Skip to content

Month: December 2020

Onward to 2024

Published by digby on December 2, 2020

Say hello to the frontrunner

Congressional Republicans were slow to embrace Donald Trump’s White House campaign in 2016. But the ousted president will have plenty of support on Capitol Hill should he run again in 2024.

Trump is even getting cheered on publicly by some of the very Republicans who could seek higher office in the future. Even in defeat, Trump’s hold on the party remains strong.

“If he were to run in 2024, I think he would be the nominee. And I would support him doing that,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). “He’d have a lot of support out in the country.”

“It’d be great if he ran. He’s done a good job. I think he ought to run if he wants to run. Who knows what’s going to happen in ‘24?” said Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who said he is not focused on a presidential run at the moment. “He can sell the things he accomplished.”

In a series of interviews Wednesday, House and Senate Republicans made clear that the GOP has no intention of turning its back on Trumpism — or Trump himself. That’s in part because Trump remains an exceedingly popular figure in his party, far more than most congressional Republicans. Some Republicans declined to discuss the 2024 race, however, deeming it too speculative.

The political calculus is also clear. While he will soon lose the Oval Office, he’ll still have his Twitter handle and will still be in firm control of his base. Republicans are loath to get cross with Trump, who could play a central role in Senate and House primaries in 2022 and create trouble for incumbents that break with him. Future GOP presidential candidates will also be eager to court his supporters if he ultimately passes on another campaign.

Still, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), one of Trump’s fiercest allies on Capitol Hill, said Trump “should run and would have the support of the party.”

“The president is very popular in the Republican Party, and he would be very tough to beat,” added Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), the incoming chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee.

As it slowly sinks in for Trump that he’s being replaced by Joe Biden, the president is starting to publicly toy with a comeback bid four years from now. And Republicans show little interest in defying the president who has rapidly transformed their party. Many have refused to recognize Biden as the president-elect, and few have condemned his baseless claims of election fraud.

The president may freeze the field as long as he weighs another presidential run, despite more than a dozen Republicans positioning themselves as potential candidates in 2024. Trump told Republican National Committee members on Tuesday that if his doomed bid to challenge the 2020 election results ultimately fails: “I’ll see you in four years.”

“I would encourage him to keep that option open. I would personally support him if he did,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who ripped Trump while running in the 2016 GOP primary and then became a close ally. “Most Republicans believe he’s done a very good job and that his presidency from a conservative’s point of view has been very consequential.”

“If President Trump runs in ‘24, I support it. That will be his decision, he’s come off a tough election,” said Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who added that most congressional Republicans would be likely to back Trump.

Republicans also said they have little reservations about putting their faith in a freshly-defeated candidate to win back the White House, arguing Trump has defied the odds — and the polls — once before.

“Here you have a gentleman that won in 2016 and then in 2020, he not only outperforms, but overperforms by 15 million votes? That’s unheard of,” said conservative Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), who noted Trump won a larger share of Black voters than he did in 2016. Trump, of course, also bled support in the suburbs — including in Arizona and Georgia, states Democrats hadn’t won in decades.

Still, not every Republican in Congress felt like chatting about the matter after five years of Trump’s dominance over the party. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said he doesn’t talk about those kinds of hypotheticals. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), a potential presidential candidate, declined to comment. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said she hasn’t “thought at all about 2024” and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said it was “too speculative” a topic.

“I am going to try not to answer hypotheticals,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). “It’s going to be a crowded field, I assume, unless he clears the field. I don’t know.”

“We’re so far away from that. I will tell you this. If he runs, I think he would clearly be the favorite. I think he would win,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who ran against Trump in 2016 and has mulled another run in the future. “I know it’s an interesting story, but I have no idea.”

While Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) predicted Trump would have many GOP supporters, Hawley guessed that some Republican senators would be dismayed if Trump ran again: “I personally suspect that Republican senators would gnash their teeth and wail and hate it.”

Some Republicans have tired of being asked about Trump’s various tweets and controversies, including this week’s threat to veto a popular defense bill and reports that he may pardon members of his inner circle. But many of the newer GOP senators, particularly those from red states, are openly supportive of Trump’s potential third run for president.

“The country benefited tremendously from the first four years of President Trump and it would benefit tremendously by a second four-year term from President Trump,” said Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who said she hopes Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election is successful. “People in Tennessee are very enthusiastic about a second Trump term.”

