Dems looking for ‘common ground’ with Trump? Really?

Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin is skeptical of “a depressingly high number of elected Democrats” who are “declaring their intent to find ‘common ground’ with President-elect Donald Trump and his crackpot Cabinet picks.”

Her skepticism is well-founded.

Trump, a convicted felon, is an existential threat to American democracy. At best, he is an authoritarian. At worst, he is inclined toward fascism. No other outgoing president incited a mob of his supporters to keep him in office by violently storming and ransacking the Capitol and terrorizing lawmakers to stop them from counting the electoral vote.

(The fact that Trump attempted such a coup d’etat and was reelected president on Nov. 5 says as much or more about American voters than about Trump. But that’s another story.)

Rubin was spot on when she warned that the “naive, tone-deaf declarations” of these common ground-seeking Democrats “epitomize an infatuation with bipartisanship for bipartisanship’s sake. Sometimes, it’s better not to bend the knee before the bidding even gets underway.”

She reloaded and fired again: “Democrats strain credulity if they imagine they can find common ground with someone who vows, among other mind-boggling schemes, to imprison opponents, deploy the military against immigrants, snatch the power of the purse from Congress, and pay for tax cuts for billionaires with cuts to entitlements and other programs that serve ordinary Americans. (What would common ground even look like? Deport just 5.5 million people, not 11 million? Cut Social Security only a little bit?)

“The fruitless search for nonexistent common ground instantaneously normalizes Trump. Democrats should not propound the dubious assertion that Trump can operate rationally and in good faith. Mouthing this platitude makes Democrats look weak, foolish, and unprepared to stand up to an authoritarian agenda.”

“But Democrats do have a mandate: to stop him when they can. Instead of ‘find common ground,’ maybe they should strive to ‘give no quarter.’”

History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes, Mark Twain supposedly said. “Weak, foolish, and unprepared” aptly describes the 1930s Anglo-French policy of appeasing Adolf Hitler. British and French leaders hoped that by permitting the Nazi dictator to rearm Germany, remilitarize the Rhineland (in 1936), and annex his native Austria and the mostly German-speaking Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia (in 1938) might somehow prevent him from starting a war of European conquest.

There’s a fine line between seeking “common ground” with a strongman (or would-be strongman) and appeasing one. The British and French crossed it; Hitler seized the rest of Czechoslovakia in March, 1939, and invaded Poland on Sept. 1, launching World War II.

Hold your horses. I’m not saying Trump is Hitler. Nor am I saying the Democrats are a party of appeasers.

Yet to find common ground on anything, both parties must want to find it. While these Democrats Rubin wrote about sincerely want to find common ground, Trump doesn’t. Unlike every other president, he sees the other party not as the loyal opposition with whom accommodation is possible but as “the enemy from within.”

The common ground seekers would do well to heed the words spoken by Franklin D. Roosevelt, their party’s greatest president and one of the country’s greatest presidents, in his Dec. 29, 1940, Fireside Chat: “The experience of the past two years has proven beyond doubt that no nation can appease the Nazis. No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it. There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness. There can be no reasoning with an incendiary bomb. We know now that a nation can have peace with the Nazis only at the price of total surrender.”

By word and deed, Trump is antidemocratic. So was Hitler from the start. In Mein Kampf, first published in 1925, Hitler revealed his homicidal hatred of Jews, his contempt for parliamentary democracy, and his aim to conquer the Soviet Union to provide “living space” for Aryan Germans.

British and French leaders deluded themselves into believing Hitler operated rationally and in good faith. The height of the appeasement folly came in the Sudeten crisis of September, 1938. Hitler threatened to seize it if the Czechs didn’t hand it over.

The Czechs were prepared to fight Hitler, believing that France and possibly Britain would back them militarily. Instead, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Premier Edouard Daladier hurried cap-in-hand to Hitler in Munich, Germany. When he promised he would take no more territory in Europe, they let him have the Sudetenland. The Czechs, whose army was no match for Hitler’s, had no choice but to surrender the region. (The Czechs were not consulted in the negotiations over the Sudetenland. They called the Munich Agreement the Munich Betrayal.)

Chamberlain went home to Britain where he assured the people he had achieved “peace for our time.” Most Britons believed — or wanted to believe — their PM.

One member of parliament who belonged to Chamberlain’s Conservative Party minced no words in denouncing the Munich Agreement.

“You were given the choice between war and dishonour,” Winston Churchill wrote Chamberlain, whom he would succeed in office, leading Britain to victory in World War II. “You chose dishonour, and you will have war. “

After Chamberlain departed, the triumphant Hitler supposedly exulted: “If ever that silly old man comes interfering here again with his umbrella, I’ll kick him downstairs and jump on his stomach in front of photographers.”

One more time: Trump isn’t Hitler, and the GOP isn’t the Nazi Party.

But Trump spoke positively of Hitler, according to former Marine Gen. John Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff. Kelly said his old White House boss declared that Hitler “did some good things, too,” and that Trump fit “the general definition of fascist.”

Trump may protest that he’s not pro-Hitler or pro-Nazi, but he and his MAGA movement — which dominate the GOP — has attracted neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and anti-Semites. A leading Ku Klux Klan newspaper endorsed Trump in 2016. So did white supremacist, antisemite, and former Klan leader David Duke in 2016 and 2020, though he backed Green Party candidate Jill Stein this time.

“Over the years, Trump has repeatedly egged on white supremacists — who believe that white people are inherently superior — and white nationalists, who desire a physical or symbolic white nation, with racist dog whistles,” Nicole Narea wrote in Vox. “At times, he has even overtly defended them. His affiliation has given a bigger platform to hate-based movements broadly, and they, in turn, have become an indispensable part of his base. The groups became emboldened in the Trump era to make their views more explicit: For instance, during the January 6 insurrection, protesters carried a Confederate flag into the US Capitol, erected a gallows and noose on the lawn, and evoked a seminal white nationalist text.”

Concluded Rubin: “Trump falsely claims he has some overwhelming mandate to accomplish a host of rash, antidemocratic moves.  “As I (along with many others) have written, he does not. He barely won, in part because many of his voters thought he would not do the radical things he promised.

“But Democrats do have a mandate: to stop him when they can. Instead of ‘find common ground,’ maybe they should strive to ‘give no quarter.’”

FDR would consider that good advice. So should we.

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