Donald Trump and maga Republicans are hypocrites- say nothing about pardon of child sex molesters but prosecute for legal free speech

 Echo opinion letter published in the Southwest Florida News-Press

Donald Trump gave a pardon to an insurrectionist who turned out to be convicted of child sexual abuse but his corrupt administration insists on prosecuting legislative leaders who spoke truth to power. 

 

An upside-down United States: In one of the numerous Trump, politically driven, Pam Bondi directed Department of Injustice baseless persecutions of Donald Trump’s ever-expanding list of political enemies, a federal grand jury recently declined to indict six military and intelligence community veterans, real patriots who serve in Congress, for simply stating the law of the land, and on that same day here in the "free" state of Florida, Andrew Paul Johnson, a January 6th insurrectionist, a MAGA “patriot” pardoned by Trump, was convicted on five charges, including molesting a child under 12 and another under 16, as well as lewd and lascivious exhibition.  Insurrectionist Johnson is one of a number of January 6 “patriots” pardoned by our felonious president Donald Trump who has gone on to commit crimes that make being an illegal immigrant akin to being a Sunday school teacher. 

But, not a peep from our Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, his attorney general, Republicans- Representative Byron Donalds or Senator Rick Scott, all of whom are like heat-seeking missiles for any nearby microphone when an illegal immigrant so much as jaywalks. 

Folks, please flock to the polls in November to deliver this country from this Trump Upside-Down Alice in Wonderland nightmare 😱 administration❗  

From:  Thomas Minor, in Bonita Springs, Florida

Death is an obsession with Donald Trump who exploits his fixation for causing harm to others: His support for the death penalty is another dire example of Trump's cruelty

Donald Trump’s death penalty obsession: As with most other developments in the Republican Party, it can be traced back to Donald Trump. Echo opinion published in The Boston Globe by Theo Zenou:

The president’s bloodlust is filtering down to red-state America.

Theo Zenou is a historian and a journalist.

This has been a trying year for Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. Every time someone is executed at Florida State Prison, activists hold a vigil outside the death chamber. They say prayers and, at 6 p.m., the time of execution, they ring a bell. In 2025, they have rung the bell 17 times.

Florida’s 17 executions are more than have taken place in any other state, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, and are by far the highest number carried out in a year in Florida since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976. 

But the grim record is about to be topped. On December 9, another inmate is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection.

This acceleration in executions is due to Governor Ron DeSantis, who signed the death warrant and set the execution date in each case. In Florida, unlike other states, this is the prerogative of the governor. Although juries vote for death sentences, DeSantis — and DeSantis alone — decides whether those sentences are actually carried out. In the past, Florida’s governors have held off on signing specific death warrants. As a result, some inmates have spent decades on death row.

“I support capital punishment because I think there are some crimes that are just so horrific the only appropriate punishment is the death penalty,” DeSantis, who has led Florida since 2019, said in May. The Republican believes that the execution spree could serve as “a strong deterrent” against violent crime. 

When he was asked by reporters why he had signed fewer death warrants earlier in his tenure — none between 2020 and 2022, six in 2023 and just one last year — he said he had other priorities to deal with, chief among them the COVID pandemic.

But it’s not hard to imagine another reason for DeSantis’s enthusiasm for the death penalty. The governor is reportedly eyeing a 2028 presidential run, and he could be flexing his muscles to impress the Republican electorate. Taking a hard line on crime has long been popular with conservatives. In recent months, however, the rhetoric has escalated. Take Texas Governor Greg Abbott. After two undocumented immigrants allegedly killed an Air Force cadet in a jet-ski hit-and-run, he tweeted: “Welcome to Texas. Here’s your Death Penalty.” Almost all 44 executions carried out this year in the United States, the highest figure in 15 years, occurred in red states, with 76 percent concentrated in Texas, Florida, Alabama, and South Carolina.

As with most other developments in the Republican Party, it can be traced back to Donald Trump. The president has long been a proponent of capital punishment. Back in 1989, when he was just a New York real estate developer, Trump took out ads in the city’s newspapers calling for the executions of the Central Park Five — men accused of raping a Central Park jogger. “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY,” screamed the all-caps headline. As it turned out, the Central Park Five were later exonerated.

Not that it has stopped Trump from bringing that same gung-ho approach into the Oval Office. The president has been hell-bent on expanding capital punishment at both the federal and state levels — even when his efforts flout the law. This hasn’t made headlines, but it is another sign of the United States’s troubling slide into illiberalism.

Trump claims that his stance enjoys “broad public support.” But that’s not the case. Public support for capital punishment is actually at a 50-year low, according to a recent Gallup poll, with just 52 percent of Americans in favor. Thirty years ago, it was 80 percent.

At present, the death penalty is legal in 27 states and at the federal level. But before this year’s 44 executions and counting, it had become less common. There were a total of 25 in 2024. None were performed by the U.S. government since Joe Biden imposed a moratorium on federal executions in 2021. Even prior to that decision, only a small number had been carried out in the 21st century. The lone exception was during Trump’s first term, with 13 executions.

Now, Trump is back with a vengeance. On January 20, the first day of his second term, he overturned Biden’s moratorium and signed an executive order titled (all caps again) “RESTORING THE DEATH PENALTY AND PROTECTING PUBLIC SAFETY.” 

In it, Trump painted a picture of sinister conspiracy. “For too long,” he wrote, “politicians and judges who oppose capital punishment have defied and subverted the laws of our country.”

No longer. The president, who once told his supporters that “I am your retribution,” was committing himself to delivering that retribution. He called on Attorney General Pam Bondi “to pursue the death penalty for all crimes of a severity demanding its use.” He also ordered Bondi to systematically pursue death sentences in the murders of law enforcement officers and all capital crimes committed by undocumented immigrants.

This has already had consequences on the ground. Although there have been no federal executions this year, federal prosecutors are seeking capital punishment in as many as 20 cases, according to the Federal Capital Trial Project. Luigi Mangione’s, the alleged murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan, is the most high profile defendant. 

