Tag: GOP

Conservative writer details how Trump’s ‘cult of personality’ is revealing its ‘grotesque selfishness’

AlterNet logoConservative Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin has been consistently critical of President Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus crisis. This week in her column, the Never Trumper asserts that Trump and his loyalists in the Republican Party will gladly encourage others to put themselves at risk during the pandemic but won’t take such risks themselves.

“This is the natural consequence of a cult of personality in which the leader’s ego and survival are paramount,” she writes in her column titled: “The party of grotesque selfishness.”

“Both ‘Fox & Friends’ host Brian Kilmeade and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos say life is full of risks; so, send your kids back to school no matter what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say,” Rubin observes. “President Trump has been jetting around, greeting visitors and talking to his supporters — albeit fewer than planned — without wearing a mask in public until Saturday. His cult naturally adopted his contempt for this basic health measure. It was only when the pandemic socked red states that many Republican officials became terribly dismayed that ‘some people’ had politicized masks.” Continue reading.

The GOP’s reliance on mega-donors is backfiring

AlterNet logoThe Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United was handed down in 2010. In response, “superPACs and other independent groups dumped more than $1 billion into the 2012 election, largely on behalf of Republicans.” They spent most of that money flooding the television airwaves with negative ads about Democrats.

Then along came a service employee who surreptitiously video-taped a speech by Mitt Romney to big donors in which the candidate talked about the 47 percent of Americans who vote for Democrats because they are dependent on the government for freebies. That videotape went viral and is perhaps one of the main contributors to Romney’s loss in 2012. And it didn’t cost the Democrats a dime.

That didn’t stop Republicans from their reliance on superPACs. Continue reading.

Trump and the GOP are blatantly sacrificing working people for political gain

AlterNet logoThe United States is currently seeing the most coronavirus infections since the pandemic began. Dr. Anthony Fauci just warned that the U.S. could soon reach 100,000 new cases each day. And across every age group, people of color, especially Black and Native people, are being infected and dying at much higher rates.

Cases are surging because we’re reopening without adequate public health protections. At least 17 states that had begun reopening are shutting back down. It’s no coincidence that the same states that were the last to shut down and the first to reopen are experiencing the most alarming spikes.

The U.S. has been hit harder by the pandemic than any other nation, largely due to a series of blunders in the Trump administration’s handling of the crisis. In response to rising cases, President Trump encouraged his team to “slow down the testing” because the numbers made him look bad.

Russian bounties revive Trump-GOP foreign policy divide

The Hill logoThe controversy over reports that Russia targeted U.S. troops in Afghanistan is shining a spotlight back on long-running foreign policy divisions between President Trump and GOP lawmakers.

The Trump administration provided a round of briefings and closed-door documents in the wake of a flurry of news reports that Moscow offered bounties to Taliban-linked fighters to target U.S. and coalition forces. That move by administration officials was meant to quell the bipartisan outcry on Capitol Hill, particularly after reports that Trump was previously briefed on the matter.

While several GOP senators defended Trump, the debacle revived broader concerns among Republicans about the administration’s relationship with Russia. Continue reading.

The GOP traded its principles for conservative judges. It was a bad deal.

Washington Post logoIf Republicans lose the White House in 2020, they’ll have to ask whether they paid too high a price

President Trump has retained support from many Republicans and conservatives thanks to a Faustian bargain: So long as Trump stacks the judiciary with friendly judges, they’ve been willing to look the other way when Trump pushes trade protectionism, ditches entitlement reform, or woos Russia’s President Vladimir Putin — positions out of step with recent conservative orthodoxy. As David Harsanyi argued for the Federalist, “The question was,” for conservatives, “ ‘What’s scarier, a Trump presidency or a progressive Supreme Court?’ ”

Former George W. Bush administration attorney John Yoo said that he had deeply conservative friends “who would normally be utterly turned off by a guy like Trump,” yet supported him “only because of [the] appointment to Justice [Antonin] Scalia’s vacancy” on the Supreme Court. Conservative fixation with judges doesn’t only include the Supreme Court, but the lower courts as well. Noting that the Supreme Court hears a tiny fraction of the cases decided by appellate judges, Washington Post columnist Hugh Hewitt challengedTrump’s conservative critics to “reconcile their vehement opposition to him with their love of the Constitution. The latter is most definitely benefiting from the president’s massive impact on the federal bench, one that extends far beyond Justice Neil M. Gorsuch on the Supreme Court.

Conservatives may have felt the bargain paid off last week, when Trump clinched his 200th judicial confirmation faster than any president since Jimmy Carter. Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) tried to spike the ball when he said the milestone marked “a sea change, a generational change on the federal bench,” and that “Republicans are stemming this liberal judicial tide that we’ve lived with in the past.” Continue reading.

GOP skeptical of polling on Trump

The Hill logoRepublicans are putting their mistrust in polls as former Vice President Joe Biden widens his lead over President Trump nationally and in battleground states. 

Trump lags Biden in national surveys by almost 10 points and trails him in battleground states like Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Meanwhile, Biden is making inroads in some GOP-leaning states like Georgia, where one poll has him running neck and neck with Trump.

With the realization that Trump is unlikely to change up his leadership style between now and Election Day, GOP senators are banking on a repeat of 2016, when polling suggested Trump would lose to Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Continue reading.

Republicans once again face questions about why Trump isn’t tougher on Russia

Washington Post logoSenate Republicans are calling for a tougher posture against Russia following reports that the country’s military spy unit offered to pay Taliban-linked militants to attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan — putting the GOP lawmakers once again potentially at odds with President Trump over how to combat Moscow’s aggression toward the United States.

Trump and the White House repeatedly denied Monday that the president had been briefed on the efforts against coalition forces in Afghanistan, which are believed to have led to the deaths of several U.S. service members. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Trump had not been told of the intelligence because it had not been verified and declined to say if the president had been briefed since news of the bounties became public.

But on Capitol Hill, Republican senators demanded more information from the administration and called for Russia to be punished if reports from the New York Times, The Washington Post and other media outlets were deemed accurate. The Republicans took a notably tougher public tone than Trump did, although they mostly avoided the question of whether the president should have been aware of the intelligence. Continue reading.

Republicans once again face questions about why Trump isn’t tougher on Russia

Washington Post logoSenate Republicans are calling for a tougher posture against Russia following reports that the country’s military spy unit offered to pay Taliban-linked militants to attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan — putting the GOP lawmakers once again potentially at odds with President Trump over how to combat Moscow’s aggression toward the United States.

Trump and the White House repeatedly denied Monday that the president had been briefed on the efforts against coalition forces in Afghanistan, which are believed to have led to the deaths of several U.S. service members. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Trump had not been told of the intelligence because it had not been verified and declined to say if the president had been briefed since news of the bounties became public.

But on Capitol Hill, Republican senators demanded more information from the administration and called for Russia to be punished if reports from the New York Times, The Washington Post and other media outlets were deemed accurate. The Republicans took a notably tougher public tone than Trump did, although they mostly avoided the question of whether the president should have been aware of the intelligence. Continue reading.

Trump, GOP place big bet on economy for 2020

The Hill logoRepublicans are betting on the economy as they try to hold on to the Senate and the White House in November.

The spread of the coronavirus and the subsequent economic fallout have rattled the party’s 2020 message and sparked a round of dismal poll numbers for President Trump and Republicans in key battleground races.

But GOP senators are hoping a potential upswing in growth heading into the fall, combined with fundamental policy differences that contrast with Democrats, will allow them to save a key piece of their campaign strategy. Continue reading.

DFL Party Chairman Ken Martin’s Statement on Jason Lewis’ History of Sowing Divisiveness and Racist Comments

Lewis set to denounce police reform in front of Minneapolis Third Precinct Police Headquarters

SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA – Today, DFL Party Chairman Ken Martin released the following statement on Republican Senate candidate Jason Lewis’ history of spreading divisiveness and partisanship, including past comments disparaging communities of color.

This comes as Lewis is set to hold a press conference this afternoon denouncing the need for police reform and denying the systemic racism that is embedded in our country.

Lewis has repeatedly circulated a false claim commonly pushed by white supremacists that white people are disproportionately killed by Black people, and he used his past conservative talk show to declare that “White Lives Matter.”

“Once again, Jason Lewis proves he’s not interested in finding solutions to problems we face, but rather exploits them for his own partisan gain,” said DFL Party Chairman Ken Martin “He denies any wrongdoing in our systems, and ignores Minnesotans’ demands for reform. Lewis has repeatedly demeaned communities of color, and his ignorant views of the Black community prove he is unfit to serve all Minnesotans in the U.S. Senate.”

The DFL has previously highlighted Lewis’ racist comments such as claiming that the problem in the Black community is the “gangsta culture,” saying that Black people on welfare “traded one plantation for another,” and comparing progressive income tax brackets to slavery.