and justice on our side. We have a deep and enduring love for America in our hearts. We love our country. ...

We have overwhelming pride in this great country and we have it deep in our souls. Together, we are determined to defend and preserve government of the people, by the people and for the people. ...

And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore. ...

Trumpism after the Capitol invasion

Historian Timothy Snyder in a post-Capitol-assaut interview, Has the threat of Trump really gone? 01/08/2021Jan 8, 2021, in which he discusses the effect of Trumpism on the future of democracy and the rule of law, in the US and elsewhere:

One of his most important points is that Biden's election as President initially provides only a reprieve from Trumpism. Not least because we can expect Trump to continue to lead what Snyder's calls a coup faction in the Republican Party.

People who have been following the far right systematically are not surprised by this. Daryl Johnson is one of them. About a week before this article, when the news first came out about Heather Heyer having been murdered by a neo-nazi in Charlottesville in 2017, I was literally attenting a panel that David Neiwert had organized about the seriousness of far-right terrorism in the US and how authorities were dangerously ignoring it. In fact, the way the Obama-Biden Administration handled he controversy over Johnson's official report or far-right terrorism in 2009 was one of the *worst* mistakes of their government. "By 2010, there were no intelligence analysts at DHS working domestic terrorism threats."

I just saw a post-Capitol-invasion interview with Timothy Snyder, who talks about how the Trumpistas are now a "coup faction" within the Republican Party, and how Biden's election in itself is only a reprieve from Trumpism. Biden and Harris really cannot afford to act like they are living in a world where Both Sides Do It and the real existing Republican Party is looking for some kind of Bipartisan harmony for it's own sake. After the spectacle this week at the Capitol, there's every reason to think the violent radical right will be even more active the next four years against the government that Trump's Coup Faction is claiming to be completely illegitimate.

He has numerous interesting observations besides, including about how authoritarians play on fear and how reducing the real fears - including the kind that come of what liberals sometimes sneer at as "economic uncertainty" - is essential to undercutting popular support for the Republican Coup Faction. He also stresses how important it is to deal effectively with the COVID-19 pandemic. As uncomfortable as it may be to the Brunch Liberalism approach ("we have a Democratic President again so we can all go back to brunch now"), the Biden-Harris Administration has to find a way to counter Republican obstructionism than the Obama-Biden Administration did. The obstacles to doing so are clearly huge. But the stakes are even bigger.

One of the biggest mistakes of the Obama-Biden Administration was caving to malicious Republican criticism - from the perspective of January 2021 seditious criticism - of the Homeland Security report on the real danger of far-right terrorism that was authored by Daryl Johnson, who described that failure in I warned of right-wing violence in 2009. Republicans objected. I was right. Washington Post 08/21/2017. This was published just over a week after Heather Heyer having been murdered by a neo-nazi in Charlottesville. "By 2010, there were no intelligence analysts at DHS working domestic terrorism threats."

Just to be clear. This was a decision by the Obama-Biden Department of Homeland Security whose chief Janet Napolitano - who served as president of the University of California 2013-2020 - went so far as to formally rescind the report that came under fire from Republicans. This was a decision made in response to irresponsible criticism from Republicans, an irresponsible surrender in pursuit of the illusionary goal of Bipartisan harmony with the Republican Party that was quickly radicalizing itself into the party of Donald Trump.

Paul Krugman returns to the theme of dealing with Radical Republicans, one which is is very familiar for him in Appeasement Got Us Where We Are New York Times 01/07/2021.

He's right on this, as he so often is, "Donald Trump ... is indeed a fascist — an authoritarian willing to use violence to achieve his racial nationalist goals. So are many of his supporters."

Krugman face-planted for a day or so in December over the $2,000 checks, then realized he was being careless about the politics of it. But he was one of the most prominent people who are were saying things like this during the Cheney-Bush Administration about the need to reign in their lawlessness. He's not at all new to this issue, and he's been trying for the last 20 years or so to get Democratic leaders to focus on how serious a problem Republican lawlessness is and has been.

Joe Biden has a moral and a political duty to hold Donald Trump and his enablers to account. A politics of “forgive and forget” will not unify the nation—it will simply ensure that Democrats lose control of Congress in 2022 and the presidency in 2024.
https://t.co/cJiUWirsVG

— John Nichols (@NicholsUprising) January 4, 2021

Krugman's point about the Michigan precedents is important. Armed Trumpistas last year walked right into the Michigan capitol building while the legislature was in session to intimidate the legislators. The Capitol attack was the same kind of action only with obviously more immediately murderous intentions.

And Krugman is right about this, too: "this isn’t over. If you aren’t terrified about what Trump might do between now and Inauguration Day, you haven’t been paying attention."

WSJ re DJT must resign:“he has betrayed his loyal supporters by lying to them about the election and the ability of Congress and Mr. Pence to overturn it. He has refused to accept the basic bargain of democracy, which is to accept the result, win or lose.” https://t.co/iMhhmd2flp

— John W. Dean (@JohnWDean) January 10, 2021

And this: "Don’t say that we should look forward, not back; accountability for past actions will be crucial if we want the future to be better." If the Biden Justice Depaprtment operates as it's legally required to do, it will conduct professional, independent investigations of major crimes committed under Trump and prosecute them as crimes. How many hundreds of thousands of black citizens are disenfranchised today because they got convicted of marijuana possession and their state legislatures still aren't willing to "look forward, not backward" even decades later when it comes to them?

A historical reminder. Before last week, the Capitol had not been raided by armed enemies of America since the War of 1812. But white supremacist violence has struck the Capitol before. Like when the seditious, pro-slavery South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks nearly beat Massachusetts antislavery Sen. Charles Sumner nearly to death in the Senate chamber in 1856.

Biden, Confederate Republicans, and the heritage (and continuing presence) of Obama

Now that Joe Biden has been elected President, even a thoroughly Both-Sides-Do-It guy like Chuck Todd is now willing to call Trump and at least some Republicans anti-democratic, as he showed on Meet the Press yesterday. But he still brought on loyal Trumpist ally Tennessee Confederate Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander to defend Trump with, you got it, Both Sides Do It. Sen. Alexander seems to think that Georgia's Stacey Abrahms was also a Presidential candidate.

