Failure of the Tulsa Trump campaign reboot has cast a very long and dark 2020 political shadow

The Republican Party Is Racist and Soulless

"...no intellectual framework for Donald Trump's failed leadership...."

Echo opinioin published in Mother Jones by David Corn

When Donald Trump decided to (irresponsibly!) back-burner the coronavirus crisis and reboot his reelection campaign with superspreader events in June, he headed to an arena in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to present his case for four more years. In front of an audience of maskless fans standing side by side, Trump performed his usual routine. He threw out buzzwords (“law and order,” “left-wing radicals”). He boasted. (“I have done a phenomenal job” responding to the pandemic.) 

Trump (imposing his complete ignorance!) denigrated his opponent as “Sleepy Joe.” He obsessed over personal grievances and slights, devoting much time to slamming news outlets that had recently shown video of him walking gingerly down a ramp after delivering a commencement address at West Point. What was mostly missing from Trump’s speech: ideas.

Although he referred to his tax cuts for the wealthy, his appointment of conservative judges, and his “beautiful” wall on the US-Mexico border, Trump had little to say about economic policy, national security, health care, education, housing, the environment, and other subjects. Moreover, he offered no agenda for a second term other than vague promises of making everything swell. Days later, during a friendly Fox News “town hall,” Sean Hannity asked Trump to spell out his plans for a second term. He replied by rambling on about his inauguration and attacking John Bolton.

All this was nothing new for Trump, who approaches the presidency more as (bouncer!) performance artist than policymaker. But in the Oklahoma crowd were many unmasked Republican senators and House members, who clapped along and looked delighted to be props for The Trump Show. Once upon a time, Republican legislators and party leaders claimed they cared deeply about certain foundational issues—the deficit, family values, free trade, hawkish foreign policy. Now they were cheering a twice-divorced adulterer who had run up the federal debt, sloppily imposed tariffs, and embraced the anti-American autocrats leading Russia and North Korea—a man devoid of serious thought and guiding policy principles, a self-fixated candidate who presented no intellectual framework for his presidency. 

Had the GOP become the party of no ideas?

This seemed a premise worth exploring, so I thought I would check in with veteran Republicans who once were attracted to the party for its conservative ideals but who have become Trump critics. 

First on my list was Stuart Stevens, the chief strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential bid. I should note that I feel a bit awkward when I talk with Stevens. Plenty of people have asserted that my exposé of the “47 percent” tape in 2012—remember Romney denigrating nearly half of Americans as freeloaders who want the government to take care of them?—played a part in his defeat. But Stevens has always been gracious when we have crossed paths. And this time was no exception. It turned out Stevens had much to say on the current state of his party. Actually, enough for an entire book.

Asked if the Republican Party in the Trump years has become an outfit free of governing ideas, Stevens went even further: “It was all a lie.” He noted that this was word-for-word the title of his forthcoming book, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump. The modern GOP, he said, never truly cared about the ideas it claimed to care about.

This was a stunning indictment coming from a longtime political consul­tant who had toiled on five Republican presidential campaigns and numerous Senate and gubernatorial races. “The Republican Party has been a cartel,” Stevens said excitedly. “And no one asks a cartel, ‘What’s your ideological purpose?’ You don’t ask OPEC, ‘What’s your ideology?’ You don’t ask a drug gang, ‘What’s your program?’ 

The Republicans exist for the pursuit of power for no purpose.”

Republicans are sunk in the metaphoric swamp - echo opinion: Thank You Senator Jeff Flake

Jeff Flake opinion echo: Donald Trump is on trial and so are my Senate Republican colleagues.

Former Republican Senator Jeff Flake asks his colleagues to save the Grand Old Party before it's just too late.
Echo opinion published in The Washington Post (courtesy of Mother Jones).

(Maine Writer summary- Republicans have denigrated themselves into being the Trumpzi party and are abandoning their pride as the Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln - God Rest His Soul.)

Jeff Flake, a Republican, represented Arizona in the U.S. Senate from 2013 to 2019. He is a resident fellow at Harvard University and a contributor to CBS News.

To my former Senate Republican colleagues,

I don’t envy you.
It might not be fair, but none of the successes, achievements and triumphs you’ve had in public office — whatever bills you’ve passed, hearings you’ve chaired, constituents you have had the privilege of helping — will matter more than your actions in the coming months.

Donald Trump is on trial. But in a very real sense, so are you.

And so is the political party to which we belong.

As we approach the time when you do your constitutional duty and weigh the evidence arrayed against the president, I urge you to remember who we are when we are at our best. And I ask you to remember yourself at your most idealistic.

