A Republican nightmare seems about to become real
By Jennifer Rubin
Columnist
July 24, 2023 at 8:48 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/...op-doomed/
For years now, some Republicans — and, to a large extent, the mainstream media — have harbored the notion that the GOP eventually would come to its senses. Surely, it would eventually dump the unhinged, disloyal, undemocratic and unfit Donald Trump, right?
But if Republicans did not wake from their slumber after the first impeachment or the second, after a jury decided he had lied about sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll, after an indictment accusing him of obstruction and violating the Espionage Act (set out in shocking detail), and after replete evidence of his alleged role in an attempted coup, it is hard to imagine what would bring them to their senses. There is scant evidence that Trump would flee the race to focus on his legal defense; to the contrary, the worse his legal position, the more desperate he becomes to regain power.
Elected Republicans and right-wing media figures have contributed to the predicament as they have minimized, rationalized and denied jaw-dropping allegations against Trump. They have made it easy for Republicans to cling to Trump. Listen, stealing and bandying about top-secret documents isn’t so bad, is it? And, after all, he didn’t do all that much on Jan. 6, 2021, did he?
This is what results when a party, its pundit class and millions of followers cut themselves off from reality, fall into a world of paranoid conspiracies and refuse to simply acknowledge they were very, very wrong to side with him.
And, frankly, the mainstream media has made it that much easier for cowardly Republicans to stick with Trump. Rather than challenge Republicans at every turn to defend their embrace of Trump or even to examine seriously the historical origins of toxic racist, xenophobic and delusional beliefs, the mainstream media largely sticks to horserace politics. (How disagreeable to grapple with the deep pathology in American politics and abandon false equivalence between the parties.)
Before going down the road to political doom, Republicans should understand how refusing to jettison Trump as their standard-bearer would play out. The so-called E. Jean Carroll II trial is scheduled for January. The Manhattan criminal trial is set for March, but even a conviction there might not move the GOP primary electorate. (Trivial! Set up!) The Mar-a-Lago documents case won’t begin before May. (All are subject to delay.) Meanwhile, the GOP presidential primary will have gotten underway in January and will run through March. Republicans might crown a presumptive winner by early May (as happened in 2016), even before the Mar-a-Lago trial concludes.
Without verdicts in the Jan. 6 cases and with appeals pending in any others (e.g., New York, Florida), the chances that a Republican National Convention in July filled with Trump-pledged delegates experiencing a spasm of buyer’s remorse (and overturning the primary winner) are slight. (Think of that being as probable as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy growing a spine or the party rediscovering the charms of moderate governors).
The GOP could very well be saddled with a nominee who has been indicted multiple times and perhaps convicted more than once. They would be betting that millions of voters who didn’t vote for him last time would vote for an indicted or possibly convicted nominee who spends most of his time railing about his plight.
And, keep in mind, even without the legal baggage, Trump would face an uphill climb to match his 2016 results. Democratic pollster Celinda Lake and documentary filmmaker Mac Heller recently wrote for The Post that “between Trump’s election in 2016 and the 2024 election, the number of Gen Z (born in the late 1990s and early 2010s) voters will have advanced by a net 52 million against older people.” Put differently, the 2024 electorate will be younger and more Democratic — by a lot — than the electorate that chose Trump in 2016. The GOP will be pleading with a less Trump-friendly electorate to ignore his alleged crime spree and reelect the Jan. 6 instigator.
If it seems fantastical, even unimaginable, that a party would put itself in such a position, remember this is a party that obsesses over Hunter Biden, elevates to prominence Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and still won’t admit that Joe Biden won the White House in 2020. Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that, barring an epiphany, the GOP’s self-delusion is risking a political wipeout that will take out more than its disastrous nominee. And it won’t be able to claim it wasn’t warned.
Comments:
Let’s be brutally honest here: Republican politicians are representing the craven views of the Republican electorate. Donald Trump has evoked (provoked?) and celebrated the worst that is in them, and they love him for it. He has consummated the foreplay that Newt Gingrich initiated.
We all know these people- we have them in our family, as neighbors and acquaintances. They have told us clearly who they really are; only a fool would not believe them. This in no way exculpates Kevin McCarthy et al. They will be forever enshrined in history as despicable cowards who have brazenly betrayed the Constitution and American ideals.
But we have learned a bitter truth about our fellow citizens: a shockingly high percentage will happily embrace an anti-democratic, fascistic, authoritarian government that brutalizes the most vulnerable among us to curry favor with the Republican mob . How high? 51%? We’ll find out in 2024. Our democracy is in grave peril. Israel has fallen to the fundamentalist right; are we next?
The Republican Nightmare is Nothing New, It Has Been With Us for the Past Century
Watching the film Oppenheimer, and witnessing the nightmare he endured at the hands of McCarthyism in the mid-1950's, a direct line can be drawn to the GOP's attack on Doctor Fauci his role in developing another weapon, this one against COVID. An argument can even be made that the COVID vaccines have saved more lives globally, than the atom bomb. Yet MAGA made Fauci their scapegoat and attack him today in campaign speeches. Another nod to the McCarthy Communist Witch Hunt era are the ongoing MAGA-GOP Kangaroo committees the GOP-controlled House unleashes as performance art attacking the FBI, the CIA and Hunter Biden, all designed to placate a radicalized base, a core base that they intentionally indoctrinated.
The true Republican nightmare began much earlier, with the original American Firster fascist movement that was embraced by the KKK in the Jim Crow 1920's. In the 1930s -1940 Firsters coveted the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini. In the lead-up to World War II, Firsters even plotted to overthrow the US government. Adolf Hitler himself was an admirer of US Jim Crow laws that provided legal cover to racism, using Jim Crow as a model to craft similar law in Germany that ultimately culminated in the Jewish holocaust.
History shows us that Trump has co-opted the American Firster ideology by unleashing Make America Great Again (MAGA). And today as the walls are closing in on Trumpism, the group has become a true fascist movement ready and willing to use big lies and long cons put their leaders in office, and to kick democracy to the curb in order to take political power ‘permanently’. So, you see the US Republican nightmare is nothing new, its has been active for the better part of the last century. And just like the atom bomb, if the US fails to deploy the full force of the DOJ and the rule of law, the costs to America and then to global democracy promise to be much, much, higher.
By Jennifer Rubin
Columnist
July 24, 2023 at 8:48 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/...op-doomed/
For years now, some Republicans — and, to a large extent, the mainstream media — have harbored the notion that the GOP eventually would come to its senses. Surely, it would eventually dump the unhinged, disloyal, undemocratic and unfit Donald Trump, right?
But if Republicans did not wake from their slumber after the first impeachment or the second, after a jury decided he had lied about sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll, after an indictment accusing him of obstruction and violating the Espionage Act (set out in shocking detail), and after replete evidence of his alleged role in an attempted coup, it is hard to imagine what would bring them to their senses. There is scant evidence that Trump would flee the race to focus on his legal defense; to the contrary, the worse his legal position, the more desperate he becomes to regain power.
Elected Republicans and right-wing media figures have contributed to the predicament as they have minimized, rationalized and denied jaw-dropping allegations against Trump. They have made it easy for Republicans to cling to Trump. Listen, stealing and bandying about top-secret documents isn’t so bad, is it? And, after all, he didn’t do all that much on Jan. 6, 2021, did he?
This is what results when a party, its pundit class and millions of followers cut themselves off from reality, fall into a world of paranoid conspiracies and refuse to simply acknowledge they were very, very wrong to side with him.
And, frankly, the mainstream media has made it that much easier for cowardly Republicans to stick with Trump. Rather than challenge Republicans at every turn to defend their embrace of Trump or even to examine seriously the historical origins of toxic racist, xenophobic and delusional beliefs, the mainstream media largely sticks to horserace politics. (How disagreeable to grapple with the deep pathology in American politics and abandon false equivalence between the parties.)
Before going down the road to political doom, Republicans should understand how refusing to jettison Trump as their standard-bearer would play out. The so-called E. Jean Carroll II trial is scheduled for January. The Manhattan criminal trial is set for March, but even a conviction there might not move the GOP primary electorate. (Trivial! Set up!) The Mar-a-Lago documents case won’t begin before May. (All are subject to delay.) Meanwhile, the GOP presidential primary will have gotten underway in January and will run through March. Republicans might crown a presumptive winner by early May (as happened in 2016), even before the Mar-a-Lago trial concludes.
Without verdicts in the Jan. 6 cases and with appeals pending in any others (e.g., New York, Florida), the chances that a Republican National Convention in July filled with Trump-pledged delegates experiencing a spasm of buyer’s remorse (and overturning the primary winner) are slight. (Think of that being as probable as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy growing a spine or the party rediscovering the charms of moderate governors).
The GOP could very well be saddled with a nominee who has been indicted multiple times and perhaps convicted more than once. They would be betting that millions of voters who didn’t vote for him last time would vote for an indicted or possibly convicted nominee who spends most of his time railing about his plight.
And, keep in mind, even without the legal baggage, Trump would face an uphill climb to match his 2016 results. Democratic pollster Celinda Lake and documentary filmmaker Mac Heller recently wrote for The Post that “between Trump’s election in 2016 and the 2024 election, the number of Gen Z (born in the late 1990s and early 2010s) voters will have advanced by a net 52 million against older people.” Put differently, the 2024 electorate will be younger and more Democratic — by a lot — than the electorate that chose Trump in 2016. The GOP will be pleading with a less Trump-friendly electorate to ignore his alleged crime spree and reelect the Jan. 6 instigator.
If it seems fantastical, even unimaginable, that a party would put itself in such a position, remember this is a party that obsesses over Hunter Biden, elevates to prominence Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and still won’t admit that Joe Biden won the White House in 2020. Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that, barring an epiphany, the GOP’s self-delusion is risking a political wipeout that will take out more than its disastrous nominee. And it won’t be able to claim it wasn’t warned.
Comments:
Let’s be brutally honest here: Republican politicians are representing the craven views of the Republican electorate. Donald Trump has evoked (provoked?) and celebrated the worst that is in them, and they love him for it. He has consummated the foreplay that Newt Gingrich initiated.
We all know these people- we have them in our family, as neighbors and acquaintances. They have told us clearly who they really are; only a fool would not believe them. This in no way exculpates Kevin McCarthy et al. They will be forever enshrined in history as despicable cowards who have brazenly betrayed the Constitution and American ideals.
But we have learned a bitter truth about our fellow citizens: a shockingly high percentage will happily embrace an anti-democratic, fascistic, authoritarian government that brutalizes the most vulnerable among us to curry favor with the Republican mob . How high? 51%? We’ll find out in 2024. Our democracy is in grave peril. Israel has fallen to the fundamentalist right; are we next?
The Republican Nightmare is Nothing New, It Has Been With Us for the Past Century
Watching the film Oppenheimer, and witnessing the nightmare he endured at the hands of McCarthyism in the mid-1950's, a direct line can be drawn to the GOP's attack on Doctor Fauci his role in developing another weapon, this one against COVID. An argument can even be made that the COVID vaccines have saved more lives globally, than the atom bomb. Yet MAGA made Fauci their scapegoat and attack him today in campaign speeches. Another nod to the McCarthy Communist Witch Hunt era are the ongoing MAGA-GOP Kangaroo committees the GOP-controlled House unleashes as performance art attacking the FBI, the CIA and Hunter Biden, all designed to placate a radicalized base, a core base that they intentionally indoctrinated.
The true Republican nightmare began much earlier, with the original American Firster fascist movement that was embraced by the KKK in the Jim Crow 1920's. In the 1930s -1940 Firsters coveted the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini. In the lead-up to World War II, Firsters even plotted to overthrow the US government. Adolf Hitler himself was an admirer of US Jim Crow laws that provided legal cover to racism, using Jim Crow as a model to craft similar law in Germany that ultimately culminated in the Jewish holocaust.
History shows us that Trump has co-opted the American Firster ideology by unleashing Make America Great Again (MAGA). And today as the walls are closing in on Trumpism, the group has become a true fascist movement ready and willing to use big lies and long cons put their leaders in office, and to kick democracy to the curb in order to take political power ‘permanently’. So, you see the US Republican nightmare is nothing new, its has been active for the better part of the last century. And just like the atom bomb, if the US fails to deploy the full force of the DOJ and the rule of law, the costs to America and then to global democracy promise to be much, much, higher.