But in the Bruch Liberalism daydream that now that Trump is leaving the White House, we're back to our Exceptional American normality with a Democratic President and a Republican Party with stodgy ideas and bad manners that is nevertheless willing to be a loyal opposition and respect the results of elections. Unfortunately, anyone holding on to that idea has probably been taking the commentary from people like Chuck Todd the last way to seriously in the last 20 years or so.

Because the Both Sides Do It world that mainstream pundits report on is a convenient fantasy to protect their access to shameless partisans who will give them anonymous partisan quotes to use: the world of the End of History in which taking political contests more seriously than sports matches. But that world, to the extent it ever actually corresponded to reality, is not the one we live in now.

At the latest, that world became a zombie haunting corporate media newsrooms sometime between the New York Times' first Whitewater story in 1992 and Bush v. Gore in 2000. Trying to make sense of today's US politics against a backdrop of that fantasy land is about as helpful as trying to learn how parents should approach distance learning for 10-year-old during a COVID lockdown by watching episodes of Leave It to Beaver.

In this Facebook post of 12/13/2020, Dan Rather writes:

But there is of course another deep worry pervasive in this country. It is about America's heretofore unbroken peaceful transfer of power between presidents. It is the notion that all of us, regardless of party, play by and revere the same democratic ideal that we the people have the power to fire our leaders in free and fair elections. This election has revealed a president who doesn't believe any of that, and a party and base that is eager to go along with him. This is not fringe; it is a movement that encompassess [sic] tens of millions of Americans. And to defeat it and preserve American democracy will require resolve, patience, ingenuity, and grit. [my emphasis]

The problem of Trumpism is a particular, symptomatic moment in the Republican Party whose Presidential candidate he was and which has followed him remarkably loyally in his anti-democracy program. The Republican Party is now the Confederate Party, the John Calhoun Party, the Trump Party.

For Democrats and anyone who considers themselves "left" in current, reality-based terms (i.e., not QAnon/One America News/FOX News/Republican Party terms), part of understanding the present is understanding how that, however "classy" and intelligent and compassionate President Obama may come off as a media figure, the combination of his political program during his Presidency and his strategy for the Democratic Party not only failed to achieve the Bipartisanship which he really seemed to value as a good thing in itself. It also left the Democratic Party unable to defeat Donald Trump in 2016 and left their leaders largely dazed and confused on how to politically combat him during the last four years.

Lili Loofbourow's article Barack Obama Sat Out the Past Four Years and It Shows (Slate 12/11/2020) is a timely reminder of this. Obama is not only a popular speaker and media star in his own right. He's also still very influential in the Democratic Party, and very much on the side of Establishment (i.e., conservative) policies and political messaging. She calls attention to one of the most important and persistent characteristics of his political rhetoric:

Barack Obama is ready to come back into the spotlight. After four years spent mostly out of the public eye, right on the heels of Donald Trump’s defeat, the ex-president is suddenly everywhere. ...

But in these recent appearances, the most surprising thing might be that his political remarks about this moment feel stale. Maybe his absence from the fray over these past four years has cost him. Maybe he’s using a different timescale to measure progress (as he sometimes explicitly says he is). But even his harshest remarks about the right don’t capture the hysterical party we’re watching try to steal an election. His recent criticisms of “snappy” leftist political slogans like “defund the police” reflect an abiding faith in a theory of politics that seems passé—as several Black intellectuals and activists have pointed out. Boiled down to its essentials, Obama’s argument is that one shouldn’t “alienate” people who might be converted to your cause if you say things in just the right way. In practice, that means tucking the political self into a package that a “reasonable person”—that usefully unmeasurable political fiction—cannot help but find acceptable and persuasive. [my emphasis]

David Bromwich wrote some useful analyses of Obama's rhetoric and messaging while he was President, although it was sometimes marred by what seemed to be a distinct dislike of the man. But this comment from Bromwich that I quoted in 2012 post is an important observation:

[Obama] has often echoed Lincoln's Second Inaugural, the canonical American speech of reconciliation. It has not occurred to him that our time may be more suited to the House Divided speech, in which Lincoln in 1858 showed why the slavery question was so important it might make the two sides irreconcilable. Obama's many House United speeches, by contrast, are always about unity for its own sake – a curious idea. Unity for its own sake will capture neither votes nor lasting loyalty among people who crave an explanation of the elements of political right and wrong. [my emphasis]

That post of mine was David Bromwich looks again at Obama's words and speculates about his personality 07/12/2012, in which I also looked at how Obama rhetoric fit so well with the neoliberal policy preferences. As I noted there, Obama distrusted progressives because he's not one, though in 2004-2008 when he first emerged as a national figure, he cultivated the notion that he was. He even regarded progressives with contempt, and I noted there that it was surely in major part because of his identification with the wealthy. I quoted a contemporary speech of his on his tax policies in which he made a point to refer to "the wealthiest Americans -- folks like myself".

In her current piece, Loofbourow observes, "Obama’s commitment to not alienating people is fascinating to the precise extent that it becomes a principle in its own right." (my emphasis)

But that approach has proven to be spectacularly deficient in dealing with the Calhoun-ized, QAnon-ized Republican Party that we now have:

Obama’s personal self-packaging has long been extraordinary. He won two elections with it. But he also disproved his own theory. Despite his extraordinary efforts to perform an unoffending normalcy, he was spectacularly mischaracterized as a socialist, a Kenyan, a Muslim, a criminal, and more. He was demonized by an opposition party whose virulent determination to shove evidence aside has only grown since—they will read Biden as a communist pedophile and Trump as an athletic man of God. This is not an environment where self-editing or careful packaging matters. Nor is it one where bland political slogans gain purchase. [my emphasis]

I'll close by recalling that Obama's "principle in its own right" of non-offensiveness was applied during his Presidency with much more rigor when dealing with hostile Republicans than in dealing with progressives in his own party.

The Lincoln Project and the state of the Republican Party

The Lincoln Project's Steve Schmidt in this interview of 12/08/2020 with Michelle Martin on . Christiane Amanpour about their position in the election and now. Lincoln Project’s Steve Schmidt: American Democracy Was Deliberately Poisoned (transcript here):

It seems obvious that they have some kind of business plan going forward. They are advertising themselves as a media company and aren't necessarily looking to only political consulting for work.

