Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Elle Hardy author of Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity Is Taking Over the World (yikes!!!) wrote this for TNR about a new war on the poor by Evangelical Christians:

A God who does his best work in the dark hours is integral to the story of American evangelical Christianity. The stuff of country music songs and conversions in roadside motels, Jesus tends to come to people at their lowest and loneliest. The only problem is that some of God’s most pernicious modern apostles understand this all too well. At a time when fewer and fewer believers are going to church, it is consumption, in these dark times, that illuminates a deeply antisocial shift in evangelical Christian beliefs.

Chief among the new doctrines is the idea that God rewards “seeding”—that is, the “sowing” of financial donations to churches, or favored online preachers—with a material harvest in return. The prosperity gospel might sound as old-fashioned—and feel as familiar—as a preacher in a three-piece suit, but a new and cynical version is making a comeback across ministries both old and new; among people who go to church and those who get their faith online.

Enter the church and, more specifically, preachers who specialize in the “health and wealth” form of faith. Quietly, outlets such as television channel INSP, the rebrand of Jim Bakker’s PTL Television Network, have become a fixture in the top 20 highest-rating channels in the nation. With viewership increasing 1,171 percent since 2010, the network that runs John Wayne films by day and Joel Osteen sermons by night has gained a foothold in American households.

[…]

For all of its certainty, social media algorithms favor muscular Christianity. During the pandemic, when people couldn’t go to church, the preachers who had the online infrastructure in place to broadcast sermons—and accept donations—found a whole new audience: members of “mom and pop” churches who had nowhere else to go. Those who ended up getting their Christianity from Facebook rather than the pulpit found it all too easy to fall down into some extreme theological rabbit holes. And without anyone to bounce new ideas off, they had no mooring—there was no congregation to moderate radical ideas.

Scott McConnell believes that this bombardment of new ideas has disrupted conventional Christian teachings. “We have access to so much knowledge and so many information sources,” he says, and unless believers are intentionally returning to the Bible, few have the time to “check their credibility.”

[…]

In May, Jason Mattera, son of Joseph Mattera, one of the most influential modern prophets of the New Apostolic Reformation—which emerged from the Pentecostal-Charismatic tradition that is sweeping all of evangelical Christianity before it—wrote a piece outlining a new direction for prosperity theology. In the article, titled “A Biblical View of Work and Welfare,” Mattera junior opined that, while Christians should help to alleviate poverty, they are not “under any obligation to help indolent bums.” Such people, he added “are not entitled to our generosity” (emphasis his).

While the concept of prosperity gospel has always held some latent hostility to the poor—that your circumstances belie a lack of faith or at least that you’re not doing it right—Mattera’s view highlights an escalation of prosperity-gospel thinking that says the quiet part out loud.

In Mattera’s vision, which appears rooted as much in right-wing talking points as in theological ideas, “​​there are clear worldview implications for Christians to consider on the topic of work and welfare.” A hereditary influencer who made his name creating a “whites-only scholarship” while at college, he concedes that Christians should be at “the tip of the spear” when it comes to looking after the poor but largely for other Christians. The unfortunate, he writes, “have chosen the path of poverty.”

This is a worldview that seeks to wage not a war against poverty but a war against the poor instead—those who have, in his view, shown insufficient faith. This might come as a surprise to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the teachings of Jesus, but it represents the culmination of a long strand of American Protestantism that gained hold after World War II.

Emerging from the New Thought movement espoused by Ralph Waldo Emerson and friends in the 1830s, ideas about “mind power” found an amped-up audience in America’s new world primacy. Reds were under the beds, and evangelicals believed that this was an existential threat to the self-made, God-fearing man. Fretting that the New Deal was welfare masquerading as communism, Protestant leaders—who until then had largely set themselves outside and above the political realm—began making common cause with political opponents of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Historian of the prosperity gospel Kate Bowler describes the merger of faith and conservative politics as incorporating the “American gospel of pragmatism, individualism, and upward mobility.”

At the same time, a renegade movement called New Order of the Latter Rain emerged to challenge the established Pentecostal hierarchy by promoting the idea that God’s blessings could be obtained on demand rather than by waiting for them to be bestowed on the pious. “Inverting the well-worn American mantra that things must be seen to be believed,” Bowler says, the prosperity gospel “rewards those who believe in order to see.” To this day, the majority of proponents of the prosperity gospel come from the Pentecostal-Charismatic tradition. (There is one important exception, though: the Reformed Church of America minister Norman Vincent Peale, whose book The Power of Positive Thinking had a lot of purchase, not least on the Trump family who were fixtures in the front row of his New York church.)

Once something of a fringe movement that was looked down upon by other evangelicals, today’s Pentecostal-Charismatic preachers—often calling themselves nondenominational—have captured the energy of American, and global, Christianity to the point that everyone from Catholic priests to mindset influencers is embracing the Holy Spirit and its powers over mind, body, and wallet. This version of Christianity has toned down the emphasis on the afterlife for an understanding of the world here and now. Like any politician seeking election, the God of prosperity speaks to issues at the kitchen table.

For Arizona pastor Thomas Anderson, author of Becoming a Millionaire God’s Way and CEO of The Word for Winners, Biblical tales can be contextualized in modern terms. “Mary and Joseph took a Cadillac to get to Bethlehem because the finest transportation of their day was a donkey,” he told his congregation in 2009. “Poor people ate their donkey. Only the wealthy used it as transportation.”

A modern Messiah that owns nice wheels is really one of victory: For some, that may be overcoming personal hardship, for others, triumph over the forces of darkness. Transport apparently being a particular preoccupation of this Jesus, last month, during a telethon fundraiser, Louisianan prosperity preacher Jesse Duplantis announced that his ministry purchased a $21 million jet. According to the Roys Report, it will sit in the driveway behind the smaller business-traveler jet already owned by the ministry.

