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An Open Letter To Republicans [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-08-02
If you personally continue to support Donald Trump, there are a few things I'd like you to think about. Please bear with me, this is important.
There is an ancient saying that goes, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." But, like many of the things we are told, it simply is not true. Sometimes, the enemy of your enemy is also your enemy. This is important in our conversation about Trump because I want to convince you that he's not merely an enemy of liberals (or democrats, if you prefer) - he's an enemy if republicans, too. He has probably destroyed the republican party's electoral chances for the next decade, and that may concern you unless you're looking forward to a string of horrific republican defeats as much as I am. A lot of people have figured out the things I want to explain to you, so if I'm merely repeating stuff you already know, I'm sorry and I'll try to be brief.
The thing I want to make you understand is that Donald Trump is also the enemy of the republican party. He's been doing a good job (sort of) of presenting himself as an enemy of liberals, progressives, immigrants, etc., but mostly, have you noticed that Trump's main focus is that he's a bitter enemy of anyone who does not like Donald Trump? He's a very simple mechanism, emotionally - he jumps from obsessively hating on one person or another, but mostly it's who's in his way at any given moment. Perhaps in 2016 you mistook his focused hostility toward Hillary Clinton as some kind of generalized hatred of a symbol but that would be wrong - he genuinely despised (and still does) Hillary Clinton for, well, being his opponent. But he veers all over the place, hating whoever is his target of the moment, never thinking strategically about it, it's simply a knee-jerk reflex on his part. You may have thought, now and again, that his protracted hatred of Clinton was perhaps a bit odd, given that he won in 2016 and she was thrown out of the political arena as a consequence. A strategic thinker would have realized that Clinton is no longer relevant to him, and switched his attention to someone else. Basically, he's beating a dead horse. You should wonder about that, because there is only one reason to beat a dead horse: they're easy.
Trump started out also hating the republican party. He came in as an outsider, and immediately began attacking other republican candidates, using playground insults and rhetorical tricks that they simply were not prepared to handle. That was effective enough that it upset the party establishment and they started trying to figure out how to sideline him before the primaries - they, rightly, worried that Trump's approach might actually lead to success in the primary. Trump's ally Roger Stone started the "Stop The Steal" meme during the republican primary because they were claiming that the republicans were stealing the primary from Trump. When the republican party was utterly defeated by Trump, the "Stop The Steal" meme was put away, until the 2020 election defeat. This is important; it shows that Trump never was interested in working within the system, and never intended to accept a loss in any contest. Do you remember when journalists were trying to ask Trump to commit to conceding graciously if Hillary Clinton won? He refused; "We'll see" was all that they could get out of him. If Clinton had beaten Trump in the electoral college in 2016, 2016 would likely have been a pre-play of 2020, with lots of exorbitant claims of fraud, etc. Ridiculous, right? But Trump actually claimed to CNN that the reason he lost the popular vote to Clinton was "millions of people who voted illegally." [cnn] I hope you realize that "millions of people who voted illegally" was unsubstantiated bullshit, which was never followed up by Trump's Department of Justice once he was in office. You'd think that, if millions of illegal votes had been cast, the Trump administration would have been diligently weeding them out, prosecuting them, and closing down gigantic gaping hole in the electoral system that allowed such a thing to happen - 2020 was right around the corner, after all.
In the lead-up to his 2020 defeat, Trump began dusting off the "Stop The Steal" meme, attempting to argue that the election systems had been hardened against fraud, but then changing tack and publicly complaining about weaknesses in the system. Congress, in fact, held hearings on DHS' efforts to harden and improve the security of voting systems [congress] Chris Krebs, a lifelong republican, was in charge of CISA, which was responsible for the work - Krebs program focused (among other things) on making paper ballots more ubiquitous - 95% in 2020 compared to 85% in 2016. Trump was in the unusual position of having directed substantial improvement in the reliability of the electoral system, but then having to turn around and scapegoat the system built under his administration, which repeatedly survived audit after audit following Trump's defeat in 2020. Anyone who thinks about this stuff should be wondering "if there was so much backdooring and fraud in the 2020 election, why wasn't CISA saying anything about it until after a republican lost?" (under a republican administration) - any rational person should have felt that Giuliani and Powell's claims of exotic fraud rang hollow, given that CISA had been supposedly working on exactly that sort of stuff during 2+ years leading up to the election. The republican administration did not do nothing in the run-up to 2020, they were busily improving the electoral systems. If Hugo Chavez' software was installed on voting machines, CISA had 2+ years to analyze it; instead they just kept improving the systems across the board. What was immediately obvious then (as now) was that the "Stop The Steal" meme was dusted off as soon as Trump's advisors realized that he was heading for a significant defeat or, at best, a marginal victory, and conditioning the media and voters for endless re-counts in the future.
