reflectivepundit

Trump Clone DeSantis is an even Greater Threat than the Original

By Brigitte L. Nacos

While I took a healthy break from following political news developments on a 7/24 basis during the last several weeks, I could not miss that media figures and their sources have become increasingly obsessed with reporting on alternatives to Donald Trump, most of all Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Some pundits have even given advice on how DeSantis should compete against his one-time mentor. But if the pundits expected that the Florida Governor would finally come out swinging at Trump and give the media an opportunity to dramatize the beginning of a bruising battle between the two competitors, the ill-fated Twitter Space announcement was a disappointment. DeSantis did not mention Trump’s name. Not once.

At this point, Trump has a healthy lead in opinion polls ahead of second-place DeSantis—all other declared and undeclared candidates are polling in modest single-digit numbers. Previous campaigns have shown that the early survey results can drastically change over time. What individual candidates do or fail to do matters but so do unforeseen developments and events (Perhaps the preponderance of Trump’s legal problems?).

For now, news reporting on the DeSantis campaign seems quite benign. And the commentariat focuses on the expected battle between the quasi-incumbent Trump and the challenger DeSantis. So far, though, almost all pundits failed to ponder the substance of the two politicians’ agenda and whether DeSantis would be a less threatening president than Trump. An exception was Gail Collins of the New York Times who said earlier this month in a published conversation with Bret Stephens, “If I was locked up in a room and forced to choose between DeSantis and Trump, I’d beat my head against the wall and then pick The Donald.”

I agree with Collins.

Both men are power-hungry narcissists with strong authoritarian, indeed fascist traits manifested in their admiration for strongmen and their plan to expand their own executive powers---if they win next year. The socially challenged, super-tense and angry looking and sounding DeSantis lacks Trump’s relaxed reality show personality. But whereas the political opportunist Trump changes his positions or forgets about them in the chaos he tends to create, DeSantis is a hardcore ideologue with Far-Right principles and the discipline and lack of empathy to adopt extreme and inhumane laws and enforce them. This he has shown relentlessly in Florida. And now he promises to bring the same “Blueprint Florida” to the rest of America. In the Twitter announcement show he spoke repeatedly about “woke” threats, such as the “woke mob” and “woke mind virus.” I assume, his banning of books and freedoms of certain expression comes in reaction to what he called last night “woke ideology.” Whatever that is.

The ruthless culture war that DeSantis is fighting in his Floridian empire has impressed moneymen in the powerful White Christian Nationalism movement. While they love Trump for all he has done for their reactionary agenda, they now want Trumpism without Trump to defeat Joe Biden and the rest of evil Democrats next year. Their super PAC has gathered hundreds of thousands of dollars to guarantee that DeSantis will be well financed throughout the primary season.

DeSantis is as arrogant as or perhaps more arrogant than Trump. Whereas it took the formation of the MAGA movement and the emergence of the QAnon conspiracy theory for Trump to give his nod to his supporters’ claim that he is the “The Chosen One,” yesterday’s DeSantis ad claimed that God made this fighter and sent him to govern.

Thus, Never Trump and Never DeSantis. The clone is an even greater threat than the original.

CNN Offers Donald Trump Once Again Free Propaganda Time

Brigitte L. Nacos

CNN has offered and Donald Trump accepted the cable network’s invitation to a May 10^th townhall meeting in New Hampshire 18 months before the 2024 presidential elections and more than 9 months before the start of the primary season. The rationale for the deal is clear: With ratings down, CNN expects from Trump’s performance a huge audience and great media interest, while Trump wants to show Fox News that he has alternative means to spread his propaganda.

Free mainstream media.

Although there are two other declared contenders for the GOP presidential nomination, Trump will be the only one in the 60-minute show that will be moderated by CNN morning show co-host, Kaitlan Collins. Some Republican and Independent audience members will get an opportunity to ask Trump questions.  

In 2015 and 2016, CNN was instrumental in over-covering Donald Trump’s toxic campaign performances and bringing the outrageous and scandalous news about the TV reality star turned presidential candidate to American and global audiences. The payoff came in form of  high ratings, high commercial rates, and healthy profits.

