Trump’s polling collapse puts Ohio back on the map

Once upon a time, Ohio was the ultimate swing state. President Barack Obama won it as recently as 2012! But then, non-college whites turned sharply in favor of bunker-hiding Donald Trump, and Ohio was both (82% non-Hispanic white, and ranked 35th in college graduates). Trump won it easily by over 8 points.

So Ohio wasn’t included in the early tally of 2020 battleground states. Early polling wasn’t encouraging for Democrats, and there were seven other states that would clearly decide the November contest: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

But, you can now officially add Ohio to that list.

As I wrote in my last story, we’re seeing clear correlation between Trump’s personal ratings, and his head-to-head matchups. In other words, whatever his favorability rating is, that’s what he’s pretty much getting against presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden. Here are the four last Civiqs state polls:

STATE TRUMP FAVORABLES TRUMP vs. BIDEN GEORGIAKANSASNORTH CAROLINASOUTH CAROLINA
47-51 47-48
51-47 52-40
45-53 46-49
51-47 52-42

Also, in the last story, I wrote about Trump’s overall collapse in his personal approval ratings. Well, Ohio has had a more exaggerated collapse compared to the country at large. 

During impeachment, Trump had a +4 favorability rating in Ohio, or 51-47. That’s important because it meant he was likely over 50% in head-to-heads against Biden. We were right to keep the state off the battleground map. 

However, those approvals have dropped a net total of 12 points, to an anemic 45-53. So what other states have approval ratings in that -8 range? 

APPROVALS NET APPROVAL Iowa Florida Ohio Georgia North Carolina Wisconsin Pennsylvania MICHIGAN Arizona
45-52 -7
45-52 -7
45-53 -8
44-53 -9
43-54 -11
43-54 -11
42-54 -12
42-56 -14
40-57 -17

We know Florida is tied because not only the polling says so, but, you know, it’s Florida. (Actually, the polling gives Biden a small lead in Florida, but it’s Florida. So it’s tied.) 

Trump’s ratings in Ohio are a hint worse. Trump’s Ohio ratings are still better than they are in Georgia and North Carolina, two states we know that he is narrowly losing. But they’re all in the same range, with Trump getting roughly 45-46% of the Trump versus Biden vote. He’s slipped away from that 50% mark. The state is in play. And it makes that Fox News poll last week showing Biden leading in Ohio 45-43 make plenty of sense. 

Now Ohio won’t be deciding this election. If Biden wins the state, it’s because he already won the other seven battlegrounds. There is no scenario imaginable in which Ohio casts any deciding Electoral College votes. (Iowa and Texas are in a similar situation, as well as Minnesota and Nevada for Trump. If he wins those last two states, he’s already won the election.) 

What it means is that a panicking Trump campaign is already spending money trying to shore up the state. 

Over the past few weeks, the president’s operation has spent about $1.7 million on advertising in just three states he carried in 2016 — Ohio, Iowa and Arizona — that it had hoped would not be competitive at all this year. Much of that sum went to a concentrated two-week barrage in Ohio [...]

As I wrote last week, this spending is proof that Trump’s campaign is either being driven by Trump’s whims—he likely hates the idea that he’s losing Ohio, or his campaign manager Brad Parscale is utterly incompetent. Again, if they lose Ohio, they already lost the election, so why waste money there when Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin have all fallen seemingly out of reach?

(To spare you the math, picking up just those four states—Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin is a 289-249 Biden victory. Including North Carolina, which also has a Trump double-digit approval deficit, makes it 304-234 Biden.)

But whatever the motivation to piss away millions in Ohio, it again proves that the state is in serious play. And that is, quite simply, remarkable. There’s nothing about the state that suggests it should be competitive. It seemed headed into Missouri territory—a once competitive state relegated by demographics to solid red status. And yet, here we are. 

Ohio, welcome back to swing-state status!

Cheers and Jeers: Monday

Thumbs Up

This month would've marked film critic Roger Ebert's 78th birthday. As it happens, over the weekend I bumped into an essay on race he wrote ten years ago last Saturday. This was after he'd lost his voice, a period during he which he wrote some of his strongest and most personal essays.

