The Not so Newsey News Analysis

I am a fan of The New York Times. After all, I worked there for nearly nine years.

But there are some stories The Times does that send me over the top.

"Are Liberals Helping Trump," a news analysis that appeared on The Times' website on Saturday was one of those articles.

According to the analysis, the upsurge in anti-Trump protests since the inauguration is pushing "moderate conservatives" who voted for Trump closer to him.

"We're backed into a corner," Jeffrey Medford, a 46-year-old owner of a small business in South Carolina, told the analysis' author, Sabrina Tavernise. "There are at least some things about Trump that I find defensible. But they are saying: 'Agree with us 100 percent or you are morally bankrupt. You're an idiot if you support any part of Trump."

He later told Tavernise: "I didn't choose a side. They put me on one."

Bryce Youngquist, a 34-year-old salesman at a tech start-up in Mountain View Calif., said of liberals:

"They are complaining that Trump calls people names, but they turned into some mean people."

Youngquist told Tavernise that when he finally admitted to his friends that he supported Trump they attacked him as being a "disgusting human being."

"They were making me want to support him more with how irrational they were being," he said. "The name calling from the left is crazy."

Ann O'Connell, a 72-year-old retired administrative assistant in Syracuse who said she voted for Bill Clinton twice, said she drifted from the Democratic Party because she felt it had moved away from its middle-class economic roots toward identity politics.

"I don't have a problem with protesting as long as it's peaceful, but this is destroying the country," she said. "I feel like we are in some kind of civil war right now. I know people don't like to use those terms. But I think it's scary."

She went on to say of liberal protestors: "These people are destroying our democracy. They are scarier to me than these Islamic terrorists. I feel absolutely disgusted with them and their antics. It strengthens people's resolve in wanting to support Trump. It really does."

That Medford, Youngquist, and O'Connell are disgusted with liberals does not bother me. That their responses to liberal protests is to double down on their conservativism does not bother me. The truth is I expect such a reaction.  

What bothers me is that there is little evidence that Tavernise pushed the three on why they voted for Trump in the first place, or whether they felt the same way when conservatives attacked President Barack Obama, calling him a closet Muslim and saying he was not born in the United States.

For eight years, conservative trolls referred to liberals as ‘libetards.” They called the President and First Lady apes. A Republican screamed “You lie” at President Obama during a State of the Union address. And of course there were the Tea Party protests.

Were these “moderate conservatives” upset at the protests and attacks from conservatives when it was directed at Obama? If they can't defend Trump now, then why did they vote for him? Are they upset at Trump's tendency to lie? Do they have questions about his possible conflicts-of-interest? Do they think it was okay for Trump not to release his taxes? How can "moderate conseratives," who called Hillary Clinton a crook, justify voting for a man who thinks its good business not to pay the owners of small businesses money he owes? Is there doubling-down a defense mechanism for voting for an unfit candidate for President?   

We won’t know reading Tavernise’s analysis.  

Rising Anger in Trumpland

It was possibly one of the most idiotic things a Republican has said so far in this age of Trump.

After being assailed by people afraid of losing their health insurance if the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, is repealed, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican, complained of “organized opposition by people who were on the losing side of the election.”

No shit Sherlock.

Who else is going to complain? The people who won?

“Oh god, I am so peeved that my candidate won because now he can do everything he promised.”
People who win do not complain. They celebrate. They take victory laps. They spike the ball in the end zone.

People who lose get angry. They protest. They organize other people. They show up at town hall meetings with lots of questions.

And when you threaten to take away the one thing that keeps them or a loved one alive they get into your “grill,” as Rep. Dave Brat, a Virginia Republican, discovered not too long ago.

It is a basic tenet of the First Amendment, the right of the people to seek redress from government, to protest as individuals or as groups. To organize. Lamenting that such people are organized does not silence their voices, nor does it negate the legitimacy of their grievances.

Americans, particularly many of the roughly 73 million people who voted against Donald Trump in November, are angry, and they have every right to be so.  Not because Trump won although the majority of Americans who voted chose a candidate other than him.

No.

They are rightly angry because his election has removed the only bulwark against a mob of faux patriots who believe the U.S. Constitution exists simply for their pleasure.

The voices of those angry people have risen to show their displeasure with the Boob-in-Chief. They have fought efforts to marginalize women and minorities, to place a back door ban on Muslim immigration.

Mostly they have raised their voices in chorus against efforts to kill the Affordable Care Act.
   
Brat, a former economics professor who defeated House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the 2014 Republican primary, was taken aback when he was accosted by women terrified of losing their health insurance.

“Since Obamacare and these issues have come up, the women are in my grill wherever I go,” Brat told a gathering of local conservatives in Virginia. “They come up to me and go, 'When's the next town hall?' And believe me, it's not to give positive input.”

Other Republicans are experiencing the same reaction.

“If I could give you an answer today, I would, but I can’t,” Sensenbrenner told a questioner at his town-hall-style meeting at the Pewaukee Public Library.

Rep. Tom McClintock of California needed a police escort after his meeting, and Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah faced a crowd of 1,000 people, many of them shouting “Do your job.” Things have become so tense that House Republicans were recently advised on security precautions at their meetings and district offices.

Others, such as Rep. Kevin Brady of Houston and Rep. Mike Coffman of Denver, faced similar audiences.
                                                                  
But such encounters are not enough.

Each protest should include voter registration drives and tips on how to keep people engaged until 2018.

Based on Republican talking points, we also can expect an assault on laws that protect us from a predatory financial class; an assault on Social Security; on women’s health; on voting rights; on public education.

The lists goes on and on. Assaults on everything that progressives hold dear. And that is the true threat to our democracy – attacks on progress by small minded men and women in Congress who want a nation this continuously looks back not forward.