That's enough history. Now, we need to talk about the serious stuff. Some of this is going to have to be conjecture because we need to talk about things that didn't happen, and I suppose we have no sure way of knowing how things might have gone differently. But: perhaps you remember when Trump kept "joking" about serving more than two terms: [cnn]
The good news is that at the end of 6 years, after America has been made GREAT again and I leave the beautiful White House (do you think the people would demand that I stay longer? KEEP AMERICA GREAT), both of these horrible papers will quickly go out of business & be forever gone!”
Trump's an autocrat, or a would-be autocrat. He orchestrated the "Stop The Steal" and Jan 6 coup attempt because the idea of being taken out of power is absolutely unthinkable, to him. [Personally, I think it's a sign of dementia more than sociopathy, but what matters is his overt behaviors] In the run-up to 2020, when media asked him if there would be a peaceful transfer of power if he lost, [cnn] offered the same non-response as he did regarding defeat in 2016:
“Well, we’re going to have to see what happens,” Trump said when asked whether he’d commit to a peaceful transition, one of the cornerstones of American democracy.
That was September, 2020. Trump's team would have already been warning him that polling showed several races were too close to call. So:
“You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster,” Trump said at a press briefing at the White House, presumably referring to mail-in ballots, which he has baselessly claimed will lead to voter fraud. “(G)et rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very … there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation,” he added, saying “the ballots are out of control.”
Trump was preparing to attempt to cling to power permanently. Fortunately, he was too incompetent, and the goofballs surrounding him like Giuliani and Powell managed to make fools of themselves instead of preparing an effective coup. [And we know from the Fox News discovery in the Dominion defamation case, that Fox News insiders also recognized the Trumpist election skeptics as a bunch of looneys - looneys who have since admitted that they have none of the evidence they said that they had, and that their information was based on psychic sources, etc.] Trump is simply psychologically incapable of admitting he's lost. What you need to understand is that he's as much of an enemy of republicans as he is of democrats. He's the enemy of anyone who wants to disempower him, or compete with him in any way, and he cheats reflexively and relentlessly. Eventually the republican party is also going to take wind out of Trump's sails and then he'll do what he always does: he'll attack with everything that he's got.
As usual, Trump has signaled his willingness to play dirty well in advance. Remember when he threatened to dish dirt on Ron DeSantis? [nyt]
If he did run, I will tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering. I know more about him than anybody other than perhaps his wife, who is really running his campaign.
He hasn't turned his basilisk magic on the republican party, yet, because - so far - they're too busy kissing his ass while trying to keep his MAGA fringe voters happy. But it won't take much.
Think of some scenarios that could play out: one is simply that Trump's not polling very well at all, right now. Thanks to Trump's promotion of lunatic fringe non-entities, republicans are generally not polling very well at all, anywhere, right now. But, the polls of republican party members show that Trump is the likely front-runner by a pretty huge margin and the republican party could find itself in a situation where they have a candidate who can't win in a general election, but can't lose the primary. What are republicans going to do about that? Losing in 2024 comes to mind - Trump has already shown that he can lose pretty badly to Biden; are the republicans seriously going to give him another shot at doing that? You'll notice how, when Hillary Clinton lost to Trump the democrats did not run her against Trump again, because they realized that she was a candidate who'd lose to Trump. Trump is a candidate who loses to Biden - the republicans would have to be delusional looneys to run Trump against Biden, again. That's one scenario. The other scenario is worse: somehow the republican party manages to edge Trump out of the primary, and Trump immediately starts pulling his voter fraud "Stop The Steal" routine internally, and splits the party. Or, he runs on a third party ticket and splits the MAGA base off from the republican party, ensuring that republicans lose every election that they run in, for the next decade. Even if Trump somehow manages to pull off a win in 2024, the republicans will not gain thereby - he's going to be trying to cling to power as president-for-life, and anoint his nepo-baby as Empress Ivanka the First. I'd like to encourage you to think long and hard before you vote for Trump in 2024. You don't want that on your conscience.
A year or two ago I'd have been optimistic (and courteous) enough to suppose that the evangelical base might realize that they have backed a truly disgusting example of a human being, who is probably more nihilistic and less moral than this atheist right here - I thought they might have backed away, or run, but instead the lure of power and the love of being able to hate publicly is too strong. I guess evangelicals will support any piece of shit, as long as they hate drag queens, or people who get vaccines, or whatever. They’re willing to stand by a rapist who pays porn stars for sex while his wife is raising his baby… Well, I never. I've given up trying to understand evangelicals and have decided that they're also a bunch of looneys who've climbed aboard the S.S. Donald Trump and set out to sea right into the teeth of a hurricane. Enjoy the ride.
The democrats gave you two chances to get rid of Trump, cleanly, while still making the democrats look like the bad guys. But the republicans loved having a republican in power too much to do anything about it, and now they've got a raving lunatic to deal with. Your last chance is to hope he winds up in prison, and you can quietly close the door on his oubliette and, as - as the term implies - forget about him. Because, otherwise, someday republicans will come between Trump and power, and then you'll reap the whirlwind. The democrats will be watching, of course, and following Winston Churchill's dictum: "let's hope that they both lose."
[This is crossposted from my regular blog over at Freethoughtblogs]
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