The spark that drove lifelong liberal Ebert (who grew up before the "Whites Only" signs had come down) to write How Do They Get To Be That Way? was an incident in Prescott, Arizona where local artists were ordered to lighten the skin of the kids in a school wall mural because the darker skin hurt the racists' feelings and they kept driving by and shouting racial slurs. The essay says nothing about the police, and yet it kinda says a lot about them and their Trump cultist supporters (Hi, Bill Barr) as we find ourselves in our current predicament. There's a snippet below the fold, but as the saying goes, every word is worth re-reading. 

Continued…

[W]hat about the people in those cars? … They don't think of the feelings of the kids on the mural. They don't like those kids in the school. It's not as if they have reasons. They simply hate. Why would they do that? What have they shut down inside? Why do they resent the rights of others? Our rights must come first before our fears. And our rights are their rights, whoever "they" are.

Not along ago I read this observation by Clint Eastwood: "The less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice."  Do the drive-by haters feel insecure?  How are they threatened?  What have they talked themselves into?  Who benefits by feeding off their fear?  We have a black man in the White House, and I suspect they don't like that very much.  They don't want to accept the reality that other races live here right along with them, and are doing just fine and making a contribution and the same sun rises and sets on us all.  Do they fear their own adequacy?  Do they grasp for assurance that they're "better"—which means, not worse?  Those poor people.  It must be agony to live with such hate, and to seek the company of others so damaged.

I miss Roger.

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Cheers and Jeers for Monday, June 8, 2020

Note:  June is Inspect Your Bunker Month. If you don’t have an up-to-date inspection sticker on your top hatch (not mid-hatch or bottom hatch), you could be fined up to $250. A friendly reminder from your friends at…well, we could tell you but then we'd have to kill you.  Just inspect the bunker and we'll avoid any unpleasantness, okay? Okay.  —Mgt.

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By the Numbers:

82 days ‘til the March for Justice, coinciding with the anniversary of King’s “I have a dream” speech.

Days 'til the March on Washington to protest racism and policed brutality: 82

Trump's current approval rating among Catholics, according to PRRI polling, down from 60% in March: 37%

Percent of Americans polled by CBS News who are satisfied with the way Trump has dealt with the response to George Floyd's death in Minneapolis: 31%

Percent in the same poll who believe things in America are moving in the right direction: 28%

Actual likely U.S. unemployment rate, versus the “official” 13.3% rate due to an error in data collection, according to CNBC: 16%

Portion of the 2.5 million job gains in May that came from the restaurant and dentistry sectors: 2/3

Current matchup numbers for Mark Kelly (D) and Martha McSally (Moscow) in the U.S. Senate race in Arizona, according to Fox News polling: 50%-37%

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Puppy Pic of the Day: Monday…

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CHEERS to a busy, angry, peaceful, Trump-scorching weekend. If you're just coming off the mushrooms you dropped Friday night, here's some of what you missed:

  Huge and peaceful protests continued across the country and around the world (a slave trader went “toodles” in Bristol), notably at the Golden Gate Bridge (which now whistles), Philadelphia, and D.C., where "DEFUND THE POLICE" was added to "BLACK LIVES MATTER" on a street leading to the White House.

♡  New York City lifted its curfew a day early. Seattle’s mayor banned the use of pepper spray.

Please update your Rolodexes accordingly.

  Minneapolis's mayor was booed out of a protest because he wouldn’t commit to abolishing the police department in its current form and rebuild it from scratch. The city council plans to do it anyway.

  A second memorial service was held for George Floyd in Raeford, North Carolina. His funeral and burial in his hometown of Houston will happen tomorrow.

  Two Buffalo police officers were charged with assault for knocking down that 75-year-old protester and letting him lie there bleeding out of his ears.

  That bicyclist who assaulted a kid and two adults for putting up messages of peace along a fence in Maryland has been identified and charged with, 2nd-degree assault, and you'll never guess what!  He's awful sorry.*

(*…that he got caught.)

And with news that George W. Bush is on board the Biden Train, that means all of our living former presidents—who know firsthand what a pressure-cooker the job is and will typically defend one another through thick and thin—are planning to hoist their middle finger to Donald Trump in November. And also the ghosts of 35 of the 40 dead ones, according to my forthcoming book, Well That Was Weird.

CHEERS to the next president of the United States. He did it, folks. Friday night Uncle Joe crossed the finish line:

Joe Biden formally clinched the Democratic presidential nomination Friday, setting him up for a bruising challenge to President Donald Trump that will play out against the unprecedented backdrop of a pandemic, economic collapse and civil unrest. […]

Biden doing two things Trump never will: wearing a mask, and listening to black people. (Or anyone.)

