GOP now the cult of Trump 8 , CD3 DFL

For Republicans, fealty to Trump’s election falsehood becomes defining loyalty test

Debra Ell, a Republican organizer in Michigan and fervent supporter of former president Donald Trump, said she has good reason to believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

“I think I speak for many people in that Trump has never actually been wrong, and so we’ve learned to trust when he says something, that he’s not just going to spew something out there that’s wrong and not verified,” she said, referring to Trump’s baseless claims that widespread electoral fraud caused his loss to President Biden in November.

In fact, there is no evidence to support Trump’s false assertions, which culminated in a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. But Ell, a Republican precinct delegate in her state, said the 2020 election is one of the reasons she’s working to censure and remove Jason Cabel Roe from his role as the Michigan Republican Party’s executive director — specifically that Roe accepted the 2020 results, telling Politico that “the election wasn’t stolen” and that “there is no one to blame but Trump.” Continue reading.

GOP ramps up attacks on Biden’s border wall freeze

Republicans in Congress are increasingly lashing out at President Biden’s decision to freeze funding for the wall along the southern border.

GOP lawmakers are zeroing in on Biden’s proclamation from January, immediately upon taking office, in which he followed through on a campaign promise to halt construction of the wall, which had become the centerpiece of former President Trump’s hard-line immigration policies.

The White House on Jan. 20 said it would take 60 days to review the use of border wall funds. Continue reading.

Chris Christie Gives One-Term, Twice-Impeached Trump An ‘A’ For His Presidency

The New Jersey Republican said there were “some things that clouded his accomplishments” at the end of Trump’s time in office.

Chris Christie is back on the Trump train.

The former Republican governor of New Jersey was not shy in railing against longtime friend Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the 2020 election result and his incitement of the deadly U.S. Capitol riot, for which he was impeached for a second time.

But on Friday, Christie was asked by Fox News personality Sean Hannity how he graded Trump’s presidency.

Christie gave top marks to the former reality-TV star, whose offensive rhetoric he has defended for years. Continue reading.

Watch: GOP leader McCarthy squirms as Chris Wallace grills him on Trump’s seditious Jan. 6 behavior

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) on Sunday disputed allegations that President Donald Trump reached out to him to coordinate an alibi after the Capitol was attacked by Trump-supporting insurrectionists on Jan. 6.

Fox News host Chris Wallace confronted McCarthy about a telephone call he had with Trump soon after the attack on the Capitol was underway.

“Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are,” Trump reportedly told McCarthy at the time, according to Rep. Herrera Beutler (R-WA). Continue reading.

The fading GOP establishment moves to support Cheney as Trump attacks and McCarthy keeps his distance

Following her vote to impeach Donald Trump, Rep. Liz Cheney has received a groundswell of financial support from the most powerful figures in traditional GOP politics and the corporate world.

Inside her nearly $1.6 million haul in three months, Cheney (R-Wyo.) secured financial backing from dozens of alumni of both Bush administrations, including a couple of Cabinet members and, not surprisingly, her parents, Richard and Lynne Cheney. More than 10 current and former members of the House cut checks to her campaign, including former speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and a handful of other Republicans who voted to impeach the former president during the Jan. 13 vote.

Five GOP senators donated to Cheney, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Continue reading.

Liz Cheney vs. MAGA

The Wyoming congresswoman challenged Republicans to turn away from Trump after Jan. 6. Instead, they turned on her.

The regular conference meetings of the Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives, held most weeks behind closed doors in the Capitol Visitor Center, tend to be predictable and thus irregularly attended affairs. The party leaders — the House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, the minority whip Steve Scalise and the conference chairwoman Liz Cheney, whose job it is to run these meetings — typically begin with a few housekeeping matters and then proceed with a discussion of the party’s message or issue du jour. The conference’s more voluble members line up at the microphone to opine for one to two minutes at a time; the rare newsworthy comment is often leaked and memorialized on Twitter seconds after it is uttered. An hour or so later, the members file out into the corridors of the Capitol and back to their offices, a few of them lingering to talk to reporters.

The conference meeting on the afternoon of Feb. 3 was different in nearly every way. It lasted four hours and nearly all of the G.O.P.’s 210 House members attended. Its stated purpose was to decide whether to remove Cheney from her leadership position.

