The number for today boys and girls is four. For. 4. Fore. Fiddle while 'Murica burns. Good luck. From Letter From An American:
January 4, 2024 (Thursday)
The Democrats on the House Oversight Committee today released a 156-page report showing that when he was in the presidency, Trump received at least $7.8 million from 20 different governments, including those of China, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Malaysia, through businesses he owned.
The Democrats brought receipts.
According to the report—and the documents from Trump’s former accounting firm Mazars that are attached to it—the People’s Republic of China and companies substantially controlled by the PRC government paid at least $5,572,548 to Trump-owned properties while Trump was in office; Saudi Arabia paid at least $615,422; Qatar paid at least $465,744; Kuwait paid at least $300,000; India paid at least $282,764; Malaysia paid at least $248,962; Afghanistan paid at least $154,750; the Philippines paid at least $74,810; the United Arab Emirates paid at least $65,225. The list went on and on.
The committee Democrats explained that these payments were likely only a fraction of the actual money exchanged, since they cover only four of more than 500 entities Trump owned at the time. When the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in January 2023, Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) stopped the investigation before Mazars had produced the documents the committee had asked for when Democrats were in charge of it. Those records included documents relating to Russia, South Korea, South Africa, and Brazil.
Trump fought hard against the production of these documents, dragging out the court fight until September 2022. The committee worked on them for just four months before voters put Republicans in charge of the House and the investigation stopped.
These are the first hard numbers that show how foreign governments funneled money to the president while policies involving their countries were in front of him. The report notes, for example, that Trump refused to impose sanctions on Chinese banks that were helping the North Korean government; one of those banks was paying him close to $2 million in rent annually for commercial office space in Trump Tower.
The first article of the U.S. Constitution reads: “[N]o Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument [that is, salary, fee, or profit], Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
The report also contrasted powerfully with the attempt of Republicans on the Oversight Committee, led by Comer, to argue that Democratic Joe Biden has corruptly profited from the presidency.
In the Washington Post on December 26, 2023, Philip Bump noted that just after voters elected a Republican majority, Comer told the Washington Post that as soon as he was in charge of the Oversight Committee, he would use his power to “determine if this president and this White House are compromised because of the millions of dollars that his family has received from our adversaries in China, Russia and Ukraine.”
For the past year, while he and the committee have made a number of highly misleading statements to make it sound as if there are Biden family businesses involving the president (there are not) and the president was involved in them (he was not), their claims were never backed by any evidence. Bump noted in a piece on December 14, 2023, for example, that Comer told Fox News Channel personality Maria Bartiromo that “the Bidens” have “taken in” more than $24 million. In fact, Bump explained, Biden’s son Hunter and his business partners did receive such payments, but most of the money went to the business partners. About $7.5 million of it went to Hunter Biden. There is no evidence that any of it went to Joe Biden.
All of the committee’s claims have similar reality checks. Jonathan Yerushalmy of The Guardian wrote that after nearly 40,000 pages of bank records and dozens of hours of testimony, “no evidence has emerged that Biden acted corruptly or accepted bribes in his current or previous role.”
Still, the constant hyping of their claims on right-wing media led then–House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to authorize an impeachment inquiry in mid-September, and in mid-December, Republicans in the House formalized the inquiry.
There is more behind the attack on Biden than simply trying to even the score between him and Trump—who remains angry at his impeachments and has demanded Republicans retaliate—or to smear Biden through an “investigation,” which has been a standard technique of the Republicans since the mid-1990s.
Claiming that Biden is as corrupt as Trump undermines faith in our democracy. After all, if everyone is a crook, why does it matter which one is in office? And what makes American democracy any different from the authoritarian systems of Russia or Hungary or Venezuela, where leaders grab what they can for themselves and their followers?
Democracies are different from authoritarian governments because they have laws to prevent the corruption in which it appears Trump engaged. The fact that Republicans refuse to hold their own party members accountable to those laws while smearing their opponents says far more about them than it does about the nature of democracy.
It does, though, highlight that our democracy is in danger.
Don’t just take my word for it and I have a book to recommend if you’re interested. And we were told that it couldn’t happen here and that the comparison was wrong.
OpinionThe media’s worst lapse: Refusing to identify Trump as a cult leader
This week, I look at the media’s worst error in covering four-time-indicted former president Donald Trump. I also pick the distinguished people of the week and share something different.
What caught my eye
After missing the significance of the MAGA movement in 2016, innumerable mainstream outlets spent thousands of hours, gallons of ink and billions of pixels trying to understand “the Trump voter.” How had democracy failed them? What did the rest of us miss about these Americans? The journey to Rust Belt diners became a cliché amid the newfound fascination with aggrieved White working-class Americans. But the theory that such voters were economic casualties of globalization turned out to be false. Surveys and analyses generally found that racial resentment and cultural panic, not economic distress, fueled their affinity for a would-be strongman.
Unfortunately, patronizing excuses (e.g., “they feel disrespected”) for their cultlike attachment to a figure increasingly divorced from reality largely took the place of exacting reporting on the right-wing cult that swallowed a large part of the Republican Party. In an effort to maintain false equivalence and normalize Trump, many media outlets seemed to ignore that the much of the GOP left the universe of democratic (small-d) politics and was no longer a traditional democratic (again, small-d) party with an agenda, a governing philosophy, a set of beliefs. The result: Trump was normalized and a false equivalence between the parties was created.
Instead of reporting Trump’s wild assertions as legitimate arguments, media outlets should explain how Trump rallies are designed to instill anger and cultivate his hold on people who believe whatever hooey he spouts. How different are these events from what we see in grainy images of European fascist rallies in the 1930s? (When Trump apologists insist that tens of millions of people cannot be part of a cult, it’s critical to remember mass fascist movements that swept entire populations.) The appeals to emotion, the specter of a malicious enemy, the fear of societal decline, the fascination with violence and the elation just to be in the presence of the leader are telltale signs of frenetic fascist gatherings. Trump’s language (“poisoning the blood”) even mimics Hitler’s calls for racial purity.
Even as Trump shows his authoritarian colors and his rants become angrier, more unhinged and more incoherent, his followers still meekly accept inane assertions (e.g., convicted Jan. 6, 2021, rioters are “hostages,” magnets dissolve in water, wind turbines drive whales insane). More of the media should be covering this phenomenon as it would any right-wing authoritarian movement in a foreign country.
Though polls continue to show Trump’s iron grip on his followers, mainstream outlets spend far too little attention on why and howMAGA member cling to demonstrably false beliefs, excuse what should be inexcusable conduct and treat him as infallible. Outlets should routinely consult psychologists and historians to ask the vital questions: How do people abandon rationality? What drives their fury and anxiety? How does an authoritarian figure maintain his hold on followers? How do ideas of racial purity play into it? Media outlets fail news consumers when they do not explain the authoritarian playbook that Trump employs. Americans need media outlets to spell out what is happening.
“Authoritarian, not democratic dynamics, hold the key to Trump’s behavior as a candidate now and in the future,” historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote. “The main goals of his campaign events are not to advance policy proposals but rather to prop up his personality cult, circulate his lies, and emotionally retrain Americans to see violence as positive and even patriotic.”
Plenty of experts are available to dissect the phenomenon. Expert Steven Hassan, for example, explained to the Atlantic’s Peter Sagal that, as Sagal wrote, “the MAGA movement checks all the boxes of his ‘BITE’ model of cult mind control — behavior, information, thought, and emotional control.” Sagal continued, “Like all cult leaders, [Hassan] argues, Trump restricts the information his followers are allowed to accept; demands purity of belief (beliefs that can change from moment to moment, as per his whims and needs); and appeals to his followers through the conjuring of primal emotions — not just fear but also joy.” (Another expert, Daniella Mestyanek Young, explained: “The first rule of cults is: you’re never in a cult. The second rule of cults is: the cult will forgive any sin, except the sin of leaving. The third rule of cults is: even if he did it, that doesn’t mean he’s guilty.”)
A message from a mentally sound, serious leader (President Biden) cannot be equated with the message of an authoritarian who seeks absolute power through a web of disinformation and, if need be, violence. (When the media doesn’t grasp this, we get laughable headlines such as: “Clashing Over Jan. 6, Trump and Biden Show Reality Is at Stake in 2024.”)
Instead of probing why MAGA followers, despite all evidence to the contrary, deny that Trump was an insurrectionist and a proven liar, pollsters insist on asking Trump followers which candidate they think might better handle, for example, health care. The answer for Republicans (Trump! Trump!) has nothing to do with the question (Trump never had a health-care plan, you recall), and the question has nothing to do with the campaign.
The race between an ordinary democratic candidate and an unhinged fascist is not a normal American election. At stake is whether a democracy can protect itself from a malicious candidate with narcissistic tendencies or a rational electorate can beat back a dangerous, lawless cult of personality. Unfortunately, too many media outlets have not caught on or, worse, simply feign ignorance to avoid coming down on the side of democracy, rationality and truth.
This. Imagine this. But you don't have to. It happened. In 'Murica. In the 21st century. How cultish is this? Oh, and thanks Iowa.
INDIANOLA, Iowa — They lined up for hours, some of them, in the minus-38-degree wind chill to see their candidate. It was the only rally Donald Trump was giving in the state in the days before Monday’s caucuses, so for the MAGA faithful, this was the golden ticket.
For the lucky 500 Trump followers admitted to the event space, the Trump campaign played a video reminding voters that Trump had already come in first place in the God primary.
“And on June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God gave us Trump,” the narrator proclaimed.
“God said, ‘I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office and stay past midnight. … So God made Trump.”
“‘I need somebody with arms strong enough to rassle the deep state and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild.’ … So God gave us Trump.”
And then it came to pass, a few minutes later, that this midwife-turned-prophet took the stage in the ballroom, and he spake thus to his flock:
“We’ve got a crooked country,” run by “stupid people,” “corrupt,” “incompetent,” “the worst.”
Trump, in the gospel according to Trump, was the victim of “hoaxes,” “witch hunts,” “lies,” “fake indictments,” “fake trials,” judges who “are animals,” a “rigged election,” “rigged indictments,” and a “rigged Department of Justice where we have radical left, bad people, lunatics.”
The nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., “is a rat-infested, graffiti infested shithole,” he said, with swastikas all over the national monuments.
His opponents, the prophet Trump continued, are “Marxists,” “communists,” “fascists,” “liars, cheaters, thugs, perverts, frauds, crooks, freaks, creeps,” “warmongers” and “globalists.”
Immigrants are like a “vicious snake,” whose “bite is poisonous,” he told them, and there is an “invasion” at the border by “terrorists,” “jailbirds” and “drug lords.”
“Our country is dying,” he informed them. And, by the way, “You’re very close to World War Three.”
Have a nice day!
It was, in short, a slightly updated version of the rage, paranoia, victimhood, lies and demonization that propelled Trump’s popularity over the past eight years. Yet there was something else Trump said in his appearance here at Simpson College south of Des Moines that, I’m sorry to say, seems reasonably accurate.
“MAGA is taking over,” he told his chilled but enraptured supporters. “On the fake news, they say MAGA represents 44 percent of the Republicans. No, no. MAGA represents 95 percent of the Republican Party.”
His numbers might be off, but the observation is true. Iowa’s Republican presidential caucuses Monday night were an overwhelming triumph for Trump, who in early results was more than 30 points ahead of his nearest competitor and getting more votes than the rest of the field combined. The voters had shown that there essentially is no Republican other than a MAGA Republican.
Trump’s opponents deserve partial blame for that, for failing to take him on more directly. But some of their candidacies, in tone and substance, offered real alternatives to Trump’s rage-filled nativism. The ominous truth is there just wasn’t appetite in the electorate for a non-Trumpian candidate. In Iowa — and probably elsewhere, alas — they are all MAGA Republicans now.
People here just won’t stop complaining about the weather.
“On Monday, it’s going to be so cold — like, I don’t even know what negative-15 is,” said Nikki Haley.
“Maybe negative-20,” fretted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Trump called off all but one of his pre-caucus rallies for “the safety of MAGA patriots across Iowa.”
What a bunch of snowflakes!
Admittedly, it is nippy here — exposed skin can succumb to frostbite in about 10 minutes — but the Republican candidates should have been well used to this by now. The GOP presidential primary campaign has been frozen for the better part of a year.
Trump led by a mile in the early polls. He led by a mile in the final polls. Iowa’s frigid Republican voters never warmed to any message that isn’t MAGA.
The candidates who explicitly opposed Trump — Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson — went nowhere. Recognizing the peril of opposing Trump, the other candidates did their best to emphasize their similarities with him.
DeSantis offered all of the Trump thuggery and culture wars with none of the Trump pizazz. Vivek Ramaswamy promised to be Trumpier than Trump. Even Haley, who offered the greatest contrast with Trump, was so mild in her critique of the man that she’s broadly seen as auditioning to be his vice president. This isn’t cowardice on her part but a concession to reality. Consider that, when the Des Moines Register poll asked likely Republican caucus voters last month about Trump’s Nazi-tinged talk of migrants “poisoning the blood” of the country and his political opponents being “vermin,” pluralities said such statements made them more likely to support Trump.
I used to think there was a large enough anti-Trump contingent in the Republican electorate that, if given a clear alternative to the demagogue, they would take it. But in Iowa, the voters had such a chance — and stuck with Trump.
It’s fair to ask whether the candidates wasted their time even coming to Iowa. Trump skipped the debates and did minimal campaigning here, and the old notion that retail politics in Iowa can propel little-known candidates to glory seemed no longer to apply. It was never a contest.
It’s obvious that journalists wasted their time; more than 1,000 came for the caucuses, waiting out the storm at the Hotel Fort Des Moines speakeasy, dining with each other, outnumbering actual Iowans at candidate events and descending paparazzi-style on the few genuine voters present. Leaving a Haley event, I heard one voter rebuff a reporter’s request for an interview: “I’ve already done three, but thank you.”
I arrived in Des Moines Thursday morning and, because Trump held only the one rally, on Sunday, I had three days to spend with the losers, examining their failures to launch.
On Friday morning, during the height of a blizzard, the Iowa state police urged people to “stay home” because of “extremely dangerous” conditions. “Please, don’t put yourself or others in danger.”
An hour later, DeSantis went right ahead with his event in the Des Moines suburb of Ankeny, Iowa.
Maybe the guy just celebrates recklessness. The evening before, at a DeSantis appearance at a barbecue place in Ames, I watched as a climate-change demonstrator climbed the stage while the candidate was speaking and unfurled a “DeSantis: Climate Criminal” banner.
These demonstrators have routinely disrupted candidate appearances here, and they’re usually led out after a momentary interruption. But at the DeSantis event, one of his security staff ran across the stage, caught the demonstrator with a flying tackle and the two fell from the stage to the floor with a sickening thud. There were gasps and murmurs in the room.
DeSantis joked about the sudden, unprovoked violence. He mocked the kid for “stumbling around to get his flag out.” He then boasted about a similar tackle at one of his events two nights earlier, when the demonstrators “got taken down and done, all this stuff.”
