I’ve written this before before, but it looks like we are on the cusp of a Republican civil war. This time, the GOP is choosing sides between Matt Gaetz and Kevin McCarthy. With both alternatives so uninspiring, I’m reminded of the great Georgia writer Lewis Grizzard’s rumination that the Iran-Iraq war was akin to a Harvard-Yale football game. In short, Grizzard explained relating his football parable, “You’re all a bunch of Yankees, and I hope you both lose.”
But until the sniping between Gaetz’s MAGA faction and McCarthy’s slightly less MAGA faction begins, I’d like to address a pattern that I’ve seen recently. Namely, that Republicans are getting more and more overt about their authoritarian tendencies and saying the quiet part out loud.
I had hoped that after Trump was beaten the Republican Party would return to sanity. The problem was that Trump didn’t acknowledge his defeat and Republicans bought into his lies about the stolen election. An August CNN poll found that 69 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners thought that Biden’s victory was “not legitimate.” Now the belief in the stolen election conspiracy theory is feeding into rhetoric that is more and more bellicose and desperate.
One of the most egregious examples was Donald Trump’s Truth Social post that advocated executing outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley for treason. Trump was upset about Milley’s backchannel communications with China at a time during the upheaval of the 2020 post-election when the Chinese were concerned that a deranged Trump might launch an attack on them.
To most of us, this sounds like the rantings of a madman, but far too many Trump supporters take it seriously.
And more serious Republican politicians give it a pass. No mention of Trump’s veiled threat was made in last week’s Republican debate. The Washington Post explains why, noting that a leaked memo from Win It Back, a group aligned with the Club for Growth, detailed that the group’s research found that “Every traditional post-production ad attacking President Trump either backfired or produced no impact on his ballot support and favorability.… This includes ads that primarily feature video of him saying liberal or stupid comments from his own mouth.”
In other words, Republicans are tuning out any criticism of Donald Trump even when Trump is caught on video saying outlandish things.
Outlandish things that include saying that he will have robbers summarily shot. I’m not making this up. In a speech to California Republicans over the weekend, The Former Guy advocated killing robbers without a trial.
“We will immediately stop all of the pillaging and theft,” Trump said to cheers. “Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.”
It shouldn’t have to be said that there is a lot wrong with this. On the most basic level, it’s unconstitutional because criminal suspects have a right to due process. It puts the federal government in a position of interfering with local law enforcement. It will get people needlessly killed and some of those people will be innocent. Finally, in a country that is already deeply concerned about police brutality, it is tone-deaf.
Except for Republicans. They love this sort of talk. The only law enforcement actions that Republicans seem willing to question are those of the Capitol Police on January 6 and anything that implicates Donald Trump in wrongdoing.
Even somewhat respectable Republicans have gone down the rabbit hole. Former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate (who I supported in 2008) Mike Huckabee said on his TBN show in September, “If these tactics end up working to keep Trump from winning or even running in 2024, it is going to be the last American election that will be decided by ballots rather than bullets.”
Seriously? If Republicans are foolish enough to nominate a four-times-indicted unpopular former president and he loses, they are going to go on the warpath? Maybe the better solution is to nominate a candidate who isn’t a criminal and who doesn’t think that windmills are killing whales (again, I’m not making this up). Maybe Republicans are losing because they nominate bad, scary candidates.
In another curiously veiled threat, Trump supporters allegedly left a birdcage at Nikki Haley’s hotel room door over the weekend. Trump supporters apparently claimed responsibility in a message to Marc Caputo of The Messenger.
Unsurprisingly, although Haley called the attempt at intimidation “pathetic,” she has not rescinded her pledge to vote for Donald Trump if he is the eventual nominee. The why is clear. Just refer back to the Win It Back memo. No Trump. No career.
The exact message behind the birdcage is unclear. Some suggested it was a reference to Haley being a “war hawk,” although she has not advocated involving the US in a war (unlike Donald Trump, whose MAGA supporters were cheering him on to go to war with Iran in January 2020 before he ultimately backed down). Whatever its exact intention, the cage seems sinister in the context of what Mike Davis, a possible cabinet member if Trump wins in 2024, is saying.
Mike Davis, founder of the Article III Project, a legal organization that notably incorporates the logo of the radical III Percenters into its own logo, is a former member of Chuck Grassley’s staff and a former clerk for Justice Gorsuch. He’s not some random internet wacko. He’s in the running for a cabinet position in the second (third?) Trump Administration and he promises a “reign of terror.”
In an August installment of “The Benny Show” on YouTube, Davis explained that he has five lists that he will put into use when Trump makes him attorney general.
