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By Julie Zauzmer August 13, 2019
BRANDON, Fla. — Three years ago, Rickey Halbert was torn about whether to vote for President Trump.
On the one hand, he had read about Trump’s extramarital affairs and the women who alleged he had sexually assaulted them. Halbert, a Defense Department employee, didn’t think the candidate matched his moral compass.
Then again, he believed Trump would reduce the number of abortions in the country.
In the end, he said, that convinced him to vote for the president, like most of his fellow evangelicals.
In the years since, he’s watched as Trump restricted abortion access, rolled back gay rights and tried to reduce both legal and illegal immigration. He’s listened as Trump has made racist statements and been accused of rape.
He has reached the same conclusion as so many evangelicals across the country: In 2020, he’ll support the president. This time, it won’t be a hard choice.
Trump enjoyed overwhelming support from white evangelicals in 2016, winning a higher percentage than George W. Bush, John McCain or Mitt Romney. That enthusiasm has scarcely dimmed. Almost 70 percent of white evangelicals approve of Trump’s performance in office, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center poll.
Interviews with 50 evangelical Christians in three battleground states — Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — help explain why. In conversation, evangelical voters paint the portrait of the Trump they see: a president who acts like a bully but is fighting for them. A president who sees America like they do, a menacing place where white Christians feel mocked and threatened for their beliefs. A president who’s against abortion and gay rights and who has the economy humming to boot.
“You’ve just got to accept the bad with the good,” Halbert said.
Evangelical Christians are separated from other Protestants (called mainline Protestants) by their belief in the literal truth of the Bible as well as their conservative politics on gender roles, sexuality, abortion and other subjects.
For many, the eight years of the Obama administration felt like a nightmare. The indelible image for the Rev. Chris Gillott was the night the Supreme Court ruled gay marriage legal across the land and Obama flooded the White House in rainbow lights.
“I didn’t see it lit up in a rainbow this June,” the youth pastor at Christian Life Center in Bensalem, Pa., notes, with a hint of satisfaction.
Gillott perceived, during the Obama administration, a newly hostile attitude toward Christians in America that left him worried his country was changing irrevocably. “If you think marriage is between one man and one woman, you’re a bigot and we don’t need you in this country,” he summarized what he saw as the thinking of Democrats. “There is animus being attributed to Christian core beliefs. And where that’s coming from is the left.”
Trump looked to many like a protector, a brash culture warrior who would take their side. “He said, ‘I’m gonna fight for you. I’m gonna defend you,’ ” said Ralph Reed, the chair of the Faith and Freedom Coalition in Georgia, which will distribute millions of voter-guide pamphlets at churches to drive evangelical turnout in 2020. “He gets it. He knows they’re hungry for that.”
Reed, and others, don’t necessarily expect Trump to fix the problems they see. On gay rights in particular — by far the most drastic change in American attitudes in this century — evangelicals fought hard to block marriage equality. But now, many believe that ship has sailed.
While they cheer Trump’s many efforts to chip away at LGBT rights, they are much more concerned with protecting their own right to maintain their opposition.
They want to be able to teach their values without interference — some churchgoers fretted about school textbooks that refer to transgender identities without condemnation and about gay couples showing up in TV commercials every time they try to watch a show with their children.
They want the right to choose how they run their businesses. Members of large churches across the country can rattle off the details of the court cases involving Christian business owners who refused to participate in gay weddings and the bill that Democrats in Congress want to pass to compel service for all customers.
For many, abortion was the defining issue of the last election. In Appleton, Wis., the Rev. A.J. Dudek sat with several leaders of men’s Bible study groups recently in his megachurch’s huge curving lobby.
“Do I enjoy his tweets? No,” Dudek said about the president. But he believes the agenda far outweighs that concern. “If Donald Trump will help save a couple million babies, that’s a good thing. My vote has to align with my view of God’s word — I should care for the baby in the womb.”
It’s a calculation that evangelicals frequently described making when they considered their options in the 2016 election.
But now, many are genuinely delighted by the Trump they’ve seen in office.