All this stuff. Despite a year of practice, DeSantis is still painfully awkward attempting to sound human. He wants supporters to know that “my, um, my, my wife … is out knocking on people’s doors, doing all this stuff.” The Machine Shed restaurant chain, he adds, is where, “you know, they have the different stuff where you can buy the gizmos or the things.” If elected, he promises, “we’re going to do that stuff.”
He makes sure to touch all culture-war buttons. Anthony Fauci. George Soros. Teachers unions. Woke government. Trans kids. Indoctrination camps. The diversity-equity-inclusion cartel. The D.C. ruling class. A sexualized curriculum. He mechanically responds to interlocutors: “Great question. What’s your name?”
And he closes each speech with the same 150 words, recited in a singsong voice, sounding bored by his own canned speech. “What we are called upon to do is to preserve what George Washington called the sacred fire of liberty,” he recites. “This is the fire that burned in Independence Hall in 1776 … It’s a fire that burned at a cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, when our nation’s first Republican president pledged this nation to a new birth of freedom. It’s a fire that burned on the beaches of Normandy when a merry band of brothers stormed the shores.”
Maybe DeSantis really believes the heroes of D-Day were “merry” under machine-gun fire, but his audiences are not merry. They start filing out well before he finishes his dreary appearances.
DeSantis generally avoids Trump, other than to say vaguely that “Donald Trump is running for his issues” while “I’m running solely for your issues,” whatever those are. Asked directly about Trump at an event in Clive, Iowa, DeSantis gingerly replied that “if he’s the nominee, the whole election is going to be about legal issues.” But he quickly added that the prosecutions are “unfair” and assured his listeners that “you can appreciate what Donald Trump did.”
So if they appreciate Trump and think he’s being treated unfairly, why would they vote for a cheap imitation?
Ramaswamy, despite holding more than 360 events in Iowa over the past year, was polling in the single digits on the eve of the caucus. But that didn’t stop him from risking the lives of his few supporters. Ramaswamy’s SUV skidded into a snow ditch last week and required the help of a “good Iowan” to push him out. He maintained his schedule anyway, likening himself to the father of our country: “George Washington didn’t complain about the weather when he crossed the Delaware.”
During the blizzard, I drove with colleagues to see him address supporters at a Comfort Inn in West Des Moines. Except there were hardly any supporters. Instead, the room was filled with college and high school kids visiting for the caucuses — and about 15 climate-change demonstrators, one of whom began heckling moments into the event.
“You lie, dude! You’re a liar!”
Ramaswamy, in a dig at DeSantis, said “we’re not going to have a security guard or a police officer tackle him” — and instead invited demonstrators to sit in the front row and ask questions. This was a miscalculation, and before long the room was festooned with yellow banners announcing “Vivek: Climate Criminal,” while the group chanted: “Vivek is a liar! The planet is on fire!”
One man took the microphone and complained to the protesters that he had come “all the way from Puerto Rico” to hear Ramaswamy.
“I came all the way from California!” retorted one of the demonstrators.
Finally, the campaign cleared out the hecklers, and Ramaswamy, alleging that the activists were part of a “quasi-religious cult,” offered his exotic view that “the earth is more covered by green surface area today than it was a century ago because carbon dioxide is plant food.”
The denial of climate-change is but one plank in Ramaswamy’s zany platform, which holds that Jan. 6, 2021, was an “inside job” and white supremacy is a myth. During the blizzard, he told the crowd of his plans to fire 75 percent of the federal workforce and to abolish the FBI as part of his fight against the imaginary “shadow government in the deep state.” He also wants to revive “our inner animal spirit.”
Adding to the surreal environment, longtime Republican pollster Frank Luntz rose, praising Ramaswamy’s handling of the demonstrators and asking: “How do we get civility? How do we get decency?” This from the man who, as Newt Gingrich’s wordsmith, was widely credited with persuading Republicans to label Democrats “traitors,” “sick” and “corrupt.”
Ramaswamy’s solution for restoring civility included a suggestion that if “somebody hits you, you hit him back 10 times harder.”
His strategy for the Iowa caucuses was just as confounding: He would hug Trump as tightly as possible. Ramaswamy hailed Trump as “the business guy who can execute and break things,” and gushed that there’s “a lot of what Donald Trump did that I love and respect.” His only complaint was that Trump didn’t go far enough to sack federal workers and vitiate the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship.
DeSantis offered Trumpian violence. Ramaswamy offered Trumpian conspiracy nonsense. Is there nobody who actually offers an alternative to Trump? Why, yes there is. Unfortunately, he was assaulted over the weekend by a giant carrot.
I walked through downtown Des Moines Saturday night (temperature: -10) to see Hutchinson, the one true Trump critic in the race after Chris Christie’s departure. At a co-working space, the former Arkansas governor was addressing a group of 100 visiting students — hardly a caucus voter among them — when a person in a carrot costume snuck onstage. (Unlike DeSantis, Hutchinson lacked the staff to intercept, much less tackle, the interloping vegetable.) From an animal rights group, the carrot carried a sign that said “Eat me!”
Hutchinson smiled, confused, and tried to stick to his message.
“If you’re saying January 6 was a patriotic act, you’re not telling the truth to Americans,” he said. He called Trump’s bid “a frail candidacy” and “a failed candidacy” that will be exposed in court. “Does it not erode confidence in our judicial system that you’ve got somebody running for president of the United States who goes out there and attacks the judge, attacks the prosecutor, attacks the jury, attacks everybody?”
One of the students noted that Trump’s approach to politics “resonates with a lot of Republicans.”
“If you’re right in your analysis, I lose,” Hutchinson responded.
An hour later, the final Des Moines Register poll showed Hutchinson getting 1 percent to Trump’s 48 percent.
Haley, by contrast, edged DeSantis to gain second place in the poll — trailing Trump by a mere 28 points. Her attempts to win the anti-Trump vote without actually saying anything that sounds anti-Trump has been a gymnastic feat, and she continued it in the final days.
I caught up with her campaign at a stop in Ankeny, where she held forth in a wedding venue in an upscale development of lofts, boutiques and yoga. In the parking lot for her event assembled an armada of Audis, Cadillacs and Lexuses, for this was Haley’s base: what remains of the country club, chamber-of-commerce Republicans who dislike Trump.
But her challenges to the front-runner are timid. “I think President Trump was the right president at the right time. I agree with a lot of his policies,” she assures every audience. “But, rightly or wrongly, chaos has followed him.”
Chaos follows Trump — through no fault of his own!
“You deserve an America without drama. You deserve an America that’s better than whether you have a couple of 80-year-olds running for president,” was as tough a critique as she offered.
She scolded the Trump administration (of which she was a part) of approving too many technology sales to China, and gently chided him for adding $8 trillion to the debt: “Under President Trump, everybody talks about how good our economy was. It was good, but at what cost?”
Still, Haley, for all her timidity, was at least implicitly offering a serious, viable, alternative to Trump. Hers is a traditional Republican message of balanced budgets, lower taxes, help for small business, a strong national defense. “The first thing I think you do is you send an accountant to the White House,” she told them. Woo-hoo! She made only a passing nod to the culture wars that so delight the MAGA crowd, briefly disapproving of “biological boys playing in girls’ sports.”
Where Trump, DeSantis and Ramaswamy are dark, even apocalyptic, Haley is sunny. She speaks plainly of her party’s need to reverse course. “Republicans have lost the last seven of eight popular votes for president,” she says, asking to “leave the negativity and the baggage behind.”
She points out that she polls better against Biden than the others, and it’s true. Were she the nominee, Republicans would likely win the presidency in a landslide. But this Republican electorate wants something different.
They want a guy who talks about being a “dictator” on day one, echoes Hitler in his rhetoric about ethnic minorities, demands absolute immunity from legal liability and threatens “bedlam” if he’s prosecuted.
They want a guy who, after all these years, still derides “Barack Hussein Obama” and “Pocahontas” Elizabeth Warren, as he did in Indianola on Sunday. They want a guy who threatens, as president, to “direct a completely overhauled DOJ to investigate every radical, out-of-control prosecutor because of their illegal, racist … enforcement of the law.”
And they want a man who promises: “We will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmonger … We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that truly hates our country. We will rout the fake news media. And we will evict Crooked Joe Biden from the White House.” The crowd, in their MAGA caps and Trump 47 jerseys, cheered their candidate and broke into spontaneous chants of “Trump!” and “USA!”
Let there be no more excuses made that Republican voters haven’t been given an alternative. They had a choice — and they chose Trump.
Instead of a ranch, a la Bundy, its a whole state, a la Abbott & Costello. Good luck 'Murica, you're going to need it.
Texas border showdown is far-right magnet, hate trackers warn
As a convoy gathers in Eagle Pass, extremism monitors see vestiges of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol in Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s defiance of federal orders
EAGLE PASS, Tex. — A motley crew is gathering here this weekend: militia-style groups invoking 1776 and the Civil War. Christian nationalists praying for the chance to confront evil. Racists stoking fear about the “replacement” of White people. Election deniers, anti-vaccination crusaders, conspiracy theorists.
And, at the center, a prominent Republican figure whose fiery rhetoric acts as a magnet.
Right-wing extremists are dusting off the blueprint for the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol and using it to rally support for their cause du jour: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s showdown with the federal government over border enforcement. Monitoring groups warn that Abbott’s posturing, like Trump’s “Stop the Steal” effort, heightens the risk of political violence as supporters converge on Eagle Pass, a frontier outpost of 28,000.
Summed up by one observer as “slow-motion secession,” the unrest in Texas is a case study in how once-fringe ideologies have been laundered into mainstream Republican politics.
On Friday, Abbott posted on social media that Texas “will not back down.” For weeks, his statements have included menacing-sounding messages saying that he’s “declared an invasion,” and would use “unprecedented action” to stop illegal crossings.
Civil rights group were outraged when Abbott, asked by a radio interviewer about the maximum pressure he could use at the border, replied: “The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”
Extremism researchers warn that Abbott’s stand against federal orders is communicated in language that glorifies vigilantism and promotes white supremacist talking points, the latest example of the GOP’s hard-right swing in the Trump era.
“This rhetoric, combined with Texas’s standoff with the federal government, is applauded by the same far-right movements that engage in hate crimes, domestic terrorism and were prominent at the January 6 insurrection,” said Heidi Beirich of the nonprofit Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “All of this should give us pause.”
Abbott’s rebellion began last month when he seized control of Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, on the banks of the Rio Grande, and shut out U.S. Border Patrol agents who had long used the area as a staging point. Supporters praised him for taking a stand against illegal crossings they describe as at “invasion” levels. Detractors viewed the move as inhumane and a dangerous overreach of state power.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ordered Abbott to allow Border Patrol to remove or cut razor wire barriers that prevent agents from reaching the river to help migrants in distress. Instead, Abbott is installing more wire, his defiance backed by 25 Republican governors who signed a letter of support. Trump, who is sailing toward the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, also boosted Abbott, writing on Truth Social that Texas “must be given full support to repel the invasion.”
Abbott and other GOP leaders use the same tropes about migrants as white-power groups and frequently echo the racist “great replacement theory,” which imagines the engineered replacement of White people in western societies. Hate trackers say violent movements have wasted little time in seizing on the political opening.
Beirich said her center’s research team has “documented an online explosion of invasion and great replacement rhetoric” related to Texas and has observed how white supremacists, Proud Boys and other extremist groups are “taking advantage of the standoff to push their propaganda and recruit new members.”
Texas Proud Boys factions have shared posts referring to “brown immigrant invaders” and urging followers to “grab your guns.” Beirich said a neo-Nazi network issued a rallying cry “asking for White men to join the resistance” in Texas.
Concerns this weekend are focused on a “Take Back Our Border” caravan of right-wing activists — billing themselves as “God’s army” — heading to Texas before planned stops in other states along the southern border. Organized mainly online, the convoy is what extremism researchers see as a microcosm of the modern-day American right: angry at the federal government, hostile toward marginalized groups, and tolerant of violent rhetoric about political enemies.
Devin Burghart of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a nonprofit focused on threats to democracy, traced the paramilitary connections of convoy organizers, linking them to movements that took up arms in previous standoffs with the federal government or had a role in the Capitol attack.
“From the convoy’s steering committee on down, the protest comprises many of the same dangerous elements as the January 6 insurrection,” Burghart said, referring to far-right umbrella movements.
The convoy left from Virginia Beach, Va., on Monday in what Vice News, which is closely monitoring the movement, described as “a sad start” of just a couple dozen vehicles, nowhere near the 700,000 figure some participants had touted. Momentum has since picked up, however, with 100 or more vehicles joining as the caravan headed southwest to Texas.
There’s no telling how many people will join Abbott’s showdown over the next couple of days. Such right-wing mobilizations often collapse at the last minute — some participants get cold feet, others give in to paranoia that the entire event is a setup by federal agents to entrap “patriots.” Whether the rallies erupt or fizzle, extremism researchers say, the consequences will outlast the weekend.
“I’m less concerned about this particular stunt,” Burghart said, “and more concerned about the long-term implications of this type of rhetoric becoming a reality.”
‘Revival’ of the right
Convoy organizers reject the extremist label and insist they are making efforts to ensure the weekend is violence-free. Participants have been asked not to bring long guns, for example, though sidearms are fine.
Anson Bills, a convoy organizer affiliated with Cornerstone Children’s Ranch in Quemado, Tex., a nonprofit hosting one of the weekend events, said he met with “extremely welcoming” officials from the Texas Department of Public Safety and provided them with a list of more than a dozen individuals and groups that were banned from the convoy and who, if they show up, will be removed by security.
Since the Jan. 6 prosecutions, Bills said, “people have been scared” to stage big rallies. This moment, he said, offers the chance for a relaunch with a focus on border enforcement, a unifying point for the right.
“It’s about time,” said Bills, speaking Thursday afternoon at the ranch, where preparations were underway for the convoy arrival.
At the compound’s front gate Thursday afternoon, a white-haired guitarist played the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” to welcome guests. American, Israeli and Christian flags hung on three poles. Posters bearing Bible verses and patriotic messaging hung from the colorful walls. Sloppy joes and hot dogs were on the menu; bottles of iced tea were stacked near the back of the room. A fully stocked medical bay boasted a stretcher-like bed and first-aid supplies.
Pointing to the grassy spot where a stage will be erected for speakers and preachers, Bills said he envisioned the event as a “revival.”
The caravan expected Friday has grown to 5 miles long, he said. Organizers obtained a permit for convoy truckers to park their vehicles along a country road next to an irrigation canal that supplies water to the surrounding farms and ranches.
Since 2021, Bills, also a Republican Party official in Uvalde County, has used the Cornerstone Children’s camp as a base for freelance “security services” offered to residents living along a busy river crossing point about 20 miles northwest of Eagle Pass.
