Look in vain in this report for a Congressional Republican to stick his head out of the bunker, where Republicans who expect another primary election in their future hide, and to offer a comment. “Trump’s plan” – to transport migrants detained at the border to sanctuary cities, like so much else in the Trump (and McConnell) era, is a reckless assault on democratic norms and the rule of law.
In my first post in this blog (July 7, 2018), “Is this the most divided you have ever seen the United States?” I commented on the answer to that question offered by an experienced journalist (Jamie Dupree): “My answer is always – no, this is not the most divided that our country has been, even in my lifetime.” He justified his response by pointing to the U.S. in 1968.
In that banner year we endured a losing war with high casualties, the My Lai massacre, a military draft, brutal clashes in the streets between protesters and police, and two political assassinations (Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy). So, why did I dissent from the journalist’s sanguine view that things were worse then than a half century later?
Because in 1968, we elected a president, Richard Nixon, who – however you assess his campaigns and administration – strove to be president of the whole country: Republicans and Democrats, rural and urban, partisans and swing voters, working folks and the GOP donor class. Richard Nixon was not ignorant or indifferent to public policy, to enacting laws and overseeing federal agencies to benefit the nation as a whole. He had a conception of the presidency that is beyond the ken of Donald Trump. And the Republican Party that Nixon led had not yet become the outlier – the scorched-earth, win at all costs group – that it is today.
Trump is presiding over a factional government. That’s the bottom line for a president who only plays to his base. As I said in that first post: “The stubborn refusal of our president to embrace America whole – all of our citizens; our country’s abiding national interest; what we share in common, not what divides us – sets this era apart from the divisive years that Dupree recalls.”
To reiterate: it’s not just Trump. The Republican Party has his back, with no more than occasional murmurs of displeasure (almost invariably fashioned to be absolutely ineffectual).
Hat tip to Josh Marshall for flagging this story (“MSM Journalism Can’t Handle Trump”), with the observation that the article is emblematic of “the problems MSM/bothsidesist journalism faces in the age of the Trump.”*
Update: *In the 8 or 10 hours since I saw Marshall’s initial post, he has revised it and edited out most of his commentary, including the sentence that contained the quote immediately above. I’ll still give him credit for alerting me to the WaPo story describing a “plan” to punish political opponents by a man who is unfit for the presidency.