Un-Trumping America: A Plan to Make America a Democracy Again

by Dan Pfeiffer

Trump’s efforts to collude with Russia and obstruct the Mueller probe had been so ham-handed that the lines between his criminality and his incompetence were blurred.

There will be no Republican epiphany during or after Trump.

I chose politics for my career because I thought working within the system was the best way to bring change. I believed politics and government got a bad rap. Despite cynical media coverage and reductionist Hollywood portrayals, the politicians I met were not inherently corrupt or incompetent. They were imperfect humans working within an imperfect system to do what they thought was best for the country. I believed this to be true no matter the party.11 I believed that our democracy was messy but worked. I trusted institutions and believed in norms. I thought the arc of American politics was long but ultimately bent toward democracy.

The reckoning between the billionaire-loving elites and the racist base never happened, because America elected a racist billionaire.

In this union lies the core of Trumpism—billionaire-funded racial grievance politics. Trump united the billionaires and the bigots. That union will continue after he is gone because they need each other to maintain their political power.

The Republican base responds to fear, and Democrats respond to hope.

In 2008, Michigan, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin had Democratic governors. In 2010, all of those Democrats were replaced by Republicans. The new Republican governors immediately passed a series of laws to make it harder to vote. While Republicans cut or eliminated early voting and made it harder to register people to vote, voter identification laws were the centerpiece of their strategy to wrest power from the public.

A Loyola Law School study found only thirty-one credible allegations of in-person voter fraud—the “problem” voter ID is supposed to address—from 2000 to 2014 out of more than one billion votes cast.8 According to the Brennan Center for Justice, 25 percent of African Americans don’t have a government-issued ID. Only 8 percent of whites don’t have an ID. Getting an identification card is prohibitively expensive for a lot of voters. One study cited by the ACLU found that obtaining an ID can cost between $75 and $175.

The state of Texas, which generally has the same affection for democracy as North Korea, accepts concealed carry permits for voting, but not student IDs.

The goal of gerrymandering to this degree is not just to make your vote count less; it’s to make you know your vote doesn’t count in the hope that you won’t vote again. Because why put in the effort if it doesn’t matter anyway? Cynicism is the ally of conservatism.

In a five-to-four decision, the Supreme Court discarded the “one person, one vote” standard and ruled that gerrymandering was an issue for voters to decide, not the courts. In other words, the Supreme Court said if you don’t like gerrymandering, vote out the people doing the gerrymandering—except you can’t vote them out because of (yes, you guessed it) gerrymandering.

Thanks to Citizens United, the Republican Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Koch brothers—the Kansas-based oil executives and billionaires who spend hundreds of millions of dollars every election to elect Republicans up and down the ballot. If you have ever wondered why Republicans pretend to believe climate change isn’t real, it’s because they live in fear that the Koch brothers—who profit off opposition to climate change—will drop a million bucks on behalf of a primary opponent more willing to walk the company line. The voices of millions of voters are being drowned out by a new Republican-supported campaign finance system that makes candidates dependent on billionaires to get their message out.

Paul Ryan voted for someone he thought was dangerously immoral and outrageously stupid to lead the country, because he would rather support a racist, corrupt idiot than a Democrat.