There, Bills said, he and other volunteers solicit permission from landowners to patrol river-adjacent properties that routinely fall victim to break-ins and car thefts. They “fill in the gaps” left open by law enforcement. He calls it a civilian patrol; extremism monitors call it an example of right-wing paramilitary groups appointing themselves border security.
Bills drew distinctions between the volunteers he works with and other militia-style formations, saying they’re not “running around with long rifles and camouflage,” and make sure to pass on tips to law enforcement agencies.
“I see this as a humanitarian mission,” Bills said. “And a constitutional one.”
But some militia-style factions that support Abbott’s stand in principle are staying away from the rallies and are encouraging other groups to do the same.
Sam Hall, leader of the Texas-based Patriots for America militia group, cited Jan. 6 as a cautionary tale about what can happen when “a few bad actors” take over an otherwise peaceful rally. Speaking in a Facebook live video, Hall said violence this weekend would “hand the Biden regime the narrative they so desperately want” in an election year.
“If that powder keg explodes, it’s going to explode right in the face of the right,” Hall warned.
Fearing an influx of anti-immigrant protesters, some Latino rights groups are recommending security precautions to local communities. Citing Abbott’s “inciteful political rhetoric,” the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the nation’s oldest Hispanic civil rights group, urged members in Texas to “be on alert for armed out-of-state extremists with a hate agenda.”
Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Tex.) represents El Paso, where the threat of hate-fueled violence is not hypothetical. In 2019, a gunman espousing great replacement theory and a desire to stop what he called a “Hispanic invasion” opened fire on a Walmart crowded with Latino shoppers, killing 23 in the deadliest attack on Latinos in U.S. history.
Escobar, on a call Thursday with reporters, said she hears Republican colleagues using the same “invasion” language as the killer in everyday business on Capitol Hill.
“Because it is in the halls of power, because it is in committee hearings, because it is coming from the mouths of some of the most powerful politicians in our country, it is being normalized,” she said. “And we have to stop that.”
This is partly why we’ll witness the collapse of democracy in ‘Murica. Enjoy the shows. They may be the last.
‘Bring our country back from hell’
The next day, in Waterford Township, thousands of people started lining up outside the Oakland County airport, their breath pluming in the cold wind as they waited for hours in temperatures below 30 degrees. Their heavy coats concealed their festive Trump-branded apparel, which they could supplement at swag stands hawking Trump hats and Trump gloves, alongside bumper stickers reading “Joe and the Hoe Gotta Go” and “USA, Love It or Leave It.” A Trump float rolled up and down the road blasting classic rock and blaring “Save America!”
“The walk from the parking lot dang near killed me,” said Mark Forton, a Republican activist from neighboring Macomb County, known as an electoral bellwether. He joked that he had walked past a police SUV and asked the officer, “If I reach in there and slap you around a little bit, would you arrest me and take me to a nice warm jail?”
He added: “Macomb went big for Trump in 2016, and we’ll do it again. The people want him.”
Through the Secret Service screening, it was still cold inside an unheated plane hangar, but packed enough that some coats could come off to reveal a sweatshirt showing an assault rifle and the words “I will not comply,” a T-shirt that said “Democrats are Communists,” and another with the word “BULL” next to a caricature of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).
The campaign passed out signs that said “FIRE BIDEN,” and the audience members shouted, “Joe can go to hell!” and “F--- Joe Biden!” as Rep. Lisa C. McClain (R-Mich.) warmed up the crowd. At the mention of Whitmer, the crowd chanted, “Lock her up!” They danced and sang along to Pitbull and Johnny Cash, as much to stay warm as to have fun.
One woman screamed and then the entire crowd erupted in cheers as Trump’s gleaming jet glided past the opening in the back of the hangar, a deep blue missile across the pale pink dusk sky. He was flying in from a stop-off in Philadelphia to unveil a line of gold-colored sneakers. A drumroll thundered over the loudspeakers, and the crowd broke into a Trump chant, but it was not time for his grand entrance yet — just the intro of James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti’s duet of “It’s a Man’s World.”
A young girl complained that she could not see over the standing mass, and her father assured her she would see later, when people sat down. “He goes on for hours,” he said.
“I don’t want to be here for hours,” she whined.
“Then go wait in the car.”
“I’m only 11, I don’t care about politics.”
“Shut up.”
When Trump did appear, it got only harder to see as people held up their hands to wave and record him on their phones. A woman in an orange sweatshirt stood on her chair, and a man behind her barked, “Hey, Orange! Sit down!”
“We’re not worried about the primary,” Trump said from under a red MAGA cap, gesticulating in black leather gloves as the crowd roared. “We want to win Nov. 5. We’re going to bring our country back from hell.”
“That’s right!” one person shouted back.
In one of his signature tactics, Trump spun the same accusations against him directly around on his opponents. Charged with trying to overturn the 2020 election, he called his prosecution a “threat to democracy.” Having named the critics he wants to punish in a second term, he described the array of civil and legal cases against himas all products of “bitterness and revenge and hatred.”
He assailed the $355 million fine issued the day before in a New York civil fraud trail against his businesses as an “atrocity” and a “disgusting charade,” calling the attorney general who brought the case and the judge, Arthur F. Engoron, who decided it “lunatics.”
“Treason!” a supporter shouted.
“Engoron’s a moron!” said another.
Trump polled the audience on which nickname he should use for Biden, “Crooked” or “Sleepy,” and some in the crowd shouted back their own suggestions. “Creepy Joe!” “Demented Joe!” “Suicide Joe!” “Traitor!” “Pedo!”
Trump derided the “fake news,” and the crowd turned around to jeer and throw up middle fingers at the press risers. He repeated his regular pledge to “drive out the globalists” and “cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. They truly do. They hate our country.”
“We are like the stupid country,” Trump said. Without evidence, he accused migrants of coming from “insane asylums” and prisons.
“Deport the illegals!” a supporter cried out.
“Our cities, they’re falling apart. Our country is falling apart. We’re like a third-world nation,” Trump said.
The 11-year-old fell asleep on the floor, while her brother, wearing socks stitched with “Let’s Go Brandon” (code for a profane attack on Biden), stood on a chair for a better view.
“You’re freezing your ass off, right?” Trump said to more cheers and whistles. “But it’s warm because there’s love in this room. Right?”
From Letter From an American. And we were told that it couldn’t happen here.
But now so-called “internment camps” are back in the news.
Trump has promised his supporters that in a second term he would launch “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” To deport as many as ten million of what he called “foreign national invaders,” Trump advisor Stephen Miller explained on a November podcast, the administration would federalize National Guard troops from Republican-dominated states and send them around the country to round people up, moving them to “large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in Texas,” that would serve as internment camps.
OpinionWe have a radical democracy. Will Trump voters destroy it?
For some time, it was possible to believe that many voters could not see the threat Donald Trump poses to America’s liberal democracy, and many still profess not to see it. But now, a little more than six months from Election Day, it’s hard to believe they don’t. The warning signs are clear enough. Trump himself offers a new reason for concern almost every day. People may choose to ignore the warnings or persuade themselves not to worry, but they can see what we all see, and that should be enough.
How to explain their willingness to support Trump despite the risk he poses to our system of government? The answer is not rapidly changing technology, widening inequality, unsuccessful foreign policies or unrest on university campuses but something much deeper and more fundamental. It is what the Founders worried about and Abraham Lincoln warned about: a decline in what they called public virtue. They feared it would be hard to sustain popular support for the revolutionary liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence, and they worried that the virtuous love of liberty and equality would in time give way to narrow, selfish interest. Although James Madison and his colleagues hoped to establish a government on the solid foundation of self-interest, even Madison acknowledged that no government by the people could be sustained if the people themselves did not have sufficient dedication to the liberal ideals of the Declaration. The people had to love liberty, not just for themselves but as an abstract ideal for all humans.
Americans are going down this route today because too many no longer care enough whether the system the Founders created survives and are ceding the ground to those, led by Trump, who actively seek to overthrow what so many of them call “the regime.” This “regime” they are referring to is the unique political system established by the Founders based on the principles of universal equality and natural rights. That, plain and simple, is what this election is about. “A republic if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin allegedly said of the government created by the Constitutional Convention in 1787. This is the year we may choose not to keep it.
A healthy republic would not be debating whether Trump and his followers seek the overthrow of the Founders’ system of liberal democracy. What more do people need to see than his well-documented attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power with the storming of the U.S. Capitol, the elaborate scheme to create false electoral slates in key states, the clear evidence that he bullied officials in some states to “find” more votes, and to persuade Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the legitimate results? What more do they need to know than that Trump continues to insist he won that election and celebrates as heroes and “patriots” the people who invaded the U.S. Capitol and smashed policemen’s faces with the stated aim of forcing Congress to negate the election results? As one 56-year-old Michigan woman present at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 explained: “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”
Trump not only acknowledges his goals, past and present; he promises to do it again if he loses this year. For the third straight election, he is claiming that if he loses, then the vote will have been fraudulent. He has warned of uprisings, of “bedlam” and a “bloodbath” and he has made clear that he will again be the promoter of this violence, just as he was on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump explicitly warned in 2020 that he would not accept the election results if he lost, and he didn’t. This year he is saying it again. Were there no other charges against him, no other reason to be concerned about his return to the presidency, this alone would be sufficient to oppose him. He does not respect and has never pledged to abide by the democratic processes established by the Constitution. On the contrary, he has explicitly promised to violate the Constitution when he deems it necessary. That by itself makes him a unique candidate in American history and should be disqualifying.
This kind of open challenge to our democracy was never meant to be addressed by the courts. As the Founders well understood, you don’t serve a subpoena to a would-be tyrant and tell him to lawyer up. Nor was it meant to be addressed by the normal processes of democratic elections. They knew, and feared, that a demagogue could capture the allegiance of enough voters to overthrow the system. That was why they gave Congress, and particularly the Senate, supposedly more immune from popular pressures, the power to impeach and remove presidents and to deny them the opportunity to run again — and not simply because they violated some law but because they posed a clear and present danger to the republic. After Trump’s attempt to overthrow the government in 2020, Congress had a chance to use the method prescribed by the Founders in precisely the circumstances they envisioned. But Senate Republicans, out of a combination of ambition and cowardice, refused to play the vital role the Founders envisioned for them. The result is that the nightmare feared by the Founders is one election away from becoming reality.
The problem with Trump is not that he has some carefully thought-out plan for seizing power, much less an elaborate ideological justification for doing so. (Others do have such plans and such justifications, including many of those who will populate his administration — more on that in a moment.) With Trump, everything is about him and his immediate needs. He will run roughshod over the laws and Constitution simply to get what he wants for himself, his family and his business interests. Americans know that if he is elected, he would abuse the justice system to go after his opponents. They know this because he says so. “I am your retribution!” he declares, and by “your” he means “my.” Americans know he would use his power as president to try to solve his financial problems. He did it as president and is doing it now as a presidential candidate. They know he would not respect the results of fair elections if he loses, which is the very definition of a tyrant.
So, why will so many vote for him anyway? For a significant segment of the Republican electorate, the white-hot core of the Trump movement, it is because they want to see the system overthrown. This should not come as a shock, for it is not a new phenomenon. On the contrary, it is as old as the republic. Historians have written about the “liberal tradition” in America, but there has from the beginning also been an anti-liberal tradition: large numbers of Americans determined to preserve preliberal traditions, hierarchies and beliefs against the secular liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights. The Founders based the republic on a radical set of principles and assertions about government: that all human beings were created equal in their possession of certain “natural rights” that government was bound to respect and to safeguard. These rights did not derive from religious belief but were “self-evident.” They were not granted by the Christian God, by the crown or even by the Constitution. They were inherent in what it meant to be human.
This is the central tenet of liberalism. Before the American Revolution no government had ever been founded on liberal principles, and the vast majority of human beings had never believed in these natural rights — certainly not the Christian church in either its Protestant or Roman Catholic versions nor Islam nor Judaism nor Hinduism nor Buddhism. People might be equal in the eyes of their god, but no government or religious institution had ever been based on the principle of equal rights. Not even the English system was based on this principle but rather on monarchy, a ruling aristocracy and a contract between crown and subjects that was modified over the centuries but was not based on the principle of universal “natural” rights.
The Founders knew these ideas were radical, that they were inaugurating, in their own words, a novus ordo seclorum — a new order of the ages — that required a new way of thinking and acting. They knew, as well, that their own practices and those of 18th-century American society did not conform to their new revolutionary doctrines. They knew that slavery was contrary to the Declaration’s principles, though they permitted slavery to continue, hoping it would die a natural death. They knew that established churches were contrary to those principles because they impinged on that most important of rights, “freedom of conscience,” which was vital to the preservation of liberty, yet a number of states in the 18th and 19th centuries retained all kinds of religious tests for office. In short, they knew that a great many Americans did not in fact believe in the liberal principles of the revolution. As Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, put it, “We have changed our forms of government, but it remains yet to effect a revolution in our principles, opinions and manners so as to accommodate them to the forms of government we have adopted.” They did not insist that citizens believe in those principles. One could be an American citizen whether one believed in the Declaration or not.
And a great many did not. Leaders of the slaveholding South called the Declaration “a most pernicious falsehood.” South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun called the very idea of equal rights a “false doctrine.” They believed in democracy, but only if it was an exclusively White democracy. When democracy turned against them in 1860, they rebelled and sought an exit from the system. That rebellion never ended. It has been weakened, suppressed — sometimes by force — and driven underground, but it has never gone away. Although the South was militarily defeated and deprived of its special advantages in the Constitution, its hostility to the Founders’ liberalism did not abate. As Southern writer W.J. Cash observed in 1941, if the war had “smashed the southern world,” it had nevertheless “left the essential southern mind and will … entirely unshaken” and Southerners themselves determined “to hold fast to their own, to maintain their divergences, to remain what they had been and were.” In 1956, almost a century after the Civil War, a fifth of Congress, almost all Democrats — signed the “Southern Manifesto” calling on states to refuse to obey the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision to end segregation in public schools. Nothing had changed. Are we so surprised that for many Americans, nothing has changed even today?
Nor has anti-liberalism only been about race. For more than a century after the revolution, many if not most White Anglo-Saxon Protestants insisted that America was a Protestant nation. They did not believe Catholics possessed equal rights or should be treated as equals. The influential “second” Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s was anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish as well as anti-Black, which was why, unlike the original Klan, it flourished outside the South. Many regard today’s Christian nationalism as a fringe movement, but it has been a powerful and often dominant force throughout America’s history.
For two centuries, many White Americans have felt under siege by the Founders’ liberalism. They have been defeated in war and suppressed by threats of force, but more than that, they have been continually oppressed by a system designed by the Founders to preserve and strengthen liberalism against competing beliefs and hierarchies. Since World War II, the courts and the political system have pursued the Founders’ liberal goals with greater and greater fidelity, ending official segregation, driving religion from public schools, recognizing and defending the rights of women and minorities hitherto deprived of their “natural rights” because of religious, racial, and ethnic discrimination. The hegemony of liberalism has expanded, just as Lincoln hoped it would, “constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of colors everywhere.” Anti-liberal political scientist Patrick Deneen calls it “liberal totalitarianism,” and, apart from the hyperbole, he is right that liberalism has been steadily deepening and expanding under presidents of both parties since the 1940s.
The fury on the anti-liberal right against what is today called “wokeness” is nothing new. Anti-liberal movements in America, whether in defense of the White race or Christianity, and more often both together, have always claimed to be suffering under the expanding hegemony of liberalism. They have always claimed that a liberal government and society were depriving them of their “freedom” to live a life according to Christian teachings and were favoring various minority groups, especially Black people, at their expense. In the 1970s, influential theologian R.J. Rushdoony complained that the Christian in America had “no right to his identity” but was forced to recognize “all others and their ‘rights.’” And he was correct if a Christian’s “rights” included the right not only to lead a Christian life oneself but to impose that life on the entire society or if a White person’s “freedom” included the freedom to preserve white primacy in society. In the 19th century, enslavers insisted they were deprived of their “freedom” to hold human beings as property; Southerners in the post-Reconstruction era insisted on their “freedom” to oppress Black citizens in their states.
Today, anti-liberals in American society are indeed deprived of their “freedom” to impose their religious and racial views on society, on public schools, on the public square and on the laws of the nation. What Christian nationalists call “liberal totalitarianism,” the Founders called “freedom of conscience.”
Six decades ago, people like Rushdoony were responding not to “woke” corporations or Black Lives Matter but to civil rights legislation. Today, anti-liberal conservatives complain about school curriculums that acknowledge the racism that has shaped America’s history, but even five decades ago, before the invention of “critical race theory,” anti-liberal White people such as Rushdoony insisted that the “white man” was being “systematically indoctrinated into believing he is guilty of enslaving and abusing the Negro.” Nor is it new that many White people feel that the demands of minority groups for both rights and respect have “gone too far” and it is they, the White people of America, who are suffering the worst discrimination. In the 1960s, surveys taken by the New York Times showed that majorities of White people believed even then that the civil rights movement had “gone too far,” that Blacks were receiving “everything on a silver platter” and the government was practicing “reverse discrimination” against White people. Liberalism is always going too far for many Americans — and certainly for anti-liberals. Anti-liberals these days complain about wokeness, therefore, but it is the liberal system of government bequeathed by the Founders, and the accompanying egalitarian spirit, that they are really objecting to, just as anti-liberals have since the founding of the nation. Many of Trump’s core supporters insist they are patriots, but whether they realize it or not, their allegiance is not to the Founders’ America but to an ethnoreligious definition of the nation that the Founders explicitly rejected.
Some do realize it. The smartest and most honest of them know that if people truly want a “Christian America,” it can only come through “regime change,” by which they mean the “regime” created by the Founders. The Founders’ legacy is a “dead end,” writes Glenn Ellmers, a scholar at the Claremont Institute. The Constitution is a “Potemkin village.” According to Deneen and Harvard Law School’s Adrian Vermeule, the system established by the Founders to protect individual rights needs to be replaced with an alternative form of government. What they have in mind is a Christian commonwealth: a “culture that preserves and encourages order and continuity, and support for religious belief and institutions,” with legislation to “promote public morality, and forbid its intentional corruption,” a “forthright acknowledgment and renewal of the Christian roots of our civilization,” “public opportunities for prayers,” and a “revitalization of our public spaces to reflect a deeper belief that we are called to erect imitations of the beauty that awaits us in another Kingdom.”
These anti-liberal conservatives know that bringing such a commonwealth into being means jettisoning the Founders’ obsession with individual rights. The influential advocate of “conservative nationalism,” Yoram Hazony, wants Americans to abandon the Declaration in favor of a nationhood built on Protestantism and the Bible. America is a “revolutionary nation,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) insists, not because of the principles of the Declaration and not even because of the American Revolution itself, but “because we are the heirs of the revolution of the Bible” that began with “the founding of the nation of Israel.” There could hardly be a statement more at odds with the American Founders’ liberal, ecumenical vision.
Expressing a belief in God is no threat to the Founders’ system, but reshaping society in accord with Christian teachings is. To build the nation Hawley and Hazony imagine would require jettisoning not only the Declaration but also the Constitution, which was designed to protect the Declaration’s principles. The Christian commonwealth would not and could not be a democracy because the majority of people can’t be trusted to choose correctly. According to the Claremont Institute’s Ellmers, “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” They are a “zombie” or “human rodent” who lives “a shadow-life of timid conformity.” Only “the 75 million people who voted in the last election” for Trump are true Americans. Instead of trying to compete with Democrats in elections that don’t reflect the will of the people, Ellmers writes, “Why not just cut to the chase and skip the empty, meaningless process?” The “only road forward” is “overturning the existing post-American order.”
For these intellectuals, Trump is an imperfect if essential vehicle for the counterrevolution. A “deeply flawed narcissist” suffering from a “bombastic vanity,” as Deneen and Ellmers note, he has “lacked the discipline to target his creative/destructive tendencies effectively.” But this can be remedied. If Trump failed to accomplish the desired overthrow in his first term, Deneen argues, it was because he lacked “a capable leadership class.” Things will be different in his next term. What is needed, according to Deneen, is a “self-conscious aristoi,” a class of thinkers who understand “both the disease afflicting the nation, and the revolutionary medicine required for the cure,” who know how to turn populist “resentments into sustained policy.” Members of Deneen’s would-be new elite will, like Vladimir Lenin, place themselves at the vanguard of a populist revolution, acting “on behalf of the broad working class” while raising the consciousness of the “untutored” masses. Indeed, according to Harvard’s Vermeule, it will be necessary to impose the common good even against the people’s “own perceptions of what is best for them” — a most Leninist concept indeed.
The Christian commonwealth, then, would require a powerful executive freed from the Constitution’s liberal and democratic constraints. The new state, Vermeule wrote, with its “robust executive,” would “sear the liberal faith with hot irons,” wielding the “authority to curb the social and economic pretensions of the urban-gentry liberals.” The whiff of violence and oppression in such statements is intentional. The anti-liberal intellectuals understand that changing the liberal system will require far more than an election and a few legislative reforms.
Deneen and Vermeule are often dismissed as mere intellectual provocateurs, but their writings stand out because they have the courage to acknowledge that what they seek is incompatible with the Founders’ liberal system. While others conceal their views under a phony fidelity to American liberal principles or claim that what they want accords with the Founders’ true intent, Deneen, Vermeule and other anti-liberals acknowledge that the country they want, a country subservient to the Christian God, a country whose laws are based on the Bible, cannot be created absent the overthrow of the Founders’ liberal and defiantly secular system. Even a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Neil M. Gorsuch, speaks of the “so-called separation of church and state.” Anti-liberalism at the Supreme Court is nothing new, either.
And the anti-liberals know as well that this year may be their last chance to effect their counterrevolution. The percentage of the population made up of White people (let alone White Protestants) is steadily shrinking. Just as the anti-liberal conservatives of the pre-World War II years closed the immigration gates too late and were overwhelmed by a tide of non-Nordic peoples from southern and Eastern Europe, so the immigration wave of largely non-White people since 1965 has brought the nation to the cusp of a non-White majority. The anti-liberals thus face the task of engineering the revolution with only a minority of the electorate committed to “regime change.”
Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party makes this possible. Trump is not a unique figure in American history. In each generation, anti-liberal forces have turned to the same breed of demagogue, the flouter of norms, the boorish trampler of liberal nostrums. William Buckley noted that the very “uncouthness” of George Wallace seemed to “account for his general popularity.” James Burnham marveled at how Joseph McCarthy’s “inept acts and ignorant words” had a “charismatic” quality that well expressed the fears and angers of his devoted followers.
What their critics saw as boorishness and malevolence, however, their followers saw as strength and defiance against a liberal system stacked against them. They were rebellious opponents of the system, “wreckers,” unabashedly anti-liberal in both thought and manner, and that is precisely what made them popular among a broad swath of White Americans who felt themselves losing ground in the culture and society — to Black people, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants from non-Nordic countries. Today, exactly a century after the most overtly racist immigration restriction in American history, Trump once again calls for more immigrants from “nice” European countries, such as Denmark, Switzerland, and Norway.
Trump did not just stumble into leadership of this movement of White rebellion. He summoned it. He made his debut as presidential aspirant on an unabashed white supremacist platform, championing the birther conspiracy that America’s first Black president was not in fact an American. Riding that issue alone, he catapulted to the front of the Republican pack, according to polls in 2011, before bowing out to continue his hit show, “The Apprentice.” Whether his debut as a white supremacist was opportunism or sprang from conviction hardly matters — it certainly has not mattered to his followers. The fact is, white supremacy has been his calling card, and millions have responded to it to the point where white nationalists have become the core of his movement. Many Christian nationalists already see him as a suffering Christ, and in this bizarre sense it is true that the prosecutions have “helped” him: The more adversity he faces, the more court battles he must wage, the more allegations that are slung at him, the more devoted they are to him.
No other group can be counted on for such absolute loyalty. While some Republicans wobble when asked if they would support Trump if convicted of a crime, White Christian Evangelicals overwhelmingly say they will support him no matter what. Trump needs that unshakable loyalty because he is fighting for his life. The thought that he might end up in jail has given him every reason to hew as closely as possible to the people who will stick with him even if he is convicted. These are also the people he will need to back him unconditionally in challenging the results of the election should he lose. If he wins, he will need them in what are sure to be titanic fights with Democrats and the legal system and to keep the Republican Party in line.
This is one reason Trump has so far shown no inclination to reach out beyond his base, to Nikki Haley voters, to more moderate suburban Republicans, to those who are made uncomfortable by his statements and actions. He may show flexibility on the important issue of abortion to secure his own election, but since clinching the nomination, he has only hardened his Christian nationalist message. His “poisoning the blood” campaign, his “dictator-for-a-day” comments, his release of the Trump Bible, his claim that, upon taking office, he will create “a new federal task force” to fight “anti-Christian bias to be led by a fully reformed Department of Justice,” are all aimed directly at his white Christian nationalist base without much concern for how millions of other Republican voters feel about it. Christians are “under siege,” he claims in hawking his Bible. “We must make America pray again.”
Besides, his hard tack toward white supremacy and Christian nationalism has cost him little among the broader Republican electorate.
Why not? Why is there so little resistance to Trump even as he commits ever more deeply to a Christian nationalist program for undoing the Founders’ liberal project?
For many, the answer is simply narrow self-interest, either a positive interest in supporting him or a negative interest in not opposing him or being seen to oppose him. This seems to be the answer for corporate America. Having first followed marketing data to appeal to the broadest cross-section of Americans by embracing communities only recently enjoying more of the full panoply of rights, businesses learned the hard way that Trump and his movement will not tolerate this and have mostly retreated to silence and neutrality. But they have also gone further, making clear as much as possible that they will not be a problem for him — either before he is elected or after.
This was the message JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon sent, from Davos, Switzerland of all places, early this year when he declared that Trump was “kind of right about NATO, kind of right about immigration,” that he “grew the economy quite well.” There is no reason to doubt that he spoke for many of the richest Americans and for other corporate leaders. There was no outcry among them that anyone could hear. The truth is, they have no financial reason to oppose Trump. They know that Trump’s White working-class followers don’t have to be paid off economically because most care chiefly about the culture wars. Trump can still cut taxes and reduce federal regulations and other obstacles to corporate profit. The rich and powerful will always have some purchase in a Trump administration if only because he needs and respects money and will want to make deals for himself and his family, as he did in a first term. Whatever moral or political qualms business leaders may have about Trump, the bottom line dictates that they get along with him, and if that means turning a blind eye to his unconstitutional actions — Dimon’s favorable recounting of Trump’s first term notably ignored his attempt to overthrow the government — then so be it.
We already know that little or no opposition will come from the Republican Party ecosystem. Among elected officials, the few willing to stand up to Trump have either been driven out of the party or are retiring so fast that they cannot even bear to finish out their terms. Those who remain have accepted Trump’s iron rule and therefore now have an interest in his success.
But what about the average Republican voter, the “normal” Republicans who happily voted for George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney? Do they not see the difference between those Republicans and Trump — or do they not care? They, too, may feel their narrow interests are served by a Trump victory, and although they may not be Christian nationalists themselves, their views as White Americans make them sympathetic to the complaints of the anti-liberals. They, too, may feel they — or their children — are at a disadvantage in a system dedicated to diversity and wokeness. Their annoyance with a liberalism that has “gone too far” makes them susceptible to Trump’s appeal, and, more importantly, unconcerned about the threat he poses. Left to their own devices, they would not be interested in overthrowing the regime. But neither are they inclined to stand in the way of those who are.
Are these voters and GOP power players right to believe that they, like Dimon, will be just fine in a system no longer faithful to the Founders’ liberal ideals? Perhaps so. They will not be the first to suffer from a shift back toward a 1920s America. White Americans tolerated the systematic oppression of Black people for a century after the Civil War. They tolerated violence in the South, injustice in the courtrooms, a Supreme Court that refused to recognize the equal rights of Black people, women and various minorities. Will they rise up against a second Trump term infused by Christian and white nationalism, or will they acquiesce in the gradual dismantling of the liberal gains of the past eight decades?
The shame is that many White people today seem to have conveniently forgotten how much they and their forebears have depended on the Founders’ liberalism to gain their present status as fully equal members of American society and to enjoy the freedoms that they take for granted.
Most White Republicans, after all, do not have the “legacy European” lineage that Tucker Carlson praises. They do not have ancestors who stepped off the Mayflower or fought in the revolution. The ancestors of the great majority of “White” Americans today were not considered “White” when they first set foot on American shores. Irish Americans may no longer remember that the Thomas Nast cartoons of the late 19th century depicted the Irish as apelike creatures. Many Italian Americans may not recall that a riot made up of “New Orleans’ finest” lynched and murdered 11 Sicilian immigrants and were never charged.
Many Catholics seem to have forgotten that they were once the most despised group in America, such that one of the Founders, John Jay, wanted them excluded from citizenship altogether. Most White Americans were at one time members of despised immigrant groups. They were the victims of the very anti-liberalism they are now voting back into power. They climbed to equality using liberalism as their ladder, and now that they have reached their destination they would pull away the ladder and abandon liberalism. Having obtained their equality using the laws and institutions of liberalism, their passion for liberalism has faded.
The Founders understood, and feared, that the fervor for rights and liberalism that animated the revolution might not last. Writing in 1781, two years before the end of the war, Thomas Jefferson predicted that once the war ended, “we shall be going down hill.” The people would return to their quotidian lives, forgetting their passionate concern for rights, intent only on “making money.” They might never again come together “to effect a due respect for their rights,” and so their government would stop being solicitous of their rights. Over a half-century later, Lincoln, in his famous Lyceum address, lamented that the original spirit of the revolution had dissipated with time, leaving Americans with only the normal selfishness of human beings. The original “pillars of the temple of liberty” had “crumbled away.” A little over two decades later, the nation fell into civil war.
