The Liars’ Club and a Senator Who Enables It

In the 1993 thriller The Liars’ Club, a circle of teens is forced to maintain even greater loyalty than before because of one member’s involvement in a sexual assault. When the victim is murdered, the web of complicity tightens. An attempt to call an end to the deceit only results in worse transgressions.

The Republican Party under Donald Trump has transformed into own version of The Liars’ Club. Only this time, it encompasses not a small group of entitled jocks (though Secretary of War Pete Hegseth seems like an alum of such a group), but an organization of politically engaged adults.

Their silence in the face of assaults on the Constitution and democracy—from Cabinet members (like the ones in this picture, joined by Veep J.D. Vance) down to local officials asked to violate time-honored election laws and regulations—is being enforced by a President with a code of omerta worthy of a sullen crime boss.

This week’s primary losses by Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy and Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie, after their undistinguished challengers were flooded with funds and endorsements by the President and his spineless surrogates, will only confirm the sense of helplessness felt by any Republicans hoping for even an inch of space from a leader bent on remolding the Grand Old Party in his own scowling image.

There is a double danger affecting the nation’s Democrats: desperation that they can no longer rely on a single member of the opposite party to rein in the President, and that a defection by one of their own might further embolden him.

Which brings us to the curious case of John Fetterman.

Lack of Prudential Judgment

A relative of mine recently noted that, though he abominated Fetterman during his successful 2022 campaign for the U.S. Senate, his views about the former Pennsylvania lieutenant governor have moderated since then. “He makes more sense than many Republicans or Democrats,” he said, observing that Fetterman had won praise for his efforts on behalf of Western Pennsylvania.

In fact, late last July, Fetterman commended the Trump administration for delivering over $1 billion in infrastructure funding to the state. Surely it didn’t escape his notice how the President interfered with funding projects to build new Hudson River rail tunnels and Army Corps of Engineers plans in cities like New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Baltimore—areas controlled, not coincidentally, by Democrats.

That’s the most charitable case for why, as Jonathan Martin’s column earlier this month for Politico laid out, Fetterman has become a tempting target for Presidential courting:

“He largely ignores Trump’s transgressions, finds ways to support the White House in high-profile moments and is increasingly ubiquitous when criticizing his own party on right-coded media in ways that affirm conservative views about liberal excess.”

I am not one to disown a Democrat or progressive for wandering off the reservation when compelled by conscience. In an age of polarization, independent thinking in a public official is as important now as it was back in 1774, when father of conservatism Edmund Burke extolled the ideal of a representative who “owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

But the independence that Burke advocated depends on a sense of prudential judgment that Fetterman, in backing the Iranian War—and in even more ludicrously supporting President Trump’s plans for a White House ballroom on national security reasons—sorely lacks.

Fetterman disregarded the bona fides of Trump and his lackeys in evaluating these two propaganda offensives. That’s important, because, if administration figures are prone to congenital misleading, then an elected official must work harder to verify claims and supporting evidence.

That fails utterly with the Iranian War and the White House Ballroom, as they have been started and supported by a Liars’ Club at the highest level of the nation: Trump and his advisers.

Ballroom BS

The $200 million for the ballroom, its financing through private donors currying favor with the President, and the complete East Wing demolition required to make way for it should have concerned Fetterman. Instead, in an interview last August with Fox News Digital, he predicted that the plans would be “done in a tasteful and historical kind of way.”

“Tasteful” and “historical” in the same sentence as the President who destroyed the Rose Garden? That would be enough to make many people gag. But Fetterman compounded his error this April by spreading Trump’s claim, with no evidence, that the shooting at the White House Correspondents' Dinner further justified the ballroom plans on security grounds.

Periodically, Trump officials should be subjected to The Pinocchio Test: i.e., the louder they scream that they are telling the truth, blameless, and innocent, the faster we should whip out rulers to measure their noses for unexplained elongations.

Administering the Pinocchio Test should be normal business on Capitol Hill in maintaining the government’s system of checks and balances. Predictably, Republicans have abdicated this role except in the cases of Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi, who so embarrassed or disappointed the President that Congressmen and Senators could safely attack them.

But it is shocking to find a Democrat like Fetterman who commits the same sin. His support for Israel’s offensive against Gaza might be excused as backing for a nation subjected to a horrendous attack.

The Iranian Insanity

But the campaign against Iran was a war of choice, the logical consequence of breaking the 2015 Iran-US nuclear treaty negotiated by the Obama administration that allowed unprecedented monitoring of uranium stockpiles.

Once Trump, at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s urging, pulled out of the pact, assessing any potential nuclear buildup became a matter of guesswork—which, as seen after the fall of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, can prove wildly mistaken.

In assessing Netanyahu’s arguments for a widened conflict that no President from either party in the prior three decades had accepted, Trump—and, consequently, Fetterman—might have thought of an exchange between Pat Riley—at that time, before becoming a Hall of Fame coach, a secondary offensive weapon for the Los Angeles Lakers—and Wilt Chamberlain.

The superstar center, according to a speech I heard Riley give at a nonprofit trade association when he was with the New York Knicks, was incredulous that his teammate had taken and missed a shot that would have won the game. What was he thinking?

“I was wide open,” Riley answered.

“Did you ever stop to think there might be a reason for that?” Chamberlain shot back.

Indeed, in reviewing past reluctance to authorize American military operations against Iran, Trump should have thought “there might be a reason for that.” Instead, with the Israeli leader feeding his fantasy of one-upping prior Presidents, he decided to join Israel in the attack.

He did so even though, according to a New York Times account of a crucial planning meeting, CIA director John Ratcliffe and Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismissed Netanyahu’s expectation of a mass Iranian uprising as fantasy, and Trump’s military advisers warned that the Strait of Hormuz could be seized.

Following the invasion, Trump, Pete Hegseth, and other officials tried out a series of shifting rationales—defeating Iranian proxies in attacks on Israel, neutralizing ballistic missiles, and regime change—before settling on what seems to be the current motivation: annihilating Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

The nuclear question seems to be the best way for punching one’s ticket for admittance to the Liars’ Club. Following last June’s “Twelve-Day War,” a US-Israel joint air attack launched for this very purpose, Trump announced that Iran’s nuclear program had been “totally obliterated.”

If that was the case, why the need for another operation, particularly since no evidence has emerged of Iran restarting nuclear enrichment?

