Republicans lean into racism, fascism, and glorification of sedition in weekend Nevada rally

Donald Trump and Republican candidates held a Nevada rally on Saturday. Thanks to the speakers, there was no attempt to misdirect or moderate the speeches. What was on display was the heart of Republicanism's new fascism. Racism; paranoia; hoax promotion; a focus not on winning elections, but on winning the power to administer and subjugate them. Highlights of the event come via Acyn.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville delivered unabashed racism:

All the quiet parts now with bullhorns https://t.co/2OANm6JFY1

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) October 9, 2022

A bit of climate denial was thrown in as well, part of the party's now-widespread anger at science and intellectualism in all its forms:

Tuberville: God changes the climate pic.twitter.com/N0uJt7Mi6D

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 9, 2022

From Jim Marchant, the party's Big Lie-endorsing and sedition-backing secretary of state candidate in Nevada, we got a definition of what taking our country back means, to Republicans. It means controlling the mechanisms of our elections.

Marchant: If get all our Secretaries of State elected around the country like this, we take our country back pic.twitter.com/w7hFyD4Kkq

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 9, 2022

But what are the secretaries of state supposed to do, once the offices are in Republican control? Apparently their role will consist not only of monitoring elections, but facilitating criminal acts from the party?

Kash Patel says they have to elect Laxalt to defeat the “lies” about “Ukraine impeachment one, Ukraine impeachment two” and January 6th with the truth pic.twitter.com/bXx2F23P0L

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 9, 2022

Criminal acts such as preparing and delivering forged documents purporting to be legitimate presidential electors based on groups of individual Republicans simply declaring themselves to be so:

McDonald: They can point at us and call us fake electors.. No, we stood up for the rights of Nevadans pic.twitter.com/H7alDwZRQQ

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 9, 2022

Glorifying the reign of Dear Leader, mainly by fictionalizing it, was on the agenda:

Fox News made them stupid. Fox and Trump got them to stop trusting facts. Then Trump showed the power of repeating lies. https://t.co/W1MZZJPX52

— Randi Mayem Singer (@rmayemsinger) October 9, 2022

After the crowd had been pummeled by delusionists for long enough, it was time for the traitor whose lies led to deaths in the Capitol to bellow his own versions. Donald Trump, a traitor, wants you to remember the good times of unabated pandemic death.

Trump: Think of it, two years ago everything was so good in our country pic.twitter.com/h8kERbKFsA

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 9, 2022

A proper fascist leader might have dug up the corpse of pandemic casualty Herman Cain and rigged it to applaud when Trump spoke that line, but we can't have everything. Trump left office a seditionist, a crooked traitor who betrayed the country in a dozen slovenly ways, but that was only after incompetently handling a national crisis to the tune of half a million deaths. But this was a crowd of Republicans willing to support such a traitor; while many of them likely had family members who died in large part because this buffoon refused to support even masking, much less other protections, those family members are long forgotten. What is important is that the shit-skulled traitor be properly cheered.

We moved on to, of course, demands that those who were not seditionist traitors be locked up.

We’ve reached the first lock her up chant pic.twitter.com/LbqlWjeCky

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 9, 2022

While glorifying Trump's own acts to overthrow the government.

Trump: You know the biggest crowd I’ve ever seen? January 6th pic.twitter.com/2rG8xZZeIR

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 9, 2022

A bit of fever dream was added in, as the traitor's mind wandered to his more current problems:

"George H.W. Bush took millions of documents to a former bowling alley and a former Chinese restaurant where they combined them. So they're in a bowling alley slash Chinese restaurant." -- Trump pic.twitter.com/T7sF52ilt2

— Howard Mortman (@HowardMortman) October 9, 2022

But Trump took time out of his own fascist delusions to promote a foreign dictatorship. The Republican Party has fetished murderous Russian kleptocrat Vladimir Putin, even as Putin faces the world exposed as a fraud, a thug whose reign has so decimated his country that his own military has collapsed from the corruption. Ukraine is currently routing Russian armies, threatening to take back Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia for nearly a decade.

Trump, who consistently sought to undermine Ukrainian sovereignty at every turn during his time in office for reasons we can still only speculate on, took a moment to promote new Russian demands that Ukrainians halt their destruction of the army that sought to occupy them.

Putin wants an immediate negotiation because he is losing and wants to stop the Ukrainian offensive before they take back more of the land Russia has illegally seized. Interesting that Trump again advocates the Putin position. And of course says nothing critical about Putin. https://t.co/EQvVqC5OdU

— Max Boot 🇺🇦🇺🇸 (@MaxBoot) October 9, 2022

Republicanism is hardening into a fascist movement steadily, and with no significant pushback. In just one event we see assertion of white supremacy, a barrage of false propaganda meant to glorify the movement and deny its failures, the now-omnipresent contempt for book-learning in all its forms, the glorification of violence to assert party dominance, assertions that the nation can be saved only if the party itself administers its elections, and the seeds of likely future violence. The party became a fascist party when it backed the January 6 coup attempt, both on the day itself and for these two long years afterwards as it both obstructed all attempts to investigate Trump's actions during the coup and glorified, to their base, the alleged patriotism of the seditionists themselves.

We are now at the point where the movement believes even state national security secrets do not belong to the state, but belong to Donald Trump personally, by the rules of finders keepers. It is fascist, fascist, fascist. Look at the crowd, in those images. They are proud to be white supremacists, to rally around hoaxes, and to back the attempted overthrow of their own government. They are having so much fun, as they cheer for it all and hold up their pre-made signs.

Sign the petition: Stop Republican sabotage of the election process

Trump and his followers proved on Jan. 6 how dangerously close they came to overturning our democracy. Help cancel Republican voter suppression with the power of your pen by clicking here and signing up to volunteer with Vote Forward, writing personalized letters to targeted voters urging them to exercise their right to vote this year.

37 Years And 7 Tours In The Military, And All We Get Is Our President Calling Us Extremist Fascists?

My husband and I consider ourselves ordinary people. We rent a 3 bedroom town home and pay our taxes. We raise our children as best we can, and my husband homeschools our 6-year-old daughter. My husband is an artist, and I am a writer and content creator. 

What makes us extraordinary is the cumulative 37 years of service to our nation. My husband was in the Air Force for 17 years, and I retired last year from the Air Force after 20 years and 8 months of service.

We both deployed numerous times to various locations, including Afghanistan.

We both saw varying levels of combat, including gunfights, explosions, enemy detention facility riots, and death on a scale that words cannot do justice.

And for all that sacrifice, we were treated to our President calling us extremists. 

How Could You?

My husband and I often joke that if it wasn’t for the defense issues, we’d probably be Libertarians versus Republicans. We believe that government rarely fixes anything and that government should stay out of social issues and trust in the people to innovate and know what is best for themselves and their families.

We voted for Donald Trump both times. The first time I voted for him was because there was absolutely no way I could vote for Hillary Clinton. Still, for the sake of word count and my editor’s sanity, I’ll just drop one big reason: Benghazi.

I voted for Trump the second time because while I didn’t care for the tweets, and I personally think he often lacks class, I do believe that President Trump had done wonders for the economy pre-COVID, and I liked his fresh take on Foreign Policy.

Besides, Joe Biden is an establishment politician who I believe is disingenuous. I feared he would bend to the will of his more dare I say it… extreme left members of his party.

RELATED: Trump Has Perfect Response To Biden’s ‘Enemies of the State’ Speech Attacking MAGA Republicans: ‘He Must Be Insane’

How Dare You

So we voted for Trump twice. Does that make us “MAGA Republicans?” I don’t think so because, personally, I think the term is stupid.

We are Republicans. I think the President believes, along with the elite members of his party who like to tout inclusion and civility, that we are too dumb to know that when they say MAGA Republicans, they really mean all Republicans.

I was still in uniform when January 6th happened. I was so upset by what I saw on TV; I felt like the air had been sucked out of my chest. I would only feel this sick feeling one other time while watching the botched withdrawal in Afghanistan.

