Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Trump Came for Their Party but Took Over Their Souls

I thought I was beyond shockable, but this week has been profoundly shocking for me. I spent the bulk of my adult life on the right-wing side of things, generally rooting for the Republican Party, because I thought that party best served America. People like Sarah Palin and Donald Trump chased me out of the Republican orbit (gradually and then all at once), but I have still held out the hope that my many friends on the right are kind of like an occupied country. They have to mouth the Trumpian prejudices to survive in this era, but somewhere deep inside, the party of Reagan still lives in their souls.

After this week, and the defeat of the immigration-Ukraine-Israel package, it’s hard to believe that anymore. Even if some parts of the bill survive, the party of Eisenhower, Reagan and McCain is just stone cold gone — and not only among House Republicans, but apparently among their Senate colleagues too.

My progressive readers are now thinking: Have you not been paying attention? Donald Trump has owned this party for years. If he told them to kill the immigration compromise because he needed a campaign issue, they were going to kill that proposal.

To which I respond: I don’t think you quite understand what just happened. This wasn’t just about Republicans cynically bending their knee to Trump. Rather, I’m convinced that Trumpism now pervades the deepest recesses of their minds and governs their unconscious assumptions. Their fundamental mental instincts are no longer conservative, but Trumpian.

Here are some of the convictions that Republicans had to assent to in order to do what they did this week:

Democracy is for suckers. In a democratic society, opposing parties negotiate and try to strike a compromise that’s, on balance, better than the status quo. This week’s immigration-Ukraine-Israel package is one of the most one-sided compromises I’ve ever seen. Republicans got most of their long-term priorities, while Democrats got almost none of theirs. “By any honest reckoning, this is the most restrictive migrant legislation in decades,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board noted. “This is almost entirely a border security bill, and its provisions include longtime G.O.P. priorities that the party’s restrictionists could never have passed only a few months ago.”

And yet Republican after Republican came out against the package, arguing it doesn’t have absolutely everything they want. They have adopted the Trumpian logic that under him, they will never have to compromise. The dictator will issue commands, and everything Republicans want will just happen. Meanwhile, Republican James Lankford, who conducted a lavishly successful negotiation, is being savaged on the right side of the internet for being a weak-willed compromiser.

Entertainment over governance. Under Trump, the G.O.P. is less a governing party and more an ongoing entertainment complex. It doesn’t have supporters; it has audience members. The Trump show has certain story lines: Washington is an unholy mess that will never get anything right. America is in chaos. Joe Biden is an inflexible left-wing radical who will never tack to the middle. Only Trump can save us. Passing this package would have upended all these narratives. The package had to be destroyed in order to save the story.

Showmanship has eclipsed even simple governance. Republican senators just ditched a compromise that could have passed, and they are already heroically parading behind ideas that have no shot at getting 60 votes. As Mitt Romney put it: “Politics used to be the art of the possible. Now it’s the art of the impossible. Meaning, let’s put forward proposals that can’t possibly pass so we can say to our respective bases — look how I’m fighting for you.”

Foreigners don’t matter. When Dwight Eisenhower defeated Robert Taft for the 1952 Republican nomination, the G.O.P. became an internationalist party and largely remained that way for six decades. Now isolationism is the dominant G.O.P. pose. Isolationism is the attitude that the outside world doesn’t matter much to American security and that global problems can be safely ignored. It’s based on the fictional notion that America once lived in splendid isolation until those elite globalists took over. Opposing further aid to Ukraine is the quintessential isolationist act, a position that now seems to be embraced by a majority of Senate Republicans and an implacable majority in the House.

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Today’s Republican isolationists have no grand strategy. Their foreign policy approach is based on a non sequitur — that because we have to spend more defending our southern border, we have to spend less defending Ukrainian democracy. People like J.D. Vance really seem to believe that if we let Vladimir Putin win his wars of conquest in Europe, it will have no consequences for us back home. Somewhere even Neville Chamberlain is gaping in disbelief.