Fetterman would be far better consuming shredded lettuce than the shredded war justifications of Trump and Pete Hegseth. And someone should ask why he muted his rhetorical trumpet when Trump issued this genocidal ultimatum to Iran: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again" unless a deal was reached.

At this point, it’s worth asking: Is there any use of military force by the administration that Fetterman regards as unwise, let alone immoral?

It’s hard to tell what’s more infuriating: the Fetterman negative vote against invoking the 1973 War Powers Act that ensured its Senate defeat, or his justification for it: “I would never want to restrict any future president to do this kind of military exercise that was very successful.”

Come again? “Successful” how?

Leave aside that Fetterman doesn’t seem disturbed by an administration and its congressional lackeys who, as this “military exercise” has evolved, have claimed: a) that the war is over; b) acknowledged that the war could continue for quite some time; and c) that a deal was within reach (this, often after the Trump Organization bought stock in companies that benefited from the war).

But what can you say about an “excursion” in which the Islamic regime remains in place, having discovered an effective tool of retaliation in closing the Strait of Hormuz that it had never attempted before—and reduced the President of the United States to a tweeting, cursing madman on Easter?

Like many of his fellow Trump supporters, a longtime friend of mine has consistently derided “globalists.” But what is the President now if not a globalist, except that his inclination is based on self-aggrandizement rather than the rules-based international law that long sustained Pax Americana?

In dealing with Russia and China, Trump’s attitude has been, “We’ll grab what we can, and let you do the same.” While busy taking over Venezuela, enforcing an embargo that has reduced Cuba to a shambles, and even threatening the NATO alliance by screaming for the annexation of Greenland, the President has signaled to Vladimir Putin that he doesn’t mind if Russia takes over Ukraine.

Where has Fetterman been in all of this? On Fox News last year, he said that if the President secured a lasting peace in the Ukraine conflict, he’d gladly nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize. This then begs the question: how would Putin accept any deal that did not provide him with a net territorial gain at the expense of Ukraine?

Trump Derangement Syndrome—or Fetterman Derangement Syndrome?

Like the President, Fetterman has unleashed a round of vitriol against anyone who holds good-faith reservations about initiating a war against a nation nearly four times the area and twice the population of Iraq—a land in which, it might be remembered, the US became involved in a quagmire.

This month, with rhetoric earlier retailed by the masterminds who brought us the Vietnam War, he accused the Democratic base of becoming “increasingly anti-American.”

It didn’t stop there. In a March interview, he saw this cohort as being “governed by the TDS”—Trump Derangement Syndrome.

It’s not enough that the senator is using a shopworn version of columnist Charles Krauthammer’s “Bush Derangement Syndrome” coinage from 2003.

But he might have more profitably reflected that “TDS” refers not to administration critics but to a President who stays up all night tweeting the most absurd, bigoted, obscene memes and rants—as well as one who has started his very own Mideast forever war to go along with his domestic endless retribution campaign.

“I’m going to disagree with [Trump], but I’m always going to disagree with respect,” Fetterman vowed. That disagreement has been decidedly low-key. 

Aside from that, though, why would the senator accord respect to a head of government who doesn’t respect the dignity of the Presidency, let alone his predecessors, popes, officeholders, journalists, entertainers, economists, business leaders, and ordinary citizens?

In the face of a daily cascade of personal insults and envelope-pushing violations of the law, outrage is the more appropriate response.

“I’m never going to call people Nazis or fascists or authoritarianism and all those extreme terms,” Fetterman said on Fox News in late April. But if Trump does not crave authoritarian rule, how else to describe someone who:

*puts his image on currency and photos;

*says that the only thing restricting his conduct in office would be his own “ethics”;

*enables a tech billionaire outside government to remove congressionally authorized agencies and their staffers at will;

*threatens businesses with tariffs or lawsuits, or demands a share of profits as leverage, to pressure companies into political alignment with the administration;

*pursues prosecutions against the likes of James Comey, Mark Kelly, Governor Tim Walz, Jerome Powell, Adam Schiff, John Brennan, and Letitia James on thin to non-existent evidence;

*authorizes government agencies to harass universities, law firms, even networks with late-night talk-show hosts who joke about them.

If the pattern of Fetterman’s statements sounds familiar, it should: Robert Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard started out as progressive Democrats until their criticisms of others in their movements became louder and more frequent while their complaints about Trump turned mute before being totally abandoned.

Never mind saving his political career: If Fetterman wants to preserve his self-respect, he can look at what happened to Kennedy and Gabbard once they fell into Trump’s embraces, which ended up involving:

*shamelessly praising the President beyond what they would ever have for any Democratic leader;

*keeping silent about major policy differences with the President;

*for RFK Jr., saying nothing while one of the primary tributes to his clan, the Kennedy Center, faced physical dismantling and creative emasculation;

*for Gabbard (before her just-announced resignation), investigating preposterous 2020 electoral claims of Presidential election that were outside her authority as director of national intelligence.

As with RFK Jr., it has to be asked how much Fetterman’s move towards the right resulted from genuine policy disagreements as opposed to an erratic personality. His attempt to carry on his senatorial duties following his stroke and the depression that followed is commendable.

But the behavior catalogued in a New York Magazine article last year (e.g., driving at recklessly high speeds, as well as what a former chief of staff listed as “Conspiratorial thinking; megalomania…high highs and low lows; long, rambling, repetitive and self-centered monologues; lying in ways that are painfully, awkwardly obvious”) calls into question whether he should continue in office.

In his interview with Martin for Politico, Fetterman wondered how Trump and the GOP could tolerate a social liberal like himself when they had forced out Tom Tillis and Bill Cassidy for far less.

As a public official, if you accept and spread the arguments of The Liars’ Club, you’re only one small step from joining it. Unlike a private citizen, you have access to information that might make you change your mind. Only willful ignorance, not naivete, could cloud a failure to perceive that the paramount issue of our time is preventing the most powerful man on earth from doing whatever he likes.

That should be as good a reason for any as why Fetterman should not accommodate an ignorant, loutish billionaire with a thirst for political dominance and a gift for demagogy.

Well, maybe one more: Caligula, according to the ancient historian Suetonius, had thought so highly of his horse Incitatus that the Roman ruler thought of naming him a consul until his assassination. 

Take your pick for why: either as an example of the emperor’s madness or of his contempt for the Senate—two traits typical of America’s current aspiring authoritarian.

Flashback, June 1965: Conservative Bill Buckley Launches Long-Shot NYC Mayoral Bid

The three-way New York City mayoral race among Republic nominee Curtis Sliwa, surprise Democratic primary winner Zohran Mamdani, and incumbent Eric Adams is already shaping up to be one for the ages. But it will be hard to top the 1965 campaign, if only for the independent candidate that year.

Even with no realistic chance to win the race for New York City mayor in the fall, William F. Buckley, Jr. announced that he would campaign as the candidate of the Conservative Party 60 years ago this week.

The National Review editor and newspaper columnist entered the race hoping to deny victory in November to the Republican nominee, John Lindsay. He didn’t achieve that goal, but the 13% he did pull indicated a strong rightward drift in the New York GOP that eventually forced Lindsay to seek reelection as the Liberal Party candidate four years later—and, eventually, to leave the Republican Party altogether.

Buckley also hopped his run would be “fun,” and so it proved, especially for reporters delighted by the copy provided by a candidate never at a loss for words—especially big ones.

It all started with his initial press conference, when his response to a question on what he would do if elected became an instant classic in the annals of campaigning: “Demand a recount.”

A self-styled “radical conservative,” Buckley disagreed with virtually every major liberal initiative of the prior three decades, from the New Deal’s economic measures to civil-rights legislation, and regarded with horror Republican efforts to move to the center to accommodate these.

A prominent campaign of his read, “He has the guts to tell the truth: WILL YOU LISTEN?”

At the end of three terms under Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr., not to mention three decades under the increasing control of urban planner and neighbor destroyer Robert Moses, New York was entering a spiral of urban decay that would climax in its bankruptcy crisis in the autumn of 1975. Crime, inner-city unrest, and busing proposals were fueling a white backlash against civil rights.

An initial, positive response from cops encouraged Buckley to run. But his support widened after that to the outer New York boroughs, where residents felt their concerns were ignored. He could be coy in how he exploited such appeals. Though he refused to grant that racial superiority had a biological basis, he had written National Review editorials criticizing federal attempts to end segregation.

During his mayoral campaign, he said whites supporting the candidacy of segregationist Governor George Wallace were not motivated by racism but by dislike of African-American figures like author James Baldwin and activist Bayard Rustin who “despise the American way of life and our civilization,” and “challenge root and branch the American approach to ­free civil order.”

His brilliance lay in how he could press hot-button issues in the coolest possible manner: with polysyllabic vocabulary delivered with a posh, mid-Atlantic pronunciation and coruscating wit, concluding with a sly grin and a flick of his reptilian tongue.

In spite of the liberal leanings of many reporters, even they couldn’t help but chuckle at his best sound bites (e.g., on his two rivals, the tall Republican Lindsay and the short Democrat Abraham Beame: “The differences between Mr. Beame and Mr. Lindsay are biological, not political”).

Not having compiled a record in public office that needed to be defended, Buckley found himself on ground ideally suited to a skill he had cultivated since his Yale days, particularly after a newspaper strike left a print information vacuum for many voters: debates.

Buckley was free to stake out unusual positions on issues. As future biographer Sam Tanenhaus discussed in an October 2000 New York Times Magazine article on “The Buckley Effect,” one of these turned out to be nearly four decades ahead of its time: bicycle paths as an alternative means of transportation throughout the city, similar to what he had seen in major European cities.

Other positions turned out to be a good deal less mainstream—certainly in the context of his time, and even more so now:

* “either lock up teenage felons or make their parents legally responsible for them”;

* cut off welfare for everyone but invalids and mothers "looking after children 14 years or younger"’

*“relocating chronic welfare cases outside the city limits”;

*legalize drugs for adults—but have…

*“great and humane rehabilitation centers” for drug addicts;

*encourage emigration;

Tanenhaus says that Buckley was an arguer rather than a thinker—never able to finish what he hoped would be his magnum opus, The Revolt of the Masses. But arguing, in the form of forensic skills, was indisputably what he had developed as far back as his undergraduate days at Yale.

Just as his much-publicized two faceoffs with African-American novelist and activist James Baldwin served as an appetizer to his mayoral campaign, the latter race led in the following year to the start of a three-decade stint hosting his public television show, Firing Line.

During the campaign, Buckley increasingly absorbed the lesson that he could blunt opponents’ threats better through genial wit than with harsh rhetoric. More than a decade later, he would back a Republican candidate for President with even greater skills of this kind: Ronald Reagan.

In his new biography of Buckley, Tanenhaus notes that, for all their differences in style, it would be a mistake to think that Donald Trump has little in common with the conservative movement that Buckley helped coordinate in the postwar period. In an article last year for The American Prospect, Rick Perlstein seconds that idea, noting that “new scholarship suggests that Trump’s rise was not a reversal of what Buckley was up to, but in many ways, its apotheosis.”

I believe it is more appropriate to believe that the nature of Buckley’s forays into the public arena will never be seen again. He belonged to a group that Mitchell Ross, in a provocative 1978 book, called The Literary Politicians—figures who “practice politics by writing books” rather than continually running for public office.

Whether in newspaper columns, extended television interviews, and especially entire books, Buckley and other figures in the book such as John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger, and Gore Vidal preferred to advocate positions at length.

They did not always fit comfortably into the party orthodoxy of their time and, though they could toss out epigrams with the best of them, their arguments rested on logical propositions rather than 30-second soundbites. The nature of American political discourse is poorer for the absence of the forums where they could appear to best advantage.

Quote of the Day (John McCain, on Russia’s Leaders, ‘Corrupt With Power’)

“Russia's leaders, rich with oil wealth and corrupt with power, have rejected democratic ideals and the obligations of a responsible power. They invaded a small, democratic neighbor to gain more control over the world's oil supply, intimidate other neighbors, and further their ambitions of re-assembling the Russian empire. And the brave people of Georgia need our solidarity and our prayers.”—US Senator (R-AZ) and former POW John McCain (1936-2018), “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Republican National Convention in Saint Paul, MN,” Sept. 4, 2008, The American Presidency Project

For years, Donald Trump has acted weirdly and inexplicably towards Vladimir Putin, to say the least—from urging Russia in the 2016 Presidential campaign to release Hillary Clinton’s emails to claiming this year that Ukraine started its war with Russia. 

