The Republican party is definitely the most schizophrenic public entity in existence right now. While in Washington this week MAGAts smeared feces in the Capitol, high-profile GOPers and staffers resigned on the spot, people lay dead, injured or going to jail, and Mitch McConnell denounced the sitting president for his “sweeping conspiracy theories” and declaimed that there was “no evidence of illegality of such a massive scale that it would have tipped the election,” down in Florida there was a completely different reality playing out, in a parallel universe. Under the crystal chandeliers of the elegant seaside Ritz Carlton, denial was the order of the day. Nobody but nobody was blaming Donald Trump for the rioting in Washington or for much of anything. In fact, they couldn’t reaffirm him as head of the party strongly enough. New York Times:
Party members, one after another, said in interviews that the president did not bear any blame for the violence at the Capitol and indicated that they wanted him to continue to play a leading role in the party.
“I surely embrace President Trump,” said Michele Fiore, the committeewoman from Nevada, where Republicans have lost two Senate races and the governorship since 2016. Ms. Fiore, who was sporting a Trump-emblazoned vest, said the president was “absolutely” a positive force in the party. […]
Earlier in the day on Thursday, when the president briefly called into a breakfast meeting, he was greeted by applause. And when the Missouri national committeeman, Gordon Kinne, said at the breakfast that he was a supporter of the president but had been upset by his comments about the violence at the Capitol, he was met with a generally frosty response, according to another committee member in the room. […]
“We can’t exist without the people he brought to the party — he’s changed the direction of the party,” said Paul Reynolds, the Republican committeeman from Alabama. “We’re a different party because of the people that came with him, and they make us a better party.”
Reta Hamilton, a committeewoman from Arkansas, said Mr. Trump should play “a leading part” in the G.O.P. in the future for just that reason — “to bring his voters,” she said.
This is who the GOP is and this is who they want to be. That much is clear. Ronna McDaniel was reelected and she was handpicked by Trump. Also reappointed was co-chair Tommy Hicks, who is buddies with Don Jr. and that’s how he got his job in the first place. They, and the rest of the RNC, are collectively oblivious to the reality of what is going on around them and oblivion is where this party is not only headed, it’s hell bent to get there. Trump is the first president since Herbert Hoover to lose reelection and the Senate and the House, in one fell swoop, and he will also be the first president since Andrew Johnson to boycott his successor’s inauguration. But that doesn’t seem to bother anybody. Their reaction is, “So?”
“This room, they’re in denial, and that’s on the record,” Bill Palatucci, a committeeman from New Jersey, said during a break in the Friday session, acknowledging the “damage done to the country” and the Republican “brand” this week.
But Mr. Palatucci was a lonely voice of dissent, at least in public.
Privately, a group of Republican officials, mostly those from the pre-Trump establishment wing of the party, said that they were appalled by the president’s conduct and that Ms. McDaniel had been candid about the party’s difficulties behind closed doors.
That may be the view privately, but just like in any dysfunctional family, what’s said in private and what’s done in public are two different things. Publicly, it looks like bluster and bravado are going to be the tools of the GOP going forward. Apparently they are unteachable and the lesson that everything Trump touches dies is lost on them. Hope for the reality of duplicating 2016 springs eternal. And that may come from the fact that the political experts are largely gone from the RNC and the CT crowd has taken over.
The loyalty to Mr. Trump results in part from the turnover on the committee during his term. The president’s top political lieutenants intervened to install loyalists in state and local G.O.P. conventions ahead of 2020. The goal was to prevent any party rule changes that could have made it easier to mount a primary challenge against Mr. Trump, but the end result was to leave the committee heavy with Trump devotees.
The changes also accelerated a trend that pre-dated Mr. Trump’s rise: the evolution of the committee from a body filled with canny political professionals and power brokers in their states to one dominated by dogmatic partisans well-marinated in Fox News and Facebook memes.
Perhaps more significant, the president has fostered a new wave of activism on the right — and many longstanding G.O.P. leaders fear alienating these newcomers to party politics.
This is exactly the dynamic of any bad marriage. The husband is crazy and abusive but the wife thinks she can’t make it without him, rationalizing that he’s a good provider and even remodeled their home and built an extension recently. The fact that he’s expanding the family home while blowing up the rest of the city it resides in and members of the family are going to jail is something that Wifey doesn’t even bother to parse, because it raises issues which are clearly too difficult to deal with. So she just decides to hang in there and hope for the best, hope for the return of an earlier day when things weren’t quite so awful.
David Bossie, one of Mr. Trump’s advisers and the Maryland committeeman, insisted that the party’s losses had been on the margins.
“You don’t have to throw out everybody when there’s nothing fundamentally wrong,” Mr. Bossie said.
What could be fundamentally wrong? What, you mean the riot at the Capitol? Don’t be such a wuss.
Both Matt Gaetz and Donald Trump Jr. recently proclaimed that the old GOP was gone and the new GOP was “the party of Trump.” Evidently that’s the feeling of the rank and file, if we can take this week’s RNC meeting as any indicator. It will be most curious to see how this comports with Mitch McConnell’s understanding of where the party’s going, because inarguably, he’s the head of the Republican party right now, not Trump. Trump’s last full day in office is ten days from now, McConnell is still leading the Republican caucus in the Senate, albeit from the minority leader position. And I daresay it’s safe to say that that is how he views it all.
This is going to be one wing ding of a house cleaning at the GOP. The plaster is falling and it’s only a matter of time before the walls collapse, but apparently if you talk to the GOPers at the winter meeting, they’ll tell you it’s a showplace. What will it take for them to wake up, one wonders, a sign on the lawn saying “This Property Is Condemned?”
Personality cult members are scared & broken people. They need someone to follow, always someone who can reaffirm their fears & promise them they are headed to paradise. I often wonder how parents saw people horribly dying from poisoning, yet fed their children the same poison in jonestown. As hamlet advised his friend, “there are more things in heaven & earth than dreamt of in your philosophy horatio”. Boy, isn’t that true for us all. Mysteries.
The line was “there are stranger things” and yes, I agree. I have never seen the dynamic of a political party morphing into a suicide cult before, but this would seem to be it. Maybe they just haven’t lost enough. The 12-step programs all proceed from the principle that you cannot effect a change until you hit bottom, meaning you’ve had it and you want to life differently. It seems like the GOP is in need of a program called Trump Anonymous.
Thanks for the correction. Been awhile since reading hamlet, but glad the point wasn’t lost. When citizens of the relatively richest, largest, & most free country in the world turn on democracy, it’s a head scratcher.
Only if you think they ever believed in it in the first place. Just like their Bibles, such professed beliefs were a mask and an excuse.
True.
This will say little of me, Scott. But as I see it, none of them are broken enough yet. But we’ve got time.
I don’t think it says little. The problem of evil & what to do about it stymies all of us. As townsend said in Tommy, ” i believe in love, but how can men who’ve never seen light be ignited?”…saw where ur dad, i think, was in patton’s army. I had 5 uncles scattered in europe & the pacific. Sometimes it has to be met with force, as they are beyond reason. The whole lot of them need to be caught & given time to brush up on history in the prison library.
Grandfather on the old man’s side, actually, Scott.
None of the above counts as my problem. As I see it, I’ll tolerate their presence if they sincerely clean up their act or I’ll banish them to wilderness on pain of extermination if they don’t.