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Democrats and Republicans Agree: Better to Lose Than to Shut Up

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Ted Rall

 “When you surround an army,” Sun Tzu counseled in The Art of War, “leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard.” Partisans on both sides of America’s everything-looks-like-a-hammer politics have forgotten this basic tenet of strategy—and are likely to pay for it.

            Donald Trump announced that he expects to be arrested in New York and indicted in connection with charges that media reports say are about to be filed by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Democrats greeted the news with characteristic gloating.

            “[Trump] cannot hide from his violations of the law, disrespect for our elections and incitements to violence,” tweeted former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The New York charges concern the allegation that he misappropriated campaign funds in order to pay hush money to Stormy Daniels, who says she had sex with the former president. They have nothing to do with denying the result of the 2000 election or the January 6th Capitol riot.

            Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann tweeted: “ARREST TRUMP TODAY! ARREST TRUMP TOMORROW! ARREST TRUMP FOREVER!”

            “I’ll throw a watch party when it happens,” Alyssa Farah Griffin said on ABC’s The View. “Lock him up! Lock him up!” Joy Behar responded, echoing the anti-Hillary chant at Trump’s rallies.

            Schadenfreude is wicked fun, but gleeful Trump-bashers might want to consider the consequences: Grievance-mongering is one of Trump’s main political schticks. Revel in the T-shirt of the presidential mugshot but remember, MAGA nation will use it to rile up the GOP base—and bring back some 2016 Trump voters who became Never Trumpers as well. In a Trump perp walk (I’d advise him to demand one), conservatives will see maddening injustice where liberals see just desserts.

            Indeed, even Trump’s primary challengers are coming to his defense. What doesn’t kill Trump makes him stronger; an arrest coupled with liberal gloating thereabout plays into his narrative that he receives unfair and disproportionate opprobrium while swampy mainstream pols get away with murder, hardens his supporters’ resolve, and increases his chances of being restored to power. “If this happens, Trump will be re-elected in a landslide victory,” Elon Musk predicted.

            Meanwhile, Republicans are overplaying their hand on abortion.

            Pro-lifers have launched a novel legal challenge to FDA authorization of the abortion drug mifepristone in a federal court in Texas, a case that will probably be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. Wyoming recently banned medication abortion. A South Carolina bill would define abortion as murder punishable by life in prison or capital punishment. Considering that 85% of voters favor legal abortion in all or some circumstances—a record high since 1976—they might ask themselves whether they’ve blown up a bridge too far.

            One-third of American women now live in a state where abortion is illegal due to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Most abortion-ban states have exceptions for rape, incest and the life of mother on their books, but in practice very few exceptions are ever granted. A lawsuit filed by five women in Texas who nearly died because they were denied abortions to which state law said they were entitled highlights that reality.

            When widespread demand encounters legal prohibition, people generally resort to a workaround—legally if possible, underground if not. There are roughly a million abortions annually. Medication abortions using mifepristone to block hormones that support pregnancy and misoprostol to empty the uterus accounted for 53% of U.S. pregnancy terminations in 2020, a portion that has almost certainly increased with the spread of telemedicine during the pandemic and the Dobbs decision.

            The mifepristone option has served as a socio-political pressure-release valve since Dobbs. Red-state women get still obtain abortions without traveling hundreds of miles. Red-state politicians can pander to pro-life voters, pointing out that abortion is far more difficult to obtain without looking like full-fledged Handmaid’s-Tale despots. The loser has been the pro-choice movement, which lacks the galvanizing effect of a 100% abortion ban.

            If SCOTUS overrules the FDA and kills mifepristone, the pressure-release valve gets closed—and not just in the 28 states that currently ban abortion. Medication abortion, the easiest and therefore most common type of abortion, vanishes in all 50 states. In an election year, the mere effort to ban mifepristone may be sufficient to enrage liberal voters. If it succeeds, watch out. Abortion rights aren’t currently a top issue for left-leaning voters, but an actual ban could spur even disgruntled progressives to turn out for Democrats about whom they otherwise might not have felt enthused.

            What should the two parties have done instead?

In an ideal world, Democratic prosecutors and investigators would have coordinated their efforts, bypassing novel legal theories like AG Bragg’s that are politically flimsy and unlikely to lead to conviction in favor of rock-solid charges like business fraud and instigating a riot. Now that an indictment appears to be forthcoming, Democrats could have assumed a sober mien, pointing out the sad necessity of having to book a former president like a common criminal. They shouldn’t be jumping up and down like overstimulated infants.

            Republicans, on the other hand, should have taken a breather on their fight against abortion. Had they waited a few years to let the new bifurcated legal normal to take hold, the pro-choice movement would have lost momentum as dispirited partisans drifted away having accepted defeat. Eventually, with Americans accustomed to abortion as less legal and rarer, they could have moved forward to ban all forms of abortion nationwide. Slow and steady, the same way economic conservatism was built up from the grass roots over decades following Goldwater’s 1964 rout, might have won this race.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

DMZ America Podcast #93: Trump Says He’s About to Be Arrested

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Ted Rall

Former President Donald Trump announced that he expects to be arrested this Tuesday by the Manhattan district attorney in connection with charges related to misappropriation of campaign funds to pay hush money to porn star stormy Daniels, who alleges that she had an affair with him. In this special edition of the DMZ America podcast in which left-leaning editorial cartoonist Ted Rall debates politics with right-leaning editorial cartoonist Scott Stantis, they go over the social, legal and political implications of what appears to be an imminent indictment, the first of its kind against a former President of the United States. Is political violence inevitable? Will there be an uprising near the New York courthouse similar to January 6? Will Trump-weary republicans close ranks behind the former president? Does this hurt him or help him in his election campaign for 2024? Spoiler alert: Democrats should be careful what they have long wished for.

 

 

You can also watch the Video Version by clicking=> here

What’s the Worst That Could Happen, Jill?

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Ted Rall

Will Joe Biden run for reelection despite his age? Democrats are on tenterhooks. Meanwhile, possible Democratic alternatives are on hold, incapable of fundraising or drawing attention to themselves until that they know it’s a wide open field and they can safely announce without disrespecting the president.

Ron DeSantis Has a Secret Weapon. He’s a Master of Wedge Issues.

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Ted Rall

           Donald Trump remains the favorite for the GOP nomination. In theoretical 2024 matchups against Joe Biden, however, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has begun to outperform the president where Trump would be projected to lose. But DeSantis might falter once Democratic voters start to pay serious attention to him.

            DeSantis knows that. He plans to undermine liberal opposition with his secret weapon: his consistent ability to identify populist themes tailormade for partisan Republican primary voters, yet are crafted to tear away enough Democrats to become wedge issues in a general election campaign.

DeSantis has staked out a hardline position as the heir apparent to lead the MAGA movement—thank you, Donald, time to pass the torch—whose conservative positions and aggressive tone could turn off moderates and spook liberals into turning out in higher numbers. DeSantis can mitigate that challenge by creating some common ground with his natural enemies.  His current slate of wedge-issues-to-be, which prima facie look like red meat for the growling dogs of the right base, also have potential to pull in centrists and even some progressives who silently concur.

Of the various national and regional responses to the pandemic, Florida initially joined the national lockdown but then landed solidly into the rapid-reopening camp. “People know that Florida is a free state,” DeSantis summarized his position a year ago. “They’re not gonna have you shut down. They’re not gonna have restrictions.” After late 2020 if you wanted to eat indoors or you wanted your kid to attend physical school with flesh-and-blood teachers without a mask, Florida became your beacon—so much so that it triggered a mini-migration to the state.

Critics say DeSantis played fast and loose with Covid death and infection data in order to disguise the failure of a policy in which Floridians had a higher case rate than the national average and Florida seniors had “a higher death rate than any other state” as of late 2022, according to the CDC.

In politics, perception is reality. DeSantis’ “Covid gamble paid off,” as Helen Lewis observed in The Atlantic. “When liberals look at DeSantis, they see a culture warrior with authoritarian tendencies,” Lewis wrote. “But as Americans have tired of pandemic precautions, and as regrets about long school closures have surfaced even among Democrats, DeSantis has been able to attract swing voters [in his gubernatorial reelection campaign] by positioning himself as a champion of both cultural and economic freedom.”

