The GOP Ties Itself to the Trumptanic

Donald Trump is now the presumptive GOP nominee. Nikki Haley has officially dropped out of the race leaving no one to stop Trump on the GOP side. The GOP has once again chosen to tie itself to the dumbest man in American politics, an adjudicated rapist, and a man who is facing 91 felony counts and goes to trial on some of them very soon. It is altogether likely that before the GOP Convention the nominee for the Republican Party will be a convicted felon.

This is stupidity of epic proportions. It’s not as though the GOP can claim ignorance of who Trump is. There is zero hope that Trump will surround himself with decent, smart, civic-minded people. At this point the only people willing to join Team MAGA are the idiotic, the irrecoverably power-hungry, and the extreme. It’s not even the JV team anymore, Trump has surrounded himself with a coalition of paste-eating freaks. And what Trump wants to do is remake America in the same way he remade the GOP—into a tool of his own boundless self-aggrandizement. Another Trump term would be a Trump term with zero guardrails, which is a recipe for absolute national disaster. To call it potential national suicide is no longer hyperbole at this point.

If the American experiment is to survive, Donald Trump must be defeated. The GOP is a dead party—it is a shambling corpse that is being worn as a skin suit by Trump. The GOP has no policies, no ideas, no thoughts, no vision. It is just a mass of grievances. All it wants to do is “own the libs” which quickly equates to “owning” even its own members who are not sufficiently affixed to Trump’s ample derriere.

I do believe that Joe Biden will be reelected as President this November—he certainly deserves to be. And the GOP deserves to die as a party. A party this thoroughly incompetent, this thoroughly corrupt, a party that sees Donald Trump and says “this man represents everything about me” is a party that has no business existing. As someone who is prudentially conservative the GOP is not a conservative party. Perhaps some day a new conservative movement will rise from the ashes, although I suspect it will be a generation or more before that happens.

The GOP tied itself to Trump. God willing it will go down with him.

Trump Wants To Be King

I was able to listen to the hearing before the DC Circuit this week in which Trump’s lawyers argued that the President can commit literally any crime and get away with it so long as he manages to get through impeachment. It is, to be blunt, a profoundly stupid argument. What Trump says is that the political process of impeachment of the President is a prerequisite to the criminal prosecution of a President. This is a deliberate misreading of the Constitution. Here is what the Impeachment Judgment Clause actually says:

Judgment in cases of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States: but the party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment, according to law.
US Const. Art. I, §3

In other words, impeachment only removes an official from office, it is not a criminal sanction, but someone who is impeached and removed may still be charged criminally. The idea behind this clause (as made clear by the Founders at the time) was that impeachment was only a political solution, and an official still remained criminally chargeable after impeachment.

What Trump’s lawyers are arguing is that a President cannot be charged criminally unless they are convicted in an impeachment proceeding first. This argument is patently ridiculous, as the DC Circuit noted right at the outset. Under Trump’s argument, the President of the United States could order the assassination of the entire opposition party in Congress on January 19th and because there was no chance for the President to then be impeached, the President could not be criminally charged for murder. If you think that hypothetical is crazy, that is literally one of the first questions asked at the hearing, and Trump’s attorney was forced into saying that is exactly what Trump’s position is.

If there is any question why someone who was once a rock-ribbed GOP-supporting conservative is now not only voting for Joe Biden, but openly campaigning for the Democrats, that is it. The most fundamental thing in American government is that the power of the government is constrained by law. My whole disagreement with the left has been that they are too eager to use the coercive power of the state to remake society. But now the “right” is arguing that there should be no guardrails at all against Presidential power. That position is fundamentally anti-American. And while I still have a healthy skepticism of the Democratic Party, the GOP is now the biggest threat to this country out there. The January 6th insurrection was the point where anyone still supporting the GOP crossed from being a rube to being a danger. The second the GOP party line went to supporting the insurrection, it became not a political party but a terrorist organization.

Trump’s position before the Court this week is the position that the President is accountable to no one. So long as the President can either delay impeachment or keep their party to the party line, the President is free to murder, accept bribes, sell secrets, or do whatever the hell they want. That is not a position that is remotely American or remotely acceptable.

Trump wants to be a King, and the GOP is perfectly happy to let him. That is why the GOP is neither American nor conservative. That is why this conservative is all in with the Biden campaign in 2024.

Donald Trump Is a Fascist

Tom Nichols has a great piece in The Atlantic in which he comes around to the idea that Donal Trump is a literal fascist. I have long thought that Trump is a textbook fascist—he has a cult of personality around him, he pines for an imagined past, and he is perfectly fine with using the power of government to punish his enemies. That America did not fall under the first Trump “administration” was due to the fact that Trump is also profoundly lazy and he had some guardrails around him. A second Trump term would still see a lazy Trump, but he would be empowered by a burgeoning movement of radical right-wing elements that have openly declared their intention to turn America into a one-party police theocracy. As Nichols defines fascism:

Fascism is not mere oppression. It is a more holistic ideology that elevates the state over the individual (except for a sole leader, around whom there is a cult of personality), glorifies hypernationalism and racism, worships military power, hates liberal democracy, and wallows in nostalgia and historical grievances. It asserts that all public activity should serve the regime, and that all power must be gathered in the fist of the leader and exercised only by his party.

That is the Trump ideology (such as it exists) in a nutshell. Trump is playing from the same old playbook that every fascist and caudillo has since time immemorial. And sadly, it is a playbook that works.

Where I disagree with Nichols is here:

But here I want to caution my fellow citizens. Trump, whether from intention or stupidity or fear, has identified himself as a fascist under almost any reasonable definition of the word. But although he leads the angry and resentful GOP, he has not created a coherent, disciplined, and effective movement. (Consider his party’s entropic behavior in Congress.) He is also constrained by circumstance: The country is not in disarray, or at war, or in an economic collapse. Although some of Trump’s most ardent voters support his blood-and-soil rhetoric, millions of others have no connection to that agenda. Some are unaware; others are in denial. And many of those voters are receptive to his message only because they have been bludgeoned by right-wing propaganda into irrationality and panic. Even many officials in the current GOP, that supine and useless husk of an institution, do not share Trump’s ambitions.

I have long argued for confronting Trump’s voters with his offenses against our government and our Constitution. The contest between an aspiring fascist and a coalition of prodemocracy forces is even clearer now. But deploy the word fascist with care; many of our fellow Americans, despite their morally abysmal choice to support Trump, are not fascists.

This is technically true—most Trump supporters might not be in favor of turning America into an anti-democratic police state. But that also does not matter in the slightest.

When the Nazis rose to power, the German people did not vote for crematoria and conquest. But they got both anyway. Most Germans were not ardent Nazis, but the Nazis controlled Germany anyway. The fact that most GOP voters are not on board with a fascist America means very little. Enough are, and history has shown time and time again that an illiberal and dangerous minority is all it takes to transform a society into a totalitarian hellhole. Anyone who supports Donald Trump is voting to end American democracy. Period. Whether they do so out of ignorance or malice does not make anything more than an academic difference.

I disagree that calling Trump what he is is dangerous. The threat that Trump poses is enhanced by euphemizing his conduct and treating him like just another political sideshow. In 2016 the media breathlessly covered his every move because it goosed the ratings. The results were Trump magnifying his bullshit personal “brand” to the Oval Office and the near destruction of this country. And today, the media is still too cowardly to openly speak the truth. The media still lavishes coverage on Trump, still tends to treat him like a normal candidate rather than an abject fascist. Trying to hide the truth will not serve this country’s interests.

We cannot afford another four years of Trump, because if he gets power again he will ensure that he remains in power for the rest of his life. There will be no guardrails, no people who will tell Trump no, no limits on what Trump will do. The best outcome we can hope for is what amounts to a civil war or coup. We cannot afford this. It might be that many of Trump’s supporters do not call themselves fascists, but at the end of the day they are enabling it. We can either grapple with that fact honestly and boldly or we can risk watching this country fall. I, for one, am tired of the euphemisms. Trump is a wanna-be dictator, a fascist, a totalitarian. He may be a stupid, unstable, and lazy dictator, but that makes him potentially more dangerous, not less.

