[image_caption]Peter Wehner[/image_caption]
As a past-his-prime scribbler with a smallish (but very smart) audience, I can’t do much to help my beloved country move beyond the horror of the Trump experience. But I can pass along smart writing that might move someone in that direction.
One such example is an Atlantic magazine piece by Peter Wehner, who worked in the White House under three Republican presidents and whose public work during the Trump years has been eloquent and consistent in rejecting what Trump has done to his Grand Old Party.
The full piece is online, and after a few excerpts, I’ll provide a link below, although I don’t know if non-subscribers to The Atlantic can access it. I assume it will be in the October issue, which hasn’t arrived yet. It begins:
“That Donald Trump has acted recklessly and lawlessly, without empathy, as if he lives in a world devoid of moral rules, should surprise no one. Some of us warned back in the summer of 2016 that Trump was erratic, unstable, and temperamentally unfit for office. He had what I referred to then as a ‘personality disorder.’ I believed then and I believe now that it is the most essential thing to understand about him. Trump in power couldn’t end well…
“Trump never found a way to escape the antisocial demons that haunt him. But here’s what turned a personal tragedy into a national calamity: He imprinted his moral pathologies, his will-to-power ethic, on the Republican Party. It is the most important political development of this century.
“The GOP once advertised itself as standing for family values and law and order, for moral ideals and integrity in political leaders. Such claims are now risible. The Republican Party rallied around Trump and has stuck with him every step of the way.
“Republican officials showed fealty to Trump despite his ceaseless lying and dehumanizing rhetoric, his misogyny and appeals to racism, his bullying and conspiracy theories. No matter the offense, Republicans always found a way to look the other way, to rationalize their support for him, to shift their focus to their progressive enemies. As Trump got worse, so did they.
“Republicans defended Trump after the release of the Access Hollywood tape and alleged hush-money payments to a porn star. They defended him when he obstructed justice to thwart the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and sided with Russia over U.S. intelligence during a press conference in Helsinki, Finland. They defended him after learning of his effort to solicit foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election. They defended him despite his effort to overturn the election by pressuring state officials to ‘find’ votes and send fake electors, by wallpapering the country with lies, and by instigating a violent assault on the Capitol. The ex-president continues to peddle the Big Lie to this day, and any Republican who challenges it is targeted.
“MAGA supporters have had countless opportunities to take the exit ramp, and they have always found reasons not to. At some point, when an enterprise is thoroughly corrupt, staying a part of it, helping it along, refusing to ever speak up, is not just a mistake in judgment; it is a failure of intellectual and moral integrity. This doesn’t mean that every area of a MAGA supporter’s life is devoid of rectitude, of course. But it does mean that one important area is. And that needs to be said.
“So, no, I am not suggesting ‘giving up’ on individual MAGA supporters, writing them off, throwing them out of polite society — even if I were in a position to do any of those things, which I’m not.
“I am suggesting that much of MAGA world is authoritarian, that Liz Cheney is right to turn all her political energies to opposing it, and that containing and defeating MAGA — not hoping it will change, not placating its grievances — is now the No. 1 priority for friends of democracy. Maybe we’ll succeed, maybe we’ll fail, but the mission is unavoidable. And honorable.”
Same old, same old.
It’s all well and good for the former high-ranking officials or the eminences grises of the Republican Party to reject Trump. I’m waiting for the Republican voters to show some integrity and reject Trump.
Unless and until that happens, color me unimpressed.
The right wing grievance machine is feeding MAGA voters a firehose of outrage & misdirection. It’s been noted elsewhere that 60% of GOP primary candidates were not MAGA types. But the only won 30% of the races. The people most motivated to vote in primaries continue to drive the party to the right. Only if they lose in the general will the party have a chance to change.
Everyone and anyone who loves democracy needs to reject trump. Dozens of people are running (and winning) on the Big Lie. Any candidate embracing that Big lie nonsense is immediately disqualified from serious consideration for elected office. Masses of people are voting for them nonetheless. Where do you start?
I say start by attacking the legitimacy, but more importantly the legality, of the GOP. They are treasonous.
Set up your Call Blocking and beef up security, dude. For Trumper thugs (cowards with phones and FB accounts), every day is its own Beer Hall Putsch.
Another “Journalist” falls into the black hole of being an “always Trumper.”
The most important point is that Never-Trump Wehner understands “containing and defeating MAGA…is now the number 1 priority for friends of democracy”.
Trumpolini’s MAGA movement is one of theocratic white nationalism. That is why the Repub base now defends whatever indefensible conduct by the ringmaster that now comes to light, from shameless grifting to outright criminality. How this East coast Manhattan dandy, the very personification of “elite” privilege, came to be accepted as the savior of the white working class is a story all its own.