My husband and I spent large chunks of our young adult lives in Afghanistan. We were lucky; we came back alive with all our appendages. But, unfortunately, many of our friends didn’t come back or left parts of themselves behind. 

Are we extremists? No. We know what an extremist looks like. We are well acquainted with what an extremist is capable of. We didn’t leave parts of our bodies in Afghanistan, but parts of our minds will never leave. 

Men and women like us have PTSD at various levels thanks to the extremism we witnessed at the behest of politicians. How dare you, Mr. President, call us extremists.

RELATED: Biden Called for Ending ‘Uncivil War.’ Now Calls GOP ‘Threat to Democracy’

With Honor and Distinction

My husband and I are ordinary people who sacrificed our young adult lives in an extraordinary act by swearing an oath and wearing the uniform with pride. We served with honor and distinction, following lawful orders of those appointed over us and representing the best of what our country has to offer.

When you deploy to a war zone, you put your life on hold. Relationships and family plans get put on pause, your education goals often get put on hiatus, and no one who hasn’t done it can ever fully understand what you miss when you are away from home for so long. 

For the families we leave behind; the wives, husbands, and children – their lives must continue without you. They have to learn to live day-to-day events without your presence. And when we return, they have to relearn how to live with you back in their lives. 

My husband and I aren’t the only veterans who voted for Donald Trump. We aren’t the only veterans that the Commander-in-Chief called extremists last night. 

Shame on you, Mr. President.

RELATED: MAGA Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene Calls For Biden’s Impeachment Following ‘President Butterbeans’ Divisive Speech

The Truth

I didn’t want to just say what I believe in this piece. While I’m the writer in my family, my husband is also a veteran and had some thoughts about last night.

We both acknowledge that there are bad actors who are Republicans who are extremists. Just as there are bad cops, bad teachers, bad soldiers, there are bad Republicans. 

But my husband said to me last night while we were watching our President call us extremists:

“What about the extremists in his party? Will he call them out too?”

What is my husband referring to? The Democrats who advocate for abortion up to birth. The Democrats who advocate for parents to be cut out of the education of their children. Democrats who advocate for violence against Supreme Court Justices. Democrats who celebrated the Summer 2020 BLM riots. 

That is who my husband is referring to. My husband and I don’t believe all Democrats are extremists, evil, fascists, or any other terrible blanket moniker floating around. But not calling out both sides makes you a hypocrite, Mr. President, and is part of why we didn’t vote for you.

Who We Are

My husband and I are ordinary people. We love our country, we love our family, and we believe in something greater than ourselves. 

We are two people that want to raise our kids in peace, teach them to be critical thinkers who contribute to society, and perhaps serve in some way as service to something greater than yourself teaches you about sacrifice, duty, and resilience.

We are two people who have had family members disown us because of our political beliefs. Yet, we are two people who spent decades sweating, bleeding, and crying with one of the best families you can ever sign onto…our brothers and sisters in arms.

We are Republicans. We are Americans. We are Patriots. 

And you, Mr. President, should be ashamed of yourself. 

Now is the time to support and share the sources you trust.
The Political Insider ranks #3 on Feedspot’s “100 Best Political Blogs and Websites.”

The post 37 Years And 7 Tours In The Military, And All We Get Is Our President Calling Us Extremist Fascists? appeared first on The Political Insider.

MAGA Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene Calls For Biden’s Impeachment Following ‘President Butterbeans’ Divisive Speech

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called on President Biden to be impeached following his speech Thursday night in which he vilified “MAGA Republicans” as extremists and a “threat to this country.”

“Joe Biden just declared all of us enemies of the state. Biden is a danger to us all,” she tweeted from her official account. “Joe Biden must be impeached!”

Greene was incensed over the President’s remarks, posting various tweets in which she mocked Biden as “President Butterbeans” and compared the speech – including the blood red lighting behind him – to that of Hitler.

“They chose this imagery. It’s unreal,” she seethed. “Joe Biden is Hitler.”

That tweet included the hashtag ‘#NaziJoe.’

RELATED: Trump Has Perfect Response To Biden’s ‘Enemies of the State’ Speech Attacking MAGA Republicans: ‘He Must Be Insane’

Marjorie Taylor Greene Wants Biden Impeached

In another social media post, the firebrand congresswoman shared a video in which Biden’s speech is altered to look like Hitler speaking in front of Nazi imagery.

“What we all saw tonight from Biden,” Greene wrote.

“I guess when President Butterbeans is frail, weak, and dementia ridden, the Hitler imagery was their attempt to make him look ‘tough’ while he declares war on half of America as enemies of the state.”

Just to be clear, it’s not real. I know that’s a ridiculous statement to have to make, but we also know full well the fact-checkers are going to write a column clarifying that Biden does not have a mustache and did not deliver a speech in German.

Biden, during his speech, did however declare that “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”

“There is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country,” he added.

RELATED: Marjorie Taylor Greene Picks A Fight With ‘Never Trumper’ Cheney On The House Floor: ‘You’re a Joke!’

Biden Just Declared War on Half of America

President Biden’s speech was such an authoritarian production that criticism was everywhere.

Ohio Republican Senate nominee J.D. Vance accused Biden of “declaring war” on 74 million MAGA Republican voters.

“I just can’t imagine anything more divisive and more dangerous coming from a president who if he said anything during his campaign, it’s that he would unite the country,” Vance told Fox News. “This is not uniting at all. He’s declaring war effectively on half of the country.”

That’s saying something, considering Vance once viewed Donald Trump as either “a cynical asshole” or “America’s Hitler.”

Turns out – It was Biden all along.

Speaking of Trump, the main target of Biden’s divisive speech, he asked people to explain to the President what ‘MAGA’ stands for “slowly but passionately,” and suggested there were indications he was “suffering from late-stage dementia.”

Then there was this American hero who captured the thoughts of most sane people watching Biden’s speech.

This isn’t the first time Marjorie Taylor Greene has called on President Biden to be impeached. In fact, she’s one of only a few people with the stones to call for it every time he commits a heinous act, of which there have been many.

POLL: Should President Biden be impeached?

By voting, you agree to receive email communication from The Political Insider. Click HERE for more information.

Just over a year ago, Greene introduced three impeachment resolutions against Biden, one focusing on his deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan, another involving the crisis at the border, and one more pointing to his extension of an eviction moratorium during the pandemic.

Now imagine a speech like that was delivered by Trump instead of ‘Dark Brandon.’

How many Democrats today would be accusing Trump of being a fascist and calling for his impeachment? And the thing about the Democrats – they’d actually follow through on it.

What are Republicans going to do? Anything?

What Biden did last night was effectively call for a civil war in this country. He spoke from the standpoint of a true fascist. He did everything Trump has been accused of doing by the media.

And it’s nothing new. He’s been calling Republicans “ultra-MAGA” for some time. He essentially called people who wanted kids unmasked and to be able to attend school in person Neanderthals. He launched his Justice Department against parents by equating them to ‘domestic terrorists.’

Biden should be impeached. It should have happened a long time ago. But it better happen if Republicans take back the House.

Now is the time to support and share the sources you trust.
The Political Insider ranks #3 on Feedspot’s “100 Best Political Blogs and Websites.”

The post MAGA Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene Calls For Biden’s Impeachment Following ‘President Butterbeans’ Divisive Speech appeared first on The Political Insider.

Meet the new dark money Republican hoax and troll group, ‘Citizens for Sanity’

One of the hallmarks of the Steve Bannon era, and the Tucker Carlson era, the Rudy Giuliani era, and God help us all we could keep going with that for another hour if nobody reined us in, was the seemingly omnipresent political question: Are American voters really dim enough to fall for that? "That" has been a take-your-pick selection of some of the weirdest conspiracy theories and paranoias to ever have campaign money put behind them, but the answer has always seemed to be: Yes.