Three weeks earlier, Cheney announced that she would vote to impeach President Donald Trump over his encouragement of his supporters’ storming the Capitol on Jan. 6 — one of only 10 House Republicans to do so and the only member of the party’s leadership. Because her colleagues had elected Cheney to the party’s third-highest position in the House, her words were generally seen as expressing the will of the conference, and those words had been extremely clear: “There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution,” she said. Continue reading.

Assaulting the Truth, Ron Johnson Helps Erode Confidence in Government

Pushing false theories on the virus, the vaccine and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Mr. Johnson, the Republican senator from Wisconsin, has absorbed his party’s transformation under Donald Trump.

BROOKFIELD, Wis. — Senator Ron Johnson incited widespread outrage when he said recently that he would have been more afraid of the rioters who rampaged the Capitol on Jan. 6 had they been members of Black Lives Matter and antifa.

But his revealing and incendiary comment, which quickly prompted accusations of racism, came as no surprise to those who have followed Mr. Johnson’s career in Washington or back home in Wisconsin. He has become the Republican Party’s foremost amplifier of conspiracy theories and disinformation now that Donald Trump himself is banned from social media and largely avoiding appearances on cable television.

Mr. Johnson is an all-access purveyor of misinformation on serious issues such as the pandemic and the legitimacy of American democracy, as well as invoking the etymology of Greenland as a way to downplay the effects of climate change. Continue reading.

In Restricting Early Voting, the Right Sees a New ‘Center of Gravity’

Donald Trump is no longer center stage. But many conservative activists are finding that the best way to raise money and keep voters engaged is to make his biggest fabrication their top priority.

For more than a decade, the Susan B. Anthony List and the American Principles Project have pursued cultural and policy priorities from the social conservative playbook, one backing laws to ban abortion once a fetal heartbeat could be detected and the other opposing civil rights protections for L.G.B.T.Q. people. From their shared offices in suburban Virginia, they and their affiliated committees spent more than $20 million on elections last year.

But after Donald J. Trump lost his bid for a second term and convinced millions of Americans that nonexistent fraud was to blame, the two groups found that many of their donors were thinking of throwing in the towel. Why, donors argued, should they give any money if Democrats were going to game the system to their advantage, recalled Frank Cannon, the senior strategist for both groups.

“‘Before I give you any money for anything at all, tell me how this is going to be solved,’” Mr. Cannon said, summarizing his conversations. He and other conservative activists — many with no background in election law — didn’t take long to come up with an answer, which was to make rolling back access to voting the “center of gravity in the party,” as he put it. Continue reading.

GOP Slams Biden’s ‘Unlawful’ Border Actions After Supporting Similar Trump Moves

Republicans eagerly supported Donald Trump when he circumvented Congress on the border wall. Now they say Joe Biden can’t do the same.

Republicans this week accused President Joe Biden of violating federal law after he froze funding for border wall construction between the U.S. and Mexico, an impediment they say is needed to stop the growing influx of migrants there.

Sens. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), joined by 38 other GOP senators, wrote a letter to the Government Accountability Office on Wednesday calling Biden’s executive order halting construction a “blatant violation of federal law and infringe(s) on Congress’s constitutional power of the purse.”

The lawmakers cited the Impoundment Control Act, a 1974 law aimed at preventing executive branch officials from unilaterally substituting their own funding decisions for those of Congress. Continue reading.

Kevin McCarthy buried by ex-GOP staffer for ‘rolling over’ and becoming Trump’s ‘good dog’

In a column for the Bulwark, a former speechwriter for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) claimed that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has given up all pretense of being his own man and now does Donald Trump’s bidding — even if it means contradicting his own previous statements.

Under a biting headline that reads, “Kevin McCarthy, Fetch,” Amanda Carpenter took the senior Republican to task for performing for Trump while on TV in exchange for “belly rubs and treats.”

Setting the stage, she wrote, “Some dog lovers believe that what makes their canine companions wonderful is their ability to ‘live in the moment’—meaning that, although they can be trained and obedient, and can learn to recognize and remember things they love and things they fear, they don’t have distinct memories of the past, let alone an ability to plan for the future. These dogs—or so the thinking goes—love their owners unconditionally. And they just want to submit and play nice for belly rubs and treats,” before complimenting the New York Times’ Julie Hirschfeld Davis for once observing McCarthy as a “golden retriever of a man who hates to be by himself.” Continue reading.

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