The economy is roaring. Trump makes mention of God at rallies and pays lip service to evangelicals. They praise his honesty, focusing not on falsehoods spoken but on his attempts to do all the things he said he would do in office.
“He’s forthright and honest — at his rallies, he talks about God,” said Joey Rogers, who wore a Trump hat while shopping at a gun show in Bradenton, Fla., last month. Rogers, a member of an evangelical church near Tampa, has attended televangelist Paula White’s church in Georgia a few times and said her affiliation with Trump reassures him that the president is a praying man.
Democrats think Christians are “wacky,” he said. He also bemoaned a degradation of American life brought on, Rogers said, by half a century of removing prayer from public schools and Bible verses from federal courthouses.
“All of our laws are based on the Ten Commandments,” he said. “I think that’s why the country is losing the values that we once had.”
During a Sunday in July when Trump spent the morning tweeting that four congresswomen of color — three of whom were born in the United States — should “go back” to the countries “from which they came,” many white evangelicals attending church in Florida said immigration is their top priority. They almost unanimously approved of Trump’s handling of the border.
“If you are coming to America and you are in one of our facilities being held, that’s on you,” said Andrea Owen, a retired police officer who spends most days babysitting her autistic great-nephew. “I’m not trying to be hateful because we’re all God’s people. But do it legally. . . . The places they’re housing them? Honestly, if they’re so uncomfortable, they shouldn’t have come here.”
Some evangelicals, like Julian Ketchum at Hope Community Church in King of Prussia, Pa., label themselves “values voters.” What they mean by values: abortion and gay rights, not traits like integrity and kindness. “There’s no way I can know those” attributes of a person’s character, Ketchum said, though he then said he picked Trump over Clinton in part because he found her dishonest.
And the allegations that Trump sexually assaulted numerous women are not a moral concern, many Christians say.
“I don’t see him as a rapist,” said Cheryl Gough, a preschool teacher at Bay Life Church in Brandon, Fla. “He can be not the nicest person, but I don’t see — I’m not calling her a liar. There’s just been too many allegations. Now you’re coming to the public about it?”
Evangelical views on gender roles also tend to put them at odds with the American mainstream: Most believe the Bible teaches that women ought to be submissive to men, who are in charge within the family.
Reed, who predicts Trump will capture as large a share of the evangelical vote in 2020 or even larger than in 2016, said a Democratic opponent who tries to chastise Trump for sexual harassment will only turn off these voters.
“Do not campaign on somebody’s personal shortcomings. History says voters are very forgiving. And they don’t like hearing it,” he said. “They’ve had moral shortcomings. They’ve had moral failings.”
The accusations of Trump’s shortcomings just keep coming. Opponents decry his attitude toward people of color, his approach to immigrants detained at the border, his answers to violence in American cities, and on and on.
But in Appleton, the Rev. Dennis Episcopo hasn’t felt the need as a religious leader to denounce any of it in front of his congregation, which includes more than 5,000 attendees on a typical Sunday. The megachurch that he has led for 22 years is almost entirely white and conservative, like the lakeside region where it is located.
Episcopo has not seen any behavior from Trump in the past three years that would prompt him to openly dissuade churchgoers from supporting this president.
“There could be something, where society really crosses the line on something, that I feel as a pastor I have to get up and say something,” he muses. “But it hasn’t happened yet.”
This last statement by Rev. Dennis Episcopo…….
Just amazing! As a social progressive (unabashed liberal) and extreme fiscal conservative, I will never understand how true conservatives and unapologetic evangelicals can still support trump, and as a matter of fact, have only increased their unwavering allegiance.
There is no line, morally, ethically or otherwise that trump, his entire administration and his republi-con enablers in congress haven’t crossed. What exactly is that ‘something’ that would cause Episcopo, as a pastor, to get up and say something about???? First Degree murder with a dozen eye witnesses? Or maybe just some perceived blasphemy toward the Jesus Christ they pretend to follow.
