Tag: Trumpism

The fading GOP establishment moves to support Cheney as Trump attacks and McCarthy keeps his distance

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Following her vote to impeach Donald Trump, Rep. Liz Cheney has received a groundswell of financial support from the most powerful figures in traditional GOP politics and the corporate world.

Inside her nearly $1.6 million haul in three months, Cheney (R-Wyo.) secured financial backing from dozens of alumni of both Bush administrations, including a couple of Cabinet members and, not surprisingly, her parents, Richard and Lynne Cheney. More than 10 current and former members of the House cut checks to her campaign, including former speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and a handful of other Republicans who voted to impeach the former president during the Jan. 13 vote.

Five GOP senators donated to Cheney, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Continue reading.

Trumpism Grips a Post-Policy G.O.P. as Traditional Conservatism Fades

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Despite falling from power in Washington, the Republican Party has done little soul-searching or reflection on a new agenda, instead focusing on attacking Democrats and the news media.

ORLANDO, FLORIDA — For decades, the same ritual took place in the aftermath of Republican electoral defeats.

Moderate, establishment-aligned party officials would argue that candidates had veered too far right on issues like immigration, as well as in their language, and would counsel a return to the political center. And conservatives would contend that Republicans had abandoned the true faith and must return to first principles to distinguish themselves from Democrats and claim victory.

One could be forgiven for missing this debate in the aftermath of 2020, because it is scarcely taking place. Republicans have entered a sort of post-policy moment in which the most animating forces in the party are emotions, not issues. Continue reading.

Nikki Haley’s defense of her nuanced Trump criticism, and the nuance it misses

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Last week, Nikki Haley was featured in an extensive Politico profile in which she seemed to take inordinate care to distance herself from former president Donald Trump. This was big news, because Haley is considered one of her Republican Party’s brightest rising stars and a 2024 presidential contender. She also was Trump’s United Nations ambassador. Given that, this was a significant entry in the GOP’s ongoing debate over how much it will remain defined by Trumpism.

But to hear Haley tell it, this has become something else entirely: an effort by the media to divide Republicans. In a new Wall Street Journal op-ed, she argues the media simply won’t let Republicans offer a nuanced review of the Trump era, instead demanding that they firmly land in the “Always Trump” or “Never Trump” camp.

This call for allowing nuance, though, itself glosses over lots of nuance. And Haley’s op-ed is a case in point when it comes to why the media is so critical of how she and other occasional Trump critics talk about his tenure. Continue reading.

Trump Is Gone, But Trumpism’s Not Forgotten

Donald Trump has left Washington, but the shadow of the former president looms large over an increasingly conflicted party.

Donald Trump is gone from Washington, metaphorically dragged kicking and screaming from a job he swears he didn’t really lose, but gone nonetheless – uncharacteristically quiet as he ponders his future from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

But the former president is still a powerful force in GOP politics, dividing the party as it struggles to use its limited minority muscle in Washington and haunting Republican candidates who still don’t know how strong Trump – or Trumpism – will be in future elections.

The division will come to a head Wednesday as Republican House members decide what to do with colleagues representing the two sides of the GOP. House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy of California is under pressure to remove Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia from her committee posts because of wild conspiracy theories Greene has espoused and comments she has retweeted calling for violence against her Democratic colleagues. McCarthy met with Greene on Tuesday night, jogging away from reporters who asked him how it went. Continue reading.

Top Republican congressional aide resigns, rips GOP lawmakers who objected to Biden win

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Jason Schmid, a longtime senior GOP aide on the House Armed Services Committee, has resigned from his post, according to a letter to incoming ranking member Mike Rogers (R-Ala.). 

The letter was first obtained by Politico Tuesday. 

In the letter, Schmid blasted GOP House members for supporting an objection to President-elect Joe Biden’s victory even after the deadly riot that occurred Jan. 6 by a mob of President Trump‘s supporters. Continue reading.

The rise of Gen Z could foretell the fall of Trumpism

Deeply committed to diversity, social justice and combating climate change, the youngest voters could be the engine that drives a new GOP.

The evidence all points in one direction: Americans born after 1996, known as Generation Z, could doom not only Trumpism but conservatism as the country currently knows it. 

Members of Generation Z who are of voting age — 18- to 23-year-olds — want more government solutions. They rank climate change, racism and economic inequality consistently in their top issues, according to polls, and they participated in greater numbers during their first midterm (in 2018) than previous generations did theirs.

