Staten Island crowd defies vaccine mandate by storming mall food court, video shows.
Paulina Villegas
Yesterday at 10:32 p.m. EDT,WAPO
As customers enjoyed their Saturday afternoon at Staten Island Mall and prepared to dig in to their meals, a raucous, maskless crowd of dozens opposing New York City’s indoor vaccination mandate stormed into the food court while chanting, “U-S-A!”
Their goal: to eat at the food court without showing proof of vaccination.
“Everybody go get food and eat. That is what we’re here to do!” one woman said to the group, according to a video from freelance journalist Oliya Scootercaster. “We’re going to meet over there and go into the food court area and sit our butts down and stay as long as we like!”
Videos posted to social media show the protesters marching into Staten Island Mall in defiance of the city’s indoor dining vaccination mandate. Although people are not required to show proof of vaccination or wear masks inside the mall, they do need to show proof of immunization to eat at the food court. Some chanted, “My body, my choice,” while others recited the Pledge of Allegiance.
“We shouldn’t be carrying papers or showing papers because we live in America and we are the land of the free,” one demonstrator said to the group, according to video.
Brookfield Properties, the operator of the Staten Island Mall, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday.
The anti-mandate demonstration at the mall food court is the latest public instance of resistance from those opposing vaccine and mask mandates, even as the country is averaging more than 119,000 new coronavirus cases a day. Vaccine mandates are a hot-button topic across the country as government officials and public health experts continue to grapple with hesitancy among the millions who remain unvaccinated. The battle over vaccine and mask mandates has been fraught nationwide, playing out in schools, restaurants, airplanes and other public spaces each day.
The scene in Staten Island — a borough largely sympathetic to former president Donald Trump — shed light on some of the opposition to New York City’s mandate that requires proof of at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine for various indoor activities for workers and customers, including indoor dining and gyms.
New York City was the first in the United States to enforce this mandate Sept. 13, as part of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s efforts to get more residents vaccinated at a time when the highly transmissible delta variant has led to a surge in infections nationwide.
De Blasio (D) has also asked city workers to get immunized or tested weekly, and has even offered $100 to incentivize people to get the shots.
“If you want to participate in our society fully, you’ve got to get vaccinated,” he said at a news conference in August. “It’s time.”
Other cities such as San Francisco have followed suit.
Scootercaster, who was at the scene, wrote on Twitter that the dozens who entered Staten Island Mall were not asked to show vaccination cards, despite a sign at the entrance stating that it is required.
Clips posted to Twitter show demonstrators expressing support for Trump and using expletives to denounce President Biden.
A male protester wielding a large American flag said he opposed mask mandates for children in schools and vaccine requirements, and falsely claimed that the vaccines have not been tested. Health agencies have repeatedly said the vaccines have been thoroughly tested, and the Food and Drug Administration gave full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine last month.
“I don’t like experiments,” he said.
Vaccine mandates have also caused political division across party lines in New York state, which was once the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic last year. Although former governor Andrew M. Cuomo and de Blasio pushed for strict coronavirus restrictions, Republican politicians in the state have fiercely opposed them. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.), whose district includes Staten Island, has called the city’s vaccination policy an “overreach” and argued that it will burden businesses that are already struggling to recover from financial losses from last year.
She was among other Staten Island elected officials who announced last month their plan to sue New York City to try to block the vaccine mandate, claiming it infringes on citizens’ rights.
The incident Saturday is not the first time residents and businesses have opposed coronavirus restrictions in Staten Island. In December, hundreds of mostly maskless demonstrators stood outside a bar to oppose the state’s coronavirus guidelines and to show their support for the tavern, which had been shut down for defying those guidelines.
“The people have rights!” one protester yelled, according to the New York Daily News. “Open the door, I’m thirsty!”
Rach3: American patriotism 2021: I regret that you have just one life to give for my drink.
More Ugly Americans
Re: More Ugly Americans
Opinion by
Robert Kagan
Contributing columnist WAPO
September 23, 2021 at 3:32 p.m. EDT
Our Constitutional Crisis Is Already Here
“Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation.”
— James Madison
The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking and denial.
But about these things there should be no doubt:
First, Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for president in 2024. The hope and expectation that he would fade in visibility and influence have been delusional. He enjoys mammoth leads in the polls; he is building a massive campaign war chest; and at this moment the Democratic ticket looks vulnerable. Barring health problems, he is running.
Second, Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary. Trump’s charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election results that do not go his way. Some Republican candidates have already begun preparing to declare fraud in 2022, just as Larry Elder tried meekly to do in the California recall contest.
Meanwhile, the amateurish “stop the steal” efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Those recalcitrant Republican state officials who effectively saved the country from calamity by refusing to falsely declare fraud or to “find” more votes for Trump are being systematically removed or hounded from office. Republican legislatures are giving themselves greater control over the election certification process. As of this spring, Republicans have proposed or passed measures in at least 16 states that would shift certain election authorities from the purview of the governor, secretary of state or other executive-branch officers to the legislature. An Arizona bill flatly states that the legislature may “revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election” by a simple majority vote. Some state legislatures seek to impose criminal penalties on local election officials alleged to have committed “technical infractions,” including obstructing the view of poll watchers.
The stage is thus being set for chaos. Imagine weeks of competing mass protests across multiple states as lawmakers from both parties claim victory and charge the other with unconstitutional efforts to take power. Partisans on both sides are likely to be better armed and more willing to inflict harm than they were in 2020. Would governors call out the National Guard? Would President Biden nationalize the Guard and place it under his control, invoke the Insurrection Act, and send troops into Pennsylvania or Texas or Wisconsin to quell violent protests? Deploying federal power in the states would be decried as tyranny. Biden would find himself where other presidents have been — where Andrew Jackson was during the nullification crisis, or where Abraham Lincoln was after the South seceded — navigating without rules or precedents, making his own judgments about what constitutional powers he does and doesn’t have.
Today’s arguments over the filibuster will seem quaint in three years if the American political system enters a crisis for which the Constitution offers no remedy.
Most Americans — and all but a handful of politicians — have refused to take this possibility seriously enough to try to prevent it. As has so often been the case in other countries where fascist leaders arise, their would-be opponents are paralyzed in confusion and amazement at this charismatic authoritarian. They have followed the standard model of appeasement, which always begins with underestimation. The political and intellectual establishments in both parties have been underestimating Trump since he emerged on the scene in 2015. They underestimated the extent of his popularity and the strength of his hold on his followers; they underestimated his ability to take control of the Republican Party; and then they underestimated how far he was willing to go to retain power. The fact that he failed to overturn the 2020 election has reassured many that the American system remains secure, though it easily could have gone the other way — if Biden had not been safely ahead in all four states where the vote was close; if Trump had been more competent and more in control of the decision-makers in his administration, Congress and the states. As it was, Trump came close to bringing off a coup earlier this year. All that prevented it was a handful of state officials with notable courage and integrity, and the reluctance of two attorneys general and a vice president to obey orders they deemed inappropriate.
These were not the checks and balances the Framers had in mind when they designed the Constitution, of course, but Trump has exposed the inadequacy of those protections. The Founders did not foresee the Trump phenomenon, in part because they did not foresee national parties. They anticipated the threat of a demagogue, but not of a national cult of personality. They assumed that the new republic’s vast expanse and the historic divisions among the 13 fiercely independent states would pose insuperable barriers to national movements based on party or personality. “Petty” demagogues might sway their own states, where they were known and had influence, but not the whole nation with its diverse populations and divergent interests.
Such checks and balances as the Framers put in place, therefore, depended on the separation of the three branches of government, each of which, they believed, would zealously guard its own power and prerogatives. The Framers did not establish safeguards against the possibility that national-party solidarity would transcend state boundaries because they did not imagine such a thing was possible. Nor did they foresee that members of Congress, and perhaps members of the judicial branch, too, would refuse to check the power of a president from their own party.
(Rach3: Re-read Federalist Paper 10 , exactly as Kagan states.)
In recent decades, however, party loyalty has superseded branch loyalty, and never more so than in the Trump era. As the two Trump impeachments showed, if members of Congress are willing to defend or ignore the president’s actions simply because he is their party leader, then conviction and removal become all but impossible. In such circumstances, the Framers left no other check against usurpation by the executive — except (small-r) republican virtue.
Critics and supporters alike have consistently failed to recognize what a unique figure Trump is in American history. Because his followers share fundamentally conservative views, many see Trump as merely the continuation, and perhaps the logical culmination, of the Reagan Revolution. This is a mistake: Although most Trump supporters are or have become Republicans, they hold a set of beliefs that were not necessarily shared by all Republicans. Some Trump supporters are former Democrats and independents. In fact, the passions that animate the Trump movement are as old as the republic and have found a home in both parties at one time or another.
Suspicion of and hostility toward the federal government; racial hatred and fear; a concern that modern, secular society undermines religion and traditional morality; economic anxiety in an age of rapid technological change; class tensions, with subtle condescension on one side and resentment on the other; distrust of the broader world, especially Europe, and its insidious influence in subverting American freedom — such views and attitudes have been part of the fabric of U.S. politics since the anti-Federalists, the Whiskey Rebellion and Thomas Jefferson. The Democratic Party was the home of white supremacists until they jumped to George Wallace in 1968 and later to the Republicans. Liberals and Democrats in particular need to distinguish between their ongoing battle with Republican policies and the challenge posed by Trump and his followers. One can be fought through the processes of the constitutional system; the other is an assault on the Constitution itself.
What makes the Trump movement historically unique is not its passions and paranoias. It is the fact that for millions of Americans, Trump himself is the response to their fears and resentments. This is a stronger bond between leader and followers than anything seen before in U.S. political movements. Although the Founders feared the rise of a king or a Caesar, for two centuries Americans proved relatively immune to unwavering hero-worship of politicians. Their men on horseback — Theodore Roosevelt, Grant, even Washington — were not regarded as infallible. This was true of great populist leaders as well. William Jennings Bryan a century ago was venerated because he advanced certain ideas and policies, but he did not enjoy unquestioning loyalty from his followers. Even Reagan was criticized by conservatives for selling out conservative principles, for deficit spending, for his equivocal stance on abortion, for being “soft” on the Soviet Union.
