Category: RepublicanParty

Republicans who keep a finger on reality are finding out their voters have gone off the deep end

Posted on by David Neiwert

It’s becoming much clearer why Republicans in Congress are so reluctant to acknowledge factual reality—such as the reality that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election fairly, or that Donald Trump incited a mob that attacked Congress and ransacked the U.S. Capitol—and have doubled down on their embrace of anti-democratic disinformation that fueled the insurrection. If the Republicans dare admit any of it is real, they risk the insane wrath of the millions of GOP voters out there who have wholly swallowed all that false Trumpian propaganda.

That’s become especially self-evident among Republicans at the state and local levels throughout the country in the weeks since the Jan. 6 riot. As Hunter recently explained, the GOP at the ground level not only has fully embraced the conspiracist rot that Trump promoted after he lost, but it also has become even more openly extreme than it was before the election. Liz Cheney is now finding that out.

Whenever Republicans have made any gestures toward acknowledging either Biden’s win or Trump’s seditionist behavior, as The Guardian recently reported, voters at the state and local level have responded with outrage and threats.

“The evidence is overwhelming that local parties across the country, in blue states and red states, are radicalized and support extremely far outside the mainstream positions like, for example, ending our democratic experiment to install Donald Trump as president over the will of the people,” Tim Miller, former political director of Republican Voters Against Trump, told The Guardian.

“They believe in insane COVID denialism and QAnon and all these other conspiracies. It’s endemic, not just a couple of state parties. It’s the vast majority of state parties throughout the country.”

The list is long and worrisome:

  • Arizona: The state Republican Party reelected Kelli Ward last weekend. She’s a conspiracy-theory-promoting “Trump Republican” who unabashedly promoted the “election fraud” disinformation. Party officials also voted to censure Gov. Doug Ducey for certifying Trump’s loss in Arizona, along with Cindy McCain, the widow of Sen. John McCain, and former Sen. Jeff Flake, both for having supported Biden in the election.
  • Texas: The state Republican Party encouraged its members to follow them on Gab, the favorite social media platform of white nationalists, with a pro-QAnon conspiracy trope: “We Are the Storm.” Even after Biden’s inauguration, the party insisted that he had won fraudulently: “It took a global pandemic, a thoroughly corrupt media, and massive election irregularities for President Trump to be removed from office," the GOP said in a statement on its website.
  • Hawaii: The Hawaii Republican Party’s official account published a thread of tweets sympathizing with supporters of QAnon—dismissing the cult’s conspiracy theories that Democrats and media figures are secretly operating as global pedophilia ring, but arguing that adherents nonetheless were engaged in a form of patriotism. The same account also praised the “generally high quality” work of a Holocaust-denying YouTuber named Tarl Warwick, saying: “It is good to periodically step outside the ‘bubble’ of corporate commentators for additional perspective.” The party deleted and condemned the tweets; the communications official who posted them has resigned.
  • Oregon: The state’s Republican Party issued a lengthy statement stuffed full of conspiracy theories and disinformation condemning the 10 Republican members of Congress who voted to impeach Trump after the insurrection. It claimed “there is growing evidence that the violence at the Capitol was a ‘false flag’ operation designed to discredit President Trump and his supporters.” Some 23 Republican members of the state House repudiated the statement, noting that “there is no credible evidence to support false flag claims,” adding that such rumormongering had become a distraction.
  • Wyoming: State activists opened a campaign to “recall” Congressman Liz Cheney after she joined the Republicans voting to impeach Trump, and they have collected over 55,000 signatures. Ten county-level parties in the state voted to censure Cheney. A state senator named Anthony Bouchard announced a 2022 campaign against the congresswoman. The Wyoming Republican state party said "there has not been a time during our tenure when we have seen this type of an outcry from our fellow Republicans, with the anger and frustration being palpable in the comments we have received."
Matt Gaetz of Florida campaigns against his fellow Republican Congressman Liz Cheney in Wyoming.

Pro-Trump Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida even traveled to Wyoming to lead a rally attacking Cheney. "We are in a battle for the soul of the Republican party, and I intend to win it,” Gaetz told the rally.

The sentiments in Wyoming were deep and widespread. A Gillette woman named Shelley Horn started the Cheney recall petition, and told CNN: “You just can't go, 'Oh well, I need to vote with my conscience.' No! Vote for what your people put you in there to do. You're a Republican, you're supposed to back your party regardless.”

Trump supporter Taylor Haynes told CNN, "In my view, she's done in Wyoming." A poll commissioned by the Trump political operation purportedly showed the impeachment vote had hurt her popularity. “Liz Cheney's favorables there are only slightly worse than her father's shooting skills,” quipped Donald Trump Jr.

Other polls, however, supported the claim. A Jan. 27 McLaughlin poll that showed 70% of Wyoming voters believe the impeachment trial was unconstitutional; more than two-thirds disapprove of Cheney’s vote, and 63% say they are unlikely to vote for Cheney again.

Some longtime GOP figures defended her. Gale Geringer, a veteran Republican strategist, told CNN that Cheney showed "courage" in casting the Trump impeachment vote: "I don't underestimate the anger people are feeling right now. It's huge. And Liz Cheney has become the target of that anger, but I don't think she's really the cause of it. I think it's fear of what the Biden administration is going to do to Wyoming. We're petrified. Our entire economy, all of our jobs, our tax base has been threatened. And there's nothing we can do about Joe Biden for four years. But we can take that fear and anger out on Liz Cheney."

But Politico reporter Tara Palmieri tagged along with the CNN crew, and found it nearly impossible to find anyone in the state who wasn’t angry with their congresswoman. Her impression was that Cheney is in serious political trouble.

Honestly, it was hard to find anyone who would defend Cheney — and I really tried to talk to as many people as I could not at the rally. I stopped at a biker bar, a gun shop, a vape shop, a hardware store, a steakhouse, a diner, a dentist’s office and a pawn shop …

— At Harbor Freight Tools, when I uttered the name “Liz Cheney,” an employee behind the cash register hurled a threatening epithet. Then a beefy and tattooed supervisor, Torrey Price, 48, came over mad as hell. His mask hung below his nose when he told me, “I don’t think she spoke for Wyoming.”

Price never votes in primaries but said he will in August 2022 — to oust Cheney. He shared more of his thoughts: the election was stolen, the U.S. Capitol raid was staged, and the number of Covid deaths were grossly inflated. He and his colleague Joe agreed on all of these points, adding that they would not be getting the vaccine.

— At the Outlaw Saloon, I envied the way a recently vaccinated NYT reporter sauntered into the biker bar maskless, when earlier, a middle-aged DJ in a cowboy hat asked me for my credentials. Likely because there were only two masks in the bar — the one on my face and another on a table, with the words “political prisoner” printed in red. The guy who threw down that mask predicted the size of the rally against Cheney, telling me the night before, “I guarantee you there will be 600 people there.” I didn’t believe him.

— At the steakhouse, our comely waitress said “a lot of people are fired up” about Cheney. As a lifelong native of Wyoming, she said Cheney made a grave mistake by not representing the people of her state.

Palmieri concluded: “If there was any doubt this is still Trump’s Republican Party, my time in Cheyenne dispelled it.”

The push to embrace Trumpism is roiling other state Republican parties as well. In Wisconsin, where 15 Republican lawmakers signed a letter to Vice President Mike Pence the day before the Washington, D.C. riot urging him to postpone the certification, and two Republican congressmen from the state, Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Tiffany, objected to the electoral votes, the party is divided into two camps.

