They have become completely un-moored from principles and morals:
More than 6-in-10 likely Republican caucusgoers — 61% — say that it doesn’t matter to their support if former President Donald Trump is convicted of a crime before the general election, according to the latest numbers from the new NBC News/Des Moines Register poll of Iowa.
By comparison, 19% of likely Iowa caucusgoers say a Trump conviction would make it more likely that they’d back Trump, while 18% say it would make them less likely to support the former president in the general election.
As with the other findings from the Iowa poll, the likely caucusgoers backing former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley — half of whom are independents and crossover Democrats — have far different perceptions about Trump and his legal challenges than other GOP caucusgoers.
Among Haley’s supporters, 56% say a possible conviction of Trump doesn’t matter to their Nov. 2024 vote choice, but 41% say it would make them less likely to back Trump.
Less than half of Haley’s tiny anti-Trump Iowa constituency say it would make them less likely to vote for Trump if he’s convicted by a jury of his peers for trying to stage a coup. These are the Real Americans the media has relentlessly insisted we’re all supposed to revere for their common wisdom and authentic all-American patriotism.
A right-wing party loses a free & fair election, claims election fraud, and refuses to certify the results – first the US, then Brazil, today it’s Guatemala. No armed militia but still chaos at the Capitol – pushed by the same people who pushed Jan 6.
Anticorruption candidate Bernardo Arévalo was fairly elected. The losers then blocked the peaceful transfer of power. The NYT shamelessly finds a new low in how to trivialize this attempted coup: “Tempers Flare as Guatemala’s Presidential Inauguration is delayed”.
One difference: in Guatemala the people in the streets with flags are the winning party, those trying to preserve democracy. As on Jan 6, everyone knew what was coming and converged on the Capitol.
The rise of authoritarianism is a global issue. The Biden administration has been quietly working to convince the losers in Guatemala to leave. Sen. Mike Lee (UT), who knew Jan 6 plans, is pushing for the coup – and Ric Grenell is there in person to cheer it on.
Because today was to be inauguration day, officials from the US and other countries – Mexico, Brazil, Honduras, Columbia – were present when the violence started. They issued a joint statement: “the will of the Guatemalan people must be respected”
Correction to Tweet 1: in Brazil, the coup attempt was a week after inauguration, a strategic mistake. In Guatemala it was on inauguration day. As on Jan 6, people waited, after dark, as order was restored to the Capitol, to see if democracy would win.
Here in the National Theater in Guatemala City awaiting @BArevalodeLeon when word came that he would finally be able to be sworn in, the room broke out into cheers of “si se pudo.” Waiting for the new President’s arrival soon. pic.twitter.com/mWndPiiRDT
January 6 is not over. Anti-democratic movements don’t stop on their own. The US must do its part by fully investigating and prosecuting what happened on Jan 6 – not just the gullible mob but the leaders who planned and directed it, and who are spreading the cancer worldwide.
I’m sure you all remember Ric Grenell, Trump’s once and future Director of National Intelligence and hardcore MAGA political operative. WTF is he doing messing with Guatamala’s election? He’s not in any office.
Grenell was an early acolyte of Viktor Orban of Hungary. He worked for him. He is part of a global network of white nationalist authoritarians. And he’s working it. I assume he’s also making money at it.
This is an excellent explainer of Trump’s 2024 agenda and it’s on TikTok, which makes me happy to see. This stuff has to blanket every corner of social media, repeatedly, if it’s going to penetrate.
So when we are actually in the hunger games, don’t NOBODY ASK HOW WE GOT THERE!! Y’all better start paying attention!! #thisidiotpic.twitter.com/r6BRL2vb3h
This from the BBC might be more appropriate for your cynical/apathetic grown-ups:
In November, it's the US Presidential election. Donald Trump wants to be the Republican Presidential nominee. Here's 7 mins on Trump and America's democracy. Produced by Mary Fuller and Michael Cox. https://t.co/Ib1Pvk7grkpic.twitter.com/ioj5SXuC5X
When I asked the European ambassador to talk to me about America’s deepening partisan divide, I expected a polite brushoff at best. Foreign diplomats are usually loath to discuss domestic U.S. politics.
Instead, the ambassador unloaded for an hour, warning that America’s poisonous politics are hurting its security, its economy, its friends and its standing as a pillar of democracy and global stability.
The U.S. is a “fat buffalo trying to take a nap” as hungry wolves approach, the envoy mused. “I can hear those Champagne bottle corks popping in Moscow — like it’s Christmas every fucking day.”
As voters cast ballots in the Iowa caucuses Monday, many in the United States see this year’s presidential election as a test of American democracy. But, in a series of conversations with a dozen current and former diplomats, I sensed that to many of our friends abroad, the U.S. is already failing that test.
The diplomats are aghast that so many U.S. leaders let their zeal for partisan politics prevent the basic functions of government. It’s a major topic of conversations at their private dinners and gatherings. Many of those I talked to were granted anonymity to be as candid with me as they are with each other.
For example, one former Arab ambassador who was posted in the U.S. during both Republican and Democratic administrations told me American politics have become so unhealthy that he’d turn down a chance to return.
“I don’t know if in the coming years people will be looking at the United States as a model for democracy,” a second Arab diplomat warned.
Many of these conversations wouldn’t have happened a few months ago. There are rules, traditions and pragmatic concerns that discourage foreign diplomats from commenting on the internal politics of another country, even as they closely watch events such as the Iowa caucuses. (One rare exception: some spoke out on America’s astonishing 2016 election.)
But the contours of this year’s presidential campaign, a Congress that can barely choose a House speaker or keep the government open, and, perhaps above all, the U.S. debate on military aid for Ukraine have led some diplomats to drop their inhibitions. And while they were often hesitant to name one party as the bigger culprit, many of the examples they pointed to involved Republican members of Congress.
As they vented their frustrations, I felt as if I was hearing from a group of people wishing they could stage an intervention for a friend hitting rock bottom. Their concerns don’t stem from mere altruism; they’re worried because America’s state of being affects their countries, too.
“When the United States’ voice is not as strong, is not as balanced, is not as fair as it should be, then a problem is created for the world,” said Ronald Sanders, Antigua and Barbuda’s longtime ambassador in Washington.
Apparently, they don’t just blame Trump but “politicians” by which they should say “Republicans” for not being willing to compromise. That’s a failure of the media.
They don’t read little red books. They wear little red hats. They want to obey he who is their retribution. They Live!
Trump wants to normalize the unthinkable, says Ruth Ben Ghiat, and not be held accountable for it. And that’s okay by his followers. Laws are for other people.
New video about the authoritarian dream of having immunity from prosecution and how authoritarians normalize the unthinkable. Please share. pic.twitter.com/gGRXGkONoA
You hear sometimes, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, that America has no heroes left.
When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.
It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself, in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.
It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.
It means signing your name to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence in bold print, even though you know you are signing your own death warrant should the British capture you, as John Hancock did.
It means defending your people’s right to practice a religion you don’t share, even though you know you are becoming a dangerously visible target, as Sitting Bull did.
Sometimes it just means sitting down, even when you are told to stand up, as Rosa Parks did.
None of those people woke up one morning and said to themselves that they were about to do something heroic. It’s just that, when they had to, they did what was right.
On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1966, King had tried to broaden the Civil Rights Movement for racial equality into a larger movement for economic justice. He joined the sanitation workers in Memphis, who were on strike after years of bad pay and such dangerous conditions that two men had been crushed to death in garbage compactors.
After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced him to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: “As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”
Dr. King told the audience that, if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Dr. King said that he felt blessed to live in an era when people had finally woken up and were working together for freedom and economic justice.
Two months after King died in Memphis in 1968, another assassin murdered Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles. On the day of King’s assassination, Kennedy broke the news to a crowd in Indianapolis where he was campaigning for president as others are today in Iowa:
In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black–considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible–you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization–black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.
Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.
For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.
Nineteen sixty-eight was a difficult year. Two heroes died at the hands of men who hated the change King represented and Kennedy promised. The Civil Rights movement King led had already accomplished much, at least on paper, by the time of his death. Without his leadership, progress on civil rights slowed even as the backlash to progress gained momentum, if in the shadows at first.
As the Vietnam War dragged on, American popular culture turned to cynical antiheroes. There was Dirty Harry (1971), followed by Death Wish(1974) the year Richard Nixon resigned over the Watergate scandal, and by Taxi Driver (1976). Rocky (1976) may have won best picture the next spring, but American optimisim was waning. By 1980, Ronald Reagan had won the presidency, introducing America to the cynicism of trickle down economics riding on the support of the religious right backlash to the 1960s and the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
On this King holiday, that backlash continues with white resentment to the shifting power dynamics represented by Barack Obama’s presidency layered on top. Like homicidal maniacs in slasher-films, it’s hard to keep white supremacists from rising like the South again.
Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk means to tarnish King’s memory this day (The Root):
“We’re gonna be hitting him next week,” Kirk stated last week on his podcast. “Yeah, on the day of the Iowa caucus, it’s MLK Day. We’re gonna do the thing you’re not supposed to do. We’re gonna tell the truth about MLK Jr. You better tune in next week. Blake has already been preparing. It’s gonna be great.”
Last month at America Fest—which was organized by Turning Point USA—Kirk also used his platform to go after King. “MLK was awful,” he stated. “He’s not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn’t believe,” referring to judging people by the content of their character and not skin color.
How cynical is that? Kirk would not fare well if judged by either.
King was satisfied that if he would not get to the promised land, he at least got to climb to the mountaintop and look over and behold it.
Asheville, N.C. hosts perhaps the country’s oldest MLK prayer breakfast, second in size in the southeast only to Atlanta’s. The keynote speaker for Saturday’s 43rd edition, James E. Ferguson, II was born here and, after graduating Columbia’s law school in 1967, co-founded the first integrated law firm in North Carolina. Looking out over the crowd, he reminded the 1,100 attendees that a gathering like this was illegal when he was growing up. The very notion was inconceivable. That was then. Despite backlash and cynicism, progress continues.
Photo by author.
Richardson concludes:
People are wrong to say that we have no heroes left.
Just as they have always been, they are all around us, choosing to do the right thing, no matter what.
Donald Trump as Iowa experiences subzero temperatures ahead of the caucuses: “You can't sit home. If you're sick as a dog, you say ‘Darling, I gotta make it.’ Even if you vote and then pass away, it's worth it, remember."
Bob Ray has participated in Iowa’s Republican caucuses in the past, but not this year. Ray is blind, and with snow clogging the roads and subzero temperatures gripping the state, showing up on Monday is a non-starter.
“I’m 75 years old, and I’m not going to want to get out that night,” he said.
To some here, the Iowa caucuses are an exemplar of democracy, binding communities together and allowing everyday voters to connect with candidates who, a year from now, may be running the country. To others, they are an antiquated system that excludes those who — due to a disability, a work shift, a flat tire, child care needs, extreme weather or any other factor — can’t turn up on the one night every four years when Iowa voters get a say in picking presidential nominees.
Voters must be at their precincts at 7 p.m. Central time on Monday, where they will hear speeches from representatives of the candidates, fill out ballots and, if they want, observe as the votes get tallied. No early or absentee voting is allowed, except for a tiny number of military service members.
States adopted caucuses in the early 19th century to choose delegates to send to national party conventions. As primaries became popularized nationally in the 1970s, Iowa stuck with its caucuses. Over the last half century the state has soaked up attention from candidates and the media by holding the first presidential nominating contest in the country.
The vast majority of states now conduct primaries, which allow more people to participate because voters can cast ballots whenever convenient on Election Day — or, often times, before then by voting by mail or at an early-voting site.
Democrats are increasingly critical of caucuses, and they are conducting a mail-in primary in Iowa this year that concludes in March. Iowa Republicans remain committed to the caucuses, saying that even in inclement weather, the process has been proven to work.
This is what the experts think is the “advantage” of caucuses:
Candidates need to connect with voters in a way that makes them willing to take the extra steps the caucuses require, she said. Because of the structure of the caucuses and Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status — at least among Republicans — candidates repeatedly visit the state and hold small events where voters can drill them about their stances. The arrangement makes Iowa a proving ground for candidates, and successful ones find that it strengthens their campaigns, she said.
“If you get rid of a process like this, I think it’s much easier for candidates with big money and a lot of name recognition to sail in, run a bunch of ads in an expensive media market and dominate the airwaves and thereby gain a lot of casual support,” she said. “And that can’t happen in Iowa. You’ve got to have a lot more than that.”
Really? Donald Trump has barely turned up in the state and he just holds rallies with the faithful.He’s [polling nearly 30 points higher than his rivals. And Iowa routinely turns out winners like Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Ted Cruz and Pat Robertson who are total duds beyond the state. It’s worthless.
These caucuses are dominated by the most aggressive, sometime belligerent, supporters who run roughshod over less assertive personalities.
There’s a reason for the secret ballot.
While Iowa’s system allows citizens to frequently meet candidates, it also results in lower voter participation. In 2016, the last time there were competitive primaries for both parties, just 15.7 percent of eligible voters attended either Republican or Democratic caucuses.
