Trumpism Triumphs In The GOP
This piece by Josh Marshall I think captures a critical and deeply upsetting piece of the import of Kavanaugh’s confirmation and how he got there.
It is a short and tough read. The upshot is Kavanaugh salvaged himself by going full Trump — deploying anger, grievance, belligerence, attacks, partisan conspiracy theories, and lies; denying and erasing the experiences of the women who accused him; and shifting the narrative to be about Kavanaugh’s “rights” rather than about the integrity of the Supreme Court . Trumpism is what works for the GOP.
While it has been clear for a long time that Trump exploits the GOP’s ugly “underbelly” of toxic masculinity and white supremacy, this nomination should put to rest any notion that there is any distinction between Trump and his party. There is not. The GOP is a full-on revanchist party channeling the howling rage of white male grievance. That is why a pathologically lying and corrupt, petty, cruel, admitted sexual predator and unapologetic bigot occupies the White House.That is why Clarence Thomas remains on the Supreme Court, wallowing in his sense of fake victimhood. That is why a rabid partisan who turned in a stunning performance of aggressive and yet sniveling grievance is about to join Thomas there. And that is why his party does not “stand up” to Trump. Trumpism works with Republican voters, especially the men.
Trevor Noah has a superb segment explaining that Trump is successful because he “offers victimhood to the people who have the least claim to it.” Trump tells his supporters that actual victims of injustice and suffering are really its perpetrators, and centers his supporters as the true victims — a neat trick that provides permission to engage in enormous cruelty, on both a policy level and a personal level, all justified by a misplaced sense of injury and self-righteousness. In this scenario, people of color are not victims of racism, white people are. Women are not victims of sexual assault, men are victims of false accusations.
And while most elected Republicans do not love Trumpism’s ugliness (most would prefer to soft-pedal their cruelty, misogyny, and racism by packaging it as “conservative principle”), they love its outcome. And they recognize that Trump’s base loves him precisely because of his ugliness. Trump did not create this ugliness or this sense of false grievance; he weaponized it. Trump is the manifestation of the Republican id that has been festering for decades.
It is time to face this and what it means. The only difference between Susan Collins and Donald Trump, at this point, is tone of voice.
Never, ever, ever, is there any admission by the White House and its adherents that the pain and anguish of those who are injured by the GOP’s policies and Trump’s vicious words are real.
When Susan Collins claimed in her Senate floor speech on Friday that “dark money” is the reason people oppose Kavanaugh; when conservative commentators on Fox said that the Women’s March in 2017 was filled with paid protesters; when Trump made that same false claim about the women protesting Kavanaugh in D.C. — they are calling us liars, they are erasing our lives, they are denying our legitimacy entirely. This is a collective, orchestrated exercise in gaslighting propaganda by a political party, not only telling us that we do not matter, but that we do not even really exist — we, apparently like the news itself, are “fake.” Our opinions, our lives, our pain, our fear, our rage, the horrible consequences of Republican policies on our lives and on the country —do not matter; our responses are written off as either illegitimate (“sour grapes”) or not even real.
Susan Collins stood on the Senate floor and pretended that our opposition to Brett Kavanaugh was not legitimate by claiming that Brett Kavanaugh isn’t actually a rabid anti-choicer and tool of corporations who spouted partisan conspiracy theories both as a Bush operative and other oath on September 28, 2018; Susan Collins actually suggested this man who who lied, barked, dissembled, evaded, and attacked Democratic senators in blotchy, red-faced rage is the perfect person to heal the division in this country! And then she implied that the division itself is a one-way street that her grotesque party is not largely responsible for — as if that division were not the product, for example, of the GOP subjecting us to continuous attacks on our rights and lives; as if the divisiveness of this nomination were not caused by Trump choosing a Federalist Society darling and former GOP operative rather than a moderate, which he could have easily done; as if the Republicans’ constant pushing of policies opposed by the majority of Americans (from tax gifts to the wealthy to evisceration of health care to cuts in Social Security and Medicare to burdens on reproductive rights to voter suppression to refusal to enact common sense gun safety legislation) were not anti-democratic and counter-majoritarian and thus inherently corrosive to democracy. This false and grotesque narrative is a form of abuse. Erasing and denying facts, accusing others of doing what you yourself are doing, centering yourself as the victim when you are the perpetrator, is abusive. This is what gaslighting is.
For Susan Collins to refuse to even acknowledge reality, to bury and ignore rather than engage with facts, to stand there and spew attacks on Democrats masquerading as thoughtfulness, to pretend to be undecided when she wrote a 43 minute speech addressed to Trump that purported to to decry divisiveness while never once acknowledging that the nomination itself was designed to be divisive and that Trump’s every word and action is designed to throw salt in the wounds of our nation and to attack and wound his “enemies” (which is most human beings who live in America) — this is a form of abuse. This speech was abusive. It was Trumpism in a shaking female voice, but it was Trumpism.
Susan Collins is no moderate. There is nothing left of the Republican Party that can pass for moderate. The party is Trump. It is a white nationalist, misogynist, corrupt-to-its core enterprise focused on maintaining white supremacy; ensuring that the hegemony of patriarchal, top-down Christianity permeates all aspects of government; giving free reign to corporations; and guaranteeing a constant flow of money to the wealthiest in America while draining the social safety net and destroying the environment.
This is a party that has left behind any pretense to principle. It is purely tribal; nativist; fear- and anger-based. Hateful, yet accusing all who resist its cruelty and oppression of being the purveyors of hate.
Stop wondering why the GOP does not “stand up” to Trump. Stop thinking its members are “spineless” and “craven.” They are not afraid to stand up to Trump — they do not want to. They have signed up for this, full stop. They are all in. The Republican Party is a corrosive force in America. It does not matter what Jeff Flake says or Ben Sasse occasionally tweets — look at what they do. Look at John Cornyn, tweeting about “Beers for Brett” in a mockery of Dr. Ford, aided and abetted by the Wall Street Journal’s grotesque headline — “Susan Collins Consents.” Rape jokes and frat boy culture are the GOP’s response after its partisan nominee got confirmed in a partisan vote after a sham process in which thousands of sexual assault survivors poured out their trauma and pain and begged that the accusers’ voices be heard. And, of course, the man who defiles the presidency and who has been accused of sexual assault by 20 women whom he has called liars despite his own admissions of sexual predation, went on the attack mocking Dr. Ford and further upped the ante by calling all the accusations by individual women against Kavanaugh a Democratic hoax.
But really Trump’s upping of the ante was simply a distillation of Lindsey Graham’s rant last week and of Grassley’s querulous whinging and of Collins’s own attacks on Friday. They are all in this together, in a longterm project to take America backward, in the ugliest way possible to an uglier time, because “great” to them is an America where only some have rights and the rest of us are nothing.
The GOP gave birth to Trump, and now the GOP is itself Trump. There is no difference.
Act accordingly. Vote them out.
And if we don’t, get ready for things to get much, much worse.
