The GOP: Still Crazy After All These Midterm Losses

By David Corn  December 17, 2022

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene speaking at the New York Young Republican Club's annual gala in New York City on December 10, 2022. Kyle Mazza/Sipa via AP

You might have heard that a few days ago Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene—the QAnonish, Jewish-space-laser-promoting, John Birch Society–backing Republican who has hung out with neo-Nazi white nationalists—referred to January 6 and declared, “I will tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed.” She made this proclamation at a gala hosted by the New York Young Republican Club. While her remark about the insurrectionist riot drew much attention—yet another instance of GOP MAGA extremism—the entire gathering showcased how nutty and dangerous the party has become and demonstrated how this craziness has not eased in the aftermath of the 2022 midterm elections. It’s only getting worse.

Optimists can point to the disappointing election results for Republicans as a positive indicator for democracy. After all, prominent election deniers championed by Donald Trump lost key statewide races, as the Democrats improved their standing in the US Senate. Yet House Republicans—the majority of whom remain Trump cultists and detached-from-reality, propaganda-pushing 2020 denialists—won control of one half of Congress. And their politics of grievance, hatred, and conspiracy-mongering—that is, Trumpism—was well reflected at this GOP event.

This shindig was initially overlooked by the media. But two researchers for the Southern Poverty Law Center attended and produced a thorough report that prompted subsequent news stories. At the posh gala, Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon, who each played a crucial role in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, hobnobbed with far-right players, including Peter Brimelow, an anti-immigration activist and white nationalist. As the SPLC revealed:

Bannon, the former Trump adviser, physically embraced the white nationalist Brimelows [Peter and his wife Lydia] at NYYRC, spoke to the couple for several minutes and took a selfie with them. VDARE [Brimelow’s organization] traffics in the great replacement conspiracy theory and has published defenses of writing a terrorist who gunned down 24 people in an El Paso Wal-Mart in 2019 allegedly authored. Peter Brimelow attended the white supremacist American Renaissance conference in November, whose host has portrayed Black people as being subhuman. The Brimelows publish writing authored by Jason Kessler, who helped organize the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Jack Posobiec, an alt-right operator who promoted the bonkers Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which led to a gunman firing an AR-15 inside a DC restaurant, sat at a table with Josh Hammer, the conservative opinion editor of Newsweek. (It’s not your father’s Newsweek.) Also present were officials of a German far-right party Alternative für Deutschland, which, according to the BBC, relies on rhetoric “tinged with Nazi overtones.” (A former AfD official was arrested earlier this month when German authorities rounded up a group of people who were allegedly plotting a coup. AfD has promoted QAnon-like and other conspiracy theories linked to the attempted coup.)

Donald Trump Jr. was there, too, and delivered a speech with this hard-to-comprehend line: “The [Republican] party is in a pretty good spot, but America may not be getting it. We have a party right now that is actually delivering for the American people. But what we don’t have [is] our same people in Washington, who can make those things happen.” Also present were three incoming House Republican members: George Santos of New York, Cory Mills of Florida, and Mike Collins of Georgia. During her speech, Greene endorsed Trump’s father and, for some reason, complained that CVS and Target stock dildos and butt plugs.

Election denialism, white nationalism, conspiracy-peddling—this is mainstream Republicanism. And these folks believe, as did Joe Biden in 2020, that they are fighting for the soul of America. They do see it as a battle. As Gavin Wax, the president of the New York Young Republican Club, told the assembled, “We want to cross the Rubicon. We want total war. We must be prepared to do battle in every arena. In the media. In the courtroom. At the ballot box. And in the streets.”

Violent rhetoric has become de rigueur within Republican circles. Certainly, Trump has made this common for the GOP. Not too long ago he vowed to pardon the January 6 rioters should he return to the White House—essentially a sign of support for violent seditionists. Bannon has called for beheading Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray. Greene, whose influence within the House GOP caucus is growing, joked about armed insurrection.