I certainly enjoyed a number of their anti-Trump ads this year. My understanding is that a lot of their television ads buys were concentrated in the D.C. media market, specifically to get Trump's attention to them. And Schmidt in this interview talks about their marketing strategies for getting under Trump's very thin skin and to try to exacerbate factional divisions in the Republican Party.

What's that you say? Those factional divisions in the Republican Party don't seem to be too evident these days with the party talking and acting like a death cult that is sunk into bizarre conspiracy theories and is massively denying the validity of the democratic Presidential election and with the President and other party officials inciting their rabid fans to armed violence against Democrats?

Josh Kelety has more in 'Die for Something:' Arizona GOP Incites Violence Over Election Fraud Fantasy Phoenix New Times 10/08/2020

No, those factional divisions don't seem so clear, do they? Although, to be fair, the cult is also turning on some Republicans who decline to break the law to give the election to Trump by overriding their own state's votes in the Presidential election. (More on that below.)

But the Lincoln Project did go after some down-ballot Republicans including the odious Mitch McConnell. So their play doesn't seem to be to solely related to internal Republican Party politics. Schmidt himself formally resigned from the party, as Martin discusses in her first question, showing a tweet of his from January 2018 saying, "Today I renounce my membership in the Republican Party."

Is the Republican Party really a membership organization? The Democratic Party does have an official Democrats Abroad organization that is a membership organization, that to be an official part of it, Democrats Abroad does have to approve you based on your affirmation that you are an American citizen and are living outside the US. But "resigning" from the party for someone who is not a public official or holds some formal party office such as delegate to the national convention is basically just theater.

Schmidt says just after 3:50 that for the Lincoln Project, "This election was about Trump. The second issue in this election was Trump. And the next 300 issues after that: Trump. And that was before COVID." 

That was also the basic message of the Biden-Harris campaign: Biden Is Not Trump. And that most likely did contribute to the down-ballot problems. The main Democratic campaign, the Presidential one, was all about not being Trump. They did not put any particular emphasis on defining the Republican Party as an essential part of the Trump problem.

But this raises a real concern. One of the striking results of the 2020 election was that Biden clearly won, but the down-ballot candidates didn't do so well. The Democrats lost one Senate seat and several House seats. The two remaining Georgia Senate elections are next month.

And despite their tangential criticism of other Republicans, the thrust of the Lincoln Project's message was the same: Trump Is The Problem, 300 times over. They reinforced what for the Democratic Party was a problematically narrow focus on Trump alone.

Evaluating exit poll findings involves the extra complication in 2020 that the turnout of eligible voters was the highest the US has seen since 1908. But the exit polls indicated that nationally among voters who identify as Republicans, a higher percentage of them voted for Trump than in 2016. That may be a reflection of the fact that an election that generally brings out more voters would also bring out more with specific partisan affiliation, not just independents. But the results don't show any clear indication that Biden pulled any significant numbers of Republicans switched their preference to Biden.

Schmidt in the interview claims that their efforts were decisive in making the Confederate flags and monuments a more significant issue. Which on its face sound dubious to me. I haven't seen any specific evaluation of the effect that their presence online, in particular their YouTube videos, may have had. The fact that they presumably delighted Democrats and annoyed Republicans doesn't tell us a lot in itself.

After 11:00 in the video, Schmidt is careful to say of how they saw their role in 2020 on the political spectrum, "this is not the Obama coalition. This is not a progressive coalition that elected Joe Biden. It's a different coalition. If it falls apart - and you look at the structural advantage that Republicans have in Presidential elections through the Electoral College - it means that you could wind up with President Tucker Carlson in 2024. Nobody should want to see that."

In other words, Schmidt is talking the familiar line of Third Way and the onetime Democratic Leadership Council: the Democrats need to try to be more like Republicans and reject progressive approaches.

Martin after 11:30 does then press him in the interview about the process that preceded Trump's 2016 victory in the primaries, the road that the Republican Party took that wound up with it becoming the Trump Party. "What part of this do you own?"

Schmidt basically ducks the question by claiming that he has always considered himself a "Jacobin Republican" who tried to get the party to reach out to minorities. This is a Republican media consultant's 2020 version of, "Some of my best friends are black people."

But he does give an actually sensible response when he says that the Republican Party took on the identity of an entertainment show. I didn't hear anything in his response that could be said to "own" any responsibility for that development. But one of the milestones in that path was the Vice Presidential candidacy of the clown Sarah Palin. She was the pick of Steve Schmidt's Presidential candidate John McCain in 2008 (he was a senior adviser), a role to which he alludes with his some-of-my-best-friends pitch, but without mentioning Palin. And, among other things, Schmidt made the accusation in 2008 about Barack Obama that he ... acted too much like a celebrity. (Liz Halloran, Republicans Press Celebrity Attack on Obama US News 08/01/2008) Essentially the same charge that he's now making against the Trumpified Republican Party. A reminder how much of what the Republicans typically say about Democrats alleged shortcomings and faults is based heavily on projection.

But even an ex-Republican like Steve Schmidt can't pass up an opportunity to attack those he calls "my progressive friends." So he advises in a sneering tone (remember: projection!), "To think carefully about the condescension, about the elitism, about the indifference that a lot of people hear in this country from those messages," i.e., messages he takes to be from his "progressive friends," presumably any message he deems to be "progressive," since he doesn't actually say what messages he means. Like any good Republican might, he disses the New Deal as economically unimportant (!) but good messaging for the Democrats back then.

Some of his analysis in this interview about what constitutes Trumpism is good. But we also do need to keep asking what the Lincoln Project's larger aim may be. Because his presentation here gives us no reason to think that it involves supporting policy agendas even slightly to the left of the Third Way/DLC neoliberal playbook.

About those standout Republicans who go so far as to insist they won't break election law for Trump ...

Here's Chuck Todd's Meet the Press 12/06/2020 interview with Gabriel Sterling, Georgia's Republican Voting System Implementation Manager, who gained wide respect with his emphatic scolding of Republicans who were complicit in supporting Trump's false and destructive claims in support of trying to overturn the election results: Full Gabriel Sterling Interview: Trump has a 'higher' responsibility. (Transcript here.)