If the American system of government fails this year, it will not be because the institutions established by the Founders failed. It will not be because of new technologies or flaws in the Constitution. No system of government can protect against a determined tyrant. Only the people can. This year we will learn if they will.
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January 4, 2024 (Thursday)
The Democrats on the House Oversight Committee today released a 156-page report showing that when he was in the presidency, Trump received at least $7.8 million from 20 different governments, including those of China, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Malaysia, through businesses he owned.
The Democrats brought receipts.
According to the report—and the documents from Trump’s former accounting firm Mazars that are attached to it—the People’s Republic of China and companies substantially controlled by the PRC government paid at least $5,572,548 to Trump-owned properties while Trump was in office; Saudi Arabia paid at least $615,422; Qatar paid at least $465,744; Kuwait paid at least $300,000; India paid at least $282,764; Malaysia paid at least $248,962; Afghanistan paid at least $154,750; the Philippines paid at least $74,810; the United Arab Emirates paid at least $65,225. The list went on and on.
The committee Democrats explained that these payments were likely only a fraction of the actual money exchanged, since they cover only four of more than 500 entities Trump owned at the time. When the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in January 2023, Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) stopped the investigation before Mazars had produced the documents the committee had asked for when Democrats were in charge of it. Those records included documents relating to Russia, South Korea, South Africa, and Brazil.
Trump fought hard against the production of these documents, dragging out the court fight until September 2022. The committee worked on them for just four months before voters put Republicans in charge of the House and the investigation stopped.
These are the first hard numbers that show how foreign governments funneled money to the president while policies involving their countries were in front of him. The report notes, for example, that Trump refused to impose sanctions on Chinese banks that were helping the North Korean government; one of those banks was paying him close to $2 million in rent annually for commercial office space in Trump Tower.
The first article of the U.S. Constitution reads: “[N]o Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument [that is, salary, fee, or profit], Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
The report also contrasted powerfully with the attempt of Republicans on the Oversight Committee, led by Comer, to argue that Democratic Joe Biden has corruptly profited from the presidency.
In the Washington Post on December 26, 2023, Philip Bump noted that just after voters elected a Republican majority, Comer told the Washington Post that as soon as he was in charge of the Oversight Committee, he would use his power to “determine if this president and this White House are compromised because of the millions of dollars that his family has received from our adversaries in China, Russia and Ukraine.”
For the past year, while he and the committee have made a number of highly misleading statements to make it sound as if there are Biden family businesses involving the president (there are not) and the president was involved in them (he was not), their claims were never backed by any evidence. Bump noted in a piece on December 14, 2023, for example, that Comer told Fox News Channel personality Maria Bartiromo that “the Bidens” have “taken in” more than $24 million. In fact, Bump explained, Biden’s son Hunter and his business partners did receive such payments, but most of the money went to the business partners. About $7.5 million of it went to Hunter Biden. There is no evidence that any of it went to Joe Biden.
All of the committee’s claims have similar reality checks. Jonathan Yerushalmy of The Guardian wrote that after nearly 40,000 pages of bank records and dozens of hours of testimony, “no evidence has emerged that Biden acted corruptly or accepted bribes in his current or previous role.”
Still, the constant hyping of their claims on right-wing media led then–House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to authorize an impeachment inquiry in mid-September, and in mid-December, Republicans in the House formalized the inquiry.
There is more behind the attack on Biden than simply trying to even the score between him and Trump—who remains angry at his impeachments and has demanded Republicans retaliate—or to smear Biden through an “investigation,” which has been a standard technique of the Republicans since the mid-1990s.
Claiming that Biden is as corrupt as Trump undermines faith in our democracy. After all, if everyone is a crook, why does it matter which one is in office? And what makes American democracy any different from the authoritarian systems of Russia or Hungary or Venezuela, where leaders grab what they can for themselves and their followers?
Democracies are different from authoritarian governments because they have laws to prevent the corruption in which it appears Trump engaged. The fact that Republicans refuse to hold their own party members accountable to those laws while smearing their opponents says far more about them than it does about the nature of democracy.
It does, though, highlight that our democracy is in danger.
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Opinion The media’s worst lapse: Refusing to identify Trump as a cult leader
What caught my eye
After missing the significance of the MAGA movement in 2016, innumerable mainstream outlets spent thousands of hours, gallons of ink and billions of pixels trying to understand “the Trump voter.” How had democracy failed them? What did the rest of us miss about these Americans? The journey to Rust Belt diners became a cliché amid the newfound fascination with aggrieved White working-class Americans. But the theory that such voters were economic casualties of globalization turned out to be false. Surveys and analyses generally found that racial resentment and cultural panic, not economic distress, fueled their affinity for a would-be strongman.
Unfortunately, patronizing excuses (e.g., “they feel disrespected”) for their cultlike attachment to a figure increasingly divorced from reality largely took the place of exacting reporting on the right-wing cult that swallowed a large part of the Republican Party. In an effort to maintain false equivalence and normalize Trump, many media outlets seemed to ignore that the much of the GOP left the universe of democratic (small-d) politics and was no longer a traditional democratic (again, small-d) party with an agenda, a governing philosophy, a set of beliefs. The result: Trump was normalized and a false equivalence between the parties was created.
Instead of reporting Trump’s wild assertions as legitimate arguments, media outlets should explain how Trump rallies are designed to instill anger and cultivate his hold on people who believe whatever hooey he spouts. How different are these events from what we see in grainy images of European fascist rallies in the 1930s? (When Trump apologists insist that tens of millions of people cannot be part of a cult, it’s critical to remember mass fascist movements that swept entire populations.) The appeals to emotion, the specter of a malicious enemy, the fear of societal decline, the fascination with violence and the elation just to be in the presence of the leader are telltale signs of frenetic fascist gatherings. Trump’s language (“poisoning the blood”) even mimics Hitler’s calls for racial purity.
Even as Trump shows his authoritarian colors and his rants become angrier, more unhinged and more incoherent, his followers still meekly accept inane assertions (e.g., convicted Jan. 6, 2021, rioters are “hostages,” magnets dissolve in water, wind turbines drive whales insane). More of the media should be covering this phenomenon as it would any right-wing authoritarian movement in a foreign country.
Though polls continue to show Trump’s iron grip on his followers, mainstream outlets spend far too little attention on why and howMAGA member cling to demonstrably false beliefs, excuse what should be inexcusable conduct and treat him as infallible. Outlets should routinely consult psychologists and historians to ask the vital questions: How do people abandon rationality? What drives their fury and anxiety? How does an authoritarian figure maintain his hold on followers? How do ideas of racial purity play into it? Media outlets fail news consumers when they do not explain the authoritarian playbook that Trump employs. Americans need media outlets to spell out what is happening.
“Authoritarian, not democratic dynamics, hold the key to Trump’s behavior as a candidate now and in the future,” historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote. “The main goals of his campaign events are not to advance policy proposals but rather to prop up his personality cult, circulate his lies, and emotionally retrain Americans to see violence as positive and even patriotic.”
Plenty of experts are available to dissect the phenomenon. Expert Steven Hassan, for example, explained to the Atlantic’s Peter Sagal that, as Sagal wrote, “the MAGA movement checks all the boxes of his ‘BITE’ model of cult mind control — behavior, information, thought, and emotional control.” Sagal continued, “Like all cult leaders, [Hassan] argues, Trump restricts the information his followers are allowed to accept; demands purity of belief (beliefs that can change from moment to moment, as per his whims and needs); and appeals to his followers through the conjuring of primal emotions — not just fear but also joy.” (Another expert, Daniella Mestyanek Young, explained: “The first rule of cults is: you’re never in a cult. The second rule of cults is: the cult will forgive any sin, except the sin of leaving. The third rule of cults is: even if he did it, that doesn’t mean he’s guilty.”)
A message from a mentally sound, serious leader (President Biden) cannot be equated with the message of an authoritarian who seeks absolute power through a web of disinformation and, if need be, violence. (When the media doesn’t grasp this, we get laughable headlines such as: “Clashing Over Jan. 6, Trump and Biden Show Reality Is at Stake in 2024.”)
Instead of probing why MAGA followers, despite all evidence to the contrary, deny that Trump was an insurrectionist and a proven liar, pollsters insist on asking Trump followers which candidate they think might better handle, for example, health care. The answer for Republicans (Trump! Trump!) has nothing to do with the question (Trump never had a health-care plan, you recall), and the question has nothing to do with the campaign.
The race between an ordinary democratic candidate and an unhinged fascist is not a normal American election. At stake is whether a democracy can protect itself from a malicious candidate with narcissistic tendencies or a rational electorate can beat back a dangerous, lawless cult of personality. Unfortunately, too many media outlets have not caught on or, worse, simply feign ignorance to avoid coming down on the side of democracy, rationality and truth.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/12/media-trump-cult/
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INDIANOLA, Iowa — They lined up for hours, some of them, in the minus-38-degree wind chill to see their candidate. It was the only rally Donald Trump was giving in the state in the days before Monday’s caucuses, so for the MAGA faithful, this was the golden ticket.
For the lucky 500 Trump followers admitted to the event space, the Trump campaign played a video reminding voters that Trump had already come in first place in the God primary.
“And on June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God gave us Trump,” the narrator proclaimed.
“God said, ‘I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office and stay past midnight. … So God made Trump.”
“‘I need somebody with arms strong enough to rassle the deep state and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild.’ … So God gave us Trump.”
And then it came to pass, a few minutes later, that this midwife-turned-prophet took the stage in the ballroom, and he spake thus to his flock:
“We’ve got a crooked country,” run by “stupid people,” “corrupt,” “incompetent,” “the worst.”
Trump, in the gospel according to Trump, was the victim of “hoaxes,” “witch hunts,” “lies,” “fake indictments,” “fake trials,” judges who “are animals,” a “rigged election,” “rigged indictments,” and a “rigged Department of Justice where we have radical left, bad people, lunatics.”
The nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., “is a rat-infested, graffiti infested shithole,” he said, with swastikas all over the national monuments.
His opponents, the prophet Trump continued, are “Marxists,” “communists,” “fascists,” “liars, cheaters, thugs, perverts, frauds, crooks, freaks, creeps,” “warmongers” and “globalists.”
Immigrants are like a “vicious snake,” whose “bite is poisonous,” he told them, and there is an “invasion” at the border by “terrorists,” “jailbirds” and “drug lords.”
“Our country is dying,” he informed them. And, by the way, “You’re very close to World War Three.”
Have a nice day!
It was, in short, a slightly updated version of the rage, paranoia, victimhood, lies and demonization that propelled Trump’s popularity over the past eight years. Yet there was something else Trump said in his appearance here at Simpson College south of Des Moines that, I’m sorry to say, seems reasonably accurate.
“MAGA is taking over,” he told his chilled but enraptured supporters. “On the fake news, they say MAGA represents 44 percent of the Republicans. No, no. MAGA represents 95 percent of the Republican Party.”
His numbers might be off, but the observation is true. Iowa’s Republican presidential caucuses Monday night were an overwhelming triumph for Trump, who in early results was more than 30 points ahead of his nearest competitor and getting more votes than the rest of the field combined. The voters had shown that there essentially is no Republican other than a MAGA Republican.
Trump’s opponents deserve partial blame for that, for failing to take him on more directly. But some of their candidacies, in tone and substance, offered real alternatives to Trump’s rage-filled nativism. The ominous truth is there just wasn’t appetite in the electorate for a non-Trumpian candidate. In Iowa — and probably elsewhere, alas — they are all MAGA Republicans now.
People here just won’t stop complaining about the weather.
“On Monday, it’s going to be so cold — like, I don’t even know what negative-15 is,” said Nikki Haley.
“Maybe negative-20,” fretted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Trump called off all but one of his pre-caucus rallies for “the safety of MAGA patriots across Iowa.”
What a bunch of snowflakes!
Admittedly, it is nippy here — exposed skin can succumb to frostbite in about 10 minutes — but the Republican candidates should have been well used to this by now. The GOP presidential primary campaign has been frozen for the better part of a year.
Trump led by a mile in the early polls. He led by a mile in the final polls. Iowa’s frigid Republican voters never warmed to any message that isn’t MAGA.
The candidates who explicitly opposed Trump — Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson — went nowhere. Recognizing the peril of opposing Trump, the other candidates did their best to emphasize their similarities with him.
DeSantis offered all of the Trump thuggery and culture wars with none of the Trump pizazz. Vivek Ramaswamy promised to be Trumpier than Trump. Even Haley, who offered the greatest contrast with Trump, was so mild in her critique of the man that she’s broadly seen as auditioning to be his vice president. This isn’t cowardice on her part but a concession to reality. Consider that, when the Des Moines Register poll asked likely Republican caucus voters last month about Trump’s Nazi-tinged talk of migrants “poisoning the blood” of the country and his political opponents being “vermin,” pluralities said such statements made them more likely to support Trump.
I used to think there was a large enough anti-Trump contingent in the Republican electorate that, if given a clear alternative to the demagogue, they would take it. But in Iowa, the voters had such a chance — and stuck with Trump.
It’s fair to ask whether the candidates wasted their time even coming to Iowa. Trump skipped the debates and did minimal campaigning here, and the old notion that retail politics in Iowa can propel little-known candidates to glory seemed no longer to apply. It was never a contest.
It’s obvious that journalists wasted their time; more than 1,000 came for the caucuses, waiting out the storm at the Hotel Fort Des Moines speakeasy, dining with each other, outnumbering actual Iowans at candidate events and descending paparazzi-style on the few genuine voters present. Leaving a Haley event, I heard one voter rebuff a reporter’s request for an interview: “I’ve already done three, but thank you.”
I arrived in Des Moines Thursday morning and, because Trump held only the one rally, on Sunday, I had three days to spend with the losers, examining their failures to launch.
On Friday morning, during the height of a blizzard, the Iowa state police urged people to “stay home” because of “extremely dangerous” conditions. “Please, don’t put yourself or others in danger.”
An hour later, DeSantis went right ahead with his event in the Des Moines suburb of Ankeny, Iowa.
Maybe the guy just celebrates recklessness. The evening before, at a DeSantis appearance at a barbecue place in Ames, I watched as a climate-change demonstrator climbed the stage while the candidate was speaking and unfurled a “DeSantis: Climate Criminal” banner.
These demonstrators have routinely disrupted candidate appearances here, and they’re usually led out after a momentary interruption. But at the DeSantis event, one of his security staff ran across the stage, caught the demonstrator with a flying tackle and the two fell from the stage to the floor with a sickening thud. There were gasps and murmurs in the room.
DeSantis joked about the sudden, unprovoked violence. He mocked the kid for “stumbling around to get his flag out.” He then boasted about a similar tackle at one of his events two nights earlier, when the demonstrators “got taken down and done, all this stuff.”
All this stuff. Despite a year of practice, DeSantis is still painfully awkward attempting to sound human. He wants supporters to know that “my, um, my, my wife … is out knocking on people’s doors, doing all this stuff.” The Machine Shed restaurant chain, he adds, is where, “you know, they have the different stuff where you can buy the gizmos or the things.” If elected, he promises, “we’re going to do that stuff.”
