In 2024, Trump voters are motivated by one thing above all: Revenge

Americans typically frame their politics as a contest between “right” and “wrong.” In our two-party system today, voters usually believe both they and their party are completely in the right, while those on the opposite side are completely wrong. And this belief persists even after one side concedes defeat: Yes, my party lost the election, but your party is still wrong.

There’s nothing unusual about this. Americans have generally viewed elections that way since the founding of the republic. One side is invariably left unhappy with the result, but they’ll invariably lick their wounds, galvanize behind a new candidate, and try again next time. There’s usually been no burning sense of resentment, no designs of revenge held against the voters who repudiated their decision the last time around. When Barack Obama beat John McCain in 2008, Democratic voters didn’t want “revenge” on McCain voters. That was just the way things were in those halcyon days.

Until Donald Trump, that is. Trump himself has been soundly and decisively dismissed by most Americans. He was repudiated by multiple impeachments that he richly deserved, and emphatically rejected by an electoral and popular majority of American voters in the 2020 election. Now, in 2024—amidst a swirling maelstrom of serious legal and criminal charges against him—Trump has made revenge the central focus of his campaign.  He’s still insisting to his supporters that his 2020 loss was fake (it wasn’t), and that they’ve been insidiously victimized by some type of amorphous, pervasive fraud and Democratic chicanery that essentially played them for fools. It’s a con that Trump started cultivating well before the 2020 election itself, that only went into overdrive after his failed coup of Jan. 6, 2021. 

As Tom Nichols, writing for The Atlantic, observes, the Republican electorate has swallowed Trump’s fiction and internalized it. Republicans have transformed Trump’s embarrassments into an insult against their own personal identities and belief systems. It’s an offense that demands and necessitates revenge against those fellow Americans who dared to insult them.  

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As Nichols observes:

These voters are not settling a political score. Rather, they want to get even with other Americans, their own neighbors, for a simmering (and likely unexpected) humiliation that many of them seem to have felt ever since swearing loyalty to Trump.

A lot of people, especially in the media, have a hard time accepting this simple truth. Millions of Americans, stung by the electoral rebukes of their fellow citizens, have become so resentful and detached from reality that they have plunged into a moral void, a vortex that disintegrates questions of politics or policies and replaces them with heroic fantasies of redeeming a supposedly fallen nation.

It’s terribly difficult and gut-wrenching to admit that one’s choices were wrong. For some people, it’s impossible. For voters who fatefully cast their lot with Trump (and have been subjected over and over to glaring examples of his unfitness), there is no way to save face but by “plunging into that moral void,” as Nichols puts it.

They have to ignore Trump’s 91 criminal charges and his wholesale moral bankruptcy. They have to invent preposterous stories about President Joe Biden and his family. They have to believe, Nichols points out, that violence may be the only path to get their way—and it’s all to salvage their own sorry egos from the unforgivable slight of being wrong. So, egged on by their media bubble and abjectly Trump-dependent political leaders, these voters invent horrors that don't exist, imagine dire threats that they'll never personally face, and conjure up enemies they'll never encounter. It's all, as Nichols seems to imply, a coping mechanism to internally justify their own bad choice.

He wants revenge, and so do his supporters.

But, Nichols asks, against whom are they seeking violence and revenge? Why, Democrats, of course. Those neighbors who had that Biden-Harris 2020 sign have left them seething for four years, as has the local election board that processed all those mail-in votes. As Nichols observes, “When people talk about ‘resorting to violence’ they are, by default, talking about violence against their fellow citizens, some of whom have already been threatened merely for working in their communities as election volunteers.”

Unlike in previous elections, the motivation of these Trump loyalists isn’t really about policy, and it’s not really about “the border” or trans kids. It’s about a sense of revenge that Trump has cynically, deliberately cultivated in them. So they can finally come out on top.

As Nichols writes:

Much like Trump himself, these voters are unable to accept what’s happened over the past several years. Trump, in so many ways, quickly made fools of them; his various inanities, failures, and possible crimes sent them scrambling for ever more bizarre rationalizations, defenses of the indefensible that separated them from family and friends. If in 2016 they suspected, rightly or wrongly, that many Americans looked down on them for any number of reasons, they now know with certainty that millions of people look down on them—not for who they are but for what they’ve supported so vocally.

