Confirmed: There is no looming GOP "reckoning" over Trump, and there will never will be, no matter how many times naïve news outlets suggest otherwise.- Eric Boehlert, Memo to media: the GOP's Trump "reckoning" is never coming Press Run 01/29/2021
For five years, the press has gotten this story wrong. Why? Today's Republican Party represents an unwieldy challenge for news outlets. It spent the winter wantonly trying to invalidate election results, while simultaneously endangering the masses during a public healthy crisis by deliberately misinforming Americans about the Covid-19 pandemic. It has also taken no disciplinary action against a new Congresswoman who previously supported the killing of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
Yet the press remains committed to portraying the GOP as a mainstream, center-right entity. That's why it keeps botching the "reckoning" story — reporters assume there is a Republican breaking point with Trump and the politics of hate and revenge he represents. But there never is.
I mentioned recently the Republican ritual of distancing themselves from previous Republican Presidents and failed Republican Presidential candidates.
But that is happening now only to a very limited extent. And it's getting a lot of pushback from the majority Republicans. (Nick Reynolds, Wyoming Capitol crowd cheers on Gaetz, seeks replacement for Cheney Casper Star-Tribune 01/28/2021)
That disavowal ritual has been part of the continuous radicalization of the Republican Party over the last four decades. It's not because the radicalization process has stopped. Nomiki Konst and her two guests in this clip looks at a recent comment by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the topic, AOC: GOP Is Full-On White Supremacist Party 01/29/2021:
Frank Luntz, who now calls himself a former Republican pollster, suggests in this long interview that Trumpism reflects the political radicalization of the Republican base. "These are not your parents' Republicans." (Trump's American Carnage: Frank Luntz (interview) PBS Frontline)
Part of the restraint on criticizing Trump is surely a horse-race one. Trump is still around, he has a fanatical following in the Republican base, and he is still eligible to run for President in 2024.
But Timothy Snyder's essay earlier this month offers a useful way to look at divisions within the Republican Party post-Capitol-riot, The American Abyss New York Times Magazine 01/09/2021. He sees today's Republican Party as an alliance between two political mentalities, which he labels the "gamers" and the "breakers". I might have picked Players and Destroyers, as the labels, but he doesn't.
In his schema, Mitch McConnell is emblematic of the Gamers and Trump of the Breakers. But he does not see this as a difference in basic policies and goal. Or even in their commitment to democracy, at least not in the sense of popular rule. Those he calls the Gamers are "concerned above all with gaming the system to maintain power, taking full advantage of constitutional obscurities, gerrymandering and dark money to win elections with a minority of motivated voters."
In other words, gaming major undemocratic elements of the system like the Electoral College, the structure of the Senate, and Supreme Court elimination of controls on campaign donations and of civil rights legislation to prevent disenfranchisement of voters based on race, to maintain dominant national power even when they cannot win a majority of votes nationally. "They have no interest in the collapse of the peculiar form of representation that allows their minority party disproportionate control of government." They want to maintain the forms of democracy and Constitutional government, in other words, even while they cheat the democratic system.
Wisconsin is one of the Gamers' success stories. "In 2012, the first election with the new [severely gerrymandered legislative districts] in place, Republicans won less than half the votes, but conquered 60 of the state’s 99 assembly seats. The Republicans grew their majority in 2014 and 2016, despite earning just over 50% of the statewide vote." (Sam Levine, Wisconsin: the state where American democracy went to die The Guardian 04/10/2020; my emphasis).
Snyder writes:
In the four decades since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have overcome the tension between the gamers and the breakers by governing in opposition to government, or by calling elections a revolution (the Tea Party), or by claiming to oppose elites. The breakers, in this arrangement, provide cover for the gamers, putting forth an ideology that distracts from the basic reality that government under Republicans is not made smaller butsimply diverted to serve a handful of interests.In other words, Snyder is agreeing with those who have been commenting that we got lucky in that Trump was too stupid to actually pull off a coup. And I think this is right, although we are finding out more all the time about how close he actually came, and we will know a lot more eventually.
At first, Trump seemed like a threat to this balance. His lack of experience in politics and his open racism made hima very uncomfortable figure for the party; his habit of continually telling lies was initially found by prominent Republicans to be uncouth. Yet after he won the presidency, his particular skills as a breaker seemed to create a tremendous opportunity for the gamers. Led by the gamer in chief, McConnell, they secured hundreds of federal judges and tax cuts for the rich.
Trump was unlike other breakers in that he seemed to have no ideology. His objection to institutions was that they might constrain him personally. He intended to break the system to serve himself — and this is partly why he has failed. Trump is a charismatic politician and inspires devotion not only among voters but among a surprising number of lawmakers, but he has no vision that is greater than himself or what his admirers project upon him. In this respect his pre-fascism fell short of fascism: His vision never went further than a mirror. He arrived at a trulybig lie not from any view of the world but from the reality that he might lose something. [my emphasis]
But Trump didn't just talk and practice "revolutionary" symbolism. He actually wanted to "revolutionize" the system. Or more clearly, to use pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric and posturing to stage an actual authoritarian coup. Here is some of the putschist rhetoric from the Transcript of Trump's January 6 incitement speech (U.S. News/AP; my emphasis in bold), all part of a long speech in which he recounted fabricated tales of voter fraud and repeatedly invoked the names of Barack Obama and Stacey Abrams, both African-American politicians his white supremacist base despite. I'm including a longish selection, to give some context to Snyder's observation that given Trump's message, the storming of the Capitol "did make a kind of sense: If the election really had been stolen, as senators and congressmen were themselves suggesting, then how could Congress be allowed to move forward?" (my italics)
Trump, January 6:
The media is the biggest problem we have as far as I’m concerned, single biggest problem. The fake news and the Big tech. ...
All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they’re doing. And stolen by the fake news media. That’s what they’ve done and what they’re doing. We will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. ...
And by the way, does anybody believe that Joe had 80 million votes? Does anybody believe that? He had 80 million computer votes. It’s a disgrace. There’s never been anything like that. You could take third-world countries. Just take a look. Take third-world countries. Their elections are more honest than what we’ve been going through in this country. It’s a disgrace. It’s a disgrace. ...
We don’t have a free and fair press. Our media is not free, it’s not fair. It suppresses thought, it suppresses speech and it’s become the enemy of the people. It’s become the enemy of the people. It’s the biggest problem we have in this country. ...
We’re gathered together in the heart of our nation’s capital for one very, very basic and simple reason: To save our democracy. ...
For years, Democrats have gotten away with election fraud and weak Republicans. And that’s what they are. There’s so many weak Republicans. And we have great ones. Jim Jordan and some of these guys, they’re out there fighting. The House guys are fighting. But it’s, it’s incredible. ...
Many of the Republicans, I helped them get in, I helped them get elected. I helped Mitch get elected. I helped. I could name 24 of them, let’s say, I won’t bore you with it. And then all of a sudden you have something like this. It’s like, “Oh gee, maybe I’ll talk to the president sometime later.” No, it’s amazing.
They’re weak Republicans, they’re pathetic Republicans and that’s what happens. ...
But we look at the facts and our election was so corrupt that in the history of this country we’ve never seen anything like it. You can go all the way back. ...
Republicans are, Republicans are constantly fighting like a boxer with his hands tied behind his back. It’s like a boxer. And we want to be so nice. We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. And we’re going to have to fight much harder. ...
Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down.
Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.
Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. ...
The American people do not believe the corrupt, fake news anymore. They have ruined their reputation. But you know, it used to be that they’d argue with me. I’d fight. So I’d fight, they’d fight, I’d fight, they’d fight. Pop pop. You’d believe me, you’d believe them. Somebody comes out. You know, they had their point of view, I had my point of view, but you’d have an argument.
Now what they do is they go silent. It’s called suppression and that’s what happens in a communist country. That’s what they do, they suppress. You don’t fight with them anymore. Unless it’s a bad story. They have a little bad story about me, they make it 10 times worse and it’s a major headline. ...
Today, for the sake of our democracy, for the sake of our Constitution, and for the sake of our children, we lay out the case for the entire world to hear. You want to hear it?
(Audience responds: “Yeah”)
In every single swing state, local officials, state officials, almost all Democrats, made illegal and unconstitutional changes to election procedures without the mandated approvals by the state legislatures.
That these changes paved a way for fraud on a scale never seen before. ...
I’ve been telling these Republicans, get rid of Section 230. And for some reason, Mitch and the group, they don’t want to put it in there and they don’t realize that that’s going to be the end of the Republican Party as we know it, but it’s never going to be the end of us. Never. Let them get out. Let, let the weak ones get out. This is a time for strength.
They also want to indoctrinate your children in school by teaching them things that aren’t so. They want to indoctrinate your children. It’s all part of the comprehensive assault on our democracy, and the American people are finally standing up and saying no. This crowd is, again, a testament to it. ...
The radical left knows ...exactly what they’re doing. They’re ruthless and it’s time that somebody did something about it. ...
As this enormous crowd shows, we have truth and justice on our side. We have a deep and enduring love for America in our hearts. We love our country. ...
We have overwhelming pride in this great country and we have it deep in our souls. Together, we are determined to defend and preserve government of the people, by the people and for the people. ...
And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore. ...
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