How Democrats Should Run

Don’t make this election about Trump, but draw a sharp contrast with Trumpism.

--Advice of Democratic political consultants for 2022 Congressional candidates, reported by the WashPost

I think that advice is pretty good.

I try not to focus on Trump at all on this site (though I lapse sometimes, like when I got recently fascinated by the theory of Trump and "the Drunken Fist"), but "Trumpism" became a search label on WataugaWatch before 2020 and has racked up many pings in 2021 and 2022. The Trumpists are raging. They're mad. They smell blood (which may turn out to be turtle poo), and they have plans for you. Especially you. They aren't afraid to say what some people consider outrageous things because they're just being themselves, finally released from the bindings of political correctness. 

Women, they have further plans for you. And you, the young and the restless, and you, Black and brown people, and newcomers to these shores from non-European nations. They have plans for all of you (and their Christian nationalist branch has definite plans for public schools and public libraries and the regulation of private behavior.

"The Purge," 2013, Universal Picts.

Gosh. The Trump GOP has created a brand -- "We stand for cruelty and force" -- that just might scorch them. 

What does it mean, after all, that Trumpists love a purge? They run off their best talent, censor them, vote them out in nasty primaries. Because those people do not kiss the ring. Those interior eliminations by the Republicans themselves become ultra mean because that's the way their leader behaves. That's his identity, and now it's become the identity of an entire political party. Hey candidates: do your best Trump, talk tough, spout conspiracy theories and rabid ideas, make your nonsense sound unassailable, and push extreme laws that strip, say, women of equal citizenship in the name of religion. 

Today it's as though Liz Cheney got denounced to the Congregation of the Holy Office (Inquisition) and was quickly condemned to an auto-da-fe ("act of faith") when the Pope Hisself marked her for death, and the Republican voters cult-like piled up the dry wood for her immolation. She's being (by all reliable reports) burned at the stake today, an actually thoughtful, knowledgeable, philosophically consistent member of Congress whose integrity cannot be abided by Trump or by his Trumpists.

Because counter-reformation Christians considered it an "act of faith"
to burn certain people at the stake, the above is a contemporary illustration
of an Auto-da-fe in Valladolid, Spain, May 21, 1559

“I think this is much bigger than Trump. This is about a radical MAGA Republican Party that wants to take away your rights, your benefits, your freedoms,” DCCC Chairman Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.) said. That's it, that's the message and the issue that can energize the Democratic base and draw the Unaffiliated.