"Trump F---ed the Party": After Georgia Loss, the Republican Fissure Grows Even Deeper

By Eric Lutz, Vanity Fair

06 January 21

Republicans’ primary reason for sticking with the president—because it was a good political strategy—has begun to evaporate. Still, some are clinging on regardless.

our years ago, Donald Trump asked Republicans to make a deal with the devil. It took some longer than others, but most eventually came around, normalizing and enabling and often outright participating in the depraved horror show of his presidency all in exchange for tax cuts, some judges, and, perhaps most importantly, access to his enthusiastic base. The pact must have seemed worthwhile for a time, especially for a party whose objections to Trump tended to be more stylistic than substantive. But if they’d bothered to read the fine print, they’d have known this would be where things were headed. Offer up your soul to Trump, and he’ll eventually come to collect.

He’s doing that now, as he mounts what will hopefully be a last-ditch effort to overturn his loss to Joe Biden. More than a hundred Republicans in the House, and about a dozen in the Senate, have pledged to protest the election results on his behalf—a cynical political ploy for some, a delusion for others, a dangerous assault on democracy for all. Trump is pushing for more: He’s encouraging protesters, including the often violent Proud Boys, to converge on Washington Wednesday when lawmakers meet to tabulate the election results, and pressuring his dutiful deputy Mike Pence to smash through the bounds of his ceremonial role as the overseer of that process and unilaterally declare those results invalid.

But as he does, he’s getting a degree of pushback from Republicans that he has rarely, if ever, received. Many GOP officials who previously had his back appear to have reached their limit, creating a fissure within the party. “We have sworn an oath under God to defend the Constitution. We uphold that oath at all times, not only when it is politically convenient,” Liz Cheney, the prominent conservative senator from South Dakota, tweeted on Wednesday, becoming one of the most prominent Republicans to speak out against Trump’s attempted coup. “Congress has no authority to overturn elections by objecting to electors. Doing so steals power from the states & violates the Constitution.”

Perhaps most importantly—if cynically—it no longer feels politically expedient to back the president. Raphael Warnock, who defeated Kelly Loeffler in Tuesday’s Georgia runoff elections and will become the state’s first Black senator, and Jon Ossoff, who is on the cusp of beating David Perdue, ran strong campaigns, and were buttressed by the grassroots work of Stacey Abrams and others to turn out Democratic voters. And Loeffler and Perdue didn’t exactly make a strong case for themselves to remain in office. But Trump’s selfish crusade to undo his own loss in the state almost certainly undermined the GOP candidates he was ostensibly supporting, first by falsely declaring the electoral process as a whole and those races specifically “illegal and invalid”—a bogus claim that seemed destined to depress his own side’s turnout—and then by hanging his erratic effort to thwart the will of the people around the incumbents’ necks.

Perdue and Loeffler wore it proudly: He paid lip service to Trump’s plight and suggested he would object on Trump’s behalf if he landed in the Senate for the certification process Wednesday; she went all in during a Trump rally Monday, announcing to a crowd of MAGA faithful that she planned to join the Senate protest led by Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley. But hewing close to Trump isn’t exactly paying off for them. Democrats are coloring a longtime red state blue, and are now poised to control both chambers of congress and the White House. If their morals aren’t keeping them from going all in on Trump, at least some Republicans may begin to see after Georgia the limits of his political benefits to them. “Trump is the cause of this, lock, stock, and barrel,” a Republican strategist told Politico Wednesday.

“Trump f---ed the party. He f---ed the party with his conspiracy theories and pushing females and independents away from the party,” a Trump adviser told Bloomberg’s Jennifer Jacobs. “The bleeding needs to stop. He needs to go.”

A great many will continue to stand with him, believing MAGA to be the path to enacting their agenda. Others won’t care, seeking to fulfill the true promise of Trumpism: to burn it all down. They may be rewarded for doing so, as the massive, frenzied crowds converging on D.C. ahead of the Biden certification underline. But with his behavior no longer merely threatening democracy, but their own political ends, other Republicans seem ready to hop off the Trump Train. Even as they do, Americans would be wise to remember how long they were willing to ride it, how much they plowed through, and all the damage they left in their wake.

