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The Republicans Who Won’t Quit Trump

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 11 › trump-republican-support-chris-sununu › 676175

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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Prominent Republicans criticized Donald Trump for two years. So why are even these supposed moderates now pledging to support him?

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

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Career Over Country

Breaking up, Neil Sedaka told us many years ago, is hard to do. But it shouldn’t be impossible. When a Republican governor describes Donald Trump as a “three-time loser,” warns that the party will lose “up and down the ballot” if Trump is the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, and calls the former president “fucking crazy,” it’s easy to imagine a responsible politician who has packed his bags and is waiting on the steps of the GOP’s Delta House for his taxi back to the world of sensible adults.

Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, however, is not such a politician.

Sununu gained a lot of media attention and applause from the Never Trump Republicans for being one of the former president’s most brutal critics. But now that Trump is all but inevitable as the GOP nominee, Sununu is bashing Joe Biden and embracing Trump as the lesser of two evils. “Did you see [Trump’s] last visit to New Hampshire?” Sununu said to reporters earlier this month. “He was comparing himself to Nelson Mandela and talking about Jesus Christ being speaker of the House—it was kooky talk … He sounds almost as bad as Joe Biden.”

Almost as bad as Joe Biden? I will be the first to note, as I did here, that Biden’s reputation as a walking gaffe hazard is well deserved. He gets carried away, embellishes, and remembers things that didn’t happen (a sign, I think, more of his penchant for self-important Irish blarneying than of his age). He spent his life as a senator; senators talk a lot, and sometimes they say dumb stuff.

But to compare Biden’s blunders to Trump’s derangement is inane. Trump’s mind often slips the surly bonds of Earth: He has claimed that he won all 50 states in the 2020 election, invented people who invariably call him “sir,” lied endlessly about an astonishing number of things, embraced the QAnon conspiracy theories, and, as Sununu himself admits, compared himself to Jesus Christ.

Biden is a competent politician who sometimes stumbles or goes off the rails in his public statements. Trump is a disturbed, emotionally disordered person who, in Liz Cheney’s words, is “the most dangerous man ever to inhabit the Oval Office.”

So why is Sununu going to vote for Trump? Because Republicans have to win. That’s it. “I just want Republicans to win,” Sununu told Puck’s Tara Palmeri in a podcast released yesterday. “That’s all I care about.”

Perhaps if Sununu had been forced from office or personally threatened by Trump supporters, he might feel differently—or at least be less inclined to stand for such mindless hyper-partisanship.

Or perhaps not. Peter Meijer, the former GOP representative from Michigan who was primaried out of Congress and harassed because of his vote to impeach Trump a second time, has endured far worse than Sununu, and yet he, too, is backing Trump again. Meijer is running for one of Michigan’s U.S. Senate seats, and he seems to be trying to mollify the MAGA church long enough to carry a statewide election. Meijer, like Sununu, is laying his more-in-sorrow-than-anger shtick on the incumbent: “My overarching goal is to make Joe Biden a one-term president,” he told Adam Wren at Politico.

We could mine the statements of other Republicans for similar pyrite nuggets of shiny Trump criticism that amount to nothing. (Even Nikki Haley can bring herself to say only that Trump was the right guy at the right time—but now is the wrong time.) None of them, I would argue, really believes that Biden is a worse president than Trump was, and they all know the danger of a second Trump term. So why would they bend the knee one more time?

The Republicans coming back to Trump are driven by two factors: ambition and delusion.

Ambition is the easiest motive to explain. Mitt Romney, at 76 years old, is retiring: He can afford to say that he might vote for a Democrat rather than enable Trump again. He’s had it with his Republican colleagues and he wants to go home. But Haley is 51, Sununu is 49, and Meijer is 35. None of these people is ready, in Washington vernacular, to go spend more time with their family. They all probably expected Trump to be disgraced and driven from public life by now, and they had plans for their own future. They did not grasp that disgrace, in today’s GOP, is a fundraising opportunity, not a disqualification from office.

Numbed by opportunism, many Republicans will simply hunker down and try to survive the next five years. They’re all sure that, after that, it’ll be their time, and they will triumphantly cobble together a new GOP coalition out of independents, moderate Republicans, and what’s left of the MAGA vote, gaining that last group by assuring Trump’s base that no matter what they may have said about their idol, at least they never went over the fence and voted for a Democrat.

But these ambitious Republicans are also under a self-serving delusion that the next Trump term will be something like the first Trump term. They assume that adults will somehow restrain Trump and that the nation will function more or less normally while Trump goes off to his beloved rallies. They are committed to the fantasy that four more years of a mad king will be akin to weathering one more passing storm. (They have also likely convinced themselves, as Haley did while working for Trump, that they can best limit the damage by being in the mix of GOP politics, rather than by being excommunicated.)

This dream narrative ends with the normal Republicans emerging from their tornado shelters, surveying some limited and reparable damage, and restoring the center-right, conservative kingdom. President Haley or Senator Meijer will get the GOP back to cutting taxes and erasing government regulations, all while mending fences with millions of people who were horrified by the violence and madness of Trumpism.

None of that is going to happen.

Trump has made it clear that he has no regrets about any ghastly thing he did as president, that as president again he will bring a legion of goons and cronies with him into the White House (including seditionists and rioters whom he will pardon and release from jail), and that he fully intends to finish the job of burning down American democracy. Politicians such as Sununu or Meijer know all of this, but they apparently think they will remain untouched by it. They have put their party and their personal fortunes over their allegiance to the Constitution, perhaps hoping that they will at least have a chance to rule over whatever is left in the ashes of the republic.

Today’s News

A new CDC report shows that U.S. life expectancy at birth rose in 2022, in part because of falling COVID deaths. The U.S. Department of Justice has indicted an Indian man on murder-for-hire charges over an alleged plot to kill a Sikh activist in New York. Officials from Qatar, Egypt, and the U.S. are asking for an extension of the cease-fire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas.

Evening Read

Bettmann / CORBIS / Getty

Must the Novelist Crusade?

By Eudora Welty

Published in the October 1965 issue of The Atlantic.

Not too long ago I read in some respectable press that Faulkner would have to be reassessed because he was “after all, only a white Mississippian.” For this reason, it was felt, readers could no longer rely on him for knowing what he was writing about in his life’s work of novels and stories, laid in what he called “my country.” Remembering how Faulkner for most of his life wrote in all but isolation from critical understanding, ignored impartially by North and South, with only a handful of critics in forty years who were able to “assess” him, we might smile at this journalist as at a boy let out of school. Or there may have been an instinct to smash the superior, the good, that is endurable enough to go on offering itself. But I feel in these words and others like them the agonizing of our times.

Read the full article.

A Breakthrough in Gene Editing

found 29 Nov The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 11 › sickle-cell-crispr-therapy › 676164

This story seems to be about:

I spoke with my colleague Sarah Zhang about a breakthrough in CRISPR therapy, and when it is ethical to use the gene-editing technology.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

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A Transformative Treatment

Earlier this month, U.K. regulators approved a new therapy that uses CRISPR—a gene-editing technology that allows scientists to make cuts to DNA—to treat people with sickle-cell disease. FDA approval is likely in the coming weeks. I spoke with my colleague Sarah Zhang, who has been covering CRISPR for more than a decade, about this landmark treatment, ethical use of the technology, and what fair access to CRISPR therapy could look like in the future.

Lora Kelley: What makes sickle-cell disease an obvious match for CRISPR therapy?

Sarah Zhang: As soon as scientists started talking about what we can do with CRISPR, treating sickle cell rose to the top of the list for two reasons. One is that with sickle-cell disease, you can take the blood cells out, edit them in the controlled environment of a lab, and then put them back in someone’s body. And with sickle cell, we know exactly the edit to make to treat the disease. For patients who have gotten the therapy, it’s been transformative. They’ve gone from being hospitalized multiple times a year to having virtually no symptoms.

Lora: Where does the scientific community draw ethical lines on when to use CRISPR?

Sarah: If you’ve heard about CRISPR and humans, you probably remember the CRISPR babies that were born back in 2018. A Chinese scientist went rogue and edited embryos that were then born as twins in China, purportedly to make them resistant to HIV.

CRISPR babies were an unnecessary and reckless use of gene editing. That moment catalyzed the community to think about how we want this technology to be used.

After that, there was a widely accepted consensus among scientists: no editing in sperm, eggs, or embryos. Edits in the DNA of your blood cells or muscle cells or brain cells don’t get passed on if you have children, the way they would be in sperm, eggs, or embryos. The rewards are also not clear. There aren’t really good applications where you could prevent a genetic disease from being inherited with gene editing that you can’t already do using IVF and embryo selection.

