Republicans must face the dangerous reality about nominating a deranged Donald Trump

Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: 

Echo opinion published in The Washington Post by Robert Kagan.

In fact, a clear path to dictatorship is a stark possibility in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day.

Vote Blue 2024!  Vote Democrat!

In 13 weeks, Donald Trump will have locked up the Republican nomination. 

In the RealClearPolitics poll average (for the period from Nov. 9 to 20), Trump leads his nearest competitor by 47 points and leads the rest of the field combined by 27 points. 

The idea that (the evil one tRumpzi) is unelectable in the general election is nonsense — he is tied or ahead of President Biden in all the latest polls — stripping other Republican challengers of their own stated reasons for existence. 

The fact that many Americans might prefer other candidates, much ballyhooed by such political sages as Karl Rove, will soon become dangerously irrelevant when millions of Republican voters turn out to choose the person whom no one allegedly wants.

For many months now, American Republican voters have been living in a world of self-delusion, rich with imagined possibilities. 

Maybe it will be Ron DeSantis, or maybe Nikki Haley. 

Maybe the myriad indictments of Trump will doom him with Republican suburbanites. 

Such hopeful speculation has allowed us to drift along passively, conducting business as usual, taking no dramatic action to change course, in the hope and expectation that something will happen. Like people on a riverboat, we have long known there is a waterfall ahead but assume we will somehow find our way to shore before we go over the edge. But now the actions required to get us to shore are looking harder and harder, if not downright impossible.

The magical-thinking phase is ending. Barring some miracle, Trump will soon be the (wrongminded❗)presumptive Republican nominee for president. 

When that happens, there will be a swift and dramatic shift in the political power dynamic, in his favor. Until now, Republicans and conservatives have enjoyed relative freedom to express anti-Trump sentiments, to speak openly and positively about alternative candidates, to vent criticisms of Trump’s behavior past and present. Donors who find Trump distasteful have been free to spread their money around to help his competitors. Establishment Republicans have made no secret of their hope that Trump will be convicted and thus removed from the equation without their having to take a stand against him.

(Ohhhh Paleeeze❗)  - God Forbid!:  All this will end once Trump wins Super Tuesday. Votes are the currency of power in our system, and money follows, and by those measures, Trump is about to become far more powerful than he already is. 

Danger!💀  The hour of casting about for alternatives is closing. So, the next phase is about people falling into line.

In fact, it has already begun. As his nomination becomes inevitable, donors are starting to jump from other candidates to Trump. The recent decision by the Koch political network to endorse GOP hopeful Nikki Haley is scarcely sufficient to change this trajectory. And why not? If Trump is going to be the nominee, it makes sense to sign up early while he is still grateful for defectors. Even anti-Trump donors must ask whether their cause is best served by shunning the man who stands a reasonable chance of being the next president. Will corporate executives endanger the interests of their shareholders just because they or their spouses hate Trump? It’s not surprising that people with hard cash on the line are the first to flip.

Defies common sense, but the rest of the Republican Party will quickly follow - like lemmings going off a cliff. 

Republicans falling off a cliff like lemmings to follow the corrupt tRumpzi

Indeed, Rove’s recent exhortation that primary voters choose anyone but Trump is the last such plea you are likely to hear from anyone with a future in the party. Even in a normal campaign, intraparty dissent begins to disappear once the primaries produce a clear winner. Most of the leading candidates have already pledged to support Trump, if he is the nominee, even before he has won a single primary vote. Imagine their posture after he runs the table on Super Tuesday. Most of the candidates running against him will sprint toward him, competing for his favor. 

After Super Tuesday, there will be no surer and shorter path to the presidency for a Republican than to become the loyal running mate of a man who will be 82 in 2028.  (❗yeeeeouzzzzaaaa❗)

Republicans who tried to navigate the Trump era by mixing appeals to non-Trump voters with repeated professions of loyalty to Trump will end that show. 

As perilous as it is for Republicans to say a negative word about Trump today, it will be impossible once he has sewn up the nomination. The party will be in full general-election mode, subordinating all to the presidential campaign. What Republican or conservative will be standing up to Trump then? 

Will the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which has been rather boldly opposing Trump, continue to do so once he is the nominee and it is a binary choice between Trump and Biden? There will be no more infighting, only outfighting; in short, a tsunami of Trump support from all directions. A winner is a winner. And a winner who stands a reasonable chance of wielding all the power there is to wield in the world is going to attract support no matter who they are. That is the nature of power, at any time in any society.

But Trump will not only dominate his party. He will again become the central focus of everyone’s attention. Even today, the news media can scarcely resist following Trump’s every word and action. Once he secures the nomination, he will loom over the country like a colossus, his every word and gesture chronicled endlessly. Even today, the mainstream news media, including The Post and NBC News, is joining forces with Trump’s lawyers to seek televised coverage of his federal criminal trial in D.C. Trump intends to use the trial to boost his candidacy and discredit the American justice system as corrupt — and the media outlets, serving its own interests, will help him do it.

Trump will thus enter the general-election campaign early next year with momentum, backed by growing political and financial resources, and an increasingly unified party. 

Can the same be said of Biden? Is Biden’s power likely to grow over the coming months? Will his party unify around him? Or will alarm and doubt among Democrats, already high, continue to increase? Even at this point, the president is struggling with double-digit defections among Black Americans and younger voters. Jill Stein and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have already launched, respectively, third-party and independent campaigns, coming at Biden in the main from the populist left. The decision by Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) not to run for reelection in West Virginia but instead to contemplate a third-party run for the presidency is potentially devastating. The Democratic coalition is likely to remain fractious as the Republicans unify and Trump consolidates his hold.

Biden, as some have pointed out, does not enjoy the usual advantages of incumbency. Trump is effectively also an incumbent, after all. That means Biden is unable to make the usual incumbent’s claim that electing his opponent is a leap into the unknown. Few Republicans regard the Trump presidency as having been either abnormal or unsuccessful. In his first term, the respected “adults” around him not only blocked some of his most dangerous impulses but also kept them hidden from the public. To this day, some of these same officials rarely speak publicly against him. Why should Republican voters have a problem with Trump if those who served him don’t? 

Donald Trump is dangerous

Regardless of what Trump’s enemies think, this is going to be a battle of two tested and legitimate presidents. 

Trump, meanwhile, enjoys the usual advantage of non-incumbency, namely: the lack of any responsibility. Biden must carry the world’s problems like an albatross around his neck, like any incumbent, but most incumbents can at least claim that their opponent is too inexperienced to be entrusted with these crises. Biden cannot. On Trump’s watch, there was no full-scale invasion of Ukraine, no major attack on Israel, no runaway inflation, no disastrous retreat from Afghanistan. It is hard to make the case for Trump’s unfitness to anyone who does not already believe it.

Trump enjoys some unusual advantages for a challenger, moreover. Even Ronald Reagan did not have Fox News and the speaker of the House in his pocket. To the degree there are structural advantages in the coming general election, in short, they are on Trump’s side. And that is before we even get to the problem that Biden can do nothing to solve: his age.

Trump also enjoys another advantage. The national mood less than a year before the election is one of bipartisan disgust with the political system in general. Rarely in American history has democracy’s inherent messiness been more striking. 

In Weimar Germany, Hitler and other agitators benefited from the squabbling of the democratic parties, right and left, the endless fights over the budget, the logjams in the legislature, the fragile and fractious coalitions. 

At that time, the German voters increasingly yearned for someone to cut through it all and get something — anything — done. It didn’t matter who was behind the political paralysis, either, whether the intransigence came from the right or the left.

Today, Republicans might be responsible for Washington’s dysfunction, and they might pay a price for it in downballot races. But Trump benefits from dysfunction because he is the one who offers a simple answer: him. In this election, only one candidate is running on the platform of using unprecedented power to get things done, to hell with the rules. And a growing number of Americans claim to want that, in both parties. Trump is running against the system. Biden is the living embodiment of the system. Advantage: Trump.

Which brings us to Trump’s expanding legal battlefronts. No doubt Trump would have preferred to run for office without spending most of his time fending off efforts to throw him in jail. Yet it is in the courtroom over the coming months that Trump is going to display his unusual power within the American political system.

It is hard to fault those who have taken Trump to court. He certainly committed at least one of the crimes he is charged with; we don’t need a trial to tell us he tried to overturn the 2020 election. Nor can you blame those who have hoped thereby to obstruct his path back to the Oval Office. When a marauder is crashing through your house, you throw everything you can at him — pots, pans, candlesticks — in the hope of slowing him down and tripping him up. But that doesn’t mean it works.

Trump will not be contained by the courts or the rule of law. 

On the contrary, he is going to use the trials to display his power. That’s why he wants them televised. Trump’s power comes from his following, not from the institutions of American government, and his devoted voters love him precisely because he crosses lines and ignores the old boundaries. They feel empowered by it, and that in turn empowers him. Even before the trials begin, he is toying with the judges, forcing them to try to muzzle him, defying their orders. He is a bit like King Kong testing the chains on his arms, sensing that he can break free whenever he chooses.

And just wait until the votes start pouring in. Will the judges throw a presumptive Republican nominee in jail for contempt of court? Once it becomes clear that they will not, then the power balance within the courtroom, and in the country at large, will shift again to Trump. 

The likeliest outcome of the trials will be to demonstrate our judicial system’s inability to contain someone like Trump and, incidentally, to reveal its impotence as a check should he become president. Indicting Trump for trying to overthrow the government will prove akin to indicting Caesar for crossing the Rubicon, and just as effective. Like Caesar, Trump wields a clout that transcends the laws and institutions of government, based on the unswerving personal loyalty of his army of followers.

I mention all this only to answer one simple question: Can Trump win the election? The answer, unless something radical and unforeseen happens, is: Of course he can. If that weren’t so, the Democratic Party would not be in a mounting panic about its prospects.

If Trump does win the election, he will immediately become the most powerful person ever to hold that office. Not only will he wield the awesome powers of the American executive — powers that, as conservatives used to complain, have grown over the decades — but he will do so with the fewest constraints of any president, fewer even than in his own first term.

What limits those powers? The most obvious answer is the institutions of justice — all of which Trump, by his very election, will have defied and revealed as impotent. 

A court system that could not control Trump as a private individual is not going to control him better when he is president of the United States and appointing his own attorney general and all the other top officials at the Justice Department. Think of the power of a man who gets himself elected president despite indictments, courtroom appearances and perhaps even conviction? Would he even obey a directive of the Supreme Court? Or would he instead ask how many armored divisions the chief justice has?

Will a future Congress stop him? Presidents can accomplish a lot these days without congressional approval, as even Barack Obama showed. The one check Congress has on a rogue president, namely, impeachment and conviction, has already proved all but impossible — even when Trump was out of office and wielded modest institutional power over his party.

Another traditional check on a president is the federal bureaucracy, that vast apparatus of career government officials who execute the laws and carry on the operations of government under every president. They are generally in the business of limiting any president’s options. As Harry S. Truman once put it, “Poor Ike. He’ll say ‘do this’ and ‘do that’ and nothing at all will happen.” That was a problem for Trump is his first term, partly because he had no government team of his own to fill the administration. This time, he will. Those who choose to serve in his second administration will not be taking office with the unstated intention of refusing to carry out his wishes. If the Heritage Foundation has its way, and there is no reason to believe it won’t, many of those career bureaucrats will be gone, replaced by people carefully “vetted” to ensure their loyalty to Trump.

What about the desire for reelection, a factor that constrains most presidents? Trump might not want or need a third term, but were he to decide he wanted one, as he has sometimes indicated, would the 22nd Amendment block him any more effectively from being president for life than the Supreme Court, if he refused to be blocked? Why should anyone think that amendment would be more sacrosanct than any other part of the Constitution for a man like Trump, or perhaps more importantly, for his devoted supporters?