As Republicans espouse “family values” and “religious liberty,” data finds that Generation Z, also known as Zoomers, are less likely than older Americans to be a member of a religious group — 4 in 10 don’t affiliate — and appear to care more about systemic racism and an equitable future than upholding traditional nuclear family structures, based on polling of their policy priorities. Continue reading.

Conservative columnist explains how Sean Duffy’s knee-jerk attack on Alexander Vindman exposed Trumpism’s moral bankruptcy

AlterNet logoA clickbait headline in The Bulwark reads, “In Praise of Sean Duffy.” Because the publication is The Bulwark — which anti-Trump conservatives Bill Kristol and Charles Sykes founded in December 2018 — and former Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy is stridently pro-Trump, one naturally assumes that the headline is being used ironically. And sure enough, it is: although the article, written by Sykes, chastises Duffy for shamelessly smearing Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, it also stresses that the far-right Republican and Trump sycophant did the political world a favor by exposing how morally bankrupt Trumpism is.

On Tuesday, Vindman, who served on the National Security Council, testified on Capitol Hill at a closed-door hearing held in connection with House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump. Duffy, a former reality television star and CNN contributor, followed the lead of Fox News’ Laura Ingraham and reflexively smeared Vindman.

This week on CNN, Duffy said of Vindman, “it seems very clear that he is incredibly concerned about Ukrainian defense. I don’t know that he’s concerned about American policy…. We all have an affinity to our homeland where we came from…. He has an affinity for the Ukraine.”

View the complete October 30 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

Trumpism isn’t full-blown fascism — but the ‘raw materials’ are there: historian

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump has been on the warpath against Democrats of color in recent weeks, telling four congresswomen (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York City, Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts)to leave the United States and using racially incendiary language to insult Maryland Rep. Elijah E. Cummings and the residents of Baltimore (a predominantly black East Coast city). History/international studies professor Andrew Gawthorpe, who teaches at Leiden University in the Netherlands, asserts this week in The Guardian that Trumpism, for all its racism, isn’t a full-blown fascist movement — although he warns that the possibility for one certainly exists in the United States. And he describes in his Guardian piece what an American fascism would look like.

“Even the Trumpified Republican Party is not a fascist movement, and Trump is certainly no Hitler,” Gawthorpe asserts. “Full-blown fascism usually emerges under the pressure of economic collapse or existential war, but it is constructed from pre-existing social and political raw materials.”

Gawthorpe adds, however, that “while the Trump era hasn’t seen the rise of a true fascism in the United States, it has given us sharp and painful insights into the raw materials out of which a future American fascism might be constructed.”

View the complete July 31 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

‘Lazy, stupid and dangerous’: This ex-Republican admits he enabled right-wing ‘populism’ — and it went completely off the the rails

Sometimes, it’s only when you’re on the outside looking in that you can perceive the real truth of a situation.

This appears to be the case for Max Boot, a conservative pundit who has become disillusioned with the right wing and the Republican Party since the rise of President Donald Trump. Boot has already publicly announced that he was wrong for supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and he left the GOP in disgust at its current state. And in a new column for the Washington Post this week, he expressed more regret about his past in the conservative movement — in particular, his engagement in the anti-intellectual rhetoric common on the right.

“I used to think right-wing anti-elitism against the intellectuals — in contrast to the left-wing anti-elitism against the rich — was innocuous and even well-warranted,” he wrote. “While warning of the dangers of populism, I sometimes indulged in this kind of posturing myself. Like a lot of conservative eggheads, I imagined that, even though I lived among the coastal elite, I was expressing the wisdom of the heartland.”

View the complete June 12 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.

Journaliat Michael Tomasky explains why Trumpism is merely a symptom of the GOP’s overall ugliness — not the sole cause

Many articles have been written about President Donald Trump’s influence on the modern-day Republican Party and the reluctance of Republicans to openly criticize him. But journalist Michael Tomasky, in an April 15 opinion piece for the Daily Beast, asserts that Trumpism is merely a symptom of the GOP’s overall ugliness — not the sole cause.

Tomasky recalls that when President Bill Clinton lied under oath about his extramarital affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky in the late 1990s, he incurred the wrath of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. The author then compares Clinton’s activities to the Trump-era GOP, concluding that the latter is much worse.

“Clinton lied to his people for one reason: he knew that if he told the truth, they would abandon him,” Tomasky explains. “His support within his party would collapse, he knew, if he acknowledged having sullied the presidency in that way.”

View the complete April 15 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.