He makes sure to touch all culture-war buttons. Anthony Fauci. George Soros. Teachers unions. Woke government. Trans kids. Indoctrination camps. The diversity-equity-inclusion cartel. The D.C. ruling class. A sexualized curriculum. He mechanically responds to interlocutors: “Great question. What’s your name?”
And he closes each speech with the same 150 words, recited in a singsong voice, sounding bored by his own canned speech. “What we are called upon to do is to preserve what George Washington called the sacred fire of liberty,” he recites. “This is the fire that burned in Independence Hall in 1776 … It’s a fire that burned at a cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, when our nation’s first Republican president pledged this nation to a new birth of freedom. It’s a fire that burned on the beaches of Normandy when a merry band of brothers stormed the shores.”
Maybe DeSantis really believes the heroes of D-Day were “merry” under machine-gun fire, but his audiences are not merry. They start filing out well before he finishes his dreary appearances.
DeSantis generally avoids Trump, other than to say vaguely that “Donald Trump is running for his issues” while “I’m running solely for your issues,” whatever those are. Asked directly about Trump at an event in Clive, Iowa, DeSantis gingerly replied that “if he’s the nominee, the whole election is going to be about legal issues.” But he quickly added that the prosecutions are “unfair” and assured his listeners that “you can appreciate what Donald Trump did.”
So if they appreciate Trump and think he’s being treated unfairly, why would they vote for a cheap imitation?
Continued next post
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Ramaswamy, despite holding more than 360 events in Iowa over the past year, was polling in the single digits on the eve of the caucus. But that didn’t stop him from risking the lives of his few supporters. Ramaswamy’s SUV skidded into a snow ditch last week and required the help of a “good Iowan” to push him out. He maintained his schedule anyway, likening himself to the father of our country: “George Washington didn’t complain about the weather when he crossed the Delaware.”
During the blizzard, I drove with colleagues to see him address supporters at a Comfort Inn in West Des Moines. Except there were hardly any supporters. Instead, the room was filled with college and high school kids visiting for the caucuses — and about 15 climate-change demonstrators, one of whom began heckling moments into the event.
“You lie, dude! You’re a liar!”
Ramaswamy, in a dig at DeSantis, said “we’re not going to have a security guard or a police officer tackle him” — and instead invited demonstrators to sit in the front row and ask questions. This was a miscalculation, and before long the room was festooned with yellow banners announcing “Vivek: Climate Criminal,” while the group chanted: “Vivek is a liar! The planet is on fire!”
One man took the microphone and complained to the protesters that he had come “all the way from Puerto Rico” to hear Ramaswamy.
“I came all the way from California!” retorted one of the demonstrators.
Finally, the campaign cleared out the hecklers, and Ramaswamy, alleging that the activists were part of a “quasi-religious cult,” offered his exotic view that “the earth is more covered by green surface area today than it was a century ago because carbon dioxide is plant food.”
The denial of climate-change is but one plank in Ramaswamy’s zany platform, which holds that Jan. 6, 2021, was an “inside job” and white supremacy is a myth. During the blizzard, he told the crowd of his plans to fire 75 percent of the federal workforce and to abolish the FBI as part of his fight against the imaginary “shadow government in the deep state.” He also wants to revive “our inner animal spirit.”
Adding to the surreal environment, longtime Republican pollster Frank Luntz rose, praising Ramaswamy’s handling of the demonstrators and asking: “How do we get civility? How do we get decency?” This from the man who, as Newt Gingrich’s wordsmith, was widely credited with persuading Republicans to label Democrats “traitors,” “sick” and “corrupt.”
Ramaswamy’s solution for restoring civility included a suggestion that if “somebody hits you, you hit him back 10 times harder.”
His strategy for the Iowa caucuses was just as confounding: He would hug Trump as tightly as possible. Ramaswamy hailed Trump as “the business guy who can execute and break things,” and gushed that there’s “a lot of what Donald Trump did that I love and respect.” His only complaint was that Trump didn’t go far enough to sack federal workers and vitiate the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship.
DeSantis offered Trumpian violence. Ramaswamy offered Trumpian conspiracy nonsense. Is there nobody who actually offers an alternative to Trump? Why, yes there is. Unfortunately, he was assaulted over the weekend by a giant carrot.
I walked through downtown Des Moines Saturday night (temperature: -10) to see Hutchinson, the one true Trump critic in the race after Chris Christie’s departure. At a co-working space, the former Arkansas governor was addressing a group of 100 visiting students — hardly a caucus voter among them — when a person in a carrot costume snuck onstage. (Unlike DeSantis, Hutchinson lacked the staff to intercept, much less tackle, the interloping vegetable.) From an animal rights group, the carrot carried a sign that said “Eat me!”
Hutchinson smiled, confused, and tried to stick to his message.
“If you’re saying January 6 was a patriotic act, you’re not telling the truth to Americans,” he said. He called Trump’s bid “a frail candidacy” and “a failed candidacy” that will be exposed in court. “Does it not erode confidence in our judicial system that you’ve got somebody running for president of the United States who goes out there and attacks the judge, attacks the prosecutor, attacks the jury, attacks everybody?”
One of the students noted that Trump’s approach to politics “resonates with a lot of Republicans.”
“If you’re right in your analysis, I lose,” Hutchinson responded.
An hour later, the final Des Moines Register poll showed Hutchinson getting 1 percent to Trump’s 48 percent.
Haley, by contrast, edged DeSantis to gain second place in the poll — trailing Trump by a mere 28 points. Her attempts to win the anti-Trump vote without actually saying anything that sounds anti-Trump has been a gymnastic feat, and she continued it in the final days.
I caught up with her campaign at a stop in Ankeny, where she held forth in a wedding venue in an upscale development of lofts, boutiques and yoga. In the parking lot for her event assembled an armada of Audis, Cadillacs and Lexuses, for this was Haley’s base: what remains of the country club, chamber-of-commerce Republicans who dislike Trump.
But her challenges to the front-runner are timid. “I think President Trump was the right president at the right time. I agree with a lot of his policies,” she assures every audience. “But, rightly or wrongly, chaos has followed him.”
Chaos follows Trump — through no fault of his own!
“You deserve an America without drama. You deserve an America that’s better than whether you have a couple of 80-year-olds running for president,” was as tough a critique as she offered.
She scolded the Trump administration (of which she was a part) of approving too many technology sales to China, and gently chided him for adding $8 trillion to the debt: “Under President Trump, everybody talks about how good our economy was. It was good, but at what cost?”
Still, Haley, for all her timidity, was at least implicitly offering a serious, viable, alternative to Trump. Hers is a traditional Republican message of balanced budgets, lower taxes, help for small business, a strong national defense. “The first thing I think you do is you send an accountant to the White House,” she told them. Woo-hoo! She made only a passing nod to the culture wars that so delight the MAGA crowd, briefly disapproving of “biological boys playing in girls’ sports.”
Where Trump, DeSantis and Ramaswamy are dark, even apocalyptic, Haley is sunny. She speaks plainly of her party’s need to reverse course. “Republicans have lost the last seven of eight popular votes for president,” she says, asking to “leave the negativity and the baggage behind.”
She points out that she polls better against Biden than the others, and it’s true. Were she the nominee, Republicans would likely win the presidency in a landslide. But this Republican electorate wants something different.
They want a guy who talks about being a “dictator” on day one, echoes Hitler in his rhetoric about ethnic minorities, demands absolute immunity from legal liability and threatens “bedlam” if he’s prosecuted.
They want a guy who, after all these years, still derides “Barack Hussein Obama” and “Pocahontas” Elizabeth Warren, as he did in Indianola on Sunday. They want a guy who threatens, as president, to “direct a completely overhauled DOJ to investigate every radical, out-of-control prosecutor because of their illegal, racist … enforcement of the law.”
And they want a man who promises: “We will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmonger … We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that truly hates our country. We will rout the fake news media. And we will evict Crooked Joe Biden from the White House.” The crowd, in their MAGA caps and Trump 47 jerseys, cheered their candidate and broke into spontaneous chants of “Trump!” and “USA!”
Let there be no more excuses made that Republican voters haven’t been given an alternative. They had a choice — and they chose Trump.
Opinion | Iowa makes it clear that all Republicans are Trump Republicans - The Washington Post
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Texas border showdown is far-right magnet, hate trackers warn
As a convoy gathers in Eagle Pass, extremism monitors see vestiges of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol in Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s defiance of federal orders
EAGLE PASS, Tex. — A motley crew is gathering here this weekend: militia-style groups invoking 1776 and the Civil War. Christian nationalists praying for the chance to confront evil. Racists stoking fear about the “replacement” of White people. Election deniers, anti-vaccination crusaders, conspiracy theorists.And, at the center, a prominent Republican figure whose fiery rhetoric acts as a magnet.
Right-wing extremists are dusting off the blueprint for the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol and using it to rally support for their cause du jour: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s showdown with the federal government over border enforcement. Monitoring groups warn that Abbott’s posturing, like Trump’s “Stop the Steal” effort, heightens the risk of political violence as supporters converge on Eagle Pass, a frontier outpost of 28,000.
Summed up by one observer as “slow-motion secession,” the unrest in Texas is a case study in how once-fringe ideologies have been laundered into mainstream Republican politics.
On Friday, Abbott posted on social media that Texas “will not back down.” For weeks, his statements have included menacing-sounding messages saying that he’s “declared an invasion,” and would use “unprecedented action” to stop illegal crossings.
Civil rights group were outraged when Abbott, asked by a radio interviewer about the maximum pressure he could use at the border, replied: “The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”
Extremism researchers warn that Abbott’s stand against federal orders is communicated in language that glorifies vigilantism and promotes white supremacist talking points, the latest example of the GOP’s hard-right swing in the Trump era.
“This rhetoric, combined with Texas’s standoff with the federal government, is applauded by the same far-right movements that engage in hate crimes, domestic terrorism and were prominent at the January 6 insurrection,” said Heidi Beirich of the nonprofit Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “All of this should give us pause.”
Abbott’s rebellion began last month when he seized control of Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, on the banks of the Rio Grande, and shut out U.S. Border Patrol agents who had long used the area as a staging point. Supporters praised him for taking a stand against illegal crossings they describe as at “invasion” levels. Detractors viewed the move as inhumane and a dangerous overreach of state power.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ordered Abbott to allow Border Patrol to remove or cut razor wire barriers that prevent agents from reaching the river to help migrants in distress. Instead, Abbott is installing more wire, his defiance backed by 25 Republican governors who signed a letter of support. Trump, who is sailing toward the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, also boosted Abbott, writing on Truth Social that Texas “must be given full support to repel the invasion.”
Abbott and other GOP leaders use the same tropes about migrants as white-power groups and frequently echo the racist “great replacement theory,” which imagines the engineered replacement of White people in western societies. Hate trackers say violent movements have wasted little time in seizing on the political opening.
Beirich said her center’s research team has “documented an online explosion of invasion and great replacement rhetoric” related to Texas and has observed how white supremacists, Proud Boys and other extremist groups are “taking advantage of the standoff to push their propaganda and recruit new members.”
Texas Proud Boys factions have shared posts referring to “brown immigrant invaders” and urging followers to “grab your guns.” Beirich said a neo-Nazi network issued a rallying cry “asking for White men to join the resistance” in Texas.
Concerns this weekend are focused on a “Take Back Our Border” caravan of right-wing activists — billing themselves as “God’s army” — heading to Texas before planned stops in other states along the southern border. Organized mainly online, the convoy is what extremism researchers see as a microcosm of the modern-day American right: angry at the federal government, hostile toward marginalized groups, and tolerant of violent rhetoric about political enemies.
Devin Burghart of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a nonprofit focused on threats to democracy, traced the paramilitary connections of convoy organizers, linking them to movements that took up arms in previous standoffs with the federal government or had a role in the Capitol attack.
“From the convoy’s steering committee on down, the protest comprises many of the same dangerous elements as the January 6 insurrection,” Burghart said, referring to far-right umbrella movements.
The convoy left from Virginia Beach, Va., on Monday in what Vice News, which is closely monitoring the movement, described as “a sad start” of just a couple dozen vehicles, nowhere near the 700,000 figure some participants had touted. Momentum has since picked up, however, with 100 or more vehicles joining as the caravan headed southwest to Texas.
There’s no telling how many people will join Abbott’s showdown over the next couple of days. Such right-wing mobilizations often collapse at the last minute — some participants get cold feet, others give in to paranoia that the entire event is a setup by federal agents to entrap “patriots.” Whether the rallies erupt or fizzle, extremism researchers say, the consequences will outlast the weekend.
“I’m less concerned about this particular stunt,” Burghart said, “and more concerned about the long-term implications of this type of rhetoric becoming a reality.”
‘Revival’ of the right
Convoy organizers reject the extremist label and insist they are making efforts to ensure the weekend is violence-free. Participants have been asked not to bring long guns, for example, though sidearms are fine.
Anson Bills, a convoy organizer affiliated with Cornerstone Children’s Ranch in Quemado, Tex., a nonprofit hosting one of the weekend events, said he met with “extremely welcoming” officials from the Texas Department of Public Safety and provided them with a list of more than a dozen individuals and groups that were banned from the convoy and who, if they show up, will be removed by security.
Since the Jan. 6 prosecutions, Bills said, “people have been scared” to stage big rallies. This moment, he said, offers the chance for a relaunch with a focus on border enforcement, a unifying point for the right.
“It’s about time,” said Bills, speaking Thursday afternoon at the ranch, where preparations were underway for the convoy arrival.
At the compound’s front gate Thursday afternoon, a white-haired guitarist played the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” to welcome guests. American, Israeli and Christian flags hung on three poles. Posters bearing Bible verses and patriotic messaging hung from the colorful walls. Sloppy joes and hot dogs were on the menu; bottles of iced tea were stacked near the back of the room. A fully stocked medical bay boasted a stretcher-like bed and first-aid supplies.
Pointing to the grassy spot where a stage will be erected for speakers and preachers, Bills said he envisioned the event as a “revival.”
The caravan expected Friday has grown to 5 miles long, he said. Organizers obtained a permit for convoy truckers to park their vehicles along a country road next to an irrigation canal that supplies water to the surrounding farms and ranches.
Since 2021, Bills, also a Republican Party official in Uvalde County, has used the Cornerstone Children’s camp as a base for freelance “security services” offered to residents living along a busy river crossing point about 20 miles northwest of Eagle Pass.
There, Bills said, he and other volunteers solicit permission from landowners to patrol river-adjacent properties that routinely fall victim to break-ins and car thefts. They “fill in the gaps” left open by law enforcement. He calls it a civilian patrol; extremism monitors call it an example of right-wing paramilitary groups appointing themselves border security.
Bills drew distinctions between the volunteers he works with and other militia-style formations, saying they’re not “running around with long rifles and camouflage,” and make sure to pass on tips to law enforcement agencies.
“I see this as a humanitarian mission,” Bills said. “And a constitutional one.”
But some militia-style factions that support Abbott’s stand in principle are staying away from the rallies and are encouraging other groups to do the same.
Sam Hall, leader of the Texas-based Patriots for America militia group, cited Jan. 6 as a cautionary tale about what can happen when “a few bad actors” take over an otherwise peaceful rally. Speaking in a Facebook live video, Hall said violence this weekend would “hand the Biden regime the narrative they so desperately want” in an election year.
“If that powder keg explodes, it’s going to explode right in the face of the right,” Hall warned.
Fearing an influx of anti-immigrant protesters, some Latino rights groups are recommending security precautions to local communities. Citing Abbott’s “inciteful political rhetoric,” the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the nation’s oldest Hispanic civil rights group, urged members in Texas to “be on alert for armed out-of-state extremists with a hate agenda.”
Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Tex.) represents El Paso, where the threat of hate-fueled violence is not hypothetical. In 2019, a gunman espousing great replacement theory and a desire to stop what he called a “Hispanic invasion” opened fire on a Walmart crowded with Latino shoppers, killing 23 in the deadliest attack on Latinos in U.S. history.
Escobar, on a call Thursday with reporters, said she hears Republican colleagues using the same “invasion” language as the killer in everyday business on Capitol Hill.
“Because it is in the halls of power, because it is in committee hearings, because it is coming from the mouths of some of the most powerful politicians in our country, it is being normalized,” she said. “And we have to stop that.”
Texas border showdown is far-right magnet, hate trackers warn - The Washington Post
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‘Bring our country back from hell’
The next day, in Waterford Township, thousands of people started lining up outside the Oakland County airport, their breath pluming in the cold wind as they waited for hours in temperatures below 30 degrees. Their heavy coats concealed their festive Trump-branded apparel, which they could supplement at swag stands hawking Trump hats and Trump gloves, alongside bumper stickers reading “Joe and the Hoe Gotta Go” and “USA, Love It or Leave It.” A Trump float rolled up and down the road blasting classic rock and blaring “Save America!”
“The walk from the parking lot dang near killed me,” said Mark Forton, a Republican activist from neighboring Macomb County, known as an electoral bellwether. He joked that he had walked past a police SUV and asked the officer, “If I reach in there and slap you around a little bit, would you arrest me and take me to a nice warm jail?”
He added: “Macomb went big for Trump in 2016, and we’ll do it again. The people want him.”
Through the Secret Service screening, it was still cold inside an unheated plane hangar, but packed enough that some coats could come off to reveal a sweatshirt showing an assault rifle and the words “I will not comply,” a T-shirt that said “Democrats are Communists,” and another with the word “BULL” next to a caricature of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).
The campaign passed out signs that said “FIRE BIDEN,” and the audience members shouted, “Joe can go to hell!” and “F--- Joe Biden!” as Rep. Lisa C. McClain (R-Mich.) warmed up the crowd. At the mention of Whitmer, the crowd chanted, “Lock her up!” They danced and sang along to Pitbull and Johnny Cash, as much to stay warm as to have fun.
One woman screamed and then the entire crowd erupted in cheers as Trump’s gleaming jet glided past the opening in the back of the hangar, a deep blue missile across the pale pink dusk sky. He was flying in from a stop-off in Philadelphia to unveil a line of gold-colored sneakers. A drumroll thundered over the loudspeakers, and the crowd broke into a Trump chant, but it was not time for his grand entrance yet — just the intro of James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti’s duet of “It’s a Man’s World.”
A young girl complained that she could not see over the standing mass, and her father assured her she would see later, when people sat down. “He goes on for hours,” he said.
“I don’t want to be here for hours,” she whined.
“Then go wait in the car.”
“I’m only 11, I don’t care about politics.”
“Shut up.”
When Trump did appear, it got only harder to see as people held up their hands to wave and record him on their phones. A woman in an orange sweatshirt stood on her chair, and a man behind her barked, “Hey, Orange! Sit down!”
“We’re not worried about the primary,” Trump said from under a red MAGA cap, gesticulating in black leather gloves as the crowd roared. “We want to win Nov. 5. We’re going to bring our country back from hell.”
“That’s right!” one person shouted back.
In one of his signature tactics, Trump spun the same accusations against him directly around on his opponents. Charged with trying to overturn the 2020 election, he called his prosecution a “threat to democracy.” Having named the critics he wants to punish in a second term, he described the array of civil and legal cases against himas all products of “bitterness and revenge and hatred.”
He assailed the $355 million fine issued the day before in a New York civil fraud trail against his businesses as an “atrocity” and a “disgusting charade,” calling the attorney general who brought the case and the judge, Arthur F. Engoron, who decided it “lunatics.”
“Treason!” a supporter shouted.
“Engoron’s a moron!” said another.
Trump polled the audience on which nickname he should use for Biden, “Crooked” or “Sleepy,” and some in the crowd shouted back their own suggestions. “Creepy Joe!” “Demented Joe!” “Suicide Joe!” “Traitor!” “Pedo!”
Trump derided the “fake news,” and the crowd turned around to jeer and throw up middle fingers at the press risers. He repeated his regular pledge to “drive out the globalists” and “cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. They truly do. They hate our country.”
“We are like the stupid country,” Trump said. Without evidence, he accused migrants of coming from “insane asylums” and prisons.
“Deport the illegals!” a supporter cried out.
“Our cities, they’re falling apart. Our country is falling apart. We’re like a third-world nation,” Trump said.
The 11-year-old fell asleep on the floor, while her brother, wearing socks stitched with “Let’s Go Brandon” (code for a profane attack on Biden), stood on a chair for a better view.
“You’re freezing your ass off, right?” Trump said to more cheers and whistles. “But it’s warm because there’s love in this room. Right?”
“Yes!” the crowd shouted back.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/19/biden-trump-michigan-presidential-campaign/
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But now so-called “internment camps” are back in the news.
Trump has promised his supporters that in a second term he would launch “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” To deport as many as ten million of what he called “foreign national invaders,” Trump advisor Stephen Miller explained on a November podcast, the administration would federalize National Guard troops from Republican-dominated states and send them around the country to round people up, moving them to “large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in Texas,” that would serve as internment camps.
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Opinion We have a radical democracy. Will Trump voters destroy it?
For some time, it was possible to believe that many voters could not see the threat Donald Trump poses to America’s liberal democracy, and many still profess not to see it. But now, a little more than six months from Election Day, it’s hard to believe they don’t. The warning signs are clear enough. Trump himself offers a new reason for concern almost every day. People may choose to ignore the warnings or persuade themselves not to worry, but they can see what we all see, and that should be enough.
How to explain their willingness to support Trump despite the risk he poses to our system of government? The answer is not rapidly changing technology, widening inequality, unsuccessful foreign policies or unrest on university campuses but something much deeper and more fundamental. It is what the Founders worried about and Abraham Lincoln warned about: a decline in what they called public virtue. They feared it would be hard to sustain popular support for the revolutionary liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence, and they worried that the virtuous love of liberty and equality would in time give way to narrow, selfish interest. Although James Madison and his colleagues hoped to establish a government on the solid foundation of self-interest, even Madison acknowledged that no government by the people could be sustained if the people themselves did not have sufficient dedication to the liberal ideals of the Declaration. The people had to love liberty, not just for themselves but as an abstract ideal for all humans.
Americans are going down this route today because too many no longer care enough whether the system the Founders created survives and are ceding the ground to those, led by Trump, who actively seek to overthrow what so many of them call “the regime.” This “regime” they are referring to is the unique political system established by the Founders based on the principles of universal equality and natural rights. That, plain and simple, is what this election is about. “A republic if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin allegedly said of the government created by the Constitutional Convention in 1787. This is the year we may choose not to keep it.
A healthy republic would not be debating whether Trump and his followers seek the overthrow of the Founders’ system of liberal democracy. What more do people need to see than his well-documented attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power with the storming of the U.S. Capitol, the elaborate scheme to create false electoral slates in key states, the clear evidence that he bullied officials in some states to “find” more votes, and to persuade Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the legitimate results? What more do they need to know than that Trump continues to insist he won that election and celebrates as heroes and “patriots” the people who invaded the U.S. Capitol and smashed policemen’s faces with the stated aim of forcing Congress to negate the election results? As one 56-year-old Michigan woman present at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 explained: “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”
Trump not only acknowledges his goals, past and present; he promises to do it again if he loses this year. For the third straight election, he is claiming that if he loses, then the vote will have been fraudulent. He has warned of uprisings, of “bedlam” and a “bloodbath” and he has made clear that he will again be the promoter of this violence, just as he was on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump explicitly warned in 2020 that he would not accept the election results if he lost, and he didn’t. This year he is saying it again. Were there no other charges against him, no other reason to be concerned about his return to the presidency, this alone would be sufficient to oppose him. He does not respect and has never pledged to abide by the democratic processes established by the Constitution. On the contrary, he has explicitly promised to violate the Constitution when he deems it necessary. That by itself makes him a unique candidate in American history and should be disqualifying.
This kind of open challenge to our democracy was never meant to be addressed by the courts. As the Founders well understood, you don’t serve a subpoena to a would-be tyrant and tell him to lawyer up. Nor was it meant to be addressed by the normal processes of democratic elections. They knew, and feared, that a demagogue could capture the allegiance of enough voters to overthrow the system. That was why they gave Congress, and particularly the Senate, supposedly more immune from popular pressures, the power to impeach and remove presidents and to deny them the opportunity to run again — and not simply because they violated some law but because they posed a clear and present danger to the republic. After Trump’s attempt to overthrow the government in 2020, Congress had a chance to use the method prescribed by the Founders in precisely the circumstances they envisioned. But Senate Republicans, out of a combination of ambition and cowardice, refused to play the vital role the Founders envisioned for them. The result is that the nightmare feared by the Founders is one election away from becoming reality.
The problem with Trump is not that he has some carefully thought-out plan for seizing power, much less an elaborate ideological justification for doing so. (Others do have such plans and such justifications, including many of those who will populate his administration — more on that in a moment.) With Trump, everything is about him and his immediate needs. He will run roughshod over the laws and Constitution simply to get what he wants for himself, his family and his business interests. Americans know that if he is elected, he would abuse the justice system to go after his opponents. They know this because he says so. “I am your retribution!” he declares, and by “your” he means “my.” Americans know he would use his power as president to try to solve his financial problems. He did it as president and is doing it now as a presidential candidate. They know he would not respect the results of fair elections if he loses, which is the very definition of a tyrant.
So, why will so many vote for him anyway? For a significant segment of the Republican electorate, the white-hot core of the Trump movement, it is because they want to see the system overthrown. This should not come as a shock, for it is not a new phenomenon. On the contrary, it is as old as the republic. Historians have written about the “liberal tradition” in America, but there has from the beginning also been an anti-liberal tradition: large numbers of Americans determined to preserve preliberal traditions, hierarchies and beliefs against the secular liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights. The Founders based the republic on a radical set of principles and assertions about government: that all human beings were created equal in their possession of certain “natural rights” that government was bound to respect and to safeguard. These rights did not derive from religious belief but were “self-evident.” They were not granted by the Christian God, by the crown or even by the Constitution. They were inherent in what it meant to be human.
This is the central tenet of liberalism. Before the American Revolution no government had ever been founded on liberal principles, and the vast majority of human beings had never believed in these natural rights — certainly not the Christian church in either its Protestant or Roman Catholic versions nor Islam nor Judaism nor Hinduism nor Buddhism. People might be equal in the eyes of their god, but no government or religious institution had ever been based on the principle of equal rights. Not even the English system was based on this principle but rather on monarchy, a ruling aristocracy and a contract between crown and subjects that was modified over the centuries but was not based on the principle of universal “natural” rights.
The Founders knew these ideas were radical, that they were inaugurating, in their own words, a novus ordo seclorum — a new order of the ages — that required a new way of thinking and acting. They knew, as well, that their own practices and those of 18th-century American society did not conform to their new revolutionary doctrines. They knew that slavery was contrary to the Declaration’s principles, though they permitted slavery to continue, hoping it would die a natural death. They knew that established churches were contrary to those principles because they impinged on that most important of rights, “freedom of conscience,” which was vital to the preservation of liberty, yet a number of states in the 18th and 19th centuries retained all kinds of religious tests for office. In short, they knew that a great many Americans did not in fact believe in the liberal principles of the revolution. As Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, put it, “We have changed our forms of government, but it remains yet to effect a revolution in our principles, opinions and manners so as to accommodate them to the forms of government we have adopted.” They did not insist that citizens believe in those principles. One could be an American citizen whether one believed in the Declaration or not.
And a great many did not. Leaders of the slaveholding South called the Declaration “a most pernicious falsehood.” South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun called the very idea of equal rights a “false doctrine.” They believed in democracy, but only if it was an exclusively White democracy. When democracy turned against them in 1860, they rebelled and sought an exit from the system. That rebellion never ended. It has been weakened, suppressed — sometimes by force — and driven underground, but it has never gone away. Although the South was militarily defeated and deprived of its special advantages in the Constitution, its hostility to the Founders’ liberalism did not abate. As Southern writer W.J. Cash observed in 1941, if the war had “smashed the southern world,” it had nevertheless “left the essential southern mind and will … entirely unshaken” and Southerners themselves determined “to hold fast to their own, to maintain their divergences, to remain what they had been and were.” In 1956, almost a century after the Civil War, a fifth of Congress, almost all Democrats — signed the “Southern Manifesto” calling on states to refuse to obey the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision to end segregation in public schools. Nothing had changed. Are we so surprised that for many Americans, nothing has changed even today?
Nor has anti-liberalism only been about race. For more than a century after the revolution, many if not most White Anglo-Saxon Protestants insisted that America was a Protestant nation. They did not believe Catholics possessed equal rights or should be treated as equals. The influential “second” Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s was anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish as well as anti-Black, which was why, unlike the original Klan, it flourished outside the South. Many regard today’s Christian nationalism as a fringe movement, but it has been a powerful and often dominant force throughout America’s history.
For two centuries, many White Americans have felt under siege by the Founders’ liberalism. They have been defeated in war and suppressed by threats of force, but more than that, they have been continually oppressed by a system designed by the Founders to preserve and strengthen liberalism against competing beliefs and hierarchies. Since World War II, the courts and the political system have pursued the Founders’ liberal goals with greater and greater fidelity, ending official segregation, driving religion from public schools, recognizing and defending the rights of women and minorities hitherto deprived of their “natural rights” because of religious, racial, and ethnic discrimination. The hegemony of liberalism has expanded, just as Lincoln hoped it would, “constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of colors everywhere.” Anti-liberal political scientist Patrick Deneen calls it “liberal totalitarianism,” and, apart from the hyperbole, he is right that liberalism has been steadily deepening and expanding under presidents of both parties since the 1940s.