A final constraint on presidents has been their own desire for a glittering legacy, with success traditionally measured in terms that roughly equate to the well-being of the country. But is that the way Trump thinks? Yes, Trump might seek a great legacy, but it is strictly his own glory that he craves. As with Napoleon, who spoke of the glory of France but whose narrow ambitions for himself and his family brought France to ruin, Trump’s ambitions, though he speaks of making America great again, clearly begin and end with himself. As for his followers, he doesn’t have to achieve anything to retain their support — his failure to build the wall in his first term in no way damaged his standing with millions of his loyalists. They have never asked anything of him other than that he triumph over the forces they hate in American society. 

And that, we can be sure, will be Trump’s primary mission as (God forbid❗)president.

Having answered the question of whether Trump can win, we can now turn to the most urgent question: Will his presidency turn into a dictatorship? The odds are, again, pretty good.

It is worth getting inside Trump’s head a bit and imagining his mood following an election victory. He will have spent the previous year, and more, fighting to stay out of jail, plagued by myriad persecutors and helpless to do what he likes to do best: exact revenge. Think of the fury that will have built up inside him, a fury that, from his point of view, he has worked hard to contain. 

As he once put it, “I think I’ve been toned down, if you want to know the truth. I could really tone it up.” Indeed he could — and will. We caught a glimpse of his deep thirst for vengeance in his Veterans Day promise to “root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream.” Note the equation of himself with “America and the American Dream.” It is he they are trying to destroy, he believes, and as president, he will return the favor.

What will that look like? Trump has already named some of those he intends to go after once he is elected: senior officials from his first term such as retired Gen. John F. Kelly, Gen. Mark A. Milley, former attorney general William P. Barr and others who spoke against him after the 2020, election; officials in the FBI and the CIA who investigated him in the Russia probe; Justice Department officials who refused his demands to overturn the 2020 election; members of the January 6 committee; Democratic opponents including Representative Adam B. Schiff (Calif.); and Republicans who voted for or publicly supported his impeachment and conviction.

But that’s just the start. After all, Trump will not be the only person seeking revenge. His administration will be filled with people with enemies’ lists of their own, a determined cadre of “vetted” officials who will see it as their sole, presidentially authorized mission to “root out” those in the government who cannot be trusted. 

Many will simply be fired, but others will be subject to career-destroying investigations. The Trump administration will be filled with people who will not need explicit instruction from Trump, any more than Hitler’s local gauleiters needed instruction. In such circumstances, people “work toward the Führer,” which is to say, they anticipate his desires and seek favor through acts they think will make him happy, thereby enhancing their own influence and power in the process.

Nor will it be difficult to find things to charge opponents with. Our history is unfortunately filled with instances of unfairly targeted officials singled out for being on the wrong side of a particular issue at the wrong time — the State Department’s “China Hands” of the late 1940s, for instance, whose careers were destroyed because they happened to be in positions of influence when the Chinese Communist Revolution occurred. Today, there is the whiff of a new McCarthyism in the air. MAGA Republicans insist that Biden himself is a “communist,” that his election was a “communist takeover” and that his administration is a “communist regime.”

It’s therefore no surprise that Biden has a “pro-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agenda,” as the powerful chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), put it this year, and is deliberately “ceding American leadership and security to China.” Republicans these days routinely charge that their opponents are not just naive or inadequately attentive to China’s rising power but are actual “sympathizers” with Beijing. “Communist China has their President … China Joe,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) tweeted on Biden’s Inauguration Day. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has called the president “Beijing Biden.” The Republican Senate nominee in New Hampshire last year even called Republican Gov. Chris Sununu a “Chinese Communist Party sympathizer.” We can expect more of this when the war against the “deep state” begins in earnest. According to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), there is a whole cabal determined to undermine American security, a “Uniparty” of elites made up of “neoconservatives on the right” and “liberal globalists on the left” who are not true Americans and therefore do not have the true interests of America at heart. Can such “anti-American” behavior be criminalized? It has in the past and can be again.

So, the (revenge driven ❗)Trump administration will have many avenues to persecute its enemies, real and perceived. 

Think of all the laws now on the books that give the federal government enormous power to surveil people for possible links to terrorism, a dangerously flexible term, not to mention all the usual opportunities to investigate people for alleged tax evasion or violation of foreign agent registration laws. The IRS under both parties has occasionally looked at depriving think tanks of their tax-exempt status because they espouse policies that align with the views of the political parties. What will happen to the think-tanker in a second Trump term who argues that the United States should ease pressure on China? Or the government official rash enough to commit such thoughts to official paper? It didn’t take more than that to ruin careers in the 1950s.

And then, who will stop the improper investigations and prosecutions of Trump’s many enemies? Will Congress? 

A Republican Congress will be busy conducting its own inquiries, using its powers to subpoena people, accusing them of all kinds of crimes, just as it does now. Will it matter if the charges are groundless? And of course in some cases they will be true, which will lend even greater validity to a wider probe of political enemies.

Will Fox News defend them, or will it instead just amplify the accusations? The American press corps will remain divided as it is today, between those organizations catering to Trump and his audience and those that do not. 

Nevertheless, in a (retaliation❗) regime where the ruler has declared the news media to be “enemies of the state,” the press will find itself under significant and constant pressure. Media owners will discover that a hostile and unbridled president can make their lives unpleasant in all sorts of ways.

So, how will Americans respond to the first signs of a regime of political persecution? Will they rise up in outrage? Don’t count on it. Those who found no reason to oppose Trump in the primaries and no reason to oppose him in the general are unlikely to experience a sudden awakening when some former Trump-adjacent official such as Milley finds himself under investigation for goodness knows what. They will know only that Justice Department prosecutors, the IRS, the FBI and several congressional committees are looking into it. And who is to say that those being hounded are not in fact tax cheaters, or Chinese spies, or perverts, or whatever they might be accused of? Will the great body of Americans even recognize these accusations as persecution and the first stage of shutting down opposition to Trump across the country?