Trump is different, which is one reason the political system has struggled to understand, much less contain, him. The American liberal worldview tends to search for material and economic explanations for everything, and no doubt a good number of Trump supporters have grounds to complain about their lot in life. But their bond with Trump has little to do with economics or other material concerns. They believe the U.S. government and society have been captured by socialists, minority groups and sexual deviants. They see the Republican Party establishment as corrupt and weak — “losers,” to use Trump’s word, unable to challenge the reigning liberal hegemony. They view Trump as strong and defiant, willing to take on the establishment, Democrats, RINOs, liberal media, antifa, the Squad, Big Tech and the “Mitch McConnell Republicans.” His charismatic leadership has given millions of Americans a feeling of purpose and empowerment, a new sense of identity. While Trump’s critics see him as too narcissistic to be any kind of leader, his supporters admire his unapologetic, militant selfishness. Unlike establishment Republicans, Trump speaks without embarrassment on behalf of an aggrieved segment of Americans, not exclusively White, who feel they have been taking it on the chin for too long. And that is all he needs to do.
There was a time when political analysts wondered what would happen when Trump failed to “deliver” for his constituents. But the most important thing Trump delivers is himself. His egomania is part of his appeal. In his professed victimization by the media and the “elites,” his followers see their own victimization. That is why attacks on Trump by the elites only strengthen his bond with his followers. That is why millions of Trump supporters have even been willing to risk death as part of their show of solidarity: When Trump’s enemies cited his mishandling of the pandemic to discredit him, their answer was to reject the pandemic. One Trump supporter didn’t go to the hospital after developing covid-19 symptoms because he didn’t want to contribute to the liberal case against Trump. “I’m not going to add to the numbers,” he told a reporter.
Because the Trump movement is less about policies than about Trump himself, it has undermined the normal role of American political parties, which is to absorb new political and ideological movements into the mainstream. Bryan never became president, but some of his populist policies were adopted by both political parties. Sen. Bernie Sanders’s supporters might not have wanted Biden for president, but having lost the nomination battle they could work on getting Biden to pursue their agenda. Liberal democracy requires acceptance of adverse electoral results, a willingness to countenance the temporary rule of those with whom we disagree. As historian Richard Hofstadter observed, it requires that people “endure error in the interest of social peace.” Part of that willingness stems from the belief that the democratic system makes it possible to work, even in opposition, to correct the ruling party’s errors and overreach. Movements based on ideas and policies can also quickly shift their allegiances. Today, the progressives’ flag-bearer might be Sanders, but tomorrow it could be Sen. Elizabeth Warren or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or someone else.
For a movement built around a cult of personality, these adjustments are not possible. For Trump supporters, the “error” is that Trump was cheated out of reelection by what he has told them is an oppressive, communist, Democrat regime. While the defeat of a sitting president normally leads to a struggle to claim the party’s mantle, so far no Republican has been able to challenge Trump’s grip on Republican voters: not Sen. Josh Hawley, not Sen. Tom Cotton, not Tucker Carlson, not Gov. Ron DeSantis. It is still all about Trump. The fact that he is not in office means that the United States is “a territory controlled by enemy tribes,” writes one conservative intellectual. The government, as one Trump supporter put it, “is monopolized by a Regime that believes [Trump voters] are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them [from] getting it." If so, the intellectual posits, what choice do they have but to view the government as the enemy and to become “united and armed to take care of themselves as they think best”?
The Trump movement might not have begun as an insurrection, but it became one after its leader claimed he had been cheated out of reelection. For Trump supporters, the events of Jan. 6 were not an embarrassing debacle but a patriotic effort to save the nation, by violent action if necessary. As one 56-year-old Michigan woman explained: “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”
The banal normalcy of the great majority of Trump’s supporters, including those who went to the Capitol on Jan. 6, has befuddled many observers. Although private militia groups and white supremacists played a part in the attack, 90 percent of those arrested or charged had no ties to such groups. The majority were middle-class and middle-aged; 40 percent were business owners or white-collar workers. They came mostly from purple, not red, counties.
Most Trump supporters are good parents, good neighbors and solid members of their communities. Their bigotry, for the most part, is typical white American bigotry, perhaps with an added measure of resentment and a less filtered mode of expression since Trump arrived on the scene. But these are normal people in the sense that they think and act as people have for centuries. They put their trust in family, tribe, religion and race. Although zealous in defense of their own rights and freedoms, they are less concerned about the rights and freedoms of those who are not like them. That, too, is not unusual. What is unnatural is to value the rights of others who are unlike you as much as you value your own.
As it happens, however, that is what the American experiment in republican democracy requires. It is what the Framers meant by “republican virtue,” a love of freedom not only for oneself but also as an abstract, universal good; a love of self-government as an ideal; a commitment to abide by the laws passed by legitimate democratic processes; and a healthy fear of and vigilance against tyranny of any kind. Even James Madison, who framed the Constitution on the assumption that people would always pursue their selfish interests, nevertheless argued that it was “chimerical” to believe that any form of government could “secure liberty and happiness without any virtue in the people.” Al Gore and his supporters displayed republican virtue when they abided by the Supreme Court’s judgment in 2000 despite the partisan nature of the justices’ decision. (Whether the court itself displayed republican virtue is another question.)
The events of Jan. 6, on the other hand, proved that Trump and his most die-hard supporters are prepared to defy constitutional and democratic norms, just as revolutionary movements have in the past. While it might be shocking to learn that normal, decent Americans can support a violent assault on the Capitol, it shows that Americans as a people are not as exceptional as their founding principles and institutions. Europeans who joined fascist movements in the 1920s and 1930s were also from the middle classes. No doubt many of them were good parents and neighbors, too. People do things as part of a mass movement that they would not do as individuals, especially if they are convinced that others are out to destroy their way of life.
It would be foolish to imagine that the violence of Jan. 6 was an aberration that will not be repeated. Because Trump supporters see those events as a patriotic defense of the nation, there is every reason to expect more such episodes. Trump has returned to the explosive rhetoric of that day, insisting that he won in a “landslide,” that the “radical left Democrat communist party” stole the presidency in the “most corrupt, dishonest, and unfair election in the history of our country” and that they have to give it back. He has targeted for defeat those Republicans who voted for his impeachment — or criticized him for his role in the riot. Already, there have been threats to bomb polling sites, kidnap officials and attack state capitols. “You and your family will be killed very slowly,” the wife of Georgia’s top election official was texted earlier this year. Nor can one assume that the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers would again play a subordinate role when the next riot unfolds. Veterans who assaulted the Capitol told police officers that they had fought for their country before and were fighting for it again. Looking ahead to 2022 and 2024, Trump insists “there is no way they win elections without cheating. There’s no way.” So, if the results come in showing another Democratic victory, Trump’s supporters will know what to do. Just as “generations of patriots” gave “their sweat, their blood and even their very lives” to build America, Trump tells them, so today “we have no choice. We have to fight” to restore “our American birthright.”
Where does the Republican Party stand in all this? The party gave birth to and nurtured this movement; it bears full responsibility for establishing the conditions in which Trump could capture the loyalty of 90 percent of Republican voters. Republican leaders were more than happy to ride Trump’s coattails if it meant getting paid off with hundreds of conservative court appointments, including three Supreme Court justices; tax cuts; immigration restrictions; and deep reductions in regulations on business. Yet Trump’s triumph also had elements of a hostile takeover. The movement’s passion was for Trump, not the party. GOP primary voters chose Trump over the various flavors of establishment Republicanism (Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio), and after Trump’s election they continued to regard establishment Republicans as enemies. Longtime party heroes like Paul Ryan were cast into oblivion for disparaging Trump. Even staunch supporters such as Jeff Sessions eventually became villains when they would not do as Trump demanded. Those who survived had a difficult balancing act: to use Trump’s appeal to pass the Republican agenda while also controlling Trump’s excesses, which they worried could ultimately threaten the party’s interests.
That plan seemed plausible in 2017. Unlike other insurgent leaders, Trump had not spent time in the political wilderness building a party and surrounding himself with loyalists. He had to choose from an existing pool of Republican officials, who varied in their willingness to do his bidding. The GOP establishment hoped that the presence of “adults” would restrain him, protecting their traditional agenda and, in their view, the country’s interests, from his worst instincts.
This was a miscalculation. Trump’s grip on his supporters left no room for an alternative power center in the party. One by one, the “adults” resigned or were run off. The dissent and contrary opinions that exist in every party — the Northeast moderate Republicans in Reagan’s day; the progressives in today’s Democratic Party — disappeared from Trump’s Republican Party. The only real issue was Trump himself, and on that there could be no dissent. Those who disapproved of Trump could either keep silent or leave.
The takeover extended beyond the level of political leadership. Modern political parties are an ecosystem of interest groups, lobby organizations, job seekers, campaign donors and intellectuals. All have a stake in the party’s viability; all ultimately depend on being roughly aligned with wherever the party is at a given moment; and so all had to make their peace with Trump, too. Conservative publications that once opposed him as unfit for the presidency had to reverse course or lose readership and funding. Pundits had to adjust to the demands of their pro-Trump audiences — and were rewarded handsomely when they did. Donors who had opposed Trump during the primaries fell into line, if only to preserve some influence on the issues that mattered to them. Advocacy organizations that had previously seen their role as holding the Republican Party to certain principles, and thus often dissented from the party leadership, either became advocates for Trump or lost clout.
It was no surprise that elected officials feared taking on the Trump movement and that Republican job seekers either kept silent about their views or made show-trial-like apologies for past criticism. Ambition is a powerful antidote to moral qualms. More revealing was the behavior of Republican elder statesmen, former secretaries of state in their 80s or 90s who had no further ambitions for high office and seemingly nothing to lose by speaking out. Despite their known abhorrence of everything Trump stood for, these old lions refused to criticize him. They were unwilling to come out against a Republican Party to which they had devoted their professional lives, even when the party was led by someone they detested. Whatever they thought about Trump, moreover, Republican elders disliked Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the Democrats more. Again, this is not so unusual. German conservatives accommodated Adolf Hitler in large part because they opposed the socialists more than they opposed the Nazis, who, after all, shared many of their basic prejudices. As for conservative intellectuals, even those who had spent years arguing that Woodrow Wilson was a tyrant because he created the Federal Reserve and supported child labor laws seemed to have no concerns about whether Trump was a would-be despot. They not only came to Trump’s defense but fashioned political doctrines to justify his rule, filling in the wide gaps of his nonexistent ideology with an appeal to “conservative nationalism” and conservative populism. Perhaps American conservatism was never comfortable with the American experiment in liberal democracy, but certainly since Trump took over their party, many conservatives have revealed a hostility to core American beliefs.