Although the state of New York abolished the death penalty in 2007, the federal government is still able to seek it for any capital crime committed there. Bondi’s justification was simple: “We carry out Donald Trump's agenda to stop violent crime and Make America Safe Again.”🤢

The Department of Justice is aggressively considering bringing capital charges in additional cases. In the process, the DOJ is testing the limits of due process. Under federal law, defendants are entitled to a “reasonable opportunity” to present mitigating evidence for why they should not face a death sentence. This can be due to physical or mental health issues or a history of trauma. Typically, this mitigation phase lasts around a year.

But the DOJ is now giving defense lawyers as little as two months to make a case for why their clients deserve to live. 

Payments to court-appointed mitigation specialists were also paused during the government shutdown. “This is really unlike anything I’ve ever experienced,” Mairead Burke, a mitigation specialist based in the District of Columbia, told The Washington Post.

In October, a New Mexico murder defendant facing a capital sentence filed an emergency motion demanding that the process be paused until funding is resumed. His attorneys argued that the situation amounted to “a deprivation of his right to counsel while the government seeks his death.” The DOJ denounced their “strained reasoning.”

Not even inmates whose death sentences were commuted by President Biden are safe from government overreach. Trump has said online he wishes for them to “GO TO HELL!” Bondi has done her best to oblige and moved most of them to a Colorado prison so harsh it is known as the “Alcatraz of the Rockies.” As Aaron Seitz, a former US assistant attorney general, told the Wall Street Journal: “If you’re not going to be killed lawfully at the hands of the state, well, your prison sentence is going to be hard as hell.”
But Trump’s impact has not just been felt at the federal level. In his January 20, executive order, he also directed Bondi to “encourage” states to seek capital punishment in all applicable cases. Cut to 11 months later and Republican state legislators are obediently doing his bidding. Nine states are currently trying to reinstate the death penalty, according to The Hill, while bills to expand the definition of capital crimes — for instance, to include pedophilia — are on the floor of 14 state houses.

Here too, Florida has been leading the pack. In February, DeSantis signed a bill into law automatically requiring capital punishment for “unauthorized aliens” convicted of a capital felony. That requirement for capital punishment — juries would have no say — is believed to run afoul of the US Constitution. The law’s sponsor, Randy Fine, a former state senator, is hoping that the conservative Supreme Court won’t strike it down. But that doesn’t appear to be his primary concern. His motivation for the law was to show loyalty to Trump. “We wanted to make sure that the state was lined up to follow in President Trump’s lead,” he said.

For decades, America has stood as an outlier among Western democracies for continuing to impose capital punishment. But Trump’s hard-line approach cannot be dismissed as business as usual. Yes, past Republican presidents like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were vocal supporters of the death penalty. But they didn’t flout legal norms the way Trump does. He has not simply defended capital punishment in theory. He has used the bully pulpit to demand the executions of specific individuals, disregarding both their right to a fair trial and the independence of the courts.

His push to expand capital punishment is not happening in a vacuum either. It needs to be understood as part of a broader attack against the rule of law. The president has made illiberalism his credo. He has unleashed the National Guard on U.S. cities. He rails against judges whose decisions he disagrees with. And he treats Immigration and Customs Enforcement like his personal special forces.

Similarly, Trump treats the death penalty as his personal prerogative. It has now become routine for the president to publicly call for the execution of murder suspects. After the Ukrainian refugee Irina Zaratuska was murdered on a train in August, Trump raged on social media: “The ANIMAL … should be given a ‘Quick’ (there is no doubt!) trial, and only awarded THE DEATH PENALTY.” But the president does not even need someone to be accused of a crime to demand their head. He acts like he is judge, jury, and executioner. Recently, after a group of Democratic lawmakers released a video saying soldiers should not obey unlawful orders, he went online to inveigh against “traitors.” His verdict: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

Such rhetoric is irresponsible. For one thing, in the case of murder suspects, it is clearly prejudicial and threatens the integrity of the judiciary. For another, it turns capital punishment into a grisly form of entertainment. This breeds a desire for vengeance among the wider public. At any time, this is bad for a healthy society. But at a time when political violence is flaring up, it is downright dangerous.

Since his return to power, Donald Trump has been carrying out a carpet-bombing campaign against America’s institutions. Call it the shock and awe approach to governing. It is easy, amid the chaos, to miss some of the damage being done. That has certainly been the case with the Trump administration’s expansion of capital punishment. Because it directly affects only a few individuals, it has elicited little public outcry. But it is no less concerning. Trump’s obsession with “THE DEATH PENALTY” betrays the destructive impulse at the heart of his presidency.

Republicans have no scruples but blame all the world problems on conspiracies

The moment the MV Dali smashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge, MAGAlomaniacs knew where to assign blame. Echo opinion by Fred Grimm published in the Orlando Sentinel in Florida. 

The Dali container ship entangled in the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Md., March 29, 2024. Clearing the debris from the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge will be a complex but urgent task, officials said. And rebuilding it may take several years, they cautioned. (Erin Schaff/The New York Times)

“DEI did this,” former Florida state representative and failed congressional candidate Anthony Sabatini tweeted Tuesday, as the Coast Guard searched for six maintenance workers lost when the span’s severed superstructure collapsed into the Patapsco River.

From 900 miles away, Sabatini could ascertain that a deadly combination of diversity, equity and inclusion had done to the container ship what an iceberg did to the Titanic.

The website of Laura Loomer, another Florida wingnut and wannabe member of Congress, was festooned with posts this week blaming the tragedy on the “high priority” Synergy Marine, the Singapore-based company that manages the Dali and 670 other cargo ships, assigns to “a diverse workforce” and “an environment where everyone feels they belong.”

So much for the prevailing theory that after a sudden loss of power, wind and river currents pushed thefoundering cargo ship into a support pillar. Today’s far right knows that nothing quite predicts a marine disaster like a diverse workforce. 

The horrors of DEI have become all the rage — and I do mean rage — in right-wing politics. MAGA politicians complain that DEI steals jobs from deserving white workers (despite a national unemployment rate of only 3.9%) and that DEI makes white students feel sad about their racial legacy. (Like how politically correct liberals tried to guilt-trip Sabatini for donning blackface back in his university days.)

Last May, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill prohibiting the expenditure of state or federal money to promote DEI at state colleges and universities. DeSantis said the bill would “prevent woke ideologies from continuing to co-opt” state schools.

In January, the Florida Board of Governors told universities and colleges that they could no longer support programs or campus activities that “advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion” or “promote or engage in political or social activism.” (One wonders how white students survived before Ron DeSantis cleansed state schools of racial and ethnic sensitivities.)

Like Sabatini, Utah Republican congressman and gubernatorial candidate Phil Lyman charged that DEI has sabotaged American infrastructure. “This is what happens when you have governors who prioritize diversity over the well-being and security of citizens,” Lyman posted on X after Tuesday’s disaster.

Ideologues pushing a racial explanation can’t quite articulate exactly how diversity toppled the Francis Scott Key Bridge. 

The Washington Post reported that the Dali’s not-so-diverse 21-man crew were all Indian nationals. The six maintenance workers who lost their lives Tuesday were all Central Americans.

But apparently, diverse simply means “not white.” 

MAGA logic argues that if Caucasians had manned the Dali, maintained the span and controlled Baltimore City Hall, the Key Bridge would still be intact.

A post on X that generated 25.7 million views and 6,000 reposts blamed the tragedy on “Mayor DEI.” As if Brandon Scott, the Black mayor elected in 2020, with 70% of the vote, had been foisted on Baltimore by the likes of George Soros, Anthony Fauci and Joe Biden.

Of course, other MAGA grievances were also blamed for the mangled metal trusses blocking the Patapsco River. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the loony Georgia😼😵😳 congresswoman who blamed California’s 2018, spate of wildfires on lasers from space,👽 suggested on X that the bridge had come under “an international attack.” 

(She added that the collision could have been avoided if the Biden administration had not frittered away money on Ukraine.)

Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo and thousands of X posters blamed the crash on Biden’s border policies.

Alex Jones, the scurrilous peddler of conspiracy theories from whom the families of Sandy Hook mass shooting victims extracted $1.5 billion in court for his lies about their dead children, warned that this calamity was no accident. “WW3 has already started,” Jones said.

Matt Schlapp of the American Conservative Union told Newsmax the wreck was another sign of a “drug-addled” workforce.

But the MAGA consensus blames the wreck on DEI, this political season’s all-purpose liberal scapegoat. If the Baltimore tragedy had occurred in 2023 or 2022 or 2021, MAGA constituents would have claimed the bridge had been torpedoed by drag queens or liberal prosecutors or Black Lives Matter protestors or Trump-hating judges or whatever the far-right’s latest imagined menace might have been at the time.

But we’ve learned in the age of MAGA that disgrace and mendacity no longer disqualify politicians. Anthony Sabatini still has stature in the GOP, despite calling Disney World “pedo world,” the U.S. capitol police “the gestapo” and the Iraq-born wife of his 2022 primary opponent “anti-Christian.” (Sabatini is running again, this time against three-term incumbent Daniel Webster.)

Same with Laura Loomer, who won 44% of Republican congressional primary vote in 2022 against Webster, despite her assertions that Parkland survivors had been paid actors in a faked massacre. (She hinted Monday on Twitter that she was considering running against incumbent Laurel Lee in a Tampa-area district.)

Marjorie Taylor Greene livestreamed her 2019 ambush of Parkland survivor David Hogg on Facebook, chasing him down the street, uttering unhinged accusations, which turns out to be admired behavior in MAGA politics. Her cruelty💀😈
was rewarded by two terms in Congress and influence in party politics.

But, never mind the lies and lunatic conspiracy theories espoused by MAGA leaders. If something goes awry, the party can always blame Black Lives Matter critical race theory DEI.

Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976.

Donald Trump received a majority of Iowa caucus GOP in a shrinking pool of right wing supporters

An echo opinion by Matt Lewis published in the Daily Beast:  After Iowa’s 57,000 GOP caucus voter result support for Donald Trump, it’s increasingly difficult to imagine anyone wresting control of the nomination away from him—even if Nikki Haley rebounds next week with a New Hampshire win.

Rather than inflating Trump’s support, it’s possible that Iowa underrepresented Trump’s nationwide dominance by bestowing him with a mere 51 percent of their caucus vote. According to a recent CBS News poll, 69 percent of Republicans nationwide are supporting Trump.

If you’re still not convinced that the GOP electorate is thoroughly Trumpified, then consider some of the exit polls coming out of Iowa.

According to The Washington Post, about two-thirds of Iowa caucusgoers said Joe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election. And about 70 percent of the voters who said that caucused for Trump.

This is to say that a majority of Republicans are a) willing to at least pretend to believe something that is patently absurd, and b) focused on relitigating the past.

In the waning days before the Iowa caucuses, Ron DeSantis attempted to obliquely address Trump’s backward-looking obsession (without actually mentioning that Biden won the 2020, election). DeSantis cast himself as the candidate of the future, saying that Trump is running on “his issues,” while DeSantis is focused on “your issues” and “this country’s future.”

It didn’t work—partly because DeSantis cannot deliver a pithy (short and meaningful) message, but mostly because Republican voters don’t want to reject The Big Lie or focus on the future. These voters seem hellbent on renominating Trump. 

Indeed, about two-thirds of caucusgoers said Trump would still be fit for the presidency, even if he was convicted of a crime (Trump won about 70 percent of these people). 😡😞⍰

On one hand, not caring whether your party’s nominee is a convicted criminal is crazy and scary. On the other hand, if the remaining one-third of Iowa caucusgoers conclude that a conviction means Trump is unfit for the presidency, that could spell trouble for Trump, come November.

But will they? 😞❓

I am reminded that back in 2016, 62 percent of Americans said Trump was “unqualified” to be president. Somehow, he still won the election. Faced with a binary choice, most Republicans will find a way to rationalize supporting a convicted felon.

Still, Trump barely won the general election in 2016—and he lost in 2020. If even a small percentage of Republican base voters (the kinds of people willing to show up in sub-zero temps), nationwide, stay home, it could defeat Trump in 2024. #NeverTrump❗

Speaking of the types of people who came out in Iowa on Monday night, it’s possible that the representation was self-selective in another way.

Turnout in the Iowa caucuses was low, (only a measly GOP 108,000 caucus voters in Iowa where the populationis 3.2 million people❗) likely because of the frigid conditions. 

But, as former Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-VA) also noted on Monday night, “Trumpism is the politics of subtraction: 56k fewer Republican caucus voters tonight in Iowa vs 2016. Trump wins by depressing and shrinking the electorate…”

While the consequences of this trend may already be impacting the 2024 election, there is also a multiplier effect. As more and more Americans see Trump as the avatar of the Republican Party, fewer college-educated suburbanites (for example) are likely to join the party in the future.

It is perhaps ironic that a shrinking Republican Party is also a purer, more Trumpy, Republican Party. Interestingly, though, just 46 percent of Iowa caucusgoers said they considered themselves MAGA (78 percent of them supported Trump). While supporters of candidates like Haley might be happy to hear that less than half of Iowans consider themselves MAGA, the results suggest this isn’t really much of a “win.” In fact, it’s cold (no pun intended) comfort.

If you add Vivek Ramaswamy’s votes to Trump’s 51 percent, you get nearly 60 percent of Iowa caucusgoers who are effectively “MAGA” (this is not an entirely hypothetical scenario, since Vivek dropped out after finishing fourth in the caucuses).

Throw in Ron DeSantis’ Iowa votes, and you’re close to 80 percent who are MAGA-ish. That leaves 20 percent for the “Nikki” vote.

Now, you might retort that caucuses are unique, so Iowa’s results cannot be extrapolated to say much of anything about upcoming primary results (see victories by Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Ted Cruz, et al.). What is more, only a fraction of registered Republicans participate (even when turnout is up). If you are looking for a reason to believe that someone other than Trump still has a shot, you might cling to the “Iowa is weird” theory, while turning your lonely eyes toward Nikki and New Hampshire.

The problem is that New Hampshire’s primary is arguably even less representative of the national GOP electorate, because independents can vote in the first-in-the-nation primary.

Trump infused political oxygen will become toxic for Republicans. The GOP candidates must escape into cleaner air.

Why Does Every Republican Candidate Sound the Same?

Echo opinion essay by Katherine Miller published in The New York Times:  There’s a late-summer-fade quality to the Republican primary contest, as if the candidates are passively sliding into the inevitability of a Biden-Trump rematch.

Donald Trump and a variety of other people see the animating factor here as the indictments against him. “We need one more indictment to close out this election,” Mr. Trump joked last month. 

This is also the prism through which the other candidates get discussed: that they don’t criticize Mr. Trump much, especially over his indictments. (HELLO? This is political insanity!  If tRumpzi were a democrat, what do you suppose those same Republican "Quislings" would be saying?)

But there’s a bigger and more claustrophobic reality to the fading quality of Ron (dis...) DeSantis and all these other Republicans: It’s as if they constructed their identities as Trump alternatives and ended up all the same.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote this summer that Mr. (dis....) DeSantis can sound generic next to Vivek Ramaswamy: They talk the same way about China and TikTok, about how they will use military force against the cartels in Mexico (even though this really sounds as if we will be going to war with Mexico), about the F.B.I.

Two weeks before Mr. Wallace-Wells was in Iowa watching Mr. Ramaswamy make Mr. (dis...) DeSantis sound generic, I heard Mr. (dis....) DeSantis and Senator Tim Scott use a similar metaphor about the border — houses, which are being broken into — in events 18 hours apart. If we don’t control the border, it might not be our country, Mr. Scott said. We will repel the intrusion with force, Mr. (dis...) DeSantis said. We will finish the wall, they said.

They said what? But wait! Wait! Did Mexico pay for it?

“That’s why you see these things like weaponization of agencies, because nobody’s held them accountable,” Mr. (dis...) DeSantis said. “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired watching the weaponization of the D.O.J. against their political opponents, against pro-life activists,” Mr. Scott said. On Day 1, Mr. (dis...) DeSantis said, we’ll have a new F.B.I. director. The first three things we have to do, Mr. Scott said, are fire Joe Biden, Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray. “You’re going to have housecleaning at the Department of Justice,” Mr. (dis...) DeSantis said. “We should actually eliminate every single political appointee in all the Department of Justice,” said Mr. Scott, who wants to “purge” the politicization of the department for the benefit of all Americans. They walked off the stage to the same song (Darius Rucker’s cover of “Wagon Wheel”).

It can be hard to remember what made Mr. Trump distinct eight years ago, because, sadly, it has become the texture of our lives. The 1980s tabloid dimension of his language — weeping mothers, blood and carnage, rot and disease in institutions, brutal action — crushed the antiseptic piety and euphemisms of the post-Bush Republican Party. The lurid, fallen vision of American life that implicitly casts critics as naïve chumps or in on the corruption is the one we still occupy.

Now they all sound kind of like that. Politicians’ impulse to shorthand and flatten major policies and controversies is eternal, but it’s not just that they use similar words. The way these politicians talk takes the old, once-novel Trump themes, aggressive energy and promises and packages them into indoctrination and the administrative state.

At the event in July where Mr. (dis...) DeSantis sounded so like Mr. Scott did the evening before, he was midway through a period that the campaign had signaled would be a reset. At first, speaking to a midday crowd in Iowa, Mr. (dis...) DeSantis ventured onto different ground, talking about economic concerns, the cost of things, debt. But he ended up talking about woke ideology, the administrative state, Disney and all the rest. 

If you spend a few days in New Hampshire, seeing Mr. Ramaswamy here and Mr. (dis...) DeSantis there, or the full field at something like Iowa’s Lincoln Dinner, you can imagine nearly the entire Republican presidential field, hands joined, heads turning at once and saying with one voice, “End the weaponization of the Justice Department.”

This dynamic might be on display in its purest form on the subject of voting and elections, in the way what Mr. Trump cares about flows through the base and becomes the starting premise of what the other candidates talk about. Mr. (dis...) DeSantis runs a state with well-regarded early voting and ballot-counting practices — one where Mr. Trump won twice, along with a bunch of down-ballot Republicans. He transformed widespread voter fraud, an (illusory) concern of Mr. Trump’s, into a unit that would address (rare) instances of voter fraud and arrested a handful of people, some of whom have said they had no reason to believe they couldn’t vote, to prove the point that he takes Mr. Trump’s fake concerns seriously.

