Conservatives learn from Trump that gaffes have lost their sting — or have they?
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Beverly Young Nelson holds her high school yearbook signed by Roy Moore during a news conference where she has accused Alabama Republican Senate candidate of sexually abusing her when she was 16.
A few brave souls in the Republican Party are bringing the war on political correctness home by bluntly saying what they believe, regardless of the potential political blowback.
One recent example comes from Alabama, where a number of state Republican leaders have responded to the serious allegations that Senate candidate Roy Moore sexually abused teenage girls by saying (and I’m paraphrasing here): “So what if he’s a perverted pedophile, a creepy stalker, and a sexual predator who attacked high-schoolers in the flower of their Southern youth? At least he’s not a Democrat who’ll vote against tax cuts for millionaires!”
“There is no option to support Doug Jones, the Democratic nominee,” Covington County GOP Chairman William Blocker told reporter Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star when asked if he’d vote for Moore even if hard proof of sexual abuse emerged. “When you do that, you are supporting the entire Democrat party.”
“Socialist Democrat Doug Jones will vote wrong,” Congressman Mo Brooks told Dale. “Roy Moore will vote right.” Moore defeated Brooks in the Senate primary.
It’s refreshing to hear such candor, even if it does reveal a heart of pure evil. To be sure, most Republican leaders — Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, but not Donald Trump — have distanced themselves from Moore, but a few Republicans have freed themselves from the sanctimony about family values and the moral majority. No more “What would Jesus do.”
These Republicans are doing us a favor by showing us in graphic detail what they really stand for.
And what do they stand for? For one thing, tax cuts for very rich people who help them get elected.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, who has always been buttoned-down and tight-lipped with the truth for 40 years in the Senate, caught the fever on Tuesday, dispensing with the fiction that the Republican tax-cut bill is all about cutting taxes for the middle class. By sunsetting the individual tax cuts in 2025, reducing the inflation adjustment and making the corporate tax cuts permanent, Hatch implicitly said what everyone knew all along: This is a tax cut for the bosses, not for the workers.
When all is said and done, regular Americans will pay more in taxes, not less. And that’s just fine with Sen. Hatch.
Another once-reliably opaque Republican, Sen. Lindsey Graham, had confirmed the same thing earlier when he said that campaign contributions to Republicans “will stop” if the tax bill fails. Republican Congressman Chris Collins of New York put it in stark terms: “My donors are saying: ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again.’”
Lawmakers usually don’t say such things out loud. Mainstream Republicans (and Democrats too) have generally been a little circumspect about revealing their true motives. They honored the Beltway rule that saying what you really think is political suicide, in the spirit of Michael Kinsley’s definition of a political gaffe as a politician accidentally telling the truth.
But the Kinsley gaffe is losing its venom. It’s been weakening for years. Remember when Mitch McConnell said the Republicans’ only goal was to ensure that Barack Obama would be a one-term president? Or when Kevin McCarthy said that the only reason for the endless Benghazi hearings was to hurt Hillary Clinton at the polls? Or when a Wisconsin Republican endorsed stronger voter ID laws because they would disenfranchise Democrats?
During the debate in Congress about repealing the Affordable Care Act, most traditional Republicans hid behind the flimsy lie that their bill wouldn’t really take away health care from tens of millions of Americans. They tried to claim that no one would be hurt, and that everyone’s costs would fall.
But a few courageous Republicans said what the others believed but couldn’t say out loud: Of course our bill takes away health insurance! And we are very proud of that! People don’t deserve to live if they can’t afford the chemotherapy, or the preventive vaccinations.
As White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney put it: America has plenty of money, but “that doesn’t mean we should take care of the person who sits at home, eats poorly and gets diabetes.” Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks agreed, saying that people who’ve been sick should pay higher insurance premiums because that would reduce “the cost to those people who lead good lives, they’re healthy, they’ve done the things to keep their bodies healthy.”
After all, what’s the point of having money if it doesn’t mean the difference between life and death?
At times, House Speaker Paul Ryan has come close to this kind of honesty about his budget proposals that would eviscerate the programs — Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — that the American people count on. In one display of honesty, Ryan reminisced about standing around with his buddies at a college kegger at Delta Tau Delta and dreaming of the day when they could take away the last shreds of dignity from poorer Americans.
At the time, of course, Ryan was making ends meet with the help of a survivors’ check from Social Security.
Those were classic gaffes, but Republican politicians learned that they wouldn’t be punished for saying what they think; they’d be rewarded.
And so increasingly Republicans are coming around to embracing the Trumpian truth that it doesn’t matter to your supporters what you do or say, because they will follow you to the end of the earth regardless. You could even stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and not lose any voters. (Please, please, please do not do this. It’s only a metaphor.)
In the Age of Trump, lots of politicians have said things that would have been gaffes in an earlier, more innocent time, and they might have been punished for it at the polls.
Earlier this year, we heard conservative pundits and officials defending the rights of neo-Nazis to run down liberals in the streets. “Run them down,” tweeted Instapundit, aka commentator Glenn Reynolds. Republicans have introduced bills in six state legislatures to legalize running over protesters who block roads.
Trump himself equated premeditated homicide on the part of Nazis with marching without a permit on the part of the antiracist protesters.
Then we heard the right wing mount a strong defense of the rights of men with personal grievances to gun down worshipers in church or concertgoers in the park. Mass murder is terrible, they admit when pressed, but stopping it would be so much worse!
“Something just snapped in him, and he decided to kill a bunch of people,” Texas Congressman Joe Barton said about the Las Vegas sniper. “I don’t know if you can protect society against that.”
(To be fair, we also heard from some equally brave souls on the other side — usually hiding behind masks — who claimed the right to pre-emptively punch any Nazis they see.)
Trump himself provides more examples of this un-PC honesty than anyone can count. It started, improbably, when he announced his campaign for president by declaring that Mexico is sending us rapists. And not the good kind of rapists either, but the kind that sneak in and steal your job and vote for Democrats.
For now, the Republicans who’ve bared their souls feel immune from any blowback. If there’s any reckoning, it will come later, when they face voters, some of whom may recoil at what they’ve heard. Until then, we can expect Republicans to keep telling it like it is, and damn the consequences.
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