And the daily diatribe spewed by fiscal conservatives (led by Wisconsin Senator Paul Ryan) about President Obama’s spending, used to dig America out of the fiscal crisis caused by the previous republi-con president, illicited not a single word about trump’s unwarranted tax cut for the richest 1% and prosperous corporations and his rampant disregard for runaway deficits.
These folks are void of common sense and the ability to reason. Critical thinking is as foreign to them as are beneficial immigrants. The only facts they respond to is when trump labels legitimate criticism and dissent as fake news.
Fortunately, this republi-con party will soon follow the dodo bird into oblivion; evangelicals are losing adherents faster than high fructose corn syrup, and the old white, confused, racist dimwits (Hillary’s deplorables) are dying off by the 10’s of thousands every month. Their prejudiced offspring are more and more inoculated to the bigoted bile passed to the next generation.
Women, the LGBTQ community, people of color and the latest bottom rung of immigrants are taking their rightful place in American society and will no longer be denied.
John Hanno, tarbabys.com
Politico
But the hour-long address was light on energy policy and heavy on stump speech material and off-script riffs, as Trump touched on everything from his love of trucks to his assessment of his potential 2020 rivals. The meandering speech came on a day when the president had already attacked a CNN anchor, endorsed a controversial World Series hero’s potential congressional bid and defended his parroting of a conspiracy theory concerning the apparent suicide of his onetime friend Jeffrey Epstein.
Here are some of Trump’s most off-key comments:
On the supposed benefits of natural gas over renewable energy: “When the wind stops blowing, it doesn’t make any difference does it? Unlike those big windmills that destroy everybody’s property values, kill all the birds. One day the environmentalists are going to tell us what’s going on with that. And then all of a sudden it stops. The wind and the televisions go off. And your wives and husbands say: ‘Darling, I want to watch Donald Trump on television tonight. But the wind stopped blowing and I can’t watch. There’s no electricity in the house, darling.’”
On his construction chops: “I was a good builder. I built good. I love building; in fact, I’m going to take a tour of the site.”
On doing some campaigning: “I’m going to speak to some of your union leaders to say, ‘I hope you’re going to support Trump, OK?’ And if they don’t, vote ‘em the hell out of office because they’re not doing their job — it’s true.
On his love of trucks: “I love cranes, I love trucks of all types. Even when I was a little boy at 4 years old, my mother would say, ‘You love trucks.’ I do, I always loved trucks, I still do. Nothing changes — sometimes you know you might become president, but nothing changes — I still love trucks. Especially when I look at the largest crane in the world, that’s very cool. You think I’ll get to operate it? We’ll put the media on it and I’ll give them a little ride, right?”
On what Trump perceives as a trade imbalance with Japan: “They send us thousands and thousands — millions of cars, we send them wheat. Wheat. That’s not a good deal. And they don’t even want our wheat. They do it because they want us to at least feel that we’re OK, you know, they do it to make us feel good.” This assertion is false.
On the price tag of the presidency: “This thing is costing me a fortune, being president. Somebody said, ‘Oh, he might have rented a room to a man from Saudi Arabia for $500.’ What about the $5 billion that I’ll lose — you know, it’s probably going to cost me, including, upside, downside, lawyers, because every day they sue me for something. These are the most litigious people. It’s probably costing me from $3 to $5 billion for the pleasure of being — and I couldn’t care less, I don’t care. You know if you’re wealthy, it doesn’t matter. I just want to do a great job.”
On his pledge to salvage manufacturing jobs: “You guys, I don’t know what the hell you’re going to do. You don’t want to make widgets, right? You don’t want to make — do you want to learn how to make a computer? A little tiny piece of stuff. … You put it with those big, beautiful hands of yours like … you’re going to take these big hands, going to take this little tiny part. You’re going to go home, ‘Alice this is a tough job.’ Nah, you want to make steel, and you want to dig coal — that’s what you want to do!”
On the number of members of the media at the event, at about 2:45 p.m.: “That’s a lot people back there for, like, an 11 o’clock speech. That’s a lot of people.”
