Gov. Chris Sununu
Namby, meet pamby. I’m talking, naturally, of Chris Sununu, governor of New Hampshire, who slithered into a Zoom call on This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday to explain why he will be voting for Donald Trump for president come November. Not because Trump doesn’t have any responsibility for the attempted coup and attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He does. Sununu thinks that all the insurrectionists “must be held accountable and prosecuted.” Except one: the man he’s voting for in November.
Watching him answering the questions of Stephanopoulos was like watching something with more legs than two crawl out from beneath a wet rock on a rainy day. Sununu, who supported Nikki Haley in the primary until she dropped out, doesn’t see anything wrong with now supporting Donald Trump for president. To explain why, he attacked the “wokeness, the fact that folks in Washington, liberal elites in Washington, want to stand on the shoulders of hard-working American families that built this country, that defended this country, and tell them how to live their lives.” Apparently, Sununu has recognized that sounding exactly like Marjorie Taylor Greene will help you as a Republican in America, even up there in the Granite State.
Stephanopoulos should have asked Sununu just what he meant by that statement. Telling people how to live their lives isn’t “woke,” it is part of the business of government. If you earn money, you pay taxes. If you form a company and the company earns money, you pay corporate taxes. If your company is publicly traded, so individual American citizens can invest in it, can give you money so that you can spend it to help your company earn more money, you must register that company with the SEC, you cannot spend your investors’ money on yourself and your own lifestyle, and you must return some of the profits you earn to your investors. If you drive on Interstate highways, you must follow the speed limit. If you manufacture cars, you must install seat belts and airbags in those cars to keep safe the people who drive them. If you buy a firearm at a firearms store, you must pass a background check to make sure that you are not a felon with no right to buy or own a firearm.
Sununu has learned the lesson all Republicans have learned, that it is not necessary to make sense and to tell the truth. When asked by Stephanopoulos if he indeed believed “that a president who contributed to an insurrection should be president again,” Sununu was ready with a lie: “As does 51 percent of America, George. I mean, really.”
Trump lost the election of 2020, 51.3 percent of the vote for Biden, 46.9 percent for Trump. He lost the electoral college by 74 electoral votes. Here is how Sununu explained what happened in the last election: “I hate the election denialism of 2020. Nobody wants to be talking about that in 2024. I think all of that was absolutely terrible, but what people are going to be voting for, what I -- what -- the reason I’m supporting not just the president, but the Republican administration. That's what this is.”
Stephanopoulos didn’t ask him how it is that the “nobody” Sununu identifies as not wanting to talk about election denialism does not include the man he says he’s voting for, Donald Trump, who has made denying the truth of the 2020 election the centerpiece of his campaign.
Listen to Sununu, until now considered one of the so-called reasonable Republicans, as he summed up why he’s voting for Trump: “States rights come first, individual rights come first, parents rights come first.” That’s the Trumpian Republican Kool-Aid right there in a single sentence. That is the reasoning behind the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe and created the nightmare women are facing in states exercising their “states rights” around the country. That is the rhetorical sewer from which the book bans and Black history denialism has emerged over the last several years.
And it’s coming out of the mouth of Chris Sununu. Sununu said previously that Trump should drop out of the race if he is convicted of a crime. Does he think that now? “No, no, no, of course not. That is not to be expected at all. There is clearly politics to bear in some of these cases, that is undeniable. The average American just says it’s more of reality TV in prosecution of him at this point. He plays that victim card very, very well. His poll numbers only go up with this stuff. So, to think of this as some kind of deal breaker, again, I’ll go back to where I started, that people are saying, yep, if he’s convicted, I’m walking away. That’s just not going to happen. If he’s going to be the standard bearer of it, we’ll take it if we have to. That’s how badly Americans want a culture change.”
Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson and Mike Pence are the only two prominent Republicans who are not named Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger who have announced they will not vote for Donald Trump, and only Kinzinger has said he will instead vote for Joe Biden.
And to think that these are the reasonable Republicans among us.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.
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How The Right Is Turning ‘Political Correctness’ Into Another Tool Of The 1 Percent
You may have noticed that when the right isn’t busy being outraged at the left for being outraged by comments by Republican reality stars, radio hosts and elected officials, they’re busy being outraged at the left for “offensive” comments about Republicans.
