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In four years, the Republican Party has lost all power. Credit: Win McNamee/Getty
Not since Hillary Clinton mysteriously declined to campaign in Wisconsin has there been so epic a political screw-up. Though it has been overshadowed by the spasm of chaos which erupted yesterday at the Capitol, one day earlier in Georgia, the Republican Party forfeited their most precious remaining governing commodity — a narrow majority in the US Senate — with a series of blunders that were remarkable for being so disastrously self-inflicted.
Two months after a presidential election widely declared to have been the most important in all of American history, the Georgia run-offs were coincidentally also declared the most important Senate elections ever. Yes: which party maintains a majority in the Senate makes a substantial difference. Republicans will control no branch of government now. But if the events in Georgia demonstrate anything about the US political system, it’s that to varying degrees both parties are stuck in a spiral of semi-permanently campaigning on how their opponents are the embodiment of civilisation-destroying apocalyptic terror — rather than putting forth any kind of tangible, positive agenda of their own.
During the campaign, the two incumbent senators from a once-decisively Republican state chose to spend their time warning incessantly that the United States would devolve into socialist tyranny if their Democratic opponents, Rafael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, prevailed. Such claims were backed by Donald Trump who, rallying in Georgia on Monday night, repeated his contention that full-blown communism was right around the corner should Democrats gain a one-vote majority in the Senate. Allegedly this nightmare would be ushered in by Joe Biden — certainly everyone’s idea of an aspiring communist despot.
In these peculiar political circumstances, all that Republican Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler could have really offered by way of a positive agenda was some combination of the following arguments: 1) that the Georgia election system fraudulently deprived Trump of victory in November, just as he’s repeatedly alleged for two months straight, and statewide Republican officials must be punished for their guilt in the scheme, or 2) that Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, must retain control of the Senate so he and his caucus can continue depriving Americans of $2,000 cash relief cheques, which McConnell has been dogged in blocking, despite demands for the cheques from Trump. For obvious reasons, neither would have been particularly inspirational stump speech material.
Parties that become hyper-reliant on a never ending cascade of wildly inflammatory and reality-detached rhetoric are often masking their own insecurities and weaknesses. Compare the final Democratic messaging of the campaign: Warnock and Ossoff stressed that among their first actions would be to approve the $2,000 Covid relief payments, and Biden travelled to Georgia on Monday to underscore his own support for this initiative. Perdue and Loeffler, conversely, couldn’t exactly tout a triumphant pledge to keep McConnell in power so he can carry on witholding withhold cash payments from Americans during a pandemic and protracted economic contraction.
So instead, they resorted to the same trite playbook that failed Trump in the general election — bellowing endlessly about the imminent onslaught of radical Leftism. Warnock and Ossoff are more “progressive” than the traditional Georgia Democrat, it’s true. But a skin-of-their-teeth Democratic majority in the Senate is highly unlikely to usher in anything particularly radical. And the attack rings even hollower when what the supposed “radical Leftists” are advocating is to give people cash based on a proposal that Trump himself loudly supports. In addition, if Loeffler — the wife of the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange who bought her way into an appointment to the Senate seat she unimpressively occupied — really represents the last bulwark against socialist tyranny, then she makes socialist tyranny seem somewhat preferable.
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SubscribeWhy take Congress seriously nowadays?
Even more than the British or other parliaments of the western democracies, it never debates any ISSUES.
Donald Trump was elected four years ago as a desperate measure by tens of millions of Americans entirely fed up with large trends of government policy which have ruined working- and lower-middle class life:
Mass Immigration, Globalisation, the sending abroad of proper jobs with proper pay and prospects, and the Overreach of all-bullying Political Correctness.
During the past 50 months the Congress has debated none of those things.
It has simply continued to be a pork-barrel citadel which from time to time presents the President of the country with preposterous boondoggle Bills for signing, which are thousands of pages long – i.e. no one can read, let alone deliberate their contents – and which are funnels of money for the multitude of vested interests about which the senators and representatives have been bought and paid for.
This latest one, the Covid Relief bill, is 5,593 pages long. Its Covid Relief element is a pitiful $600 per victim. The rest of it is zillions for everything else that the DC lobbyists have wanted.
To talk about yesterday’s insurrection at the Capitol as if it were ‘an attack on democracy’, and an attempt to extinguish the citadel of citizen representation, is purest humbug.
I do not at all approve of a segment of the Washington Marchers storming the building nor of any of the violence; but to see that as an assault on good government is ludicrous, given the record of the Congress in the past three decades.
The best part is that they pretend they have done a good job over the last twenty years while almost the entire American political spectrum hates them.
Voted every 2 years by the American People.
This always brings a smile to my face – people protest as if the population of the congress, the senate and laughing stock morons like Donald Trump had reached their power-wielding positions by some mysterious magic.
Democracy’s only chance of ever working lies in responsible political education and wise voting. The current situation is a reflex of the average US citizen’s immaturity, which has been on display for the whole world to see for quite a while…
The greatest argument against democracy is a 5min discussion with the average voter.
I know. Pathetic. Nancy Pelosi lives like a queen in San Francisco . . .far in miles and money from her constituents. Yet they continue to re-elect the . . . uh . . .
Well, you have no political choice at all in China or a choice of two parties in the US. A choice of two is infinitely better, but the Congress is indeed very remote from the concerns of much of the American public; of course that is hardly unique to the US. Politicians have become increasingly remote and a separate caste from the electorate. Remember when we used to get actual working class MPs in the UK?
By the way, I’m not sure the argument that the better educated you are the better your political judgement is holds – just look at the enthusiastic support for Communism by much of the ‘intelligentsia’ for decades, or even, however unfashionable now, for Fascism. Not to mention the irrational and divisive doctrines of the woke left being propagated through academia.
Sometimes an innate common sense scepticism of political grandstanding and all encompassing theoretical systems, might be a better support for democracy and liberty
That is why USA is a federal country. States in USA have a huge amount of power.
In the early/mid 90s a group of US universities took people that claimed to care about budget deficits and asked them to balance the budget through a combination (their choice) of taxes and spending. Experts would explain to them what their action would mean to their budget/services…In the end all the people agreed to cut foreign aid.
Our votes amount to choosing the color fabric on the chaise lounges aboard the Titanic (we aren’t allowed to even re-arrange them)…
Really? Plenty of mainstream Republicans have been pushed out of power by the base (Eric Cantor).
AOC unseated a mainstream democrat.
The conundrum is that both parties represent the plutocrats. They have their insurgent elements, but from widely different locations on the political spectrum. This will not end well.
A billionaire with a fondness for high earner tax cuts was and remains an odd choice for this mission but i agree he was the only one to deliver the necessary rhetoric to the voters.
since those “high earners” pay about 80% of the taxes, just who do you think would benefit if taxes were reduced? And what might happen with that money? Wealthy people don’t stuff money into mattresses and Scrooge McDuck with his swimming pool full of bills is a cartoon character.
Do those “high earners” pay about 80% of the taxes, or is that only various forms of income taxes?
Those high earners pay about 80% of the taxes. Does how they do it matter? Traditional income has different rates than income from investments, but that’s not new. In the end, they are the ones who pay. People fleeing places like NY and CA are often voting with their wallets.
I wasn’t disputing the figure, just querying it. And I was thinking of taxes like VAT (US sales tax?), which I think I’ve read fall disproportionately on the poor, even if overall high earners do pay the 80% you say.
Sales tax has a regressive quality in that its bite of a poor person’s income will be disproportionately higher. But a president cannot cut state or local sales taxes, and not many governors and mayors will do that. So federal tax cuts involve income.
We don’t have anything approaching a vat; sales taxes are in the single digits, varying across jurisdictions. I’ve tried making that point to people who are all for nationalized medicine. They have no concept of European style taxes, VATs included.
My local sales taxes add up to 8.13%,
But the government is anyway well on its way to financing itself by printing money rather than collecting taxes.
That the poor pay more in tax is an old left wing argument and misleading (or a lie).
If you earn 200 dollars and spend it all, you will pay 20% VAT. So you have paid 40 dollars to the government.
If you earn 2,000 dollars and only spend 1,000 dollars (the rest is savings), you will pay 20% VAT. This is 200 dollars (or 10% of earnings)
In the above example, the Left say that the poor person has paid 20% in tax and the rich person has paid 10% in tax. The poor pay more in tax than the rich! Of course, its nonsense. The poor person paid 40 dollars and the rich person paid 200 dollars.
More importantly. In the case of the poor person, the 200 dollars income is likely to be largely from the state anyway in the form of benefits. So the government give you 200 dollars and you give 40 dollars back. You are still a net beneficiary of the government. So you are paying negative tax.
Since the mention of “20% VAT” gives this a UK feel, note that the low-paid person pays 20% VAT on a pair of new shoes but the high paid one pays no VAT on their private school fees, and no tax on their yacht, since they register it in the Channel Islands before mooring it at Hamble, Cowes or Rochester.
A supreme act of whataboutery. The top 25% pay the majority of tax in the UK.
The bottom 50% are net beneficiaries of the state. That is, they receive more in state spending (cash or in public services) than they pay in tax. In other words, they not only pay no tax, they pay negative tax.
In terms of education, for a state school pupil, the government pays approximately 7,500 pounds to educate them. That is why there is no VAT on private school fees. Private schools essentially save the exchequer 7,500 pounds for each pupil that is not educated in the state system.
The true crime is that for 7,500, we could probably send every state pupil to a private school (assuming economies of scale would reduce the usual fee of aprox 12K for a minor public school). Instead we have to fund a group of Lefty teachers to turn our children into left wing avatars who ‘protest against the patriarchal, racist, evil capitalist system called the United Kingdom’.
Tax evasion and fraud is at a record low according to the tax office.
So lets look at fraud at the DWP.
There is the small problem of the 14 trillion pounds hidden off hte books.
Ah but its socialist probkem
What on earth are you talking about?
Who will benefit when they stop paying? Illinois, California are hints. But if you look at NY. The top 1% pay over 50% of the taxes.
When they leave, watch the results.
“A billionaire with a fondness for high earner tax cuts” that wasn’t what Trump asked Congress in terms of tax cuts. Congress did what Paul Ryan wanted in terms of cuts but Trump stopped Ryan from some reforms that Ryan never forgave Trump. Trump asked for middle class cuts and more taxes on hedgers that he didn’t get either.
No reports in the UK MSM that the rioters were led by the Democrat approved antifa, disguised as Trump supporters. Agents provocateur in action.
Karl Marx warned us that democracy will eat itself from within.
The facial recognition company whose software purportedly identified antifa agitators denies that this is the case, despite reports in e.g., One America News and other efforts to deny the reality that the rioters were Trumpists, incited by Trump and his enablers.
The hypocrisy over the Antifa and BLM ‘peaceful demonstrations’ as opposed to the events yesterday is as nauseating as ever. Media and ‘celebs’ who backed the former, congressmen who marched with the former, now fulminating against the latter.