It seems that the CNN bosses have forgotten the frequent attacks on the network, its star correspondents and moderators by first-time candidate and later president Trump. They also must have forgotten that Donald Trump plotted with others to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory and incited the breach of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 by his supporters.

For years, Trump called the mainstream media “the enemy of the American people” and news organizations and individual journalists “liars.” That is an old trick of autocratic strongmen who violate the laws and conventions of liberal democracy. Not for the common interest but their own corrupt interests.

CNN’s bosses should know better. After all, the network was high up on Trump’s hate-the-press list that encouraged MAGA fanatics to threaten journalists covering Trump’s rallies.

Again and unfortunately profit imperatives matter more than the journalistic ethics rules of a free press. 

Nikki Haley’s “Softer” Touch: Posing with an Attack Gun

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina, UN Ambassador during part of the Trump presidency, and now declared candidate for the GOP’s presidential nomination, runs as member of “a new generation to lead us into the future.” In the early stages of her candidacy, she appealed particularly for the support of female Republicans in Iowa and elsewhere. Yet, if anyone hoped that a woman as alternative to candidate Trump and potential male competitors would take a softer approach to her party’s outrage politics, she already dashed those hopes. For once, Trump may be right in calling her “overly ambitious.”

Like her onetime boss and now fellow-candidate, she wants to please the core of extremist Republican primary voters, many of them part of America’s deadly gun culture. In the midst of a mass shooting crisis in this country and nearly daily incidents in which children and adults are killed in public places and their own homes, Haley tweeted a photo showing her with an attack weapon with her finger on the trigger and the caption, “Making sure our military has the equipment they need to keep us safe is a priority…” Under the guise of supporting the

military candidate Haley promoted the very attack guns that can be bought and carried in most blue states. She also thanked the manufacturer of the gun she held and a gun-rights organization. At a campaign stop in New Hampshire shortly after the mass shooting in a school of Nashville, Tennessee, Haley rejected any gun-control measures. Instead, she assured fellow-Republicans, “Everybody wants to talk about gun control. My thing is, I don't want to take away your ability to protect yourself until they do those things that protect those kids." She said it is okay to have metal detectors in schools.

To emphasize the generational gap between herself (she is 51 years old) and the two heavy weights for 2024, Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Haley called for mandatory mental competency tests for politicians 75-years old. But although Trump will be 77-years old in June, Haley exempts the former president from her “old age” campaign attacks on Joe Biden, who is four years older than Trump and will be 81-years old in November.

Many voters, Democrats and Republicans, are uncomfortable with the advanced age of both Biden and Trump along with the old guard in the Congress. Thus, it is quite legitimate to discuss the age of candidates for the highest offices in the land.

The question is, how to frame such discussions. And Haley has not come up with right answer. Instead, her public statement that it is unlikely for the Biden to live until he is 86 years old and that therefore a vote for Biden in 2024 will be a vote for Kamala Harris is as shameful as her mandatory pro-gun photo on Twitter.

But as the great Irish writer Finton O’Toole wrote in the New York Review of Books on Trump’s current legal problems and by extension the political culture the former president created, “the shameless cannot be shamed.”

The Chutzpah of Tucker Carlson: Now the Fired Fox News Star Sells Himself as Truthteller

By Brigitte L. Nacos

After years of falsifying the truth and promoting non-factual tales and ridiculous conspiracy theories that contributed mightily to dividing Americans into hostile political camps, the fired Fox News star and darling of the hard-line MAGA movement Tucker Carlson sells himself as victimized truth-teller. And he promises to return to counter the “liars.”

