Trump's Bonkers Attack on Brian Kemp

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. 

A  rule of thumb in political psychology: look at personality to account for political behavior only when no other explanation makes sense.  Case in point: attacking a governor whose support you desperately need.  Extra points for attacking a Southern governor's wife.

Adam Wren and Meridith McGraw at Politico:

Former President Donald Trump is reopening an old feud with Republicans in Georgia.

Just before rallying supporters in Atlanta on Saturday, Trump unleashed a tirade on the state’s popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp, whose vaunted ground game operation Trump may need in November, ripping into him on Truth Social for “fighting Unity and the Republican Party.”

And when Trump took the stage, he went at him even harder.

“He’s a bad guy, he’s a disloyal guy and he’s a very average governor,” Trump told supporters, eliciting boos toward Kemp from the crowd.

The attack — on social media and in person at the Georgia State University Convocation Center — marked an escalation of Trump’s longstanding criticism of Kemp. And it instantly unsettled Georgia Republicans, who warned Trump’s comments threaten his already shaky prospects in the state.

“I’m sitting here scratching my head,” Bobby Saparow, a Republican operative and Brian Kemp’s former campaign manager, told POLITICO. “Attacking the popular governor of a pivotal swing state makes zero sense. If we want to actually unite, ask for the support of the guy who beat your endorsed primary opponent by 52 points and handily defeated Stacey Abrams.”

Or, as Erick Erickson, the Georgia Republican and radio host, told POLITICO: “Over 30,000 people refused to vote for [Trump] in Georgia in 2020 and he lost by about 12,000 votes. All he’s doing is reminding everyone why they don’t like him. And he has no Georgia ground game and will have to rely on Kemp. It’s going to hurt him.”

 

Trump's temper tantrums and rants are becoming a common occurrence again. Watch him lose it over Gov. Kemp's wife not endorsing him for president. pic.twitter.com/0pWabapGY1

— American Bridge 21st Century (@American_Bridge) August 3, 2024

My focus is on winning this November and saving our country from Kamala Harris and the Democrats - not engaging in petty personal insults, attacking fellow Republicans, or dwelling on the past.

You should do the same, Mr. President, and leave my family out of it. pic.twitter.com/m8y6CSuZKY

— Brian Kemp (@BrianKempGA) August 3, 2024

Trump Throws Away Two Senate Seats in Georgia

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race.   Our next book, title TBA, discusses the 2020 results.

The last important 2020 results came in last night, as Democrats took both Georgia Senate seats.

Meredith McGraw at al. at Politico:

Democrats have pulled off at least one Senate win in Georgia, with another likely to follow. And Republicans are pointing a frustrated finger at Donald Trump.

With control of the Senate at stake in the state’s two races, the president chose to spend weeks peddling baseless claims that Georgia’s electoral system was rigged, fueling an online movement to boycott Tuesday’s election. He demonized the state’s Republican leaders and fractured the local GOP. He ignored calls from his allies to rally in the state sooner. His support for Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue mainly came in the form of the occasional tweet and two rallies, including one on Monday. He blasted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for not heeding his calls for boosted stimulus checks.

...

 “He is the Dems’ best base animator,” said one GOP strategist involved in the Georgia races. “Look at how high turnout was on their side compared to historical trends. Look at how much their candidates raised. He steps back after Election Day and denies them that oxygen. He didn’t.”

  Trump's probably-illegal call to the Secretary of State may have offended a small number of GOP voters.  

Alexis Simendinger and Al Weaver at The Hill:

Trump’s refusal to concede the November result in Georgia, having lost to Biden there by 11,779 votes, also created headaches for the party as they lost a key messaging opportunity. According to a Senate GOP campaign official, the most persuasive message to Republican voters in the Peach State was to return Perdue and Loeffler to Washington to hold the Senate majority as checks on a Democratic executive branch. But Republicans could not sustain that message because Trump will not acknowledge Biden’s victory and continues to baselessly lob claims of widespread voter fraud.

During his speech on Monday, Trump denounced Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who probably still have some supporters within the GOP electorate:

There is no place like a Trump rally, but you know what? This is a Kelly rally and a David rally. I wouldn’t do it unless I loved them both. I wouldn’t do it. But I’m going to be here in a year and a half and I’m going to be campaigning against your governor and your crazy secretary of state, that I can tell you.

Infighting did not help either.  At Politico: Marianne Levin and James Arkin reported on November 9:

Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue of Georgia called on the state’s GOP secretary of state to resign on Monday, citing “failures” in the election process but not providing any specific evidence to support their claims.

“There have been too many failures in Georgia elections this year and the most recent election has shined a national light on the problems,” Loeffler and Perdue said in a joint statement. “The Secretary of State has failed to deliver honest and transparent elections. He has failed the people of Georgia, and he should step down immediately." 

If you are trying to motivate people to vote, maybe the best course is not to say that the election is illegal and invalid:

 

....is therefore both illegal and invalid, and that would include the two current Senatorial Elections. In Wisconsin, Voters not asking for applications invalidates the Election. All of this without even discussing the millions of fraudulent votes that were cast or altered!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 1, 2021

Kempism

Peter Spiliakos writes at First Things:

Kempism started as an opening to the working-class. Kempism argued—somewhat persuasively under the circumstances of the late-1970s—that the needs of entrepreneurs and wage-earners overlapped. Today, Kempism has degenerated into a rationalization for the interests and priorities of the affluent.

Kempism speaks for a Wall Street Journal editorial page that prioritizes tax cuts for businesses and high-earners above everything else. Kempsim speaks for the employers who want to make it easier to find workers (and to pay those workers less) as the labor market finally heats up after the Great Recession. The social basis of Kempism is now the business lobbies, and politicians like Paul Ryan whose experiences with the world of conservative think tanks are utterly alien to those of most American wage-earners.

On taxes, Kempism was a victim of its own success. Reagan-era tax reforms (in which Kemp played a big role) took many people off the income tax rolls entirely:  as of last year, about 45 percent of households (mostly lower income) paid no federal income tax at all.  As a result, income-tax cuts now disproportionately benefit the affluent.  

The other half of Kempism, which the article doesn't mention, consisted of proposals to help the poor, such as tenant management of public housing.

Good stuff by itself, but Kempism offered little to the people in between -- the blue-collar and pink-collar workers now flocking to Trump.

Reform Conservatism, New Ideas, and Neocons

At The Weekly Standard, Michael Warren writes that Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) is working to be the GOP's new new-ideas guy:

Lee knows he isn’t the presidential candidate conservatives are looking for, but he’s got his eyes on that “positive, innovative, and unapologetically conservative agenda.” He’s not shy about the role he’d like to play. “I do want to influence that debate,” Lee says. His slate of policy proposals isn’t light fare. Since 2013, Lee has introduced bills to make the tax code more family friendly, take on cronyism in Washington, reform the college accreditation system, and change the way the federal government funds transportation infrastructure. But what Lee really wants is to change the way conservatives think about domestic policy, reorienting the Republican party toward a family-focused, constitutional populism to help the GOP win back the White House. If Lee succeeds, it will make him one of the most consequential conservatives of his generation.

Lee’s touchstone is Ronald Reagan, but not in the rote way you might think. “It’s important for us to remember that by the time 2016 rolls around, we will be about as far away from Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 as Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 was from D-Day, and it’s important for us to update our agenda to make sure that it fits the times,” says Lee. “We need to stop simply talking about Reagan and start acting like him.” That doesn’t mean slashing the marginal tax rate or getting rid of the Department of Education. Lee says acting like Reagan means applying principles of limited government, constitutionalism, and a healthy civil society to the issues of the day—namely, the rising cost of living and economic insecurity of the American middle class.

