“The Democrats are using their power to push an alarmist and false narrative that there is a problem accessing contraception,” said Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, the top Republican on the Senate Health, Labor, Education and Pensions Committee.

If he really meant this, there’d be no problem passing a bill to protect contraception access. If there’s already no problem getting it, and you’re not intending to prevent people from getting it, a bill protecting access is at worst window dressing and harms no one.

I can only conclude they are intending to find further ways to prevent people from getting contraception, and don’t want this bill to get in their way.

A lot of his base admires precisely those qualities you mentioned. They dig the idea of someone who appeals to their shared prejudices and wields power capriciously and cruelly. Either because they think he will wield that power on their behalf, or because they wish they could wield that kind of power themselves and are enjoying it vicariously by watching him do it.

I can’t believe they would expel the only Navy SEAL to ever walk on the moon and win the World Cup twice! This is an outrage!

The problem is “for the moment to preserve American democracy and freedom” winds up being every election, unless a genuine leftward push is made at some point down the line.

If that leftward push never happens, every election is a choice between temporarily halting fascism, and allowing fascism to metastasize.

This is what they mean by all the “real American” rhetoric. It’s a rhetorical shortcut to ignore the increasing popularity of economic and social policies they don’t like and declare the ones they do like are the only ones that count.

“Woke is when I hate something, and the more I hate it, the more woke it is”