The Data Is In. People of Color Are Punished More Harshly for Covid Violations in the US

By Timothy Colman, Pascal Emmer, Andrea Ritchie and Tiffany Wang, Guardian UK

06 January 21

People of color and immigrants who bear the brunt of Covid-19 are also subject to the most punitive enforcement of public health orders

ovid-19’s spread is neither colorblind nor colorless, sending Black, Latinx and Indigenous people to the hospital at a rate four times higher than white people. To make matters worse, the people of color and immigrant communities who already bear the brunt of the Covid-19 outbreak are also subject to the most punitive enforcement of emergency public health orders. The co-occurring pandemics of Covid-19 and state violence are deeply interconnected.

The Covid-19 Policing Project launched in May 2020 to monitor how cities, states, territories and tribal jurisdictions police the pandemic. As we watched cops drag a Black man off a bus in Philadelphia, put a Black man in a chokehold, and throw a Black mother to the ground in New York City in front of her toddler, all in the name of promoting health and safety, we asked ourselves: if this is the floor for treatment during unprecedented health, economic and state violence crises, then what is the ceiling?

Our findings six months later, summarized in the recently released report Unmasked: Impacts of Pandemic Policing, clearly show that arrests, racial disparities in enforcement, police violence and aggression did not pause because people are dying in record numbers. Instead criminalization continues to target the people who are susceptible to disproportionately dying from both the virus and under the hands and knees of police. Not only did the uneven enforcement of Covid-19 public health orders track predictable patterns of policing, it also strengthened and widened the webs of criminalization which ensnare marginalized communities.

The Covid-19 Policing Project reviewed public information about enforcement over the past six months and found that Black, Indigenous and people of color (Bipoc) were 2.5 times more likely to be policed and punished for violations of Covid-19 orders than white people. Black people specifically were 4.5 times more likely to be policed and punished for coronavirus orders than white people.

Black women – who disproportionately work as healthcare and essential service workers, and are quite literally saving our lives – experienced the highest rates of racial disparity in enforcement of public health orders. According to our statistical analysis, Black women were five times more likely than white women to be policed and punished for violations of Covid-19 orders. Black men were 3.7 times more likely than white men to be policed and punished for such violations.

In Hawaii, Micronesian communities experienced 26% of arrests for violations of stay-at-home orders, despite making up just 1% of the state’s population. About 20% of people cited by Honolulu police for violation of public health orders probably had experienced homelessness, and of those, 60% were cited multiple times for violating stay-at-home orders. According to New York police department data, 81% of the 374 summons for social distancing violations between 16 March and 5 May were issued to Black and Latinx residents.

This kind of aggressive policing only exacerbates the effects of the pandemic. Fines ranging from $500 to $10,000 hit communities already reeling from record unemployment, a looming eviction crisis and soaring food bank use with yet another financial burden when many cannot afford basic necessities. Arrests place people in high-risk jail and prison environments, raising rates of Covid-19 transmission, infection and mortality among incarcerated populations. Many cops – who have some of the highest rates of infection – refuse to wear masks and violate social distancing rules to harass, ticket and take people into custody. Even a brief encounter with an officer or short detention in a police car can dramatically increase risk of infection, and that risk increases in a holding cell or jail where people are unable to maintain social distancing and have little or no access to soap, water and sanitizer.

Joe Biden has a choice: push our government to provide genuinely life-saving health and financial support to struggling people and communities – or pour more money into local police departments on top of the $750m already allocated in May by the Cares Act to enforce punitive emergency orders. State and local officials face the same choices.

In fact, as an adviser to the Biden coronavirus taskforce recently pointed out, health professionals have advanced a humane and simple solution to get the virus under control: pay everyone to stay home for four to six weeks.

And instead of leaving people to die in Covid-plagued prisons, jails and detention centers, officials could free them with support to return safely to families and communities.

The way forward through the raging pandemic and devastating economic crisis doesn’t lie in more surveillance, policing and punishment of marginalized communities – it lies in the demands to stop pouring money and resources into policing and start pouring resources into people and communities.