Someone once asked me who I thought would be the Democratic equivalent of Donald Trump would be. My answer: Kanye West. He’s world-famous, extremely wealthy, narcissistic, unstable, politically ambitious, lacks any self-awareness and is manifestly unfit — except it turned out that he’s actually a right-wing anti-semite. I might have answered Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at one time, except he’s now endorsed Donald Trump. I’m sure there must be some truly crazy lefty out there who would be a bridge too far for many Democrats but that combination of authoritarianism, pathological character flaws, overwhelming ignorance and demagogic talent seems to inevitably drift toward the right these days.
That is not to say that voters aren’t always subject to emotional attachment to their leaders in both parties. In recent decades, Republicans practically worshipped Ronald Reagan and Democrats were head over heels for Barack Obama. There was even a time when even George W. Bush was practically deified.
Still, the Trump phenomenon is different from those examples because he is so unfit for office that it has shaken many Americans’ belief in democracy. How could our system allow such a person to dominate our political culture for more than eight years and be within striking distance of the presidency again after having been roundly defeated in the last election?
I thought about that as I watched the Democratic convention last week and a small group of Republicans and former Republicans took the stage to speak out against their former president and exhort their erstwhile comrades to vote for Kamala Harris instead. It wasn’t the first time members of the opposing party spoke at a convention. I think of Jeane Kirkpatrick, a Democratic foreign policy expert who drifted into the right wing with those other Democratic apostates known as the neoconservatives. At the 1984 Republican National Convention, she gave the keynote speech, calling the Democrats the “Blame America First crowd” for their alleged lack of patriotism. Back in 2004, former Georgia Gov. Zell Miller, a Democrat, also gave the keynote speech at the GOP convention to re-nominate President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. It was brutal. Still in the throes of the Iraq war, he condemned John Kerry and the Democratic Party as weak on national security.
2024 wasn’t the first time that Republicans spoke at a Democratic convention either. In 2020 former GOP Govs. John Kasich of Ohio and Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey gave speeches exhorting voters not to vote for Donald Trump. This year we heard from former Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger, former Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham. former Georgia Lieutenant Gov. Geoff Duncan and a few others as well.
Whether it’s because they have Fox News brain rot and are convinced that Antifa is the greatest threat America faces, as Bill Barr does, or that loyalty to the GOP brand is paramount, as McConnell does, they are simply incapable of reacting seriously to the threat.
But it seems to me that the big difference between these GOP apostates and the Democrats who left the party to join the Reagan Revolution or back George W. Bush is the fact that the Democratic apostates left their party over policy differences. They didn’t like what they saw as the leftward ideological drift of the Democrats so they moved over to the Republicans, There were plenty of voters who went that way too, especially during the Reagan years.
But the Republicans who’ve spoken at the last two Democratic conventions have done so almost exclusively out of disgust with Donald Trump, personally, and his lack of ideological principles. It’s true that there was some talk about the Democrats being better on foreign policy with support for Ukraine and opposition to authoritarian tyrants like Putin and Kim Jong Un, but for the most part, their entreaties to vote for Harris were simply based upon the need to defeat Trump because of his bad character, criminality and dangerous unfitness. Some even went so far as to say that Harris needs to be elected in order to save the Republican Party from the MAGA cult.
These people represent the Never Trump faction which has set ideology aside for the moment in order to create a popular front to defeat Trump. Some of them are openly endorsing Kamala Harris, telling their followers that she is preferable to Trump in some ways on issues but mostly arguing that policy differences just don’t matter at the moment because the threat of Trump is so dire.
But they aren’t the only Republicans who know the threat exists. Former Attorney General Bill Barr knows that Trump tried to overturn a legitimate election. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell understands that Donald Trump was a disaster as president. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley made it clear that she thinks Donald Trump is unfit to hold office. Yet they are all voting for him anyway. Whether it’s because they have Fox News brain rot and are convinced that Antifa is the greatest threat America faces, as Bill Barr does, or that loyalty to the GOP brand is paramount, as McConnell does, they are simply incapable of reacting seriously to the threat.
Saying they will write in someone else’s name, as former Vice President Mike Pence and former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton, are saying they will do is a silly affectation. And those others who have written books and given interviews spilling the beans from the inside on what an utter catastrophe Trump’s first term was and yet are refusing to step up and publicly endorse Harris or even go on TV to condemn Trump, the only reasonable explanation is that they are, as The Bulwark’s Tim Miller writes, “chickenshit.” Apparently, they can’t be bothered.
Miller calls out people like former White House Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Kelly, former defense Sec. Gen Jim Mattis, former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coates. Former Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, it should be noted, is currently pushing his new book declaring that Russian President Vladimir Putin had Trump wrapped around his little finger. (Yet he went on TV this weekend and absurdly claimed that he believes that writing his book will persuade Trump not to let Putin do that in the future.) As Miller writes:
There are two options for president. On the one hand you have a woman who just presented herself as a mainstream Democrat who plans to respect and uphold the fundamental American political traditions at home and abroad.
On the other you have a candidate who you have acknowledged is the most flawed person you have ever encountered, a danger to the country, and an existential threat to our system of government—a convicted criminal, an abuser of women, and a moron. How in God’s name do you justify silence in the face of that choice? This is not a close call!
It is not a close call.
I don’t know if I will ever be faced with a situation like this. But I would like to think that if some famous loon were to capture the imagination of Democratic voters and he or she threatened the future of the nation, I would have the guts to oppose him or her and throw my lot in with the saner other party. Anyone’s first responsibility should be to stop a dangerous demagogue and argue about ideology and policies later. If you don’t do that, as Trump himself likes to say, “you won’t have a country anymore.”
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