On the Oscars: “Like the Academy Awards during the day, it used to be — you know the Academy Awards is on hard times now, you know that right? Nobody wants to watch it. You know why? Because they started taking us on, everyone got tired of it. It’s amazing. That used to be second after the Super Bowl, and then all of a sudden now it’s just another show because people got tired of people getting up and making fools of themselves and disrespecting the people in this room and the people that won the election in 2016.”
On attacking Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Vice President Joe Biden, potential 2020 rivals: “I did it very early with Pocahontas, I should have probably waited. She’s staging a comeback on Sleepy Joe. I don’t know who’s going to win, but we’ll have to hit Pocahontas very hard again if she does win. But she’s staging a little bit of a comeback. What a group — Pocahontas and Sleepy Joe.”
On Mexico deploying soldiers to stem the flow of Central American migrants: “I want to thank Mexico, it’s incredible. We have close to 27,000, you think of that. We never had three — I think we had about 2½ soldiers, one was sitting down all the time. We had nobody.”
August 13, 2019
“They’re calling for a revolution.” Clashes between police and protesters have brought Hong Kong to a standstill, with thousands of citizens continuing to peacefully march despite tear gas and forceful removal by police. Here’s what protesters are demanding, and how the standoff is bringing the city of more than 7 million to the brink. Warning: The following video contains graphic content. Viewer discretion is advised.
Clashes ripple across Hong Kong as student-led protests defy government
“They’re calling for a revolution.” Clashes between police and protesters have brought Hong Kong to a standstill, with thousands of citizens continuing to peacefully march despite tear gas and forceful removal by police. Here's what protesters are demanding, and how the standoff is bringing the city of more than 7 million to the brink. Warning: The following video contains graphic content. Viewer discretion is advised.
Posted by CNN on Tuesday, August 13, 2019
August 12, 2019
Trump reminded everyone this weekend that, at heart, he’s just an unhinged conspiracy theorist. Seth takes A Closer Look.
Donald Trump Is the Conspiracy-Theorist-in-Chief: A Closer Look
Trump reminded everyone this weekend that, at heart, he’s just an unhinged conspiracy theorist. Seth takes A Closer Look.
Posted by Late Night with Seth Meyers on Monday, August 12, 2019
“This is one of the world’s most beautiful places, with a thriving salmon run, and now we’ll get some…gold.”
A salmon leaping rapids in Alaska. “I was dumbfounded,” said one EPA insider after Trump officials reversed the agency’s opposition to the copper and gold mining project in Bristol Bay that scientists warn will devastate the salmon and the overall ecosystem. “We were basically told we weren’t going to examine anything. We were told to get out of the way and just make it happen.” (Photo: arctic-tern/Getty Images)
“If that mine gets put in, it would … completely devastate our region. It would not only kill our resources, but it would kill us culturally.” —Gayla Hoseth, Curyung Tribal Council/Bristol Bay Native Association That was the succinct and critical reaction of Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein to reporting on Friday that President Donald Trump had personally intervened—after a meeting with Alaska’s Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy on Air Force One in June—to withdraw the Environmental Protection Agency’s opposition to a gold mining project in the state that the federal government’s own scientists have acknowledged would destroy native fisheries and undermine the state’s fragile ecosystems.
Based on reporting by CNN that only emerged Friday evening, the key developments happened weeks ago after Trump’s one-on-one meeting with Dunleavy—who has supported the copper and gold Pebble Mine project in Bristol Bay despite the opposition of conservationists, Indigenous groups, salmon fisheries experts, and others.
CNN reports:
In 2014, the project was halted because an EPA study found that it would cause “complete loss of fish habitat due to elimination, dewatering, and fragmentation of streams, wetlands, and other aquatic resources” in some areas of Bristol Bay. The agency invoked a rarely used provision of the Clean Water Act that works like a veto, effectively banning mining on the site.
“If that mine gets put in, it would … completely devastate our region,” Gayla Hoseth, second chief of the Curyung Tribal Council and a Bristol Bay Native Association director, told CNN. “It would not only kill our resources, but it would kill us culturally.”