All this has left few dissenting voices within the Republican ecosystem. The Republican Party today is a zombie party. Its leaders go through the motions of governing in pursuit of traditional Republican goals, wrestling over infrastructure spending and foreign policy, even as real power in the party has leached away to Trump. From the uneasy and sometimes contentious partnership during Trump’s four years in office, the party’s main if not sole purpose today is as the willing enabler of Trump’s efforts to game the electoral system to ensure his return to power.
With the party firmly under his thumb, Trump is now fighting the Biden administration on separate fronts. One is normal, legitimate political competition, where Republicans criticize Biden’s policies, feed and fight the culture wars, and in general behave like a typical hostile opposition.The other front is outside the bounds of constitutional and democratic competition and into the realm of illegal or extralegal efforts to undermine the electoral process. The two are intimately related, because the Republican Party has used its institutional power in the political sphere to shield Trump and his followers from the consequences of their illegal and extralegal activities in the lead-up to Jan. 6. Thus, Reps. Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik, in their roles as party leaders, run interference for the Trump movement in the sphere of legitimate politics, while Republicans in lesser positions cheer on the Jan. 6 perpetrators, turning them into martyrs and heroes, and encouraging illegal acts in the future.
This pincer assault has several advantages. Republican politicians and would-be policymakers can play the role of the legitimate opposition. They can rediscover their hawkish internationalist foreign policy (suspended during the Trump years) and their deficit-minded economics (also suspended during the Trump years). They can go on the mainstream Sunday shows and critique the Biden administration on issues such as Afghanistan. They can pretend that Trump is no longer part of the equation. Biden is the president, after all, and his administration is not exactly without faults.
Yet whatever the legitimacy of Republican critiques of Biden, there is a fundamental disingenuousness to it all. It is a dodge. Republicans focus on China and critical race theory and avoid any mention of Trump, even as the party works to fix the next election in his favor. The left hand professes to know nothing of what the right hand is doing.
Even Trump opponents play along. Republicans such as Sens. Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse have condemned the events of Jan. 6, criticized Trump and even voted for his impeachment, but in other respects they continue to act as good Republicans and conservatives. On issues such as the filibuster, Romney and others insist on preserving “regular order” and conducting political and legislative business as usual, even though they know that Trump’s lieutenants in their party are working to subvert the next presidential election.
The result is that even these anti-Trump Republicans are enabling the insurrection. Revolutionary movements usually operate outside a society’s power structures. But the Trump movement also enjoys unprecedented influence within those structures. It dominates the coverage on several cable news networks, numerous conservative magazines, hundreds of talk radio stations and all kinds of online platforms. It has access to financing from rich individuals and the Republican National Committee’s donor pool. And, not least, it controls one of the country’s two national parties. All that is reason enough to expect another challenge, for what movement would fail to take advantage of such favorable circumstances to make a play for power?
Today, we are in a time of hope and illusion. The same people who said that Trump wouldn’t try to overturn the last election now say we have nothing to worry about with the next one. Republicans have been playing this game for five years, first pooh-poohing concerns about Trump’s intentions, or about the likelihood of their being realized, and then going silent, or worse, when what they insisted was improbable came to pass. These days, even the anti-Trump media constantly looks for signs that Trump’s influence might be fading and that drastic measures might not be necessary.
The world will look very different in 14 months if, as seems likely, the Republican zombie party wins control of the House. At that point, with the political winds clearly blowing in his favor, Trump is all but certain to announce his candidacy, and social media constraints on his speech are likely to be lifted, since Facebook and Twitter would have a hard time justifying censoring his campaign. With his megaphone back, Trump would once again dominate news coverage, as outlets prove unable to resist covering him around the clock if only for financial reasons.
But this time, Trump would have advantages that he lacked in 2016 and 2020, including more loyal officials in state and local governments; the Republicans in Congress; and the backing of GOP donors, think tanks and journals of opinion. And he will have the Trump movement, including many who are armed and ready to be activated, again. Who is going to stop him then? On its current trajectory, the 2024 Republican Party will make the 2020 Republican Party seem positively defiant.
Those who criticize Biden and the Democrats for not doing enough to prevent this disaster are not being fair. There is not much they can do without Republican cooperation, especially if they lose control of either chamber in 2022. It has become fashionable to write off any possibility that a handful of Republicans might rise up to save the day. This preemptive capitulation has certainly served well those Republicans who might otherwise be held to account for their cowardice. How nice for them that everyone has decided to focus fire on Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin.Yet it is largely upon these Republicans that the fate of the republic rests.
Seven Republican senators voted to convict Trump for inciting an insurrection and attempting to overturn a free and fair election: Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Romney, Sasse and Patrick J. Toomey. It was a brave vote, a display of republican virtue, especially for the five who are not retiring in 2022. All have faced angry backlashes — Romney was booed and called a traitor at the Utah Republican convention; Burr and Cassidy were unanimously censured by their state parties. Yet as much credit as they deserve for taking this stand, it was almost entirely symbolic. When it comes to concrete action that might prevent a debacle in 2024, they have balked.
Specifically, they have refused to work with Democrats to pass legislation limiting state legislatures’ ability to overturn the results of future elections, to ensure that the federal government continues to have some say when states try to limit voting rights, to provide federal protection to state and local election workers who face threats, and in general to make clear to the nation that a bipartisan majority in the Senate opposes the subversion of the popular will. Why?
It can’t be because they think they have a future in a Trump-dominated party. Even if they manage to get reelected, what kind of government would they be serving in? They can’t be under any illusion about what a second Trump term would mean. Trump’s disdain for the rule of law is clear. His exoneration from the charges leveled in his impeachment trials — the only official, legal response to his actions — practically ensures that he would wield power even more aggressively. His experience with unreliable subordinates in his first term is likely to guide personnel decisions in a second. Only total loyalists would serve at the head of the Justice Department, FBI, CIA, National Security Agency and the Pentagon. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs will not be someone likely to place his or her own judgment above that of their civilian commander in chief. Nor would a Republican Senate fail to confirm Trump loyalists. In such a world, with Trump and his lieutenants in charge of all the levers of state power, including its growing capacity for surveillance, opposing Trump would become increasingly risky for Republicans and Democrats alike. A Trump victory is likely to mean at least the temporary suspension of American democracy as we have known it.
We are already in a constitutional crisis. The destruction of democracy might not come until November 2024, but critical steps in that direction are happening now. In a little more than a year, it may become impossible to pass legislation to protect the electoral process in 2024. Now it is impossible only because anti-Trump Republicans, and even some Democrats, refuse to tinker with the filibuster. It is impossible because, despite all that has happened, some people still wish to be good Republicans even as they oppose Trump. These decisions will not wear well as the nation tumbles into full-blown crisis.
It is not impossible for politicians to make such a leap. The Republican Party itself was formed in the 1850s by politicians who abandoned their previous party — former Whigs, former Democrats and former members of the Liberty and Free Soil parties. While Whig and Democratic party stalwarts such as Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas juggled and compromised, doing their best to ensure that the issue of slavery did not destroy their great parties, others decided that the parties had become an obstacle to justice and a threat to the nation’s continued viability.
Romney & Co. don’t have to abandon their party. They can fashion themselves as Constitutional Republicans who, in the present emergency, are willing to form a national unity coalition in the Senate for the sole purpose of saving the republic. Their cooperation with Democrats could be strictly limited to matters relating to the Constitution and elections. Or they might strive for a temporary governing consensus on a host of critical issues: government spending, defense, immigration and even the persistent covid-19 pandemic, effectively setting aside the usual battles to focus on the more vital and immediate need to preserve the United States.
It takes two, of course, to form a national unity coalition, and Democrats can make it harder or easier for anti-Trump Republicans to join. Some profess to see no distinction between the threat posed by Trump and the threat posed by the GOP. They prefer to use Trump as a weapon in the ongoing political battle, and not only as a way of discrediting and defeating today’s Republican Party but to paint all GOP policies for the past 30 years as nothing more than precursors to Trumpism. Although today’s Trump-controlled Republican Party does need to be fought and defeated, this kind of opportunistic partisanship and conspiracy-mongering, in addition to being bad history, is no cure for what ails the nation.
Senate Democrats were wise to cut down their once-massive voting rights wish list and get behind the smaller compromise measure unveiled last week by Manchin and Sen. Amy Klobuchar. But they have yet to attract any votes from their Republican colleagues for the measure. Heading into the next election, it is vital to protect election workers, same-day registration and early voting. It will also still be necessary to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which directly addresses the state legislatures’ electoral power grab. Other battles — such as making Election Day a federal holiday and banning partisan gerrymandering — might better be postponed. Efforts to prevent a debacle in 2024 cannot. Democrats need to give anti-Trump Republicans a chance to do the right thing.
One wonders whether modern American politicians, in either party, have it in them to make such bold moves, whether they have the insight to see where events are going and the courage to do whatever is necessary to save the democratic system. If that means political suicide for this handful of Republicans, wouldn’t it be better to go out fighting for democracy than to slink off quietly into the night?
Robert Kagan
Contributing columnist WAPO
September 23, 2021 at 3:32 p.m. EDT
Our Constitutional Crisis Is Already Here
“Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation.”
— James Madison
The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking and denial.
But about these things there should be no doubt:
First, Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for president in 2024. The hope and expectation that he would fade in visibility and influence have been delusional. He enjoys mammoth leads in the polls; he is building a massive campaign war chest; and at this moment the Democratic ticket looks vulnerable. Barring health problems, he is running.
Second, Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary. Trump’s charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election results that do not go his way. Some Republican candidates have already begun preparing to declare fraud in 2022, just as Larry Elder tried meekly to do in the California recall contest.
Meanwhile, the amateurish “stop the steal” efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Those recalcitrant Republican state officials who effectively saved the country from calamity by refusing to falsely declare fraud or to “find” more votes for Trump are being systematically removed or hounded from office. Republican legislatures are giving themselves greater control over the election certification process. As of this spring, Republicans have proposed or passed measures in at least 16 states that would shift certain election authorities from the purview of the governor, secretary of state or other executive-branch officers to the legislature. An Arizona bill flatly states that the legislature may “revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election” by a simple majority vote. Some state legislatures seek to impose criminal penalties on local election officials alleged to have committed “technical infractions,” including obstructing the view of poll watchers.
The stage is thus being set for chaos. Imagine weeks of competing mass protests across multiple states as lawmakers from both parties claim victory and charge the other with unconstitutional efforts to take power. Partisans on both sides are likely to be better armed and more willing to inflict harm than they were in 2020. Would governors call out the National Guard? Would President Biden nationalize the Guard and place it under his control, invoke the Insurrection Act, and send troops into Pennsylvania or Texas or Wisconsin to quell violent protests? Deploying federal power in the states would be decried as tyranny. Biden would find himself where other presidents have been — where Andrew Jackson was during the nullification crisis, or where Abraham Lincoln was after the South seceded — navigating without rules or precedents, making his own judgments about what constitutional powers he does and doesn’t have.
Today’s arguments over the filibuster will seem quaint in three years if the American political system enters a crisis for which the Constitution offers no remedy.
Most Americans — and all but a handful of politicians — have refused to take this possibility seriously enough to try to prevent it. As has so often been the case in other countries where fascist leaders arise, their would-be opponents are paralyzed in confusion and amazement at this charismatic authoritarian. They have followed the standard model of appeasement, which always begins with underestimation. The political and intellectual establishments in both parties have been underestimating Trump since he emerged on the scene in 2015. They underestimated the extent of his popularity and the strength of his hold on his followers; they underestimated his ability to take control of the Republican Party; and then they underestimated how far he was willing to go to retain power. The fact that he failed to overturn the 2020 election has reassured many that the American system remains secure, though it easily could have gone the other way — if Biden had not been safely ahead in all four states where the vote was close; if Trump had been more competent and more in control of the decision-makers in his administration, Congress and the states. As it was, Trump came close to bringing off a coup earlier this year. All that prevented it was a handful of state officials with notable courage and integrity, and the reluctance of two attorneys general and a vice president to obey orders they deemed inappropriate.
These were not the checks and balances the Framers had in mind when they designed the Constitution, of course, but Trump has exposed the inadequacy of those protections. The Founders did not foresee the Trump phenomenon, in part because they did not foresee national parties. They anticipated the threat of a demagogue, but not of a national cult of personality. They assumed that the new republic’s vast expanse and the historic divisions among the 13 fiercely independent states would pose insuperable barriers to national movements based on party or personality. “Petty” demagogues might sway their own states, where they were known and had influence, but not the whole nation with its diverse populations and divergent interests.
Such checks and balances as the Framers put in place, therefore, depended on the separation of the three branches of government, each of which, they believed, would zealously guard its own power and prerogatives. The Framers did not establish safeguards against the possibility that national-party solidarity would transcend state boundaries because they did not imagine such a thing was possible. Nor did they foresee that members of Congress, and perhaps members of the judicial branch, too, would refuse to check the power of a president from their own party.
(Rach3: Re-read Federalist Paper 10 , exactly as Kagan states.)
In recent decades, however, party loyalty has superseded branch loyalty, and never more so than in the Trump era. As the two Trump impeachments showed, if members of Congress are willing to defend or ignore the president’s actions simply because he is their party leader, then conviction and removal become all but impossible. In such circumstances, the Framers left no other check against usurpation by the executive — except (small-r) republican virtue.
Critics and supporters alike have consistently failed to recognize what a unique figure Trump is in American history. Because his followers share fundamentally conservative views, many see Trump as merely the continuation, and perhaps the logical culmination, of the Reagan Revolution. This is a mistake: Although most Trump supporters are or have become Republicans, they hold a set of beliefs that were not necessarily shared by all Republicans. Some Trump supporters are former Democrats and independents. In fact, the passions that animate the Trump movement are as old as the republic and have found a home in both parties at one time or another.
Suspicion of and hostility toward the federal government; racial hatred and fear; a concern that modern, secular society undermines religion and traditional morality; economic anxiety in an age of rapid technological change; class tensions, with subtle condescension on one side and resentment on the other; distrust of the broader world, especially Europe, and its insidious influence in subverting American freedom — such views and attitudes have been part of the fabric of U.S. politics since the anti-Federalists, the Whiskey Rebellion and Thomas Jefferson. The Democratic Party was the home of white supremacists until they jumped to George Wallace in 1968 and later to the Republicans. Liberals and Democrats in particular need to distinguish between their ongoing battle with Republican policies and the challenge posed by Trump and his followers. One can be fought through the processes of the constitutional system; the other is an assault on the Constitution itself.
What makes the Trump movement historically unique is not its passions and paranoias. It is the fact that for millions of Americans, Trump himself is the response to their fears and resentments. This is a stronger bond between leader and followers than anything seen before in U.S. political movements. Although the Founders feared the rise of a king or a Caesar, for two centuries Americans proved relatively immune to unwavering hero-worship of politicians. Their men on horseback — Theodore Roosevelt, Grant, even Washington — were not regarded as infallible. This was true of great populist leaders as well. William Jennings Bryan a century ago was venerated because he advanced certain ideas and policies, but he did not enjoy unquestioning loyalty from his followers. Even Reagan was criticized by conservatives for selling out conservative principles, for deficit spending, for his equivocal stance on abortion, for being “soft” on the Soviet Union.
Trump is different, which is one reason the political system has struggled to understand, much less contain, him. The American liberal worldview tends to search for material and economic explanations for everything, and no doubt a good number of Trump supporters have grounds to complain about their lot in life. But their bond with Trump has little to do with economics or other material concerns. They believe the U.S. government and society have been captured by socialists, minority groups and sexual deviants. They see the Republican Party establishment as corrupt and weak — “losers,” to use Trump’s word, unable to challenge the reigning liberal hegemony. They view Trump as strong and defiant, willing to take on the establishment, Democrats, RINOs, liberal media, antifa, the Squad, Big Tech and the “Mitch McConnell Republicans.” His charismatic leadership has given millions of Americans a feeling of purpose and empowerment, a new sense of identity. While Trump’s critics see him as too narcissistic to be any kind of leader, his supporters admire his unapologetic, militant selfishness. Unlike establishment Republicans, Trump speaks without embarrassment on behalf of an aggrieved segment of Americans, not exclusively White, who feel they have been taking it on the chin for too long. And that is all he needs to do.
There was a time when political analysts wondered what would happen when Trump failed to “deliver” for his constituents. But the most important thing Trump delivers is himself. His egomania is part of his appeal. In his professed victimization by the media and the “elites,” his followers see their own victimization. That is why attacks on Trump by the elites only strengthen his bond with his followers. That is why millions of Trump supporters have even been willing to risk death as part of their show of solidarity: When Trump’s enemies cited his mishandling of the pandemic to discredit him, their answer was to reject the pandemic. One Trump supporter didn’t go to the hospital after developing covid-19 symptoms because he didn’t want to contribute to the liberal case against Trump. “I’m not going to add to the numbers,” he told a reporter.
Because the Trump movement is less about policies than about Trump himself, it has undermined the normal role of American political parties, which is to absorb new political and ideological movements into the mainstream. Bryan never became president, but some of his populist policies were adopted by both political parties. Sen. Bernie Sanders’s supporters might not have wanted Biden for president, but having lost the nomination battle they could work on getting Biden to pursue their agenda. Liberal democracy requires acceptance of adverse electoral results, a willingness to countenance the temporary rule of those with whom we disagree. As historian Richard Hofstadter observed, it requires that people “endure error in the interest of social peace.” Part of that willingness stems from the belief that the democratic system makes it possible to work, even in opposition, to correct the ruling party’s errors and overreach. Movements based on ideas and policies can also quickly shift their allegiances. Today, the progressives’ flag-bearer might be Sanders, but tomorrow it could be Sen. Elizabeth Warren or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or someone else.
For a movement built around a cult of personality, these adjustments are not possible. For Trump supporters, the “error” is that Trump was cheated out of reelection by what he has told them is an oppressive, communist, Democrat regime. While the defeat of a sitting president normally leads to a struggle to claim the party’s mantle, so far no Republican has been able to challenge Trump’s grip on Republican voters: not Sen. Josh Hawley, not Sen. Tom Cotton, not Tucker Carlson, not Gov. Ron DeSantis. It is still all about Trump. The fact that he is not in office means that the United States is “a territory controlled by enemy tribes,” writes one conservative intellectual. The government, as one Trump supporter put it, “is monopolized by a Regime that believes [Trump voters] are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them [from] getting it." If so, the intellectual posits, what choice do they have but to view the government as the enemy and to become “united and armed to take care of themselves as they think best”?
The Trump movement might not have begun as an insurrection, but it became one after its leader claimed he had been cheated out of reelection. For Trump supporters, the events of Jan. 6 were not an embarrassing debacle but a patriotic effort to save the nation, by violent action if necessary. As one 56-year-old Michigan woman explained: “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”
The banal normalcy of the great majority of Trump’s supporters, including those who went to the Capitol on Jan. 6, has befuddled many observers. Although private militia groups and white supremacists played a part in the attack, 90 percent of those arrested or charged had no ties to such groups. The majority were middle-class and middle-aged; 40 percent were business owners or white-collar workers. They came mostly from purple, not red, counties.
Most Trump supporters are good parents, good neighbors and solid members of their communities. Their bigotry, for the most part, is typical white American bigotry, perhaps with an added measure of resentment and a less filtered mode of expression since Trump arrived on the scene. But these are normal people in the sense that they think and act as people have for centuries. They put their trust in family, tribe, religion and race. Although zealous in defense of their own rights and freedoms, they are less concerned about the rights and freedoms of those who are not like them. That, too, is not unusual. What is unnatural is to value the rights of others who are unlike you as much as you value your own.
As it happens, however, that is what the American experiment in republican democracy requires. It is what the Framers meant by “republican virtue,” a love of freedom not only for oneself but also as an abstract, universal good; a love of self-government as an ideal; a commitment to abide by the laws passed by legitimate democratic processes; and a healthy fear of and vigilance against tyranny of any kind. Even James Madison, who framed the Constitution on the assumption that people would always pursue their selfish interests, nevertheless argued that it was “chimerical” to believe that any form of government could “secure liberty and happiness without any virtue in the people.” Al Gore and his supporters displayed republican virtue when they abided by the Supreme Court’s judgment in 2000 despite the partisan nature of the justices’ decision. (Whether the court itself displayed republican virtue is another question.)
The events of Jan. 6, on the other hand, proved that Trump and his most die-hard supporters are prepared to defy constitutional and democratic norms, just as revolutionary movements have in the past. While it might be shocking to learn that normal, decent Americans can support a violent assault on the Capitol, it shows that Americans as a people are not as exceptional as their founding principles and institutions. Europeans who joined fascist movements in the 1920s and 1930s were also from the middle classes. No doubt many of them were good parents and neighbors, too. People do things as part of a mass movement that they would not do as individuals, especially if they are convinced that others are out to destroy their way of life.
It would be foolish to imagine that the violence of Jan. 6 was an aberration that will not be repeated. Because Trump supporters see those events as a patriotic defense of the nation, there is every reason to expect more such episodes. Trump has returned to the explosive rhetoric of that day, insisting that he won in a “landslide,” that the “radical left Democrat communist party” stole the presidency in the “most corrupt, dishonest, and unfair election in the history of our country” and that they have to give it back. He has targeted for defeat those Republicans who voted for his impeachment — or criticized him for his role in the riot. Already, there have been threats to bomb polling sites, kidnap officials and attack state capitols. “You and your family will be killed very slowly,” the wife of Georgia’s top election official was texted earlier this year. Nor can one assume that the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers would again play a subordinate role when the next riot unfolds. Veterans who assaulted the Capitol told police officers that they had fought for their country before and were fighting for it again. Looking ahead to 2022 and 2024, Trump insists “there is no way they win elections without cheating. There’s no way.” So, if the results come in showing another Democratic victory, Trump’s supporters will know what to do. Just as “generations of patriots” gave “their sweat, their blood and even their very lives” to build America, Trump tells them, so today “we have no choice. We have to fight” to restore “our American birthright.”
Where does the Republican Party stand in all this? The party gave birth to and nurtured this movement; it bears full responsibility for establishing the conditions in which Trump could capture the loyalty of 90 percent of Republican voters. Republican leaders were more than happy to ride Trump’s coattails if it meant getting paid off with hundreds of conservative court appointments, including three Supreme Court justices; tax cuts; immigration restrictions; and deep reductions in regulations on business. Yet Trump’s triumph also had elements of a hostile takeover. The movement’s passion was for Trump, not the party. GOP primary voters chose Trump over the various flavors of establishment Republicanism (Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio), and after Trump’s election they continued to regard establishment Republicans as enemies. Longtime party heroes like Paul Ryan were cast into oblivion for disparaging Trump. Even staunch supporters such as Jeff Sessions eventually became villains when they would not do as Trump demanded. Those who survived had a difficult balancing act: to use Trump’s appeal to pass the Republican agenda while also controlling Trump’s excesses, which they worried could ultimately threaten the party’s interests.
That plan seemed plausible in 2017. Unlike other insurgent leaders, Trump had not spent time in the political wilderness building a party and surrounding himself with loyalists. He had to choose from an existing pool of Republican officials, who varied in their willingness to do his bidding. The GOP establishment hoped that the presence of “adults” would restrain him, protecting their traditional agenda and, in their view, the country’s interests, from his worst instincts.
This was a miscalculation. Trump’s grip on his supporters left no room for an alternative power center in the party. One by one, the “adults” resigned or were run off. The dissent and contrary opinions that exist in every party — the Northeast moderate Republicans in Reagan’s day; the progressives in today’s Democratic Party — disappeared from Trump’s Republican Party. The only real issue was Trump himself, and on that there could be no dissent. Those who disapproved of Trump could either keep silent or leave.
The takeover extended beyond the level of political leadership. Modern political parties are an ecosystem of interest groups, lobby organizations, job seekers, campaign donors and intellectuals. All have a stake in the party’s viability; all ultimately depend on being roughly aligned with wherever the party is at a given moment; and so all had to make their peace with Trump, too. Conservative publications that once opposed him as unfit for the presidency had to reverse course or lose readership and funding. Pundits had to adjust to the demands of their pro-Trump audiences — and were rewarded handsomely when they did. Donors who had opposed Trump during the primaries fell into line, if only to preserve some influence on the issues that mattered to them. Advocacy organizations that had previously seen their role as holding the Republican Party to certain principles, and thus often dissented from the party leadership, either became advocates for Trump or lost clout.
It was no surprise that elected officials feared taking on the Trump movement and that Republican job seekers either kept silent about their views or made show-trial-like apologies for past criticism. Ambition is a powerful antidote to moral qualms. More revealing was the behavior of Republican elder statesmen, former secretaries of state in their 80s or 90s who had no further ambitions for high office and seemingly nothing to lose by speaking out. Despite their known abhorrence of everything Trump stood for, these old lions refused to criticize him. They were unwilling to come out against a Republican Party to which they had devoted their professional lives, even when the party was led by someone they detested. Whatever they thought about Trump, moreover, Republican elders disliked Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the Democrats more. Again, this is not so unusual. German conservatives accommodated Adolf Hitler in large part because they opposed the socialists more than they opposed the Nazis, who, after all, shared many of their basic prejudices. As for conservative intellectuals, even those who had spent years arguing that Woodrow Wilson was a tyrant because he created the Federal Reserve and supported child labor laws seemed to have no concerns about whether Trump was a would-be despot. They not only came to Trump’s defense but fashioned political doctrines to justify his rule, filling in the wide gaps of his nonexistent ideology with an appeal to “conservative nationalism” and conservative populism. Perhaps American conservatism was never comfortable with the American experiment in liberal democracy, but certainly since Trump took over their party, many conservatives have revealed a hostility to core American beliefs.
All this has left few dissenting voices within the Republican ecosystem. The Republican Party today is a zombie party. Its leaders go through the motions of governing in pursuit of traditional Republican goals, wrestling over infrastructure spending and foreign policy, even as real power in the party has leached away to Trump. From the uneasy and sometimes contentious partnership during Trump’s four years in office, the party’s main if not sole purpose today is as the willing enabler of Trump’s efforts to game the electoral system to ensure his return to power.
With the party firmly under his thumb, Trump is now fighting the Biden administration on separate fronts. One is normal, legitimate political competition, where Republicans criticize Biden’s policies, feed and fight the culture wars, and in general behave like a typical hostile opposition.The other front is outside the bounds of constitutional and democratic competition and into the realm of illegal or extralegal efforts to undermine the electoral process. The two are intimately related, because the Republican Party has used its institutional power in the political sphere to shield Trump and his followers from the consequences of their illegal and extralegal activities in the lead-up to Jan. 6. Thus, Reps. Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik, in their roles as party leaders, run interference for the Trump movement in the sphere of legitimate politics, while Republicans in lesser positions cheer on the Jan. 6 perpetrators, turning them into martyrs and heroes, and encouraging illegal acts in the future.
This pincer assault has several advantages. Republican politicians and would-be policymakers can play the role of the legitimate opposition. They can rediscover their hawkish internationalist foreign policy (suspended during the Trump years) and their deficit-minded economics (also suspended during the Trump years). They can go on the mainstream Sunday shows and critique the Biden administration on issues such as Afghanistan. They can pretend that Trump is no longer part of the equation. Biden is the president, after all, and his administration is not exactly without faults.
Yet whatever the legitimacy of Republican critiques of Biden, there is a fundamental disingenuousness to it all. It is a dodge. Republicans focus on China and critical race theory and avoid any mention of Trump, even as the party works to fix the next election in his favor. The left hand professes to know nothing of what the right hand is doing.
Even Trump opponents play along. Republicans such as Sens. Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse have condemned the events of Jan. 6, criticized Trump and even voted for his impeachment, but in other respects they continue to act as good Republicans and conservatives. On issues such as the filibuster, Romney and others insist on preserving “regular order” and conducting political and legislative business as usual, even though they know that Trump’s lieutenants in their party are working to subvert the next presidential election.
The result is that even these anti-Trump Republicans are enabling the insurrection. Revolutionary movements usually operate outside a society’s power structures. But the Trump movement also enjoys unprecedented influence within those structures. It dominates the coverage on several cable news networks, numerous conservative magazines, hundreds of talk radio stations and all kinds of online platforms. It has access to financing from rich individuals and the Republican National Committee’s donor pool. And, not least, it controls one of the country’s two national parties. All that is reason enough to expect another challenge, for what movement would fail to take advantage of such favorable circumstances to make a play for power?
Today, we are in a time of hope and illusion. The same people who said that Trump wouldn’t try to overturn the last election now say we have nothing to worry about with the next one. Republicans have been playing this game for five years, first pooh-poohing concerns about Trump’s intentions, or about the likelihood of their being realized, and then going silent, or worse, when what they insisted was improbable came to pass. These days, even the anti-Trump media constantly looks for signs that Trump’s influence might be fading and that drastic measures might not be necessary.
The world will look very different in 14 months if, as seems likely, the Republican zombie party wins control of the House. At that point, with the political winds clearly blowing in his favor, Trump is all but certain to announce his candidacy, and social media constraints on his speech are likely to be lifted, since Facebook and Twitter would have a hard time justifying censoring his campaign. With his megaphone back, Trump would once again dominate news coverage, as outlets prove unable to resist covering him around the clock if only for financial reasons.
But this time, Trump would have advantages that he lacked in 2016 and 2020, including more loyal officials in state and local governments; the Republicans in Congress; and the backing of GOP donors, think tanks and journals of opinion. And he will have the Trump movement, including many who are armed and ready to be activated, again. Who is going to stop him then? On its current trajectory, the 2024 Republican Party will make the 2020 Republican Party seem positively defiant.
Those who criticize Biden and the Democrats for not doing enough to prevent this disaster are not being fair. There is not much they can do without Republican cooperation, especially if they lose control of either chamber in 2022. It has become fashionable to write off any possibility that a handful of Republicans might rise up to save the day. This preemptive capitulation has certainly served well those Republicans who might otherwise be held to account for their cowardice. How nice for them that everyone has decided to focus fire on Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin.Yet it is largely upon these Republicans that the fate of the republic rests.
Seven Republican senators voted to convict Trump for inciting an insurrection and attempting to overturn a free and fair election: Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Romney, Sasse and Patrick J. Toomey. It was a brave vote, a display of republican virtue, especially for the five who are not retiring in 2022. All have faced angry backlashes — Romney was booed and called a traitor at the Utah Republican convention; Burr and Cassidy were unanimously censured by their state parties. Yet as much credit as they deserve for taking this stand, it was almost entirely symbolic. When it comes to concrete action that might prevent a debacle in 2024, they have balked.
Specifically, they have refused to work with Democrats to pass legislation limiting state legislatures’ ability to overturn the results of future elections, to ensure that the federal government continues to have some say when states try to limit voting rights, to provide federal protection to state and local election workers who face threats, and in general to make clear to the nation that a bipartisan majority in the Senate opposes the subversion of the popular will. Why?
It can’t be because they think they have a future in a Trump-dominated party. Even if they manage to get reelected, what kind of government would they be serving in? They can’t be under any illusion about what a second Trump term would mean. Trump’s disdain for the rule of law is clear. His exoneration from the charges leveled in his impeachment trials — the only official, legal response to his actions — practically ensures that he would wield power even more aggressively. His experience with unreliable subordinates in his first term is likely to guide personnel decisions in a second. Only total loyalists would serve at the head of the Justice Department, FBI, CIA, National Security Agency and the Pentagon. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs will not be someone likely to place his or her own judgment above that of their civilian commander in chief. Nor would a Republican Senate fail to confirm Trump loyalists. In such a world, with Trump and his lieutenants in charge of all the levers of state power, including its growing capacity for surveillance, opposing Trump would become increasingly risky for Republicans and Democrats alike. A Trump victory is likely to mean at least the temporary suspension of American democracy as we have known it.
We are already in a constitutional crisis. The destruction of democracy might not come until November 2024, but critical steps in that direction are happening now. In a little more than a year, it may become impossible to pass legislation to protect the electoral process in 2024. Now it is impossible only because anti-Trump Republicans, and even some Democrats, refuse to tinker with the filibuster. It is impossible because, despite all that has happened, some people still wish to be good Republicans even as they oppose Trump. These decisions will not wear well as the nation tumbles into full-blown crisis.
It is not impossible for politicians to make such a leap. The Republican Party itself was formed in the 1850s by politicians who abandoned their previous party — former Whigs, former Democrats and former members of the Liberty and Free Soil parties. While Whig and Democratic party stalwarts such as Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas juggled and compromised, doing their best to ensure that the issue of slavery did not destroy their great parties, others decided that the parties had become an obstacle to justice and a threat to the nation’s continued viability.
Romney & Co. don’t have to abandon their party. They can fashion themselves as Constitutional Republicans who, in the present emergency, are willing to form a national unity coalition in the Senate for the sole purpose of saving the republic. Their cooperation with Democrats could be strictly limited to matters relating to the Constitution and elections. Or they might strive for a temporary governing consensus on a host of critical issues: government spending, defense, immigration and even the persistent covid-19 pandemic, effectively setting aside the usual battles to focus on the more vital and immediate need to preserve the United States.
It takes two, of course, to form a national unity coalition, and Democrats can make it harder or easier for anti-Trump Republicans to join. Some profess to see no distinction between the threat posed by Trump and the threat posed by the GOP. They prefer to use Trump as a weapon in the ongoing political battle, and not only as a way of discrediting and defeating today’s Republican Party but to paint all GOP policies for the past 30 years as nothing more than precursors to Trumpism. Although today’s Trump-controlled Republican Party does need to be fought and defeated, this kind of opportunistic partisanship and conspiracy-mongering, in addition to being bad history, is no cure for what ails the nation.
Senate Democrats were wise to cut down their once-massive voting rights wish list and get behind the smaller compromise measure unveiled last week by Manchin and Sen. Amy Klobuchar. But they have yet to attract any votes from their Republican colleagues for the measure. Heading into the next election, it is vital to protect election workers, same-day registration and early voting. It will also still be necessary to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which directly addresses the state legislatures’ electoral power grab. Other battles — such as making Election Day a federal holiday and banning partisan gerrymandering — might better be postponed. Efforts to prevent a debacle in 2024 cannot. Democrats need to give anti-Trump Republicans a chance to do the right thing.
One wonders whether modern American politicians, in either party, have it in them to make such bold moves, whether they have the insight to see where events are going and the courage to do whatever is necessary to save the democratic system. If that means political suicide for this handful of Republicans, wouldn’t it be better to go out fighting for democracy than to slink off quietly into the night?
Re: More Ugly Americans
Absolutely brilliant analysis.
That chill in my spine hasn't paid rent in over a year.
Never forget.
That chill in my spine hasn't paid rent in over a year.
Never forget.
Re: More Ugly Americans
I would only add that in addition to further encouraging and amplifying America’s inherent White bigotry and bigots by his own racism, Trump has also emboldened mysoginists,frauds, crazies, wannabe tough guys, losers, failures,corrupt of all stripes, former D - students, all by his own example.
Re: More Ugly Americans
What's that you say about the inmates running the asylum?Rach3 wrote: ↑Tue Sep 28, 2021 1:15 pmI would only add that in addition to further encouraging and amplifying America’s inherent White bigotry and bigots by his own racism, Trump has also emboldened mysoginists,frauds, crazies, wannabe tough guys, losers, failures,corrupt of all stripes, former D - students, all by his own example.
Re: More Ugly Americans
The Why Axis newsletter, Oct.6
Last month, a police officer with the Long Beach Unified School District saw two teenagers fighting on the sidewalk about a block away from the school. The officer pulled over and attempted to stop the fight. One of the teens, 18-year-old Mona Rodriguez, tried to leave the scene by hopping into a nearby car. None of the teens were armed, and there was no indication anyone’s life was in danger. But the officer opened fire into the car as it pulled away, striking Rodriguez in the back of the head.
Rodriguez was taken off life support this week, leaving behind a 5-month-old son. The case has drawn renewed concern over the presence of armed, poorly trained law enforcement officers in schools, as well as the “shoot first, ask questions later” culture that’s become prevalent in many police departments.
New research published in The Lancet confirms that the public health threat posed by violent police officers is significant and growing: from 1980 through 2018, American law enforcement officers killed at least 30,800 people — more than double the federal government’s official tally.
The annual number of police killings has roughly doubled since the late 1980s, from around 600 to around 1,200 in 2018 and 2019. The numbers are high enough to classify police violence as one of the chief causes of death among American men — cops kill more men each year than Hodgkin lymphoma (835 deaths), testicular cancer (486 deaths), or heat and cold exposure (931 deaths).
“Police are trained that any interaction can turn deadly and that they should react as such,” the authors write. “Heavily armed officers can dangerously escalate situations that never needed violent intervention” — precisely what happened in the Mona Rodriguez case.
They note that police killings are not evenly distributed across the population. In per-capita terms, Black Americans are more than twice as likely as Whites to be killed by the police. The police mortality rate among Black Americans has decreased considerably since the 1980s, although it has started edging upward again in the 21st century. Police mortality is up sharply among white Americans since 2010, driving the increase in the overall mortality rate over that time period.
“Long-standing research in the USA has well established that the disproportionate amount of police violence against Black Americans is driven by systemic racism,” the authors write. “Black Americans experience disproportionately high levels of police contact, even for crimes that Black and White Americans commit at the same rates, such as certain drug offences, and for interactions that are not triggered by criminal activity, such as investigatory traffic stops.”
The study notes that a number of common policy responses to police violence, including body cameras, training in de-escalation and implicit bias, and diversifying police forces, “have all failed to further meaningfully reduce police violence rates.” A number of large cities have reduced police killings, however, by implementing policies that ban officers from shooting non-violent fleeing suspects.
But for those policies to work, officers have to understand and abide by them. Police officers with the Long Beach Unified School District, for instance, are banned from shooting at moving vehicles and from shooting at fleeing suspects. Neither policy was sufficient to prevent Mona Rodriguez’ death.
Last month, a police officer with the Long Beach Unified School District saw two teenagers fighting on the sidewalk about a block away from the school. The officer pulled over and attempted to stop the fight. One of the teens, 18-year-old Mona Rodriguez, tried to leave the scene by hopping into a nearby car. None of the teens were armed, and there was no indication anyone’s life was in danger. But the officer opened fire into the car as it pulled away, striking Rodriguez in the back of the head.
Rodriguez was taken off life support this week, leaving behind a 5-month-old son. The case has drawn renewed concern over the presence of armed, poorly trained law enforcement officers in schools, as well as the “shoot first, ask questions later” culture that’s become prevalent in many police departments.
New research published in The Lancet confirms that the public health threat posed by violent police officers is significant and growing: from 1980 through 2018, American law enforcement officers killed at least 30,800 people — more than double the federal government’s official tally.
The annual number of police killings has roughly doubled since the late 1980s, from around 600 to around 1,200 in 2018 and 2019. The numbers are high enough to classify police violence as one of the chief causes of death among American men — cops kill more men each year than Hodgkin lymphoma (835 deaths), testicular cancer (486 deaths), or heat and cold exposure (931 deaths).
“Police are trained that any interaction can turn deadly and that they should react as such,” the authors write. “Heavily armed officers can dangerously escalate situations that never needed violent intervention” — precisely what happened in the Mona Rodriguez case.
They note that police killings are not evenly distributed across the population. In per-capita terms, Black Americans are more than twice as likely as Whites to be killed by the police. The police mortality rate among Black Americans has decreased considerably since the 1980s, although it has started edging upward again in the 21st century. Police mortality is up sharply among white Americans since 2010, driving the increase in the overall mortality rate over that time period.
“Long-standing research in the USA has well established that the disproportionate amount of police violence against Black Americans is driven by systemic racism,” the authors write. “Black Americans experience disproportionately high levels of police contact, even for crimes that Black and White Americans commit at the same rates, such as certain drug offences, and for interactions that are not triggered by criminal activity, such as investigatory traffic stops.”
The study notes that a number of common policy responses to police violence, including body cameras, training in de-escalation and implicit bias, and diversifying police forces, “have all failed to further meaningfully reduce police violence rates.” A number of large cities have reduced police killings, however, by implementing policies that ban officers from shooting non-violent fleeing suspects.
But for those policies to work, officers have to understand and abide by them. Police officers with the Long Beach Unified School District, for instance, are banned from shooting at moving vehicles and from shooting at fleeing suspects. Neither policy was sufficient to prevent Mona Rodriguez’ death.
Re: More Ugly Americans
Policy, schmolisy!
These hotshots are just plain trigger-happy, and wearing a uniform is their excuse to go a-hunting!
Some things get passed down from one generation to the next.
Even the Big Apple, the vast majority of our police force votes Republican & watches right-wing media.
These hotshots are just plain trigger-happy, and wearing a uniform is their excuse to go a-hunting!
Some things get passed down from one generation to the next.
Even the Big Apple, the vast majority of our police force votes Republican & watches right-wing media.
Re: More Ugly Americans
From WAPO today:
BOISE — On a quiet street south of downtown Boise, Michael Dick has festooned his front yard with homemade signs, including a large yellow placard that facetiously thanks President Biden for a growing list of grievances — $4-a-gallon gas, inflation, Afghanistan, covid-19. In capital letters in black marker, Dick, 59, recently added "dead civilians" and "dead U.S. soldiers" to his bill of particulars.
In another part of town, alongside a “No trespassing” sign, Michael Schwarz, 60, used black spray-paint to scrawl “Joe Blows” across an electric-pink poster board.
And that’s mild compared to the sentiments some people — largely in conservative areas — are expressing in their front yards and on the signs they lug with them to greet Biden as he travels the country.
On Wednesday, when the president visited Scranton, Pa., he was greeted at the corner of Biden Street by a woman holding a handmade “F--- Joe Biden” sign, with an American flag as the vowel in the offending word. And back in Boise, Rod Johnson, a retired gunsmith, has hung a blue flag from the roof of his home that reads “F--- Biden.” Underneath, in smaller letters, he added, “And f--- you for voting for him!!”
“I’m not the only Republican that doesn’t like Biden,” Johnson, 68, said in an interview, sporting a red “Proud White American” hat and puffing a skinny cigar. “I just chose to show it.”
During the 2020 presidential campaign, one of Biden’s political superpowers was his sheer inoffensiveness, the way he often managed to embody — even to those who didn’t like him — the innocuous grandfather, the bumbling uncle, the leader who could make America calm, steady, even boring again after four years of Donald Trump.
But it’s clear that after nine months in office, Biden — or at least what he represents — is increasingly becoming an object of hatred to many Trump supporters. The vitriol partly reflects Trump’s own repeated baseless claims that Biden is a usurper, depriving him of his rightful claim to the presidency, and partly stems from Biden actions that Republicans deplore, from his spending plans to his immigration policies.
Yet the anger also demonstrates how a political party or cause often needs an enemy, a target of vilification that can unite its adherents — and, in this case, one refracted through the harshness, norm-breaking and vulgarity of the Trump era.
Boos, jeers and insults are nothing new for politicians, especially those who reach the White House. Former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as well as Trump, were all heckled, weathering protests along their motorcade routes and at some of their events. At one 2011 fundraiser in Los Angeles, a heckler called Obama the Antichrist; “F--- Trump” graffiti adorned some walls in Washington.
The current eruption of anti-Biden signs and chants, however, is on another level, far more vulgar and widespread.
The ubiquity of Trump signs, especially in rural stretches of the country, has long been striking, and possibly unprecedented for a losing candidate — especially nearly a year after the election. But now, in towns like Boise — in states both red and blue, and almost all across the country — anti-Biden signs are cropping up as well, frequently with angry and profane insults.
Some of are scrawled by hand. Others are bought on Amazon. Still others are professionally procured. The crude signs are held by people lined up along Biden’s motorcade routes and clustered near his events. Protesters shout obscenities from outside his appearances.
Then there are the chants. In early Oct., a “F--- Joe Biden!” cry broke out among the crowd at Alabama’s Talladega Superspeedway. Kelli Stavast, an NBC Sports reporter, was interviewing NASCAR driver Brandon Brown live on air at the time, and she quipped, “You can hear the chants from the crowd, ‘Let’s go Brandon!’”
Trump supporters instantly saw signs of a coverup, claiming on social media that journalists were deliberately censoring anti-Biden sentiment. The brief video exchange quickly turned viral.
The result has been a proliferation of chants in recent weeks, both of “Let’s go Brandon!” — now used as a stand-in by the Trump faithful — and the more vulgar original, sometimes shorthanded as “FJB.”
Trump’s Save America PAC has even begun selling a $45 T-shirt featuring Biden’s black-and-white visage above the phrase “Let’s go Brandon.” And the PAC sent a message to supporters that read, “#FJB or LET’S GO BRANDON? Either way, President Trump wants YOU to have our ICONIC new shirt.”
The former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., has repeatedly promoted the meme, and the original chant, on his social media feeds. At a speech in Georgia, he took the stage after the crowd had been chanting “USA! USA!” and roared, “There’s a couple other chants I’ve been hearing going around. Have you heard the other one that’s been going around?” The crowd took the cue and broke into cries of “Let’s go Brandon.”
The vitriol has even entered the House chamber. Rep. Bill Posey (R-Fla.) wrapped up a floor speech this week with the sign-off, “Let’s go Brandon.” Then, in a jarring return to House decorum, he concluded, “I yield back.”
When Trump was in office, he deployed public profanity in a way unlike any other modern president, which his supporters saw as truth-telling and his opponents as vulgarity and sometimes racism. He railed against immigrants from “shithole countries.” He tweeted that Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) was a “pompous ass.” He was elected after boasting of grabbing women’s crotches.
Sometimes he prompted obscenities from Democrats in return.
“One of the many legacies of the Trump presidency is he normalized angry speech,” said Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist and Trump critic. “Trump and our culture in general has beaten decorum out of politics, so now it’s just angry rage therapy — so you get out your Magic Marker and you do your coarse lawn sign.”
Murphy, whose Twitter bio describes him as “Infuriated GOP Strategist,” added, “When Trump acts like a savage, it makes other people think it’s okay to act like a savage. . . . We’re so tribal, everybody now is an angry Democrat or an angry Republican.”
That tribalism is reflected in surveys. A 2020 AEI poll found that 64 percent of Democrats see the Republican Party as so misguided that it poses a serious threat to the country, while 75 percent of Republicans say the same thing about the Democratic Party.
Schwarz — the Idahoan with the spray-painted sign — said he was motivated in part by his anger that the 2020 election was stolen, an assertion Trump has repeatedly promoted despite its falsity. “I don’t see how he won without doing fraudulent things to the voting machines,” Schwarz said of Biden. “How the hell did he get a landslide?”
Now that Biden has been in office for nearly a year, Schwarz said he has lost faith in his ability to handle foreign policy, as well as such domestic issues as immigration and the current labor shortfall.
“A lot of people don’t want to work,” Schwarz said. “They’re waiting for the government to hand out another check.”
Rod Johnson stands outside his northwest Boise home by an anti-Biden flag that his son helped find for him on the Internet. Johnson said he knew he wanted the flag after he saw a similar one flying from the back of a truck.
For Johnson — who immediately asked his son to help him find his own anti-Biden flag online after he saw one waving from the back of a truck — immigration is also a motivating issue. He said he wants to see Biden clamp down on the number of people crossing the border, adding, “Where the hell are we going to put the people who are already here?”
But the signs often appear to be as much a manifestation of the general rage against the system that helped fuel Trump’s ascent as a specific indictment of the current president.
“The psychological dynamic that led to the rise of Trump is happening again — this sense that you’re losing your country and it’s being led by an individual without the cognitive capacity to run a fast-food joint,” said Cliff Sims, who served in a senior role in the Trump administration. “The anger is less about Joe Biden individually and more about the state of the country that he is presiding over. He’s an avatar — he’s like the symbol of the decline of America.”
Administration officials sought to downplay the phenomenon, and at least one claimed to be unfamiliar with the “Let’s go Brandon” chant or its cruder cousin, though they are now chanted everywhere from football stadiums to concert arenas to local bars.
“I had never heard of that chant until you explained it to me,” said White House spokesman Andrew Bates. Referring to an anonymous message board known for promoting online extremism, he added, “I guess I’m not spending enough time on 8chan or whatever.”
The signs have followed Biden nearly everywhere, held aloft by protesters. The president addressed them obliquely when he visited Howell, Mich. earlier this month.
“They said it was time to build an economy that looks out from Scranton, Pennsylvania — where I grew up as a kid — instead of looking down from Wall Street,” Biden said in his speech that day, then quickly added, “notwithstanding some of the signs that I saw — that’s why 81 million Americans voted for me, the largest number of votes in American history.”
In an interview after that speech, Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), a centrist who represents the area, said the protesters in her district are clearly energized. While she supports freedom of speech, she added, she found the use of crude language distasteful.
“What I think was really disappointing was the profanity and the sort of really over-the-top, heinous things that people wrote on signs, just blocks from a school,” Slotkin said. “And I think it reflects that there is a strain in the country right now of people who are angry and they’ve sort of lost their decency and civility.”
Less than two weeks later, during a visit to a child development center in Hartford, Conn., Biden again found himself dogged by signs sporting the four-letter anti-Biden slogan.
“The protesters outside the child care center today had a giant ‘F — k Joe Biden’ sign and were chanting the same thing loud enough to make sure all the children could hear it,” tweeted Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) after the president’s trip. “Just heartbreaking for kids to see how crude and uncivil some of our discourse has become.”
And as Virginia gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin campaigned in Culpeper last week, the crowd several times attempted to start a “Let’s go Brandon!” chant. After Youngkin jokingly referred to Biden as the “uncle” of his opponent, Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe, one attendee called out, “Brandon! Let’s go Brandon!”
Hours later, at a Richmond-area rally organized by conservative radio talk show host and former Trump state campaign chair John Fredericks, multiple speakers led the crowd of a few hundred in the chant.
Among them was Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem, a candidate for Arizona secretary of state who has been endorsed by Trump. Finchem knew how to elicit loud cheers after a 10-minute speech about his campaign to overturn Biden’s win in his state, urging, “So with that, I’d like to have a one round — if you don’t mind it, just humor me — of ‘Let’s go Brandon!’”
Some who have erected anti-Biden signs, especially vulgar ones, have found themselves in conflict with local officials, including one woman in New Jersey who was asked to take down several banners because they violated a local anti-obscenity ordinance. She has said she plans to fight a judge’s order in court.
That hasn’t deterred Trump supporters. As reporters left a Biden event in Elk Grove, Ill., earlier this month, an anti-Biden protester could be heard speaking over a loudspeaker nearby, booming, “We’re all waving at you to let you know how much you suck.”
BOISE — On a quiet street south of downtown Boise, Michael Dick has festooned his front yard with homemade signs, including a large yellow placard that facetiously thanks President Biden for a growing list of grievances — $4-a-gallon gas, inflation, Afghanistan, covid-19. In capital letters in black marker, Dick, 59, recently added "dead civilians" and "dead U.S. soldiers" to his bill of particulars.
In another part of town, alongside a “No trespassing” sign, Michael Schwarz, 60, used black spray-paint to scrawl “Joe Blows” across an electric-pink poster board.
And that’s mild compared to the sentiments some people — largely in conservative areas — are expressing in their front yards and on the signs they lug with them to greet Biden as he travels the country.
On Wednesday, when the president visited Scranton, Pa., he was greeted at the corner of Biden Street by a woman holding a handmade “F--- Joe Biden” sign, with an American flag as the vowel in the offending word. And back in Boise, Rod Johnson, a retired gunsmith, has hung a blue flag from the roof of his home that reads “F--- Biden.” Underneath, in smaller letters, he added, “And f--- you for voting for him!!”
“I’m not the only Republican that doesn’t like Biden,” Johnson, 68, said in an interview, sporting a red “Proud White American” hat and puffing a skinny cigar. “I just chose to show it.”
During the 2020 presidential campaign, one of Biden’s political superpowers was his sheer inoffensiveness, the way he often managed to embody — even to those who didn’t like him — the innocuous grandfather, the bumbling uncle, the leader who could make America calm, steady, even boring again after four years of Donald Trump.
But it’s clear that after nine months in office, Biden — or at least what he represents — is increasingly becoming an object of hatred to many Trump supporters. The vitriol partly reflects Trump’s own repeated baseless claims that Biden is a usurper, depriving him of his rightful claim to the presidency, and partly stems from Biden actions that Republicans deplore, from his spending plans to his immigration policies.
Yet the anger also demonstrates how a political party or cause often needs an enemy, a target of vilification that can unite its adherents — and, in this case, one refracted through the harshness, norm-breaking and vulgarity of the Trump era.
Boos, jeers and insults are nothing new for politicians, especially those who reach the White House. Former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as well as Trump, were all heckled, weathering protests along their motorcade routes and at some of their events. At one 2011 fundraiser in Los Angeles, a heckler called Obama the Antichrist; “F--- Trump” graffiti adorned some walls in Washington.
The current eruption of anti-Biden signs and chants, however, is on another level, far more vulgar and widespread.
The ubiquity of Trump signs, especially in rural stretches of the country, has long been striking, and possibly unprecedented for a losing candidate — especially nearly a year after the election. But now, in towns like Boise — in states both red and blue, and almost all across the country — anti-Biden signs are cropping up as well, frequently with angry and profane insults.
Some of are scrawled by hand. Others are bought on Amazon. Still others are professionally procured. The crude signs are held by people lined up along Biden’s motorcade routes and clustered near his events. Protesters shout obscenities from outside his appearances.
Then there are the chants. In early Oct., a “F--- Joe Biden!” cry broke out among the crowd at Alabama’s Talladega Superspeedway. Kelli Stavast, an NBC Sports reporter, was interviewing NASCAR driver Brandon Brown live on air at the time, and she quipped, “You can hear the chants from the crowd, ‘Let’s go Brandon!’”
Trump supporters instantly saw signs of a coverup, claiming on social media that journalists were deliberately censoring anti-Biden sentiment. The brief video exchange quickly turned viral.
The result has been a proliferation of chants in recent weeks, both of “Let’s go Brandon!” — now used as a stand-in by the Trump faithful — and the more vulgar original, sometimes shorthanded as “FJB.”
Trump’s Save America PAC has even begun selling a $45 T-shirt featuring Biden’s black-and-white visage above the phrase “Let’s go Brandon.” And the PAC sent a message to supporters that read, “#FJB or LET’S GO BRANDON? Either way, President Trump wants YOU to have our ICONIC new shirt.”
The former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., has repeatedly promoted the meme, and the original chant, on his social media feeds. At a speech in Georgia, he took the stage after the crowd had been chanting “USA! USA!” and roared, “There’s a couple other chants I’ve been hearing going around. Have you heard the other one that’s been going around?” The crowd took the cue and broke into cries of “Let’s go Brandon.”
The vitriol has even entered the House chamber. Rep. Bill Posey (R-Fla.) wrapped up a floor speech this week with the sign-off, “Let’s go Brandon.” Then, in a jarring return to House decorum, he concluded, “I yield back.”
When Trump was in office, he deployed public profanity in a way unlike any other modern president, which his supporters saw as truth-telling and his opponents as vulgarity and sometimes racism. He railed against immigrants from “shithole countries.” He tweeted that Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) was a “pompous ass.” He was elected after boasting of grabbing women’s crotches.
Sometimes he prompted obscenities from Democrats in return.
“One of the many legacies of the Trump presidency is he normalized angry speech,” said Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist and Trump critic. “Trump and our culture in general has beaten decorum out of politics, so now it’s just angry rage therapy — so you get out your Magic Marker and you do your coarse lawn sign.”
Murphy, whose Twitter bio describes him as “Infuriated GOP Strategist,” added, “When Trump acts like a savage, it makes other people think it’s okay to act like a savage. . . . We’re so tribal, everybody now is an angry Democrat or an angry Republican.”
That tribalism is reflected in surveys. A 2020 AEI poll found that 64 percent of Democrats see the Republican Party as so misguided that it poses a serious threat to the country, while 75 percent of Republicans say the same thing about the Democratic Party.
Schwarz — the Idahoan with the spray-painted sign — said he was motivated in part by his anger that the 2020 election was stolen, an assertion Trump has repeatedly promoted despite its falsity. “I don’t see how he won without doing fraudulent things to the voting machines,” Schwarz said of Biden. “How the hell did he get a landslide?”
Now that Biden has been in office for nearly a year, Schwarz said he has lost faith in his ability to handle foreign policy, as well as such domestic issues as immigration and the current labor shortfall.
“A lot of people don’t want to work,” Schwarz said. “They’re waiting for the government to hand out another check.”
Rod Johnson stands outside his northwest Boise home by an anti-Biden flag that his son helped find for him on the Internet. Johnson said he knew he wanted the flag after he saw a similar one flying from the back of a truck.
For Johnson — who immediately asked his son to help him find his own anti-Biden flag online after he saw one waving from the back of a truck — immigration is also a motivating issue. He said he wants to see Biden clamp down on the number of people crossing the border, adding, “Where the hell are we going to put the people who are already here?”
But the signs often appear to be as much a manifestation of the general rage against the system that helped fuel Trump’s ascent as a specific indictment of the current president.
“The psychological dynamic that led to the rise of Trump is happening again — this sense that you’re losing your country and it’s being led by an individual without the cognitive capacity to run a fast-food joint,” said Cliff Sims, who served in a senior role in the Trump administration. “The anger is less about Joe Biden individually and more about the state of the country that he is presiding over. He’s an avatar — he’s like the symbol of the decline of America.”
Administration officials sought to downplay the phenomenon, and at least one claimed to be unfamiliar with the “Let’s go Brandon” chant or its cruder cousin, though they are now chanted everywhere from football stadiums to concert arenas to local bars.
“I had never heard of that chant until you explained it to me,” said White House spokesman Andrew Bates. Referring to an anonymous message board known for promoting online extremism, he added, “I guess I’m not spending enough time on 8chan or whatever.”
The signs have followed Biden nearly everywhere, held aloft by protesters. The president addressed them obliquely when he visited Howell, Mich. earlier this month.
“They said it was time to build an economy that looks out from Scranton, Pennsylvania — where I grew up as a kid — instead of looking down from Wall Street,” Biden said in his speech that day, then quickly added, “notwithstanding some of the signs that I saw — that’s why 81 million Americans voted for me, the largest number of votes in American history.”
In an interview after that speech, Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), a centrist who represents the area, said the protesters in her district are clearly energized. While she supports freedom of speech, she added, she found the use of crude language distasteful.
“What I think was really disappointing was the profanity and the sort of really over-the-top, heinous things that people wrote on signs, just blocks from a school,” Slotkin said. “And I think it reflects that there is a strain in the country right now of people who are angry and they’ve sort of lost their decency and civility.”
Less than two weeks later, during a visit to a child development center in Hartford, Conn., Biden again found himself dogged by signs sporting the four-letter anti-Biden slogan.
“The protesters outside the child care center today had a giant ‘F — k Joe Biden’ sign and were chanting the same thing loud enough to make sure all the children could hear it,” tweeted Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) after the president’s trip. “Just heartbreaking for kids to see how crude and uncivil some of our discourse has become.”
And as Virginia gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin campaigned in Culpeper last week, the crowd several times attempted to start a “Let’s go Brandon!” chant. After Youngkin jokingly referred to Biden as the “uncle” of his opponent, Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe, one attendee called out, “Brandon! Let’s go Brandon!”
Hours later, at a Richmond-area rally organized by conservative radio talk show host and former Trump state campaign chair John Fredericks, multiple speakers led the crowd of a few hundred in the chant.
Among them was Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem, a candidate for Arizona secretary of state who has been endorsed by Trump. Finchem knew how to elicit loud cheers after a 10-minute speech about his campaign to overturn Biden’s win in his state, urging, “So with that, I’d like to have a one round — if you don’t mind it, just humor me — of ‘Let’s go Brandon!’”
Some who have erected anti-Biden signs, especially vulgar ones, have found themselves in conflict with local officials, including one woman in New Jersey who was asked to take down several banners because they violated a local anti-obscenity ordinance. She has said she plans to fight a judge’s order in court.
That hasn’t deterred Trump supporters. As reporters left a Biden event in Elk Grove, Ill., earlier this month, an anti-Biden protester could be heard speaking over a loudspeaker nearby, booming, “We’re all waving at you to let you know how much you suck.”
Re: More Ugly Americans
All of the GOP US Senators who voted to convict Trump on the Jan,6 impeachment recently voted against even bringing up the voting rights bills for votes. So much for those profiles in " courage."
Re: More Ugly Americans
I'm just hanging on, waiting for the "Reichstadt Fire" moment that's surely coming soon....
Never forget.
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