Lying is normal. Politicians always distort proposals they disagree with, but Trump has given his colleagues permission to make things up with abandon. In the hours after the package was released, Republican officeholders produced a Vesuvius of misinformation about what was in it.

Representative Steve Scalise asserted that the package “accepts 5,000 illegal immigrants a day.” No, actually it doesn’t, a Fox News reporter explained. Representative Dan Bishop asserted that undocumented immigrants “not from Mexico or Canada won’t be counted toward total encounters.” No, the financier Steven Rattner corrected, this provision refers only to unaccompanied minors, of whom very few arrive from noncontiguous countries. The president doesn’t need new laws to halt illegal immigration, Speaker Mike Johnson asserted. Then why did House Republicans go to all the trouble to pass H.R. 2 last year, an attempt to create an ambitious new law to halt illegal immigration?

Trump has erased the assumption that credibility is a nice thing to have.

America would be better off in a post-American world. As Noah Rothman noted in National Review, if you had presented the pre-Trump G.O.P. with an enforcement-only immigration bill linked to provisions to contain Russian, Chinese and Iranian aggression, you would basically have fulfilled every Republican fantasy all at once. But today’s party rejected the deal, not only because it didn’t like the immigration bits, but also because it no longer believes in the American-led international order.

The American economy is enjoying one of its greatest growth periods of our lifetimes, and yet many Republicans have persuaded themselves that the nation is in ruins and can’t afford foreign commitments. In the 60 years after World War II, America and its allies built and preserved a global order that produced a world vastly safer and richer than the world that came before, and yet Republicans have persuaded themselves that the United States is impotent, that its foreign entanglements perpetually fail. The Republicans say they oppose Xi Jinping’s regime in China, and sometimes even pretend to oppose Putin’s regime in Russia, but operationally they also share many of Xi’s and Putin’s goals — to reduce America’s role in the world, to destroy America’s confidence in its ability to project power, to reduce America to a regional superpower.

We’re living through one of the most dangerous periods of modern times. As the historian Hal Brands noted recently in Foreign Affairs, the situation today is reminiscent of the mid- to late 1930s. Back then, fascist Italy assaulted Ethiopia. Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland. Japan ravaged China. These three regional conflicts had not yet metastasized into a global world war, but even in 1937, Franklin Roosevelt warned of an “epidemic of world lawlessness.”

That epidemic of lawlessness is back. Russia, Iran and China have started or raised regional tensions in ways that threaten to coalesce into something truly nasty. Groups like the Houthis seek to fill the vacuums left by American weakness. The storm clouds are gathering.

You’d think these trends would inspire a note of seriousness among the men and women elected to represent the people of this nation. It hasn’t. Trumpism was once a posture most Republican officeholders donned to preserve their political viability. But it’s an eternal verity of human psychology: If you wear a mask long enough, eventually the mask becomes who you are.

Over the last two decades, I've often found myself in disagreement with a lot of other liberal types whenever I would speak in limited defense of David Brooks. By "limited" I mean that I commonly found him to be honest, thoughtful and generally careful in his thinking and not merely a mouthpiece for conservative cliches and partisan initiatives even if I would disagree with, say, 60% or even 70%of what he wrote. Further, that over these years reading him, I've found him to have become increasingly brave in separating himself from the wave of crazy taking over the GOP (which I'm sure has cost him friends and dinner invitations).

Further, that over these years reading him, I've found him to have become increasingly brave in separating himself from the wave of crazy taking over the GOP (which I'm sure has cost him friends and dinner invitations).

I got to dislike Brooks enough to stop reading his columns (sorta like I had been doing with Dowd)...but got to like his comments so much on the PBS News Hour that I started reading him again.

What's interesting is that even at the time the Nazis tried to blame the Poles, claiming they fired first in a propaganda act.

