Cynical, Nasty, and Nuts
What I saw in the fourth Republican debate.
I’M A MODERATE. In 2018, I voted for Larry Hogan, Maryland’s Republican governor. Four years later, when Republicans nominated an election denier to replace him, I voted for the Democratic nominee, Wes Moore. Give me a sensible conservative party, and I’ll consider it. But that’s not what I’m seeing in Congress or in this year’s Republican presidential debates.
I’d like to believe, for instance, that Republicans want a cautious but reasonable immigration policy. I agree with them that our border isn’t secure, that too many people are entering our country illegally, and that our asylum process is being abused. But Wednesday’s presidential debate showed that for too many Republicans, controlling illegal immigration is just the beginning. They want to curtail immigration in general—even during an obvious labor shortage—and part of their underlying motivation is bigotry or appeals to bigotry.
Eight years ago, Donald Trump infamously proposed an explicit ban on Muslims entering the United States. Two months ago, he said illegal immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” In Wednesday’s debate, Ron DeSantis expressed similar views. “Europe is committing suicide with the mass migration. And it’s illegal and legal,” he warned. “There needs to be limits on immigration. And we should not be importing people from cultures that are hostile.”
With a straight face, in the name of opposing prejudice, DeSantis categorically ruled out any resident of Gaza. “We’re not taking anyone from Gaza, because of the antisemitism and because they reject American culture,” he said.
Not to be outdone, Vivek Ramaswamy endorsed—in his own words—“the Great Replacement theory.” He said it was a “basic statement of the Democratic party’s platform.”
In case Ramaswamy’s racial message wasn’t clear enough, he underscored it in a post-debate interview on CNN: “Look at the video I posted yesterday of [President Joe] Biden and [Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro] Mayorkas ten years ago expressly discussing—and these are Biden’s words, not mine—about nonwhite populations exceeding white populations in the U.S. through immigration, and that being not a bad thing.”
You can watch the clipped Biden video and read Ramaswamy’s post about it here. Essentially, Biden said that America was becoming mostly nonwhite and that this was fine. Ramaswamy portrays that statement as a threat.
I’D LIKE TO BELIEVE that Republicans are approaching the latest hot-button cultural issue, transgenderism, from a position of wisdom or principle. But what I saw in this debate was unprincipled political exploitation of the issue.
On most topics, Republicans advocate firm deference to parental rights. But only one candidate on the stage, Chris Christie, said such deference should extend to parents who support their child’s request for puberty blockers or other transgender medical interventions. Every other candidate denounced this position. Megyn Kelly, one of the debate’s moderators, asked Christie whether his position made him “way too out of step on this issue to be the Republican nominee.”
After the debate, in an interview with Kelly, Nikki Haley said she favored a ban on any transgender procedure for a minor, including puberty blockers, because “I do not think any medical procedure should be done to a child before the age of 18. . . . Even if your parents give you permission, I don’t think it’s okay, because kids—we know kids going through puberty can be confused.”
Confusion in pubescent children is a totally valid concern. But Haley, DeSantis, Ramaswamy, and other Republicans aren’t just questioning the judgment of kids who think they’re transgender. They’re overriding the judgment of the parents of those kids. That’s the opposite of the Republican approach to other issues of parental authority, such as sex education and vaccine refusal.
What seems to be happening here is that Republicans have found a new sexual panic, and they’re exploiting it from any angle they can find. Haley, in particular, has been using this issue to bond with the right. In the debate, she made the same pitch she has made elsewhere: “Biological boys shouldn’t be playing in girls’ sports, and I will do everything I can to stop that, because it’s the women’s issue of our time.” In her interview with Kelly, Haley claimed that people who allow “biological boys” in girls’ sports are “trying to erase” women.
Erase women? The women’s issue of our time? Come on. The percentage of kids playing girls’ sports who are transgender is infinitesimal.
Haley and DeSantis also squabbled over a bill DeSantis signed into law last year, which prohibited “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity” in the early elementary years. In the debate, Haley boasted, “I actually said his ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill didn’t go far enough, because it only talked about gender until the third grade. And I said it shouldn’t be done at all.”
I’D LIKE TO BELIEVE that Republicans have a healthy skepticism of government. But what I saw in this debate were wild anti-government conspiracy theories.
The obvious nuttery came from Ramaswamy. He asserted that (1) “the 2020 election was indeed stolen by Big Tech”; (2) “the 2016 election—the one that Trump won for sure—was also one that was stolen from him by the national security establishment that actually put up the Trump-Russia collusion hoax”; and (3) “January 6th now does look like it was an inside job.”
Ramaswamy isn’t alone in his derangement. Two days before the debate, at a rally in Iowa, DeSantis complained that Trump, “on his last day in office,” had failed to “help the people that got caught up in the Capitol stuff, that he told to go there.” That’s a clear signal that the January 6th perpetrators, in DeSantis’s view, should have been pardoned.
DeSantis fumed that instead of helping these defendants, Trump had given a commendation to Anthony Fauci, who was then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The Florida governor vowed to “clean house” at the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control. He denied that he had said these agencies should be “burnt to the ground.” His actual statements about them, he joked, were harsher.
DeSantis is off the deep end on COVID and vaccines. He has said that if he’s elected, he’ll prosecute Fauci. And in the debate, he accused the FDA of “approving an mNRA [sic] shot for six-months-old babies” not to serve public health but “because Big Pharma will make money.”
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY’S INSANITY leaves a big hole in this country. When progressives jerk their knees on one issue or another—deriding religious parents, overdoing COVID restrictions, calling every border-control policy racist—I’d like to hear alternative ideas from a sane conservative party. Instead, what we have is an extremist, authoritarian party in which—as Kelly essentially acknowledged—the one presidential candidate who tells the truth and adheres to principle has no chance of being nominated.