As a highly combustible news week neared its midpoint, plans were solidifying around Friday afternoon for President Joe Biden to sign into law the Inflation Reduction Act, which, you might have heard, is no small thing.
Even some of the most hardened climate critics are already calling it a real chance to sidestep an existential global crisis, on top of which it reduces the deficit, allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices while capping out-of-pocket costs at $2,000, lowers Affordable Care Act premium, and slaps a 15% minimum tax on corporations making more than $1 billion in profits, all without raising taxes on small business or families making $400,000 or less.
One could argue that it’s the biggest legislative leap forward for this country since the New Deal, and I for one would like to sincerely thank Donald Trump.
You heard me.
Biden should thank him too on Friday.
Probably won’t, right?
Without Trump’s typically infantile reaction to losing the 2020 election, and without the shameful supplication of key Republican bootlicks to his most earnest desires, progressive legislation like what figures to become law this week would have been dead on arrival in the U.S. Senate.
Even as recently as December of 2020, even after most prominent Republican leadership figures knew Trump had lost and some had even admitted as much, then-Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was predicting that Georgia’s two Democratic Senate candidates, Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, would lose their races decisively to noted incumbent Trump genuflectors Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue in a runoff election Jan. 5. Few in Washington or anywhere in the punditocracy expected anything different, until Trump started calling people in Georgia, until Rudy Giuliani started calling people in Georgia on Trump’s behalf, until Lindsey Graham started calling people in Georgia on Trump’s behalf.
In the Senate at the time were 52 Republicans and 48 Democrats, but after Trump started caterwauling about how imagined corruption had allowed Biden to win the state, too many in Georgia’s solid block of GOP voters became suspicious enough of the election infrastructure to stay home on Jan. 5 rather than vote in the wave necessary to overcome a huge Democratic lead in early voting. Four days earlier, Trump had phoned Georgia election officials and asked them to “find” 11,780 votes, one more than his margin of defeat, which sounds an awful lot like that corruption he’s always talking about.
In any case, Jan. 5 was a bloodbath for the GOP’s Georgia Senate candidates, with Warnock scalding Loeffler by nearly 94,000 votes and Ossoff thumping Perdue by nearly 55,000.
All Loeffler and Perdue had to do in the final weeks of that campaign was warn Republican voters that with Biden in the White House and Democrats holding a majority in the House, their continued presence in the Senate was crucial to block the Biden agenda. But that would have required them to admit Biden won, and to offend the world’s most offendable man, and neither they nor the Republican Party hierarchy had the stomach for it.
Thus the Senate was suddenly a 50-50 playing field for the new administration, where Democrats could advance any legislation they could all agree on (no small matter) just by having Vice President Kamala Harris cast the decisive vote. That’s what happened Sunday. Thank you, Donald Trump.
Thanks further accrue to the former buffoonatic-in-chief for the shrieking clarity between the parties as the midterm elections move to within three months. Democrats, despite spectacular pratfalls and failures, can represent and even deliver on the promise of what democratic government can be and should be. Republicans are pretty much down to “Hey, let’s try Fascism!”
Sure they’re frantic to come up with another name for it — Christian Nationalism, Nationalist Conservatism— but call it what it is. Call it what Trump was looking for when he complained to his military aces that they weren’t loyal enough.
“You f---ing generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?” Trump once asked Gen. John Kelly, then White House chief of staff, according to Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s new piece in The New Yorker.
“Which generals?” Kelly asked.
“The German generals in World War II,” Trump said.
“You do know they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off,” Kelly replied.
“No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” Trump countered.
If nothing else, that exchange re-establishes with spectacular redundancy that Trump is a man who essentially knows nothin’ about nothin’ and yet is absolutely certain that he does. Later in the same piece, the authors deliver Gen. Mark Milley’s resignation letter, a letter that he most fortunately never submitted.
“Between 1941 and 1945, 150 million people were slaughtered in the conduct of war,” it read in part. “They were slaughtered because of tyrannies and dictatorships. That (the Greatest) Generation, like every generation, has fought against Fascism, has fought against Nazism, has fought against extremism. It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order. You don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against.”
Milley might be right about that, but Trump subscribes to very little. His only ideology is that everyone should realize they are subservient to him and should act accordingly. That so many Republicans are eager to comply remains an exercise in intellectual bankruptcy.
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