“I have five lists ready to go and they are growing,” Adams said. “List number one, we’re going to fire a lot of people in the Executive Branch and the Deep State. Number two, we’re going to indict. We’re going to indict Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and James Biden and every other scumball, sleazeball Biden except for the five-year-old granddaughter they refused to acknowledge for five years until the political pressure got to Joe Biden. Number three, we’re going to deport. We’re going to deport a lot of people, 10 million people and growing, anchor babies, their parents, their grandparents. We’re going to put kids in cages. It’s going to be glorious. We’re going to detain a lot of people in the DC Gulag and Gitmo, and list number five, I’m going to recommend a lot of pardons. Every January 6 defendant is going to get a pardon.”
There’s a lot to unpack there and quite a bit wrong with that sort of plan. Again, to begin with, it is a clear violation of the Constitution’s due process clause to lock up and deport American citizens (a more accurate term for “anchor baby” is “US citizen”) without a trial and, in some cases, without any clear indication that they’ve committed a crime. Essentially what Davis is doing is advocating having the Republican Party do what Trump accuses Democrats of: Engaging in political prosecutions.
That is not what happened with Trump. Independent investigators found that Trump committed crimes ranging from improper handling of classified documents to fraudulently attempting to overturn election results.
January 6 defendants are not political prisoners either. They are common criminals who committed crimes for political reasons. January 6 prosecutions are about justice for broken laws, not persecuting political opponents.
But Republicans don’t understand that. If you don’t understand why, refer back a few paragraphs to the Win It All memo. Republicans refuse to believe – or even listen to – anything derogatory about Donald Trump. At this point, the Republican Party is a personality cult, not a principled political organization.
The other side of the coin is that some Republicans are doing their best to instill terror in their listeners by trying to convince them that Democrats will kill them if they win in 2024. This sort of talk has come from various members of the MAGA fringe including Marjorie Taylor Greene and Mike Cernovich.
This makes no sense on multiple levels. For example, since Democrats control the government now, why should they wait? Wouldn’t purging Republicans before the election make things easier? But logic and rational thought are not highly prized in the Republican Party right now so the alarmist grifters get the clicks and the fear and anger get ratcheted higher.
And given the statements by Trump and his minions, this is very dangerous for America. Rather than making America great again, Trump and his cohorts want to turn it into something unrecognizable. Barack Obama aimed at “fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” but his changes were nothing compared to what Trump says he wants to do.
In the past, we were told to take Trump seriously but not literally. I think we’re past that now. Numerous dictators in the past have laid out their authoritarian plans for the future and been ignored. No one should doubt Trump and his minions when they tell us what they want to do.
I’ve been critical of nutpicking and out-of-context exaggerations about the opposition in the past, but this is what Trump himself and his lieutenants are saying. They may not be able to implement their plans, but we should believe them when they say they want to execute officials who are disloyal to Trump and lock up political opponents in Gulags and that they are willing to terminate the Constitution. We should believe them and act accordingly, especially since more moderate Republicans seem to have given up on reining in Trump’s bad behavior.
I remember in the Trump years when my friend Steve Berman wrote in The Resurgent that Trump was a stress test on American institutions. The institutions held, but it was a close thing. I’m not sure that they could withstand a second such assault. The thing about stress tests is that if the object you’re testing fails the test, it breaks and there’s no putting it back together.
I haven’t been a Republican since 2016, but I’m still a conservative. I’d like to see conservative policy implemented, but I don’t see conservatism coming from the presumptive Republican nominee and his lackeys.
2024 is not going to be a policy election. 2024 is going to be a referendum on whether America should remain a constitutional republic or welcome back a lawless executive and “wannabe dictator.” The conservative option is going to be whoever runs against Trump.
I’m becoming more and more concerned that this radical and dishonest MAGA rhetoric is ultimately going to cause more bloodshed. The words of Trump, Huckabee, Davis, Greene, Cernovich, and others may be garbage, but millions of Republicans (not all of them but too many) lap them up and believe them. Some have acted on these alarmist exhortations already and it’s only a matter of time before others do as well.
The irony is that these grifters and liars are helping to bring about what they claim to be trying to prevent. When their words inspire more attacks and end up with more Republicans in jail for violent and seditious acts, it will have been a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And a further irony is that their crazy talk is one of the things that is costing them elections in the first place. If the party nominated a traditional sane Republican, he (or she) would probably beat Biden handily, but Donald Trump and MAGA have steered the party into Cloud Cuckoo Land and it’s not coming back anytime soon.