“The Republican Party right now is relatively divided, but it's not the traditional ideological divisions that used to be in place, as much as it’s between the sane and insane wings of the party,” RightWisconsin Editor James Wigderson told the Madison Capital Times. “I think that there’s a chance of a real fracture coming.”

Establishment Republicans such as former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, however, defended the Trumpists for their paranoia and embrace of partisan disinformation: “That is the perspective they have, that is the view that they have and it’s valid; you can’t say someone’s opinion of a subjective matter is invalid,” she said. “I mean, what gives us the right to judge someone’s opinion like that?”

In Michigan, where Republicans also embraced the “Stop the Steal” campaign prior to the insurrection, the impulse to maintain their embrace of Trumpism remains largely undiminished. The Allegan County Republican Party censured Congressman Fred Upton because he voted to impeach Trump.

“Not a lot appears to be changing. We have former Ambassador Ron Weiser (expected to be the new Michigan GOP chair) and Meshawn Maddock (expected to be Weiser’s co-chair),” WKAR politics reporter Abigail Censky observed. “(Maddock) led ‘Stop the Steal’ efforts in the state and was a key part of the kind of infrastructure to overturn the state’s election results, which we know from bipartisan clerks and expert testimony was a fair and safe and secure election. It’s interesting to see that that’s kind of beyond reproach still, and that, that leadership is still going to go into place.”

And in Georgia, Republican Party officials are grimacing at the wounds being inflicted on their voter-appeal operations by the presence of QAnon-loving Congressman Majorie Taylor Greene in the state’s delegation, as well as in the media as her multiple conspiracist pronouncements—such as her approval of lynching House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—have come increasingly to light.

“If you have any common sense, you know she's an anchor on the party. She is weighing us down,” said Gabriel Sterling, a Georgia Republican election administrator who criticized the baseless election conspiracy theories espoused by Trump and his supporters.

“Some people are saying maybe Nancy Pelosi will throw her out” of Congress, Sterling said. “The Democrats would never throw her out. They want her to be the definition of what a Republican is. They’re gonna give her every opportunity to speak and be heard and look crazy — like what came out Wednesday, the Jewish space laser to start fires. I mean, I don't know how far down the rabbit hole you go.”

The unhinged behavior and conspiracism is widespread. The Oregon GOP’s statement was rife with conspiracy theories, including a passage explaining why they viewed the Jan. 6 insurrection as a false flag operation:

Whereas this false flag will support Joe Biden plans to introducing new domestic terrorism legislation likely placing more emphasis on themes from post-9/11 Patriot Act such as allowing those charged with terrorism to be automatically detained before trial, outlawing donations to government-designated terrorist groups, allowing electronic surveillance of suspected terrorists, letting the government use secret sources in those trials, and perhaps new provisions such as codifying putting conservatives on a secret no-fly list without recourse to due process and restricting free speech, similar to the Sedition Act of 1798, which criminalized making “false statements” critical of the Federal government.

The peculiar combination of self-righteousness, persecution complex, and projection endemic to extremist conspiracism was omnipresent. Shelley Horn, the Wyoming petitioner, blamed Cheney’s impeachment vote for dividing the nation: “It’s just sows more hate and division,” Horn told the Cowboy State Daily, “and people are tired of it. Our country can’t stand much more.”  

As Zack Beauchamp observed at Vox:

It’s obvious that some of the party’s national leaders, like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, don’t actually believe in these conspiracy theories. But for too long, the party has been comfortable letting their rank-and-file supporters believe them because it’s politically advantageous. Now, true believers are rising up and capturing the leadership of state parties and local activist groups — putting pressure on national politicians to conform to extreme ideas or risk a serious primary threat.

This makes the GOP’s post-Trump trajectory look even scarier. No one person or organization is in charge of the party, in a position to fix the root causes of its continuing turn toward extremism. Reforming the party requires a fight on multiple levels and in multiple arenas: reforms to the local and national party, transformations of both the party and adjacent institutions like Fox News.

This is what Barack Obama adroitly describes as America’s “epistemological crisis.” It will not stop happening as long as there are news organs that traffic in falsehoods as a profit model, and who devote 24 hours a day, seven days a week of broadcast time to using those lies to coach half of the nation on how and why to hate the other half—and politicians gleefully profiting from it as well.

McConnell is terrified of Trump, but why isn’t he worried about a center-right Republican revolt?

Posted on by Mark Sumner

When Mitch McConnell gave a hint that—following that little thing where violent Trump supporters engaged in a deadly insurgency where they pushed aside police and went roaming the halls of Congress for congressional hostages—it might possibly, maybe, be okay to, just this once, hold Donald Trump accountable for inciting sedition, the response was simple. Trump broke out a few Patriot Party pins, hinting that he and his remaining followers might just slink away to some place where they were free to stage all the insurrections they liked without the pesky threat of someone wiggling The Finger of Concern. That was all it took to snap McConnell and crew back into line. Only five Republicans in the Senate were even willing to allow that impeaching Trump is constitutional, a question that is about as controversial as “is the sky blue?”

The ease with which Trump’s threat to shave some fraction of the party’s voters away generated boot-clicks (and licks), raises the question: Why doesn’t someone else do this? It’s possible to debate whether “sane conservative party” is an oxymoron, but back before the election—and even before the previous election—there were plenty of Republicans who claimed they were ready to pull up stakes and start a new party to save the old Grand Old.

So why haven’t they?

Here’s conservative author Tom Nichols writing in The Atlantic back in September 2020.

I was a Republican for most of my adult life.

[…]

I understand the attachment to that GOP, even among those who have sworn to defeat Donald Trump, but the time for sentimentality is over. That party is long gone. Today the Republicans are the party of “American carnage” and Russian collusion, of scams, plots, and weapons-grade contempt for the rule of law. The only decent, sensible, and conservative position is to vote against this Republican Party at every level, and bring the sad final days of a once-great political institution to an end. Then build the party back up again—from scratch.

Instead, argues Nichols, sensible conservatives should allow the GOP to crash and burn, so that it can be resurrected or replaced by a new “center-right party.”

A month later, conservative pundit Max Boot pulled out one of history’s most famous misquotes to make his point.

“We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” That famous, if probably apocryphal, quote from the Vietnam War describes how I feel about the Republican Party. We have to destroy the party in order to save it. 

As a lifelong Republican until Nov. 9, 2016 — and as a foreign policy adviser to three Republican presidential candidates—it gives me no joy to write those words. It’s true that the party had long-standing problems—conspiracy-mongering, racism, hostility toward science—that Donald Trump was able to exploit. But he has also exacerbated all of those maladies, just as he made the coronavirus outbreak much worse than it needed to be.

Instead, says Boot, America needs a … sane center-right party. 

Then in December, well after the election, when it was clear Trump was going to keep clawing away at the party no matter what, the Never Trumpers’ never Trump Evan McMullin popped up in The New York Times to keep on pounding that drum. 

So what’s next for Republicans who reject their party’s attempts to incinerate the Constitution in the service of one man’s authoritarian power grabs? Where is our home now?

The answer is that we must further develop an intellectual and political home, for now, outside of any party. From there, we can continue working with other Americans to defeat Mr. Trump’s heirs, help offer unifying leadership to the country and, if the Republican Party continues on its current path, launch a party to challenge it directly.

