(Dobbs) Make America Great Again? More Likely They'll Destroy It
We define "great" quite differently.
Here’s what we must never lose sight of now that the 2024 political season has launched: if the MAGA crowd has its way, they won’t make America great again, they’ll destroy it.
Of course their definition of what makes America “great” is different from mine. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, the unrepentant matriarch of MAGA, framed theirs earlier this month when that 21-year-old Air National Guardsman was arrested in Massachusetts for leaking secret and super-sensitive Pentagon intelligence, which the Justice Department says might have “tremendous value to hostile nation states.” Rather than condemning the act, which compromised our security and antagonized our allies, Greene gave the accused leaker a pass and jumped to his defense. She implied in a tweet that he was arrested because he is “white, male, christian [sic], and antiwar.”
For the record, there’s no evidence that the man was arrested because he is white, male, Christian, or anti-war. He was arrested because he is suspected of espionage. He could have been black, female, Jewish, and a war-mongering hawk. He’d have been arrested all the same.
But being white, male, and Christian, according to Greene, “makes him an enemy to the Biden regime.” Fanatics like her believe we need traits like his— white, male, Christian, and straight— to make America great again. They make that obvious time and time again.
They make it obvious when they curtail minorities’ voting rights. When they attack gay rights. When they embrace anti-Semites. When they defend white nationalists (which from his internet postings, the guardsman appears to be). They make it obvious when they ban books that don’t paint their puritanical picture of America.
Greene’s crazed charge about the guardsman’s arrest was too much even for the supple senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, who through his unashamed alliance with Donald Trump bears his own guilt for the growth of MAGA. “For any member of Congress to suggest it’s okay to leak classified information because you agree with the cause,” he complained, “is terribly irresponsible and puts America in serious danger.”
As if the worst of the worst in MAGA even care about putting us in danger.
If they have their way and keep fighting common sense gun reform, we will have more assault rifles and more bloodshed, not less. If they have their way because their drastic budget demands aren’t met, they will let our nation default on its debt and trash America’s economy. If they have their way and cut aid for Ukraine, we could hand it to Russia and encourage more cold-blooded authoritarian conquests.
These are what put America in serious danger.
Remember, this is the crowd that has denounced American support for Ukraine
The latest disciple— lining up in fact with the international isolationist and Putin apologist Donald Trump— is Florida Governor and presidential aspirant Ron DeSantis. In response to a question last month from Putin propagandist Tucker Carlson (before Carlson was dropped like a cold stone from Fox), DeSantis said, “While the U.S. has many vital national interests… becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.” What he and the extremists in the MAGA movement fail to understand— which is shocking when you realize they want to run this country— is that Ukraine’s interests are Europe’s interests and Europe’s interests are America’s interests. What they don’t get is, what weakens our allies weakens us.
If President Putin is allowed to run roughshod over a sovereign neighbor, it is a green light to him and other powerful authoritarians— China’s has to come to mind— to take what they want. Liz Cheney, the conservative heroine of liberal America, put it well in a statement aimed at DeSantis: “Weakness is provocative and American officials who advocate this type of weakness are Putin’s greatest weapon. Abandoning Ukraine would make broader conflict, including with China and other American adversaries, more likely.” She also made it clear that the war in Ukraine is not “a territorial dispute.” She told DeSantis and his ilk, “The Ukrainian people are fighting for their freedom. Surrendering to Putin and refusing to defend freedom makes America less safe.”
To their credit, other conservative leaders— from Mike Pence to Nikki Haley to Tim Scott to Chris Christie to Mitch McConnell—have stood up for America’s aid to Ukraine.
But here’s what’s scary: right now, three-quarters of Republicans who say they’ll vote in next year’s primaries say they’ll vote either for DeSantis or Trump. The isolationists. The apologists.
MAGA is not going away.
And if they have their way, neither are the guns.
For example in Michigan two weeks ago, Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed two non-invasive new laws, one requiring that guns be locked up in a home with a minor child, the other requiring background checks for private firearm sales and gun shows. MAGA Republicans in Michigan’s legislature opposed them both though, and now are suing to overturn them.
In another blue state, Colorado, the majority of Democrats could not overcome Republican opposition to a bill that would ban AR-15 assault rifles, and had to let it die. Which inescapably means, more Americans will die.
This, MAGA’s crusaders would crow, will make America great again.
Here are a few more characters from the MAGA crowd who, given their will to fight everything from abortion rights to climate change constraints to cautions about Covid to the integrity of our elections, would destroy America.
In audio uncovered this month, a lawyer named Cleta Mitchell, who was part of Trump’s Machiavellian plot to overturn the 2020 election but now serves nevertheless as an advisor to the Republican National Committee, told a private meeting of major donors that “election integrity task forces” should be created to make it harder for college students— a bloc that backs Democrats— to vote.
The new chairman of the Republican Party in Colorado, a former state representative named Dave Williams, still maintains that Trump won re-election. The GOP chairs in at least three other states— Idaho, Michigan, and Kansas, as well as legislators spread throughout the nation— whistle the same tune.
And let’s not forget the super-majority of Republicans in the legislatures of both Tennessee and Montana. In Tennessee, distressed early this month that three Democratic members of the House had broken “several rules of decorum” during a debate about guns, the Republicans unanimously stripped two of them— both black— of their seats (until the commissioners in their local constituencies promptly and unanimously sent them back). Observers have noted that the third, who was not expelled, is white.
Then Wednesday in Montana, a transgender state rep was barred from the floor of the House for the balance of the legislative session.
Her sin? It’s all about decorum again. She “failed to do her duty” to “maintain decorum” when she told the Republicans, preparing for a vote to ban transitional care for transgender minors, that they will have “blood on your hands.” The hard-right conveniently forgets that for decades, they have used that same phrase about anyone playing a part in an abortion, but apparently it wasn’t inappropriate until now.
They forget too that for the life of his political career, between the bullying and the threats, Donald Trump has been the antithesis of decorum.
MAGA has saturated the GOP.
Then there’s the man whose Wall Street Journal columns Ron DeSantis started admiring early in the pandemic, Dr. Joseph Ladapo.
In his op-eds he discouraged reasonable precautions against Covid and even promoted as a cure the anti-malaria drug that Donald Trump was pushing, hydroxychloroquine, which flew in the face of top public health scientists who said it could increase deaths, not reduce them. But DeSantis, defying science and safe practices, appointed Ladapo to the position of Surgeon General in Florida. Now Politico has discovered that when the Florida Department of Health last year reported that any slightly increased risk of cardiac-related deaths after Covid vaccinations were “no longer significant,” Ladapo actually deleted his scientists’ conclusions.
These are the people who would destroy America in their crusade to make America great again.
But I don’t think they’ll win. From the two last elections, Americans are on to them and they will face a fight. Just as an influential “Never Trump” organization called The Lincoln Project was born in 2019 to counter the creator of MAGA, a new organization called Mission Democracy has just been formed specifically to “stop MAGA” in Congress. One of its founders said, “If we don’t do something now, if we don’t get these extreme MAGA members out of Congress, we stand to lose our very democracy.”
If we do our lose democracy, we will have lost America. They will have destroyed it.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Apparently, the even more radically outlandish Newsmax is courting Tucker Carlson in order to amplify their twisted view of the world. The hope for an enlightened future dims.
Thanks Greg. Spot on right!