Should We Be Polite as the GOP Stomps on Our Democratic Rights?

When a fox attacks a hen house, is it uncivil for the hens to raise a ruckus? Two Supreme Court justices say it is. Elevating collegiality above social justice, right-wing extremist Amy Coney Barrett and progressive jurist Sonia Sotomayor have jointly been hailing America's top court as a model of genteel political discourse, claiming that the six Republicans and three Democrats disagree agreeably. "We do not interrupt one another, and we never raise our voices," Barrett primly lectured to a recent conference of civics teachers. Sotomayor chimed in that court decorum frowns on any internal comments that "could be viewed (by other justices) as hurtful."

How sweet that the Supremes are so judiciously cordial inside their marble sanctuary. But how bitter that the court's lockstep Republican ideologues are so crudely slapping down women's rights, running roughshod over our environmental protections, stomping on voting rights, enthroning plutocracy, imposing theocracy ... and so awful much more. Yet, when any of the three progressive justices do publicly assail these blatantly partisan, anti-democratic edicts, Barrett decorously decries their "stridency," demurely chiding that "the court should turn the national temperature down, not up."

Yoo-hoo, Madame Supreme, can you even hear yourself? Your very elevation to the High Court was a strident affront to our democracy and to the very idea of justice, rammed through in a flagrantly partisan power play by a lame-duck president and a corrupt Republican senator. Please, spare us your phony lectures on judicial propriety!

America would still be an English colony if the rebels of 1776 had not "stridently" risen up and impolitely confronted the kind of elitist governmental authoritarianism that Barrett & Co. wants to re-impose on us. Come on, progressives — get rude! Democracy demands that we be confrontational ... not courtly.

I Listened to Trump’s Rambling, Unhinged, Vituperative Georgia Rally—And So Should You

Whether or not it’s news in the conventional sense, it’s easiest to understand the threat that Trump poses to American democracy most clearly when you see it for yourself. Watch his speeches. Don't look away.

March 15, 2024 - Susan Glasser - The New Yorker

I’m sure you had better things to do on Saturday evening than watch Donald Trump rant for nearly two hours to an audience of cheering fans in Rome, Georgia. His speech was rambling, unhinged, vituperative, and oh-so-revealing. In his first rally since effectively clinching the Republican Presidential nomination, Trump made what amounted to his response to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. It’s hard to imagine a better or more pointed contrast with the vision that, two days earlier, the President had laid out for America.

And yet, like so much about Trump’s 2024 campaign, this insane oration was largely overlooked and under-covered, the flood of lies and B.S. seen as old news from a candidate whose greatest political success has been to acclimate a large swath of the population to his ever more dangerous alternate reality. No wonder Biden, trapped in a real world of real problems that defy easy solutions, is struggling to defeat him.

This is partly a category error. Though we persist in treating the 2024 election as a race between an incumbent and a challenger, it is not that so much as a contest between two incumbents: Biden, the actual President, and Trump, the forever-President of Red America’s fever dreams. But Trump, while he presents himself as the country’s rightful leader, gets nothing like the intense scrutiny for his speeches that is now focussed on the current occupant of the Oval Office. The norms and traditions that Trump is intent on smashing are, once again, benefitting him.

One of the amazing political achievements of Republicans in this election cycle has been their ability, at least so far, to send Donald Trump’s last year in office down the memory hole. Voters are supposed to remember the good economy of January 2020, with its combination of low unemployment and low inflation, while forgetting about the plague year that followed.

Since Trump’s romp in the Super Tuesday primaries, however, the ex-president and his surrogates have begun trying to pull off an even more impressive act of revisionism: portraying his entire presidency — even 2020, that awful first pandemic year — as pure magnificence. On Wednesday, Representative Elise Stefanik, the chair of the House Republican Conference, tried echoing Ronald Reagan: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

And Trump himself, in his Tuesday night victory speech, reflected wistfully on his time in office as one in which “our country was coming together.”

So let’s set the record straight: 2020 — the fourth quarter, if you will, of Trump’s presidency — was a nightmare. And part of what made it a nightmare was the fact that America was led by a man who responded to a deadly crisis with denial, magical thinking and, above all, total selfishness — focused at every stage not on the needs of the nation but on what he thought would make him look good.

Trouble in Trumpland?
Feb 26, 2024

(snips)

President Biden won the South Carolina Democratic primary with 96.2% of the vote. Trump, who is essentially an incumbent up against a novice at running for national office, could not muster even 60% of his party’s vote. Exit polls from Saturday night should have GOP leaders nervous.

