"It’s impossible to understand the appeal Donald has for his followers if we try to do so from the perspective of people who value honor, decency, empathy, and kindness in their leaders. It isn’t that they see things in Donald that aren’t there. They identify with what is—the brazenness of his lies, his ability to commit crimes with impunity, his bottomless sense of grievance, his monumental insecurity, his bullying, and, perhaps most intriguing, the fact that he is an inveterate failure who keeps being allowed to succeed. Donald is their proxy and their representative. And their ardor has only seemed to grow since his loss. We need only look at data from North Carolina Senate candidate Ted Budd’s campaign to see how complete this identification is. When Republican primary voters were told that Budd had been endorsed by Donald, there was a 45-point net swing in his favor, skyrocketing him to a 19-point lead over his primary opponent. The idea that any other one-term president (George H.W. Bush or Jimmy Carter) would have had the same kind of influence is laughable. On the other hand, though, neither one of them would have tried.
By the same token, elected Republicans, Donald’s chief enablers, see Donald as a means of perpetuating their own power. But they aren’t just putting up with the worst of him simply because they see him as a means to an end. He is them. They value his mendacity and his name-calling and his autocracy because these work for them as well.
Republicans counter truth with absurdity, rendering the truth inoperable. Now a party of fascists, they call Democrats socialist communist Marxists, which is effective in part because it is so nonsensical and in part because they are never asked to define the terms. They cover up their massive (and successful) efforts at voter suppression with wild claims of widespread voter fraud, which essentially doesn’t exist—31 incidents in over a billion votes cast, a number so vanishingly small as to have no meaning.
The main mechanism by which they can successfully carry out these sleights of hand is fear. Whether it’s drug dealers from Mexico or caravans from Central America or Democratic presidents coming for your guns, abolishing religion, or letting gay people get married, they need to keep their voters afraid."
We've noted and covered most all of her points there, now Mary has packaged it expertly. And the bit from Democracy Now
Mary Trump: the most cogent description ever of our current peril as a democracy
The most dangerous Republican enabler by far is, of course, Mitch McConnell, who saw an opportunity that even he probably never dared hope for: The guy in the Oval Office wouldn’t just sign off on every aspect of the Republicans’ agenda, he would push the envelope—of decorum, of autocracy—so far that the system itself could be used to create permanent minority rule. Donald showed his party (and yes, it is his party) the limits of pretending to care about good governance or play by the rules. He also showed them the utility of not just stoking racism and hatred of the Other—in the form of immigrants, Democrats, and even epidemiologists—but championing those who espoused them.
McConnell is the greatest traitor to this country since Robert E. Lee (with the difference that McConnell has been trying to take our country down from within). He has always been expert at using existing rules and procedures in ways they weren’t intended to be used, and yet—whether it was denying Merrick Garland a hearing, pushing through Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation, or ending the filibuster as it applied to Supreme Court nominees but employing it to block legislation that would expand voting rights—his anti-democratic maneuvers have been performed within the bounds of the system. The fact that he’s misusingthe system outlined in the Constitution isn’t an exoneration of him, however; it’s a condemnation of the Constitution’s limitations. The definition of treason in the Constitution is so narrow (levying war against the country or giving aid and comfort to the enemy) that a case could never be made against him. It would be difficult, however, to find anybody in modern times who has so undermined our democracy.
This destruction of norms by Donald and other Republicans in the executive and legislative branches has happened so quickly, and has been so thorough, that it’s clear the seeds of it must have been planted a long time ago. It was possible for Donald, the weakest man I have ever known, to exploit the weaknesses in the system not because he introduced them, but because they were there for him to exploit in the first place.
These situations are not the result of four years or even four decades of poor governance—although the worsening of the problem has certainly accelerated since Ronald Reagan’s disastrous presidency. The combination of “trickle-down” economics, his devastating handling of the AIDS crisis, and the intensification of the “War on Drugs,” with all of its racist implications, accelerated the divide between Americans along economic, cultural, and racial dimensions. But we really need to go back to this country’s inception to understand how we got here and to assess how we can possibly repair the extensive damage. With Joe Biden’s election, we did indeed snatch democracy from the jaws of autocracy—a rarity in human history. But as the insurrection of January 6 made clear, we are not out of the woods yet—far from it.
The Trump G.O.P.’s Plot Against Liz Cheney — and Our Democracy
"Donald’s Plot Against America"
Dated, but relevant until some 10 million more American voters understand better how dangerous to American democracy Donald Trump and his GOP are.