            DeSantis’ nativist stance on the migrant crisis plays a similar tune. Flying clueless asylum applicants to Martha’s Vineyard was counterproductive—it would have  been cheaper to house them indefinitely than to blow a cool $12 million of Floridians’ tax dollars on a stunt—and cruel. But closed-border hardliners loved it.

And some Democrats silently cheered. At least DeSantis did something to draw attention to immigration—which Biden and the Democrats would rather not discuss. The border crisis became a major topic of debate during the 2022 midterms, during which frustrated Democrats in vulnerable districts lashed out at the White House for their failure to grasp immigration as a potential wedge. A Spectrum News/Siena College Poll released a month before the midterms found that DeSantis was onto something: 50% of independents supported Florida deporting migrants, especially to Massachusetts and New York. He retained strong support among his state’s Latinos.

Nationally, Democratic voters remain pro-immigration. But things are beginning to shift in a direction that creates an opportunity for a disciplined Republican message to create inroads among swing voters. “The percentage of Democrats dissatisfied and desiring less immigration was nearly nonexistent in 2021, at 2%, before rising to 11% last year and 19% now,” Gallup reported on February 13th. “Independents’ dissatisfaction and preference for less immigration has about doubled since 2021, rising from 19% at that time to 36% today.”

DeSantis’ attacks on “woke” education and AP Black Studies presents as a classic racist dog whistle to Biden Democrats. “He’s gone full-blown white supremacist,” columnist Jennifer Rubin cried in The Washington Post.

But many left-leaning voters also wonder whether public schools really ought to offer AP courses outside core subjects like history, math, English and foreign languages, as well as whether queer studies or intersectionality are appropriate topics for discussion in high school. Overall, most voters do not oppose DeSantis’ proposed ban on AP Black Studies. A surprisingly high 19% of Democrats, more than enough to make a difference in a tight race, side with DeSantis.

DeSantis’ judicious deployment of well-timed wedge issues—now that trust in the news media is so low people actually think the press misleads them intentionally, he says it should be easier to sue reporters for libel—has already endeared DeSantis to Republicans looking for a Trump-like candidate without the baggage. If he beats his former mentor and goes on to fight a Democrat, he’ll look somewhat reasonable in some respects to some liberals and some moderates. That’s a tricky slalom ride, one he’s navigating well so far.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

DMZ America Podcast #85: Pence’s Classified Documents, Ukraine Slog, Parents Rights & Trans Kids, the Fight to Save Downtowns

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Ted Rall

Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) break down another interesting week in news and current events. Former Vice President Mike Pence, it turns out, also had classified documents left over from his time in office. Is it time to admit that (a) everyone has classified documents and (b) way too much stuff is overclassified and we should just stop caring about this? Now Ukraine wants tanks. But it turns out many of President Zelensky’s top officials were corrupt, so he fired them. Should the U.S. establish a war aim to define what victory looks like? If so, what should it be? Angry parents, including some liberal Democrats, say schools should tell them if their kids are identifying as a different gender in the classroom. Do parents have a right to know that their boy is really a girl? Finally, downtowns are dying as a result of workers no longer going into the office. Why do Americans hate commuting so much?

 

 

Maybe You Should Go Easy Next Time

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Ted Rall

Democrats defend Biden for taking classified documents home with him on the grounds that he took fewer and that he turned them in voluntarily, unlike Trump. Problem is, Biden was so vituperative when talking about Trump’s irresponsibility. Hypocrisy is political Kryptonite.

It’s My Party and I’ll Conflate If I Want To

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Ted Rall

Ever since Donald Trump became president, Democrats have taken to equating the fate of their own party to the fate of American democracy. In a two-party system, the logical conclusion is that this is profoundly undemocratic.

24th Time Is a Charm

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Ted Rall

From the classified documents he took to Mar-a-Lago to New York State business fraud charges to Stormy Daniels, Donald Trump’s demise has been predicted too many times to count. We will believe it when we see it.

Non-Partisan Man

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Ted Rall

In an age where political partisans pick and choose their own facts, we need a defender of reality who forces Republicans and Democrats alike to face up to the harsh truth.

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