These are far from the only voices to raise the idea of walking away from the Republican Party of Trump and taking their ball elsewhere. Though in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s election Republicans were still talking about just waiting him out then dragging the party back to center, everyone acknowledges that this is no longer possible. The Republican Party isn’t just a party led by Trump, it’s a party about Trump. With ideas and a foundation that goes no deeper than Trump’s.

And why not? It may be easy to see that under Trump Republicans managed to lose the House, then the White House, then the Senate. What’s less clear is how thoroughly they’ve cleansed their institutional memory. Of Republicans now serving in the House, 85% have never served under a Republican president who was not Donald Trump. He is all that they know.

That may explain why most congressional Republicans are so quick to roll over when Trump snaps his fingers. It doesn’t explain why no one has followed through on the plan that conservatives have been talking up since before Trump took office. A whole cadre of Republicans from Jeff Flake to Justin Amash left the GOP—and their positions in Congress—after getting crossways with Trump. None of them has been out there on the hustings ringing the bell for the New Center-Right Party of Traditional Republican Dreams.

Donald Trump may not be able to get an accused pedophile elected in Alabama, or boost an inside trader back to office in Georgia. But he has demonstrated repeatedly that he can raise the temperature of his supporters high enough to knock good candidates out of Republican primaries. And there’s no doubt that Trump means it when he says he lives for revenge. Whether it’s Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney, every single Republican who supported Trump’s impeachment (#1 or #2) is certain to get meet a frothing Trump supporter in their next primary.

So why don’t they beat Trump at his own game? Why aren’t Romney and Murkowski parked in McConnell’s office letting him know that, unless he encourages the party to wake up and smell reality, they’re going to start a new party? Bring in Flake. Bring in Amash. Enlist the pens of all those pundits and the pocketbooks of the Lincoln Project. Put up a New Republican Party candidate for every House and Senate seat.

After all, their threat is just as good as Trump’s. They don’t have to be able to win. They don’t even have to be able to swing a majority of Republicans with them. In a lot of districts they’d need to persuade just 10%, or 5%, or 2% of Republicans to join them to make sure the GOP loses a slot. And that’s what all those pundits and former officeholders and real red Republicans have been saying—the party needs to get a few shots until it wakes up and comes back to itself.

So again, why aren’t they doing it? The biggest reason is … they don’t really mean it. Or at least they don’t mean it enough to put in more work that writing a guest column.

Donald Trump and his white supremacist militias planned assault on Capitol long before Jan. 6

Posted on by Mark Sumner

Jan. 6 may have been the culmination of Donald Trump’s efforts to overthrow a U.S. election, but it certainly was not the beginning. Even before the 2016 election, Trump began telling his supporters that American elections were corrupt. He repeated and amplified claims of voting by “dead people,” lied about Democratic officials bringing in “boxes of ballots,” and—especially after he lost the popular vote by more than 3 million—made enormous false claims about voting by “illegal immigrants.”

Trump never backed away from his lies about the 2016 election. Neither did his spokespeople in the White House, at Fox News, or across the rest of the right-wing media. By the time of the 2020 election, Trump had more than doubled down on claims that any election that failed to show him as a victor was a false election. He assailed mail-in ballots. He revived old conspiracy theories about voting machines. He ignored legitimate warnings from security officials about Russian attempts to interfere in the election and instead pushed false concerns about other nations working to help Democrats. He created a situation in the mind of his supporters where anything other than a landslide victory was “proof” that of a fraudulent election.

Before dawn on the day after the election, Donald Trump stepped in front of cameras to claim that he had won. Then both Trump and a collection of white nationalist militias set out to make that happen by destroying democracy.

That Trump would actually lose the election was certainly no surprise to anyone paying attention. Trump supporters may have turned out in greater numbers than pollsters expected, but the revulsion that four years of his chaotic reign generated brought those opposed to Trump out in numbers great enough to swamp that support. Joe Biden didn’t just reverse Trump’s surprise victories in Rust Belt states, he flipped states like Arizona and Georgia. The election results were a clear signal of how Trump’s actions to even more closely marry Republicans to overt racism, xenophobia, and isolationism had damaged the party far more than many realized. 

Trump certainly wasn’t surprised by the results on Election Day. He had not only already salted the earth with claims of election fraud, he immediately called on his supporters to interfere with the proper counting of votes in places ranging from Philadelphia to Detroit to Las Vegas. Trump immediately dispatched multiple legal teams to begin filing lawsuits in defense of his claims. And he immediately began calling officials at every level in an effort to secure their cooperation in defeating democracy.

Like Trump, members of the white supremacist militia movement were not surprised by the outcome. After years of receiving signals from Trump that it was okay to “get rough” and being told to “stand by,” these groups were more than prepared to respond to Trump’s loss at the polls.

As The Washington Post reports, indictments unsealed on Wednesday show that members of the Oath Keepers—a group that recruits heavily among the military and law enforcement—were already recruiting for assault on the Capitol by Nov. 9, just six days after the election. They didn’t just reach out to existing members of their organization; a group of (now arrested) Ohio members planned a “basic training” camp to prepare new members to fight in overturning the election. And while the stories of “antifa busses” that have constantly circulated on the right are entirely fiction, the white supremacist militia group was definitely planning to bring “at least one full bus 40+ people coming from N.C.” along with massive amounts of weaponry. The plans even included describing how weapons would be brought in advance using a truck so that in case the bus was stopped, the militia members would be able to continue to Washington.

Some Republicans have—bizarrely—suggested that the fact that the insurgency on Jan. 6 involved advanced planning somehow absolves Trump of the charges in his impeachment. After all, his speech that morning could hardly have incited the mob to break out the tiki torches if they came to Washington prepared to execute … executions.

The problem with that argument is everything. First of all, the impeachment documents make it clear that the problem was greater than just Trump’s words at a single “Stop the Steal” rally. A timeline of events just since Election Day makes it clear that Trump’s incitement began well before the morning of the insurgency. Trump was very deliberate in everything he did leading up to that day, including the signals he sent to groups like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other white supremacist militias. 

Events on Jan. 6 were not a spontaneous uprising. That’s exactly the point. They were the result of actions Trump took—not just on that day, not just since Election Day, but over a period of years—to activate a white supremacist base, reassure them of support, and encourage them to take violent action. Militia members arrested after participating in the insurgency sent messages in advance with statements such as, “If Trump activates the Insurrection Act, I’d hate to miss it.” They didn’t do that out of thin air. They did it because Trump supporters from Michael Flynn to Mike Lindell were openly encouraging Trump to take this action and they were still being invited to speak at Trump events.

Trump didn’t cross the Rubicon on Jan. 6. He waded through that stream day by day over a period of years. 

In the immediate wake of the insurgency, Republicans seemed aghast to find the barbarians weren’t just at the gates, but inside the building. Calls to remove Trump under the 25th Amendment didn’t just come from Democrats. The idea that impeachment might clear the two-thirds hurdle in the Senate were taken seriously.

But all it took was the merest glimmer of disapproval from Trump to bring Republicans back in line. He didn’t even have to step off the golf course to have Tucker Carlson declaring that the Rubicon was barely a creek after all or to get the weakest spine in Congress to blame the whole insurgency on Nancy Pelosi. Republican leaders had every opportunity over the last three weeks to finally pry their party away from Trump, and to do so in a way that might have left both them, and the nation, stronger. Instead, they fainted at the first mention of the dreaded “third party.”