Practically every candidacy right now is about Mr. Trump: The protest candidates exist to oppose Mr. Trump; the alternatives basically seem constructed in the negative (Trump but nice, Trump but we’ve got to win the suburbs again, Trump but competent) and grown inside the Trump concerns lab. Here and there, the candidates talk about health care, education costs, the economic changes with artificial intelligence or anything that might be kitchen table — things that exist beyond Mr. Trump’s reach — but it’s amazing how little some of this stuff is emphasized beyond inflation and energy costs.

During the August debate, the Fox (aka "Fake") News moderators put something Nikki Haley said — that trans kids playing girls’ sports is “the women’s issue of our time” — to a few candidates. When they asked Ms. Haley, she barely registered her own line and led with, in what seems to be her real voice: “There’s a lot of crazy, woke things happening in schools, but we’ve got to get these kids reading. If a child can’t read by third grade, they’re four times less likely to graduate high school.” She can oscillate a bit, in and out of past and present iterations of the G.O.P., but as David Weigel wrote this spring, she accepts the premise of the Trump era: “I am very aware of a deep state,” she told a voter who asked about her plans to dismantle it this spring. “It’s not just in D.C.; it’s in every one of our states.”

And none of them are winning! It might be the indictments that have firmed up Mr. Trump’s support, but the inescapable sameness of the candidates, especially when they should sound and seem different, is real.

The idea some conservatives had for Mr. (dis...) DeSantis — including Mr. (dis...) DeSantis — was that he would be a singular figure, uniting the people attracted to the statist aggression of Mr. Trump and the people looking to move beyond Mr. Trump. Fundamentally, this depended on the idea that Mr. (dis...) DeSantis is distinct from Mr. Trump, which seems like a misunderstanding. His appeal for certain kinds of conservatives, particularly donors, depended then on a subtle trust that he would not go too far and could shift into some other plane of political operation.

But they were never distinct figures; Mr. (dis...) DeSantis’s rise in the party as a competent aggressor exists because of the Trump era and the things that Mr. Trump is and isn’t. He makes happen what Mr. Trump talks about. And, like all the others who have defined themselves by being an alternative to an individual who is still always present, he has ended up talking about the same things and sounding the same as most of the others. Mr. Trump created the air that everyone now breathes.

Let me get this right? Ron "daahh" Santis is running for president against his own state constituent? WWWTP?

Echo opinion letter published in the Orlando Sentinel newspaper:

(Maine Writer- What is it about the lunacy of running a campaign against your own constituent, who is the former guy, that the D. "daahh" Santis campaign does not get?) 

Seems to me like the "Governor DeSanctimonious" needs to rethink his failing campaign strategy.

D. Santis or "daahh❗-Santis"? Loose cannons hurtling through Florida

Ponce de Leon’s Spanish sailors first docked in “La Florida” in 1513, at a place later named St. Augustine. 

Those sailors were always fearful that one of their ship’s cannons would break loose from its moorings and cause havoc as it careened wildly about the ship’s deck. The term “loose cannon” slowly transitioned into describing people who create havoc. Over 500 years later de Leon’s sailors’ fear came true, as “loose cannon” Ron DeSantis (aka, daaah-Santis) became governor of Florida, partially due to the support of another “loose cannon” named Donald Trump.

So, now Florida has two loose cannons careening wildly around Florida firing verbal fusillades at each other, not caring about the collateral damage they are causing. 

Both of these loose cannons need to be jettisoned overboard before they completely destroy democracy in America.

Trump Goes Scorched Earth On DeSantis With Freaky Hitler/Satan Post (Huffington Post).  "I’m gonna kick your ass very soon," mocked the former guy.

I wonder if our Florida governor even realizes that slavery was introduced into Florida in 1539, courtesy of Hernando DeSoto, almost 100 years before Jamestown, Virginia. 

History at times is sad and despicable, but it shouldn’t be whitewashed as DeSantis would like.

From James Stuart Emery in Valrico, Florida

WWWTP?

Republican alert! Attacking abortion rights is a loosing issue and L.G.B.T.Q. is not an alternative

 Ron DeSantis Doesn’t Know Whether He’s Coming or Going

By Gail Collins and Bret Stephens Ms. Collins and Mr. Stephens are Opinion columnists. They converse every week. An echo opinion published in The New York Times:

Gail Collins: Bret, about Ron DeSantis. Last week, I criticized him for weenie stuff like big book advances and questionable road repair materials. At the time, I definitely felt like I was carping.

Then his people shared an ad on L.G.B.T.Q. issues that … wow.

Bret Stephens: “Wow” just about covers it.

Gail: It began with a clip of Donald Trump defending gay rights in days of yore, which was very clearly supposed to make viewers … hate Trump. 

Followed by praise for Florida laws DeSantis signed that “literally threaten trans existence.” Followed by a super-duper weird montage showing men flexing muscles, Brad Pitt in Trojan-warrior garb and Governor Ron with lightning flashes coming out of his eyes.

Pete Buttigieg, who is President Biden’s secretary of transportation and one of the best-known gay figures in politics, rightly pointed out “the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you in between oiled-up, shirtless bodybuilders.”

Any thoughts?

Bret: I guess my main takeaway is that DeSantis isn’t going to be the next president. He makes Trump seem tolerant, Ted Cruz seem likable, Mitch McConnell seem moderate, Lauren Boebert seem mature and Rick Santorum seem cool. Not what I would have expected out of the Florida governor six months ago, but here’s where I confess: You were right about him, and I was wrong.

Gail: My other takeaway is that Republicans are focusing more on L.G.B.T.Q. issues now that they’ve come to understand that attacking abortion isn’t a national winner — or even a state winner in most places.

In the long run, stomping on gay rights isn’t going to do it either, because such a huge number of people — even conservative Republicans — have friends, family, colleagues who are gay. May take a while to come to grips with that, but once you realize someone you care about is gay, the idea of persecuting them presumably seems way less attractive.

