Category: 2020 Election

The Grand Old Meltdown

What happens when a party gives up on ideas?

Earlier this month, while speaking via Zoom to a promising group of politically inclined high school students, I was met with an abrupt line of inquiry. “I’m sorry, but I still don’t understand,” said one young man, his pitch a blend of curiosity and exasperation. “What do Republicans believe? What does it mean to be a Republican?”

You could forgive a 17-year-old, who has come of age during Donald Trump’s reign, for failing to recognize a cohesive doctrine that guides the president’s party. The supposed canons of GOP orthodoxy—limited government, free enterprise, institutional conservation, moral rectitude, fiscal restraint, global leadership—have in recent years gone from elastic to expendable. Identifying this intellectual vacuum is easy enough. Far more difficult is answering the question of what, quite specifically, has filled it.

Bumbling through a homily about the “culture wars,” a horribly overused cliché, I felt exposed. Despite spending more than a decade studying the Republican Party, embedding myself both with its generals and its foot soldiers, reporting on the right as closely as anyone, I did not have a good answer to the student’s question. Vexed, I began to wonder who might. Not an elected official; that would result in a rhetorical exercise devoid of introspection. Not a Never Trumper; they would have as much reason to answer disingenuously as the most fervent MAGA follower. Continue reading.

Trump rails on mail-in voting in surprise remarks at convention

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President Trump delivered a rally-like address to the Republican National Convention on Monday in a surprise appearance in Charlotte, N.C., after he was officially nominated for the 2020 GOP ticket.

Trump’s remarks, which lasted about an hour, touched on a variety of topics but repeatedly returned to the pandemic and mail-in voting, arguing that expanding access to mail-in ballots could invite massive fraud in the election — a claim experts say is not substantiated.

He spoke optimistically about the prospect of economic recovery — pledging to create 10 million jobs in 10 months if he is reelected — and warned that his opponent, Democratic nominee Joe Biden, would raise taxes and increase regulations, making it “impossible to build a highway.” Continue reading.

To my Republican friends in Washington

Will you choose Trump over America again?

Five years ago, we all had a hearty laugh when Donald Trump descended the golden escalator to introduce himself and his ugly brand of politics to the American people. We didn’t take it seriously then, and Trump rolled through the Republican field of 17 like he has all his life: By doing and saying things so outrageous and beyond the pale, all anyone could do was stare, mouth agape.

Four years ago, not enough of us believed Trump could actually beat Hillary Clinton. After all, his campaign was a shambles, he was the disastrous human being we all knew him to be, and every major poll showed him getting crushed come November. It was OK to oppose him, because he wasn’t really a Republican, and Clinton, at worst, was status quo antebellum.

Clinton was a well-known force in the insular world of D.C. politics where names and faces at the top might change, but the political bureaucrats were always in place to ensure the machinery of government and patronage sailed smoothly along. Continue reading.

GOP Convention Opens With White Nationalist Tropes

The Republican National Convention began on Monday with a blatant nod to white supremacism.

“From that moment he came down that famous escalator, he started a movement to reclaim our government from the rotten cartel of insiders that have been destroying our country,” Charlie Kirk, founder of the right-wing youth group Turning Point USA, said of Donald Trump.

“We may not have realized it at the time, but Trump is the bodyguard of Western civilization. Trump was elected to protect our families from the vengeful mob that seeks to destroy our way of life, our neighborhoods, schools, churches, and values.” Continue reading.

Mike Pence hopes four years of subservience to Trump will lift his political future

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Like many who served in Congress alongside the late John Lewis, then-Rep. Mike Pence made a pilgrimage to Selma, Ala., in 2010 to commemorate the 45th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday.” He marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge just a few feet from Lewis as they retraced the historic route, and posed for a photo at the foot of the span — the Indiana Republican in crisp gray and the Georgia Democrat in somber black, their shoulders touching.

But when Lewis died last month of pancreatic cancer at 80, Pence, now vice president, held off on issuing a public comment on the civil rights hero’s passing. President Trump was no fan of the congressman and openly complained about Lewis’s refusal to attend his inauguration. Only after the White House distributed a perfunctory proclamation on the death in Trump’s name did Pence feel comfortable releasing a statement of his own, memorializing Lewis as not just an “icon” but also “a colleague and a friend.”

That hesitation — deferring to Trump for cues, and then following his lead — was classic Pence. It exemplified the well-honed subservience of a man who once governed his home state of Indiana but who as vice president has transformed himself into a loyal student and servant of Trump — binding his political ambitions to a mercurial and capricious boss now trailing in polls with just over two months to go until Election Day. Continue reading.

As the Postal Service is attacked by Trump, workers lament what’s been lost

Austin musician and concerned citizen Mike Hidalgo filed a Change.org petition to save the United States Postal Service in April, assuming he’d rack up about a thousand signatures or so. He wound up with about 300 times that. “I said to myself, ‘Whoa, I guess a lot of people care about this,’” Hidalgo tells Mic. “Then I asked myself: What can I do with this?” He decided to post updates directly on the petition, reasoning that arming its signatories with information about the dual financial and operational crises currently haunting the USPS was the best way to capitalize on the unanticipated response.

Presently, that response includes 1.5 million signatures and counting, which speaks to how strongly Americans feel about the Postal Service — and by extension how strongly they feel about the Trump administration’s stubborn-verging-on-impressive attempts at dismantling it.

The appointment in June of Louis DeJoy, erstwhile logistics career man and proud Trump ally, to the position of postmaster general sent the already hurting agency into urgent disarray after the announcement of new guidelines that essentially forbid employees from doing their jobs properly, including slashing overtime as well as branch hours. Crucially, if mail came into the office late, postal workers, who typically never leave letters behind and take as many tours as needed to make sure every parcel is delivered in a day, were ordered to leave it where it sits, leading to mail delays that stack up over time. Continue reading.

From ‘visionary’ to ‘guardian of America’ — the Republican convention is all about Trump

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A symphony of superlatives played loudly Monday on the opening night of the Republican National Convention, as speaker after speaker lavished praise on President Trump and spoke of him in messianic, almost otherworldly terms.

“A builder.” “A visionary.” “The richest man in the world.” “The guardian of America.” “The bodyguard of Western civilization.”

Political parties typically adopt platforms at their conventions every four years articulating their policy priorities and core beliefs, but not the Republicans in 2020.

Instead, the Republican National Committee passed a resolution over the weekend stating simply that it “enthusiastically supports President Trump” and that the party “has and will continue to enthusiastically support the president’s America-first agenda.” In other words, the party’s platform is Donald Trump. Continue reading.

Watch: Trump abruptly ends news conference after reporter points out contradictory statements on plasma treatment

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President Donald Trump abruptly ended his press conference after a reporter asked for details about the emergency authorization of convalescent plasma from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn’s comments seemed to conflict with Trump’s characterization during the short Sunday press conference. The reports are still coming in on the research, but Trump said he fast-tracked what he called the “bureaucracy.”

“You have the treatment is safe and very effective, yesterday it was showing promising efficacy, so which of the two is correct?” Trump was asked by who appeared to be Washington Examiner reporter Rob Crilly, wearing a mask. Continue reading.

Trump’s Scare Tactics Aren’t Working on Women in the Suburbs

North of Charlotte, N.C., voters of both parties can see through the GOP’s strategy of frightening them about an urban crime wave.

CORNELIUS, N.C. — A few years back, in the middle of the day in the middle of a week in the spring, in the parking garage of an upscale mall in Charlotte half an hour south from her house here in the suburbs, Susan Sandler was attacked. A young Black man in a hoodie hit her in the side of the head as she walked to her car. He knocked her unconscious and dragged her across the concrete, took her purse and her wedding ring and left her with ripped jeans and bleeding knees.

If anybody, I thought, might be receptive to the president’s racially loaded warnings of crime spreading from cities and promises to keep the suburbs safe …

“Um, no,” said Sandler, a Democrat who is 59, white and married to a Republican who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and will again (she thinks) come November.

“He fuels the fire and wants to make people like me feel like it’s coming this way,” she said Monday. “It’s just Trump’s rhetoric to try to scare people.” Continue reading.