Former Republican congressman from Illinois, Joe Walsh, says that Donald Trump was elected by angry people, and this is why he gets away with what he does. Wednesday night’s rally in North Carolina should have been the tipping point, Walsh says, and Republicans should have started hopping off the band wagon, but they won’t, because they just don’t care. If you want to hear the whole clip, This is what he said on CNN Thursday, via RawStory:
They don’t give a damn what he does, they don’t give a damn what he says…he lied about what he did in North Carolina last night. This is on him. When I tell my [radio show] listeners that…they say, “I don’t care that he lies. I hate the Democrats.” They don’t care that he lies almost every single time he opens his mouth, because he’s so angry. And you get what you got last night.
As a former Republican member of Congress, it made me profoundly sad that the standard bearer of the Republican party, my party, is making “Send her back!” his campaign rallying cry. It’s ugly, it’s racist, it’s anti-American…it should have been denounced by the president last night, but he’s not capable of it.
Walsh was then asked how much of Republican leaders not speaking out against this, because they don’t want to suffer Trump’s ire.
They can’t stand what the president has unleashed, this big bowl of ugly. Privately, they are uncomfortable with what the president did last night. Bullcrap on being private uncomfortable. I’m sick of the private stuff. These Republicans have to get up the courage to stand up publicly and denounce this. If they don’t strongly, publicly denounce this un-American crap, Republicans are going to get wiped out in 2020.
So, privately Republican leaders are uncomfortable, but publicly they’re gutless. Okay.
Another former GOP rep, David Jolly of Florida, also went to town over the takeaways from Trump’s rally.
We can’t forget that he single-handedly injected this poison into the mainstream of American politics. It is his fault. But you’re going to see Republicans devolve to love it or leave it. And in many ways I think it’s just as dangerous or more so than the chant “Send Her Back.” Love it or leave it suggests that you must agree with political leadership. It is anathema to everything this nation is founded on. Suggesting that Representative Omar must agree with an administration policy of putting kids in cages, or agree with injecting greater insecurity on the world stage, or agree with the president criminally obstructing justice in the Mueller investigation, or criminally engaging in campaign finance violations. And if she fails to agree, then she must leave.”
It’s heartwarming that former Republican members of Congress see things this way. What will it take to wake up the current ones? Meanwhile, Trump will doubtlessly forge ahead with his version of George Orwell’s Two Minute Hate, because that’s exactly who he is.
There was a saying that “Not all Republicans are racists, but all racists are Republicans.”…..that is no longer the case at all.
If you continue to call yourself a Republican after what has transpired this week, you are a racist and I applauded those with the moral integrity to denounce and desist Republicanism.
For all time, let the R following their names stand for Racist.
A hall full of yahoos actively cheering racist statements is not a campaign event, it is a Klan rally.
Or a Nazi rally.
We need two healthy political parties in this country, and for them to be healthy we cannot have a party of whites and a party of everyone else. That’s untenable.
Which means that there is a need for some to fight to reform the GOP and work to expunge the racism. Or form a third party for non-racist conservatives? I don’t know…it feels like their coalition is about to collapse. Who knows what will rise up to replace it if it does.
Oh, I’ve been saying that the old Reagan coalition is falling apart or has already done so for a while now, Rory. Trump is Bizarro Jimmy Carter in that he represents the last gasp of this group before something else takes its place. I predict that after all this, conservatives as a whole have a decade of the political wilderness ahead of them. Being exclusively the party of whites is only going to make their eventual transition tougher.
The GOP had its chance back in 2010 when it COULD have told the burgeoning teabagger movement (which was based far more on racism than any sort of legitimate economic concerns) to take a hike and let GOP politicians deal with “far-right conservative” voters in the general election instead of letting the teabaggers play in the party.
But no. The GOP leadership was concerned that the teabaggers would cause even some deep-red districts (for the House) and states (for the Senate) possibly go “blue” because the far-right would effectively split the vote and it allowed the lunatics to take over the asylum. And things simply got worse as the decade progressed to the point where the “moderate” GOPers either have to form a third-party (and spend a decade or longer in the political wilderness) or kick out the nuts and “make the party great again.”
