Vote in Midterm Elections & Vote for Our Constitutional Democracy…The party possessed by the Trump cult has now basically taken over Congress, the Supreme Court & the echo (conservative media), while also working fervently to control the DOJ/FBI as they seek to stop the Mueller probe. So that cult in a larger sense strives to stop the truth from coming out on potential criminal actions, along with conducting other direct attacks on our democracy through voter suppression, gerrymandering & providing very little pushback as foreign powers taint our elections. Considering all those factors, the deck is stacked against principled, freedom-loving Americans for the midterm elections, but our overriding disgust for Trump & the horrors we see in his autocratic intentions should inspire us to turn out in droves. So through a (hopefully) blue wave we can place appropriate checks on the president, preserving the rule of law & our constitutional democracy. The Senate terrain is tough on the Dems, but they really need to win the House, otherwise we might face a real disaster as Trump becomes more emboldened & out of control. Let’s rally the #NeverTrump troops (us ex-GOP supporters) along with all Dems & Independents who oppose Trump to vote in these midterm elections, since it’s vital we preserve democracy & defeat the voices of oppression who could risk greasing the skids into dictatorship.
The sense is the GOP has been gaining ground on the Dems heading into the midterms, with the Kavanaugh hearings & then the Honduran migrant march getting the Trump based stirred up. One poll I saw which gives me encouragement for what it’s worth, the voters who don’t like either party are breaking heavily toward the Dems as the lesser of two evils. But they all need to vote! Women & young people in particular really need to save us! From the newsfeeds, we’ll start with this article on the midterm elections: The-Midterms-as-Tipping-Point-Making-our-Enthusiasm-Contagious. If the American people want to find out the whole truth about what the Mueller team is finding, as we need to, we’d better vote in the midterm elections to make sure Dems at least win the House. If the Trump sycophant party remains the majority, our nation could set a dangerous precedent by not adhering to the rule of law, allowing serious crimes to go unpunished. That’s a potential creepy slide towards fascism. See excerpts from midterm-elections-republican-party-trump-senate-house:
The end of Robert Mueller’s investigation. The loss of health insurance for several million people. New laws that make it harder to vote. More tax cuts for the rich. More damage to the environment. A Republican Party molded even more in the image of President Trump. These are among the plausible consequences if the Republicans sweep the midterm elections and keep control of both the House and Senate. And don’t fool yourself. That outcome, although not the most likely one, remains possible. The last couple of weeks of polling have shown how it could happen. Voters who lean Republican — including whites across the South — could set aside their disappointment with Trump and vote for Republican congressional candidates. Voters who lean left — including Latinos and younger adults — could turn out in low numbers, as they usually do in midterm elections. The Republicans’ continuing efforts to suppress turnout could also swing a few close elections. If Republicans do manage to keep both chambers of Congress, it would cause a political shock. It would be validation for Trump, who could then brag that he had defied the experts once again. I obviously find this prospect alarming.
For today’s congressional Republicans, the election will be a measure of how worried they need to be about Trump and Russia. As Susan Hennessey of the Brookings Institution says, the midterms “are the last best hope for Republicans in Congress to grow a backbone.” A Democratic takeover may make congressional Republicans less willing to make excuses for Trump. A Republican victory would suggest that the party does not need to be very scared about the politics of Russia. Yes, Mueller — the special counsel overseeing the investigation — could change that by issuing an explosive report after the election. But a midterm victory could also give Trump the confidence to shut down the investigation, through firing some combination of Mueller, Rod Rosenstein (who oversees Mueller) and Jeff Sessions, the attorney general. In their place, he could install loyalists unconcerned with the quaint notion that no one is above the law. An expanded Senate majority could ease the confirmation of those loyalists. Even if Mueller’s findings eventually became public, an unfinished report is different from a completed investigation that could include indictments of people close to Trump. It’s easy to imagine Trump waving it away as a “witch hunt.” Congressional Republicans may go even further and hold hearings investigating the investigators — the current and former law-enforcement officials whom Trump has unjustly blamed for the investigation. Altogether, an election victory would probably give Trump the confidence to do what he has already signaled he wants to do: use the law as an instrument of political power rather than one of justice.
Roger Stone
Evidence against Roger Stone has been presented to the grand jury. We’ve anticipated for a long time there would be a whole assortment of charges that special prosecutors could bring against Stone. These articles show why Stone is under the gun by Mueller’s team: special-counsel-examines-conflicting-accounts-as-scrutiny-of-roger-stone-and-wikileaks-deepens & also robertmueller-rogerstone-wikileaks.
No, not a Witch Hunt, & Yes, Evidence of Collusion
As Trump’s former lawyer explains, this Russia probe is no witch hunt: former-trump-lawyer-mueller-probe-is-not-a-witch-hunt. Trump keeps saying no collusion, no collusion, but Mueller can get the last word on that. There’s overwhelming circumstantial evidence there was collusion between the Trump campaign & Russia, which more signs are revealed in this article posted from michael-flynn-peter-w-smith-collusion-trump-russia:
The alliance between the Trump campaign and Russia had many nodes of contact. One of the least known, but potentially most significant, is the work that ran through Republican operative Peter W. Smith. Much of the reporting on Smith has been broken by The Wall Street Journal, and its accumulated reports are building an incriminating story. Smith is a Chicago-based operative with a taste for the political dark arts, who set out in 2016 to obtain Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails, which he believed had been stolen by Russian hackers. Smith died under somewhat odd circumstances last year — he committed an apparent suicide days after being contacted by a reporter, citing an expiring life-insurance policy, but seemed to be in good spirits just hours before his death. But the most important mystery involving Smith is how important his work was to the campaign, and where it led. When he met with a cybersecurity expert in 2016, Smith represented himself as working on behalf of Michael Flynn, Trump’s chief national security adviser during the campaign. Flynn, of course, had ties to Russia and was forced to resign very shortly after starting as national security adviser for lying about his contacts with Russia.
But Smith, unlike Flynn, was not a famous figure, and initially some people assumed that he might have been working on his own. The Journal has fleshed out Smith’s role, and every new report has suggested that his work was significant. An October 7 report found that Smith raised at least $100,000, from at least four donors, for his work on the emails. An October 10 follow-up confirmed that Smith and Flynn were in regular, close contact. Today’s report is more explosive still. Investigators have evidence that Smith “may have had advance knowledge of details about the release of emails from a top Hillary Clinton campaign official by WikiLeaks,” according to the Journal. If true, this would mean that Smith wasn’t merely attempting to get ahold of stolen Clinton emails. He got through to WikiLeaks and was, in some form, a channel of collusion between the hackers and the Trump campaign. Flynn long ago started cooperating with Robert Mueller. So if Flynn discussed any of this information with Trump during the campaign, the special counsel probably knows about it.
Watergate had a Saturday Night Massacre, will History Repeat Itself?
Posted here is the opening to nixons-saturday-night-massacre-casts-shadow-as-trump-considers-fate-of-doj-leade, which the rest of the article goes on to reveal some recollections of the Watergate saga:
Imagine if President Trump, on the weekend after the upcoming midterm elections, suddenly forced out Jeff Sessions, Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller. For the record, that would be the removal of the attorney general, the deputy attorney general and the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. And imagine Trump also shut down the offices occupied by Mueller’s team of prosecutors — lock, stock and barrel. Just like that. Impossible, you say? Unprecedented? In fact, it is neither. It is the scenario Washington, D.C., witnessed exactly 45 years ago this weekend, when President Nixon lost patience with his own Justice Department’s relentless investigation of the Watergate case — a case that would eventually bring about Nixon’s resignation. Nixon’s firing spree was soon dubbed the Saturday Night Massacre. And, by that name, it has remained notorious enough to be mentioned whenever a president seems to be contemplating serial firings.
In Trump’s early months in office, his removal of an acting attorney general (Sally Yates) and the director of the FBI (James Comey) drew comparisons to the infamous Saturday in 1973. Trump has made manifest his unhappiness with Sessions, who recused himself from the Russia investigation, leaving Rosenstein to take it over. The president has recently held more than one personal meeting with Rosenstein, who has increasingly been regarded as a target of Trump’s distrust since he appointed Mueller. On the job now for about a year and a half, Mueller has prosecuted a number of Russian officials and several Americans — winning several convictions and guilty pleas with agreements to cooperate. These include Paul Manafort, who was briefly Trump’s campaign chairman in 2016 and will be sentenced in February. Trump has restrained his famous penchant for firing close associates, at least so far. But if the approaching midterms are a factor in his thinking, that restraint might be coming to an end with Election Day on November 6.
Coordinated Campaign Message is a Fact
A focus of the Mueller probe is anyone who had direct connections with WikiLeaks: who-communicated-wikileaks. The latest criminal charge against a Russian national detailed the current disinformation campaigns on social media, featuring weaponizing American bigotry. Mueller is going to need to tell us whether there was direct/intentional coordination between the Trump campaign & Russians in 2016, but as these excerpts explain from the-issues-that-russian-operatives-used-to-divide-americans-in-their-own-words, there was definitely coordination in the messaging:
In a criminal complaint unsealed Friday, federal prosecutors described a Russian operation to sow political discord in the United States that began in 2014 and was now aimed at disrupting the midterm elections. The covert campaign was designed to inflame passions about hot-button issues and controversial figures, including the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, whose team has been investigating Moscow’s interference in the 2016 presidential race. Russian operatives combed the American media to identify polarizing issues and then crafted social media messages to promote on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms. The complaint follows two earlier indictments this year of Russians for election interference, including hacking Democratic computers. Some messages appeared to praise President Trump or his policies and went after his opponents or fellow Republicans who disagreed with him. Posing as Americans, the Russians warned that threats of impeachment could be a prelude to civil war.
Borrowing a favorite political theme of conservatives and some members of the Trump administration, the Russians promoted the message of widespread voter fraud, arguing that stricter voter identification laws were needed to prevent Democrats from falsifying election results. The Russians accused Mr. Mueller of bias, falsely claiming he had close ties to the Democratic Party and a history of scandals during his tenure as F.B.I. director. The Russians sought to portray The New York Times, CNN and other media organizations as untrustworthy and deeply biased against the president. They picked up on Mr. Trump’s favored term of “fake news,” accusing the mainstream media of deliberately spreading lies about the president. Before Senator John McCain died in August, hailed as a revered figure in American politics, the Russians crafted a message describing him as a lawmaker long past his prime who hated Mr. Trump and tried to subvert the president’s promises.
This is the Current GOP!
Posted below is most of the article from congress-republicans-democrats-conservatives, which pretty much sums up the current state of the GOP. That’s why sending a clear message for the midterm elections is so important:
Unfortunately, the principled version of the Republican Party in Congress has virtually collapsed, a crisis compounded by the death of Senator John McCain. Republican leaders in Congress actively resist providing congressional oversight and are no more than the president’s poodles. Sure, there are still many principled individuals within the party, but as a national institution the Republican Party is hollow. It is no longer about an ideology; it’s about shining President Trump’s shoes. And that is the fundamental issue hanging over the midterm elections. “The Republican Party must suffer repeated and devastating defeats,” Max Boot, a lifelong Republican until Trump’s election, writes in his new book, “The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right.” “It must pay a heavy price for its embrace of white nationalism and know-nothingism,” Boot continues. “Only if the G.O.P. as currently constituted is burned to the ground will there be any chance to build a reasonable center-right political party out of the ashes.” Then there’s Andrew Sullivan, the conservative writer, who dismisses today’s Republican Party as “the party of corruption, propaganda, vote suppression, and barely masked bigotry.” He adds, “I despise it because I am conservative.” I don’t know that such rumbling matters much to the electorate: For voters who back Trump partly because they see him as anti-elitist, fussing by effete intellectual snobs is less a demerit than a credential. But the point remains that we need a principled Republican caucus in Congress — and we don’t have one.
Historically, Republicans were associated with fiscal conservatism, free trade and standing up militarily to autocrats in Moscow. But what does the party stand for today? Until recently, one might have said that Republicans stood for repealing the Affordable Care Act. But now that it is popular with voters, at least 20 Republican members of Congress have scrubbed or softened their denunciations of the law, according to the Daily Beast. The most odious pirouette may involve deficit spending. During the height of the 2008-9 recession, not a single Republican House member voted for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to stimulate the economy. It’s difficult to explain the G.O.P.’s resistance to a stimulus during the recession except as a willingness to let millions of Americans lose their jobs in hopes that President Barack Obama would get blamed. It can’t have been about deficits, because Republicans then passed a tax cut for rich Americans that adds $1.4 trillion to deficits. The Republican turnabout on Russia is similar. Just a few years ago, Republicans denounced Democrats for being too trusting of Vladimir Putin — and they had a point — yet now they line up behind a president who gushes about Putin.
The Republican Party boldly challenged Obama over scandals that dishonored the White House. Um, like, his once wearing a tan suit. Or holding a latte while saluting a Marine. But congressional Republicans have been spineless about a president who tears immigrant children from parents, declares his “love” for a North Korean leader who is still adding to his nuclear arsenal, and accepts large sums from the Saudi government in his hotel empire even as he downplays its torture-murder of a Washington Post journalist. Granted, a certain amount of hypocrisy is human. Democrats rage at evangelical Christians who embrace a philanderer, but they themselves denounce corruption while still supporting Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey. Yet if we’re all tribal to some degree, congressional Republicans now seem to care only about tribe. The indifference to Russian interference in the 2016 election and to democratic norms is particularly sad. The party of Lincoln has today embraced white nationalists and undertaken systematic efforts to suppress voting by African-Americans and Native Americans. Consider the effort in Georgia to close polling places used by black voters on the ground that the toilets aren’t accessible to the disabled. George Will, one of the best-known conservative thinkers in America, is no fan of Democrats but bluntly urged readers: “Vote against the G.O.P. this November.” When a political party stands for nothing larger than itself, it is time to rebuild it — and that requires voters first to engage in demolition.
2016 interference likely swung the election, so Russkies want to do it again
Plus they want to exploit our divisions & further send us spiraling into hopeless polarization. The more we learn of the extent of the Russian interference, the more it appears likely the Russians swung the 2016 election: russia-cyber-theft-trump-us-election-president-clinton. Since America is lacking presidential leadership in erecting our defenses, Russia sees themselves having a free hand for also tainting this year’s election, as we can see inside new-justice-department-case-shows-russia-is-now-attacking-the-midterm-elections & also Indictment-of-Russian-national-reveals-massive-project-to-fracture-America-using-social-media.
Nuclear Pact
It is true Russia has been cheating on this 3-decades-old nuclear treaty, plus it’s now a little outdated because China is not bound by it. The success of the Trump agenda in a potential positive way is whether he can effectively strike better deals for America, prominently featuring a new Asian/China trade deal, some sort of deals restricting/eliminating the North Korean & Iranian nuclear programs, plus renegotiating this Russian nuclear deal while hopefully bringing China onboard in trying to head off another nuclear arms race. Putin has already warned his hypersonic weapons are far more advanced than anything we have. So should Trump successfully negotiate positive compromises in any of these areas, it could actually validate his presidency in some very important ways. But such high-stakes negotiations could just as easily backfire, threatening to turn into a series of miscalculations & unmitigated disasters: death-of-inf-treaty-with-russia-could-start-arms-race-with-china & also a-reminder-that-trump-has-the-single-control-of-nuclear-weapons. These increased international tensions now happening could lead to unleashing the greatest threat to human survival the world has ever seen, as revealed in this post from nuclear-war-weapons-bombs-how-kill:
But the past couple of years have been different. When he asked that question again this spring, roughly 60 percent of his students raised their hands. What’s more, he agrees with them. “If I had to bet at least one nuclear weapon would be used in my lifetime,” says the 40-year-old Kroenig, “my bet would be yes.” Kroenig and his students are not alone. A January 2018 World Economic Forum survey of 1,000 leaders from government, business, and other industries identified nuclear war as a top threat. The widespread concern is understandable. Last year, it seemed a nuclear conflict between the US and North Korea was on the horizon. India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed enemies, could restart their decades-long squabble at any time. And the US and Russia — the world’s foremost nuclear powers — have had warheads pointed at each other since the earliest days of the Cold War. President Donald Trump’s presence in the Oval Office has increased worries of a potential nuclear war. In January, a poll showed about 52 percent of Americans — many of them Democrats — worried that the president would launch a nuclear attack without reason.
Incredibly Tone-Deaf!
What an enormous miscalculation to praise & cheer on this sort of violence from a political leader! See these excerpts from trump-gianforte-violence-midterms:
What many forget in seeking to analyze this election is that we need to go forward as a country after the election is over. On Thursday night, President Donald Trump celebrated a violent crime. At a rally in Montana, Trump saluted Rep. Greg Gianforte, who pleaded guilty last year to assaulting a reporter. Trump mimicked Gianforte’s takedown of Ben Jacobs, a Guardian correspondent who, on the final day of a special congressional election in May 2017, had tried to ask Gianforte about health care. “Any guy that can do a body slam, he’s my kind of—he’s my guy,” Trump told the applauding crowd. Trump looked off to the side and saw somebody— apparently Gianforte—who seemed embarrassed by his remark. “There’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” Trump said jovially. “I had heard that he body-slammed a reporter. … And I said, ‘Oh, this is terrible. He’s going to lose the election.’ Then I said, ‘Well, wait a minute. I know Montana pretty well. I think it might help him.’ And it did!” Trump grinned, and the crowd roared. Trump’s praise for this assault makes a mockery of his claim, three minutes earlier, that “Democrats have become the party of crime.” He has a long history of encouraging violence, and he’s still doing it as he defends a Saudi government that apparently murdered a journalist two weeks ago.
But Trump isn’t just saying it’s good to hurt people. He’s boasting that voters support politicians who hurt people or who endorse hurting people. He’s saying this because Gianforte won in 2017, and because Trump won in 2016 despite—or perhaps, in part, thanks to—his advocacy of violence and his admission on tape that he sexually assaulted women. Trump is betting that in 2018, he’ll win again. He thinks you’ll vote for Gianforte and other Republicans because you like their culture of brutality: beating up reporters and protesters, protecting Vladimir Putin, kneecapping the FBI, mocking women who report sexual assault, and separating children from their parents. If you vote Republican, or if you stay home and let Trump’s supporters win, he’ll claim that the election of 2018, like the elections of 2017 and 2016, is a mandate for his war on morals and the rule of law. Since Trump’s election, his patterns of behavior—lying, smearing, baiting, subverting—have worsened. That’s partly because these traits are in his nature. But it’s also because they haven’t hurt him much. Republican lawmakers have shrugged or chuckled and continued to support him. Voters have continued to elect Republicans to Congress. The first two congressmen who endorsed Trump for president are under indictment on charges of financial crimes. In their re-election ads, they’re race-baiting. And they’re winning. Most voters don’t support thuggery.
Trump loves bullies since he’s a bully himself
Please, please, please watch this interview: https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/10/21/sotu-sasse-full.cnn. As I exceed my limit of outbound links, you could look up other articles about this congressman who beat up a journalist, including articles on how that journalist feels about being assaulted (& the president’s irresponsible compliments):
salon/tough-guy-donald-trump
salon/trump-celebrates-assault-of-journalist-during-rally
mediaite/ben-sasse-we-need-a-president-who-doesnt-pretend-beating-up-a-reporter-is-okay
washingtonpost/guardian-reporter-calls-gop-congressman-who-hit-him-coward-calls-trump-something-worse
thehill/guardian-reporter-gop-lawmaker-who-assaulted-me-isnt-a-tough-cookie-hes-a
More Thuggery
The increasing threats to journalists risk a free press, which by extension risks free democracies, seen in this post to donald-trump-anti-president-greg-gianforte-reporter-jamal-khashoggi:
Ben Jacobs of The Guardian is a friend of mine, so when he was assaulted two years ago by a thug named Greg Gianforte, I was pretty pissed. This was not abated by the fact that the thug, Greg Gianforte, became Congressman Greg Gianforte anyway. So on Thursday night, just as the final consensus was solidifying around the fact that journalist Jamal Khashoggi had been tortured, murdered, and dismembered within the Saudi Arabian embassy in Turkey by members of the Saudi intelligence service and (probably) at the behest of the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, the president went to Montana and said this about the thug, Congressman Greg Gianforte, I got pissed all over again.
“Any guy who can do a body slam, he’s my candidate, he’s my guy.”
He is not the President* of the United States in any way that matters. If he were, he would not be standing by, lamely, while a resident of the United States, and a journalist, was brutally murdered in the embassy of an ally whose regime owes this country its very existence. (Gulf War I, remember? It was in all the papers.) His supporters, the people who applauded his endorsement of the thug, Congressman Greg Gianforte, are beyond all hope and reason. He’s cheering on the thug, Gianforte, while also whining about fictional violent left-wing mobs as the centerpiece of his truthless, fear-mongering homestretch campaign plan. The hypocrisy is breathtaking and all too typical. Also, the kind of campaign referenced above is the way the members of those crowds got that way, and that was entirely fine with the modern Republican Party until the monster got out of the lab two years ago.
The president* has transformed the office into just another adjunct of the multigenerational criminal enterprise to which he was heir. He thrives on the support of brainless masses in this country, and of more competent authoritarians overseas. Putin is a international criminal who presides over a country with an economy that you could feed to a goat. It’s the Ducky of Grand Fenwick with nukes and oil revenues. But he’s emboldened to shoot off his mouth because his sublet in the White House won’t do anything about it, not when there is mindless adoration to be mined in some banquet hall or local arena in the hinterlands. This is not a president. This is, to borrow a useful phrase from the church of my birth, an anti-president. He doesn’t have the national interest in mind. He couldn’t find the national interest if you gave him two tracking hounds and the ghost of James Madison to show him the way. He is most comfortable among thugs, whether they are in government or out of it. They make him feel oh, so very strong.
Trump insulting women is just integral to who he is
The prez who recently called a woman a “horseface” & praised a congressman who assaulted a reporter, he has a long history of insulting anyone who isn’t just like him. Remember the insults of the disabled, POW’s, Gold Star family, those from other countries, & so on. That’s why I call him a jackass, since his words & deeds don’t deserve our respect. See more on this deserved backlash from these links:
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/10/19/trump-rallies-comedy-916795
More on the Midterm Elections in this Divided Nation
He may win because it is Texas, but gridlock-Teddy is so repulsive!: houston-chronicle-endorses-beto-orourke-over. Uncle Joe talks about the pitiful effects of the Trump factor on our society inside biden-american-values-being-shredded-under-trump. Both sides now specialize in crafting narratives to smear the other side, rather than finding real solutions to actually help the country. The start to in-midst-of-political-violence-america-greatly-needs-unity correctly points out in order to ever truly achieve MAGA, as a society we must somehow come together:
That may sound like a truism, but when you have events like Democratic activists in Nevada attacking the campaign manager of Republican Adam Laxalt, and President Trump going to Montana and saying it was great that Congressman Greg Gianforte body slammed a reporter before his victory in the special election, that is just plain wrong. It’s wrong if the Democrats do it, it’s wrong if the Republicans do it, it’s wrong if anyone does it. Let me be clear: Political violence has no place in our system, threats of violence have no place in our system, and it is pointless to try to say that Democrats are worse than Republicans, or that Republicans are worse than Democrats. For the purposes of this piece, and indeed I believe to the American people, both sides are culpable — and that is just plain wrong, and is wholly unacceptable. We have emerging crises in health care, the budget, the debt, the deficit, and we need conciliation and consensus if we are ever going to achieve positive change. We cannot do this by demonizing the other side, and as Nikki Haley said, compellingly, at the Al Smith Dinner on Thursday Night in New York, “in America, our political opponents are not evil,” she added “they are just our opponents.”
Rubin concludes with these excerpts inside an-election-that-goes-way-beyond-policy-issues:
In other words, Americans cannot tell whether Trump is so corrupted and compromised that he’s running Middle East policy to secure his own finances. The reason we do not know for certain is thatRepublicans refuse to look for answers. Even during Watergate we did not experience such profound and unchecked corruption, such utter disregard for elected officials’ constitutional oaths to serve the people’s interests, not their own. The corruption eating away at the presidency is not merely financial, of course. Conservative Trump critic and former adviser to President George W. Bush, Peter Wehner, in recent days eloquently addressed the moral dimension of the Saudi situation. “I think the fundamental interpretative fact of the Trump presidency – and I think that this Saudi example is only one manifestation of it – is this is a person [Trump] who is fundamentally amoral and immoral,” he said during an MSNBC appearance. “He is a man without human empathy or without human sympathy, and in many respects a man without conscience; and I think what you’ve seen over the last several days is a person who’s reacting that way.” Wehner continued, “And I think that we’ve seen that lack of human empathy and conscience in almost every arena of the Trump presidency. It explains the cruelty, it explains the policy at the border, separating kids from [parents], it explains the pathological lies, it explains the fact that he’s a man without loyalty — and I think this is just the latest arena in which we’re seeing this ugly drama play itself out.”
In short, the country is convulsed by a president whose personal corruption and moral vacuity offend our deepest-held convictions and our self-image as a citizens of the world’s leading democracy. His devoted cult and his cynical apologists are content to be lied to and receive trinkets (e.g., a tax cut that really doesn’t benefit most of them). The rest of us are not. The energy, the anger and the sense of urgency we see in the run up to the midterm elections reflects voters’ disgust and dismay over a president and a party who sully our democracy. Two years of Trump leave us wanting to wash away the moral and financial filth that he’s tracked into the White House. If Americans turn out to vote in large enough numbers, the midterms will provide a national cleansing, a political fumigation. The midterms could mark the first substantial step on the road to national renewal. How refreshing and exhilarating that would be.
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