They privately worry and wring their hands — and then sit on them:
On Capitol Hill, some Republicans fret — mostly privately, to avoid his wrath — that Trump’s fixation on racial and other cultural issues leaves their party running against the currents of change. Coupled with the coronavirus pandemic and related economic crisis, these Republicans fear he is not only seriously impairing his reelection chances but also jeopardizing the GOP Senate majority and its strength in the House.
“The Senate incumbent candidates are not taking the bait and are staying as far away from this as they can,” said Scott Reed, a veteran Republican operative and chief strategist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has invested heavily in keeping GOP control of the Senate. “The problem is this is no longer just Trump’s Twitter feed. It’s expanded to the podium, and that makes it more and more difficult for these campaigns.”
Trump has all but ignored the outcry and remains convinced that following his own instincts on race and channeling the grievances of his core base of white voters will carry him to victory against former vice president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, according to a White House official and an outside Trump adviser who spoke on the condition of anonymity to comment candidly.
“It’s the 2016 campaign all over again, when we had the Muslim ban and the wall, just add Confederate statues,” the outside adviser said.
Trump allies say the president’s words and actions are not racist but rather attentive to his core voters.
“President Trump has been more exposed to black people, black leaders and black culture than most previous presidents,” said Armstrong Williams, a longtime adviser to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson. “He doesn’t see the implications of his tweets in the way that his critics do. He just loves his supporters.”
Thus proving once again that being a celebrated neurosurgeon doesn’t pr3vent you from being completely delusional.
Williams added: “This is someone who spoke at length on the phone to Don King on election night — I was with Trump when he took the call. This is someone who welcomed Kanye West at the White House. That’s who Trump is.”
Right. He loves his African Americans. Especially the celebrities.
Jason Miller, a senior Trump campaign adviser, said “the mainstream media is never going to give the president the credit he deserves, in terms of his optimism and his belief in the American spirit.”
He added, “There is a backlash against this counterculture, this cancel culture, and Americans are proud we’re a beacon for freedom.”
Freedom for white wingnuts who love Trump. They are the only people who count. Everyone else is an enemy. […]
Trump’s commentary of late has been dizzying and visceral. He has referred to the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, which originated in China, as the “kung flu.” He has called racial justice demonstrators “thugs.” He has attacked efforts to take down Confederate statues as an assault on “our heritage.” And in an ominous hypothetical scenario, he described a “very tough hombre” breaking into a young woman’s home while her husband was away.
Trump’s Twitter feed, meanwhile, has become something of a crime blotter, with posts of grainy photos of suspected vandals the president labels anarchists and demands for lengthy prison sentences.
Former Ohio governor John Kasich, a Republican who ran against Trump in 2016, said the GOP’s muted and scattered response to the president on race this week underscores how the party is “in decline” and has become a vessel for Trumpism — even as polls show Trump losing ground among seniors and white evangelicals and trailing Biden in every key battleground state.
“They coddled this guy the whole time and now it’s like some rats are jumping off of the sinking ship. It’s just a little late,” Kasich said. “It’s left this nation with a crescendo of hate not only between politicians but between citizens. . . . It started with Charlottesville and people remained silent then, and we find ourselves in this position now.”
Kasich added, “I’m glad to see some of these Republicans moving the other way but it reminds me of Vichy France where they said, ‘Well, I never had anything to do with that,’ ” a reference to the French government that continued during Nazi occupation in the 1940s.
Racist symbols and ideas have long plagued U.S. politics, but Trump has tested the tolerance of Americans of a leader who shouts rather than whispers them. More than a strategy, this has been an expression of Trump’s character and his dominance of a Republican base in which older white voters remain the key demographic.
He has quite the racist legacy:
As president, Trump has banned travel from seven Muslim-majority countries; equivocated over the deadly 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville; questioned the intelligence of basketball star LeBron James and numerous other African American figures; attacked the national anthem protests of black football players; and demanded that four Democratic congresswomen of color “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came,” among other actions and episodes.
Trump claimed last month that he had done more for black Americans than any president with the exception of Abraham Lincoln, who freed slaves and ended the Civil War — but added to Fox News Channel anchor Harris Faulkner that Lincoln “did good, although it’s always questionable.”
That’s just for starters.
Some senators and their advisers believe they must expand their vote share beyond Trump’s base to win reelection.
“The president’s base is locked in. They love him, they’re going to turn out and they’re going to vote for him,” GOP pollster Whit Ayres said. “The problem is that the base is not enough to win. You can make a case that protecting Confederate monuments is very popular among at least a portion of his base, but it does nothing to expand the coalition, and that’s the imperative at the moment and will be going forward if the party hopes to govern.”
Trump has not made it easy for embattled Republicans to duck him. He reaffirmed Tuesday that he would veto this year’s proposed $740 billion annual defense bill if an amendment is included that would require the Pentagon to change the names of bases named for Confederate military leaders — an amendment that has bipartisan support.
At times, some Republicans have been moved to speak out more forcefully on race, but when they have done so it has often been about lower-profile Republicans, such as Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who in June was defeated in a primary election, or various GOP candidates out in the country who pop up in the news for making racist statements — far easier targets than a sitting president with zero tolerance for dissent.
They are all quivering cowards. An embarrassment to the human species.
Most congressional Republicans in challenging races this year have long been mute on Trump’s racist comments, or they have cast them as unhelpful or combative but not racist — a method that has largely helped them avoid Trump’s anger.
When asked two summers ago about Trump calling Omarosa Manigault, the president’s former highest-ranking black adviser in the White House, a “dog,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) gave a typical GOP response: “I know you have to ask these questions but I’m not going to talk about that. I just think that’s an endless little wild goose chase and I’m not going there.”
Senate Republicans looking to hold onto the party’s 53-seat majority are trying to balance their political alliance with Trump with their attempt to win over more moderate voters amid the reckoning over race. For instance, Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) recently co-sponsored a bill with Cornyn — both are up for reelection in November — and others to make Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery, a federal holiday.
A cost-free act that means nothing if you are licking the Orange Supremicist’s boots 24/7 — which they are.
Kasich is right. These are cowardly, opportunistic, Vichy collaborators. And they must never be allowed to forget what they have done.