Springtime for contortionists in America

On climate change and other issues, Donald Trump demands more than a twist

How does a politician keep up with Donald Trump? It requires a flexible backbone. (Photo by ejmc on VisualHunt.com)

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On a clear spring day, with the redbuds blossoming and lilacs seemingly aching to release their creamy fragrance, an Upstater can drink in the fresh air and feel a bit smug. We live in what’s come to be called a climate haven, a place mostly spared the more obvious afflictions that a warming planet is delivering to other Americans.

We don’t experience the excruciating heat and severe drought that have gripped the Southwest over the past decade, the more violent tornadoes that nowadays routinely sweep the Midwest and Southeast, the flooding that devastates lowlands everywhere, nor the destructive hurricanes that threaten the East Coast — which, incidentally, are predicted to be especially numerous and damaging this year. In fact, this place I call home might give comfort to climate deniers — those stubborn souls who yet insist that human-caused global warming isn’t worth much worry.

That group of controverts includes, of course, Donald Trump, who has called climate change a “make-believe problem” and a “hoax” perpetrated by China. But as the Bloomberg columnist Mary Ellen Klas noted this week, this is presenting problems for the many Republicans who have recently, if grudgingly, come to accept the scientific and empiric evidence that climate change is real, and even embraced some clean energy options. Now, with Trump again demanding allegiance down the ballots that he will lead, conservatives are required to hate science again — which could explain why Florida’s legislature has just passed a law ordering deletion of all references to “climate change” in state statutes.¹

Yet climate denialism is only one of the Trump-forced inconveniences that is forcing many conservatives to become contortionists, their political pliability as striking as the physical fluidity of a Cirque du Soleil star. Some contort themselves more artfully than others, but they all seem to display the soft backbone that is emerging as the identifying inherent trait of the MAGAfied Republican Party.

This week J.D. Vance, the Never Trumper of 2016 who is now so eager to be The Donald’s vice presidential partner that he has taken to palling around with Don Junior, found himself flummoxed as he tried in a televised interview to take the Trump line on campus protesters against the Gaza war.

“Okay, so you agree that people who break in and vandalize a building should be prosecuted?” CNN’s Kaitlin Collins asked after Vance had demanded a crackdown.

“Exactly,” Vance said.

“I’m just checking,” Collins said, “because you did raise money for people who did so on January 6^th, which was impeding an official proceeding, breaking into a building that they weren’t allowed to be in, and vandalizing the Capitol.”

Vance took a beat — being a smart Yalie, he surely recognized that he had entrapped himself in a double standard — and then soldiered on with a Trumpian attack on the media and a brushing aside of Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results. He blamed “the obsession of the national media” for even having to talk about the Jan. 6 insurrection — which, to perhaps explain this alleged obsession, has led to criminal charges against 1,265 people, yielding 718 guilty pleas (213 to felonies, including assault on federal officers, obstructing law enforcement and seditious conspiracy) and 171 convictions after trial by juries of citizens. To a follow-up question by Collins about Trump’s vow to issue blanket pardons of those he calls “the January 6^th hostages” if he is re-elected, Vance twisted his way through a non-answer that culminated with the phrase, “if we’re honest.”²

That’s a big “if,” Senator. Honesty seems to be fairly far from a relevant factor in considering political allegiances these days.

The Trump turnaround is surely easier for politicians who are less immediately ambitious, if no less morally limber. New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu — who has no shot at a place on Trump’s ticket, after calling him during this calendar year a “loser,” as well as “not a real Republican” and an “asshole” — said last month that Trump nevertheless will get his vote over Joe Biden.

“You believe that a president who contributed to an insurrection should be president again?” asked ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, incredulously.

Sununu, like Vance, responded by first attacking the media, naturally: It’s a sort of verbal tick among conservative politicians. Then he insisted that Americans’ desire for “culture change” — a term he used eight times, but did not define — outweighed any concerns he has expressed about the insurrection Trump inspired, as well as the four criminal prosecutions he faces, and the more than $530 million in court-ordered fines for civil fraud and defamation.³

Yes, lay all that aside, because otherwise we get four more years of Joe Biden, who has opened the spigot for $1.2 trillion in infrastructure work, expanded the clean energy economy, stimulated the domestic microchip industry and left American households wealthier and in better financial shape than ever before – the latter a fact, if one not generally accepted by voters. No, says Sununu, a champion of so-called moderate Republicans, better to go with the loser, the insurrectionist, the '“asshole”; otherwise, he suggests, you get something worse: a Democrat.⁴

A similar tack is now taken by former Attorney General Bill Barr, though it must be said that in the realm of political gyrations, he’s less gymnast than blunderbuss. Barr said last year that Trump “shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office,” but now he says he’ll vote for him, anyway. Trump seemed not to appreciate the endorsement; on Truth Social, he said that he would modify his prior description of Barr, who quit his administration only after the Jan. 6 uprising — that is, he said he would alter “Weak, Slow-moving, Lethargic, Gutless and Lazy” by removing the word “lethargic.”⁵ (Anybody who thinks Donald Trump personally wrote that first post must explain how it’s possible that “lethargic” could wind up in his “bigly” vocabulary.)

To be sure, the MAGA meld of some Republicans has been smoother. U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, who in 2016 refused to say which presidential candidate she supported, backed Trump for a third presidential run just three days after the 2022 election. There appeared to have been no anguished twisting for Stefanik; she went through a quick metamorphosis as soon as she saw a chance in 2021 to replace Liz Cheney in the House Republican hierarchy, going all MAGA faster than a tadpole becomes a frog.

Of course, nobody should be surprised when elected officials display partisan allegiance. There’s a history in America of primary losers endorsing their opponents, and of people laying aside their initial endorsements to fall in line behind those whose ideology, if not much else, matches their own.

But there’s something different, and more troubling, in the support of Trump by people who know who he really is: “a dictator,” according to former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie; a president who displayed “a disgraceful dereliction of duty,” according to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell; “a coward,” according to former Vice President Dick Cheney, who “tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him.” 

Trump is not a normal candidate, and this is not the time for politicians or the voters who have supported them to line up as they normally do behind their party’s candidate. The immorality of the man has been underscored repeatedly over many years, most recently by trial evidence introduced in a Manhattan courtroom this week that revealed not only his relationship with a star of pornographic films, but more importantly his eagerness to lie to voters and pay hush money to keep the truth concealed. That makes support for him similarly immoral.

And while we’re speaking of morality, let’s return to the issue of climate change, since leaving the planet in such ruin is a moral blot on those of us who came of age in the 20th century. We who live in so-called climate havens, no less than voters in more immediately imperiled spots, ought to consider what Trump would do to the fight against warming: He has said he would “terminate” efforts to encourage vehicles that don’t burn gasoline and “cancel” Biden’s steps to cut pollution from power plants that burn fossil fuels; he would surely again pull the United States out of the 2015 Paris agreement to reduce greenhouse gases. A study by Carbon Brief, a Britain-based climate analysis organization, suggested that Trump’s likely policies would add four billion tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, making global warming faster and its impact more severe, surely costing millions of lives.⁶

If you try to tuck in to ignore the faraway peril, you’re out of luck. My Upstate neighborhood, for instance, will surely be dramatically reshaped in the decades to come. Ice palaces that are features of Adirondack winter festivals will melt in unseasonal rain; ski resorts in the Catskills will close. Disease-carrying ticks will proliferate, the threat of Lyme disease and other ailments ruining everything from gardening days to family picnics. Water supplies will be threatened by algae blooms and maple sugaring will disappear as a staple of rural life. Even cows will be affected: In higher temperatures, cows eat less, and thus produce less milk — which will cause more small farms to vanish and more rural communities to sink into economic despair.⁷

Which is why the contortionists who wiggle their way into supporting Donald Trump are particularly loathsome. They make these bright days of spring seem fragile, as though the life we lead in this haven is one that might not long endure. It’s why we need to stiffen our backbone and stand up to those who seem to have none.

1. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-04-26/trump-s-climate-change-denial-is-scaring-republicans-who-believe?utm_source=website&utm_medium=share&utm_campaign=twitter&embedded-checkout=true

2. https://www.thedailybeast.com/cnn-host-kaitlan-collins-calls-out-jd-vances-gaza-protest-hypocrisy

3. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/14/us/politics/sununu-trump-insurrection-2024.html

4. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-opinion-biden-accomplishment-data/

5. https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4620415-trump-mocks-bill-barr-after-endorsement/

6. https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-trump-election-win-could-add-4bn-tonnes-to-us-emissions-by-2030/

7. https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-09/documents/climate-change-ny.pdf

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NEWSCLIPS FROM THE UPSTATES

Dispatches from our common ground *

Wherein each week we look around what we call the nation’s Upstates — those places just a bit removed from the center of things — to find illuminating news and intriguing viewpoints, which you might not otherwise see.

This week, we share reporting published here:

• North Cascades National Park, Wash. (Kitsap Sun, kitsapsun.com)

• Concord, N.H. (Portsmouth Herald, seacoastonline.com)

• South Bend, Ind. (South Bend Tribune, southbendtribune.com)

• New Orleans, La. (Shreveport Times, shreveporttimes.com)

NOTE: The complete “Newsclips from the Upstates” section, and The Upstate American Midweek Extra Edition, which is sent to email boxes on some Wednesdays, are available only to paid subscribers. Thanks for your support!

WASHINGTON

Grizzlies returning to the North Cascades

It has been almost three decades since the last confirmed sighting of a grizzly bear in the North Cascades, an alpine wilderness less than three hours from Seattle. But now, reports Laurel Demkovich of Washington State Standard, a nonprofit newsroom, federal officials have stepped forward with a plan to gradually reintroduce the animals to the area that they inhabited for thousands of years. It’s not a fast process: The plan is to move three to seven grizzly bears from the Rocky Mountains or British Columbia every summer for five to 10 years until reaching a population of 25 bears. The goal is a population of 200 bears in 60 to 100 years. Not everyone is pleased. U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse, a Republican, said it was “outrageous” that the bears were coming, which he blamed on federal officials “catering to the whims of coastal elites and the out-of-touch environmentalist lobby.” Supporters say the bears will restore balance to the ecosystem and encourage biologic diversity.

NEW HAMPSHIRE

Politicians fighting to save area code

New Hampshire’s state legislature includes 400 representatives and 24 senators, making it the second-largest legislature in the country (following the U.S. Congress, which hs 535 members). So what are they all to do? Margie Cullen reports in the Portsmouth Herald that the lawmakers seem determined to cling to what she writes is “New Hampshire’s iconic 603 area code” — to which most of us may reply, “Who knew?” There are only so many seven-number combinations that can be put after the number 603, of course, and the maximum count may be hit as soon as 2027 — meaning that the state might have to adopt a second area code. Yes! To delay it, state lawmakers have introduced the aptly titled Senate Bill 603, which directs the New Hampshire Department of Energy and the Public Utilities Commission to do all it legally can to adopt telephone conservation measures and maximize the number of available numbers. “603 is more than an area code. It's an identity,” one political aide explained. “We have songs and bumper stickers, and political slogans, and craft beers and T-shirts.m603 is New Hampshire, and New Hampshire is 603.”

INDIANA

Family wants to move Rockne’s gravesite

Knute Rockne is a football legend: He coached the Notre Dame University team from 1918 until his death in a place crash in 1931. But despite his affiliation with the university and his conversion to Catholicism in 1925, Camille Sarabia reports in the South Bend Tribune that his survivors decided not to bury Rockne’s body at the university’s cemetery — because at the time it wasn’t well-tended. And his widow didn’t want the place to draw any special attention. "Grandma was very much concerned that Grandpa's grave would not turn into a memorial site,” Rockne’s grandson, Knute Rockne III, told WNDU. So the gravesite wound up in a newer cemetery, which promised mowing and perpetual care. But now the family is ready to move the gravesite to Notre Dame’s Cedar Grove Cemetery. Another grandson, Nils Rockne, said, “I’m glad Notre Dame will look after the family. I feel comfortable knowing he’ll be cared for forever.” 

LOUISIANA

Mick Jagger takes a shot at conservative governor

During a set at the New Orleans Bass & Heritage Festival, Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger had some choice words for Louisiana’s hard-right Republican governor, Jeff Landry. After singing the classic “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” Jagger spoke: "We're an inclusive group. We like to include everyone. The governor is here, and we'd like to include him, even though he's trying to take us back to the Stone Age." On the social media platform X, the governor responded, in part, “"The only person who might remember the Stone Age is MickJagger.”

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THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about *our common ground, this great country.

One of the aforementioned redbuds surrounding our home. Happy spring to you all!

-Rex Smith