Washington Post Editorial: Ron DeSantis reaches a new low of cynicism and recklessness

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican, has descended to a jaw-dropping level of cynicism. At a news conference on Monday, he announced that if local governments in Florida impose vaccine mandates on their employees, he would fine them $5,000 for every worker. Then he stood silently by as Gainesville city employees made false claims about the mRNA vaccines that have saved countless lives during the pandemic.

Mr. DeSantis harbors national political ambitions. But what he’s displaying here is crass opportunism and disregard for the greater good. As he stokes the ignorance and misguided impulses of some in the Republican base, he is acting against the very tools needed to save lives and stop the pandemic. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/14/ron-desantis-reaches-new-low-cynicism-recklessness/

Karen Tumulty: California’s recall election confirmed everything that is wrong with today’s Republican Party

Tuesday’s recall election in California was only the latest evidence of how dark and delusional is the place to which former president Donald Trump has led his party.

It was the product of the same undemocratic impulses that have sparked a phony “audit" of the 2020 presidential election in Arizona, which is likely to be soon replicated elsewhere; that have stoked unfounded fears of fraud, undermining confidence in the electoral system; that have given GOP officials cover in states across the map to pass measures that will make it harder for people to vote.

The party seems willing to do whatever it takes to win, with the exception of putting forward a set of palatable ideas that might make more people vote for Republicans.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) easily beat back the effort to recall him, an exercise that cost the state an estimated quarter-billion dollars.

If anything, the lengths to which Republicans were willing to go in their Golden State suicide mission speak to the reality that there is nothing they will not try if it gives them even a glimmer of a chance to regain power. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/15/californias-recall-election-confirmed-everything-that-is-wrong-with-todays-republican-party/

Jonathan Bernstein: California Recall Flashes Danger Signs at Republicans

The recall election says something small and something large about the Republican Party that may affect upcoming elections.

The minor point is that Republicans are still following their 2020 strategy of giving their own voters a one-two demobilization punch. They’re still demonizing absentee and other mail-in or drop-box voting, thereby discouraging their own voters from using those methods and making it harder for their own supporters to vote. Some of the recent Republican state laws making voting harder are in part simply a convoluted way of making up for the campaign that’s pushed Republican voters away from voting methods they were in the habit of using.

The bigger idea is that Republican claims of election fraud are not only fictional and dangerous for democracy, but also may be sending a message to Republican voters that voting is futile. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-09-15/california-recall-election-flashes-danger-signs-at-republicans

Eric Lutz: The Lesson Of Gavin Newsom’s Big Win Is Actually Pretty Simple

There are limits to the lessons that can be drawn from any one race—particularly in California, where Democrats dramatically outnumber Republicans. But Newsom’s decisive victory there does suggest that there may be some profit in his party tying GOP opponents to the former president, whose brand may help them with the base, but hurt them with a general electorate that has always, broadly, found Trump to be unappealing. Democrats are trying a similar strategy in Virginia and New Jersey, both of which will also hold statewide elections this year. In some cases, Trump himself is making that easier, endorsing his chosen candidates and bearers of the mantle. “I agree that Trump had been a huge motivator for the last four years, but…he’s not off the ballot here in Virginia,” governor Terry McAuliffe told the Washington Post. “Very uniquely, of all the races, Glenn Youngkin”—who earned a Trump endorsement—“has inserted Trump back into the race.”

Indeed, it’s worth remembering that Trumpism has always had limited appeal, not just in liberal California but in the country as a whole, where he was soundly defeated in the popular vote in 2016 and 2020. It can be easy to forget that, amid all the noise about populist backlash against Democratic elites. But in the end, Newsom didn’t win because he pulled off a miraculous political high-wire act, CNN analyst Kasie Hunt suggested; he won, simply, because his policies and priorities better reflected the electorate than his opponents’ did. That the recall vote happened at all, of course, is a testament to the power of the Trump-era GOP; that Newsom, after all that, brushed it off so easily may underscore its limits. “Gavin may have been on a high wire,” as California-based Republican strategist Mike Murphy told the Times, “but he was wearing a big, blue safety harness.” https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-09-15/california-recall-election-flashes-danger-signs-at-republicans

Charlie Sykes: Does the GOP Really Want to Do This Again?

The great political mystery of our time has been the refusal of the GOP to take the many off-ramps from Trumpism.

They could have put the petulant, disgraced, defeated one-term president firmly in the rearview mirror — but, instead, they have embraced their hostage status with an obsequiousness that makes the Stockholm Syndrome seem quaint.

Republicans could have moved on after the election; they certainly could have bailed after January 6. They even had a chance to wipe the slime off during the impeachment process. They could have refused to go along with the Big Lie and easily segued into post-Trumpian oppositional politics.

Instead, they are poised to wear Trumpism like a coat of many colors into the mid-terms; and to nominate him for a second term in 2024, so that he can wage his paranoid revenge campaign against his enemies. https://morningshots.thebulwark.com/p/does-the-gop-really-want-to-do-this

Philip Bump: All of this to keep Trump from getting upset

By now, we’ve revealed most of the details surrounding former president Donald Trump’s last few months in office. We know the broad themes of that period but keep learning new anecdotes that fill in the white spaces. We learn, for example, that Trump’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, was so concerned about Trump’s stability after last year’s election that he proactively soothed the concerns of his counterpart in China and worked to insulate the military against the president’s vagaries. That’s a big shark that was floating there, undiscovered.

But that story and others from a new book by The Washington Post’s Robert Costa and Bob Woodward are still just part of the overall picture, one that we recognized even before we’d added any detail at all. It’s an image of a person terrified of being seen as a loser who yanked every available lever of power to keep that perception from taking root. Nothing we’ve learned since Nov. 3, 2020, has shaken that fundamental image. It’s all been detail that presents a fuller, more complete picture, not revelations that shift what we’re seeing.

The small detail that jumped out at me from the new reporting is how Trump tried to cajole Vice President Mike Pence into pretending that he could reject the will of voters and halt the final counting of electoral votes. Pence told Trump, correctly, that he couldn’t do that.

“I don’t want to be your friend anymore if you don’t do this,” Trump told Pence in response, according to the book.

There are just so many ways in which to interpret that. There’s the image of the most powerful man in the country sitting in the Oval Office, the seat of American executive power, threatening to withhold his friendship to get his way. Then there’s the idea that Pence would in January 2021 be under any illusion that Trump was his friend in the first place. He endured months of speculation about being replaced on the ticket for 2020, and Trump, only days prior, attacked him during a rally speech in Georgia. Pence had been around Trump long enough to know the value of friendship to Trump, had seen more than enough examples of people loyal to Trump being quickly sliced clean when they became inconvenient, to understand that Trump wasn’t going to be loyal to him. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/09/14/all-this-keep-trump-getting-upset/

Dana Milbank: This is how a Republican lie is born

This is what happens when an entire political party takes leave of reality.

Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, used a hearing intended for sworn testimony from the secretary of state on the Afghanistan withdrawal to allege that President Biden is mentally incompetent.

Risch first devoted his opening statement to continuing the long-running Republican narrative. “We know for a fact the president of the United States is somewhat disadvantaged here in that someone is calling the shots. He can’t even speak without someone in the White House censoring it or signing off on it,” the senator claimed. “As recently as yesterday, in mid-sentence, he was cut off by someone in the White House who makes the decision that the president of the United States is not speaking correctly. … This is a puppeteer act.”

Then, as the first Republican questioner, Risch used his time to elaborate on the slander. “Somebody in the White House who has authority to press the button and stop the president, cut off the president’s speaking ability and sound," he told Secretary of State Antony Blinken. "Who is that person?”

Blinken chuckled as he replied that Biden “speaks very clearly and very deliberately for himself.”

The episode is worth unpacking because it shows, in miniature, how misinformation infects the Republican Party, rapidly spreads through partisan media and contaminates elected GOP leaders — who amplify and defend the falsehood, even when it’s shown to be wrong. This is how lies are born. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/14/risch-blinken-hearing-questions-republican-lie/

Marianna Sotomayor and Josh Dawsey: Trump endorses Wyoming lawyer to unseat Liz Cheney in biggest test of his ability to purge his critics from the party

Donald Trump announced Thursday that he is endorsing Harriet Hageman to take on Republican Rep. Liz Cheney in a Wyoming primary contest that will serve as the marquee test of the former president’s ability to purge his critics from the party, particularly lawmakers who challenge his false claims about the 2020 presidential election.

Trump has vowed to unseat Cheney since she voted to impeach him in January over his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which was carried out by a mob of supporters who echoed Trump’s false claims about the election while seeking to stop Congress from certifying its results and declaring Joe Biden the president-elect.

In a statement, Trump called Cheney a “warmonger and a disloyal Republican,” and said, “Unlike RINO Liz Cheney, Harriet is all in for America First,” adding that she has his endorsement in “replacing the Democrats number one provider of sound bites, Liz Cheney.”

In a quick response, Cheney tweeted, “Here’s a sound bite for you: Bring it.”

The congresswoman said in a statement that she is proud of her conservative record and looks forward to a debate about elected officials upholding their oath to the Constitution.

“It is tragic that some in this race have sacrificed those principles, and their duty to the people of Wyoming, out of fear and in favor of loyalty to a former president who deliberately misled the American people about the 2020 election, provoked an attack on the U.S. Capitol, and failed to perform his duties as president as the violence ensued,” Cheney said. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/26/robert-kagan-afghanistan-americans-forget/

Dana Milbank: Robert E. Lee was a stone-cold loser

“If only we had Robert E. Lee to command our troops in Afghanistan, that disaster would have ended in a complete and total victory many years ago. What an embarrassment we are suffering because we don’t have the genius of a Robert E. Lee!”

For a point-by-point grading of Trump’s history paper, I checked in with Ty Seidule, a retired U.S. Army brigadier general and military historian who is the former head of the U.S. Military Academy history department. Now at Hamilton College, he’s the author of “Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning With the Myth of the Lost Cause.”

Greatest strategist of all? “Well, he’s a loser,” Seidule responded. “He wasn’t just defeated; his army was destroyed. The idea that he’s the greatest strategist of all is just ludicrous.”

War would have been over in a day? If it had, Seidule argued, then slavery may have survived. Emancipation wasn’t U.S. policy until 1863. “So the fact that Lee was able to keep the war going as long as it did helped add to the eventual destruction of that which he fought for.”

Lee chose the Confederacy because of his great love of Virginia? Seidule said Lee was one of eight U.S. Army colonels from Virginia at the time of secession in 1861. The other seven remained loyal to the United States — as did Virginian Winfield Scott, the U.S. Army’s commander, and 80 percent of all colonels from the South. “Lee’s the outlier,” Seidule said. That may be because at that level of Army officers “no one benefited from slavery more than he did.” Lee ran an enslaved-labor farm — a plantation — from 1857 to 1860. He wasn’t even a resident of Virginia for most of his prewar life; Alexandria, his hometown, was part of the District of Columbia until 1847.

Would have won but for Gettysburg? The day after Gettysburg, Ulysses S. Grant triumphed at Vicksburg, giving the U.S. Army control of the Mississippi River and splitting the Confederacy. Lee’s army couldn’t function without thousands of enslaved people working as servants or in factories and on farms, and after Vicksburg, Seidule said, “they lose all that enslaved labor” as the U.S. Army pushed into the South.

Greatest unifying force after the war? Grant called Lee’s actions “forced acquiescence” that was “grudging and pernicious.” Though more conciliatory than others, Lee testified to Congress in 1866 that Black residents “cannot vote intelligently” and that “it would be better for Virginia if she could get rid of them.” In 1868, Lee joined in issuing the White Sulphur Springs manifesto, which argued that Black people had “neither the intelligence nor the qualifications … for political power.” Argued Seidule: “His idea of reconciliation is only if the White South is given complete political control over Black people.”

Afghanistan would have been a total victory under the “genius” Lee? If the U.S. military had suffered the same casualty rate in Afghanistan that Lee’s army did, 200,000 American troops would have been killed, not the actual 2,400. Some 400,000 would have been injured or captured instead of 20,000 injured. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/10/robert-e-lee-statue-richmond- trump-history/

Nate Cohn: How Educational Differences Are Widening America’s Political Rift

The front lines of America’s cultural clashes have shifted in recent years. A vigorous wave of progressive activism has helped push the country’s culture to the left, inspiring a conservative backlash against everything from “critical race theory” to the supposed cancellation of Dr. Seuss.

These skirmishes may be different in substance from those that preceded them, but in the broadest sense they are only the latest manifestation of a half-century trend: the realignment of American politics along cultural and educational lines, and away from the class and income divisions that defined the two parties for much of the 20th century.

As they’ve grown in numbers, college graduates have instilled increasingly liberal cultural norms while gaining the power to nudge the Democratic Party to the left. Partly as a result, large portions of the party’s traditional working-class base have defected to the Republicans.

Over the longer run, some Republicans even fantasize that the rise of educational polarization might begin to erode the Democratic advantage among voters of color without a college degree. Perhaps a similar phenomenon may help explain how Donald J. Trump, who mobilized racial animus for political gain, nonetheless fared better among voters of color than previous Republicans did, and fared worse among white voters. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/08/us/politics/how-college-graduates-vote.html

Maureen Dowd: Manning Up, Letting Us Down

Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld wrecked W.’s presidency, with their overweening ideas about big-stick executive power and with their loony plan to establish America as the sole superpower by preemptively striking potential foes. (Cheney, always ready to bomb despite his five deferments during Vietnam.) And of course, there was that most belligerent and shameful act: sanctioning torture.

This unholy pair of consiglieres played into W.’s fear that he would be called a wimp, as his father once was, if he did not go along with the guns-blazing, facts-be-damned case to sideline Afghanistan and invade Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11.

Unfortunately, the horrors this “shock and awe” crew unleashed did not shock the country enough to stamp out the mania of this self-defeating streak of hyper-masculinity.

When Trump was running in the Republican primaries, focus groups reported that the quality voters most admired in the reality show star was “balls.” (He even referenced his anatomy during a debate.) His fans were posting memes of him as Rambo, quite an upgrade for Cadet Bone Spurs, and Trump himself tweeted a picture of himself as a shirtless Rocky. All this, even though he would later hit the White House bunker during the Black Lives Matter protests.

After riling up his supporters on Jan. 6 to swarm the Capitol, and telling them “we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you,” Rambo/Rocky retreated to the Oval Office to watch the chaos on TV.

Trump’s faux tough-guy routine led to the lethal political divide on masks, which undermined our ability to beat the virus. When Trump got Covid, he was happy to accept all the special medications he could get from his large team of doctors at Walter Reed. Yet he continued to act as though Covid was a minor annoyance, signaling to his red-state supporters that masks were for wimps.

Never one to miss a cheesy tableau of machismo, Trump is providing ringside commentary on a boxing match on 9/11 at the Hard Rock Casino in Florida between Evander Holyfield, 58, and Vitor Belfort, 44. During a promotional event for the Hasbeenpalooza, the 75-year-old bragged that he’d like to beat up the 78-year-old Joe Biden in the ring, that it would be his “easiest fight” and that Biden would “go down within the first few seconds.”

Hopefully, Biden has something better to do on 9/11 than climb into a ring with Trump. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/11/opinion/september-11-masculinity.html

Eric Lutz: Biden’s COVID Vaccination Strategy Triggers Full-Scale Republican Meltdown

Let’s begin with the obvious: Joe Biden is not a “dictator” for expanding vaccination and testing requirements, nor is he “trampling on civil liberties.” None of the steps outlined Thursday to combat COVID-19, which is still rampaging 18 months into the pandemic despite the widespread availability of safe and free vaccines, amount to “tyranny.” Those seeking to give you a Pfizer shot are nothing at all like the “gestapo,” and Americans should absolutely comply with public health guidelines—regardless of what some hysterical guy standing in a cornfield at night might tell you.

The right-wing backlash to Biden’s new efforts to beat back the pandemic is as predictable as it is aggravating. Republicans, particularly devotees of noted public health expert Donald Trump, have already been standing in the way of the long-sought return to post-COVID normalcy, with some on the right apparently eschewing vaccines in favor of an anti-parasitic commonly used to treat heartworm in animals and state leaders like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott warring against common sense precautions as caseloads rise. That this lot, already prone to hyperbole, would go absolutely ballistic over the White House’s more forceful vaccine push was a foregone conclusion.

And yet, the right’s response to the Biden administration’s new six-part plan has somehow been even more unhinged than anticipated. Ted Cruz called the updated guidelines “utterly lawless” and applauded the right-wing Daily Wire for announcing it wouldn’t comply with the administration’s new vaccination requirements—and his was one of the more subdued takes on the matter. Several GOP lawmakers, including Senator Marsha Blackburn and Representative Madison Cawthorn, likened Biden to a “dictator.” Senator Josh Hawley, one of the main instigators of the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill, accused Biden of “threatening” Americans. Steve Scalise, the number two Republican in the House, charged that Biden was “abusing power.”  https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/09/bidens-covid-vaccination-strategy-triggers-full-scale-republican-meltdown

Robin Abcarian: You go, Joe! Thank heavens the president is standing up for science, public health and vaccines

How refreshing to see a defiant President Biden invite Republicans to “have at it” over his aggressive new plan to make sure most Americans are vaccinated against COVID-19. Thursday, he announced that private-sector businesses with more than 100 employees must make sure their workers are fully vaccinated or be tested each week before coming to work.

The order, which also applies to healthcare workers, federal contractors and most federal workers, is expected to affect more than 80 million American adults who remain unvaccinated.

It’s about time we had a president who stood up unapologetically for science and the public health, and against those selfish, reflexively anti-communitarian conservatives who think that inoculating themselves against a deadly new virus represents a horrendous trampling of their personal freedoms.

Republican governors are already foaming at the mouth to sue Biden for what they see as unconstitutional overreach. They were already worked up over his directive to the education secretary to use the weight of the federal government against governors who have blocked and intimidated local school officials from imposing mask mandates. (The hysteria on display by mask-hating parents at school board meetings across the country has become a social media genre all its own.)

In response to legal threats by Republican governors like Kristi Noem of South Dakota, Biden was blithe: “If those governors won’t help us beat the pandemic,” he said last week, “I will use my power as president to get them out of the way.”

The refusal of otherwise healthy people to vaccinate is, in fact, a trampling of common sense, decency and the very idea that any of us owes a measure of respect to those around us.

No man is an island, as the poet John Donne wrote, and that sentiment has never been more profound now that the world is in the clutches of a deadly pandemic that has already taken more than 4.6 million souls, roughly 660,000 of them in America.

I am so done with the public servants — especially firefighters and police officers who come into contact with the physically frail and vulnerable every day of their working lives — who believe they have a God-given right to refuse vaccines and still keep their jobs. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-09-11/biden-osha-mandate-vaccine