Tag: GOP now the cult of Trump

Paul Krugman Points Out The Unusual Thing About The GOP Cult Of Donald Trump

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“Many people, myself included, have declared for years that the GOP is no longer a normal political party,” the economist wrote in his New York Times column.

Economist Paul Krugman, in his latest column for The New York Times, pointed out the “unusual thing” about the GOP’s cult-like devotion to one-term, twice-impeached former President Donald Trump.

The party “doesn’t have a monopoly on power; in fact, it controls neither Congress nor the White House,” noted Krugman in his essay published Monday.

“Politicians suspected of insufficient loyalty to Donald Trump and Trumpism in general aren’t sent to the gulag. At most, they stand to lose intraparty offices and, possibly, future primaries,” Krugman continued. “Yet such is the timidity of Republican politicians that these mild threats are apparently enough to make many of them behave like Caligula’s courtiers.” Continue reading.

Trump fan went to ‘protest’ Democratic event in rural Texas — and almost immediately began assaulting people: police

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On Monday, DailyTrib.com reported that a Trump supporter was arrested on charges of assault and resisting arrest following an incident at a rally for rural Democrats in Marble Falls, Texas, a small community northwest of Austin.

According to the report, the incident started when Reynol P. Gray came to the Turn Rural Texas Blue Rally to protest, and things escalated. 

“The rally, hosted by local Democratic clubs, featured speeches by Democratic lieutenant governor candidate Mike Collier, state Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa, and others,” reported Brigid Cooley. “Police were called to the rally after Gray began yelling profanities at event speakers and made his way toward the pavilion stage.” Continue reading.

The Memo: Trump is diminished but hasn’t faded

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Tuesday marks six months since former President Trump left the White House.

Back then, Trump helicoptered off the South Lawn having become the only president in history to be twice impeached. The tumult of the Jan. 6 insurrection was still reverberating.

Where he stands now is a more complicated question. Continue reading.

Have you seen the MAGA-inspired ‘Freedom phone’? Here’s why you should stay as far away from it as possible

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Have you seen the new MAGA-inspired “Freedom Phone”? The mobile device hitting the market appears to be one that addresses the concern of right-wing supporters who are fed up with so-called Big Tech “spying” and “censorship.” 

According to Gizmodo, the phone is being marketed by Erik Finman, described as a 22-year-old cryptocurrency millionaire who says he “wants America’s patriots to take ‘back control’ of their lives from the tech oligarchy.”

“This is the first major pushback on the Big Tech companies that attacked us – for just thinking different,” Finman tweeted Thursday morning. “We’re finally taking back control.” Continue reading.

Michigan GOP official who said Trump ‘blew it’ resigns from executive director post

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The executive director of the Michigan Republican Party, who said the 2020 presidential election wasn’t stolen and blamed Donald Trump for the GOP loss, has resigned.

Jason Roe, a veteran strategist who was brought on in February, stepped down from the post but declined to expand on why he resigned less than six months later, the Detroit Free Press reported.

“I resigned my position as executive director and the reasons will remain between me and Chairman Weiser,” he said in a statement to the newspaper, referring to Michigan GOP Party Chairman Ron Weiser. “We’ve built an amazing team and I know they will be very successful in 2022. I look forward to helping however I can.” Continue reading.

How Trumpism has become outright ‘fascism’

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Although conservative journalist David Frum has been a blistering critic of Donald Trump, he has been reluctant to use the word “fascist” to describe the former president. The words “fascist” and ‘fascism,” Frum has stressed in the past, should never be used casually simply to attack policies one does not like. But in an article published by The Atlantic on July 13, the Never Trump conservative lays out some disturbing reasons why Trumpism does, in fact, fit the definition of fascism.

“Through the Trump years, it seemed sensible to eschew comparisons to the worst passages of history,” Frum explains. “I repeated over and over again a warning against too-easy use of the F-word, fascism: ‘There are a lot of stops on the train line to bad before you get to Hitler Station.'”