A week later, more than half the eligible voters in New Hampshire cast ballots in that state’s primary, according to data kept by University of Florida political science professor Michael McDonald. Many other states with primaries had turnout rates in the 30s that year, more than twice as high as Iowa.
The Prince William County Office of Elections in northern Virginia has confessed to an underreporting error in the 2020 presidential election results on Thursday, January 11.
The error resulted in a margin of victory for President Joe Biden over Donald Trump that was 4,000 votes lower than reported.
This admission comes after the discovery of discrepancies in vote counts as part of a criminal case in 2022.
Eric Olsen, the current registrar of the county, has clarified that the errors did not significantly impact the outcome of any race, according to WTOP News.
Although the counts were also off for the US Senate and US House of Representatives races, the discrepancies in these cases were less significant.
Mistakes do happen and that’s probably all this was. But imagine if the discrepancy had favored Biden. It would be screaming headlines on right wing media. Trump would never shut up about it.
Take this little tidbit for example from the new NBC-Des Moines Register poll:
"I think this poll is very bad news for Haley in the primary. I think it's actually bad news for Trump in the general election… He should actually be getting more than 50% of the vote against these sort of subpar candidates." @danpfeiffer on final NBC News/DMR Iowa poll pic.twitter.com/2H4e4dHwsU
In case you didn’t watch the whole thing, he reveals that a quarter of voters told the pollster that they would vote for Joe Biden over Donald Trump in the general election. Wow.
Republican voters continue to believe Trump is their best bet to beat Joe Biden in November, even as Nikki Haley leads Joe Biden by a wider margin in a general election match-up than either Trump or Ron DeSantis. We show why in this analysis.
They are wrong. Trump is less likely to beat Biden.
There are other ideas and statements from the frontrunner that have brought criticism from Trump’s political opponents.
On immigrants:One of those is his use of the phrase “poisoning the blood of the country” when describing immigrants who enter the U.S. illegally. While most voters overall disagree with this language, eight in 10 Republican primary voters say they agree with it — and that includes majorities of both MAGA voters (97%) and non-MAGA voters (65%) in the GOP electorate.
It says everything about the GOP electorate that so many of them agree with his Hitler quotes. It’s enough to make you sick.
But there are a few who disagree with some of his Nazi rhetoric:
Other ideas divide Republican primary voters — sometimes along MAGA/non-MAGA lines.
Perhaps just as importantly, several of these ideas and statements are not disqualifying: even if Republicans disagree with Trump on these items, most are still backing him for the nomination.
Here are some examples:
On revenge or payback:Most MAGA voters want him to prosecute his opponents if he’s elected, while few non-MAGA primary voters do. That said, six in 10 Republican voters who don’t want Trump to do this are still backing him.
On relations with allies: Half of MAGA voters would have him take the U.S. out of NATO, with most other GOP primary voters opposed. But Trump enjoys wide leads among both groups, regardless of their support for NATO.
On loyalty in government: There’s less support for ideas like removing federal workers who aren’t Trump supporters; almost no one wants government officials to show loyalty to Trump over the U.S. Constitution, and there’s little backing for the idea of punishing media organizations that criticize him. Most MAGA voters don’t sign onto these either. But again, Republican voters are overwhelmingly voting for Trump, regardless of their position on each of these items…
Trump voters who are at least considering someone else look pretty similar to Trump-and-only-Trump voters on a variety of attitudes. They want to hear candidates talking about similar issues: the economy and the border. They express similar preferences about what the candidate does: most importantly, promising tax cuts, challenging “woke” ideas, and banning surgeries that change a child’s gender. And even those considering another candidate tend to say their support for Trump is “very strong” and that he has the best chance of beating Mr. Biden.
I’m sorry, if you vote for Hitler even though you disagree with “some of his policies” you are objectively pro-fascist. That’s just the way it is. The Republican Party is fascist in 2024.
Trump is going to be the nominee so these primaries are irrelevant. But they do give us a snapshot of the GOP electorate and I think we can rest assured that the vast majority of whom will vote for Trump in the general election. But there are just enough of them who say they won’t that it could make a difference in a close election, particularly if Trump continues to decompensate. There is a small but important faction within the GOP and among GOP leaning Independents who simply don’t hate Biden as much as they hate Trump. Let’s hope they continue to see this world more clearly than their fellow Republican voters.
