Trump's retreat with the GOP

 This detailed summary of the RNC's "Spring Retreat" and Trump's "behind-closed-doors" $100,000 per seat speech there is worth reprinting here, since it is behind a paywall. The Washington Post also has a few good articles on the weekend retreat that the Republican National Committee tellingly held at the doorstep of Trump's resort and 10 miles away from it in Palm Beach, Fla. The article below appeared in Vanity Fair on Sunday, April 11, 2002.TRUMP KEEPS THE BIG LIE ALIVE AT RNC DONOR RETREAT: by Charlotte Klein The former president’s toxic mix of conspiracy theories and grievances continue to define the GOP, as evidenced by his Saturday night speech full of baseless election claims and petty attacks on anyone deemed disloyal.

By Charlotte Klein

April 11, 2021

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President Donald Trump at the White House on December 7, 2020.by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images

Addressing Republican National Committee donors and GOP officials at Mar-a-Lago on Saturday, former President Donald Trump delivered more or less the same speech he’s been giving since losing the election nearly six months ago, as he continued to lie about the 2020 race and attack those perceived as not doing enough to help change its outcome. “I wish that Mike Pence had the courage to send it back to the legislatures,” Trump said of his vice president, reprising the complaint that led his supporters to chant “Hang Mike Pence” as they stormed the Capitol. “I like him so much. I was so disappointed.” Trump also denounced Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, calling the Kentucky lawmaker a “dumb son of a bitch” and mocking his wife, Elaine Chao, for resigning as transportation secretary in light of the January 6 attack. “She suffered so greatly,” Trump sneered, according to the Washington Post.

Trump’s Palm Beach club was reportedly paid more than $100,000 to hold Saturday’s event, the headliner of the RNC’s spring retreat. Most of the gathering—the first of the former president’s boosters since his election loss—took place down the road, at the Four Seasons resort where “around 360 donors mingled poolside at the beachfront hotel with Republican officials, including chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and co-chair Tommy Hicks,” according to CNN. Trump loyalists such as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Senator Lindsey Graham, and former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway reportedly spoke at the retreat, as did a slew of potential 2024 presidential candidates, including Governors Ron DeSantis and Kristi Noem and Senators Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton. But attendees, including many lawmakers, made the 10-minute trip to Mar-a-Lago on Saturday to hear from the former president himself, whose attacks on McConnell reportedly drew frequent cheers from the room. Trump also signaled out Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, asking the crowd: “Have you ever seen anybody that is so full of crap?”

The roughly hour-long speech veered from Trump’s prepared remarks, a “boring” script he told guests he’d scrapped, the Post reports. Instead, he reiterated falsehoods about the election, such as continuing to declare victory in Pennsylvania and Georgia (both of which he lost to President Joe Biden) and railing against Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who recently passed a voter suppression measure fueled by Trump’s debunked fraud claims. While Trump did not talk about running again, a possibility that looms large over the party, he did pledge to help the GOP take back control of the House and Senate in 2022 and eventually the White House in 2024. Ahead of the speech, Trump adviser Jason Miller told CNN that "Palm Beach is the new political power center, and President Trump is the Republican Party's best messenger." One donor who attended, Andrea Catsimatidis, chairwoman of the Manhattan Republican Party, told the New York Times that “the party is still very much revolving around” Trump. 

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Some on the right took issue with Trump’s speech. Stephen Hayes, editor of The Dispatch, one of the few conservative outlets critical of Trump, tweeted that his “rigged” election rant was “all bullshit” and full of “provable, demonstrable lies”—and “virtually every elected GOPer knows it [and] most will tell you as much off the record.” (Indeed, the headline of Politico’s Playbook on Sunday noted how Republican donors are “privately” panning Trump’s speech.) Rep. Liz Cheney, one of only 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for inciting the insurrection at the Capitol, stood out from her GOP colleagues again on Sunday in calling out the former president’s dangerous rhetoric. “As a party, we need to be focused on the future,” she said on CBS’s Face the Nation. “We need to be focused on embracing the Constitution, not embracing insurrection.”

Even though most Republican members of Congress sided with Trump over democracy on January 6, the former president complained Saturday night about the party not being in lockstep behind him. During his speech, Trump “said he was jealous of Democrats for sticking together to vote against him,” per the Post, calling on his coalition to exhibit such unity. The comment was a kind of meta moment, with the retreat itself reflecting the extent to which the GOP has become “a party thoroughly animated by a defeated incumbent,” the New York Times notes, “a bizarre turn of events in American politics.” 

In an attempt to reorient the party, out of power for the first time in four years and especially aimless without Trump at its helm, Republicans have increasingly adopted “his preference for engaging in red-meat political fights.” Republicans nationwide are focused on voter suppression—fueled by Trump’s baseless election attacks—as well as culture war clashes and grievances with the media. “This is the beating heart of the Republican Party right now—the media has replaced Democrats as the opposition,” Republican strategist Scott Jennings told the Times. “The platform is whatever the media is against today, I’m for, and whatever they’re for, I’m against.”

TDS

For anyone who doesn’t know what that is, it stands for Trump Derangement Syndrome.  It means, you have it bad and that ain’t good. 

No, not that kind of bad, as in, say, “unrequited love” bad.  Rather, you are obsessed with (I’ll call it) “hating all things Trump.”  You can hardly stand even hearing his crude, simpleton's voice, or seeing his ugly orange pancake-makeup’d face.  And that about sums it up for me; it’s that bad for me.  Yeah, I got TDS. 😵

When I think of my disgust with Trump and those who don’t get it, the following comes to mind:

“If you find yourself losing your head, while some others around you are not, then chances are good that they haven’t really grasped the seriousness of the situation.”

Okay, so I used a little poetic license there, versus the original saying.  But you get my point.  (Or maybe you don’t. 😮)  Point being, everyone should also be losing their heads, not just me!

So here are the questions:

1. Have some of us over-reacted to Trump, these last 5-ish years?
2. Should any of us still be screaming from the rafters about him?  Is he still that dangerous?
3. With Trump’s coffers ($85M) being fuller than the RNC's themselves ($84M), how much more political damage do you anticipate from Former Guy?
4. Is my reflecting on the situation just giving him/it more oxygen here?

Pick and choose, or answer all of the questions as you see fit.

Thanks for posting and recommending.

Who are QAnon believers and what do they believe?

In June of 2020, Wired magazine discussed a poll of QAnon supporters to try to figure out what they know and believe. The poll was small, about 350 people with an error margin of 1.7%. Wired writes:

Q FEVER, WE’RE told, is sweeping the nation. Polls show that some 7 percent of Americans believe in or support QAnon, the cultish conspiracy theory and community that originated in online message boards in late 2017. Other fringe ideas draw wider support, but few are as bizarre or alarming. QAnon defies easy summary, but its core premise is that Donald Trump is waging a secret war against a cabal of celebrities and Democratic politicians who abuse children in Satanic rituals. In one lurid variation, Hollywood stars harvest the chemical adrenochrome from children’s bodies. According to Q, the anonymous poster who started the movement, the Mueller investigation was a false-flag operation, ordered by Trump, to investigate these sex criminals. In a prophesied event called “the storm,” Trump will strike against them with mass arrests and possibly executions.

The rise of a community committed to such outré notions has drawn extensive media coverage, much of which seems animated by a simple question: How can so many people believe such crazy stuff?

New research provides a partial answer: They don’t. Until now, polling on QAnon has generally gone no further than asking people how they feel about the movement. This left unexplored what it actually means when someone says they believe in QAnon. Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts University, recently sought to find out. In September, he conducted a nationally representative online poll asking respondents not just whether they support QAnon, but also whether they believe in eight specific false claims, including four that are central to the QAnon worldview. The poll was funded by Luminate and published by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. The results suggest that most “QAnon supporters” have never even heard of, let alone believe, some of the most outrageous claims associated with it.

As you’d expect, QAnon supporters are much likelier to believe false conspiracy theories than everyone else, whether Q-specific or not. But while you might also expect the overwhelming majority of the QAnon group to uniformly embrace its core theories, the results were far more mixed. The highest-polling statement was “Democratic politicians and Hollywood stars are part of a global network that tortures and sexually abuses children in Satanic rituals”—62 percent of QAnon supporters rated it as definitely or probably true. The other three QAnon theories polled—Trump is preparing mass arrests, Mueller was secretly ordered by Trump to investigate pedophiles, and celebrities harvest adrenochrome from children—registered between 44 and 54 percent.

Those numbers, however, heavily overstate the level of belief. Toward the end of the poll, Schaffner asked respondents which statements they had heard of before taking the survey. A large number of Qanon supporters, it turned out, were rating as “true” statements that they were encountering for the first time. The “global network” statement only polled at 38 percent when discounting people who had never heard it. For the “Trump is preparing mass arrests” claim, which is generally described as the foundational QAnon belief, only 26 percent both had heard of it and said it was true. Recall that these are percentages of a percent. Thirty-eight percent of 7 percent [23.1 million people] translates to only 2.6 percent [8.6 million] of the overall population [330 million].

Indeed, QAnon may have less to do with politics, or with Trump, than is generally assumed. Among survey takers who said they approve of it, 28 percent said they plan to vote for Joe Biden. Compare that to 17 percent of white Evangelicals who say the same.

A few weeks ago, after a scurrilous attack ad falsely accused US representative Tom Malinowski (D-New Jersey) of protecting sex offenders, Malinowski said he received several death threats from QAnon supporters. (In response, last week the House of Representatives voted 371-18 to condemn QAnon.)

Forty percent of poll respondents who said they trusted QAnon to provide accurate information also said that their belief had negatively affected their relationships with friends and family. That’s real human suffering.

According to Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami who studies conspiracy theories, conspiracy beliefs don’t spread so easily anyway. “People are generally resistant to ideas that don’t fit their existing worldviews, so simply asking a question isn’t going to turn them into QAnon people,” he said. Rather, there is a stable subset of the population that is drawn to conspiratorial ideas. “When you say ‘They’ve come to believe this’—well, maybe, maybe not. The basic idea of QAnon that there’s a pedophile ‘deep state’ working against the president—as wacky as it sounds, that’s not new at all. That’s the plot of Oliver Stone’s JFK.”

QAnon has been persuasively compared both to a religion, for the fact-resistant faith of its adherents, and to a multiplayer role-playing game, for the collaborative, participatory dynamic by which the theory develops online. It’s important, however, to keep in mind the other implications of those comparisons. People who belong to a religion don’t necessarily believe all or even most of its teachings. And most people understand that a game is just a game.

This is too bizarre

If that poll is reasonably accurate, it seems to suggest that most QAnon supporters do not believe, or have even heard of, most of the core QAnon conspiracies. QAnon believers claimed to support Biden more than Evangelicals. What's up with that? Is this mostly a matter of some people who know the whole thing is a farce but like playing games or owning the libs for the sheer fun of upsetting them or pissing them off? 

I suspect that, regardless of what is in the minds of most QAnon people, they really do not understand the full scope of ramifications of what their beliefs are or the consequences of playing their game. The republican party cannot come out and loudly reject QAnon, notwithstanding the feeble GOP House squeak of condemnation. Electoral politics are too close for the GOP to simply reject QAnon out of hand as it should it if was an honest, moral political party concerned about the public interest, which it isn't. And maybe that is the key source of QAnon political influence. The GOP is too weak to truly reject and ostracize it. So the beast keeps spewing its poison into minds susceptible to crackpottery and/or minds that like playing troll games, even if it causes damage to the poor innocents in families who have to live with with such awful lies- and hate-driven bullshit. 

Assuming the poll is reasonably accurate, what other ways are there to characterize or explain this bizarre mindset?

The Broken Families of QAnon

This discussion reflects another of my attempts to better understand the nature of what is tearing American society and politics apart and what the effects of this poisonous situation are for at least some regular people.

An article in the Week, The broken families of QAnon, dives into what some families with a Qanon believer are going through. One must be clear about this point. Most or nearly all QAnon believers appear to be sincere in their beliefs. That is the case regardless of how crackpot the basis in reality their beliefs appear to non-believers. The main drivers appear to be, not surprisingly, fear (of tyranny, democrats, illegal immigrants, social change, etc.), anger, deep distrust (of the free press, political opposition, etc.), deep resentment (e.g., of insults from liberal elites), and deep discomfort with the complexity, ambiguity and/or direction of major social changes that America is in the midst of. 

The Week writes:

Tyler, 24, had been living with his mother an hour north of Minneapolis .... The paranoia and fear that had engulfed his home became unbearable in the  months since T**** began to falsely claim that the 2020 election had been stolen from him.

“Any advice on dealing with a qanon parent who thinks ww3 will happen during the inauguration?” Tyler asked last month on r/QAnonCasualties, a fast growing Reddit group for those whose loved ones have been consumed by the bizarre and byzantine universe of baseless conspiracy theories known as QAnon.

“Do they have weapons?” one of the site’s moderators asked. “Yep. A lot of them.” Tyler replied.

.... Far from Washington, the falsehoods that had whipped so many into a frenzywere wreaking a different sort of chaos; one that was tearing families apart.

The anguish was playing out behind closed doors in therapists’ offices, where overwhelmed family members were seeking advice. .... Since last summer QAnonCasualties had grown from 10,000 members to more than 130,000 in the days after Joe Biden’s inauguration.

A woman in Palm Beach, Fla., had gone two weeks without speaking to het mother and was starting to wonder if the rift was irreparable. “I grieve for her every day as if she is dead,” she wrote.

A teenager in Annapolis, Md., worried that she no longer knew her father. “I’ve come to the breaking point,” she confessed. “My heart goes out to everyone else in this situation. It really sucks.”

“My mom has been into QAnon since it got started [the first post was on July 4, 2019],” wrote the QAnonCasualties founder .... “The ignorance, bigotry and refusal to question ‘the plan’ has only gotten worse over time. I’m always torn between stopping communication with her because it only seems to make me feel terrible, and feeling like it’s my responsibility to lead her back to reality.”

“Thank the fucking stars I found you guys,” replied one of the first to join. “Today has been hard.”

“My mother is a hard core believer,” wrote another. “I found her Twitter account handle and I am horrified and embarrassed. Who is this person?”

Like many conspiracy theories, QAnon supplied a good-versus-evil narrative into which complicated world events could be easily incorporated.

A big part of what made it novel was that it was interactive, allowing its followers to take part in the hunt for clues as if they were playing a video game.

Unlike other online conspiracy theories, it also had the blessing of some top Republicans, such as T****, who embraced the movement in the hope that he could channel believers’ rabid and sometimes violent passions for political gain. “It’s a bet that they can control this insurgency [said an expert] .... The bet is we can ride this tiger. And sometimes, as in Germany and Italy, you can get eaten by the tiger.” 

A few days after the Capitol riots, one of his mother's oldest friends stopped by to deliver a wedding present. Tyler’s mother had recently remarried. “Do you plan on shooting someone today?” the friend said she joked when she noticed Tyler’s mom was wearing a pistol. “You never know what's going to happen with the democrats,” Tyler’s mother replied, according to the friend, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “They stole the election.”

Tyler wound up getting kicked out of the house by the new husband and estranged from his mother. He commented: “I just don’t see the humanity in this. I wanted my family back, not this hatred.”

Questions: Is QAnon immoral, evil, neither and/or something else just expressing free speech? What about people who sincerely believe in QAnon’s lies, crackpot conspiracies and irrational emotional manipulation, including fomented distrust and intolerance leading to families being torn apart and the QAnon believers hating their own family members?

THE ROCK FOR PRESIDENT!!

 

Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson teases White House run after surprise poll

A poll of more than 30,000 Americans conducted by Piplsay found nearly half of respondents — 46 percent — willing to consider the candidacy of a future President Rock.

https://nypost.com/2021/04/10/dwayne-the-rock-johnson-teases-white-house-run-after-poll/?_ga=2.85544729.1485339358.1618118435-2146874233.1618118435

Evidence of Threat to American Democracy and Its Rule of Law

This discussion is longer than most, but what it contains strikes me as important and urgent.

Several recent discussions here assert that there is an immediate, dire threat to democracy and the rule of law. The threat is asserted to come from radical right groups and propaganda sources like Fox News, the Sinclair Broadcasting behemoth, etc., the republican party leadership and elites and at least some rank and file republicans who are deceived into a sincere belief that they are fighting to defend democracy and the rule of law. 

Obviously, the American people are not a monolith in their beliefs. For example, I characterize the 1/6 attack on the US capitol as terrifying and a coup attempt. But that is a minority opinion. For example, Pew Research found that only 14% of Americans surveyed indicated “surprise/concern for country” and only 13% blamed Trump. Just 9% of Americans were critical of the law enforcement response to the sacking, 8% describe it as a “coup attempt” or as “domestic terrorism” and a mere 3% claimed to be scared about it. That lack of fear by Americans and their failure to connect T**** with the coup attempt really frightens me. A lot. I am undeniably out of synch with most Americans on this issue.

But does that poll data on the 1/6 coup attempt accurately reflect the seriousness of what I firmly claim to be a deadly serious attack by the radical right, including at least the GOP leadership, on democracy and the rule of law? Other people saw the threat going at least back to a couple of days after the 2016 election. Russian journalist Masha Gessen, who witnessed the fall of democracy in Russia to tyrants and kleptocrats, was blunt about what she saw:

“Thank you, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. We have lost. We have lost, and this is the last day of my political career, so I will say what must be said. We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half. The president-elect has made his intentions clear, and it would be immoral to pretend otherwise. We must band together right now to defend the laws, the institutions, and the ideals on which our country is based.”

 
That, or something like that, is what Hillary Clinton should have said on Wednesday [in her concession speech to T****].

An article in the current issue of Washington Monthly, America’s Next Insurgency, posits this: “The January 6 violence could signal the start of nationwide conflict not seen since the Civil War. Can we stop it?” WM writes:

The present United States may be more polarized than it has been at any time since the 1850s. Large swaths of the population simply refuse to accept the election of political opponents as legitimate. Many of the social issues that divide us, in particular questions of systemic discrimination, stem from slavery.

Most frighteningly, research suggests that a growing number of Americans believe that political violence is acceptable. In a 2017 survey by the political scientists Lilliana Mason and Nathan Kalmoe, 18 percent of Democrats and 12 percent of Republicans said that violence would be at least a little justified if the opposing party won the presidency. In February 2021, those numbers increased to 20 percent and 28 percent, respectively. Other researchers have found an even bigger appetite for extreme activity. In a January poll conducted by the American Enterprise Institute, researchers asked respondents whether “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” Thirty-six percent of Americans, and an astounding 56 percent of Republicans, said yes.

All of this raises a serious question: Could the United States experience prolonged, acute civil violence?

According to dozens of interviews with former and current government officials, counterterrorism researchers, and political scientists who study both the U.S. and other countries, the answer is yes. “I think that the conditions are pretty clearly headed in that direction,” says Katrina Mulligan, the managing director for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress and the former director for preparedness and response in the national security division at the Department of Justice (DOJ). The insurrection on “January 6 was a canary in the coal mine in a way, precisely because it wasn’t a surprise to those of us who have been following this.” 

But officials and researchers overwhelmingly agreed on the main source of the threat: the radical right. Despite overwrought warnings of “antifa,” it has been extreme conservatives who have driven into crowds of protestors, killing liberal activists. No leftists have murdered police officers or security guards, as right-wing fanatics did last summer in California. Progressives have not called for a race war or the bloody overthrow of the federal government. “Primarily, this is a far-right problem,” Napolitano said. “We saw it pretty clearly expressed on January 6.” 

Unfortunately, the Biden administration might not have much more luck fighting insurgents on the home front. The economic dislocation and misplaced cultural grievances that are driving discontent are not easy to fix, especially with our knotty political system. And even if the president can tackle these challenges, the institutions that are trusted by the right—incendiary conservative politicians, Fox News, talk radio grifters, Facebook commentators obsessed with “owning the libs,” and, above all else, Donald Trump—have no incentive to stop peddling lies or to cool their tone. Hate works to their political and financial benefit. 

“We can run around and do targeting operations. The FBI can sweep up dudes nonstop,” says Jason Dempsey, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a former special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But political violence is, ultimately, a political problem. So long as the GOP remains in thrall to the far right, attackers will have enough support to regenerate. “If you don’t address that,” Dempsey says, “then no amount of tactical action will ever get you ahead of the game.” (emphasis added)

There is also evidence of significant public support for a potential military intervention and/or closing down Congress. The Washington Post indicates that both voters and non-voters share such views:   

Our research finds that, in fact, substantial numbers of U.S. adults say they would embrace ruptures in the constitutional order, which is in keeping with Bright Line Watch findings that experts believe that measures of U.S. democracy have declined under President Trump.

Whether his supporters believe it or not, the former president was and still is not democratic (in my opinion). He was and is an authoritarian autocrat with a lot of hostility toward democracy, especially elections, and the rule of law. Based on that data, most republican believe T****-style democracy, i.e., autocracy, is just fine.

Another cause for concern lies with arguably inadequate laws and/or reluctance to enforce existing laws in the face of right wing domestic terrorism. Once source comments on this:

“When someone like [Tree of Life synagogue shooter] Robert Bowers kills18 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue, and he’s not considered a domestic terrorist because he used a handgun and not a weapon of mass destruction. It really points to the absurdity of the law as it exists today,” Blazakis told The Intercept. “If that were an individual inspired by ISIS, they’d be charged with an act of terrorism. 

Collectively, that evidence is convincing to me that democracy and the rule of law are under a severe attack and most of the danger, about 90% in my opinion, comes from the republican party leadership and radical right conservatism and propaganda generally. 

Questions: Is that content and analysis too biased-prejudiced and/or the evidence too cherry picked to be persuasive? Is Antifa and/or governance by democrats much more of a threat than just ~10%, say ~50% or even 90%? If there is widespread delusional thinking and belief, is it mostly on the left or the right, or roughly equal on both sides? Are the information sources not trustworthy and thus the evidence is not true or believable?

Thanks to PD for raising most of the information this discussion is based on.