Jonathan Chait: The Republican Party May Not Be Fascist, But It’s Definitely Getting Fasci-er

On the narrow point of terminology, I largely agree that fascist should not be used to describe figures like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. Historians and political theorists have innumerable definitions of fascism — some narrow, others extremely broad. But most people understand fascism to mean a single-party state in which effective political opposition is impossible — or at least extremely dangerous. Neither Trump nor DeSantis is trying to build a system like this.

What I do believe is that it’s accurate to describe Trump and DeSantis as engaging in and advocating authoritarian measures that weaken democracy without eliminating it altogether as a fascist would. A more limited and precise term might be democratic backsliding — a term I favor (despite its unsuitability in headlines), because it correctly conceives of democracy and dictatorship as existing on a continuum rather than in a binary. I think Joe Biden’s term, ‘semi-fascist,’ captures this well enough. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/03/republican-fascist-authoritarian-democratic-trump-desantis-bessner.html

Sen. Elizabeth Warren: Silicon Valley Bank Is Gone. We Know Who Is Responsible.

No one should be mistaken about what unfolded over the past few days in the U.S. banking system: These recent bank failures are the direct result of leaders in Washington weakening the financial rules.

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act to protect consumers and ensure that big banks could never again take down the economy and destroy millions of lives. Wall Street chief executives and their armies of lawyers and lobbyists hated this law. They spent millions trying to defeat it, and, when they lost, spent millions more trying to weaken it.
Greg Becker, the chief executive of Silicon Valley Bank, was one of the ‌many high-powered executives who lobbied Congress to weaken the law. In 2018, the big banks won. With support from both parties, President Donald Trump signed a law to roll back critical parts of Dodd-Frank. Regulators, including the Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, then made a bad situation worse, ‌‌letting financial institutions load up on risk.

Banks like S.V.B. ‌— which had become the 16th largest bank in the country before regulators shut it down on Friday ‌—‌ got relief from stringent requirements, basing their claim on the laughable assertion that banks like them weren’t actually “big” ‌and therefore didn’t need strong oversight. ‌ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/13/opinion/elizabeth-warren-silicon-valley-bank.html

Dana Milbank: Kevin McCarthy joins the insurrection

Not since the Know-Nothing Party disappeared in the 1850s has a public figure boasted about his ignorance with as much gusto as Kevin McCarthy does.

It doesn’t seem to matter what you ask the speaker of the House. He hasn’t read it, seen it or heard about it.

The explosive documents from the Dominion case showing Fox News hosts privately said Donald Trump’s election lies were hokum but promoted the lies on air anyway?

"I didn’t read all that. I didn’t see all that," McCarthy told The Post.

The way Fox News’s Tucker Carlson (predictably) manipulated the Jan. 6, 2021, security footage McCarthy (foolishly) gave the propagandist, giving the false appearance that the bloody insurrection was mostly peaceful?

"I didn’t see what was aired," McCarthy asserted.

Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, in an implicit rebuke of McCarthy, blasting the Carlson propaganda while holding up a statement from the Capitol Police chief denouncing Fox News’s "outrageous," "false" and "offensive" portrayal of the insurrection?

You guessed it. McCarthy "didn’t see" McConnell do that.

The benighted McCarthy has been amassing this impressive body of obtuseness for some time. If ignorance is bliss, the California Republican has been in nirvana for years now.

How about Trump’s speech on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, provoking the sacking of the Capitol?

"I didn’t watch it," McCarthy said.

Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) calling the insurrectionists’ rampage a normal tourist visit?

"I don’t know what Congressman Clyde said," quoth McCarthy, and "I didn’t see it."

When his own designated negotiator reached a bipartisan agreement to form a commission to probe the Jan. 6 attack (a commission McCarthy ultimately killed)?

"I haven’t read through it."

Trump, in a recorded phone call, demanding Georgia’s secretary of state find enough votes to overturn the election results?

"I have to hear it first."

Trump telling four congresswomen of color (three of them U.S.-born) to go back where they came from, prompting chants of send her back among his rallygoers?

"I didn’t get to see the rally."