During the same broadcast, pastor Jerry Savelle joined the stage to announce that his ministry was seeding $100,000 for a private jet of his own. “I was sowing for the future,” he said, but God told him that “there’s something bigger, better, faster, and more range in your future.” Handing the check to another preacher on the stage, Savelle offered the money “out of my aviation account.”

That ordinary churchgoers are happy to give money to those who so obviously don’t need it can be confounding to many, but it speaks to people of faith living in a world where we equate valuing something with paying for it. We only need to look at the number of people who are willing to pay Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, for VIP access to his free social media site.

In this sense, it would be unfair to attribute the resurgence in prosperity-gospel beliefs to the lack of education found in the Lifeway study. It found that churchgoers who have a high school diploma or less were more likely to believe in the prosperity gospel (81 percent) than those with a bachelor’s degree (67 percent).

It’s easy to deride believers in the prosperity gospel as misinformed or uneducated. But for all of Mattera and his fellow trevelers’ views about people living in poverty, there is a growing body of evidence that the failings of the secular world are driving believers to faith-based alternatives. And this movement is going global: Research out of Brazil, where Pentecostal-Charismatic churches are overtaking Catholicism as the primary expression of Christianity, found that economic downturns push people toward the gospel of health and wealth—and, politically, to more religiously conservative candidates. One man’s spiritual Ponzi scheme looks a lot like another’s solidarity network, and for those who believe that there are better ways than the state to look after people, it’s a powerful thing.

God help us.

Greg Sargent observes this tiresome dynamic in which the media expects the Democrats to vote for a far right Speaker of the House because the wingnuts won’t take yes for an answer. He notes that it didn’t work this time. There’s a lesson in that:

When Democrats refused to save Kevin McCarthy from the hard-right faction of House members who ousted the California Republican as speaker earlier this month, the pundit recriminations were thunderous and damning: Democrats had “burned” future possibilities of bipartisanship. They’d squandered a chance to own “the adult brand.” They should have “saved the country” but betrayed it instead.

But now, with Republicans still struggling to elect a speaker, Democrats’ strategy — largely charted by Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — is plainly working. The New York Democrat’s approach to navigating the GOP’s disaster isn’t just proving to be good politics for his party; it’s likely to produce a better result for the country as well.

Only weeks ago, Jeffries faced stern questioning from reporters on whether his party would provide the votes to rescue McCarthy and prevent the House from plunging into prolonged chaos. But this affair shows that when Democrats ignore the disapproval of the pundit class, the spotlight turns back on GOP efforts to quell their mania within. It has forced Republicans to vote on whether a full-blown MAGA firebrand such as Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan really merits the awesome powers of the speakership.

Eight Republicans are now running to be speaker after Jordan fell short of the 217 Republican votes he needed last week. Punchbowl News reports that the “top contender” is Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), who voted to certify Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss, as well as for previous rounds of Ukraine aid and government funding.

By contrast, McCarthy relentlessly whitewashed the Jan. 6 insurrection. He also tried to renege on a deal to maintain spending at a level both parties support. Democratic aides tell me they consider Emmer a more reliable negotiator than McCarthy, though few will say this publicly to avoid rallying conservative support against him.

To Jeffries’s credit, McCarthy’s downfall also forced Republicans to vote publicly on Jordan for speaker (who maxed out at around 200 GOP votes), which benefited Democrats politically. As Ronald Brownstein writes for the Atlantic, the mere fact that most Republicans nominated a member so deeply involved in Trump’s 2020 conspiracy vividly showcases the GOP’s turn away from democracy.

But the vote also forced Republicans to defeat Jordan, compelling some to go on record rejecting the MAGA tactics wielded by his supporters, such as bullying their colleagues and threatening holdouts. The bloc of 20 to 25 Republicans who voted against him — a combination of vulnerable members from swing districts, experienced appropriators and military veterans — bucked MAGA and have lived to tell the tale.

If Republicans can’t get 217 votes for one candidate, they will have to revisit the idea of empowering Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (N.C.) as temporary speaker, Punchbowl reports. Though Republicans rejected that option last week, the pressure is mounting to find a solution, and several have offered resolutions that would let McHenry preside over passage of so-called “must-pass” legislation.

The rub is that because the far-right wing opposes this move, it would require Democratic support — which gives Democrats leverage. Rep. Ann Kuster (N.H.), chair of the New Democrat Coalition, said her group would back a bipartisan option, including a temporary speaker such as McHenry, with assurances that legislation backed by a majority of House members would get a vote.

Such legislation could include aid to Ukraine and government funding once current spending runs out in mid-November. Finding a bipartisan coalition here is not at all far-fetched: More than 100 Republicans recently voted for Ukraine aid and for temporary government funding at mutually acceptable levels (though that temporary funding ultimately didn’t include the Ukraine money).

Rather than once again expecting Democrats to rush in and help Republicans clean up their own mess, it would require the GOP to take responsibility for what’s happening in its ranks, and compel the party to seriously entertain working with Democrats to make the House a functional governing body again.

Some Democrats, such as Kuster, think Republicans will gravitate toward this endgame if they can’t elect anyone. “What they’ve been telling us is they have to hit rock bottom,” Kuster said. “I think we’re getting there.”

I wonder. But at the moment, the Democratic refusal to make their own members walk a plank and vote for some anti-abortion, culture war, Trump sniffing wingnut (which describes all Republicans to at least some extent) they held strong. The Republicans own this and that’s exactly how it should be.

Rep. Tom Emmer won the nomination for Speaker this morning with only 117 votes. They then did a roll call by name and he won a few more but came far short of the 217 it will take to win. So really, they are no closer than they were last week. The MAGA freaks believe that if they hold their breath until they turn blue they will eventually force the RINOs to capitulate and give them what they want.

Political Scientist Rachel Bitecover:

The first time I posted about the harsh reality of America’s collapsing democracy, it seemed like many folks were genuinely surprised to see that America is not actually the Greatest Democracy on Earth.

According to the democracy index compiled by the EIU and published annually by The Economist, America is actually a “flawed” democracy.

The United States was downgraded from “full” to “flawed” democracy after half of America handed the keys to the White House to a wannabe dictator-con man who immediately began to roll back civil liberties and ignore the rule of law.

That’s why the very second I saw the topic Steve Levitsky’s and Daniel Ziblatt’s latest book, Tyranny of the Minority I knew I had to get them onto the show.

In Tyranny, Levitsky and Ziblatt, who are both professors at Harvard and are also the authors of another important book you should definitely read titled How Democracies Die, have put their fingers right onto the pulse of something you need to understand: America’s institutions are failing and must be reformed for our democracy to ever flourish again.

Our institutions were brilliant constructs of an 18th century world and a newly born country with one common fear among its creators: too much consolidation of federal power.

Thus, America’s Constitution was constructed to remove the creation of policy from the direct control of its chief executive, which is why most Americans are familiar with the terms “checks and balances” and “separation of powers” even if they’d be hard-pressed to specify what it means exactly, or how it actually works, in any meaningful way.

So concerned with the centralization of national power were the Founding Fathers that they codified checks and balances and separation of powers within each branch of government too.

As America is painfully learning right now, the House of Representatives was given sole “first mover” power in the appropriations process even though the “power of the purse” was granted to Congress at large. We can not fund the government without the House of Representatives which is why having it closed for 3 weeks while the Republican Party fights over custody of the kids is so damaging to our domestic and foreign policy interests.

Its why federal judicial appointments and treaty approval power belongs solely to the Senate.

Its why Chief Justice John Marshall wasn’t laughed out of the room when he asserted that the judicial branch had a “right of review” of actions taken by the legislative and executive branches in what went on to be called “judicial review.”

Yes, the Founding Fathers were positively OBSESSED about centralized power and did everything they could to gum up the works and force compromise in a system designed with one main goal in mind: to avoid creating a tyranny of the majority.

American institutions are designed to have a bias against action. It is very easy to propose legislative goals and very hard to actually enact them. This was true in America’s best of times and this, my friends, is not the best of times.

Fast forward 236 years and the very same institutional checks and balances that were supposed to protect us from a king have left America all but paralyzed on policy formation. Name a pressing policy problem and you’d be hard pressed to find Congress effectively legislating it despite robust public opinion begging for action on issues like immigration reform, climate change, and gun safety.

So what happened? Why have the institutions that served our young Republic so well, for so long, suddenly feel like they’re in danger of collapse?

You can hear the interview here.

It’s only straight talk when the press doesn’t do it

Sen. John McCain dubbed his campaign bus the “Straight Talk Express” during his 2000 presidential run. Voters claim to prefer straight talk to mealy-mouthed answers from their politicians. Donald Trump, the MAGA cult claims, “tells it like it is.”

“He’s outspoken. Other candidates wouldn’t tell you how it is, but he does.” – Betty Tully, August 2015

But straight talk is in the eye of the beholder. Straight talk from popular Fox News celebrities consists of xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and branding anyone to the left of Germany’s WWII dictator as hating America. Shy about being branded the enemy of the people, the straight press often shuns straight talk.

Maybe that’s one of the many reasons the news business is in such a slump. The press danced around calling Trump’s lies lies for years. When finally they began, of course, and whenever he didn’t like his coverage, Trump declared them the enemy of the people and invited his cult to hurl invective at reporters. Voters are fickle about what they consider straight talk.

Dan Froomkin (Press Watch) has called out New York Times headline writers for months for substituting dainty euphemisms for straight talk: “The New York Times cannot bring itself to definitively state anything negative about powerful people in a headline.” Euphemisms are obfuscatory, like the Nixon administration using “counter-insurgency strikes” in place of straight talk. (They were carpet-bombing Cambodia.)

In this news environment, extremists and crooks become “firebrands” and “norm busters.”

Froomkin wrote last month, “It’s not just an individual failure. It’s a system failure. The headline writers are often very low-level editors whose nightmare scenario is being fired for a headline that makes the story appear liberal. So they avoid that at all costs.”

There are rude terms for describing such people. We won’t use them here.

Brian Beutler this morning considers House Speaker contest press coverage of Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, that wrasslin’ “conservative firebrand“:

But we got a brief and revealing glimpse of how major news outlets would’ve greeted a Republican speaker—even one handpicked by Donald Trump—after Republicans rejected Jim Jordan, leaving the Washington Post to publish this lengthy profile of the Ohio Republican without the coronation it clearly intended to use as news peg.

I’m not sure if this qualifies as a “beat sweetener” because, at several thousand words, it isn’t all flattering. To the contrary, it’s really an investigation and recapitulation of Jordan’s scandalous past as a wrestling coach at Ohio State University, communicated in the language of a soft-touch profile.

But because it’s both things at once, it provides a few clues as to how beltway political journalists would have covered Jordan had he become speaker.

• HEADLINE: “Relentless Wrestler”;
• SUBHEADLINE: “Jim Jordan is an unyielding combatant, whether grappling on the mat or in the halls of Congress”;
• The article describes Jordan’s “firebrand defense of [Donald] Trump”;
• It depicts Jordan “On the mat… a fury of arms and legs, more will and stamina; than brute strength, always on offense, probing weakness, seeking leverage”;
• It marvels at his “metabolic energy.”

