Political Irony

I know this article is a week old, but there were just too many things going on that pushed this down in my stack. But you really should read this article in The Atlantic titled “Why Trump Supporters Can’t Admit Who He Really Is“.

When I’m talking to various liberal people, a common refrain is that we can’t figure out why Trump’s base continuously dismisses his terrible behavior and even believes his obvious lies and even rejoices in his venal corruption. Well, here’s your answer.

The bottom line is that they believe that “If Joseph R. Biden Jr. wins the presidency, America dies.” If you believe that Biden is an existential threat to you, your family, and your beliefs, then you will find a way to tolerate and even justify virtually anything Trump does to save you.

That is the message that is being delivered to them by the Republicans, by Fox News and other right-wing media, and even by their churches:

During last week’s Republican National Convention, speaker after speaker insisted that life under a Biden presidency would be dystopian. Charlie Kirk, the young Trump acolyte who opened the proceedings, declared, “I am here tonight to tell you—to warn you—that this election is a decision between preserving America as we know it and eliminating everything that we love.” President Trump, who closed the proceedings, said, “Your vote will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans or whether we give free rein to violent anarchists and agitators and criminals who threaten our citizens. And this election will decide whether we will defend the American way of life or allow a radical movement to completely dismantle and destroy it.” And in between Americans were told that Democrats want to “disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home, and invite MS-13 to live next door” and that they “want to destroy this country and everything that we have fought for and hold dear.”

“They’re not satisfied with spreading the chaos and violence into our communities. They want to abolish the suburbs altogether,” a St. Louis couple who had brandished weapons against demonstrators outside their home, told viewers. “Make no mistake, no matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats’ America.”

This creates a strong tribal identity that people cling to:

When groups feel threatened they retreat into tribalism. They close ranks and become more insular, more defensive, more punitive, more us-versus-them.

As a result, they will justify almost anything. For example:

In just the past two weeks, the president has praised supporters of the right-wing conspiracy theory QAnon, which contends, as The Guardian recently summarized it, that “a cabal of Satan-worshipping Democrats, Hollywood celebrities and billionaires runs the world while engaging in pedophilia, human trafficking and the harvesting of a supposedly life-extending chemical from the blood of abused children.” Trump touted a conspiracy theory that the national death toll from COVID-19 is about 9,000, a fraction of the official figure of nearly 185,000; promoted a program on the One America News Network accusing demonstrators of secretly plotting Trump’s downfall; encouraged his own supporters to commit voter fraud; and claimed Biden is controlled by “people that are in the dark shadows” who are wearing “dark uniforms.”

Trump believes his own government is conspiring to delay a COVID-19 vaccine until after the election. He retweeted a message from the actor James Woods saying New York Governor Andrew Cuomo “should be in jail” and another from an account accusing the Portland, Oregon, mayor of “committing war crimes.” The president is “inciting violence,” in the words of Maryland’s Republican Governor, Larry Hogan. Trump defended 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, a supporter who is charged with first-degree homicide; and stated that if he loses the election in November it would be because it was “rigged.” At the same time, the second-ranking House Republican, among other of the president’s supporters, has shared several manipulated videos in an effort to damage Biden.

Telling these people that Donald Trump is a lying, corrupt con man won’t help. When people believe they are drowning, they will grasp at straws.

The article even points out that Democrats have done similar things in the past (albeit to a lesser degree). For example:

The degree to which Democrats, including feminists, overlooked or accepted Bill Clinton’s sexually predatory behavior—including his campaign’s effort to smear his accusers and its use of a private investigator to destroy Gennifer Flowers’s reputation “beyond all recognition”—is an illustration of this. So Flowers was branded a “bimbo” and a “pathological liar,” even though Clinton later, under oath, admitted to having an affair with her.

But as usual, Trump has taken this to an extreme:

But what’s different in this case is that Trump, because of the corruption that seems to pervade every area of his life and his damaged psychological and emotional state, has shown us just how much people will accept in their leaders as a result of “negative partisanship,” the force that binds parties together less in common purpose than in opposition to a shared opponent. As the conservative writer David French has put it, with Donald Trump and his supporters we are seeing “negative partisanship in its near-pure form, and it’s the best way to explain Trump’s current appeal to the Republican party.” His ideology is almost entirely beside the point, according to French: “His identity matters more, and his identity is clear—the Republican champion against the hated Democratic foe.”