Just recalling how my conservative Catholic mother wound up, in old age, riding on a float in Cincinnati’s Gay Pride parade …

Bret: As you mentioned last year in that wonderful column you wrote about Allen Ginsberg.

Gay bashing is morally intolerable as well as politically inept. But a lot of people — including many Democrats and independents — have honest and serious concerns about some aspects of the trans issue, especially as it concerns the integrity of women’s sports, the morality of drastic medical interventions in teenagers and the anti-scientific denial of basic biology when it comes to questions of sex.

I also detest terms like “bodies with vaginas” as a substitute for “women.” It isn’t a sensitive or inclusive use of language; it’s misogynistic (😡) and Orwellian.

DeSantis could have addressed these issues in a sober and nuanced way. Instead, he went full Trojan, and I suspect his campaign will meet a similar fate to Troy’s.

Gail: Full Trojan? Just like Brad Pitt in that ad!

  Ron DeSantis’ Bizarre New Video

1-minute-and-13-second video hyping the Florida governor’s hardline opposition to LGBTQ rights.

But wait, there's more:

Bret: So, switching topics, Gail, can we talk about homelessness?

The problem just keeps getting worse, particularly out west, and it’s doing real damage to urban life. Your thoughts on what does and does not work?

Gail: What works is pretty simple: more housing and outreach for the mentally ill. Both are difficult, of course, ranging from pretty darned to stupendously.

Bret: What also works are ordinances forbidding “camping” on public lands so that homeless people are required to use shelter beds, which some liberal judges have blocked cities from doing. One of the problems of our public discussion of the issue is that we treat homelessness as a problem of the homeless only. It’s also a public safety issue and a quality-of-life issue. People ought to have a right to walk down urban sidewalks that haven’t been turned into tent cities and open-air toilets.

Gail: New York is still dealing with a flood of new migrants, mainly from Latin America, who have been coming in huge numbers for more than a year. Most of them are ambitious and hopeful, and they could be a great shot to our local economy — if they had permanent places to stay.

Bret: Completely agree. I also think the migrant problem is qualitatively different from the kind of homelessness issues that cities like San Francisco or Portland, Ore., are experiencing. Migrants are struggling with poverty but not, generally, mental health or drug-dependency issues. What migrants typically need is a room and a job.

Gail: Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, has talked about finding some of them homes in the suburbs, where there’s obviously more room and housing prices are sometimes a lot lower. Said suburbs rose up in rage to stop an incursion of needy people. It’s so irritating, although I have to admit that my liberal Manhattan neighborhood — which has plenty of programs for the homeless — consistently rebels against talk of any big new housing projects for any income group.

Your turn …

Bret: I’m skeptical of the theory that we could solve the crisis just by building a lot more housing. First, because we can’t build quickly and cheaply enough to keep up with the growing number of homeless people. Second, because even when the homeless are housed, they often fall back into the kinds of behaviors that ultimately lead them to return to the streets.

My own view is that people living on the street should be required to go into shelters, which can be built much more quickly and cheaply than regular housing, be required to get mental health screenings, and be required to be treated if they have drug or alcohol dependencies.

Gail: Well, if the mental health treatments were great, that might be an argument. But they often aren’t — just because there’s a terrific shortage of personnel.

And the shelters are no picnic either. A lot of the people you see on the street have been, at one time or another, threatened by a mentally troubled co-resident, gotten into a fight as a result of shared emotional problems or in some other way come to feel that living on the street is safer.

Bret: The other big story from last week, Gail, is the ruling by a federal judge that forbade the Biden administration to work with social media companies to remove content it didn’t like, mainly connected to alleged Covid misinformation. What the administration was doing seems to me like a serious infringement on people’s freedom of speech, but I’d like to know your view.

Gail: Gee, I was under the impression one of the jobs of the executive branch was to make sure people were getting the right information about health issues. And it’s not as if the Biden folks marched in and removed a bunch of posts themselves. 

Conferring with the social media companies seems like something they ought to do.

Bret: One good way of thinking about the issue is putting the shoe on the other foot. For instance, we now know that the Steele dossier was malicious partisan misinformation, secretly and illicitly paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, and that some of its most salacious allegations, like the pee-tape stuff, were false. How would you react if you had learned that the Trump administration had been putting heavy pressure on executives at MSNBC to forbid Rachel Maddow from ever mentioning it back when she had her show?

Gail: Hey, it’s hot and humid outside. No fair trying to take me down the Hillary Clinton road. Look — the whole world changed with the advent of social media. If you’ve got influencers with millions of followers warning that, say, giving milk to babies is dangerous, you’ve got to do something more than issue a press release.

Bret: I’m pretty sure we could get the word out that milk is generally fine for babies or vaccines are generally safe, without setting a precedent that the federal government can work with Big Tech to censor individual speech.

Gail: Of course I agree with you about freedom of expression. But in the process of protecting it, it’s natural to argue about specific cases with particular details. We will pursue this again soon. Well, forever probably.

But let me be boring for a second and ask you about Congress. Just got through that deficit crisis, and another one will be coming around the bend this summer. What’s your long-term advice? Spend less? Tax more? Ignore the whole thing and figure it’ll work out somehow like it always does?

Bret: My advice: Talk less, smile more. Seriously, what we need from Congress and the president is to get through the next 18 months without another manufactured domestic crisis. 

Between the war in Ukraine, Iran’s creeping nuclearization and China’s saber-rattling over Taiwan, we have more than enough to worry about abroad.

Gail: Hmm. One writer’s manufactured domestic crisis is maybe another’s reasonable disagreement. And while Congress isn’t always fascinating, it’s at the top of the critical-if-possibly-boring ladder.

Bret: Before we go, Gail, I have to put in a word for Penelope Green’s funny, fabulous obituary in The Times of Sue Johanson, a Canadian sex educator who died last month at 92. It has the single most memorable paragraph to appear in the paper for at least a month, if not a year. I have to quote it in full:

Is it weird to put body glitter on your boyfriend’s testicles? Is it safe to have sex in a hot tub? Could a Ziploc baggie serve as a condom? If condoms are left in a car and they freeze, are they still good? Answers: No. No (chlorinated water is too harsh for genitals, particularly women’s). Definitely not. And yes, once they’ve been defrosted.

I mean, after that, what else is there to say?

Fascists are morphed Populists

Confronting the Roots of American-Style Fascism in One Family's History by Julie Carr, a poet and Professor of English at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and the author of Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West, which will be published in May by University of Nebraska Press.

Omer Madison Kem (standing) with his family and their sod house, Nebraska 1886.

These days, not many people talks about the populists. In the age of Ron DeSantis and MTG (Ugh! Marjorie Taylor Greene!)  we’re more likely to see the MAGA crowd, or at least some of their leaders, referred to as fascists. 

But back in 2016, Trump’s followers were routinely described as populists, though hardly anyone seemed sure of what that meant. Because, my great-grandfather, Omer Madison Kem, was a founding member of the original Populist Party, formed in the 1890s from the Famers’ Alliance in the South and West in protest against the vast abuses and inequalities of the Gilded Age, I thought I did know something about it. 

For example, I knew that the Populists had fought against political corruption and capitalist greed and for the rights of workers, farmers, and the poor.

When way back in 1892, Omer Kem and ten other Populists entered Congress as Senators and Representatives, mostly from the Plains states, they took radical and pro-worker positions in debates surrounding tariffs, taxes, and the rights of the poor. 

Over a period of 60 years, the state forcibly sterilized over 2,600 Oregonians. From 1923 to 1983, Oregon law allowed for compulsory sterilization of those deemed unfit for reproduction.

During the 1892, legislative session Kem and the other Populists called for the forfeiture of railroad land grants, an eight-hour workday law, and the nationalization of transportation and finance. 

After Pinkerton agents killed at least seven strikers during the Homestead Strike that July, 1892, Kem supported a resolution to investigate the corporate use of violent strikebreakers. 

Kem advocated for direct election of U.S. Senators (rather than election by state legislatures), demanded safeguards against land speculation in the West, so that “men of very meager means” could have the “privilege of making for [him]self and [his] family a home,” and in 1894, while the country faced a devastating depression, Kem argued passionately for a graduated income tax so that the rich would be compelled to support the needs of the vulnerable.

At a time when 9 percent of American families owned 71 percent of the country’s wealth, when the average industrial worker lived on $406 a year, and when striking workers were routinely beaten and shot at by hired thugs, the Populists had actively and energetically sought justice for the working poor. 

As Black Kansas Populist Benjamin F. Foster wrote, the Populists “are in favor of the masses and against monopolies. It is the party of the poor man ... and would give him a chance to live and heal his present misery.”

And yet, just less than a decade after his time in Congress, my great-grandfather became a passionate advocate for eugenics, including the forced sterilization of people he considered “unfit to breed.” In the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s, he eagerly trafficked in the scientific racism that has long influenced U.S. immigration, and criminal justice policies, and both European and American fascism, to this day.

What is the connection between the Populist cry for equality (“equal rights for all, special privileges for none!” was their slogan) and the turn toward a proto-fascist belief that some people are worthy of life and reproduction and others not? 

From 1896's, An Illustrated Congressional Manual: The United States Red Book.  Omer Kem (b. November 15, 1855 in Hagerstown, Indiana; d. February 13, 1942 in Cottage Grove, Oregon.)

Was it simply that Omer Kem, along with much of the country, got caught up in the pseudo-science of the day (social Darwinism mixed with Mendelian genetics)? Or was there something deeper in Kem’s Populist roots that would lead him in 1926, to write a letter to the Oregonian in which he advocated (as he had many times in letters to family, friends, and other papers) for the forced sterilization of the poor, and then a decade later to go even further with a quasi-endorsement of infanticide? ❗

That letter to the Oregonian earned Kem an admiring response from a man named Mr. Schuman, a member of a Portland (Oregon) -based fascist organization, the Nordic Aryan League of America ❗, who addresses Omer “with Aryan greetings.” Kem finds the writer a little batty but does not hesitate to respond, noting that he and his interlocutor are in general agreement about the value of the “Great White Race” (with this phrase my great-grandfather makes me wonder if he’d been reading Madison Grant). 

“The time will come,” he writes, “when so-called white couples marry, they will not know whether their children will be black, white, ringed, streaked, striped, bronzed, or spotted. The only way now left by which this calamity can be averted, is to sterilize all participants in these mixed marriages.”

In a recent talk sponsored by the April Institute for Antifascist Research and Education, Cynthia Miller-Idriss spoke about the factors that can lead someone to become radicalized by White Nationalism or Fascism. 

Citing dates drawn from the biographies of participants in the January 6th, insurrection, Miller-Idriss notes that those who are vulnerable to fascistic thinking (though she does not use that term) tend to be people who, having experienced precariousness, fear losing what power they do have (even if they are currently perfectly well-off): “I call it a kind of precariousness plus entitlement,” she says, “because in order to be afraid of something being taken away from you, you have to think you’re entitled to have it.”

Indeed, this quality defines my great-grandfather and many of the white agrarian Populists from plains states, the vast majority of whom had found their way to Kansas or Nebraska by way of the Homestead Act. 

As poor laborers from mostly the Midwest, they’d been promised the privilege and security of property, but for many it had not turned out that way. Unregulated railroads, falling crop prices, terrible weather conditions, and an aggressive lending industry meant that in 1890s, Nebraska there was one mortgage for every three persons—thus, more than one per family—and most of the farms were mortgaged for all they were worth. It was in these conditions that the Populist party arose; white men, having been promised security at the expense of Native populations deemed unworthy or worse, found themselves nevertheless buried in unpayable debt.

The internal contradiction—between a desired and assumed independence and an actual, though decried, dependence—can be readily seen in the (familiar to us) phrase Kem used to describe his feelings upon first acquiring his homestead: “I had passed my 26th birthday somewhere on the way, acquired 320 acres of fine land and you may rest assured that I was one proud boy.”

Plains Populism arose out of a condition in which the white settler-farmer was deeply insecure in his relation to the land, which was nonetheless the foundation of his identity (and his survival). In this context, it made a kind of perverse and dangerous sense that some settler-homesteaders like Kem would seek to relocate the source of their legitimacy from where they lived and what they did to who they thought they were, that is, from the land to the blood. 

