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While the broader GOP weighs just how much distance to put between itself and Trump, some of the former president’s most loyal political allies are working to cement his ideological influence in politics.
So, interesting developments over night in the Senate. Both sides are portraying the agreement as a win. But basically McConnell caved. So chalk up a win for Chuck Schumer.
News of Sen. Rob Portman’s (R-OH) retirement could be grounds for the latest reassessment of the historically-purple-but-lately-pretty-red state.
A few thoughts and suggestions for moving forward in the Biden era, in no particular order.
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Remember Mark Sanford? If you were a Golden Duke: Duke of Dukes voter this last time around, you most certainly will.
Republicans began by resorting to coups and even violent insurrections to overturn the 2020 election. Having failed at that they are now glomming on to Joe Biden’s focus on national ‘unity’ to insist that Democrats overturn it on their behalf by agreeing to the absurd proposition that unity means forgetting the 2020 election even happened. Most of us intuitively know that is a bad faith gambit. But it’s worth articulating what national unity means and does not.
Donald Trump, former President and current GOP leader, governed by making war on the so-called ‘blue states’. Supporters got cash and assistance, opponents got punished. This was a through-line from the first days of Trump’s presidency and the scope and consequences became more open and grotesque during the COVID pandemic.
Unity means governing on behalf of all Americans, not treating half the country like enemies. In the nature of things Biden’s vision of what to prioritize will match the platform he ran on. There are myriad particulars but in general more social spending, more focus on equity and social justice, renewed commitment to confronting the climate crisis. That is what happens when you win an election. That’s democracy, not divisiveness.
The Biden White House and the Democratic Senate face numerous substantive decisions in the coming days and months. But certain decisions, more procedural than policy, will set the tone and ground rules today and in the months and years ahead. They are critical. And they will have a profound impact on the breadth and success of policy-making over the next two and four years.
You’ll be familiar with these ground rules decisions in concept even if the particulars are technical and occluded in administrative and parliamentary jargon. In short, will resurgent Democrats use their lawful powers to enact their policy agenda or get wrong-footed and derailed by bad faith arguments from Republicans about norms, fairness, unity and the like? Will they be gamed into chasing Republican buy-in, the possibility of which will always be snatched away after it has served its purpose of forcing Democrats to fritter away time they need to deliver on election promises?
This was the great failure of Barack Obama’s presidency, one he fully grasped only late in his second term and after Republicans had used it to wrest away control of Congress and the Courts.
If you didn’t see the COVID memorial service this evening – part of Joe Biden’s larger inauguration program – you really should. It is remarkable, simply remarkable that we are almost a year into this horrible epidemic and this is the first national memorial or commemorative service honoring, remembering the dead.
It is a remarkable and a devastating commentary. I did not quite grasp this absence until I saw it. We’ve fought so much over this epic calamity. We’ve seen so much deflection, blame-shifting and lies. Biden’s comments, remarkably brief, were a reminder that much of what we need is in silence, remembering and memorializing this catastrophic loss. We are now at more than 400,000 Americans dead, roughly the total number of fatalities over almost four years of World War II.
The brief program included two songs: Amazing Grace and Hallelujah.
This quiet, devastating and hopeful memorial reminded me of the remarkable and wholly improbable journey of this song, Hallelujah, into something like a canonical song of memorial or pathos in American culture. That this should be so is actually quite odd, not least because it is not at all clear what the song, in its totality, is even about. And a number of things the song is quite clearly about … well, they are not what you’d expect in a song now treated as appropriate, uplifting and fitting for all occasions and audiences.
Mainstream or memorial versions commonly expurgate the song’s erotic imagery. But it can’t all be ironed out. This energy, rumbling rough under the simplified lyrics, gives a power and ballast even to the more sanitized versions. In any case the mixing and matching of lyrics is possible because Leonard Cohen wrote numerous different lyrics for the song. You can mix and match them and create your own version.
