Donald Trump’s trading cards. We’ll get to that.
Barton Swaim is a sometime columnist at The Wall Street Journal. He writes longer pieces than the rest of the opinion crew and a week ago came up with a near 2,000 word piece titled, "Why the ‘Smart’ Party Never Learns". Its premise is that "Democrats are increasingly the party of educated urban elites; the GOP belongs to the white working class" — nothing new to that — and worse, that Democrats and their Progressive cohort live in a bubble, a bubble so vast and prevalent that conservatives are enmeshed in it wherever they go.
They are captives of CNN at airports, they can't go to "a concert by the local symphony orchestra" without first having "to listen to a four-minute lecture about systemic racism or climate change before the music starts", and so forth. (Symphonies and travel so frequent that CNN gets on their nerves says Swaim's working class is doing very well).
He then gets to his point that for fellow conservatives, there is no escape, because for them "There is no bubble, no silo, for such a person".
MEANWHILE…
Two days after Swaim's essay appeared, Talking Points Memo (TPM) launched a week-long series that promised "the definitive, real-time record of a plot to overturn an American election". The online publication had "obtained from multiple sources" all text messages from the personal cell phone and email accounts that Trump's final Chief of Staff Mark Meadows had turned over at the end of last year to the January 6 House select committee. You may recall that in April reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa got hold of 29 email and text exchanges between Meadows and Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in which she fervidly implored Meadows to do everything in his power to overturn Joe Biden's 2020 election victory and hand Donald Trump a second term as president.
But now, in filtering the trove of 2,319 messages, TPM had identified 34 members of Congress, all of them Republican, texting Meadows in the days after the 2020 election up to the assault on the Capitol and beyond with much the same messages as Ginni Thomas's. “Fight until hell freezes over than [sic] fight them on the ice”, said one. "Mark, When we lose Trump we lose our Republic", said another. A third wrote, "Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall [sic] Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO.” This last was sent 11 days after the insurrection.
The 34 sent a total of 364 emails to Meadows. Besieged with exhortations to overthrow the government, Meadows very much echoed them in the 95 responses he managed to send out.
Let that sink in: 34 Republican members of the Congress of the United States urged that the Constitution and the vote of the American people be cast aside in a coup d'état to keep Donald Trump in power. When January 6 arrived, the number was far larger: 147 Republican Congress members voted to reject the choice of voters in key states with the intent of substituting fraudulent slates of electors that had their states steal the votes from Biden and switch them to Trump.
BLINDERED
Swaim claim that there is no bubble on the right manages to forget the enormous bubble (or “silos” or “echo chambers” or “information cocoons” that he lists) that we have been living in over the past several years in which some two-thirds of Republicans believe Trump's contention that the 2020 election was stolen from him, compounded by the truly frightening percentage of them who have been beguiled by QAnon conspiracies that began with the belief that Democrats conduct child sex-trafficking rings. The latest: Trump confidant Roger Stone believes that a "demonic portal" opened above the White House when Biden moved in… Click to continue reading