Skip to main content

What the GOP Learned from The Former Guy

 

I promise to write something new soon — right now, it's not in the cards. Regardless, there are still a few past posts that I think are worth revisiting. This one goes back to March 2021, two months after Jan 6 and the subsequent Biden inauguration. The timeline and its context notwithstanding, I don’t think there’s a word I would change. If anything, I’m guilty of understatement, as the Trump cancer continues to metastasize to the point where it will clearly outlive him.

The Trump legacy is still a work in progress, but the outlines are already on full display.

I tried to watch the Former Guy’s CPAC speech. I really did. I hung in there for almost two minutes before I needed a shower.

But at least one thing came through loud and clear. In the last four years, Donald Trump gave all Republicans a license to lie, cheat, and steal just as much as their natures allow. And that license has not expired.

Trump led by example, and they were happy to follow. We would now be hard put to find a single Republican public figure who doesn’t enjoy the ethical code of a playground bully.

Every one of them now lives permanently in an alternate universe where cruelty, inhumanity, and death are policy positions. They see no Covid, no climate change, no dilapidated infrastructure, no racism. They see not a single reason why government should step in and do anything. Fifty senators are content to watch the country incinerate.

Imagine what the Biden administration could do if there were just ten Republican senators with even the slightest interest in keeping people from dying. Just ten with just a tiny sense that there might be a few things that demand the attention of responsible government.

Even those six who so spinefully jeopardized their careers to vote for Trump’s conviction promptly reverted to type. They must have remembered they have constituents that still need ignoring.

You would think something like a global pandemic might have been instructive. That it might have gotten them to think twice about the cost — political, if not human — of nonstop lying and gaslighting. But no, following Trump’s lead, they’re happy to absorb that cost. If there even is one.

Not that they weren’t vile before. It’s just that they always used to pretend otherwise. They always seemed to know how good people were supposed to behave, even if they had no interest in it themselves. They always seemed to have some inkling that overt, in-your-face hatred wouldn’t do their careers any good.

It was fine being racist, it just wasn’t fine to talk about it. At least not in public.

Trump changed all that. Trump put them in touch with their inner playground bully, and they’re now fully committed to a morally bankrupt existence.

We’ve all been reading how the GOP is dividing into two mutually hostile factions — the Mitch McConnell wing and the Trump wing — and how this spells doom for the party. Don’t believe it. The GOP has been left for dead too many times in the last fifty years. Each time they’ve come back more malevolent than ever.

So while it warms my heart to think the Republican vote might one day be split between the Mitchies and the Trumpies, the rift isn’t really that deep.

The Mitchies are all about “I’m rich. You’re not. Fuck you.”

The Trumpies are all about “I’m stupid. I have a constitutional right to be stupid. Fuck you.”

Both groups get to the same place, just by different intellectual paths. They’re two symptoms of the same disease.

The Mitchies answer to their corporate donors and oligarchs, the ones who bought and paid for the party’s current predicament. They have long depended on, and shamelessly pandered to, their electoral base of racists and religious nuts. Which was always just a cover for their real agenda — deregulation and tax cuts. They never thought the base would get wise.

But the Trumpies, while still far from wise, are nonetheless in open revolt. Just what they’re revolting against is not clear, especially not to them. But they’re threatening the political futures — and perhaps even the very lives — of the Mitchies. When a mob talks about hanging Mike Pence, the word “Republican” takes on new meaning.

So right now, it seems the Trumpies have the upper hand. Certainly the CPAC burlesque would have you believe that. But it could be an illusion. Trump worship could melt away faster than we think. Stripped of his Twitter account, Trump’s ability to fan the flames of idiocy will be far more constrained. Beyond that, he’s about to get pulled in ten directions by indictments and civil suits that will be hard to spin as political strength.

Trump is a unique figure, and without him the Trumpies may have nowhere to turn. No obvious replacement has yet been heaved up from the ooze, and he won’t be an easy act to follow.

At the same time, it would be a mistake to underestimate the staying power of the Mitchies. They have vast amounts of money at their disposal, and they’re not afraid to use it. Even now, they’re working out ways to buy off the Trumpies and bring them back into the fold — it’s safe to say this will involve lying. Plus, they’re doubling down on gerrymandering, voter ID laws, and whatever else they can do to steal the midterms.

I think both factions will coalesce around somebody — or some faux cause (remember the Tea Party?) — I just don’t think it will be the Former Guy. I don’t see him as the problem going forward, as noisy as he’ll be in the near term.

The real problem is the willingness of Republicans to go down the road he paved for them.

They already knew decency was overrated. What they didn’t know — until he showed them — was just how expendable it was.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Blackmail for Fun and Profit

Once in a while, I like to use this space to indulge in some idle speculation, taking a few what-ifs and seeing where they lead. I tend to do this in response to some stimulus, some ping to my brain. Which is just what Keith Olbermann provided in one of his podcasts last week. He was talking about Jeff Bezos’ upcoming wedding to Lauren Sanchez, the woman with whom Bezos had been having the affair that ultimately ended his marriage. You'll recall that in 2019, Trump operators had a heavy hand in that breakup, having attempted to blackmail Bezos into coercing The Washington Post, which he owns, into covering Trump more obsequiously. It's rare to see such an instance of high-level blackmail surface in public, and we only know about it because Bezos didn't bite. He outed himself, he went public about the whole affair, thereby ending his marriage, which was apparently on the ropes anyway. An unusually happy postscript to this otherwise routine multi-bill

The Mainstream Media Continues to Disappoint

The awkward term "both-siderism" has, at long last, stepped into the limelight, thanks to the graceful gravitas of CNN icon Christiane Amanpour (full disclosure: our dog used to play with her dog). In one brilliant commencement address , to the Columbia School of Journalism, she dope-slapped her own profession and, indeed, her own boss, both of whom richly deserved it. That takes guts, not to mention a reputation for integrity. Both of which she has in abundance. What she said about the "both sides" problem in journalism is nothing new. But to those of us who've been screaming about it for years, it's refreshing to hear it denounced by a mainstream journalist of her stature, in a venue that serves as an incubator of mainstream journalism. While she declined to mention names, there was no doubt about the targets of her irritation. CNN and its chairman, Chris Licht, were still licking their wounds from their treacherous but buffoonish

The Definition of Defamation is Up in the Air

Underlying all the recent commotion surrounding Fox, Tucker Carlson, and the mess they've created for themselves, there's an important legal issue that has flown largely under the radar, but may soon be ready for its closeup. It's a First Amendment issue concerning the meaning of defamation, and the standard that must be met to prove it. The constitutionality of the existing standard was expected to be tested in the Fox-Dominion case, had that case come to trial. But since that didn't happen, I figured it would go back to the back burner. But then, last week, Ron DeSantis had it blow up in his face , giving the whole issue new momentum, and from a surprising direction. His own people took him down. DeSantis had talked his pet legislature into launching an outrageous assault on freedom of the press, eviscerating existing libel laws, and making it easier for public figures — like, say, DeSantis himself— to sue for defamation. One can just imagine DeSantis cackling