The most wildly misunderstood yet commonly used word in American politics is “gaffe.” The dictionary defines it as “an unintentional act or remark causing embarrassment to its originator; a blunder” — and that’s not wrong. But on the campaign trail, 95% of the time a much-talked-about “gaffe” is the blunder of a politician accidentally blurting out the truth.
You’ve been hearing a lot about Donald Trump’s disastrous, Nazi-echoing rally at Madison Square Garden, and “comedian” Tony Hinchcliffe’s vote-killing “jokes” about Puerto Ricans and African Americans, and that’s been a game-changing development. But over the last week, it’s also been open-mic night for the Republicans who want to run Congress, and the embarrassing blunder of accidental truth-telling has been coming faster than Henny Youngman one-liners. Election Day will tell whether the joke is on the GOP, or on the American people for electing them.
Consider Pennsylvania U.S. Senate candidate Dave McCormick, whose very existence as a Connecticut hedge-fund CEO pretending to be a voice for the Keystone State is a kind of living gaffe. Last week, the progressive news site Heartland Signal released audio of a “hot mic” exchange of McCormick telling a voter who was complaining about the Affordable Care Act’s provision allowing adult children to stay on their parents’ health insurance until age 26: “I’m not for that,” adding: “I gotta get my kids working!” (Gobsmackingly, McCormick also admitted he didn’t know the provision was part of 2010′s ACA, or Obamacare.)
I’m hard-pressed to think of a federal government action in the 21st century that’s been more popular than that provision of Obamacare, which helped at least 2.5 million young Americans gain health coverage. I know first-hand because the law was a lifesaver for my own two children as they navigated grad school and no-benefits starter jobs on their path to careers. I’m sure McCormick, with an estimated net worth of at least $165 million after running Wall Street’s largest hedge fund, could pay his kids’ doctor bills from the lost change in the couch cushions of his Connecticut mansion, but the middle-class voters he claims to be fighting for aren’t so lucky.
Yet it’s impossible to dismiss McCormick’s “gaffe” as an isolated moment of a mega-millionaire saying, “Let them eat cake.” Instead, the Senate candidate’s remarks are deeply revealing of the broader Republican scheme if they can win the so-called trifecta of a Trump 47 presidency and a GOP-controlled House and Senate. That would be to repeal or gut every program enacted by Democrats or even bipartisan alliances, no matter how popular, or how many Americans would be hurt. It’s not a conspiracy theory. They are openly saying this. Believe them.
In fact, the current GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson, with a 50-50 chance of clinging to that job next January, has been barnstorming America in a festival of truth-telling “gaffes,” including the revelation that his party dreams of not just gutting Obamacare — as McCormick suggested on that hot mic — but repealing the ACA altogether. This despite Trump’s September debate admission that after a decade of talking about this, he only has “concepts of a plan” (and in reality he doesn’t even have that) on how to replace a program that has saved thousands of American lives.
“No Obamacare,” Johnson responded to a voter’s comment during a news conference in Pennsylvania, before suggesting that Republicans, if it’s in their control, will make major but totally unspecified changes to a program that is broadly popular with the American public while currently insuring more than 21 million. He added: “The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work, and we got a lot of ideas on how to do that.”
Yeah, sure, Mike. But like Bluto in Animal House, the House speaker was now rolling. Only a day or so later, campaigning for an embattled House ally in upstate New York, Johnson replied to a student journalist from Syracuse University asking if Congress would also repeal 2022′s bipartisan CHIP and Science Act, which is aiding an $100 billion new plant in that New York candidate’s district creating thousands of new jobs. “I expect that we probably will but we haven’t developed that part of the agenda yet — we gotta get over the election first,” Johnson said.
This time, Johnson soon realized that he’d gone too far even for today’s Republicans, and he rolled back the comment with the hard-to-believe claim that he’d misheard the clearly audible student journalist just a few feet away. But while the semiconductor-aid program, and its large-scale job creation, appear to be safe for now, we should take Johnson, McCormick and their colleagues seriously, if not always literally.
