Trump didn’t just break the GOP, he broke conservatism

Remember when you could all describe, in one succinct sentence, what the Republican Party was all about? “Family values, lower taxes, and a strong national defense.” Democrats spent decades trying to come up with their own pithy slogan and failed. We are just too diverse a coalition to condense into a single sentence. And turns out, we don’t need to, because the head of the conservative movement, Donald Trump, has exposed just how empty that statement of values always was. 

It was quite the feat, actually, to take the one man with inarguably the worst record on “family values,” and then rally around him with zero sense of irony or shame. Trump had multiples and then cheated on them with pornstars while ignoring his children. He didn’t (and doesn’t) go to church, give to charity, or show any semblance of humility. In fact, the did the opposite of charity—he used a charity to grift. 

In fact, has any one man ever embodied the seven deadly sins more perfectly than Trump? Pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth. He is a wretched human being, morally bankrupt and ethically corrupt. And through it all, evangelical Christians have stuck with him, proving that they never ever cared about any actual morality. 

On national defense, Republicans have acknowledged that Trump is a puppet of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. The current House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy, a solid Trump ally, who was recorded saying back in 2017, “There’s …there’s two people, I think, Putin pays: [California Rep. Dana] Rohrabacher and Trump … [laughter] … swear to God.” Then-Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, another Republican, thought that was funny, ““This is an off-the-record … [laughter] … NO LEAKS … [laughter] … alright?!”

Hilarious. 

We went through a whole impeachment process in which Trump’s attempts to enlist foreign governments to help his reelection campaign were fully exposed, and Republicans did nothing but shrug. 

But nothing tops revelations that Russia paid Taliban fighters in Afghanistan a bounty for every dead American they killed, and Trump couldn’t be bothered to give a damn. Instead, Putin’s loyal lapdog keeps checking in with Moscow every month, to discuss who knows what. You’d think Republicans would care about America’s top historical geopolitical opponent encouraging the murder of our troops, but nah. 

They did get to the “lower taxes” bit, however. Nothing like destroying our nation’s finances in order to justify the cutting of our social nets to really get Republicans excited. … Then again, “bailing out billionaires” isn’t particularly the most populist and popular policy plank on which to hang all your electoral hopes. 

So we know that all of this has utterly crushed the GOP, and we’re headed toward another anti-Republican wave election this fall. But now we’re seeing evidence that this goes deeper than simple anti-GOP sentiment. By exposing its flimsy pretenses, Trump is breaking conservatism itself. Check out Gallup’s polling on self-identified ideology over the course of this year:  

American’s ideology Jan/Frb mar/Apr May/Jun Conservative Moderate Liberal
40 37 34
34 36 36
22 23 26

That’s a stunning collapse in such a short period of time, while the long-demonized term “liberal” is making a strong comeback. (Many Democrats prefer the safer-sounding “moderate,” as you can see if you follow the link above. Black, young, Latino Americans all prefer “moderate” to “liberal,” when we know they are politically liberal.)

More Gallup:

The decline in self-identified conservatism in 2020 has been seen about evenly among men and women, and among all political party groups.

However, it was more pronounced among adults in upper-income households as well as among middle-aged adults (aged 35 to 54) than their counterparts.

The conservative falloff has also been stronger among White and Hispanic Americans than Black Americans. Relatively few Black Americans (25%) identified as conservative in January/February, and thus there may have been less opportunity for the rate to decline.

Among those who earn more than $100,000, the number of self-identified conservatives dropped 11 points, from 40% to 29%. And since we’ve tracked suburban voters so closely for the last several cycles, they are also leaving the conservative fold, from 36% to 28%. In fact, and this is crazy—there are fewer conservatives now in the suburbs than in cities (33%)!

Still, don’t count out rural areas, getting hit harder and harder by COVID-19. They’ve gone from 50% conservative to 43%. That’s why states like Alaska, Iowa, Montana, and Ohio are suddenly back in play at both the presidential and Senate levels. 

Republicans exist only insofar as conservatives exist, as they and Trump fight to make their tent even smaller and unwelcome to anyone who isn’t ideologically pure. Seeing at close range the kind of rampant hypocrisy, corruption, mismanagement, and incompetence inherent in conservatism, Americans are ditching the label and, with it, their votes for Republicans. 

And they still have a lot further to fall. 

Millions of Americans will soon find out just how badly they’ve been screwed by Trump and the GOP

Robert Reich, writing for The Guardian, weighs in on the fairy tale that our country is somehow “roaring back,” as Donald Trump characterized it when he hawked a report last week based on misleading unemployment statistics—numbers that were already woefully out of date at the time they were released.

The US economy isn’t roaring back. Just over half of Americans have jobs now, the lowest figure in more than 70 years. What’s roaring back is Covid-19. Until it’s tamed, the American economy doesn’t stand a chance.

As former Labor Secretary Reich notes: “The uptick in jobs in June was due almost entirely to the hasty reopening, which is now being reversed.”

Last month, many businesses rehired previously laid-off employees based on cues they received from state governors assuring them the crisis had passed and that it was “time to reopen.” Those governors and Republicans in their legislatures in turn took their cues from a political imperative pushed relentlessly by the White House. But, as most of these governors well knew, that wasn’t the reality at all. It was simply a story spun out of thin air by an administration growing increasingly desperate about its reelection chances; a story to mollify a restless public grown increasingly frustrated at the endless lockdowns; a story to provide temporary cover for Republicans at the state and federal level who had absolutely no clue how to handle this pandemic.