Mike Johnson and the GOP’s Anti-American Litmus Test

Louisiana Congressman Mike Johnson is the Speaker of the House, defeating Minnesota’s Tom Emmer who was shivved by Trump and saw his candidacy last less than a day. Emmer’s grave sin in the GOP’s eyes was not supporting election denial—Emmer voted to approve the democratic results of the 2020 election, and therefore was a “RINO” in the eyes of the GOP. Speaker Johnson, on the other hand, is an avowed 2020 denialist, Christian nationalist, and extremist.

Make no mistake about it, the GOP has a litmus test: if you believe that the 2020 election was fair and the Joe Biden is the legitimate President of the United States, you are not welcome in the GOP today. Never mind the fact that the 2020 election was fair and that Joe Biden is the legitimately-elected President of the United States. Belief in a lie is necessary to be a part of the GOP now.

At one point, the GOP stood for actual values. However imperfectly, the GOP believed in democracy abroad and at home, a limited federal government of enumerated powers, a strong national defense, and having government serve as an exemplar of personal ethics. None of that matters today. Today’s GOP is about simple-minded “owning the libs” and using government to enforce a deeply broken system of values. It is a personality cult around the mentally and morally diseased Donald Trump.

Mike Johnson does not deserve to be Speaker of the House. No election denialist has any business being in government. And that means that no GOP candidate today belongs in government. And over the next year, hopefully another major electoral bloodbath for the GOP will make that closer to a reality.

The Fall of Kevin McCarthy

For the first time in American history, the House of Representatives have kicked out the Speaker of the House, as Kevin McCarthy lost a vote to keep his office 216-210.

McCarthy sold his soul for power, and lost both in the process.

Now the GOP owns this chaos, despite increasingly desperate attempts to pin this all on the Democrats. It is a testament to just how screwed up the GOP is that the former President of the United States being put under a gag order to stop threatening the clerk of the judge in his civil case is not even the biggest and most damning story of the day. The GOP is simply a party that cannot govern because it does not want to govern. The entire nervous system of the GOP is based on getting approval from the radicalized right-wing media ecosystem which requires constant performative assholery. That is why the first thing that the interim Speaker did was kick Rep. Nancy Pelosi and other prominent Democrats out of their offices. It is all about what generates clicks and fundraising dollars. The process of governing the country is not even a consideration.

Ultimately, the reason why Kevin McCarthy lost his job was because he decided for one moment to do his job instead of throw chum into the wide-open maw of the right-wing rage machine. By working with Democrats on a continuing resolution that kept the government running McCarthy committed the one unforgivable sin in the GOP world: not putting the grift ahead of everything else.

Sadly, whatever poor sap that ends up replacing McCarthy will no doubt have learned their lesson: that to “lead” today’s GOP requires commitment to the grift above everything else, Actually governing is a fatal error. This is the way for the nihilism of today’s hollowed-out shell of the GOP. And this is ultimately why the GOP has to be completely destroyed as a viable party before there can be a responsible and mature conservative party in this country again.

The Fall of the House of Trump

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

A New York judge has issued an order that essentially gives the Trump Organization the corporate death penalty. Judge Arthur Engoron’s order rescinds the Trump Organization’s business charters and puts Trump’s corporate empire into a receivership. Ultimately this may do just as much or more to end Donald Trump’s reign as the many criminal indictments against him.

The Trump Organization is in the bullshit business. Real estate is just the side hustle. Trump shamelessly slapped his name on anything he could—golf courses, steaks, a failed airline, even vodka (which tee-totaling Trump does not drink). Trump is right that the main source of his revenue was through his “brand,” a brand which is now synonymous with right-wing extremism. But ultimately Trump is incredibly cash poor and highly leveraged. His real-estate empire was basically an attempt to get more and more money from lenders to keep his incredibly-leveraged empire afloat.

