The unaddressed conundrum of ‘intelligent’ Republicans flanking the MAGA march.
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Recently, I attended an art opening named after a painting called Entre Chien et Loup — which references an ancient French expression, “between dogs and wolves.”
As the artist, Alexandre Lenoir, explained in an interview published in the Brooklyn Rail:
It refers to dusk, the moment of the day when the light goes down and you cannot recognize if the animal you see in front of you is a domestic one or wild one. In earlier times, this distinction was crucial because one protected the sheep, while the other preyed on them.
This suddenly came to mind as I thought through the formula by which Donald Trump stands to win the presidency again.
Believe it or not, putting aside Trump’s “know nothing, not gonna listen, don’t care, nyah nyah nyah” base, he cannot possibly win without the millions of those once known as “regular Republicans”: people who know plenty and presumably do “listen” — i.e., process new information that comes to their attention.
Many of these people have a college education, own businesses, make complex day-to-day decisions. Do they not understand what Trump is doing to this country? How is it possible, one wonders, for them not to assess Trump in a moderately thoughtful manner, and comprehend just how dangerous he is? Why have they failed to grasp that he is certainly no guard dog but a vicious predator, wreaking havoc on everything and everyone?
And how is it they have evaded any serious scrutiny for their own shocking irresponsibility — for their past and potential future role in the destruction of their country?
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Prominent people from their ranks — Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, most of Trump’s own Cabinet members, former RNC Chair Michael Steele — have stepped up and taken strong stands against Trump.
But so far, their warnings have mostly fallen on deaf ears, if polls showing a virtual tie in state after state that will decide the election are any indication.
It’s hard to know precisely why supposedly smart, functional human beings still don’t get it.
One explanation is the effectiveness of the Trump campaign’s continuous efforts to distract from damaging and ominous disclosures through ludicrous and nonsensical counterattacks.
For example, the leak of JD Vance’s private message criticizing Trump’s economic performance in his first term — “Trump thoroughly failed to deliver” — has been pretty much drowned out by Trump’s calls to “kill the messenger.”
That is, make the leak the thing people should be outraged about (which is comically reminiscent of their outrage at Vance’s being fact-checked during the VP debate). This is a neat way to bury a damning admission by Trump’s own running mate that he was terrible for the economy in the past.
Perhaps rational, intelligent Republicans did not notice these deceptions — but there is no way they could have missed the stream of lies and disinformation that Trump pumped out to take advantage of the series of catastrophic weather disasters. They also must realize that his ridiculous attacks underline the failures of Trump and the GOP itself to do anything meaningful about global warming and its increasingly obvious consequences.
The particulars are probably well known to you: Trump’s outrageous fabrications that the federal government and Democratic leadership were “going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas,” even “blocking people and money” to those areas; that FEMA offered no more than $750 in total to people whose homes were washed away. And “Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants.”
Even Neil Cavuto of Fox News said of Trump’s claims, “It is bull. And it cannot be tolerated.”
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I’d like to see some of these traditional Republicans questioned under the bright spotlight available to legacy media — like, say, 60 Minutes, a show that many in their cohort traditionally watched — on how they can support someone who so conspicuously lies to exploit a tragedy?
So what is their story? Are they not aware that Trump is a reckless fraud who is a clear and present danger to them, their families, and their businesses?
Maybe they don’t care as long as Trump promises to reduce their taxes? Or perhaps that’s just one part of it?
But even the conventional raison d’etre of the GOP — lower taxes and smaller government — doesn’t seem relevant these days. According to a survey from earlier this year, 63 percent of Republicans actually support raising taxes on big corporations and the wealthy.
If this is true — and paradoxically, the MAGA base, which is largely lower-income, presumably supports these tax increases on the wealthiest — then presumably many old-line Republicans agree too.
This then raises the question: What is driving their support for Trump?
An entire propaganda machine is at work 24/7 to convince Republicans that a Trump loss would result in a tidal wave of brown murderers roaming the streets, Christians being persecuted, unisex bathrooms installed in all public buildings, and boys playing basketball with girls — in other words, that the country they know and love will no longer exist.
But do the more educated Republicans believe this?
I have not seen much exploration by legacy media on what makes this sizable but ignored element tick. One notable exception was an intriguing effort by The New York Times to break GOP voters into six distinct groups.
Unfortunately, that article came out more than a year ago. But now is the time for these inquiries.
Certainly, the less educated, more closed-minded, rage-filled, and often buffoonish MAGA base has been thoroughly scrutinized, analyzed — and satirized. And some attention has been focused on the one-percenters and their excesses.
But the millions of less angry, reasonably well-off, relatively well-dressed regular Republicans blandly slip by, out of the spotlight. They don’t attract attention, so their presence may be rendered practically invisible to the legacy media.
With little effort to hold up the mirror to them, with few asking the pointed questions I’ve framed, it is shockingly easy for this whole cohort to evade the self-reflection that could bring them up short in their willingness to join the Trump parade.
Meanwhile, they continue to shuffle quietly behind the noisy MAGA cultists toward the looming demise of what George Washington called our nation’s “great experiment” in democracy.