CHUCK TODD:

Well, I'm just curious what was it that sparked your decision to come out as, you know, to come out as direct as you came out earlier this week? Was there a specific incidence or incidents that have been happening to you or others?

GABRIEL STERLING:

It wasn’t happening -- obviously, I have a police car outside my house right now. I could see it out the right side of my peripheral vision. There has been police protection for the secretary, his wife received sexualized, violent threats on her personal cell phone. But what, for lack of a better word, set me off on Tuesday was about an hour before, hour and a half before a producer-scheduled news conference, I got a call from the project manager from Dominion Voting Systems out of Colorado who was telling me in a very audibly shaken voice that one of their contractors had received some threats in Gwinnett County. And this is just a young tech. He took a job a few weeks ago. He's one of their better ones. And when I was going through the Twitter feed on it and I saw, it basically had the young man's name, it's a very unique name. So they tracked down his family and started harassing them. And it said his name, "You have committed treason. May God have mercy on your soul," with a slowly swinging noose. And at that point I just said, "I'm done." [my emphasis]

But check this out. Even Sterling still pledges his allegiance to the Party. Just prior to the part just quoted:

CHUCK TODD:

Mr. Sterling, you had made an impassioned plea there that we just played that this has to stop. It doesn't look like he chose to stop. Is there-- could you please debunk or, what he said there when it comes to your role in the Georgia elections?

GABRIEL STERLING:

At this point, it’s a game of whack-a-mole as we’ve been saying. The president's statements are false. They're disinformation. They are stoking anger and fear among his supporters. And hell, I voted for him. The situation’s getting much worse and it’s an environment that’s been built out over years, and it's not just -- you know, Republicans and this side this time. But even in polling up to 2019, up to 50% of Democrats think Russians flipped votes on machines. So this is going both ways. It undermines democracy. We've got to get to a point where responsible people act responsibly. [my emphasis]

Both Sides Do It! He's singing Chuck's favorite song!

Is there is any senior Democrat claiming that "Russians flipped votes on machines"? Sterling didn't cite the poll and (surprise!) Chuck Todd didn't fact-check him in real time or question the claims, which Sterling also references again later in the interview. The Senate Intelligence Committee did issue a report in 2019 that found that Russian cyber-probing of American election systems in 2016 was more widespread than previously generally believed. But as the New York Times reported, the Committee "concluded that while there was no evidence that any votes were changed in actual voting machines, 'Russian cyberactors were in a position to delete or change voter data' in the Illinois voter database. The committee found no evidence that they did so." (David Sanger and Catie Edmondson, Russia Targeted Election Systems in All 50 States, Report Finds 07/26/2019)

A redacted verions of the report is available online from the Senate's website.

But Sterling goes on to express disappointment that the two Georgia Senate Republican candidates weren't talking a straightforward position against Republican efforts to nullify the Georgia elections in November. But he is careful to say that he still supports them: "I'm a Republican. We need to hold on to the Senate. So I'm still going to vote for them. But I'm not happy with how they conducted themselves in this particular situation." (my emphasis)

I think it would be too generous to call this a mixed message. He's saying he's still going to support senior Republicans who won't defend democracy. The best I could say about it is that it's just sad.

And while we should give people credit for doing the right thing, Gabriel Sterling has a public position of responsibility and trust. He is obligated to follow the law in doing so. The fact that he stands out in pushing back on pressure from his own party to do otherwise is a very damning commentary on the Republican Party of 2020. Public officials obeying the law should be entirely ordinary.

State of the Biden-Harris transition: pandemic, economics, war-and-peace

The historian Heather Cox Richardson has been posting daily updates on American political developments on her Facebook account. In her entry for 11/16/2020, she described the current public posture of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris this way:

This afternoon Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris and President-Elect Joe Biden held a press conference outlining their economic strategy. They had just come from a strategy meeting with business leaders and union officials, and Biden seemed quite optimistic that the different groups had found common ground. In a notable change from his predecessor, Biden was transparent about who was at the meeting, identifying the attendees by name and position.

The plans Biden and Harris outlined essentially boiled down to what they had said on the campaign trail: they will bring jobs back to America by limiting federal contracts to companies in the country, support a $15 minimum wage, and support unions. Biden also reiterated that it is imperative for Congress to pass the Heroes Act, the $3 trillion coronavirus relief act the House of Representatives passed last May but which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) refuses to take up. (“Heroes” stands for Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions Act.)

Biden reminded listeners that the states are in a crisis through no fault of their own, and they cannot fix it on their own, either. By law, virtually no state and local governments can operate with a deficit, while the federal government can. [my emphasis]

I don't have a problem with vague invocations of "working together". It's such standard political rhetoric that it alone doesn't signal much. But there is tremendous pressure from large Democratic donors for Democratic officials to "work together" with Republicans for actions that benefit the One Percent. So the real focus for people wanted to follow what's happening is the actual policies that emerge from this projected polite cooperation.

Richardson's summary indicates that Biden and Harris are so far sticking to major elements of their agreed program, the program that is the mandate on which they were elected. And since the Democrats typically are reluctant to fight for its own positions, that's a good sign, so far as it goes.

She also calls attention to the Republicans' cynical effort to withhold aid from states in order to drive them into bankruptcy. "But the process of driving states to that point means that Americans will lose their homes or their apartments, and be unable to afford food. And that is coming to pass. Today CBS News posted a video of thousands of cars lined up in Dallas, Texas, to collect boxes of food."

She directs our attention to an article from David Frum, the Shrub Bush speechwriter credited with coming up with the phrase "axis of evil," Why Mitch McConnell Wants States to Go Bankrupt The Atlantic 11/25/2020. He explains:

First, the country’s wealthiest and most productive states are overwhelmingly blue. Of the 15 states least reliant on federal transfers, 11 are led by Democratic governors. Of the 15 states most reliant on federal transfers, 11 have Republican governors.

Second, Congress is dominated by Republicans. Republicans controlled the House for eight of the last 10 years; the Senate for six. Because of the Republican hold on the Senate, the federal judiciary has likewise shifted in conservative and Republican directions.

A state bankruptcy process would thus enable a Republican Party based in the poorer states to use its federal ascendancy to impose its priorities upon the budgets of the richer states.

Frum's article also describes the important distinction betwee a state default and a state bankruptcy.

(BTW, even though I'm citing Frum here on something that's actually informative and helpful, I'm still going to keep referring to the following statement as The One True Thing David Frum Ever Said: "while Republican politicians fear their base, Democratic pols hate theirs"; Gibbs on the Left FrumForum 08/10/2010.)

Richardson explains:

The federal judiciary has shifted rightward in the last ten years, so bankruptcy would allow a federal judge to impose Republican priorities on Democratic states like New York, for example, states Republicans have little hope of controlling through elections. In such proceedings, the first things to go would be pensions and social welfare programs, while judges would protect bondholders, many of them wealthy people who pour money into the Political Action Committees of Republican politicians. [my emphasis]

It's important for us all to remember that Trumpism is not an aberration in the Republican Party. It was the Republican Party that produced Trumpism. The Republicans in Congress and the statehouses have no intention to enter some kind of strategic Bipartisanship with the Biden-Harris Administration to deal with the pandemic or the economic depression. Biden  may be able to peel off some Republican votes on individual measures having to do with those two major problems. But some kind of broad strategic cooperation of the kind that the Obama-Biden Administration pursued in vain for eight years is not in the cards. The only Grand Bargain the Republican Party will accept is one that enacts radical Republican policies.

Richardson provides this reminder that whatever he may have done right in foreign policy, by accident or otherwise, he did not have a pro-peace policy: "2018. Last Thursday, Trump asked his advisers whether he could do something about Iran’s main nuclear site, but appears to have been talked out of military action as they warned a military strike could escalate into a bigger conflict."

The New York Times reported that story: Eric Schmitt et al, Trump Sought Options for Attacking Iran to Stop Its Growing Nuclear Program 11/16/2020:

After Mr. Pompeo and General Milley described the potential risks of military escalation, officials left the meeting believing a missile attack inside Iran was off the table, according to administration officials with knowledge of the meeting.

Mr. Trump might still be looking at ways to strike Iranian assets and allies, including militias in Iraq, officials said. A smaller group of national security aides had met late Wednesday to discuss Iran, the day before the meeting with the president. ...

The episode underscored how Mr. Trump still faces an array of global threats in his final weeks in office. A strike on Iran may not play well to his base, which is largely opposed to a deeper American conflict in the Middle East, but it could poison relations with Tehran so that it would be much harder for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear accord, as he has promised to do. ...

The events of the past few days are not the first time that Iran policy has emerged in the final days of a departing administration. During the last days of the Bush administration in 2008, Israeli officials, concerned that the incoming Obama administration would seek to block it from striking Iran’s nuclear facilities, sought bunker-busting bombs, bombers and intelligence assistance from the United States for an Israeli-led strike.

Vice President Dick Cheney later wrote in his memoir that he supported the idea. President George W. Bush did not, but the result was a far closer collaboration with Israel on a cyberstrike against the Natanz facility, which took out about 1,000 of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges. [my emphasis]

In other words, a late-administration attack on Iran would be a continuation of a Republican precedent set by the Cheney-Bush Administration, not some uniquely Trumpian idea.

Richardson also comments on a reported argument within the Administration about drawdowns of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, which the Pentagon opposes. Even Sen. Majority Mitch McConnell has publicly objected to the idea. The Times also reports on that controversy (Eric Schmitt et al, Trump Is Said to Be Preparing to Withdraw Troops From Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia 11/16/2020):

Under a draft order circulating at the Pentagon on Monday, the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan would be halved from the current deployment of 4,500 troops, officials said.

In Iraq, the Pentagon would trim force levels slightly below the 3,000 troops that commanders had previously announced. And in Somalia, virtually all of the more than 700 troops conducting training and counterterrorism missions would leave. ...

But the president’s aspirations have long run into resistance, as his own national security officials argued that abandonment of such troubled countries could have catastrophic consequences — such as when the United States pulled out of Iraq at the end of 2011, leaving a vacuum that fostered the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Mr. Trump has also repeatedly pushed to withdraw from Syria, but several hundred U.S. troops remain stationed there, partly to protect coveted oil fields held by American-backed Syrian Kurdish allies from being seized by the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. The current deliberations over withdrawals would not affect those in Syria, officials said.

The plan under discussion to pull out of Somalia is said to not apply to U.S. forces stationed in nearby Kenya and Djibouti, where American drones that carry out airstrikes in Somalia are based, according to officials familiar with the internal deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity. [my emphasis]

What's that you say? You didn't know the US military was stationed in Somalia and Kenya and Djibouti? You didn't know there was a country named Djibouti? You're not alone. The US reporting on US military activities abroad is pretty lacking. It's not nearly as interesting for TV pundits as, say, Hillary Clinton's emails.

The PBS Newshour repors on withdrawal discussions back in October, DOD surprised by Trump's intent to accelerate U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan 10/09/2020:

When it comes to military interventions, war critics need to be able to walk and talk at the same time. One of the jaded pieces of conventional wisdom about war is that it's a hell of a lot easier to get into a war than to get out of one. And there are lots of vested interests, aka, the military-industrial complex, that want it to be hard to get out of a war. Or to withdraw US troops completely from a country where they have been at war.

But that said, blundering around is just not a good way to run foreign policy. US troops should have been out of Afghanistan and Syria and Somalia years ago. But the process of removing them does matter. Would it be reckless or irresponsible to cut the number of troops in Afghanistan by half right away? I seriously doubt it. But it's also a call that needs to be informed by accurate, on-the-ground information, and not all that can be made immediately public.

But open-ended commitments of troops can also be a bad idea. A really bad idea. And, at some point, if the US is going to remove troops from a country, they actually have to do it by some actual point in time. The pullout of troops from the Kurdish enclave in Syria was particularly problematic because it was not only sudden. It also directly empowered Turkey to undertake an ethnic cleansing operation immediately following the pullout.

But anyone wanting to defend Trump as a pro-peace President should take note in those stories that: (1) a serious discussion of a immediate military attack on Iran is under way; (2) the Afghanistan pullout plan reported does not envision a full withdrawal of all remaining troops (it's easier to augment an existing commitment of troops than to begin a new commitment after all troops are gone); and, (3) when Trump abandoned Kurdish allies to Turkish ethnic cleansing, he made sure to leave troops to guard oil wells in Kurdish territory. Trump has said publicly that he thought the US should just seize natural resources from countries we invade, a blatant violation of international law.

