Also More Violent
Ironically, the part of Brooklyn I grew up in— Gravesend— was one of the most Democratic neighborhoods in America… and is now a MAGA hellhole. I didn’t know any Republicans when I was growing up there in the early-mid 1960s but Trump did really well there in 2016 and 2020. I think Fox News fucked it up.
And that brings us to Peter Wehner’s latest essay, The Party of Malice— Donald Trump has made the Republican Party cruel, xenophobic, exclusionary and bigoted. Well, to me it’s always been the party of malice and it’s cruel, xenophobic, exclusionary and bigoted. I had been president of the Young Democrats; Wehner was writing speeches for the cruel, xenophobic, exclusionary, bigoted Secretary of Education,William Bennett. He also worked for Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush and George W Bush. He and I agree that Trump is far worse than any of them but… probably not on much else. He’s an anti-Choice, anti-Palestinian warmonger who wrote that Obama “undermined America's moral self-confidence.”
“In his first run for president,” wrote Wehner, “Trump had awful rhetoric; this time around, he has worse. His words are fascistic. Trump is repeating like an incantation the claim that illegal immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’ He has referred to his opponents, whom he sees as his enemies, as ‘vermin.’ Since the first day Trump stepped on the presidential stage, and in some cases since long before then, he has stoked grievances, resentments, and fears. He has targeted Mexicans; Muslim and Syrian refugees; Haitians, Salvadorans, and Africans; and Black Americans, including the Central Park Five and the Black prosecutors who have filed charges against him. As Michael Steele, the first Black man to chair the Republican National Committee, put it, ‘If he can race bait it, he will. These prosecutors, these Black people are coming after me— the white man.’”
“When it comes to race, Trump plays with fire like no other president in a century,” the New York Times reporter Peter Baker wrote in 2019. “While others who occupied the White House at times skirted close to or even over the line, finding ways to appeal to the resentments of white Americans with subtle and not-so-subtle appeals, none of them in modern times fanned the flames as overtly, relentlessly and even eagerly as Trump.”
No president in living memory, and no major political leader since George Wallace, has said and done things that stir the heart of white supremacists— of David Duke, Richard Spencer, Nick Fuentes, and the Proud Boys, among others— as powerfully as Trump does. But his appeal is hardly limited to them.Trump’s rhetoric is resonating with the majority of Republicans.
…Reagan and Bush were following in the tradition of Lincoln, the greatest Republican and the greatest president America has produced. He was a supporter of immigration throughout his political career, considering it a “source of national wealth and strength.” Lincoln despised nativism and was contemptuous of the “Know Nothing” party, which was anti-slavery (at least the Northern wing was) yet ferociously anti-immigrant.
“When the Know-Nothings get control, [the Declaration of Independence] will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics,” Lincoln wrote in a letter to his friend Joshua Speed. “When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty— to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
In his July 10, 1858, speech, Lincoln argued that recently arrived immigrants who were not descendants of the early colonists—German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian— could yet feel a connection with America. Citizenship was not based on racial, ethnic, or religious identity; it was based on the ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence. In an extraordinarily elegant and profound passage, Lincoln said: “If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”
The Republican Party, at its founding and at its best, was capacious, generous in spirit, welcoming to foreigners. It was conservative, and it was compassionate.
Today’s Republican Party has laid waste to those sensibilities. Donald Trump took a party that, by the time he first ran for president, was increasingly inward looking, fearful, and uncharitable, and he made it cruel, xenophobic, exclusionary, and bigoted. It is the party of malice.
I hope my former party will one day be reformed. For now, it needs to be defeated.
I would rather see Republicans fail to pass anything rather than pass the agenda of the increasingly dominant neo-Nazi wing of the party. And two of those neo-Nazis have been complaining loudly that they haven’t been able to get anything passed. Chip Roy (R-TX) famously bitched “I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing— one!— that I can go campaign on and say we did. One! Anybody sitting in the complex, you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done besides, ‘Well, I guess it’s not as bad as the Democrats.’”
A few weeks later, another neo-Nazi, Andy Biggs, told the far right Newsmax audience that “We have nothing. In my opinion, we have nothing to go out there and campaign on. It’s embarrassing.” The Newsmax host, Chris Salcedo responded, “I know. The Republican Party in the Congress majority has zero accomplishments.”
What could they be doing instead? Well, Kentucky legislators “are rallying behind a new bill that would authorize the use of force— and potentially deadly force— against unhoused people who are found to be camping on private property. The bill would also criminalize unsanctioned homeless encampments and restrict cities and towns from preempting state laws. The bill, known as the ‘Safer Kentucky Act,’ or HB5, would target homelessness, drug possession and mental illness by drastically increasing criminal penalties for a range of offenses. Introduced last week by Republican state representative Jared Bauman, it already has 52 sponsors in Kentucky’s House of Representatives. A vote is scheduled for this week.”
The Kentucky House has 78 Republicans and just 20 Democrats and the state Senate has 31 Republicans and just 7 Dems. This is when you can feel a little relieved that the state just reelected a Democrat, Andy Beshear, governor. And it wasn't that close. Beshear beat MAGA Republican Daniel Cameron by 5 points, winning majorites in 6 of 7 most populous counties (the ones with cities basically)-- Jefferson, Fayette, Kenton, Warren, Campbell and Daviess.