Nichols—a conservative, adamant “never-Trumper”—gets it mostly right here about Trump’s base, but he omits an important fact: that “what they’ve supported so vocally” is in fact quite telling about “who they are.” Still, he effectively dispenses with all the time and pixels wasted by major media in trying to “understand”—via visits to homey small-town diners and such—Trump voters’ motivations, ostensibly in the vain hope “that more listening and more empathetic nodding would put things right in a few years.”

That time has mercifully passed. Assuming Nichols is right, then there’s precious little to be gained by trying to understand Trump voters or ascribe any rationality to them. Revenge is a raw human emotion, not something that can be dealt with through discourse or reason. As Nichols cogently explains, more than anything, Donald Trump’s loyal base wants revenge “on their fellow citizens” for their attacks, critiques, and disparagement of Donald Trump.

No doubt they’ll be sorely disappointed when they don’t get it.

Trump lashes out at Laurene Powell Jobs over Atlantic piece calling him ‘fascistic,’ anti-Christian

Former President Donald Trump attacked The Atlantic and its publisher and majority owner, Laurene Powell Jobs, a billionaire philanthropist who is the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. On Saturday, Trump posted a diatribe on his money-losing Truth Social platform.

He did not specify which article in the magazine upset him so much. But last Wednesday, Peter Wehner, who served in the administrations of Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. and Jr., wrote an op-ed for The Atlantic titled: “Have You Listened Lately to What Trump Is Saying?

In the piece, Wehner described Trump’s rhetoric at recent campaign rallies as “clearly fascistic” and anti-Christian. Wehner, a Christian conservative, concluded that by supporting Trump, “far too many Christians in America are not only betraying their humanity; they are betraying the Lord they claim to love and serve.”

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Trump posted this on his Truth Social platform:

It’s so good to see how badly the THIRD RATE MAGAZINE, The Atlantic, is doing. 

It’s failing at a level seldom seen before, even in the Publishing Business. False and Fake stories do it every time! They’ve got a rich person funding the ridiculous losses, but at some point, rich people get smart also. Steve Jobs would not be proud of his wife, Laurene, and the way she is spending his money. The Radical Left is destroying America!”

It’s not the first time that Trump has gone after Powell Jobs. In September 2020, Trump got angry after The Atlantic published a story by its editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg that cited four anonymous sources as saying Trump called Americans who fought and died in World War I “losers” and “suckers.” 

In October 2023, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly, a former Marine Corps general whose son was killed by a landmine in Afghanistan, went on the record with CNN to confirm details of Goldberg’s story. But back in September 2020, Trump posted this on what was then known as Twitter:

Steve Jobs would not be happy that his wife is wasting money he left her on a failing Radical Left Magazine that is run by a con man (Goldberg) and spews FAKE NEWS & HATE. Call her, write her, let her know how you feel!!! https://t.co/wwuoP85bQE

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 6, 2020

Trump’s tweet was responding to a post by Charlie Kirk, who has become a millionaire heading the conservative pro-Trump youth group, Turning Point. 

While Powell Jobs has not responded directly to Trump, she has put her money where her mouth is by donating generously—to the tune of more than $900,000—to Joe Biden’s reelection campaign. Powell Jobs founded the Emerson Collective after she inherited billions of dollars of stock in Apple and Disney after her husband died of pancreatic cancer in 2011. In 2023, Forbes ranked her as the eighth richest woman in the U.S. with a fortune estimated at $13.4 billion.

The Emerson Collective is a social change organization dealing with such issues as education, immigration reform, the environment, health care, and media. In 2017, it purchased a majority stake in The Atlantic, which was founded in 1857 by prominent abolitionists, including writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson.

But Wehner is no liberal. He is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative Christian who served as a speechwriter and senior adviser to President George W. Bush. But he became one of the first senior Republicans to see the dangers posed by a Trump presidency and wrote an op-ed for The New York Times in January 2016 titled: “Why I Will Never Vote for Donald Trump.” He said he would vote for “a responsible third-party alternative.”

And Wehner has only grown more alarmed about Trump’s threat to American democracy, which he expressed in last week’s op-ed. Wehner began by relating how political leaders of the Hutu ethnic group cultivated hatred toward the minority Tutsis in Rwanda by singling them out in rhetoric “as less than human,” eventually leading to the 1994 genocide in which an estimated 1 million people were killed, mostly Tutsis. He noted that one influential Hutu political leader referred to the Tutsi as “vermin.”