Biden now has 1,993 delegates, with contests still to come in eight states and three U.S. territories.

Under normal conditions, I'd be holding my breath waiting for the media to seize on his every innocent gaffe as if it was the end of our republic. But then I remember that the guy he's planning to dislodge in November is actually trying to end our republic.  So now it would seem that Joe's the one who could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and still get elected. Strange times.

P.S. Remember the smear campaign against Joe's son Hunter that led to the president's impeachment for extorting favors from Ukraine to help swing the 2020 election? Ukraine investigators have cleared Hunter of any wrongdoing. What else ya got, Rudy?

CHEERS to hot Joe-on-Joe action. 66 years ago this week, during the Army-McCarthy hearings, attorney Joseph Welch quietly destroyed bedraggled, belligerent Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy (and his little brat lawyer Roy Cohn, who would later clutch Trump’s ankles for money) with the immortal words: "Have you no sense of decency,sir, at long last?  Have you left no sense of decency?"

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Within a couple years McCarthy was dead of alcoholism, and today his grave is guarded by a giant emaciated demon vulture.  Birds of a feather.

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BRIEF SANITY BREAK

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This dude trolling the police with Star Wars - Imperial March is exactly the Twitter content I am here for today...pic.twitter.com/zh5R7zm70c

� Rex Chapman�� (@RexChapman) June 5, 2020

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END BRIEF SANITY BREAK

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JEERS to keeping count. Along with the millions who took to the streets over the weekend, the Covid-19 pandemic marched not-so-merrily along, and our macabre Monday tradition of maintaining a benchmark of the awfulness for the C&J historical record continues. Let’s check the most depressing tote board in the world with all due reluctance:

9 weeks ago: 288,000 confirmed cases, 7,000 deaths.

5 weeks Ago: 987,000 confirmed cases, 55,000 deaths.

1 week ago: 1.8 million confirmed cases, 106,000 deaths

This morning: 2 million confirmed cases, 112,000 deaths

On Friday the president, who’s getting terrible marks for dealing with the pandemic, visited a swab factory here in Maine. Afterwards they had to throw out all the swabs. Not because they were worried people would catch the coronavirus from them. They were worried people would catch the Trump from them.

CHEERS to great moments in dust busting.  Ives McGaffey of Chicago patented the first mechanical ("whirlwind") vacuum cleaner on this date in 1869.  It was a crude device—the butler sucked on a hose.

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Ten years ago in C&J: June 8, 2010

JEERS to putting the past behind us.  So, uh...you remember that itty-bitty li'l bump-in-the-road in Bhopal, India, during which over 2,000 people died instantly in 1984 when Union Carbide spilled a chemical that I believe was called Killitol?  It was in all the papers for awhile, but then it disappeared.  Well, it looks like justice has finally been served 25 years after the fact.  Seven former Union Carbide executives will be spending the rest of their lives behind bars (assuming they only have 2 years left to live), and be forced to pay a fine of one gazillion dollars (assuming that by "gazillion" you mean "2 thousand").  Case closed nothing to see here please move along.

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And just one more…

JEERS to stupid God tricks. Over the weekend, while you were sleeping, an asteroid the size of the Empire State Building plowed into Earth (no need to click on the link, you can trust me) instantly turning soil, water and our magma core to dust, but not before all carbon-based life forms were transmogrified into glitter. (Figure that one out, Einstein.)

Awww...it has Stephen Miller’s eyes. And misshapen head.

Suspecting this was going to happen, the Good Lord hired Microsoft to store a backup "Blue Marble" in the Cloud—updated in real time—that could instantaneously replace the old one if necessary. So as you rise and shine and wipe the sleepies out of your eyes, take a moment to realize that you're a perfect copy—thoughts, feelings, aches, pains, and everything else—of who you were just before the meteor did its dirty work. There’s one minor exception: thanks to inept Gary in Coding Bay J-7: you now have a new tentacle. Keep an eye on your email—they're working on a patch.

Have a tolerable Monday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?

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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial

“What Bill in Portland Maine needs—what we parents say when we are dealing with an intractable child, he needs a time-out.”

George Will

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How Did The Left Lose Their Minds ‘Collectively And Individually’ To The Degree They Have?