Even as Trump becomes more of a ridiculous caricature of himself—buy my NFT trading cards!—extremism is not abating within the Grand Old Party. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is pandering to anti-vaxxers. House Republicans are planning a barrage of impeachments, as well as hearings to advance conspiracy theories about Biden, the Deep State, the media, the FBI, public health officials, and who knows what else. Defeated Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake seems to have taken up residence at Mar-a-Lago to promote the latest iteration of the Big Lie (claiming she is doing God’s work). In a tweet, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) endorsed Trump’s call for the “termination” of the US Constitution (before he deleted the tweet). And nothing breaks the party’s slavish devotion to Trump—not tax fraud, not stolen documents, not embracing QAnon, not supping with a white nationalist and an antisemite.

One sentiment seems to unite the crowd at the GOP soiree and Republicans in general: shamelessness. Giuliani evinces no shame for his efforts to overturn a free and fair election. (This week, a DC bar committee found that Giuliani violated legal ethics in pushing a lawsuit asserting unfounded charges of voter fraud.) Neither does Bannon. Nor does he apparently feel any shame for his involvement in a fraudulent scheme to raise money for a border wall. (Two of his colleagues pleaded guilty; Bannon was pardoned by Trump and escaped prosecution, but he was indicted on similar New York state charges in September.) Greene expresses no shame for anything—not for having amplified social media messages calling for the assassination of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, not for joshing about a violent riot that caused deaths and threatened the peaceful transfer of power. (She claimed her remark about January 6 was “sarcastic.”) One major Trump accomplishment: institutionalizing shamelessness within Republican politics.

As the GOP bash indicates, the Republican Party likes this version of itself—crazy, bigoted, extremist, and all. Laughing about violence. Mixing with white nationalists. Subverting democracy. Spreading paranoia and hatred. It’s all a gas, and this party ain’t over.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.

Thought You Should Know

* Talking Points Memo had a good scoop this week. It obtained thousands of text messages that then–White House chief Mark Meadows had received and sent to members of Congress in the weeks after the 2020 election. The texts show that Meadows was in contact with congressional Republicans desperate to overturn the election who were sharing with him bizarre conspiracy theories and outlandish proposals for reversing the results. Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), for one, urged Meadows to push Donald Trump to declare martial law in order to retain power. (“Marshall Law,” he called it.) The texts also showed something else: how Meadows presented a brazenly false and misleading account of the post-election period in the book he released last year. I wrote about that here.

* My old pal, journalist Marc Cooper, in his newsletter this week made an important point. Noting that most prominent election deniers lost major statewide races in the 2022 elections, he asked, “So can we now celebrate the fact that The Big Lie is in decline and on its way to extinction?” His answer: “No way. In a record speed transition, Elon Musk has stepped in to be the new standard bearer of the aggrieved Republican masses. And it seems he is dead set, actually obsessed, with the notion that Twitter ‘censorship’ must have cost Trump the election…He has now cast himself as the beloved leader of the millions of Trumplikins, the acolytes of MTG, the gun nuts, the extremist militias, several pockets of Know-Nothings, insurrectionists, election deniers, and every hoople-head from Maine to California.” This is now the new Big Lie: Twitter, because it suppressed a story about Hunter Biden during the 2020 election for a single day, doomed Trump’s reelection bid, and this nefarious action was done in cahoots with the Deep State, the Democrats, the liberal media, and, no doubt, a cabal of Satanic pedophiles. It’s another baseless conspiracy theory, and it’s been provided a blast of oxygen by Musk, who arranged for a selective release of internal Twitter documents that don’t even support this crazy notion. Yet this is the new article of faith on the right. So much so that Trump on Thursday released a campaign video decrying the “left-wing censorship regime” that he described as a “sinister group of Deep State bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media” that aims “to silence” the American people. He declared that if he is returned to the White House he will prosecute this “censorship cartel.” Expect to hear more of this new variant of right-wing conspiracism.

Cooper wrote his piece before Musk went on a banning spree on Thursday night, booting seven prominent journalists and others off Twitter. What does this mean for the future of the site? As of this writing, I don’t know. But if you follow me on Twitter, please also follow me on two other alternatives: At Post.News, I’m @davidcorn, and you can look me up at Mastodon at mastodon.social/@DavidCorn. As always, you can also follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/davidcorndc. 