As with every other Trump outrage, Republicans voiced momentary outrage. Then they backed away just long enough to catch the next hand signal from Trump and from Fox. Reassured, they then stepped forward again to pretend—as they always do—that whatever Trump did was no big deal, not worth raising a fuss about, and after all didn’t Hillary Clinton once something something email? Now we’re at the point where they’re declaring that the real outrage isn’t that armed insurgents broke into the Capitol, spread blood and excrement along the walls, ransacked congressional offices, and went looking for hostages to send to the gallows waiting outside. The real outrage is that anyone is raising a fuss. The next step is the one where Republicans demand an official Trump Bridge to commemorate that patriotic Rubicon crossing. And a Jan. 6 federal holiday for celebrating his triumph.

When the next violent assault goes even further, expect Republicans to be momentarily scandalized. But only momentarily.

The GOP needs to figure out their Trump problem now

Posted on (Updated by kos

On his way out the door, right before it hit him in his ass, twice-impeached madman Donald Trump said, “Have a good life. We will see you soon.” What might’ve been a throwaway line from a person incapable of surrendering the limelight received added context when The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had discussed starting a new “Patriot Party” with his aides—a five-alarm fire that has Republicans panicking and Democrats licking their chops. In fact, it might be a major factor as Senate Republicans struggle with how to handle the impeachment trial. 

And yet I wouldn’t bet on it ever happening. 

First things first: Let’s stipulate that Trump never does anything for anyone except himself, and maybe Ivanka. While several Republicans would love to bask in its light—the Paul Gosars and Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the right-wing MAGA/Q fever swamp—Trump’s entire reason for building this party would be for the benefit of the TRUMP brand, and nothing else. And how could it not? There is no such thing as a Trump ideology (beyond “owning the libs”). There isn’t a cause that motivates him, a higher calling or purpose. He clearly didn’t even like the job of president! He barely showed up to work, didn’t read briefing papers, watched television all day, and said the dumbest shit ever said by a president … and that includes eight years of George W. Bush! 

All Trump cared about was the title, being the Big Man with his airplane and taxpayer-funded Big House and his precious bully pulpit, which he used to, well, bully people. For example, at a reelection rally in Ohio, Trump wasn’t making a case based on how he had improved people’s lives, or a policy vision for a second term (a question he was repeatedly asked during the campaign and he could never answer). Nay, he could only focus on the perks of being president. “[Air Force One has] more televisions than any plane in history! They’ve got televisions in closets, in bathroom, on the floor, on the ceiling.” 

So what would being a member of the Patriot Party entail beyond the further aggrandizing and enrichment of Trump himself? 

Forget any broader strategy of pressuring Republicans, again, on policy grounds. Trump is too stupid to formulate any real strategy, and too aloof to care about any outcome beyond “they better kiss my ring” and “send me more money to save America.” That last part may actually loom large. Trump saw the $200 million that he raised for his big “fight the steal” lie, and he wants more. His real estate empire is on the verge of collapse, with banks refusing to do further business with him. Mainstream television isn’t going to give him another show to bail him out financially. The MAGA rubes are his last chance. And sure, campaign finance law prohibits candidates from enriching themselves from campaign contributions, but since when has Trump cared about the law? He’d do what he wants and dare a toothless Federal Elections Commission (FEC) to do something about it. And if the FEC did act on it, he’d tie it up in the courts for years. 

Remember, Trump is a guy who couldn’t manage to get a platform for his own Republican Party convention—are we really going to pretend that his Patriot Party would have one? 

So what would the actual impact of this party have on elections? If smartly set up (ha ha), it might function as the Working Families Party, which endorses in primaries and supports candidates who back its agenda. Or maybe like the Democratic Socialists—again, focusing heavily on primaries, mostly on friendly territory, trying to push Republicans closer to Trump. There could be a “Patriots caucus” in the House that would push Q conspiracies, Putin’s agenda, and whatever other inanities whip up its white supremacist base.

At the presidential level, imagine Trump going on his own (or, hilariously, whoever emerged from the Patriot Party primary process—Don Jr. or Ivanka), splitting off critical votes from the mainstream Republican Party. If Republicans lost even 10% off their toppling (or flip it around: Trump got the bulk of base Republican support, 90% of it), this is what the electoral map would look like with a split right: 

Furthermore, Alaska and South Carolina would be competitive. And you can believe that the right-on-right rhetorical violence would be fierce in such a contest. The fireworks from a Ben Sasse vs. Donald Trump matchup could even render the Democrats an afterthought, with Joe Biden waltzing easily to reelection. It wouldn’t be the worst thing to happen to us. 

Which is why it is in Senate Republican (and minority, ha ha) Leader Mitch McConnell’s interest to nip this shit in the bud. His best way to do it? Conviction. He takes away Trump’s ability to run again, and he removes 98% of the any impetus Trump might have for this party. Will Republicans have to deal with pissed-off MAGA assholes for several years? Of course, but it should be pretty clear at this point that Republicans need some time in the wilderness to rethink who they are if they are going be competitive at the national level. 

The demographic trends that flipped Arizona and Georgia this time aren’t ebbing. Republican Texas is next, and South Carolina and Mississippi three to four presidential cycles behind. Kansas doesn’t have the racial and ethnic diversity of other transforming states, but it has higher-than-average education levels and is also moving in the Democrats’ direction. All of those states would more than offset any Republican gains in the rust belt and Minnesota. 

Just flipping Texas and North Carolina alone keeps a Republican Party wholly dependent on white non-college evangelical voters so far from a presidential majority that it is doomed to eternal minority status. Republicans need college-educated whites (both urban and suburban), and they need to do better with growth demographics (Asian, Black, Latino, and Muslim). Trump Republicanism isn’t going to get that done. 

What’s worse, the GOP advantage in the Senate will erode over time. Arizona and Georgia both went from two Republican senators to two Democratic ones seemingly overnight (though it took a decade of hard organizing to make it happen, of course). Texas came close to flipping a seat, and Democrats will hold those seats before long.  

Susan Collins won’t be around forever in Maine. That seat will eventually be Democratic. South Carolina and Mississippi will be more competitive in the next two decades. Statehood for Washington, D.C. and maybe Puerto Rico would further erase their built-in advantages. And again, if Republicans retreated to a white evangelical base, they could still hold an easy 30-40 Senate seats, representing a fraction of the U.S. population, but that’s not going to get them a majority.

On the other hand, if Republicans excise the Trump cancer, wander in the wilderness for one to two presidential cycles, and start winning back college whites while eating away at Democratic dominance with voters of color, then you have a national party once again. 

By all indications, that’s where McConnell’s head seems to be. He’s done playing with Trump and his cult: “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people." It doesn’t hurt that conservative mega-donors and corporate PACs are refusing to donate to Republicans until they clean house of the insurrectionists.

So for conservatives suddenly in danger of losing control of their party to American fascists, that might not be a bad course of action. They had a good run, got themselves an ill-gained 6-3 Supreme Court majority, some nice tax cuts, a few wars, and lots of environmental degradation and higher global temperatures. None of that would’ve been possible with a truly democratic America, one in which the Senate actually reflected people, not cow country, and one in which presidents got popularly elected by a majority of the American people, not just a handful of battleground states. 

And sure, it led to an actual insurrection and occupation of the U.S. Capitol by American Nazis, but all in all, I’m sure they’d do it all over again. It’s just that the bill has come due, and they now have to pay the price. 