I used to think they were employing hyperbole and grasping at any straw at the beginning (2016-17). Still, the past couple of years, they’ve lost all connection to not only reality but also goodness, virtue, and our bedrock American values. They will get what they want, good and hard, and none will have ever deserved it more.

Skin color shouldn’t matter at this time in our country, but there are those (Democrats, Socialists, Communists, Anarchists) who will not let it be a non-issue.

RIGHT IS WRONG, AND UP IS DOWN

Sadly, we live in a time where the unthinkable has become tolerable, where the tolerable has become acceptable, where the acceptable has become legal. We now live in a time where the legally acceptable, barely tolerable, and in some cases, outright unthinkable has become praised. And, in some cases, it has even become mandatory to accept the unthinkable.

MORE NEWS: Disgraced Ex-FBI Lawyer Lisa Page Lands Job With MSNBC

The Left’s plan all along has been to destroy our society to turn us into a socialist country for the New World Order. The right’s boogeyman George Soros is extremely vetted in the globalist cause and goes unscathed as he and others destroy lives, homes, businesses, and communities.

If these foolish politicians accept the demands from ANTIFA and Black Lives Matter (BLM) about police, then they will have taken away any obstacle in my way of shooting you when you make the mistake of aggravating me or trying to hurt my family. If you accept these fool’s terms, then they will have no choice but to accept mine and tens of millions like me. With foolish actions goes serious and profound re-actions that will not end up well for the participants like BLM and ANTIFA.

IT’S ALL A CULT, ALL THAT’S MISSING IS THE KOOL-AID

Leftist ideology and indoctrination programmed children for decades in public school systems. That’s why our news media is 95% Leftists. Starting in the 60s with free love, cops are pigs, question authority, etc. when they were all coming of age. All so hip.

“Hey, Hey Ho Ho, Western Civ has got to go.” SDS, the Weather Underground, Black Power. Some of us remember it well. This is not new. It’s supercharged due to the lightening speed of the internet and cell phones.

TRUMP HAS BEEN HAMSTRUNG HIS ENTIRE TERM

He deserves a term that will let him get even more accomplished. It’s a miracle that he has accomplished as much as he has – and anyone who hates him should not be taking advantage of the massive stock market successes that are entirely due to him.

MORE NEWS: 57 Buffalo Police Officers Resign From Emergency Response Team After Cops Suspended For Pushing down 75 Year-Old Man

One thing most of us know,  GOP Establishment RINOS were always joined at the hip with the Democrat/Marxist party. They just lived in the shadows and dressed in camouflage to fool conservative voters and get elected- over and over- Trump recognized the growing anger and frustration in the country and started a party and movement of his own.- our own.

He has been at war with the Uniparty since he began his unbelievable journey to the White House. They have ALL “resisted” his every attempt to right the wrongs and held the threat of impeachment over his head like a sharp sword. We are slowly ridding ourselves of these RINO traitors even though it takes more time than we would like.

EXPECT A HUGE TRUMP WIN

The country is far more liberal than it was in 1968-72, so we cannot expect a Nixon-like landslide; however, we can expect a clear and convincing win of at least what Obama did to Romney in 2012.

MORE NEWS: Black Caucus PAC Defames WH’s Kayleigh McEnany As ‘Racist’ In Baseless Petition For Her Resignation 

Trump will win every state he did last time but also pick up New Hampshire, Minnesota, Nevada, and Maine AT LEAST.

If the Dems were pragmatic and had any sense, they’d dump Biden and lever in Michael Bloomberg with Amy Klobuchar as his VP to hold Minnesota and those crucial midwest states. Still, they won’t because they are prisoners of their Leftist ideology like victims of a cult in meltdown mode.

WAYNE’S RECOMMENDATIONS

The post How Did The Left Lose Their Minds ‘Collectively And Individually’ To The Degree They Have? appeared first on The Political Insider.

How Trump’s willing Republican collaborators make excuses to justify their treachery

In Dante’s Inferno, the ninth, most terrible circle of hell is reserved for the worst type of traitors. Dante specifically includes Judas, who betrayed Christ, and Cassius and Brutus, who betrayed and slew Julius Caesar, as the only named persons who inhabit the fourth and final round of this circle. Each is condemned to be gnawed within the three mouths of Satan for all eternity. Judas is being chewed on head first, his legs forever dangling out of Satan’s mouth.

