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Donald Trump

Trump Authoritarians Are Preparing To Purge Anyone Who Isn't 'MAGA' Enough

Coming out of the Iowa caucuses, there was a moment when Donald Trump seemed almost gracious. His victory speech largely ignored the campaigns of Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley as Trump concentrated on thanking his supporters and wandering into a strange interlude about how former President Jimmy Carter must be happy despite his wife’s recent death. That line drew applause and cheers from the Republican crowd.

Trump lavished admiration on withdrawn candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and barely mentioned DeSantis or Haley. For Trump, that’s as good as it gets.

But things changed in New Hampshire. In the aftermath of an unimpressive win, Trump ripped into not just Haley but her supporters. Now Trump is warning that anyone who gives Haley a contribution will be “permanently barred from the MAGA camp.” Any illusion that someone could be a Republican but not totally loyal to Trump is over.

Trump’s threat, posted to Truth Social on Wednesday, makes it clear that anyone who sends a dime to Haley will never be accepted into his red hat movement. The post came on the same evening when Trump released a video statement outlining his plan to remove “rogue bureaucrats,” saying, “I will wield that power very aggressively.” Then he ticked off his intentions to liquidate security officials, intelligence agents, and justice officials, whom he says are targeting “conservatives, Christians, or the left’s political enemies.”

Trump is making it clear that if he is elected, being MAGA will be a requirement of government employment. His threat to Haley drives home that only unwavering, slavish devotion to Trump makes one MAGA.

This echoes Trump sycophant Marjorie Taylor Greene’s call for “completely eradicating” from the Republican Party anyone who doesn’t support Trump. The representative from Georgia also recently said that Trump supporters “will not forget” Haley’s failure to fall in line behind Trump.

MAGA is not a philosophy. It’s not a political platform. It’s a loyalty oath to one man over everything else.

There is a month remaining until the South Carolina primary, where Haley hopes that her home state will rally to keep her in the presidential race. But Trump is making it absolutely clear to Republicans that the time in which they might support someone else is over. Anyone who contributes to Haley is going on a blacklist for life. He’s not quite threatening to sew a giant red or yellow “H” on their clothing … but it’s close.

Give it time, and a good MAGA rating might soon also be required to get a government contract. Or to travel freely around the country. Or to stay out of the massive internment camps Trump is planning. Trump has dropped all pretenses. Anyone who wants a future in Trump’s America had better get in line, and they better get in line now.

And that’s exactly what Senate Republicans are doing.

Within the past 10 days, Senate Republicans were praising a new deal on immigration, with conservatives like Sen. James Lankford calling it “by far, the most conservative border security bill in four decades.” Senators warned Republicans in the House that they wouldn’t get a better deal.

“To those who think that if President Trump wins, which I hope he does, that we can get a better deal—you won’t,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham. “You got to get 60 votes in the United States Senate.”

“The Democrats will not give us anything close to this if we have to get 60 votes in the United States Senate in a Republican majority,” said Sen. John Thune. “We have a unique opportunity here. And the timing is right to do this.”

Then, on Wednesday, Trump told Republicans to kill the deal so that he could continue to talk about the border for his campaign. And just like that, what Republicans were calling a crisis and an invasion became something that could be put off. Because nothing, nothing, nothing matters more to them than pleasing Trump. “I think the border is a very important issue for Donald Trump. And the fact that [Trump] would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn't want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is really appalling.” But it is already clear that Romney is never getting his MAGA hat.

That’s what it means to live in a dictatorship, doing what the dictator says even when you know it’s wrong. Republicans are there already. Now they want to bring America with them.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Frustrated Trump And His Thuggish Stooges Are Threatening Nikki Haley

Frustrated Trump And His Thuggish Stooges Are Threatening Nikki Haley

On Tuesday, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley took 43 percent of the vote in New Hampshire’s Republican primary. That allowed her to nab nine of the state’s 22 delegates. With this finish, Haley declared that she was staying in the race and moving on to campaign in South Carolina.

That Republican primary in South Carolina is a full month away. That gives Haley time to grow her voter base and reach out to her network of supporters in a state that elected her governor. Twice.

Naturally, Donald Trump is boiling over about Haley’s refusal to get out of his way and Trump’s legions of sycophants are hurrying to apply pressure. But some statements stand out from the crowd because they lower the bar on Republican hypocrisy. And that bar was already on the ground.

As might be expected, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) jumped straight to claims that the vote for Haley included “fake numbers” and said that “Nikki Haley does not have this much support.”

Then Greene went after Haley’s donors and said her consultants “should go to jail,” as captured by Acyn on X:

Turning the pressure level up to 11, Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel also called for Haley to drop out in a Fox News appearance.

“I do think there’s a message from the voters which is very clear,” said McDaniel. “We need to unite around our eventual nominee, which is going to be Donald Trump.”

Trump topped off his primary night festivities with none-too-subtle threats that he knew “five reasons why” Nikki Haley should be under investigation.

But threatening opponents with investigations is old hat. When it comes to genuinely smashing all previous barriers of hypocrisy, it was Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway who really went there. So much so, that you may want to put away anything breakable before watching the video below.

