The View from Right Field

The Great Georgia 2021 Senate “What If?”

November of 2020, there were 50 Republican senators and 48 Democrats.  But there were two races in Georgia where there had to be run-off elections because no candidate had gotten 50%+1 of the votes cast on election day (as required by Georgia law).  In both races, the Republican candidate got more votes than the Democratic candidate on election day, but the Republican had not gotten 50%+1.  So there were going to be two run-off elections on January 5, 2021.  The Democrats won run-offs, thus giving the Democrats a 50-50 “majority” in the Senate because of Vice President Kamala Harris.

But what if Donald Trump, instead of going down to Georgia in December of 2020 in a snit and complaining he had been cheated out of the election and saying there was no way any Republican would be allowed to win anywhere, even in Georgia¹; what if President Trump had gone to Georgia in December of 2020 and tried to rally Republicans to vote for the Republican Senate candidates, telling his supporters that they needed to get out and vote so we could keep the Democrats from controlling the Senate?²  And what if, therefore, even one of the Republicans had won?  The Republicans would have controlled the Senate.  But what more might have happened?

Donald Trump Praises Vladimir Putin – As Putin Invades Ukraine

One would like to think that Donald Trump’s praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin at the very moment Russia is invading Ukraine would be enough to finally put enough Republicans off former President Trump, but I fear it may not.

Note: I will leave it to others to explain why former President Trump said these things.  I don’t know if there is a reason other than, for former President Trump, everything is always about him.  I doubt there is another reason, but if somebody can come up with one, more power to them.

An Alternate Covid History

Here’s a thought experiment or maybe, more accurately, a possible alternate history of Covid in the United States:

• Donald Trump wins re-election in November of 2020.  (It was possible.  As I noted here, Joe Biden’s margin of victory was only 66,000 votes.¹)

Other Countries Can Get Competent Leaders. Why Can’t We?

You would think that a country as big as the United States, with as many people as we have, could have really good people at the top of its government.  But look at our current president and his predecessor.  They are both embarrassing.

Compare them, either of them, with Sir John Key, former Prime Minister of New Zealand (from 2008-2016), who spoke on “Walking the path to the next global financial crisis” in this panel discussion hosted by The New Zealand Initiative:

The Republican Party’s Got Trouble

To paraphrase (poorly) Robert Preston singing Meredith Willson’s song “Ya Got Trouble” in “The Music Man”:  

“[The Republican Party’s] got trouble!
Right here in River City
Trouble with a capital "T"
And that rhymes with "P" and that stands for … former President Trump.”

Donald Trump is going around telling everybody that the 2020 election was stolen from him.  He calls it the “Presidential Election Fraud of 2020.”  Except the election was not stolen from him.  He lost because Joe Biden won a majority in the Electoral College.¹  But former President Trump can’t seem to handle that fact.  He wrote a long letter to the editor in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday listing all kinds of problems with the vote count in Pennsylvania.  The WSJ listed just some of the errors in former President Trump’s list in an editorial on Friday, but it is impossible to respond to all of his claims.  But that doesn’t mean they’re right.  He just says things.  Trying to respond to them all is a fool’s errand.

Who’s Worse on Foreign Policy: Biden or Trump?

Donald Trump did a bad job on foreign policy.  I talked about that a lot, though, eventually, I got tired of saying it over and over, so I mostly stopped.¹  Even though I felt that way about former President Trump, I did not vote for Joe Biden because, in Illinois, I did not need to.  President Biden was going to win Illinois.  And I was very concerned about President Biden’s domestic policy – or, rather, the domestic policy of his supporters.  Still, when President Biden won, I was hopeful American foreign policy would be better than it had been under former President Trump.  Unfortunately, it hasn’t been.

On February 19, President Biden told the Munich Security Conference that “America is back.”  That was the hope: President Biden would restore, or at least start to restore, America’s credibility and reliability around the world.  But the way we left Afghanistan was a disaster.  Obviously, President Biden was handed a terrible mess in Afghanistan.  President Trump signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban on February 29, 2020, under which we were to leave on May 1, 2021.² 

After Afghanistan: What Next for American Foreign Policy?

After the collapse in Afghanistan, the questions for many are: Why did it happen so quickly¹ and why we weren’t prepared.  Which are good questions.  But I have a different question: What’s next for American foreign policy?  In that regard, I was surprised by the very negative reaction from Europe to our quick and unilateral pullout from Afghanistan.  One might have expected concern from Asia, but the comments from Europe were very interesting.  Here are excerpts from an article Wednesday’s Financial Times (behind the FT paywall):

“European allies had hoped Joe Biden’s election to the US presidency would bolster Nato’s relevance after Donald Trump’s acrimonious years.  Washington’s messy withdrawal from Afghanistan is prompting a rethink.

Biden Has Defined Success in His Afghan Exit: Nobody Pulled Off an Embassy Roof By Helicopter

When Joe Biden was asked last week if there was any similarity between Kabul today and Saigon in 1975, he said no:

“None whatsoever.  Zero.  What you had is you had entire brigades breaking through the gates of our Embassy.  Six if I’m not mistaken.  The Taliban is not the South, the North Vietnamese army.  They’re not – they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability.  There’s going to be no circumstance where you’re going to see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy [in Afghanistan].”

He also defended the withdrawal by asking:

The Saving Grace of Donald Trump’s Presidency: Incompetence

With Donald Trump back on the campaign trail, now seems like a good time for this post.  For all the complaints about Donald Trump’s lack of competence as president, it was actually his incompetence that was the saving grace of his presidency.  Former President Trump was good at some things.  He knew how to energize those who supported him.  He identified people who had been ignored for years, if not decades, and spoke for them.  His skill at public relations and his ability to play the media in the 2016 campaign was impressive.  He didn’t need to spend as much as his opponents because he knew how to get free publicity from the media.

But, while he knew how to get elected, he didn’t know how to govern.  He was competent at getting elected president.  He was incompetent at being president.

Liz Cheney, Donald Trump, 2020, and the Republican Party

Liz Cheney was ousted as head of the House Republican Conference last week, mostly (entirely-?) because she wouldn’t sign up for former President Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen.  The decision to remove her was taken by a voice vote.  Which was either because almost everybody agreed or because, if one wants to be cynical (which I often find is the best way to look at things, especially politics), people didn’t want to go on the record. 

In any case, here are a few comments on Donald Trump, the 2020 election, and the future of the Republican Party: