Peter Navarro is definitely in the running for worst Trump administration official. I think this puts him in first place:
LOL!
By the way, he isn’t the only one who’s still flogging a coup:
It’s Happy Hollandaise time! If you’d like to help keep this old blog going for another year, you can do so here:
It’s so interesting seeing all these Republicans suddenly worried about the wingnut crazies now that Trump has sicced them on them. As usual, they become concerned with something only when it affects them personally. The rest of us have to deal with these monsters all the time — including even public health officials who are just trying to do their jobs!
Here’s Brian Kemp of Georgia, getting very upset about the way he’s being treated —- by Republicans:
Gov. Brian Kemp is fed up with the unrelenting attacks from conspiracy theorists calling on him to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia. But he’s even more enraged that some of those peddlers of false claims are targeting his wife and three daughters.
“It has gotten ridiculous — from death threats, (claims of) bribes from China, the social media posts that my children are getting,” he said. “We have the ‘no crying in politics rule’ in the Kemp house. But this is stuff that, if I said it, I would be taken to the woodshed and would never see the light of day.”
The Republican singled out the invective targeting his daughter Lucy, who has received hate-filled messages about inane false conspiracies about the death of her longtime boyfriend, Harrison Deal, who was killed in a traffic accident this month in Savannah.
“I can assure you I can handle myself. And if they’re brave enough to come out from underneath that keyboard or behind it, we can have a little conversation if they would like to.”
Kemp, speaking to reporters shortly after a vaccine-related event at Grady Memorial, did not blame President Donald Trump for the wrath he’s facing from Republicans, even though the president has stoked the fury by blasting Kemp for refusing to illegally reverse his defeat in Georgia.ADVERTISING
“As far as I know, my relationship with the president is fine. I know he’s frustrated, and I’ve disagreed on things with him before,” he said, adding: “Look, at the end of the day, I’ve got to follow the laws and the Constitution and the Constitution of this state.”
Trump has repeatedly vented his outrage at Kemp, and has called him a “clown,” predicted he would lose the 2022 Republican primary and said he was “ashamed” for endorsing him in 2018. At his rally in Valdosta, Trump encouraged U.S. Rep. Doug Collins to run against Kemp in two years.
State elections officials say there is no evidence of systemic irregularities, and courts at every level have tossed out every complaint.
Asked broadly about a potential primary challenge, Kemp said: “I’m ready for any kind of fight that anybody wants to have — Republican primary general election, whatever it is.”
“I’m going to continue to run on my record but I’m also going to look Georgians straight in the eye and say: Look, this is what I told you I was going to do when you elected me. This is what I’ve been doing. And one of those things is placing my hand on the Bible and giving an oath before God to follow the law.”
He urged fellow Trump supporters to lower the temperature.
“If anybody has an issue with something I’ve done, they need to come see me and I’ll talk to them about it. They don’t need to bother my wife or my children or anybody,” Kemp said.
“It’s fine to disagree on policy,” the governor said, adding: “We’re just not going to go down the road of enticing violence — at least here in this state, as long as I’m governor.”
I don’t blame him for being upset. But I’ll be very surprised if he has learned anything from all this beyond the fact that it’s unfair to do this to him because he’s such a good right winger that he doesn’t deserve it.
It will be interesting to see if this has any effect on the Senate runoff. There might be a few people who find all this distasteful enough to make hem vote Democratic. Or not.
Probably not. But we live in hope …
It’s Happy Hollandaise time! If you’d like to help keep this old blog going for another year, you can do so here:
I’m more than willing to give the Biden administration some time to get their bearings and figure out the lay of the land after the carnage of the Trump years. But I am very, very skeptical that they will be able to “work with” Republicans even if Biden thinks he has some kind of special talent for it. They are way too far gone.
Ron Brownstein has some thoughts on this:
The dissonance between the first and second halves of Joe Biden’s landmark speech this week encapsulates a central strategic challenge he’ll face as president.
During his victory speech on Monday, following the Electoral College vote, Biden denounced more forcefully than ever before the Republican Party’s legal maneuvers to overturn his win, arguing that they constituted an effort “to wipe out the votes of more than 20 million Americans … a position so extreme, we’ve never seen it before.” Yet in the speech’s final sections, Biden pivoted to a more familiar message, promising to “turn the page” on these skirmishes and insisting that he’s “convinced we can work together for the good of the nation.”