"This is a democracy, a constitutional republic. We must respect the will of the people,” said Conway, “and Nikki Haley can't become an election denier. She’s been rejected. She can say tonight she came in second, or you can say she came in last.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

By Threatening Fed Chairman, Rick Perry Admitted That Easing Money Helps Economy

When Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry uttered what many heard as a physical threat against Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke for the allegedly “treasonous” act of easing the nation’s money supply, did he realize that he was actually admitting that might be a good idea? Matthew Yglesias at Think Progress points out what most political reporters covering Perry’s outburst missed, namely that monetary easing — printing money and injecting it into the economy by purchasing assets – would be good for employment:

I’ve been tracking hard moneyism for a couple of years now, and the main thing about it is that most of its exponents claim that monetary stimulus would be bad for America. Since they’re mistaken about this, the arguments they offer are often confused, confusing, or somehow nonsensical. But the basic premise is always that monetary easing will lead to some bad result. That’s most emphatically not what Perry said. What Perry said was that he was worried that Ben Bernanke would “play politics” by engaging in monetary easing before Election Day. Which doesn’t make much sense as a position unless Perry agrees with me that monetary easing would boost growth. If monetary easing hurt the economy, then it would hurt Obama. But Perry’s concern is that monetary easing would work well, and he was putting Bernanke on notice to avoid it because he wants to win the election. That’s a very different view.

Now maybe Perry didn’t mean that. But it’s what he said. And given all the attention that his remarks have prompted, I wish some of the reporters covering him would try to pin him down on this point. If monetary easing would help Obama, doesn’t that mean monetary easing would boost growth? And if it would boost growth, shouldn’t we be doing it?

Perry is implying that Bernanke cut a deal with Obama in exchange for another term as Fed Chairman to boost the president’s reelection — or maybe just that he’s committed to the dual mandate of the Fed, which includes boosting employment. Either way, Perry implicitly acknowledges that Bernanke’s loose money might be helping the economy — and that, because this could help the incumbent president, he must be a traitor to his country.

After The Debt Ceiling Fiasco

WASHINGTON — Hours before the negotiations on the debt limit between President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner collapsed, political reporters received a missive from Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign that served as a reminder of how irrelevant this kerfuffle might feel next year.

The headline read, “Romney for President Launches New Web Video: Obama Isn’t Working: Where are the Jobs?”

The video spoke to the difficulties that new college graduates are having finding work in a brutal job market. This bit of campaign propaganda went straight at the core of Obama’s political base — young Americans who volunteered for him by the tens of thousands in 2008 and powered him to victory in state after state. If joblessness disillusions enough of them, the president will be in trouble.

Romney’s exercise was a passing bit of politics unlikely to make many waves in an environment obsessed with debt and fears of default. But it was hugely instructive.

The Romney message was more in touch with what voters are worried about than the spectacular show of dysfunction Washington politicians are putting on. Consider a Gallup Poll released last week. Asked what was the most important problem facing the country, 31 percent of Americans said the economy and an additional 27 percent specifically said unemployment and jobs, for a total of 58 percent. Only 16 percent listed the deficit or the debt.

While the president was snared in a trap set by the Republicans over the debt ceiling, Romney was out there campaigning on the electorate’s animating issue. It’s a nice division of labor for the GOP. Obama is caught up in the tea party’s priorities. Romney isn’t. It’s upside-down politics.

None of this takes away from the fact that Obama was right to be angry at the collapse of his talks with Boehner. He was entirely justified in calling out House Republicans for refusing to accept what would have been an excellent deal from their own point of view. Obama went far more than half way to accommodate conservatives with a deal that tilted heavily toward spending cuts. As the president himself said, if the deal he offered was “unbalanced,” it was unbalanced on the side of not including enough tax revenues. This would have made Obama’s own supporters very unhappy.

By rejecting this way out, House Republicans have shown they simply cannot govern. When control of government is divided between two parties, each party has to give some ground. But Boehner’s GOP majority includes dozens of members who don’t even think that defaulting on our debt is a problem, and do believe they can eventually get what they want if they keep saying “no” to every other alternative.

This is a recipe for catastrophe, which is what we are getting perilously close to now. It is a clear demonstration that this House majority does take its responsibilities seriously. Too many of its members seem to forget that they are no longer outsiders free to protest, and proclaim their purity. They are part of the government of the United States. The fact that they are not willing to act that way now threatens the nation’s economy.

Which brings us back to Romney. To this point, he has been free to run more of a general election race than a primary campaign. He can talk about jobs while Obama is grappling with how to run a government paralyzed by the tea party.

But this breakdown in Washington is too big an issue for Republican primary voters to ignore. If Rick Perry, Texas’ right-wing governor, enters the race as expected, he will appeal to the tea party rejectionists and try to cast Romney as some sort of moderate — a very dangerous thing to be among Republican primary voters these days. Will Romney have the courage to insist that the radicalism represented by the tea party is not authentic conservatism, not the path to a Republican victory, and not a formula for effective government? I’m not holding my breath, but this crisis calls for a period of reckoning inside the GOP. The presidential primary campaign is the obvious moment for it to happen.

In the meantime, Obama should watch that Romney ad on jobs several times. By letting the congressional Republicans set his agenda, he’s gotten away from the one issue most likely to determine his fate in 2012. He should remember that the day after this debt crisis is settled, the Republicans’ question will be: Where are the jobs?

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.

(c) 2011, Washington Post Writers Group