THere’s some really weird image inclusion/editing going on with this post. I want to read it but something is REALLY wonky.Report
I took the liberty of tidying up Mr. Thornton’s HTML. Try now.Report
Yep, much better.Report
It comes through fine in RSS. On the site, All the text starting with “Unsurprisingly, although Haley called the attempt at intimidation” was added as a caption to image from twitter of the birdcage. So probably some unclosed element with the image?Report
Rantings of a madman or factual content? Looks like both.Report
Imagine being a time traveler and going back to 1993, or 1983 or 1973 and posting the transcript from one of Trump’s speeches in the NYT, ascribing it to one of the leading Presidential candidates of the time, like if Bill Clinton or Howard Baker were calling one of the Defense chiefs a traitor and demanding his execution.
Or if say, the Brookings Institution were publishing articles calling for an American Caesar to rise up and rule as a dictator.
The American political world would have stopped revolving, and his political career would have been over instantly, and his party would have disavowed him as a deranged madman.
In 2023 we have normalized the madness to where this is so unremarkable an occurrence that it barely makes the front page.Report
I imagine that there are a ton of things about 2023 that would confuse people from 1993, 1983, or even 1973.
That’s probably why they vote for Trump, honestly.Report
you might actually be right Jay.Report
Wildly entertaining watching right wing idealogues ALMOST get it, but continue the circular “wow these guys are crazy maybe they shouldn’t be crazy but then they wont get any support from the craz-“. I love the “Authoritarian tendencies” thing, it’s almost like all of the caterwauling about small gubbmint, liberty, taxes bad, etc. didn’t ever mean anything…Report
Not unexpected – Democrats have decided not to throw him a lifeline. Can’t say as i blame them, what with his willingness to renege on the default aversion agreement.Report
Did my comment go to mod again for an accurate description of Trump but one not made in dulcet tea party language?Report
It is something to see people who know Trump is bad and dangerous, see the GOP getting crazier as discussed here, but they still can’t bring themselves to simply write or argue “vote for the Democrats, its important” because despite clear-eyed views on Trump and the GOP, they still think the Democrats are secret Maoists who want to enforce mandatory genderqueer in elementary school or something like that.Report
This right here. However, now youre gonna get 1000 bad libertarian-type takes about how the lesser of two evils is still evil blah blah blah.Report
I’ve become convinced that most of them are stuck at the rage stage of grief for the GOP. A few may have made it to bargaining, but none are near acceptance.Report
Jennifer Rubin has largely become a moderate Democrat/liberal. Most of the writers at the Bulwark have done the same. Bobo and Brent Stephens at the Times state they are people without a party. But you are probably correct for the most part including some posters and writers here.Report
What has surprised me is to discover that most of the conservatives don’t actually think that we are secret Maoists.
It is enough for them that we want queer and nonwhite people treated equally as full citizens, that they will knowingly choose a dictatorship over living with us.
Like, those memes floating around of “This is the world liberals want” and it is nothing more shocking than easily available abortion and where a purple haired lesbian is allowed to walk around freely.
Or like those threads where I asked for their vision of a liberal dystopia and got just a bunch of “Well, the economy would be worse” type of comments.
Or any Trump speech where his list of grievances is stuff like low flow toilets.
Conservatives use belligerent victimhood because they don’t have the real thing so they have to invent persecution to justify their own.Report
They also don’t have a positive vision of America to offer, nor coherent policies to get us there. And they know it.Report
Or like those threads where I asked for their vision of a liberal dystopia and got just a bunch of “Well, the economy would be worse” type of comments.
Here was *MY* idea of a Progressive Dystopia, for the record.
It opens by acknowledging that one woman’s dystopia is another woman’s utopia and so it’s possible to paint a picture of a dystopia and get someone to say “but that sounds great!”
I mean, my sister is always cold. *ALWAYS*. You know those cars that have buttwarmers? She uses hers all the time. She uses it in July. (Doctor told her that she has an iron thingy. She’s getting it treated but, even so, she’s still always cold.)
If she were in charge of the temperature in my house, I am sure that I would constantly complain about how hot it was, complain about the heating bills, so on and so forth. As it is, she lives in her house and I live in mine.
Private utopias.
But, anyway, my dystopia didn’t talk about the economy.Report
On the one hand, Trump is calling for open murder of people he sees as his opponents and DeSantis wasted hundreds of millions of tax payer dollars to go after a small, artsy college to own the libs. On the other hand, Jaybird’s sister might have to put on a sweater because liberals are concerned about climate change and want to staunch the bleeding as much as possible when it comes to unprecedented wildfires and flooding.Report
Back on the 2020 thread, Jaybird said he would link to it when the topic came up again. At the time, I advised that people not take the bait when he did that.Report
“I asked for an example of X and all of the examples had Y.”