If Trump does launch another bid, it could force other Republicans who have been waiting in the wings to put their presidential ambitions on hold for yet another four years. The idea of Trump as the GOP nominee for three cycles straight could stymie the ambitions of an entire generation of Republicans.

“I’m from Indiana, and I want to see my guy, Mike Pence, in the White House one day,” Banks said. “And hopefully, [in] 2024, we’ll have Mike Pence on the ballot one way or another.”

These people may rue the day they empowered this guy. You know most of them would like to have the road clear for someone else, even if they really, really like him. They don’t want to freeze the party for another eight years. But they just can’t quit him.

Corrosive and dangerous

Published by digby on December 2, 2020

The speech was totally demented. But I guess the Republicans are just going to allow this nonsense to go on because they are continuing to benefit from it.

And, as I wrote this morning, they will also think nothing of tut-tutting the Democrats for alleged misbehavior, claiming that they are upholding norms and proper leadership as the “adults in the room.” It’s going to be maddening. And also very damaging. Without any accountability, all the next Republican president has to do is not tweet insults and every fascistic move he or she makes will be defended as well within presidential norms.

They knew

Published by digby on December 2, 2020
https://twitter.com/actdottv/status/1296881001168158720?s=20

And they still know.

Read this whole thing. It’s important:

November 14, 8:37 a.m. my phone rings. I do a double take on my caller ID and realize who is calling. I take a deep breath and answer the phone. The next 30 minutes and 32 seconds would be a conversation that was nothing short of surreal.

My discussion with Senator Ron Johnson was one that I have hesitated openly discussing for three weeks. As a former chairman for the Brown County Republican Party, I have people I respect deeply who are still members of the party. There are many elected officials whom I consider friends and I do not want to give reason to think twice about any conversation we have. Additionally, I didn’t want my family to become a target, especially with my wife days from giving birth to our child. However, given what was discussed, and given the war that leaders of the GOP such as Senator Johnson are waging on the very foundations of our democracy, I could no longer stay silent.

The TL;DR of the call was this: Senator Johnson knows that Joe Biden won a free and fair election. He is refusing to admit it publicly and stoking conspiracies that undermine our democracy solely because it would be “political suicide” to oppose Trump. I find this unconscionable.

Full disclosure, I initiated our exchange when I gave Senator Johnson a phone call on November 6 and left him a message. I told him I wanted to discuss, among other things, the direction in which the GOP is headed and my hopes that we could leave some of the more bigoted and conspiratorial elements of Trumpism behind now that the president had lost. I never thought Sen. Johnson would return my call given how outspoken I have been over the past four years. As a local elected official in 2016, I endorsed and campaigned for his opponent, Russ Feingold. This year I was featured in an ad for Republican Voters Against Trump. Yet there we were, on November 14, talking like we used to, many years ago.

I opened the conversation by remarking on my concern for the party. I reiterated that what the GOP is doing and the direction it is going are unsustainable. The GOP has become the party of Donald Trump, and Trumpism has become the doctrine upon which everything else is built; they are one and the same. Senator Johnson spoke about the massive amounts of people Donald Trump brought into the party, many of whom have never cared about politics before. He said that “yes, Donald Trump is an asshole,” but the votes that Trump received, especially in Wisconsin, cannot be overlooked. Senator Johnson talked about how, prior to November 3, Johnson received the highest number of Republican votes in the history of the state of Wisconsin. His goal going into his 2016 re-election was to get 1.5 million votes. He failed to reach that in 2016, while President Trump did in 2020, despite losing. (It did not seem to occur to Senator Johnson that President Trump motivated massive, greater turnout in opposition to him than he did in support.)

Senator Johnson argued that that kind of message from Republican voters was one that he received loud and clear.

In every conversation, we have moments where we look back and wish we said something differently. This is one of those cases. I wish I had reminded the senator that he is not just a senator for Wisconsin Republicans, but a senator for all of Wisconsin. And although the message from Wisconsin Republicans was a strong one, the message from Wisconsin itself was much clearer: It was a rejection of Trumpism, and of the politics of division and toxicity which has poisoned our communities.

Senator Johnson  then asked me if I had ever been to a Trump rally. I chuckled and responded that I had not. He said that I should have gone because if I did, I would have seen that the one constant throughout all his rallies was, “the people there absolutely love America.” I reminded him that in every speech I gave as a Republican county chairman, I asked those in attendance to stop calling Democrats the “enemy.” I would say, “Democrats aren’t the enemy. We both love our country and want to make it a better place. We just have different ways to achieve that goal.” And I told him that “I would be willing to bet that at any rally Bernie Sanders or AOC held, you would see a crowd who loved America just as much.”

Johnson scoffed and said, “Absolutely not. Bernie Sanders and AOC want to fundamentally change our country. And you can’t love something you want to fundamentally change.” I disagreed and believe this is a toxic way to look at our politics. But we moved on.

Next we covered the election results. I said I was both frustrated and gravely concerned about how the GOP is continuing to advance disproved conspiracy theories regarding the integrity of the election. Senator Johnson said that he knew and accepted the fact that Joe Biden had won. I asked why he wouldn’t say so at a moment  when Trump was taking a sledgehammer to the very foundation of our democracy. Senator Johnson replied that the institutions of our democracy are strong enough to withstand what is going on.  This response shocked me, since it suggested that the truth was ultimately unimportant and that Sen. Johnson viewed what the president was doing as someone else’s problem.

Here’s the thing. Ron Johnson knows that this  is BS. Because five years ago he said so. In 2015 he introduced legislation streamlining the transition process, saying “the peaceful transition of power is one of the hallmarks of our democracy. It is also an enormous undertaking requiring months of planning in order to be successful.”

Here he was five years later on the phone with me saying that he knows Biden won. But simultaneously refusing to publicly congratulate Biden and standing in the way of his transition.

And since then, Sen. Johnson’s performance has gone even further. On Tuesday, Attorney General Bill Barr announced that he had found no evidence of fraud that would rise to the level of altering the outcome of the election. Senator Johnson then said  that Barr needed to “show evidence”—meaning:  a negative—and that he still thinks “there’s enough questions outstanding.”

After dismissing the notion that being honest with his constituents about election integrity was important, Sen. Johnson said that although Biden had won, he was, “the worst candidate for president in the history of the country.” He said that Biden won strictly because of all the hatred for Trump that was advanced by the media every single day. We spoke of organizations such as the Lincoln Project and Republican Voters Against Trump. Johnson said that he loathed these organizations because “they are money-grubbing pieces of shit.” He said that these organizations and the media refused to accept all the good things Trump has done, “even though he [Trump] is an asshole, he was right on so many things.” He talked about his displeasure for the “political establishment.” He said that he “honestly doesn’t even much care for Mitch McConnell,” because of his entrenchment within said establishment.

The senator talked about Trump being right on the First Step Act, right on China, and right on the economy. He said that Trump had so many accomplishments but that nobody wants to talk about them because everyone hates his guts. He said that with him, “it’s really about what’s right and what’s wrong,” and in his mind Trump was right on so many things. I asked him that if it truly is about right versus wrong, why doesn’t he call out what Trump does wrong?

His answer: In essence, that it would be political suicide.

To his credit, Senator Johnson was incredibly cordial. We had a respectful discussion, even though we passionately disagree. He did not come off at all like the person you see on TV. He was not the aloof, abrasive persona he puts on when he’s on Fox. Also to his credit, he even criticized Wisconsin Republicans for not working enough with the Evers administration regarding the COVID-19 crisis that has been ripping through America’s Dairyland. (Which is another thing I wish he’d say publicly.)

Our discussion was mostly based in reality. (With the one exception being Johnson’s assertion to me that  Joe Biden “has Lewy body dementia.”) The senator understands Joe Biden’s victory.

The problem is he refuses to live in that reality publicly, because of political considerations.

Looking back at the disaster these last four years have been, I hope that my speaking out gives those on the right a permission structure to come back to the world of facts. You can support the good things President Trump did without lying about how our elections were rigged by Venezuela. Conspiracies and alternate realities are causing our society to crumble. We can’t move forward together when we acknowledge reality in private and then peddle falsehoods in public. It’s bad enough when people in the media do this. But we need more from our elected officials.

They are servants, first and foremost. Servants not just of one party, but of all their constituents. They owe us more.

It’s not too late, Senator Johnson. Just tell America what you told me.

Meanwhile in Bizarroworld

Published by digby on December 2, 2020

They are still doing this.

How do you like them now, Brian?

Psychopathic shamelessness

Published by digby on December 2, 2020

Throughout this post-election period, the reaction from congressional Republicans has been entirely predictable. Mostly they’ve remained mum about the demented behavior of their president during the last month as he has continued his precipitous dive into a rabbit hole filled with conspiracy theories so delusional that it calls for medical intervention. A few have stepped up to say publicly that Trump has a “right” to pursue legal remedies in court, while privately assuring reporters that the president just needs to act out a little bit before he finally can emotionally accept what’s happened to him.

His stalwart manservant, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., initially involved himself in Trump’s attempts to strong-arm state officials into throwing out legitimate votes in order to help him win. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has evidently been poring over some alleged statistical analysis he found on a dodgy website, and has convinced himself there’s something hinky about votes that were counted after midnight. And Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, the man Trump once accused of stealing the Iowa caucuses back in 2016, now wants the Supreme Court to take up one of the president’s absurd cases.

This isn’t the first time a demagogue and conspiracy-monger has captured the Republican Party. CNN’s Ron Brownstein has pointed out the unpleasant parallels between the way the GOP establishment kowtowed to Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare of the ’40s and ’50s and their servile acquiescence to Trump’s malignant narcissism. In fact, this seems to be a permanent strain in American conservatism:

Whatever their private doubts about his claims, [Sen. Robert] Taft and other GOP leaders concluded that McCarthyism was a political winner for the party. … Gallup polls showed that about three-fifths of Republican voters viewed McCarthy favorably well into early 1954.

In another parallel to Trump, congressional Republicans were deferential not only because they considered McCarthy an ally, but also because they recognized him as a potential threat. The journalist William S. White captured their skittish ambivalence when he wrote, “In McCarthy, embarrassed Republican leaders know they have got hold of a red-hot bazooka, useful in destroying the enemy but also quite likely to blister the hands of the forces that employ it. Their private fear is that a lethal rocket may at any moment blast out through the wrong end of the pipe.”

Brownstein notes that this dynamic drove the party further and further into conspiracy theories being disseminated by the progressively unhinged McCarthy. It was years before his reign of terror was ended and one of the few Republicans who stood up against him, Sen. Ralph Flanders of Vermont, told the truth about what had happened: “The responsibility for this thing lies squarely on the heads of the Republicans who have been obsessed with the value of McCarthy to the party. We are reaping what they have sown.”

I don’t know what it is about the Republican Party that invites this sort of thing but it’s disturbing, to say the least, that we have seen it reappear in the 21st century. I have to say that I’m even more disturbed by what we are seeing in the aftermath, which also closely resembles what happened during that dark time. The Republican establishment, which so eagerly enables dangerous demagogues, seems to emerge from these episodes without any sense of responsibility for what they’ve done, or even any memory of what happened.

Sure, McCarthy was consigned to history’s dustbin, remembered as a malevolent drunk who railed against communism and was finally taken down by Joseph Welch, chief counsel for the U.S. Army, who famously demanded, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” But there is little mention of the cowardice and opportunism of the Republicans of that time who acted as McCarthy’s accomplices. They carried on with their careers as if nothing had happened. (In fact, one of the great Republican red-baiters of the era, Richard Nixon, went on to become president.)

This brings me to today, when I watch with astonishment as Republicans who have actively collaborated with Donald Trump are partying like it’s 2009, as if Donald Trump were still hosting “Celebrity Apprentice.” Take, for example Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who had the unmitigated gall to go to the floor of the Senate and say this on Tuesday:

Your jaw has to drop at the utter absurdity of any Republican saying such a thing, particularly one who not only supported Trump with his opaque, byzantine business dealings around the world but voted for every one of Trump’s corrupt Cabinet picks, including Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who was just revealed to have remained on the board of a Chinese company up until last year.

Even more outrageous is Cornyn’s opposition to Joe Biden’s choice to head the Office of Management and Budget, Neera Tanden, supposedly because of her insulting tweets:

Here’s another member of the Republican establishment weighing in on that “bad judgment”:

Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio is also clutching his pearls over Tanden’s “partisanship”:

“I think it’s very important to have someone who can work with both sides of the aisle,” said Portman, who held the budget post under President George W. Bush. “She has a very liberal public record and a very partisan series of comments she’s made.”

