One Day the Republican Party Is Bound to Settle Down and Start Treating Me Right

“The most anti-slavery Democratic Chief Justice in history!” –Zaid Jilani, 1857

Zaid Jilani has tweeted the most ridiculous thing ever, a record that will stand until the next time Jilani tweets something:

“actually, trump is still pro-LGBT” is one of most ill-advised double downs in the history of this website pic.twitter.com/OJbYIUNrAO

— sean. (@SeanMcElwee) July 27, 2017

I…wow:

• Even the original tweet was incredibly silly.* Trump had nominate Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, and Jeff Sessions as his Attorney General. He was an anti-LBGT president, and thinking his stray comments during the campaign outweighs that is the kind of logic that compels you to praise John McCain for making speeches that are wholly inconsistent with his actions.
• To double down after he announced that he was banning transgender people from the military is amazing even by the standards of the easiest Republican mark among paid nominally leftist writers.
• You have to love the “most pro-LBGT Republican Party ever!” metric. On tonight’s epiosde of Quantum Leap, Zaid Jilani travels to 1868 and proclaims that Horatio Seymour is leading the most pro-civil rights Democratic Party ever, even if it still has to pander to its white supremacist minority faction from time to time.
• The key here is the “it doesn’t count because he’s just pandering to a ‘minority faction'” defense. This is the key to false equivalence at a time of a historically large gap between the parties — when Democrats do or say liberal things they don’t count because they’re just pandering, and when Republicans do or say bad things they don’t count because they’re just pandering.
• And, of course, the idea that anti-LBGT reactionaries are a minority faction within the GOP is insane.
• Which leads us to a serious point. Jilani is a buffoon, but the idea that SSM is now pretty much a settled question across party line isn’t just something that people who think the Republicans will bring us single payer any day now believe. And the idea is both wrong and pernicious. Most Republican voters and public officials still oppose SSM, and would vote to restore bans if they could. And if The Most Pro-LBGT President in Republican Party History (TM) gets one or especially two more Supreme Court nominations, they may well get that opportunity.

*A couple of commenters correctly noted that the original tweet was from April 2016, not 2017. So let me amend that to say that it’s silly to weigh Trump’s stray comments more than the fact that he would nominate an orthodox reactionary like Gorusch to the Supreme Court and nominate someone like Jeff Sessions to be the Attorney General, both of which were well known at the time.