Connect the Dots 101

TrumpFest begins today. The contrast with the DNC convention will be both apparent and instructive.

Whereas Democrats heard from former Democratic Presidents Carter, Clinton and Obama, as well as 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton, their Republican counterparts will be conspicuous by their absence.

No President Bush. No Mitt Romney.

The Republican narrative is that Donald Trump and his tribe have manned the walls against the dark forces of the demonic Democrats.

In point of fact, the opposition to Trumpism is bipartisan.

Prominent Republicans were given speaking roles during the DNC convention—“former Ohio Gov. John Kasich; former New York Rep. Susan Molinari; former Secretary of State Colin Powell; former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman; and business executive Meg Whitman.”

Former Arizona Senator Jeff Flake and a group of “Republicans for Biden” announced their support today—

• Texas Rep. Steve Bartlett

• Pennsylvania Rep. Bill Clinger 

• Missouri Rep. Tom Coleman

• Hawaii Rep. Charles Djou 

• Oklahoma Rep. Mickey Edwards

• Maryland Rep. Wayne Gilchrest

• Pennsylvania Rep. Jim Greenwood

• South Carolina Rep. Bob Inglis

• Arizona Rep. Jim Kolbe

• California Rep. Steve Kuykendall

• Illinois Rep. Ray LaHood

• Iowa Rep. Jim Leach
• New York Rep. Susan Molinari

• Maryland Rep. Connie Morella

• Mississippi Rep. Mike Parker

• New York Rep. Jack Quinn

• Rhode Island Rep. Claudine Schneider

• Connecticut Rep. Christopher Shays

• Vermont Rep. Peter Smith

• Texas Rep. Alan Steelman

• New York Rep. Jim Walsh

• Virginia Rep. Bill Whitehurst

• New Jersey Rep. Dick Zimmer

The best ads against Donald Trump have arguably been produced by the Lincoln Project (lincolnproject.us) which defines its mission as “defeating President Trump and Trumpism at the ballot box.”

“We do not undertake this task lightly nor from ideological preference,” they go on to say, “Our many policy differences with national Democrats remain. However, the priority for all patriotic Americans must be a shared fidelity to the Constitution and a commitment to defeat those candidates who have abandoned their constitutional oaths, regardless of party. Electing Democrats who support the Constitution over Republicans who do not is a worthy effort.”

(Read their New York Times op-Ed here https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/opinion/lincoln-project.html?referringSource=articleShare)

“Former Republican National Security Officials for Biden,” a group of over 70 former nation security professionals who served in Republican (and Democratic) administrations, registered their opposition to a second Trump term and announced their support for Joe Biden. (https://www.defendingdemocracytogether

The Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee just released a 1,000-page report (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/us/politics/senate-intelligence-russian-interference-report.html?referringSource=articleShare) that corroborated the central findings of the Mueller Report— that “the Russian government disrupted an American election to help Mr. Trump become president, Russian intelligence services viewed members of the Trump campaign as easily manipulated, and some of Mr. Trump’s advisers were eager for the help from an American adversary.”

The “report showed extensive evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and people tied to the Kremlin — including a longstanding associate of the onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, whom the report identified as a “Russian intelligence officer.”

(Paul Manafort was sentenced to 7 1/2 years and has since been released to home confinement despite his failure to meet the guidelines of the federal Bureau of Prisons.)

Democrats will be an easy target for the deplorables President Trump seems hellbent on packing cheek by jowl in as many live venues as possible this week. It is essential for the press and people of conscience to bear in mind and publicly repeat the fact that it isn’t just Democrats who stand to lose everything in another four years of buffoonery, incompetence and death.

The barbarians are in fact at the gates but they’re manning the inside of the walls. And they’re wearing red hats.