The Republican Party Will Eventually Be Wrong About Everything -- Including Israel

Just give it time. They'll get there.

Above: the mascot of the Stupid Party.

Author’s note: it’s been an incredibly long time since my last missive. I won’t bore you with the details; family issues have played a large role, as has my utter state of disbelief in how absurd our society has become. But my long silence has left me very uneasy vis-a-vis the paid subscribers. The subscribers know my pattern by now: long periods of silence followed by exceedingly long pieces that contain as many words as most people give you in several newsletters. (For example, this newletter is nearly 8000 words long; containing over 4500 words for all subscribers, and an extra 3400+ words for paid subscribers. That’s about ten 800-word essays in one.) But this time, the time between missives has been embarrassingly excessive, and it has been eating at me for a while. Therefore, if you are a paid subscriber, I believe I owe you some kind of compensation. See the end of the newsletter (the section for paid subscribers) for more on that, so I can clear my conscience. Thanks.

By now, most political observers realize that the Republican Party has become the Stupid Party. This is not to say that the Democrats don’t have a heaping helping of stupid in their party; they most certainly do, mostly revolving almost entirely around issues of grievance related to identity politics (as well as some other issues, like gun rights and religious rights). But on almost any issue with no identity politics component, the Republicans have reliably become the Party of Stupid. And indeed, many of the party’s current positions are positions once held (and in some cases still held) by the extreme left. Let’s look at just a handful of representative items on the list, which I will elaborate on below but present here in list form only:

• Donald Trump: This nincompoop is the overwhelming front-runner in the Republican primary. As we will see, he drives a lot of the wrong opinions in this list.

• Ukraine: Republicans can’t unify behind the clear need to provide all necessary aid to Ukraine.

• The 2020 Election: They think it was stolen, based on fantasy.

• Vaccinations: A frightening percentage of Republicans have become skeptical of vaccinations—not just the COVID vaccine, but general vaccines for their children and even their pets (!). (Hello, rabies!)

• Surveillance to Combat Terror: The GOP is the main threat to the renewal of FISA’s section 702, which provides critical intelligence to fight terror.

• Confusion About Who Our True Allies Are: Following the lead of the aforementioned nincompoop, many Republicans have shockingly high approval ratings for the worst tyrants in the world, like Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un.

• Law Enforcement: Primarily due to the criminal corruption of said nincompoop and many of his cronies, Republicans have developed ridiculously conspiratorial and absurd notions of federal law enforcement.

• Contempt for the Importance of Character in Our Leaders: Yeah, it’s little mystery why this longstanding mainstay of Republican thought suddenly became trivial.

• Concern for the National Debt: I may get pushback on this, as the GOP pretends to care about it when the other party is in the Oval Office, and consequently pretends to care now. Guess what? When Trump was president, they proved they didn’t care.

Now, looking over this list, I can hear grumbling from many of you. Why, I hear you saying, these dumb positions are not representative of the mainstream of the party! Many Republicans support Ukraine, for example! And many are quietly critical of Donald Trump!

I understand that I am not describing the entirety of the Republican Party. I also understand that there are people—good people—including readers of this newsletter, who support the party, and believe it is worth fighting for their values inside the party. I am not here to attack such people or smear them. I am not claiming that the whole party has gone stupid.

But there is a trend here, and you’re blind if you can’t see it. And the stupid people are in the dominant position. When I call it the “Stupid Party” that’s what I mean. The stupid people have assumed control.

Let me give you two examples to illustrate how, to borrow the apochryphal simile invoked by the title of Nick Catoggio’s excellent newsletter, the frog has been getting boiled before our eyes.

1. I was one of the people who was nervous when I learned that the GOP would be winning the House majority, because I worried about the fate of Ukraine aid. Don’t worry! I was told. It’s just the fringe who opposes Ukraine aid. The responsible majority of the party won’t allow Ukraine to be defunded! Then Kevin McCarthy, early in his tenure, put his finger on the wrist of the base and took its pulse, and proclaimed something something about a blank check (which never existed). And slowly, over the months, the frog has been boiled to the point where most Republicans want to reduce Ukraine aid. I discuss this in detail below, with the numbers to back it up.