The revulsion felt towards treachery—and particularly treachery against one’s country—is well established. Children in the U.S. learn about Benedict Arnold’s treachery in middle school. Students of World War II learn about the treachery of Vidkun Quisling. Their names (along with that of Judas) have gained such notoriety that they have become epithets describing traitors in general. From a political standpoint, there is not much if any practical distinction between outright treachery and “collaboration.” The Petain government of Vichy France collaborated with the Nazis, as did Quisling’s Norwegian government. Both Petain and Quisling are now universally viewed as traitors, with each possessing a unique litany of justifications for his actions—justifications that are now viewed as shabby excuses for complicity with evil.

With an embattled and unstable Donald Trump making alarming noises about unleashing the military on American citizens and his attempts to delegitimize an election that looks increasingly likely to go against him, there seems to be no better time to examine the motivations of those in the Republican Party who have collaborated with him and are allowing him to be in a position to make these threats. As Anne Applebaum—a renowned historian of the Soviet Union and the former Communist bloc—demonstrates in a tour de force just published in The Atlantic, it’s not as if Republicans looked at their reflections in the bathroom mirror one morning and decided they would betray their country for the interests of Donald Trump. There was self-reflection involved, a weighing of self-interest, costs and benefits—all leading to the conclusion that fealty to Trump outweighed their sworn oaths to defend the Constitution.

The oh-so-telling title of Applebaum’s essay is “History Will Judge The Complicit.” In it, she cites several examples of collaborators throughout 20th Century history—most significantly those who supported totalitarian Soviet puppet regimes in Eastern Europe—and analogizes how the rationales and excuses each used to try to justify their actions mesh perfectly with the behavior of today’s Republican Party in their nearly-collective decision to pay meek obeisance to Donald Trump.

Applebaum explains just what a “collaborator” is.

In English, the word collaborator has a double meaning. A colleague can be described as a collaborator in a neutral or positive sense. But the other definition of collaborator, relevant here, is different: someone who works with the enemy, with the occupying power, with the dictatorial regime. In this negative sense, collaborator is closely related to another set of words: collusion, complicity, connivance. This negative meaning gained currency during the Second World War, when it was widely used to describe Europeans who cooperated with Nazi occupiers. At base, the ugly meaning of collaborator carries an implication of treason: betrayal of one’s nation, of one’s ideology, of one’s morality, of one’s values.

Applebaum notes there can be two types of political collaborators: voluntary and involuntary. People forced at gunpoint to cooperate with a regime out of necessity or a duty to preserve other people’s lives are among the involuntary class of collaborator. Voluntary collaboration, on the other hand, implies either a willingness to collaborate for the sake of “ the national interest,” or an enthusiastic embrace of the enemy borne of outright admiration or alignment with one’s ideology. Describing the latter variety, Applebaum cites Harvard scholar Stanley Hoffman, who in 2007 “observed that many of those who became ideological collaborators were landowners and aristocrats, ‘the cream of the top of the civil service, of the armed forces, of the business community,’ people who perceived themselves as part of a natural ruling class that had been unfairly deprived of power under the left-wing governments.”

But curiously, as she notes, just as “equally motivated” to willingly collaborate were the country’s “losers,” the “social misfits” and political deviants who also saw an opportunity to raise their own standards of living by joining forces with an occupying enemy.

If this is beginning to ring some bells, it should.

Applebaum also cites the work of Czesław Miłosz, a Nobel-prize winning poet who wrote about the mindset of collaboration based on his experiences in working for the Polish government after WWII. In The Captive Mind, Milosz uses a series of biographical portraits to depict the various justifications that collaborators use to justify the betrayal of their principles. As Applebaum points out, these are all transferable to the behavior of the modern Republican Party in selling out their principles, and even selling out their oath to serve the American people, to a demagogue like Donald Trump. In fact the near-total abdication of their souls to Trump—even in the face of his blatantly apparent cruelty, crudeness, self-interest, and lack of any commitment to democratic principles—is closer to the historical reality of collaboration than are those voices that dissent or object. That is because collaboration is a way of ensuring conformity, and conformity is more pleasurable, more rewarding, and ultimately safer than nonconformity.

