Trump's Big CON: "Just Whistling Dixie"

UPDATE:  Another MUST READ: the Washington Post, Republicans and conservatives defending Trump on Charlottesville are morally bankrupt, which states in full:

The affront that is the Trump presidency is a violation of everything I learned about morality and reverence for the Constitution and the presidency — from Republicans. The party that spent my entire life lecturing liberals and Democrats on the finer points of being an upstanding American and upholding the honor and dignity of the presidency can’t speak with a clear, unified voice when it comes to President Trump.

Democrats were soft on crime. Democrats weren’t serious about that 'bear in the woods,' otherwise known as Russia. The late Jerry Falwell thundered about moral decline from his perches at the Moral Majority and Liberty University (nee Lynchburg Baptist College), helping Republicans win elective office all the way up to the Oval. And President Bill Clinton was impeached nearly 20 years ago for his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Because of Clinton’s reprehensible conduct, then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush rallied Republicans by promising to restore “honor and dignity to the White House.”

Trump has used every minute of his 213 days in the White House (as of this writing) to upend all of those Republican lessons I learned. After running an overtly racist and xenophobic campaign for the presidency, Trump squandered its moral authority with a 20-minute celebration of white supremacy that gave aid and comfort to bigots, Nazis and white supremacists everywhere. He didn’t even give a full-throated condemnation of the hate in Charlottesville that led to the death of Heather Heyer. Talk about being soft on crime. And as shameful and un-American as that is, there’s Falwell’s namesake on TV on Sunday, uttering nonsense like this in support of the president:

ABC News Politics
@ABCPolitics

.@JerryFalwellJr: Pres. Trump "doesn't say what's politically correct, he says what's in his heart...and sometimes that gets him in trouble"
8:18 AM - Aug 20, 2017

    One of the reasons I support him is because he doesn’t say what’s politically correct, he says what’s in his heart. What he believes. And sometimes that gets him in trouble. But he does not have a racist bone in his body. I know him well.

If Trump 'does not have a racist bone in his body,' then my eyes and ears have been lying to me all these years.

Listen, I’ve already had my say about Trump and Charlottesville. How his coddling of the Confederacy and those who revere its treason make him unfit to be president. That many Republicans, including our 41st and 43rd presidents, have stepped forward to condemn what the 45th would not doesn’t leave me entirely despairing of the sorry state of the GOP and our national psyche.

So, my message is for all those Republicans and conservatives rallying around Trump and his offensive “both sides” idiocy and the racism it supports: You’re morally bankrupt. Your lectures and righteous indignation are meaningless in the age of Trump. And you have harangued me and other liberals on our morality and patriotism for the last time."

MUST READ: the Washington Post, Why Stephen K. Bannon was such a failure, which states in full:

"Stephen K. Bannon, the recently deposed architect of President Trump’s nonexistent populist agenda, wishes it was the 1930s.

That, of course, is what he promised to do: to make things as 'exciting' now as they were back then. Now, he might not have been talking about the war or the depression or the fascists in other countries, but what he did mean was a politics where racial resentment and economic populism could once again exist side-by-side. Where Republicans could target Muslims for special restrictions and raise the top marginal tax rate to 44 percent; could cut legal immigration in half and undo free trade deals; could stick up for white supremacists and spend $1 trillion on infrastructure. In other words, where the ideological heirs of the Dixiecrats were the ones calling the shots.

They haven’t been for a long time now.

Why not? Well, because our parties have sorted themselves based on race first and economics second. The political history of the past 100 years, you see, has really been the story of the rise and fall of the New Deal coalition. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression brought blacks, liberals, Northern ethnics and Southern whites all together until the civil rights movement drove them apart. It’s true that the Dixiecrats — the Jim Crow-supporting Southerners who left the Democratic Party to form their own, before eventually migrating over to the Republican one — weren’t all in favor of big government, but a lot of them were. Forced to choose between that and racial backlash, however, they chose racial backlash, whether that was calls for 'law and order' or denunciations of 'welfare queens' or, in the past few years, chants of 'build the wall.'

Bannon didn’t want them to choose anymore. He understood that a lot of Republicans don’t care about Ayn Rand-inspired odes to heroic entrepreneurs, or paeans to the Schumpeterian beauty of creative destruction, or how much capital gains are taxed. They want their Social Security and their Medicare. They’re called Trump voters, and they aren’t really represented in Washington. That’s because the money men and interest groups that members of Congress rely on ensure complete ideological conformity on the issue nearest and dearest to the hearts — or rather the wallets — of the donor class: how much they’re taxed. Bannon wanted to change that so people could get Democratic economic policies together with a Republican brand of racial pandering.

The only problem is you can’t. Just look at Bannon’s proposal to increase the top tax rate to 44 percent. Who was ever going to vote for that? Republicans never would when their party’s entire raison d’etre for the past 40 years has been keeping taxes as low as possible on the rich. And neither would Democrats when Bannon had alienated them about as much as possible with his barely disguised attempt to ban Muslims. The same was true of infrastructure. Republicans didn’t really want to do it, and Democrats didn’t want to with Trump. It reduced Bannon to being able to do little more than alternately insist that he wanted to build a rainbow coalition of populists — 'we'll get 60 percent of the white vote and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote, and we’ll govern for 50 years,' he rather modestly claimed — and cheer, for example, when Trump said last Friday’s neo-Nazi rally was full of 'very fine people.' Bannon never understood that one made the other impossible.

Bannon thought he was a revolutionary, but he was just whistling Dixie."