2. Remember when Lindsey Graham, of all people, warned Donald Trump that it would be a terrible thing if he were to fire Robert Mueller? Everyone was clear that such a move would be a Bridge Too Far. It would destroy Trump’s support in Congress, we were told. I never believed that, but that’s what people said at the time. Nowadays, everyone takes it for granted that if Trump somehow wins the presidency again, he will simply fire Jack Smith and shut down any prosecutions of himself and his cronies. He’ll probably pardon the January 6 defendants, himself, and any other criminal who ever said a kind word about him. And then, as if that weren’t enough, he pledges to use the apparatus of the federal criminal justice system to go after his enemies. And none of these things is particularly controversial. People hear this sort of pledge to act like a dictator and just . . . shrug their shoulders.

Wherever we are on the issues in my list, we are much further down the path of stupid today than we were two years ago—and two years ago, we were further down the stupid path than we had been six years before that.

The key point to realize here is this: we have not yet hit rock bottom. As far as I can tell, we’re going to keep sliding down this hill. When Trump dies, I guess we’ll reassess over the following five years, and maybe then we’ll get a better sense of whether he is a Cause or a Symptom of the GOP’s illness. (I have always said he is both, but I gravitate towards the Symptom end of the spectrum more and more these days.) But for now, the slide continues.

So now, I plan to elaborate on how the GOP sucks on almost every issue of importance, other than those relating to identity politics. Then, for the paid subscribers (if any of you are left) I will discuss how, shockingly, I think the GOP is headed towards abandoning once of its most historical allies: Israel.

I know, right? But I think it could happen.

How the GOP Sucks on Almost Every Issue of Importance

In the free part of this newsletter, I think it’s worth fleshing out some of the criticisms I just leveled in service of my case that the GOP seems to find its way towards the stupidest possible position on nearly every issue—at least issues divorced from the uniquely leftist fascination with identity politics.

I’m going to start with an issue that is very important but gets little attention, just to add some value at the outset.

Surveillance to Combat Terror

This is an issue that is worth talking about at some length, because it’s not something you read about much in Big Media. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is the tool that the government relies on to surveil terrorists overseas. It is incredibly important. One article observed that “nearly 60% of the information in President Joe Biden’s presidential daily brief includes at least some information derived from Section 702.” But the statute is also controversial, for both sound reasons and dumb reasons. Let’s discuss both. (Which reason do you think many in the Republican party have chosen, by the way? If you guessed the dumb one, you win the prize.)

The sound reason that section 702 is controversial is because it was designed to target foreign nationals and not U.S. citizens—but controversies have arisen about the extent to which that surveillance scoops up incidental communications with U.S. citizens, and how to handle those communications.

A recent report from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) discusses how the FBI in particular (the NSA does a better job) tends to abuse its access to the incidental information thus collected. The members of the PCLOB all think section 702 information is critical. But in terms of dealing with the abuses, the board’s members split on their recommendations for addressing this issue. All of the board members agree that some reform needs to happen, but they disagree as to what, exactly, should happen.

One recommendation, supported by the majority of the PCLOB, is to have the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) authorize any query of the incidentally collected information for information about a U.S. person. But even among that majority, there is disagreement. Two members would require the FISC to conclude that the query would be “reasonably likely to retrieve” foreign intelligence information or evidence of a crime (for the FBI). The third member of the majority would require this decision to be made according to a higher “probable cause” standard.

The two members in the minority do not want to involve the FISC in these decisions, but instead want to institute reforms in the FBI—to fix its “structure and culture,” improve auditing and compliance, and codify privacy and civil liberties protections for making such queries.

All of these are serious and weighty issues being discussed by adults, and should form no obstacle to renewing section 702, which is critical to our national security. The only question is: renewal on what terms? But this is a sensible and indeed necessary conversation.

And then we have the dumb reasons to oppose section 702 renewal—which, of course, is the stuff that Republicans yammer about. Basically you can boil it down to this: THE FBI DONE OUR PRESIDENT TRUMP WRONG WITH THAT THERE FISA AND WE GOTTA REPEAL IT!

Let’s go to the least serious guy in Congress for his take:

“You couldn’t waterboard me into voting to reauthorize 702,” said Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, who backed the program in 2018. [Yes, but I’d like to try. —Ed.] “These 702 authorities were abused against people in Washington on January 6 and they were abused against people who were affiliated with the B.L.M. movement, and I’m equally aggrieved by both of those things.”

The actual revelations about FBI abuses are probably not what you’re thinking: some government official with a personal grudge against someone seeking to use the database for their own reasons, or members of federal law enforcement going after President Trump on account of how much they hate him. Instead, the revelations relate to what seem like queries with legitimate, good-faith concerns behind them—but which, in the opinion of the Department of Justice, did not meet the guidelines for those searches. That’s a problem, of course, but it’s not worth tanking all of our most important tools to fight foreign terrorism. It’s a reason to engage in the sort of common-sense reforms advocated by the PCLOB.

Gaetz’s resolution stating that section 702 ought to be allowed to expire was “co-sponsored by Reps. Eli Crane (AZ-02), Paul Gosar (AZ-09), Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA-14), Thomas Massie (KY-04), and Matt Rosendale (MT-02).” In other words, some of the other least serious people in Congress. Gosar and Greene in particular are the bottom of the barrel.

By the way, most of what I know about section 702, I learned on the National Security Law Podcast with University of Texas School of Law professors Bobby Chesney (now the Dean!) and Steve Vladeck. In particular, their most recent episode is largely devoted to an in-depth discussion of section 702 and the PCLOB report. If you don’t listen to this podcast, what is the matter with you?

Law Enforcement

The issues with section 702 renewal provide a natural transition to the more general issue of Republicans finding themselves to be the enemies of federal law enforcement. It’s no accident that people like Gaetz, Greene, and Gosar, who want to tank section 702 renewal, are the same kinds of people who say they want to defund the FBI, and run around claiming that the federal indictments of Donald Trump are an example of the weaponization of federal law enforcement against poor “President” Trump. (We really have to do away with the ridiculous custom of using people’s former titles to refer to them after they have left office. Trump is now just Trump.)

USA Today from July:

The legal troubles surrounding former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, have made the FBI a common target for 2024 Republican presidential candidates and some current members of the House GOP.

After the FBI searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate for classified documents last year, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-GA., called to defund the FBI on X, formerly known as Twitter.

They’re not lying:

Back to the article:

This position has been reiterated by other members of the House in recent months, including Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Florida, as federal and state investigations focus on Trump and House Republicans investigate Hunter Biden’s business dealings abroad.

Some lawmakers have alleged the agency is “weaponized” against conservatives and have called for the Trump-appointed FBI director Christopher Wray to step down.

On the campaign trail, 37-year-old biotechnology entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy took the calls a step further and said he would shut down the FBI and replace it with a similar institution.

Does this represent the views of everyone in the GOP? No; and the same can be said of many of the topics I am discussing here. There is a divide; in essence, there are two parties within one. But the stupid one is the one led by Trump, and Trump is a Big Enchilada in the party, so everyone defers to him, and the people who disagree with him are scared to say so. Even Ron DeSantis prattles on about the weaponized FBI and has pledged to fire the FBI director on Day One.

Which is a nice segue into the central problem:

Donald Trump

We’re all tired of talking about Trump, I know. I’m including Trump in this list only because it’s the most glaring way in which this party has become stupid. So let’s just devote a couple of paragraphs to restating the obvious, out of a need for a sense of completeness.

Donald Trump is looking at, what? 91 felonies in four criminal cases. The federal documents case against him is basically a slam dunk. It would take a completely unforeseen turn in the evidence presented, or a completely unreasonable juror, for that case not to result in a federal conviction that would likely carry a prison term. And whatever you think of the other cases (I think they are all very triable), the behavior that gave rise to the charges—whether relatively trivial (falsification of records to hide a payment to a porn star to influence a campaign) or immensely consequential (trying to steal a presidential election that was fairly won by the opposing candidate)—ought to disqualify the man from being electted to anything, even the office of dogcatcher. (There’s actually only one elected dogcatcher in the country, so getting elected dogcatcher is tougher than you might think. But I digress.) And yet this party will not have anyone else, despite a field consisting of candidates who would, a couple of cretins aside, be mostly fine.

Indeed, Trump wields so much power that the GOP majority in the House of Representatives held an internal vote and decided on Steve Scalise as their selection for Speaker—and then Trump criticized Scalise and said he should not be Speaker, after which Scalise bowed out within hours. Later, the GOP majority decided on Tom Emmer as their selection for Speaker—and then Trump criticized Emmer because Emmer did not vote for Trump’s coup, after which Emmer dropped out within hours. True, Trump’s support for Jim Jordan was not enough to drag that very unpopular figure over the finish line, but he did manage to get another coup-plotter, Mike Johnson, in the Speaker’s office. Matt Gaetz summed everything up:

The party is sick. It’s a cult, at this point, and that’s no exaggeration. The behavior is no different from a cult. (And no, Hillary, it does not help things for you, of all people, to observe that and call for forcible “deprogramming.” Just shut up and go away already.) There’s nothing to do but ride the storm out. But it seems like one of those storms that could last for the rest of my life.