That’s right, the people who routinely say they don’t read the president’s outrageous tweets are now pretending to care about online civility. Moreover, they are complaining about “partisanship” when they all voted to confirm Mick Mulvaney, the onetime Tea Party congressman and founder of the House Freedom Caucus, which was so “partisan” it chased both John Boehner and Paul Ryan out of the speaker’s chair and forced regular government shutdowns. (Mulvaney himself told the Washington Post that Tanden has no chance of confirmation.)

We are seeing a return to the smarmy, sanctimonious, “adults in the room” pretense of Republicans who will wring their hands over Democrats’ alleged incivility and partisanship — toward Donald Trump, the crudest, most insulting brute in American politics since Joseph McCarthy. Hypocrisy doesn’t even come close to describing this. It is shamelessness on a level that is downright psychopathic.

I maintain that one reason the Republicans did as well as they did in down-ballot elections was an ongoing desire on the part of people on all sides of the political spectrum to say, “Oh that’s just Donald Trump — he’s nuts, but now he’s gone.” Plenty of people all over the country apparently believed that and split their tickets, voting for Biden for president and Republicans for other offices. If the two Georgia runoffs don’t go the Democrats’ way, then that party’s inability or unwillingness to make clear to voters that the Republican Party was equally responsible for everything Trump did will end up being one of the biggest mistake they’ve ever made. Republicans are already “pivoting” to being the grownups who need to tame the unruly Democrats, as if none of this ever happened, and the Democrats are already on defense.

My Salon column

The Trump cult’s libertarian wing

Published by digby on December 2, 2020

The firing of a Trump critic from one of the most important libertarian magazines would seem bizarre but truthfully it doesn’t surprise me. I have found libertarian tolerance for Trump throughout his term to be pretty obvious. It’s not just that they tend to be Koch style libertarians who really only care about money. There are plenty who have been ACLU type First Amendment absolutists and anti-nationalist authoritarians in the past who found unique soft spot Trump and spent lots and lots of time finding ways to excuse his clear cut, autocratic tendencies. I can only assume that it comes from a personal loathing for the left — you know, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” It’s very revealing:

A leading critic of “cancel culture” is being accused of canceling one of its own—for speaking out too loudly and too often against President Donald Trump.

Throughout the Trump era, Reason magazine, a digital and print publication published by the nonprofit libertarian Reason Foundation, has routinely sounded the alarm about the perceived threat posed by “cancel culture,” the modern phenomenon in which people are publicly and professionally ostracized for heterodox beliefs or remarks. The magazine has lambasted other outlets like The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Intercept for firing or pushing out key staffers whose views or actions were determined to have conflicted with their respective editorial missions.

And yet, a long-time Reason columnist and policy analyst alleges that the libertarian magazine dropped her over her vehemently anti-Trump views.

“After 15 years, the curtains came down for me at Reason today. My views, I was told, had become too out-of-step with those of the organization,” Shikha Dalmia announced Tuesday evening in a Facebook post.

“Reason has some amazing writers who do great work on a whole host [of] issues that I will continue to read and share. And it has been an honor and pleasure to work with them,” she added. “However, I had a staunch and uncompromising anti-Trump voice calling out his authoritarian tendencies unambiguously. That this made many libertarians uncomfortable raises all kinds of interesting questions about the state of the liberty movement.”

The Reason veteran further suggested that her demise came as a result of complaints from the Reason Foundation’s donors—many of whom are also big donors to Republicans and conservative think tanks. “Defending my work to donors and stakeholders had evidently made me too much of a liability,” she wrote.

Reason editor-in-chief Katherine Mangu-Ward publicly commented on Dalmia’s post, replying, “I disagree with your characterization of our parting, but certainly won’t get into it here on your page.” And in an internal memo sent to staffers, obtained and reviewed by The Daily Beast, Mangu-Ward announced Dalmia’s departure on Tuesday evening: “Today is Shikha’s last day, after 15 years at Reason. It has been an honor to work with a person of such tremendous journalistic talent and deep libertarian conviction. Her contributions to Reason have been enormous, especially in the area of immigration policy. This change has been in the works for a while, and I wish her great luck in her next phase.”

Virginia Postrel, Reason’s editor-in-chief from 1989 until 2000, reacted late Tuesday evening to Dalmia’s ouster and her allegations about donor pressures by tweeting: “When I was @reason it was INCREDIBLY poor but had integrity. [Co-founder] Bob Poole had some intensely uncomfortable conversations w/ donors but always defended the magazine’s independence and never even read it until it came out. Now it’s big and rich but I could never work there.”

