Tag: GOP now the cult of Trump

Trump Is Gone, But Trumpism’s Not Forgotten

Donald Trump has left Washington, but the shadow of the former president looms large over an increasingly conflicted party.

Donald Trump is gone from Washington, metaphorically dragged kicking and screaming from a job he swears he didn’t really lose, but gone nonetheless – uncharacteristically quiet as he ponders his future from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

But the former president is still a powerful force in GOP politics, dividing the party as it struggles to use its limited minority muscle in Washington and haunting Republican candidates who still don’t know how strong Trump – or Trumpism – will be in future elections.

The division will come to a head Wednesday as Republican House members decide what to do with colleagues representing the two sides of the GOP. House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy of California is under pressure to remove Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia from her committee posts because of wild conspiracy theories Greene has espoused and comments she has retweeted calling for violence against her Democratic colleagues. McCarthy met with Greene on Tuesday night, jogging away from reporters who asked him how it went. Continue reading.

GOP senator warns his party must decide between ‘conservatism and madness’

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Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), who’s said he may vote this month to convict former President Trump on an article of impeachment, is pushing back against possible retaliation from the Nebraska Republican State Central Committee by warning that his party must choose between “conservatism and madness.”

Sasse on Thursday released a five-minute video responding to Republican officials back home who want to censure him at a Republican State Central Committee meeting on Feb. 13 because of his criticism of Trump.

He warned that purging Trump skeptics from the GOP is “not only civic cancer for the nation [but] just terrible for our party.”  Continue reading.

Despite denouncing QAnon months ago, Kevin McCarthy now says, ‘I don’t even know what it is’

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After a private meeting Wednesday night of the House Republican conference meant to hold together an increasingly divided party, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) defended controversial freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). But as he lauded Greene’s apology to Republicans for her history of outrageous rhetoric on social media, McCarthy also claimed that the extremist ideology she supports was foreign to him.

“I think it would be helpful if you could hear exactly what she told all of us — denouncing Q-on, I don’t know if I say it right, I don’t even know what it is,” said McCarthy, referring to QAnon, a radicalized movement based on false claims that the FBI has deemed a domestic terrorism threat.

McCarthy’s comment set off immediate backlash, with critics pointing out that the minority leader has addressed QAnon before in TV interviews and at news conferences. Continue reading.

House votes to impose fines of up to $10,000 on lawmakers who flout security screening

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The House voted Tuesday night to penalize lawmakers who seek to bypass the security screening measures that have been enacted in the wake of the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, with members facing a $5,000 fine for the first offense and $10,000 each time thereafter.

The measure passed on a 216-to-210 vote, with all but three Democrats present voting in favor and all Republicans present voting “no.”

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Rules Committee, defended the move in an impassioned floor speech in which he blasted the “elitist mentality” of those who have ignored the screening procedures, imploring his fellow lawmakers to recognize that “the rules apply to us, too — and it’s time all of us acted like it.” Continue reading.

Senate Republicans move against ‘nutty’ House member in widening GOP rift

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A growing number of Republicans took sides Tuesday in a brewing House battle over the shape of the GOP after the Donald Trump presidency, amplifying pressure on Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy as he decides this week whether to sideline conspiracy theorists and secure a place for anti-Trump voices in party leadership.

Leading the charge was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who made an unusual detour into the other chamber’s affairs by denouncing the extremist rhetoric of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene while offering a gesture of support for Rep. Liz Cheney, the No. 3 House GOP leader, who voted last month to impeach Trump.

He was joined Tuesday by several other Republican lawmakers, as well as pillars of the conservative establishment, who together warned that sidelining Trump critics from the party while tolerating purveyors of social-media-driven paranoia would spell long-term disaster — a “cancer for the Republican Party and our country,” as McConnell put it. Continue reading.

Opinion: Trumpism is American fascism

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It is revealing how a political movement that claims to be dedicated to the recovery of national greatness has so readily and completely abandoned many defining national ideals. Donald Trump’s promise of American strength has involved the betrayal of American identity.

One of the most important strands of our founding ideology is civic republicanism. In this tradition, the common good is not automatically produced by a clash of competing interests. A just society must be consciously constructed by citizens possessing certain virtues. A democracy in particular depends on people who take responsibility for their communities, show an active concern for the welfare of their neighbors, demand integrity from public officials, defend the rule of law, and respect the rights and dignity of others. Without these moral commitments, a majority is merely a mob.

What type of citizen has Trump — and his supportive partisan media — produced? Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) still holds her job in Congress because she is representative of ascendant MAGA radicalism. Those who reflect her overt racism, her unhinged conspiracy thinking and her endorsement of violence against public figures are now treated as a serious political constituency within the Republican Party. Trump has come down firmly on Greene’s side. One participant in the Jan. 6 attack sent a video to her children saying: “We broke into the Capitol. . . . We got inside, we did our part. We were looking for Nancy [Pelosi] to shoot her in the friggin’ brain, but we didn’t find her.” The detail that gets to me? She sent this to her children. She was living in a mental world where vile, shameful things are a parent’s boast. And she saw her actions as the expression of a public duty — an example of doing her part. Continue reading.

Many of my fellow politicians won’t tell voters the truth. The result was Jan. 6.

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Telling the public only what it wants to hear is no way to keep democracy going

In the fall of 2013, in the middle of what was at the time the second-longest government shutdown in American history, Republican leaders in Congress kept asking each other one question: “How did we end up here?” That is also the question I have had in recent weeks, especially as I witnessed the violent attack on our Capitol and our democracy on Jan. 6.

The answer is the same in both cases: an unwillingness to speak truth to power. In businesses, employees speak truth to power when they deliver unwelcome facts to their bosses. In government, appointed officials do that when they tell elected leaders something they don’t want to hear. But in a democracy, the people are the ultimate source of power. Our elected officials work for us, and they fail us when they decline to tell us truths that we, the people, don’t want to hear. Even worse, they fail us when they set up false expectations we desperately want to believe.

Back in 2013, the expectation was that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives could force the Democratic-controlled Senate to pass — and compel President Barack Obama to sign — a repeal of his signature health-care initiative. This false narrative started with a few outside groups like Heritage Action and Tea Party Express arguing that the barrier to repealing Obamacare wasn’t the president; it was elected Republicans who were unwilling to fight hard enough. These groups purposely  ramped up expectations, overpromising, even knowing that the end result would under-deliver. Continue reading.

Lifelong Republican Donor Quits GOP: ‘Absolutely’ Now The Party Of QAnon

“If you stay in the Republican Party, you have to pay homage to Trump and I don’t do that. I don’t pray to any man,” said Houston immigration lawyer Jacob Monty.

Lifelong Republican donor and activist Jacob Monty revealed this week he has quit the GOP and joined the Democratic Party, citing the deadly U.S. Capitol riot incited by former President Donald Trump as “a bridge too far for me.”

“I’m out,” the immigration lawyer from Houston told Erin Burnett on Friday’s broadcast of CNN’s “OutFront.” (Watch the video above).

Burnett asked Monty ― who voted for President Joe Biden in the 2020 election ― if the GOP was now more the party of the unhinged QAnon conspiracy theory than of conservatives like himself. Continue reading.

Trump notches court wins by running out clock on lawsuits

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Former President Trump left office as numerous lawsuits against him and his administration still hung in the balance, a result that legal experts say was part of a calculated strategy to run out the clock and avoid accountability while in the White House.

By dragging his feet in court, Trump evaded subpoenas for his tax returns and dodged a final ruling on whether his continued business dealings violated the Constitution’s ban on profiting off the presidency.

His administration also upended the legal process, experts say, by treating emergency requests to the Supreme Court as a standard litigation move, often with success. Continue reading.

White Nationalist Facing Election Indictment — And Carlson Defends Him With Lies

On January 27, the Department of Justice announced that it had filed charges against Douglass Mackey, alias “Ricky Vaughn,” regarding allegations that he had interfered with the 2016 election. Mackey, a white nationalist who was eventually banned from Twitter, allegedly conspired to use social media to spread false information about voting in 2016 – specifically, claiming that people could text in their votes. Parts of the misinformation campaign appeared to target Black and Latino people. The complaint alleges that “at least 4,900” telephone numbers did just that.

Fox host Tucker Carlson ignored what Mackey’s actual charges claim and instead shouted that Mackey had merely “hurt [the] feelings” of liberals. Carlson said that Mackey’s arrest was proof that the First Amendment is “effectively suspended,” and he declared that “we are clearly living under some form of martial law at the moment.”

Carlson was flatly pushing lies. He either didn’t read the one-page Department of Justice press release explaining the charges of voter disinformation or decided to just flat-out lie given that his own network argues no reasonable viewer takes him seriously anyway. Mackey’s posts solicited people to text a specific number to vote, and there is evidence a large number of them did. There are no “meme” or “LOLz” exceptions for breaking the law. Continue reading.