We are conservatives. The political impulses that compelled us all to enter public life were defined by sturdy pillars anchored deep in the American story. Chief among these is a realistic view of power and of human nature, and a corresponding and healthy mistrust of concentrated and impervious executive power. Mindful of the base human instincts that we all possess, the founders of our constitutional system designed its very architecture to curb excesses of power.

Personally, I have never met anyone whose behavior can be described as perfect, but so often has the president repeated this obvious untruth that it has become a form of dogma in our party. And sure enough, as dogma demands, there are members of our party denying objective reality by repeating the line that “the president did nothing wrong.” My colleagues, the danger of an untruthful president is compounded when an equal branch follows that president off the cliff, into the abyss of unreality and untruth.

Those curbs are especially important when the power is wielded by a president who denies reality itself and calls his behavior not what it is, but “perfect.”

Call it the founders’ blind spot: They simply could not have envisioned the Article I branch abetting and enabling such dangerous behavior in the Article II branch.

Moreover, when we are complicit, we cede our constitutional responsibilities, we forever redefine the relationship between Congress and the White House, and we set the most dangerous of precedents.

My simple test for all of us: What if President Barack Obama had engaged in precisely the same behavior? I know the answer to that question with certainty, and so do you. You would have understood with striking clarity the threat it posed, and you would have known exactly what to do.

Regarding the articles of impeachment, you could reasonably conclude that Donald Trump's actions warrant his removal. You might also determine that the president’s actions do not rise to the constitutional standard required for removal. There is no small amount of moral hazard with each option, but both positions can be defended.

But what is indefensible is echoing House Republicans who say that the president has not done anything wrong. He has.

The willingness of House Republicans to bend to the president’s will by attempting to shift blame with the promotion of bizarre and debunked conspiracy theories has been an appalling spectacle. It will have long-term ramifications for the country and the party, to say nothing of individual reputations.

Nearly all of you condemned the president’s behavior during the 2016, campaign* Nearly all of you refused to campaign with him. You knew then that doing so would be wrong — would be a stain on your reputation and the standing of the Republican Party, and would do lasting damage to the conservative cause.

Ask yourself today: Has the president changed his behavior? Has he grown in office? Has the mantle of the presidency altered his conduct? The answer is obvious. 

In fact, if the president’s political rally in Michigan on Wednesday is any measure, his language has only become more vulgar, his performance cruder, his behavior more boorish and unstable.

Next, ask yourself: If the president’s conduct hasn’t changed, has mine? Before President Trump came on the scene, would I have stood at a rally and cheered while supporters shouted “lock her up” or “send them back”? Would I have laughed along while the president demeaned and ridiculed my colleagues? Would I have ever thought to warm up the crowd for the president by saying of the House speaker: “It must suck to be that dumb**”?

As I said above, I don’t envy you. You’re on a big stage now. Please don’t accept an alternate reality that would have us believe in things that obviously are not true, in the service of executive behavior that we never would have encouraged and a theory of executive power that we have always found abhorrent.

If there ever was a time to put country over party, it is now. And by putting country over party, you might just save the Grand Old Party before it’s too late. 

Maine Writer trickster asterisks post scripts:

* Example: Transcript The New York Times Access Hollywood: Donald Trump's taped comments about women. "Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything."

 

**Esquire: Louisiana Senator John Kennedy's 'Dumb' Attack on Nancy Pelosi Is a Reminder Every Republican Is Trump Now. "... a perfect illustration of how, in the Age of Trump, The Base now demands the performance of bludgeoning the various Enemies. At every one of these traveling arena shows..." by Jack Holmes.

Scientists revolt- use real data to count people

When it comes to counting the number of people in a crowd, it's always a good idea to start with the number of persons at "1" and continue with additional digits, until all are included in the final tally. In reality, it makes no sense to claim a crowd size, without the verification of having somebody who does a "count". Obviously, some crowds are too large to count; but other attendance indicators can be counted, like checking to see if all parking lots are full to capacity or by issuing numbered tickets to events.  

Empty seats at inauguration of Donald Trump January 20, 2017- evidence of low crowd size.

Unfortunately, Donald Trump made up the numbers about his inaugural crowd size. Among his first executive orders as POTUS was to randomly declare that his inauguration crowds were huge. Nevertheless, even people who can't count have the ability to see when the event photographs showed empty seats. Rather than admit to the pictures of empty seats, Donald Trump ordered the Park Service to remove the evidence from social media. 

