That Literally Defines The Republican Party
Maybe you noticed the reports yesterday that when Netflix chair Reed Hastings contributed $7 million to the Kamala campaign, MAGAts organized a boycott. The hashtag #CancelNetflix started trending on right-wing social media sites and cancellations nearly tripled. Sometimes fighting fascism comes with a cost. I wonder how MAGAty fascists will respond to the launch over the weekend of Athletes for Harris, chaired by Magic Johnson; tennis great Billie Jean King; Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr; two-time World Cup champion Ali Krieger; WNBA champion and Olympic gold medalist Candace Parker; Milwaukee Bucks coach Doc Rivers; South Carolina coach Dawn Staley; Paralympic swimmer Ali Truwit; NBA all-star Chris Paul; and Philadelphia Eagles defensive lineman Thomas Booker and endorsements from 15 Pro Football Hall of Famers: Mel Blount, Emmitt Smith, Kellen Winslow, Andre Tippett, Marv Levy, Alan Page, Drew Pearson, Kenny Houston, Jan Stenerud, Calvin Johnson, Robert Brazile, Willie Roaf, Mike Haynes, Elvin Bethea and Ron Mix.
I don’t expect many MAGAts read either the New Yorker, which endorsed Kamala over the weekend, or the New York Times, which endorsed her this morning. Comparing this election to FDR’s 1940 race, the New Yorker’s editors wrote that “The 2024 election also comes at a moment of national crisis. This time, however, the threat to the country’s future— to its rule of law and its democratic institutions, its security and its character— resides not in a foreign capital but at a twenty-acre Xanadu on the Florida coast. For nine years, Donald Trump has represented an ongoing assault on the stability, the nerves, and the nature of the United States. As President, he amplified some of the ugliest currents in our political culture: nativism, racism, misogyny, indifference to the disadvantaged, amoral isolationism. His narcissism and casual cruelty, his contempt for the truth, have contaminated public life. As Commander-in-Chief, he ridiculed the valor of fallen soldiers, he threatened to unravel the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and he emboldened autocrats everywhere, including Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Viktor Orban. When Trump lost to Joe Biden, in 2020, he tried every means possible to deny the will of the electorate and helped incite a violent insurrection on Capitol Hill.”
They continued that “In contrast, the Democratic Party’s nominee, Vice-President Kamala Harris, has displayed the basic values and political skills that would enable her to build on the successes of the Biden Administration and to help end, once and for all, a poisonous era defined by Trump. Few, if any, of our readers will be surprised that we endorse Harris in this election…The second Presidential debate, at the National Constitution Center, in Philadelphia, was an unmasking of another kind. For some time, observers have asked whether Trump, who is now seventy-eight, has himself suffered from some form of decline. On a given day, it is hard to determine if a particular insult, lie, or rant represents his usual malevolence or something else. Not long before the debate, Trump took to speculating whether it would be preferable, in the event of finding oneself on a sinking boat, to die by shark attack or by electrocution from the boat’s battery. (‘I’ll take electrocution every single time,’ he assured a grateful nation.) There is nothing he will not say. When a group of Proud Boys were convicted of conspiracy last year, he warned that the FBI and the Justice Department were just getting started: ‘get smart america, they are coming after you!!!’ Trump has defied multiple legal gag orders, attacking judges and jurors, and has even blamed the latest attempt on his life, a deeply alarming event, not on the would-be assailant or the easy availability of assault weapons but on the Democratic ticket.”
No one would be shocked that the Times editors assert that there could be a candidate “more unworthy to serve as president” than Señor T. “He has,” they wrote, “proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest. He has proved himself temperamentally unfit for a role that requires the very qualities— wisdom, honesty, empathy, courage, restraint, humility, discipline— that he most lacks. Those disqualifying characteristics are compounded by everything else that limits his ability to fulfill the duties of the president: his many criminal charges, his advancing age, his fundamental lack of interest in policy and his increasingly bizarre cast of associates. This unequivocal, dispiriting truth— Donald Trump is not fit to be president— should be enough for any voter who cares about the health of our country and the stability of our democracy to deny him re-election. For this reason, regardless of any political disagreements voters might have with her, Kamala Harris is the only patriotic choice for president.”
Most presidential elections are, at their core, about two different visions of America that emerge from competing policies and principles. This one is about something more foundational. It is about whether we invite into the highest office in the land a man who has revealed, unmistakably, that he will degrade the values, defy the norms and dismantle the institutions that have made our country strong.
As a dedicated public servant who has demonstrated care, competence and an unwavering commitment to the Constitution, Harris stands alone in this race. She may not be the perfect candidate for every voter, especially those who are frustrated and angry about our government’s failures to fix what’s broken— from our immigration system to public schools to housing costs to gun violence. Yet we urge Americans to contrast Harris’s record with her opponent’s.
Harris is more than a necessary alternative. There is also an optimistic case for elevating her, one that is rooted in her policies and borne out by her experience as vice president, a senator and a state attorney general.
Over the past 10 weeks, Harris has offered a shared future for all citizens, beyond hate and division. She has begun to describe a set of thoughtful plans to help American families.
While character is enormously important— in this election, pre-eminently so— policies matter. Many Americans remain deeply concerned about their prospects and their children’s in an unstable and unforgiving world. For them, Harris is clearly the better choice. She has committed to using the power of her office to help Americans better afford the things they need, to make it easier to own a home, to support small businesses and to help workers. Trump’s economic priorities are more tax cuts, which would benefit mostly the wealthy, and more tariffs, which will make prices even more unmanageable for the poor and middle class.
…[Trump] has promised to be a different kind of president this time, one who is unrestrained by checks on power built into the American political system. His pledge to be “a dictator” on “Day 1” might have indeed been a joke— but his undisguised fondness for dictatorships and the strongmen who run them is anything but.
Most notably, he systematically undermined public confidence in the result of the 2020 election and then attempted to overturn it— an effort that culminated in an insurrection at the Capitol to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power and resulted in him and some of his most prominent supporters being charged with crimes. He has not committed to honoring the result of this election and continues to insist, as he did at the debate with Harris on Sept. 10, that he won in 2020. He has apparently made a willingness to support his lies a litmus test for those in his orbit, starting with JD Vance, who would be his vice president.
His disdain for the rule of law goes beyond his efforts to obtain power; it is also central to how he plans to use it. Trump and his supporters have described a 2025 agenda that would give him the power to carry out the most extreme of his promises and threats. He vows, for instance, to turn the federal bureaucracy and even the Justice Department into weapons of his will to hurt his political enemies. In at least 10 instances during his presidency, he did exactly that, pressuring federal agencies and prosecutors to punish people he felt had wronged him, with little or no legal basis for prosecution.
Some of the people Trump appointed in his last term saved America from his most dangerous impulses. They refused to break laws on his behalf and spoke up when he put his own interests above his country’s. As a result, the former president intends, if re-elected, to surround himself with people who are unwilling to defy his demands. Today’s version of Trump— the twice-impeached version that faces a barrage of criminal charges— may prove to be the restrained version.
Unless American voters stand up to him, Trump will have the power to do profound and lasting harm to our democracy.
That is not simply an opinion of Trump’s character by his critics; it is a judgment of his presidency from those who know it best— the very people he appointed to serve in the most important positions of his White House. It is telling that among those who fear a second Trump presidency are people who worked for him and saw him at close range.
…Most dangerous for American democracy, Trump has transformed the Republican Party— an institution that once prided itself on principle and honored its obligations to the law and the Constitution— into little more than an instrument of his quest to regain power. The Republicans who support Harris recognize that this election is about something more fundamental than narrow partisan interest. It is about principles that go beyond party.
In 2020 this board made the strongest case it could against the re-election of Trump. Four years later, many Americans have put his excesses out of their minds. We urge them and those who may look back at that period with nostalgia or feel that their lives are not much better now than they were three years ago to recognize that his first term was a warning and that a second Trump term would be much more damaging and divisive than the first.
Kamala Harris is the only choice.
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