The Trump dictatorship will not be a communist tyranny, where almost everyone feels the oppression and has their lives shaped by it. In conservative, anti-liberal tyrannies, ordinary people face all kinds of limitations on their freedoms, but it is a problem for them only to the degree that they value those freedoms, and many people do not. The fact that this tyranny will depend entirely on the whims of one man will mean that Americans’ rights will be conditional rather than guaranteed. But if most Americans can go about their daily business, they might not care, just as many Russians and Hungarians do not care.

Yes, there will be a large opposition movement centered in the Democratic Party, but exactly how this opposition will stop the persecution is hard to see. Congress and the courts will offer little relief. Democratic politicians, particularly members of the youngest generation, will yell and scream, but if they are not joined by Republicans, it will look like the same old partisanship. If Democrats still control one house of Congress, they will be able to blunt some investigations, but the odds that they will control both houses after 2024 are longer than the odds of a Biden victory. Nor is there sufficient reason to hope that the disordered and dysfunctional opposition to Trump today will suddenly become more unified and effective once Trump takes power. 

That is not how things work. In evolving dictatorships, the opposition is always weak and divided. That’s what makes dictatorship possible in the first place. Opposition movements rarely get stronger and more unified under the pressures of persecution. Today there is no leader for Democrats to rally behind. It is difficult to imagine that such a leader will emerge once Trump regains power.

But even if the opposition were to become strong and unified, it is not obvious what it would do to protect those facing persecution. The opposition’s ability to wield legitimate, peaceful and legal forms of power will already have been found wanting in this election cycle, when Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans threw every legitimate weapon against Trump and still failed. Will they turn instead to illegitimate, extralegal action? What would that look like?

Indeed, who will stand up for anyone accused in the public arena, besides their lawyers? In a Trump presidency, the courage it will take to stand up for them will be no less than the courage it will take to stand up to Trump himself. How many will risk their own careers to defend others? In a nation congenitally suspicious of government, who will stick up for the rights of former officials who become targets of Trump’s Justice Department? There will be ample precedents for those seeking to justify the persecution. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, the Wilson administration shut down newspapers and magazines critical of the war; Franklin D. Roosevelt rounded up Japanese Americans and placed them in camps. We will pay the price for every transgression ever committed against the laws designed to protect individual rights and freedoms.

Americans might take to the streets. In fact, it is likely that many people will engage in protests against the new regime, perhaps even before it has had a chance to prove itself deserving of them. But then what? Even in his first term, Trump and his advisers on more than one occasion discussed invoking the Insurrection Act. No less a defender of American democracy than George H.W. Bush invoked the act to deal with the Los Angeles riots in 1992. It is hard to imagine Trump not invoking it should “the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs” take to the streets. One suspects he will relish the opportunity.

And who will stop him? His own handpicked military advisers? That seems unlikely. He could make retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff if he wanted, and it is unlikely a Republican Senate would decline to confirm. Does anyone think military leaders will disobey commands from their duly elected, constitutionally authorized, commander in chief? Do we even want the military to have to make that call? 

There is every reason to believe that active-duty troops and reservists are likely to be disproportionately more sympathetic to a newly reelected President Trump than to the “Radical Left Thugs” supposedly causing mayhem in the streets of their towns and cities. Those who hope to be saved by a U.S. military devoted to the protection of the Constitution are living in a fantasyland.

Resistance could come from the governors of predominantly Democratic states such as California and New York through a form of nullification. States with Democratic governors and statehouses could refuse to recognize the authority of a tyrannical federal government. That is always an option in our federal system. (Should Biden win, some Republican states might engage in nullification.) But not even the bluest states are monolithic, and Democratic governors are likely to find themselves under siege on their home turf if they try to become bastions of resistance to Trump’s tyranny. Republicans and conservatives throughout the nation will be energized by their hero’s triumph. The power shift at the federal level, and the tone of menace and revenge emanating from the White House, will likely embolden all kinds of counter-resistance even in deep-blue states, including violent protests. What resources will the governors have to combat such attacks and maintain order? The state and local police? Will those entities be willing to use force against protesters who will likely enjoy the public support of the president? The Democratic governors might not be eager to find out.


Should Trump be successful in launching a campaign of persecution and the opposition prove powerless to stop it, then the nation will have begun an irreversible descent into dictatorship. With each passing day, it will become harder and more dangerous to stop it by any means, legal or illegal. Try to imagine what it will be like running for office on an opposition ticket in such an environment. In theory, the midterm elections in 2026 might hold hope for a Democratic comeback, but won’t Trump use his considerable powers, both legal and illegal, to prevent that? Trump insists and no doubt believes that the current administration corruptly used the justice system to try to prevent his reelection.

Will he not consider himself justified in doing the same once he has all the power? He has, of course, already promised to do exactly that: to use the powers of his office to persecute anyone who dares challenge him.

This is the trajectory we are on now. Is descent into dictatorship inevitable? No. Nothing in history is inevitable. Unforeseen events change trajectories. Readers of this essay will no doubt list all the ways in which it is arguably too pessimistic and doesn’t take sufficient account of this or that alternative possibility. Maybe, despite everything, Trump won’t win. Maybe the coin flip will come up heads and we’ll all be safe. And maybe even if he does win, he won’t do any of the things he says he’s going to do. You may be comforted by this if you choose.

What is certain, however, is that the odds of the United States falling into dictatorship have grown considerably because so many of the obstacles to it have been cleared and only a few are left. 

If eight years ago it seemed literally inconceivable that a man like Trump could be elected, that obstacle was cleared in 2016. If it then seemed unimaginable that an American president would try to remain in office after losing an election, that obstacle was cleared in 2020. And if no one could believe that Trump, having tried and failed to invalidate the election and stop the counting of electoral college votes, would nevertheless reemerge as the unchallenged leader of the Republican Party and its nominee again in 2024, well, we are about to see that obstacle cleared as well. In just a few years, we have gone from being relatively secure in our democracy to being a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship.

Alexandra Petri: I’m starting to think Donald Trump is sounding like Hitler on purpose

Are we going to do anything about it? To shift metaphors, if we thought there was a 50 percent chance of an asteroid crashing into North America a year from now, would we be content to hope that it wouldn’t? Or would we be taking every conceivable measure to try to stop it, including many things that might not work but that, given the magnitude of the crisis, must be tried anyway?

Yes, I know that most people don’t think an asteroid is heading toward us and that’s part of the problem. But just as big a problem has been those who do see the risk but for a variety of reasons have not thought it necessary to make any sacrifices to prevent it. At each point along the way, our political leaders, and we as voters, have let opportunities to stop Trump pass on the assumption that he would eventually meet some obstacle he could not overcome. Republicans could have stopped Trump from winning the nomination in 2016, but they didn’t. The voters could have elected Hillary Clinton, but they didn’t. Republican senators could have voted to convict Trump in either of his impeachment trials, which might have made his run for president much more difficult, but they didn’t.

Throughout these years, an understandable if fatal psychology has been at work. At each stage, stopping Trump would have required extraordinary action by certain people, whether politicians or voters or donors, actions that did not align with their immediate interests or even merely their preferences. It would have been extraordinary for all the Republicans running against Trump in 2016 to decide to give up their hopes for the presidency and unite around one of them. Instead, they behaved normally, spending their time and money attacking each other, assuming that Trump was not their most serious challenge, or that someone else would bring him down, and thereby opened a clear path for Trump’s nomination. And they have, with just a few exceptions, done the same this election cycle. It would have been extraordinary had Mitch McConnell and many other Republican senators voted to convict a president of their own party. Instead, they assumed that after Jan. 6, 2021, Trump was finished and it was therefore safe not to convict him and thus avoid becoming pariahs among the vast throng of Trump supporters. In each instance, people believed they could go on pursuing their personal interests and ambitions as usual in the confidence that somewhere down the line, someone or something else, or simply fate, would stop him. 

Why should they be the ones to sacrifice their careers? Given the choice between a high-risk gamble and hoping for the best, people generally hope for the best. Given the choice between doing the dirty work yourself and letting others do it, people generally prefer the latter.

A paralyzing psychology of appeasement has also been at work. At each stage, the price of stopping Trump has risen higher and higher. In 2016, the price was forgoing a shot at the White House. Once Trump was elected, the price of opposition, or even the absence of obsequious loyalty, became the end of one’s political career, as Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Paul D. Ryan and many others discovered. 

By 2020, the price had risen again. As Mitt Romney recounts in McKay Coppins’s recent biography, Republican members of Congress contemplating voting for Trump’s impeachment and conviction feared for their physical safety and that of their families. There is no reason that fear should be any less today. But wait until Trump returns to power and the price of opposing him becomes persecution, the loss of property and possibly the loss of freedom. Will those who balked at resisting Trump when the risk was merely political oblivion suddenly discover their courage when the cost might be the ruin of oneself and one’s family?

We are closer to that point today than we have ever been, yet we continue to drift toward dictatorship, still hoping for some intervention that will allow us to escape the consequences of our collective cowardice, our complacent, willful ignorance and, above all, our lack of any deep commitment to liberal democracy. As the man said, we are going out not with a bang but a whimper.

Opinion by Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an editor at large for The Washington Post.

Pope Francis is the leader of the Roman Catholic Church and Bishops are ordained to obey his leadership

Echo opinion published in The New York Times  by James Horowitz.

Pope’s Critics Feel the Sting After His Patience Runs Out

Pope Francis smiled warmly at the circus performers spinning and flipping in front of him at his weekly general audience in the Vatican. He looked every bit the grandfatherly figure who has, for the last decade, sought to make the church a kinder, gentler and more inclusive place.

Except for the people feeling his wrath.

There is a sense among some Vatican analysts and conservatives that Francis, who is suffering from a lung inflammation that unfortunately forced him to pass off his readings at the event and to cancel an important trip to Dubai this weekend, is increasingly focusing his depleted energies on settling scores and cleaning house.

In the last month, he has turned his focus on two of his most vocal and committed conservative critics in the United States, and in theyear since the death of his conservative predecessor, Benedict XVI, he has exiled a previously protected chief antagonist and moved against others who have accused him of destroying the church.

While some have wondered whether his ailing health might be driving his actions, Francis, who from the beginning said he didn’t expect to live long in the job, has often moved with urgency. And when it comes to personnel moves, analysts said, it has always been thus.

“He has always acted like this,” said Sandro Magister, a veteran Vatican observer at L’Espresso magazine, who cited cases of bishops that Francis had iced out for publicly divulging private conversations or for making him look bad or causing scandal, whether or not they were actually to blame.

But Mr. Magister said the death of Benedict XVI, last December, was the real catalyst for an even more intensive period of “frenetic activism” against his foes, with the former pope no longer a presence in the Vatican gardens.

While conservatives have long complained that the publicly cuddly Pontiff Francis, has actually acted as a ruthless and impetuous autocratic, supporters of Francis, who will turn 87 next month (December 17th) and is increasingly slowed by the use of a cane and a wheelchair, say that he has exercised patience far beyond that of his conservative predecessors.

But Pope Francis's patience, people close to him say, has limits. 

Moreover, after years of allowing criticism in the interest of allowing good-faith debates, Francis came to the conclusion that some of the invective is simply politically and ideologically driven.

A Vatican investigation into the bishop of Tyler, Texas, Joseph Strickland, who uses his broad conservative radio and internet platform to sharply criticize Pope Francis, resulted in his removal.

In late November 2023, Pope Francis started feeling under the weather, so he told a meeting of church office heads that he would take action against another American antagonist, Cardinal Raymond Burke*, by revoking his right to a subsidized Vatican apartment and salary because, according to one attendee, the American was “sowing disunity” in the church.

The conservative Italian outlet that first reported Cardinal Burke’s possible eviction, La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, also claimed that Francis had called Cardinal Burke “my enemy.”

On Wednesday afternoon, the pope’s biographer Austen Ivereigh said that Francis denied calling Cardinal Burke his enemy. “I never used the word ‘enemy,’ nor the pronoun ‘my,’” Francis wrote in a note to Mr. Ivereigh.

Francis also told Mr. Ivereigh that he had decided to strip Cardinal Burke of his Vatican apartment and salary because the American prelate had been acting against the unity of the church.

A spokesman for Cardinal Burke on Wednesday said the prelate had received no eviction notice.

“His Eminence did not receive any notification on that matter,” said Canon Erwan Wagner, Cardinal Burke’s secretary.

Yet. even if Cardinal Burke does lose his lease, he will not exactly end up on the street. 

A conservative Catholic celebrity, his guest appearances at churches and speaking engagements are often paired with promotions of his many books. He is close to well-financed conservative groups in the United States that are supportive of his campaigns. He also maintains the real instrument of his power in the church: a vote in the next conclave to elect a pope.

“Taking away an apartment is not a sanction, it’s a gesture of spite,” said Alberto Melloni, a church historian and the director of the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Sciences in Bologna. 

Bishop Strickland's removal was more serious because, while Cardinal Burke’s punishment “was administrative, the other was sacramental.”

Mr. Melloni argued that Pope Francis had long been wary of giving his opponents something to complain about and has in the past been careful not to make martyrs out of his antagonists. 

But now, conservatives would make a meal out of his latest crackdowns and eventually enter the next conclave, the meeting of cardinals that selects the pope’s successor, saying “never again.”

But, if conservatives are worried about Francis’ hard actions recently, the liberals have lamented his inaction. 

In major church policy areas, such as allowing married priests, same-sex blessings or communion for the divorced and remarried, Francis has instead punted time and again.

A recent major assembly in the Vatican of bishops and laypeople drew the condemnation of Cardinal Burke, who depicted it as a hostile and illegitimate takeover of the Catholic church by progressive interest groups. 

Nevertheless, the gathering ended up doing very little, and left forces urging meaningful change in the role of L.G.B.T.Q. and female followers of the church disappointed. And Francis has strongly resisted the efforts of the progressive German church to move independently of the Vatican on issues ranging from priestly celibacy to same-sex blessings.

But after his more conservative predecessors cracked down on, and even fired, liberal theologians, Francis and his reform agenda have clearly been better news for progressives in the church, and bad news for traditionalists accustomed to getting what they wanted.

Cardinal Burke, who in many ways became a champion to conservatives for the opposition to Pope Francis, also became perhaps the greatest papal punching bag.

In 2013, the year he was elected pope, Francis did not reappoint Cardinal Burke to his position on the Congregation for Bishops, and the following year, he also removed him from his post as prefect of the Vatican’s highest court, the Apostolic Signatura, and named him cardinal patron of the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta, a ceremonial post for a medieval religious order. He eventually removed him from thattoo. For good measure, Francis later removed the cardinal’s ally, the traditionalist leader of the Order of Malta, Matthew Festing, over a staffing conflict.

But, Cardinal Burke is hardly alone in facing the pope’s ire.

In 2014, Francis seemed to give a major promotion to the Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah, a figure beloved by traditionalists, making him head of the church’s office on liturgy. But critics argued that Cardinal Sarah was isolated at the top because Francis surroundedhim with his own allies.He ultimately removed the church’s prayer book from Cardinal Sarah’s hands altogether, accepting his resignation, and then cracked down on the use of the old Latin Mass, beloved by Cardinal Sarah, Cardinal Burke and other conservatives, arguing it had been used for disunity in the church.

In 2017, Francis perplexed Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, then the church’s doctrinal watchdog, by ordering him to fire three conservative priests in his office. Then Francis got rid of Cardinal Müller.

The current occupant of that job is Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, a fellow Argentine who Mr. Magister called “the direct opposite of Benedict,” the conservative pope often called “God’s Rottweiler” who himself headed that office for decades when he was a cardinal.

Earlier this year, soon after the death of Benedict XVI, Francis essentially exiled to Germany Archbishop Georg Gänswein, Benedict’s personal secretary, who had served as prefect of the papal household. Archbishop Gänswein had published a book that exposed tensions between Francis and Benedict.

Those measures drew attention, but the punishment of the prelates from the United States, a country whose clerics the Argentine pontiff has long been skeptical of, that has touched a conservative nerve. Close allies of Francis have said that America, with its well-funded conservative Catholic media apparatus, amplified far and wide criticism intended to derail the pope’s vision of a more inclusive church.

Asked on the papal plane returning from Africa in 2019, about the American conservatives attacking his pontificate across vast media platforms, he seemed to shrug off the possibility of their splitting off from the church.

“I pray there are no schisms,” he said. “But I’m not scared.”

Elisabetta Povoledo contributed from Rome

*Raymond Leo Burke is an American prelate of the Catholic Church. He led the Archdiocese of St. Louis from 2004, to 2008, and the Diocese of La Crosse from 1995, to 2004.

Rosalynn Carter fondly remembered at Glenn Memorial Church

When we take our leave of this world, we should hope to be remembered as fondly and reverently as Rosalynn Carter.

Opinion editorial published in the Orlando Sentinel, the Virginia Pilot and Daily Press:  

Mrs. Carter, the former first lady, died at age 96, on Sunday, November 19, 2023, in Plains, Georgia. Her death elicited an outpouring of emotional tributes in honor of her remarkable public life — all richly deserved.

Glenn Memorial Methodist Church Memorial Service on the campus of Emery University

While Jimmy Carter served as governor of Georgia and president, and after they returned to private life, Carter was an essential partner and a woman who gave freely of her time and energy to build a better world for all. At a time when empathy and compassion are in short supply, Carter displayed it in abundance, setting a laudable example we would all do well to emulate.