In other words, the first executive order Donald Trump gave after his inauguration was to tamper with evidence.  There's no way he serendipitously made up that kind of judgement. In fact, it's probably so routine for Trump to change facts in his favor, that he didn't even consider how he might be wrong. Moreover, in his selfish corporate world, nobody dared to tell Trump otherwise, until the media forced the issue. (Classic, "Emperor has no clothes".)

Thankfully, scientists are rightly obsessed about speaking "facts to power", in spite of protracted efforts by revisionist Donald Trump and right wing extremists.

Scientists, reported in "Mother Jones" evaluated the
Anti-Trump "Science Protesters". They finally released their thoroughly fact-checked crowd estimates. (By Rebecca Leber)

When protesters descended on Washington, DC, last month for the March for Science, they carried signs that were straight-to-the point: "What do we want? Evidence-based science. When do we want it? After Peer Review." And unlike the Donald Trump administration they were protesting, organizers were careful to apply scientific rigor to how they calculated the number of people who participated in the march.

As a result, it took organizers an unusually long time—three weeks—to come up with their estimate for how many people took part in the April 22 marches in Washington and 600 other cities worldwide. In a blog post published Monday, organizers approximated that nearly 1.1 million people had protested around the world, with the largest marches taking place in DC (100,000), San Francisco (50,000), Los Angeles (50,000), Chicago (60,000), and Boston (70,000).

Their patience was a marked contrast to how President Donald Trump handled his inauguration crowd size. Trump spent his first weekend as president insisting that far more people attended his swearing-in than were actually there and attacking anyone who disagreed. Trump told the CIA on that Saturday that he drew "a million-and-a-half people." In his first address to reporters as White House press secretary, Sean Spicer angrily claimed, "That was the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period." Photographs proved these assertions to be untrue, but the White House didn't budge. Trump aide Kellyanne Conway even coined the term "alternative facts"—a phrase widely derided by the pro-science marchers—when she was defending the White House's claim that Trump drew a larger crowd than President Barack Obama had in 2009.

March for Science organizers decided to take their time tabulating their crowds after volunteer Kate Gage suggested that they should "science the shit out of the numbers"—which Gage said was meant neither as a reference to Trump's crowds debate nor to Matt Damon's character in the movie The Martian. 

"We really wanted to emphasize that it was a march about science and data and evidence," explained Gage, a former policy adviser in the White House's International Science and Technology office during the Obama administration. Scientific rigor was critical, she said, because the march "was organized by scientists, in a way and a scale we haven't seen before."

Crowd counting is an inexact science, and the volunteers who organized the marches acknowledge the shortcomings of their methodological choices. The DC march was particularly challenging, said Kishore Hari, the DC march coordinator (and a co-host of our Inquiring Minds podcast), because the National Park Service doesn't release crowd estimates and the rainy weather that day prevented the use of satellite imagery. In the end, comparing crowd density to the area's known capacity, they estimated 100,000 attendees.

While the DC march count had its limitations, the other marches used a variety of methods. Most marches used hand counts, but for larger, moving groups, hand counts can be prone to error, so organizers had to rely on other methods. Rufus Cochran, an engineer and co-chair of the Indianapolis march, spent a few nights reading about different methodologies. Here's the approach they settled on in Indianapolis, as described in a blog post on the March for Science's website:

At the beginning of their event, pictures of the square were taken with reference landmarks visible. Using this and other pictures, the organizers estimated a fairly consistent density across the square. The organizers then drew an outline of the area using MapChecking.com and combined that with state crowd density still data from Professor Keith Still, a crowd estimation scientist. They settled on a likely density of 2 and 3 people per m2 resulting in an attendance calculation of just under 10,000. Given that more people arrived after this picture was taken and there were people at the periphery beyond the borders of area, this estimate is likely conservative.

"Researching and building on existing technologies is very important," Cochran told me. "A lot of the methodology is people making best-educated guesses." He said his aim was to use "a methodology that is transparent and repeatable."

Keith Still, a crowd size scientist who provided estimates for the Inauguration and Women's March, says that the methods used by the March for Science organizers were acceptable. "Crowd counting has been around for a long time, we don't use a static process as it is fraught with inaccuracies," he said in an email, noting that some methods for determining density are crude and highly variable. "Without images, it would be difficult to assess the accuracy of the crowd count in the March for Science, but the information on the blog is reasonable. By that I mean, the figures are typical of this sort of event (and not over inflated)."

(MaineWriter:  I can predict this. When Donald Trump is impeached, the crowd size and the television ratings for the vote will exceed all the numbers thrown around about the inauguration.)