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Month: November 2018

The rake flake by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 19, 2018

The rake flake
by Tom Sullivan

“He came. He saw. He said something stupid,” tweeted NBC producer Ken Olin. Pretty much sums it up. Except several stupid things, really.

Surveying California fire damage he blames on poor forest management, American president Donald J. Trump repeated something he misunderstood from something he half-heard about forest management from the president of Finland. That makes him an expert on the subject:

“We’ve got to take care of the floors, you know the floors of the forest, very important,” he continued. “You look at other countries where they do it differently and it’s a whole different story. I was with the president of Finland and he said… we’re a forest nation, he called it a forest nation, and they spend a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things. They don’t have any problem, and what it is, it’s a very small problem.”

All Finnish President Sauli Niinistö remembers is telling Trump is “we take care of our forests.” He only rakes his yard.

In announcing on “Face the Nation” that Trump would not cut funding to California for fighting fires, California Gov. Jerry Brown called it a “big, big win.” The magic word. Speak it and the sitting president is putty in your hands. But on Saturday, Brown looked like he wanted to be anywhere else except standing beside a fool spewing nonsense.

Finnish social media had a much better time with Trump’s raking comments.

CBS reports the death toll stands at 76 and the estimate of the missing has risen since Friday to 1,276.

Watch Brown’s head whip around (video at top) when Trump mentions “a lot of study going on.” Brown has actually read “peer-reviewed scientific articles” [timestamp 2:40] attributing a doubling of land burned in California over the last 15 years to climate change. He wisely did not argue the point with the man who thinks the fire threat results from inadequate raking of federal forests by the state of California.

He prefers people who catch bin Laden earlier, ok?

Published by digby on November 19, 2018

He prefers people who catch bin Laden earlier, ok?

by digby

He’s really working hard to insult the military these days, isn’t he?

McRaven responded:

“I did not back Hillary Clinton or anyone else. I am a fan of President Obama and President George W. Bush, both of whom I worked for. I admire all presidents, regardless of their political party, who uphold the dignity of the office and who use that office to bring the nation together in challenging times. I stand by my comment that the President’s attack on the media is the greatest threat to our democracy in my lifetime. When you undermine the people’s right to a free press and freedom of speech and expression, then you threaten the Constitution and all for which it stands.”

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Loser. Bigly.

Published by digby on November 19, 2018

Loser. Bigly.

by digby


I wrote earlier about his continuing insistence that he won, except where he didn’t as if it makes sense.

Here’s the most amazing cold water being thrown on that nonsense I’ve seen yet:

Why so few stories about The Resistance? Because it’s a bunch of liberal and moderate men and women and people of color. They aren’t Real Americans like all those Trump voters who say things like “the NFL stands for Ni**ers For Life. You know, the salt of the earth folks who really matter.

The truth is that the media has done a good job exposing Trump. I’m not criticizing them. But they have failed to tell the stories of people who are appalled by him. And it is a majority! Trump is not popular!

I’m sure it’s mostly because of the years of conditioning to believe that “the heartland” which is mostly white rural Americans are a reflection of the majority. This is no longer true. And it wasn’t fair to the people who were working their fingers to the bone to elect Democrats in the last cycle. Sadly, I doubt it will be any different this time. This goes back to the 60s when the Republicans discovered that they could hector the press into focusing on conservatives in order to prove they aren’t biased. It was always a suckers game but never more than now.

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“You take care of the floors”

Published by digby on November 18, 2018

“You take care of the floors”

by digby

Huffington Post:

With 76 people dead and nearly 1,300 unaccounted for and feared dead in California wildfires, President Donald Trump had a word of advice about stopping future blazes: “Raking.”

“You’ve got to take care of the floors. You know the floors of the forest, very important,” Trump noted Saturday surrounded by the devastation of the burned town of Paradise in northern California.