Those quotes all come from the lead portion of the article, and it’s peppered throughout with many similar examples. This contrast between the frank descriptions we see of the Republican Party as a whole, and these sorts of sanded-down descriptions of the people responsible for the chaos, is hard to figure from the outside. But it’s perfectly consistent with the professional customs of American political journalism that I’ve been describing in our video series, Decoding the News.

Trump vs. Cohen today

Donald John Trump won’t be armed and he won’t be standing in the middle of Fifth Avenue when he and his former fixer Michael Cohen meet today at the former president’s state fraud trial in Manhattan. Trump plans to be there, mug-shot glare at the ready (The Guardian):

“I look forward to the reunion,” Cohen, once Trump’s lawyer, said. “I hope Donald does as well.”

Now in its fourth week, Trump, his adult sons and their family business have been found liable for inflating the value of Trump’s assets to routinely and repeatedly deceive banks, insurers and others. Judge Arthur Engoron is using the hearings to decide on punishment, which could include a huge fine and probably means the dissolution of the Trump’s New York property empire.

Over a dozen witnesses, many former Trump Organization employees, have testified in the trial so far. But Cohen’s testimony is seen as crucial to the case.

Trump has a schedule full of court cases, indictments, and a lengthy list of complaints about how unfairly he’s being treated.

Just last night, Trump barely made the cutoff date for filing motions to dismiss his January 6th indictment. Marcy Wheeler (emptywheel) provides a handy table of his motions to dismiss things for which he’s not been charged:

Wheeler ticks through the list, perhaps most ironically this one:

Motion to Strike Inflammatory Allegations: This is an attempt to eliminate the language in the indictment showing how Trump mobilized his mob because he isn’t charged with mobilizing the mob (as DOJ already laid out, that is one of the means by which he obstructed the vote certification). This is likely tactical, an attempt to remove one of the primary means by which he obstructed the vote certification to make his 18 USC 1512(c)(2) argument less flimsy.

Washington Post cites the filings, explaining that these type of motions are fairly typical:

“Because the Government has not charged President Trump with responsibility for the actions at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, allegations related to these actions are not relevant and are prejudicial and inflammatory. Therefore, the Court should strike these allegations from the Indictment,” wrote defense attorneys Todd Blanche, John Lauro, Emil Bove and Gregory Singer.

“The indictment must be dismissed because it seeks to criminalize core political speech and advocacy that lies at the heart of the First Amendment,” they wrote.

Special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecutors will respond in coming weeks, the Post reports.

Trump is scheduled to face trial in federal court in Washington in March after pleading not guilty to an Aug. 1 indictment accusing him of a criminal conspiracy to remain in power, obstruct Congress’s lawful certification of Biden’s victory and deprive Americans of their civil right to have their votes counted.

These types of motions are all the more typical for Donald Trump.

In Trump’s appeal of the defamation lawsuit by writer E. Jean Carroll on Monday, a Trump attorney argued presidential immunity shields him. This would be the Nixon defense on steroids. When the president does it, it’s not illegal (Politico):

Trump’s argument comes as he is pressing a similarly aggressive immunity defense in his federal criminal case stemming from his efforts to subvert the 2020 election. Trump is “absolutely immune from prosecution” in that case, his lawyers contended in court papers this month — an argument that special counsel Jack Smith said is in sharp conflict with American history and the Constitution.

In the Carroll case on Monday, Trump lawyer Michael Madaio told a three-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals that presidential immunity is “an absolute and non-waivable protection.”

“If this court does not overturn the lower court’s ruling,” Madaio said, “a president, for the first time in our nation’s history, will be held civilly liable for his official acts.”

A more pedestrian version would be a tourist from Sheboygan in the hands of Italian police shouting, “You can’t do this to me. I’m an American!”

Meantime, Trump is still fuming about the gag order imposed last week in his federal Januray 6th trial. He’s filed an appeal of that as well (Washington Post):

Judge Tanya S. Chutkan agreed to temporarily lift the gag order that had restricted Trump’s public statements about special counsel Jack Smith, his team and witnesses while she considered a motion from Trump’s lawyers to suspend it entirely while they appeal.

Within 48 hours, Trump issued a new broadsideattacking the prosecutor, Trump’s first since the gag had been imposed. On Sunday, he took to his social network Truth Social to attack Smith in the exact terms that the order had prohibited, calling him “Deranged Jack Smith.”

Fred and Mary Anne Trump never gave little Donny a “time out,” did they?

The sequence illustrated the careful dance Trump had engaged in since Chutkan issued her order. He had refrained from immediately and flagrantly violating the gag order while it was in place, even as he railed against it and continued attacking judges and making a host of other comments that, while not technical violations, most defense attorneys would advise against.

And most clients would take the advice for which they are paying handsomely. Trump’s attorneys can neither count on getting paid nor on him taking their advice. *

Trump is fundraising furiously off the gag order.

“Anything that turns up the temperature and becomes controversial is where the online fundraising comes from,” said Brad Parscale, a former Trump campaign manager who now works in online fundraising. “It’s a lot easier to catch fish in a hot lake than a cold lake. All these stories heat up the lake.”

As Trump racked up criminal charges over the summer, his campaign message increasingly focused on fighting the prosecutions that he claims are politicized. In doing so, Trump has worked to position himself alongside his supporters, with one fundraising message last week calling the gag order against him “an attempt to gag American people and cancel out your vote.”

“We couldn’t script this any better from a political standpoint,” one adviser said. “He does best as the victim who is being treated unfairly.”