Now, that scheme is falling apart. Trump was already radioactive to most banks, forced to go to less savory banks connected to Saudi and Russian oligarchs. But Trump needed legitimate assets to do that, including Trump Tower and his Mar-a-Lago club. Now, Trump has run out of both legitimate assets and likely the revenue streams he needs to keep his secured creditors at bay.

Trump’s money, real or imagined, is what kept everything together. Now Trump has a voracious need for cash, not only to keep his quasi-campaign afloat, but to pay his lawyers in his numerous criminal cases and keep his standard of living going. Right now Trump is quite adept at fleecing his followers with everything from t-shirts to worthless NFTs. But that is likely not going to be enough. While their may be a sucker born every minute, Trump needs a lot of suckers to keep himself afloat, and sooner or later that well will run dry.

The question becomes what happens next. Trump will certainly appeal Judge Engoron’s ruling. That appeal is highly unlikely to change anything, but it may delay the process. However, no matter what happens, Trump’s access to credit through conventional means is likely to be incredibly curtailed. That leaves Trump even more at the mercy of Saudi autocrats, Russian oligarchs, and other unsavory characters than he already is. Whether Trump can get enough support outside of banks depends on whether the Saudis, Russians, etc. see him as a valuable investment or simply damaged goods. The more legal hot water Trump gets into the less his “Teflon” appearance becomes.

Just as in Hemingway’s quotation above, Trump’s downfall could be gradual then incredibly sudden. Trump has so far been incredibly adept at avoiding the consequences of his actions, but this ruling strikes at the heart of who he is and who he makes himself out to be. At some point Trump’s luck and bluster will run out. His only hope at this point is to win the Presidency and use the power of his office to make his legal troubles go away. Sadly for the country, there remains a precipitously high chance that could happen. But the entire Trump mystique is based on him being the world’s greatest businessman. That has never been true, and the collapse of Trump’s empire of bullshit might be more personally devastating to him than even a jail sentence.

CBS Poll Shows Trump Barely Ahead – But Do The Polls Matter Now?

A rather shocking CBS/YouGov poll shows 91-count felony defendant Donald Trump leading President Biden by a 50-49% margin. The fact that Trump has been indicted in multiple jurisdictions, including crimes related to harming the national security of the United States seems to be less of a concern to voters than the fact that Joe Biden is old. And while it is certainly true that Joe Biden is old, the candidate with the clearest cognitive difficulties is Donald Trump. So why is it faced with such an obvious, stark choice that the American public is split down the middle?

The fact is that political polling in this country is broken. Pollsters still rely largely on phone calls to conduct polls. As technology has moved on that method of polling has become less and less reliable. And even when polling methods were much better a poll taken a full year prior to an election is hardly worth ~~the paper it’s printed on~~ the bandwidth used to transmit it. As the CBS article notes, in past polls at this time showed Bob Dole beating Bill Clinton and Barack Obama at risk of losing. We all know how those elections turned out.

What this poll really measures is less about the horse race of the election and more about political partisanship. The people who are answering pollster phone calls a year prior to the election are more likely than not the most partisan Americans. The “normal” voter is not paying attention except in the most general terms. And it would not be shocking at all if Trump has an edge—even a significant edge—in terms of partisan intensity. But as 2020 showed us, elections are not won by riling up the most partisan MAGA base. And even among the most tuned-in members of the electorate, the people crazy enough to answer a pollster’s phone calls, the vote is split evenly.

Now, if this were September 2024 rather than September 2023 that would be causing all sorts of alarm bells to ring in the Biden camp. But over the next year just about anything could happen. And the normal voter is just not paying attention, and it’s the normal voter that decides elections in this country. That’s why those very early polls showing Bob Dole up and Barack Obama down ended up not mattering at all. Plus there are a whole flock of black swans in the 2024 cycle. We already saw how suburban women punished the GOP for the Dobbs case in 2022, and that anger is not going away. We already saw how toxic Trump was with ordinary voters, especially moderate suburbanite voters, and that has not gone away either.

The real fear the Democrats should have is that Trump will motivate his base, which is only in the low 40% range of the electorate, but Democrats will decide to stay home. That would be a much bigger problem for the Democrats in a normal election year against a normal GOP candidate. But Biden isn’t going to be running against a normal GOP candidate, he’s going to be running against Donald Trump. And Trump motivates the Democratic base too.

