NY Times:
How a Defeated Trump Is Making a Muddle of the G.O.P.
The former president’s instincts for red-meat political fights over governing and policymaking have left party leaders in a state of confusion over what they stand for.
As G.O.P. leaders and donors gather for a party retreat in Palm Beach this weekend, with a side trip to Mar-a-Lago for a reception with Mr. Trump on Saturday night, the former president’s pervasive influence in Republican circles has revealed a party thoroughly animated by a defeated incumbent — a bizarre turn of events in American politics.
Barred from Twitter, quietly disdained by many Republican officials and reduced to receiving supplicants in his tropical exile in Florida, Mr. Trump has found ways to exert an almost gravitational hold on a leaderless party just three months after the assault on the Capitol that his critics hoped would marginalize the man and taint his legacy.
They aren’t confused. They are white supremacists with a cable network backing them.
Max Boot/WaPo:
The GOP can’t be saved. Center-right voters need to become Biden Republicans.
Most Republicans don’t care that Trump locked up children, cozied up to white supremacists, tear-gassed peaceful protesters, benefited from Russian help in both of his campaigns, egregiously mishandled the pandemic, incited a violent attack on the Capitol and even faced fraud complaints from his own donors. A new Reuters-Ipsos poll finds that 81 percent of Republicans have a favorable impression of Trump. Wait. It gets worse: 60 percent say the 2020 election was stolen from him, only 28 percent say he is even partly to blame for the Capitol insurrection, and 55 percent say that the Capitol attack “was led by violent left-wing protestors trying to make Trump look bad.”
This is a portrait of a party that can’t be saved — at least in the foreseeable future. The GOP remains a cult of personality for the worst president in U.S. history. It has become a bastion of irrationality, conspiracy mongering, racism, nativism and anti-scientific prejudices.
So what should a sane, center-right voter — someone who might have voted for the GOP in the past — do under those circumstances?
Damon Young/NY Times:
Racism Makes Me Question Everything. I Got the Vaccine Anyway.
Surviving in an anti-Black society requires some personal negotiations. This was one of them.
I don’t trust doctors, nurses, physician assistants, hospitals, emergency rooms, waiting rooms, surgeries, prescriptions, X-rays, MRIs, medical bills, insurance companies or even the food from hospital cafeterias. My awareness of the pronounced racial disparities in our health care system strips me of any confidence I would have otherwise had in it. As critics of a recent Saturday Night Live skit suggesting that Black people are illogically set against getting vaccinated pointed out, the vaccine hesitancy isn’t due to some uniquely Black pathology. It’s a direct response to centuries of anecdote, experience and data. (Also, the demographic among the least likely to get a vaccine? White evangelicals.)
Despite all this, in March, I stood in a long line to receive my first dose of a vaccine to prevent me from becoming seriously ill from a virus that I had no idea even existed 14 months ago.
My journey from “I don’t even eat hospital pizza” to “voluntary Pfizer guinea pig” is complicated, but not singular. Existing in America while Black requires a ceaseless assemblage of negotiations and compromises. Even while recognizing the anti-Blackness embedded in society, participation is still necessary to survive.
Gregory Stanton/Just Security:
QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded
America had its own dark side. Henry Ford echoed Nazi hatred of Jews and had 500,000 copies of the Protocols printed and distributed in the U.S. Father Coughlin preached the Protocols on national radio. The Ku Klux Klan combined its white supremacist racism with hatred of Jews.
QAnon’s conspiracy theory is a rebranded version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Ron Brownstein/Atlantic:
The GOP Is Voting Against Its Base
Republicans are making a risky bet by opposing Biden’s infrastructure plan.
With their opposition to President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan, Republicans are doubling down on a core bet they’ve made for his presidency: that the GOP can maintain support among its key constituencies while fighting programs that would provide those voters with tangible economic assistance.
Last month, every House and Senate Republican opposed Biden’s massive $1.9 trillion stimulus plan, even though it delivered significant benefits to working-class white voters, the GOP’s foundational voting bloc, including increased health-care subsidies and expanded tax credits for families with children. That pattern is repeating with the infrastructure plan, even though it directs billions of dollars to rural communities, which are indispensable to Republican political fortunes.
That resistance represents a political gamble, because the proposed benefits—including $1,400 stimulus checks, and rural broadband in the infrastructure plan—are large enough and visible enough that voters may be more likely to feel them in their daily life than most legislative actions. Republicans “are going to have to explain how they are voting against the interests of their base, because I think there [would] be meaningful impacts” on their voters from the plans’ provisions, says Jeff Link, a Democratic consultant who led a research project last year that tried to improve his party’s performance among rural voters.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Josh Hawley’s ugly rant unmasks the fraudulence of the anti-‘wokeness’ crusade
With Republicans increasingly attacking “woke” corporations for defending voting rights, one can theoretically envision a semi-understandable motive at play. It would be that conservative voters feel disempowered by social liberalism’s dominance of large swaths of American life — like big business — and Republicans are just speaking to their angst.
But it’s hard to take this notion seriously, given the lead role Sen. Josh Hawley is playing in this farce. As a rising GOP intellectual star and proponent of an idea-driven conservative populism, the Missouri Republican’s handling of this merits attention, and should ideally challenge us.
Instead, it reveals how easily that populism slides into utter fraudulence — and just how ugly a game Republicans are truly playing here.
The Hill:
Clyburn: Documents show Trump officials helped suppress coronavirus CDC reports
Top former Trump administration advisers helped suppress scientific information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) they felt was harmful to President Trump, and attacked the agency's credibility, according to documents obtained by House Democrats.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis sent letters to former Trump advisers Scott Atlas, Paul Alexander and Steven Hatfill, asking for documents and communications about the former administration's response to the pandemic.
"Our investigation has shown that Trump Administration officials engaged in a persistent pattern of political interference in the nation’s public health response to the coronavirus pandemic, overruling and bullying scientists and making harmful decisions that allowed the virus to spread more rapidly," said Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), chairman of the subcommittee.
Jill Lawrence/USA Today:
Yo-Yo Ma talks COVID, hope and anti-Asian hate: 'Why is anybody surprised?'
Q. How else have you brought classical music to nontraditional settings during the pandemic?
A: The pandemic accentuated that part of me that says why am I useful? Am I useful for anything? I'm only useful if I feel I can respond to need.
There were the months when nobody was allowed in a patient's room. And even family, relatives and that person may be just leaving us. Music actually touches the skin of people; it's that tactile, that personal, that intimate.
So I thought if I can actually be useful and Zoom into hospital rooms, Zoom and play for front-line workers — remember when Italy was going through this surge where people were just all of a sudden just overwhelmed with cases? So we sent music there. Remember when the huge explosion happened in Beirut?
When people go through terrible times, there's sometimes not much we can do. But if someone sends me a note and says, "I'm thinking of you because you're going through this tough time," it gives some kind of comfort.
If the way I'm thinking of someone is sound, this is what I do. This is what I can offer. Maybe I can't give you an orange. But I can give you music.