Turley: "Trumpunity"
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As Washington prepares for a Biden administration, congressional Democrats are discovering they cannot live without Donald Trump. In controversies ranging from federal investigations to executive orders, they are invoking Trump to justify abandoning the very principles they inveighed against him for four years. There is a sense of immunity from needing to be consistent or coherent. Call it “Trumpunity.”
Trumpunity is the right to adopt the very practices or policies you once denounced, all because you are not Trump. Even the mention of his name magically relieves any duty to follow prior positions.
So, it was no problem when incoming White House deputy chief of staff Jennifer O’Malley Dillon heralded the Biden administration as ushering in a new “sense of unity” while calling Republicans a “bunch of f—ers.” Although Dillon later apologized, figures like Hillary Clinton and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) publicly supported her vulgar attack as perfectly acceptable given Trump’s past rhetoric. There is now an open license to engage in the very same behavior as he did. AOC (who previously called for a blacklist of those “complicit” with Trump) told Republicans that, after Trump, “you don’t get to sob now” when Democrats engage in vulgar attacks.
This is, of course, little more than a juvenile “he did it first” defense. Washington has long floated on a deep rolling sea of hypocrisy, but now leaders do not even feel the need for pretense — they have Trump.
After complaining for years that Trump acted unilaterally through executive orders, Democrats now call on Joe Biden to do the same with dozens of such orders. Just a few months ago, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) denounced Trump’s unilateral COVID-19 relief orders as unconstitutional, a circumvention of Congress. Now, he wants Biden to circumvent Congress after his inauguration with such acts as wiping out up to $50,000 in debt per college student — a massive federal subsidy without any vote of Congress.
For years, Democrats and an array of legal experts denounced Trump for dismissing the Russia collusion investigation as a politically motivated hoax. They insisted on the appointment of a special counsel, and described even rhetorical criticism as criminal obstruction or witness tampering. Now, Biden has dismissed federal investigations of his son as just another form of political “foul play.” Various Democratic senators, including Schumer, have called for the Justice Department not to investigate the Hunter Biden allegations, and figures like House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) called for the termination of the Durham investigation.
Even constitutional terms apparently no longer have discernible meaning if they come in the same sentence as Trump. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) told CNN that members of Congress who question the election results “are bordering on sedition and treason.” That would mean more than 70 percent of Republicans and 10 percent of Democrats nationwide are potentially traitors for believing Trump won. Shaneen and her colleagues denounced Trump for calling people traitors and sought to protect officials who denounced his use of the label “enemies of the people” against reporters. Just two years ago, Trump was called a Stalin for using such labels by Democrats. It is same position taken recently before the Supreme Court by Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who called a legal challenge to the election “seditious.” Of course, the use of the courts or Congress to raise such objections is the very opposite of sedition, which seeks to overthrow the legal system.
Democrats did not accuse their colleagues of treason or sedition when they sought to block the certification of Ohio’s electoral votes in Congress in 2004. They did not call Hillary Clinton traitorous for advising Biden not to concede any Trump victory on Election Night. They did not describe members of Congress or the media as traitors for repeatedly declaring Trump “illegitimate” over the last four years.
Napoleon once said “treason is a matter of dates.” And the key date in the United States, for now, appears to be Nov. 7 — the day the media declared Joe Biden the presumptive winner. It also would seem to be the day that millions of Americans became presumptive traitors for questioning the election results. This, according to the same Democrats who once legitimately denounced Trump for calling his critics “traitors” and “enemies of the people.”
It seems Trump is simply too useful to really let go. Without him, the critics would be forced to live according to the values they claimed to defend for the last four years. Why be civil, collaborative or constitutional when you can act like Trump? After all, you’ve got Trumpunity.
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Yeap, the GOP will soon want to pretend that Trump never happened. Comes to 2024, my prediction is the GOP will not nominate Trump or any of the Trump kids as their POTUS or VP nominees, and the GOP nominees will want nothing to do with Trump or any of the Trump kids. The “Trump” name will become even more poisonous and more disgraceful than the “Bush” name after G.W.Bush.
Heck, this might even happen sooner; maybe by the 2022 election, the GOP will already want nothing to do with Trump.
The Democrats will likely still take every opportunity to hang Trump around the GOP’s neck, and the GOP will deserve it.
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@catseye3 said in Turley: "Trumpunity":
Yeah. Short memories.
We're still arguing over the Civil War...
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Jonathan Turley’s thesis that “Democrats are discovering they cannot live without Donald Trump” is pretty obviously wrong right off the bat.
The Democrats did fine with Obama, the Democrats would have done fine with Clinton. Even if you want to argue that the Democrats need an imaginary “villain” at whom to sling their rhetorical arrows, Mitch McConnell will fill that role just fine. Mitch McConnell committed enough inconsistencies that “Mitchpunity” would work just as well as a foil.
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@axtremus said in Turley: "Trumpunity":
Yeap, the GOP will soon want to pretend that Trump never happened. Comes to 2024, my prediction is the GOP will not nominate Trump or any of the Trump kids as their POTUS or VP nominees, and the GOP nominees will want nothing to do with Trump or any of the Trump kids. The “Trump” name will become even more poisonous and more disgraceful than the “Bush” name after G.W.Bush.
Heck, this might even happen sooner; maybe by the 2022 election, the GOP will already want nothing to do with Trump.
The Democrats will likely still take every opportunity to hang Trump around the GOP’s neck, and the GOP will deserve it.
But for now it’s still Trump all the time, isn’t it? The addiction is so hard to come down from. No one has a post Trump plan. Sad. Lol.
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@loki said in Turley: "Trumpunity":
But for now it’s still Trump all the time, isn’t it? The addiction is so hard to come down from. No one has a post Trump plan. Sad. Lol.
Trump is still trying to wreak havoc (e.g., his recent veto of the defense funding bill, his recent threat to not sign the omnibus bill, his continuing to spout ‘voter fraud’ nonsense and to overturn legitimate election results) ... yeah, Trump deserves all the criticism he’s got for these shenanigans.
As for ‘post Trump plan,’ the Democrats have it just fine, and Uncle Joe is busy putting that plan in motion.
The GOP is the one without a ‘post Trump plan.’ They could not even pass a party platform in their last party convention.
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@axtremus said in Turley: "Trumpunity":
@loki said in Turley: "Trumpunity":
But for now it’s still Trump all the time, isn’t it? The addiction is so hard to come down from. No one has a post Trump plan. Sad. Lol.
Trump is still trying to wreak havoc (e.g., his recent veto of the defense funding bill, his recent threat to not sign the omnibus bill, his continuing to spout ‘voter fraud’ nonsense and to overturn legitimate election results) ... yeah, Trump deserves all the criticism he’s got for these shenanigans.
As for ‘post Trump plan,’ the Democrats have it just fine, and Uncle Joe is busy putting that plan in motion.
The GOP is the one without a ‘post Trump plan.’ They could not even pass a party platform in their last party convention.
Wreaking havoc. What is wrong with your rhetoric, it actually sounds funny. I would be frightened to live that way if you really think that.
