reflectivepundit

My Future Representative in Washington is a Liar and Crook

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Filling in for Fox News host Tucker Carlson, former Representative and former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard tore into Republican Congressman-elect George Santos for lying during his campaign about his education, job history, religion, and properties. She did not let him get away with the excuse that he merely embellished his resume “a bit”—and that Democrats are far bigger liars. “Do you have no shame?” she scolded him. She mentioned the people who will be represented by Santos in the lower chamber of congress, “If I were one of those in New York’s 3rd District right now, now that the election is over, and I’m finding out all of these lies that you’ve told, not just one little lie or one little embellishment — these are blatant lies…”

I am one of those people in New York’s third congressional district and disgusted that I will be represented by a liar and crook in the U.S. House of Representatives. There is no doubt that Santos will be sworn in on January 3^rd. While I did not vote for Santos but for Democrat Robert Zimmerman, I have no doubt that the GOP candidate won the election in the formerly Democratic but redrawn 3^rd district fair and square. Lies are no crimes. Only pressure from party leaders could perhaps derail Santos’s path to Washington.

But that will not happen.

The GOP House leadership has remained silent since the New York Times revealed details about Santos’s falsified biography. Minority leader Kevin McCarthy wants nothing more than become Speaker of the House and will welcome any member who promises to vote for him.

That’s what Santos has already done. He pledged to vote for McCarthy who has no vote to spare in his struggle with MAGA fanatics in his caucus.

Forget about MAGA Party leaders. They will not stand up for truthfulness, ethics, moral principles--and not for the ideals and ideas of our democracy.

That did not happen, when Donald Trump lied every day as candidate, as president, as ex-president, and now, again, as declared candidate for the 2024 presidential race.

George Santos indicated in interviews that what he calls “embellishing” his biographical information is a common practice among politicians. Everyone does a bit of it, he claimed.

In other words, he calls politicians collectively fellow liars and crooks.

That’s what is the legacy of the Trump years in the GOP.  

After Trump’s Call for the Suspension of the US Constitution…

By Brigitte L. Nacos

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that former president Donald Trump used his social media platform last weekend to call for the suspension of the U.S. Constitution. He wants to scrap laws and constitutional articles that are the foundation of our democratic system because he still claims falsely that the 2020 presidential election was rigged in favor of the winning candidate.

Obviously, he does not want to wait for voters to decide in November 2024 but rather tries to sell the idea of a second coup to his hardcore supporters. Many of them, most of all the QAnon conspiracists, believe all along that he must and will return to power well before the next elections.

Although Mike Pence, the former vice-president, and Mitch McConnell, the minority leader in the US Senate, had a few critical words for Trump’s attack on constitutional democracy, the bulk of GOP officials responded once again by remaining silent.

A shocking silence and proof that the power-hungry master of Mar-a-Lago continues to hold his grip on the GOP, if only, because the GOP’s elected officials fear the influence of the MAGA movement in their party’s primaries.

By now it is crystal clear: For the GOP, Trump cannot go too far with even the most extremist words and actions that were unthinkable for presidents or ex-presidents until this performance artist moved into the political arena.

Trump does not hide his hostility to democracy and his preference for strong-man rule. He publicizes his outrageous ideas and acts on them.

More recently, he displayed his preference of far-right extremism in several cases.

• He does not make a secret of his support for the organized terrorists and MAGA insurrectionists who supported his coup attempt on January 6, 2021 (1/6) by an unprecedented violent attack on the US Capitol. And he has promised the convicted 1/6 participants pardons once he returns to power. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green, a Trump disciple, plans GOP hearings into the Department of Justice’s “unfair” treatment of violent 1/6 offenders once her party takes over in the U.S. House of Representatives.

• He hosted the White Supremacist, neo-Nazi, and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and the anti-Semite Kanye West for dinner at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. If that was not a clear message of support to far-right extremists, among them violent ones, what would be? While Trump signaled his support for these elements among his supporters before, his get-together will Fuentes and West was an overt embrace and brought Trump a blast of the media attention he seeks.

Can the Midterm Election Results Derail the Trump Train?

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Although the GOP will likely become the majority party in the House of Representatives and perhaps in the US Senate as well, the results of this week’s midterm election were the first signs of hope that the leader of the MAGA movement is not invincible. That there are limits to contemporary extremism and pure craziness in American politics. That enough Americans have not succumbed to rhetorical and actual political violence.

Of course, hope is not reality. Perhaps signal changes to come.

Donald Trump and his minions were not the only ones to predict a landslide victory for the Republican Party and their hand-picked line-up of far-right candidates. Pollsters and pundits and reporters in the field confirmed the coming shellacking of the Democratic Party and their candidates.

They all were wrong. Again.

Their predictions were far removed from what actually happened and still unfolds in undecided races in three states and two dozen congressional districts.

Democrats won clear victories in a number of swing states, among them Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire. And they won against GOP candidates who were so extreme that they were rejected by enough Independents and even some Republicans. The Democrats’ unexpected good showing included gubernatorial victories and majorities in state legislatures matched finally previous sweeps of the GOP in state-wide elections.

If the senatorial races in Arizona and Nevada are ultimately won by the Democratic candidates, the Democrats would remain in the driver's seat in the US Senate because Vice President Harris would break likely 50-50 ties. If the Republicans end up winning the senatorial seats in those two western states, they will be in charge in the upper chamber of the Congress. In either case, a win in the run-off in Georgia on December 6 between the sitting Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, and the Trump-handpicked former football star Hershel Walker would be gravy for either Democrats or Republicans.

Today, the big question is this:  Can this week’s mid-term election results finally derail the Trump MAGA train?  

Rupert Murdoch’s far-right New York Post celebrated Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on the front page of its Wednesday edition calling him “young GOP star” and “DeFuture”—a slap in Donald Trump’s face and plan to announce his third run for the presidency next week. Worse yet, on Thursday, the New York Post’s front page showed “TRUMPTY DUMPTY” and the following verse:

"Don (who couldn’t build a wall)

Had a great fall—

Can all the GOP’s men

Put the party back together again?"

 

Perhaps it does not take “all the GOP’s men” but only some courageous GOP men and women a la Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger to “put the party back together.”

Performance Artist Trump and his Big Helpers in the Mainstream Media

By Brigitte L. Nacos

In the United States of America, the loyal opposition is dead.

Instead of debating political differences with opponents in rational debate that differentiates democracies from autocracies, the leader of the Republican Party continues to up the ante of his usual crude rhetorical insults and degradation.

At a campaign rally in Ohio on the eve of the midterm elections, former President Trump called the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, “an animal.” And, as he has done many times before, he also labeled her “Crazy Nancy.”  

Shortly after the attack on Paul Pelosi, the former and would-be next president Trump contributed to instantly circulating right-extreme conspiracy theories, according to which the assault on the 82-year old husband of the Speaker was staged by the liberal cabal or the result of a gay relationship gone bad—all contrary to the police version supported by video footage of the break-in.

Trump did not condemn the attacker’s political violence; probably, because the perpetrator’s posts revealed the same violent far-right extremism that is at home in the MAGA cult and the community of QAnon conspiracy theorists—both Trump’s staunchest supporters.

The Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election is merely one big whopper among the ex-president's daily spoken and written lies.

Lies or not, the ex-president consumes more mainstream media news oxygen than most other politicians—on many days more than the sitting president.

The legacy news media, involved in sharp competition with each other and social media platforms, attract the largest audiences to their political reporting, when their infotainment stars unorthodox political performance artists—like Donald Trump. That’s appreciated by news organizations’ managements and stock owners. After all, higher audience ratings rake in higher profits.  

The key to Trump’s nomination and election victories in 2016 was not FOX News, the army of Far-Right radio hosts, his tweets, or his rallies during which he preached anger, hate, division, and—yes—violence. Instead, Trump’s biggest helpers during the decisive pre-primary and primary seasons were mainstream media organizations. The huge volume of coverage devoted to his rude speech during his performances and the attention to outrageous tweets he or his team posted gave him unprecedented free propaganda that was not available to his opponents.

After Trump announces his next presidential candidacy, we will get an idea whether the mainstream media will repeat their mistakes of Donald Trump’s first presidential run.

I am not optimistic that a self-correction is in the cards.

For Trump’s GOP Violence is “Political Discourse”

When it comes to violence, we know for a long time that Donald Trump is like the emperor without cloths: he does not hide his love of brutal force for the sake of his own power. He does not hide most of his illegal actions but describes and celebrates them in public. He is naked, when it comes to any shame. He is an empty vessel, when it comes to a moral compass.  