Putin has refined that as if small nations don't immediately acquiesce to the demands of big powers that is an act of war.

Way to codify might is right.

A key story that got missed yesterday was that the Senate voted 64–19 to allow a bill that includes $95.34 billion in aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan to advance a step forward. In terms of domestic politics, this appears to be an attempt by those who controlled the Republican Party before Trump to push back against Trump and the MAGA Republicans.

MAGA lawmakers had demanded border security measures be added to a national security supplemental bill that provided this international aid, as well as humanitarian aid to Gaza, but to their apparent surprise, a bipartisan group of lawmakers actually hammered out that border piece. Trump immediately demanded an end to the bill and MAGA obliged on Wednesday, forcing the rest of the party to join them in killing the national security supplemental bill. House Republicans then promptly tried to pass a measure that provided funding for Israel alone.

At stake behind this fight is not only control of the Republican Party, but also the role of the U.S. in the world—and, for that matter, its standing. And much of that fight comes down to Ukraine’s attempt to resist Russia’s invasions of 2014 and 2022.

Russian president Vladimir Putin is intent on dismantling the rules-based international order of norms and values developed after World War II. Under this system, international organizations such as the United Nations provide places to resolve international disputes, prevent territorial wars, and end no-holds-barred slaughter through a series of agreements, including the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the U.N. Genocide Convention, and the Geneva Conventions on the laws of war.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, deliberate targeting of civilian populations, and war crimes are his way of thumbing his nose at the established order and demanding a different one, in which men like him dominate the globe.

Trump’s ties to Russia are deep and well documented, including by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which was dominated by Republicans when it concluded that Trump’s 2016 campaign team had worked with Russian operatives. In November 2022, in the New York Times Magazine, Jim Rutenberg pulled together testimony given both to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and the Senate Intelligence Committee, transcripts from the impeachment hearings, and recent memoirs.

Rutenberg showed that in 2016, Russian operatives had presented to Trump advisor and later campaign manager Paul Manafort a plan “for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland, where Kremlin-armed, -funded, and -directed ‘separatists’ were waging a two-year-old shadow war that had left nearly 10,000 dead.”

But they were concerned that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) might stand in their way. Formed in 1947 to stand against Soviet expansion and now standing against Russian aggression, NATO is a collective security alliance of 31 states that have agreed to consider an attack on any member to be an attack on all.

In exchange for weakening NATO, undermining the U.S. stance in favor of Ukraine in its attempt to throw off the Russians who had invaded in 2014, and removing U.S. sanctions from Russian entities, Russian operatives were willing to put their finger on the scales to help Trump win the White House.

When he was in office, Trump did, in fact, try to weaken NATO—as well as other international organizations like the World Health Organization—and promised he would pull the U.S. out of NATO in a second term, effectively killing it. Rutenberg noted that Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine looks a lot like an attempt to achieve the plan it suggested in 2016. But because there was a different president in the U.S., that invasion did not yield the results Putin expected.

President Joe Biden stepped into office more knowledgeable on foreign affairs than any president since Dwight Eisenhower, who took office in 1953. Biden recognized that democracy was on the ropes around the globe as authoritarian leaders set out to dismantle the rules-based international order. He also knew that the greatest strength of the U.S. is its alliances. In the months after he took office, Biden focused on shoring up NATO, with the result that when Russia invaded Ukraine again in February 2022, a NATO coalition held together to support Ukraine.

By 2024, far from falling apart, NATO was stronger than ever with the addition of Finland. Sweden, too, is expected to join shortly.

But far more than simply shore up the old system, the Biden administration has built on the stability of the rules-based order to make it more democratic, encouraging more peoples, nations, and groups to participate more fully in it. In September 2023, Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained to an audience at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies that the end of the Cold War made people think that the world would inevitably become more peaceful and stable as countries cooperated and emphasized democracy and human rights.