And Wehner said that he thought about the events leading to the Rwandan genocide when he heard Trump refer to his enemies as “vermin” in a Veterans Day speech. Trump said in Claremont, New Hampshire:

“We pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country—that lie and steal and cheat on elections. They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream. The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”

Wehner wrote:

Trump’s rhetoric is a permission slip for his supporters to dehumanize others just as he does. He portrays others as existential threats, determined to destroy everything MAGA world loves about America. Trump is doing two things at once: pushing the narrative that his enemies must be defeated while dissolving the natural inhibitions most human beings have against hating and harming others. It signals to his supporters that any means to vanquish the other side is legitimate; the normal constraints that govern human interactions no longer apply. …

That is the wickedly shrewd rhetorical and psychological game that Trump is playing, and he plays it very well. Alone among American politicians, he has an intuitive sense of how to inflame detestations and resentments within his supporters while also deepening their loyalty to him, even their reverence for him.

After citing Trump’s numerous anti-democracy excesses, Wehner called out those in the Republican Party who, though they know better, have accommodated themselves to “a profoundly damaged human being, emotionally and psychologically.”

And he also expressed alarm about the continuing overwhelming support among white evangelical Protestants, one of the GOP’s most loyal constituencies, for Trump and MAGA world. He noted that in one survey, nearly one-third of white evangelicals expressed support for the statement, “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

Wehner wrote:

It is a rather remarkable indictment of those who claim to be followers of Jesus that they would continue to show fealty to a man whose cruel ethic has always been antithetical to Jesus’s and becomes more so every day. Many of the same people who celebrate Christianity’s contributions to civilization—championing the belief that every human being has inherent rights and dignity, celebrating the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount and the parable of the Good Samaritan, and pointing to a “transcendent order of justice and hope that stands above politics,” in the words of my late friend Michael Gerson—continue to stand foursquare behind a man who uses words that echo Mein Kampf.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Taking a stand for conscience, even long after one should have, is always the right thing to do.

in his op-ed, Wehner also mentioned how Trump once described the press as “truly the enemy of the people.” And he recalled that Trump once demanded that the parent company of MSNBC and NBC be investigated for “treason” over what he described as “one-side[d] and vicious coverage.” Trump’s Truth Social post on Saturday lashing out at The Atlantic and its publisher, Powell Jobs, by name has to be seen in that context. 

On Monday morning, Wehner appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” After host Joe Scarborough sharply criticized Trump’s threatening rhetoric as “evil,” Wehner piled on about the disgraced former president who remains the GOP presidential front-runner despite two impeachments and four criminal indictments. 

"There is a long history of this dehumanization, these passions consuming people, including people of faith. That's why I think there has to be such a pushback from others, to try, in a sense, to shake them and say, 'Do you know what you're doing? Do you know what you're a part of? You've jettisoned everything you claim to most cherish in your life to make inner peace with this man who is a sociopath, an unfiltered sociopath.'

"And he is undisguised … in who he is and what he wants to do. That not only pushes them away, but it brings them toward him. It is just a sickening episode in the history of American politics and the history of American Christianity."

Trump’s messy abortion switcheroo is latest proof he and Republicans are running scared

Donald Trump has done something remarkable over the past week: He’s actually remained focused on something. During Sunday’s “Meet The Press” debacle, he told his hapless interlocutor, Kristen Welker, that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had made a “terrible mistake” in signing a six-week abortion ban. He also vaguely claimed that, if reelected in 2024, he’d be able to negotiate a “compromise” and impose some type of national abortion prohibition acceptable to everyone.

Facing predictable hand-wringing and consternation from his fellow Republicans, on Wednesday Trump did what he always does: He doubled down, telling an audience in Iowa that Republicans need to learn how to “properly talk about abortion,” and warning Republicans that they could lose the House majority “and perhaps the presidency itself” if they kept pushing more violent and draconian intrusions into people’s personal reproductive lives.

First, let’s be clear on one thing: As Adam Serwer concisely puts it in the title to his latest essay for The Atlantic, “Trump Is the Reason Women Can’t Get Abortions,” and, of course, that’s true for anyone who may become pregnant. 

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As Serwer writes:

The person most responsible for what might be the greatest assault on individual freedom since the mid-20th century is Donald Trump, who appointed fully one-third of the justices on the Supreme Court, hard-core right-wing ideologues who overturned Roe just as he promised they would.

If you cannot get an abortion, if you fear leaving your state to get an abortion, if you are afraid to text your loved ones or type abortion into a search bar, if you are scared to ask a friend or loved one to help you get an abortion, if you know someone coerced into remaining in an abusive relationship because they fear prosecution, if you cannot find an obstetrician in your state, if you have a relative who was left at the edge of death by doctors afraid to risk prosecution by violating an abortion ban—you have Donald Trump to thank.

Trump, of course, is not changing his tune on abortion because he’s actually had a change of heart. He is, in typical fashion, simply running a con, his dirty work having been accomplished. He may not have personally cared about abortion, but he knew what to say in 2016 to earn the votes of the white evangelicals who elect Republicans in this country, and he knew exactly what to do to please them once he attained the presidency. Most importantly, Trump realizes how much credit those religious voters grant him, how blindly devoted to him they are, and that they’ll never, ever vote for a Democrat, no matter what Trump says or does.

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So since those voters are already in his pocket, he’s searching for what he can say to try to neutralize the abortion issue among those who voted against him in 2020.

The short answer is “nothing,” and anyone who takes what Trump says seriously should rightly have their head examined. No one should even entertain the possibility of giving Trump any credibility—on any issue, but especially abortion. In that vein, Serwer’s article skewers the wholly predictable, knee-jerk reactions of the press to Trump’s statements. 

So let’s go beyond just gawking at Trump’s obviously cynical trial balloon, and instead look at what he’s really acknowledging: This issue is hurting him and Republicans, badly, and it’s not going to go away.

Republicans have been tying themselves into knots over the past few months trying to find a way out of the abortion trap they’ve caught themselves in. Some think there is a perfect number of weeks where punishing pregnant people feels okay; if they could just find it, an American public that overwhelmingly supports abortion rights will somehow be mollified and move on.

Others contend they can finesse the problem they’ve created with magical language: It’s not “pro-life” anymore, but “pro-birth control” or most recently, “pro-baby.” Or, as Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley suggests, politicians just “need to be specific” about what it is they mean when supporting laws imposing state controls and surveillance over pregnant patients’ choices. Does that mean prohibiting people from searching on the internet for information, punishing them for leaving the state to obtain an abortion, or inflicting criminal penalties on doctors, nurses and medical providers? Republicans just need to clarify the terms a little better, it seems.

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No one is fooled by this nonsense. When given the chance, Trump used his power in office to strip away a right in place for 49 years. Republicans in state legislatures around the country then followed up by turning on the tools of state control, and they’re manifestly intent on finishing what they’ve started. There’s no getting around that fact, even if the (overwhelmingly white and male) proponents of these laws remain oblivious to the horrific, real-world implications of what they’ve done. 

For Trump to even raise this issue—multiple times in a week—confirms that both he and the Republican Party are simply running scared. On a national level, those voter-rich, highly-educated, suburban enclaves that can spell the difference between a Democratic or a Republican Congress, a Democratic or Republican governor, or a Democratic or Republican president? Those districts are swiftly falling out of reach for Republicans, specifically because of the abortion issue. The GOP is losing young people as well, because (among other reasons), it’s younger people who tend to have unwanted pregnancies.

Below is an ad currently being run by Kentucky’s Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear.

KY Gov Andy Beshear’s new ad on abortion. Democrats, this is the way. pic.twitter.com/GMfY6YHmRi

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) September 20, 2023

And yet Republicans continue to double down. In Ohio, a right-wing state Supreme Court rubber-stamped pejorative forced-birth ballot language inserted by Republicans desperate to dissuade Ohioans from voting Yes on a November referendum enshrining reproductive freedom in the state’s constitution. In Wisconsin, Republicans in the state Legislature continue to threaten baseless impeachment proceedings against a newly elected state Supreme Court justice who won her seat largely because of her pro-choice positions. In Texas, a Trump-appointed federal district judge and his right-wing Court of Appeals issued rulings threatening to outlaw mifepristone (the “abortion pill”), sending the issue to the same Trump-riddled Supreme Court responsible for this situation in the first place.  

And all this time, the horror stories of patients who were denied abortions even when their life was at risk continue to mount. Obstetricians and gynecologists, fearing criminal prosecution, simply pack up and leave states like Idaho, leaving patients to fend for themselves. A new bill in Texas would block internet service providers from allowing sites that inform users about abortion, much like China blocks sites about democracy.