Let’s not forget that 1980 was the year that the “liberal Republican” became an endangered species as John Anderson ran a third-party campaign because he felt that Reagan was a dangerous ideologue who didn’t represent the “real Republican Party.” Over the next decade, liberal Republicans would lose to more conservative Republicans in primary elections to the point that the group would become the face of Republicanism only in New England (and, even then, moderate and conservative Republicans have been making inroads there).
Sounds like Walsh missed the memo that folks like him have already left the party, leaving it to the crazies he and his ilk stupidly empowered in the first place. The poison must therefore run its course.
I call bullshit on both of these guys for trying to make a case that this ugliness is on Trump. He’s unleashed it to be sure – given people all over the country license to say out loud what they’ve felt all along. Here’s the thing though. The GOP has carefully conditioned these people to feel the way they are now openly and in increasing numbers expressing.
Even as a young boy I was shocked by the images on the TV screen in the 1960s of what was going on in the south. Doubly so because my grandfather was a virulent racist and Klansman who abused his position as a Police Captain in a decent sized town in Arkansas before the Klan had to whisk the family out of there literally in the middle of the night – and get him a job as a federal railroad cop “up” in southern Illinois. My dad and his sister were quite young when that happened. I never got all the details but over time I think I figured out what happened and it had nothing to do with his Klan activities but something just as despicable. But I digress.
The racism we saw in the south might have been more prevalent and “statewide” in that region but it was hardly limited to the former confederate states. Still, the beliefs and attitudes instilled in most children from their earliest ability to learn was concentrated down there and in the wake of the Civil & Voting Rights acts “southern Democrats” (who would turn into Republicans) and the GOP in general were ripe for a way to continue a version of Jim Crow/racism that wouldn’t generate so much heat in the national news.
Hence Nixon’s infamous “southern strategy” which started the use of “dog whistle” racial politics and would be perfected by the “great communicator” Ronald Reagan. The GOP had been steadily absorbing old “southern” Democrats and the job was mostly completed under Reagan. If I’m not mistaken Alabama’s Richard Shelby was the last to make the switch early in Clinton’s tenure. The point however is that while it might have made some Republicans like Jolly and Walsh “uncomfortable” they went along with the southern strategy and overall GOP dog-whistle politics. IOW they weren’t “uncomfortable” enough to openly challenge the GOP’s overarching strategy of underhandedly stoking white resentment towards “those people” and the resulting political power the GOP amassed. At least until they left politics and all of a sudden decided to speak up. Same goes for Joe Scarborough btw. The folks I’ve cited and so many others were complicit.
A long while back I wrote a piece elsewhere stating that what has so many in the GOP quietly furious and also concerned is that while they had some electoral setbacks at times overall their decades long strategy of racial dog-whistle politics had gotten them so much of what they wanted. Not just supply side tax cuts and a conservative majority on SCOTUS but a shift in the political dynamic and discussion – best evidence by the rampant “both siderism” and/or false equivalency in mainstream political reporting and punditry. They even got their own TV network and a vast radio station network to pollute the country’s political thought processes and thoughts thanks to Reagan’s elimination of the Fairness Doctrine. With the well crafted and executed strategy of 2010 they even gerrymandered a huge political advantage in both Congress and a distressing number of states that we at best will only be able to mitigate next year.
They were steadily building a political fortress using the dog-whistle politics and then Trump comes along and starts literally blurting it all out in plain language! You’re damned right they’ve been both pissed and concerned. Sure, it’s riled up their base and allowed Trump to thread the needle to an electoral vote win with the help of a hostile foreign power but the concern all along was that he wouldn’t STFU and learn to play the game the GOP had been mostly winning at for decades by the old rules. And they’ve been proven right. They’ve got their base, the one that was listening to and understanding the dog-whistle stuff all along to be sure. But they’ve lost a lost of state and local races since then and then there was last November. Losing suburban Republicans and especially Independents is something the GOP can’t afford.
Faced with a choice of dumping Trump and installing Pence (and the GOP could have quietly worked out doing so with Democrats long before last November but they wanted their fucking activist judges) the GOP decided to try and ride the Trump Train through next year and hope for the best – and that once again Russia would step in and maybe even change actual vote tallies if necessary. That might not be as doable as it seems btw although it’s a real possibility. IF they can hang on both to the Presidency and the Senate it’s likely they will also do good enough in state houses in a lot of places. In which case the U.S. we once knew will be gone forever. But last night scared the fuck out of a lot of the GOP. I think the reason Trump did his half-assed-not-really backtracking this afternoon is because enough Senators went to Pence and told him they thought Trump would take down the whole Party next year if he doesn’t tone it down – and that they will jump ship IF the Democrats go ahead with impeachment. THAT would scare Trump enough to say what he did – but he’s Trump and he simply won’t be able to contain himself.
The question in my mind is those Independents out there. The ticket splitters who lean one way on social issues and another on fiscal ones. If the shift we saw last November gets even bigger then the GOP is fucked up and down the ballot next year. If.
But back to my original point – Trump isn’t saying anything openly and plainly that isn’t stock GOP messaging for decades. And Republicans (or former ones) like the ones mentioned above were part of the problem and if not saying that shit themselves weren’t about to force their former Party to stop doing it because THEY benefited from it. There might be exceptions in the GOP and “former” GOP ranks but from where I sit they have always been part of the problem and are more angry that Trump might be blowing things for the GOP and all the shit they’ve shoved down the country’s throat by ignoring the old school messaging. And that they might, just might have to (oh the horror!) accept significantly higher taxes and other “horrific” stuff like average Americans one day again having an actual real shot at the American dream instead of the Lords and Serfs type of country they’ve been working for decades to turn us back in to prior to the New Deal.
That was a long post, so I wanted to say I took the time to read it and appreciate it. The only thing I’d add is that what you wrote made me think of what someone else wrote on more or less the same subject:
“The Republican Party geared its appeal and program to racism, reaction, and extremism. All people of goodwill viewed with alarm and concern the frenzied wedding at the Cow Palace of the KKK with the radical right. The “best man” at this ceremony was a senator whose voting record, philosophy, and program were anathema to all the hard-won achievements of the past decade.
Senator Goldwater had neither the concern nor the comprehension necessary to grapple with this problem of poverty in the fashion that the historical moment dictated. On the urgent issue of civil rights, Senator Goldwater represented a philosophy that was morally indefensible and socially suicidal. While not himself a racist, Mr. Goldwater articulated a philosophy which gave aid and comfort to the racist. His candidacy and philosophy would serve as an umbrella under which extremists of all stripes would stand. In the light of these facts and because of my love for America, I had no alternative but to urge every Negro and white person of goodwill to vote against Mr. Goldwater and to withdraw support from any Republican candidate that did not publicly disassociate himself from Senator Goldwater and his philosophy.”
Dr. King
One way or another, the USA as we have known it IS gone. As that version made these Republicans possible, I’m not sorry to see it go. The truth is that if they could have gone with Pence and gotten away with moving ahead without Trump, they’d have done it by now. He’s a loose cannon who goes off-script far too often. In earlier decades, he would have been barred from the presidential primaries. But, as I have said several times before, they haven’t had real leadership since W left. All that’s left are aging middle managers and shameless grifters trying to accomplish the impossible.
And private industry (which made the Nazis possible, let’s remember) knows this too. Does anyone really think a coincidence that a good many publicly traded companies’ stances and PR campaigns of late appeal to the very people the GOP have wanted under their boot? Or that the Mercers, the Koch network and Chamber of Commerce all want nothing to do with Trump’s reelection campaign? They don’t make moves like this UNLESS they’ve determined who the eventual winners are. So I say let’s ruin the rest of the Republican dream once and for all.