How Trump manages his schedule among all the court cases, lawyer meetings, campaign rallies, and Truth Social tirades is a wonder. His scheduler is not paid enough, it goes without saying,

* I can relate. One of my cocktail party answers to, “So what do you do?” was, “Clients pay a lot of money to ignore what I tell them.”

The man they want to lead the world

Trump: I’m for us. You know how you spell us, right? U.S. I just picked that up. Has anyone ever thought of that before? I’m reading and said us. You know, when you think about it, us, equals U.S. If we think of something genius, they will never say it. pic.twitter.com/xzXTMRRge6

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 23, 2023

The vast majority of Republican voters will vote for that puerile imbecile next November. What the fuck has happened to this country?

Update:

Whoa…

Wow. Trump says if he’s elected he’ll implement “strong ideological screening” of all immigrants to the U.S.

One of his criteria: “if you don’t like our religion…then we don’t want you in our country.” pic.twitter.com/PJ8rbqglZ9

— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) October 23, 2023

Will it work?

An interesting thought experiment from Brian Beutler in his newsletter today:

President Biden has been buffeted by attacks on his Middle East policy for the past two weeks, but enjoyed a brief reprieve on Thursday in the form of welcome criticism from Ari Fleischer, an immense cynic and warmonger who gained infamy as chief spokesman for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. 

“When [President Biden] said that Israelis should not be consumed by rage? Who the hell does he think he is?” Fleischer cried bitterly on Fox News. “I sat in on every summit meeting with foreign leaders when they came to the U.S. after 9/11 and met with President [George W.] Bush—not one said to Bush the Americans shouldn’t be consumed with rage. Instead they just came to support us.”

It’s worth stipulating a few things before we consider why Fleischer’s input was valuable (though he surely did not intend it to be): 

-First, Biden’s plea to the Israeli people wasn’t to let go of their rage, but to not let rage shape their response to the Hamas pogrom of October 7. 

-Second, by attacking Biden in this way, Fleischer adopted an implicit position either that Israel should let rage be its guide, or that ministering to a grieving people not to lash out vengefully and ineffectively is wrong in principle. In other words, his view is self-discrediting no matter its intended meaning. 

-Third, the idea here isn’t just to devise Middle East policy through negative domestic polarization. “If Ari Fleischer is owned we must be doing things right,” is a logically and morally infirm way to think about policy, and in any case, right-wing goons like Fleischer will attack U.S. Middle East policy, whatever it is, when the president is a Democrat. 

But we don’t need to assume Biden’s on the right track just because Fleischer played mad at him. Fleischer helped us (or at least he helped me) see past a barrage of good- and bad-faith Biden criticism with an unwitting thought experiment: What if one or more of those heads-of-state had tried to make American citizens and our leaders respond to the 9/11 terrorist attacks shrewdly instead of ruthlessly?

A pincer movement of left-wing critics and right-wing hawks and opportunists has encircled Biden at a precarious moment, but I think, given real political constraints (not polling data but, e.g., Israeli politics, and the U.S. Congress, and its veto powers) he has so far done quite well. 

Still he and and all of his critics and everyone else would benefit from thinking through what we’d say today in hindsight if some respected U.S. ally had appealed to us the way Biden appealed to Israelis and Benjamin Netanyahu—supportive publicly, but with caveats, hinting at a more aggressive diplomatic effort behind the scenes to nudge us off the path to flailing wars of retribution. 

The unsatisfying answer, as with most alternate history, is that it depends. If it had worked, events would’ve played out much differently, and the person who beat back the neoconservatives would be a hero, underappreciated only because our catastrophic response to 9/11 would never have happened. 

If it had not worked, on the other hand, I think people looking back would still appreciate their prescience. (We can see now in our public reassessments of Iraq and Afghanistan war skeptics that the leaders of the post-9/11 period who didn’t fall in line behind Bush have fared the best historically.) But their legacy would turn just at least in part whether they changed their relationship with the United States when it became clear Bush had decided on a course of indiscriminate violence. Did they pay lip service to justice, or did they seek it in earnest?

That hypothetical should (among so many other things) be on Biden’s mind today.

The critique at the heart of Biden’s diplomatic efforts is that invading Gaza without a next-stage plan for withdrawal, and for its humane future, would resemble the mistakes the U.S. made after September 11.

But I think a similar insight applies to Israel supporters in American politics, particularly in the Democratic Party, which will drive U.S. policy in the coming weeks and months, and whose supporters don’t carry a desire for unconstrained violence in their bloodstream. Much has already been made (more than is strictly wise) of the fact that surveys find public opinion in the U.S. on the side of support for Israel. As much support as Biden has provided or more. I think a more nuanced reading of the data is that the public wants the U.S. to support an Israeli counteroffensive but can be easily nudged into revealing that their views will likely change if the current approach leads to quagmire and mass death in Gaza. 

This hints at the ultimate danger of poll-driven politics—that leaders will chase volatile public opinion into the moral abyss. It was nothing if not public opinion that spooked early aughts Democrats into supporting the invasion of Iraq, when with a little imagination they (like Barack Obama and Barbara Lee) could’ve seen disaster coming and staked out war opposition early, when doing so was hard. 

What will Biden and his political allies do if and when Israel invades Gaza without an achievable objective and it becomes an endless disaster? What happens when the polling turns? If they don’t know how to answer the question, it’s an argument for following their consciences now. (Of course, for many Democrats, that would change nothing. They’re following their consciences already.)

But it’s something I hope Biden has pondered deeply. 

The best journalism I’ve read on this basic conundrum—a very difficult subject to report out, to be sure—suggests both that Israel is on the precipice of disaster 1, and that a better, more defensible alternative is available. What does he do if Israel doesn’t embrace it?