The fury on the anti-liberal right against what is today called “wokeness” is nothing new. Anti-liberal movements in America, whether in defense of the White race or Christianity, and more often both together, have always claimed to be suffering under the expanding hegemony of liberalism. They have always claimed that a liberal government and society were depriving them of their “freedom” to live a life according to Christian teachings and were favoring various minority groups, especially Black people, at their expense. In the 1970s, influential theologian R.J. Rushdoony complained that the Christian in America had “no right to his identity” but was forced to recognize “all others and their ‘rights.’” And he was correct if a Christian’s “rights” included the right not only to lead a Christian life oneself but to impose that life on the entire society or if a White person’s “freedom” included the freedom to preserve white primacy in society. In the 19th century, enslavers insisted they were deprived of their “freedom” to hold human beings as property; Southerners in the post-Reconstruction era insisted on their “freedom” to oppress Black citizens in their states.
Today, anti-liberals in American society are indeed deprived of their “freedom” to impose their religious and racial views on society, on public schools, on the public square and on the laws of the nation. What Christian nationalists call “liberal totalitarianism,” the Founders called “freedom of conscience.”
Continued next post
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Six decades ago, people like Rushdoony were responding not to “woke” corporations or Black Lives Matter but to civil rights legislation. Today, anti-liberal conservatives complain about school curriculums that acknowledge the racism that has shaped America’s history, but even five decades ago, before the invention of “critical race theory,” anti-liberal White people such as Rushdoony insisted that the “white man” was being “systematically indoctrinated into believing he is guilty of enslaving and abusing the Negro.” Nor is it new that many White people feel that the demands of minority groups for both rights and respect have “gone too far” and it is they, the White people of America, who are suffering the worst discrimination. In the 1960s, surveys taken by the New York Times showed that majorities of White people believed even then that the civil rights movement had “gone too far,” that Blacks were receiving “everything on a silver platter” and the government was practicing “reverse discrimination” against White people. Liberalism is always going too far for many Americans — and certainly for anti-liberals. Anti-liberals these days complain about wokeness, therefore, but it is the liberal system of government bequeathed by the Founders, and the accompanying egalitarian spirit, that they are really objecting to, just as anti-liberals have since the founding of the nation. Many of Trump’s core supporters insist they are patriots, but whether they realize it or not, their allegiance is not to the Founders’ America but to an ethnoreligious definition of the nation that the Founders explicitly rejected.
Some do realize it. The smartest and most honest of them know that if people truly want a “Christian America,” it can only come through “regime change,” by which they mean the “regime” created by the Founders. The Founders’ legacy is a “dead end,” writes Glenn Ellmers, a scholar at the Claremont Institute. The Constitution is a “Potemkin village.” According to Deneen and Harvard Law School’s Adrian Vermeule, the system established by the Founders to protect individual rights needs to be replaced with an alternative form of government. What they have in mind is a Christian commonwealth: a “culture that preserves and encourages order and continuity, and support for religious belief and institutions,” with legislation to “promote public morality, and forbid its intentional corruption,” a “forthright acknowledgment and renewal of the Christian roots of our civilization,” “public opportunities for prayers,” and a “revitalization of our public spaces to reflect a deeper belief that we are called to erect imitations of the beauty that awaits us in another Kingdom.”
These anti-liberal conservatives know that bringing such a commonwealth into being means jettisoning the Founders’ obsession with individual rights. The influential advocate of “conservative nationalism,” Yoram Hazony, wants Americans to abandon the Declaration in favor of a nationhood built on Protestantism and the Bible. America is a “revolutionary nation,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) insists, not because of the principles of the Declaration and not even because of the American Revolution itself, but “because we are the heirs of the revolution of the Bible” that began with “the founding of the nation of Israel.” There could hardly be a statement more at odds with the American Founders’ liberal, ecumenical vision.
Expressing a belief in God is no threat to the Founders’ system, but reshaping society in accord with Christian teachings is. To build the nation Hawley and Hazony imagine would require jettisoning not only the Declaration but also the Constitution, which was designed to protect the Declaration’s principles. The Christian commonwealth would not and could not be a democracy because the majority of people can’t be trusted to choose correctly. According to the Claremont Institute’s Ellmers, “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” They are a “zombie” or “human rodent” who lives “a shadow-life of timid conformity.” Only “the 75 million people who voted in the last election” for Trump are true Americans. Instead of trying to compete with Democrats in elections that don’t reflect the will of the people, Ellmers writes, “Why not just cut to the chase and skip the empty, meaningless process?” The “only road forward” is “overturning the existing post-American order.”
For these intellectuals, Trump is an imperfect if essential vehicle for the counterrevolution. A “deeply flawed narcissist” suffering from a “bombastic vanity,” as Deneen and Ellmers note, he has “lacked the discipline to target his creative/destructive tendencies effectively.” But this can be remedied. If Trump failed to accomplish the desired overthrow in his first term, Deneen argues, it was because he lacked “a capable leadership class.” Things will be different in his next term. What is needed, according to Deneen, is a “self-conscious aristoi,” a class of thinkers who understand “both the disease afflicting the nation, and the revolutionary medicine required for the cure,” who know how to turn populist “resentments into sustained policy.” Members of Deneen’s would-be new elite will, like Vladimir Lenin, place themselves at the vanguard of a populist revolution, acting “on behalf of the broad working class” while raising the consciousness of the “untutored” masses. Indeed, according to Harvard’s Vermeule, it will be necessary to impose the common good even against the people’s “own perceptions of what is best for them” — a most Leninist concept indeed.
The Christian commonwealth, then, would require a powerful executive freed from the Constitution’s liberal and democratic constraints. The new state, Vermeule wrote, with its “robust executive,” would “sear the liberal faith with hot irons,” wielding the “authority to curb the social and economic pretensions of the urban-gentry liberals.” The whiff of violence and oppression in such statements is intentional. The anti-liberal intellectuals understand that changing the liberal system will require far more than an election and a few legislative reforms.
Deneen and Vermeule are often dismissed as mere intellectual provocateurs, but their writings stand out because they have the courage to acknowledge that what they seek is incompatible with the Founders’ liberal system. While others conceal their views under a phony fidelity to American liberal principles or claim that what they want accords with the Founders’ true intent, Deneen, Vermeule and other anti-liberals acknowledge that the country they want, a country subservient to the Christian God, a country whose laws are based on the Bible, cannot be created absent the overthrow of the Founders’ liberal and defiantly secular system. Even a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Neil M. Gorsuch, speaks of the “so-called separation of church and state.” Anti-liberalism at the Supreme Court is nothing new, either.
And the anti-liberals know as well that this year may be their last chance to effect their counterrevolution. The percentage of the population made up of White people (let alone White Protestants) is steadily shrinking. Just as the anti-liberal conservatives of the pre-World War II years closed the immigration gates too late and were overwhelmed by a tide of non-Nordic peoples from southern and Eastern Europe, so the immigration wave of largely non-White people since 1965 has brought the nation to the cusp of a non-White majority. The anti-liberals thus face the task of engineering the revolution with only a minority of the electorate committed to “regime change.”
Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party makes this possible. Trump is not a unique figure in American history. In each generation, anti-liberal forces have turned to the same breed of demagogue, the flouter of norms, the boorish trampler of liberal nostrums. William Buckley noted that the very “uncouthness” of George Wallace seemed to “account for his general popularity.” James Burnham marveled at how Joseph McCarthy’s “inept acts and ignorant words” had a “charismatic” quality that well expressed the fears and angers of his devoted followers.
What their critics saw as boorishness and malevolence, however, their followers saw as strength and defiance against a liberal system stacked against them. They were rebellious opponents of the system, “wreckers,” unabashedly anti-liberal in both thought and manner, and that is precisely what made them popular among a broad swath of White Americans who felt themselves losing ground in the culture and society — to Black people, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants from non-Nordic countries. Today, exactly a century after the most overtly racist immigration restriction in American history, Trump once again calls for more immigrants from “nice” European countries, such as Denmark, Switzerland, and Norway.
Trump did not just stumble into leadership of this movement of White rebellion. He summoned it. He made his debut as presidential aspirant on an unabashed white supremacist platform, championing the birther conspiracy that America’s first Black president was not in fact an American. Riding that issue alone, he catapulted to the front of the Republican pack, according to polls in 2011, before bowing out to continue his hit show, “The Apprentice.” Whether his debut as a white supremacist was opportunism or sprang from conviction hardly matters — it certainly has not mattered to his followers. The fact is, white supremacy has been his calling card, and millions have responded to it to the point where white nationalists have become the core of his movement. Many Christian nationalists already see him as a suffering Christ, and in this bizarre sense it is true that the prosecutions have “helped” him: The more adversity he faces, the more court battles he must wage, the more allegations that are slung at him, the more devoted they are to him.
No other group can be counted on for such absolute loyalty. While some Republicans wobble when asked if they would support Trump if convicted of a crime, White Christian Evangelicals overwhelmingly say they will support him no matter what. Trump needs that unshakable loyalty because he is fighting for his life. The thought that he might end up in jail has given him every reason to hew as closely as possible to the people who will stick with him even if he is convicted. These are also the people he will need to back him unconditionally in challenging the results of the election should he lose. If he wins, he will need them in what are sure to be titanic fights with Democrats and the legal system and to keep the Republican Party in line.
This is one reason Trump has so far shown no inclination to reach out beyond his base, to Nikki Haley voters, to more moderate suburban Republicans, to those who are made uncomfortable by his statements and actions. He may show flexibility on the important issue of abortion to secure his own election, but since clinching the nomination, he has only hardened his Christian nationalist message. His “poisoning the blood” campaign, his “dictator-for-a-day” comments, his release of the Trump Bible, his claim that, upon taking office, he will create “a new federal task force” to fight “anti-Christian bias to be led by a fully reformed Department of Justice,” are all aimed directly at his white Christian nationalist base without much concern for how millions of other Republican voters feel about it. Christians are “under siege,” he claims in hawking his Bible. “We must make America pray again.”
Besides, his hard tack toward white supremacy and Christian nationalism has cost him little among the broader Republican electorate.
Why not? Why is there so little resistance to Trump even as he commits ever more deeply to a Christian nationalist program for undoing the Founders’ liberal project?
For many, the answer is simply narrow self-interest, either a positive interest in supporting him or a negative interest in not opposing him or being seen to oppose him. This seems to be the answer for corporate America. Having first followed marketing data to appeal to the broadest cross-section of Americans by embracing communities only recently enjoying more of the full panoply of rights, businesses learned the hard way that Trump and his movement will not tolerate this and have mostly retreated to silence and neutrality. But they have also gone further, making clear as much as possible that they will not be a problem for him — either before he is elected or after.
Continued next post
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This was the message JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon sent, from Davos, Switzerland of all places, early this year when he declared that Trump was “kind of right about NATO, kind of right about immigration,” that he “grew the economy quite well.” There is no reason to doubt that he spoke for many of the richest Americans and for other corporate leaders. There was no outcry among them that anyone could hear. The truth is, they have no financial reason to oppose Trump. They know that Trump’s White working-class followers don’t have to be paid off economically because most care chiefly about the culture wars. Trump can still cut taxes and reduce federal regulations and other obstacles to corporate profit. The rich and powerful will always have some purchase in a Trump administration if only because he needs and respects money and will want to make deals for himself and his family, as he did in a first term. Whatever moral or political qualms business leaders may have about Trump, the bottom line dictates that they get along with him, and if that means turning a blind eye to his unconstitutional actions — Dimon’s favorable recounting of Trump’s first term notably ignored his attempt to overthrow the government — then so be it.
We already know that little or no opposition will come from the Republican Party ecosystem. Among elected officials, the few willing to stand up to Trump have either been driven out of the party or are retiring so fast that they cannot even bear to finish out their terms. Those who remain have accepted Trump’s iron rule and therefore now have an interest in his success.
But what about the average Republican voter, the “normal” Republicans who happily voted for George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney? Do they not see the difference between those Republicans and Trump — or do they not care? They, too, may feel their narrow interests are served by a Trump victory, and although they may not be Christian nationalists themselves, their views as White Americans make them sympathetic to the complaints of the anti-liberals. They, too, may feel they — or their children — are at a disadvantage in a system dedicated to diversity and wokeness. Their annoyance with a liberalism that has “gone too far” makes them susceptible to Trump’s appeal, and, more importantly, unconcerned about the threat he poses. Left to their own devices, they would not be interested in overthrowing the regime. But neither are they inclined to stand in the way of those who are.
Are these voters and GOP power players right to believe that they, like Dimon, will be just fine in a system no longer faithful to the Founders’ liberal ideals? Perhaps so. They will not be the first to suffer from a shift back toward a 1920s America. White Americans tolerated the systematic oppression of Black people for a century after the Civil War. They tolerated violence in the South, injustice in the courtrooms, a Supreme Court that refused to recognize the equal rights of Black people, women and various minorities. Will they rise up against a second Trump term infused by Christian and white nationalism, or will they acquiesce in the gradual dismantling of the liberal gains of the past eight decades?
The shame is that many White people today seem to have conveniently forgotten how much they and their forebears have depended on the Founders’ liberalism to gain their present status as fully equal members of American society and to enjoy the freedoms that they take for granted.
Most White Republicans, after all, do not have the “legacy European” lineage that Tucker Carlson praises. They do not have ancestors who stepped off the Mayflower or fought in the revolution. The ancestors of the great majority of “White” Americans today were not considered “White” when they first set foot on American shores. Irish Americans may no longer remember that the Thomas Nast cartoons of the late 19th century depicted the Irish as apelike creatures. Many Italian Americans may not recall that a riot made up of “New Orleans’ finest” lynched and murdered 11 Sicilian immigrants and were never charged.
Many Catholics seem to have forgotten that they were once the most despised group in America, such that one of the Founders, John Jay, wanted them excluded from citizenship altogether. Most White Americans were at one time members of despised immigrant groups. They were the victims of the very anti-liberalism they are now voting back into power. They climbed to equality using liberalism as their ladder, and now that they have reached their destination they would pull away the ladder and abandon liberalism. Having obtained their equality using the laws and institutions of liberalism, their passion for liberalism has faded.
The Founders understood, and feared, that the fervor for rights and liberalism that animated the revolution might not last. Writing in 1781, two years before the end of the war, Thomas Jefferson predicted that once the war ended, “we shall be going down hill.” The people would return to their quotidian lives, forgetting their passionate concern for rights, intent only on “making money.” They might never again come together “to effect a due respect for their rights,” and so their government would stop being solicitous of their rights. Over a half-century later, Lincoln, in his famous Lyceum address, lamented that the original spirit of the revolution had dissipated with time, leaving Americans with only the normal selfishness of human beings. The original “pillars of the temple of liberty” had “crumbled away.” A little over two decades later, the nation fell into civil war.
If the American system of government fails this year, it will not be because the institutions established by the Founders failed. It will not be because of new technologies or flaws in the Constitution. No system of government can protect against a determined tyrant. Only the people can. This year we will learn if they will.
Opinion | Robert Kagan: Will Trump voters destroy America’s radical democracy? - The Washington Post
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