GOP lawmakers are grumbling over President Trump’s redirection of funds from military construction projects in their states and districts to his promised wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Their uneasiness stems from this week’s announcement by Secretary of Defense Mark Esper that $3.6 billion will be stripped from 127 projects at U.S. bases, including some in states where GOP senators are up for reelection
Congressional Republicans now face the fraught task of assuring their constituents that the projects won’t be canceled while also working with the Defense Department and Democrats to craft legislation that will replenish or “backfill” the funding — all while not coming across as publicly rebuking President Trump..
View the complete September 5 article by Ellen Mitchell and Jordan Carney on The Hill website here.
Last year, I was asked by the civil rights group CAIR-Minnesota to research the financing behind a rash of disparaging news coverage of Minnesota’s Muslims. I assumed I’d be cataloging the work of a few small-town bloggers, and that the hard part would be managing expectations.
To hear the Trump team tell it, the media’s biggest sin was reporting on potential collusion and obstruction of justice. When special counsel Robert S. Mueller III concluded there was no criminal conspiracy and punted on obstruction, all of it was immediately rendered foolish, overzealous speculation. Reporters who circumspectly detailed key events months and years before Mueller did publicly were suddenly lumped in with pundits who had declared President Trump to be a guilty man.
Three weeks after Democrats took control of the U.S. House in the 2018 midterm elections, about 40 reelected and recently defeated lawmakers in the centrist Republican Main Street Caucus gathered at the Capitol Hill Club to sift through the electoral wreckage.
While President Donald Trump continues to have many cheerleaders on the right — from Attorney General William Barr to Sen. Lindsey Graham to Fox News’ Sean Hannity — some former champions of Trump have turned into adversaries. One conservative who recently went from Trump defender to Trump foe is former White House Communications Chief Anthony Scaramucci, who doesn’t hesitate to express his disdain for the president in a candid 
For most of modern political history, the Republican Party has used patriotism — an odd and obfuscating sentimentality — as a weapon to shame critics of American foreign policy, and turn the general public against dissidents who reject the folly of Empire maintenance through violence. Samuel Johnson’s excoriation — made famous by Bob Dylan — that “patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels” always seemed accurate in both its denunciation of the manipulative emotion itself, and also of those who take advantage of it for political expediency.