What is his plan if Netanyahu, who brought what’s left of Israel’s democracy to its knees to keep himself out of prison, rolls the dice with wrecking the whole global order to keep his prime ministership? Will he change U.S. policy in any way? Is America obligated to blindly support a foreign government, even one with Israel’s unique and tragic history, if its people choose as their leader a person who is as corrupt as Donald Trump and bloodthirsty as Dick Cheney? I would not want to gamble my presidency, my party, my country’s standing in the world on the impulse and selfishness of a person like him.

1 –Prior to this month I had not read a Thomas Friedman column in many years; his work was honestly laughing stock in my peer group, in part because of his views on globalization and the Iraq war (remember “suck on this”?), and because of his tendency to write in cliche and mixed metaphor. But circumstance has made his realm of genuine reportorial expertise more salient, and that’s reflected in his recent output.

I don’t have the answer to that either and basically I’m just hoping that the Israeli people decide to get rid of Netanyahu and try to turn the page. The polling suggests that they see him for the self-absorbed failure he is right now. 80% want him to take responsibility for what happened and he is refusing to do so.

Asked who they would vote for had elections been held today, the poll again gave abysmal grades to the current coalition — 43 seats compared to their current 64 — with Gantz’s party alone soaring to 40 seats from its current 12..

They may be rallying around the flag but they are not rallying around Netanyahu and his party.

I’m not sure that it was rage that drove the American response after 9/11. The neocons who used the rage and pain of Americans to fulfill their long-held ambitions to institute a “Pax Americana” could have been marginalized if the president had been a stronger, smarter man with a mind of his own. Instead, not unlike Trump, he clung to shallow tropes like “I got capital and I’m gonna use it” to initiate a war that lasted 20 years and from which we are still feeling the ramifications. He didn’t have the tools to fight them off and he loved dressing up in soldier costumes and calling himself a “wartime president.” (He did make it a policy not to grotesquely degrade Muslims and Islam, which is more than anyone can say for Donald Trump.)

In Israel, Netanyahu is driving this himself for his own political survival and I get the sense that the Israeli people see through this. Maybe that means they will have cooler heads than we had. Let’s hope so.

Don’t kid yourself

At least they aren’t blaming the Democrats anymore. (For now anyway.)

Kevin McCarthy, the ousted speaker, was making his way through the Capitol when reporters asked what he thought of the chaos consuming House Republicans, who for nearly three weeks have been trying and failing to replace him.

His answer veered into the existential. “We are,” he said on Friday, “in a very bad place right now.”

That might be an understatement.

In the House, Republicans are casting about for a new leader, mired in an internecine battle marked by screaming, cursing and a fresh flood of candidates. In the Senate, their party is led by Senator Mitch McConnell, who spent weeks arguing that he remained physically and mentally fit enough for the position after freezing midsentence in two public appearances. And on the 2024 campaign trail, the dominant front-runner, Donald J. Trump, faces 91 felony charges across four cases, creating a drumbeat of legal news that often overwhelms any of his party’s political messages.

As national Democrats largely stand behind President Biden and his agenda — more united than in years — Republicans are divided, directionless and effectively leaderless.

For years, Mr. Trump has domineered Republican politics, with a reach that could end careers, create new political stars and upend the party’s long-held ideology on issues like trade, China and federal spending. He remains the party’s nominal leader, capturing a majority of G.O.P. voters in national polling and holding a double-digit lead in early voting states.

And yet his commanding position has turned Republicans into a party of one, demanding absolute loyalty to Mr. Trump and his personal feuds and pet causes, such as his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. The result is an endless loop of chaos that even some Republicans say once again threatens to define the party’s brand heading into an election in which Republicans — after struggling to meet the basic responsibilities of governing the House of Representatives — will ask voters to also put them in charge of the Senate and the White House.

“This looks like a group of 11th graders trying to pick the junior class president, and it will hurt our party long term,” said former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who is challenging Mr. Trump for the party nomination. “It’s going to be very hard to make the case that the American people should turn over control of the government to Republicans when you can’t even elect a speaker.”

In recent months, the former president has focused more on his own legal peril than on his party. Flouting pressure from the Republican National Committee, Mr. Trump has largely opted out of some of the party’s biggest moments. He skipped the first two Republican primary debates for his own events and plans to skip the third, forgoing a chance to present his party’s message to an audience of millions.

And he has largely taken a hands-off approach to the fight over the House speakership. Nine months ago, he helped install Mr. McCarthy as speaker. But he did not come to Mr. McCarthy’s rescue this fall when Representative Matt Gaetz led the charge to oust him. He then endorsed Representative Jim Jordan, who has failed to win enough support.

Political parties out of power typically lack a strong leader. In 2016, Mr. Trump’s election plunged Democrats into years of ideological battles between a restive liberal wing and a more moderate establishment. But what’s less typical — and perhaps more politically damaging, some Republicans said — is the drawn-out, televised turmoil putting the internal dysfunction on public display.

“It’s kind of a captainless pirate ship right now — a Black Pearl with no Jack Sparrow,” said Ralph Reed, a prominent social conservative leader, who argued that the issues would eventually be resolved. “But on the bright side, we will have a speaker at some point.”

“These Republicans are complete idiots,” Ann Coulter, the conservative commentator, said on a radio program last week.

Mr. McConnell all but threw up his hands in interviews on the Sunday talk shows. “It’s a problem,” he said on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “We’re going to do our job and hope the House can get functional here sometime soon.”

And The Wall Street Journal editorial board, long a bastion of establishment Republican thought, wrote more than a week into the drama: “As the current mess in choosing another House Speaker shows, never underestimate the ability of Republicans to commit electoral suicide.”

