Tag: Republicans

How Trump inoculates his supporters against reality

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Donald Trump has failed at almost every venture he has undertaken. That started long before his presidency, with a string of business failures. Nevertheless, he has excelled as a con artist. That is demonstrated by the question that has haunted so many of us over the last four years: why are his supporters so loyal, no matter what he says or does?

A lot of ink has been spilled over that question. Much of it has focused on what makes his supporters so vulnerable to a con job. But in an expansion of his term “epistemic closure,” the writer Julian Sanchez has provided us with insight into how Trump inoculates his followers from reality, truth, and facts.

Continue reading “How Trump inoculates his supporters against reality”

The Voting Will End Nov. 3. The Legal Battle Probably Won’t.

New York Times logoAs the two parties clash over how to conduct an election in a pandemic, President Trump’s litigiousness and unfounded claims of fraud have increased the likelihood of epic postelection court fights.

The stormy once-in-a-lifetime Florida recount battle that polarized the nation in 2000 and left the Supreme Court to decide the presidency may soon look like a high school student council election compared with what could be coming after this November’s election.

Imagine not just another Florida, but a dozen Floridas. Not just one set of lawsuits but a vast array of them. And instead of two restrained candidates staying out of sight and leaving the fight to surrogates, a sitting president of the United States unleashing ALL CAPS Twitter blasts from the Oval Office while seeking ways to use the power of his office to intervene.

The possibility of an ugly November — and perhaps even December and January — has emerged more starkly in recent days as President Trump complains that the election will be rigged and Democrats accuse him of trying to make that a self-fulfilling prophesy. Continue reading.

On The Trail: The first signs of a post-Trump GOP

The Hill logoFor four years, President Trump has held an iron grip over the Republican Party, basking in the warm glow of adulation from a base that follows his direction to punish critics and reward allies.

But with polls showing an increasingly perilous path to reelection, there are new signs that his grip is loosening, as some Republicans begin to explore what the future of the Grand Old Party might look like once Trump becomes a lame duck or an ex-president.

In interviews with more than a dozen strategists, party leaders and current and former members of Congress, Republicans said their party is searching for a new direction even before Trump leaves the stage. Continue reading.

Stimulus checks debate now focuses on size, eligibility

The Hill logoRepublicans and Democrats negotiating the next coronavirus relief package are voicing support for including another round of stimulus checks, but their competing proposals for direct payments have some differences that need to be hammered out.

The two key issues that need resolving: payment amounts for dependents and eligibility requirements.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have put forth direct payment proposals largely similar to the stimulus checks included in the CARES Act from late March that provided checks for most Americans — up to $1,200 per adult and $500 per child under 17. Continue reading.

‘Sniveling victims and temper tantrums’: Conservative torches the thin skin of Trump-supporting ‘crybabies’

AlterNet logoConservative opinion writer Jennifer Rubins detailed a glaring contradiction within the Trump-era Republican Party in her Washington Post column on Thursday.

On one hand, Rubin observes, Republican supporters of President Donald Trump have “adopted the swaggering tone and false bravado of high school athletes” and are expressing a false machismo that “too often morphs into cruelty.” But “more often than not,” Rubin argues, today’s GOP is “a party of sniveling victims and temper tantrums.”

Trump, according to Rubin, is setting a tone of self-pity among Republicans. Continue reading.

Democrats keep having to clean up Republican messes. When is our turn to advance America?

A President Biden would face extraordinary damage and repair jobs at home and abroad. Democrats must hammer this home to voters and stop the cycle.

Should former Vice President Joe Biden defeat President Donald Trump in the November election, his victory will cement a pattern that influential Democratic messengers would be wise to exploit savagely in order to change.

Many Americans have not yet grasped that every time they have given Republicans the keys to the White House over the past half-century, they turn to Democrats to extinguish the fire. This arrangement hampers party priorities each time Democrats come to power because their first orders of business are to clean up the ashes. Once the country is sturdy enough, the electorate returns to Republicans to get a little extra walking around cash in the form of marginal tax cuts, and Democratic policy goes back underground.

This pattern began when Richard Nixon and his successor, Gerald Ford, presided over a three-year recession that darkened the outlook for Ford before the 1976 campaign launched in earnest. Democrat Jimmy Carter glided into office on a message of reform, after the country felt betrayed by Watergate and Nixon’s corrupt inner circle, and of recovery from poor GOP stewardship of the economy. Continue reading.

Conservatives’ tributes to John Lewis open them up to scrutiny of their actions on civil and voting rights

Washington Post logoPraise for the legacy of Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) dominated social media Saturday following news of his death from pancreatic cancer. He was 80.

But some of those reactions have been called empty and mostly for show. For people who shared the lawmaker’s politics, the only true way to honor him is to help advance his policy initiatives.

Fellow Democratic lawmakers testified about his contribution to U.S. history. But so did those who disagreed with Lewis on fundamental issues, thus attracting accusations of hypocrisy. Continue reading.

GOP to Trump: Change tune on mail-in voting or risk ugly November

Republican officials throughout the country are reacting with growing alarm to President Donald Trump’s attacks on mail-in ballots, saying his unsubstantiated claims of mass voting fraud are already corroding the views of GOP voters, who may ultimately choose not to vote at all if they can’t make it to the polls come November.

Behind the scenes, top Republicans are urging senior Trump campaign officials to press the President to change his messaging and embrace mail-in voting, warning that the party could lose the battle for control of Congress and the White House if he doesn’t change his tune, according to multiple GOP sources. Trump officials, sources said, are fully aware of the concerns.

The impact could be detrimental to the GOP up and down the ticket, according to a bevy of Republican election officials, field operatives, pollsters and lawmakers who are watching the matter closely. Every vote will count in critical battleground states, they argue, fearful that deterring GOP voters from choosing a convenient option to cast their ballots could ultimately sway the outcome of races that are decided by a couple of percentage points. Continue reading.

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson abruptly announces a vacation — right after explaining why his top writer resigned in disgrace

AlterNet logoFox News host Tucker Carlson announced Monday night that he’s going on a vacation — “trout fishing” — for the rest of the week, shortly after addressing the latest inflammatory controversy that has dogged his show.

His top writer, Blake Neff, resigned last week after CNN uncovered that he has been posting online in a forum filled with bigotry. The report found he had engaged with rank racism and sexism on the platform. Many argue that Carlson’s program itself is deeply racist — and it carries overt white supremacist themes — but the language on the forums was even more explicit and unequivocally bigoted.

Carlson addressed the reasons Neff left only obliquely. Continue reading.

The GOP’s reliance on mega-donors is backfiring

AlterNet logoThe Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United was handed down in 2010. In response, “superPACs and other independent groups dumped more than $1 billion into the 2012 election, largely on behalf of Republicans.” They spent most of that money flooding the television airwaves with negative ads about Democrats.

Then along came a service employee who surreptitiously video-taped a speech by Mitt Romney to big donors in which the candidate talked about the 47 percent of Americans who vote for Democrats because they are dependent on the government for freebies. That videotape went viral and is perhaps one of the main contributors to Romney’s loss in 2012. And it didn’t cost the Democrats a dime.

That didn’t stop Republicans from their reliance on superPACs. Continue reading.