But now, Blinken said, that era is over. After decades of relative stability, authoritarian powers have risen to challenge the rules-based international order, throwing away the ideas of national sovereignty and human rights. As wealth becomes more and more concentrated, people are losing faith in that international order as well as in democracy itself. In a world increasingly under pressure from authoritarians who are trying to enrich themselves and stay in power, he said, the administration is trying to defend fair competition, international law, and human rights.

Historically, though, the U.S. drive to spread democracy has often failed to rise above the old system of colonialism, with the U.S. and other western countries dictating to less prosperous countries. The administration has tried to avoid this trap by advancing a new form of international cooperation that creates partnerships and alignments of interested countries to solve discrete issues. These interest-based alignments, which administration officials refer to as “diplomatic variable geometry,” promise to preserve U.S. global influence and perhaps an international rules-based order but will also mean alliances with nations whose own interests align with those of the U.S. only on certain issues.

In the past three years, the U.S. has created a new security partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom, known as AUKUS, and held a historic, first-ever trilateral leaders’ summit at Camp David with Japan and the Republic of Korea. It has built new partnerships with nations in the Indo-Pacific region, as well as with Latin American and Caribbean countries, to address issues of immigration; two days ago the Trilateral Fentanyl Committee met for the fourth time in Mexico. This new system includes a wider range of voices at the table—backing the membership of the African Union in the Group of 20 (G20) economic forum, for example—advancing a form of cooperation in which every international problem is addressed by a group of partner nations that have a stake in the outcome.

At the same time, the U.S. recognizes that wealthier countries need to step up to help poorer countries develop their own economies rather than mine them for resources. Together with G7 partners, the U.S. has committed to deliver $600 billion in new investments to develop infrastructure across the globe—for example, creating a band of development across Africa.

Biden’s is a bold new approach to global affairs, based on national rights to self-determination and working finally to bring an end to colonialism.

The fight over U.S. aid to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and the other countries with which we have made partnerships is not about saving money—most of the funds for Ukraine are actually spent in the U.S.—or about protecting the U.S. border, as MAGA Republicans demonstrated when they killed the border security bill. It is about whether the globe will move into the 21st century, with all its threats of climate change, disease, and migration, with ways for nations to cooperate, or whether we will be at the mercy of global authoritarians.

Trump’s 2024 campaign website calls for “fundamentally reevaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission,” and in a campaign speech in South Carolina today, he made it clear what that means. Trump has long misrepresented the financial obligations of NATO countries, and today he suggested that the U.S. would not protect other NATO countries that were “delinquent” if they were attacked by Russia. “In fact,” he said, “I would encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want.”

“I’m so scared, please come,” were some of the last words six-year-old Hind Rajab said in a telephone call to rescuers after her family’s car came under fire in Gaza City.

Trapped in the vehicle and surrounded by her dead relatives, for three hours she pleaded with the Red Crescent to save her.

But the aid agency lost contact with the ambulance dispatched to her aid on 29 January and its crew and Hind remained missing.

Now Hind’s family has said that she was found dead inside the car in the Tel al-Hawa area of Gaza City on Saturday morning.

“Hind and everyone else in the car is martyred,” her grandfather, Baha Hamada, told Agence France-Presse. “[Family members] were able to reach the area because Israeli forces withdrew early at dawn today.”

Hind’s mother, Wissam Hamada, added: “I will question before God on Judgment Day those who heard my daughter’s cries for help and did not save her.”

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) said that it had located its bombed-out ambulance just metres away, and that its two paramedics, Yusuf Al-Zeino and Ahmed Al-Madhoun, had also been killed.

Footage shared by the PRCS showed what it said were the mangled remains of the ambulance that was struck.

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I got to dislike Brooks enough to stop reading his columns (sorta like I had been doing with Dowd)...but got to like his comments so much on the PBS News Hour that I started reading him again.

I think it was probably the Jim Lehrer show on Fridays nights where I first became familiar with Brooks (also EJ Dionne - and Paul Gigot who showed himself as intellectually unprincipled during the first GWBush campaign).

I suggest everyone read it.

Twelve years ago, political scientists Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein shook up Washington with their argument that the U.S. government wasn’t working because of what had happened to the Republican Party.

They made their case in a book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” and in a powerful Post op-ed titled “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.”

“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics,” they wrote. “It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”

Mann and Ornstein — I should note they’re my friends, and we wrote a subsequent book together — took a lot of grief for supposedly being partisan. This criticism flew in the face of their entire professional careers: thoroughly balanced, appreciative of the work of many Republican politicians and deeply engaged in making our nation’s political institutions work better.

Events of the past week not only ratify what they wrote but suggest that matters are, to borrow from them, even worse now.

It’s one thing for a party to oppose the other party’s proposals over differences of principle. Small-d democratic politics ought to be a contest of ideas and a debate over which remedies are more likely to work.

It’s something else entirely for a party to reject its own ideas to address a crisis simply because it doesn’t want to get in the way of a campaign issue. This is exactly what Republicans did at the behest of former president Donald Trump after President Biden and Senate Democrats offered the best deal the GOP could hope for to strengthen the nation’s southern border.

You have to feel for Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who was chosen by Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to negotiate the border deal precisely because he had tough immigration views. Trump himself described Lankford in his 2022 endorsement as “Strong on the Border.”

But if Trump claims the right as president to break the law, he also asserts the right to lie with impunity. He insisted, falsely: “I did not endorse Sen. Lankford. I didn’t do it.” Former students at Trump University are familiar with this sort of thing.

Lankford recounted on the Senate floor what happens these days to Republicans who try to legislate: A “popular commentator,” he said, threatened to “destroy” him if he dared try to solve the border crisis during a presidential election year.

The episode speaks to how the trends Mann and Ornstein caught on to early have metastasized. Power in the GOP has moved away from elected officials and toward those right-wing “commentators” on television, radio, podcasts and online. The creation of ideological media bubbles enhances their power. Republicans in large numbers rely on partisan outlets that lied freely about what Lankford’s compromise did and didn’t do, rather than on straight news reports.

The party’s hostile vibe can also be traced back to a habit in the Bush years to distinguish between “real America” (the places that vote Republican) and what is presumably unreal America. Declaring a large swath of the population to be less than American means they’re not worth dealing with and, increasingly, easy to hold in contempt.

Then there is the denigration of science, dispassionate research and technical knowledge. In his book “The Death of Expertise,” writer Tom Nichols described this mournfully as a “campaign against established knowledge.”

Challenging experts is, of course, a democratic right and can be useful in calling out those who disguise their interests behind claims of special understanding. But Republicans have put this practice to naked political use in pushing back against action on climate, necessary regulation and public health advice.

Something big happened in this arena in the late 2000s. GOP attitudes on climate are a telltale: In 2007, the Pew Research Center found, 62 percent of Republicans believed there was solid evidence of global warming. By 2009, only 35 percent did.

Many GOP legislators — notably John McCain — were active in climate discussions earlier in the decade; not so later. This speaks to the larger retreat from problem-solving, reflected now, in the most perverse way possible, in the flight from an immigration proposal Republicans could have written themselves — and, thanks to Lankford, largely did.

For those who try to be hopeful, there are a few straws to clutch at. The Senate just might approve aid for Ukraine, putting pressure on GOP leaders in the House to keep our nation’s commitments. For its part, the House passed an important increase in the child tax credit, which might move Senate Republicans to do the same.

But the way things are going, Republicans in each chamber are just as likely to ignore the other’s better instincts. “Worsest” is not a word, but Mann and Ornstein might need it if they publish a new edition.

Did Trump join the Committee to Re-Elect Biden, because he just delivered some votes.

Of course, so does Biden’s mental incapacity.