Most frustrating to some Republicans is the fact that the messy battle is largely symbolic. Democrats control the Senate and the White House, meaning that whoever becomes speaker has little chance of making their agenda into law.

Still, there could be real-world political implications. As Republicans battled one another, Mr. Biden focused on an actual war. He spent much of last week building support for Israel, with a wartime visit and an Oval Office prime-time appeal for $105 billion in aid to help Israel and Ukraine — funds that face an uncertain future in a House frozen by infighting.

It’s a split screen Democrats are more than happy to highlight.

“The president of the United States, a Democrat, gave the strongest pro-Israel speech, at least since Harry Truman, maybe in American history,” said Representative Jake Auchincloss, a moderate Democrat from Massachusetts. “The division is on the Republican side of the aisle, where they are so fractured they can’t even elect a leader of their conference.”

Mike DuHaime, a veteran Republican strategist who is advising Mr. Christie, said the inability to pick a speaker was a “new low” for Republican governance. “If you don’t have the presidency there is no clear leader of the party,” he said. “That’s natural. What’s unnatural here is that we can’t run our own caucus.”

But others say that Mr. Trump, along with social media and conservative media, has turned the very incentive structure of the party upside down. With a broad swath of the conservative base firmly behind the former president, there may be little political cost in causing chaos. The eight Republicans who voted to oust Mr. McCarthy, for example, are likely to face no backlash for plunging the party into disarray. As their message is amplified across conservative media, they’re more likely to see their political stars rise, with a boost in fund-raising and attention.

“What’s happening is you have people who don’t want to be led, but also want to engineer a situation where they can be betrayed and use that to rail against leadership,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist and former National Republican Senatorial Committee aide.

Trump is their leader. It’s just that a few of them don’t like it and have to be coerced into supporting him. And if they can get away with flouting his orders, they do it. His endorsements have often gone unheeded. But if he really puts his clout behind stopping someone it’s likely he will succeed.

Trump is whipping against Tom Emmer because he didn’t vote to overturn the election on January 6th. That’s a bridge no GOP speaker is allowed to cross, apparently. So, I would guess the Republicans will capitulate to that. They have plenty of others to choose from who have not offended Dear Leader in this way.

And then this. Sigh:

Nicole McCleskey, a Republican pollster, said the messy dust-up in the House would be forgotten by next November’s elections, washed away as just another moment of broken government amid near-record lows for voters’ trust in Congress.

“People are used to Washington dysfunction, and this is just another episode,” she said. “It’s Republicans and Democrats, and they’re all dysfunctional. For voters, it’s just further evidence that Washington can’t address their problems.”

As long as the media keeps both-sidesing this that’s probably true.

For the first two years of Biden’s presidency, the government functioned as it’s supposed to. The filibuster required some egregious sausage-making but at the end of the day they got legislation passed, the government stayed open and a lot of business was done on a bipartisan basis in spite of this clown show that calls itself the GOP. But once the voters handed power to the Republicans, even in one house of congress, all hell broke loose.

They are not “all dysfunctional.” The Republicans are dysfunctional. But I’d imagine that a lot of people don’t see it that way because the press insists on implying that both sides are equally screwed up. They need to remember that making people hate government is the Republican agenda. This is how they get people to believe in a strongman, even an impecilic pretender like Trump.

Look for him to start blowing everything up

They’re serious this time:

Donald Trump wanted to pull the United States out of NATO during his first term, but was repeatedly talked out of it by senior administration officials. For a possible second term in the White House, the 2024 Republican presidential frontrunner is already discussing how he could actually get it done, if his demands aren’t met by NATO. He and his policy-wonk allies are also gaming out how he could dramatically wind down American involvement to merely a “standby” position in NATO, in Trump’s own words.

When the former president has privately discussed the United States’ role in the transatlantic military alliance this year, Trump has made clear that he doesn’t want the upper ranks of a second administration to be staffed by “NATO lovers,” according to two sources who’ve heard him make such comments. The ex-president has made these kinds of jabs at the longstanding alliance during conversations related to the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine. 

Trump, the sources say, has continued to express an openness to pulling the U.S. out of NATO altogether. However, Trump has suggested that this could be averted if the alliance — which Trump once famously called “obsolete” — gives in to his newest demands. This would include his desires for non-American members to further and steeply increase their defense spending, and for a reevaluation of the bedrock principle that an attack on one member is tantamount to an attack on all. 

When he was in office, Trump would repeatedly scoff at this collective-defense clause of the North Atlantic Treaty, known as Article 5. One former senior administration official recalls to Rolling Stone a moment in the Oval Office in mid-2018 when the then-president started reading from a written list of smaller NATO countries, some of which he argued most Americans had never even heard of before. 

Trump then vented that “starting World War III” over some of these countries’ sovereignty made absolutely no sense, and that he shouldn’t be forced to automatically commit American troops to any such crisis. 

Any threats or action on Trump’s part in recasting the U.S.’s role in NATO would all, of course, be contingent on Trump winning reelection next year. When he was leader of the free world for four years, he dangled anti-NATO sentiments on multiple occasions, only to yield to intra-administration pushback.

“It would be a tremendously stupid endeavor, especially at a time when war in Europe rages, and much of Europe is looking to the United States to deter further conflict,” Dr. Aaron Stein, a Black Sea Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, says, reacting to Trump’s NATO-skeptic policy goals. “Trading away allies based on ignorance, and Trump is ignorant about this issue, is just silly for broader U.S. national security.”

But this time around, an array of nationalist allies and pro-Trump policy wonks have been eager to offer the ex-president frameworks for how to MAGA-fy the U.S. approach to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. One possibility that has piqued Trump’s interest in recent months is what the former president has privately branded, “NATO on standby,” according to sources familiar with his private musings. One source close to Trump describes the idea as having the potential to “blast a hole straight through NATO.”