Then again, they can roll the die some more. They can gamble that a deplatformed Trump won’t have anywhere near the juice to maintain his level of influence. They can gamble that they can still keep control of the Trump-only hidden deplorable crowd, that it was just a few “bad apples” and antifa infiltrators who caused the Capitol insurrection. They can guess (with good reason) that Trump is incapable of managing anything well, and that his party wouldn’t be any different. Remember, this is the guy who bankrupted a casino. This is a guy whose most successful investment is the one he had nothing to do with. He’s the guy who surrounds himself with hucksters and grifters like Steve Bannon, Corey Lewandowski, and Brad Parscale.

For nearly three years we have been building a juggernaut campaign (Death Star). It is firing on all cylinders. Data, Digital, TV, Political, Surrogates, Coalitions, etc. In a few days we start pressing FIRE for the first time. pic.twitter.com/aJgCNfx1m0

— Brad Parscale (@parscale) May 7, 2020

They can try to blow kisses at Trump and hope it keeps him (and his MAGA/Q adherents) satisfied enough to keep him in the fold. This is the Sen. Lindsey Graham approach. "I hope people in our party understand the party itself. If you're wanting to erase Donald Trump from the party, you're gonna get erased," Graham said on Fox News. "Most Republicans like his policies, a lot of Republicans like his style. A lot of people are disappointed with him personally at times but appreciate the outcomes he's achieved for our country." Maybe if they stroke his ego enough, Trump will be stay happy until he loses interest and heads off to the golf course. 

And is there really that much danger? Trump can’t tweet his threats, and he doesn’t have a White House press office to distribute his proclamations. He was never able to generate small-dollar donations for other candidates, including his preferred primary choices. (Not that Trump would ever direct his supporters’ dollars anywhere but into his own pocket.) And anyone betting that this party will ever get off the ground and have enough juice to seriously impact Republican politics would be taking one hell of a risk. I wouldn’t take that bet. Trump just doesn’t have a track record of success.

But for Republicans, it’s an existential question: Do they cut the Trump cancer out, wander in the wilderness for a few cycles, then rebuild in the image of today’s America (more diverse, more educated, more secular), or do they keep going down the same path that cost them the House, the Senate, the White House, and the critical support of key growth demographics (not to mention, Arizona, Georgia, and soon, Texas), while at the same time remaining beholden to the whims of an egotistical madman? 

If I were them, I’d rip off the Band-Aid and start rebuilding today. 

Abraham Lincoln explained exactly how we should respond to the insurrection of Jan. 6

Posted on by Dartagnan

Since the Jan. 6 attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol we’ve been treated to the spectacle of people like Rep.Kevin McCarthy, Sen. Ted Cruz, and others within the Republican party invoking a spirit of “unity” as they urge Democrats to temper their response to a crisis that Republicans themselves were responsible for causing.

As Sarah Churchwell, writing for the New York Review of Books, observes, these newfound calls for “unity” are from the exact same people who have constantly cast themselves as the “Party of Lincoln” at various times over the past four years.

Republican leaders enjoy flashing their badges as the “Party of Lincoln,” preening themselves on Lincoln’s moral victories and declaring themselves his rightful political heirs. “Our party, the Republican Party, was founded to defeat slavery. Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, signed the Emancipation Proclamation,” Senator Ted Cruz declaimed at the Republican National Convention in 2016, as a prelude to endorsing for president a man whom he had once called a “sniveling coward” and “pathological liar,” a man who had insulted Cruz’s wife and accused his father of conspiring to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. Senator Marco Rubio is another who presumes to speak for “the party of Lincoln,” including the time he tweeted, in February 2016, that Donald Trump would “never be the nominee of the party of Lincoln,” as does House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who managed to recall a few familiar words from the Gettysburg Address in honor of Lincoln’s birthday last year.

But, as Churchwell illustrates, the real Abraham Lincoln had some strong opinions about the kind of treachery we witnessed on Jan. 6, one in which white supremacist seditionists perpetrated a mob-style attack on the seat of American government. And his opinions were not couched in any wishful concept of “unity.” His views, in fact, were unsparing and to the point:

Lincoln consistently likened the minoritarian efforts of the South to a mob, as it employed threats, intimidation, blackmail, political chicanery, voter fraud, and violence to coerce the majority into giving way to ever more unreasonable demands. “We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose,” he told John Hay, his private secretary. For Lincoln, as he said repeatedly, the Civil War was more than a question of the moral wrongs of slavery, as fundamental to the conflict as those were; the principles of democratic self-government and the political character of the nation were also at stake.

As applied to the events of Jan. 6, the Republicans’ vision of “unity” is one in which their party escapes blame for the horrifying spectacle of a treasonous, would-be despot inciting his rabid and deluded minions to violently desecrate our national heritage, all egged on and applauded by complicit state and federal officials within the Republican ranks.

As Churchwell suggests, not only would Lincoln have rejected any invocation of “unity” under such circumstances, he would have been appalled:

The actual party of Lincoln made the opposite decision, believing that the deep principles of preserving the Union far outweighed the superficial comity of false unity. Lincoln had been pressured on all sides to capitulate to Southern demands, including permitting the South to secede, to “let the erring sisters depart in peace!” But part of his reason for refusing to do so was, as the historian James M. McPherson put it in This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War (2007), the fear of setting a “fatal precedent,” one that could be “invoked by disaffected minorities in the future, perhaps by the losing side in another presidential election.” And so they made the apparently paradoxical decision to fight a civil war in an effort to achieve, not unity, but a more perfect union.

In fact what occurred on Jan. 6 was exactly what Lincoln foresaw as the ultimate test for our nation’s survival. As Churchwell points out, contrary to espousing any attempt at “unity” with such insurrectionists, Lincoln’s counsel was to bring the hammer down, hard, on attempts at insurrection by way of the mob.

In particular, Lincoln cautioned against turning a blind eye to mob violence in the futile effort to maintain a tenuous and self-devouring peace. Leaving the perpetrators of such violence “unpunished,” he held, would only embolden the mob and inevitably destroy democratic self-government, as “the lawless in spirit, are encouraged to become lawless in practice” and “absolutely unrestrained.” Without accountability, such a mob would “make a jubilee of the suspension of [the Government’s] operations; and pray for nothing so much, as its total annihilation.”

In reality, it’s not “unity” that Republicans want, but absolution. They want Americans to forget what we just witnessed and what we are now likely to witness over and over again as the delusional, poisonous racism fanned by the GOP over the last thirty years intrudes, unsolicited and unwanted, into Americans’ daily existence.

As Lincoln well understood, there can be no “unity” where our democratic traditions are under attack by an insensate, racist right-wing mob.

CIVIQS poll shows most Republicans are now Trump supporters first, party supporters … not at all

Posted on (Updated by Mark Sumner

In 2016, Donald Trump infamously said that he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue without losing the support of his fanatical followers. That still appears to be pretty much true as, after refusing to acknowledge the results of a free election, splitting his own party, presiding over the loss of the Senate, and instigating a deadly, violent assault on the Capitol in a bid to interfere with counting electoral votes, the latest CIVIQS results still show Trump holding onto 43% support. 

In fact, if anyone has suffered from Trump’s actions it’s every other Republican official. It doesn’t even seem to matter to what degree they supported Trump in his efforts to topple the elected government. Kevin McCarthy? Way down. Mitch McConnell? Down to a hilarious 11% favorable rating. But the biggest loser may be Mike Pence, who has seen his support among Republicans plummet, putting him at a 33% favorable rating.

All of this can be explained simply enough: Republicans no longer think of themselves as Republicans. By a two to one margin, those who voted for Trump say they consider themselves “a Trump supporter,” not “a Republican.”

The way that these voters attach to Trump rather than anyone else can be seen in another value in the poll. When asked if they believed the election was “stolen,” a jaw-dropping 40% of Americans still said yes, over a week after the assault on the Capitol. But when asked if Republicans who voted against certifying the vote were “protecting democracy,” only 37% agreed. Even when Republicans were doing exactly what Trump asked them to do, they still got lower marks than Trump himself.

There was an interesting split on views of the actual insurgency. Asked if the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol represented “a coup attempt,” 53% of Americans agreed—within a point of those in the poll who said they did not vote for Trump. However, when asked if the attack was “an act of terrorism,” the number rose to 60%. That number indicates that even some of those who voted for Trump were upset over the the sight of a mob prowling the halls of Congress. That number was apparently confirmed by the 62% who agreed that everyone who broke into the Capitol building should be arrested. And still, the guy who instigated the attack is polling far higher than other Republicans.

Finally, a plurality of voters want to see both Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley kicked out of the Senate. In Hawley’s case, that includes at least some voters who went for Trump.

Everything in the poll seems to indicate that Trump voters remain Trump voters, not Republican voters. If there remains a core of non-Trump Republicans, they are vanishingly small. As the GOP tries to separate itself from the angry guy leaving the room, it’s completely unclear how many of those Trump voters are ready to come back into their ranks without Big Orange at the lead. With a 11% favorable rating for McConnell, and a 20% rating for McCarthy … just who is the leader of the Republican Party going into 2021? 

One possible side effect of this deep schism in the Republican Party is that it may make it easier for McConnell and other Republicans to support Trump’s impeachment. To coin a phrase: What do you have to lose?

Republicans ditch Mitch, because Trump is their one true love

Posted on by kos

Once upon a time, the Republican establishment made a Faustian bargain with the ignorant, racist rabble that makes up the conservative base, and it’s now coming back to bite them. Of the 74 million people who voted for Donald Trump in 2020, a huge chunk of them—the dangerous, conspiracy theory-believing, radicalized populist right—don’t care for Republicans. Their allegiance is to one man: a cult of Trump. 

First and foremost, after everything that has happened—the nearly 400,000 dead from COVID, the Capitol insurrection, the refusal to accept democracy, the bullying and deplorable behavior—the Republican base still loves its Donald Trump. 

Trump’s job approvals are currently at their lowest levels ever in Civiqs polling history—40% approve, while 57% disapprove. Yet most of that drop is among independents. Republicans are, for the most part, holding firm: Trump’s job approval among Republicans was 91-7 on Election Day, and 88-8 today.

And despite that small erosion in job approvals, Trump’s favorability ratings among Republicans is barely budging, from 91% favorable and 7% unfavorable on Election Day, to 90-9 today. Sheesh. 

Civiqs Results

It’s safe to say that despite his unprecedented assault on American democracy, self-identified Republicans aren’t jumping ship. They are slightly less impressed with the job that he is doing, but that’s all cool! They still think he’s the best. 

Now compare that to Republican sentiment for the Republican Party:

Civiqs Results

Those same Republicans approved of the GOP by a 82-9 margin on Election Day. Today’s 64-21 margin is a net 30-point drop. Those are Republicans upset that the party, generically, isn’t “fighting” hard enough to upend the results of the election. 

Now look at Mitch McConnell: 

Civiqs Results

Holy crap! McConnell went from a 70-13 favorable rating among Republicans on Election Day, to just 25-49% favorables today! I’ll do the math for you—that’s an 81-point net drop. 

As you can see on the graph, the collapse came in two waves—the first after McConnell finally recognized Biden’s victory (after Vladmir Putin had done so and apparently given the go-ahead), and then after the failed insurrection at the Capitol, when McConnell refused to join Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas to contest the Arizona and Pennsylvania electors. 

Meanwhile, who was tops on the insurrectionists’ murder list? Vice President Mike Pence. Let’s look at this numbers: 

Civiqs Results

Pence’s 91-6% favorability rating on Election Day was in line with Trump’s 91-7. And Republicans mostly stuck with him while Pence humored Trump’s electoral delusions. But the attack on the Capitol was fueled, in large part, with anger at Pence’s refusal to join in a coup attempt while certifying the Electoral College vote. And the reaction was immediate, as you can see from the chart above, down a net 48 points to a 61-24 favorability rating today, 

To summarize:  

Net favorability

(republicans)

Election Day Today change Donald Trump Republican Party Mitch McConnell Mike Pence
+84 +81 -3
+73 +43 -30
+57 -24 -81
+85 +37 -48

Once again, Donald Trump is the favorite thing among Republicans. They barely budged off him. The Republican Party has suffered a steep drop, but not as steep as the second- and third-highest ranked Republicans. The party might still be seen as belonging to Trump himself, limiting the damage. 

McConnell has always been distrusted by Republicans, for reasons that are unfathomable to me. Look at all the Supreme Court seats he stole for the GOP! Perhaps it’s like El Chapo Trap House-style hatred for Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—when you are on the fringe, you are never going to be happy with what any legislative chamber’s leader can accomplish in our current system. And while McConnell had earned some goodwill among Republicans for his defense of Trump during the first impeachment trial, his refusal to sign on to the election challenges eliminated all of that. 

But McConnell is easy to hate, and Republicans love to hate him. This isn’t the first time he’s been underwater with Republicans in the three years we’ve tracked him: 

Civiqs Results

Pence, on the other hand, is a reliably conservative Republican stalwart, loyal to a fault to Donald Trump. His Election Day favorables with Republicans actually exceeded Trump’s by a point. His drop in support is directly attributable to his refusal to join the coup attempt.

If Senate Republicans actually provide the votes for conviction, these numbers will be scrambled yet again. Who knows how Trump’s de-platforming will affect his ability to control his party. Will the nascent Lynn Cheney/Lincoln Project faction of the GOP gain traction? The situation is volatile. 

But as of now, the GOP is very much Trump’s Party. 

Siege of the Capitol the culmination of the GOP’s long embrace of anti-democratic authoritarianism

Posted on by David Neiwert

Republicans scurried to distance themselves Wednesday from the horrifying takeover of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., by a riotous mob of fanatical Donald Trump supporters. “Those who made this attack on our government need to be identified and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” tweeted Sen. Lindsey Graham. Those storming the Capitol need to stop NOW,” chimed in Sen. Ted Cruz. The Senate Republicans’ Twitter account posted: “This is not who we are.”

This is, however, exactly who they are. What happened Wednesday was the apotheosis of the GOP’s two-decades-and-longer descent into right-wing authoritarianism, fueled by eliminationist hate talk, reality-bereft conspiracist sedition, anti-democratic rhetoric and politics, and the full-throated embrace under Trump of the politics of intimidation and thuggery. It came home to roost not just for Republicans, but for us all.

This radical authoritarianism was evident not just in the intent of the Capitol siege—an insurrectionist attempt to force Congress to overturn the known results of the November presidential election—but in the faces and voices of the men and women who comprised Wednesday’s mob.

  • In the crowd of rioters invading the Capitol building while chanting “treason” and “our house.”
  • In the grinning young white man who offered a Nazi salute to the invading rioters.
  • In the mobs harassing journalists and destroying their equipment, telling them: “Every corner you set up now, we’ll be there.”
  • In the voice of the man chanting inside the Capitol: “Traitors get the rope!”
  • In the zip ties and handgun carried by one of the Capitol invaders, suggesting that these insurrectionists intended to take hostages, and perhaps to execute them.
  • In the voice of the woman from Knoxville, Tennessee, who explained why, despite being maced, she had attempted to enter the building: “We’re storming the Capitol! It’s the revolution!”

There is little question that one man is primarily responsible for the unleashing of this kind of proto-fascist politics: Donald Trump. As I explained a few months ago:

Predicated by his mutual embrace of the far right in the 2015-2016 campaign, Trump’s election to the presidency unleashed a Pandora’s box of white-nationalist demons, beginning with a remarkable surge in hate crimes during his first month, and then his first two years, in office. Its apotheosis has come in the form of a rising tide of far-right mass domestic terrorism and mass killings, as well the spread of armed right-wing “Boogaloo” radicals and militiamen creating mayhem amid civil unrest around the nation.

Trump’s response all along has been to dance a tango in which, after sending out a signal of encouragement (such as his “very fine people on both sides” comments after the white-nationalist violence in Charlottesville in August 2017), he follows up with an anodyne disavowal of far-right extremists that is believed by no one, least of all white nationalists. Whenever queried about whether white nationalists pose a threat—as he was after a right-wing terrorist’s lethal attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, when he answered: “I don’t really, I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems”—Trump has consistently downplayed the threat of the radical right.

More recently, the appearance at the very least that Trump is deliberately encouraging a violent response to his political opposition has been growing. When far-right militiamen have gathered in places like Richmond, Virginia, and Lansing, Michigan, to shake their weapons in an attempt to intimidate lawmakers and other elected government officials, Trump has tweeted out his encouragement. When a teenage militiaman in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot three Black Lives Matter protesters, two fatally, Trump defended him while mischaracterizing the shootings. When far-right conspiracy theorists created a hoax rumor that antifascists and leftists were responsible for the wildfires sweeping the rural West Coast—resulting in armed vigilantes setting up “citizens patrols” and highway checkpoints, sometimes with the encouragement of local police—Trump retweeted a meme promoting the hoax.

The reality currently confronting Americans is that the extremist right has been organizing around a strategy of intimidation and threats by armed “Patriots”—embodied by street-brawling proto-fascist groups like the Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, American Guard, and the “III Percent” militias, along with their “Boogaloo” cohort, all of them eager to use their prodigious weaponry against their fellow Americans in a “civil war.” And what we have seen occurring as the 2020 campaign has progressed is that the line of demarcation between these right-wing extremists and ordinary Trump-loving Republicans has all but vanished.

However, Trump never could have accomplished this kind of empowerment of the radical right, not to mention his ceaseless underhanded attacks on our democratic institutions, without having been enabled at every step by an enthusiastic Republican Party, both its establishment wing and its far-right “populist” bloc, as well as an army of authoritarian devotees in right-wing media and social media.

People like Cruz and Graham, as well as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and former Attorneys General Jeff Sessions and William Barr, all have played major roles in enabling Trump’s multiple depredations. At every step, Republicans have avidly empowered Trump as he has ravaged our international alliances, our national security apparatus, our courts, our Justice and Education and State departments (not to mention Interior, Energy, Treasury, and multiple other departments, notably the Environmental Protection Agency).

The problems with the Republican Party and the conservative movement generally extend well beyond the past four years, and well beyond Trump himself. Indeed, the man the party empowered and enabled to undermine our democratic institutions is the embodiment of conditions created within the GOP for the previous four decades and longer, all of them profoundly anti-democratic and authoritarian.

The strands of authoritarianism that conservatives wove together for many years to create the noose that is Donald Trump are all clear and on the record:

  • Ronald Reagan’s abiding anti-government sentiments (“Government is not the solution to our problem, it is the problem”) became deeply embedded as a fundamental approach to governance within the conservative movement—guaranteeing not just its incoherence and cognitive dissonance, but inevitably its antagonism to democratic institutions, particularly voting rights.
  • Bill Clinton’s presidency—or rather, the conservative reaction against it—begat the far-right “Patriot” movement that Trump now essentially leads, borne of “New World Order” conspiracy theories, Bircherite nationalism, and hysterical fearmongering. It also established what became a permanent right-wing ethos in which any kind of Democratic presidency is characterized as illegitimate, and the Republican Party became the vehicle for pushing this claim (as in the Javier-esque impeachment effort the GOP then undertook).
  • During the Bush years, any questioning of the Republican administration’s conduct of the Afghanistan and Iraq post-9/11 invasions (thanks in no small part to a relentless drumbeat of fearmongering after those terrorist attacks) was summarily attacked by its defenders as “on the side of the terrorists” and “helping the terrorists win”—that is, disloyal and treasonous. Not just war critics but anyone who dared question Bush policies would find themselves summarily subjected to a barrage of smears and eliminationist rhetoric. “We don't want to get rid of all liberals,” Rush Limbaugh was fond of saying. “I want to keep a couple, for example, on every major U.S. college campus so that we never forget who these people are."
  • John McCain’s presidential nomination in 2008 gave us Sarah Palin, who more than any Republican politician previously normalized the know-nothing “populist” politics that now completely dominate the party. It also unleashed the tide of nativist bigotry—manifested especially in the expressed world views of her adoring fans, who had no hesitation in pronouncing Barack Obama a Muslim, a terrorist, and a man who “hates white people”—on which Trump would later surf into the White House.

This tide soon swelled to mass proportions during Obama’s presidency under the aegis of the Tea Party phenomenon, which was portrayed in the press as a populist uprising for conservative values but which in reality was a major conduit for the revival and ultimate mainstreaming of the far-right “Patriot”/militia movement of the 1990s, and all of its attendant conspiracist fearmongering and bigotry (manifested especially in the “Birther” conspiracy theories). Trump, who built his political power by promoting that theory, declared himself the personification of the Tea Party in 2011, and by the time he announced his campaign in 2015, he was broadly perceived as just that.

By winning first the GOP nomination and then the presidency, Trump culminated all these long-developing trends into a genuinely authoritarian politics fueled by ignorance and bigotry and resentment, filtered through the prism of paranoid conspiracism. All of which has led us to the pass we reached this week.

The conspiracist authoritarianism has long ceased to be merely a fringe element. Over 80 percent of Trump voters believe that Joe Biden won the election fraudulently. In one poll taken yesterday, 45 percent of Republicans approved of the Capitol siege, and 68 percent said it posed no threat to democracy. This is who they are.

The Republican Party’s hostility to democracy—embodied by conservatives’ running refrain that “America is not a democracy, it’s a republic”—has become its official policy over the past decade, manifested most apparently in its egregious voter suppression policies and court rulings that reached a fever pitch in recent years. It’s now a commonplace for Republican politicians (notably Trump himself) to fret that a high voter turnout is nearly certain to translate into Democratic wins as a reason to even further suppress the vote.

As David Frum (a never-Trump conservative) noted in his book Trumpocracy: “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.” On Wednesday, that rejection became undeniably, irrevocably manifest.

Rather than taking a hard look at what they have become after the mob their president ginned up stormed the Capitol, today’s lame attempts by conservatives to gaslight the public about what happened Wednesday (with figures like Matt Gaetz and Mo Brooks trying to gaslight the public by claiming the invaders were actually “antifa”) make all too clear that the Republican Party, now consumed by right-wing authoritarianism, has ceased to be a viable partner in a working democracy. The problem the rest of us now face is how to proceed from here.

Mitch McConnell has presided over the ruin of the Republican Party. Congrats

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

In four years, Donald Trump cost Republicans control of the House, the White House, and the Senate—so goes the celebratory refrain among liberals on Twitter. But the person who truly made the electoral demise of the Republican Party possible was the man who Washington reporters have praised for a decade as the GOP's master tactician—the puppeteer supposedly pulling strings behind the scenes while everyone else simply served as marionettes on his stage. 

That man, erstwhile Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, will almost surely be ordering new letterhead once all the votes are counted. In the two crucial Georgia Senate runoffs, Democrat Raphael Warnock has been declared the victor and the other Democrat, Jon Ossoff, felt confident enough about his growing lead to declare victory Wednesday morning. Sure, it was Trump's buffoonish domination of the spotlight over the past four years made the glare of the GOP's moral bankruptcy burn too bright for many moderate-to-conservative voters to ignore. But Trump was simply the outward manifestation of McConnell's inner decay.

In his relentless pursuit of power and securing a lasting legacy in the courts, McConnell happily abandoned his oath of office and any inkling of patriotism to play footsie with Trump throughout his grotesque tenure as de facto head of the GOP. In fact, McConnell helped clear the way for Trump's corrupt elevation to office when he refused to sign on to a bipartisan statement revealing Russian interference in the 2016 election. When Trump declared neo-Nazis "very fine people" in 2017, McConnell led Republicans in declining to condemn the comments. And after a mountain of evidence showed Trump had extorted the leader of Ukraine in his bid to smear a political rival and win reelection, McConnell lined up the Republican votes to acquit Trump of impeachment charges without hearing from a single witness in the Senate.

So when it came time for McConnell to shoot down Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 election results before it blossomed into a full-blown coup attempt, it came as no surprise that McConnell spent more than five weeks diddling around before finally acknowledging Joe Biden as the country's rightful president-elect.

But now, suddenly, as McConnell faces a return to the Senate minority, he and his allies apparently think it's time to wipe off that Trump stench and start anew.

"Emotions running high among McConnell-aligned Republicans early Wednesday am — after reality of what transpired in Georgia settled in," National Journal columnist Josh Kraushaar tweeted early Wednesday morning. "May be the heat of the moment, but mood is for declaring war on Team Trump. Want to marginalize Trump as they marginalized Steve Bannon in 2017."

Wow—now that Trump simultaneously alienated suburban voters while failing to turn out enough of his cultists to deliver wins in Georgia, McConnell and his cronies are going to take a stand. Bold.

Sorry, fellas, that ship has sailed. McConnell & Co. aided and abetted Trump for four solid years, presiding over the destruction of America's institutions and democratic norms and leaving the country in tatters. But now that the GOP's electoral future is in peril and the party is descending into a bitter civil war, McConnell and his allies think they can just brush Trump off their shoulders like a pesky bout of dandruff.

Go ahead, declare war on Trump. History will remember. And in the meantime, McConnell and the Republican Party will now reap what they sowed—total fucking chaos with no end in sight.

Republicans think 175,000 dead Americans is okay, and that’s not all

Posted on by kos

The sorry, sad state of the morally bankrupt Republican Party: 

57 percent of Republicans think 176,000 coronavirus deaths (and counting) is acceptable. Holy shit. pic.twitter.com/dd737aoOmj

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 23, 2020

By double-digit margins, Republicans think 175,000 Covid-related deaths (and counting) are “acceptable.” These are the same Republicans who now think that Russian meddling in our politics is okay, that “family values” was a cynical joke on our moral discourse, that “law and order” was something that mattered, that no one stood above the law, that leading the world in pursuit of shared democratic ideals is best replaced by boyish fandom of murderous despots, and that the entire purpose of the Republican Party is nothing more than the singular worship of their idiotic man-boy president. 

Oh, and the response to anything is whine, whine, whine:

.@GOPChairwoman responds to @CBSNewsPoll showing 57% of Republicans say the number of those dead from #COVID19 is acceptable at 175,000: "I think that is a really unfair poll..Republicans do not want to see people suffering from this pandemic." pic.twitter.com/E43B4p9rck

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) August 23, 2020

Republicans literally are okay with people suffering during this pandemic because they—like their dear leader—are utterly devoid of empathy for their fellow neighbors. It’s the reason so many still resist wearing face masks, putting everyone around them at risk. It’s the reason Republicans continue to support their president despite knowing what they know now, which is exactly what they knew then:

Ted Cruz knew. Rand Paul knew. Nikki Haley knew. Marco Rubio knew. Kellyanne Conway knew. Mike Pompeo knew. Glenn Beck knew. Rick Perry knew. Susan Collins knew. They all knew. pic.twitter.com/73XyJkiNkv

— act.tv (@actdottv) August 21, 2020

Nothing about Donald Trump has been a surprise. Everything that has happened was predictable. We didn’t know we’d suffer a global pandemic, but we knew Trump would be tested during his first term—every president is—and that he would fail spectacularly. 

What wasn’t predictable was how quickly his whole party would become as sociopathic as Trump himself, how quickly they’d acquiesce to his rampant lawlessness. The party that once went into hysterics because former President Bill Clinton had a quick chat on an airport runway with Attorney General Loretta Lynch is now silent as the curent attorney general acts as Trump’s private lawyer. The same party that went into hysterics and filed multiple lawsuits over former President Barack Obama’s executive orders now turns the other way as Trump escalates the same practice. 

And a whole party that once declared fealty to “law and order” is totally mum as Trump literally thumbs his nose at the Supreme Court. What army do they have, anyway? 

USCIS makes it official. They will ignore SCOTUS ruling and, "will reject all initial DACA requests from aliens who have never previously received DACA and return all fees." Furthermore, renewals will be limited to one year. https://t.co/RUIZ3LXw3n

— Ali Noorani (@anoorani) August 24, 2020

There is a single constitutional remedy for such defiance of our nation’s laws: impeachment. But Republicans decided that they were okay with Trump’s lawlessness, and he’s returned the favor by making an even greater mockery of the very institutions that make our democracy work. 

It turns out they're quite fragile, indeed. All it takes is one despot and an enabling party to watch those institutions crumble. Turns out, the only thing keeping them in place was a belief in our democratic system. Republicans don’t care for our system. Or democracy.

The “party of life” never was, but at least now everyone can stop pretending. Their opposition to abortion has nothing to do with “life,” and everything to do with controlling women. 

The “party of national security” is a laughable joke. Russia strongman Vladimir Putin pulls the strings. 

The party of “law and order”? Trump has literally argued that as president, he is above the law, and Republicans have been happy to play along. 

Tax cuts is all that’s left of what Republicanism was all about. The rich and powerful still get their payday. They always do. Nothing like global economic devastation to redistribute even more wealth to the top 0.01%. 

But the stuff that was supposed to trickle down to the masses? All of that is shredded, in tatters, as the Republican Party devolves into an outright cult of personality and Q-inspired conspiracy mongering.