This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell
Tagged with: GOP
Asking Republicans who feign earnest concern about America’s national security, or more ironically how the rest of the world sees us, about January 6th and the Trump administration more generally is not partisanship, it is, in fact, balanced journalism. However, almost nobody in the media did this.
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.
It is possible that it may just take more time for Trump and his supporters to fade away, but it is more likely that, even if the Democrats hold on to their majority in the House, Trumpism will further consolidate its hold on the GOP and continue to be a major and deeply damaging part of American politics for the foreseeable future.
The recent CPAC convention was the world’s first glimpse of the post-Donald Trump Republican Party and that glimpse made it clear the Republican Party is not post-Trump at all. Donald Trump’s speech on Sunday, which in tone, style and duration was very similar to one of his campaign rallies, capped off a weekend where it was made clear that fealty to Donald Trump, and the alternate reality that he created, is still the price of admission into today’s Republican Party.
Faced with overwhelming evidence that Donald Trump incited, encouraged and seemingly enjoyed the violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th, 43 of the 50 Republican senators voted to acquit the former president, making it clear that they did not think what Trump did was worthy of impeachment. There are only two reasons why those 43 senators voted to acquit Trump; either they were afraid of a primary from a Trump-backed opponent or they are true believers in what can perhaps best be described as the cult of Trump.
False equivalencies are like oxygen to the alternate realities, fealty to Donald Trump and affinity for angry conspiracy theories that now define the Republican Party.
The view that the Republican Party is about to tear itself apart trying to wrestle with the legacy of the Trump administration is another case of the American political class wanting to believe the crisis is less acute than it really is. If we convince ourselves that Trumpism is on its way out, we can also convince ourselves that American democracy is still strong. This is intellectually lazy and politically dangerous. As partisan and ugly as it sounds, Trumpism is the Republican Party. There is no way to purge the latter of the former. Rather, they both need to be summarily defeated.
A few months from now, Trump may be an odd sideshow, occasionally appearing in the media to spread disinformation and indulge his megalomania, while trying to stay one step ahead of the law and creditors. This will be a familiar role for Trump as it was the one he played for decades before running for president.
The Republican Party is faced with a quandary about whether or not to rally around the president and become complicit in his most egregious efforts to undermine democracy. The argument for doing this is that Trump may just succeed and remain in office after January of 2021. If this happens, the Republicans will buy a few more years in power and a few more years of not being held accountable. However, by backing up the president now the Republicans would also put themselves at risk of, politically speaking, jumping on the Titanic just moments before it hits the iceberg.
Given the recent history of the Republican Party seeking to put barriers in front of young people, African Americans and Latinos seeking to exercise their franchise, the states where the Coronavirus crisis could lead to greater voter suppression having a major effect on the presidential election are those swing states that have Republican governors and state legislatures-Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Ohio, or where there are Democratic governors, but Republican control of the state legislature-Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. If recent actions to make it harder for some groups to vote in states like Ohio, Georgia and Wisconsin are any guideline, it is very possible the laws passed in these states, to adjust to the Coronavirus crisis will have a similar impact.
It is not hard to imagine a scenario where Trumpcare does not make it through congress and investigations continue on several fronts, leaving the administration frustrated, but still without the competence or expertise to pass new laws or even engage maturely in the legislative process. Should that happen, the administration will, metaphorically speaking, hunker down and rely on executive orders, administrative policy changes in various agencies and Trump’s madcap and dangerous words and Tweets to set policy and, for lack of a better word, govern. In the short run, that strategy will, given the current political environment, be enough to keep Trump and people in office and out of trouble with the law, but over the long term the impact on American democracy could be devastating.
As this campaign, the nastiest in a very long time, comes to a close, activists, leaders and elected officials from both parties must wrestle with the lessons of this election and determine where to go from here. The lessons of this election, however, are contested and depend very much on how each party answers a similar, almost parallel question. For the Republicans, the key question about this election is whether Hillary Clinton is a pathological liar who prima facie should not hold high office and who represents a threat to the US, or whether she will be a President with whom they will disagree on many issues, but with whom they can work. Democratic leaders and activists are asking whether the abomination and threat to the democratic process that is Donald Trump is an aberration that grew out of the quirks of this year’s primary season or whether he is the natural development of a party that played footsie with bigots for more than a generation and through efforts to limit voting rights, massively increase surveillance and lead the US into a foolish and illegal war, has been betraying American democracy since the Bush administration.
The government shutdown is not driven by a Republican desire to overturn the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Nor is it about trying to reign in government spending or limit the national debt. It is, at its core, the latest act in an effort by the far right of the Republican Party to delegitimize the presidency of Barack Obama.