Frum continues, “Two traits have historically marked off European-style fascism from more homegrown American traditions of illiberalism: contempt for legality and the cult of violence. Presidential-era Trumpism operated through at least the forms of law. Presidential-era Trumpism glorified military power, not mob attacks on government institutions. Post-presidentially, those past inhibitions are fast dissolving.” Continue reading.

Adviser to pro-Trump GOP group sent out a newsletter ‘so racist’ it could ‘make a Ku Klux Klansman blush’: report

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Pro-Trump Republicans often engage in subliminal racism or “dog whistle” attacks — that is, code words that they will insist aren’t racist. But when Florida resident Rip McIntosh, an adviser to far-right Trumpista Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, sent out a fundraising newsletter on April 29, there was nothing subtle or subliminal about the racism in the newsletter. 

In the newsletter, Talking Points Memo’s Nick R. Martin reports, someone going by the pen name E.P. Unum wrote that Blacks have “become socially incompatible with other races” and that “American Black culture has evolved into an unfixable and crime-ridden mess.” Martin described Unum’s rant as being “so racist it might make a ku klux klansman blush.”

According to Martin, the newsletter that McIntosh e-mailed, “also said White people aren’t racist but ‘just exhausted’ with Black people. It portrayed post-Civil War America as a 150-year-long ‘experiment’ to see whether Black people could be ‘taken from the jungles of Africa,’ enslaved, and then integrated into a majority-White society. It said that experiment had failed.” Continue reading.

‘Warning lights are blinking red’: Pollsters sound the alarm on shocking data on GOP voters

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Polling data is showing that Republican base voters are radicalizing against democracy, and two polling experts are sounding the alarm on what it means for the United States.

The Economist’s G. Elliot Morris pointed to polls showing that a plurality of Republican voters think that state legislatures should have the right to overturn the results of presidential elections, while supermajorities believe that former President Donald Trump really won the 2020 election and that President Joe Biden is illegitimate.

In fact, Morris said that the most recent polling numbers show that 74 percent of Republican voters do not believe Biden’s presidency is legitimate. Continue reading.

Trump-allied GOP chairs turn on fellow Republicans

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State Republican Party chairs who have bought into former President Trump’s lies of widespread election malfeasance are turning their fire on fellow Republicans who have acknowledged the reality of Trump’s defeat, in a turn that has longtime party leaders and strategists worried about the future of the conservative coalition.

For most of modern political history, a state party chair’s role has been confined to raising money and building an organization that can contact voters and elect candidates. Their job is much more often to promote those who win primaries than to wade in on behalf of a specific contender during those primaries.

But in the age of Trump, some party leaders are as eager to talk about the perceived turncoats within their own ranks as they are to go after the opposition party. Continue reading.

Conservative explains why the Trumpified GOP now resembles the China’s ‘authoritarian’ Communist Party

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When then-President Donald Trump called for mandatory “patriotic education” for all U.S. students in September 2020, Susan Rice (former national security adviser under the Obama Administration) slammed his authoritarian idea as profoundly unamerican and told CNN’s Erin Burnett, “I thought I was listening to Mao Tse Tung running Communist China.” Rice, however, isn’t the only one who sees parallels between Trumpism and the regime in Beijing. Never Trump conservative Max Boot, in a scathing Washington Post column published on July 5, argues that the Republican push to abolish the teaching of “critical race theory” in public schools and replace it with “patriotic education” is exactly the type of thing the Chinese Communist Party would do.

“Woe to any person in China who challenges the official version of the past; that is a crime for which you can be sent to prison,” Boot explains. “The United States is different. We are a free country where nothing is off-limits. We can talk about the good, the bad and the ugly. Can’t we? Yes, we can — but Republicans are doing their level best to change that. How ironic that the GOP, which claims to be the ‘tough on China’ party, wants to make America more like China. As the party of white America, Republicans seek their own political legitimacy from history by trying to minimize the impact of racism.”

Critical race theory — which argues that in the United States, the racism of the past continues to have an impact on the institutions of today — has become a source of hysteria in the Republican Party and right-wing media. Far-right pundits at Fox News claim CRT is an attack on white Americans in general, which, of course, it isn’t. Continue reading.