May 11, 2021
Damon Winter/The New York Times
By Thomas L. Friedman Opinion Columnist
I met a girl who sang the blues And I asked her for some happy news But she just smiled and turned away
— “American Pie” insert embed
I didn’t want to write again .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/04/opinion/gop-trump-2020-election.html .. about the House Republicans ousting Liz Cheney .. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/05/12/us/liz-cheney-biden .. from their leadership for calling out Donald Trump’s Big Lie. I was going to make this my week for happy news. But to write about anything else on the verge of Trump’s G.O.P. moving to formally freeze out Cheney would be like writing a column about the weather the day after Watergate exploded or about Ford Theater’s architecture after Lincoln was shot. This is a big moment in American history.
One of America’s two major parties is about to make embracing a huge lie about the integrity of our elections — the core engine of our democracy — a litmus test for leadership in that party, if not future candidacy at the local, state and national levels.
In effect, the Trump G.O.P. has declared that winning the next elections for the House, Senate and presidency is so crucial — and Trump’s ability to energize its base so irreplaceable — that it justifies both accepting his Big Lie about the 2020 election and leveraging that lie to impose new voter-suppression laws and changes in the rules of who can certify elections in order to lock in minority rule for Republicans if need be.
It is hard to accept that this is happening in today’s America, but it is.
If House Republicans follow through on their plan to replace Cheney, it will not constitute the end of American democracy as we’ve known it, but there is a real possibility we’ll look back on May 12, 2021, as the beginning of the end — unless enough principled Republicans can be persuaded to engineer an immediate, radical course correction in their party.
If someone tried a dishonest power play at the P.T.A. of your child’s school like the one in the House, you’d be on the phone in a flash, organizing the other parents to immediately denounce and stop it. If you read about something like this happening in another pillar of democracy, like Britain or France, you’d be sick to your stomach and feel like the world was a little less safe. If you heard that a banana republic dictator had forced such a Big Lie on his sham parliament, you’d want to picket his embassy in Washington.
But this is us— today, right now. And I fear that we’ve so defined down political deviance in the Trump years that we’ve lost the appropriate, drop-everything, Defcon 1, man-the-battle-stations sense of alarm that should greet the G.O.P. crossing such a redline.
“It just bothers me that you have to swear fealty to the ‘Dear Leader’ or you get kicked out of the party,” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a moderate Republican, said Sunday on “Meet the Press.” “It just doesn’t make any sense.”
But it doesn’t end there. We’re witnessing a daylight mugging of our democracy — and I am not talking only about the voter-suppression measures being passed by Republican-controlled legislatures in swing states.
There are also the new laws to enable Republican legislatures to legally manipulate the administration and counting of the votes in their states. Election expert Rick Hasen explained it all in an essay .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/opinion/republicans-voting-us-elections.html .. in this newspaper last month: “At stake is something I never expected to worry about in the United States: the integrity of the vote count. The danger of manipulated election results looms.”
We’re talking about new regulations like the Georgia law that removed the secretary of state from decision-making power on the State Election Board, clearly aimed to curb the powers of the current secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, after he rejected Trump’s request that he “find” 11,780 votes to undo Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia. We’re talking about Arizona’s Republican-led State Senate hiring a company owned by an advocate of the “Stop the Steal” movement to examine the November ballots from Maricopa County. And much more.
“Many of the bills would make elections more difficult to administer or even unworkable; make it more difficult to finalize election results; allow for election interference and manipulation by hyperpartisan actors; and, in the worst cases, allow state legislatures to overturn the will of the voters and precipitate a democracy crisis.”
Had these bills been in place in 2020, it added, “they would have … raised the prospect that the outcome of the election would have been contrary to the popular vote.”
As Stanford University democracy expert Larry Diamond summed it all up to me, while we’re focusing on Liz Cheney and the 2020 elections, Trump’s minions at the state level “are focused on giving themselves the power to legally get away with in 2024 what the courts would not let them get away with in 2020.”
You tell me how American democracy will ever be the same again and how these people can be trusted to cede power the next time they win the White House.
And while you’re at it, tell me how America can ever again be a credible observer and upholder of democratic elections around the world — so vital to our national security and the hopes and dreams of democrats in all these countries who look to America as a beacon of democracy and the rule of law. The next time we want to question election results in Russia or Iran or Poland or Hungary, what do you suppose their elected autocrats will say?
They’ll say: “Listen to you? Your Republican Party turned a blind eye to a guy who told the biggest election lie in the history of the Milky Way Galaxy. And it wasn’t even in the service of some urgent, compelling policy. It was just so he could stay in power, salve his ego and deny he lost.”
So, thank you, Liz Cheney, for doing something vitally important and clarifying — something that only a conservative Republican like you could do: force the G.O.P. at every level to choose whether to stand with Trump and his Big Lie or with the Constitution and the most important conservative principle of all — reverence for the rule of law.
Because, if Trump and friends are not stopped, one day they will get where they are going: They will lock in minority rule in America. And when that happens, both Democrats and principled Republicans will take to the streets, and you can call it whatever you like, but it is going to feel like a new civil war.
I don’t use that term lightly or accidentally. We are all the product of our life experiences, and my first reporting experience was living inside the Lebanese civil war in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
I saw close up what happens when democratically elected politicians think that they can endlessly abuse their institutions, cross redlines, weaken their judiciary and buy reporters and television stations — so that there is no truth, only versions, of every story. And they think that they can do it endlessly — cheat just one more time, break one more rule, buy one more vote — and the system will hold until they can take it over and own it for their own purposes.
Then one day — and you never see it coming — the whole system breaks down. Whatever frayed bonds of truth and trust that were holding it together completely unravel.
And then it’s gone. And there is no getting it back.
Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Op-Ed columnist. He joined the paper in 1981, and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook A version of this article appears in print on May 12, 2021, Section A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline: The G.O.P. Plot Against Cheney, and Democracy. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
McCarthyism was never defeated. Trumpism won’t be either.
"Donald’s Plot Against America"
Censure brought down a crusading anti-communist senator but fired up his followers.
Thousands of supporters of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisc.) filled the lower sections of Madison Square Garden in New York on Nov. 29, 1954, rallying to his cause. (AP)
By Beverly Gage Beverly Gage?is a professor of history at Yale University. She is writing a biography of former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
December 4, 2020 at 9:55 a.m. EST
A month after the presidential election, most Republican lawmakers have refused to acknowledge the obvious: Despite President Trump’s fondest hopes and florid temper tantrums, Joe Biden won. This display of political cowardice can tempt us to seek comfort in the past — in moments when even the most stalwart GOP loyalists put country over party.
One such episode occurred in August 1974, when three Republican congressional leaders trudged to the White House to let Richard Nixon know that he was fast losing his party’s support. Another took place in late 1954: A Republican-controlled Senate voted to censure Joseph McCarthy, one of their own, after four years of lies and vitriol. In that nobler age, the story goes, McCarthy’s colleagues recognized the threat he posed to democratic institutions and political fair play, and voted to bring an end not only to McCarthy’s personal reign of terror but to the broader phenomenon of McCarthyism — just as many Democrats (and more than a few Republicans) hope that Trumpism will disappear, or at least diminish, once Trump himself leaves office.
But the afterlife of McCarthyism is not nearly as clear-cut x— or as comforting for Trump opponents — as the legend might suggest.
Sen. Joseph McCarthy at a Senate subcommittee hearing in Washington, on March 9, 1950. (Herbert K. White/AP)
Though we now think of McCarthy as one of the most hated men in American politics, even in 1954 he retained a passionate base of support, with about a third of the public backing his anti-communist campaign. Once the Senate voted against him, the tale of how he had been victimized by a corrupt and self-interested Washington establishment helped fuel the far right’s grievance politics — and spark what would become the modern conservative movement. Far from bringing an end to McCarthyism, the 1954 Senate vote mainly pushed it out of Washington, and a new generation of right-wing activists took up his cause.
Something similar is likely to happen as Trump departs the Oval Office warning of elite conspiracies and rigged ballots, encouraging his base to see themselves as noble warriors against an illegitimate political order. While the Trump presidency will soon be over, the history of Trumpism is just beginning.
Like Trump, McCarthy burst on the political scene as a self-proclaimed outlier, nominally part of the Republican Party but with a style all his own. Though nearly everyone in Washington could be considered “anti-communist” in the early 1950s, McCarthy knew how to turn vague affinities into shocking headlines .. https://www.nytimes.com/1950/02/12/archives/mcarthy-insists-truman-oust-reds-57-communists-still-are-on-job-at.html , accusing the Truman administration of harboring secret communists at the highest levels. Even without Twitter, McCarthy dominated the news cycle,introducing one outrageous claim and then switching to another if the first came under challenge. As with Trump, not everything he said was false, but the constant slippage between truth and lies served to destabilize the national conversation and upend political norms.
VIDEO - Post Senior Producer Kate Woodsome talks to Americans who voted for Trump, or simply don't feel like denouncing him, about why they feel wrongly scorned. (The Washington Post)
Millions of Americans loved what they saw. At the peak of his influence, McCarthy boasted a 50 percent approval rating; like Trump, he divided the country with near-perfect precision. Among Republicans, he was even more widely admired, if not quite universally. In June 1950, Republican Sen. Margaret Chase Smith delivered what she described as a “Declaration of Conscience .. https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/investigations/mccarthy-hearings/a-declaration-of-conscience.htm ,” accusing McCarthy of promoting “fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear” and of turning the Senate into “a forum of hate and character assassination.” Though six other Republican senators joined in her dissent, the rest remained silent.
Their keep-quiet strategy seemed to pay off in 1952, when the Republicans retook the White House for the first time in 20 years, along with both houses of Congress. Many credited McCarthy with the victory, citing his ability to capture public attention and persuade working-class White voters, Catholics especially, to vote for the Republican ticket. Dwight Eisenhower, the party’s presidential nominee, was no McCarthy fan. But he, too, chose not to speak out against the senator and even made a campaign appearance .. https://www.jsonline.com/story/life/green-sheet/2017/03/14/our-back-pages-when-eisenhower-campaigned-joe-mccarthy-wisconsin-and-regretted/99017276/ .. with McCarthy in Wisconsin.
After the Republican victory, McCarthy gained control of his notorious Senate subcommittee, hauling in accused communists based on scant information and attacking any institution, from the CIA to the U.S. Army, that stood in his way. By mid-1954, those attacks produced the stirrings of a backlash among his fellow senators, who reluctantly agreed to look into his treatment of Army witnesses. The Army-McCarthy hearings produced one of the most famous put-downs in American history, with Army counsel Joseph Welch demanding to know: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” (It was a line that might have worked equally well for Biden during this year’s presidential debates.) A few months later, in the lame-duck session between the 1954 midterm elections and the Democrats’ resumption of Senate control, McCarthy’s Republican colleagues finally voted in favor of decency.
Less often noted is the counternarrative that began to build among McCarthy’s grass-roots supporters during those years, in which the sheer volume of criticism aimed at the senator became proof that he was right all along: that the country was, indeed, run by a menacing but elusive liberal-communist conspiracy aimed at taking down right-thinking, God-fearing Americans. Among those who signed on to this idea was William F. Buckley, the wunderkind intellectual of the emerging conservative movement, hot off the success of his anti-socialist polemic “God and Man at Yale .. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/089526692X?ie=UTF8&tag=thewaspos09-20&camp=1789&linkCode=xm2&creativeASIN=089526692X .” In 1954, Buckley published a second book, co-written with his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell, a future McCarthy staffer and speechwriter, in which they argued that the merits of McCarthy’s cause largely outweighed qualms about his style and methods. In a sign of the combative lost-cause ethos already taking hold among McCarthy’s supporters, they titled the book “McCarthy and His Enemies .. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0870001108?ie=UTF8&tag=thewaspos09-20&camp=1789&linkCode=xm2&creativeASIN=0870001108 .”
After McCarthy’s censure, this tale — of a courageous warrior taken down by illegitimate foes — helped fuel a wave of institution-building on the right. In 1955, Buckley founded National Review magazine, a bid, as he described it, to break up the “identifiable team of Fabian operators .. https://www.nationalreview.com/1955/11/our-mission-statement-william-f-buckley-jr/ ” who were “bent on controlling both our major political parties.” Three years later, candy manufacturer Robert Welch established the John Birch Society, a conspiratorial far-right organization that attracted millions of members with claims that even Eisenhower secretly sympathized with communism. The two camps never saw eye to eye, with Buckley sneering at the Birchers’ paranoid style. When it came to McCarthy, though, they shared a common view: Though Buckley expressed certain reservations about the senator’s methods, he agreed that McCarthy’s censure in 1954 revealed the workings of a corrupt, soft and traitorous political establishment.
Trump’s story of what happened in the 2020 election bears all the hallmarks of McCarthyite myth:conspiring elites, hidden corruption, even the threat of an imminent socialist takeover. And though Trump will no doubt leave office on Jan. 20, that story — and the powerful sense of grievance behind it — is sure to thrive in the years ahead. Trump has all but vowed to run again in 2024. Even if he doesn’t, he will continue to sell the tale of his martyrdom through Twitter and cable news and talk radio and conspiracy sites — forms of direct public communication that McCarthy would have envied. After 1954, when media gatekeepers such as Edward R. Murrow turned against him, McCarthy was hard-pressed to find mainstream outlets willing to tell his side of the story. Trump now has an entire right-wing media universe at his disposal, while social media allows him to bypass the gatekeepers altogether.
As a president rather than a mere senator, Trump exercises far more power and influence than McCarthy ever did. And despite his age, he shows few signs of being willing to relinquish them. When he no longer has access to the White House, he will still have his base, tens of millions of Americans whose identities and aspirations are wrapped up in the amorphous but energetic politics of Trumpism. Even in the unlikely event that Trump himself disappears or retreats or, like McCarthy, succumbs to despair, this vast swath of citizens who love and admire him will still be here, better organized than they were four years ago, now with a martyr’s tale for inspiration.
Today’s Republican establishment may ultimately repudiate the man who has held it in thrall — and in fear — for four-plus years. But it is Trump’s base, and their interpretation of his ouster from Washington, that will determine the future of Trumpism.
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