And now, the Republican Party, already on bended knees, has revealed its complete surrender to its fascist leader and his complete disregard of the legal anchor of this nation: The Republican National Committee censored their members Rep. Liz Cheney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger for participating in the congressional investigation of the January 6^th events. They charged the only two Republicans courageous enough to stand up for democracy for taking part in the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”

However incredible it is: One of the two major political parties in the oldest continuous democracy declared today openly that terrorist and insurgent violence is “legitimate political discourse” among “ordinary citizens.” Obviously, the leading GOP party hacks felt the urgent need to second Donald Trump’s promise to January 6^th terrorists, insurgents, and fellow-plotters in the White House and elsewhere that he might pardon them all, when back in power.

50 years ago, Hannah Arendt wrote about violent movements,

If goals are not achieved rapidly, the result will be not merely defeat but the introduction of the practice of violence into the whole body politic. …The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.

That’s exactly what we are experiencing now: When Trump and his MAGA movement failed to overturn the election and keep him in office on January 6^th, 2021, violence became part of body politic in America.

Neo-Nazis march now openly in American streets, display swastikas, and attack Jewish Americans. The violent Far Right and its organized groups have friends in high places claiming to provide security.

Violence as political discourse has no place in democracy. Embracing violence as is a giant step to fascism.

Especially, when it becomes the doctrine of a major political party.

Our Greatest Problem is Not Covid but the Imminent Threat to Our Democracy

This week’s first anniversary of the breach of the Capitol by Trump supporters will be another shocking display of the fragile state of our democratic system of governance. Whereas President in a speech and congressional Democrats in a vigil plan to honor the defenders of our democracy and their elected representatives, the former president and his sycophants are reported to plan a strong defense of the violence of January 6, 2021 and its perpetrators. Nothing displays the political divide in America more shockingly than those two opposing views about the assault on Congress a year ago—one based on reality and truth, the other on “alternative reality” and lies.

Political polarization is what serves authoritarian politicians best. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes in her book Strongmen: Mussolini to Present, “authoritarians hold appeal when society is polarized, or divided into two opposing ideological camps, which is why they do all they can to exacerbate strife.” This helps to explain the rise and continuing appeal of Donald Trump among many millions of Americans.

The starting point was the Tea Party movement that arose in early 2009 in response to the election of Barack Obama and sharpened the partisan and ideological divergences of political elites and the public at large. When Trump became the public face of the birther conspiracy theory that had massive support among Tea Partiers, he won over what became his core support in his run for the presidency—Tea Party supporters and evangelical Christians, many of whom sympathized with the reactionary Tea Party agenda.

During his candidacy and presidency, Trump appealed relentlessly to the emotions of his base and possible converts to his MAGA movement. It is highly revealing what the then GOP candidate Trump told Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in an interview in March 2016 about two powerful emotions he recognized,  

• “Real power is—I don’t even want to use the word—fear.”
• “I bring rage out. I do bring rage out. I always have.”

Thus, the titles of two Woodward books on Trump (FEAR and RAGE); the third book, co-written with Costa is titled PERIL (perhaps meant to be the result of stirring fear and rage in the MAGA movement?).

Ultimately, emotions, not rational choices are the main drivers of political and policy preferences. And fear and anger/rage are among the most potent ones.

President Biden and Democrats Must Wake Up and Defend Democracy

By Brigitte L. Nacos

President Joe Biden has yet another talk with Senator Joe Manchin. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer tries to keep the Before-Christmas deadline to hold a vote on the Build Back Better bill. The House Select Committee on January 6 digs deep into the horrific facts of that day.

As important as all of the above may be, everything pales in comparison to the existential threat that President Biden and congressional democrats fail to deal with aggressively—even at the expense of other items on their agenda.

I cannot get a recent column by Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times and a recent article by Barton Gellman of The Atlantic out of my mind. Goldberg in “The Problem of Political Despair” and Barton in “January 6 was Practice” lay out the clear and present danger to our democratic values and American democracy itself.

The insurrection attempt by domestic terrorist groups and Trump supporters as well as the coup attempt by the former president and his clique of enablers inside and outside the White House failed nearly a year ago. But there are plenty of signposts that the Trumpian Big Lie about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election results has a good chance to prevail in 2024.

The mid-term elections next year will preview the effectiveness of GOP majority states to destroy fair elections as we know them.

Whether the former president decides to run again in 2024—or not, the one-time Grand Old Party does no longer exist. The Trump Party has become the theater of the absurd in which would-be performers deliver shock messages and threaten political opponents.

A recent podcast performance by “War Room” host Steve Bannon and his guest Congressman Matt Gaetz was a case in point. They talked about  an “army of patriots” and “shock troops” as they previewed a future in which Trump was president again.

Bannon: “This is Trumpism in power. That's when we went to the 4,000 shock troops we have to have that's going to man the government. Get them ready now. Right? We're going to hit the beach with the landing teams and the beachhead teams and all that nomenclature they use when President Trump wins in 2024 — or before."

Gaetz: “And we're going to go after this administrative state and we're going to start at the Department of Justice and the FBI. That's the job I want. You know, send me over to the Judiciary Committee and their sphincters will tighten because they have been doing a lot of corrupt things over there."

Oh, yes, one wants to laugh—just as many of us did, when Trump announced his presidential candidacy in the summer of 2015. Then, he was merely a spent reality show performer with birther conspiracy theorists on his side. Now, he controls a major party whose members are on bended knees to please their dear leader and progressing rapidly in the destruction of our electoral system—and our democracy.

Not Racial, Ethnic, and Religious Diversity but White Supremacy and Crazy Conspiracy Theories Loom as Serious Threats to U.S. Democracy

By Brigitte L. Nacos

In his 2011 book “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” the one-time presidential speechwriter, presidential GOP candidate, and to this day right-extreme pundit Patrick J. Buchanan characterized the essence of a nation as “a people of common ancestry, culture, and language, who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays, share the same music, poetry, art, literature, held together, in Lincoln’s words, ’by bonds of affection…mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriotic grave, to every living heart and heath-stone.”

Given those characteristics, Buchanan lamented, “the European and Christian core of our country is shrinking” and “the death of its [America’s] cradle faith brings social disintegration, an end to moral community, and culture war.”

 He left no doubt that the election of President Barack Obama represented the greatest threat to the survival of “his” idea of America. And in his prescriptions to save the European-Christian America included a moratorium on immigration and rolling back any progressive gains won in what Buchanan labeled the [liberal] culture war.

Not only pundits like Buchanan but also some well-known scholars have long warned of the evils of multiculturalism. In 2004, the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington chose as the lead in his article “The Hispanic Challenge” the following paragraph,

“The persistent flow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages. Mexicans and other Latinos have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, forming instead their own political and linguistic enclaves—from Los Angeles to Miami—and rejecting Anglo-Protestant values that build the American dream. The United States ignores this challenge at its peril.”

It is ironic that President Joe Biden warned the other day in his Memorial Day that “democracy itself is in peril,” using the same term as Huntington. But the peril Biden spoke of has a very different meaning than the peril Huntington meant.  

Whereas Huntington and Buchanan saw multicultural challenges to what Isabel Wilkerson described in her recent book “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents” as a system of White caste dominance, Joe Biden invoked the beliefs and values of true Christianity and inclusive democracy, when he said, “Wherever Americans are, there — there is democracy: churches and synagogues and mosques, neighborhoods and coffee shops and diners, bleachers at kids’ baseball or soccer games, libraries and parks.  Democracy begins and grows in the open heart and the impetus to come together for a common cause…Americans of all backgrounds, races, creeds, gender identities, sexual orientations, have long spilled their blood to defend our democracy.  The diversity of our country and our arm- — and of our armed services is and always has been an incredible strength.”

Shame on Mainstream Media for Publicizing another Trump for Political Office

By Brigitte L. Nacos

It is well-document that the most influential organizations of the U.S. mainstream media—from CNN to the New York Times and Washington Post—singled out Donald Trump for the bulk of their election-related coverage. This was the case in 2015 before and in 2016 during the Republican primaries. The celebrity candidate, however rude and insulting, received significantly more and more positive coverage than his competitors on the GOP side but also with respect to Hillary Clinton. Only after he had won the presidential nomination, did the same news organizations finally scrutinize the least qualified and the most dangerous of all candidates. It was too late.

While these same newsrooms deserve credit for their watchdog role during the nightmarish years of the Trump administration, they seemed not to have learned from their past mistakes in 2015/16. Again, they help—unwittingly, I assume—to pave the way for another Trump’s political career.

I was shocked this morning, when I first saw on Yahoo’s home page a story on Lara Trump, Donald’s daughter-in-law, under the headline “Lara Trump for North Carolina Senate Seat?” The article originated in the New York Times and was, as the story revealed, teased by Donald Trump’s enabler-in-chief Lindsay Graham, Senator of North Carolina, who told FOX News that the pro-conviction vote by Richard Burr of North Carolina in the Senate’s impeachment trial “made Lara Trump almost the certain nominee for the Senate seat” in that state.

So, the ambitious Trump through marriage, whose political ambitions had already been covered quite generously before, won another plum piece of free media without saying a single word or doing a single thing—just like father-in-law Donald whose ample free news in 2015/16 freed him from pleading for donations or spending his own money.

The news media must not become the former president’s substitute for his no longer available Twitter account but treat him like any former ex-president, better less so, although the FOX News newsrooms and their competitors will be delighted to serve as his bullhorns.

Just as important, the influential mainstream media must refrain from providing free publicity to other members of the Trump Clan: his sons, his daughters, daughters-in-law, and son-in-law.

When it comes to Mr. Trump and his family, journalists, editors, producers—all in the mainstream media must act according to George Santayana’s aphorism, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

I do not expect that they will.

Trump and the Madman Theory: A Madman Without a Theory

 By Brigitte L. Nacos

In his book “The Madman Theory: Trump Takes on the World” Jim Sciutto applies President Nixon’s so-called “Madman Theory” to President Trump. But whereas Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser/Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had some, however crazy plan as they tried to convince adversaries of a president mad enough to resort to weapons of mass destruction to get concessions, Trump and his advisers never had a plan.

Now, after four crazy years, there is still a madman, a would-be tyrant and his hardcore followers trying to overthrow America’s more than 200-year-old democracy. What we have witnessed during the last four years and especially since Trump’s electoral defeat two months ago has been a huge step away from democratic principles—most of all the acceptance of election results by winners and losers in the pluralist system of governing.

As I watched FOX New last night at a time when Georgia’s election returns indicated a possible double win for the Democratic Party in the run-off for seats in the U.S. Senate, I heard hysterical outcries about those two “communists” ahead of their patriotic opponents. Given the long-used labels “communists” and “socialists” attached to “extreme liberals” by Trump and his propagandists, the time has come to call the Trumpian fascist movement no longer benignly “conservative” or “the conservative right,” they are in reality autocrats and, yes, they are fascists trampling on the rule of law.

At the end of his book “The Anatomy of Fascism” Robert O. Paxton details what he calls the “mobilizing passions” of fascism, among them,

• the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without any legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;

• the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny;

• the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success.

We see these fascist mobilizing passions at play right now at work in Washington, D.C. and around the country with the President of the United States Donald Trump in the starring role. We see these fascist mobilizing passions in the two chambers of Congress where too many GOP Senators and Representatives violate the oaths they swear to the U.S. Constitution. And we see these fascist mobilizing passions in the social media posts of online fascists who are devoted to and courted by their Dear Leader.

In two weeks, there will be a changing of the guards in Washington. Joe Biden will become U.S. President, and Kamala Harris will become U.S. Vice-President.

But to assume that the fascist passions will evaporate once Biden and Harris move into the White House would be naïve. The Madman without Theory will not go quietly into a post-presidential life.

                                                                                                              ***

I wrote the above post a few hours before Trump's fanatic followers unleashed terror in the halls of the U.S. Congress. While the violence did not surprise me at all, I watched in amazement the thin or non-existent law enforcement presence in and around Capitol Hill. Assuming that the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and other agencies kept track of violent online extremist communities, law enforcement was fully aware that many fanatic Trump followers heard their idol's call to come to Washington and fight for his second term. Whereas overwhelming military and police might threatened peaceful "Black Lives Matter" demonstrators in the capital last year, the White Supremacists, typically insisting on their right to wear arms, met no serious resistance as they entered through doors and windows into congressional buildings.

After inciting and watching the seditious horror show for hours Donald Trump finally asked his terrorist followers to "go home" assuring them that he loved them...