Two for you to watch;
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
Note: I am not saying either is right – it is the hypocrisy I am calling out and have done since Trump came to office and, in Britain, since the Brexit debacle began. The similarities in the behaviour of the press, the BBC, the ‘celebs’, the, soi distant, comedians etc on these issues is staggering. All have a raging contempt for the ordinary people whose lives were actually being damaged by their deluded ideas, whilst suffering none of the consequences themselves
Agreed….OANN is a xtreme right wing propaganda site, with many failed fact checks and promotion of conspiracy theories… not a credible source at all.
http://tapnewswire.com/2021…
They weren’t incited by Trump. They were incited by the Democrats’ election shenanigans.
A Marxist supporting Trump. Interesting.
You have a problem with comprehension.
So the fact that the MSM do not treat laughable fantasies as important is PROOF that they are part of a conspiracy.
Try this one. The world is controlled by a three-headed lizard. The fact the media don’t report that just PROVES how total global control by the three-headed lizard is.
” . . . rioters were led by the Democrat approved antifa, . . .”
and your evidence is . . . .?
http://tapnewswire.com/2021…
I fully agree, with one caveat. The faces of those who stormed the building have been identified by the online community, as members of ANTIFA (dressed as Trump supporters), one even being the boyfriend of Pelosi’s daughter. It looks like there was a deliberate ploy to vilify all the real Trump supporters.
It all worked though as did the fraudelent part of the elections. It appears that the swamp persists and what is at stake is American democracy.
Should ‘identified by the online community’ read ‘identified by an online community?’
Then why are most Trump supporters, supporting them? You can’t have it both ways.
You can’t be serious…. The faces of those who stormed the building, and been arrested, have been identified as radical Trump supporters, through their online footprints.
So you accept Trump’s presidency was a failure?
The fact is, global trade has made people in the West richer. That includes the USA. It’s true the growth in disposable incomes for the bottom 10% have been less than that top 10%, but there has still been growth. No one has become poorer. The USA poor are the richest poor in the world.
You do realise most of the COVID relief has gone to the poor? To protect small businesses and furlough low income workers, who are effectively being paid not to work. You do realise the people most likely to die from COVID are the poor and vulnerable?
You can’t explain away the complexities of modern economies by saying ‘they sent our jobs abroad’. The USA had record employment numbers prior to COVID (something Trump was very proud of). You claim to be against the Left, but oblivious to the fact you have essentially embraced a Marxist analysis of the problem and seem to advocate Marxist solutions.
To see a violent attack on a democratic institution as ‘not an attack on democracy’ is to be somewhat deluded.
How you can say that globalisation has made no one poorer is beyond my understanding.
Millions of jobs went abroad with it, leaving gig-economy employments with low pay for people who previously had enjoyed full-time work with decent wages and prospects.
For instance, the U.S. had a steel industry. That disappeared – it went to China. Work of equivalent value – in dignity, salary, prospects – was not found for the steelworkers made unemployed.
And so on throughout the land.
You can argue that by comparison with peasants in Bangladesh the American working-class and lower-middle class are still better off; but surely the phenomena I have mentioned are developments which should have been front and centre of discourse in bodies such as the venal meaningless Congress, and of concern to both the major political parties.
It is not much better here in the UK. I know of only one MP, Lisa Tandy, representing Wigan, who has concerned herself with the grievances she identifies as having had a part in the Leave vote in our Referendum.
The rest of the British Parliament has not debated this new kind of joblessness at all, that I can perceive; not even in order simply to acknowledge the problem’s existence.
What it comes to is that a whole generation now have (in real terms) smaller stipends, fewer work-opportunities and dimmer prospects than their parents and their grandparents had.
Is it right and proper not to care about this issue?
Hence the election of Donald Trump 4 years ago (with all his rather exasperating imperfections on his head); and possibly this time around??
I thought the point of Unherd was not to run partisan pieces like this.
Trump is the first president since Carter not to start a new war. He created full employment and stood up to China. All that will now be abandoned, which is why my share portfolio reaches a record high almost every day. (Good for me, not good for American workers, who will see their jobs sent abroad). He did something to secure the US border when 79% of Americans want controls on immigrations.
And I don’t see why ‘storming the Capitol’ was worse than BLM/Antifa burning down countless (often black-owned) businesses last summer, invariably without repercussions.
Previous last time the Capitol was stormed was on 4 October 2018, but that was off course fine, because it was the left doing it.
1) US unemployment rate in 2016 – 4.87%; in 2019-3.68%. US had full employment rate when Obama left office – assuming we know (and YOU do not) what fully employment means.
2) He bombed Syria – did you forget that? And betrayed the Kurds. Or did you ignore that
3) You don’t see how/why “storming the Capitol” is bad because you have been sprouting conspiracy theories about the stolen election.
Trump is also the first president
-to not publish his taxes (did liberal globalist media do that?)
-not to separate himself from his private business (did liberal globalist media do that?),
-he is the first president to waste a week arguing about the inauguration crowd
–AND he is the first president to accuse his predecessor of Killing Team Seal 6 and faking the death of Bin Laden.
He has lost 61 legal cases – YES 61 legal cases – trying to overthrow a legal election.
He has spend the last 5 years banging on (LYING!!!) about voter fraud. And what did he do as president about the voter fraud in 2016 that cost him the popular vote – according to him – NOTHING. It could be because he was too busy fighting about the size of his inauguration crowds…or he was just LYING.
Trump is an utter degenerate!
How do you explain the Clinton Foundation – allegedly a charity but with 94% of all the money it raised (according to the accountants) spent on ‘Administration’ while Chelsea bought an apartment in New York so big it travelled the entire extent of a whole block?
Nothing to do with Trump. Bill used his legacy to raise funds. Sad/shameful/despicable but true.
Did BIll Clinton accuse Bush Senior of killing American soldiers and faking the death of (say) Sadam Hussein.
‘2) He bombed Syria – did you forget that?’
No, I hadn’t forgotten that. It was the only time the media praised him for anything, with one particularly sick presenter on MSNBC repeatedly describing the attack as”beautiful”. They love war because it’s good for ratings. Anyway, as Biden has said, “The US is back”, so the chances are that everyone will soon get the bombing and intervening they love so much.
Did the media make him Betray the Kurds. Or maybe it was the Media that made the Kurds not help Allies during WW2
DId the media make him accuse President Obama of killing Team Seal 6 and faking the death of Obama?
I really do not understand this incredible vitriol. Trump is not perfect, but you seem to willfully ignore the manifold lies and bad acts of Obama, Biden, Harris, Hillary.
Explain to me “perfect” with the accusation that the previous president had killed US soldiers and faked the death of the N1 most wanted terrorist.
Please, please explain it to me?
I hardly think that you are sincere in your sneering “question”. “not perfect” is what I said , by the way…
How does “not perfect” explain trump’s accusation?
They also love war because the whole political/media class (conjoined twins) are owned by the Big Money folk who find many of their accounts in the Military Industrial Complex.
We can expect several ‘lovely’ wars again across the world map, now that the Establishment is back in power.
War is often considered an effective way for a leader to unite the nation behind them.
I often refer to the president-to-be as Warlord Biden, and I sincerely hope that turns out to be idiotic flippancy on my part.
You do not appear to be particularly non-partisan either.
Do commenters have to be non-partisan?
I have never liked Trump as an individual. To me he was never anything other than a vulgar real estate mogul who, perhaps, should have been bankrupted in the early 1990s. That said, the entire US media and all the rappers etc loved him until he decided to stand for office. This despite the fact that Oprah and others had repeatedly encouraged him to stand for office. Had he stood as a Democrat against another male Democrat they would probably have loved him.
But he was right to identify that the policies of Clinton/Bush/Obama etc were a complete disaster for the working class in America and everyone in the various countries they invaded and bombed.
That said, the entire US media and all the rappers etc loved him until he decided to stand for office.
NO they did not – NY Post Page 6 covered his BSing but the mainstream media (especially NY Elite) knew he was a clown!
You need an intervention.
Somehow the right wing, when their arguments fall flat, always resort to ugly personal attacks. So like their idol Trump.
“…always resort to ugly personal attacks.”, he said, attacking a broad swath of others.
If this is the first time you’ve noticed Unherd running partisan pieces, all I can say is that they must usually sit comfortably within your own bias so you don’t notice. Unherd runs lots of partisan pieces.
Fair point. I just get deranged myself by the TDS. Yes, Trump is an often unpleasant and bizarre individual with an unfortunate manner and a double-edged ability/inability to express himself. But his track recored in terms of getting things done in the interests of normal, working people as opposed to the utterly corrupt ‘elites’, was quite remarkable. Anyway, it’s back to normal now with the elites selling out the US to China.
The tax cut for the rich was for the working people?
Normal working people voted against him in 2016 by 3M votes, voted against him in 2018 Midterms and again in 2020 by 7m votes.
TDS doesn’t explain your conspiracy theories.
The “tax cut for the rich” was for people who pay taxes. That 20% of the people pay 80% of the taxes is the work of past politicians, so it stands to reason that any reduction in taxes will most benefit the people who pay the bulk of them. My, lord; that has to be one of the weakest talking points in the left’s catalogue.
I got the tax cut, he could have cut taxes for the low/middle earners while raising taxes (as Bannon wanted to do) for people making more than 10M a year. Or remove the tax breaks from Private Equity that treat income as carried interest – Ann Coulter (is she a lefty?) wanted to remove that tax break for rich people.
In the end (AND WE KNOW WHAT HAPPENED) Goldman bankers (Mnuchin, Cohn) that Trump appointed won the argument. And Trump signed the deal.
W did that, to the point that a lot of “low earners” were absolved of all federal liability, but that insipid “cuts for the rich” talking point echoed anyway. It’s all you folks know.
I got the cut as well, on income substantially less than 10M or even 1M per year.
Nothing to do with W.
Trump could have undone that – he did not!
Could have undone what? W’s tax cuts absolved the lower earners of ALL federal liability. That means a tax rate of zero essentially. You cannot further cut taxes for someone not paying any in the first place.
Trump could have raised taxes on the rich – as he PROMISED the american people.
Just like he promised to release his taxes.
And what would raising taxes have accomplished? The country has a spending problem. The annual budget is approaching five trillion per year with no sign of slowing down.
Yes, and as WE have discussed before it was Trump with a republican house and senate that blew the budget up.
He promised to balance the budget – so where is it?
Repeal and replace Obamacare with a cheaper & better system – where is it?
The debt doubled under Obama, who took office with Dems controlling both chambers. And spending has gone up consistently irrespective of party. I remember Barack criticizing W’s spending habits, too, only to do exactly what you are now accusing Trump of doing.
The last 4 years of Obama (we can measure it) the government borrowed c.2 trillion.
During 3 years of Trump (pre Covid) debt went up by 3.5 trillion.
I am simply holding the man to his promises
Where are his taxes?
In Obama’s eight years, the debt doubled from 10 to 20+ trillion. And we’ve seen leaks of at least some of Trump’s taxes. Rachel Maddow made a fool of herself over them.
Again, we had the debate before.
1) He promised to raise taxes on rich people and himself – He didn’t
2) He promised to release his taxes – He didn’t.
But yes, Rachel Maddow is responsible for his lies about his taxes.
She’s responsible for making a deal about having secured a leak tax return and then looking ridiculous for what was in it. As to taxes, your boy Joe is likely to make good on what you seem to want in raising them on the wealthy. I wonder if the same folks so concerned about Trump’s taxes will have the same curiosity about Biden’s sudden increase in wealth.
You didn’t address any of my points. Biden has released his taxes, if you think he is lying prove it.
My taxes increased because with his usual malice, he eliminated the local tax deduction.
The deduction was not eliminated; it was capped at 10K. Why should someone in Florida be forced to underwrite the state and local taxes of California?
The left has this funny idea that it’s better to tax the people who actually make money than the people who are at the edge of starvation. Even if you don’t care about the ethics of it, it just seems sensible to try to get money out of people who actually have some than people who don’t.
What is ethical about taking one person’s money just because you think it’s too much, whatever too much means? The lower earners have no federal income liability as it is, so the goal you outline has already been achieved. And cutting taxes is not the same as eliminating them, which no one has suggested. The left has this funny idea of creating divisions where none are needed, in this case among class lines, because doing so along racial, gender, orientation, and ethnic lines is apparently not enough.
Isn’t the idea that the money belongs to one person part of an ethical system in the first place?
The money first belongs to the person who earned it. That taxes will be involved is part of living in a civil society, but that has to apply to everyone. You cannot have one group of people living at the expense of another group, with politicians essentially as the middlemen who take a cut for themselves.
Govt has certain legitimate functions. I just don’t see 4 trillion dollars per year worth of such functions, and that’s just at the federal level. Treat being a taxpayer like being a consumer because we’re all basically consumers of govt services. Are you getting your money’s worth? If so, great, but I doubt most people would say yes. And that does not get to those with liability on income.
But how you define ‘earned’ it is dependent on your ethical system. I don’t think currency speculators, hedge fund investors have earned their money. I don’t think people who inherit large sums that they then invest to get even richer have earned their money. I don’t think arms dealers who sell weapons used to kill Yemenis have earned their money. They’re parasites. You don’t have to agree with me – but that’s an ethical system.
“The money first belongs to the person who earned it” seems like an ethical decision, and don’t many ‘high earners’ get a fair proportion of their income from interest, loans, bonds and so on, which used not to be considered earned income?
but you still pay taxes on investment income, just at a lower rate than is paid on salary.
True, but it puts the phrase high earners in a different light if until recently some, or much, of their income was considered unearned. It could be said that living off unearned income is living at the expense of another group, and for this income to be taxed at a lower rate than salaries might seem a double injustice.
But I have to admit I don’t really know how it all works.
Investments are what fuel pensions that are paid to people who are not high earners. Often, these are pensions for public employees, so the investor class is not limited to the wealthy. It also includes the 401k in private enterprise.
Investment income is taxed at a lower rate to facilitate investment. The more you tax something, the less of that thing you get. It’s the logic behind increase in taxes for things like cigarettes and booze. Besides that, if you invest some of what you earned, you have already paid taxes on that initial income.
This interpretation of what constitutes “money” demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of the origins, purpose and history of money, and even less understanding of fiat monetary operations.
Excluding lower earners from paying Federal Tax isn’t something to brag about. It just means you’re allowing a system to exist where people aren’t even paid enough money to contribute to the running of the country. If, as Trumpians claim, they love their country then paying taxes should be considered an honour – not something you can’t afford to do.
It’s not bragging, it’s a statement of fact and what do you suppose the impact of it is? Nothing is easier than being in favor of someone else paying more when you don’t pay anything yourself.
Loving my country does not mean turning over as much of my income as possible. Govt is not my parent; I’d like for it to adequately do the things that make sense for it to do, not to involve itself in functions where it has no expertise.
I will miss Trump and his honesty. He was a bit of a bulldozer but I think his country needed that. Will America now go downhill? I hope not.
I suppose non partisan means that you allow opposing views. This is fine so long as writers are not lying.
Trump obviously didn’t buy into the Washington consensus, but he was too contradictory and self-obsessed to do anything very consistent about it. This will take a different political force, one that straddles, to some degree, the current divide between the radical right and the radical left. A political impossibility? Well, a hard ask, I agree. But the alternative is continued shadow-boxing between the plutocrats of the respective established political parties.
The piece is not partisan. It is a bona fide attempt to make sense of a very toxic situation in the US. I am Welsh, have a Green Card, Southern Belle wife in NC, but see both the UK and the US as often as Covid allows. Trump has achieved things from which the US (and Democrat Administration) will benefit in the long run – if it is sensible – including the ability to control the Southern Border, and in challenging China (unlike the mercenary Biden family) and in making European nations pay more to NATO (which they needed to do in their own interest). And he has, thankfully, challenged political correctness. His downside includes (1) making crass remark about Sen.John McCain and (2) having a marked ability to freak out women voters, even when they may well agree with his policies. It is not his fault that the Democrats/Media/Silicon Valley now operate in a way which any normal liberal Brit ought to fear. He is not to blame because so many lies get half-way round the world before he has got his boots on. He is not racist. He is not fascist. Neither Dems (amazingly) nor the GOP have workable policies for Health Provision. The GOP has the problem of whether to cave in to many trends in the US or fight them. Well, so does every person in Britain.
including the ability to control the Southern Border, and in challenging China (unlike the mercenary Biden family) and in making European nations pay more to NATO (which they needed to do in their own interest).
which of these is likely to stand in a Biden administration? Maybe the NATO part, but it is impossible to see the Dems suddenly finding religion over the border or for Joe to upset his masters in Beijing.
Oh to have actual investigative journalists…
That breed died out decades ago.
There are still a few if you search around. One such is independent journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the Edward Snowden story and has written a great piece on the Biden/Hunter saga.
https://greenwald.substack….
“Trump….. is not fascist”
He just tried to persuade Republican-controlled State legislatures to certify their States as Republican even when the majority of their voters voted for Biden and to appoint Electors to the Electoral College on that basis, tried to persuade Bill Barr to impose Martial Law on the swing States in order to rerun the election, and then spent an hour trying to persuade the Georgia Republican controlling the election count to “find me 11880 votes”.
But he’s not a Fascist. Oh no.
I agree this article could have appeared in the New Yorker, New York Magazine, Politico, NYT, WAPO, BBC, NPR, and all the way down the line of corporate media singing from the same song sheet. There is a reason half the country doesn’t trust the media.
Trump tried to overturn an election and start a civil war. Still, we shouldn’t let one small mistake overshadow an otherwise successful presidency.
Also can we drop the confected outrage. If BLM had done precisely what Trump’s supporters did, the media would have presented it as a stunning and brave message to the White Patriarchy by poor, oppressed victims who had had enough. The big outrage would have been over a policeman shooting a protester dead.
Cops shot a woman to death in this incident. Imagine that having happened at a BLM/antifa event.
Her name is Ashli Babbitt.
Black people would be lying dead on the steps of Capitol Hill.
Confected? Wrong. If BLM even TRIED to do what the Orange Mob did, there would be a few hundred dead and wounded brown, black and young people on the steps of the capital today. The most ironic part is that DJT over the summer issued an executive order that anyone found to have destroyed or damaged federal property be liable to a 10 year sentence… which confirms once again the old line, that whatever he touches, dies.
As Bret Weinstein and Jimmy Dore – both leftists of great integrity – have said many times: ‘Trump is the symptom, not the cause”. if you kick normal, decent people in the teeth every day for years, they will eventually kick back, as happened with Trump and Brexit. The political/financial/media establishment almost overcame Brexit, and now the US establishment has regained control. There is every chance that they will act as the boot stamping on a human face forever.
Of course, one expects this of the political and financial establishment. But particularly disgusting over the last 20 or years or so is the way in which the media has allied with them, or been bought by them.
What a long bitter nasty diatribe that was.
I feel sorry for the US electorate. The electoral system clearly is eminently corruptible:- mail in votes, dominion machines , “miscounts” and all the rest along with a judiciary that is not remotely interested in fairness.
It looks like the elites reponse is going to be suck it up buttercup as regards the fraud. If I was a US voter whose standard of living just kept on falling and who knew his democracy was useless I would be exasperated today. Biden knows what happens when people get exasperated after all he was a big fan of the IRA.
Release the Kraken!
What a short, bitter nasty diatribe this is.
Your IRA comment at the end was particularly graceless.
Was it inaccurate? genuine question
Yes, on the tone of the article for one. It wasn’t bitter or nasty, I think it was a harsh but fair reflection on the state of conservative American politics at the moment, and its increasingly unhealthy relationship with Donald Trump.
Second, he seems to be conflating the ‘electorate’ with ‘people who still believe that the election was rigged’. The presence of minor scale fraud or miscounting isn’t evidence for a one-sided, orchestrated campaign against one candidate.
Third, the ‘elites’ response to the consistently unproven allegations of a stolen election is to give them a fair hearing and afford them due process. That’s why 1,000s of hours were wasted, in the top courts up and down the land no less, debunking the increasingly outlandish claims of voter suppression, ballot stuffing, and encouraging people to use Sharpies to invalidate their ballot (despite the fact they were counted regardless). Trump’s lawyers themselves withdrew their own cases on a number of occasions because they knew their cases were built on conjecture and conspiracy theories. This charade is a pretty long, drawn out and costly way of the elites saying ‘suck it up, buttercup’.
Last, but by no means least (not that it needs saying), Biden is not – in fact – a ‘big fan’ of the IRA. But you knew that already.
Yes. Never mind the rest – if you need me to explain to you that Biden is not, in fact, a ‘big fan’ of the IRA then I’d argue that you’re either very misinformed, or that your question isn’t genuine at all.
https://www.belfasttelegrap…
“Oirish” Joe isn’t a big fan of the IRA?
Maybe a little fan then.
Any American who claims to be Irish rather than American, five generations down the line, is signaling something.
It was shameful for USA to tolerate IRA raising money during teh Reagan years (friend of Maggie right?)
But Biden is not responsible for the NI mess or Brexit and the Internal Market Bill.
Ah, I have yet to press the block button!
In the meantime I’m not interested in your incessant yapping. You’re like a particularly irritating character from The Inbetweeners
Yeah he really is the TDS is strong in that one, I hope they are paying him well.
What if I may ask is the ‘block button’?
I think I am currently being chastised by it but cannot find out why or who.
I’m frankly both astonished and disappointed that UnHerd tolerates such behaviour.
Anyway we will see if you even manage to read this. Thanks in advance.
NORAID is still collecting!
This “isn’t over” as they say.
Seriously? That’s your argument? He claims an ancestry, and that automatically means terrorism?
If I tell you I’m Swedish, will you hold me accountable for the Vikings? Just curious.
If I tell you I’m Swedish, will you hold me accountable for the Vikings? Just curious.
Well it does seem to be fashionable right now to blame people for things their ancestors did so YES.
there are people in the States that want to hold all whites accountable for slavery, so your question is less far-fetched than one might think. Taking the argument to its most ridiculous conclusion should expose the entire thing as ridiculous, yet a great many people want to “punish” one group of Americans for something it had no hand in.
Only a yank would claim to be something else.
He ain’t Irish, and you ain’t Swedish unless you were born in Sweden.
Sorry, but you are yanks, That is your problem – Not mine.
‘,,, inaccurate’? No. He believes in a United Ireland and made no secret of that fact during the 30 year terrorist campaign mounted by the Provisional IRA against the legitimate (internationally agreed) State of Northern Ireland.
Graceless, perhaps, but accurate?
Definitely along with Polossi and so many others, too numerous to mention.
The electoral system has always been corruptible. Black people had to endure their democratic rights being gerrymandered for decades. One suspects you wouldn’t condone ‘IRA tactics’ for them. The double standards are hilarious. The worst thing is that your oppression is imagined and is merely a tactic in service of a despot.
I understand the democrats bought in the Jim Crow laws. I don’t condone IRA tactics at all, that was creepy Joe.
This is a perfect example of projection.
Those democrats (over 150 years ago) are long dead. Their heirs are – brace yourself – Republican. And they voted Trump 2x – look at the vote.
Perhaps you don’t know how to count, but the first half of the 20th century was not 150 years ago. It wasn’t Republicans enforcing Jim Crow and disenfranchising black voters in the south then.
“Black people had to endure their democratic rights being gerrymandered for decades”…yes, by Democrats.
Indeed. What’s your point?
Where is the Kraken?
You mean that fraud that Trump has been burbling about for months but can’t produce a single shred of evidence for beyond “this can’t be happening! I never lose! Losing is something that happens to other people!”? That fraud?
You know what, on a better day I’d be willing to admit that liberals aren’t too great at the whole “accepting defeat graciously” thing either. They moaned long and hard about the last election, I haven’t forgotten that. But right now, I’m not in the mood. At least liberals didn’t form angry mobs and storm into government buildings in a half-assed attempt to intimidate their way to an unearned victory.
You are quite correct to compare them to the IRA. They are showing that they are very much a bunch of deranged terrorists who deserve nothing but contempt.
Ah yes, that absolutely lovely idea that it was Donald Trump that cost the Republicans the Senate. Here is a crazy idea. Maybe, just maybe it had something to do with Mitch McConnell? After all, this election would determine if old Mitch would be the Senate Majority Leader. Keep in mind several things. First, Nancy Pelosi tried to play games with the stimulus checks and blame it on the Republicans. It failed and a majority of Americans across the political spectrum were pissed. Second, congressional votes did not coincide well with presidential votes last election. Hmm… It’s almost as if there were other political considerations than presidential party. Finally, the Senate run off election, occurred at a point when Trump was no more. So right before the election, Mitch decides that he will give struggling Americans the finger and demonstrate that he was no different than Pelosi, in an election that would determine just how much power he would get. What the hell was he thinking, and why should Republican voters stay with him after this blatant display of petty stupidity?
Did you read the article?
It wasn’t much of an article-more of a partisan polemic.
Mitch played the game bad, but the deal was negotiated with Trump Admin!!!
Why did the administration agree to the $600 instead of pushing from day 1 to $2,000?
McConnell wants to be in a minority. The Republican niche is not government but opposition…more or less like a protection racket…
You might be right – I don’t think Republicans want to govern. Aside from pointing judges they have no policies.
Trump’s behaviour since he lost the election was so pathetic, extreme and anti-democratic that it was bound to repel the minority of Republican voters who have some standards. His slavish supporters losing their Senate races is entirely unsurprising.
Unheard’s policy of actually giving both sides has its advantages. Here we have the usual leftist tone of bored superiority, although Tracey’s twitter feed reads to me a bit more sneering than his article here. However, on the assumption that he actually wants some “ideological self evaluation”, here’s my suggestions:
For the Democrats – dump the Whig history. “Fate” is not a Christian concept for a good reason. It’s garbage. You’re not “destined” to usher in some earthly paradise, nothing you do is “validated” by history and you are not entitled to the loyalty of the poor, the working class, minorities or anyone else. I hate to break it to you, Mr Biden, but if a black guy votes for Trump, he’s still black. Oh, and those who don’t see things your way are not actually vermin, germs, a disease or in need or eradication, like smallpox.
For the Republicans – fight. You know, actually stand up and do what you say you believe in. When you control state legislatures, loosen gun controls. Actually abolish entrenched civil service bureaucracies, even if that means putting interfering social workers and “safety” hacks out on permanent gardening leave, for years if necessary, until their departments expire. Stop apologizing for being conservatives and for God’s sake, stop preferring to lose graciously rather than to win.
This week is your idea of losing graciously? Dear lord.
I would normally agree with you about how a politician seeking office must, at a bare minimum, not have a sense of contempt for large swaths of the electorate. But right now, I can’t help it wonder if contempt isn’t in fact what large swaths of the electorate actually deserve – irrespectively of whether admitting that out loud is politically advisable.
Uhu. I’m guessing it’s the right of the political spectrum you think of as deserving contempt. Let’s just forget about the left storming the Senate last year during the Kavanaugh hearings. It probably wasn’t reported in the MSM. Embarrassing stuff like that rarely is. Contempt is a good start. Let me know when we start to qualify as vermin, germs or a disease needing eradication, won’t you? I’d like to get my affairs in order.
you will soon be assigned a symbol to sew onto your clothing. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Truth will comb through your social media history looking for any questionable material that can be used to justify your firing from work. And the wokerati will work on making public your home address along with pictures of the kids so that you can all be harassed. ABC’s political director has already talked of a “cleansing” being needed for conservatives.
Trump was born from the despair of the middle & lower class American citizen. The failure of both the Republican & Democrat parties to listen to the genuine grievances of Americans, on Immigration, jobs fleeing the USA, Foreign wars, crime & the approaching Technocracy. The Establishment has no idea how it can turn this around, or does it really care? I suspect the Democrats may end up wishing they hadn’t won this election.
Plenty of poor Americans voted against Trump in 2016, 2020 and Midterm Elections in 2018.
And plenty, to include the so-called working class multiple minority groups, voted for him. Your TDS is acting up this morning.
the nutters accuse the sane to be insane.
like I said.
Most of poor minorities (by huge margins) voted against him.
Cubans (if you truly know the community) is very affluent.
percentages of black and hispanic votes went up. That minorities tend to vote Dem is not new. How’s that been working for them? By his hand or not, the two biggest groups were experiencing record low unemployment before coronabola.
Yes and white middle class suburbia voted against him.
What do we do about those white people.
maybe you could look at them as human beings instead of political NPC characters. The left’s fixation on identity provides many moments of amusement when they start turning on one another.
Nice try!
accurate try. You don’t see people; you see skin color. From the looks of Trump’s rallies, quite a few whites support him. Blacks, too, though the left usually chooses to insult them over that.
The right is fully committed to identity politics. You overstate the support he receives from minorities. It’s rock bottom. 95% of black women voted Democrat in the Georgia run-off. Aside from Candace Owens – probably one of the most dishonest commentators out there – there is threadbare support for Trump among minorities. It’s funny how white identity politics is just politics.
Why is it that Trump’s support is rooted in lower/working class white communities and not black or nearly every other minority community? It’s not about class in the main. He is appealing to a particular strand of ethno-nationalism. Fears around job security and immigration are fair enough but they are tied up with racism and a fear of the ‘other’. Genuine progress to increase social mobility is not going to come from Republicans in their current state as they only value white grievance. Democrats have a broader appeal across racial and class lines.
Minorities tend to vote Dem. It’s that simple. It has nothing to do with Trump. During his tenure, black and hispanic unemployment hit record lows. Whether or not he’s to be credited does not much matter since presidents get credit or blame for no reason beyond things happening on their watch.
Dems runs most major cities. How’s that working out for minorities? Perhaps you’ve noticed but the Dems’ anti-cop stance in several of those cities has caused massive spikes in crime, to include homicide.
I’ll grant you all of that so we can focus on the point that you dodged. The only reason minorities mostly are not voting for Trump is because of his politics is rooted in white grievance. Trump supporters notion of what it means to be American excludes them. I mean what his economic policies are so great and their employment prospects the best they’ve been. What is the reason holding minorities back from supporting what is obviously the best candidate?
I agree that defunding the police is a stupid policy. The police need to be reformed but are still necessary, especially in a nation like America that is relatively violent compared with other developed nations.
The Republican Party is the party of white grievance and racism currently. It can shed that image but it needs to abandon Trump and his cultists.
“He is appealing to a particular strand of ethno-nationalism”.. how does that explain non-white Americans supporting him? Maybe there are fundamental differences between poor people who just want jobs and economic freedom and poor people who just want the government to take care of them.
The Democratic Party has radical representatives and supporters that would gladly implement many redistributive economic policies unheard of in America. By the same token the Democratic Party is backed by big business and is able to draw upon enormous amounts of funding from wealthy backers. The Republicans and Democrats are broad churches by necessity as without building a coalition of voters they would not be able to win elections. Trump appeals to a base nationalism that in the minds of millions of Americans is intrinsically linked with their whiteness. This is the basis of their own superiority. Other Republicans may interpret the rhetoric differently, ignore it or they may just consider the Democrats the greater threat. However, you cannot deny how millions of Trump supporters are interpreting the rhetoric when they boast anti-Semitic slogans, make white supremacist gestures and fly confederate flags. All as they stormed Capitol Hill to illegally detain lawmakers and halt a democratic process.
Your comment is interesting (I mean that sincerely not sarcastically) but does not explain why 7 million more Americans voted for Biden than Trump, even after Republican States disenfranchised very large numbers of black voters using rules targeting them. In contrast, in 2016 Trump was defeated by only 2 million votes, so seeing Trump in action clearly didn’t persuade the ‘middle and lower class American citizen’.
“…in 2016 Trump was defeated”…um, he won in 2016. Are you still refusing to accept that?
I almost feel sorry for the Tracey wing. For four years, Trump has been their business model, their very oxygen. What will they do when no longer able to blame him for everything they dislike. A few in the media have already said they will not cover Biden in the same way, which should surprise absolutely no one and in a sane world, would embarrass those saying it.
Why won’t any swing state let the ballots be checked by Jovan Pullitzer? Why won’t they allow the machines to be checked? All that is wanted is an honest, legal election conducted in accordance with the Constitution. Let the ballots be analyzed. It takes a few hours to check the whole state. Why were truck loads of ballots counted at 3AM all for Biden? What are they hiding? Biden got over 80 million votes? Harris couldn’t break two percent and dropped out yet they set records. More people voted than were registered. Shouldn’t that be investigated?
Perhaps if you read media other than Republican media you would know the answers to your questions.
Georgia recounted by hand. Or are you suggesting that the Republican counters and observers were corrupt? Bought?
There were not more votes than registered, this has been proven, but not accepted by Trump and some of his supporters.
Fraud committed? I expect so, in fact a number of fraudulent votes have been uncovered having been committed by Republicans. I suspect that each side cancels the other out.
Who is Jovan Pullitzer? I have never heard of him.
I have found out now, he runs his own shouty websites. Nothing to see here
Apparently a bunch of rednecks storming the Capitol is an attack on democracy, but tech oligarchs conspiring to bring down Trump, and the neoliberal global corporations spending $16 Billion on a Democrat victory isn’t.
Defeat in Georgia and chaos in the Capitol call for an ideological self-evaluation
Pointless – because Trumpists care about “triggering the left” not policy.
Anyone that understood policy knew that Trump’s promises (balance the budget, Obamacare reform – day 1; trade deficits etc.) were utterly unrealistic. And Trump either was lying, didn’t care or simply was/is too ignorant about the affairs of the state.
And it wasn’t just Trump but the whole Republican party. Despite winning election after election with “repeal and replace” when the time they did absolutely nothing. Instead they cut taxes, blew a massive whole in the budget and didn’t care at all.
Most of the commentators on this site don’t care AT ALL about policy – they pretend they do but in fact they don’t – they simply want to trigger the liberal/remain elite (Guardian/BBC/Oxbridge/Islington etc.)
They want tweets – that is all!
For once, you and I partly – and in that part, emphatically – agree!
I don’t think you are right about the Trumpists. They are frantic and desperate about national policy. They have seen their standard of living collapse over the course of the past 25 years. Their grandfathers and grandmothers had decent jobs that paid sufficiently, were able to afford a decent house in a pleasant area and a car; so were their parents. Not so, they themselves nowadays. This is due to the senators and representatives of the meaningless Uniparty in Congress (one wing of which is the Democrats, the other the Republicans) being entirely in the business of feathering their own nests with lobby-graft and doing the bidding of their donors: hence, Globalisation, sending jobs abroad, Political Correctness run riot, everything on China’s terms &c.
You are right, however, about Trump himself and the Republican Party. He lumbered into office with good policy objectives but entirely unprepared for making them come to pass. And the Republican Party has long committed itself to complete meaninglessness in the interests of donor-graft.
I am not denying in any shape and form the economic dislocation of many American (especially rural areas) voters. Take W Virginia and coal. Clinton was right – invest in the future because coal is dead (mostly because of natural gas); Trump came up with “beautiful clean coal” and did absolutely nothing. Coal consumption has declined as has the number of jobs in the coal industry. Trump lied or again doesn’t understand how the world works.
And USA (someone should tell that to Trumpists) is not going to go back to 1950s when Germany/Japan were utterly destroyed. Nor will China go back to Mao’s days.
Very well. If you are right about coal and a whole lot of other industries (which I should have thought any nation wanting independence from others would be eager to mine or make at home rather than importing), what policy do you propose which will grant full-time properly paid employments with tolerable prospects to whole classes of people over the entire land who now live with incomes (in real terms) about one-fourth of what their parents and grandparents had?
Just do what the horrible political-cum-media class do – who are financially FINE, thankyou, owing to all the money pumped into them – and tell them ‘Tough!’ You’re now what the Victorians called ‘the surplus population. Learn coding or drop dead’?
In election year 2016, a majority of American families could not afford a new car; and that in a country where distances are huge and your own wheels the only way for getting across them.
US doesn’t import coal – natural gas is cheaper and cleaner. And it is natural gas – thanks to fracking – that has killed the coal industry.
It is not an opinion it is fact.
Trump (he is delusional at best) should have recognized the truth and tell that to the public. He lied to them. Or he was/is delusional.
In relation to other industries it will require (read my original argument about policy making and Trump/Republicans don’t care at all)
1) improve vocational education – like Germany.
2) increase the size of welfare state – like Germany.
3) pay people to move out regions with no prospect. We have to face the truth.
But under Democratic Party management education has declined and declined in quality. That is one of the big reasons why so many black people never break out of the poverty trap.
And when was it Democratic Party policy to pay people to move out of regions with no prospect?
Education is state/local responsibility. The worst educated in America are the Red States- especially South.
The best schools are in the “democratic” areas and the best universities and the high tech jobs. Hillary won the counties of USA that produce c.75% of country’s GDP. Even in Republican states the best “educational” areas are “democratic”.
I don’t see the connection with my comments (you are jumping from branch to branch) – but OK….
There are whole cities – e.g. Chicago, Detroit – which have black (large) majority populations.
These have been run by the Democratic Party for a century or more.
Education in them is so poor that unemployment and crime rates among black people are horrific.
How are black people (you seem to be very concerned with their welfare) doing in Alabama…Mississippi?
Oh Mr. Smith, you are so TDS infected, I mean, really-the high-handed things that you declare “Most of the commentators on this site do not care about policy…” Trump “lied or is delusional” “Clinton was right about coal”-which is why he (they) received so much “help” from the Indonesian coal magnate-China was pleased. That you never give Trump credit for any benign motive, or positive act, belies your pose as a concerned “commentator that cares about policy”. When have you been in W. Va., or the south, and talked with the people that live and work there?
In 2001 I drove across America (NY to LA) . Did I spent time with coal minders in VW? No!
I have been to Arkansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Missouri. Have I seen all the south? No!
Do I need to ? No!
But I do know facts!
Trump deserves credit for raising the issue of China (he changed the position of US GOV forever) and I TRULY WISH he would have reformed migration (family chain crap and all that). Did he do it?
NO!
He also pressured Mexico to seal its border with CA. A great achievement.
Or is my “TDS” to blame for that?
They are doing just fine in those states, why do you ask? They hold elected seats in Birmingham, Montgomery, Jackson, and so forth, to include mayoral offices, reliably voting Dem and being treated by the left as barely functioning children or mascots, whichever serves the purpose. Unlike their big city counterparts in Chicago, Philly, and elsewhere, they are not killing each other in large numbers, though the bulk of crime tends to be in minority neighborhoods.
Yes, Dems not Republian.
yes, Dems, with the results to show for it – failing schools, denied any choice regarding education, high crime combined with a distrust of cops, the highest levels of unemployment. Sounds like you got them right where you want them.
People vote. I can not force people to vote for/against a party.
If Trump voters think he is their best choice many minorities seem to think that Dems (sadly) are their best choice.
Again, how’s that devotion worked out for them? It appears that LBJ was right, and it has not benefited black Americans at all.
As they see it (right or wrong) it is the only choice they got.
There is word for repeatedly making the same choice but believing the result will change.
I don’t understand the point of this question, I’m afraid.
Item 3 doesn’t make sense. First because people move anyway, and second because remote working makes “regions with no prospects” a rather fuzzy concept. I believe that in many parts of the world real estate in rural areas is now doing better than in big cities for this reason.
These Republicans are as realistic as UK Conservatives in the 1950s who actually believed we could get the Empire back.
There is nothing particularly unrealistic with the 2016 Trump agenda. Reduced foreign intervention (though this should have come with reduced military expenditure). Incentives to onshore production and buy American. Border control to stop wage and living standard deflation. All good stuff to my mind and all stuff that should have been done – as well as killing off political lobbying and graft. Sadly was not to be…sadly…
“as well as killing off political lobbying and graft.”
How are you going to do that? Policy please!
Trumpists are far too worried about the future of their country as a civilization, and about their ever dwindling standard of living and job opportunities, to be busy with ‘triggering the left’.
They might enjoy doing that; but it is so very much a sideline by comparison with what motivates them, that it is almost off the radar of their impulses.
Same with the commentators on this site.
They are anxious to see more and more compatriots wake up to the way whole western nations now are played by a venal networking oligarchy.
If US citizens saw Trump reversing the trend of what you claim are “ever-dwindling standard of living and job opportunities”, why did Trump lose by an even bigger margin of the popular vote than last time?
Doesn’t that suggest that their experience, which is better known to them than to you, is different from what you claim?
But that’s the kind of honest self-examination that the author of the piece states Republicans have made themselves incapable of. He clearly has a point.
I would readily accept that Trump lost the election if a whole raft of extreme implausibilities were provided with credible explanations.
For instance, whole districts sending in ballots where every single vote has been for Mr Biden and not one for Donald Trump. Statisticians claim this is an impossibility.
For another instance, the extremely peculiar, perhaps unprecedented event circa 10.30 p.m Eastern Time on Nov. 3rd, when the counts in five states were stopped, the tellers and observers told to go home (and that counting would be resumed in the morning); but then it turned out (CCTV shows this) that a handful of workers stayed behind, and continued to do various tasks; and then counting resumed still in the dark hours some while later.
For another instance, vast numbers of ballot-papers which were filled in only as to the choice of presidential candidate and no-one else on the long comprehensive ticket of what after all in American terms was a GENERAL election.
For another instance, 2,500 election officials and observers testifying in sworn and signed affidavits (under penalty of perjury-punishment with imprisonment if they have been lying) that they saw at first hand outrageous election fraud perpetrated.
All this and much more beside needs to be properly audited if Great Doubts are to recede.
As it is, even the tallies presented to the public show Trump to have gained 74 million votes, which is 11 million more than last time; and more than any Republican candidate has ever harvested hitherto.
Do I think Trump (in terms of leadership &c) deserved to win the election? On balance, no.
Do I think anything in or about Joe Biden or Kamala Harris is hopeful or virtuous. – Not a scrap.
Do I think it matters IF the election has been stolen? Emphatically.
Do I suppose the Alliance between Big Money and the equally totalitarian Left will now make the U.S. a basically grim place with ever dwindling human rights in it? Yes.
We are also in for a repeat of all the disastrous policies – mass immigration, sending jobs abroad, finding pointless endless winless wars to fight – which have disfigured the 16 years previous to Donald Trump’s incumbency.
It’s interesting how the chattering class has finally found a mob it can criticize, almost as interesting as how an armed agent of the state (unless it was someone else) shoots to death a civilian and not one word is whispered about cops.
The Repubs’ refusal to engage in “ideological self-evaluation” is how Trump was made possible in the first place. In a normal, healthy republic, an outsider would be impossible.
The Democrats spent four years in industrial-scale efforts trying to overturn the election which elected President Trump, corrupting numerous public officials along the way. President Trump on far more legitimate grounds has questioned the election of Biden but the media have attacked him with insane frenzy (see above). This has gone well beyond acceptable journalism. Some of us already took everything in the media with a pinch of salt; that has now become a truck-load of salt.
“Some of us “
yes the idiots
Ho, hum. People who don’t believe what they read in the papers are ‘idiots’ are they? You’ve evidently never been in the midst of an important event covered by journalists. I have, and they make most of it up, sunshine.
How did Dems do that?
Proven facts not Presidential tweets
Comey and other FBI personnel were blatantly corrupt. Why even the mainstream media were forced to agree on that. It’s a pity that Unherd is becoming home to miserable, fake-news-spouting trolls, sunshine… don’t you agree?
No MSM has not agreed to that. Just because you say it doesn’t make it true!
And you-speaking for the elite “non-idiot” crowd, lap it all up.
I only speak for myself.
Calling people who disagree with you “idiots” is not an effective debate tactic, something I learned in ninth grade.
It’s not really Trump’s fault, this is what you get when elections are believed by half of the population (from surveys) to be corrup/stolent. A persons vote is often seen as a scared right of a democracy, it allows the losing side to accept rule by the winners.
In this election Trump (and others) accumilated a large volume of evidence which was denied review by both Federal and State Judicery/Legislatures. News and Social media consistently censored or simply denied (always baseless) this existed – how else were this dispossed group to complain
The state and news media failed a large body of the population by preventing transparency – and the mass rally and eventual temporary occupation of the Senate was the result – and in my opinion if you diliberately prevent electoral transparently then this was a correct response to percieved fraudulant abuse by Biden.
The injuries and death and damage were regretable and should if possible have been avoided but compare that to months and months of Democrat supported Antifa./BLM riots – how many dead so far…..
For what it’s worth, Robert Cahaly – a Republican pollster, who runs Trafalgar Group – said right before the Georgia special elections that his polling saw a turn against Loeffler and Perdue right around Christmas.
He attributed it to Trump calling for $2,000 (rather than $600) COVID relief checks on December 22, which changed the COVID bill that had already been negotiated – including by the people who Trump had negotiating over the package deal on behalf of the Administration. It was also the day after both houses of Congress had passed the package deal. (I’d post a link to a National Review interview where Cahaly makes this point, but Unherd’s moderation puts links in never-ending approval limbo.)
I’d argue that one was far more of a Trump screw-up than a McConnell screw-up. It set up the message for even Republican and Republican-leaning voters as the one that Michael Tracey notes here: McConnell’s Republican Senate is blocking these bigger checks.
A likely problem for McConnell, however, was that he knew that having a straight up or down vote on this provision – which it would have to be, because the large COVID package bill had already passed – would create its own problems for some other Republican Senators. Have to think that some number of Republican Senators would see the political calculation as being stuck between a “yes” vote being a political negative in a future primary and a “no” vote being a problem in a future general election. Other Republican Senators in states with big Republican voting majorities basically only have to think politically about the primary election, not the general. Add to that some Republican Senators who were ideologically opposed to bigger checks. I think there’s a decent chance that the increased checks not only would have needed Democratic Senate votes to pass, but they might not have even gotten a majority of Republican Senators to vote in favor. So that still causes messaging problems for the two Republican Senate candidates in Georgia, while also complicating life for some other Republican Senators.
One can argue that McConnell didn’t play this political hand very well, but Trump unnecessarily put him in a very tough spot.
There’s an easy victory in the offing at the next US election for a sane moderate -question is whether such a thing exists any more in the fevered state of US politics or can exist given the partisan nature of the MSM.
Tulsi Gabbard is a good contender for “sane moderate”, IMO.
Claiming shock and horror over the Capitol breach is just handwringing from a context-less lens. Trump and supporters got to where they were becoz of the very attack on democracy committed by Congress Dems, deep state and MSM over the last 4 years. They tried to ensnare him illegally before he started and mount a coup d’etat throughout his term. (FBI lawyer convicted for misleading FISA, what’s happened to the rest?). Dem leadership and MSM must bear direct responsibility for the anger and distrust of the democratic system that half the voting population (including Dems based on recent polls) is feeling.
If they attack Trump now they will set fire to democracy itself. He’s accepted peaceful transfer of power, which is more than can be said of Dem leadership for the last 4 years.
The reason why Trump lost is simple: Covid-19. The CCP deliberately released the virus and scuttled the surging US economy, causing social mayhem and human misery in the West. Trump would have won a landslide without biowarfare from China. Even with a devastated economy and 350k deaths, there was no blue wave. Half of all American voters saw through the fog of war and stayed with Trump and GOP. The other half tried to grapple with a vast dose of conflicting beliefs germinated from expert propaganda and indoctrination by subversive elements as warned by FBI and DOJ, and misinformation from MSM out of spite of Trump calling it out.
Trump’s achievements will stand the test of time: strengthening NATO’s budget, realigning global supply chains away from China, cutting off Chinese state biz groups from US capital market and core technologies, forcing domestic collaborators with CCP into the open, exterminating ISIS and resetting the Middle East to peaceful co-existence, cutting a mountain of regulations that were strangulating US productivity, raising real wages for the first time in 2 decades, winning over more Black voters than previous GOP prez, funding HBCs and bringing investment to inner cities, unleashing a counterculture of individual freedom and inclusive merit-based ideology befitting the party of emancipation against the Left’s regime of soul rotting identity politics and divisive victimhood. Even his accelerating program for vaccine development against the incompetent, handwringing health “experts” has brought outstanding results.
Americans of all sides must not let the election results go to their head and start allocating praises or blames to one another. Their enemy is sitting pretty in Beijing watching the horror show of death and destruction in the West, waiting for the right moment to pounce again. The CCP has established and been funding a vast network of social and ideological insurrectionist groups in America, from Antifa to BLM to school boards and university R&D programs tied to a curriculum of demonizing the right and might of the American Republic. CCP members and sympathizers have taken up positions of influence across financial and corporate institutions and state and local governments in the US. They drive social divisions using Western principles of freedom and equality by funding entitlement groups and movements, the same way they had pilfered Western IP by playing to Western societies’ openness and knowledge sharing. Whether they are Democrats or Republicans, Americans must accept the reality that the world is at war with a vast inhumane empire that has managed to spread its corrupting tentacles deep inside US society. Its aim is to sow intellectual discord then take advantage of, and co-opt, social grievances into justifying social unrest using well established brow-shirt tactics to instigate civil war amongst Americans.
Re-establishing American global dominance and power, for the benefit of humanity, requires total decoupling from China until the CCP falls, the way America defeated the Soviet Union. That will cut the lifeline to subversive movements inside the US, allowing the country to reclaim the unifying culture of a color blind Republic as envisioned by its founders.
Plenty outside the USA think the world is at war with a vast inhumane empire that has managed to spread its corrupting tentacles around half the globe. Withdrawing those tentacles might result in the fall of that empire, not China.
Trump is what he is, which is a Queen’s Businessman. He isn’t a politician having spent his life in swamp land, always on the take. I find it extraordinary that the Democrats and their mates in the ‘Deep State’ have spent four and a half years trying to destroy the man. First there was Obama and his ‘spying’, next came RussiaGate, which was a load of guff. Next we had Impeachment, which had no legal basis whatsoever, and because none of that worked they had to resort to blatant electoral fraud.
The ‘end does not justify the means’, a lesson the Democrats need to learn because the wheel always turns and one day they will be the victims. Either that or there will never be another free and fair election held again, just as in Germany in the 30s. Be careful is all one can say.
Why? I would think the opposite would be far more obvious: that incestuous little DC club has little use for an outsider who cannot be bought and who might expose their cozy little game. More telling than Dems were the alleged conservatives who became Never Trumpers, those who conveniently ignored Trump doing many of the things they long championed because his style offended their delicate sensibilities.
Indeed Trump couldn’t be ‘bought’ as almost every politician – Joe Biden being a prime example – can and is. And there were far too many ‘never Trumpers’ who were busy clutching their pearls and tut tutting. Perhaps as the American people wont stand up for the integrity of elections they deserve all they will get. Pity the Capitol wasn’t burnt to the ground like the Reichstag so CCP Joe could pass his Enabling Act.
That’s hilarious, Andy. Out of curiosity, how many bankruptcies does it take to become a “Queen’s Businessman”. I would have thought hes earned a higher standing with 6, but who knows. Beyond that, every single thing you say is a lie. Obama didn’t spy on Trump, as shown by multiple investigations, including the Senate REPUBLICAN report, and DJT’s own special investigators. Multiple. Russiagate? How many in jail? How many pardoned? We even have the tapes of Don looking forwards to the meeting… but don’t believe your ears. Impeachment? Again, why would you take DJT’s word… over the recordings? Finally the ‘election fraud’. As I said to others above, when you have the proof, I would urge you to take it to your nearest courthouse and file suit. Make sure it’s a Trump judge just so you don’t accidentally stumble into one of those deep state types. Prove it. Find one or two of the thousands of Republicans who had to be in on it. Or get one or two of the Republican Governors, Lieutenant-govs, Secretaries of State, or legislators in the republican controlled state houses to testify that yes, there was fraud and they have the proof.
Until then, STFU. You’re just misleading ignorant people into doing the kinds of things that ignorant people do, like yesterday.
Careful, you’re totalitarian roots are showing, again. You may be surprised to know that free thinking people will not be so easily be subsumed into your groupthink. And no I don’t think we will STFU thanks!
This is a very good article and there are very good complementary comments which add to the substance of what went so wrong so sadly after what should have been normally a reelection of a quite successful president except for the pandemic.
Trump had a very bad pandemic, that was THE problem for him and his ideology of freedom would have made it very difficult to impose a social tyranny, all be it for good reasons.
If the pandemic had come a few months latter Trump would have won because the results which he had managed were good.
In the UK we just managed the election of a conservative government to be before the pandemic hit us by a whisker and in this way we managed a good conservative majority. The Conservatives have struggled in a similar way to Trump with the pandemic for the same reasons, conservatives don’t believe in cutting freedoms and telling peope what to do.
Sadly Turmp’s last impression in defeat will be his legacy and a final mistake will cover up all his good work. People will not remember the violent shadow of the Democrat controlled regions with all their racist violence much worse and with many more deaths than this final last mistake, without the pandemic Trump would have won hands down. It is so sad and so unfair that it had to end like this. Now it will be for somebody else in the Republican Party to find and present to the people a way forward.
How many people counted out the Republican Party in 1976 after Watergate and the ousting of Gerald Ford? The 2024 election is anybody’s and the decision of the Democrat Party to select a senile old man with serious questions of corruption hanging over his head and a monumentally unlikeable VP could well come back to bite them.
The Democrats could select a hologram of Josef Stalin and still win with postal voting, ballot harvesting, unsigned ballots, late ballots and all the rest of it. They proved this last November.
You go girl! When you find the proof, I’d recommend you take it to your nearest court house and fill suit. At this point your side is 1 for 65, but heck, why quit now just when it’s getting good!
And precisely how many of those cases were dismissed for lack of evidence?
You hang on to that thought, Kevin, if it makes you sleep better at night. I’m personally looking at at least two years of knife and gun fights in what was the Republican party over the next two years, followed by a wipeout in 2022. And a reminder that the ‘unhiversally unliked’ VP was part of a ticket that took 7 MILLION more votes than DJT. See you in 2022
You have some perverse fantasies. There will be a wipeout in 2022, but it won’t be one that makes you happy.
If there was ever any proof needed that secession into Red and Blue States is needed, this was it. The Biden team will only worsen the trend by enacting woke laws and pushing woke policies that the Trumpists will find abominable. Expect more right on left violence the next 4 years.
What a load of self serving nonsense the article is.
Rightly or wrongly a significant portion of the US population believe the election was stolen. As any rational person (that apparently excludes Tracey) understands that is not a good recipe for a democracy.
The harsh fact is the concerns of the citizenry were:
ignored by the media
Ignored by Big Tech (who tried to censor concerns)
Ignored by business
Ignored by the judiciary.
Ignored by the FBI and Police in general
Ignored by the politicians.
And so some of the voiceless citizenry rioted and now we trot out the double standards on steroids. Look at, for example, Chris Cuomo of CNN’s eye watering hypocrisy. Only recently delivering a paean on the nobility of AntiFa and BLM rioters and now painting the Capitol riots as consummate evil.
I, for one, think the Trump presidency for all the mistakes and errors achieved and exposed many important things including, and perhaps most importantly, how the US, like most modern Western countries is not a full democracy, but rather a pretend democracy run by a bunch of self interested elitists, bureaucrats and businessmen plus the Starbucks swilling hangers-on in the big cities. The elites orchestrate a sort of controlled democracy while organizing affairs not for the good of the country, but for the good of a small group of self men and women while ignoring the impact – think outsourcing and off-shoring and mass migration – on the person in the street.
If you doubt this consider that during the pandemic the Tech oligarchs have, collectively, increased their wealth by over $2 trillion while millions of small businesses and working class people (those who cannot use Zoom) have been financially destroyed.
You bothered reading it? I got past the first paragraph and came to the same conclusion. Drivel.
From tech oligarchs, to the so called cultural elites shaping society through their compliant media outlets, so much hand wringing, so much fake outrage. Liberal wets do not speak for the majority. The ordinary working man and woman, I can assure you, were not horrified at the storming of Congress, a cesspit of corrupt, virtuous, career politicians above all else defending their best interests. They try to whip up a frenzy of outrage, claiming the moral high ground, they have already failed, catastrophically! As ye sow so shall ye reap. The chill winds have barely begun.
We keep hearing about the baseless allegations of election fraud. No audit, no truth! We can all fill in the blank spaces, and we will.
As even the author seems to imply, the problem is more with the old RINO big business kleptocrats like McConnell than with Trump. The RINOs are too busy sending money to Israel to bother about their constituents…
Their constituents voted for them.
Every 2 years in the congressional elections BTW.
Trump isn’t the cause of civil unrest in America. He is just a symptom of the powerlessness felt by much of the population. You have to be pretty desperate to vote for Trump. Like all societies America was held together by common myths. In the last few decades these have been debunked one-by-one leaving little to hold the country together. Trump was a bad imitation of the heroes Americans grew up with. John Wayne without the horse.
Every time someone discusses politics with me, their clinching argument is “it’s democracy”. In this binary world, where image defines reality, the only deviation from democracy is said to be totalitarianism or dictatorship. Yet on both sides of the pond we see delays, screw-ups, divisiveness, civil disruption and anarchy that, arguably, could be ascribed as democracy or, to be more precise, the democratic process of government. Just like the saying goes with justice, democracy delayed is democracy denied.
it’s not just democracy’s delay but its content, which remains ill-defined and certainly fails to satisfy and embrace the main segments of a divided nation. This is sadly evidenced by the interminable multi-faceted multi-staged US presidential election with its keystone cops voting mechanics, particularly the final ballot, in which voting citizens finally have their say, but which this time, more than usually, is suspected of being a vote fraudster’s paradise (or at the very least hasn’t plugged all the holes).
Unfortunately the fraud begins much earlier, with the lies, bullshit and knowingly unattainable promises spouted by candidates. It highlights the pointlessness of two opposing relentlessly-competing parties, both seeking to capture the majority but rendered indistinguishable from one another on nearly all the issues that the majority of voters care about. We then end up with two parties trying to fabricate their undeliverable or untrue Unique Selling Proposition (USP). The truth is that the only winning proposition is one that is close to a central positioning, a pragmatic regression to the mean, also known as being all things to all men. Inevitably that takes the shape of a welter of various election campaign propositions that are just image eyewash to soften or blur the difference between “Democrat = Socialism” versus “Republican = Capitalism”. The blur is easily achieved by meeting in the centre with “Socialism without communism” versus “Capitalism without greed”, which are just alternative ways of promising the same thing.
It is therefore hardly surprising that the two parties remain near equal in votes, hence daggers drawn in uncompromising partisan competitiveness, exacerbated by the complexity of an upper and lower house which impedes effective government (we have a similar problem in the UK, although at least we’ve only got one real house (the House of Lords is just a luxury daytime care-home funded by tax payers; a privileged cosseted furlough to the next life).
The stumbling block is when voters detect a significant difference in emphasis or nuance between the eyewash USP’s of the two contestants. This reinforces the traditional divisiveness between the supporters of each of the two parties. Hilary Clinton labelled Trump’s primary supporters as the “deplorables” and while this helped her to lose the election, Trump’s bedrock supporters more than lived up to that description 2 days ago in Washington.
Yet it is too easy to describe those rioters as deplorably bad losers. Most certainly their fury was fuelled by the hard-to-prove suspicion of vote-count fraud, Trump was the first but by no means only person to put his head above the parapet with this allegation. It is regrettable that he is only able or willing to look at the big picture. It is open t debate whether that reflects a lazy or limited intellect. Nonetheless his suspicion is made plausible by cockamamie voting process that has morphed from Parkinson’s Law to Murphy’s Law, to (accidentally) opening the door to the Democrat Party’s traditional end-justifies-the-means opportunism. The massive increase in the last presidential election in the proportion of postal voters, coupled with a system where postal voters’ identities are, before counting, detached from their voting sheets (with no means of being reattached), coupled with the unexpected 11th hour surge for a Democrat photo finish wins in a key swing Democrat states which only requires a few small bundles of voter sheets, coupled with the only check in response to the allegation of fraud being recounts (which merely repeats rather than investigates the bias, to provide a normal small +&- variation of small recounting errors number of votes) “¦”¦.. you surely don’t need to be Albert Einstein or Sherlock Holmes to smell a rat.
Trump might have got in again if he had employed the average politician’s and newscaster’s heart-on-sleeve corona virus vocabulary, which is to lace every utterance of death with “loved ones” and “sadly”. That was unlikely when learning that Trump closely resembled a real-life descendant of The Addams Family.
Slightly off-topic but Facebook has just banned #WalkAwayFromTheDemocrats, a completely peaceful movement of people – most women – who had come to see how mad and corrupt the Dems had become. Many of the movement’s members were not even Trump voters. Karlyn Boryshenko is in tears. This is beyond all evil.
Can you recommend a democratic institution we can destroy to protest this act of censorship? Perhaps burn down the statue of liberty? That will show them! 🙂
The US – and much of the West – no longer has any democratic institutions. They are almost all oligarchic. Nor is the US the home of liberty, not since 2001 and the demented and disastrous response to 9/11.
To the Unherd moderators
From Rob Alka
I wrote a lengthy comment that began: Every time someone discusses politics with me, their clinching argument is “it’s democracy”. It went on to discuss how and why the government – both those in power and the opposition – have shot themselves in the foot and done the same to democracy – and it is that which has been the root cause of what took place in Washington 2 days ago. I go on to explain why pinning it on Trump is a childish act of denial to avoid self-reproach for a problem or social illness that has run rife through America. It’s America that’s ill – there are loads of Trumps.
My posted comment was deleted as “spam”
What are playing at?
What kind of forum here are you running?
Unherd or unheard?
Are you imposing or shaping an agenda? I can get get a bucketful of that with The Times!
You have my email address if you want to explain yourselves
Trump’s egregious character flaws found him out in the end. But he was the only President in the last 50 years who did not take America to war – Hilary Clinton almost certainly would have to placate her backers and to line her own pockets – and the working class whites and blacks (who are the US canon fodder) supported and voted for him because of this promise and, prior to Covid, their higher employment rates. They saw the Democrat win with charlatans like Biden and Harris as a return to new wars, rising unemployment for them, and the US military industrial complex gaining ever more power. Of course they protested; wouldn’t you in their position and faced with the new awful prospect for them and their children?
“Trump didn’t create the problem, the problem created Trump”. Dinesh D’sousa. Always remember that whenever you run into some smug liberal latte sipper emoting into his blog at Starbucks (assuming Starbucks ever reopens). Without people like them, there would have been no Donald Trump.
latte sipping liberals decided to invade Iraq?
latte sipping liberals have opposed a national healthcare program?
Trump has affected the Republican party despite not being a ‘real’ Republican. What the future holds is uncertain but Trump will retain popularity after the current spate of self flagellation ends. He personally is likely to never run again given the material that will be created to destroy him, but he will be a king-maker to be dealt with in the party. The mid terms will see a change, again of Congress as election issues will be fully known. The potential fraud avenues will be shut down in most places. New avenues will then be needed. If the Biden administration does what previous administrations have tried the failures will demonstrate how incompetent government has really become.
Highly tendentious piece.
For what it’s worth, Robert Cahaly – a Republican pollster, who runs Trafalgar Group – said right before the Georgia special elections that his polling saw a turn against Loeffler and Perdue right around Christmas.
He attributed it to Trump calling for $2,000 (rather than $600) COVID relief checks on December 22, which changed the COVID bill that had already been negotiated – including by the people who Trump had negotiating over the package deal on behalf of the Administration. It was also the day after both houses of Congress had passed the package deal. https://www.nationalreview….
I’d argue that one was far more of a Trump screw-up than a McConnell screw-up. It set up the message for even Republican and Republican-leaning voters as the one that Michael Tracey notes here: McConnell’s Republican Senate is blocking these bigger checks.
A likely problem for McConnell, however, was that he knew that having a straight up or down vote on this provision – which it would have to be, because the large COVID package bill had already passed – would create its own problems for some other Republican Senators. Have to think that some number of Republican Senators would see the political calculation as being stuck between a “yes” vote being a political negative in a future primary and a “no” vote being a problem in a future general election. Other Republican Senators in states with big Republican voting majorities basically only have to think politically about the primary election, not the general. Add to that some Republican Senators who were ideologically opposed to bigger checks. I think there’s a decent chance that the increased checks not only would have needed Democratic Senate votes to pass, but they might not have even gotten a majority of Republican Senators to vote in favor. So that still causes messaging problems for for the two Senate candidates in Georgia, while also complicating life for some other Republican Senators.
One can argue that McConnell didn’t play this political hand very well, but Trump unnecessarily put him in a very tough spot.
I wonder if the Trump admirers are going to a) calm down eventually and be more sensible, b) simply give up and stop voting, or c) start their own party – or conversely the GOP establishment start their own party. I suspect most GOP grassroot members support Trump down the line. GOP representatives will be asked; “Are you for Trump or against him?”. Can any ambitious GOP politician succeed as a Trump critic outside of Utah?
If you understand information warfare, the clear answer is b. The elites want to crush any and all descent that doesn’t benefit the. I wonder if BLM/Antifa will calm down and be more sensible? The answer is yes because their funding will now disappear as their job has been done.
We shall see if BLM ‘calms down.’ Racism hasn’t magically disappeared with Biden’s win, any more than it did with Obama’s, and it’s unlikely no more black people will be shot by the police.
I don’t really get the accusations of partisanship about this article. It’s just an attempt to explain the failure of the Republicans to hold on to their two Senate seats in Georgia. In the November election Purdue failed to win because of a Libertarian candidate who took 2.32% of the vote. You might have assumed that with him out of the way in the run-off election this week, Purdue would have got those votes, but he still lost.
What would be interesting to read in the comments is an alternative explanation, but no it all dissolves into the usual antagonistic diatribes. Personally I found his explanation quite convincing.
Fair enough, and I jumped in too quickly to defend Trump’s record, which is not really pertinent to the article. The fact is that the Republicans are just as corrupt as the Dems, but not as vicious and not as well organised. Trump showed them that they can win if they appeal to the aspirations and beliefs of normal, working people. Their response was to abuse and disown him. Of course, the people in the Rep party machine will not suffer as a consequence of this, but working people will.
I agree. Though Trump’s record is a good one vis-a-vis China, N.Korea, Iran, the southern border and the EU – certainly better than any Dem or normal Rep could manage – the problems in America (and the UK) run deeper and further back than those geopolitical questions. Mark Steyn sarcastically refers to “rock-ribbed” Republicans who in reality fold at the first whispered accusation of racism (now also homophobia, islamophobia, gynophobia and transphobia) by the party of Jim Crow. Since neither party stood for the working class – of any colour, preferring to ignore them (Republicans) or call them deplorable (Clinton’s wife) or “clingers” (Obama) they had no choice but to vote for Trump. The trashing of the culture of working class patriotic nationalism via the off-shoring of jobs to cheaper countries, the in-shoring of masses of cheaper labour for decades and a general disgust at their conservative cultural preferences, has had a devastating effect on the working classes in both countries. Since that problem hasn’t been fixed, and is likely to be accelerated by Democrats, it is likely the working class in America will be disowned again. Normal service resumes…
Surely the likely reasons why Purdue lost despite the elimination of the Libertarian candidate are:
(1) Trump has descended further and has become a banana-republic-president type refusing to accept the result of an election. That’s repulsive to those November 2020 Republican voters in Georgia who believe in democracy and believe America is better than aping Upper Volta or Zimbabwe
(2) Those Republican voters who aren’t put off by (1) are being told that their votes won’t be counted. It’s nonsense, but if you believe that nonsense, you will be less motivated to cast a vote when there are other tasks to do.
Imagining that it’s a conspiracy is unnecessary.
Although it might seem counter-intuitive to impeach their own party’s President, the only way they Republican Party can rid itself of the menace of Trump is to ensure he can’t run for federal office again; impeachment means they can start the difficult path to moving on – otherwise they risk being, as Donald Junior said, Trump’s Party.
Simplistic twaddle. Trump is not the disease: he is a symptom of it. And that disease is a huge dissatisfaction with the Republican leadership because they have failed miserably to be Conservatives, but have become liberal lefties. It is this detachment from their own voters that created Trump, just as in the UK the distance of the Tory leadership from their voter base created Brexit. It was Cameron who insulted them calling them the ‘Turnip Taliban’, but they did for him.
Excellent and acute analysis. ‘Things aren’t always what they appear to be, in politics’.
Michael, your analysis is quite helpful in helping us NevertRumpers sort out what has just happened and where the hell do we go from here.
. . .” in a span of four years, they went from full control of the House of Representatives, Senate, and presidency to no control of all three” says quite a lot about the big picture, which lately has faded into the mists of history because of the extreme shenanigans we’ve witnessed in the final phases of this campaign.
But going forward here just has to land us on a realization that Joe Biden’s leadership is bound to be be a refreshing wind of relief. Joe is a seasoned politician, probably worthy of ‘statesman’ status, who patiently attended Obama for four years as VP, then stood aside in the earlier phases of the 2020 primaries before stepping in to rescue Dems from what could be construed as the infamous scourge of “socialism.”
Bottom line: We have a new President who has forty+ years of governance experience, an extremely calm and confident demeanor, and Dem majority in Congress to boost his plans.
Now that is progress! Or, as the Dems like to say . . . progressive.
Whatever. After this dark night of tRumpian chaos and Capitol destruction, the Biden presence feels like a new wind of reform, or, as an earlier Prez used to say . . . Morning in America, or, as another former Prez said . . . “Our long national nightmare is over.”
Trump will be back. Any impeachment won’t work.
All the Democrats will do is shovel money to their mates, not the people who need it.
End result the mess gets bigger and bigger.
The masses will be screwed even more.
A significant number will switch to Trump as the only viable alternative to the establishment.
So what should Trump do in 4 years?
He should turn on the deep state, and he has one power. He can veto the increase in the debt ceiling. After 4 years of now pay, most of the deep state will give up. They have no choice. They will be bust.
“Not since Hillary Clinton mysteriously declined to campaign in Wisconsin has there been so epic a political screw-up. Though it has been overshadowed by the spasm of chaos which erupted yesterday at the Capitol, one day earlier in Georgia, the Republican Party forfeited their most precious remaining governing commodity — a narrow majority in the US Senate — with a series of blunders that were remarkable for being so disastrously self-inflicted.”
Apparently you missed the screw-up in Alabama in 2018, where the GOPe joined the Dems in piling on the GOP’s own nominee in tacit support of the Democrat. Their Senate majority would have been unaffected by anything that happened in GA in 2020-2021 otherwise.
Retired US admiral and former Supreme Commander of Nato’s armed forces James Stavridis, on today’s BBC Hardtalk, speculates the Republican Party, and perhaps too the Democratic Party, will cease to exist, and a new, centrist party emerge.
I hope that Admiral Stavridis was better at analyzing international geopolitics than he is at analyzing domestic U.S. politics. I’d say that’s wildly unlikely, at least if he means that literally.
It is conceivable that one of the parties evolves over time toward some different positions, or a different mix of policies, to position itself as more “centrist”. I’d largely bet against the rise of an actual new political party, however.
The U.S. system – first past the post voting, generally won with a plurality – tends toward a two-party system, however. (Some states have run-offs in many races if no candidate clears 50%, which is why David Perdue didn’t solidify a Senate majority for Republicans in November.)
Both parties are also so well-established in a variety of ways that it’s very difficult to see them being outright displaced. They have everything from bases of straight ticket voters to dedicated donors to party organizations/volunteers to benches of candidates providing candidates for the higher offices (state legislators running for Congress, for example) to ballot access rules (in most states) that favor established political parties. It’s worth considering that Trump won the presidency in 2016 with something that closely resembled Ross Perot’s 1992 presidential campaign platform. Trump – unlike Perot – did so by essentially mounting a 3rd-party campaign within one of the two established parties. Trump also, of course, won the election (unlike Perot).
I think he did indeed mean it literally. He talked of how the USA hasn’t always had Dems and Reps, and mentioned Whigs and Progressives among others.
I’m not sure he’s any better at international geopolitics than US party politics; he seems more at home sailing warships into the Gulf ready to attack Iran, something he says he would do (were he not retired) if ordered by Trump, even though he considers Trump’s recent actions seditious.
But the Republican Party does seem to have painted itself into a corner, with four years of supporting a president half of them can’t distance themselves from fast enough today, so there could be something in what he says.
I agree that the Republican Party has real issues to sort out.
That said, the parties have proven durable and capable of building unusual coalitions. The Democrats, for example, for a few decades had an electoral coalition that included working class Irish and Italian Catholics, northern blacks, and (largely anti-Catholic) Southern segregationists. And they dealt with sorting out the inherent contradictions of that coalition at roughly the same time that their party had bitter internal conflicts over the Vietnam War. That had electoral consequences for national elections – the Democrats lost 5 of the next 6 presidential elections – but it occurred basically within the confines of the two-party system (with a couple 3rd-party/independent candidates for president along the way).
Throughout history, the Democrat Party has been based upon identity and carving lines between groups to gain and retain power. The Republican Party was founded on foundational ideas. The difference is due completely to their origins (time and place). Both parties, first the Republicans under Bush Sr. and then the Democrats under Clinton(s) became completely beholden to Plutocratic, big money donors while trying to pretend to still care about their founding core. The Republicans gave us Bush Jr. (inept), McCain (unstable war monger), and Romney (global finance oligarch) while the Democrats provided Obama (feckless radical) and Clinton (venally corrupt). They were all effectively 2 degrees of separation. Sanders shook the Democrat Party but they had a structure in place to stop him. The Republicans, due largely to their nature could not do the same to Trump. He upset the order and he and his supporters must be destroyed. On that the Elites on both sides agree.
A decent stab at a postmortem, but still using some of the old false shibboleths; like “…both parties are stuck in a spiral of semi-permanently campaigning on how their opponents are the embodiment of civilization-destroying apocalyptic terror ” rather than putting forth any kind of tangible, positive agenda of their own.”… a line right out of the usual bothsidesism nonsense we’ve been hearing for the past 4 years… particularly when the author himself goes on to state that the republican Georgia senatorial candidates had nothing of substance to say, while the Democrats campaigned on specific policies, namely healthcare and Covid remediation.
If anyone is really interested in examining the modern history of the Republican party, Stuart Stevens book “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party became Donald Trump” is a must read. Stevens is a 40 year republican strategist and campaigner, and he should know. He saw it all and wrote and defended most of it.
Anyone still defending this carbuncle that took over the Republican party, particularly after yesterday, needs to put the koolaid down and see their psychiatrist.
Still blaming Trump? Trump was elected by the people. The American freedom loveing people. He was not defeated, he was ousted by traitors from his own party. A coup d’état by theft and fraud. The treachery has pesisted from inaguration. Maybe I should remind you, that when the parasites in both parties and the leeches called the deep state establishment realised Trump was going to cut down the money tree, they all panicked. They then used a strategy of manipulation by deception with the help of the technocrats who controlled the media. The manipulators one needs to remember are among the most clever, accomplished liars. This is what created the panic and four years of relentless warfare against Pres Trump.
Today’s ceremony, however, has very special meaning. Because today we are not merely transferring power from one Administration to another, or from one party to another ““
but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.
For too long, a small group in our nation’s Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.
Washington flourished ““ but the people did not share in its wealth.
Politicians prospered ““ but the jobs left, and the factories closed.
The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.
Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs; and while they celebrated in our nation’s Capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.
People woke up and realised he was the real deal. Washington DC was exposed and will be exposed and the people can make it happen
Yea, Yea, we need a Jew Jersey Journalist to tell us about Trump losing, like he ever got any voting thing going there,
Trump lost by (I heard but may be made up, but is exceedingly small) 34,000 votes! In the just right communities, given the American Electoral College system, these minute numbers kicked borderline communities in borderline States in the all or nothing slide to Biden. Now there is always a good chance of vote harvesting, so one should not throw that out, but the real thing is the TINY amount Trump lost by! Even if there was vote trickery.
The Ga Senate races, 1/2 of one percent margins.
Trump has a mandate equal to the dreadful Biden and his unspeakably horrible VP! This was the East and West coast cities calling for the destruction of USA, and succeeding. Like they wish to house homeless at 100,000 a year, decriminalize crime, free the prisoners and lock up the workers, and defund the Police, their pathology spread that tiny, 1/2 of one percent into a win for the haters. But it was very close and the American Patriots almost defeated the anti-Americans, 1/2 of one percent. sniff, good by all which was great…
“I heard but may be made up,” – you should have stopped there.
Trump lost by 7 million votes, just like he lost the mid-term election in 2018 and the popular vote by 3M in 2016. You might find it hard to believe but most Americans hate him and didn’t vote for him.
“Now there is always a good chance of vote harvesting, so one should not throw that out, but the real thing is the TINY amount Trump lost by! Even if there was vote trickery.” – a absurd conspiracy theory. Trump went to court 62 times in 5 different states – in state and federal courts. He lost 61 cases. Let me repeat that for you again – let lost 61 court cases and won 1.
But you believe Trump a man that spend a whole week providing Alternative Facts about the size of his inauguration crowd.
I’ve blocked Jeremy on the grounds that he has a mouth larger than the Grand Canyon.
This forum will promptly shrink by half.
Senility – it only gets worst.
Yes, now we employ the ad hominem attacks. I am sure that he is not senile, but my, your mouth!
But at least the remaining half will be a comfortable echo chamber where everyone just tells you how right and special and beautiful you are and that all your deranged conspiracy theories are only common sense. So that’ll be nice for you.
Just out of curiousity, why do you feel the need to say, ‘Jew Jersey Journalist’, specifically the ‘Jew’ bit? Do you have some kind of issues with Jews? Please do tell…
The J is next to the N. New Jersey journalist intended? That’s actually what I read it as.
Maybe…I hope that’s it, and not that he was merely attempting to be cleverly alliterative.