The polls just do not matter right now except for generating clicks. What it does tell us is that among the most politically active Americans the race is evenly split. What happens when the rest of the country tunes in will decide how the 2024 race proceeds.

Kevin McCarthy’s Deal With The Devil Comes Due

In order for Kevin McCarthy to win his position as Speaker of the House after 15 ballots, McCarthy had to make a deal with the devil—he had to agree to ridiculous concessions that would give the most radical members of the House the power to force his hand on key issues. McCarthy was narrowly able to avert a government shutdown earlier this year, but now the GOP’s Caucus of Crazies have demanded that McCarthy launch a politically disastrous attempt to impeach President Joe Biden. McCarthy, with his Speaker’s chair turned into a Siege Perilous, has acquiesced to the insane demands of the most radical members of his caucus.

The claim is that President Biden has fostered a “culture of corruption.” The problem with this claim is that there is precisely zero evidence of it. Yes, his son Hunter Biden was clearly trading on his family name. However, that may be unethical, but it is absolutely not illegal. If you think that Jared Kushner got his $2 billion payout from the Saudi Royal Family on the basis of his business acumen, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. There is simply zero evidence that Joe Biden did anything wrong other than have a son with some very deep personal problems. The claims that President Biden somehow received a “bribe” or that he interfered in Ukraine on behalf of Burisma are both completely false. There is no evidence of either, as a GOP probe already determined. But the lack of evidence has not prevented the GOP from desperately trying to find a pony in that giant pile of right-wing horseshit.

Logan Roy from Succession saying "you are not serious people" — As Logan Roy from Succession might say, the GOP is not made up of serious people.

Ultimately, a clearly politically-motivated impeachment is a gift to President Biden. The impeachment investigation is likely to go nowhere. It it is not at all clear that McCarthy would have enough votes in the House to actually impeach Biden. Any impeachment would be DOA in the Senate. Instead, impeachment will demonstrate to independent and swing voters that the GOP is just not a serious party. Impeachment is a distraction, a base play for a base that is already shrinking. A serious GOP would be thinking of ways to win back the suburban voters that it lost during the Trump years. Issues like crime and inflation may not be quite as powerful as they were when the GOP’s “red wave” turned into a ripple, but at least they are real issues. Trying to paint Joe Biden as some kind of nefarious crime lord is just ridiculous. Voters did not care about Hunter Biden in 2020, and they’re not going to care in 2024.

Kevin McCarthy made a deal with the devil to become Speaker of the House, Not giving the radicals like Marjorie Taylor Green and Matt Gaetz the impeachment they demand mean losing his position as Speaker. But giving them what they want might well do the same. There are enough GOP candidates that won districts that were Biden leaning that will be made incredibly vulnerable by this quixotic impeachment campaign to swing the House. The problem with deals with the devil is that the devil always wants his due. Kevin McCarthy is finding that out the hard way.

Who Is To Blame For Trump?

At The Federalist, Ben Domenech persuasively argues that the failures of Barack Obama led to the rise of Donald Trump:

It is no accident that President Obama’s America has given rise to Donald Trump. It is an America that is more tribalist, where people feel more racially and religiously divided; more politically correct, where people feel less free to speak their minds; and it is an America where trust in the nation’s elites, whose skills are credentialed but unproven, are at historic lows.

That is all true. American institutions are seen as failing—and often are failing—because those running those institutions have bought into the left-wing mindset. The academy is devouring itself in a furor of radical leftism. The press, with a few exceptions, is monolithically left-wing. Government exists to feed itself, not to serve the public. It is true that if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.

Time and time again, conservatives have embraced people with few qualifications other than they tell conservatives exactly what they want to hear.

But that’s not the sole reason that Trump, a man who is neither conservative nor a patriot, is leading the GOP field. Conservatives cannot blame Trump on Obama or the media—Trump’s supporters are supporting him of their own free will. They are choosing to embrace a man who routinely spits on basic conservative and even American values. Yet no matter how idiotic Trump acts, they still support him.