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) harassing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) with shouts and slander just off the House floor?

"I didn’t see that. I don’t know what happened." https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/03/10/kevin-mccarthy-i-know-nothing-insurrection-questions

Katie Phang: The true cost of Dominion’s devastating Fox News bombshells

In the Dominion versus Fox News defamation case, Fox is now trapped in an ever-worsening spiral of lies of its own creation. Time and time again, Fox allegedly trafficked in lies and falsehoods. And the result just might be a financial death penalty for the network…

Armed with thousands of pages of texts and internal chats and emails by and between Fox hosts, producers and executives, Dominion seeks to convince a Delaware judge that a jury no longer needs to hear the case because, as a matter of law, there is no work left to be done to decide whether Fox defamed Dominion. On March 21, both sides will appear in court for oral arguments. As Dominion has argued, “It is the rare case to grant summary judgment of actual malice, but it is also the rare case where direct evidence of actual malice exists, as it does here.” 

And some legal experts agree: Dominion doesn’t just have the upper hand, it has the truth on its side. If Dominion is successful, then all that would be left to determine is the amount of damages that Dominion is entitled to receive. That’s where the numbers become astronomical. Dominion is seeking $1.6 billion in lost profits and reputational harm. But it’s also seeking punitive damages, which are not capped under New York state law and could also be in the billions of dollars. Punitive damages are intended to punish the wrongdoer and to deter others from repeating that egregious conduct. And a multi-billion-dollar punitive damages verdict would not just punish Fox News. It would send a ringing message to all media companies to keep themselves in check and uphold the truth. https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/fox-news-dominion-damages-rcna74446

Bess Levin: Donald Trump’s VP Short List Is A Who’s Who Of Uniquely Awful Republican Women.

In January, we learned that Donald Trump was reportedly considering GOP representative Marjorie Taylor Greene to be his 2024 running mate. As a stark raving lunatic—who, among other things, believes there’s some truth to what QAnon says about Democrats being Satanic cannibal pedophiles, has insisted there’s no evidence a plane crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11, and claimed the Clintons had JFK Jr. killed—the Georgia Republican is obviously a perfect complement to the most deranged president in modern history. But apparently, Greene isn’t the only certifiably insane candidate Trump has his eyes on.

That’s right, Axios reports that Trump is also mulling over Kari Lake as a VP pick. Like the 45th president, the former news anchor also has exactly zero government experience, although unlike Trump, she’s never actually won an election. But don’t tell her that! Since losing the Arizona gubernatorial race last November, Lake has insisted the whole thing was stolen from her; despite having her claims rejected by two different courts, she apparently believes the Arizona Supreme Court will rule in her favor. That defiance, in the face of utter facts, is presumably a large part of what Trump sees in her, in addition to liking that, per Axios, she has shown she’s willing to defend him vociferously, no matter the issue or controversy. (Ahead of the 2022 midterms, Lake called for her opponent to be thrown in jail for certifying the 2020 election results, which Trump surely loved. More recently, she called Maricopa County election officials crooks who need to be locked up for not buying her own election fraud claims.)  https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/03/donald-trump-vp-short-list-kari-lake

Eric Lutz: Tucker Carlson Doesn't Think Much Of Donald Trump—Or His Audience

It’s long been clear that Fox News wasn’t buying the election denial it was selling. That much was made plain by the January 6 committee, which uncovered messages from hosts like Sean Hannity attempting to get Trump to put an end to the riot that day. But unsealed documents from Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation suit against the network further underscore the full extent to which Fox knowingly misled its viewers: Last month, a Dominion court filing revealed internal communications that showed everyone from leaders like Fox Corp. Chair Rupert Murdoch to on-screen personalities like Laura Ingraham mocking the Trumpworld election conspiracy theories they were promoting on air. And just this Tuesday, the day after Carlson tried to convince Americans that the insurrectionists were actually more like "sightseers," a new trove of emails, texts, and deposition transcripts went public.

