One of Us

This week’s Republican National Convention has so far yielded few surprises.  Donald Trump secured his third successive presidential nomination.  Trump’s naming of U.S. Senator J. D. Vance as his running mate did not raise eyebrows either since the freshman senator was already shortlisted.

Vance’s comparatively brief public career has reflected an interesting but also unsurprising evolution.  His 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, painted a bleak picture of the lives of Appalachian transplants in Ohio.  Vance’s personal biography is presented as a paradox: A career in venture capital preceded by Yale Law School by way of Ohio State University and the Marine Corps.  The book made him a media darling, an overnight pundit on the state of poor whites.  A voice from the people who made good, one of us as it were.  Vance was a Never-Trumper that election year, at one point tempting Godwin by speculating Trump might be a latter-day Hitler.

His election to the Senate in 2022 showed that Vance, like the Republican establishment, had “evolved” on the topic of Trump.  Trump endorsed Vance, who defeated his opponent, Tim Ryan, by a healthy but unimpressive margin.  Once in office, he fell into line.  It paid off.

Vance’s positions have been variously described as national conservative to populist.  He’s certainly a social conservative; the Heritage Foundation favored Vance as a candidate.  His stated policy positions align quite well with its Project 2025 plan.  While never liberal in his beliefs, he appeared a run of the mill conservative before he actually went into politics.  To repeat, he fell into line.

Thus Vance’s views are alarming should he ever be in a position to act on them.  It’s quite possible; the 39-year-old Vance is nearly half Trump’s age.  Even if Trump completes his term, some of the editorial commentary has already anointed Vance as the heir to MAGA and he’s in scoring position for the 2028 nomination.

This week’s RNC solidifies a years-long trend.  The Republican Party is wholly the Party of Trump.  That’s the choice.  With Biden’s obvious lapses and stubborn refusal to step aside as candidate, we have seen the future after November 5^th. 

 

© 2024 The Unassuming Scholar

Something Like This

Something like this was bound to happen.  Yesterday’s assassination attempt on Donald Trump is yet another manifesting of the roiling stream of violence churning beneath the surface of American life. 

It could have been worse.  But for the quick reaction to shots fired from outside the crowd by the Secret Service the incident would have joined a sordid history of political murder in this country.  It is bad enough an innocent bystander at the Pennsylvania rally died and two others were injured.  It is a sobering thought to know that even with extensive security precautions a would-be killer can come within millimeters of taking down a president.

Naturally the intended target immediately grasped the optics of his near-miss.  Blood trickling from his injured ear, Trump greeted the crowd with an upraised fist as his bodyguards hustled him away.  Predictably, he attributed his deliverance to God.  Millions of others undoubtedly believe this.  The attempt also serves to further the shared sense of grievance and need for a martyr among the base.

As time goes on the thread of our political narrative becomes snagged.  Presidential elections used to be routine affairs; they came, they went.  There were occasional complications, as in the case of the 2000 election, but for almost a half century most passed without incident.  Perhaps we should have seen it coming with the Tea Party movement, but the surprise outcome of 2016 remains just that.  More accurately, it was an all-around surprise at the time but has become a divinely ordained event to Trump’s more fervent supporters.    

Given that last tenet, the public reaction to the incident is as expected.  Commentators from the left expressed relief the attempt failed.  From the right, the rhetoric from Trump’s opponents was to blame.  As for the shooter, little is known at present other than his name, his age, and a few biographical tidbits.  He is reported to have been a registered Republican who also made a small contribution to a liberal group, but neither fact really has any bearing on what he did.  The demographics track; he was a twentysomething white male.  But his motive is a mystery.

It's certain that Trump’s brush with death will pervade the discourse at next week’s Republican National Convention.  It will likely become a theme in campaign media as we near the election.  Perhaps it will have an effect on undecided voters.  Trump’s sangfroid does enhance his image.  Whether this will be the case several weeks from now remains to be seen.  But the fact that something like this has happened is an ominous sign of our polarization.

 

© 2024 The Unassuming Scholar

Bedtime for Democracy

 

(Apologies…I couldn’t come up with a better title, so I borrowed from The Dead Kennedys.)

The Supreme Court wrapped up its term last week, and it was predictably disheartening.  Former (for now) president Trump got his executive immunity.  Attempted election tampering and inciting insurrection are no barriers to the highest office.  The Sackler family is immune from being sued for Perdue Pharma’s role in the opioid crisis. The courts no longer have to defer to the expertise and judgment of administrative agencies.  The Biden administration has been blocked from its efforts to curb air pollution.

And so forth.  None of this is surprising, just more of the usual.  Long standing protections and safeguards are falling one by one and there seems to be little will to push back.  Biden’s disastrous performance in the first presidential debate seems to augur worse tidings to come.

Time has blunted the sense of shock surrounding J6.  It’s hard to reconjure the feelings of dread pervading the pandemic year as emboldened armed nutters tested the boundaries of duly constituted authorities and the law itself.  But it seems we are careening toward a repeat performance.  Donald Trump is a master of self-reinvention, and it is becoming evident we are on the threshold of a second Trump presidency with all the implications that carries.

There’s always been an underlying current of violence beneath the placid surface of American life which periodically erupts as sudden, startling paroxysms of carnage.  Nine short years ago some laughed and shrugged as long-shot candidate Trump bragged he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight and get away with it.  But January 6^th demonstrated that his words could move bad actors to commit bad acts. 

It’s tempting to reflexively paint Trump and his devotees as fascists, which isn’t always a subtle enterprise, but there are historical parallels.  An apt comparison is the assassination of Italian politician Giacomo Matteotti a century ago.  Matteotti had challenged the victory of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party in the 1924 parliamentary elections, charging intimidation and election fraud.  Days after making the accusation on the floor of parliament, Matteotti was kidnapped and murdered.  The antifascist opposition then miscalculated and abandoned its parliamentary forum and counted on a general strike to topple Mussolini’s government.  The strike failed and the withdrawal of the opposition only solidified Mussolini’s hold on power, moving Italy toward the totalitarian state it became. Mussolini eventually took credit for Matteotti’s death, framing it as a necessity and condoning the actions of the assassination squad. 

It is not a broad inferential leap to see something comparable in present-day America.  The Democrats won’t withdraw from electoral politics to be sure, but the Republicans use razor-thin majorities in Congress much more effectively than the Democrats.  If Trump wins and the Republicans regain the Senate in November, matters could deteriorate quickly.  With SCOTUS loosening its oversight of the executive and with Trump’s stated intention to replace civil service merit hires with handpicked loyalists, it won’t take a large majority in Congress to advance the MAGA vision.  The roadmap is already there in the Project 2025 policy document published by the Heritage Foundation.  The conservative long game that began with the Powell Memorandum in the 1970s is about to pay off magnificently.

But then there is a faint glimmer of hope amidst the dark tidings.  New York state just disbarred Rudy Giuliani.  For election denial.  Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

 

© 2024 The Unassuming Scholar