To reach their true spiritual goal of taking America back to a time when white men like them ruled without challenge — not only on Capitol Hill but in every household — they are willing to willy-nilly repeal anything passed not just by President Joe Biden but LBJ and maybe even FDR. They want to bring back an uneven playing field for women, Black and brown folks, or the LGBTQ community, even if it also hurts the white middle class they claim to be representing.
Is it a gaffe that we’re learning in the campaign’s final hours that Team Trump plans to give enormous power over public health policy to former-candidate-turned-Trump-ally and anti-vaccine nutjob Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who tweeted Saturday night that he literally wants to take America back to the 1950s by removing fluoride — which has improved the dental health of U.S. children for decades — from public drinking water. Make all the jokes you want about the John Birch Society or Gen. Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove, but — just like Hinchcliffe’s MSG put-downs of Latinos and Black people — their push to unravel modern American progress is no laughing matter.
Voters understand RFK Jr.’s words are serious because we’ve already seen in one hugely important area — reproductive rights — what happens when the barking dog of GOP policy nonsense actually catches the car. The Trump-fried U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 reversal of Roe vs. Wade has taken women’s health care back more than 60 years, and now we are learning the stories of the women who are dying as a result. How many more Americans will die needlessly if Johnson, McCormick, Trump and their ilk keep driving their 1950s Rambler policies off the cliff?
The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who has emerged as a kind of shadow candidate this fall by spending well over $100 million to elect Trump in expectation of a prominent White House role, even committed the truth gaffe of telling voters to expect what he called “some temporary hardship” under an unthinkable $2 trillion in cuts to federal spending. That’s because apparently taking America back to the Eisenhower era will mean an Eisenhower-sized budget.
The GOP’s 11th-hour policy truth bombs aren’t getting the media attention they deserve. They are competing with the increasingly racist, violent and unhinged rhetoric from Trump’s allies but especially from the 78-year-old candidate himself, who seems to be descending into madness in what, either way, are (probably) his last days ever on the trail. We should be paying great attention to events like his nearly six-hour Manhattan hatefest. But understand that the cruelty is the point of the modern MAGA movement, and Trump’s despicable language and attitudes toward women and nonwhite men will be translated on Capitol Hill into cruel policies — political neutron bombs that will devastate everyone, even the folks lining up in Appalachia or the prairies of the Great Plains to vote for Trump.
I want to be extremely careful with what I am about to say next. There do appear to be signs in this last weekend of the campaign that a majority of Americans are in the process of rejecting Republicans’ dark, retrograde vision for the country. None is more dramatic than Saturday night’s report from the nation’s most highly regarded and historically most accurate pollster, Iowa’s J. Ann Selzer, that Democrat Kamala Harris has surged to a 3-point lead (47-44%) in the Hawkeye State, which Trump won so decisively in 2016 and 2020 that neither candidate has campaigned there.
The Iowa Poll dovetailed with weaker-than-expected polls for Trump in heartland states like Ohio, with internal surveys showing last-minute undecideds breaking for Harris, with the Democrats’ seeming strength this cycle with older women furious about the Roe reversal, which has been reflected in early voting here in Pennsylvania, and in polls showing rage among voters of Puerto Rican heritage after the MSG debacle. As Republicans increasingly reveal who they really are, many voters are apparently electing to believe them the first time.
But the most important thing that voters can do with this last-minute flood of information is to completely ignore it. The only things that matter between now and 8 p.m. Tuesday are casting a ballot, and talking to family and friends or even knocking on some doors to make sure as many as possible do the same. Vote as if your life depends on it. Because if you finally have health insurance, if you believe in clean drinking water, if you or a loved one plan on having a child or want control over your own body, or if you live in an immigrant community, your life does depend on it.