“I was with the president of Finland and he said, ‘We have a much different —we’re a forest nation.’ He called it a forest nation, and they spent a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things. And they don’t have any problem. And when they do, it’s a very small problem,” Trump said.

Critics were stumped by the raking solution.

They also pointed out the many extreme differences between warm, sunny, drought-stricken California with its annual destructive (and growing worse) fire seasons and Finland, land of marshes, cold temperatures and snow. A quarter of the nation is within the Arctic Circle.

But even with the fire-preventing advantages of far colder temperatures and precipitation, Scandinavia and Finland were hit with serious fires this year due to unusually hot and dry conditions, which scientists attributed to climate change.

I’m with her:

“Yeah, they brutally murdered a journalist and US resident, but I don’t really give a shit” — Trump, basically

Published by digby on November 18, 2018

“Yeah, they brutally murdered a journalist and US resident, but I don’t really give a shit”  — Trump, basically

by digby

Former Obama National Security Official Ben Rhodes on “This Week”


I think what’s very important here, and one of the things I want to know about is, what did Trump know and when did he know it? Because the US intelligence community…Saudi Arabia is something that they follow very closely. And so, the idea that something like this would happen without our intelligence agencies knowing something about what happened, I always thought was very unlikely. And so, what we’ve seen over the last few weeks is Trump kind of trying to get through this, and trying to avoid blaming Mohammed bin Salman, this person who he’s held in a full embrace since the beginning of his presidency. He’s acted almost like the defense attorney for Mohammed bin Salman, trying to figure out what the cover story is today. 

And they just felt like they were about to get through it. And now we have this report that the US intelligence community has high confidence assessment that MBS did this. … That’s based on information they’ve been looking at for some time. So, when Trump says, well, we just got this information in, no. You just got an intelligence assessment that leaked to the press. The intelligence that informed that assessment has probably been in the system for some time. And guess what? They would share intelligence about a high profile event like this with the White House. So, I think a Democratic House should look very carefully at, was the White House aware that MBS was responsible for this murder? Were they lying about it when they knew MBS was responsible for this murder? Why are they covering up for the Saudi murder of a dissident in a third country?

Trump takes it even further, lying through his teeth about the reasons by insisting that it’s all about millions of jobs building weapons for Saudi Arabia. (It’s not — very few jobs will be created, not that that matters anyway) No, the reason is something else, probably no more complicated than his feeling of sympatico with the authoritarian Prince bin Salman and the influence of the hardliners who want war with Iran. Also, probably money in his pocket and his general lack of respect for human rights across the board.

He’s a monster.

The mind of a child

Published by digby on November 18, 2018

The mind of a child

by digby

A dim child. This passage shows him contradicting himself with the space of a minute. I can’t get past the idea that people think this guy is brilliant — or even mentally competent:

WALLACE: When Democrats flipped the House back in 2006 and picked up 30 seats, President Bush 43 had a news conference the next day and said, “We had a thumping.” Last week, in this election, the House picked up, so far it’s 36 seats, it may be on the way to 40 seats and your reaction was that it was almost a complete victory.

TRUMP: I won the Senate, you don’t mention that.

WALLACE: But, well – I–

TRUMP: Excuse me, I won the Senate.

WALLACE: I understand that but–

TRUMP: I think they said 88 years.

WALLACE: But this was a — this was a historically big defeat in the House. You lost 36, maybe 40 seats. Some would argue that it was a thumping. And I want to talk about some of the ways in which you lost. You lost in traditionally Republican suburbs, not only around liberal cities like Philadelphia and D.C. but also red-state big cities like Houston and Oklahoma City. You lost among suburban women. You lost among independents and, in three key states that I think you remember pretty well — Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan — you lost both the governor seats and the senate seats.