Trump is not a peace advocate and has definitely not been a peace President.

After Tuesday, the Democrats need to remember which party the Never-Trump Republicans came from

Claire Conner, who wrote an autobiographical account of growing up in a family whose father was a major player in the John Birch Society, wrote this blog post late last year describing Trump's radical right politics as President, Poisoning America with Conspiracy Theories, Birther Nonsense, and Lies 03/19/2017 (bolding in original):

They [Trump and the Republicans] tell us:

• The economy has been a disaster
• The military is crumbling
• Obamacare is a disaster
• Nothing in the government works
• Terrorists are pouring in
• Immigrants are taking our jobs
• Muslims are the enemy
• Undocumented immigrants must be deported
• Our leaders are losers and morons, except, of course, the great Donald Trump and his cabinet
• We’re one supreme court justice away from gun confiscation
• It’s almost the end of the nation that was once known as the United States of America. 

Every day these talking points are repeated by Trump’s surrogates. Republicans parrot the same dribble and repeat it to their constituents.

As a child of the radical right, I heard the identical talking points from my father and his John Birch Society allies. It’s hard to say, but it’s true; my father preached the ideas that are poisoning American politics today. These radical right-wing ideas have polarized Americans and threaten our democracy.

Please don’t dismiss Trump and his GOP pals as “politics as usual.” Don’t laugh at his crazy tweets and pretend that somehow, someday he’ll start acting presidential. Don’t assume that a president like Donald Trump will be stopped by the same radical GOP that elected him.

I would add: Don't assume that the same radical GOP that elected Trump and supported him loyally for the last four years are going to revert to acting like those fabled moderate Eisenhower Republicans of "bipartisan" folklore.

I should point out that at least in the 1950s and 1960s, Muslims were not a particular target of Bircher fear-mongering.

Speaking of the Birchers, here's an interesting cultural relic from 1968 - John Denver singing a song critical of them, John Denver with The Mitchell Trio - The John Birch Society (Live 1968):

The John Birch Society still exists, though I won't include their website link here. John Savage wrote about them in 2017 in The John Birch Society Is Back Politico 07/16/2017:

This is what the 21st-century John Birch Society looks like. Gone is the organization’s past obsession with ending the supposed communist plot to achieve mind-control through water fluoridation. What remains is a hodgepodge of isolationist, religious and right-wing goals that vary from concrete to abstract, from legitimate to conspiracy minded—goals that don’t look so different from the ideology coming out of the [Trump] White House. It wants to pull the United States out of NAFTA (which it sees as the slippery slope that will lead us to a single-government North American Union), return America to what they call its Christian foundations, defund the UN, abolish the departments of education and energy, and slash the federal government drastically. The John Birch Society once fulminated on the idea of Soviet infiltration of the U.S. government; now, it wants to stop the investigation into Russia’s 2016 election meddling and possible collusion with the campaign of President Donald Trump.

The Society’s ideas, once on the fringe, are increasingly commonplace in today’s Republican Party. And where Birchers once looked upon national Republican leaders as mortal enemies, the ones I met in Texas see an ally in the president. “All of us here voted for Trump,” says Carter. “And we’re optimistic about what he will do."

Rick Perlstein discussed the Birchers and Claire Conner's book in Growing Up in the John Birch Society The Nation 08/06/2013. That was during the Obama Administration, three years before Donald Trump was elected President. Rick wrote then:

... now we have thirty states with Republican majorities, many of them veto-proof.

... in Chicago, Claire [Conner] concluded in thunder. “These people are at the point of changing our government. If you want to see how, look at Texas, look at Florida. Look at Ohio. Look at Wisconsin, for God’s sake - my state. Look at Michigan, for heaven’s sake: they think they elected a moderate, but they elected a right-wing radical. That’s how this game is played. They’re changing the policy. And the whole thing is so deep that when they vote them out of office, number one, half of them won’t be able to vote. And number two, we will have years of problems to fix…. We were so happy that we won the popular vote, but they’re buying the place….they’ve virtually stopped the government for five years.”

Claire Conner knows of what she speaks. She was there at the inception—as a sad-eyed, vulnerable adolescent—then watched as the machine was put together: a machine whose deceptively smooth surface has always only barely hid the corrosive ugliness and cunning anti-democratic cleverness underneath, convincing too many liberals, too many times, that the ugliness could not but fade away in the fulness of time—convincing them wrong. Read her, and listen well: there is nothing new under the wingnut sun. [italics in original; my emphasis in bold]

We can defend or idealize Obama all we want. But this was the state of American politics less than a year after Obama's re-election. And whatever the Democrats did, good or bad, during those eight years was not sufficient to avoid a Radical Republican takeover in 2016. This is something we all need to remember when people hold up the Obama Administration as a template for a Biden Administration. If we want a Biden Presidency to be more than a four-year reprieve from a Trumpist restoration, that Administration will have to achieve something different in both policy and in political organization and persuasion than what we had in 2009-2017 under Obama.

Once again on liberals trying to understand Trump voters

I referred in my previous post to sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild and her book presenting a sympathetic analysis of white conservatives in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

I see she just published an article on the election, Is Donald Trump a bully or bold protector? That depends on whom you ask The Guardian 10/11/2020. She refers to one of her Lake Charles subjects in trying to explain the exotic Trump voters to Mean Libruls:

Many studies have shown that Republicans yearn for a “strong leader”, a “fighter”, and this may make them hesitant to condemn bullying. I came to know Sharon Galicia, a lively single mum and medical insurance saleswoman from Louisiana, while researching my 2016 book about the American right, Strangers in Their Own Land. “The man liberals see as an arrogant bully,” she told me, “conservatives see as Rocky Balboa.”

Many good-hearted blue-collar voters with American flag decals on their pickups tune into Trump on a frequency that secular liberals cannot hear. Where most liberals hear bullying, Trump supporters hear: “I’m your guy. I do all I do for you and I deliver.” Where liberals hear an interrupter, many conservatives hear, when Trump speaks: “My enemies – the deep state, whistleblowers, impeachment-seekers, the mainstream media, the Democrats, Covid-19 critics [!!!] – bully me. I suffer for you. Stand by me as I bully back.” [my emphasis]

Yes, there are "secular liberals" that may not be familiar with white culture in the Deep South.

