Supporters of President Donald Trump have failed the Americans who defeated fascism during World War II — the so-called “Greatest Generation” — by backing the Republican despite his extremism.
“Look, Republicans knew what they were getting, and they didn’t care,” Stuart Stevens, a Republican strategist who worked at the highest levels of Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign and an adviser to the anti-Trump Republican group The Lincoln Project, told MS NOW’s Katy Tur on Thursday. “This isn’t about crypto or about Donald Trump — it’s about an entire party making a deal that once they got power, everything they said they stood for didn’t matter. I know, because I was part of it.”
Tur asked Stevens, “But the voters didn’t care either. Republican voters clearly didn’t care. Why not?”
Stevens replied by saying that, although political parties used to check extremism and demagoguery, Republican voters decided in the 2016 election to throw out those guardrails because they were enamored with Trump’s far right rhetoric. It conditioned them, Stevens said, to ignore Trump’s scandals or blame the messengers.
“From 2016 on, everyone in the primary thought, ‘All I have to do is get one-on-one with Trump and I’ll win, because the Republican Party isn’t going to nominate someone who talks in public about dating his own daughter,’” Stevens told Tur. “But that didn’t happen. Even after the Access Hollywood tape, there was outrage, but it wasn’t sustained. It should have been — if it had been, voters would have reacted differently.”
Trump has repeatedly said that he lusts after his oldest daughter, Ivanka Trump, and shortly before Election Day 2016 was caught on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women.
“There was talk at the convention about ousting him,” Stevens told Tur. “But he had a hold over the voters. And it got to a point where — we now know this — he was threatening riots outside the convention if he was denied the nomination. We should have taken that threat more seriously at the time. We did take it seriously, but not seriously enough — hence January 6th.”
He concluded that “I have no sympathy here [for Trump voters]. Republicans were handed the legacy of the greatest generation and asked to defend democracy. They didn’t have much to do — they just had to have their communications shop put out a statement saying who won the presidential election. That’s not exactly storming a beach or manning a machine gun, and they couldn’t even do that. ‘What does it matter if we go along with him — just humor him.’”
Stevens is not the only high-ranking political analyst who says Republicans have failed to rein in their party’s dictatorial tendencies under Trump. Trump’s former communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, similarly warned that Trump displays fascist tendencies, while former aide to President George W. Bush Steve Schmidt raised the alarm that “no figure in American life has done more to normalize violent rhetoric than Donald Trump.”
Prominent Democrats are also issuing warnings. Speaking to AlterNet in May, Dr. Robert J. Shapiro — who served as an economic adviser at various times for Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — warned that a recent survey found “83 percent of its sample of 1,128 MAGA followers said the American way of life was disappearing so fast that force may be required to save it, and 61 percent endorsed violence and force to stop protests by those with whom they disagree,” Shapiro wrote. “More disturbing, when MAGA believers were asked whether they would personally be willing to use violence against a federal or state official to advance their political objectives, 11 percent said yes; based on surveys of the MAGA movement, that translates to 4.4 million people. Some 5 percent also said they would be personally willing to attack people who don’t share their views.”
Shapiro continued that “liberals cannot feel smug about these numbers: MAGA believers are not alone in their willingness to consider violence. Democrats, Independents, and non-MAGA Republicans may be less likely to endorse violence in politics or participate in it. But most Americans are Democrats, Independents, or non-MAGA Republicans, so those who do agree add up.”
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