Mangu-Ward replied to Postrel and another libertarian critic by repeating in multiple tweets: “I strongly disagree with this characterization of our parting, but I wish her the absolute best in what comes next.”

When reached by The Daily Beast, Dalmia said “I stand by my statement on Facebook” but otherwise declined to comment on this story. And in a statement to The Daily Beast, Mangu-Ward wrote: “Shikha Dalmia’s departure from Reason is a personnel issue, so I won’t discuss the details.”

The top editor added: “Reason is editorially independent and publishes a tremendously wide range of content within a libertarian framework. That ‘big-tent libertarianism’ has included and continues to include pointed critiques of authoritarianism in all its guises. Reason considers it a core part of our mission to hold the powerful accountable, and believe we have done so this presidency—and plan to do so in the next. I invite your readers to actually check out the voluminous content published on our website over the past four years—and last half-century for that matter—and see for themselves. Nowhere else in opinion journalism will you find content that is consistently critical of the left and the right, of Republicans and Democrats, when they advance policies and ideas that are hostile to freedom.”

As a Reason employee, Dalmia regularly wrote columns for the magazine which also often ran at The Week, seemingly as part of the libertarian organization’s effort to advance its ideas via outside publications. (Dalmia has previously published columns at Bloomberg View, Washington Examiner, and The Daily Beast.)

Curiously, however, over the past few months, several of Dalmia’s columns were published at The Week but never appeared on her home base at Reason, including a column suggesting Trump is, in fact, a bigger statist than Joe Biden; a column outlining the libertarian case for voting for Biden; and a column criticizing the hypocrisy of conservative “cancel culture” alarmists “forgetting that right-wingers themselves have been its main practitioners through most of American history.”

The columnist’s ouster comes as the magazine has taken heat from some libertarians and former employees, including Washington Post columnist and reporter Radley Balko, for what they perceive to be the magazine’s peculiar Trump-era positioning: Not overtly pro-Trump by any stretch, but apparently more focused on belittling, dismissing, or ignoring the left’s concerns about the president’s autocratic impulses than on actively repudiating his abusive governance—instead seeming to reserve its most unequivocal condemnations for campus PC and cancel-culture gripes.

“There are many staffers still at Reason who do great work, and whose journalism I really admire. But I think a lot of libertarians have been puzzled by the general editorial direction of the magazine in the Trump era,” Balko said in a statement to The Daily Beast. “Libertarians are supposed to be the ones who sound the alarm about government threats. Yet with Trump, it felt like Reason spent an inordinate amount of time and energy mocking the people who felt threatened.”

He continued: “This is a magazine whose staff took a hard line against the firing of James Bennet, Kevin Williamson, and was sympathetic to Glenn Greenwald’s claim that he’d been censored by The Intercept. That’s all hard to square with firing one of their own writers for being overly critical of the most powerful man on the planet.”

We’ve had a natural experiment to see where people would land if the country were faced with real domestic authoritarian leadership, however ragged it may have been. Let’s just say I wouldn’t count on all libertarians to stand next to liberals and progressives in a fight for liberty. Some will, of course. But it’s not a given.

A Superspreader Christmas

Published by digby on December 2, 2020
https://youtu.be/DTabCakEfVQ

So heartwarming:

 President Donald Trump teased running again for president in 2024 as he hosted a holiday reception at the White House on Tuesday evening.

“It’s been an amazing four years,” Trump told the crowd, which included many Republican National Committee members. “We’re trying to do another four years. Otherwise, I’ll see you in four years.”

The video of Trump’s appearance was streamed live on Facebook by one attendee, Pam Pollard, who is national committeewoman for the Oklahoma GOP. It showed dozens of people crammed into the Cross Hall of the White House state floor, standing closely together. Many seen in the video were not wearing masks.

The Trumps began hosting holiday receptions this week, intent on celebrating a final season before Trump leaves office on Jan. 20. According to social media postings reviewed by The Associated Press, the events have featured large crowds of often maskless attendees gathered indoors — violating the very public health guidance the U.S. government has pressed the nation to follow this holiday season as cases of COVID-19 skyrocket across the country.

In the video, Trump is heard continuing to air baseless allegations of election fraud to explain his defeat by President-elect Joe Biden despite his attorney general, William Barr, telling the AP earlier Tuesday that the Justice Department had not uncovered evidence of widespread voter fraud and had seen nothing that would change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

“It’s certainly an unusual year. We won an election. But they don’t like that,” Trump told the group, adding: “I call it a rigged election, and I always will.”

The White House has been the site of at least one suspected COVID-19 superspreader event, and dozens of the president’s aides, campaign staffers and allies have tested positive in numerous outbreaks. Trump himself was hospitalized for the virus in October, and the first lady and two of his sons have tested positive. Numerous others have had to quarantine.

Stephanie Grisham, the first lady’s spokeswoman and chief of staff, had said last month that the White House would be moving forward with events, “while providing the safest environment possible.” She said that would include smaller guest lists, that “masks will be required and available, social distancing encouraged while on the White House grounds, and hand sanitizer stations throughout the State Floor.”

“Attending the parties will be a very personal choice,” she added.

Droney knows if you’ve been bad or good

Published by Tom Sullivan on December 2, 2020
Droney the Friendly Drone Shirt – TopatoCo

My friend Barry Summers has been watching the development and marketing of the military-grade drone for use as a “persistent eye in the sky” over U.S. cities for years now. In September, he wrote with Medea Benjamin:

Along with civil liberties, a major concern must be safety. The military and the drone manufacturers, principally General Atomics, are arguing that the technology has advanced far enough that flying 79-ft. wingspan, six-ton drones over populated areas and alongside commercial air traffic is safe. We have one response: self-driving cars.

Speaking of cars, we have this on Monday from Voice of San Diego:

San Diego was supposed to be the site this year of a major drone project intended to show off the civilian capabilities of military-grade technology for monitoring things like wildfires and infrastructure. The players involved in the test flight obscured its other purpose: catching drivers who speed.

Records obtained by Voice of San Diego show that the city’s Office of Homeland Security had been supportive of General Atomics, a local defense contractor, in its attempt to open the skies above San Diego to new forms of surveillance. They wound up talking last year about how police might benefit from putting a massive vehicle with a camera above the metro.

San Diego had been “kicking around” the idea of using drones for speed enforcement, but asked General Atomics to leave that detail out of public statements.

When asked last year about the city’s connection to the SkyGuardian, Capt. Jeff Jordon, who manages special projects for the police chief, told the Union-Tribune he hadn’t heard of the drone but assumed the public wouldn’t react well to it. “People are concerned about the smart streetlights, so I can only imagine how they would feel about these,” he said.

I can too. But I have said for years no one will pay attention until one crashes into a school bus.

Tom Tomorrow cartoon about drones
Tom Tomorrow via Daily Kos

No worries, kids, drones almost never crash due to loss of contact with controllers.

(h/t Barry)

Where the slippery slope leads

Published by Tom Sullivan on December 2, 2020

The outgoing president’s post-hoc skullduggery aimed at winning the election he lost in November has all but played out. Americans celebrated in the streets after multiple media outlets declared Joe Biden had won days after Nov. 3. But the sense of relief that the U.S. would not descend into fascism under a second Donald Trump term was tempered by knowing that, whatever came next, the inveterate huckster always has another card up his sleeve.

Trump’s official power may be on the wane, but like Saruman that does not mean he cannot still work evil. His sway over the minds of men is not yet broken.

Gabriel Sterling, a Georgia elections official, stood before microphones Tuesday visibly angry at death threats being hurled at election workers there: from the highest elected officials to hourly employees.

“It has to stop,” Sterling, said. “Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language.”

Calling out other officials’ silence, Sterling added, “This is elections. This is the backbone of democracy, and all of you who have not said a damn word are complicit in this. It’s too much.”

Joe diGenova, a Trump campaign lawyer, had called for fired federal cybersecurity official Chris Krebs to be “drawn and quartered, taken out at dawn and shot” for declaring the election untainted by fraud (NYT):

But Mr. Sterling said that “the straw that broke the camel’s back” had involved a threat against a 20-year-old contractor for a voting system company in Gwinnett County. He said the young worker had been targeted by someone who hung a noose and declared that the worker should be “hung for treason,” simply for doing a routine element of his job. Mr. Sterling did not provide any other details.

Reacting to Sterling’s emotional press event, McKay Coppins of The Atlantic told “All In with Chris Hayes” how Trump, insecure and paranoid, regularly demands Republicans prove their loyalty:

He’s created this increasingly absurd set of litmus tests that he requires the rest of his party to pass. First it was Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States … absurd conspiracy theory, completely untrue. People felt like they had to go along with it or at least wink at it in order to be taken seriously by the Republican base.

Then it was Muslim immigration should be banned. Then it was openly soliciting foreign interference in a presidential election. It’s fine, and we don’t have to care about it. Then it was the idea that the presidential election should be reversed. The outcome should be reversed by tossing millions of ballots. That’s currently the argument that Donald Trump’s legal team is making, and the vast majority of Republican elected officials are going along with it…. I’m pretty sure we’re going to hear pretty soon the idea that bribery for a presidential pardon is no big deal. That’ll be the next litmus test.

Trump has been doing this for years. And I think that what was so powerful about that clip that you showed wasn’t really the anger and indignation, at least to me. It was the desperation. It was like almost a sense of hopelessness, because he knows even as he’s giving this impassioned speech … he knows that President Trump is not going to forcefully condemn these threats. He knows that the vast majority of Republican senators, especially the ambitious ones, are not going to come out and condemn this. So it’s almost like a cry into the wind. He’s saying his peace, but he knows that it’s probably not going to make a difference.

Hayes recalled a column by National Review Online writer Michael Brendan Dougherty that Trump’s demands for loyalty echo the initiation rites of street gangs:

Allegiance to a plain insanity is a good test of loyalty, like being beat-in during a gang initiation… It demonstrates “commitment” or heart. Shared insanity can make people loyal to each other, sure. But it does so by rendering them useless or repulsive to the normal and decent people who need champions.

The paranoid style of the American right has a storied history dating from the McCarthy and Bircher eras and before. That paranoia, Dougherty wrote, once “expressed itself in the demand to believe Dwight Eisenhower was a communist.” Thirty years ago in another century, after the Berlin Wall fell, American conservatives declared Sir Ronald of Reagan had slain the Evil Empire and won the Cold War. Yet they are still fighting it.

International New York Times opinion writer Jochen Bittner cautions that Trump-world’s refusal to accept the loss echoes what he calls “arguably the most potent and disastrous political lie of the 20th century — the Dolchstosslegende, or stab-in-the-back myth.”

Germany had been betrayed by internal enemies, by “Social Democrats and Jews.” The myth’s “core claim was that Imperial Germany never lost World War I,” Bittner writes. “Defeat, its proponents said, was declared but not warranted. It was a conspiracy, a con, a capitulation — a grave betrayal that forever stained the nation. That the claim was palpably false didn’t matter.”

As with Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign, Bittner cautions. As the South’s myth of The Lost Cause led to a reign of terror and nooses put to use, the festering German myth led in time to war, slaughter, and genocide.

Bittner writes:

In this way, the myth was not just the sharp wedge that drove the Weimar Republic apart. It was also at the heart of Nazi propaganda, and instrumental in justifying violence against opponents. The key to Hitler’s success was that, by 1933, a considerable part of the German electorate had put the ideas embodied in the myth — honor, greatness, national pride — above democracy.

It took Germany 15 years in a time before social media when commercial radio was still in its infancy. Today, Trump supporters are within a month making threats and calling for a coup d’état.

Image

They cannot spell constitutional or get the date of the Georgia Senate runoff right (it’s Jan. 5), but they are by-god certain the election was stolen by “Foreign and Domestic enemies.” This means you, “corrupt Democrat/Socialist Party operatives.”

Bittner observes:

According to the Pew Research Center, 89 percent of Trump supporters believe that a Joe Biden presidency would do “lasting harm to the U.S.,” while 90 percent of Biden supporters think the reverse. And while the question of which news media to trust has long split America, now even the largely unmoderated Twitter is regarded as partisan. Since the election, millions of Trump supporters have installed the alternative social media app Parler. Filter bubbles are turning into filter networks.

In such a landscape of social fragmentation, Mr. Trump’s baseless accusations about electoral fraud could do serious harm. A staggering 88 percent of Trump voters believe that the election result is illegitimate, according to a YouGov poll. A myth of betrayal and injustice is well underway.

Acceding to Trump’s regular demand for loyalty was always a slippery slope. Coppins sketches out the history of how we got to this point. Sterling is shaken by where the slippery slope leads from here. Bittner suggests we learn from the lessons of history: “Beware the beginnings.”