Mitch McConnell’s remarks today about Trump’s role in the insurrection on their face make it pretty clear he believes Trump’s guilty of impeachable offenses which merit removal from office and a ban on serving again in the future. Whether he would vote that way is another question. I think there’s basically no way he does not if he’s not certain of at least 17 other Republican senators ready to join him.
But there’s one thing that’s worth noting about this impending trial.
There are less than 24 hours left of the Trump administration.
And the President is leaving behind a sicker, more divided and more violent nation than the one he inherited four long years ago.
We are now in the final 52 hours of the Trump presidency – I just checked. We will be trying to digest for years just what happened over the last three weeks. But in the simplest sense it’s been an 10 or 11 week temper tantrum by a failed, lawless President who couldn’t face defeat and had one of the country’s two political parties enabling his tantrum right up through January 6th.
Back in 2018, Trump had one of his most dramatic bromance breakups yet.
If you recall, it was back when excerpts of Michael Wolff’s new book “Fire and Fury” were trickling out. Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon was quoted in the book calling the infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Donnie Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and a Russian lawyer “treasonous.” Trump dumped him immediately and in brutal fashion.
I strongly recommend you read Josh Kovesnky’s account of why the US government’s vaunted intelligence capabilities were caught utterly flatfooted by the events of January 6th despite that fact that one needed no greater intelligence asset than a Twitter account or at most one on Parler to know what could be coming.
A key cause of the failure is that no one wanted to raise an alarm about a security threat from the President’s own supporters. Indeed, no one really wanted to be caught investigating it.
This is both a shocking abdication of responsibility and entirely unsurprising given what’s happened to basically anyone in the federal security bureaucracy who’s gotten crosswise with the President. But we can’t understand this development without understanding or simply remembering that this is our fourth or fifth round of this cycle: the institutional Republican party rushing forward to claim that any effort to combat far right terrorism or organized political violence amounts to a crackdown on conservatives or bias against the GOP.
Trump was formally impeached for the second time yesterday afternoon.
But the process began in real time while the Capitol was being mobbed by his supporters last week.
As you can see, the tempo of events is moving rapidly now. Donald Trump not finishing his term of office now seems like a real possibility, as astonishing as that may seem. A number of developments are coming together, like converging waves that build on each other.
There are two things I think we should be thinking about as developments which led to this quickening.
President Trump used his first public appearance in front of reporters since a mob of his supporters breached the Capitol last week, resulting in the deaths of five people, to test out whether his old defenses still carried any water.
There is a simple chain of events that even news outlets doing the best work are still tiptoeing around. After President Trump gave his speech to the insurrectionists on Wednesday he returned to the White House and excitedly watched the storming of the Capitol on TV. As members of Congress were besieged and then retreated to a secure undisclosed location, Trump received numerous pleas from members of Congress to send reinforcements or call on his supporters to disperse. He refused because he liked what he was seeing.
It is the last full week of the Trump presidency and if last week was any indication of how long this week will feel, we should be prepared for another interminable one.
A month ago I made a point that I and others have been making in various ways and in various contexts for years, but with renewed urgency. After Trump Democrats must exercise great discipline not to operate within or engage with the bad faith arguments of Republicans who remain unwilling to come to grips with or take accountability for what they’ve done to the country. Today we see, predictably, the same pattern: it has taken Republicans only three or four days to resolve that they are the primary victims of the events of the last week. We’ve skipped ahead from the “stolen election” lie to claims Republicans are the new Jews being trained off to concentration camps because their months-old pet social network Parler became too radioactive for the hosting service it ran on.
One thought I keep returning to: if there were a functioning federal government we’d be seeing regular press conferences updating the public on on-going arrests, health status of the injured, progress of the investigation. As far as I can tell there hasn’t been a single one. Nothing from DOJ, FBI, Capitol Police, the Pentagon. Normally you might expect such information to be channeled through press conferences at the White House. But, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s not clear or perhaps too clear which side the White House is on.
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