Trump’s idea reflects some of the arguments laid out in a policy brief, published in February by researcher and conservative writer Dr. Sumantra Maitra, titled: “Pivoting the US Away from Europe to a Dormant NATO.” The paper was posted by the Center for Renewing America, a think tank stacked with Trump administration veterans and MAGA Republicans that is laying groundwork to be a premier policy driver if Trump retakes the presidency. “The NATO bureaucracy is a barrier in the path of reduced American commitment,” the brief reads. “It is self-sustaining and prone to push missions that are beyond NATO’s core role and, at times, opposed to the domestic interests of the United States. Radically reducing the NATO bureaucracy should be a chief aim.”

Sources familiar with the matter say that this paper indeed circulated within Trump’s immediate circle earlier this year. “There were some ideas in it that the [former] president liked,” says a former Trump administration official who remains in close contact with the 2024 campaign. 

During his time in office, Trump repeatedly misunderstood the meaning and purpose of NATO’s collective spending agreements, which required each member to spend at least two percent of their gross domestic product on defense. By contrast, the former president mistakenly spoke of the alliance as a kind of protection racket, in which members’ spending obligations were paid to the U.S. as dues rather than a general requirement for countries to spend set amounts on defense as they saw fit.

In a memoir of his stint as Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton wrote that he “could never tell” if Trump genuinely understood NATO’s defense spending requirements. Bolton recounted a number of attempts in which Trump, frustrated by an impression that NATO members were stiffing the U.S. on an imagined tab, alternately threatened to leave or reduce America’s commitment to the Atlantic alliance, only to have the threats walked back by staff. (These days, the ex-president has reserved especially harsh words for “NATO lovers” in general and Bolton in particular.) 

“In a second Trump term, we’d almost certainly withdraw from NATO,” Bolton predicted to The Hill in August.

The issue has taken on new urgency as Trump has ratched up his antagonism both towards European allies and the Ukrainian government in the wake of Russia’s invasion of the country in February 2022. 

“The good old USA ‘suckers’ are paying a VAST majority of the NATO bill, & outside money, going to Ukraine. VERY UNFAIR!” Trump bellowed on his Truth Social platform in January. 

During an August town hall interview with Fox News, Trump bragged that he had told NATO members “I will not protect you from Russia,” if they were “delinquent” in defense spending. 

The former president’s continued irritation at NATO allies and his growing agitation against U.S. military aid to Ukraine, which has sought to join the alliance, has ratched up fears that Trump would make good on his threats to leave the alliance if he wins the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

That prospect prompted the Senate to pass an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act over the summer. The legislation, introduced by Senators Time Kaine and Marco Rubio, would prohibit any future president from withdrawing from NATO without the approval of two thirds of the Senate.

The measure would tie up any attempt at a formal withdrawal in Congress but would not prevent a future Trump administration from undermining confidence in the U.S. security guarantees implicit in the alliance. Under NATO’s Article 5 collective defense agreement, states are obliged to assist member states under attack, but the treaty leaves it to member states to define the scope and type of assistance they would offer once invoked. 

Even his expression of intent would upend all of our alliances and throw everything into chaos.

Trump has no idea what he’s doing — he’s posting memes about his omnipotence and whining about his legal problems all day. He’s too dumb to understand anything complicated and his only agenda is revenge against his enemies so blowing up agreements and institutions is all he can do. Getting rid of NATO is one of them because he has a grudge against Europe for some reason. But there are other people on the far right who are ready to do it for other more substantive reasons and they aren’t good.

“Well right now, [the House] can’t govern, and I think that the eight people who betrayed the conference and joined the Democrats to defeat the 96 percent of the conference unleashed furies that I don’t think they’d even dreamed of, because it gave every person the right to be equally destructive and equally angry.

Hahahaha. No, Newt, those furies were unleashed decades ago by you. Recall Newt’s first big power play against his own party:

On the evening of Oct. 4, 1990, Newt Gingrich and his then-wife, Marianne, were enjoying a VIP reception at a Republican fundraiser when they were suddenly hustled over to have their picture taken with President George H.W. Bush.

“I thought it was a bad idea,” Gingrich said in a series of interviews in 1992 that have not been previously published.

Days earlier, Gingrich had dramatically walked out of the White House and was leading a very public rebellion against a deficit reduction and tax increase deal that Bush and top congressional leaders of both parties — including, they thought, Gingrich — had signed off on after months of tedious negotiations. The House was to vote on the deal the very next day.

“We went over and I said [to Bush], ‘I’m really sorry that this is happening,’ and he said with as much pain as I’ve heard from a politician, ‘You’re killing us, you are just killing us.’ ”

Gingrich’s actions both before and after his encounter with Bush showed a man willing, if not eager, to weaken the president and, as he put it, “to dismantle the old order.”

Gingrich, then the party whip and No. 2 Republican in the House, and his followers took down the deal the next day, severely undercutting Bush and highlighting the betrayal of his famous “Read my lips: no new taxes” pledge. In some key respects, Gingrich’s revolt set the stage for Bush’s demise and eventual defeat — as well as the Republican takeover of the House in 1994 that catapulted Gingrich to the speakership.

Gingrich’s defiance and high-visibility debut as provocateur in 1990 was a decisive moment for him. It was the first chance he had to exercise real political power, providing an early glimpse of the complexity and the contradictions that he has displayed since.

Recall that Newt succeeded in helping to defeat Bush in 1992 and was rewarded for it by making him Speaker of the House in 1994.

This is your monster, Newt. You paved the way for bomb-throwing narcissists to blow everything up. They learned from the best.