Letters from an American - October 24, 2024

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

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October 24th, 2024. Trump's threat to use the military on the enemy within, along with the recent statements of General John Kelly and other members of Trump's administration who say he is a fascist, have fed growing concern that Trump's re-election could spark a deadly conflict between MAGA Republicans and those they perceive as their enemies. But there has been far less attention paid to the civil war within the Republican Party. On the Hugh Hewitt show this morning, Trump boasted that he had taken the Republican Party and made it into an entirely different party. The Republican Party is a very big, powerful party. Before, it stood.

It was an elitist party with real stiffs running it. Trump's analysis of his effect on the party is right. In 2015, the party had been controlled for years by a small group of leaders who wanted to carve the U.S. government back to its size and activity of the years before the 1930s, slashing regulations on business and cutting the social safety net so that they could cut taxes. But their numbers were small, so to stay in power, they relied on the votes of the racist and sexist reactionaries who didn't like civil rights. Once he took office in 2017, Trump put the base of the party in the driver's seat. Using the same techniques that had boosted Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, he attacked immigrants, Black Americans, and people

of color and promised to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision protecting abortion rights. After his defense of the participants in the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, he began to turn his followers into a movement by encouraging them to engage in violence. In the following years, Trump's hold on his voting base enabled him to take over the Republican Party, pushing the older Republican establishment aside. In March 2024, he took over the Republican National Committee itself, installing a loyalist and his own daughter-in-law, Laura Trump, at its head and adjusting its finances so that they primarily benefited him. But while older leaders were happy to use Trump's base to keep the party in power, the two factions were never in sync. Established Republican leaders'

goal was to preside over a largely unregulated market-driven economy. But MAGA Republicans want a weak government only with regard to foreign enemies, another place where they part company with established Republicans. Instead, they want a strong government to impose religious rules. Rather than leaving companies alone to react to markets, they want them to shape their businesses around MAGA ideology, denying LGBTQ plus rights, for example. In 2024, those tensions are stronger. Trump's promise to build a tariff wall around the country contradicts the established Republican's reliance on free trade. His vow to deport 20 million immigrants threatens to devastate entire sectors of the economy. Both plans are widely panned by economists. Yesterday, 23 Nobel Prize-winning economists warned that Trump's economic plans would lead to higher prices, larger deficits, and greater inequality.

On Morning Joe today, economic analyst Steve Ratner noted that Trump's plans would cut the gross domestic product in the U.S. by 8.9%, creating a severe recession or depression. MAGA Republicans are fiercely loyal to Trump, but it's not clear how much they offer to those trying to get elected in more moderate districts. Extremist abortion bans have fired up significant opposition to Republican candidates, and that opposition does not appear to be weakening. opposition to Republican candidates, and that opposition does not appear to be weakening. My wife was miscarrying and bleeding out, John Legend said today on the podcast of Broncos legend Shannon Sharp. Her life was in danger, and for the government to say, oh, we need to evaluate this to make sure you're sufficiently dying before you can have an abortion. That's what they're saying in all these states where they have Trump abortion bans. Not your doctor, not your family, the government.

No, stay out of it. We don't need the government to be involved in it. And if the government's involved, that means the police and the district attorney are involved in medical decisions. That's crazy. He is killing us, Mika Brzezinski said this morning on Morning Joe. He is putting us at risk. He is making us afraid to have babies. He is putting our reproductive health at risk. And some women have died already because of this. What's happening with women right now is real and it is playing out across America. MAGA extremists in the House of Representatives did the party as a whole no favors when they took control of the chamber in 2023 and made it virtually impossible for the Republicans to govern. Party members took

weeks to agree on a House speaker and then threw him out, marking the first time in U.S. history that a party has thrown out its own Speaker. With MAGA extremists unwilling to compromise on their demands, the Republicans were unable to pass almost any legislation at all, including appropriations bills and the long overdue Farm Bill. Their determination not to yield an inch continues. A Trump-endorsed Republican candidate challenging a Democratic incumbent in New York could not name a single Democrat she would be willing to work with if she is elected. These people are not fit to govern, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat of New York, posted today. MAGA Republicans are already signaling their intent

to expand their power in the House should Republicans retain control over it. Ohio Representative Jim Jordan appears to be considering making a bid for House leadership, while others have their eye on committee chairs. Joe Perticone of The Bulwark explored today how Trump's already stuffing House GOP normies in the locker as they feel obliged to defend everything he does, even when his former White House chief of staff says he is a fascist. But the struggle between the Republican factions has not gone away in the past few years. Indeed, it appears to be escalating as evidence mounts that Trump will not be able to continue to lead the party. Earlier this month, 230 doctors publicly called on Trump to release his medical records. Trump is falling concerningly short of any standard of

fitness for office and displaying alarming characteristics of declining acuity, they wrote. Today, 233 mental health professionals organized by conservative lawyer George Conway's anti-psycho PAC warned both that Trump appears to be showing signs of cognitive decline that urgently cry out for a full neurological workup and that his malignant narcissism makes him grossly unfit for leadership. But if Trump's grip is slipping, who will take over the party? In a new biography of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican of Kentucky, by Michael Tackett of the Associated Press, obtained by CNN, McConnell condemned the MAGA movement and blamed Trump for making it hard for the Republican Party to compete. He called Trump not very smart, irascible, nasty, just about

every quality you would not want somebody to have. He also went after Florida Senator Rick Scott for his leadership of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the party's campaign arm. Trump loyalist Senator Mike Lee, a Republican of Utah, promptly called McConnell's comments indefensible. Scott said he was shocked that McConnell would attack a fellow Republican senator and the Republican nominee for president just two weeks out from an election. Technology elites, including Elon Musk, who is pouring money into Trump's campaign, and Peter Thiel, who backs Trump's running mate J.D. Vance, also appear to be making a play to control the Republican Party, challenging both the established Republicans and the MAGAs. And then there are the Republican voters, some of whom are abandoning the MAGA

Republicans, who are now openly embracing fascism. Today, Republican State Senator Rob Cowles of Green Bay, Wisconsin, who has served for almost 42 years, announced that he would vote for Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris. David Holt, the Republican mayor of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, also indicated he would be casting his ballot for Harris. In 1880, when the Democrats went off the extremist cliff, voters forced it to move to the center. In 1879, after the bitterly contested 1876 election, voters gave Democrats control of Congress. So convinced were Democrats that the American people backed their determination to overthrow Reconstruction, they refused to fund the government unless Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes

pulled the federal government out of the southern states. They also tried to get a federal pension for Confederate President Jefferson Davis. If this is not revolution, Civil War veteran, House Minority Leader James A. Garfield, a Republican of Ohio said, which if persisted in will destroy the government, then I am wholly wrong in my conception of both the word and the thing. Observers had expected the 1880 election to be a romp for the Democrats, who reiterated their demands in their party platform. But voters backed Garfield's defense of the country and of black rights, and elected him to the White House. The unexpected loss prompted the Democrats to toss aside their former Confederate leaders

and shift toward the northern cities. For president in 1884, they backed former New York Governor Grover Cleveland, who had broadened black appointments to office and desegregated the New York City police force, and who had worked closely with New York Assembly Minority Leader Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, to reform the worst abuses of the industrial system. Cleveland won with the help of a significant numbers of crossover Republican voters, dubbed mugwumps, thereby securing the roots of the modern Democratic Party. This is the old world.