Saturday Late Morning Tabs
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, January 4, 2025
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17 comments
- Via Court Watch: ‘Largest Seizure of Homemade Explosives in FBI History’ made in Virginia.
- Via The Atlantic: Thermometers Are Hot Garbage.
- Via CNN: Cruise ships hit by worst year for stomach bugs in over a decade, CDC data reveals. Gotta admit, every time I see those water-park-equipped cruise ships on commercials, I just see one giant norovirus delivery system.
- Via Politico: Chris Sununu still believes the GOP is bigger than Donald Trump. And Chris Sununu has been a massive disappointment on this general topic. Yes, the GOP will survive Trump, but the notion that everything will go back to normal once he is gone is a mistake–not to mention the cost of supporting Trump as a general matter.
- Will Bunch, writing at the Philadelphia Inquirer, is not impressed with AG Garland: The Biden mistake that blew up America.
- Shane Harris has a profile of Trump’s nominee to run the CIA in The Atlantic: The Rise Of John Ratcliffe.
- Via Politico: Trans rights to be marquee fight for House Republicans. And, of course, that is a fight against trans rights, to be clear.
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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I kinda get the point Sununu is trying to make. After Trump, the party will probably stop being overtly vulgar and overtly racist, and overtly advocating violence against other Americans. And that’s all Sununu and the other never-Trumps care about. As long as the party stops being an obvious dumpster fire, they’ll be fine with it.
He’s discouraged by what the party looks like, not what it is.
Sununu has a record here, and it’s servility and lies.
While it’s possible that the Republican Party, such as it is, will present a less overtly racist and authoritarian face in the future, I don’t think there is any reason to believer that Trump exiting the scene automatically makes that true, or even likely. The most important lesson of the Trump error with regard to political parties is that if your candidate selection is based entirely on a widely popular vote, anyone can hijack the apparatus to become the nominee and the “establishment” is helpless to do anything but leave the party or fall in line. When Trump is gone, his voters are going to look for Trump^2, and there are always people as depraved as Trump, or more, ready to jump in. I’d go so far as to say if the core voters don’t get someone as chaotic as Trump in his place, they will simply stay home.
Re: Garland. We expect the Mitch McConnells and Sununus to fail the country. But Garland was “one of the good guys” and his weakness at a crucial moment was momentously consequential. He should have either done the job, or looked in the mirror at the beginning. realized he didn’t have what it took, and resigned.
Institutions don’t save us on their own. The tools and the power provided by those institutions need to be wielded by good, and strong, people.
I think it’s actually too early to predict but I think the next GOP primary will be a contest between people trying to emulate Trump and people trying to be even Trumpier. If I had to bet right now I would bet on someone who emulates Trump but has a bit more decency towards the military than Trump and maybe doesnt have as much of a womanizer/pervert history like Trump and his cabinet nominees.
Steve
Sununu suffers from the delusion that he can be a R presidential nominee in a future election cycle. Ain’t a gonna happen Chris. Yes the R’s will moderate somewhat, as we’ve saw with DeSantis, no amount of performative craziness and cruelty will gain you the MAGAt following, so out doing trump doesn’t get you the nomination. But what Sununu is betting on, is that the R’s revert to being the party of Reagan, an party in which Sununu could very well have been the nominee.
The party will change post trump, because there is no one that has his skill set. The closests might be Musk, but it may only appear that he could be a contender for the trumpian crown, due to the enormous megaphone.
@steve: Oh, I’m sure Larry Hogan and a few others like him might make a run for it, but they will go nowhere. The only chance that the Republican Party becomes even a shell of its former self is if the Trump core voters stay home in the primary.
I think it would be more accurate to say that the GOP will move on to someone else, someone like Vance or another younger, healthier Trump-like (or -lite, if you prefer) figure. But the idea that it’s going to return to some kind of traditional establishment party is flat out nuts. History don’t go in reverse.
@Not the IT Dept.: If someone like Vance is the nominee, most of the hardcore Trumpers will stay home in the general, unless Vance goes full batshit-crazy mode and out-Trumps Trump. The GOP has alienated too many sane people for them to win without the most hardcore of their loons.
One very good thing about Garland’s appointment as AG, is that allowed Ketanji Brown Jackson to replace him on the D.C. Circuit and her eventual move to the Supreme Court.
To be clear, I don’t either, but that’s what the never-Trump types are hoping for. I took Mitt at face value when he said that the thing he objected to about Trump was not the governing or the policy, but the man himself. If Trump wasn’t an a*****e as a person, conservatives at large would be rating him as high as guys like Jack do when they come here to troll. He’d be another Reagan. Maybe the uber Reagan.
@steve: I would think that whoever is next is bound to be less “Trumpy.” Trump’s a pretty tough act to follow in terms of vulgarity and loathsomeness. Societies tend to filter out the Trumps before they get to positions where they can aspire to true power or authority. Even in Trump’s case, if he’d needed to do anything noteworthy beyond being the son who wasn’t an alcoholic, he wouldn’t be where he is. Donald succeeded Fred because the business was too small for there to be anyone else.
@MarkedMan:
Re Garland and what he should have done etc: Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel has written extensively about how many news stories, and the general public understanding and expectations, of how cases like these work, do not give an accurate picture of when and how things happened. There are a bunch of posts on her site about putting criticism of Garland in full context (both positively and negatively), but the most recent one is here:
https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/12/30/the-opportunity-costs-of-conspiracy-theories-about-merrick-garland/
@Erik: Wheeler has indeed been defending Garland for some time. And she has a point. There is a process and the mills of the American criminal justice system do grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly slowly. That said, an insurrectionist, black letter banned from serving*, is going to be inaugurated. And no one has done a damn thing effective to stop it, while hoping someone else would. Maybe Garland’s reputation needs to go down with the ship whether it’s strictly his fault or not.
If we see an honest report from Smith I may forgive Garland. If not, because of some Mueller/Barr style ratfracking, fwck them all.
* As determined by the CO state Supreme Court and overturned by SCOTUS on the grounds that it would be inconvenient.
@Erik: Yeah, Marcy has a lot to say about this, and she may be right in a lot of ways, but Trump is still going to get away with everything. She can provide all the excuses she wants for Garland’s abject failure to see justice done, but it was still a failure and America will suffer the consequences for years, if not decades, to come.
@steve:
Depends on how popular Trump is three years from now. Difficult to impossible to predict because he can reverse himself on any issue at any time. We can not judge this on his statements. That said, if he succeeds in doubling or more the prices at Walmart with tariffs it’s unlikely he will be.
@gVOR10:
I think it would be more accurate to say that “no one was able to stop it.” The power of all that money and political favors is very hard to stop.
Let’s recall the immunity decision by SCOTUS and the decision to throw out the documents case brought by Trump appointee Aileen Cannon.
Both of these decisions are ridiculous, but they accomplished the purpose they were meant to accomplish.
Rather than throwing rocks at Garland, we should save our invective for Cannon and the Supreme Court Justices who think “Trump is fine!”