The big question his remarks raise is whether the Republican Party that Biden described in the speech’s first half is truly open to the kind of cooperation and partnership he promised in the second.
The answer is already dividing centrists—who believe that Biden has no choice but to seek agreements with congressional Republicans—from progressives, who fear that he will sap his momentum and demoralize his coalition if he spends weeks on what could prove to be fruitless negotiations over COVID-19 relief and other subjects. The divide is not only ideological but generational too: Compared with Biden, who came of age in the more collegial Senate of the 1970s and ’80s, younger congressional Democrats forged by the unrelenting partisan warfare of the modern Congress—a group some Democrats think includes Vice President–elect Kamala Harris—are generally less optimistic about finding common cause with Republicans.
I actually disagree with this a little bit. I don’t think the divide is ideological or generational as much as is it strategic and tactical. I’m old and yet I am convinced that the Republicans are a destructive, nihilistic power mad force that is going to do everything they can to sabotage anything that will help the American people and potentially benefit their political enemies. They are hopeless in my view. So I’m for the Biden administration using the power they have to enact policies that must be enacted if we are to survive. (And I’m ferevently hoping for a good result in georgia which changes everything.)The GOP is a roadblock to that and while it’s certainly fine to keep the lines of communication open — who knows, maybe Romney and Murkowski will come over once in a while — but putting any confidence in them is a huge mistake.
This isn’t about policy. There may be ideological differences within the big Democratic coalition that have to be hashed out. But Republicans are bad faith actors and cannot be counted upon to do anything but obstruct.
Brownstein continues:
Biden’s recent criticism of the GOP is notable because the president-elect has generally downplayed Donald Trump’s attempts to subvert the election while emphasizing his own optimism about future cooperation. Biden aides told me that his priority has been to project his victory’s inevitability, and to avoid giving what one top adviser called “any additional lift or credibility” to Trump’s groundless claims of election fraud, even as more Republicans have embraced them. But that choice has come with what some Democrats see as a serious consequence: a failure to alert the public to the magnitude of the president’s assault on a democratic election, and to the broad willingness inside the GOP to join him.
The president-elect struck a different tone in Monday’s speech, when he condemned a Texas lawsuit to toss out the election results in four swing states where he won—litigation endorsed by about two-thirds of both GOP House members and Republican state attorneys general. Appearing on behalf of the Democratic Senate candidates in Georgia on Tuesday, Biden kept the pressure on, lashing the state’s two GOP senators for endorsing the lawsuit, which would have invalidated the votes of nearly 5 million of their own constituents.
That messaging marked a subtle but significant departure from Biden’s usual language during the campaign, when he mostly presented Trump as an aberration within the GOP, and repeatedly predicted that once he was defeated, more in the party would return to centrist dealmaking. Biden’s broad criticism of Republicans on Monday may have been his most candid acknowledgment yet that much of Trump’s party has followed him over the past four years toward more radical positions, particularly by abetting his serial assaults on the rule of law.
But the senior Biden adviser said that in targeting the GOP’s postelection actions, the president-elect’s goal was not “trying to score points against Republicans” or branding them as anti-small-d democratic. Rather, his intent was to reassure Americans that the failure of Trump’s efforts, even with the support of so much of his party, underlines the fundamental resilience of American democracy. “It was … more about trying to lay out the scope and the magnitude of the crisis that we had just navigated,” said the adviser, who like others I talked with for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations.
Although almost the entire Democratic Party remained silent during the first weeks of the postelection period, more recently some members have raised sharp alarms about the long-term implications of the GOP’s actions. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut delivered a blistering floor speech on Friday in which he declared that Republicans who support Trump’s efforts to overturn the election “are engaged in a treachery against their nation.”
In an interview yesterday, Murphy told me that he fears Republicans may grow even more brazen in seeking to subvert future elections. “You can foresee a circumstance in which a Senate election is overturned in a red state in 2022, because I think the majority of Republicans have come to the conclusion that if a Democrat wins in any place other than New York or Connecticut, it must be because of fraud,” Murphy said. “That’s the point at which the blue states start to say, ‘Hey, can we be in this together with states that aren’t actually committed to democracy and the free will of voters?’”
The GOP’s unprecedented postelection maneuvering poses an inescapable question for Biden: whether reaching bipartisan agreements is possible when many Republicans have become so radicalized that they still refuse to acknowledge Trump’s defeat.
They are that radicalized. 79% of Trump voters believe the election was stolen and these people have done nothing to disabuse them of that lie.