If the Republican party needs another Reagan, Lee wants to fill the role of Jack Kemp, who as a junior congressman took the lead in formulating the tax cuts that were central to Reagan’s agenda once he took office. Like Kemp, Lee has made tax reform his signature issue, despite not having a seat on the tax-writing Finance Committee. The target of Lee’s tax proposal is what he calls the “parent tax penalty.” Parents, like everyone else, pay some combination of income and payroll taxes. The “penalty,” Lee says, is that parents also bear the costs of raising children who will grow up to become taxpayers themselves. The current child tax credit isn’t enough to offset these additional costs. Lee’s plan looks a lot like other Republican tax reform ideas—simplifying the brackets, lowering rates, removing costly deductions—while adding an extra $2,500-per-child tax credit that can apply to any parent’s combined tax liability. It’s money that could pay for child-care costs or cover expensive dental work or even help one parent stay home to raise the kids.

Arit John writes at Bloomberg:

Ahead of his foreign policy speech in Chicago on Wednesday, Jeb Bush released a list of 21 familiar foreign policy advisers joining his staff. Nineteen of the names would have been familiar to foreign policy wonks (they’d served under one of more of the last Republican presidents) but only one brought back memories of the neoconservative movement that led the U.S. into Iraq: Paul Wolfowitz.

As several people, especially liberals, have pointed out, by including Wolfowitz—whose brief, scandal-plagued tenure as president of the World Bank is overshadowed by his key role in America’s unpopular invasion of Iraq under President George W. Bush—the former Florida governor did little to distinguish himself from his brother’s foreign policy.

But while Jeb Bush is adding neoconservative Iraq War baggage to his 2016 presidential campaign, expected Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton has spent years dealing with her own. One of Clinton’s biggest weaknesses with the Democratic base has been her perceived hawkishness—Barack Obama used her vote for the Iraq War against her in 2008, andDemocrats criticized her critique of President Obama’s foreign policy in the Atlantic last year, when she argued that the U.S. should have armed moderate Syrian rebels to prevent the rise of groups like the Islamic State.

In July of last year, the New York Times ran two pieces tying Clinton to the neoconservative movement. In “The Next Act of the Neocons,” Jacob Heilbrunn argued that neocons like historian Robert Kagan are putting their lot in with Clinton in an effort to stay relevant while the GOP shies away from its past interventionism and embraces politicians like Senator Rand Paul...

Kasich: Kemp Redux?

The Wall Street Journal reports on Ohio Governor John Kasich:

More so than any other leading Republican, Gov. Kasich is using his perch to promote a blend of conservative orthodoxy leavened with liberal policies meant to help the poor, the mentally ill and the uninsured.

To hear him tell it, the 61-year-old onetime Lehman Brothers executive wants to rebrand the Republican Party by refashioning what it means to be a conservative in the 21st century.

On the one hand, he tamed a deficit by slashing funding to local governments and overhauling the state's Medicaid rules, among things. He has eliminated the state's estate tax and wants to phase out all state income taxes, a step aimed at stimulating growth. A budget he signed in June included a range of new abortion restrictions that drew sharp criticism from Democrats.

At the same time, Mr. Kasich has stirred strong opposition from tea-party leaders—and won surprised approval from liberals—by pushing to expand Medicaid coverage to nearly 300,000 additional Ohioans, adopting a provision of the Obama health-care overhaul that he has taken to defending with an openly religious fervor..

..
Driving back to Ohio last month from a Cape Cod vacation with his family, Mr. Kasich stopped to eat in Buffalo, N.Y. He asked a few people at random if they had ever met Jack Kemp, the late Buffalo Bills quarterback who became a congressman and 1996 vice-presidential nominee.

Mr. Kemp, who once described himself as a "bleeding-heart conservative," built a reputation as a Republican who focused on urban minorities and the poor.

"It was Jack, over and over again, who talked about lifting people, about hopes and dreams," Mr. Kasich said. "Jack had a profound impact on the conservative moment. Maybe I have a chance to do that, too."

See Kasich's action on an autism insurance mandate.