Rosalynn Carter was a different kind of first lady. While the president’s spouse often served as a confidant and sounding board, Carter made the role more muscular during the Carters’ four years in the White House. She ruffled feathers by sitting in on Cabinet meetings, acting as a policy adviser and using the unelected office to make progress on issues close to her heart.

Rosalynn Carter (b. August 18, 1927-
d. November 19, 2023) age 96 years old

In doing so, she shrugged off criticism that she was overstepping traditional boundaries. “You can’t let it stop you,” she said about the opposition to the role she played in the administration, according to The New York Times. “I didn’t let it stop me.”

“Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” former President Carter said in a statement on Sunday. “She gave me wise guidance and encouragement when I needed it. As long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew somebody loved and supported me.”

The Carters are often revered for their lifelong partnership in a marriage that lasted 77 years. They were married in 1946, and took up residence in Norfolk, while the future president served in the U.S. Navy; their first son was born in Portsmouth, Virginia.

The qualities common to Navy spouses — independence, loyalty, determination — would serve her well in the years to come as her husband won election as governor of Georgia before his plain-spoken charm connected with an electorate disillusioned with government after the Watergate scandal.

Rosalynn Carter was front and center throughout the administration, serving as a policy adviser and surrogate for the president on high-profile priorities. She played an important role in the peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt that led to the Camp David Accords and helped strengthen ties with Latin America.

But her primary passion while in public life was mental health, where she worked to expand access to care and eliminate the stigma associated with asking for help. As first lady of Georgia, she served on the Governor’s Commission to Improve Services to the Mentally and Emotionally Handicapped, work she continued in the White House where she served as honorary chair of the President’s Commission on Mental Health.

That resulted in passage of the Mental Health Systems Act in 1980, which expanded community mental health centers and provided a lifeline to millions of Americans in need of help, particularly in rural parts of the country.

She continued that work after her husband’s defeat in the 1980, presidential election with the same enthusiasm and passion as before. While the Carters accomplished much while in government, it can be argued that their dedication to improving mental health care, expanding democracy and alleviating homelessness through Habitat for Humanity has been similarly successful in improving the lives of their fellow citizens.

Still, it was her unique approach to the role of first lady that still shapes how presidential spouses operate in the White House. At a time when she was expected to take a back seat, she stepped forward and, in doing so, served the country with grace and determination.

To spend a life in such a way takes empathy. It takes compassion. And it takes courage. Rosalynn Carter possessed those qualities in abundance, and our nation is that much better for it.

This editorial originally appeared in the The Virginian-Pilot And Daily Press.

Speaker Mike Johnson carries January 6 election denialism as negative baggage

Echo report published in Politico by Kelly Garrity: 

Ken Buck blasts his Republican party’s hardliners for ‘lying to America’.

Republican right wing House Speaker Mike Johnson was regularly in communication with Trumpzi, now the leading MAGA-GOP presidential candidate, during the period between the 2020 election and the January 6 Capitol riot, Politico reported.

“Everybody who thinks that the election was stolen or talks about the election being stolen is lying to America,” Buck said.

Republican Rep. Ken Buck laid into his own party Sunday, blasting those who continue to propagate the lie that the 2020 election was stolen for “lying to America.”

“Everybody who thinks that the election was stolen or talks about the election being stolen is lying to America,” the Colorado Republican said during an interview in CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

Buck didn’t stop there.

“Everyone who makes the argument that January 6 was, you know, an unguided tour of the Capitol is lying to America. Everyone who says that the prisoners who are being prosecuted right now for their involvement in January 6, that they are somehow political prisoners or that they didn’t commit crimes, those folks are lying to America.”

It’s not the first time Buck, a member of the Trump-aligned House Freedom Caucus, has decried his party’s unwillingness to accept the results of Biden’s 2020 victory or condemn the violent attack on the Capitol. The Colorado Republican voiced a similar warning earlier this month in announcing that he would not seek reelection in 2024.

“Too many Republican leaders are lying to America,” he said in his announcement video in early November.

Buck didn’t name the former President Donald Trump, who has brandished lies about the 2020, election and elevated January 6 rioters (calling them “hostages” earlier this month) on his seemingly runaway road to the GOP presidential nomination. 

Buck pleaded with his Republican party to defeat President Joe Biden with “someone who’s not lying to the country.”

“I hope all of my Republican colleagues become more clear and recognize the fact that Joe Biden is an existential threat to this country. We need to defeat him and we do that with someone who’s not lying to the country,” Buck told CBS’ Margaret Brennan.

When asked specifically about MAGA House Speaker Mike Johnson, who spearheaded an effort to undo the 2020, election results through a longshot legal scheme in Texas, Buck noted that he had signed onto the amicus brief Johnson was pushing.

“I signed on to that brief also and I believe that going through the courts to challenge an election is absolutely proper and it’s been done dozens of times in American history. What’s wrong is to try to stop a legal function, a legislative function like counting the votes in an election, as happened on January 6,” he said.

Johnson took over as speaker after Rep. Kevin McCarthy was ousted in an effort led by a small faction of Republican hardliners, including Buck, who were unhappy the California Republican sought help from Democrats to pass a stopgap bill to keep the government open.

Though Johnson was forced to do much the same earlier this month, Buck said Sunday he doesn’t expect he’ll face the same blowback as McCarthy.

“I don’t think that most Republicans blame Speaker Johnson for the problems that he is now facing, the challenges he’s facing. Those were created during the McCarthy time period, and Speaker Johnson is "trying" to do a good job to work his way through those issues,” Buck said. “So no, (at this time....) I don’t think he’s going to face a rebellion.”

Immigrants are important to sustain population and economic growth

Immigration provides significant economic and social benefits to communities.  Opinion letter published in The New York Times:

Check this link here for New York emigration and immigration. 

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"

Right now, there is heated rhetoric about the increase in migration to New York City and the rest of the state. While the influx of many new arrivals over a short period of time causes short-term challenges, it also offers many long-term opportunities.

New York State is currently leading the country in out-migration and population loss. In just one year, from 2021 to 2022, New York’s population decreased by more than 180,000. This has led to work force shortages in key industries. The increase in new arrivals could be critical in recovering our labor force and tax base.