But are those secular Mean Libruls actually so out of it that they don't understand that Louisiana Trump fans are hearing something they like coming from Trump's mouth? I doubt there are many of them in that state. What liberals and everyone else not living in the FOX News/QAnon bubble wonder is what motivates people who hear Trump's hate talk and find it appealing.

My main criticism of Hochschild's explanations of her Louisiana white conservatives is not that the explanations are sloppy or wrong. It's that she takes their justifications for their own positions as good faith descriptions of their political motivations, without sufficiently inquiring into what they claims as the factual basis of their allegiances and apparently not making a lot of effort to understand the highly political background of white Southern racial narratives.

She also makes a normative assumption that I find dubious. She describes people who are attracted to Trump because they see him as a bully as nevertheless being "good-hearted blue-collar voters with American flag decals on their pickups." She might have said they are "very fine people," but she doesn't use that phrase.

Not to nitpick. But encouraging, admiring, and supporting bullying is not a sign of being "good-hearted."

And reality-checking matters. Are "whistleblowers" exposing illegal conduct in government or "Covid-19 critics" (as opposed to COVID-19 fans?) really bullying blue-collar white people in Lake Charles Louisiana? That doesn't make any sense.

She actually spends the rest of the column sharply criticizing Trump's destructive bullying behavior, making her preference for Biden as a person and a leader clear. She concludes, "As the nation faces the enormous challenges ahead – jobs, climate change, automation, racial justice, drug addiction, Covid-19 – the truth is that the bully’s hammer causes many more problems than it solves. Bullies do not solve such problems. Leaders do." [my emphasis]

Hochschild is right to encourage left-leaning voters outraged by Trumpism to try to understand the complexity of the political motivations of Trump voters and to make some effort to understand their perspectives. But we also shouldn't take the conventional and superficial reasons people give for their perspectives simply at face value. Especially if they are justifying their positions on conspiracy theories or demonstratively false factual assumptions.

Trumpism and pre-Trumpism

Another reminder that Bunker Boy is bad in his own unique way and is changing the US government radically for the worst. But Trumpism also didn't appear out of nowhere. The Republican Party created it, and the Democratic Party far too often abetted the process.

Angela Dewan and Jennifer Hansler report (CNN 06/08/2020):

The US' credibility has taken another dent over the past two weeks. Current and former diplomats told CNN the events at home were "scary" and "heartbreaking" to watch -- and also undermined their mission. A current State Department official said that America's "moral standing is challenged."

But the erosion of the country's moral credibility didn't begin with Trump. America's so-called war against terror and the abuses that came with it, such as those in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, was a major turning point. Some of that was remedied under the Obama administration, but even then, the US continued to violate rights abroad as the wars trundled on.

Trump's three years in office have expedited that erosion, in part by his failure to lead by example at home, said Rob Berschinski, who worked for the US State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor during the Obama years. [my emphasis]

The American political system is currently badly broken. From asymmetric partisan polarization to the militarization of the police to the collapse of the will of Congress to maintain essential Constitutional checks to the massive corruption of money in politics to the massive inequality and institutionalized white racism that underpins the system, the problems cannot be fixed only by substituting a minimally competent President for Bunker Boy.

Al Gore, who was rightfully elected President in 2000 but was blocked from taking office by a system already badly failing, wrote about the cycles of security scares in American history, with particular reference to the post-9/11 one, wrote in The Assault on Reason (2007), published the year that Season 5 of The Apprentice began:

Former Supreme Court justice William Brennan commented on this cycle once, writing, ''After each perceived security crisis ended, the United States has remorsefully realized that the abrogation of civil liberties was unnecessary. But it has proven unable to prevent itself from repeating the error when the next crisis came along."

There are also reasons for concern this time around that what we are experiencing may no longer be the first half of a recurring cycle, but rather the beginning of something new. For one thing, this war is predicted by the administration to last for the rest of our lives. So we are told that the conditions of national threat that have been used by other presidents to justify arrogations of power will persist in near perpetuity. Some have expressed the view that over time it will begin to resemble the "war" against drugs - that is, it will become a more or less permanent struggle that occupies a significant part of our law enforcement and security agenda from now on. If that is the case, then when - if ever - does this encroachment on our freedoms die a natural death? [my emphasis]

Trump's continuing scam, the COVID-19 crisis, and critics' desperate to believe the situation isn't as bad as it looks

Peter Wehner writes, "Trump’s success as a politician has been built on his ability to impose his will and narrative on others, to use his experience on a reality-television show and his skill as a con man to shape public impressions in his favor, even—or perhaps, especially — if those impressions are at odds with reality." (The President is Trapped The Atlantic ß3/25/2020)

One big mistake the Democrats made in campaigning against Trump in 2016 was to smugly assume that Trump's professional-wrestling style of politicking couldn't win him the Presidency. Wehner continues, "He convinced a good chunk of the country that he is a wildly successful businessman," which he wasn't. Now that he has essentially $4.5 trillion dollars that he can allocate to pretty much any companies he wants including his own, maybe he will finally make his business fabulously successful.

But being a lucky and unscrupulous grifter isn't the same as being the business genius he claimed to be. David Cay Johnston has been telling anyone who would listen for years that Trump was a mobster and a scamster, not a brilliant business titan.

Wehner continues that sentence by saying that Trump's persuasion of "a good chunk of the country" also extended to conning them into thinking that he "knows more about campaign finance, the Islamic State, the courts, the visa system, trade, taxes, the debt, renewable energy, infrastructure, borders, and drones than anyone else."

And Wehner predicts that as the COVID-19 crisis proceeds:

Trump’s hallmarks will be even more fully on display. The president will create new scapegoats. He’ll blame governors for whatever bad news befalls their states. He’ll berate reporters who ask questions that portray him in a less-than-favorable light. He’ll demand even more cultlike coverage from outlets such as Fox News. Because he doesn’t tolerate relationships that are characterized by disagreement or absence of obeisance, before long we’ll see key people removed or silenced when they try to counter a Trump-centered narrative. He’ll try to find shiny objects to divert our attention from his failures. [my emphasis]

Unfortunately, Wehner's piece reflects a lot of the weaknesses the American commentariat has displayed in dealing with Trump's Malicious Orange Clown Show. He presents Trump's success at selling his con job image of himself as due to Trump's own talent for scamming. Which is part of the story.

But there is a great deal of the story to which Beltway media types don't want to call attention. One of those factors is the corporate media itself. CBS Executive Chairman and CEO Leslie Moonvies described his view of the Trump campaign at a media conference in early 2016 (Paul Bond, Leslie Moonves on Donald Trump: "It May Not Be Good for America, but It's Damn Good for CBS" Hollywood Reporter 02/29/2016):

"It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," he said of the presidential race.

Moonves called the campaign for president a "circus" full of "bomb throwing," and he hopes it continues.

"Most of the ads are not about issues. They're sort of like the debates," he said.

"Man, who would have expected the ride we're all having right now? ... The money's rolling in and this is fun," he said.

"I've never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It's a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going," said Moonves.

"Donald's place in this election is a good thing," he said Monday at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco.

"There's a lot of money in the marketplace," the exec said of political advertising so far this presidential season. [my emphasis]

Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as corportate media. And their approach to covering politics is radically different from the classical image of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite that many older Democrats still have in their heads as the normalcy that a successful Make America Boring Again campaign this year would restore.

That doesn't diminish Trump's own success in working that system. He's unmistakably a talented demogogue. But Wehner's article also reflects the very narrow and unrealistic framing of NeverTrumper rightwing Republicans and the Democratic "Resistance" types, which portrays Trump as a unique aberration whose departure from the political scene will somehow restore a lost normal state. The Republican fever will break, conservative Democrats keep telling themselves and the public, year after year, and decade after decade.

The media malfunction, which has very much to do with the business laws that frame the media market, won't go away without serious reforms to the legal framework that currently controls matters such as media concentration.

The political environment that made Trumpism and a President Trump possible is one of asymmetric partisan polarization in a system in which essentiall all meaningful limits to spending in political campaigns have been aboloished. (On the latter point, I don't mean to imply it can't get worse!) The campaign financing model in the US is a system of legalized bribery in which even illegal bribery and corruption become much harder to detect, deter, and prosecute.

For Democrats - to the extent that they actually want a healthy representative democracy - it's especially important to stop pretending that Trump is akin to a Thanos or Cthulhu dropping in from space. The criminal and anti-democratic aspects of the Trump Presidency were present and on very prominent display during the Bush-Cheney Administration. And the subsequent Obama-Biden Administration gave Cheney's project to establish an authoritarian Unitary Executive system of government the one thing a Republican Administration could never give itself: immunity from prosecution for criminal activity granted by an administration of the other party.

Joe Scarborough denounces Trump while still pretending Trump is not a Real Republican

Here is a classic Nevertrumper moment, from Thursday's Morning Zoo, Worst-Case Scenarios Come True In Syria:

Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski are talking to former GOP chair Michael Brown. And at just after 8:00, Scarborough says something that's genuinely impressive:

Think about this, the President talked about, I beat ISIS in a month.

The same President who said, when I took over the United States. The same President who said, when I took over the military. The same President who said, Article II of the Constitution allows me to do whatever I want.

Republicans, Michael, they are our friends in that party, They know he's not well emotionally. They know he's not well mentally. They know that.

But put that aside, they also know that this is a man with illiberal instincts, with antidemocratic impulses who really does believe that his power is unlimited.

It is an anathema to everything we stand for. And he undermines Madisonian safeguards every single day.

That's all true, and impressively put, and I'm glad he's saying it. I give him credit for saying what everyone else in the world can also see, that the President is barking mad.

But he's also saying that their "friends" in the Republicans Party all know this and haven't yet made a move to remove him from office.

Plus, Scarborough, a former Gingrich Revolution foot soldier in the House in the 1990s, pitches this as Trump betraying the noble ideals of the Republican Party he served back then. But somehow he didn't and apparently still doesn't recognize that "this is a man with illiberal instincts, with antidemocratic impulses" also describes Newt Gingrich when he was Speaker of the House, and Dick Cheney, and Shrub Bush? And the Republicans who have focused for the last two decades or so on disenfranchising black and Latino voters in good Southern segregationist style?

As Charlie Pierce sometimes says: Honky, please!

There is a lot more wrong with the Republican Party than having an unstable three-year-old at its head. And getting rid of its "illiberal instincts" and "antidemocratic impulses" will take a lot more than just sending the three-year-old to a children's psychiatric facility.

Joe Conason wrote about that fine Republican statesman Newt Gingrich in Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth (2003):

A central theme of his propaganda lexicon was the "breakdown in public manners and morals" he blamed on liberalism. He recommended that when Republicans discussed themselves and their party's values, they should use words such as moral, crusade, and family. When they talked about Democrats, he urged them to emphasize terms like decay, sick, liberal, permissive attitude, antifamily, and bizarre.

As he drove the Republicans toward their takeover of Congress, the portly firebrand plugged his movement's morality with evangelistic fervor. "You have absolutely, in the abstract, a cultural civil war going on," he told US News 6 World Report in 1992. "A nihilistic hedonism and secular belief pattern is by definition involved in a religious war with a spiritual system."

While he blathered on about the culture war, Gingrich's close associates waged a private jihad on Bill Clinton. In the closing months of the 1992 election, Chicago financier Peter Smith, a top contributor to Gingrich's GOPAC fund, hired the Georgian's consultant and confidant Eddie Mahe and two Gingrich lawyers to dredge up dirt about the Democratic nominee's sex life. They focused on a far-fetched tale about an affair with a black prostitute in Little Rock that had produced a male "love child." Their objective was an old-fashioned sexual smear, tinted with race. [my emphasis in bold]

The fanaticism and assymetical polarization in which the Republican Party was actively engaged during the "Gingrich Revolution" era is what made a Trump Presidency possible.

There's a famous phrase from Max Horkheimer in 1939, "whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism." In other words, to understabd fascism, you have to understand the role that capitalism plays in its development.

We can borrow his wording to say also: whoever is not prepared to talk about Newt Gingrich (and Dick Cheney, and Shrub Bush, and Oliver North, and Rush Limbaugh) should have some humility about talking about Trumpism.