But mostly it was a story to satisfy their donors, who were seeing their corporate profits evaporate and taking it out on their paid stooges in Congress and the states. The GOP jumped to the task, bailing out businesses as much as they possibly could—namely with hundreds of billions of dollars—without ever telling the American public where those funds were actually going. (Hint: It was to their donors.) But it wasn’t done out of any concern for American workers. If it had been, the GOP would have come up with a game plan that didn’t simply involve waving some fairy dust at the end of May and telling people it was now suddenly safe to go back to work.

This was effectively an untested medical experiment on a grand scale, collectively embraced by Republicans, with ordinary Americans as its unwitting subjects. The reopening push was not based on any scientific or medical planning to address the pandemic but wholly on “feel-good” politics designed to satisfy donors for a few months. 

So when those June unemployment numbers trumpeted by Trump and his state media last Thursday were actually compiled, reported COVID-19 cases in this country were averaging 25,000 daily because all those reopenings in late May were only just beginning to register a corresponding spike in infections. Since that report, cases have now jumped drastically to an average of 55,000 per day or more, forcing many states that had prematurely reopened to reverse course, shutting down businesses once again in a desperate attempt to prevent the virus from spiraling out of control and overwhelming their state’s medical capabilities. Late in June, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci warned that we were likely to see 100,000 cases of new infections every day thanks to inadequate efforts to contain the virus and these misguided reopenings.

Republican state legislators from Texas to Arizona to Wisconsin, where COVID-19 cases are now shooting through the roof, all rode the reopening bandwagon for months. They pounded their chests on their Facebook pages about their “patriotism,” attended rallies in support of gun-toting Neo-Nazi militias, and brought frivolous lawsuits to force businesses to reopen. In most Republican-led states (and some Democratic-run ones as well), the GOP’s blind push—and often violent agitation—to force accelerated reopenings caused several states to issue blanket, credulous edicts to reopen long before it was safe to do so. In states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin where they did not control the governor’s mansion, GOP-controlled legislatures introduced articles of impeachment to try to force their states to reopen, or petitioned like-minded judges to overrule the lockdown measures.

In less than a week since those new job numbers were released, instead of a nation “roaring back,” we are now witnessing an embarrassing and hasty Republican retreat from everything they and Trump assured us of with such certainty. Meanwhile, as Reich painstakingly points out, the pandemic hasn’t gone anywhere in the last four months. It still hangs around, strong as ever, like a voracious beast, ready to devour anyone foolish enough to try to defy it.

Now, Reich explains, all of those efforts are proving to be disastrous.

Arizona’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey, initially refused to order masks and even barred local officials from doing so. This week he closed all gyms, bars and movie theaters in the state. The governors of Florida, Texas and California have also reimposed restrictions. Officials in Florida’s Miami-Dade county recently approved the reopening of movie theaters, arcades, casinos, concert halls, bowling halls and adult entertainment venues. They have now re-closed them.

And so on across America. A vast re-closing is under way, as haphazard as was the reopening. In the biggest public health emergency in US history, in which nearly 130,000 have already lost their lives, still no one is in charge.

You’d think some Republicans would have the decency to apologize. But none have as of this writing. Meanwhile, as a result of Republican dithering and inaction, millions of Americans are now finding themselves teetering on the edge of a financial abyss thanks to the complete lack of a coherent national response to this crisis by this president, and thanks to the Republican officials at all levels who abetted him. Reich plainly lays out what is coming in the next few weeks, all Republican “magical thinking” and fantasy-spinning to the contrary.

Brace yourself. Not only will the virus take many more lives in the months ahead, but millions of Americans are in danger of becoming destitute. Extra unemployment benefits enacted by Congress in March are set to end on 31 July. About one in five people in renter households are at risk of eviction by 30 September. Delinquency rates on mortgages have more than doubled since March.

An estimated 25 million Americans have lost or will lose employer-provided health insurance. America’s fragile childcare system is in danger of collapse, with the result that hundreds of thousands of working parents will not be able to return to work even if jobs are available.

The GOP-controlled U.S. Senate has all but abandoned the field in this pandemic, blocking attempts by Democratic lawmakers in the House to provide additional emergency aid to suffering Americans, and instead going on vacation throughout the entire month of June. In this conscious act of cowardice, they deliberately left Americans to their fate. Sen. Mitch McConnell and his colleagues have long since exhausted their quiver of phony, supply-side, “market-based” solutions and are now willingly leaving millions to be crushed by an ongoing economic catastrophe that is only now beginning to reveal its full ferocity.

As the true, stunning magnitude of this crisis finally hits home for Americans, the Republican Party will be offering no solutions—because they have none. Helping Americans in a crisis like this is not in their playbook, and they have no point of reference even if they had the inclination to do anything. In the end, they will be only too happy to scamper away to whatever gated communities continue to offer them shelter, muttering their worthless platitudes as Americans collapse into economic hardship, hunger, and in many cases, homelessness.

By late summer, all people of voting age in this country are going to be forced to make brutal, existential decisions about their futures and those of their families, and none of Trump’s hysterical babbling about Confederate statues or other race-baiting dogwhistles is going to make one whit of difference. This crisis is about to go into overdrive, far beyond any Republican attempts to “wish it away.” Millions of peoples’ lives are about to come alive with a fierce urgency that may well consign the Republican Party to the sorry trash bin of history, as Americans realize just how badly they’ve been screwed and lied to.