Martin Longman at The Washington Monthly writes—The GOP Never Offered Alternatives to Trump:
Warren Henry, writing in The Federalist, castigates a long list of liberal columnists for arguing during the early stages of the Republican primary that Donald Trump was in many ways the least offensive of the GOP’s candidates. The idea is that they were willing to overlook his racism, misogyny, ignorance, and polity incoherence, and that their decision to make a big deal about those faults now represents a kind of situational ethics and an opportunistic hypocrisy.
Some of the quotes that Henry finds are a bit breathtaking in retrospect, and I certainly don’t want to do a line-by-line defense of any of them. But Henry makes too little of one valid critique and too much of the rest.
To be frank, there was a fair amount of bad faith trolling going on. These are liberal columnists who were mixing honest analysis with a rooting interest in the Republicans nominating their least electable option.
Brian Beutler at The New Republic writes—Obama Was Right About Republican Extremism All Along:
Obama is repurposing a critique he’s been making for years, in public and in private, directed at Republican officeholders themselves. His retooled stump speech is crafted not just to fire up Democratic voters against Trump, but to overwhelm other Republican politicians with a sense of dread by making them recognize the huge mistake they made not listening to him. [...]
“For years,” Obama said in Las Vegas, “Republican politicians and the far-right media outlets have pumped up all kinds of crazy stuff about me, about Hillary, about Harry [Reid]. They said I wasn’t born here. They said climate change is a hoax. They said that I was going to take everybody’s guns away.”
Obama went on:
[T]here are a lot of politicians who knew better. There are a lot of senators who knew better. But they went along with these stories because they figured, you know what, this will help rile up the base, it will give us an excuse to obstruct what we’re trying to do, we won’t be able to appoint judges, we’ll gum up the works, we’ll create gridlock, it will give us a political advantage. So they just stood by and said nothing. And their base began to actually believe this crazy stuff.
So Donald Trump did not start this. Donald Trump didn’t start it. He just did what he always did, which is slap his name on it, take credit for it, and promote it. That’s what he does. And so now when suddenly it’s not working, and people are saying, wow, this guy is kind of out of line, all of a sudden, these Republican politicians who were okay with all this crazy stuff up to a point, suddenly they’re all walking away. “Oh, this is too much.” … Well, what took you so long? What the heck?
Tim Murphy at Mother Jones writes—Bernie Sanders Is the Most Popular Politician in America:
One of the tightest House races in the country this year is in New York's Hudson Valley, where Democrat Zephyr Teachout and Republican John Faso are vying to replace retiring GOP Rep. Chris Gibson. Faso, a former assemblyman and pipeline lobbyist, and Teachout, a fiercely anti-fracking Fordham law professor, are natural rivals. But it's the flood of outside money that has defined the race. The latest effort: a new spot from the National Republican Congressional Committee, attacking Teachout as an ally of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. [...]
There is one major flaw with this message, though: Bernie Sanders is super popular. As of this writing, he is the most popular politician in America. His favorable ratings are two points higher than those of President Barack Obama (who is currently enjoying his highest numbers in 45 months). They are 10 points higher than Hillary Clinton's. They are 19 points higher than those of both Donald Trump and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.
David Leonhardt at The New York Times invokes his lifelong Republican grandparents’ vote for Barry Goldwater in Dear Republican Voters:
For Republicans today, Trump is scarier than Goldwater. He is scarier because he resembles a double agent dreamed up by liberal screenwriters. He embodies almost every left-wing caricature of Republicans that Republicans despise.
He is a racist and a sexist — having refused to rent apartments to African-Americans, retweeted neo-Nazis, besmirched Muslims and Latinos and boastfully molested women. For years, Republicans have been frustrated by liberal sensitivity on race and gender. Comes now Trump, spewing bigotry.
He is also an unrepentant denier of reality. Do you remember that Al Franken wrote a jeremiad against conservatives called “Lies: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them”? I imagine the book’s title offends you. Yet it now feels like a preview of a candidate who almost every day makes immediately disprovable claims. [...]
The best path is the hardest one. Only an unambiguous rejection of Trump will banish Trumpism for 2020 and beyond. Only a lopsided loss, with millions of Republicans so repelled by him that they vote for someone they never imagined they would, sends the message that bigotry, lying and authoritarianism violate Republican values — your values.
With the death of Tom Hayden Sunday, the catalyst and one of the key drafters of the Port Huron Statement in 1962, which laid the groundwork for the founding of Students for a Democratic Society, it is worth looking at that document again. Of course, at 25,000 words the response of many probably will be tl;dr. The editors at In These Times took such a look back on the statement’s 50th anniversary in 2012, putting together an aggregation of the assessment of 14 people, including three who had a hand in shaping it, one of those being Hayden himself. The editors reprised that retrospective in the latest digital edition of ITT, calling it The Port Huron Statement: Still Radical at 50.
Dana Milbank at The Washington Post goes full tilt with generational warfare and blames the baby boomers for everything bad that’s happened in the past quarter century, pours hot lead on idealists in general but offers hope that his own generation—Generation X—can clean up the mess of their predecessors. In Baby boomers have been a disaster for America, and Trump is their biggest mistake yet, he writes:
Happily, Gen Xers, the cleanup crew, could become the plurality in Congress as soon as 2018. The question is whether my generation, working with the millennials, can break the boomers’ gridlock and deal jointly with the many crises boomers left us. [...]
And this much is for sure: After a quarter-century of boomer mismanagement and the monstrosity that is Trump, we can’t possibly do worse.
He doesn’t names names, so let me do it for him: Paul Ryan, Tom Cotton, Scott DesJarlais, Mike Lee, Tim Scott, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Nikki Haley, Bobby Jindal, Mia Love, Kristi Noem, Cory Gardner, Jason Chaffetz. Generation Xers all. They are going to clean up the mess?
Jessica Valenti at The Guardian writes Enough is enough: we've reached a tipping point on sexual assault:
Trump’s remarks about women – his bragging about assaulting women without consequence and his continued insistence that every accuser is lying – have brought us to a sort of national tipping point. As Elizabeth Warren said about Trump to tremendous applause this week, “Women have had it with guys like you”.
Women are tired. Tired of being told that this is just the way men talk or act. Tired of looks or touches that we’re expected to deal with because they’re not “real” assault. Tired of saying nothing in the face of unrelenting sexism and slights. Why should we have to live like this?
Perhaps when the election is over, the anxiety and anger women are feeling right now will subside and many of us will go back to saying nothing in those scary moments. Maybe the national conversation around assault will wane. But I doubt it. When you start to speak up, it’s hard to stop. America should be prepared for a lot of loud, “nasty” women to make themselves heard.
Alex Wagner at The Atlantic writes—Chris Christie Is Over:
While most of America has been busy digesting a nearly-daily intake of sexual assault allegations, paranoid screeds about a rigged election, and a wildly vituperative back and forth between party elders and their Republican leader, Governor Christie’s political career has been quietly, steadily unraveling.
There are some who will point to the governor’s early and eager embrace of Trump as the beginning of his political demise (others may point to his wife’s obvious disdain for the man for whom her husband was putting his reputation on the line), but the ongoing trial of Christie aides Bridget Kelly and Bill Baroni for their roles in the Bridgegate scandal has revealed a culture of craven and unusually vindictive acts (even for New Jersey pols). The testimonies are devastating to Christie’s political ambitions.
Ed Kilgore at New York Magazine writes—A Big Part of Trump’s Movement Will Soon Literally Die Off:
Realizing how much of Trump’s following comes from voters in their golden years may not make much difference in predicting this election. But it does matter in projecting the future of Trumpism. Older Trump voters who see him as a last chance to go back to the 1950s will soon be gone. That doesn’t mean Trump’s kind of politics will go away — indeed, younger Trump voters not only exist, but are probably angrier and more open to radical and intolerant policies than old folks who just wish women and minorities would stay “in their place” and kids would mind their manners. After all, old white men remember a time when America worked — for them, at least. For many of their children and grandchildren, American “greatness” is more or less ancient history.