“Both political parties, and their donors, have reached consensus on what benefits them, and they actively collude to shut down any conversation about it. Suddenly, the United States looks very much like a one-party state…,” he said in the first response after his fall. And then, in a first-rate propaganda trick he compares the honest people against the liars—the “us” versus “them” thing—and sends a message of hope to his fans:

"When honest people say what’s true, calmly and without embarrassment, they become powerful. At the same time, the liars, who have been trying to silence them, shrink and they become weaker. That’s the iron law of the universe. True things prevail. Where can you still find Americans saying true things? There aren’t many places left, but there are some.  And that’s enough. As long as you can hear the words, there is hope. See you soon."

In other words, Carlson tells his fellow “honest people” that he will not be silenced for long. The American cable channels with more extreme Far-Right ideologies than Fox News offer him options. And then there is the Russian government’s propaganda arm RT that invited Carlson with the tweet, "Hey @TuckerCarlson, you can always question more with @RT_com.”

More telling is that the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov commented unprompted during a news conference on Carlson’s firing implying that it was a move by the US government. “Perhaps it would be useful to consider how things are with freedom of speech in the United States,” he said with a straight face.

To be sure, Moscow is not happy that their favorite American TV host lost his Fox News perch from which he dispatched anti-American messages that found their way into Russia’s government-controlled media.

If one had not witnessed the perennial truth-twisting by Carlson (and his like-minded colleagues), one would be shocked by the fired TV-host’s complaint that the U.S. looks now like a one-party state. Isn’t that what Carlson and his fellow autocrats in the Far-Right GOP movement see as model? He and they have not hidden their great admiration for strongmen like Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Hungary’s Victor Orban.  

But, then, it is hard to understand the logic of these people. Instead, we need to remind us that  there are two  “realities” in American body politics with drastically different perceptions of what is fact and fiction.

Anti-Gun-Control Hardliners are Accomplices in Gun Violence

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Gun violence in the United States is as American as apple pie. The same is true for mass shootings in schools and other public places. As the growing number of mass shootings in elementary and secondary schools attests to, young children and teenagers are increasingly victims of this sort of violence. According to the Gun Violence Archive, so far this year 59 children (up to 11-years old) and 344 teenagers (12- to 17-years old) were killed in such incidents this year; the number of injured was 130 for children and 827 for teenagers. The latest mass shooting in an elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee, was merely another of the frequent mass shootings across the country.

In the Nashville case, the shooter was a 28-year-old woman armed with an AR-15-style rifle, an AR-style pistol and another handgun. The military style assault weapons could have killed far more children and adults in record time, if law enforcement officers had not responded as quickly as they did.

The fact that anyone in this country can acquire weapons designed for soldiers fighting in wars is scandalous and only possible in the United States. Leaving all other gun-control issues aside, those politicians in Congress and in Republican-controlled state governments who refuse to outlaw military style assault weapons are in my book accomplices in all incidents in which Americans are killed by assault weapons in the hands of perpetrators.

Even when the victims are their neighbors, these Second Amendment fanatics in the political class will not vote for life-saving measures that a strong majority of the American public approves.

Last year, after the mass shootings in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, U.S. Senator Bill Hagerty (R-Tennessee) noted,  

To be clear: using this horror to infringe upon the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens—before we even know what might have prevented this tragedy—and accusing anyone who disagrees of being complicit in this abhorrent crime is not a solution that will make us safer.

Senator Marsha Blackburn (R. Tennessee) said at the same time,

Schools should have secured, limited entry points, and increased funding for school resource officers. School officials with prior military or law enforcement experience should be allowed to carry firearms. Finally, mental health must be taken seriously.

Well, the Nashville perpetrator shot the glass out of doors and climbed easily through a seemingly secure entrance.

 Senator Blackburn reacted with a tweet: “Chuck & I are heartbroken to hear about the shooting at Covenant School in Nashville…” Her colleague Senator Hagerty wrote, “Devastated and heartbroken about the tragic news at Covenant School

Always the same, unhelpful phrases.

                                                                       

Congressman Andy Ogles (R-Tennessee), who represents the district that includes Nashville and the Covenant School, posted last year a Christmas card on Facebook depicting his family posing with guns. That’s how deeply ingrained the gun culture is in the United States of America and why it still seems impossible to defeat it.