The Supreme Court decision abolishing the constitutional right to abortion has put wind in the sails of the fascist forces headed by Donald Trump that dominate the Republican Party.
Exuberant over the long-sought victory of clerical reaction over the elementary rights and social needs of millions of working women—and the promise of more rollbacks in democratic rights to come—some are letting slip the racist and anti-Semitic views they have up to now sought to conceal in their public statements.
At a Trump “Save America” rally outside of Quincy, Illinois on Saturday night, the ex-president campaigned for two far-right candidates in this Tuesday’s Republican primary elections in the state: freshman Representative Mary Miller, who is running for U.S. Congress in a newly drawn district against a veteran GOP lawmaker, and state Senator Darren Bailey, who is seeking the Republican nomination for the November gubernatorial race.
After hailing the destruction of a basic right in place for nearly 50 years as a “victory for the Constitution … the rule of law and, above all, a victory for life” and attacking the House committee investigating his January 6 coup attempt as a “vile group of unhinged partisans and craven lunatics,” Trump introduced Miller as “pro-life, pro-gun, pro-police, pro-American energy and pro-MAGA.”
Miller proceeded to tell the crowd: “It’s such an honor to be able to welcome you to God’s country. … President Trump, on behalf of all the MAGA patriots in America, I want to thank you for the historic victory for white life in the Supreme Court yesterday.”
Trump, beaming behind Miller on the platform, did not bat an eye as the crowd cheered.
Miller continued: “I’m running against a RINO [Republican in name only] named Rodney Davis, who betrayed conservatives. He betrayed us by voting against President Trump in 2016 … voting for red flag gun confiscation, voting for the January 6 witch hunt commission. This race is between MAGA and a RINO establishment member.”
Miller added: “We will never surrender to the Marxists in Washington. We are the Christians who put our faith in God, not in the government.”
Following the rally, when some local press outlets began to publicize Miller’s racist outburst, her spokesperson called it a “mix-up of words,” telling the Associated Press that she had intended to call the court ruling a victory for the “right to life.”
There was no attempt to explain why Miller’s supposed “mix-up” took the form of a paean to “white life.” There is, in fact, nothing mysterious about this.
Miller was chastised shortly after she assumed office in January 2021 for giving a speech at the U.S. Capitol in which she cited in a positive way the example of Adolf Hitler. Speaking at a January 5 rally held by “Moms for America,” a far-right group that promotes Trump’s lie of a “stolen election,” she said, “Hitler was right on one thing. He said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’”
The next day, January 6, Trump’s mob of fascist paramilitaries, assembled with the aid and support of White House officials and Republican lawmakers, stormed the Capitol and came within seconds of seizing and likely killing Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi and other officials in a bid to block the official certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. Miller was among the 147 Republican members of Congress who voted against certification in the early morning hours of January 7, some hours after the rampaging insurrectionists had finally been cleared out of the Capitol.
At the same rally, Trump announced his endorsement of Bailey, until recently considered a dark horse behind the more establishment figure Richard Irvin, the African American mayor of Aurora, Illinois. Billionaire GOP donor Ken Griffin ploughed $50 million into Irvin’s campaign, staking him to an early lead in a six-man primary race. But in recent weeks, after a pilgrimage to Trump’s estate in Mar-a Lago and some $17 million in campaign funding from the billionaire Republican kingmaker Richard Uihlein, Bailey has moved ahead in the polls.
Trump hailed Bailey for his defiance of anti-COVID mandates imposed in the early stages of the pandemic by Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker, the billionaire owner of the Hyatt Hotel chain.
In 2019, Bailey joined six other state Republicans in sponsoring a resolution calling for the city of Chicago to leave Illinois and become its own state. The resolution stated that “the majority of residents in downstate Illinois disagree with City of Chicago residents on key issues such as gun ownership, abortion, immigration, and other policy issues.”
After announcing his bid for governor, Bailey backtracked on the resolution, calling it “old” and “a warning shot” to Chicago. However, in a debate between Republican gubernatorial candidates earlier this month, he called Chicago a crime-ridden “hellhole” and attacked Irvin as a “corrupt Democrat.”
The cowardly failure of Biden and the Democrats to prosecute Trump or any of his top accomplices in the attempted overthrow of the Constitution, in the name of “unity” with their Republican “colleagues,” has allowed Trump and the Republicans to bring the attack on democratic rights to a new level and strengthened the fascist forces they are seeking to mobilize.
But the cynical machinations of the Democrats go even further. Pritzker and the Democratic Governors Association have spent $34 million on TV ads attacking Bailey for his far-right, pro-Trump politics. They have made no secret that the ad campaign is designed to build support for Bailey in the Republican primary within the GOP’s active base, particularly in the more rural, downstate regions, because they believe Pritzker has a better chance of winning in November against Bailey than against Irvin.
Thus, on the basis of the most narrow electoral calculations, the Democrats are actually working to bolster the openly fascist wing of the Republican Party.