Trumpism
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Hard Right vs the GOP?
From Thomas Edsall's column this morning regarding right wing disappointment that the Supreme Court didn't support the president: A poster whose name cannot be printed in this newspaper declared, “I can’t wait to taste your blood.” MakeLiberalsCryAgain put the case bluntly: It’s INSANE. Many of these contested states have REPUBLICAN majorities in their legislatures. They
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Trump’s Big Lies: Mission Accomplished (Updated)
For his opponents, the lies were intended to be profoundly demoralizing. Neither counting them nor checking facts nor debunking conspiracies made any difference. Trump demonstrated again and again that the truth doesn’t matter. In rational people this provoked incredulity, outrage, exhaustion, and finally an impulse to crawl away and abandon the field of politics to
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Status and Legitimacy on the Trumpian Right
I wrote this in February right after the Senate acquittted Trump in the impeachment trial: The problem isn't Trump; it's the Republican Party. Republicans simply do not care about the rule of law, i.e., the constitution, except when they can use it as a club to hit their political enemies. This isn't new; it been
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Ontological Dizziness and Fear of the Future
Their portrayal of what the country would look like if the Democrats win big in November is indeed a frightening one to Trump supporters: a White House with Senator Bernie Sanders as the shadow socialist president; a Democratic House of Representatives where Representative Ilhan Omar calls the shots; a society in which mask mandates are
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Christian Nationalism
If you're not aware of this bizarre exercise in religious delusion, this article in the NY Times does a good job of laying it out, and of identifying who benefits. It's pretty much what I've been writing about over the last month–how billionaires use culture war issues and credulous Christians to insure the entrenchment of
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Quote of the Day: Eliot Cohen
Other thoughtful Republicans (or former Republicans) are mulling over their own complicity in a party that was compromising its values for power. But equally, or more so, there has not been a full reckoning on the left. Particularly given the impending release of what is sure to be a gracefully written and elegiac memoir by
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Quote of the Day: Barack Obama
I recognize that there are those who believe that it’s time to discard the myth—that an examination of America’s past and an even cursory glance at today’s headlines show that this nation’s ideals have always been secondary to conquest and subjugation, a racial caste system and rapacious capitalism, and that to pretend otherwise is to
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Trump Doesn’t Worry Me; Republican Leadership Does
If Republican leadership won't stand up to this buffoon playing at il duce, why should we expect them to stand up to a truly dangerous, ruthless one? This is another problem of commonplaces and how they work with ideas that everybody grew up thinking. The commonplace about the Republican Party is that it's pro-business, pro-military,
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Two Cliches
The first cliche being repeated ad nauseam by the incoming Biden people is "We've got a lot of work to do." The second is "What unites is far stronger than what divides us," or words to that effect. So regarding the first, assuming that the Dems don't get at least 50 in the senate, what
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When the Temporary Stay is Removed
The situation is a perfect setup, in other words, for a talented politician to run on Trumpism in 2024. A person without the eager Twitter fingers and greedy hotel chains, someone with a penchant for governing rather than golf. An individual who does not irritate everyone who doesn’t already like him, and someone whose wife