It’s been tragic to watch once sensible Republicans expose their feral side as the TV game show host has taken over their party. Lindsey Graham was one of the first. Back in 2015 Graham saw Trump for the “kook” and “xenophobe” that he was. Nowadays he sees him in messaniac terms, as do they all. Even more tragic, possibly, is Elise Stefanik’s descent to Trump toadie. Stefanik is very smart. She was initially hailed as being the hope for the future of the GOP, representative of a new generation of Republicans. And the latter is true. She does represent a new generation of the GOP that has simply given up, smashed any remaining moral compass, and decided to throw in their lot with the least qualified and most corrupt politician in the history of not only the Republican party but American politics as a whole. Why? For power.
She has no scruples or principles beyond attaining short-term power.
— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) June 15, 2024
That’s the motivation. The reason I compare Stefanik to Leni Riefenstahl is because she’s the perfect propagandist. She knows exactly what she’s doing. She knows there was nothing wrong with the 2020 election but rather than move past the lie and rebuild, she wants to use the lie to destroy the basis of our democracy, which is faith in free and fair elections. That she would do such a thing tells you everything about her that you would want to know.
Leni Riefenstahl believed that Adolf Hitler could “save” Germany and she produced pro-Nazi propaganda films. She said her idealized image of him fell apart “far too late.” I don’t think that Stefanik has an idealized image of Trump. I think she sees him for who and what he is and is seizing an opportunity to leap frog ahead in politics. If she can get on Trump’s ticket as the VP and if by some miracle Trump can get reelected, Stefanik might be the president in not too many years — or such is her reasoning and her hope.
She’s not doing a lot of reasoning if her best political moves are geared around a horrific candidate like Trump who loses lawsuits the way the rest of us dispose of paper napkins. The man got where he did through a series of flukes and through the empowerment of a Republican party with a vacuum of leadership. Stefanik and the others in the GOP apparently believe, in the words of Charlie Sykes, that “amnesia and ignorance” can win the day for Trump in 2024.
They are all blindly committed to try, in any event. Stefanik may have once embodied the values of the Republican party but she is no longer a conservative. She’s embraced the dark side and beome a Trump toadie. She’s in it for money and power. If she has to burn down democracy in her quest for personal advancement, so be it.
Interesting that Lauren Boebert and Stefanik play by the same rules, isn’t it? Stefanik has probably 40 IQ points and definitely two college degrees on Boebert and is lightyears beyond her in every way. But not this one. On this issue, being a Trump toady and lying like a rug, they are both cheap propagandists and virtually indistinguishable.
It will be interesting to see what happens when today’s Republicans, the ones that we are watching right now, Stefanik, Mike Johnson, Mitch McConnell, all have their 1946 moment. I refer to 1946 in post-war Germany, when everybody and his brother began to claim that they weren’t really Nazis, they just had to join the party in order to survive because Hitler the maniac would have had them killed. Let’s see who claims that they were never really MAGAs and just giving lip service to Trump to survive.
I can’t wait to hear Stefanik’s version of how she wanted power only so she could set right what Trump had messed up, or something to that effect. She’s quite the fantasist. I would put nothing past her.
stefanik’s reasoning shows a remarkable lack of, well, reasoning. She is not intelligent, she is not even rational. She is an abject opportunist and would stab her own family members in the back to get on the Von Shitzinpants ticket. Someone needs to tell this idiot woman that the v.p. in a trump administration is likely his diaper changer and nothing more. If she thinks she’ll be the P on some future ticket she is deluding herself. It’d be like palin thinking she was going to get elected prez-ain’t gonna happen EVER.
Please note, the photo at the beginning of the article is of Kari Lake (another toady), not Stefanik.
Yeah the Germans claimed they were innocent but Patton marched their sorry evil child killing asses over to the camps to see the piles of bodies.
Maybe someone should remind Stefanik of exactly how many Democrats have been successfully prosecuted for voter fraud compared to how many Republicans have been successfully prosecuted for voter fraud. (I haven’t heard of any cases involving Democrats–officials or ordinary folk–getting caught up in such investigations but GOPers? Yeah. A couple of dozen or so just in the last decade–starting right about the time that Trump and the GOP started getting so concerned about “election integrity.”)