We Have Met The Enemy, And It Is Us

Conservatives must accept the hard truth that Donald Trump is a monster of at least part of our making. Yes, he’s a reaction to the failures of Obama’s left-wing agenda. But time and time again, conservatives have embraced people with few qualifications other than they tell conservatives exactly what they want to hear. Sarah Palin showed immense promise when she was initially picked as John McCain’s VP—but she flamed out in a spectacular fashion not only due to a hostile media, but because she was woefully unprepared. From there, the GOP has embraced candidates who have little experience but throw more chum in the water than Shark Week: Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Christine O’Donnell, Todd Akin, Ben Carson, the list could go on. These candidates enjoyed fame not because they were qualified for public office, but because they told conservative activists what they wanted to hear.Donald Trump is just that trend taken to its inevitable extreme. Trump is playing on the crudest themes possible—hatred of immigrants, fear of terrorism, economic insecurity. He’s taken the traditional Democratic playbook of using fear to whip up partisan fervor and has taken it to the right.

Yes, Ben Domenech and others are correct in stating that Trump is a reaction to seven years of failure and a President who seems blithely disinterested in fundamental American values. Someone like Trump was going to inevitably come along. But that doesn’t mean that a significant plurality of the GOP had to embrace such a toxic buffoon. Instead, major figures like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingram have embraced Trumpism. Even though Trump routinely flouts basic constitutional principles—like calling for Bill Gates to shut down the Internet—he gets a pass because he’s against Obama and the mainstream media. For more, National Review‘s Charles C. W. Cooke has an excellent piece on the many ways that Trump shreds the Constitution in favor of his own brand of dime-store authoritarianism.

That’s simply no reason to support a candidate. Trump is not qualified for office—he speaks with the intellectual fluency of a 12-year old. He has no clue about world affairs. It’s one thing to be rude and abrasive, but Trump takes that to a pathological extreme. Trump is likely to abandon every single one of his newfound “principles” once he gets the power he seeks. Conservatives who embraced him in this race would be the first ones he would screw over if, God forbid, he were to come anywhere near the White House.

We didn’t have to fall for this. As conservatives, we not only should stand for a smaller government, we should be standing for quality government. That means we should be holding our political leaders to the highest standards possible. The office of the Presidency should represent the best of the American people. Yet conservatives would further diminish the Presidency to carnival barker in chief just because it would give the media and the left-wing establishment a poke in the eye.

It’s Time to Get Serious

I hate to agree with the left-wing media—but even a broken clock is right twice a day. Trump is a danger. He is a danger to the nation and to the Republican brand. No doubt many in the left-wing media are pushing the GOP to reject Trump precisely because they know that will make them less likely to do so. But no matter what the left-wing media thinks, conservatives are bound by morality and principal to act.

Conservatives must reject Trump, and moreover they must reject the empty populism that Trump represents.

It is a choice of one or the other. Either we as a political party and a movement stand on behalf of enduring American values or we stand with Donald Trump. Because America’s values are in democratic pluralism, and Trump stands for dividing the country by race and religion. America’s values are with free enterprise, and Donald Trump is the poster boy for the same kind of crony capitalism that has ruined this nation. America’s values are based on personal responsibility and individual morality. Donald Trump is an amoral, areligious, and irresponsible blowhard with a thin skin. Put bluntly, Donald Trump is a whiter, blonder Obama.

If the Republican Party and the conservative movement embraces Donald Trump, it will destroy itself on the altar of Trump’s insatiable egotism. We will have demonstrated that we don’t really have principals—we’ll fall for any old huckster who tells us what we want to hear. The future will belong to the left, and President Hillary Rodham Clinton will take this country so far from its founding principals that it may never be able to recover.

We can’t blame the media for our embracing Trumpism. We can’t blame Obama for embracing Trumpism. The blame lies with us and our unwillingness to put principals ahead of pissant politics.

If Trump takes the entire conservative movement down with him—and he has every ability to do that—we will have no one to blame but ourselves.