GOP threats to the American Way are not normal | Will Bunch Newsletter

Today marks the 35th anniversary of one of the most pivotal events of my lifetime, China’s brutal and deadly crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in and around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. It was a reminder — just two days before the 45th anniversary of D-Day and five months before the fall of the Berlin Wall — that history’s good guys don’t always win, not right away. Today, Chinese-style repression is on the rise, and yet I remain forever inspired by the people who stood up to tanks and sacrificed everything for freedom. That courage is needed now, more than ever.

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If Donald Trump manages to win the November presidential election despite his 34 felony convictions, and if he decides to follow the U.S. Constitution as 47th president — two gigantic ifs, for sure — then he’s going to need at least 50 GOP senators, and possibly one or two more, to ram through his oddball MAGA cabinet secretaries and far-right judges.

Currently, Republicans only have 49 Senate seats. It would sure help Project 2025 — Trump’s 900-page blueprint for a dictatorship — if the GOP could steal a seat in a deep-blue Democratic state like, say, Maryland. As it happens, Maryland Republicans nominated the only man who could possibly pull it off: the popular, center-right two-term ex-governor Larry Hogan.

In normal times, the Republican National Committee would be going to mat to help Hogan in any way possible. But you may have noticed that 2024 is not a normal year, not by a Preakness longshot. Instead, Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump (yes, the daughter-in-law) told CNN on Friday that their party’s best hope for a Senate majority “doesn’t deserve the respect” of Republican voters, and that what Hogan had just done was “ridiculous.”

Oh my gosh! Did Hogan murder his own puppy and a smelly goat and dump them in a gravel pit, in front of people? What kind of monster...?

No, actually the ridiculous thing that Larry Hogan — not coincidentally, the son of the 1970s’ GOP House member from Maryland who voted to impeach his own party’s president, Richard Nixon — did was to urge voters to trust the process that had resulted in Trump’s guilty verdict. “Regardless of the result, I urge all Americans to respect the verdict and the legal process,” Hogan said in a post. For that fairly anodyne comment about the sanctity of the U.S. legal system, Trump senior aide Chris LaCivita tweeted: “You just ended your campaign.”

And honestly, without Maryland’s sliver of diehard MAGA voters, Hogan probably did. This is not his father’s Republican Party. Indeed, the GOP doesn’t feel like any kind of political party any of us have ever seen before. It feels like a cult that’s increasingly veering into Jonestown territory.

Except for Hogan’s statement, you wouldn’t know from any Kool-Aid-drinking top Republican Party elected official or major candidate that Trump was tried before a jury of his peers, that Trump’s lawyers only tried to strike one of the twelve who were picked, that the trial took place before a judge praised for his even-handedness and his cool temperament, or that could have defended himself on the witness stand but chose not to. You would have thought from the GOP comments that this was a Soviet show trial staged in the piney woods of Mississippi in the 1950s. Or a crucifixion.

Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise, the second-ranking House Republican, said that the verdict was “a defeat for Americans who believe in the critical legal tenet that justice is blind.” House Speaker Mike Johnson called it “a shameful day in American history,” but no one spun a wilder narrative than Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who is auditioning to be Trump’s vice president and who insisted his trial was the kind of injustice that Fidel Castro brought to his parents’ native Cuba. “The public spectacle of political show trials has come to America,” Rubio posted. Really?

Rubio also joined with seven other Senate extremists in a pledge to block all of President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees and all Democratic legislation. More disturbing were the more overt threats of retribution and violence that came from not just the party base, but also from some media bottom-feeders. “You tyrants are about to awaken a machine you don’t want,” Newsmax host Carl Higbie ranted, while claiming that blue cities should be afraid because Republicans own 90% of the guns.

“We are living in a fascist state,” Trump told his bizarre, rambling news conference last Friday — perhaps the ultimate moment of projection from a man who has promised a gulag archipelago for undocumented immigrants, vowed to jail his political rivals, and who calls journalists “the enemy of the people.” Nevertheless, the nearly unanimous, over-the-top and cultlike reactions from GOP top officials ought to be a moment of clarity for voters about what is really at stake in the November election. The GOP is setting the stage for an America in which Trump can act as a “red Caesar” and blow up the institutions that convicted him of a crime.

Experts in authoritarianism know that a wannabe dictator rises up by telling citizens they can no longer trust anything in a corrupt society. Instead, they must create an Orwellian, freedom-is-slavery, upside-down zeitgeist: An America in which all elections are rigged, everything you read or hear from the news is a lie — and the guilty are innocent.

Now that 2024 is nearly half over, what’s striking is how everything feels increasingly unmoored, as we drift together into choppy and uncharted waters. The news media that I’ve devoted so much of my life to is falling apart with layoffs, closures, and desperate Hail Mary passes like the radical changes announced Monday at the Washington Post, in an America in which the election will be decided by the millions who already don’t read the news and frankly don’t care. Indeed, the dream of an educated U.S. citizenry also seems to be falling apart, with institutions like the University of the Arts, Cabrini University, and Birmingham-Southern tumbling like dominoes, as college becomes just another institution that no one trusts anymore.

The result is an America where a public-health hero like Dr. Anthony Fauci becomes Public Enemy No. 1, where vaccines don’t save you but kill you, where climate change is fake even when it’s 115 degrees in Phoenix, and a common criminal like Donald Trump is an outlaw battling cruel injustice.

We don’t have to live like this. We can reject Republican nihilism at the ballot box in November, and give ourselves some breathing room to rebuild our deeply flawed institutions instead of watching a blowhard strongman demolish them. If we don’t, the fantasy world spun by Trump, Rubio, and all the others — a fascist state with Cuban-style show trials and gun-toting right-wingers invading our cities — will become our everyday reality.

Question: If Republicans really still think the 2020 election was stolen why have they not mounted an investigation in The House? And if they think non-citizens are voting in substantial numbers why have they not sought to prove this contention? It should not be difficult. — via Cult of Rationality (@DerfElif) on X/Twitter

Answer: I guess you are too wedded to the cult of rationality to see what’s really happening here. In journalism, there’s is a popular expression about a “story that’s too good to check,” usually a wild rumor about a public figure with which you can regale your colleagues at the bar, but would fall apart if you actually tried to confirm and publish it. So it is with the Republicans and 2020 election fraud — proved non-existent in major newsroom investigations as well as 50 court cases — and especially the legend of non-citizens voting, which not only rarely happens but is 100% illegal already. But why ruin a fantastic Fox News talking point with the facts of a public hearing?

I was concerned that last week’s question about President Joe Biden and Black voters might be a little too hot-button for readers, and I was right. I did hear from Armando Pandola, who said: “Biden should tell Black voters the truth... Trump and his cohorts will take away their right to vote.” True. Tom Ferkler suggested stronger Black ties with organized labor and more funding for HBCUs and community groups. With just five months to go, it all remains very much a work in progress.

📮This week’s question: The felony convictions for Donald Trump should have been a slam-dunk gain for President Biden, but nothing is ever easy for Democrats. Should party leaders be calling on Trump to drop out of the race? Should Biden run aggressive ads slamming Trump as a convicted felon? Or will too much focus on Trump’s conviction backfire? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “Trump felon” in the subject line.

The concept of a “long hot summer” was born in 1967, when tensions over police brutality and racism exploded in fiery and lethal uprisings in Detroit, Newark, and dozens of other U.S. cities. In 2024, our cities are largely calm and crime rates are also falling — despite what you see on Fox News — but the fires threaten our communities nonetheless. This time around, the threat comes from unthinkably high temperatures in our air and in the oceans, as climate change comes home to roost. The most alarming American manifestation right now is the massive heat dome settling over the American West, already triggering a new season of killer wildfires.

Meteorologists say the worst days out West are coming later this week, as the mercury is predicted to top 110 degrees in big cities such as Las Vegas and Phoenix while passing 120 degrees in places like Death Valley. Wildfires are already threatening communities in inland California and Oregon, and the danger is expected to grow much worse in over the next few days. The news of this large, slow-moving “heat dome” should not be a shock, coming after 2023′s record heat deaths across the American Sun Belt and an entire year of monthly world records for average temperature. The world is on fire right now, as a killer heat wave also ravages India, not long after Iraq posted its highest daily temperature ever, 122 degrees. Even war-torn Ukraine is baking.

Here in Philadelphia, May was a couple of degrees above average and unseasonably dry. Along the Eastern Seaboard, the lurking danger is offshore. Climate experts are shocked by the current water temperatures. “The whole tropical Atlantic is warmer than it’s ever been for this time of year,” Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami, told USA Today, which is an alarming development for the 2024 hurricane season that officially began just four days ago. The recent average ocean temperature in the Caribbean of 84.7 degrees is a level not typically seen until August.

In normal times, deadly wildfires out West and a major hurricane striking the East Coast, not to mention the astronomical home-insurance rates that are resulting from these risks, would become a major issue in the 2024 presidential election. In our real world, Donald Trump is out raising large donations from Big Oil executives by promising to roll back any and all regulations that might reduce greenhouse-gas pollution. President Joe Biden is taking some of the right steps — federal dollars for solar power, or curbing oil and gas leases in Alaska — but getting little recognition from the media or voters. Can the long, hot summer of 2024 change the political dynamic? Stay tuned.

Thursday is the 80th anniversary of the World War II’s D-Day invasion of France: the beginning of the end of America’s last war against fascism. Today, only a handful of Americans who stormed beaches in Normandy on June 6, 1944 still survive. Twenty years ago this week, as a straight-news reporter for the Daily News, my editors commanded me to find a veteran for the 60th anniversary and somehow I got turned on to a remarkable, then-81-year-old Philadelphian named Paul Zimmaro, who lost a leg fighting the Nazis but found a wife. Waiting in England for D-Day was, I wrote, “the calm before a blizzard before trading gunfire with Nazi troops in Normandy’s hedgerows and surviving the frigid Battle of the Bulge. Before a German 88mm gun blasted him off the back of a Sherman tank and shattered his right leg just a month before Hitler’s Germany fell.” Read the rest from June 6, 2004 in my 2013 blog post: “D-Day: A love story.”

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