Yes, there is literally no invented paranoia too ridiculous for some segment of the jus' folks Republican base to refuse to latch on to. You say Central American drug cartels are working with Al Qaeda to ship dangerous sex toys to Walmart store basements? This requires immediate action! Why are Democrats letting this happen? Why are our national newspapers not up in arms about this? Why yes, I will donate $20 to your campaign or interest group so that you can bring us more news about the Al Qaeda Sex Toy Caravan!

You might remember, as one example, that Texas Republicans—the sort of people who willingly elect Louie Gohmert to office, and more than once—became convinced during the Obama years that a multistate military exercise used to test and train our large-scale military operations capabilities, dubbed by the Pentagon as Jade Helm, was secretly a plot by the federal government to take over Texas and turn it into, uh, part of America. Republicans showed up at town halls seething about these things. The state's Republican officials put out stern warnings insisting that they were on the lookout for this sort of thing, so if any Texas law enforcement folks saw any suspicious pro-Obama annexation happening, by gum there would be trouble.

No, really. State officials had to "address" this and everything.

So yeah, something we've learned over the years is that the more conservative an American is, the more willing they are to believe absolutely anything you throw at them. You say caravans, they believe caravans. You say "Obama's gonna annex Texas" they believe Obama's gonna annex Texas. They might not know what a single damn word of it means, but they will make it a core part of their identity and howl in heavily armed outrage at anyone who doesn't believe it as much as they do.

Conservative dark money groups have taken to weaponizing that paranoia, and that brings us to the current moment. A Politico story reports that a dark money group calling itself Citizens for Sanity—this is a very Washington, D.C., thing, this naming convention of picking a name that openly throat-punches the premise of the underlying thing being sold—will supposedly be spending "millions of dollars" on what amounts to a trolling campaign.

A trolling campaign aimed just as much at their own base as on anyone else, mind you: The group is targeting allegedly out-of-control "wokeness" and the terrible "woke" radicals who are threatening America with it. The first John Brabender-produced ad, reports Politico, envisions a terror-filled future in which a transgender athlete wins a sporting event.

Because yes, that's the sort of thing that will get Republican base voters worked up. Republican voters are not smart. They are extremely not smart. They are to smart what yogurt is to bridge construction. The Republican base quite literally does not care about 1 million pandemic deaths. They believe climate change is a hoax perpetrated against them by nerds. They would rather live in a post-coup fascist dystopia than pay an extra 20 cents for gas, and will tell you so to your face.

Tell them that transgender athletes are coming to win all the sporting events, thus somehow leading to America annexing Texas, you'll have these beer-burping twits out waving guns in front of government buildings in three minutes flat. Conservative campaign groups love these voters. They can be controlled with a piece of cheese on a string. Come up with even the most bizarre scenario in which a conservative talk radio listener or Fox News watcher might be expected to show a bare amount of public decency and out come the guns. Convince them that the history book mention of Fredrick Douglass on page 174 is a conspiracy to make children “woke” and they'll be dry-humping whatever politician vows to defeat that evil scheme.

Yogurt. Bridges.

So this is how unknown rich assholes will be spending their money in the months before the midterms, and we don't know which rich assholes because nobody wants their name attached to what amounts to a(nother) bottomlessly cynical professional hoax-producing outfit. Maybe it's the MyPillow guy. Maybe it's the Uline guy. Maybe it's some stadium owner, maybe it's that same group of half-dozen wealthy fascists that has been trying to overturn democracy ever since people started muttering that they should pay their damn taxes already. It's purely a trolling effort, with billboards—and, if Politico is to be believed, this is actually real—with fake slogans plastered on them like "Protect Pregnant Men from Climate Discrimination," and, "Open the jails. Open the borders. Close the schools. Vote progressive this November."

It's a multimillion dollar troll campaign, and the people being trolled aren't just conservatism's many supposed cultural enemies, but Republican voters themselves. If you want a conspiracy theory to panic over, here’s one: Republicans have spent the last five decades trying to sabotage both education and journalism, and now that a significant percentage of the U.S. population has yogurt for brains and couldn’t decipher a two-box flowchart if their lives depended on it, the party intends to capitalize on the effort by rousing the yogurt-brained as the driving force of electoral politics.

Forget about the coup attempt and the deaths in the U.S. Capitol. Forget about the Republican domestic terrorism, the new laws giving party lackeys the power to overturn election results, the million pandemic deaths, the two impeachments, the national security documents found stuffed into rooms at Mar-a-Lago. Forget about your abortion rights. If you abandon Republicanism just because of that stuff Republicans are doing, our dearly gullible Republican voters, criminals will run amuck, men will demand pregnancy rights, and children will be allowed to participate in sporting events without local party officials looking down their pants.

The premise of Citizens for Sanity: "Forget everything we've done, all you yogurt-brains. Instead, here are 50 new conspiracy theories. Just pick whichever one you want and go with it, we really don't care."

Once again: Republicanism is reliant on hoaxes. It is now how they campaign, and how they govern, and how they try to evade responsibility for even criminal acts. Not just the dark money groups, but individual campaigns are now centered around "The 2020 elections were secretly rigged against Trump," or, "The entire American education system is actually a trick perpetrated on the country by woke anti-racist groomers." Hoax-based gibberish is now the basis of all of Republicanism.

And we're left once again wondering: Will it work? How much will it work? What percentage of conservative voters, after turning their own brains to absolute mush by watching pro-fascist conspiracy programs propped up by the Murdoch family for just a bit more wealth, will vote to ignore the abortion debate, Florida's future coastlines, the future inhabitability of large parts of the Republican-held South, the return of polio, and an economy that's no longer collapsing because they are absolutely convinced a secret plot by "woke" people will destroy the country if they don't keep voting for the party that turns everything it governs to crap?

Donald Trump’s next-term promises are a laundry list of fascist ideas

The Washington Post has a roundup of Donald Trump's most recent dystopian visions of what his theoretical second term might look like—if we assume that America just moves on from that whole violent militia-assisted end of democracy thing; the requests to state officials to fake their election totals; and the squirreling away of "highly classified" security secrets to a room in Spytown, USA, otherwise known as Donald Trump's Florida golf club.

His proposals range from petty to just plain crooked, and from impossible to fascist. Since there seems to be no great urgency to put the treasonous coup-plotter and document thief in handcuffs anytime soon, however, we've got time. So, sure. It's a bit like publicly debating Al Capone's gardening skills, but whatever. Let's take a look at the Post's six identified planks in whatever the hell Donald Trump thinks he's building up to.

"Execute drug dealers"

This is a retread. Trump had a pathetic fascist crush on Philippines strongman Rodrigo Duterte from the first months of his presidency, specifically for his "unbelievable job" in the extrajudicial killings of anyone in his country suspected of drug sales. A year into his term, he was already pushing to copy the Duterte approach.

But he didn't do it. He couldn't do it. There's a whole government in the way of plans like, "What if we impose the death penalty for Eric's cocaine dealer while eliminating all penalties for selling nuclear secrets to Russia?” We know Trump was just itching to kill people because, once William Barr landed in the attorney general spot, the administration started executing death row prisoners like it was a new Trump team sport. But it's already looking like much of Trump's would-be new presidential campaign will be based on pointing out that he was a colossal failure at getting the big-ticket fascist stuff done the first time around. So vote for him again!

"Move homeless people to outlying 'tent cities’"

Again, this is just his standard real-estate tycoon fixation on property values and how all these poor people around here are lowering them. He famously complained about unhoused people outside expensive buildings. The "people in those buildings pay tremendous taxes," but "all of a sudden they have tents. Hundreds and hundreds of tents and people living at the entrance to their office building," he ranted back in 2019.

So his solution to poor people ruining rich people's office building experiences is, of course, concentration camps. In Donald's America, you'll be able to call a hotline to report a disheveled person on the sidewalk outside your place of work, and authorities will come to take that person away to the "outer skirts of the various cities" where they can get the tent-based care they need.

"You don't have time to build buildings, you can do that later," he opines.

Concentration camps for the Americans wealthy property owners don't want to see. I'm mostly curious as to how the democracy-hostile and fascism-curious current Supreme Court would justify that brazenly creep-ass-strongman proposal. There's little doubt that Justice Samuel Alito would reach back to 1600s Britain to assert that, actually, there are 400 years of history that says wealthy people can imprison whoever the hell they want.

"Deploy federal force against crime, unrest, and protests"

Yeah, been there before. The Lafayette Square approach to policing: If regular law enforcement is encumbered by too many rules restricting who they can use violence against and for what reasons—and heaven knows American law enforcement is famously reluctant to use violence against people who aren't doing actual crimes—then call up your hand-picked attorney general and have them send some prison riot teams to crack skulls. Or, of course, the National Guard.

Fascism, then. Republicanism has been going here for a long time. Sen. Tom Cotton and Bill Barr and innumerable state Republicans with strong opinions about protesters have been so noisy in advocating that those who protest against the regime be met with a military or paramilitary response that Trump's not breaking any new ground here. Yeah, he wants to be able to hurt and kill protesters. It's one of his big things.

It was also a central part of his coup plans; the Trump coup team hoped that Mike Pence could be convinced to throw the election into chaos, upon which time Trump would declare emergency powers under the Insurrection Act to snuff out whatever protests of the stolen election developed, and/or use the military to literally seize the voting machines. A fully fascist plan. Trump is still pissed that it didn't work.

"Strip job protections for federal workers"

Yeah, that's a pretty banal subhead for Trump's actual proposal here. Trump and his fascist allies (see: Ginni Thomas) have long been enamored with the notion that whenever one of Captain Bigbrain's ideas lands with a thud, or whenever the U.S. Constitution and other laws prevent Captain Bigbrain from doing something—like executing drug dealers on sight or putting disheveled-looking people in government camps—Trump's failures were actually because of a "deep state" conspiracy to make him fail. Ginni Thomas, coup supporter, is all about this theory. And Trump, in his first term, focused obsessively on firing any government official or watchdog who reported his possible crimes, undercut one of his favored lies, or was unwilling to assist in corrupt acts.

It's not just Trump; it’s all of his orbiting Republican allies who propose a new solution that would solve many of their past problems with, you know, being caught doing illegal stuff. They want the ability to fire any government worker they want to, through the entirety of the federal government. No more rules preventing presidents from wholesale firings to clear out entire agencies so that their own sycophants can be installed into every last role.

So, fascism again then. This is basically the Russian model as well; in Vladimir Putin's Russia, all jobs are allocated not according to competence or expertise but by loyalty. Putin rewards his most reliable sycophants with the most powerful jobs, which each loyalist then uses to siphon as much money as possible into their own accounts; those sycophants, in turn, hire only those willing to help them in their corruption, in exchange for their own corrupt schemes being overlooked, ad nauseam all the way through government.

In a government based on willingness to overlook corruption, corruption becomes the primary task of government. When an emboldened and sycophantic-to-the-point-of-delusion Russia declared a new war of conquest, it turned out much of Russia's military had simply ceased to meaningfully exist. The food the troops were to bring with them consisted of long-expired rations. Warehouses of materials turned out to be imaginary. From vehicle maintenance to secure communications plans, the money that was to be used to keep the military running had gotten siphoned away to the point of logistical collapse.

This is an absolute dream scenario for the likes of Donald J. Golfboy: A government in which he gets to do anything he wants, punish whoever he wants, and take whatever he wants, and a government that allows him to control who else gets similar spoils. And if it later turns out that all the crookedness has led the country to ruin, then who the hell cares, baby, because he got to be the one doing it.

It's also now standard-issue Republicanism. From the first impeachment onward, the party declared en masse that Republican leaders could absolutely do crooked things and get away with it. Republican Party rhetoric, both from the party itself and individual lawmakers, is currently centered on vows of revenge against whichever government agents, witnesses, or whistleblowers dared to catch Trump doing yet another crime. This has been the theme of Republican governance for a decade: Find the names of those who testify to Republican corruption. Expose them. Eliminate them.

"Eliminate the Education Department"

Right, the revenge-for-segregation thing that's animated the right for a half-century. Trump doesn't give a damn, he's just jumping on the latest bandwagon. Some hack wrote this into his speech, and he said it, and it got applause from the angry racist base, so he's probably going to say it some more. Didn't do it the first time around. Was willing to attempt a coup that resulted in deaths, but wasn't able to do that. Because it would require work. Lots of work. Donnie Two-Scoops does not do work.

"Restrict voting to one day using paper ballots"

Ha ha ha ha ha—yeah, uh, again, it's more than just that. Donald Trump, supergenius big-brain uberdude from planet Golfcheat, convinced himself the election machines were all rigged against him in order to block out any hint that maybe America just wanted to scrape him out of the Oval Office because they didn't like him. He convince himself absentee ballots were all rigged against him for the same reason. And that there was a conspiracy by elections officials. And China. And possibly Italy, and a dead South American guy, and Hillary Clinton, and the guy who designed the ramp that Donald Trump once had to gingerly inch down, tarnishing his big-muscle superguy image.

Trump wants to get rid of voting by mail, obliging everyone to vote at the polling places. Republicans, historically, have made a game of under-allocating booths and staff to polling places in Democratic-majority districts, making it far more difficult (or even impossible) to vote if you're in one of those blue places. Republicans used to love voting by mail because their base skews much older and is less mobile; they now absolutely hate mail-in ballots because, during the pandemic, there was a surge of pandemic-conscious younger voters who took advantage of the same system—which erased, and then some, what Republicans thought was a built-in party advantage. So now it’s gotta go; it can’t be controlled, Republicans have learned, the same way physical polling places can be controlled.

Oh, and Donald Trump thinks it's a conspiracy against him if the person who's leading in the first released results loses that lead in later counts. And he thinks it's a conspiracy against him if the counting isn't done before he gets sleepy and wants to go to bed.

Oh, and Trump's Republican "Big Lie" believers want every ballot to be hand-counted. Hundreds of millions. Gotta do it by midnight, though, or it's crooked. Whatever didn’t get counted by midnight is automatically crooked. No, we won’t be allocating any more counters to the job; that’s much too expensive.

Guess what: If Republicans accomplish all of this, and their latest Dear Leader figure still doesn't win, they're still going to say the vote was crooked. That's why Republican lawmakers in the various most-crooked states have already passed new laws giving Republican officials the power to challenge whatever vote totals they don't personally like, and the power to take over the ballot-counting in places that might produce such unpleasant results.

All of this has gone far beyond one man's uncontrollable narcissism. Trump didn't get the job the first time around because of his supposed promises or claims that he was smarter than every scientist, military general, and world leader on the planet. He got it because he was a mean, blustery asshole willing to spout more hate more openly than anyone else on the debate stage—and Republican voters absolutely love that stuff. They don't want good government; they want government that will punish their enemies while elevating their own paranoias.

Trump could drop dead tomorrow, and the "let's corral the poor into death camps" plank of Republicanism would probably wither away. But the Republican Party moves to take control of election counts, identify and fire government workers who are not loyal to the latest party proclamations,  and meet protests against them by sending in military forces to crush those protests? Those are here to stay.

That's standard-issue Republicanism now. All of the candidates will be promoting that. DeSantis, Hawley, Cruz, Graham, Cotton, McCarthy, Abbott—all of them. It's carved into the movement now, and there's no evidence it can be scraped back out. They happen across the fascist solutions to each of their problems, and adopt the fascist solutions as their answers.

As for how it got this way—how we got a base that no longer cared whether government functions, had no interest in policies or in facts but would instead eagerly identify with all of a narcissistic conman's most guttural burps of paranoia and anger—well, that's a different question. Ask the Murdoch family; they probably could run you through the whole history.

RELATED STORIES:

Top Republican candidates in some battleground states are running to overturn the next election

Republicans promise chaos and lawlessness if they get Congress back in November

Trump and his media allies are stoking a civil war

Trump breaks the law, so Republicans say it's the law that needs to go—and the agents who caught him

'We will not stand by and we will not stand down': Armed Trump backers protest at Phoenix FBI office

Trump breaks the law, so Republicans say it’s the law that needs to go—and the agents who caught him

The Republican reactions to Trump, ahem, being caught with highly classified nuclear weapons-related documents after asserting to federal agents he didn't have them continues, and as the facts worsen for Trump his pro-attempted-coup Republican allies are sliding towards the obvious endpoint. If a Republican leader commits a crime against the government, well then maybe that thing shouldn't even be a crime at all!

Rand Paul has been homing in on that one. He started out claiming that the FBI might have been planting evidence against Trump.

Rand Paul suggests the FBI may have planted evidence in boxes they seized from Mar-a-Lago pic.twitter.com/3yd6I9tlaa

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 10, 2022

Then we found out that it wasn't just any documents the government was hunting for, but classified nuclear weapons documents, and that among the potential criminal charges facing Trump was violations of the Espionage Act, so Paul had to revise and extend his hackery. If Donald Trump violated the Espionage Act, and the government has him dead to rights on that, it can only mean the Espionage Act is wrong. "It is long past time to repeal this egregious affront to the 1st Amendment," tweeted Paul.

It's not enough to merely suggest that the FBI is full of crooks who would plant evidence against Dear Leader, as addled Trump supporters throughout the country target FBI offices and individual FBI agents. No, if Donald Trump is caught with classified national security documents being stored in a room at his spy-riddled for-profit golf club, it is A Violation Of The First Amendment Itself to not let him keep them. Or to, you know, even look into it.

Good work, Rand. Can always count on you to jump off any rhetorical bridge you might come across. A First Amendment right to keep and sell classified nuclear secrets, sure, you stick with that one.

Rand Paul has always been a bit of a turd, piping up with sudden libertarian proclamations in between advocating for big government powers, but ... actually, I forget where I'm going with that. He's just a turd.

On Team Spy, however, Trump ally Peter Navarro isn't content with "let's just repeal whatever laws Donald Trump was caught violating." He wants you to know that Donald Trump was patriotically planning on patriotically leaking our nuclear secrets so that the American people can "get more jobs."

The video suggests that Navarro was on exactly as much cocaine as you think he was when suggesting this.

Peter Navarro says the documents Trump had should never have been classified in the first place, and Trump needed them to let the American people know what was in them so we can stay out of wars and get more jobs. pic.twitter.com/ZMRc7Eon9G

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) August 12, 2022

Got it? Donald Trump is a big-brain whistleblower who was going to out national nuclear secrets so that the United States would "stay out of wars." Then you'll all get jobs, America. Don't you want jobs?

Surely, we can all agree that Donald Golf Resort Trump, in between hosting Saudi golf tournaments and attempting to overthrow the United States government, only has the American people's best interests at heart. He wasn't going to trade those documents away for the right to build a new hotel in Saudi Arabia or in the center of Moscow. He was going to patriotically release that information for the good of everyone who congregates in midwestern diners.

It is not enough, say other Republicans, to merely erase whatever laws Donald Trump may have willingly broken. The Republican focus during two impeachment trials and during every other scandal during Trump's years was always on finding out who was trying to enforce laws Donald wanted to break, so that those people or government agencies could be punished good and hard.

That's why Trump and his lawyers released a their copy of the government warrant papers served at Mar-a-Lago with the names of the goverment agents involved left unredacted, which in turn immediately led to Trump's base hunting down information about the agents and, predictably, death threats. It's why Republicans followed up the release with a party-wide campaign accusing the FBI of being corrupt, which almost immediately led to an attack on FBI offices because of course it did.

By Wednesday the Republican message was already out, though. Sen. Rand Paul was only one of the Republicans whose immediate reaction to the raid was to parrot the Trumpworld insistence that whatever Bad Stuff the FBI might have found was, uh, actually planted there. Why, Dear Leader being caught doing a crime means it's time to gut the FBI, which every Republican knows has been corrupt this whole time!

The FBI has a long history of corruption that’s only grown over time - but these recent actions are the straw that broke the camel’s back. It’s time for Congress to bring the swamp to heel. pic.twitter.com/IR83QaAdP5

— Rep. Dan Bishop (@RepDanBishop) August 10, 2022

Don't just get rid of the laws Trump broke. Find out who found out he was breaking the laws, call them corrupt, release their public information, and shutter their whole agencies if we have to. All hail Dear Leader, and so forth.

Obviously, catching Donald Trump with nuclear weapons secrets in the basement of his spy club means that the sitting attorney general also has to go. That's just common sense.

GOP strategist: Trump has to be indicted or Merrick Garland has to resignhttps://t.co/UiDw3f3qgt

— Ryan Struyk (@ryanstruyk) August 14, 2022

Here's a tip: "GOP strategist" is not a news thing. CNN chose to host a "GOP strategist" despite the job of "GOP strategist" being, quite literally, strategizing how to best bullshit the American people with party-flattering spins on news events. It is not news; CNN, as a network, is reliant on booking partisan liars to mislead the public about current events in between news reports of what those current events actually are. Hosting professional liars is the core network strategy; it's cheap, it's assured to generate faux-"controversy," and you can be abso-tootly sure that party-paid propagandists will always, always be willing to show up. They own the suits, they know where the studio is, and they know how to look presentable on camera. Can’t say that about government records law experts.

But sure, this is all very bad news for Merrick Garland. The first former president to be caught stealing nuclear secrets is really putting Merrick Garland in a bind here, and if Merrick Garland doesn't want to be seen as overplaying his hand he either has to put Donald in prison or this or resign in shame.

Sure, fine. Let's go with that. The dude who defended Trump through a list of half-dozen treasons and counting is going with it, so you know it's gonna be a (very stupid) thing. But we agree: If the Department of Justice can't see its way to prosecuting a very powerful figure caught dead to rights doing the sort of crime other people get decades in prison for, then it would certainly demonstrate Justice Department leadership isn't up to snuff. That's what you meant, right?

All right, so the Republican response is now morphing into one in which Trump violating the Espionage Act means we have to erase the Espionage Act, Donald Trump hiding nuclear weapons secrets in his for-profit golf club serves only as proof that Donald Trump was valiantly trying to save the American people by spilling those secrets, the FBI discovering that Donald Trump was lying through his crooked teeth when he claimed he didn't have the documents now requires a wholesale purge of the FBI for Their Unholy Audacity, and the attorney general who oversaw getting those papers back is now hopelessly politically compromised because he may have actually believed the bullshit we tell our schoolchildren about "nobody being above the law," which is not something the Republican Party has believed at any point in its modern history.

Fox host defends Trump’s handling of top secret documents: “President Nixon said, that if the president does it, that it is not illegal. Is that not truly the standard when it comes to classified documents?” https://t.co/xGTOhrP52O pic.twitter.com/ZXorS95AV4

— Media Matters (@mmfa) August 14, 2022

If you're going to eliminate whatever laws Donald breaks from now until his eventual McDonald's-caused death, plus whatever agents discovered the crimes, plus whatever agencies the agents belong to, plus the attorney general for having the audacity to believe he had any right to, for example, take classified nuclear documents out of Donald's golf club and for-profit wedding venue even if Donald didn't want him to, there's not much of America that's going to be left. You're undermining everything that counts as "rule of law," when people say "rule of law."

At some point you don't have a government at all, if you're getting rid of all the parts that might inconvenience Dear Leader during a crime spree.

Which, as it turns out, is what the pro-insurrection parts of Republicanism's violent base are again saying out loud. Republicanism is becoming indistinguishable from the threats of terrorism it fosters. And it's all because Republicans think that whatever Trump wants, whether it's stealing nuclear weapons secrets or staying in office despite losing an election, Trump should get.

RELATED STORIES:

Trump took classified docs and tried to hide them from investigators. His excuses don't hold water

'We will not stand by and we will not stand down': Armed Trump backers protest at Phoenix FBI office

Cincinnati FBI breach suspect is killed in shootout and identified as possible Jan. 6 participant

The complete guide to every excuse Republicans have made for Trump's theft of classified documents

As evidence of Trump’s coup plot grows, most Republican pundits are only shouting louder

The evidence that Donald J. Trump attempted to overthrow the United States government on Jan. 6, 2021 is overwhelming, and the House select committee tasked with investigating the coup has been remarkably effective in gathering and presenting it. It's a certainty that Trump gathered the crowd that day, that he was told many were armed, and that he specifically told them to "march" to the Capitol at the exact time Congress was meeting to acknowledge his election loss. His intent was to intimidate Congress into declaring the election invalid. He sat on his behind, watching television, watching the violence play out, and with a tweet attacking vice president Mike Pence specifically, egging it on. He refused to help until it had already been made clear that the violence had failed and both Congress and Pence were safe.

Trump is a stone-cold traitor surrounded by Republicans bent on toppling the government, and the effectiveness of the Jan. 6 committee's explanation of Trump's pathetic but still-violent plot has been enough to rattle anyone in conservative media not explicitly devoted to kissing Trump's ass. And that would be very good news—if the number of media conservatives who condemned the coup to begin with amounted to more than a handful. Everyone else in Republicanism is still riding the ol' fascist trolley, and anyone who thinks a fascist base is going to condemn a fascist leader for attempting to erase the rules preventing him from retaining power needs a refresher on what fascism actually is.

Is the conservative media turning against Trump, then? Not in any real numbers, no. What's changing right now is that some individual media figures are looking to cut Trump loose as too much of a liability even for Trumpism. Most of the movement is not that tactical, however, and those who supported the coup by promoting the invented hoaxes used to fuel it, and who immediately downplayed the deaths afterward—either with new hoaxes or by insisting that "most" of the crowd Trump gathered did not attempt to beat Capitol police officers to death in an effort to hunt down Trump's named enemies—are only shrieking those same hoaxes louder.

Campaign Action

In The New York Times, we get a run-through of so-called conservative reactions to the hearings and, surprise, it's all the usual garbage fire. Radio shrieker Mark Levin says that it wasn't a real insurrection because a real insurrection would have involved Trump arresting Mike Pence. Merely pointing an angry mob in his direction and telling them that Pence was the thing standing between them and victory doesn't count. There's Laura Ingraham, one of the Fox News hosts who thought the violence of the day was extremely bad when it was happening, and were begging the White House to call it off—but who immediately turned around to downplay the same violence to viewers, a process that has become rote whenever the network's hosts have found their own network rhetoric to be in too-close proximity to acts of domestic terrorism.

As for Tucker, what is there even to say? The perpetually whining brat remains as devoted to a fascist remaking of the country as fellow sociopath Steve Bannon, who Carlson hosted after Bannon was found guilty of criminal contempt of Congress. As the House select committee has held hearing after hearing, Carlson's show has gotten more and more vigorous in its condemnations of the committee's very existence.

Carlson's post-Trump-revelations show was a raging trash fire, an absolute parade of gaslighting with mockery for Pence's Secret Service team and every other law enforcement officer on the job that day:

Watch Tucker Carlson literally laugh at DC cop Michael Fanone saying he's "been left with psychological trauma and emotional anxiety" from the Capitol riots. Fanone was nearly beaten to death and suffered a heart attack! This is truly sociopathic behavior here. pic.twitter.com/VA2QN3Rk5T

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) July 28, 2021

Sociopathic? Maybe. But even back during his CNN days, Tucker Carlson had a thing for mocking injured people—he spent multiple such days sneering about a lawsuit filed after a child had been disemboweled by a poorly designed pool drain. That giddy cruelty is his own little schtick, and possibly the only aspect of his persona that carried over from "smug fraternity kid in bowtie" to "globetrotting white nationalist with penchant for anti-democratic strongmen."

At The Washington Post, Greg Sargent mulls the "fracturing" between those conservatives that are attempting to cut Trump loose and those who are not, and is correct in suggesting that the split is mostly for self-serving reasons.

Two editorials from far-right media kingpin Rupert Murdoch's possessions, in The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, are unambiguous in cutting Trump loose; Trump has proven "unworthy" for office, says the Post. Sargent cites Post newsletter-writer Olivier Knox to note that the split is perhaps between those who fancy themselves part of the D.C. establishment versus those whose public personas rely on demonizing that establishment.

Put more bluntly: As revelations mount about what Trump did not just to assemble the violent mob, but the acts he took to use the resulting violence in his bid to stay in power, it's every conservative pundit for themselves. The question in every pundit’s mind is whether Donald Trump is so damaged—or so close to being indicted—that the movement has to pry him loose and accept the damage.

Much of what passes for intellectual Republicanism still secretly despises Trump, as anyone with a brain and a pulse naturally should, and would absolutely love to cut the ineffectual, unpredictable blowhard away from his base so that the movement could be inherited by an equally mean-spirited but more competent new Dear Leader. From most Republican senators to the editors of the Journal, replacing Trump with a less buffoonish figure would be a dream come true.

For the vast majority of the "conservative" media, however, every possible off-ramp was passed by long ago. The whole point of the newly fascist movement is that their "enemies" are wrong, every investigation of wrongdoing by movement leaders is a fabrication meant to discredit them, and indeed the entire world is allied in conspiracy against them. The news is no longer even news, but a jumping-off point for adding another lie to the big pile.

Fox's Greg Gutfeld makes ridiculous claim that the January 6 hearings are “exonerating Trump”https://t.co/idqPuLxcXG

— Media Matters (@mmfa) July 25, 2022

You're not going to get career talking heads who staked themselves to the notion that four years and two impeachments’ worth of rampant Trump corruption was all a conspiracy by Republicanism's enemies to make the ridiculous public clown look bad to now reverse themselves. They became big-name pundit celebrities by claiming all Republicans are innocent all the time.

Nobody on the Fox News programs is struggling with the question, or doing any nighttime soul-searching on whether the new details of Trump's inaction should finally be the brick that walls him up forever in the mausoleum of failed leaders. Every paycheck for the last four years has been dependent on their own ability to feed their audience whatever that audience wants most to hear, and the Republican base most wants to hear unhinged conspiracy theories about how all of their non-white, non-conservative, non-straight, non-library-hating enemies all plotted to make it look like Trump is a nation-betraying pile of crap, even after far-right cartoonists spent all those years drawing him as conservatism's musclebound and perfect-postured savior.

Republicanism is a fascist movement. There's no getting around that at this point; the party is dedicated to pushing hoaxes and propaganda as a primary means of winning elections, and is especially focused on targeting all Americans who are not them as their enemies. The truth of whether or not Dear Leader incited a violent, armed mob to assault a joint session of Congress rather than abide an election loss is not important, because the Republicans of the House and Senate, the Fox News punditry, and the Republican base would all have absolutely supported Trump's move to seize power if it had worked.

If the mob had found and killed Mike Pence and Trump used the act to declare emergency powers, nullify the election, and remain parked in the White House, every Republican from McConnell to Graham to McCarthy to Sean Hannity would all be defending Trump's position as the only plausible path forward. It would only be "reasonable" for Trump to act to maintain the nation's "security," and if the loser of an election announcing themselves to be the winner has never been done before, at the presidential level, then it would still be declared better than the unrest that would transpire if law enforcement or the military tried to remove him from the building.

We've been here before. We've been here even during the impeachment process launched against Trump for this precise event. Terrible shame, the Republicans all said, but Congress having to flee a violent mob is hardly reason to put a negative mark down in a president's permanent political record. Now let us all move on to hunt down "critical race theory" in all its imagined forms.

Fascist pundits respect power (see: Viktor Orban) and mock perceived weakness (see: Capitol police officers unable to subdue the mob.) The coup attempt is still seen, by them, as a perfectly reasonable bit of politicking, and the main concern even when it was happening was not over whether their dear ally Donald Trump was a filthy violence-provoking traitor using hoaxes to overturn an American election but the optics that would result after it presumably failed. There's nobody on Fox News saying this should never happen again. They're saying it was no big deal to begin with, and why are our political enemies so obsessed with this.

The bad news for Trump is that even pro-fascist conservative pundits are likely to cut Trump loose in the near future. The movement no longer needs him. Anyone looking for promises of vengeance against non-whites, against LGBT children, against school librarians, against pandemic scientists or other movement enemies has a host of Republican governors who have been falling over themselves to prove they could lead such a movement. Florida's Ron DeSantis has literally been copying even Trump's mannerisms in his bid to detach Trump from his base and paste himself into its leadership.

Whether the base will go along is another matter, but ... they probably will. Again, fascist movements celebrate power and mock weakness; all a new leader has to do to beat Trump is belittle him in front of the base that coalesced around Trump specifically because they liked seeing people belittled. Trump's success in creating a movement that is utterly vapid will eventually be his own undoing; these are people with low attention spans. Their focus is on hurting their perceived enemies, not loyalty toward their perceived allies. Anyone who lets them express their constant bubbling rage will do.

Trump and his followers proved on Jan. 6 how dangerously close they came to overturning our democracy. Help cancel Republican voter suppression with the power of your pen by clicking here and signing up to volunteer with Vote Forward, writing personalized letters to targeted voters urging them to exercise their right to vote this year.

RELATED STORIES:

'Americans kneel to God': Trump advocates for Christian nationalism, hints at presidential run

Jan. 6 committee probes depths of Trump's dishonor in wildly revealing hearing

Cassidy Hutchinson's claims about Trump fighting to go to Capitol confirmed by multiple witnesses

Republicans increasingly viewed by Americans as the party of violence

Republican Tom Rice gives long interview, calls Trump some pretty bad names

Republican Rep. Tom Rice of South Carolina was one of the architects of the enormous tax breaks for the rich that the Republican Party passed during the Trump administration. While it was wildly unpopular and led almost entirely to further extremes in wealth inequality in our country, it may be considered the only piece of Republican legislation to actually be passed during all of the years the GOP enjoyed majority control under Trump. This, of course, is not good enough for the more fascist wing of the Republican Party, and after Donald Trump’s attempts to orchestrate a coup d’etat fell through, Rep. Rice found himself among the 10 Republican representatives who voted for his impeachment.

To be crystal-clear here: Rep. Rice is the only one of the 10 Republicans to vote for impeachment that also voted against certifying the results of 2020 election. He subsequently told reporters, months later, that while he still has reservations about the results of the presidential election, he regrets his anti-certification vote, and felt it was clear that “President Trump was responsible for the attack on the U.S. Capitol.” This means that in 2022, Rice is persona non grata among wannabe fascist henchmen like craven Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy and others.

Rice is facing a backlash and a Donald Trump rally-machine that has continued to call him a Benedict Arnold to the MAGA-Nazi movement. Trump has endorsed GOP primary candidates against Rice and has traded public jabs with him, with Trump calling Rice a “disaster” while Rice called Trump a “would-be tyrant.”

As a result of the orange-grey-haired elephant in the room, Rice has tried to remind his blood-red congressional district that he is the same misinformation-peddling anti-masker who has called COVID-19 the “Wuhan flu,” like every other racist shitheel in his Party. He has tried to remind everyone that he basically voted with Donald Trump all of the time and has done his part to vote with his fellow Republicans against popular legislation and emergency aid for front line workers. He even voted in support of Marjorie Taylor Greene to keep her committee assignments, in a showing of non-accountability for promoting blatantly white supremacist ideologies and conspiracy theories.

Listen and subscribe to Daily Kos Elections’ The Downballot podcast with David Nir and David Beard

Depending on whose polling you go by, the primary race for Rice’s 7th Congressional District is going great for him … or his opponent. So Rice, like Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, has decided to lean into bashing Trump while attempting to remind the GOP’s base that Donald Trump is just the bluntest version of what Rice and the rest of the Republican Party have always been.

On Sunday, Rep. Rice did an interview with ABC News’ Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl to help promote himself, as well as further explain why Donald Trump is sort of a terrible person. The interview was a pretty softball one (you can watch below) where Karl attempts to paint Rice as some kind of maverick. It’s a bit embarrassing, honestly. That being said, Rice does a solid job of pointing out that Donald Trump did to try and orchestrate the overthrow of the government, and that when the Capitol building was being invaded by his followers and conspirators, Trump didn’t do a single thing to protect the legislative branch of the U.S. government. In fact, he didn’t even do anything to protect his own vice president.

“When he watched the Capitol, the ‘People's House,’ being sacked, when he watched the Capitol Police officers being beaten for three or four hours and lifted not one thing or to stop it -- I was livid then and I’m livid today about it,” Rice recalled. “And it was very clear to me I took an oath to protect the Constitution.”

Rice also points out that while Donald Trump has publicly called him a “disaster” who lacks the respect of his fellow GOP operatives, he was a good little foot soldier to the Donald, until he wasn’t: “If I am a ‘disaster,’ and a ‘total fool’ and I voted with him 169 times out of 184, what does that make him? I was following his lead.”

Here is where we see the limitations of the modern Republican Party, and more specifically, the neocon wing of the Party that is hoping to retain control while waiting for Trump to pass. Rice told ABC News that he hopes Trump does not run for office again. But his hope has nothing to do with what’s good for the country. It’s not simply because Trump is, in Rice’s words “ a narcissist, and he’s driven by attention, and he’s driven by revenge.” It isn’t because Trump should be in jail or on trial for treason, but because “We’ll [the GOP] get painted more in the corner of extremism, they'll try to label us as extremist. And he’ll feed that.”

Asked about whether or not he would support a Kevin McCarthy speakership if the GOP took majority control of the House in November, Rice was equally mushy-mouthed, saying, “We’ll see what happens.”  

RELATED STORIES:

Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day: Tom Rice- 2021 Update

Republican who doesn't wear mask on floor of the House announces he and his family caught COVID-19

A lonely Republican: Tom Rice says he regrets voting against Biden certification

In leaked audio, Sen. Lindsey Graham calls Biden ‘maybe the best person to have’ as president

Let it be known that during a brief, ephemeral moment when Donald Trump sycophant Sen. Lindsey Graham momentarily gained a conscience and understood just how horrific the Jan. 6 insurrection provoked by Trump's lies really was, even he expressed relief that Joe Biden would soon be taking office and sending Trump back to the toxic swamp from which he came.

"We'll actually come out of this thing stronger," Graham told reporter Jonathan Martin in a recording only being released by Martin now to goose publicity for his new book. "Moments like this reset. It'll take a while."

Martin probed Graham on his optimism: "And Biden will be better, right?"

"Yeah, totally," responded Graham. "He'll be maybe the best person to have, right? I mean, how mad can you get at Joe Biden?"

Yeah, we're all just going to have to let that sit there for a while. It turns out that Lindsey Graham is just as wrong about the actions the Lindsey Graham of the future will take as he is about everything else. What followed next was indeed Graham's predicted "reset," but it was he and his closest allies who did the resetting. In the immediate aftermath of the attempted coup, numerous Republican House and Senate leaders expressed horror at the violence Trump had unleashed and privately vowed to cut him loose, or at least think real hard about cutting him loose. House minority leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy was among those to float either removing Trump as unfit for office or asking for his resignation.

But then Republicans "reset," and not only returned to rally around Trump but to publicly dismiss the severity of the violent coup, to near-unanimously once again support Trump during his impeachment trial, and indeed to flit to Trump's Florida crime laboratory to publicly polish his boots. (A fun thing to think about: McCarthy and all the other Republican visitors presumably not knowing, during their Mar-a-Lago trips, that inside a private room sat boxes of documents Trump had stolen from the government, some of them highly classified. Or maybe Trump was handing them out as party favors.)

And Graham bungled his prediction even worse when he supposed that nobody could get too mad at the incoming Joe Biden. Republicans quite swiftly pivoted back into lying about Biden outright, and Biden's every new proposal was met with bulging Republican eyes as lawmakers declared him to be the real "fascist."

Graham and the others weighed an attempted coup against proposals to hike corporate tax rates or speed the transition away from fossil fuels and decided that they preferred the coup. So here we are—except, now, with Republican state legislatures and Republican Party functionaries all hurriedly scribbling up new rules allowing the precise methods Trump attempted for his coup, evidence-free declarations that some communities should not have their votes counted paired with new Republican means of overturning elections if the votes do not go their way, to go forward with less resistance next time around.

In Graham's case the motives for flipping from outrage to coverup may be simpler than most. Graham himself was one of the Republicans to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to alter presidential vote totals in the state, backing the very Trump strategies that would soon consolidate into an attempted coup.

Yes, Lindsey Graham is a terrible person. Just terrible. This has been evident for years and was evident when he ditched his longtime ally Sen. John McCain to back Trumpism instead, and is evident every time he defends Republican sexual assaults, international crimes, or violent coup attempts with teary eyes and sneering contempt for the witnesses. He is a horrible, horrible, horrible person of the sort that Republicanism breeds; you cannot back Trumpism after all that has happened unless your devotion to horribleness surpasses every other ambition and personality trait.

So-called journalists who keep private these demonstrations that our elected officials lie constantly and grotesquely to us, exposing them only later when the quotes can be better monetized, aren't much better.

RELATED STORIES:

Audio: McCarthy weighed 25th Amendment for Trump in private after Jan. 6

McCarthy said he’d tell Trump to resign after Jan. 6. McConnell thought he’d be out, book reports

Kevin McCarthy is in large trouble with his fellow Republicans after more recordings released

Georgia DA impaneling special purpose grand jury for Trump investigation

Another book again confirms that Trump wanted the military to ‘just shoot’ BLM protesters

In news we already knew but now know more, er, knowingly, a new book by ex-Trump secretary of defense Mark Esper confirms that yes, Donald Trump really did want to "just shoot" Black Lives Matter protesters rallying near the White House during the 2020 protests. Specifically, Trump said he wanted the U.S. military to "beat the fuck" out of the protesters, and told Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Gen. Mark Milley and other top administration officials to "just shoot them" on several occasions. When Milley and then-attorney general Bill Barr resisted due to the blazing illegality of such an order and, let's assume, not wanting to spend the rest of their lives in prison on this bozo's behalf, Trump modified his proposal to "just shoot them in the legs or something?"

We knew these incidents had taken place because a previous book profiting off the slow death of democracy described them last year; Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender's 2021 book revealed them in similar detail, including Trump's demands to use military force, "beat the fuck" out of protesters, and "shoot them in the leg" or "maybe the foot."

That earlier book also gave us the heartwarming scene in which a fed-up Gen. Milley, tired of White House white nationalist Stephen Miller egging Trump on with claims that parts of the United States were now a "war zone" due to the protests, "spun around in his seat" and told Miller to "shut the fuck up, Stephen." There is no military medal awarded to generals who personally tell Stephen Miller to "shut the fuck up," but there ought to be. We're all perhaps a bit disappointed Milley didn't shoot Miller in the leg or "maybe the foot," but there you go. That's military discipline for you.

What Mark Esper's new book brings to the scene is confirmation by another participant that yes, all of this really did take place and they took place just as previous accounts said. Donald Trump wanted to use the military, and he specifically wanted to use the military to kill protesters or, after meeting resistance from the rest of his staff, shoot them "in the legs" so that they could no longer march against his self-imagined greatness. That Black Lives Matter protesters might have had a legitimate point to make never crossed his mind; that he, as president, was not allowed to simply murder protesters outright was something he struggled to understand even as the top officials who would have to order such murders tried to explain it to him.

Listen to Markos and Kerry Eleveld talk Ukraine and speak with Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler on how hitting back at Republicans helps win elections on Daily Kos’ The Brief podcast

Truly, the worst president ever. Possibly the worst human being ever, though that's a value judgment—and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is making his own bid for both positions, so Trump may last as America's Worst President for no longer than George W. Bush did before him.

The purpose of Esper's book is self-redemption. Esper was Trump's secretary of defense during a time, post-impeachment, when Trump was widely purging the U.S. government of anyone thought to be disloyal, felt newly emboldened after Senate Republicans immunized him from the consequences of a Watergate-plus sized campaign of political corruption, and was increasingly deemed by many to be dangerously unstable—as he would go on to prove at numerous points during the 2020 campaign and post-election, culminating in an attempted coup. Esper was one of Trump's enforcers, as Trump attempted to do to the military what he was doing everywhere else, only to be replaced after Trump's November election loss with the more-toadying Christopher Miller.

Whatever career Mark Esper once had before Trump appeared on scene is now well and truly gone; he will remembered now alongside William Barr and other Republicans who protected Trump through years of corrupt, self-serving, often-delusional, nation-harming behaviors only to write up books afterwards mumbling that they were Actually against all of the outright evil things all along, or were against at least some vanishingly small number of them, and ought to still be served in public restaurants and invited to Washington parties.

If a sitting president of the United States repeatedly—no, incessantly—asks his staff to do criminal things, anything from the political extortion of an at-war government to further a propaganda effort to requesting that Americans protesting against him simply be murdered, refusing to do the murder part is not bold. Trump's vast and wide-ranging ignorance made him an incompetent leader during every national crisis he was faced with. He could not grasp security briefings, forcing staff to include frequent mentions of him to at least keep him reading; he was so obsessed with self-promotion that he altered government hurricane maps and promoted the altered forecasts rather than admitting to a piffling Twitter mistake; his prescriptions for dealing with pandemic continuously did active harm to the nation, even as his lack of focus made more organized and sensible responses impossible.

All of this was a pattern and was being warned of, incessantly, both long before and during every winter day leading up to a Trump-led attempted coup. His own staff knew of his history of demanding illegal or corrupt actions—and, after his election loss, much of his stalwart-Republican staff helped him take those actions. Some, like chief of staff Mark Meadows, may have played a more pivotal role in attempting to nullify the election than the buffoonish Trump could himself even manage.

You do not get to say, "I worked for the man who soon afterward attempted to end United States democracy," and append "but was of course against the coup part," unless you can provide even a teaspoon of evidence of being "against" the government purges, political purges, manufacturing of hoaxes, flagrant daily lying, contempt for the American public, white nationalism, autocratic demands, and ingrained fascist beliefs that had been laying the groundwork for that outcome through Trump's whole long, crooked descent. There's now an entire cottage industry of hard-right Republican officials who helped Trump do extraordinarily bad and damaging things, but who are propping themselves up now on the pretense that, well, at least they did not support murdering protesters outright, or at least they did not support attempts to capture or murder Trump-opposed House and Senate leaders, or at least they did not help the rest of Trump's staff in schemes to declare that the vice president could scrub out the votes of whatever Americans he wanted to, in order to arrive at whatever election outcome the current leaders of government wished to announce.

You especially cannot respond to an attempt to overthrow democracy itself by demanding that Americans move on while your party allies write new election laws to get around the flaws of the first coup attempt and make a second one easier to muster. You don't get to say, "I am still a Republican," without adding, "even though the party both plotted an election-nullifying coup and is continuing to protect its plotters."

Take your books and shove them. Do something worthy of redemption before demanding it. William Barr, Mark Esper, the blizzard of propagandist-to-news-"analyst" career slides—Americans have every right to treat all of these people with contempt for their parts in normalizing horrific acts, bragging that they prevented even more horrific acts, and demanding the nation move on without any doled-out consequence or comeuppance. We've got library book bans now. We've got a party that has convinced the majority of American voters that our elections are illegitimate—based on a barrage of internet hoaxes and nothing more. White nationalism is now a party plank, such that even mentions of racism in American history are now fodder for public retaliation.

Stuff your books. Abandon your party or do your part to redeem it—or shut the fuck up, Stephen. Nobody has time to give you the attention you seek.