No “magic language” or “consensus ban” is going to solve these problems for Republicans, and nothing Trump says is going to help him on this issue in 2024, or “separate” him from other Republicans.

As Serwer emphasizes in his Atlantic article, what Trump and Republicans say means nothing; it’s what they’ve done—and continue to do—that matters.  

They were always in this together. And now they’re going to have to face the consequences. Together.

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Romney reveals what he really thinks about Trump, GOP senators, but it’s too little, too late

McKay Coppins, a journalist and staff writer at The Atlantic, is the author of a forthcoming biography about Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney. That book, “Romney: A Reckoning,” appears to dovetail quite well with the senator’s plans to retire, announced Wednesday. Also on Wednesday, Coppins published a piece in The Atlantic featuring some excerpts from his book. They are eye-opening, to say the least, not so much for what they reveal about Romney himself, but for their frank and brutal assessment of Romney’s Republican colleagues in the U.S. Senate, particularly their slavish fealty to Donald Trump.

According to Coppins, when he and Romney began to meet privately for the book in 2021, the senator had not advised any other senators that he’d begun working with a biographer, meeting most often at Romney’s Washington, D.C., residence. Coppins acknowledges that he didn’t expect the level of candor Romney exhibited towards him.

From acknowledging that a “very large” segment of the Republican party “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution,” to his frank accounts of other Republican senators’ true feelings about Donald Trump, Romney doesn’t appear to have held anything back from his biographer, often providing unedited texts, emails and documents for Coppins’ thorough perusal. Even though Romney had privately advised Coppins early on that he wasn’t going to seek reelection, Coppins came away with the impression that there was something “beyond his own political future” that accounted for his startling honesty.

That “something,” Coppins believes, was “not just about the decomposition of his own political party, but about the fate of the American project itself.”

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It appears that the greatest catalyst for Romney’s pessimism was the events of Jan. 6, 2021.

Coppins notes that Romney became noticeably preoccupied with world history and the fall of global empires after he witnessed the insurrection of Jan. 6. Romney concluded, in large part, that it was history repeating itself, noting that the rise of particularly oppressive tyrants inevitably preceded the dissolution of empires. According to Coppins, Romney said, “Authoritarianism is like a gargoyle lurking over the cathedral, ready to pounce.”

It’s clear that Romney sees Trump as that gargoyle. In one incident Romney shared, he reached out via text message to then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell after a concerning phone call.

“In case you have not heard this, I just got a call from Angus King, who said that he had spoken with a senior official at the Pentagon who reports that they are seeing very disturbing social media traffic regarding the protests planned on the 6th. There are calls to burn down your home, Mitch; to smuggle guns into DC, and to storm the Capitol. I hope that sufficient security plans are in place, but I am concerned that the instigator—the President—is the one who commands the reinforcements the DC and Capitol police might require.”

According to Romney, McConnell never responded.

A significant section of the book addresses the evolution of Romney’s own feelings toward Trump, which apparently rapidly descended into complete disgust, culminating in Romney writing a 2019 opinion piece in for The Washington Post excoriating Trump as unfit to lead the nation. He emphasizes to Coppins that this sentiment was and is shared by almost all of his Republican Senate colleagues.

Romney and Trump’s famous dinner after the 2016 election

From Coppins’ book:

“Almost without exception,” he told me, “they shared my view of the president.” In public, of course, they played their parts as Trump loyalists, often contorting themselves rhetorically to defend the president’s most indefensible behavior. But in private, they ridiculed his ignorance, rolled their eyes at his antics, and made incisive observations about his warped, toddler­ like psyche. Romney recalled one senior Republican senator frankly admitting, “He has none of the qualities you would want in a president, and all of the qualities you wouldn’t.”

According to Coppins’ account, when Romney would criticize Trump, his fellow GOP senators would “express solidarity” with him, sometimes saying they wish they had a constituency that would allow them to express their true feelings. As Coppins reports, Romney also described an incident where Trump attended a private meeting with Republican senators, who remained “respectful and attentive,” only to burst out laughing when Trump exited the room.

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Romney also quoted McConnell as calling Trump an “idiot,” and saying Romney was “lucky” he could say what he actually thought of Trump. According to Coppins, McConnell denied this conversation. Romney also confirmed what many of us have already assumed: His Republican colleagues were cynically dismissive of the (first) impeachment proceedings against Trump. 

“They didn’t want to hear from witnesses; they didn’t want to learn new facts; they didn’t want to hold a trial at all,” Romney told Coppins. Romney also claimed that McConnell warned that a “prolonged, polarizing Senate trial would force them to take tough votes that risked alienating their constituents,” something that McConnell felt would lead to a Democratic Senate majority. As Romney told it to Coppins, he was appalled that there was not even the slightest pretense of impartiality in Republicans’ strategy to handle Trump’s impeachment.

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Coppins report, quite honestly, paints a picture of a Romney desperate to actually do the right thing and approach the Trump impeachment as an impartial juror would, and as he felt his constitutional duty demanded—an approach which led Romney to conclude that Trump was guilty. Even so, he spoke to his 2012 running mate and former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan on the phone, and Ryan apparently did his level best to convince Romney that he’d be killing his future political prospects by voting to convict Trump. According to Coppins, after Romney cast that vote—the lone “guilty” vote cast by a Republican senator in Trump’s first impeachment—he “would never feel comfortable at a Republican caucus lunch again.”

Coppins’ biography also examines Romney’s reaction to the Jan. 6 insurrection, describing in detail Romney’s reactions to the Capitol being attacked, even as he and his fellow senators were being evacuated.

At some point, Romney’s frustration and anger appears to boil over. As Coppins writes:

He turned to Josh Hawley, who was huddled with some of his right-wing colleagues, and started to yell. Later, Romney would struggle to recall the exact wording of his rebuke. Sometimes he’d remember shouting “You’re the reason this is happening!” Other times, it would be something more terse: “You did this.” At least one reporter in the chamber would recount seeing the senator throw up his hands in a fit of fury as he roared, “This is what you’ve gotten, guys!” Whatever the words, the sentiment was clear: This violence, this crisis, this assault on democracy—this is your fault.

Coppins confirms that Romney was aware of and disapproved of his GOP colleagues’ plan to reject electoral slates and thus perpetuate Trump’s hold on power. Late into the evening on Jan. 6, he had believed that the harrowing Trump-incited assault on his own colleagues’ safety would prompt them to abandon their plans. He was surprised when the unctuous Josh Hawley nevertheless stood up and delivered his speech supporting Trump’s position, a decision that Romney attributes to pure “political calculation.”

But one of the most telling passages excerpted by Coppins addresses not Trump’s first, but his second impeachment, and the refusal of Romney’s fellow Republicans to convict Trump for instigating the insurrection of Jan. 6.

According to Coppins’ account, Romney attributes this to his colleagues’ fear for their personal safety.

But after January 6, a new, more existential brand of cowardice had emerged. One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety. The congressman reasoned that Trump would be impeached by House Democrats with or without him—why put his wife and children at risk if it wouldn’t change the outcome? Later, during the Senate trial, Romney heard the same calculation while talking with a small group of Republican colleagues. When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the others urged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, Romney recalled someone saying. Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right.

Coppins emphasizes that Romney believes his colleagues’ fear was—and is—well-founded. Romney says he began to observe an increasingly “deranged” quality in Republican voters, even among his most loyal constituents back in Utah. As the 2022 election approached, Romney grew increasingly appalled by the MAGA fanaticism exhibited by his party’s senatorial candidates. He regarded J.D Vance of Ohio, whom, as Coppins writes, Romney felt “reinvented his whole persona overnight,” as particularly loathsome.

According to Coppins, “[w]hat Romney couldn’t stomach any longer was associating himself with people who cynically stoked distrust in democracy for selfish political reasons.”

By that point, according to Coppins, Romney had begun to gradually let his colleagues know that he wouldn’t be running again. He briefly toyed with the idea of making a third-party run for president in 2024, but abandoned it after concluding it would more than likely siphon votes from President Joe Biden and possibly lead to a Trump victory. Since then, he has had some discussions about forming a quasi-political party with like-minded “centrists” such as West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, with a view toward ultimately endorsing whichever party’s nominee—Democrat or Republican—aligns most closely with their own views.

Coppins suggests this idea is still in the “brainstorming” stage.

By taking himself out of the running, it appears Romney’s quest for political relevance may be quixotic. But Coppins’ piece in The Atlantic may be the closest thing to a fair assessment of what the modern Republican party actually thinks about Trump, and why it behaves in the sycophantic manner it does.

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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.