Dumbass Comment of the Week

Covid is surging again. Health departments in several big cities are advising mask-wearing. Consequently, we can anticipate a rise in Covid idiocy. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, playing to anti-vaxxers, announced a politically loaded investigation of the Covid vaccine. Elon Musk, continuing his alt-right pander-thon, called for prosecuting Dr. Anthony Fauci and falsely suggested different viruses were being labeled Covid-19 because that leads to “more funding.” But Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) outdid them all by dismissing the need to be vaccinated with this line: “Having gotten the disease naturally is like a vaccine but even a better vaccine.” Natural immunity may have advantages, but Paul was forgetting one thing: An unvaccinated person who contracts Covid has a much greater chance of being hit hard by the disease, hospitalized, and possibly killed by it. The risk/reward ratio for the vaccine is obvious, except for conspiratorial ideologues.

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) was in contention again. At a Capitol Hill press conference, she called for the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and gave this reason: “On Mayorkas’s watch, more than 14,000 pounds of fentanyl was seized in fiscal year 2022 at our southern border. That is an all-time record high.”

Sounds like the guy is doing a bang-up job, interdicting more fentanyl than ever before. That doesn’t seem like a firing offense.

Yet not even Boebert could win this week up against Shane Vaughn, a pro-MAGA pastor. Upset about Herschel Walker’s defeat in Georgia, Vaughn complained that Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, won only because the large “population centers”—that is, Atlanta—voted for him, while he lost to Walker throughout the rural areas of the state. “The entire state is conservatives,” he shouted. The Walker voters were “winning their state…until they hit that blue area called Atlanta.” To these “good people” he said, “Your voice doesn’t matter because you don’t have the majority of the population.”

Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work? A senator is elected by the majority of the people in a state. Yet Vaughn noted the Georgia runoff prompted him to see another way to hold elections. Or, as he put it, “that’s when it hit me like a stroke of genius.” His brilliant idea? Each state should have its own version of the electoral college: “The only way to save the Senate in the United States of America is that the Senate election should also be done by the electoral college of a state.” This, of course, would disempower urban voters—which means a lot of Black voters—and create a system that violates the one-person, one-vote principle. Which is the point. For Vaughn, city dwellers and Black voters don’t count. And he thinks he’s being smart as a whip in proposing to limit their political power to rig the electoral system for conservative voters. For his brazen proposal—demonstrating contempt for democracy—Vaughn takes home the trophy this week.

The Mailbag

Just as I was, many readers were jazzed by the new podcast Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra, which tells the long-forgotten story of how members of Congress colluded with Nazi Germany prior to the United States’ entry into World War II.

Bette Piacente wrote:

I tiptoed into Maddow’s podcast, thinking I would catch the first episode and then get on with my day. Well, that plan disintegrated spectacularly. I had to listen to all eight episodes because it was an amazing piece of our history I did not fully understand. I simply could not stop listening. America has a so much potential and so much to answer for. We are not special except for the continuing dream for a better country. After listening to this podcast, it is really hard to think we will ever be able to wash the stain of Nazism from our doorstep. How much are we missing today because it is too hot for the public to know? I won’t be around when the next expose hits the airwaves. Maddow’s Ultra is fascinating and achingly rhyming.

I was glad to see that many folks connected Ultra to my new book, American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy (a great stocking stuffer!). Donald Price emailed:

Thanks for the summary of Ultra. American Psychosis is excellent. Finished the Audible version yesterday. I have not downloaded Ultra yet because American Psychosis was the priority. Until Our Land highlighted Ultra, I had not planned to do so on the assumption that it would be a small plot in the larger problem with the right/GOP you chronicled in American Psychosis…You are my favorite journalist, and I will miss you when you are gone, as much as I miss Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid.

Oh boy, I’m not dead yet, Donald. And let me note that the overlap between Ultra and American Psychosis is minimal. In my book, I write about the extremism of the pre-WWII America First movement, but I don’t chronicle the Nazi plot to influence American public opinion that was aided by sitting members of the House and Senate. Maddow’s podcast and my book chronicle different parts of the dark history of the United States.

Judy Kaneko also had a comment about American Psychosis:

I’m reading this book. I also sent two copies as gifts to friends. I told my friends, “We’ve been here before, and survived it, there’s hope we may do so again.” I need that sliver of hope.

Maddow and I both believe our respective projects can offer hope. They each show that extremism has previously threatened the nation and that this danger has been beaten back.

There was much reader response to a recent issue that noted that the GOP establishment cannot save the party from Trump because that matter will be resolved by the party’s voters and much of the base remains Trumpified.

Thomas Schmitt emailed:

Absolutely agree, but what’s the problem? Let them continue to lose.

Edward Hackett had a different take:

Your summation of the state of the Republican Party is right on target. I have not read anyone else who has so clearly summed up the situation the Republicans find themselves in at the time. As a confirmed liberal, I should be happy at the corner the Republicans have put themselves into, but I am not happy. Our country needs two strong political parties so two or more sides of an issue can be discussed in a polite atmosphere. Additionally, I am dismayed at how many people are willing to vote for hatemongers. Some of these hatemongers are members of Congress, and other members merely lack the backbone to call them out.

Harry Freiberg riffed on my line that “you can’t save a party if its voters do not want to be saved”:

And there you have it. Some 40 percent of the American public approves of Trump, and what he stands for. End of story. As H.L. Mencken wrote about 100 years ago: “As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Dark, Harry, dark.

Emmeline McCarthy had this to say:

Thank you, David, for so eloquently stating what so many dare not...it's the voters. Everyone seems to be afraid of "putting off" a sizable portion of the electorate by essentially calling them Deplorables, but that's what they are and will evermore remain. Their resentment and eternal grievance assure it.

Tom Moore emailed:

Thank you for this article. I think you’re right that the GOP establishment cannot save the GOP from Trump—today. But reading it made me wonder whether they could do so over time by abandoning the Gingrich-era "our-political-opponents-are-sick-and-evil-people” rhetoric in their day-to-day language. It’s like a boiling kettle of water. There’s nothing you can do to cool the water down immediately, but turning the heat off will allow it to get back to room temperature over time. It won’t cool down immediately, but it didn’t get to boiling immediately, either. This would be hard message discipline, and one can rarely count on politicians to choose the hard route. But if Republican leaders are genuinely interested in not being the ones to lead our country into fascism, it is one thing they could do, starting today, to help. 

That could work. But I don’t see enough GOP leaders committed to such a course or goal. Too many of them want to exploit GOP voter grievances, resentments, and prejudices to advance their own careers. See Rep. Jim Jordan—also watch Rep. Kevin McCarthy kowtow to Greene and other GOP extremists to secure the House speakership.

MoxieCam™

“Moxie, why are you sitting in a pile of leaves?”

“I don’t want autumn to end.”

“It always does. But it will be back in a year, and, if we are fortunate, we’ll be here then.”

“Why wouldn’t we be?”

Read Recent Issues of Our Land

December 13, 2022: Rachel Maddow and the rhymes of history; Amazon Prime’s The Peripheral does justice to William Gibson’s novel; twangy Americana from a new duo called Plains; and more.

December 10, 2022: Why the GOP establishment cannot save the GOP from Trump; Michael Pertschuk, thank you and RIP; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Rep. Paul Gosar); the Mailbag, MoxieCam™; and more.

December 6, 2022: How Trump-Russia denialism lead to Elon Musk’s dangerous #TwitterFiles failure; a Twitter exit strategy; Sonic Youth’s “Superstar”; and more.

December 3, 2022: The GOP and Nazis, nothing new; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Madison Cawthorn, for the last time?); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

November 30, 2022: What I learned during my Thanksgiving in Italy; why Andor may be the best Star Wars spinoff; and more.

November 17, 2022: Herschel Walker should release his medical records; giving thanks early; The Last Movie Stars reveals Paul Newman’s and Joanne Woodward’s most notable performances—their own lives; MoxieCam™; and more.

November 15, 2022: Is this the end of Donald Trump?; where were you when the Senate was called (I was with Jackson Browne and Tim Robbins); and Neil Young and Crazy Horse keep on riding with a new album; and more.

November 12, 2022: The 2022 midterms and the state of Trumpism; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Special Election Edition); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

November 8, 2022: It’s election day…and it’s the Beatles; and more.

November 5, 2022: Has Biden lowballed the threat to American democracy; American Psychosis in the news; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Kari Lake); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

November 1, 2022: Elon Musk: a problem, not a solution, when it comes to right-wing extremism; Barack Obama gets it right; Jason Kander’s gutsy and empathetic memoirs; Robert Gordon, RIP; and more.

Got suggestions, comments, complaints, tips related to any of the above, or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.