TRUMP: Are you ready? I won the Senate, and that’s historic too, because if you look at presidents in the White House it’s almost never happened where you won a seat. We won — we now have 53 as opposed to 51 and we have 53 great Senators in the U.S. Senate. We won. That’s a tremendous victory. Nobody talks about that. That’s a far greater victory than it is for the other side. Number two, I wasn’t on the ballot. I wasn’t–

WALLACE: Wait — wait a minute you said — you kept saying–

TRUMP: I said look at me — I said look me.

WALLACE: You said, “Pretend I’m on the ballot...”

TRUMP: But I have people and you see the polls, how good they are, I have people that won’t vote unless I’m on the ballot, OK? And I wasn’t on the ballot. And almost everybody that I won — I think they said it was 10 out of 11. And I won against President Obama and Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama in a great state called Georgia for the governor. And it was all stacked against Brian and I was the one that went for Brian and Brian won. Look at Florida. I went down to Florida. Rick Scott won and he won by a lot. I don’t know what happened to all those votes that disappeared at the very end. And if I didn’t put a spotlight on that election before it got down to the 12,500 votes he would of lost that election, OK? In my opinion he would have lost. They would have taken that election away from him. Rick Scott won Florida. You’d have to say, excuse me, a man named Ron DeSantis is now your governor — your new governor of Florida. A wonderful man named DeWine is your governor of the great state of Ohio. Remember what they used to say before my election? You cannot win unless you win Ohio. I won Ohio. We had a tremendous set of victories. You look at the victories–

WALLACE: But if you can’t carry — and you certainly didn’t carry it two weeks ago — Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — you’re not going to get reelected.

TRUMP: I didn’t run. I wasn’t running. My name wasn’t on the ballot. There are many people that think, “I don’t like Congress,” that like me a lot. I get it all the time; “Sir, we’ll never vote unless you’re on the ballot.” I get it all the time. People are saying, “Sir, I will never vote unless you’re on the ballot. I say, “No, no, go and vote.” “Well, what do you mean?” As much as I try and convince people to go vote, I’m not on the ballot.

First of all, George W. Bush won a Senate majority in the 2002 midterm. But whatever.

You can see the disordered nature of his mind. Where Republicans won it was because of him. Where they didn’t win it was because he wasn’t on the ballot. It makes no sense. The whole idea is irrational.

But as I have said before, this is about Trump being desperately afraid of being seen as a loser. He knows that is the kiss of death among many of his cult members. If they come to believe that he’s not the Giant Slayer, all the bad stuff will come to the surface and they will see him for who he really is.

He doesn’t understand much, but he understands that.

Update: The Finnish press reports on this idiocy. They don’t rake the forest. Also, they are an arctic country.

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Women, what women?

Published by digby on November 18, 2018

Women, what women?

by digby

538 breaks down what happened with women voters in the midterms. It’s not pretty for the Republicans. They don’t seem tocare much so maybe that’s fine:

Democratic women did really well last Tuesday. And many broke new ground: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who won a New York U.S. House seat, is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. Rashida Tlaib, who won in Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, and Ilhan Omar, of the Minnesota 5th, will be the first Muslim women to serve in Congress. Women also flipped districts blue in competitive races — Navy veteran Elaine Luria won in the Virginia 2nd, and former CIA analyst Elissa Slotkin, who served in the Obama administration, won in the Michigan 8th.

According to ABC News projections and FiveThirtyEight analysis, 113 women U.S. House and Senate candidates — from both parties — are expected to be winners.1 And there are eight unresolved races with at least one woman candidate.2 The number of women winners is certain to grow to 115, because both of the major-party candidates in two of the unresolved races are women. In the other six races, two of the women candidates are favored to win — Republicans Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi’s Senate runoff and Mia Love in Utah’s 4th District — according to FiveThirtyEight’s analysis.

Regardless, the 116th Congress will feature the largest class of female legislators ever. But there’s a sharp divide across party lines in this historic first. Of the 113 projected women winners, 98 are Democrats, and 15 are Republicans. (They will be joining 10 female senators who weren’t up for election this year: six Democrats and four Republicans.) It’s a sober reminder that this standout year for women is mostly a standout year for Democratic women.

But this is not necessarily a new trend. According to data from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, the Democratic Party has historically elected more women to Congress than the GOP has. Even though at least 123 women will make up the 116th Congress, only 19 — or 15 percent — will be Republicans.

That’s down from 27 percent in the 115th Congress, according to the center. So why are so few Republican women elected to Congress? We’ve looked at this question in-depth before the 2018 midterm elections, but it’s worth revisiting in the wake of 2018 to better understand the dynamics that have led to fewer Republican women running for office and the underlying reasons as to why.

According to data collected by the Center for American Women and Politics, 63 percent of

the women who ran in Senate and House primaries from 1992 through 2018 were Democrats. In every election during that period, there were more women candidates in Democratic primaries than in Republican ones (although the numbers were fairly close in 2010, when 145 Republican women ran and 153 Democratic women ran). The largest difference was in this election cycle, when 73 percent of the women who ran in the primaries were Democrats. (The gap held in the general election, as well — 77 percentof all women candidates nominated by one of the two major parties were Democrats.)

That said, lower female representation in government is not unique to the Republican Party. There are more men than women in Congress overall and in state legislatures, too. Up until this election, the share of women in Congress had yet to break 20 percent. If the number of women serving in the 116th Congress stays at 123, women will be 23 percent of the total.

But why are fewer Republican women than Democratic women running for office? Political science gives us a few clues.

Being tapped or recruited to run for office matters — especially among potential women candidates. But there is some evidence that Republican women don’t respond to recruitment efforts as positively as Democratic women do. In a survey experiment published in 2016, professors at Brigham Young University found that even if a community leader encouraged Republican women to run for office, they were not any more likely to run. Democratic women were more receptive, however.

This has been happening for a while, ever since the GOP started to go batshit crazy. You can thank Newt Gingrich for this:

A study published in 2014 in the journal Research and Politics defined the criteria for successful candidates as people who were closely aligned with one of the two political parties, who were highly educated and who held a high-status job, like an attorney or professor. The researchers then looked at data on the adult population of the U.S. to see who fit the criteria. Most of the people who did were men. The women who met the criteria tended to identify as Democrats. As time went on, the gap between the Democratic and Republican female candidate pools grew, the study found: In the 1970s and 1980s, the numbers of Democratic and Republican women considered potentially successful candidates were about the same. But in the 1990s, the Democrats began to pull away, and the gap has only grown since then.

The authors of the 2014 study suggest that one factor behind the partisan gap could be the different beliefs about gender roles that are held by Democrats and Republicans. For example, according to a Pew Research Center survey, in 2012, 88 percent of Republicans said they have “old-fashioned values about family and marriage” compared with 60 percent of Democrats. And 21 percent of Republicans said they agreed that women should return to their traditional roles in society, compared with 16 percent of Democrats. These more conservative attitudes about family and women’s roles in society held by Republicans may have a negative influence on Republican women’s interest in pursuing a path that might lead to a political career.

It’s also what keeps so many conservative white women in the fold. They are still in thrall of the traditional patriarchal set-up for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the old “well, I may be a second class citizen but I’m still better than black and brown people and I want to keep it that way.” In other words, racism. There was a time when I might have thought they were religious zealots who held traditional views but clearly that is not the case. They are voting for Donald Trump — worshipping him even. Their “traditional values” aren’t religious. They believe in “traditional” white supremacist values.

And (surprise!) those values also put women in the “traditional” role of broodmare and supplicant. You didn’t see a lot of women marching in that Nazi march. But I’m sure they were behind the scenes making sandwiches for the boys.

I don’t know what it will take to convince these women to wake up but I’m skeptical about it. I have them in my family and they are just as brainwashed as the men, maybe more in some ways. It’s a form of being the “cool girl” in conservative circles. However, the new generation of white women is moving away from that. We’ll see where they stand in a decade or so but I’d be surprised if they move back to the traditional view. But the old ones? They’re gone.