When the internal announcement was made by Trump political appointees that the agency was dropping its opposition, which came one day after the Trump-Dunleavy meeting, sources told CNN it came as a “total shock” to some of the top EPA scientists who were planning to oppose the project on environmental grounds. Sources for the story, the news outlet noted, “asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution.”
According to CNN:
Four EPA sources with knowledge of the decision told CNN that senior agency officials in Washington summoned scientists and other staffers to an internal videoconference on June 27, the day after the Trump-Dunleavy meeting, to inform them of the agency’s reversal. The details of that meeting are not on any official EPA calendar and have not previously been reported.
Those sources said the decision disregards the standard assessment process under the Clean Water Act, cutting scientists out of the process.
The EPA’s new position on the project is the latest development in a decade-long battle that has pitted environmentalists, Alaskan Natives and the fishing industry against pro-mining interests in Alaska.
Responding to Klein’s tweet, fellow author and activist Bill McKibben—long a colleague of hers at 350.org—expressed similar contempt.
“This is one of the world’s most beautiful places, with a thriving salmon run, and now we’ll get some…gold,” McKibben tweeted. Trump, he added, is “President Midas.”
After being told that the decision was made, one EPA inside told CNN, “I was dumbfounded. We were basically told we weren’t going to examine anything. We were told to get out of the way and just make it happen.”
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In an extreme example of angst over expensive medical bills, an elderly Washington couple who lived near the U.S.-Canadian border died in a murder-suicide this week after leaving notes that detailed concerns about paying for medical care, police say.
The Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office reported that deputies found notes in the couple’s Ferndale, Washington, home that explained the wife’s severe medical issues and “concerns that the couple did not have sufficient resources to pay for medical care.”
Deputies say Brian S. Jones, 77, shot and killed Patricia A. Whitney-Jones, 76, before taking his own life.
Police said the husband called 911 moments before 8:30 a.m. Wednesday and told the dispatcher of his plans to shoot himself. He said he wrote a note with instructions and told the dispatcher that the couple would be in the front bedroom.
The dispatcher tried to keep him on the phone, but he hung up.
Deputies responded to the house about 15 minutes later and a crisis negotiator tried to call the couple, first by phone, then a megaphone. When no one answered, deputies sent a robot-mounted camera in the house and discovered the couple.
Whatcom County Sheriff Bill Elfo said the tragic circumstances might have been averted if the couple had reached out for help.
“They think it’s the only way out,” Elfo told USA TODAY. “That just shouldn’t be in this country. There should be a much better way of responding to that.”
More: Struggling to stay alive: Rising insulin prices cause diabetics to go to extremes
More: ‘Really astonishing’: Average cost of hospital ER visit surges 176% in a decade, report says
Elfo said the medical examiner has confirmed the murder-suicide but investigators have not yet reviewed all paperwork, including the couple’s medical bills.
“We believe it is legitimate,” he said of the husband’s angst over medical bills. “We certainly want to help and intervene and help the people get to a better day. When things peak like this, perhaps if they wait an hour or two, they can find a better solution then committing a murder and a suicide.”
Records show when the couple filed for bankruptcy in 2016, they estimated medical expenses of $200 and more than $122,000 in unsecured credit cards, credit accounts and collections.
Credit counselors say that people who struggle with hospital, doctor and prescription drug expenses often depend on credit accounts to pay medical bills.
Bruce McClary is vice president of communications for the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, a nonprofit financial counseling organization.
McClary said he consulted with seniors who would routinely resort to high interest rate credit cards to pay for expensive medical bills and prescriptions they could not afford. He tried to connect seniors with resources from patient-assistance organizations that help defray the cost of prescription drugs.
“It was just driving them further and further into debt that they otherwise would have been able to avoid had they found these resources sooner,” McClary said. “That is one thing that is driving a lot of people to file bankruptcy in that age group.”
John Mauldin, Senior Contributor – Markets June 2019
We all wonder if Trump’s trade actions are as random as they appear or if there is a broader strategy.
Some of my contacts argue that the relatively strong U.S. economy allows the administration to take a harder line than would normally be advisable.
