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If the Republican Party Can Be Saved From Its Trumpocalypse, This Senator Could Be the Key

"Trump Escalates Already-Deadly U.S. Border Policies, Ordering National Guard Troops to Mexico"

Long before his colleagues saw the light, Ben Sasse repudiated Trump and demanded a new kind of politics. But is the GOP ready for his reformation?

Tim Murphy September/October 2016 issue

IMAGE - Anita Kunz

One evening in early May, Sen. Ben Sasse sat at his home on the banks of the Platte River just outside Fremont, Nebraska, and began writing a message “to majority America.” Donald Trump had just become the de facto Republican presidential nominee. As Sasse explained in a Facebook post that would soon go viral, two things had happened that day that he couldn’t shake. His phone had been flooded with voicemails from party leaders asking the first-term Republican to get on board with the GOP’s candidate. And he had gone shopping at Walmart.

Sasse had been critical of Trump throughout the primaries—mocking his insecurity about the size of his hands, crashing a private meeting between Glenn Beck and Fox News’ Sean Hannity to assail the latter’s Trump coverage as “bull,” and even traveling to Iowa to warn voters that Trump talked like a man who was running to be king. Trump, for his part, retorted that the 44-year-old Sasse looked like a “gym rat.” But as Sasse navigated the aisles of Walmart, his shopping trip became a rolling public forum. Shopper after shopper approached him, he wrote, with the same refrain. They were fed up with both parties; they were sick of Trump as well as Hillary Clinton; and mostly, they were tired of Washington punting on its responsibilities.

And so Sasse, putting off his kids’ bedtime bath to keep writing, proposed an alternative. What if there were someone else—a candidate running on a minimalist platform that promised to focus on three or four things, like entitlement reform and fighting terrorism: “I think there is room—an appetite—for such a candidate.”

To the chagrin of the party’s Never Trump rump, Sasse made clear that he himself would not be that candidate. Nevertheless, as his colleagues one by one climbed aboard the Trump train, Sasse steadfastly withheld his support from the GOP nominee.

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His image reinforces his message—an aggressively relatable politician confronting a Washington power structure that’s way out of touch. In a nod to old Senate tradition, he waited nearly a year after his election to make his maiden speech. But when he took the floor, he was unsparing .. https://medium.com/@SenatorSasse/full-text-maiden-speech-on-the-senate-floor-d70892d29de0#.m3uqeaeno , warning that unnamed “grandstanders who use this institution as a platform for outside pursuits” were dooming the chamber to irrelevance, ceding governance to the executive branch, and weakening constitutional checks and balances. Sasse often reaches for the high note, arguing that the economic disruption that’s happening now—”disruption” being an essential Sasse buzzword .. http://www.watchmenpastors.org/archive-2016 —is magnified because our politicians are so ill-equipped for the challenge. Democrats are selling “central planning in the age of Uber,” he warns; Republicans are “trying to make America 1950 again.”

Sasse grew up in Fremont, a small city of farms and meatpacking plants 45 minutes northwest of Omaha that’s named for John C. Fremont, the first Republican candidate for president following the collapse of the Whig Party. Sasse has described his country childhood there as almost “artificially quaint.” On summer mornings he would wake up at 5 a.m. to catch a school bus to the farms outside of town, where he’d weed rows of soybeans and detassel corn—a Plains rite of adolescence that aids pollination.

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Sasse has staked his future on stopping Trump. But Trumpism helps explain how he got to Washington.

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Sasse’s wife, Melissa, taught at a boarding school outside New Haven, and he didn’t have much time for campus life. On fall weekends he would fly home for Cornhuskers football games. But he still managed to leave an impression: “Even among Yale Ph.D. students, Ben was still a cut above,” says his friend Will Inboden. “He stood out—he’s probably one of the two or three most brilliant people I’ve ever met.” When drinking at New Haven dives, Sasse might sketch out thoughts on a cocktail napkin. “It almost got to be a joke among us,” Inboden said. “Oh, there’s Sasse riffing on the Industrial Revolution again.”

After Yale, Sasse headed off to Washington for a quick succession of jobs in the Bush administration. He took a post helping to run the Justice Department’s in-house think tank, served seven months as “start-up” chief of staff to a newly elected Nebraska congressman, and was later tapped as an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, where he worked in the agency’s internal ideas shop. Then, in 2009, while teaching public policy at the University of Texas, Sasse got a call from home. Midland Lutheran College was in trouble.

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Sasse has called Trump a “megalomaniac strongman” with a “creepy” tyrannical streak.