New York has a long history of welcoming immigrants, and this history has been critical in building our vibrant state.

When we hear dangerous rhetoric that dehumanizes immigrants, we must fight back and remind people that when we create welcoming communities, our entire society benefits.

Carola Otero Bracco in  Mount Kisco, N.Y.
The writer is executive director of Neighbors Link.

Republican party is dysfunctional

The Republicans’ demographic trap:

Echo opinion essay published in the Boston Globe by Thomas E. Patterson.

Republicans are sitting on a demographic time bomb of their own making, and it could send them into a tailspin.

Vote Democrat 2024 #VoteBlue

Republicans were in office and were widely blamed when the Great Depression struck in 1929. The Grand Old Party lost the next three presidential elections by wide margins. 

But, it was a related development during the period that ruined the GOP‘s long-term prospects. First-time voters backed the Democratic Party by nearly 2 to 1 and stayed loyal to it. Election after election until the late 1960s, their votes carried the Democrats to victory.

In only one period since then have young voters sided heavily with one party in a series of elections. Voters under 30 have backed the Democratic presidential nominee by a 3-to-2 margin over the past four contests. And as they’ve aged, these voters have leaned more heavily Democratic while also turning out to vote in higher numbers. They now include everyone between the ages of 21 and 45 — more than 40 percent of the nation’s adults.

Republican House is politically dysfunctional 

Republicans are sitting on a demographic time bomb of their own making, and it could send them into a tailspin. Although the politics of division that Republicans have pursued since Richard Nixon launched his “Southern strategy” in the late 1960s — a blueprint to shore up the vote of white Southerners by appealing to racial bias — has brought new groups into their ranks, including conservative Southerners, evangelical Christians, and working-class whites, it has antagonized other groups.

Republicans are paying a stiff price for defaming immigrants. If they hadn’t, they could have made inroads with the Latinx population. Although most Latinx have conservative views on issues like abortion and national security, they vote more than 2 to 1 Democratic. A 2019 poll found that 51 percent of Latinx believe that the GOP is “hostile” toward them, with an additional 29 percent believing that the GOP “doesn’t care” about them.

Asian-Americans have also turned away from the GOP. They are America’s fastest-growing ethnic group and have the profile of a Republican bloc. They have the nation’s highest average family income and are twice as likely as other Americans to own a small business. As late as the 1992 presidential campaign, they voted 2 to 1 Republican. Today, they vote more than 2 to 1 Democratic.

Without the vote of white evangelical Protestants, the GOP would already be a second-rate party. Eliminate the evangelical vote in the 2016 election and the GOP would have received barely more than 40 percent of the popular vote. Even the GOP’s reputation as a “white” party owes to evangelicals. Non-evangelical whites voted Democratic by a 53-47 percent margin in 2016. Moreover, white evangelicals’ ability to prop up the GOP is declining. America’s fifth wave of religious revival began to wane two decades ago. White evangelicals now constitute a sixth of the population, down from a fourth in the 1990s.

There was no gender gap until the GOP adopted evangelicals’ version of family values, including opposition to abortion. Women are now the Democrats’ largest voting bloc, and their loyalty has increased, reaching record highs in the 2016 and 2018 elections. And Republicans’ embrace of evangelicals’ position on gay rights has alienated the LGBTQ community. They are now second only to Black Americans in their Democratic loyalty. The GOP’s rigid stance on social issues has also eroded its standing with college-educated voters. Once heavily Republican, most of them now side with the Democratic Party.

To assess the threat of demographic change to the GOP, I projected the outcome of future elections based on the US Census Bureau’s population change estimates. The Republican Party faces a dim future, as the groups supporting it shrink in size while those opposing it grow in number. 

By 2032, Democrats would have a 59-to-41 percent edge based solely on population change.

A maxim of two-party politics is that a party needs to be inclusive — a big tent — to be competitive. Whatever the short-term advantage of the GOP’s politics of division, it is now facing the fallout. Millions of younger adults, women, Blacks, Latinx, Asian Americans, LGBTQ, and the college-educated will be pulling the Democratic lever for years to come.

Thomas E. Patterson is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center. This series is adapted from his book “Is the Republican Party Destroying Itself?”

Voters who grew up in first and generation immigrant families must oppose cult dictatorial candidates

Echo opinion letters published in the Los Angeles Times:

To the editor: Why are so many Cuban Americans in Florida voicing their opposition to open borders? Why do they consider immigration one of their most ardent concerns? (“Florida Democrats’ lesson for California: Don’t take anyone’s support for granted,” Nov. 16)

Democratic voters must come out in overwhelming numbers

Have they forgotten the migration of thousands fleeing hostilities during the Cuban revolution? How about the Mariel boatlift of 1980, which brought Cubans fleeing oppression to the United States? Or the ongoing Cuban migration crisis that started in 2021, in which economic hardship rooted in the Trump-era sanctions has sparked another wave of people seeking entry into the U.S.?

True, Latino voters are not one homogeneous group, but if we could come together, we would find that we all want the same thing: justice and liberty for all. From Toni Martinez-Burgoyne, Pasadena

To the editor: Interesting how people from Venezuela and Cuba who escaped dictators in their home countries are now ready to endorse one here. From Fernando Torres, North Hills

To the editor: I guess the saying commonly attributed to P.T. Barnum is right — there’s a sucker born every minute.

Anyone who supports former President Trump at this juncture has fallen for the con and cannot, or will not, admit to themselves that they’ve been duped. There is nothing redeemable about him.

His supporters are now in a cult, even as they refuse to believe and accept it. The head of the Republican National Committee has even said she will support the former president, (even❓) if he is convicted❗😡

Democratic voters must come out in overwhelming numbers. 

At this point, I no longer have any sympathy or empathy for those who are in the cult. None. They made the choice to support a traitor. Let them lie in the bed they’ve made for themselves. From Scott Hughes, Westlake Village