He goes on to point out Biden’s recent comments that the Republicans are going to wise up and that the fever will break. And notes that some people are deeply skeptical:
In an open memo published late last month, four leading progressive groups said such optimism could prove electorally dangerous for Democrats—by luring the party into dead-end negotiations that demoralize the Democratic base heading into the 2022 election. “The only question is whether Democrats spend the next two years playing into Republicans’ hands by feeding the pretense that [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell is seeking to negotiate in good faith,” the groups wrote.
Biden should target McConnell almost immediately, says Sean McElwee, a founder of the progressive polling-and-analysis firm Data for Progress, one of the organizations that signed the open memo. “Democrats really need to start making people understand that Mitch McConnell is leading a do-nothing Senate that should be replaced in the midterms,” McElwee told me. “You want to make Mitch McConnell the enemy, and we need to get his favorables down to nil and then tie all of the Republicans to” him.
By contrast, the centrist Democratic group Third Way this week released a poll showing that a strong majority of registered voters want political leaders in both parties to seek compromise. In the survey, 85 percent of self-identified Democrats and two-thirds of Republicans said they prefer political leaders who will “compromise in order to get things done.”
Matt Bennett, the group’s executive vice president for external affairs, told me that while Republicans’ behavior since the election has been “openly seditious,” Biden has no choice but to seek agreements with them. Referring to Biden’s remarks after the Electoral College vote, Bennett said: “He couldn’t make the entire speech the first half; he had to have the second half. You simply can’t enter office as a new president convinced that there is no hope of working with your political opponents.” (He added one qualification: “I guess Trump did that, but that resulted in the worst presidency in American history, so that’s not one to emulate.”)
In practice, these two perspectives may not really be all that different. McElwee agrees that Biden should work, wherever possible, to divide the GOP by seeking to attract at least a few Republican senators to his policy priorities. And Bennett said that while Biden must continue to pursue agreements “in the hope that Republicans will come to their senses, he also needs to be mindful that they may not.”
That’s fine. But keep in mind that people always say they want bipartisan cooperation and what that means in practice is that they want the other side to capitulate to their agenda. Why even Mitch McConnell may give way if Biden agrees to enact the GOP agenda with no changes. (Actually, he probably won’t.)
The real difference among Democrats may be over where to strike the balance between conciliation and confrontation—between seeking agreements and building a case against McConnell as a blindly partisan obstructionist, the same way Republicans have worked for years to paint House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as a radical.
Biden probably lands much more on the conciliatory end of that continuum, both because of his long experience in the clubbier Senate of decades past and because of his belief that he’s negotiated productively with McConnell before (a view not all Democrats share). But his is not the only viewpoint in the incoming administration. Jen O’Malley Dillon, his campaign manager and future White House deputy chief of staff, expressed the flintier perspective common among younger Democrats in an interview published this week in Glamour. Dillon said that while Biden must pursue the “bipartisan ideal” he offered voters, she, at least, will enter any negotiations without illusions: “I’m not saying they’re not a bunch of fuckers,” she said. “Mitch McConnell is terrible.”
They are a “bunch of fuckers” and Mitch McConnell is terrible. The fact that she’s advising Biden makes me feel better.
I think this represents the real divide in the Democratic party and it’s not ideological. There are progressives and centrists alike who think the GOP has shown itself to be an undemocratic, abusive political faction that is dedicated to obstruction by any means necessary — which means the Democratic strategy must work with that reality. There are also progressives and centrists who believe either that Republicans can be reasoned with or that they are irrelevant. I am in the first camp: they are too powerful to ignore and also bad actors that cannot be reasonably dealt with. These different views require different tactics and I hope that the people around Biden don’t let him waste too much time dallying with Mitch who is always, always acting in bad faith.
It’s Happy Hollandaise time! If you’d like to help keep this old blog going for another year, you can do so here:
The GOP is now a zombie so I suppose that there’s no real need for an autopsy. But get a load of the delusional cult-like thinking among Republican officials.
Democrats in Texas and New Hampshire are forming committees to examine the party’s failings in last month’s election. Less formal autopsies are underway in states across the country.
But the party that lost the presidential election isn’t soul-searching at all.
For the final act of his showman-like presidency, Donald Trump has convinced the Republican Party that despite losing the White House by 7 million votes — and despite seeing five states flip in 2020 — things could hardly be better inside the GOP.