To some at Midland, Sasse is a savior. “Not only does he see around corners, but he sees around corners before other people see the building—all the time,” says Tom Adamson, a business professor. But as in the corporate world, where the jobs of longtime employees are often the first thing to go in a restructuring effort, Sasse got rid of tenure, forcing many of the professors who had been there longest into early retirement. He downsized the board by eliminating the seats belonging to the Lutheran Church, and reconstituted it with a smaller group of allies that included his college roommate. (The move happened so quietly that the head of the church’s Nebraska branch found out only after he showed up at a board meeting and was told he was no longer a member.) “You can usurp power, and then you can do certain things because you usurp power, but there might have been a kinder, gentler way to do that than to say, ‘These are the new rules; this is what we’re gonna do,'” Scott says.

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No one issue or moment triggered the schism. Sasse has knocked the Muslim ban and labeled Trump’s remarks about the Mexican American judge handling his fraud case as “racism.” He vigorously supports the free-trade deals that Trump opposes. But he hasn’t made his fight about any one of those things. Rather it’s a critique of character—Trump’s crassness, ego, and misogyny—that Sasse squeezes into his general What Ails Washington framework. Worst of all, to Sasse, Trump is a big old liar who poisons the well of political discourse—just like those grandstanders in the Senate. “Our public square is plagued by habitual, brazen lying,” he wrote in July. “I do not believe this country can long survive if the public concedes in advance that people in government do not need to be consistently aiming to tell the truth.”


Ben Sasse has told Republicans that he “chose this party, for as long as it is useful.” Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

But for all of Sasse’s pleas for seriousness and big ideas, he’s shown that he’s comfortable with elements of Trumpism. In his Senate campaign, he told voters that America was “becoming a socialist mess, like Europe,” and that Obamacare “is arguably the worst law in our history“—he even brought a poster hawking “death panels” to a Fox News interview. He laments Washington’s inability to set aside partisan sniping to get serious on entitlement reform, but he has also called Medicare a “Ponzi scheme” and warned that we’re headed toward “cradle-to-grave dependency.” Sarah Palin, perhaps the second-most-visible icon of the know-nothing conservatism that Sasse now loves to deride, campaigned with him back in 2014, even starring in a TV ad. So did Ted Cruz, the embodiment of the kind of senatorial grandstanding Sasse has subsequently called out. Sasse is making noise about the abrasive, talk radio conservatism that helped America’s most prominent birther become the Republican presidential nominee, but that same wave helped him land his Senate seat. That isn’t particularly surprising. For all its Rotary Clubs and church groups, Fremont isn’t an escape from Trumpian insanity: It’s a birthplace of it.

For decades, one of Dodge County’s biggest employers has been the meatpacking industry. But beginning around the 1980s, when the unions weakened, Fremont experienced a demographic shift, as Latinos came to work in the plants. Some of Fremont’s white residents began to grow uneasy. In 2008, a city councilman introduced an ordinance drafted with the assistance of Kris Kobach, a lawyer who helped popularize self-deportation laws, that would require anyone renting an apartment or home in Fremont to apply for a license at the police station. (Kobach now serves as Kansas’ secretary of state and has advised Trump on immigration policy.) The license would cost $5, but as part of the process you’d have to indicate whether or not you’re a US citizen.

When the mayor cast a tie-breaking vote to defeat the measure in the city council, proponents put it on the ballot, drawing national attention and kicking off one of the most intense political fights in town history. Sasse, in his first spring in charge at Midland, made sure he and the college steered clear as Fremont voters approved the law. A federal court challenge was launched, and undocumented workers were told to avoid Sasse’s favorite Walmart, lest they be picked up by federal agents. Latino residents had their windows shot out. Flyers were posted warning that “providing housing to invaders is treason.”

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A few days before the Republican National Convention, Sasse published an open letter—on Medium, of course .. https://medium.com/@BenSasse/two-kinds-of-voting-two-kinds-of-disruption-and-two-kinds-of-unrighteousness-fd26895aa01f#.u8w35k9vm —which he said he had begun composing while on a congressional delegation to Afghanistan over the Fourth of July, at a table “backed up against razor wire.” After reiterating that “DC should be disrupted” and using several hundred words to define theological righteousness, Sasse cast his decision not to vote for a presidential candidate in strong moral terms: “If we shrug at public dishonesty—if we normalize candidates who think that grabbing power makes it okay to say whatever they need to in the short-term—then we will be changed by it.”

Around the time he was drafting that letter, Sasse made clear he would not be attending the convention. The senator, his spokesman said, planned to instead take his children on a tour of Nebraska’s dumpster fires.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/nebraska-senator-ben-sasse-never-trump-republicans/

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This post is specifically to this one, close to half-down in yours

Sasse on Trump trade war: 'the dumbest possible way to do this'

The Rachel Maddow Show
4/5/18

Rachel Maddow reports on Donald Trump raising the stakes in the trade war he is starting with China, and the
reaction of Republican Senator Ben Sasse who says Trump is "threatening to light American agriculture on fire."

©2018 NBCNews.com

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/sasse-on-trump-trade-war-the-dumbest-possible-way-to-do-this-1203958851755