The team that blew open Watergate, Carl Bernstein talks about Bob Woodward’s new book about Donald Trump, Rage. Woodward interviewed Trump 18 times and has recordings of Trump.

In fact, today the Trump administration did something that even flabbergasted me. The first two paragraphs say it all:

The Justice Department on Tuesday intervened in the defamation lawsuit brought by a woman who says President Trump raped her years ago, moving the matter to federal court and signaling it wants to make the U.S. government — rather than Trump himself — the defendant in the case.

In filings in federal court in Manhattan, the Justice Department asserted that Trump was “acting within the scope of his office as President of the United States” when he denied during interviews in 2019 that he had raped journalist E. Jean Carroll more than two decades ago in a New York City department store. Carroll sued Trump over that denial in November.

That’s right, “L’état c’est moi” lives. The US government will now defend Trump’s personal (despicable) actions, and the taxpayers would be on the hook for any damages, not Trump. Sheesh!

Here are a series of articles about how Donald Trump, Republicans, and right-wing media are trying to destroy our democracy.

First is tonight’s article by Heather Cox Richardson. She goes through a list of the things that democracy depends on, and then gives examples of how they are being attacked and even destroyed:

• The rule of law. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy coerced his employees to contribute to the Republican Party, and then reimbursed them by giving them bonuses. Not only did he buy an election, he bought himself a cabinet position.
• Equality before the law. Minorities, especially Blacks and Latinos, are discriminated against by the courts and by the police.
• Reality-based policy. Today Trump claimed “Our Economy and Jobs are doing really well.” We are in a recession and unemployment is 8.4%.
• History itself. This weekend, Trump demanded that schools change their curriculum, or they will lose federal funding. He is trying to rewrite history.
• Universal suffrage. First Trump, and now Attorney General William Barr are spreading false statements (which are the same as false statements being spread by the Russians) claiming that mail-in ballots will lead to massive fraud. At the same time, Republicans are fighting to suppress Democratic votes.
• Elections must provide a choice. Republicans are attempting to delegitimize the Democratic Party. Today, Trump tweeted “The Democrats, together with the corrupt Fake News Media, have launched a massive Disinformation Campaign the likes of which has never been seen before.”
• Checks and balances. The Trump administration is blocking the long-established right of Congress to investigate and subpoenas the executive branch.
• Transition of power. Trump keeps suggesting that he will not relinquish power, even if he loses the election.

Second is an article in the Daily Beast, pointing out that one of the reporters of the One America News Network (OANN), Trump’s favorite news source, is actually an employee of the Kremlin.

Trump is now even attacking Fox News, because they sometimes don’t buy into Trump’s constant lies.

And finally, Trump is attacking the widow of Steve Jobs, because she is the majority owner of The Atlantic, which recently published an article detailing how Trump disparaged soldiers (especially dead or captured ones) by calling them “losers” and “suckers”. The White House claims the article is completely false, even though there is plenty of video and other records of Trump doing exactly that, and multiple news outlets have confirmed the facts in the article, including Fox News.

Heather Cox Richard has the best article about the RNC I’ve seen. I’m including it here because I want everyone to actually read the whole thing. Enjoy!

Having moved the RNC from Charlotte, North Carolina to Jacksonville, Florida, and then having been forced to cancel his plans for a huge rally due to coronavirus, Trump decided to hold tonight’s major speeches on the South Lawn of the White House. It was a flagrantly illegal move, designed to do two things: to turn the majesty of the White House into the trappings of a dictator, and to spark fury from opponents. With luck, the dramatic setting behind Trump would woo his base, while the fury of his opponents would grab attention from the ongoing crisis of the coronavirus and the economic disaster of the past few months.

It was a thoroughly Trumpian move, and to some degree, it worked. The entire convention drew on imagery from dictatorships. A parade of family members assured us Trump is wonderful, subordinates offered generic over-the-top praise, and every speaker demonized anyone who doesn’t support Trump’s continued rule. The convention had demonstrations of mercy from the president as he both pardoned a criminal and granted citizenship to five immigrants (who were apparently not told they would be part of the convention), a standard trope in the authoritarian’s handbook. And it had the trappings of dictators, from First Lady Melania Trump’s dress that evoked a Nazi uniform— almost certainly to provoke a response while appealing to the alt-right—to the cathedral ceilings of our hallowed civic temple, to the wall of flags, all evoking tradition, majesty, and might.

It was desperately sad to see the White House, the people’s house, turned into the background for a political rally, emblazoned with flags and sporting jumbotrons that spelled out “Trump/Pence.” It looked like a Biff Tannen fantasy.