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Restoring a little faith by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 18, 2018

Restoring a little faith
by Tom Sullivan

“They start shifting in their seats,” the freshly minted citizen tells me. Born in Argentina, raised in Venezuela, the single mother works seven days a week and supplements her work as a Spanish translator by driving for Uber and Lyft. Chatting after an impromptu post-mortem on the election Saturday, she explained how her more Trumpish passengers react to her being from Venezuela.

What is it like being from a communist country? they ask pointedly. How did things go bad so quickly?

It’s really an authoritarian dictatorship, she corrects them. (Her family left before Hugo Chávez took power.) She then has a little fun. People wanted a change from the status quo, she explains. So, they elected a man with no experience. People thought he was a straight-shooter.

Her passengers start looking uncomfortable and start shifting in their seats, she grins.

He appointed cronies to key government positions, she continues. Then he insisted the president needed more time to fix what was broken. So he began rewriting the national constitution to extend his term indefinitely.

And so on.

That’s the problem with electing strongmen. Her family left Venezuela to get away from them. Now, she says with some irony, she is a citizen of Trump’s America.

A senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, Joshua Kurlantzick cautions that once democratically elected autocrats begin unwinding democratic institutions and norms, “rebuilding democracy is arduous and hardly guaranteed.” His opinions run counter to the confidence of experts at CFR, the Brookings Institution, the Heritage Foundation, and the Center for American Progress that liberal democracy can weather the autocratic populists now in control in countries across the globe.

Kurlantzick cites a series of cases to argue that recovery from a descent into autocracy is hit or miss, and easier when there is “a relatively clean break with the ancien regime,” as after military defeat and occupation. Populists simply turned out of office can retain influence and a strong base of support. Even return to power:

Another problem is that, while in power, democratically elected tyrants can permanently alter institutions. In Turkey, as Cook points out, Erdogan and his party have so deformed the judiciary, parliamentary oversight and the election process that it will be extremely difficult for future leaders to reform the system and fashion any type of real democracy. This differs from the situation of purer post-authoritarian states: Where there were genuine revolts, where fully autocratic governments fell, their replacements could build judiciaries and political systems with integrity from scratch. Germany fashioned a more decentralized political system after the Nazi era, and Indonesia did the same in the years after Suharto.

Weakened institutions and shattered civic norms leave an opening for other populists to rise — or for opponents of the populists to fight back with even more undemocratic methods, like the coups that ousted Thaksin and, in 2014, his sister and successor. In Venezuela, some Hugo Chávez opponents welcomed a failed 2002 coup, and in Turkey, opponents of Erdogan tried to oust him with a coup in 2016. Citizens who lose faith in democracy and turn to antidemocratic tactics to oust populist leaders grease the slide toward permanent authoritarianism.

A survey of countries across Latin America shows faith in democracy falling. Dissatisfaction has risen from 51% in 2009 to 71%, reports a pollster in Santiago, Chile. Content with it has fallen to 24%, the lowest recorded in two decades. More than half say it is still their preferred form of government, although that too has declined.

Disillusionment is becoming easier here among white Trumpers who see their standing on the social pecking order challenged. It is challenging for Democrats to hang on, too, when corrupt officials no longer shrink at hiding efforts to undermine elections, Brian Kemp.

Pundits keep warning of an impending constitutional crisis that asymptotically never arrives. Hint: It’s here. But for the president’s lack of competence as an autocrat, we might already be Venezuela:

The recipe for populism is universal. Find a wound common to many, find someone to blame for it, and make up a good story to tell. Mix it all together. Tell the wounded you know how they feel. That you found the bad guys. Label them: the minorities, the politicians, the businessmen. Caricature them. As vermin, evil masterminds, haters and losers, you name it. Then paint yourself as the savior. Capture the people’s imagination. Forget about policies and plans, just enrapture them with a tale. One that starts with anger and ends in vengeance. A vengeance they can participate in.

The smackdown Trump received on November 6 means the U.S. still has a chance to stop the Trump train before it runs away with the country. Democrats headed for control of the House have more at stake than reelection and regaining the presidency in two years. They have to promote policies that will make people’s lives better if they can get back the power to enact them. People’s faith in democracy must be reinforced against those who have rejected it.

My new friend was not done with her passengers. Where else had she lived? they asked. Belgium, she replied.

So, what is it like living under socialism? they ask pointedly.

Her son was born there prematurely, she says. She herself spent a week in the hospital. Her son had to remain even longer, getting top-notch care in a hospital that felt to her like a spa.

They start shifting in their seats again.

When it was done, her husband paid about $1,000 total, she said.

Maybe our new crop of Democrats could start with something like that.

A GOP death spiral?

Published by digby on November 18, 2018

A GOP death spiral?

by digby

The president is in California today to survey the devastation. I’m talking about the fires of course, but I could easily be talking about the devastation of the California Republican party. It’s bad. It’s not all his fault, of course. They’ve been in a death spiral here for a couple of decades. He just put it into warp speed:

In the wake of a near-political annihilation in California that has left even longtime conservative stronghold Orange County bereft of a single Republican in the House of Representatives, a growing chorus of GOP loyalists here say there’s only one hope for reviving the flatlining party: Blow it up and start again from scratch.

That harsh assessment comes as Republicans survey the damage from the devastation of a “blue tsunami” in California which wiped out five GOP-held House seats — with more still threatened — while handing every statewide seat and a supermajority to the Democrats in both houses of the state legislature this week.

The latest blow came Thursday, when Democrat Katie Porter, an UC Irvine professor, defeated Republican Rep. Mimi Walters in a district which represents the beating political heart of Orange County.

“I believe that the party has to die before it can be rebuilt. And by die — I mean, completely decimated. And I think Tuesday night was a big step,’’ says veteran California GOP political consultant Mike Madrid. “There is no message. There is no messenger. There is no money. And there is no infrastructure.”

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Republicans like Madrid also mourned another low point this week: the defeat of Southern California Assemblyman Dante Acosta, marking the demise of the last GOP Latino legislator — in a state where Latinos comprise the fastest-growing electorate.

“The California Republican Party isn’t salvageable at this time. The Grand Old Party is dead,” wrote former state GOP Assembly leader Kristin Olsen, who startled fellow Republicans with a brutally frank op-ed this week saying Republicans must acknowledge their “serious problem” in California, particularly the effects of toxicity of President Trump.

GOP strategist John Weaver, who has worked California races and also has represented the presidential campaign of Ohio governor John Kasich, seconded Olsen’s view, tweeting that the effects of the Trump presidency have doomed any chance of resurrection. “In one fell swoop Trump & Republicans who willingly handcuffed themselves to him have turned Orange County into a GOP wasteland,’’ he tweeted this week. “You want to see the future? Look no further than the demographic death spiral in the place once considered a cornerstone of the party.”

Madrid argues that many California Republican leaders remain in complete denial of the fact that their continued support of Trump presidency has sealed the fate of the GOP — and last week’s midterm elections revealed the true extent of the GOP’s rot in California, where the state party has now shrunken to third party status.

“Now, it’s just open warfare. The barbarians have broken through the gates. The army is in full retreat,’’ said Madrid, who adds there’s no hope left for a party that for years has been on a path toward destruction. “Burn it to the ground. I want to reconstitute.’’

Republicans looking at the ashes of the midterm results say they must envision what a new party will look like — after the current structure and its leadership has been entirely disassembled.

“That’s the question: how do you start over?,’’ said Joel Fox, a longtime GOP strategist who publishes the “Fox & Hounds Daily” commentary site. He says the answer will be more wide-ranging than finding “one dynamic leader” — celebrity or billionaire — to rescue their cause.

“The rise of the Republican Party may really depend on the Democratic Party,’’ Fox said, and how it handles the heady times of having a $14 billion surplus and a supermajority under the leadership of the incoming Governor-elect Gavin Newsom. If progressives try to push their agenda too far, and land too many pro-tax ballot measures in front of the voters in future ballots — including revisions of the landmark property tax measure Prop. 13, soda taxes and oil taxes — it’s possible they will create an opening for the GOP to return to viability.

Yeah, ok. But if that happens, it won’t be this wingnut freakshow they call a party. It will have to be something different because it’s clear that a very large majority of California loathes what they’ve been doing. So fine. Reinvent yourself as something better.

But I have my doubts that they are there yet. Mostly because their voters are watching and listening to the same neo-fascist, conspiracy mongering pro-Trump propaganda that people in rural areas all over the country are listening to. They don’t want moderation, they want war and they are a long way from figuring out that they’ve been had:

Not everyone agrees that Trump is the cause for the party’s bottoming out. This week, former state GOP chair Shawn Steel, a member of the Republican National Committee, argued in an op-ed published in the Washington Examiner that “it’s not Trump” who lost Orange County dominance for the party. He laid the blame on millions of dollars in “dark money” raised by Democrats, who he said were aided by better organization and help from the tech industry in Silicon Valley. And — without any substantiation — Steel also claimed Democratic voter registration drives produced “borderline fraudulent turnout rates” in some key districts.

Already, a leading pro-Trump Republican voice — former gubernatorial candidate Assemblyman Travis Allen, a far-right conservative who fully supports the president’s wall and immigration policies — has kicked off his campaign to head the state GOP, announcing that it’s time to “take back California.”

But a growing number of Republicans in the party’s #NeverTrump wing — which includes prominent strategists like Rob Stutzman and Luis Alvarado — insist that a new beginning will rely heavily on a full-throated repudiation of Trump’s caustic divisiveness. They believe the rebuilding process could require years, if not generations, to rid the state GOP of the taint of a president who is blamed for ramping up anti-immigrant sentiment in a state that is home to more immigrants than any other in the country.

This isn’t the first time the dilapidated Republican Party in California has faced a dire outlook — or debated the notion that it must be completely overhauled. In 2007, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was lambasted by Republicans when he delivered an address to their state convention warning that the GOP was “dying at the box office’’ because they lacked inclusive messaging and policies, particularly to minorities who now dominate the state’s demographics.

And in assuming the leadership of the party in 2013, former state Sen. Jim Brulte predicted it would take at least six years to rebuild the structure and fundraising strength of Republican in California. He warned then that Republicans would need to “either stop the bleeding and/or start turning it around” in 2014 — or the party will be in the pits “for the rest of the decade.”

None of that altered the party’s downward trajectory, however, or caused a wholesale rethinking among some leading candidates and party leaders. Madrid cites the recent gubernatorial contest in which Republican nominee John Cox, who described himself repeatedly as a “Jack Kemp” Republican, pushed for Trump policies that are abhorrent to many Californians.

“It is completely unfathomable…for a Republican nominee to run on building a wall,’’ said Madrid, a nationally recognized expert on Latino voting trends who noted that the party has spent 20 years trying to extricate itself from the damage done by Prop. 187, the anti-illegal immigration ballot measure that eviscerated Latino support in the state. “And everyone acts like it’s normal…Cox was running on that, in California. Are you out of your mind?”

What choice did he have, really? The party has already shrunk to a rump faction of racist wingnuts, just like everywhere else in the country. Theoretically, the jungle primary should give them an opportunity to nominate someone more moderate but it doesn’t really work out that way. The wingnuts rule and the party label is so degraded from years and years of being out of step with the population that it may just be dead.

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