Republicons

CHRIS HEDGES—Donald Trump has transformed the decayed carcass of the Republican Party into a cult. All cults are personality cults. They are extensions of the cult leaders. The cult reflects the leader’s prejudices, worldview, personal style and ideas. Trump did not create the yearning for a cult leader. Huge segments of the population, betrayed by the established elites, were conditioned for a cult leader. They were desperately looking for someone to rescue them and solve their problems. They found their cult leader in the New York real estate developer and reality television show star. Only when we recognize Trump as a cult leader, and many of those who support him as cult followers, will we understand where we are headed and how we must resist.

MVH: They put out their proposal to public comment, which closed October 15 at midnight, and we started a massive public education and outreach campaign. We digested this 100-page, nearly 100-page proposal, broke it down. We reached so many organizations and groups who were reaching their own constituencies to get public comment in. And that number—which is still going up, because comments are still registering, even though the period has closed—has now surpassed 70,000 comments in response to Trump’s anti-protest plan.

DAVID W. PEAR—It is obvious that the Senate and the public know far too little about Kavanaugh. What little we do know about Kavanaugh raises so many questions that they cry out for an extensive investigation for months. Fortunately, there are thousands of pages of his prior testimony and other documents that have buried in a shallow grave about him. All of them need to be gone through to see what other skeletons they contain.

BLAIR HOPKINS—We all know that The Nation is a respected liberal outfit, and that it is precisely mainstream liberals who have been leading the insane campaign to provoke Russia and topple Trump—at any cost, and yet, Cohen, perhaps because of his privileged position, is able, or manages, to get his dissident viewpoint out, which is certainly salutary for the country and the rest of the world, as sanity and fairness are in extremely short supply at this point in the homeland of the empire.

PATRICK MARTIN—The 2018 elections could well see a similar process, but in reverse. Angered by the tax cuts for the wealthy and big business, the gutting of social programs like Medicaid and food stamps, the attacks on immigrants and democratic rights more generally, and Trump’s threats of military violence and even nuclear war, millions of working people, however reluctantly, will go to the polls to cast their ballots for the official “opposition,” the Democratic Party, which does not actually oppose Trump at all.