When, in September of 2020, Donald Trump told a crowd of white supporters that they hailed from “good genes,” and referenced “the racehorse theory,” he was offering a clue to where the GOP would go next. One root to this frankly fascistic rhetoric lies in the soil of Kansas and Nebraska, in the settler-history of families, like mine.

When election losers make bigger headlines than the winners!

November's nick name of the month:

Meet Ron DeSanctimonious

The Republicans’ Post-Midterm Reckoning with Donald Trump

Will the era of Stop the Steal—and the G.O.P.’s overt challenges to democracy—finally start to recede?

November 13, 2022 Echo essay published in The New Yorker, by Benjamin Wallace-Wells. 

Savvy sportswriters know that the dramas are often richer in the losing team’s locker room, but, no matter how crushing the defeat, the shortstop does not usually try to assault the second baseman. One cannot say the same about the post-midterm atmosphere among Republicans. Within hours of the G.O.P.’s dismal failure to produce a “red wave,” the knives were out for the Party’s presumed leader. “Republicans have followed Donald Trump off the side of a cliff,” David Urban, one of the ex-President’s former advisers, told the Times. On Twitter, Jacqui Heinrich, a White House correspondent for Fox News, quoted a Republican source as saying, “If it wasn’t clear before it should be now. We have a Trump problem.”

The specific gripe that these Republicans have with Trump is not of a moral or a legal nature. The problem, in their eyes, is that Trump effectively handpicked the candidates who underperformed in some of the country’s most crucial races. Many of these duds had won Trump’s favor for only one reason: fealty to a lie. As Chris Christie put it, “The only animating factor [for Trump] in determining an endorsement is ‘Do you believe the 2020 election was stolen or don’t you?’ ” This loyalty test led Trump to back a huckster doctor (Mehmet Oz, in Pennsylvania); a foggy ex-football star who supported a nationwide ban on abortion yet allegedly pushed former paramours to have the procedure (Herschel Walker, in Georgia); and a young venture capitalist who proved susceptible to dorm-room musings about the wisdom of the Unabomber (Blake Masters, in Arizona). On the morning after the election, Trump reportedly lashed out at people in his circle who he says advised him to back the likes of Oz—including his wife, Melania. What a guy.

Democrats have been through enough of these cycles to be a little jaded. Republicans are forever stomping around, insisting that they’ve had enough of Trump’s excesses, only to get over it and once again line up behind him. Why should this time be any different? The best reason to think that it will—really, the only reason—is that now there is an alternative. “defuture” was the enormous headline on the front page of Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post on Wednesday. It ran, of course, with a photograph of a smiling Ron DeSantis, the resoundingly reëlected governor of Florida. If that headline was too subtle, the Post followed it the next day with a front-page cartoon of Trump teetering on the top of a wall: “trumpty dumpty.” From Fox News to Trumpworld itself, the loyalists were fleeing. As the results came in on CBS, Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s former chief of staff, said, “DeSantis wins tonight and Trump is not doing very well.”

The postmortems are still accumulating, but they already suggest a pattern. The Republicans had no trouble turning out their base. Their struggle was in winning over the independent voters who customarily reject the party in power. And this time around the G.O.P. had enormous advantages, from the high rate of inflation to the low popularity ratings of the sitting President. According to Nate Cohn, of the Times, Republican candidates fared poorly in places where abortion rights were on the ballot, and in places where the Party’s candidates had backed Trump’s challenges to the election. (Democrats also made much of Republican plans to weaken Medicare and Social Security.)

It was evident, the electoral problem was simple: the Republicans were too extreme, and not just on one issue.

DeSantis’s ascent on the national scene is a reflection of his political success in Florida: having won the 2018, governor’s race by some thirty-three thousand votes, he was reëlected on Tuesday by a margin of more than a million, turning a state nearly as populous as Australia from purple to convincingly red. He made significant gains among Hispanic voters and, perhaps most alarmingly for Democrats, won Miami-Dade County, traditionally a Democratic stronghold. But it’s hard to see what solution he would offer to the extremism problem. DeSantis, like the ex-President, is a steadfast culture warrior—and he shares Trump’s willingness to use cruelty as a political weapon. It was DeSantis, after all, who tricked migrants in Texas into boarding a plane and being sent off to Martha’s Vineyard. The seeming shift in enthusiasm from the former President to DeSantis suggests that many Republicans intend to replace one cult of personality with another, to move away from Trump, and his particular fixations, without altering the nature of Trumpism.

That is a cynical kind of choice.

But in one important way it might also signal some small progress. The glimmer of hope in this election lies in the scattered indications that the era of Stop the Steal, and the Republican Party’s overt challenges to democracy, may be receding. 

Quietly, even the most ostentatious election deniers who lost on Tuesday promptly conceded defeat. DeSantis doesn’t much differ from Trump politically, but he has declined to say that the 2020, election was stolen.

You can trace the effects of the midterms on Presidential politics by observing who is acting relaxed and who is anxious. At a press conference on Wednesday, Joe Biden, who turns eighty this month, was positively ebullient. DeSantis merely basked in what he called “a win for the ages.” Trump, on the other hand, exhibited a frenzied urgency. Republican officials, including Kevin McCarthy, who seems likely to become the next Speaker of the House, had reportedly talked Trump out of declaring a 2024, Presidential bid on the night before the midterms. Instead, Trump announced an announcement: a major speech that he says he’ll make at Mar-a-Lago on November 15th. Later in the week, as Hurricane Nicole threatened Palm Beach County, Trump wrote a post on Truth Social, the platform he founded after he was banned from Twitter, sniping at the Murdoch-owned outlets that seemed to be “all in for Governor Ron DeSanctimonious, an average REPUBLICAN Governor with great Public Relations.”

That DeSantis has become a Trump fixation makes sense. One political truism holds that, at any given time, only two people in politics really matter: the President, and whomever the President is arguing with. For more than half a decade, Trump has been one of those two people. Now he has a challenger. ♦

Published in the print edition of the November 21, 2022, issue, with the headline “Fall Guy.”