The Story of Therapy Dog Tails 609
The Story of Therapy Dog Tails 609
Where Everyone Gets a Dose of Puppy Love
PRESENT DAY 85: The Size of MAGA
Trump only loves things that are HUGE. Just ask Arnold Palmer. But ever since Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, we’ve been wondering just how big MAGA is. No one including Trump expected him to win that year. It’s very likely, in fact, that he didn’t win legitimately. He lost the popular vote to Clinton by about three million. He won the electoral college in enough swing states to get himself installed in the White House but he only won those states with the help of 1) lying about hush money and 2) Putin. Trump colluded with Putin throughout and even hired a Russian operative, Paul Manafort, to run his campaign. Manafort was caught passing information from the Trump campaign to Putin to enhance Putin’s interference in our election. That’s beyond high crime. That’s treason. Manafort went to prison for lying about that but was pardoned by Trump, of course, as part of Trump’s obstruction of the investigation into the collusion. Trump then tried to install a Russian asset, Mike Flynn, as his top national security advisor but was thwarted by Sally Yates and the FBI. Yates sacrificed her career outing Flynn as the threat to national security that he was and remains, thanks to another pardon from Trump. Flynn, like Manafort and Trump himself, is a convicted felon. No doubt Flynn was Putin’s pick for the job of “Trump’s” national security advisor. The margins in the swing states were small in 2016 so it will never be known definitively if Putin’s help was what put Trump over the top. It is known with certainty that Trump cheated and then obstructed the investigation into his cheating by firing James Comey and then putting the thoroughly corrupt Bill Barr in place to distort and lie about the Mueller investigation. The Mueller investigation found obstruction of justice for which Trump has yet to be prosecuted. Still, Trump got more votes than he should have gotten given that he was so completely and obviously unfit and unqualified. It was clear in 2016 (and long before that for anyone who had paid any attention to Trump in business, the tabloids or on t.v.) that he was corrupt, racist, misogynist, a con man, an idiot, a compulsive liar, completely lacking in empathy and that he does not believe in American institutions or values and never has. It wasn’t immediately clear how filled with hate he was toward those very American institutions or how far he would be able to go in dismantling them. It wouldn’t be clear until January 6, 2021 just how easy it was for someone with the power of the presidency to corrupt the judicial branch including the Supreme Court and simply ignore the oath of office and Constitutional duties and obligations. Since no one had gone so far in jettisoning the Constitution, it was assumed that it couldn’t be done. The Nixon era had led us to believe that there were enough elected Republicans to thwart flagrant high crimes and misdemeanors from a president but we found during that last year of the Trump administration and during the four years since that the Republican Party had been coopted by a con man and demagogue and was no longer the party of the Nixon / Reagan era. It was no longer a political party at all but a cult of the deluded where submission to the will of the supreme leader is the only morality. That’s because MAGA turned out to be bigger even than right wing Republicans realized in 2016. Ted Cruz didn’t realize how big MAGA was when he called Trump a “sniveling coward” and a “pathological liar.” Marco Rubio didn't realize it when he called Trump a “con artist” and a “lowlife.” Lindsey Graham didn't realize it when he called Trump a “disgrace,” a “nut job” and “one of the dumbest human beings” he’d ever seen. All were simply telling the truth back then, stating the obvious. I could go on and some of the Republican denunciations were even worse after J6. But they’ve all changed their tune. They changed those tunes when they realized that MAGA is big enough to send them packing should an even nuttier nut job choose to primary them in their ruby red districts and states. If you think MAGA Republicans aren’t trying to out-nub job each other, just take a look at Kari Lake in Arizona. MAGA turned out to be much bigger than anyone thought in 2016 but we had gone through various right wing anarchist revolutions before, the last being the racist tea party movement that sprang up in opposition to America electing a black president. That one is still with us, having morphed into the fake freedom caucus and to some degree into Trump MAGA itself. But there had been others going back through the Oliver North / H.W., Nixon / John Mitchell, John Birch, Joseph McCarthy periods and then on back to the American Nazis of the 1930s and 40s including Charlie Lindbergh and Henry Ford. But they had never completely taken over one of the two major political parties in America. They were all Republicans but they never took control of the Republican Party because there had always been enough Republicans loyal to the Constitution and to their oaths of office to render all of these movements fringe movements. Meanwhile since WWII America had made real progress toward achieving the American goals of equal rights, justice and opportunity for all. These are the inherent goals of democracy and self rule. Such victories were gained but only through the struggles, often violent, of the civil rights, women’s rights, anti-war and other human rights movements. Still, progress was made. Too much, it seems, because the election of a black president proved to be a uniting moment in U.S. history, uniting those for whom either racism, misogyny, xenophobia or fundamentalist, intolerant Christianity was their reason for being. Trump brought together a disparate group that had primarily hatred in common, hatred of one thing or another, hatred of one group or another. Surprisingly this coalition of hate turned out to be far bigger than those of us who believe in American values and democracy thought it could ever be. So particularly since J6 the size of the fascist MAGA moment in America has been an area of interest for us woke libs who like the idea of living in a free society where there is no authoritarian to whom you must bow down. We like living in a world where the power is spread democratically across the entire population as envisioned by the founders because there is no freedom in authoritarianism, Trump-style or other. Polls tend to show Trump with anywhere from 44% to 48% of the vote but that doesn’t accurately depict true Trump MAGA zealotry. Some part of that Trump group are Republicans who simply vote Republican because they are Republican, have always been Republican and can’t imagine being anything other than Republican, in part because of the demonizing of Democrats that has gone on in right wing media since Rush Limbaugh made his first million doing it. It’s to this group that people like Liz Chaney, John Giles (Mesa AZ), Sarah Matthews, George Conway, Cassidy Hutchinson, Tim Miller, Adam Kinzinger, those in the Lincoln Project and many other Never Trump Republicans are appealing. I'd say that that reduces the MAGA cult to something more like 30% of the U.S. population though it is a much larger chunk of what is now still called the Republican Party, big enough that people running for office as Republicans are running scared. They're scared of this group because this group has proven to be ignorant, gullible, violent, intolerant and psychotic. A thousand of them to date, for example, have been sentenced to prison for their violent attack on the Capitol, a coup attempted at Trump’s direct behest. They’re also scared of Trump himself, though Trump himself is as courageous as a field mouse. He strikes fear in the hearts of Republican politicians because of his domination of his MAGA minions. But 30% of the voting population is about 45 million people. Trump got 74 million votes in 2020. Biden got 81 million. So roughly 30 million people voted for Trump who are not, in my opinion, MAGA nut jobs. They were conservative independents and moderate Republicans, two groups now switching to Harris and Walz in droves. If even ten percent of those 30 million vote for Harris, her win is assured. I believe that more than 10% of that 30 million will vote Democratic next week. I expect 25% of that 30 million to vote for Harris and another 25% will either not vote at all or not vote for either of the two main candidates. If this happens, Harris won't just win. She will win in a landslide. Trump will keep lying about how HUGE MAGA is but the truth will be obvious. To those who think I’m naive or optimistic, I’d just ask this: when is the last time members of one party campaigned for the candidate of the other party? The number of Republicans now actively endorsing and campaigning for Kamala Harris is staggering. Liz Chaney and company have influence. Don’t think they don’t. In fact, with Trump in prison, Liz Chaney may well be the next Republican adversary Democrats have to worry about. For the moment the Republican Party is defunct but honest conservatives like Liz Chaney could bring it back the way Ronald Reagan brought back a Republican Party on the brink of extinction after an administration in which not just the president had to resign in disgrace but so did his vice president, Spiro Agnew. Liz Chaney is such a Republican. She’s a Republican who is way too conservative for me but one who believes in fundamental American values. MAGA was bigger than we thought but let’s hope that it was just the Trump effect. Let’s hope that with the demagogue in prison, the MAGA movement will shrink like a deflated bombastic balloon. Let’s hope a true conservative party is revived. It would be good to have two true Americans running for the presidency once again. More than that, a decisive rejection and renunciation of Trump and his fascist MAGA cult is the only way for America to redeem itself.