To win the presidency again, Trump will need to bring all Republicans into the tent. Gallop estimates that 41% of the electorate identifies as Republican. Then it gets really tough. He has to convince a large number of independents and Democrats to vote for him. But how?

Not by favoring a 16-week national abortion ban
Not by threatening to pull out of NATO
Not by defunding Ukraine and supporting Putin’s invasion
Not by promising “ultimate and absolute revenge” against his political opponents
Not by refusing to accept the results of elections he’s lost
Not by promising to be a dictator on day one of his second term
Not by saying things like: “These are the stakes of this election. Our country is being destroyed, and the only thing standing between you and its obliteration is me.”

But the likely GOP nominee continues to feed fears about immigration using language tailored to his MAGA base. “They’re coming from Asia, they’re coming from the Middle East, coming from all over the world, coming from Africa, and we’re not going to stand for it ... They’re destroying our country,” Trump said Saturday at CPAC, a conference of extreme-right Trump supporters.

“No, Mr. Trump, they’re not,” is the answer of many Americans. There is strong public opinion that what is tearing our country apart is the divisiveness and rancor that comes from Trump, the Republican Party, and their right-wing media machine.

Trump Is Not Strong, Or Winning
In every possible way I would much rather be us than them
Simon Rosenberg
Feb 22, 2024

Trump is far weaker than 2020, the GOP party itself is in shambles, and they’ve grown far uglier, extreme and dangerous. Right now the Republican is an unprecedented shitshow - I mean, c’mom:

Trump is campaigning from the courthouse this time, not the White House. He is facing 91 felony indictments. He and Rudy owe $700m. He keeps losing in court, badly. He raped E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room. He oversaw one of the largest financial frauds in American history. His criminal trial for cooking the books to pay off a porn star starts in a few weeks. He stole America’s secrets, lied to the FBI about it, shared these secrets with others. He tried to overturn the 2020 election, led an armed insurrection against the US government, and has promised to end American democracy if he somehow gets into the Oval Office again. He and his family have corruptly taken more money from foreign governments than any political family in history. He is singularly responsible for ending Roe and stripping the rights and freedoms away from more than half the population.

His campaign and his party are in shambles. He is spending more money than he is taking in (just holy shit). Nikki Haley outraised him in January. 93% of registered Republicans in Iowa choose to not vote for him. 43% of Haley voters in Iowa said they would vote for Biden. He underperformed public polls in NH by 10-15 points. Polling in these early states found 20-30% of the GOP eletorate could flee if Trump is convicted (which has already happened btw). The RNC is broke. It’s leadership has been ousted. His daughter in law may take over the RNC (LOLOL) because she may be the only member of his family legally allowed to serve in a leadership role in a non-profit. Dozens of Republican Party leaders in the battleground states have been indicted for various electoral crimes, including trying to overturn the 2020 election. MAGA-led state parties are crashing across the US. GOP state party chairs in both Arizona and Florida just resigned in epic scandals. The GOP House is arguably the worst in American history, and House Republicans are retiring and abandoning ship in record numbers. Despite his “wealth,” Trump is somehow forcing the Republican Party to pay for his outrageous legal bills, draining the party of resources he and other Rs need against a well funded Biden/DNC operation. The hard side of Republican politics has collapsed, something that deserves far more discussion.

Trump’s performance on the stump is far more erratic, delusional and disturbing than ever before. He is making damaging, impulsive traditional political mistakes like coming out against the ACA which are the kind of mistakes losing candidates make. He wears more make-up than a drag queen, attendance at his rallies is way off, and his wife and daughter are refusing to campaign with him. The thrill is gone, baby.

His agenda is far more radical and dangerous than it was in 2016 or 2020. He wants Putin to win, the West to lose. The border to be in chaos, and migrants to keep flowing into the country. The economy to crash. Women, people of color to lose more freedoms and rights. The planet to warm faster. 10 year olds to carry their rapist's baby to term, and for more women to die on an operating room table. Tens of millions to lose their health insurance. More dead kids in schools. Verified rapists in positions of authority. A restoration of pre-Civil Rights era white supremacy. Big tax cuts for their donors, higher deficits and less for everyone else. Books banned across the US. Seniors to pay more for insulin and prescription drugs. Foreign governments free to pollute our daily discourse and harass our citizens. Teenagers to work night shifts in meat packing plants and not go to school. The minimum wage to stay at $7.25. Mass arrests and mass deportations of immigrants long settled in the US. Insurrectionists to get pardoned. 10% tariffs which would blow up the global economic order and punish American consumers. To end American democracy for all time. Good luck selling all this to the American people who have rejected a milder MAGA in 2018, 2020, 2022, 2023 and early 2024, and already rejected him.