In the latest batch of findings, Murdoch describes Trump and Rudy Giuliani as "increasingly mad" and dangerous. Raj Shah, a senior vice president and Fox and former Trump administration official, described Trump lawyer Sidney Powell as "MIND BLOWINGLY NUTS," but expressed concern that the network could lose viewers to Newsmax and One America News if they felt "betrayed" by Fox’s coverage. And then, of course, there’s Carlson, who not only acknowledged despising Trump personally, but suggested in a text that he didn’t see any benefit to him politically. "We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show [for the last four years], because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest," Carlson wrote in a January 4, 2021 exchange. "But come on. There really isn’t an upside to Trump."

Nevertheless, Carlson and Co. remained publicly loyal to Trump—and for obvious reasons. "It is not red or blue, as Murdoch put bluntly in a Dominion deposition, it is green." The network knew it was feeding its audience bullshit. But it kept doing so—at the expense of those very viewers, some of whom are now serving jail sentences for acts they committed in service of the conspiracy theories they were sold by the right-wing media—because it was good for business. "The emails, texts, and deposition testimony speak for themselves," as a spokesman for Dominion, the voting system Trump and his allies claimed was rife with fraud, told NBC News. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/03/tucker-carlson-doesnt-think-much-of-donald-trump-or-his-audience
 

Dan Pfeiffer: How to Fight a Vulnerable Fox News

Rupert Murdoch and his merry band of insurrectionists (Hannity), racists (Tucker), propagandists (Ingraham), and fake journalists (Baier) are in a whole heap of legal trouble.

As I am sure you know by now, Fox News is being sued by Dominion Voting Systems for $1.6 billion for defamation. The testimony and text messages released in the court filings have been devastating. Fox News Chairman Rupert Murdoch and his Viet Dinh, the Chief Legal Officer, both admitted under oath that the network failed to meet its responsibility to knowingly stop false information from making it onto the airwaves.

While defamation cases are typically tough to win, the folks at Fox decided to violate the "Stringer Bell" principle and repeatedly text about their culpability in real time. Many legal experts believe Fox will lose the case, and executives and on-air personalities could get the ax to stanch the bleeding.

The revelations in the Dominion lawsuit make it clear that even journalists like Bret Baier are complicit in the worst behavior at Fox. They are propagandists — nothing more and nothing less. And it is essential that we treat them like political adversaries. Never again, should a Democrat feel a need to accommodate a Fox News reporter, answer their question, or appear on their show out of fairness or duty.

Those days are over. There are no objective journalists at Fox. There are just obvious propagandists writing opinion pieces and, more dangerously, subtle propagandists who pretend to be journalists. https://messagebox.substack.com/p/how-to-fight-a-vulnerable-fox-news
 

Susan B. Glasser: 2024 Trump Is Even Scarier Than 2020 Trump

In politics, as in life, there is a tendency to overcomplicate things. And the simple truth about the 2024 campaign is that, like the two Presidential elections that preceded it, the race is all about Donald Trump.

On the Republican side, no potential candidate has registered in the national polls as anything close to a Trump-toppler, and that includes, so far, the much touted governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis. I was reminded of this while listening to the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt interview the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie the other day. Christie is considering running again for President as a former Trump friend who’s seen the light, but it’s hardly clear whether there is a path for him in the field. Hewitt summed up the state of the Republican electorate as being divided into four categories: Never Trump, Sometimes Trump, Always Trump, and Only Trump. The Only Trump category constitutes a more or less immovable twenty-five to thirty per cent of the Party, Hewitt said—which is also the estimate he gave for the percentage of Republicans who will never again vote for Trump. The Party, in other words, is stuck in a Trump doom loop, and the primary will come down to a referendum one way or the other on the former President.

Among Democrats, who are united at least in their loathing of the ex-potus, the Trump factor hangs over the race in a different way. Without him running again, it’s at least conceivable that Joe Biden might choose, at age eighty, not to seek reëlection. But with Trump as the Republican front-runner, Biden has positioned himself as an indispensable opponent: the one proven Trump-beater.
Their fates are intertwined. Once again, it’s all about Trump, Trump, Trump.