Even as the Electoral College this week confirmed Joe Biden’s victory, interviews with more than two dozen GOP state and local chairs and Republican National Committee members reflect a party that, far from reassessing its embrace of Trumpism, is hell-bent on more of the same.
“Our president absolutely grew our party,” said Jennifer Carnahan, chair of the Minnesota Republican Party, noting the GOP’s down-ballot victories and explosive turnout with Trump on the ticket. “He totally advanced our party … I think that as Republicans, we just need to continue to remain on the course.”
It hardly matters that Trump couldn’t beat Biden in the Rust Belt. Or that Trump ceded the longtime Republican strongholds of Georgia and Arizona to Democrats and, in defeat, became the first incumbent president since 1992 to fail to win a second term.
Six weeks after the election, Republicans are beginning to chart a multi-state effort to undo mail ballot expansions that disadvantaged the party in November. But that’s a mechanical concern. As it prepares for the midterm elections and 2024, the direction of the party is set.
“As far as I’m concerned, everything’s great,” said Stanley Grot, a district-level Republican Party chair in Michigan, a state Trump won four years ago but lost to Biden in November.
In one of the more surreal role reversals in modern post-presidential election history, the winning party nationally is poring over its congressional and legislative losses, while the party that lost the White House isn’t.
When Mitt Romney lost the national popular vote by 5 million votes in 2012, his defeat sparked a devastating, 100-page RNC post-mortem based on conversations with more than 2,600 people, in-depth focus groups and polling, a survey of pollsters, and an online survey featuring the participation of more than 36,000 individuals. Trump lost by 2 million more votes than Romney, and there is nary a peep.
To many Republicans, that makes total sense. After all, GOP turnout was up, and down-ballot Republicans over-performed, reducing Democrats’ House majority and positioning the GOP — depending on the result of two runoffs in Georgia — to hold the Senate. Even if the president did get swamped by Biden — an outcome most Republicans don’t accept — there is little belief among Republicans that it had anything to do with him.
“It wasn’t a matter of our candidate,” said Bill Pozzi, chair of the Republican Party in heavily Republican Victoria County, Texas. “It was a matter of the process.”
[…]
But in the Republican Party of 2020, second-guessing is heresy. Trump ignored the lessons of the 2012 post-mortem when he ran in 2016, and he won. And even in defeat this year, Trump received more votes than any presidential candidate in history except for Biden, dramatically expanding the Republican Party’s ranks and making some modest inroads with Latinos, a growing segment of the electorate. More important, he persuaded Republicans, without evidence, that the election was rigged.
It’s hard for a party to draw lessons from an election it doesn’t think it lost.
As a result, Republicans mostly aren’t reckoning with their erosion in the suburbs or their weakness with women. Instead, they’re turning Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud into a cause that will animate the party for years, spinning forward frustration with the November election’s administration to advance voter ID laws and measures to limit mail voting in future elections.
“Everything’s great!” Lol.
The truth is that many of these people see a YUGE opportunity to use Trump’s fraudulent “voter fraud” nonsense as an excuse to further suppress the vote in swing states run by Republicans. But there is real brainwashing going on there too. They seem to truly believe that Donald Trump is worth hitching their futures to, even though he is the worst sore loser in history and clearly has shrunk their party to nothing but the core cult members.
They are nuts, but they still represent tens of millions of Americans and they have clout in this antiquated, barely-democratic country of ours. They aren’t going away. And they eat brains. Obviously.
It’s that time of year again, friends. If you’d like to help keep this old blog going for another year, you can do so below. And Happy Hollandaise!
Once again, I want to thank everyone who has participated in the Hullabaloo Happy Hollandaise fundraiser. This has been a hell of a year for all of us and I’m so grateful to all of you.
We can finally see the light at the end of what has been a very long, dark tunnel. The COVID vaccines are rolling out and Donald Trump is almost on his way to exile in Mar-a-lago. Huzzah!
Unfortunately, the trauma of this tragic pandemic and the four years of Trump are going to be with us for a while. (In fact, Trump himself is going to be with us for some time although, blessedly, we won’t have to pay as much attention to him.) And we have a terrible economic crisis on our hands that is going to require some very serious government attention at least for the next year as business and jobs ramp up, hopefully with enough pent up demand to create a strong recovery.
But our long-term challenges are going to require sustained attention on the part of our elected officials and activists. The right wing assault on democracy is an acute problem that cannot be ignored if we are to deal the big issues of wealth inequality to racial justice to climate change. We have come to a point at which action on all those fronts is mandatory if we expect to survive as a nation (and a planet.)
We have spent the last four years in a hallucinogenic political atmosphere, simply trying to wrap our minds around the surreality of the Donald Trump three ring circus on a daily basis. It was a very dangerous time and we didn’t escape unscathed, unfortunately, We have over 300,000 deaths, many of which could have been prevented if we’d had serious leadership, and tens of millions of our fellow Americans have been brainwashed into a bizarre conspiracy-theory cult driven by a demagogue and extremist media machine.
Now we are facing the fallout and it isn’t going to be easy. As much as we would like a break, the carnage they’ve left in their wake is extreme and those long term problems are even more urgent than before. Oh, and by the way, the Republican Party is more insane than it’s ever been before. We can’t afford to look away.
Hopefully, politics will least be operating on a more rational plane over the next few years (although I wouldn’t bet on it.) And we’ll be here to try to make sense of it as best we can, with as much insight, focus and humor that we can muster in these complicated times.
If you’d like to help us keep the lights on here at Hullabaloo to continue to do what we do, I would very much appreciate it. And thanks again to all who have given support already, past and present.
cheers,
digby
I am very glad to see the House pursue this case beyond the Trump presidency:
House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler intends to reissue a subpoena for former White House Counsel Don McGahn’s testimony next year, the House told a federal appeals court Wednesday, confirming that Democrats intend to press ahead with its long legal battle to compel testimony from a star witness in special counsel Robert Mueller’s obstruction of justice investigation of President Donald Trump.
“I expect to promptly reissue the Committee subpoena to Mr. McGahn to ensure this Committee’s litigation and corresponding legislative and oversight efforts continue uninterrupted,” Nadler said in a memo to the Judiciary Committee, which accompanied the 66-page court filing signed by House Counsel Douglas Letter.
Nadler had previously signaled his interest in continuing the fight for McGahn’s testimony — a crucial marker in a yearslong separation of powers battle against the Trump administration — but Wednesday’s filing emphasized Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s agreement with that strategy. In the filing, Letter indicates that he anticipates the next Congress to adopt a longstanding rule that permits litigation to carry over from one legislative session to the next.
The Justice Department had argued that the McGahn suit should essentially be dismissed as moot because the subpoena Nadler issued in 2019 would lose force once the current Congress expires on Jan. 3.
But Letter pointed to the House’s long history of permitting litigation to carry over, noting that if each Congress were required to start from scratch, they would simply be forestalling indefinitely answers to crucial questions about Congress’ ability to compel testimony from the Executive Branch. Though Trump will be out of office, Letter emphasized that his testimony could help shape “remedial legislation.” Nadler said in his memo that he anticipated legislation to “restore historical norms” governing the relationship between Congress and the Executive Branch.
McGahn was a central witness to evidence that Trump attempted to obstruct Mueller’s probe. He twice ordered McGahn to have Mueller removed and also instructed him to create a false record about the decision, McGahn told Mueller’s investigators.
The Judiciary Committee subpoenaed McGahn for testimony in April 2019, but he ignored their deadline under orders from Trump. The House brought the case to court in August 2019, and lawmakers have been winding their way through litigation since. The Justice Department and White House have claimed that McGahn and other close aides to the president are “absolutely immune” from testimony, a doctrine that has never been upheld by a court but has also rarely been tested. Courts that have examined it have largely rejected the breadth of the claim but also have not set out detailed contours for when Congress may demand testimony from senior presidential advisers.
The principle is very important and the congress needs to pursue it. If an administration can simply ignore subpoenas then congressional oversight is pretty much neutered. But the beauty of testing this during a Biden administration is that the conservative courts will have to weigh whether or not they want to grant this “absolute immunity” to a Democratic administration.
And, needless to say, I am thrilled to see them pursue McGahn. If they follow through and call him and the rest of Trump’s rogue gallery to testify about what happened maybe we can have some public accountability for this rogue administration.
I’m not holding my breath. I suspect that there will be a massive push to let bygones be bygones. There’s just so much criminality, corruption and abuse of power that I’m sure it’s tempting to just try to write it off and move forward. But they have an obligation to look at all of it and force the American people to look at it as well, no matter how painful it is. We can’t “look forward” as long as this trauma is unresolved.
It’s Happy Hollandaise time! If you’d like to help keep this old blog going for another year, you can do so here:
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) fears participatory democracy:
Change the outcome? You speak as if the outcome is predetermined, senator. You mean infrequent voters may determine the outcome, don’t you? Surely.
Stacey Abrams is working hard to determine the outcome of Georgia’s Jan. 5 U.S. Senate runoff elections that will determine which side of the chamber controls it. “I’m nothing special … I just — I’m kind of relentless,” she recently told Rolling Stone:
What was different in 2020?
Republicans, when they took over the [Georgia] House, the Senate and the governor’s mansion, were very intentional about making vote-by-mail easier, because it was largely the province of older white voters. For years, Republicans beat us at vote-by-mail. And there was a great deal of suspicion about it from black and brown voters — including because, in 2010, then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp arrested a group of black voters in south Georgia for using vote-by-mail. When I ran for governor in 2018, we were the first campaign that did a deep and wide investment in vote-by-mail: We sent [voters] applications, we made sure they returned those applications, and we harangued them to return those ballots. We, in 2018, dramatically increased their participation. [And] what happened in 2020 is that voters were not willing to risk their lives — especially black and brown voters. They were afraid of going and standing in long lines, because you have to remember, in [the primary in] June, we had eight-hour lines.The other piece was that we, through Fair Fight [and] the Democratic Party, made it easier to vote by mail. In Georgia, if you were black or Latino, you were twice as likely to have your absentee ballot rejected. If you were young, it was three times more likely that your ballot would be rejected. Because of the consent decree that we were able to get enforced against the secretary of state, more of those ballots could be fixed — they could be “cured” so those votes would count.
When Republicans outperformed Democrats in voting by mail, they supported it. Now that that balance has changed, the Rand Pauls among them are opposed. Go figure.
Abrams added that she wants to figure out how to convince the “next 50,000, that next 100,000 voters to believe that [voting is] worth the effort.”
“I would focus on that,” Abrams continued (emphasis mine), “and I would marry that to aggressive attempts to articulate and demonstrate what policies can look like. I’d love to be able to embed — not to bring people in, but to actually cultivate from within communities — folks whose only job is to talk about the connective tissue between policy and outcomes.”
This is where Democrats fall short as Anat Shenker-Osorio reminded Pod Save America last week [timestamp 1:15:45] using the brownie analogy:
“When we are walking through the grocery aisle and want to buy brownies,” she begins, “what is the image on the brownie box? The brownie! What’s not staring you in the face? The recipe! … We need to stop messaging our policy and talk about what our policy achieves.”
Don’t argue your policies in public. Talk about outcomes.
Abrams wants to activate those infrequent and new voters by telling them how their families’ lives will get better if they turn out to vote for Democrats. They won’t stand in line to vote for policy prescriptions.
Universal health care? Talk about how much more money families will have in their pockets at the end of each month. Talk about not worrying the next health care crisis will bankrupt you. Your kids will get well and stay well. You’ll be able to go to the doctor without risking your home. We’ll save 68,000 lives per year. One of them might be yours.
Right now, my truck is sitting in the driveway with a bad water pump. When it goes into the shop, all I want to know is how much it costs and when it will be ready to drive again. I don’t care about the details. That’s why I hire a mechanic. That’s why (less ideological) voters hire politicians. For the results.
It’s that time of year again, friends. If you’d like to help keep this old blog going for another year, you can do so below. And Happy Hollandaise!
Fighting Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing. That saying appropriated from UCLA Bruins football coach “Red” Sanders might accurately describe Donald J. Trump’s Republican Party. Americans do love a fighter, as I noted here days ago. But there should be a point to the fighting. An end goal. For the party of Trump, the means is the end.
Our conservative neighbors, for example, have made freedom (and liberty) a shibboleth, a code word called out in the dark to identify other members of the tribe. Ask, “Freedom to do what?” and you might draw a blank stare. Just freedom, lib. You don’t get it, do you?
Fighting has become like that for Republicans. Not fighting for anything in particular. Just fighting, argues Joel Mathis at The Week. It is what made Donald Trump such a darling for supplicants both intimidated and energized by Trump’s eagerness to set fires, pick fights, and punish adversaries. Some among the base perceive less-belligerent Republicans as members of the “surrender caucus” who don’t get that politics now is a perpetual culture war. Trump is their first wartime president.
Mathis writes:
The big problem with the right’s “always fight harder” mentality is that it is anti-democratic, reducing politics purely to the exercise of your own side’s will, instead of acknowledging that other factions will sometimes win elections for lots of other reasons — a bad economy, an unexpected pandemic, or a platform that simply appeals to more voters. It also exerts negative pressure on politics, which should be about getting things done for all Americans. Instead, the fight becomes the most important thing, the only thing, with participants judged primarily on their ability to “own the libs” or “have all the right enemies” instead of their capacity to do anything useful.