But Wehner’s point is that the MAGA-ites have made abundantly clear they can’t be reasoned with or rationally persuaded. They can only be defeated; voted down. That is Job One. And with the anti-democratic mechanisms of the failed 1789 constitution and a Supreme Court illegitimately packed with reactionary Trump-sympathetic partisans, that is going to be a Herculean task…
“Some of us warned back in the summer of 2016 that Trump was erratic, unstable, and temperamentally unfit for office.” Although I’ve never heard of this guy, it seems to me that he’s been anti-Trump all along, so …
Like all of these never-Trumpers, I’m curious as to which policies they disagree with, because they never seem to get around to that little detail for refusing to support a politician. Is it the energy independence that we achieved, removing our reliance on foreign oil? Was it his quest to close the Southern border, keeping out the millions of drug dealers, gangsters, and others who have simply walked across the open border in the last 18 months? Was it his appointment of three conservatives to the Supreme Court? Was it his ongoing battle to limit the communist Chinese party’s influence on the U.S. economy? Was it his willingness to get along with our adversaries that would have kept us out of the Russia-Ukraine war, saving us tens of billions in defense material? Was it the new blood of conservative women and minorities who are starting to reinvigorate the party? I mean, which policy, as a “conservative,” do they disagree with?
This is all about the butt-hurt establishment resenting Trump taking over their party and reinventing it to be the home of working people and minorities, rejecting the old school establishment and their uni-party loyalties that have given us nothing but endless wars and 30 trillion dollars in debt, while the marxists run everything from school boards to the White House.
Other than the illegitimate packing of the Supreme Court with reactionary ideologues, most of the “policies” you identify are either failed fantasies or accomplished by the previous administration. Frankly, other than cutting taxes and harassing Latino refugees, Trumpolini accomplished almost nothing policy-wise.
How could he? He doesn’t have the attention span to read a sentence, and he is a towering ignoramus, which has been confirmed by virtually every Repub worthy who worked with the imbecile. Having to listen to Trumpolini hold forth and spout total nonsense must have been very like having to listen to an hour-long diatribe from another low education rightwing authoritarian, Adolf Hitler.
I suppose Trumpolini would have “kept us out of” of Putin’s War of Annihilation against Ukraine, and he likely would have “gotten along with” (i.e. appeased) his idol Putin. But that you think this is an action that Reagan “conservatives” would applaud is comical.
As is the idea that the white nationalist Trump is infusing the GOP with the “new blood” of minorities and women. Only a very blinkered view of the Repub base could come to such a fanciful conclusion, which is nothing but wishful thinking, especially after the Trump Court’s decision to overrule Roe.
“I’m curious as to which policies they disagree with.”
Basically, the lying, cheating, and stealing. It’s not like Trump is the only person who can nominate conservative judges.
“…I’m curious as to which policies they disagree with…”
Mhmm. You know, Mussolini claimed to make the trains run on time. No one really disagreed with that policy (even though it was stolen credit). But, perhaps the fact that he was a fascist dictator made him look less than desirable.
Good grief, you would think you would be embarrassed to claim marxists run school boards and the White House but apparently not. Those boogiemen marxists like Joe Biden are a bigger danger in your mind than a narcissistic 13 year old who would never be allowed off a psychiatrist’s couch if you could get him there. The same guy who calls a murderous thug a “genius” for invading another nation and causing the deaths of untold thousands. The same guy who met with this thug and didn’t allow any record of what was said. What was that nuclear sub you were stationed on doing sitting in the depths with a nuclear armament? It wasn’t defending us against Nancy Pelosi. It was there to deter the same guy or his predecessors from thinking they could simply bully other nations into doing what they wanted. The fact that people who consider themselves much better “patriots” than anyone who doesn’t gobble up what Trump, Fox, Qanon, etc peddles is maybe the most depressing thing about MAGA.
“Some of us warned back in the summer of 2016 that Trump was erratic, unstable, and temperamentally unfit for office.”
Ted Cruz
Lindsey Graham
Marco Rubio
In actual fact, the only mainstream GOP official who supported Trump was Jeff Sessions.
How’d that work out?
Hmm. While I appreciate the moral clarity on tfg that Mr. Wehner has, this statement is patently untrue: “He imprinted his moral pathologies, his will-to-power ethic, on the Republican Party.”
I’m gonna refer to the Eagles, who were referring to how a woman can affect a man, but seems apropos with a little modification:
“And I found out a long time ago
What a [tfg] can do to your soul
Aw but [he] can’t take you any way
You don’t already know how to go”
Let us bow down to yet another Never Trumper who spent his life advancing the cause of a Republican party that was principled and honorable thru and thru, until Mr. Trump came down the elevator and *presto* cast his spell.
To say it yet again, and yet again, Trump did not “imprint[ ] his moral pathologies, his will-to-power ethic, on the Republican Party.” Trump walked in and took custody of a political base that Republican leadership had spent 50 years grooming to give its devotion to morally pathological, will-to-power leaders. By doing so, he claimed as well the fealty of a Republican leadership who, across the board, had reached positions of power precisely thru their capacity to abjure morality and principle and, not least, self-regard.
So Mr. Wehner “warned back in the summer of 2016” (the word “back” is a particularly nice touch to convey the vast temporal distance of six years) of what would result from giving power to those who “act[ ] recklessly and lawlessly, without empathy, as if [they live] in a world devoid of moral rules.” Well, again, those of us on the left have been sounding the alarm since 1980 (and a few for much longer than that), when lawlessness, punching down and will-to-power became the proudly acknowledged Republican credo. Since the mainstream discourse bars the door to any words from the left, I’ll welcome Mr. Wehner’s as better than nothing. But let’s not celebrate him as a visionary; like the rest of the Never Trumpers, he got fat and happy serving unprincipled power, perceived that it was time to jump ship, and is seeking to make the best of that decision.
Most importantly, let’s not succumb to the profoundly dangerous supposition that underlies the Never Trumper fairy tale, and indeed the thinking of all those who focus singularly on accountability for Trump: that finally ending Trump’s influence within the Republican party will magically and instantaneously dispel the nihilist rot that is an existential threat to the nation.
It isn’t nearly enough for Trump to be defeated, he needs to be discredited and I don’t see a pathway to making
that happen.
There are still people who think Nixon was wrongly forced from office. Presumably some number of Trump supporters are similarly blind to reason. However, it seems more are waking up to the reality that he’s unfit for office.
Well, again… I’m not sure why a demonstration of basic intellectual bandwidth and mundane morality constitutes a noteworthy set of observations but I guess this is what makes a Republican “smart” eh? I guess there’s no law against dropping moral and intellectual bars on the floor and stepping over them, but I’m not sure why this praiseworthy?
I’m pretty sure commenters here on Minnpost have made the exact same observations many times over the last 4+ years… but hey this was in the Atlantic!
Meanwhile I hate to say but one could interpret Wehner’s piece as a transparent attempt to dodge complicity. I notice he fails to mention the decades long Republican drift into Fascism long before Trump came along. One suspects that Wehner himself could be counted upon to support the de facto boycott of Obama’s court appointments, Iraq war, Supreme Court packing, wealth disparity, culture war, voter restrictions, and spending cuts that have inflicted deficits and chaos throughout the nation. So yeah… let’s speak out against Trump as if it ALL started with him. But hey… we can give some credit where credit is due… at least he’s willing to acknowledge some degree of reality even if it only meets minimum requirements.
Yep! Yep! Yep! I know that the average commenter on here is fairly intellectually elevated, but it does get pretty old seeing so much praise for these conservatives coming to some sort of realization like it was a proclamation that came to them and only them from God or something. If by “eloquent,” you mean abashedly admitting the obvious 30 years too late. But yeah, better late than never. Good job!
Most all if the Republicans whom I know up here in rural Crimson Hubbard county, I’ve lived up here for 26 years, identify with many of these personal traits: Suspicion and rejection of most anything different from the established norm, Fear mongering, Conspiracy theory zealousness, Religious zealotry, ‘knee-jerk’ reactions, Arm folding rejection of different from their own discussion opinions, Suspicion of public school teachers and financing, Suspicious and outwardly wary of people of color, Very anti-LBGT+ people.
With that said however, these same Republican voters will cheerfully latch onto and idolize a proven lying, crooked, misogamist, business failing, non religious, treason-promoting reality tv figure who has conned millions of them out of their money. Go figure.
Not sure how many times you can hit a MAGA supporter in the noggin with a 4X4 of truth, logic, reality and facts before they have that ah-ha moment. Just look at the comments, still got folks defending the great grifter after PW gives them another reality whack with that 4X4!
The POTUS is lying about inflation, recession, open borders, the economy, legislation along with other lies that are told everyday. The performance of this lying press secretary is worthy of a Saturday Night live series.
Along with his allies in the press, the truth about his attack on the poor and the middle class goes unmentioned.
Mr. Black rarely mentions the name Biden and seems afraid to speak the truth to those in power.
I think it is time for yet another article about the evils of the electoral college or another slanted poll.
Maybe someday the major donors to MinnPost will give the order that it is OK to start telling the truth about basement Joe?
How about specifically identifying even a single “lie”? Or go crazy, identity two!
Or how about some more exposition on Biden’s “attack on the poor”? Is that anything other than the existence of inflation in the economy?
Come on, you can do it!
Republicans traded Lincoln and decency for segregationist Dixiecrats and other segregationst mostly southern democrats who bolted over school desegregation, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, 1964 voting Rights Act, etc. Republican operatives purposely recruited not segregationist politicians like strom Thurmond, Jessie helms, etc with lots of congressional seniority, who blocked any progress on civil rights. They enthusiastically recruited segregationist voters with Goldwater-Nixon-
reagon southern strategy. “Family values” is extreme right wing, white evangelical Christian values plus a large measure of greed, fear mongering and verbal and physical violence.
Sorry, but the GOP’s embrace of MAGA was not some random occurrence. Remember the Tea Party? The Republicans enthusiastically embraced that group after Barrack Obama’s election in 2008, and one could successfully argue the Tea Party drove the GOP to mid-term wins in 2010 and 2014. They needed votes, they went out and found them. Unfortunately, tea party activists started winning primaries against established Republicans and obstructing Congress, basically turning John Boehner into a wet noodle. Donald Trump is responsible for A LOT, but he is not responsible for the current state of the Republican Party. Perhaps the Republican Party should start working on ideas that benefit the country instead of letting the lunatics out of the asylum to play. And by lunatics I mean people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul …