Yesterday, while everyone was sitting around biting their nails over Super Tuesday, Greg Sargent informed his readers that new polling shows that “large swaths of voters appear to have little awareness of some of Trump’s clearest statements of hostility to democracy and intent to impose authoritarian rule in a second term, from his vow to be ‘dictator for one day’ to his vague threat to enact ‘termination’ of provisions in the Constitution.” Sargent sees that as an opportunity for the Biden campaign “to make voters aware of them— and the polling also finds that these statements, when aired to respondents, shift them against Trump.”
That’s good, but one person who is certainly aware of Trump’s deficiencies in regard to democracy and the Constitution is Mitch McConnell and, according to the Associated Press, he’s getting ready to actually endorse Trump. Lisa Mascaro wrote that though McConnell called Señor T “morally responsible” for the insurrection, his “political team and Trump’s campaign have been in talks over not only a possible endorsement of the former president but a strategy to unite Republicans up and down the party’s ticket ahead of the November election.” Trump and McConnell haven’t spoken since McConnell declared Biden the legitimate winner in 2020.
Mascaro wrote that “In the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, key Republicans, including McConnell, signaled unequivocally they were done with Trump. In a scathing speech during the Senate impeachment trial on charges Trump incited the insurrection at the Capitol, McConnell decried Trump’s intemperate language and the ‘entire manufactured atmosphere of looming catastrophe’ and ‘wild myths’ about a stolen election. ‘The leader of the free world cannot spend weeks thundering that shadowy forces are stealing our country and then feign surprise when people believe him and do reckless things,’ said McConnell after the mob siege… The two have traded harsh words since even before McConnell’s 2021 speech, with Trump deriding the now 82-year-old as an ‘Old Crow.’ But in recent weeks Trump has refrained from name-calling McConnell, or using racial slurs against McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, the former Trump Transportation Secretary, who resigned in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack.”
Other Republicans remember who Trump is every single day. Yesterday, William Kristol wrote that he went so far as to vote in the GOP primary just so he could cast a ballot against Trump. “I hadn’t voted in a Republican primary since 2016. I had to steel myself to ask for a ballot for my former party, one that is about to overwhelmingly nominate Trump for a third consecutive time. But I did so. And I cast my vote for Nikki Haley... and looking forward to participating in the Democratic primary for our House seat in June.) What’s next for Nikki?”
Will she take Sarah Longwell’s advice, offered a week ago after Haley acknowledged that it was “very possible” the Republican party had shifted decisively away from her views? “Burn the boats, Nikki,” Sarah said. “There’s nothing to go back to.”
Will Nikki follow in the footsteps of Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador who, legend has it, burned his ships in 1519 so that he and his men would have to stay in the New World, to conquer or die?
A couple of months ago, I would have predicted that, after losing the nomination, Haley would choose to sail timidly back to Trump’s Republican party. I think she expected to do that. She expected to go back home again.
But I no longer believe she expects to go back. I think it’s more likely she’ll embrace the logic that increasingly shaped her rhetoric and animated her campaign. I think she’ll refuse to endorse Trump.
Now, there are many different paths to take after not endorsing Trump. Haley’s made it clear she won’t support Joe Biden. So she could simply sit out the rest of the 2024 campaign.
Or Haley could choose to continue to make the case against Trump in 2024. She could even engage in energetic efforts to stop Trump from winning in November. She could even consider participating in an independent candidacy, her own or someone else.
And normal Americans less obsessed with politics— or repulsed by politics? Yesterday, the NY Times asked if Americans have a collective amnesia about Trump. “Polling,” wrote Jennifer Medina Reid Epstein, “suggests voters’ views on Trump’s policies and his presidency have improved in the rearview mirror. In interviews, voters often have a hazy recall of one of the most tumultuous periods in modern politics. Social scientists say that’s unsurprising. In an era of hyper-partisanship, there’s little agreed-upon collective memory, even about events that played out in public… While Trump is staking his campaign on a nostalgia for a time not so long ago, Biden’s campaign is counting on voters to refocus on Trump, hoping they will recall why they denied him a second term.”
For now, the erosion of time appears to be working in Trump’s favor, as swing voters base their support on their feelings about the present, not the past. A New York Times/Siena College poll conducted late last month found 10 percent of Biden’s 2020 voters now say they support Trump, while virtually none of Trump’s voters had flipped to Biden. The poll found Trump’s policies were viewed far more favorably than Biden’s.
“What’s been clear for a while, especially among swing voters, is that Biden is just more front and center,” said Sarah Longwell, a Republican consultant who opposes Trump and has conducted dozens of focus groups with conservative and swing voters in recent months. “They know about what they don’t like about Biden, and they have forgotten what they don’t like about Trump.”
Polls suggest that Trump has also made inroads with voters who may have been too young to remember his first term in detail. The nearly 4.2 million 18-year-olds who are newly eligible to vote this year were in middle school when Trump was first elected. Polls show they have soured on Biden in part because of his support for Israel in the war in Gaza, saying they favor Trump on the issue, even though Trump was also a staunch ally to Israel while in office.
And, as James Risen wrote this week in The Intercept, hardly a bastion of Biden support, as bad as Biden is on Israel-Palestine, Trump is worse. And so is the GOP as an entity. “Trump,” he wrote, “is a big fan of war crimes, especially against Muslims. During his first term, he intervened on behalf of Special Operations Chief Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL platoon leader convicted of posing for a photo with the body of dead Iraqi; another SEAL team member told investigators that Gallagher was ‘freaking evil,’ but Trump said at a political rally that he was one of ‘our great fighters.’ Trump also pardoned Blackwater contractors convicted of killing Iraqi civilians in a wild shooting spree in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. There is no chance that he would try to stop Israel from indiscriminately killing Palestinians.”
Republicans’ support for Israel is matched or exceeded by their hatred for Palestinians. Rep. Ryan Zinke, a Montana Republican who was secretary of the interior in the Trump administration, has proposed legislation that would prevent Palestinians from entering the United States and trigger the mass deportation of those already here. It would ban those holding passports issued by the Palestinian Authority from obtaining U.S. visas, while mandating the removal of Palestinian passport holders already living here.
Many Republicans express their unwavering support for Israel in biblical and apocalyptic terms. Rep. Mike Johnson, a Christian evangelical, made his first public appearance after being elected House speaker last October at a conference of the Republican Jewish Coalition, where he said that “God is not done with Israel.”
It is dangerous to get between evangelicals and their theology. Trump recognizes their importance to his political success, and his support for Israel is a way to satisfy his evangelical Christian base. “No president has done more for Israel than I have,” Trump claimed in 2022. “Our wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of this than the people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the U.S.”
At the 2016 Republican convention, Trump pushed through a provision in the party platform ending GOP support for a two-state solution and a Palestinian state. Now, Trump and Republicans agree with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he says that Israel can no longer agree to a two-state solution. “In any future arrangement … Israel needs security control over all territory west of the Jordan,” Netanyahu said in January. “This collides with the idea of sovereignty. What can you do? This truth I tell to our American friends, and I put the brakes on the attempt to coerce us to a reality that would endanger the state of Israel.”
That’s fine with Trump and Republicans like Brian Mast.
Although the Biden administration has bent over backward to support Israel, the president has said repeatedly in recent weeks that an independent Palestinian state is still possible. What’s more, political unrest within the Democratic Party is starting to have an impact on Biden, forcing changes in the White House’s approach to Israel. Over the weekend, Vice President Kamala Harris called for an immediate ceasefire; such new pressure from the Biden administration appears to be working, as Israel and Hamas now seem closer to an agreement.
Trump would never face such pro-Palestinian pressure from within the Republican Party. He and his MAGA cult of Christian nationalists would never force Israel to accept a ceasefire — or a Palestinian state. Mast has harshly attacked Biden for continuing to support a two-state solution, dismissing the idea by saying that “a Palestinian state would be run by terrorists.”
There are limits to Biden’s support for Netanyahu. Trump and the Republican Party have none.
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