That behavior became even odder earlier this week, when he posted that the Russian dictator has “gone absolutely CRAZY” by escalating attacks on Ukraine amid peace negotiations.

Crazy? Hardly. That adjective, many would say, applies more to Trump.

No, despite the American President’s dictator-wanna aspirations, Putin has been unrelenting about his nationalist goals, pursuing them with a silence that Trump is temperamentally unable to maintain and with a cunning he can only envy.

Most of all, he has known how to appeal to Trump’s overweening ego, calling him a “genius” and feeding his misperception that Putin disregarded Barack Obama and Joe Biden because he didn’t “respect” them as he did their successor in the Oval Office.

So, over last weekend, Trump voiced frustration that Putin is “killing a lot of people.” Where has he been these last three years, since the invasion of Ukraine? Or the past decade? Or, to take McCain’s point, the last two decades?

You have to wonder, why is Trump squawking about Putin now? From the moment he became a serious contender for the GOP nomination a decade ago, he adopted a “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” attitude on the former KGB operative.

Do you think the President is reading polls that show Americans don’t approve of that posture—and wonder if he is taking a tough enough stance against Putin?

Maybe, like Rip Van Winkle, Trump fell asleep for a generation, only to wake up to find the world utterly changed. Maybe his short-term memory is vanishing.

Long ago, that same phenomenon took hold of the MAGA faithful. How else to explain why, even after Putin’s actions unleashed the concerns of McCain (and the 2012 GOP nominee, Mitt Romney), delegates to the 2016 convention agreed, without the slightest fuss and following the urging of Trump representatives, to water down that year’s platform language about “providing lethal defensive weapons” to help Ukraine fight against pro-Russian separatists?

Whatever the case may be, Moscow can barely disguise its amusement over Trump’s incoherent rhetorical flailing. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov referred to “emotional overload,” while a female flunky trotted out for Putin-controlled television said Trump’s warning that the Russian strongman might be “playing with fire” would last “until tomorrow.”

Remarkably, the Russian government finds itself in accord with Wall Street about Trump’s mood and policy shifts—all that loud blustering followed by hasty retreats. The nickname most applicable, an acronym that made the President lash out yesterday at yet another reporter for asking a “nasty question,” was TACO—“Trump Always Chickens Out.”

(The image accompanying this post—John McCain's official senatorial photo, taken Jan. 23, 2009—derived from his Facebook page.)

Flashback: Dewey-Stassen Debate, 1948

“To outlaw the communist party would be recognized everyplace on earth as a surrender by the great United States, to the methods of totalitarianism. Stripped to its naked essentials, this is nothing but the methods of Hitler and Stalin. It is thought control borrowed from the Japanese war leadership. It's an attempt to beat down ideas with a club.”—New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, May 17, 1948, in the first live electronic media debate, in which he and his opponent, former Minnesota governor Harold Stassen faced off on a single issue: “Should the American Communist Party be banned?”

Fighting off a nasty cold and pressed by work obligations, I blogged less extensively than I would have liked a few weeks ago. One event slipped through the cracks then—the Dewey-Stassen debate just before the Oregon GOP Presidential primary. 

I didn't want to forget it, however. It deserves more attention than it has received this year, both for what it represented in American electoral history and as a possible turning point in the Cold War.

The debate is important for another reason: it featured two rivals whose images not long thereafter became frozen in stereotypes: Dewey, the cold "Man on the Wedding Cake" who lost a race he should have won handily against Harry S. Truman, and Stassen, the shameless, clueless, perennial Presidential sweepstakes loser. 

At the time of their clash, however, these men were viewed as credible candidates, even Presidential timber.

In the masterly historical thriller Hour of the Cat, Peter Quinn depicts Dewey as a kind of proto-Guiliani: bruising and charm-challenged. That characterization is, I’d have to say, inarguable. But in the following episode, at least, he displayed another side to his character that doesn’t get enough recognition.

Formerly a prosecutor who, like Guiliani more recently, parlayed indictments of underworld figures into a political career, Dewey soon contracted the New York Governor's Disease: the sudden itch to raise his sights to the highest office in the land. (I'm indebted for the identification of the disease's symptoms, though not its name, to Peter Quinn.) 

He was considered the odds-on favorite after having won his battle stripes as FDR's last Presidential rival, and had compiled a respected record in Albany.

Called the nation's "boy governor" after winning the Minnesota gubernatorial race in 1939, then re-elected twice, Stasssen joined the Navy in 1943, eventually becoming chief of staff for Admiral William F. Halsey. He served with distinction as part of the American delegation to the first UN Conference at San Francisco, where he not only helped write the UN Charter but was voted the most effective delegate. In the early going of the 1948 Presidential election, he pulled off several upset victories over Dewey, with polls indicating he could beat Harry Truman in a head-to-head contest.

But, with Dewey pulling out all the stops in the run-up to the Oregon primary, the Midwesterner made a crucial error by challenging the New Yorker to a debate. 

Unlike other debates before and since, this one was confined to a single topic of all-too-real importance: the constitutional question of whether Communism should be outlawed. Stassen took the "pro" position; Dewey, the "con."

The debate was broadcast on the KEX-ABC radio station in Portland. No precise count exists on the number of listeners, but with 900 audio stations nationwide carrying the debate, the estimates ranged from 40 to 90 million people. Telephone operators claimed later that long-distance calls dropped by 25% during the broadcast.

Dewey’s opening statement packed the kind of roundhouse punch that might leave its recipient technically standing, but awfully woozy. Listeners couldn't see Stassen's lack of comfort, the way that TV viewers witnessed Richard Nixon sweating in his first debate in 1960 with John F. Kennedy, but his shaky tone gave the game away.

Why did Stassen perform so badly? Admittedly, Dewey was a skillful prosecutor used to making cogent statements to audiences. But I think Stassen might have, in his heart of hearts, found this cause not to his liking.

Remember that Stassen was considered the heir apparent of the Theodore Roosevelt brand of progressivism. During the campaign, he advocated federal funds for housing, limited regulation of labor, international cooperation, and adjustment of federal taxes and spending to prevent boom-or-bust swings in the economy. As leader of the American Baptist Convention, he would join the civil rights March on Washington in August 1963.