But everyone I talked with feels like this sickle-cell treatment is an appropriate use of CRISPR. The big question going forward is: Who can actually get access to this therapy?

Lora: What would equitable and fair access to CRISPR therapy to treat sickle-cell disease look like?

Sarah: This therapy is likely to be very expensive. It may cost around $2 million a person. It’s also hard to get physically. You’re basically doing a bone-marrow transplant on yourself. Your blood cells are taken out of you and edited; meanwhile, you’re undergoing chemotherapy to kill your remaining bone marrow. And then you’re getting your edited cells infused back into you, and rebuilding your blood and immune system over the course of several months.

So you have to be either in the hospital or going to the hospital and going to see doctors for about a year. If you live near one of these transplant centers, you may be able to do that. But if you live in a rural location, or maybe you are in school, or you have kids, or you have a job, you can’t take a year out of your life to undergo this therapy. Most people who have sickle-cell disease live in developing countries, largely in sub-Saharan Africa. So this therapy is logistically unfeasible for them.

Still, there’s some amount of justice to the fact that this groundbreaking therapy is helping treat a disease that predominantly affects Black people, who have been historically—and still are—marginalized in the medical system. The idea is that one day this treatment can be something more like a shot, which would be cheaper and easier to get.

Lora: How do you anticipate CRISPR being used to treat diseases in the future?

Sarah: The next step will be: How do we treat CRISPR right in the body? We’re starting to do that. There was a recent trial to lower people’s cholesterol using CRISPR. Lipid nanoparticles were used to send CRISPR to the liver, which is a relatively easy target. Changing things in the brain, the heart, or muscles is a lot harder. A big question now is: How do we get CRISPR to the cells that we want to edit?

Even though CRISPR has been described as a very precise gene editor, it’s actually still quite limited. It’s not the same thing as opening up Google Docs and changing some letters around. But now there are new technologies where you can change a single letter, or paste in a sequence, and that will allow for much more precise edits in the future. CRISPR is quite easy to use. But making sure you do all the right edits is harder.

Still, these breakthroughs have been exciting for me personally. I started covering CRISPR very early in my career, when it was a thing you did to cells in a petri dish in a lab. Now it’s being used to treat humans. It’s only been a little bit more than 10 years, which feels like a long time, but in the medical world, it’s really a blink of an eye. It’s extraordinary that it happened so quickly.

Today’s News

Forty-one workers were rescued after a tunnel collapsed in the Indian state of Uttarakhand; they had been trapped for more than two weeks. Americans for Prosperity Action, a political network founded by the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, has endorsed Nikki Haley in the Republican primary for president. Israel and Hamas will extend a temporary pause in fighting until tomorrow, maintaining the possibility of further extensions and hostage-prisoner exchanges.

Evening Read Painting by Fulton Leroy Washington (MR WASH). Source: Malike Sidibe for The Atlantic.

This Is Not Justice

By Jake Tapper

Editor’s Note: As of yesterday, C. J. Rice, the subject of our November 2022 cover story, could be very close to freedom after a federal court overturned his conviction. The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office now has 179 days to decide whether to retry Rice’s case or release him from custody. Read our update here.

On Tuesday, September 20, 2011, a young patient walked haltingly into a medical office in South Philadelphia to have his bullet wounds examined.

The patient was a 17-year-old named C. J. Rice, who lived in the neighborhood. The doctor was a pediatrician named Theodore Tapper.

My father had been working as a physician in South Philadelphia for more than four decades and had known Rice since he was a child. Rice had been brought in for a checkup soon after he was born, and as a doctor my father had seen Rice several times a year, along with other members of the family. Two weeks and three days before his September appointment, Rice had been shot while riding his bike, in what he believed was a case of mistaken identity. To remove one of the bullets, a surgeon had made a long incision down the middle of Rice’s torso. The wound was then closed with a ridge of staples—more than two dozen. After his discharge, Rice was in severe pain and could barely walk. He needed help to get dressed in the morning and help to go up and down stairs …

The timing of that visit is significant because, six days later, the Philadelphia police announced that they were seeking Rice and a friend of his, Tyler Linder, in connection with a shooting that had occurred in South Philadelphia on the evening of September 25 and left four people wounded, including a 6-year-old girl.

Read the full article.