As always, Trump didn’t create such attitudes within the Republican Party, but he has been masterful at identifying, exploiting, and encouraging them. He was rewarded with the presidency for doing so, and still retains the loyalty — and votes — of tens of millions of Americans. Which means that trouble still lurks. As long as a significant portion of society elevates an irrational fighting spirit as the highest quality in our leaders, fighting is mostly what we’ll get.
Upon being declared the victor in NC-11 last month, know-little Republican Madison Cawthorn, 25, fired off his first tweet as congressman-elect: “Cry more, lib.”
James Kimmel, Jr., a psychiatry lecturer and violence researcher at the Yale University School of Medicine, wrote at Politico last week that Trump’s uncontrollable urge to lash out at perceived enemies fits a pattern consistent with a kind of addiction. Specifically, revenge addiction.
In pursuing the role of grievance and retaliation in violent crime, Kimmel writes that brain imaging studies show that “harboring a grievance (a perceived wrong or injustice, real or imagined) activates the same neural reward circuitry as narcotics.”
Kimmel continues:
This isn’t a metaphor; it’s brain biology. Scientists have found that in substance addiction, environmental cues such as being in a place where drugs are taken or meeting another person who takes drugs cause sharp surges of dopamine in crucial reward and habit regions of the brain, specifically, the nucleus accumbens and dorsal striatum. This triggers cravings in anticipation of experiencing pleasure and relief through intoxication. Recent studies show that similarly, cues such as experiencing or being reminded of a perceived wrong or injustice — a grievance — activate these same reward and habit regions of the brain, triggering cravings in anticipation of experiencing pleasure and relief through retaliation. To be clear, the retaliation doesn’t need to be physically violent—an unkind word, or tweet, can also be very gratifying.
Pleasurable even. (See: Donald Trump.)
The research remains unsettled, but suggests people may become addicted to revenge the way others become addicted to drugs or gambling. In some cases, carrying grievances others let go can result in violence.
Kimmel explains that this form of addiction can also be contagious:
Like substance addiction, revenge addiction appears to spread from person to person. For instance, inner-city gun violence spreads in neighborhoods like a social contagion, with one person’s grievances infecting others with a desire to seek vengeance. Because of his unique position and use of the media and social networks, Trump is able to spread his grievances to thousands or millions of others through Twitter, TV and rallies. His demand for retribution becomes their demand, causing his supporters to crave retaliation—and, in a vicious cycle, this in turn causes Trump’s targets and their supporters to feel aggrieved and want to retaliate, too.
The outgoing president’s daily grievance tweets have held the nation’s attention for over five years. That, as always, is Trump’s primary goal, attention being as necessary for him as oxygen. But addicting a large portion of the electorate to grievance is both the political project and the business model of conservative media. Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Bill O’Reilly, Mark, Levin, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Fox News, etc., have spoon-fed listeners their daily dose of outrage for decades. Day after day and all day they tune in to get their “hits.”
The result can be destroyed families, “relationship problems and conflicts, display periods of euphoria followed by depression and restlessness,” and so forth. So long as the ad revenue keeps streaming in, the dealers will keep feeding the addicts.
“There are no quick fixes with addiction,” Kimmel writes. “More people need to become savvy about how, why and for whose benefit they are being made to feel aggrieved and must decide to stop dealing in the drug of their own destruction.”
But it feels so good to get even. That is why fighting has become an end in itself on the right and another reason why the republic is in such disrepair. Getting anything useful done is no longer the point.
It’s that time of year again, friends. If you’d like to help keep this old blog going for another year, you can do so below. And Happy Hollandaise!
Don’t forget these men’s names. In the not too distant future we will be asked to take them seriously and the media will treat them with respect. And we must remind ourselves and everyone else just how fatuously sycophantic they were when it really counted:
“There was fraud in this election,” said Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chair of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, who called the controversial hearing and said Monday that he acknowledged Biden’s win. “I don’t have any doubt about that.”
It’s a nebulous argument, made without proof, that allows the receiver to make what they want of it. Coming a day after Biden won the electoral college, it seems like an attempt to bridge Trump and his most hardcore allies, who seem to truly want to believe in widespread election fraud, with the reality that there was none, and with shades in between.
Johnson invited several Trump lawyers who had lost cases in courts in several different states to restate the claims that the courts deemed not credible — including on the merits of the actual fraud claims: that people voted twice, dead people voted, poll workers weren’t allowed to watch, etc.
One lawyer for the Trump campaign who testified Wednesday had his lawsuit thrown out by a Nevada judge who examined the claims and decided that the campaign, for all its efforts, “did not prove under any standard of proof that illegal votes were cast and counted.”
The judge, as many others have, also derided witness statements the Trump campaign submitted about potential fraud as “self-serving statements of little or no evidentiary value.” In other words, useless.
Yet Senate Republicans in this hearing were willing to use the fact that those statements exist to say that something must be wrong if people were willing to make them. They didn’t go as far as Trump in straight-up saying that the election was stolen. But they were willing to inject the question of whether there was fraud deeper into the political conversation, which allows it to be easily conflated with the false claims of a president who has systematically tried to undermine the democratic process at every turn.
“I think it’s the right thing to do to get people to feel comfortable that elections are free and fair,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said of holding the hearing. “And if this one wasn’t that, the next one will be.”“Fraud happened,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said, without evidence. “The election in many ways was stolen.”
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) even tried to use the fact that a majority of Republican voters believe the election was rigged as proof that it might have been: “Yesterday I was talking from the state of Missouri with some of the constituents back at home, a group of about 30 people. Every single one of them, every one of them told me that they felt they had been disenfranchised, that their votes didn’t matter, that the election had been rigged. These are normal, reasonable people. These are not crazy people.”
They may not be crazy but they have been brainwashed by Donald Trump and right wing media — and Josh Hawley knows that. In fact, he has helped brainwash them. It is his fault for failing to tell his constituents the truth.
At some point all these people are going to stake a claim to leadership and expect people to fall in line behind him. But when it counted, when they could have been brave enough to help their constituents believe in reality, when they could have stood up for democracy and the constitution, they opted for the cynical easy path to maintain their power. (Well, all but Ron Johnson who really seems to be brainwashed himself — there’s something very wrong with him, always has been.)
Here are some highlights of that hearing. WTF is happening to our country?
Remember their names.
It’s Happy Hollandaise time! If you’d like to help keep this old blog going for another year, you can do so here:
President Donald Trump may not be willing to accept his term is ending, but as the clock ticks down on his time in office, hundreds of his allies — including some of his closest business associates and many high-profile criminals — are ramping up their efforts to squeeze out the final ounces of his presidential power.
Since Trump lost the election six weeks ago, calls and emails have been flooding into the West Wing from people looking to benefit from the President’s powers of clemency. So inundated is Trump’s staff with requests for pardons or commutations that a spreadsheet has been created to keep track of the requests directed to Trump’s close aides.
Trump, who refuses to acknowledge his loss and who officials say is devolving further into denial, has nonetheless been eager to engage on who is requesting what. He’s been handed case summaries to review and, in some instances, has polled his network of associates about whom he should pardon.
With the end of his presidency nearing, Trump appears eager to wield his powers before he finds them gone. Unlike practically any other matter related to the end of his presidency, his clemency powers are a topic Trump actually seems to enjoy discussing, one person in communication with the President said, even though it amounts to another tacit reminder that his tenure at the White House is nearly over.
Not everyone knows the place that means the most to your spouse, family member or friend, but you do. So why not put that knowledge to good use and make a great gift with Grafomap?That’s a stark contrast with how Trump has responded to another, smaller effort also ramping up as Inauguration Day approaches: an effort to convince Trump to accept the election results.
The Electoral College’s affirmation of President-elect Joe Biden’s win this week did not appear enough to shake Trump from his delusions of victory, but it is adding urgency to a push by several of his advisers to gently steer Trump toward reality. Several of his closest allies have urged him to move on from his efforts to contest the election and begin planning his post-White House political future — including a potential 2024 run.
Yet even amid the intractable movement of the transition and the hurried lame-duck activity — some of which he is participating in himself — Trump is steadfastly refusing to acknowledge that he lost.
He’s unstable and lord knows what that might lead him to do. But for the moment he seems most concerned with wreaking revenge on his political enemies and figuring out how best to protect himself and his cronies. He’s adopting a scorched earth policy, but as always, it’s focused on his own psychic needs.
That’s horrific, of course. But it’s better than nuclear war.
It’s Happy Hollandaise time. If you’d like to help keep this old blog going for another year, you can do so here: