Trump May Change The Language But He's Keeping The Heinous Goals
Senate Republicans just successfully filibustered a bill “to protect an individual's ability to access contraceptives and to engage in contraception and to protect a health care provider's ability to provide contraceptives, contraception, and information related to contraception.” With two Republicans— Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowsky— voting with all the Democrats and the 4 independents, it would have needed 9Republicans voting in favor of cloture to get a vote on the floor. Among those voting against contraception, I especially want to point out these candidates for reelection in 5 months:
Ted Cruz (R-TX)
Deb Fischer (R-NE)
Josh Hawley (R-MO)
Rick Scott (R-FL)
All 4 have competitive races, particularly Hawley and Fischer, who are being challenged by very strong opponents, respectively Lucas Kunce and Dan Osborn.
Banning abortion and threatening other aspects of women’s healthcare have been working out very badly for Republicans at the polls. Smart candidates are absolutely hammering their GOP opponents. “Plain and simple,” responded Wisconsin progressive Eric Wilson, “this is a power and dominance issue. Men like my opponent Derrick Van Orden want to be able to sexually harass women without consequences. Van Orden, wants to demonize women and he even compares abortion to genocide. Unlike him, I’m in support of unrestricted abortion. Forcing women to carry children is a crime against humanity and considered a war crime. Instead of forcing women to have birth, we should be providing women the resources to make their own decisions about their bodies. I will always fight for women’s rights to their own body.”
Herb Jones is running for Congress in Virginia’s First congressional district, a swingy seat held by an anti-choice MAGA fanatic, Rob Wittman. Jones has been really clear that his intends to help ratify the Equal Rights Amendment and intends to support HR 3755, the Women's Health Protection Act of 2021. “These two pieces of legislation,” he told us, “will ensure women have the full and complete autonomy to make their own reproductive and health care decisions.”
Conor O’Callaghan scoffed, “We all know the definition of insanity, yet the MAGA extremists keep trying these same tactics to undermine women's healthcare. It won't work and we will remind them of that again this November.”
You'd think that in a state like New Jersey, this war against women's rights would have been settled long ago. If only! Sue Altman, the candidate taking on Trump lackey Tom Kean Jr, told us that “Republicans around the country are shocked that their endless assault on women's health and freedoms has consequences. Candidates like Tom Kean, Jr. hide from the press and the public because they know their party’s anti-choice brand is toxic in their districts.”
Please consider contributing, whatever you comfortably can, to Conor O'Callaghan, Herb Jones Eric Wilson and Sue Altman so that they can replace their anti-Choice opponents in Wisconsin, Virginia, Arizona and New Jersey... at the ActBlue Flip Congress page.
Mar-a-Lago sees this and the operative there are trying to head off a catastrophe. A few weeks ago, NBC ran a piece by Matt Dixon about how the abortion issue will be handled at their convention. Mar-a-Lago’s “involvement,” he wrote, “is intended to stop those on the party's right flank from trying to push the official Republican National Committee platform too far to the right on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage headed into the general election. A Trump campaign official acknowledged to NBC News that there are conversations throughout the party about culture war-infused policies and that they have been watching and engaged in some state-level races for spots on the RNC's Platform Committee, which is the body that will play a significant role in shaping platform changes.”
At the grassroots level, this involvement amounts to the Trump team and its allies handpicking candidates they want to be on the platform committee, giving those individuals a leg up in the elections.
The committee's staff leadership, which were picked earlier this month, are firmly Trump supporters.
…There is a sense among some party leaders that Trump’s team wants to make sure that the people who make it onto the platform committee don't come up with a platform that could be viewed as too extreme in a general election on issues like the definition of marriage and abortion, with the latter having taken on defining political influence after the Supreme Court— helped by three conservative Trump picks— overturned Roe v. Wade.
… As abortion has become a dominant electoral issue since the overturning of Roe in 2022, the issue has left Trump trying to balance pleasing social conservatives who have long pushed for strict federal abortion bans, and the fact that access to abortion remains popular with the broader electorate. An NBC News poll last year found that 60% of voters disapproved of the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
In recent interviews, Trump has used a blanket comment to respond to abortion, saying that it should be up to individual states to determine abortion policy.
That answer often does not placate the more socially conservative factions of the party, including former Vice President Mike Pence, and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, who is considered by some [imbeciles] to be on the shortlist to serve as Trump’s running mate in 2024.
“You don’t need a federal ban,” Trump told Time magazine during an April interview. “Roe v. Wade … wasn’t about abortion as much as bringing it back to the states. So the states should negotiate deals.”
Another RNC platform sticking point is over the definition of marriage. In the current document, it's defined as “between one man and one woman” and called “the cornerstone of the family is natural marriage, the union of one man and one woman.”
“It is just politically dumb,” said a Republican official vying to sit on the RNC’s Platform Committee who disagrees with any decision to moderate the party on social issues. “How do you go back on decades of life language? What, maybe you will impact like a half of one percent of voters, and freeze out many more.”
In 2019, the Trump administration launched a global campaign to stop the criminalization of homosexuality, an effort led by then-U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell. He became the first openly gay person appointed to a Cabinet-level position in 2020 when Trump made him Acting Director of National Intelligence.
Grenell spoke at the RNC convention in 2020, a year in which Trump also picked up the endorsement of the Log Cabin Republicans; the group did not endorse him in 2016. Melania Trump also held a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser for the group in April.
…The former president has said he will roll back government programs backing transgender rights and punish doctors who provide gender-affirming care to minors. He frequently mocks trans athletes and has gone after schools for pushing "transgender insanity."
The Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest LGBTQ rights group, for instance, is planning on spending $15 million in key swing states to back President Joe Biden.
“This moment feels so important, not just for this election, but really what it means for the future of our community,” HRC President Kelley Robinson told NBC News. “We are seeing an incredible backlash in states across the country to the progress that we’ve made... that’s led by an opposition that doesn’t want us to have the rights we have today.”
At no point is Trump really advocating for less conservative policies, less reactionary policies or less divisive policies. He’s just advocating for how they’re talked about before the election. Once he’s in office… well the neo-Nazi Project 2025 documents lay out positions far more extreme than what Trump is cleansing from the RNC platform.
And thinking about that also made me recall a short essay that Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote, How Hitler Got To Power. After he was arrested in the Munich Putsch, Hitler moderated his language and image slightly. “Hitler,” she wrote, “had already learned from Mussolini the importance of making himself palatable to a larger public to gain entry into the political mainstream. In 1925 he promised to abide by the Weimar constitution to get the NSDAP ban lifted, and his speaking ban ended in 1927… [But h]aving waited a decade to get into office, Hitler had no interest in following Renzetti’s advice to ‘make your moves carefully, and don’t rush.’ The February Reichstag fire ensured that he didn’t have to. The building still smoked when Hindenburg issued an emergency decree ending freedoms of press, assembly, and more. Thousands of leftists were detained in prisons and warehouses while Dachau, the Reich’s first concentration camp, was being converted from an arms factory. In March came the Enabling Act, which allowed Hitler to rule without consulting the Reichstag or the President. In less than two months, he had secured the ability to govern without any checks on the exercise of his authority. This was likely no surprise to the Italian-Austrian journalist and writer Curzio Malaparte, whose 1931 book The Technique of the Coup d’Etat had predicted that Hitler would ‘corrupt, humble, and enslave the German people, in the name of German liberty, glory, and power’ if he got into office. Curzio Malaparte’s comment about Hitler’s relationship with his most faithful collaborators proved prescient and is a lesson for us today:
“He channels his brutality into humbling their pride, crushing their freedom of conscience, diminishing their individual merits and transforming his supporters into flunkeys stripped of all dignity. Like all dictators, Hitler loves only those whom he can despise.”
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