For Republicans, the strongest argument that’s been advanced against a Trump redux is that of simple electability. The Party has lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight Presidential elections, and few believe that Trump, already a two-time popular-vote loser, is likely to convince many general-election voters to change their minds the third time out. In that same interview with Hewitt, Christie argued that Trump simply could not win suburban women—and a Republican not winning suburban women can’t win the Presidency. Christie’s appeal to the pragmatism of G.O.P. voters may seem eminently reasonable, but that hardly means his logic will prevail. It should be noted that Christie was one of many who believed Trump would not, and could not, win the Republican nomination in 2016—before eagerly climbing on board Trump’s campaign.

The point is that we’ve been here before. Let’s not make the mistake once again of failing to take Trump seriously. Or literally. Today’s Republican Party is a lot closer to Forever Trump than it is to Never Again Trump. The revenge play continues. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/2024-trump-is-even-scarier-than-2020-trump
 

Steve Coll: The Republicans Begin to Eye 2024

Holed up in his gilded bunker at Mar-a-Lago, Trump might not appear to be the political force he once was, and he has clearly lost some mojo since the Republicans’ disappointments in the midterm elections, which followed his endorsement of weak and extremist candidates in key races. By Trump’s robust standards, his fund-raising since the midterms has been anemic. His love-hate relationship with Fox News has been aggravated by a lawsuit’s recent revelations that Rupert Murdoch and some of his network’s personalities seem to have privately thought that Trump’s claims of election fraud were nonsense. As the primary field for 2024 takes shape, G.O.P. establishment figures are calling Trump a liability. “If we nominate Trump again, we’re going to lose,” the former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan said late last month.

Yet Trump remains the top choice for 2024 among likely Republican primary voters, often by sizable margins, according to many national polls, including two released last week. Among other possible contenders, only Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, attracts double-digit support. And, although he and other high-profile Party leaders such as former Vice-President Mike Pence and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are testing the waters, for now the only other prominent figure to have officially declared is Nikki Haley, who has served as both U.N. Ambassador and governor of South Carolina.

Our two-party apparatus of Presidential primaries—absurdly long, media-saturated, corrupted by big money—can hardly be justified as a model of democratic decision-making. Yet it does allow Republicans and Democrats to resolve their factional conflicts in the open, and it gives motivated partisan voters at the grass roots a say. The Republican primaries will offer an early measure of whether our constitutional system remains strong enough to expunge by democratic means the anti-democratic movement that Trump continues to mobilize. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/13/2024-presidential-race-republican-field
 

Marina Koren: Elon Musk Is Spiraling

When Elon Musk acquired Twitter, he articulated a vision for making the social network a platform for free speech. But in practice, the self-described Chief Twit had gotten dragged into—and has now articulated—the thing that many people understand to be true about Twitter, and social media at large: that, far from providing a space for full human expression, it can make you a worse version of yourself, bringing out your most dreadful impulses.
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We can’t blame all of Musk’s behavior on social media: Visionary Elon has always relied on his darker self to achieve his largest goals. Only now his online persona so alienating people that more of his fans and employees are starting to object. Last summer, a group of SpaceX employees wrote an open letter to company leadership about Musk’s Twitter presence, writing that “Elon’s behavior in the public sphere is a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us.”

SpaceX responded by firing several of the letter’s organizers. By being so focused on Twitter—a place with many digital incentives, very few of which involve being thoughtful and generous—Musk seems to be ceding ground to the part of his persona that glories in trollish behavior. On Twitter, Egregious Elon is rewarded with engagement, “impressions.” Being reactionary comes with its rewards. The idea that someone is “getting worse” on Twitter is a common one, and Musk has shown us a master class of that downward trajectory in the past year. (SpaceX, it’s worth noting, prides itself on having a “no-asshole policy.”)

Does Visionary Elon have a chance of regaining the upper hand? Sure. An apology helps, along with the admission that maybe tweeting in a contextless void is not the most effective way to interact with another person. Another idea: Stop tweeting. Plenty of people have, after realizing—with the clarity of the protagonist of The Good Place, a TV show about being in hell—that this is the bad place, or at least a bad place for them. For Musk, though, to disengage from Twitter would now come at a very high cost. It’s also unlikely, given how frequently he tweets. And so, he stays. He engages and, sometimes, rappels down, exploring ever-darker corners of the hole he’s dug for himself. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/03/elon-musk-twitter-disability-worker-tweets/673339/

Tom Nichols: The Ugly Elitism of the American Right

Fox News will likely never face any real consequences for the biggest scandal in the history of American media. But will Republican voters finally understand who really looks down on them?

Loathing and Indifference

It’s time to talk about elitism.

Last month, I wrote that the revelations about Fox News in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit showed that Fox personalities, for all their populist bloviation, are actually titanic elitists. This is not the elitism of those who think they are smarter or more capable than others—I’ll get to that in a moment—but a new and gruesome elitism of the American right, a kind of hatred and disgust on the part of right-wing media and political leaders for the people they claim to love and defend. Greed and cynicism and moral poverty can explain only so much of what we’ve learned about Fox; what the Dominion filings show is a staggering, dehumanizing version of elitism among people who have made a living by presenting themselves as the only truth-tellers who can be trusted by ordinary Americans.

Unlike people such as Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham, I have never told anyone—including you, readers of The Atlantic—anything I don’t believe. What we’re seeing at Fox, however, is lying on a grand scale, done with a snide loathing for the audience and a cool indifference to the damage being done to the nation. Fox, and the Republican Party it serves, for years has relentlessly patronized its audience, cooing to viewers about how right they are not to trust anyone else, banging the desk about the corruption of American institutions, and shouting into the camera about how the liars and betrayers must pay.

Fox’s stars did all of this while privately communicating with one another and rolling their eyes with contempt, admitting without a shred of shame that they were lying through their teeth. From Rupert Murdoch on down, top Fox personalities have admitted that they fed the rubes all of this red, rotting meat to keep them out of the way of the Fox limos headed to Long Island and Connecticut.

You can see this same kind of contemptuous elitism in Republicans such as Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Elise Stefanik. They couldn’t care less about the voters—those hoopleheads back home who have to be placated with idiotic speeches against trans people and critical race theory.

These politicians were bred to be leaders, you see, and having to gouge some votes out of the hayseeds back home requires a bit of performance art now and then, a small price to pay so that the sons and daughters of Harvard and Yale, Princeton and Stanford, can live in the imperial capital and rule as is their due and their right. https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/03/the-ugly-elitism-of-the-american-right/673350/
   

Paul Waldman: Thank you, Kevin McCarthy and Tucker Carlson

Certain political leaders inspire grudging respect or even fear from their opponents, but let’s face it: House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is not among them. His latest political gambit, a ham-handed attempt to rewrite the history of the Capitol insurrection in collaboration with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, was not just a spectacular faceplant. It turned out to be a service to all of us.

The McCarthy-Carlson collaboration put Jan. 6 back on the top of the news agenda, reminding everyone of Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his 2020 defeat, the violent reaction of his radical supporters and the craven response of Republican politicians who fed deranged conspiracy theories to their base to save their own political skins.

More important, it created an opportunity to revisit the actual events of that day. Some people watched Carlson’s fantasy depiction of Jan. 6 as a peaceful protest where Trump supporters strolled into the Capitol and took selfies while milling around. But a much larger audience likely saw multiple news reports on TV, newspapers and the internet in which both journalists and Republican leaders reiterated the ugly truth about that day’s attack on democracy.

The episode has also further discredited Fox News as it reels from extraordinary revelations showing network executives and personalities privately acknowledging in emails and texts that claims of a stolen election were preposterous even as they amplified those claims on the air. It’s long been argued that Fox News is in no real sense a news organization but is instead a propaganda machine that advances the interests of the Republican Party. That’s never been more clear than it is today.

McCarthy probably thought it was shrewd to give Carlson access to the surveillance footage. Instead, his decision helped reinforce an accurate understanding of Jan. 6, undermined the status of the right’s most important media outlet and reminded the electorate of the rotten core at the heart of the GOP. It’s quite an accomplishment. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/03/09/mccarthy-carlson-fox-january-6-propaganda/