Using Lindsey Graham and Mitt Romney as examples, Applebaum illustrates how two men, both claiming to have some semblance of principles, behaved once they fell under the presidential orbit of Donald Trump. Noting that both had vehemently criticized Trump prior to his election, she shows how Graham ultimately showed his so-called principles about “patriotism, duty and honor” (which he had attributed to his military experience in the JAG corps) to be nonexistent, turning himself into one of Trump’s fiercest supporters beyond all logic, despite the amorality, corruption, and self-absorption of Trump himself:

It was Graham who made excuses for Trump’s abuse of power. It was Graham—a JAG Corps lawyer—who downplayed the evidence that the president had attempted to manipulate foreign courts and blackmail a foreign leader into launching a phony investigation into a political rival. It was Graham who abandoned his own stated support for bipartisanship and instead pushed for a hyperpartisan Senate Judiciary Committee investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden’s son. It was Graham who played golf with Trump, who made excuses for him on television, who supported the president even as he slowly destroyed the American alliances—with Europeans, with the Kurds—that Graham had defended all his life. By contrast, it was Romney who, in February, became the only Republican senator to break ranks with his colleagues, voting to impeach the president.

Graham’s surrender to Trump was shocking, but Applebaum thinks she understands it. His behavior, and most importantly his rationale, mirrored the same justifications that officials in the Nazi-collaborating Vichy French government employed. The Republican Party is displaying exactly the same rationalizations for their behavior that collaborators in the Vichy regime—as well as collaborators in Sovietized Eastern Europe—exhibited. As Applebaum observes: “These are experiences of people who are forced to accept an alien ideology or a set of values that are in sharp conflict with their own.”  

And that, according to Applebaum, is exactly what Trump has done from the outset to the Republican Party: He imposed an alien ideology, by claiming to possess different values from “traditional” Republicans. Examples cited by Applebaum include Trump’s campaigning as a “populist” and his phony promises to “drain the swamp,” and above all, attacking fact-based reality at every turn.

This began with his patent lying about size of his inauguration crowds, a seemingly trivial matter that gradually cascaded into a habitual and relentless refashioning of “reality” to be whatever he said it was. The number of absolute lies (over 19,000 at last count) delivered by Trump, the wholesale corruption of our federal agencies with political supporters lacking any experience in government or even their agency’s subject matter, and the insistence on his own infallibility were, according to Applebaum, not intended to convince thinking Americans of their truth but instead to convince his supporters in the Republican Party that he could simply lie and lie again with impunity and get away with it; that he could corrupt an entire branch of government and get away with it; and now, that he can grossly mishandle a national public health crisis and still get away with it. As Applebaum states: “Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie—it’s to make people fear the liar.”

As Applebaum states, corruption to a large body of people does not happen suddenly—it happens gradually, like a “slippery slope,” as people (here, Republicans) “abandon their existing value systems” through a process where such corruption is normalized. Republicans have normalized Trump’s lies and learned to reflexively blink at his corruption. In doing so, and by allowing their own sense of competence and “patriotism” to be co-opted by Trump, they have abandoned whatever responsibility they once felt towards the American people.

Meanwhile, with this kind of sycophantic following Trump has done whatever he wants, which is to fulfill his own interests and create what is certainly the most corrupt administration in American history while using racism and xenophobia when necessary to achieve those ends. His antipathy towards any legal or Constitutional restraints on his power are established; his sneering dismissal of science, the military, and our intelligence services are all matters of record; his complete abandonment of our strategic alliances is probably irreparable. As Applebaum puts it: “He meets his own psychological needs first; he thinks about the country last. The true nature of the ideology that Trump brought to Washington was not ‘America First,’ but rather ‘Trump First.’”

By now the disaster of the Trump presidency is laid bare. We are experiencing an economic calamity even as people are dying from a grossly mishandled public health crisis. Our streets are literally on fire with people protesting chronic racial injustice, and the rest of the world looks on, aghast at what this country has become. Why then do Republicans continue to act as collaborators with such a regime?

Applebaum says that the same justifications are those set forth in Milosz’ work, The Captive Mind, noted above. They are the same tortured excuses collaborators have told themselves throughout history to justify their betrayal of the people they are supposed to represent. Applebaum distills some of them for us.

 “We can use this moment to achieve great things.”

“We can protect the country from the president.“

“I, personally, will benefit.”

“I must remain close to power.”

“My side might be flawed, but the political opposition is much worse.”

“I am afraid to speak out.”

Applebaum deftly shows how each one of these excuses/rationales has been trotted out or otherwise displayed by Republicans to justify their collaboration with this lawless and amoral regime. From the dubious “bravery” of Anonymous, who you may recall piqued the nation with their “inside account” of the administration’s foibles while claiming to be part of the Resistance, to unnamed officials who decide to ignore the massive onslaught of corruption as long as they get their own pet projects to work on. From people like John Kelly and Jim Mattis, who said they believed they could act as a “failsafe” to prevent the country from imploding but proceeded to quit and fade out of the public view, to cowards like John Bolton and Paul Ryan, who left the administration and their party, respectively, because of Trump and Trumpism yet were too afraid or too opportunistic, even afterwards, to call him out. Of course, there’s also the blatantly self-interested—the Sonny Perdues, the Scott Pruitts, and any of those who view a plum administration position as a mere stepping stone to lucrative careers on K Street. All of these collaborators have exhibited one classic excuse or another.

It is Applebaum’s analysis of the true sycophants—such as Mike Pompeo, William Barr, and Mike Pence, whose collaboration with Trump is not based on excuses but dogmatic religious fanaticism—that is most horrifying.  

The three most important members of Trump’s Cabinet—Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Attorney General William Barr—are all profoundly shaped by Vichyite apocalyptic thinking. All three are clever enough to understand what Trumpism really means, that it has nothing to do with God or faith, that it is self-serving, greedy, and unpatriotic. Nevertheless, a former member of the administration (one of the few who did decide to resign) told me that both Pence and Pompeo “have convinced themselves that they are in a biblical moment.” All of the things they care about—outlawing abortion and same-sex marriage, and (though this is never said out loud) maintaining a white majority in America—are under threat. Time is growing short. They believe that “we are approaching the Rapture, and this is a moment of deep religious significance.”

The fact that collaborators in the Trump administration tell themselves comforting stories to justify their actions is bad enough, but when the collaborators are motivated solely by a desire to impose their religious nuttery on the American population and are given the power to do just that, we are in truly perilous territory. This is particularly the case with Barr, whose role as attorney general and head of the Justice Department gives him nearly limitless power to impose his delusional worldview on the most vulnerable in our society. Our country was specifically designed to prevent the imposition of an official “religion” for this very reason.

But the consequences of collaboration probably reached their apotheosis in the conduct of Republicans during the impeachment saga. The GOP-controlled Senate failed to muster a single vote, save that of Mitt Romney, to convict a patently guilty president on charges of obstruction of justice. Applebaum, probably correctly, attributes this appalling inaction to fear of speaking out. As she points out, we are living with the fatal consequences of that act of cowardice and collaboration today:

[I]in March, the consequences of that decision became suddenly clear. After the U.S. and the world were plunged into crisis by a coronavirus that had no cure, the damage done by the president’s self-focused, self-dealing narcissism—his one true “ideology”—was finally visible. He led a federal response to the virus that was historically chaotic. The disappearance of the federal government was not a carefully planned transfer of power to the states, as some tried to claim, or a thoughtful decision to use the talents of private companies. This was the inevitable result of a three-year assault on professionalism, loyalty, competence, and patriotism. Tens of thousands of people have died, and the economy has been ruined.

All of this, and all that waits for us in the coming months, are the consequences of a knowing Republican collaboration with an administration whose incompetence and malevolence is unmatched by any in U.S. history. And yet, Republicans still show no sign of opposition. No voice of objection is raised to decry the torrent of perpetual cruelty and inhuman disregard, even as a deadly virus sweeps through the population, even as the world turns its back on an America it no longer recognizes. Applebaum frankly asks of these Republicans: How low will you allow the country to go?

Come November, will they tolerate—even abet—an assault on the electoral system: open efforts to prevent postal voting, to shut polling stations, to scare people away from voting? Will they countenance violence, as the president’s social-media fans incite demonstrators to launch physical attacks on state and city officials?

To these open questions Applebaum simply attaches a small piece of advice to those who have compromised whatever integrity they once possessed in the service of this one awful man. She quotes Władysław Bartoszewski, a survivor of Auschwitz and former prisoner of both the Nazis and the Soviets, who later rose to the position of foreign minister in his home country of Poland. Bartoszewski’s advice? Just try to be a decent human being, because that is the way you will be remembered.

Whether any Republicans will actually follow that advice remains to be seen.