The men who founded our government based it not on hereditary leadership, or on religion, or on race, because they recognized that such governments would inevitably lead to bloodshed. They knew well the history of European countries torn asunder by warring families or religious sects. Instead, they took the radical step of founding a nation on the idea that all men are created equal, that no man is any better or any worse than another, and that all must be equal before the law. They were blind to things they should have seen, of course—their “all men” excluded men of color and women—but the principle of equality before the law was a radical new idea in western history.

A government of laws, not of men, meant that no one should be able to leverage his political office to retain power, and when officials began to violate that principle, Congress in 1939 passed the Hatch Act, forbidding all federal employees except the president and vice president “from using federal property for political activities or for engaging in anything that is a partisan political act,” as political scientist Norm Ornstein, from the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, put it.

“People have been fired for sending flyers around for a municipal election that was partisan,” Ornstein says. “Every time Kellyanne Conway in her official capacity made a statement that was partisan, it was a violation of the Hatch Act. Every cabinet member, every border patrol member, every federal employee participating in the activities at the White House tonight violated the Hatch Act. This was the most blatant abuse of power and legal authority for partisan purposes by far than anything we have ever seen by a president or an executive branch.” Violations of the Hatch Act are supposed to result in removal from office, but punishment for the numerous violations in this administration has been minimal.

Indeed, disregarding the Hatch Act this week has been a demonstration of Trump’s move toward a dictatorship. In 1997, then-Vice President Al Gore, a Democrat, had to defend making fund-raising phone calls from the White House despite the vice president’s exemption from the Hatch Act, but Trump is running roughshod over the law with impunity. This morning White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said that “nobody outside the Beltway really cares” about the Hatch Act, and this evening, Fox News Channel personality Dana Perino said that “it doesn’t matter” that Trump is breaking the law because “by the time they have an investigation, this election is going to be over.”

During Trump’s speech he seemed to revel in his use of the White house for partisan ends, asking rhetorically “What’s the name of that building?” referring to the White House, and going on: “We’re here and they’re not.”

But will his version of America win? Will we really replace the idea of equality before the law with a world in which a leader can declare that he and his family and friends have the right to rule over the rest of us?

I looked at the hundreds of people at Trump’s rally tonight, unmasked and older, and almost all so very white, and saw a group of people so afraid of the future they are willing to say yes, willing to throw in their lot with a malignant narcissist because he tells them they can recover a world in which they felt more relevant, a world they control.

We have been here before. In the 1850s, when the nation had to grapple with the idea of westward expansion across a continent, many reactionary Americans thought the solution to keeping an expanding nation stable was to spread human enslavement along with the American flag so that a small group of wealthy slaveowners maintained control over the government.

But Americans who believed that society worked best if every man had a right to his own labor organized under Abraham Lincoln and, rejecting their neighbors’ hierarchical view of society, restored the idea of human equality and pushed America into the future.

In the 1890s, when the nation had to grapple with the idea of industrialization, many reactionary Americans thought the solution to the growing divide between labor and capital was to create a world in which a few wealthy industrialists directed the labor of the masses.

But Americans who believed in the founding principle of human equality before the law organized under Theodore Roosevelt and rejected the idea that workers belonged to a permanent underclass. They pushed America into the future.

In the 1930s, when the nation had to grapple with a worldwide depression, reactionary Americans thought the solution was fascism, in which a few strong men organized and directed the labor of their countrymen.

But most Americans rejected the idea that some men were better than others, and they organized under Franklin Delano Roosevelt to restore the idea of equality before the law and return the government to the hands of ordinary Americans. They pushed America into the future.

Tonight’s event at the White House demonstrated that we are in another great crisis in American history. A reactionary group of older white men look at a global future in which questions of clean energy, climate change, economic fairness, and human equality are uppermost, and their reaction is to cling to a world they control.

But that world is passing, whether they like it or not. Even if Trump wins in 2020, he cannot stop the future from coming. And while the United States will not meet that future with the power we had even four years ago, we will have to meet it nonetheless. It will be no less exciting and offer no fewer opportunities than the dramatic changes of the 1850s, 1890s, and 1930s, and at some point, Americans will want to meet those challenges.

If history is any guide, when that happens, we will restore the principle of equality before the law, and push America into the future.

One addition: the NY Times reports “Some of Mr. Trump’s aides privately scoff at the Hatch Act and say they take pride in violating its regulations.”