2020 Election

Closely connected to the Trump sickness is the “stolen election” sickness. The GOP electorate thinks the 2020 election was stolen, based on nothing but pure lies and fantasy. This seems like another topic that has been talked to death, as to which there is nothing more to add . . . but there is. As the presidential race heats up, positions will harden and become even more extreme. A couple of recent polls demonstrate this with agonizing clarity.

Let’s start with the truth:

Trump lost in 2020, and tried to steal the election.

Now let’s talk about what Republicans believe:

Trump won in 2020, but he did not try to reverse the results of the election (???)

Whaaaaa?

Yup. That’s what they think.

Let’s start with the most recent polls on who the GOP believes the winner was in 2020. You’ve no doubt seen past polling on this. The latest polling I found was a poll of likely Iowa caucusgoers. From the Des Moines Register:

A majority of voters likely to attend the Iowa Republican caucuses believe that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election over President Joe Biden, a new Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows. 

Asked whether “you believe or not believe Donald Trump’s claims he won the 2020 presidential election,” 51% of likely Republican caucusgoers say they believe them, 41% do not and 8% are unsure. 

If you ask a slightly different question—was Joe Biden “legitimately elected”—you see a fairly consistent result over time: except for one outlier, most polls show that 25% of Republicans or fewer agree with that statement.

OK, but we knew that. Just how crazy have Republican voters become now, though? Well, now GOP grassroots voters tell pollsters that Trump didn’t even try to reverse the results of the 2020 election!! Aaron Blake in the Washington Post explains:

The Economist and YouGov this week became the latest to publish a head-scratching poll showing Republicans rejecting basic facts about Trump and his legal jeopardy.

The poll asked people whether Trump was “involved in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.” He, of course, was. Myriad pieces of evidence make that abundantly clear. We have a literal recording of him asking Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” just enough votes to overcome his deficit, and Trump on the call explicitly cited “flipping” the results in the state.

But to most Republicans, this apparently never happened. Just 18 percent in the YouGov poll said Trump was involved in trying to overturn Georgia’s results, compared to 59 percent who say he wasn’t.

My God. There’s simply no reality that these people won’t deny.

Ukraine

Republicans can’t seem to agree on providing aid to Ukraine. And it has gotten worse. The polling shows it.

This graph is a little confusing on its own; I had to peer at it for a minute before I understood what it was saying. So I’ll just explain it to you. A poll asked people if they favor increasing, decreasing, or maintaining the same level of aid to Ukraine. This graph shows the folks who said they wanted to decrease aid. The red line is Republicans. They are now up to 60%—a solid majority that wants to decrease aid to Ukraine. The graph covers the time period from September 2022 to September 2023. Over a year ago, barely over 20% of Republicans said that. Now, 60% do.

Meanwhile, the gray line is all adults, and the blue line is Democrats.

Keep the trend line in mind, because it will become relevant when I discuss below, for paid subscribers, the possible evolution of the GOP’s attitude on aid to Israel along similar lines.

This is one of the worst indictments of a political party I can imagine. I think a lot of us have temporarily and understandably forgotten about Ukraine in all of the coverage of the horrific and inexcusably brutal and barbaric attacks perpetrated by Hamas in Israel. But Ukraine is still fighting for its very existence against a genocidal monster, Vladimir Putin. That has not changed.

A majority of Republicans does not care. This is not my party.

The word is out, and the talking heads are paying heed. We’re at the point where even conservative talking heads you believed were sensible now behave like everyone knows that Ukraine funding is bad:

If I thought Matt Gaetz had actually managed to set up a situation where Ukraine funding would be guaranteed for the foreseeable future, I would be cheering Matt Gaetz, who is a giant a[double letters removed]hole whom nobody should ever cheer. Of course that didn’t happen. As noted, “Maga Mike Johnson” is the new Speaker, and he has voted against Ukraine funding on more than one occasion. And in the most recent round of budget legislation, the GOP stripped a provision for funding Ukraine out of the bill that was passed to keep the government open.

Hooray.

Vaccinations

It’s generally known that Republicans have become skeptical of vaccinations. It started with the COVID vaccinations. In October 2021, Brookings reported:

As of mid-September, 75% of adult Americans have been vaccinated, including 73% of non-Hispanic white adults and 78% of non-whites. Along party lines, however, the breakdown was 92% of Democrats, 68% of Independents, and 56% of Republicans.