In other words, Stassen’s stance in this debate was not really characteristic of most of the rest of his career. You have to wonder if he felt he needed to placate what he viewed as the mainstream in his party at the time. (After all, he must have thought, he’d not only knock out Dewey but even outpoint the conservative wing’s favorite, Senator Robert Taft.)

Perhaps because the contest involved a pair of losers—Dewey, the two-time Presidential loser, and Stassen, the uber-loser of them all (running not only for President—nine times!—but also governor of Minnesota and Pennsylvania)—this event has been mostly ignored.

One publication that, to its credit, did not neglect the event was Esquire Magazine, which, in the 1980s, in a monster retrospective issue that I can no longer locate, included an article on the debate.

Camelot chronicler Arthur Schlesinger also took notice. In an interview with The New York Times in 2000, the venerable historian agreed with columnist Walter Lippmann’s remark that if Dewey had beaten Truman, there’d have been no Joe McCarthy.

“Dewey wasn't a bad fellow,” Schlesinger observed. “He was rather enlightened….Although a Republican, Dewey was not a reactionary. And had he won, the politics of revenge which played a large role in the McCarthy years might have subsided.”

The 19th-century historian George Bancroft, I read somewhere once, voted Democratic on every page. The same might also be said of Schlesinger, whose reputation was made with accounts of the Jackson and FDR Presidencies, even before he became the court historian of the Kennedys.

There’s a certain brand of historian who doesn’t have a nice thing to say about a Republican until he’s dead. Sean Wilentz, a longtime defender of the Clintons, is one such individual, offering, in The Age of Reagan, some surprisingly kind words about how the latter transformed his party and the nation. 

(My own take on The Gipper: He was manifestly right about the intrinsic evil of the Soviet regime, but his part in its downfall has been exaggerated by his partisans, and the economic gains made during his Presidency would not be so fondly recalled now had not successor George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton reduced his jaw-breakingly-large deficit.)

It does make you wonder about why such historians can’t be a bit more objective and nuanced while the objects of their retrospective upgrading are still in office, or, at least, alive to appreciate it. But let’s let that pass and accept the spirit of charity that has belatedly overtaken them.

Let’s consider Schlesinger’s proposition about Dewey for a second. How well does it hold up? And what did Dewey’s triumph over Stassen in Oregon accomplish?

* It gave the upper hand to the internationalist wing of the GOP over the isolationist faction. Both Dewey and Stassen appealed to elements of this same group, particularly in their reactions to the UN and the Marshall Plan. But Dewey’s victory in the debate relegated to the sidelines the Taft isolationist element that would have most favored a ban on Communism. (Taft would try again for President in 1952, only to lose to Ike.) The internationalists would remain ascendant until the Goldwater debacle in 1964, ensuring that the GOP, like the Democrats, would favor united action of the West against Communism.

* It demonstrated that Americans need not be stampeded into running roughshod over civil liberties. Though the Korean War and the Rosenberg arrests for espionage were still two years away, Dewey still had to face a decidedly unfavorable time for taking his position against the ban. The Iron Curtain had fallen over Eastern Europe, and Stalin’s grip on the region would tighten further that year as he attempted to cut off Berlin from the West and engineer a power grab in Czechoslovakia. Film studios were doing everything they could to distance themselves from the “Hollywood Ten” screenwriters and directors who refused to answer questions on Capitol Hill about their Communist associations. In that context, the format, allowing for Dewey to frame a countervailing argument over 20 minutes, represented a whole different world from today’s, which allow slittle better than a string of sound bites. To its credit, the Republican electorate accepted Dewey's reasoning.

* The contention that there would be no McCarthyism, however, is harder to sustain. Lippmann and Schlesinger were implicitly arguing that McCarthy would have found it much more difficult to defy a President from his own party than a Democrat. This was only true to an extent, however, as can be seen in McCarthy’s disastrous decision to investigate the Army—the institution at the heart of President Eisenhower’s career.

Moreover, some of Dewey’s own associates—and presumptive appointees—indicated, in their careers, that the governor would not have acted like a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union. 

(Note to ACLU lovers: As journalist Jessica Mitford wrote in A Fine Old Conflict (1977), that organization “instituted its own loyalty purge excluding from membership those suspected of harbouring subversive ideas.”) 

John Foster Dulles’ policy of “brinksmanship” toward the U.S.S.R. continued to fan the Red Scare. Most surprising is Curt Gentry’s argument, in J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets, that Dewey won behind-the-scenes support from the FBI Director in the race against Truman with the promise of an appointment as Attorney-General.

Quote of the Day (Eric Levitz, With an Election Prediction That Actually Came to Pass)

“[T]he Trump era indicated that its coalition has more room to grow than liberals tend to think. The GOP improved with Hispanics nationwide as well as with Black and Asian American voters. Historically, immigrant communities have grown more conservative in their later generations, and Hispanic and Asian immigrant groups may follow a similar trajectory. At the same time, as the Black church declines, and young African-Americans enter more integrated social networks than their forebears, the Democrats' capacity to unite 90-plus percent of the demographic behind their banner is likely to diminish.

“If the Republicans make minuscule expansions to their base, they will likely control all three branches of the federal government by 2025 while boasting a hammerlock on the Senate for a decade or more.”—American political and economics reporter Eric Levitz, “The Big Rig,” New York Magazine, June 7-20, 2021

With Wednesday’s news that Republicans have maintained their hold on the House of Representatives, the Democratic nightmare envisioned by Levitz has come to pass.

All those 2002 predictions about demographic trends spelling “An Emerging Democratic Majority,” one of those generational “realignments” so beloved by political scientists, have turned out to be electoral fools’ gold—and even that optimistic book’s authors, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, saw fit to revise their estimate last year with Where Have All the Democrats Gone?

Well, no matter. First things first: how the Democrats plan to block the worst Trump appointments and actions, right now.

Quote of the Day (Peggy Noonan, With a Prediction for the 2016 GOP Race)

“I can say what this [2016 Presidential] election will most assuredly be, at least on the Republican side: anything but boring. On the Democratic side Hillary Clinton may wind up debating herself on an empty stage with good lighting. But Republicans will have Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio and probably John Kasich duking it out. Add Carly Fiorina, and some others….What a heck of a fight this will be.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist—and former Presidential speechwriter—Peggy Noonan, “The Too-Smooth Cruz,” The Wall Street Journal, Mar. 28-29, 2015

For some reason I don’t recall now, I clipped out the page where Ms. Noonan’s article was originally printed, put it aside, and then found it by chance only a week or so ago. As soon as I re-read this quote, I burst out laughing.

There’s an obvious name missing here—indeed in the entire article. I suppose you could say that Ms. Noonan did anticipate a candidate coming out of nowhere and making at least a momentary splash when she used that phrase “and some others,” as if recalling Herman Cain (remember him) from 2012. But that really would be stretching things, wouldn’t it?

Many of my friends on the liberal side of the spectrum will chortle at Ms. Noonan’s lack of foresight about the 2016 election. But I don’t offer this to ridicule her.

(Indeed, she warned early on that Donald Trump’s chances that year should not be airily dismissed, and she’s endured more than her share of brickbrats from him and the MAGA faithful since then for her periodic attacks on him—perhaps most memorably, in a direct hit on his emphasis on his “strength,” assailing his “whiny, weepy and self-pitying” character.) 

No, I put this out there to illustrate that the Washington establishment that Ms. Noonan joined in the Reagan administration is much like how Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman described Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything...... Not one person… knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one.”

It’s safe to say that, unlike what Ms. Noonan expected, Bernie Sanders gave Hillary Clinton an unexpectedly tough time in the Democratic primaries.

But this is what’s really wild: Trump beat 16 rivals for the GOP nomination that year, including those Ms. Noonan praised, in a case of being overly charitable, for being “serious talents with big accomplishments.”

Well, grant her this: nearly all of those 16 possessed governmental and/or national security experience that the eventual nominee conspicuously lacked. 

And all but one—retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson—had been answerable to the public, either voters or (in the case of Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina) shareholders in her company.

Instead, GOP primary voters embraced a private-company executive with no financial transparency and no board of directors that could remotely question his plans.

This year, 91 criminal counts on four indictments, not to mention two adverse decisions in civil courts, did nothing to dent Republican faith in Trump’s candidacy. 

Yet, even with a field significantly narrower than the divided one he conquered eight years ago, he still romped through the primaries.

Nothing like this has ever been remotely seen in the history of Presidential campaigning. No other candidate would be so shameless in defying scandal. No other electorate has ever ignored at such a high level the weight of so much evidence of bad faith, corruption, and basic lack of character.

To adapt a phrase from one of his scorned rivals, “low-energy Jeb” Bush, the former reality-show host did become “the chaos President.”

Famous not for being a great business executive but for playing one on TV, Trump was anything but the proverbial “dark horse” candidate. 

But he became (to borrow a phrase from the field of finance) “the black-swan” candidate—one elected through a series of unexpected, even close to unknowable, events.

That black-swan candidate found his rock-solid base—and is now slated to be a Presidential nominee for the third time—in a contingent that conservative Peter Wehner, in a New York Times opinion piece, termed “Fifth Avenue Republicans”—diehards who would support Trump even if, as he boasted back in 2016, he shot someone on that tony New York street.

We can’t begin to tell what this year’s events will be, especially now. That’s why polls are as good as useless at this point.

That’s also why maintaining vigilance about threats to democracy can be so frustrating. But, as Shakespeare would say, “the readiness is all.”

In one sense, Ms. Noonan was right: the 2016 GOP race, with Trump insulting rivals, lashing out at anyone remotely critical of him, and circulating falsehoods almost as often as he opened his mouth, was “anything but boring.” But now she’d probably agree with the adage about being careful what you wish for.

For myself, after the past eight exhausting years, I can’t wait to get back to “boring.” 

The Past Decade’s GOP ‘Violets’: Making Peace With the Inevitable

Recently, the late Philip Kerr’s historical detective novel March Violets has profoundly disturbed me. Its title refers to German opportunists who only turned Nazi after newly installed Chancellor Adolf Hitler used the Reichstag fire as an excuse to push through an “Enabling Act” that gave him unchallenged authority in March 1933.

Or, as Kerr’s detective hero, Bernie Gunther, mordantly observes, “Everyone in Germany was somebody different before March 1933.”

The term can be easily adapted to the current situation in the Republican Party, as another would-be nationalist strongman, after failing in one attempt to overthrow the government, angles toward seizing power in a more meaningful way than he ever thought possible.

I took the image accompanying this post as darkness descended on Capitol Hill in November 2015. Five months before, Donald Trump had announced his candidacy for Presidency. Almost no member of the Senate or House of Representatives could imagine then how their lives were about to change.

Just as the Nazis were a minority party even up to March 1933, the MAGA faction did not constitute a majority of the GOP through much of the spring of 2016. But, just like the splintered anti-Nazi groups did not form a united front against Hitler, Trump opponents could not consolidate against him in time to slow his march to the party nomination.

In both cases, opponents bided their time, sure that the bumptious interloper would make a fatal mistake. It didn’t happen.

Not in November 2016, when Trump, contrary to pre-election polls, pulled out an Electoral College victory.

Not in February 2020, when, despite clear evidence that he had pressured Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to announce an investigation of his likely Democratic rival Joe Biden, all but one Senate Republican voted to acquit him on impeachment charges.

Not in November and December 2020, when, having lost the popular and Electoral College counts, he refused to accept the results.

And not after January 6, 2021, when—despite fearing for their lives in a Capitol Hill riot instigated by the President—only six more Senate Republicans joined Mitt Romney in voting to convict Trump of inciting the insurrection.

The first Senate failure to convict Trump merely encouraged him to act even more drastically. The second failure was more consequential: The “violets” who privately (and, in some surprising cases, publicly) scorned and loathed him lost their chance to bar him from office again, move their party and nation in a new direction, and enjoy peace of mind.

Those Who Know Better

Now, with Trump running the table in the Republican primaries (defeated only in DC and Vermont), the ranks of party dissenters are even thinner than previously.

Falling by the wayside, accepting the inevitable by endorsing the presumptive nominee, are New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu (who had once called the former President “f****** crazy”) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (who called Trump “morally responsible” for inciting the January 6 riot). It may well be only a matter of time before the former President’s last rival for the nomination, Nikki Haley, ends up endorsing him, too.

The support of the MAGA faction for Trump is understandable; after all, they are true believers.

The Trump “violets,” however, are a different case. They have every reason, ideologically and personally, to refuse to endorse him. Yet instead, they try to exceed MAGA supporters with a shameless backing of everything he says or does, as seen in the cases of:

*Ted Cruz, who, despite calling Trump a “sniveling coward” for, among other reasons, suggesting that Cruz’s wife was unattractive and falsely implying that Cruz’s father was involved with the JFK assassination, ended up championing in the Senate Trump’s bid not to certify results in the 2020 election.

*Lindsey Graham, who, after calling Trump a “race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot” in 2016 and even threatened the White House with removing him from the Presidency if he didn’t denounce the Jan. 6 rioters, engaged in a public reconciliation.

*Kevin McCarthy, who, after saying Trump “bears responsibility” for the riot, flew down to Mar-a-Lago three weeks after the insurrection, and tried vainly to gain more significant support as Speaker of the House from the former President.

J.D. Vance: A Hideous Case

Yet the evolution of J.D. Vance—from acclaimed Hillbilly Elegy author and advocate for “flyover country” to one of Trump’s staunchest Senate defenders—has been especially hideous.

The Ohio Senator’s call a month ago for Trump to ignore any adverse Supreme Court rulings epitomizes the GOP violets at their most shameless—turning on a dime from implacable opposition to topping the MAGA crowd in overheated rhetoric and extreme positions.

Back in 2016, Vance told talk-show host Charlie Rose, “I’m a Never Trump guy; I never liked him,” and tweeted, “What an idiot.” 

But his February interview with George Stephanopolous on ABC’s “This Week” set a marker for threats that no mainstream politician had supported in decades.

Once Trump embarks on a second term, Vance said, he should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, [and] replace them with our people.”  If the court ruled against Trump, the ex-President would be justified in taking the same position that Andrew Jackson had so memorably expressed it in the 1830s: the Chief Justice “has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”

Many Hillbilly Elegy reviewers praised Vance’s rise from poverty to Yale Law School graduate as a victory of will and determination over circumstance.

But evidently, Vance must have missed in his education any mention of the Jacksonian Era, because “Old Hickory’s” response to the Supreme Court ruling on Cherokee land rights that the Senator alluded to has become one of the darkest stains on that President’s record, as it removed an entire indigenous population.

Surely, Vance’s statement that unlike Mike Pence, he would have permitted competing slates of electors when the 2020 vote counts were presented to Congress, has put him on Trump’s list of 2024 Veep hopefuls.

Why the New ‘Violets’ Fear Their Party Leader

At no other time in its history has the Republican Party been so overshadowed by a single man. Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan never caused so much fear of their displeasure among officeholders. Once has to ask, “Why are so many so worried?”

Let me enumerate the fears that may beset the Trump “violets”:

*Being “primaried”: In 1950, Maryland Senator Millard Tydings, a 24-year incumbent and conservative Democrat, lost his seat when colleague Joseph McCarthy, criticized by the Marylander for perpetuating a “fraud” and a “hoax” with his charges of widespread Communist infiltration of the State Department, aided the campaign of his Republican challenger. These days, challenges come even before Election Day, when an incumbent might be forced to take less compromising positions lest he face an opponent from his own party’s fringes. Liz Cheney’s loss of her once-safe House seat, after she had voted for his impeachment for inciting the Capitol riot, served notice that Trump could rile up the MAGA base against them. Of the nine House members who joined Cheney in voting against Trump, three lost primaries when they sought reelection, and four others chose to retire.

*Blackmail: The Presidency President gave Trump access to all kinds of secrets about domestic and foreign figures. But, as Andrea Bernstein’s September 2022 ProPublica piece notes, his immersion in the world of New York tabloid journalism had already taught him how to trade gossip for maximum advantage. The one politician who has gone on record to describe his methods is former New Jersey Governor Christie Todd Whitman, made vulnerable when her teenaged son went on a drunken spree that landed him in the hospital. Annoyed a few years later that a tunnel project nearing final state approval would run from the Atlantic City Expressway almost to a casino run by then-rival Steve Wynn, Trump called Whitman to let her know it would be “too bad” if the press found out about the youth’s escapade. Nearly 20 years later, when Whitman refused to endorse his Presidential bid, Trump sent her a letter repeating the same veiled threat. Whitman rebuffed him each time. How many politicians have followed her lead? (At least one Southern senator, widely rumored to be gay, presents an especially tantalizing possibility for such treatment.)

*Doxxing: The digital age has made it possible to find out and disseminate information on public figures that had previously been closely held. Trump used such cyberbullying by revealing the cellphone number of Lindsey Graham, who briefly ran against him in the 2016 Republican primaries. The South Carolina shortly found himself barraged with crank calls.

*Harassment: Being accosted at restaurants, airports, and other public places has become far more of a hazard for officeholders in the Age of Trump. After Graham briefly broke with Trump after the January 6 riot, Trump supporters harassed him at Reagan National Airport with shouts of “Traitor!” and “You’re a liar!” (That same week, Democratic congressional members received similar treatment.) Even when they don’t defy Trump himself but one of his minions, they may be harassed, as when allies of Jim Jordan conducted a pressure campaign on his behalf for Speaker of the House that resulted in threats against them, their offices, or spouses.

*Lost TV commentary gigs: A Trump opponent might not only lose his office but also standing in the party that could jeopardize potential income from appearing on TV. Contributors to Fox News—those who have moved beyond being mere “guests”—are paid even as they build their corporate brands. Displeasure from Trump or his base can lead to the loss of brands and bucks.

*Lost lobbying fees: Despite sporadic reform attempts over the years, government officials can often expect cushy paydays after their tenures conclude by joining lobbying firms. These, too, can wither on the vine if Trump is on one of his vendettas. Politico’s Alex Isenstadt reported last week that they have been warned if they didn’t vote in the DC primary, they shouldn’t expect access if Trump returns to the White House.

*Threats to themselves: Bodyguards, bulletproof vests, and assassination fears have become more of a way of life for Capitol Hill members—indeed, any government or electoral functionary. Don’t think that House and Senate members didn’t shudder at the thought of cowering from another mob as they voted to let Trump off the hook in the second impeachment trial—and even to join him by voting against refusing to certify Biden as the 2020 winner. Romney, Cheney, and Rep. John Katko spent heavily on personal security after voting to impeach Trump in 2021, according to this 2022 Axios article.

*Threats to family members: The attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul surely resonated with the then-Speaker’s colleagues on the GOP side of the aisle. Trump’s subsequent embrace of swiftly rebunked conspiracy theories about the attack could in no way have reassured the GOP Violets that he would come to their aid if another fanatic tried to perpetrate violence on their loved ones as well.

As I considered the impact of a Trump denunciation on members of the party he took over, I was reminded of the final, terrifying image of the 1978 remake of the sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. So was the remake’s director, Philip Kaufman, who told The Hollywood Reporter’s David Weiner six years ago, “[Donald Sutherland’s pod shriek] at the end of the film could be a very Trumpian scream. The way Trump points to the press in the back of the auditorium and everybody turns, you get that scary ‘poddy’ feeling. There’s a kind of contagion that’s going on here.”

This Day in New York History (Birth of Hamilton Fish III, Political Scion and Arch-Isolationist)

Dec. 7, 1888— A shared upstate patrician background might have sufficed to put Franklin Roosevelt and Hamilton Fish III on a pleasant personal, if not political, basis.

Instead, the Republican Fish—born on this date in Garrison, NY—became an increasingly vociferous Congressional opponent not only of the Democratic President’s New Deal domestic policies, but also, problematically, of his attempts to “quarantine” Fascist dictators through aid to Western democracies at the outbreak of World War II.

Relations between the two Hudson Valley politicians (Fish was the congressman for the President’s own district) became so tense that FDR lumped the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, together with fellow GOP isolationists Joseph Martin and Bruce Barton, in the scornful, rhythmically charged phrase “Martin, Barton and Fish.”

For most of the postwar period, Fish has been regarded just as a cranky reactionary foil to Roosevelt, with, at worst, hidebound isolationist views. 

Since the airing of Rachel Maddow’s podcast Ultra last year, however, long-forgotten aspects of his approach to dealing with Nazi Germany have raised serious questions about his office’s involvement in disseminating Nazi propaganda and supporting violent far-right hate groups.

Those questions have been troubling enough that the Desmond-Fish Public Library in Garrison, after pointed and persistent inquiries from residents, is reviewing whether it should rename itself and/or engage in a “restorative justice” effort.

In the fall of 1941, during a federal investigation of Nazi activities in the U.S., George Hill, a top staffer for Fish, was seen carrying large bags to a Capitol Hill storage room and to the D.C. headquarters of the America First Committee that promoted non-intervention in World War II. 

The links to Fish were eye-opening and multiple: the congressman not only employed Hill but also controlled the storage room and had spoken at an America First rally. When files were destroyed at the America First office, a scandal arose as to whether Fish might have been the effort to tamper with evidence.

As investigators dug further, they found that Nazi agents had used Hill to send out order forms for recipients who wanted copies of the notorious antisemitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” It was all done with the “franking privilege” that allows members of Congress the right to mail material to their constituents for free.  

It is too bad that Maddow became so fascinated by the unmistakable contemporary echoes of the Nazi plot to undermine democracy that she did not explain why the isolationist movement that Hill hoped to exploit enjoyed broad-based support, across multiple ethnic groups and ideologies. 

But her revelations about isolationist Senators Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota and Burton Wheeler of Montana will surely lead many to look further into the careers of these once-boldface names in politics.

For me, though, the story of Fish—part of a political dynasty that included a grandfather who became governor of New York and Ulysses Grant’s secretary of state, as well as a father who also served in Congress—is particularly fascinating. It’s not just because his office was at the heart of the hullabaloo.

It’s also because a politician like Fish—who, like FDR, was inspired to join the Progressive movement by the President’s distant cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, and who led an African-American regiment in WWI—became associated with some of the most arch-conservative elements in American politicians.

Consider, for instance, that in 1921, shortly after he began his term as a U.S. representative, Fish sponsored legislation creating the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, or that a year later, he secured passage of the resolution calling for a homeland in Palestine for the Jews; or that, in 1924, he secured passage of “adjusted service” certificates redeemable in 1945 for war veterans—legislation that President Coolidge feared constituted an undue burden on taxpayers.

But in 1930, he led a committee investigating Soviet Communist influence in the United States that, while uncovering no subversives, gave early exposure to the extremist views of Fr. Charles Coughlin.

Though he started out by wishing FDR well after the governor of New York won the Presidency, Fish quickly came to believe that the New Deal—and, consequently, the Democratic Party that supported it—was riddled with socialism.

From then on, Fish’s beliefs and actions drifted towards the fringe, as he:

*denounced FDR for establishing diplomatic relations with the USSR in 1933;

*called for Roosevelt’s impeachment following his 1937 “quarantine” speech;

*spoke at a German Day rally in 1938 at Madison Square Garden, where the stage was filled with swastikas;

*took the personal airplane of Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to an August 1939 conference in Oslo, then stated that German claims to territory were “just”;

*led GOP opposition to the Lend Lease Act, a “fascist” piece of legislation that would make FDR a “dictator.”

It might fairly be said after that last characterization that Fish couldn’t recognize a real dictator if he stumbled over one. Although he denied being antisemitism, pointing to his early advocacy for a Jewish homeland, it can fairly be stated that, like British appeasers, he saw Nazi Germany as a bulwark against the rise of international Communism.

The attack on Pearl Harbor was anything but a happy 53rd birthday gift to the congressman. It left Fish scrambling for cover, as he was among the first to call for a declaration of war against Japan (although years later, he characteristically reversed himself, charging that FDR had conspired to get the U.S. into the conflict).

These days, it has become fashionable for some observers to say that the fate of Donald Trump should lie not with jurors but with voters. The termination of Fish’s political career does not exactly conform to this model.

True, Fish escaped legal accountability for any part he might have played in the Nazi subversion scheme when the investigation into that stumbled. 

Even with the growing pro-war feeling of the public during the war, he might have continued to represent his district except that he’d made a powerful enemy in his own party: Thomas Dewey.

Annoyed by Fish's support for fellow isolationist Robert Taft for the GOP Presidential nomination in 1944, the New York Governor helped redraw the boundaries of his congressional district, leading to Fish's loss of his seat. 

Maybe the true lesson of Fish's political termination--as well as those involved in the January 6 insurrection--could be that while voters might possess the ultimate power over a politician, they can be provided a great assist by fellow party officeholders who punish them primarily for their own reasons.