The thinking is that we can ride out a trade war better than China can.
This only works if the U.S. economy keeps growing long enough for the tariffs to make China bend. We can postpone a recession for another year or two if the trade war doesn’t intensify and Europe holds together.
Since it is intensifying, we may not get that time. In other words, tariffs could end the conditions that justified them.
Something similar happened before, during the most famous trade mistake in U.S. and global history.
The 1930’s Smoot-Hawley Tariffs
Similar to today, the Roaring 1920’s saw rapid technological change, namely automobiles and electricity.
This created a farm surplus as fewer horses consumed less feed. Prices fell and farmers complained of foreign competition.
Herbert Hoover promised higher tariffs in his 1928 presidential campaign. He won, and the House passed a tariff bill in May 1929.
The Senate was still debating its version of the bill when the stock market crashed in October 1929. Today, we use that event to mark the Great Depression’s beginning.
But at the time, people didn’t know they were in a depression or even a recession. Most economists expected a quick recovery. Stocks did recover quite a bit in the following months, though not back to their prior highs.
So, when the Senate finally passed a tariff bill in March 1930, the thinking was not that different from what we see today. They thought they could preserve and even extend the good times.
But conditions worsened quickly, and by 1931, unemployed men were standing in soup lines.
In 1932, both Smoot and Hawley lost their seats as Franklin Roosevelt beat Hoover in a landslide—57% of the popular vote.
That history won’t necessarily repeat this time, but it’s not a good sign.
Throwing Caution to the Wind
Last year, I wrote about a sandpile experiment conducted by physicists back in the 1980’s. I described how a sandpile can slowly grow in size, apparently stable. At any moment, however, something could trigger an avalanche.
The global trade system is something like that. Of course, it’s not perfect or even optimal. Countries erect barriers to their advantage.
I can point to several countries whose economic policies are mercantilistic, but at least everyone knows about them. We see the the dangers and back off to avoid an avalanche whose victims are impossible to predict.
It is a kind of equilibrium.
Everyone’s incentive is to avoid catastrophe and make incremental improvements. That makes trade talks extraordinarily difficult.
The Trump administration doesn’t seem to care about equilibrium. Whether it’s coming from the president himself or those around him, the strategy appears to be “kick apart the sandpile and make everybody rebuild it.”
And whether we like it or not, many of Trump’s supporters actually like the concept of throwing a wrench into the system.
So, it is not the case that the U.S. has no choices. We have many choices. Tariffs are the wrong one. But then, that is just me, and I am one lone voice and vote.
John Mauldin is President of Mauldin Economics and a financial writer, publisher, and New York Times bestselling-author. Each week, nearly a million readers around the world receive my Thoughts From the Frontline free investment newsletter.
‘I just wanted to remind them that we are here with peaceful purposes and without weapons – but they are not’
Colin Drury July 31, 2019
She is a lone teenage girl sat cross-legged and armed with nothing more than the Russian constitution.
They are a line of Moscow’s notoriously brutal riot police, equipped with shields, batons and helmets.
But the image of a young pro-democracy demonstrator single-handedly defying Vladimir Putin’s security forces looks set to become one of the most powerful symbols of resistance to the president’s autocracy.
Olga Misik, 17, was photographed sitting in front of the officers reading out the country’s constitution – which affirms the right to peaceful gatherings – during protests on Saturday.
Apparently unsure how to handle such a show of calm audacity, the police hold back.
The image has gone viral across the world, being shared thousands of times, the peaceful defiance central to the photo faintly reminiscent of that present in the the iconic picture of Tiananmen Square’s Tank Man. It is now being used by Russian opposition to rally support in the face of continuing state oppression.
“I just wanted to remind them [the police] that we are here with peaceful purposes and without weapons, but they are not,” the high school graduate told the Riga-based Meduza website.
“It never even occurred to me that someone other than them would hear it … I sat on the ground and began to read out our constitutional rights, specifying that what is happening here [police arresting protesters] is illegal.”
The weekend’s demonstrations were ostensibly a protest against the banning of several leading opposition politicians from running in September’s Moscow City Duma elections.
But they also called more widely for greater political freedoms and transparency in Russia, where elections are widely viewed to be rigged.
Constitutions are often waved around at such protests as a reference to how Mr Putin continues to ignore article 31 – the right to free assembly – to ban such demonstrations.
“Injustice always concerns everyone,” Olga said. “Today the Moscow City Duma, tomorrow the governor of the region, a week later the head of the Resurrection District. It is only a matter of time.
“It is foolish to think that this is a rally only for free elections or the admission of candidates. This is a rally in defense of elementary constitutional rights that would not be questioned in a democratic state.”
The teenager herself, whose own father is a supporter of Mr Putin, was allowed to walk away after the reading, but was later arrested by police as she walked to a subway station.
“They did not introduce themselves, did not explain the reason and grounds for detention,” she said.
“There was not a rally or a crowd of people in this place. They grabbed my arms and legs and dragged me down the street and through the underpass … I screamed that they were hurting me, but they told me that they knew better.”
She was held until the next day and says she will now appear in court next month charged with attending a public event which was held without filing a notice.
She was one of more than 1,000 people arrested. Opposition leader Alexei Navalny was arrested at an earlier demonstration last week.
Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is starting his summer break under siege. Democrats are intensifying pressure on him to take up gun legislation, expletive-hurling protesters have shown up at his front door and his campaign generated social media outrage over a tweet.
It’s been a rough stretch for the Kentucky Republican, and the aftermath of two mass shootings in 24 hours last weekend guarantees he’ll remain under the spotlight. McConnell, who is up for re-election in 2020, must decide whether to step away from his rigid defense of gun-owner rights as he works with an unreliable partner in President Donald Trump, who is sending mixed signals about where he stands on the issue.
Mitch McConnell
The self-described “grim reaper” of liberal policy plans has stayed firmly in control in the GOP-led Senate by successfully shepherding a host of conservative judges through confirmation, staving off Democratic legislative initiatives and staying out of the line of fire from Trump. The gun issue, one of the most volatile in U.S. politics, will test his ability to maneuver between the Democrats and the president.
McConnell said Thursday that he and Trump spoke earlier in the day about the issue, and both agreed a bipartisan deal is needed and that “two items that for sure will be front and center” are background checks for gun buyers and encouraging state “red flag” laws intended to take firearms away from dangerous or mentally ill people.
“The urgency of this is not lost by any of us because we have seen entirely too many of these outrageous acts by deranged people,” he said in an interview on Louisville radio station WHAS. He added, though, that he won’t bring the Senate back early from an August recess to act.
The renewed emphasis on gun control comes as McConnell also is fending off Democratic attacks over his unwillingness to allow votes on legislation aimed at securing U.S. elections before 2020, in response to findings that Russia acted to swing the 2016 vote in Trump’s favor. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough tagged McConnell as “Moscow Mitch,” kicking off the social media trend that’s been picked up by chanting protesters.
Days before lawmakers left Washington for a month-long recess, McConnell took to the Senate floor to angrily defend his record on Russia and to take on his detractors in an unusually impassioned extended address. He accused his critics of engaging in “modern-day McCarthyism.”
National scorn and Democratic attacks have followed him back home to Kentucky, where he is campaigning for a seventh term. At a political picnic in Fancy Farm, Kentucky, on Saturday, protesters chanted “Moscow Mitch” as he spoke. Other protesters appeared outside his home in Louisville this week, shouting expletives while he was inside recovering from a shoulder injury on Sunday.
His campaign also was derided by critics over a photo posted on McConnell’s Senate re-election twitter account shortly after the Saturday shootings at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, that left 22 people dead. The photo showed cardboard replicas of tombstones that depicted the Democrats’ “Green New Deal” on climate change, his Democratic opponent in 2020, Amy McGrath, and socialism.
McConnell’s remarks on Thursday provided the first hints of what he might consider. He told the Louisville radio station that restoring a lapsed ban on assault-style weapons probably would be discussed but that he questions how effective that would be. On background checks, he pointed to an earlier proposal by GOP Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia as a possible model. Their measure, blocked in the Senate in 2013 in part because McConnell’s opposed it, would eliminate loopholes for making background checks part of firearms transactions.
“McConnell is a cool customer and he’ll let the Senate work its will without taking up Democratic House-passed legislation,” said Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist who was a top aide to past GOP leaders of both the House and Senate.
Trump has been inconsistent about where he is on the matter, hinting at a tough challenge this fall for McConnell when senators return to work.
Trump on Monday gave support to a proposal intended to take firearms away from the mentally ill as he called for bipartisan action following the shootings in Ohio and Texas that killed 31 people and wounded dozens of others. He has proposed nothing that would curtail the availability of firearms.
While the president has threatened to veto House-passed legislation on background checks, on Wednesday he told reporters on the White House lawn that he is in favor of some form of bolstered vetting for gun buyers.
“I’m looking to do background checks,” Trump said. “I think background checks are important.”
Trump has a track record of backing away from proposed new gun laws. Two weeks after last year’s massacre at a Parkland, Florida, high school, Trump convened an extraordinary meeting of top Democrats and Republicans. He indicated he would push through universal background checks and other measures that Democrats long have supported. He ended up backing away from universal checks in the face of opposition from the National Rifle Association.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer this week repeated his call for McConnell to bring the Senate back for an emergency session and take up legislation approved in February by the Democrat-led House that would require background checks on all gun purchases — including at gun shows and online.
Chuck Schumer
“We’re saying to Leader McConnell, do the right thing,” Schumer said at a news conference where he was joined by GOP Representative Peter King of New York, who co-sponsored the measure.
Last year a number of modest policy changes were enacted after the mass shootings in Florida and Las Vegas. The administration took action to ban so-called bump stocks that allow semi-automatic rifles to mimic fully automatic weapons. Congress also voted to improve background checks for gun purchases, spend more on school safety, and let the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study gun violence — ending what was in effect a 22-year ban that was supported by the NRA.
But they were small steps compared with the 1994 assault-weapons ban that lapsed in 2004.
The twin attacks in recent days seemed to renew momentum for action to address gun violence. Trump ally and Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham said Monday that he and Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, a gun-control advocate, will draft legislation to help states adopt so-called red flag laws intended to take firearms away from dangerous or mentally ill people.
A number of leading Republicans also called for action. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, on Tuesday issued proposals including a “red flag” law, background checks for most firearm purchases, and tougher penalties for felons with guns and straw purchases.
In the Senate, some senior Republicans called for action on “red flag” legislation, including several members of McConnell’s leadership team. That includes Senator John Thune of South Dakota and Senator Todd Young of Indiana.
“Clearly we have multiple problems in this country – problems of hate, social alienation, and the devaluing of human life – and we’re going to have to work together as a nation to address these challenges,” Young said in a statement.
But there were few calls for enhanced background checks, with the exception of two GOP senators: Toomey and Susan Collins of Maine.
Democrats are keeping the pressure on.
Representative Tim Ryan, an Ohio Democrat who’s among the crowded field of candidates seeking the party’s 2020 presidential nomination, said Thursday he’d start a caravan from Niles, Ohio, to McConnell’s home in Kentucky to demand action on gun-safety bills.
“People say ‘Why is it different now?’ I just think this has all accumulated,” Ryan said during an interview Thursday with CNN. “You go back: it’s Parkland; it’s Sandy Hook; it’s Columbine. It’s all of these things over the past 20 years.”
As McConnell navigates the matter, there is some prospect that the pressure to act will be reduced in the weeks before Congress returns to work, said Republican strategist Whit Ayres. Passage of a few weeks means advocates could “lose the momentum of the moment,” he said.
“I am hesitant to make any predictions in the aftermath of the latest tragedy, given the fact that past tragedies have raised the possibility of changes in our laws that have never come to fruition,” Ayres said. Demand for legislation is clearly growing, but he said it will take “an alignment of the planets to get something significant changed given the controversy over any sort of laws affecting guns.”