True Statements I never thought I would say—
1- The current president of the US is a petty vindictive little f**k.
To His Dead Brother’s Family--
In 1999, Donald Trump’s father died. His deceased brother’s family was cut out of the will. They sued the future president arguing they were originally in the will, but Donald Trump took advantage of his father’s dementia to cut them out.
But wait, that’s not the vindictive part. This is:
Mr. Trump retaliated by withdrawing the medical benefits critical
to his nephew’s infant child.
“I was angry because they sued,” he explained during last week’s interview. [Jan. 2016]
Being prepared to kill a baby out of vengeance toward their parents, that’s a special kind of vindictive. www.quora.com/…
More details at: www.newyorker.com/...
To Spicy—
I don’t even like Sean Spicer, but petty Trump pulled him off the trip to meet Pope Francis in May 2017 to punish Spicer for not containing the James Comey firing story. Trump gets mad and fires Comey, then on-air talks about firing Comey to contain Russia story, then punches down to beat up Spicer.
Notably, Spicer, a devout Catholic, was left out of Trump's meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican in May.
"Wow. That's all he wanted," a source close to the White House told CNN in May. Spicer has spoken publicly about his Catholicism, telling reporters that he gave up alcohol for Lent. www.businessinsider.com/...
(Spicer did get to meet the Pope with a group of legislators Aug 2017. I know you were worried about that.)
To Mueller Team & House Dems —
Trump threatens retaliation against 'evil, treasonous' opponents over Russia investigation
Donald Trump has complained of a 'false narrative' promoted by
people who have done 'evil ... treasonous things' after the completion of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into allegations of collusion with Russia. US attorney general William Barr's summary, released on Sunday, said the report had not established that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government. 'We can never let this happen to another president again,' the US president said, promising to 'look into' those people. www.theguardian.com/...
To Sanctuary Cities (but this seems like it’s backfiring)—
Trump’s sanctuary city idea could help some immigrants stay
in the country
An idea floated by President Donald Trump to send immigrants from the border to “sanctuary cities” to exact revenge on Democratic foes could end up doing the migrants a favor by placing them in locations that make it easier to put down roots and stay in the country.
The plan would put thousands of immigrants in cities that are not only welcoming to them, but also more likely to rebuff federal officials carrying out deportation orders. Many of these locations have more resources to help immigrants make their legal cases to stay in the United States than smaller cities, with some of the nation’s biggest immigration advocacy groups based in places like San Francisco, New York City and Chicago. www.denverpost.com/...
2- Republicans caved; they are entirely the party of Trump.
How the GOP morphed from the party of Reagan to the party of Trump
An overlapping Obama-era shift occurred among older voters. In 2008, members of the “Silent Generation” born between 1925 and 1945 leaned slightly toward Democrats, 48 percent to 41 percent; by 2017, Silent Generation voters spoke for Republicans by a margin of 52 percent to 43 percent.
Republicans turned an eight-percentage-point 2008 deficit among white Catholics into a 14-percentage-point Republican advantage. The large GOP edge among white evangelicals (64 percent to 28 percent in 2008) grew even larger (77 percent to 18 percent in 2017)…
Dubbed “American Preservationists” by Cato Institute analyst Emily Ekins in a June 2017 study, Trump’s original core constituency have relatively low levels of education and income. They fear the loss of Social Security and Medicare benefits. They dislike free-trade deals, think of “real Americans” as native-born Christians, feel more negatively toward minorities than other Americans do and complain of discrimination against whites. They oppose both legal and illegal immigration.
Their attitudes match Trump’s pledge to protect existing old-age benefits, his talk of shredding trade deals, his declaration that “Christmas is back,” his attacks on African American athletes protesting racial injustice and his border crackdown. Other GOP leaders, to the extent they disagree, fear defying them. www.cnbc.com/… [Underline mine.]
Trump’s Takeover of the Republican Party Is Almost Complete
Those [2016] power struggles have now been resolved in a one-sided fashion. In every state important to the 2020 race, Mr. Trump and his lieutenants are in firm control of the Republican electoral machinery, and they are taking steps to extend and tighten their grip.
It is, in every institutional sense, Mr. Trump’s party...
As Mr. Trump has prepared to embark on a difficult fight for re-election, a small but ferocious operation within his campaign has helped install loyal allies atop the most significant state parties and urged them to speak up loudly to discourage conservative criticism of Mr. Trump. The campaign has dispatched aides to state party conclaves, Republican executive committee meetings and fund-raising dinners, all with the aim of ensuring the delegates at next year’s convention in Charlotte, N.C., are utterly committed to Mr. Trump. www.nytimes.com/...
3- I worry about the state of our democracy
Trump Again Threatens Violence If Democrats Don’t Support Him
One of Donald Trump’s favorite riffs is a wish, cast as a warning, that his supporters inside and outside the state security services will unleash violence on his political opponents if they continue to oppose the administration. The specifics of the riff don’t vary much. Trump laments that his opponents are treating him unfairly, praises the toughness and strength of his supporters — a
category that combines the police, military, and Bikers for Trump, which he apparently views as a Brownshirt-like militia — and a prediction that his supporters will at some point end their restraint.
He does it again in a new interview with Breitbart:
I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don’t play it tougher. Okay? I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.
… Already his authoritarian rhetoric is so thoroughly normalized that it hardly even registers as news any more. Anybody whose political efforts involve helping Trump gain more power, rather than opposing that project, is playing Russian roulette with the Constitution. nymag.com/...
A major democracy watchdog just published a scathing report on Trump
Freedom House is a respected bipartisan watchdog group that compiles an annual report on the state of democracy and human rights around the world. This report, known as Freedom in the World, is widely cited by policymakers and academics who study democracy. It’s a serious endeavor done by serious analysts — and this year, it’s heavily focused on Trump.
“Trump has assailed essential institutions and traditions including the separation of powers, a free press, an independent judiciary, the impartial delivery of justice, safeguards against corruption, and most disturbingly, the legitimacy of elections,” Freedom House president Mike Abramowitz writes in a special section of this year’s report, released on Tuesday morning. “We cannot take for granted that institutional bulwarks against abuse of power will retain their strength, or that our democracy will endure perpetually. Rarely has the need to defend its rules and norms been more urgent.”
… I’d encourage you to read the whole thing, to get a deeper sense of why it is that the authors see Trump as being uniquely threatening — the report goes into some detail on factors ranging from his attacks on the press as “the enemy of the people” to his systematic disregard for anti-corruption norms. But the short version is this: Freedom House is more than a little worried.
“Ours is a well-established and resilient democracy, and we can see the effect of its antibodies on the viruses infecting it,” Abramowitz concludes. “Yet the pressure on our system is as serious as any experienced in living memory.” www.vox.com/...
90% of Rs do support Trump.
However, part of that statistic is because sane, moderate Rs have left the Republican Party.
Republicans are now the incredible shrinking elephant in the room.
MESSAGE—
WE are not alone in our struggle to remove Trump from power
What I’ve Gained by Leaving the Republican Party by Peter Wehner
I’m more willing to listen to those I once thought didn’t have much to teach me.
I’m a politically homeless person these days. For most of my life, I’ve been closely affiliated with the Republican Party. My first vote was cast for Ronald Reagan in 1980. I worked in his administration, as well as that of George H. W. Bush; for seven years, I was a senior adviser to President George W. Bush…
But since the political rise of Donald Trump, I’ve found myself at
first deeply disappointed and now often at odds with the GOP. The party of Reagan has been fundamentally transformed. It’s now Donald Trump’s party, through and through.
That’s turned out to be quite a problem for me, because from the moment he announced his run for the presidency, I believed that Trump was intellectually, temperamentally, and psychologically unfit to be president. Indeed, I warned the GOP about Trump back in 2011, when I wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal decrying his claim that Barack Obama was not born in America. From time to time, people emerge who are peddlers of paranoia and who violate unwritten codes that are vital to a self-governing society, I wrote, adding, “They delight in making our public discourse more childish and freakish, focusing attention on absurdities rather than substantive issues, and stirring up mistrust among citizens. When they do, those they claim to represent should speak out forcefully against them.”
...Here’s what I hope: Detaching myself from my longtime political party means that I find myself more willing than I was to hear the views of people I once tended to tune out, to listen to those I once thought didn’t have much to teach me, and that I now put a greater premium on epistemological modesty than I once did. Aware of having been wrong in the past, I’m more open to being wrong today, and I trust that I’m more open to correction. “There are truths to be discovered,” in the words of the political scientist Harry Clor, “but truths complex and many-sided.”
www.theatlantic.com/…
Boycott the Republican Party by JONATHAN RAUCH & BENJAMIN WITTES
If conservatives want to save the GOP from itself, they need to vote mindlessly and mechanically against its nominees
A few days after the Democratic electoral sweep this past November in Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere, The Washington Post asked a random Virginia man to explain his vote. The man, a marketing executive named Toren Beasley, replied that his calculus was simply to refuse to calculate. “It could have been Dr. Seuss or the Berenstain Bears on the ballot and I would have voted for them if they were a Democrat,” he said. “I might do more analyses in other years. But in this case, no. No one else gets any consideration because what’s going on with the Republicans—I’m talking about Trump and his cast of characters—is stupid, stupid, stupid. I can’t say stupid enough times.”
...We have both spent our professional careers strenuously avoiding partisanship in our writing and thinking. We have both done work that is, in different ways, ideologically eclectic, and that has—over a long period of time—cast us as not merely nonpartisans but antipartisans...This, then, is the article we thought we would never write: a frank statement that a certain
form of partisanship is now a moral necessity. The Republican Party, as an institution, has become a danger to the rule of law and the integrity of our democracy. The problem is not just Donald Trump; it’s the larger political apparatus that made a conscious decision to enable him. In a two-party system, nonpartisanship works only if both parties are consistent democratic actors. If one of them is not predictably so, the space for nonpartisans evaporates. We’re thus driven to believe that the best hope of defending the country from Trump’s Republican enablers, and of saving the Republican Party from itself, is to do as Toren Beasley did: vote mindlessly and mechanically against Republicans at every opportunity, until the party either rights itself or implodes (very preferably the former)…
Faced with the choice between soul-killing accommodation and futile resistance, many Republican politicians who renounce Trumpism are fleeing the party or exiting politics altogether. Of those who remain, many are fighting for their political lives against a nihilistic insurgency. So we arrive at a syllogism:
- The GOP has become the party of Trumpism.
- Trumpism is a threat to democratic values and the rule of law.
- The Republican Party is a threat to democratic values and the rule of law.
...We understand why Republicans, even moderate ones, are reluctant to cross party lines. Party, today, is identity...But the Democratic Party is not a threat to our democratic order. That is why we are rising above our independent predilections and behaving like dumb-ass partisans. It’s why we hope many smart people will do the same. www.theatlantic.com/… [Bolding mine]
We Fight. We Organize. We Must Win. We Will Win.
We organize like never before. We make allies and find partners in our precinct, county, state party and work together with Swing Left, Neighbors on Call, Indivisible, etc. to win every election from school board, to mayor, to state legislators, state attorneys general, state judicial offices, to US House Reps, to Senators, to President.
- We work with disaffected former Republicans and the politically homeless Unaffiliated who share our broadest goals.
- We recognize that 51% of the loaf beats 0% of the loaf every day of the week.
- We reclaim our fight songs—