January 17, 2021: A Rotten Seed that Took Root in the Republican Party

 

1/17/21: Having had several days to ponder the sad state of the Republican Party, Sen. Ben Sasse offers harsh assessment of what went wrong on January 6.

 

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“It is the blossoming of a rotten seed that took root in the Republican Party.” 

Sen. Ben Sasse

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The violence that Americans witnessed – and that might recur in the coming days – is not a protest gone awry or the work of “a few bad apples.” It is the blossoming of a rotten seed that took root in the Republican Party some time ago and has been nourished by treachery, poor political judgment, and cowardice.

 

When Trump leaves office, my party faces a choice: We can dedicate ourselves to defending the Constitution and perpetuating our best American institutions and traditions, or we can be a party of conspiracy theories, cable-news fantasies, and the ruin that comes with them. We can be the party of Eisenhower, or the party of the conspiracist Alex Jones. We can applaud officer [Eugene] Goodman or side with the mob he outwitted. We cannot do both.

 

The conservative swaths of this media landscape were primed for Trump’s “Stop the steal” lie, which lit the fuse for the January 6 riot. For nine weeks, the president consistently lied that he had “won in a landslide.” Despite the fact that his lawyers and allies were laughed out of court more than 60 times, he spread one conspiracy theory after another across television, radio, and the web. For anyone who wanted to hear that Trump won, a machine of grifters was turning clicks into cash by telling their audiences what they wanted to hear. The liars got rich, their marks got angry, and things got out of control.

 

And that, dear America, is a nearly pitch-perfect assessment of what went wrong on Capitol Hill, and whom we should blame.

 

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“Any reasonable person could see the potential for violence.” 

GOOD REPUBLICANS, and we should remember there are many, continue to come to grips with what has happened under Trump’s rule. Former GOP Congressman Evan McMullin tweets:  

Rand Paul warns that if Senate Republicans convict Trump, a third of the party will break off. So be it. The GOP faces an inescapable choice between a future of extremism, treachery and losses, or of truth, principle and leadership. Both paths are difficult, but only one is good.

 

Rep. Tom Rice, one of ten House Republicans to vote to impeach the president releases a statement explaining his vote. 

Under the strict definition of the law, I don’t know if the President’s speech last Wednesday morning amounted to incitement of a riot, but any reasonable person could see the potential for violence.

 

Once the violence began, when the Capitol was under siege, when the Capitol Police were being beaten and killed, and when the Vice President and the Congress were being locked down, the President was watching and tweeted about the Vice President’s lack of courage.

 

For hours while the riot continued, the President communicated only on Twitter and offered only weak requests for restraint.

 

…It is only by the grace of God and the blood of the Capitol Police that the death toll was not much, much higher.

 

It has been a week since so many were injured, the United States Capitol was ransacked, and six people were killed, including two police officers. Yet, the President has not addressed the nation to ask for calm. He has not visited the injured and grieving. He has not offered condolences. Yesterday in a press briefing at the border, he said his comments were “perfectly appropriate.”

 

I have backed this President through thick and thin for four years. I campaigned for him and voted for him twice. But, this utter failure is inexcusable.

 

Sen. Sasse later adds to his criticism of those who have been playing with matches and flamethrowers. Writing in The Atlantic, he warns: “Until last week, many party leaders and consultants thought they could preach the Constitution while winking at QAnon. They can’t. The GOP must reject conspiracy theories or be consumed by them. Now is the time to decide what this party is about.” 

In case anyone missed the point, he singled out newly-elected GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, poster child for QAnon folly, and offered succinct assessment. Greene, he warned, is “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.”

 

“If the GOP is to have a future outside the fever dreams of internet trolls,” the senator adds, “we have to call out falsehoods and conspiracy theories unequivocally. We have to repudiate people who peddle those lies.”

 

Doug Leone, a billionaire backer of President Trump renounces his support in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot. “After last week’s horrific events, President Trump lost many of his supporters, including me,” he explains. “The actions of the President and other rally speakers were responsible for inciting the rioters. We need to find the best way to move forward as a country, get behind our newly-elected President, and start working on the many difficult issues facing America.” 

He and his wife Patti had donated $700,000 to the president’s reelection. Money they’d clearly like back.

 

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WE REALIZE THAT PRESIDENT TRUMP is about to leave office the same way he came in: as the most ill-informed dope ever to take up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. While he was busy howling about a stolen election that there was no proof was stolen, NASA used plenty of evidence to report that 2020 was, by the slimmest of margins, the hottest year, globally, ever. 

That’s NASA laying out the facts.

President Trump and the Coal Miner's Granddaughter

At a March 2016 campaign rally, Hillary Clinton told her audience what was going to happen if she won. “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” she said. 

At that point, it was already clear that Donald Trump was the most loathsome man ever to run for the nation’s highest office. I knew Secretary Clinton meant she was going to focus on clean energy. Still, it was a tone deaf comment and I thought to myself, If I was a coal miner, I’d probably vote for Trump too.

I was reminded of that incident again one recent morning. I was driving over to my son’s house because I watch my three-year-old granddaughter on Fridays. On the radio NPR was doing an interview with an Ohio miner. He said Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord gave him a “sense of security.” He had “bills to pay.” He only wanted to provide for his family.

I thought he sounded like any good family man. He cared about his wife and children, just as the rest of us care about ours. And that’s a fundamental element in this story. The problem is this tale doesn’t terminate with one coal miner, or one generation, or one snowball (as we shall see).

This story encompasses one planet.

The decision this week by President Trump, who has no better grip on climate science than my granddaughter—and she can be excused because she’s three!—ignores that final element, that one planet. In my mind, if you don’t sympathize with that Ohio miner something is wrong with you. If he loses his place in the mines, or a thousand peers lose theirs, you should hope he wins the lottery and they all get hired by some good company that will still go ahead and pay them $25 or $30 per hour.

(As a card-carrying liberal, I’m for higher wages for the average worker.)

Unfortunately, our country finds itself saddled with an intellectual dwarf in the White House, a man who thinks not in terms of planets but snowballs. 

That means the coal miner’s granddaughter, and Trump’s grandchildren, and yours, and mine, are all going to pay for his gross stupidity.

Mark Twain once joked that everybody complained about the weather but nobody ever did anything about it. There’s a difference, though between climate and weather which Trump seems incapable of processing, despite his constant complaining.

Suppose you went outside one day and the temperature was twelve degrees above normal. Would that be proof global warming and/or climate change was occurring? You would be a fool to argue a position based on a single day’s weather. Yet that has been the level of sophistication Trump has brought to the topic. Sadly, the man in the Oval Office believes in James Inhofe’s snowball.

If you are not familiar with Inhofe, or his snowball, you can be sure, together, they represented complete and willful ignorance. In the winter of 2015, during a cold snap following a blizzard in the nation’s capital, Inhofe carried a snowball into the U.S. Senate. This was not a random snowball, packed by a lawmaker from Oklahoma, where snow is rare and (according to scientists) earthquakes related to fracking are common.

No. This was a proof.

Inhofe stepped to the podium on a cold January day and offered up juvenile analysis: “In case we have forgotten, because we keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record, I ask the chair, do you know what this is?” Inhofe directed his remarks to Sen. Bill Cassidy, presiding over a mostly empty Senate chamber. A good guess at that moment might have been: A moron about to offer up a stunt to fool other morons? Alas, Cassidy, a fellow Republican, was not prepared to comment. In dramatic fashion Inhofe pulled out a plastic bag. He opened it. Inside was a snowball. Inhofe removed it. “It’s a snowball,” he explained, pretty much stating the obvious, even for any morons listening at the time. “And it’s just from outside here. So it’s very, very cold out. Very unseasonable.”

“We hear the perpetual headline that 2014 has been the warmest year on record,” Inhofe continued. He was referring to a report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). “But now the script has flipped,” he insisted.

Only the script hadn’t flipped.

It still hasn’t.

NASA and NOAA were relying on global data, the kind of data Trump has routinely ignored. According to their records 2014 was the hottest year on record. Not one day. Not one city. Not one fool with one snowball.

One planet.

You could go to the NASA website. You could pull it up on the internet. It’s as easy as packing a bit of snow.

For years, however, Trump has been too lazy or too busy grabbing women to bother with any science. He started seeing snowballs in 2011 when he first plunked down in the camp of the willfully ignorant. That fall he tweeted: “It snowed over 4 inches this past weekend in New York City. It is still October. So much for Global Warming.”

No, sir. 

That would be weather.

In the winter of 2012 he looked outside and spotted Frosty the Snowman, still not melting. “It’s freezing and snowing in New York—we need global warming!”

Again: that would be weather.

In 2013 he used slightly better evidence, mentioning trends for an entire month and an entire country: “Looks like the U.S. will be having the coldest March since 1996—global warming anyone?????????”

Only that still wasn’t climate. The year, itself, globally, proved one of the hottest on record.

Trump’s tiny toes turned blue again in December and it was back to complaining about weather, but not doing anything about it. “Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee—I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!” he tweeted.

In 2014 he offered up another nugget of Trumpian wisdom: “Baltimore just set a record for the coldest day in March in a long recorded history -4 degrees. Other places likewise. Global warming con!”

He even backed up Inhofe in January 2015 with this fact-deprived, flailing stab at scientific thinking: “It’s record cold all over the country and world—where the hell is global warming, we need some fast!”

So, was it a hoax? Was 2014 the hottest year ever? 

NASA said it was.

What happened in 2015, the year that began in promising fashion, with James Inhofe’s snowball? Again, relying of worldwide data, from all four seasons, five oceans and seven continents, scientists said it was the new hottest year on record.

NASA reported.

The year did end on a hopeful note when the Paris Climate Accord was ratified and signed by 195 nations. It wasn’t a perfect document, because no human document is. But because the danger was clear, nations united.

By chance, six months before, Trump had opened his campaign for president. As one might have expected, he continued to display a complete lack of understanding of simplest science. At one point he sat down with loyalists at Fox News and said: “Well, I think the climate change is just a very, very expensive form of tax.” People who studied it were probably only in it to make “a lot of money.”

Then the numbers were tabulated again—by dedicated men and women at NASA and NOAA. Once more, 2016 turned out to be the new hottest year on record. In fact, sixteen of the hottest seventeen had occurred in this young century. That’s why 194 nations still support the Paris agreement.

As for the United States, we now link arms in solidarity only with rogue nations Nicaragua and Syria.

In the end, we should sympathize with the coal miner and his plight. We should do what we can to help all workers in a similar predicament. But if we blow this battle, as President Trump seems intent on doing, we must surely fear for the coal miner’s granddaughter. 

I know I fear for my grandchildren. 

You should fear for yours.