That’s a significant disparity. Similarly, in September, POLITICO reported that polling shows “48 percent [of those polled] said vaccines are ‘very safe,’ including 64 percent of Democratic voters but only 33 percent of Republicans.” Republicans are more skeptical of the COVID vaccine than are Democrats, and are less likely to support recommending that others get the shot. And the GOP suspicion of COVID vaccines has metastasized, to the point where Republicans are hostile to school mandates on other vaccines. We’re now at the point where 44% of Republicans disapprove of school requirements that children get vaccinated for the measles, mumps, and rubella. It’s gotten so bad, Americans are even becoming reluctant even to vaccinate their dogs for rabies. NPR doesn’t note a partisan divide on that question, but I have a guess as to which party has the most resistance to the rabies vaccine.

It’s the Stupid Party, reliably finding its way to the stupidest positions possible.

Confusion About Who Our Allies Are

Who are our allies? Do you think we count among our allies countries like England, France, and Germany? Or are our real pals Russia, Hungary, and North Korea? To hear Donald Trump talk, you’d definitely conclude that he far favors dictators like Kim Jong Un (who send him “love letters”) to leaders like Angela Merkel. But surely his petty fixations don’t translate to Republican voters as a whole?

I’m joking of course.

By now you should not be surprised to learn that Republicans in 2022 viewed Vladimir Putin more favorably than they viewed sitting members of Congress from the Democrat party—Congresscritetrs who never murdered anyone . . . as far as we know. (You probably think Democrats would have a similar blind spot, but the link shows that they actually favored Trump over Putin, if not by much.) Tucker Carlson has promoted dopey Russian propaganda so often he is known by many as Tuckyo Rose. Surely you remember the famous line: “Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist?” His clips are often featured on Russian state television. Tucker and Trump are also big fans of Viktor Orban, a guy who gave five minutes on state TV to each opposition party before the last election.

In 2018, Republicans also viewed Kim Jong Un more favorably than they viewed Nancy Pelosi.

I don’t like Nancy Pelosi. But to view her less favorably than a guy who rounds up opponents and puts them in concentration camps, tortures them, and kills them, seems to show . . . poor judgment.

All in a day’s work for the Stupid Party.

Contempt for Character in Our Leaders

Remember how Republicans used to care about character in their leaders? Shockingly, around the time Donald Trump became the flavor of the month for the GOP, they suddenly stopped caring. Gee, I wonder why that might be!

In 2018, Gallup documented the phenomenon:

Republicans are much less likely now than they were during the Bill Clinton years to say it is very important for the president to provide moral leadership for the U.S. Democrats, on the other hand, are more likely to believe moral leadership is important now, with Donald Trump in office, than they were under Clinton.

Across four polls conducted during the Clinton administration, an average of 72% of U.S. adults said it was very important for the president to provide moral leadership for the country. A May 1-10 update of the question finds 66% of Americans holding that view.

The modest change at the national level obscures more significant shifts among partisans -- a 23-percentage-point decline among Republicans and a 13-point increase among Democrats.

It’s stupid not to care about character in your leaders—especially in your president. The office wields a tremendous amount of power with very few real checks on that power—and the main one, impeachment, has shown itself to be utterly toothless in an era of overweening partisanship.

But stupid ideas are good, to the Stupid Party.

Concern for the National Debt

I’ll end this portion of my diatribe with something literally nobody cares about: the national debt. If you were born yesterday, you could be fooled into thinking that Republicans actually care about this issue. Rather than writing a bunch of words, let me give you a chart that shows how much each president over the last hundred years or so added to the debt:

Only Barack Obama barely added more than Trump, and Obama had eight years to add his $8.34 trillion (which I found appalling at the time and still do). Trump added $8.2 trillion in four years.

Republicans controlled both houses of Congress during the first two years of Trump’s presidency. They lost the House during the final two years. During all that time, their concern about the debt dialed down to a number approaching zero.

They may never have really cared. But at one point they pretended to. To compare the spending under Trump to the spending of a drunken sailor is an affront to the fine men and women of our Navy.

Now I’ll turn from a general discussion of the GOP as the Stupid Party to a specific discussion, for paid subscribers, about how the party might even turn stupid about supporting Israel.

The warning signs are there, like they were a year ago with Ukraine.

The New Right Is Making Noises About Not Going Too Far to Support Israel

In this section, I’m going to lay out some evidence that the New Right is dipping its toe in the waters of treating Israel like it treats Ukraine. I don’t want to overstate the case, though. As I will discuss, the Democrats are still worse on Israel. But there are worrying signs that remind one of the New Right’s attitude towards Ukraine a year ago or more. This could get worse.