Above: h/t The Bulwark, Trump Is the One Who Wants to Burn It All Down.
The Washington Post reports, RNC votes to withdraw from presidential debates commission:
The Republican National Committee on Thursday voted unanimously to withdraw from the Commission on Presidential Debates, following through on threats to bar GOP presidential nominees from participating in debates sponsored by the nonprofit organization.
The RNC has accused the commission, which was repeatedly attacked by Donald Trump, of being biased in favor of Democrats [because Trump sucks at debating and got his ass kicked, the damm crybaby.] The bipartisan commission, which was established in 1987 and has hosted the debates since 1988, has rejected the charge.
In a statement Thursday, RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said that her party is “committed to free and fair debates” [sure you are] but that they would be held through other platforms. She did not specify them.
“Debates are an important part of the democratic process … We are going to find newer, better debate platforms to ensure that future nominees are not forced to go through the biased CPD in order to make their case to the American people,” she said.
McDaniel said the commission had refused to make changes the RNC had requested demanded, including hosting debates before early voting begins and “selecting moderators who have never worked for candidates on the debate stage.” [wouldn’t this eliminate everyone at Fox News, Trump’s “kitchen cabinet,” for the GQP nominee?] The latter was a reference to would-be 2020 debate host Steve Scully of C-SPAN, who was an intern for Joe Biden for one month in 1978, when Biden was a senator from Delaware. The debate Scully was scheduled to moderate wound up being canceled after Trump objected to holding it virtually because of coronavirus concerns.
Representatives for the Commission on Presidential Debates and the Democratic National Committee did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday.
In January, after McDaniel sent the debates commission a letter saying the RNC had lost confidence in the organization, CPD Co-Chairman Frank J. Fahrenkopf said the RNC “wanted to control things we aren’t prepared to let them control.”
He also noted that the commission deals “directly” with the candidates for president and vice president who qualify for general-election debates, not their party organizations.
“The CPD’s plans for 2024 will be based on fairness, neutrality and a firm commitment to help the American public learn about the candidates and the issues,” Fahrenkopf said in a statement then.
Trump’s repeated attacks on the commission during the 2020 election caused at least one commission member — a Republican — to break his “strict vow of silence” regarding his personal feelings about the presidential campaign. John C. Danforth wrote then that Trump’s accusations were simply wrong and contributed to the eroded trust in the democratic process. He also defended the moderators chosen by the commission as “highly professional and experienced.”
“Some have suggested that the Commission on Presidential Debates disband, and that in future campaigns the candidates simply negotiate the debate rules among themselves,” Danforth wrote then. “Good luck with that.”
Paul Waldman of The Post writes, Republicans just gave us a terrifying preview of their 2024 strategy:
The Republican Party has just offered us a glimpse of the hell they’re going to put us all through in 2024. What might appear to be a petty argument about the conditions under which general election debates will or won’t be held is actually much more.
The Republican National Committee on Thursday voted unanimously to withdraw from the Commission on Presidential Debates, which has organized general election debates since the 1980s. The RNC will also require primary candidates to sign a pledge not to join any debate not approved by the party. Party chair Ronna McDaniel said the Republican nominee should not be “forced to go through the biased CPD to make their case to the American people.”
The likely result in 2024 is that for the first time since 1972 (when President Richard M. Nixon refused to face George McGovern), there will be a presidential vote with no general election debates. On the surface, this is about protecting Donald Trump, who will almost certainly be the Republican nominee if he chooses to run, from the consequences of a disastrous debate.
But it’s also a sign that the Republican strategy will again feature chaotic, Trumpian whining that is meant to delegitimize the entire presidential campaign process from start to finish, culminating in an attempt to take back the White House by theft if the voters don’t vote the “right” way.
Let’s remember that while Trump performed well in the 2016 primary debates when he was on stage with a collection of empty suits, he did poorly in every one of his debates with Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. By the fall of 2024, he’ll be 78 years old; the idea that he’ll be more disciplined and focused than he was in the past is far-fetched. Everything Americans dislike about him would be on vivid display in a debate, before the largest audience the candidates will have.
If Republicans announce now, two-and-a-half years in advance, that they’re refusing to participate in the debates, it could save them a last-minute act of cowardice. But the more important reason they’re doing this is to reinforce the idea that every institution and practice associated with the presidential campaign must be considered corrupt and biased against Trump and therefore illegitimate, whether it’s the news media, the debates, maybe even the weather — and especially the vote counting.
For the record, the Commission on Presidential Debates was formed in 1987 as a neutral body to organize general election presidential debates; it is always co-chaired by one Republican and one Democrat. You can call it stodgy, but the idea that it is somehow “biased” in favor of Democrats is idiotic.
But a core part of Trump’s worldview, which has now been assimilated throughout the GOP, is that only procedures and processes biased in his favor are truly fair. The only fair interview is one conducted by Fox News’ Sean Hannity or Jeanine Pirro; the only fair vote count is one carried out by someone who has pledged their loyalty to Trump’s lie that he was the true winner of the 2020 election.
So on every day of the campaign, Trump, the RNC and all their allies will be clamoring like 5-year-olds: “No fair! No fair!”
The idea is to keep Trump’s supporters sycophants in a state of perpetual agitation and grievance, one that will build and build all the way to the counting of the votes, when it could explode if Trump is not immediately declared the winner.
Don’t forget that in state after state this year, Republicans are running election fantasists to administer voting at the state and local level. Some of them are absolutely unhinged, such as Mark Finchem in Arizona, a QAnon-spouting conspiracist and self-proclaimed member of the far-right Oath Keepers who could well be in charge of elections in that vital swing state in 2024.
So imagine it: After a campaign of nonstop complaining about how Trump and all his supporters are victims of a rigged process, the votes come in, and it looks like Biden has won again. Trump’s angry supporters erupt into the streets, convinced that the election is being stolen. What are the Trumpist secretaries of state going to do?
Will they just certify him as the winner of their state’s elections, no matter what the votes actually were? Will Republican-controlled legislatures in places such as Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin simply hand him their electoral votes? And if so, how will the challenges fare with the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority?
A dispute over debates may seem far removed from that nightmare, but it isn’t. It’s all part of the same strategy: to convince the Republican base that the entire process is rigged against them.
This is how Republicans have decided to wage the 2024 campaign, in every way and on every day. If our democracy can escape it intact, it will be a miracle.
MSNBC political contributor Dr. Jason Johnson has suggested that the GQP is just a “dime store front for a terrorist organization called ‘MAGA,'” and warned that its “true believers” are “dangerous people” who are “a danger to our democracy.” True dat.
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I agree 100% Wileybud…although let us remember, the LWV only ran the debates for three presidential races (’76, ’80, and ’84). Before that, there had been no presidential debates since ’60, and Carter refused to participate in ’80, so it was Reagan v. Anderson. So it’s not the end of the world if there are no presidential debates for awhile, as heavily scripted as they have been.
Bipartisan is not the same as nonpartisan (especially given the number of people who are registered as neither D or R, but I or others). I would like to see a true nonpartisan organization run the debates, but that is almost certainly a pipe dream.
One of the worst political moves, at least as far as our democracy is concerned is after 1984 both major parties ditching the League of Women Voters from running presidential debates in favor of both parties running the debates themselves. This deprived voters the chance to view and hear the candidates outside of their respective controlled campaign environments. As a result presidential debates have become more and more of a joke instead of being the informative vehicles they’re supposed to be.
I would advocate returning control back to the Leave of Women Voters but the Republicans and more than a few Democrats are terrified of such a common sense move. An independently nonpartisan entity controlling presidential debates? Sacre bleu!
Politico interviews Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar on the history of modern autocracy. “The One Way History Shows Trump’s Personality Cult Will End”, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/04/16/history-shows-trump-personality-cult-end-00024941
(excerpts)
Nearly two years later — after a riot, an impeachment, and a monomaniacal campaign to punish the Republicans who tried to hold him accountable — Ben-Ghiat has ample proof of her thesis. And she professes even more concern that Trump’s sway over the GOP has permanently transformed the party’s political culture. “He’s changed the party to an authoritarian party culture,” she told me. “So not only do you go after external enemies, but you go after internal enemies. You’re not allowed to have any dissent.”
With the midterms and some key governors races approaching, Ben-Ghiat is looking around the corner again. She sees dangerous signs of autocracy seeping into state houses and governors’ mansions where leaders such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are executing policies and enacting laws that mimic Trump but with a smoother, less bombastic style.
[P]olitical violence is more likely than an actual civil war; a Republican takeover in November would be catastrophic but she remains heartened by the ability of American voters to “interrupt an autocratic personality who’s in the middle of his project;” and ballot box victories alone don’t stop autocrats but the law can. “It takes prosecution and conviction to deflate their personality cults,” Ben-Ghiat said. “That’s what it takes.”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: The GOP was already going away from a democratic political culture, but he accelerated it and normalized extremism and normalized lawlessness. And so the GOP over these years has truly, in my estimation, become an authoritarian far-right party. And the other big story is that his agenda and his methods are being continued at the state level. Some of these things were on the agenda way before he came in, like getting rid of abortion rights and stuff like that. But these states are really laboratories of autocracy now, like Florida, Texas.
Ben-Ghiat: One of the big talking points and strategy of right-wing authoritarianism, is to label democratic systems as tyrannical. Mussolini was the first to say that democracies are tyrannical, democracies are the problem. And there’s a whole century’s worth of the strategy of calling sitting Democrats, who you want to overthrow, dictators. Biden as a social dictator, [is] a phony talking point. It has so many articulations from “They’re forcing us to wear masks.” And you have people like DeSantis who are doing this very subversive thing of saying, “Florida’s the free state. You can have refuge from the dictatorship of Biden here.” And what this is designed to do is discredit the sitting democratic administration in order to create, a myth of freedom. January 6 was actually marketed as the violence [being] in the service of freedom, and you were overthrowing a dictator.
Ben-Ghiat: The genius of the “big lie” was not only that it sparked a movement that ended up with January 6 to physically allow him to stay in office. But psychologically the “big lie” was very important because it prevented his propagandized followers from having to reckon with the fact that he lost. And it maintains him as their hero, as their winner, as the invincible Trump, but also as the wronged Trump, the victim. Victimhood is extremely important for all autocrats. They always have to be the biggest victim.
So the “big lie” maintained Trump’s personality cult versus seeing him as just another president who was voted out of office. Americans traditionally always accepted that when your time is up, no matter how popular you were, you were gone. Trump disrupted that because he’s different from any other president, Republican or Democrat. He’s an authoritarian, and they can’t leave office. They don’t have good endings and they don’t leave properly. And I predicted — I had to turn in [my] book in the summer of 2020 — and I just predicted that he wouldn’t leave in a quiet manner. The “big lie” allowed him to psychologically never leave. So he’s in this kind of limbo. As an authoritarian, his other job has been to make sure to keep hold of the party so no rivals emerge, so that he could [not] be eclipsed by a younger version of himself. And that would be DeSantis.
[T]he big question will be what will happen in the coming months so that he can retain that power because he’s very toxic. There’s always this worry that maybe the investigations will bring more things out, so it’s not a done deal that he will get the nomination. But he’s been remarkably successful in ways that don’t surprise me at all. Because that’s how authoritarians are. They’re personality cults, even if they rule in a democracy like [Italy’s former prime minister Silvio] Berlusconi did. Berlusconi’s personality cult did not deflate until he was convicted, which he eventually was. That’s what it takes. It takes prosecution and conviction to deflate their personality cults.
Trump truly is an autocratic individual. He was as a businessman and he has surrounded himself with people from [Paul] Manafort and [Roger] Stone to [Steve] Bannon who have decades of experience helping and working for dictators. They’re on a crusade to ruin democracy.
[T]he reason that Trump was able to shift the political culture, Trump and his allies, is that he imposed an authoritarian party culture [with] unified messaging. Propaganda needs to be repeated with small variations. All the different Fox News hosts, all the GOP politicians, you can tell when the various talking points come up, because they get echoed by all these lawmakers and throughout Fox. Now Democrats by their nature are not going to impose unified messaging. And so Democrats don’t have that force of concentration of message, that repetition, and that’s a failing in this environment.
“Federal judge says Jan. 6 was an ‘insurgency’ and ‘charlatans’ like Trump threaten democracy in post-trial remarks”, https://www.rawstory.com/federal-judge-says-jan-6-was-an-insurgency-and-charlatans-like-trump-threaten-democracy-in-post-trial-remarks/
After a jury found a January 6 rioter guilty on all charges a federal judge weighed in with a warning on American democracy.
“The insurgency, and it was in effect that, is very troubling,” Judge Reggie Walton, a Senior U.S. District Judge for the District of Columbia, said, CNN reports. “I think our democracy is in trouble because unfortunately we have charlatans, like the former President, in my view, who don’t care about democracy and only care about power.”
Judge Walton is no “liberal activist judge,” a term of derision conservatives like to wave. He was nominated to the federal bench by a Republican, President George W. Bush. He also served as the Presiding Judge of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (also known as the FISA Court), and was nominated to that post by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, another Bush nominee.
Walton’s remarks came at the end of the trial of Dustin Thompson, a 38-year-old Ohio exterminator who “faced six charges — obstructing an official proceeding, theft of government property, illegally entering the Capitol, illegally protesting in the Capitol, and two counts of disorderly conduct in the Capitol,” CNN adds.
He “claimed he was following ‘presidential orders’ when he stormed the US Capitol and stole liquor and a coat rack.”
CNN notes the “trial marked the first time a Capitol riot defendant tried to convince a jury that Trump was responsible for the violence on January 6, 2021.”