“I gave an example of X and it didn’t touch on Y. It talked about Z.”
“WHAT ABOUT TRUMP”Report
the issue here is that you sister having to wear a sweater because of an iron deficiency doesn’t rise to the level of dystopia we’d expect when our policies are flogged as creating a dystopian hell. She’s clearly got good health care access to have it treated – a great many Americans don’t.
So we asked for examples of X. We got what reads as an example of eggplant, and you aren’t often willing to connect the dots clearly until we are a 100 or so comments in.
That’s why many of us consider your commenting bad faith trolling.Report
“This isn’t a dystopia! I think it’s just fine!”
“Well, I don’t.”
“You’re a freaking troll. Nobody has a problem with this but you.”
“I know of others who have problems with it.”
“Name them.”
“Here’s an article I found after googling for 2 seconds.”
“Whoever wrote that did it anonymously.”
And over and over and over again.
“Just because there is an entire subculture out there dedicated to gaslighting you doesn’t mean you live in a hellworld!”
“I didn’t say it was a hellworld. I called it a dystopia.”
“It’s not a dystopia at all. I rather like it.”
“Yeah.”Report
It could be worse than having to put on a sweater. She might have to get around by public transportation. That would be horrible.Report
It’s been about a year since Chip said that he didn’t believe in intellectually honest debate for the, I don’t know, eleventh time, and it finally sunk in for me that he meant it. I see comments like his and I want to correct them, but then I remember the years I spent correcting them and him ignoring it.
To Saul’s comment: at least half of what the Republicans believe is correct, which is way more than the Democrats, and the Republicans’ actions are less or equally as abhorrent as the Democrats’. I mean, likely the only reason the Democrats are supporting Ukraine is because this happened on Biden’s watch, and your allies stepped away from free trade before mine did.Report
Care to tell us which half of Republican beliefs are correct?
Because Democratic support of both Gulf wars and Afghanistan for close to two decades was what exactly?Report
That thread is the one I was thinking about, that produced no plausible examples of persecution of conservatives.
Yet conservatives are, this very day, using some imaginary dystopia to bray for a dictator to punish their enemies.Report
Oh, that’s the dystopia you imagine others would imagine? “Where people like that would be persecuted”?
I imagine that my thread was confusing, then.
“That’s not a dystopia!”, I could see you saying (under those circumstances).
And I look forward to you saying, again, “like those threads where I asked for their vision of a liberal dystopia and got just a bunch of “Well, the economy would be worse” type of comments” and having no recollection of the one that I described.Report
There’s a difference between “Trump is dangerous, it’s important to vote for Biden” (I agree with this btw), and “vote for the Democrats because every member of the GOP is Trump-ish”.
The first is a fact, the second is nut picking.Report
How about at a minimum, all of the Republican’s who voted against certifying the 2020 election, including McCarthy?Report
https://x.com/kyledcheney/status/1709246053977833828?s=20
Trump is apparently having a real meltdownReport
Of course he is – when that trial is over he may well be The Biggest Loser. Hugely.Report
No fat-shaming. ;).Report
The old guard of the Republican Party thought they could harness the power of the crazies but ultimately control them. Like in many cases in history, they turned out to be very wrong. The crazies will eventually seize control.Report
The Motion to Table has failed 208-218. McCarthy lost 11 Republicans. His Speakership may well be done. Proving – again – that giving in to toddlers and terrorists gets you nowhere.Report
Trump receives a gag order: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/03/nyregion/trump-gag-order-fraud-trial.htmlReport
Your lips to God’s ears I hope he enforces it with heavy fines and jail time.Report
Imagine my disappointment to learn a rubber ball and leather strap were not involved.Report
Judge Engoron placed a gag order on Trump for his attacks on Engoron’s clerk Allison Greenfield.Report
And just as a marker – McCarthy has been ousted as Speaker.Report
Post up on McCarthy being vacated for discussion on thatReport
Getting older has for me, politically, meant going further to the left. But that’s also been matched up with meeting a decent number of people who actually seem to fall under the small “c” conservative label – valuing incremental change, wanting to preserve the accomplishments of constitutional democracy, and very much wanting avoid jumping off a variety of political, social, and economic deep ends.
I disagree more and more with the specifics of what frequently comes out of this orientation, but I can see it as legitimate, and at the very least not just as euphemistic code for being incredibly willing to put people up against a wall.
All of that said, I don’t see remotely how small c conservatism is meaningfully represented in Conservative politics, which at this point, seems to be all about putting people against a wall. And as the post points out, there really is NO euphemism about that being used anymore.Report