This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell
Tagged with: Donald Trump
The MAGA movement is a profound threat to American democracy, but the movement gains a lot of strength from enablers who see it as an opportunity to enrich themselves and who understand that Trump’s supporters, particularly the most extreme, are easy marks. If somebody can be persuaded to follow Donald Trump, then they can be sold pretty much anything.
Despite the tough road ahead for Haley as she tries to become her party’s nominee for president in 2024, she brings a combination of youth, energy, media skills and accomplishment that are unmatched by any major Republican politician looking at the race. However, there is little reason to believe this is anything more than a better presentation of the angry, grievance based messages that have been the handmaiden of the Republican Party’s efforts to weaken American democracy since 2016.
Since the midterm elections, something just short of a consensus has formed that Ron DeSantis will be the Republican nominee for president in 2024. It is also assumed that along the way he will defeat Donald Trump and prevent the former president from winning a third straight Republican presidential nomination. This consensus is in part due to both smart Republican strategists, and there are still some, as well as center and center-left pundits, observers and journalists, wanting to believe it, albeit for totally different reasons.
As the 2024 election approaches, we will hear much more from Ron DeSantis. His sterling educational resume and reputation for having a sharp intellect will be part of that narrative. There is ample reason to believe that DeSantis is a smart man, but that only makes him more responsible for the terrible and deadly decisions he made in the face of a global pandemic.
The Speaker’s vote was personal, pitting one not very popular right-wing Trump apologizing congressman against a series of even less popular right-wing Trump apologizing congressman. The stakes were low enough that opponents of McCarthy could drag the process out and keep demanding more because they had so little to lose. McCarthy ultimately won and when it comes to legislation, will use his Speakership to do, well, nothing.
There is thus a very real possibility that contrary to all evidence, and logic, the lesson the GOP will take away from this election is that they were not sufficiently pro-Trump. That sounds absurd, but that is today’s Republican Party.
The lines between domestic and international affairs have never been blurrier than they are now. Nowhere is this clearer than in the complex and increasingly hostile relations between the US, Ukraine and Russia. As the world watched the battles in Ukraine, we should not overlook the enormous impact electoral battles in American states like Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio next month and in 2024 will have on the future of Ukraine.
There is no precedent for the President of the United States giving a major speech warning of the threat of democracy being undermined by domestic forces aligned with a major political party, but that is precisely what President Joe Biden did on September 1st. The threat Biden identified is real. While there is value in alerting Americans to the danger that, to use Biden’s phrase, MAGA Republicans, pose to American democracy, Biden’s speech will do little to ameliorate that threat.
The Alaska race is particularly significant because a prominent celebrity with ties to Trump lost in a solidly Republican state. The rank choice system in Alaska provides some insight into the race. It turns that the votes for third place finisher Nicholas Begich, a Republican from a prominent Democratic family, did not go to Palin by enough of a margin to defeat Peltola. This suggests that animus towards Palin was a driving force in the election. That cannot be good news for candidates like Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania or Herschel Walker in Georgia. Both are, like Palin, c-list celebrities with strong ties to Trump and little knowledge of government. Palin’s defeat is a sign both that the Democratic Party may be in better shape that it seemed a few months ago, and that candidates matter.
The Trump fever is not going to break. The MAGA cult, which constitutes a significant minority of the American people is not going to wake-up from a now more than seven-year infatuation with Trump and return to what once passed as normal American politics. Similarly, the leadership of the GOP is not going to finally break with Trump and ask themselves why it took so long. The moment for that to happen came and went years ago.
Although the most recent polls are not great for Trump, there is little reason to think he will decide not to run and very few, if any, people inside of the Republican Party can stop him.
The best way for the US to help Ukraine is to have a functioning Biden administration-and preventing that is the primary goal of the GOP. Therefore, doing the domestic and policy work must be at the center of Biden’s efforts to support Ukraine in this war.
The biggest challenge is to persuade a significant proportion of those who now support the authoritarian movement that is almost entirely indistinguishable from the Republican Party that democracy is a better solution. If the GOP is recaptured by conservatives who believe, generally, in the idea of democracy, or if it is defeated enough that fewer than about 30% of the American people support it, democracy will have a chance in the US. However, if neither of those unlikely events come to pass, the crisis will endure for a while.
January 6th will mark one year since the violent insurrection at the US Capitol that sought to disrupt the certification of President Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. While that is a significant anniversary that we should recognize and reflect upon, it should not be overlooked that 2022 is the sixth year in a row that has begun with American democracy in crisis.
The American media has been covering politics as a horserace, giving equal times and credence to both sides, for so long that it is very hard to change. However, the overarching story in the US now is the threat to democracy posed by the GOP. Ignoring that in favor of false equivalencies and continuing to treat both sides as roughly equal is not just lazy and bad for democracy, but, by overlooking the true nature and goals of the Republican Party, is also deeply partisan.
Trump’s Covid policy, and recent revelations about how he endangered the life of Joe Biden are not just stories that demonstrate his erratic behavior and tenuous grip on reality, but a reminder of the danger Donald Trump represents in so many different ways and that even though the disgraced former president has always been a big buffoonish, we must continue to take him very seriously.
Events in Afghanistan over the last few days have been a long time coming. They may, in fact, demonstrate how President Biden mishandled the drawdown of troops, but they are better understood as what may be the final chapter in an overly ambitious war that flummoxed American policy makers over two decades and four presidential administrations.
In recent weeks, the Republican Party has taken an even stranger, darker and more murderous approach to Covid. While their previous policies led directly to the deaths of Americans because they simply ignored the danger of Covid and resisted medical interventions from masks to social distancing to vaccines, current GOP policy essentially mandates that people directly or indirectly expose themselves to the virus and seeks to punish those who would like to prevent that.
Moreover, whether they truly believe this or are doing it for political reasons becomes less important with every passing day. If you perform ignorance, cult-membership, dishonesty and racism for half a decade, you become ignorant, part of a cult, dishonest and racist-and that is the plight of the Republican Party six months into the Biden presidency.
In 2018 Trump finally found his Roy Cohn, albeit something of a bloated goyishe knockoff of the original, in the person of William Barr. Barr, who Trump nominated to be Attorney General in late 2018 and was confirmed by the Senate in early 2019, was unusual among the members of Trump’s inner political circle and most trusted enablers in that he had impressive legal, professional and educational credentials.