The current target is MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, who featured a brief segment on her show last weekend with panelists joking about Mitt Romney’s black grandchild. This was an issue so urgent, apparently, that Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus felt the need to demand an apology from the host just hours after the story broke.
While Republicans spent most of the last few decades being revolted by the idea of “political correctness,” there is now a conscious effort on the right to set the terms of discourse and play the role of the offended victim, whenever doing so is convenient. Then, just as quickly, conservatives will switch back to defending outrageous comments from the right and attacking “PC” thought by framing themselves as the defenders of free speech.
“Political correctness” is a term that — if you believe Wikipedia — originated in the Stalin-era USSR to describe acceptable thought to the regime. In the ’90s it became an epithet the right used to describe the intolerance of left-wing academic thought as progressives tried to reshape society to protect and encourage those who have been historically discriminated against. The great educator Herbert Kohl pointed out that the smear was meant “to insinuate that egalitarian democratic ideas are actually authoritarian, orthodox and Communist-influenced, when they oppose the right of people to be racist, sexist, and homophobic.”
The idea that rich, powerful people need to be protected from both bullying and the consequences of bullying comments often targeting minorities requires an agility and intellectual dishonesty that has been perfected by the right-wing media and spread to the movement’s more outlandish politicians, who thrive on the perpetual outrage of the Tea Party movement.
The perfect example of this is, of course, Sarah Palin. In 2009, she encouraged conservatives to “screw the political correctness.” A few months later she was demanding that President Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel be fired for allegedly using the word “retarded” in a meeting.
The right is investing in the outrage industry. Fox News is the Standard Oil of outrage, but a new breed of organization, born and thriving in social media, is designed to gin up and sustain outrage by using features unique to online marketing.
Ben Shapiro, who some call the right’s next Andrew Breitbart, is the face of a new venture called TruthRevolt, which is funded by The David Horowitz Freedom Center.
“The media must be destroyed where they stand,” its mission statement reads. “That is our mission at TruthRevolt. The goal of TruthRevolt is simple: unmask leftists in the media for who they are, destroy their credibility with the American public, and devastate their funding bases.”
The group’s blog is updated several times a day with stories that reinforce the right-wing worldview and fume at those who say things they disagree with. Additionally petitions help the site build its mailing list with campaigns against villains who refuse to honor “religious liberty” by expecting reality stars not to say things like homosexuality leads to bestiality.
TruthRevolt is a new project and characteristic of Shapiro’s desire to “fight fire with fire” and by using a tactic the right used to decry.
Twitchy — which was started by the Pope of Outrage Michelle Malkin and was recently purchased by the owners of Town Hall — is apparently trying to fight fire with a mob wielding digital torches.
After Melissa Harris-Perry gave in to the demands to apologize for the segment on her show, Twitchy decided the apology didn’t count because it was tweeted with a hashtag. What would the Founders think?
Being mentioned on Twitchy doesn’t just make you the target of vague scorn. It’s a batsignal to the right wing that you need to be attacked directly. Active Twitter users who have been vilified by the site are likely to see abusive mentions for days.
Perry, who is the product of an interracial relationship, is primarily a target because she’s on (slightly) left-leaning MSNBC. The right is in the process of racking up scalps from the news network.
Now-former MSNBC host Martin Bashir responded to Sarah Palin’s comparison of debt to slavery by describing a practice in which slaveowner Thomas Thistlewood forced one slave to defecate in another’s mouth as punishment. He concluded his point by saying, “She confirms if anyone’s truly qualified for a dose of discipline from Thomas Thistlewood, she would be the outstanding candidate.”
The right wing went into outrage overdrive to condemn the host, who apologized twice before leaving his job, likely involuntarily. Bashir suffered from a lack of a political base—and the fact that his indefensible comments involved human waste and a woman’s mouth.
“My role is to accept his apology and be humble enough to accept it and move on,” the ever-humble Palin said on Fox News. “But I just hope that unprovoked attacks like that don’t result in people being hesitant to jump in the arena anyway.”
A few weeks later, Palin was defending the “free speech” of a guy who suggested homosexuality could lead to sex with animals.
The former Republican nominee for vice president is worried about those who might be hesitant to speak out in favor of policies that benefit the rich and enforce historic discrimination. But she’s not as concerned about a gay teen who may be hesitant to go on living because his desires make him someone society is encouraged to despise.
Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr