Tag: Republicans

Opinion: The man who will never go away

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Donald Trump is back, possibly at his party’s peril

There is a time-honored spy story plot: A retired CIA agent, tired of the clandestine life, has retreated to an island in Mediterranean. One day up the dirt road to his hideaway comes his former CIA station chief luring him back for one last mission. 

Saturday night, Donald Trump lured everyone back to his alternative universe of crazed conspiracies about a “rigged” election. His 91-minute speech in Wellington, Ohio, was the start of his vengeance tour against Republicans like nearby Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, who voted to impeach Trump for fomenting the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. 

Equally predictable, but far more devastating, is the beginning of the onslaught of books featuring dramatic scenes from inside the Trump Oval Office. We have, of course, had articles and books like this before, but this time around the sources are finally talking on-the-record instead of lurking in the shadows.  Continue reading.

How Republicans Became the ‘Barstool’ Party

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The Barstool-ification of the GOP could reconfigure its cultural politics for a generation.

Earlier this year, when Echelon Insights released its way-too-early pollof voters’ preferences for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, political wonks could be forgiven for having to Google the name at the bottom of the list next to Sen. Josh Hawley: somebody called “Portnoy,” polling at zero percent. 

As founder of the self-consciously lowbrow Barstool Sports digital media empire, Dave Portnoy has, over the past decade, parlayed an outsized, aggressively macho social-media presence into a status as a right-leaning populist champion. He threatened — via Twitter, almost certainly illegally — to fire any Barstool employees who might attempt to unionize. He went viral with his impassioned rants against Covid-19 lockdowns. He feuded with Elon Musk on the behalf of meme-stocking, little-guy day traders. (He also heads an online outlet that has shamelessly stolen content and engaged in flagrant racism and misogyny, leading harassment campaigns against anyone who would dare call them out.)

Portnoy jokingly “announced” a presidential campaign on Twitter shortly after the poll’s release, but an actual run is highly unlikely. There’s no obvious reason to mount one: his presence in the poll is evidence enough of how the Republican Party has become the party of Barstool Sports. Continue reading.

Republicans scrambling as the number of reliable evangelical voters becomes increasingly smaller: report

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According to a report from NPR, the Republican party’s dependence upon Christian evangelical voters as a reliable voting bloc is coming back to bite them as Americans increasingly abandon the church.

For decades the GOP has been able to count on evangelical Christians to turn out on election day due to their opposition to hot button cultural issues like abortion and gay rights but with, church attendance collapsing, Republicans are faced with either ginning up new controversies to keep Christians who are tuning out in their camp.

According to NPR’s Danielle Kurtzleben, “For the first time, a majority of Americans are not church members, Gallup found this spring. Over the last decade, the share of Republicans who are church members fell from 75% to 65%, according to Gallup. That’s a solid majority but also a sizable fall. The key bloc of white evangelicals is also shrinking as a share of the population, while the share of religiously unaffiliated Americans grows.” Continue reading.

Democrats say it’s up to GOP to stop Trump 2024

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Democrats say it’s up to the Republican Party to put the kibosh on Donald Trump and that they aren’t going to do anything to try to stop the former president from running again in 2024. 

In a speech on the House floor the eve of her ouster from House GOP leadership, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said it was up to members of both parties — not just Republicans — to stop Trump from holding elected office again. 

“Our duty is clear. Every one of us who has sworn the oath must act to prevent the unraveling of our democracy,” Cheney said. “This is not about policy. This is not about partisanship. This is about our duty as Americans. Remaining silent, and ignoring the lie, emboldens the liar.” Continue reading.

Everything Republicans Oppose, They Now Call ’Socialist’

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Republicans have devised a new definition for the term socialism: anything we don’t support.

According to Merriam-Webster, socialism is defined principally as “any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.”

But congressional Republicans accused their Democratic colleagues and President Joe Biden this week of being socialists for considering reforms to the Supreme Court.

“Biden is dead set on packing the Supreme Court with activist justices who will rubber stamp the Socialists’ anti-America agenda,” tweeted Rep Mo. Brooks of Alabama on Wednesday. Biden has not endorsed any changes to the court, but signed an executive order on April 9 to create a commission to study various proposals for reforming it. Continue reading.

Gaetz, on the ropes, finds few friends in GOP

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In four years on Capitol Hill, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) has experienced a meteoric rise to national prominence — one fueled by a close alliance with former President Trump, a penchant for political theatrics and a no-apologies brand of conservatism that’s made him a darling of the right-wing cable outlets.

Yet this week, facing a federal investigation into allegations of a sexual relationship with an underage girl, Gaetz is finding himself in an unusual spot: on the ropes and virtually alone.

Few of Gaetz’s GOP colleagues are coming to the defense of the third-term Floridian following a New York Times report that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is investigating allegations of sexual misconduct with — and interstate trafficking of — a minor roughly two years ago. And a number of Republicans, while warning against jumping to premature conclusions about Gaetz’s conduct, also suggested they wouldn’t miss him if he were gone. Continue reading.

Republicans seek to make vaccine passports the next battle in the pandemic culture wars

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Republicans are opening a new front in the pandemic culture wars, attacking efforts by the Biden administration to develop guidelines for  coronavirusvaccination passports that businesses can use to determine who can safely participate in activities such as flights, concerts and indoor dining.

The issue has received an increasing amount of attention from some of the party’s most extreme members and conservative media figures, but it has also been seized on by Republican leaders like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is considered a potential 2024 presidential candidate.

“We are not supporting doing any vaccine passports in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said Monday. “It’s completely unacceptable for either the government or the private sector to impose upon you the requirement that you show proof of vaccine to just simply be able to participate in normal society.” Continue reading.

Republicans put themselves in a box — after driving the nation into a ditch​

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Why, at this time of desperate need, does the Republican leadership refuse to put its fingerprints on legislation that relieves the American people’s suffering? Not one Republican in the entire US Congress voted for the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).

If you scrolled through right-wing social media last weekend, you’d see the top news was not the increased pace of vaccination or the arrival of $1,400 stimmies. It was Joe Biden’s triple-stumble on the staircase to Air Force One. A particularly creative meme tweeted out by Donald Trump, Jr. interspersed video of the former president hitting golf balls, which then appeared to hit Biden in the head and knock him down. 

United behind obstructionism so extreme it overwhelmed the need to pass legislation when the GOP controlled both chambers of the Congress, Biden tripping and falling now counts as a Republican win. In fact, over the four years of the Trump administration, exactly one major piece of legislation was passed, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, a big unwrapped present to corporations, but not to the American people. Instead, congressional Republicans have unified behind the bizarre theory that Congress must deliver cultural criticism and mean jokes about their colleagues. Continue reading.

Trump ramps up activities, asserts power within GOP

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Former President Trump is reemerging on the political scene after a months-long hiatus, and Trump World insiders expect him to ramp up his activity even more as the midterm elections get closer.

Trump on Monday called into Fox News and a new podcast hosted by conservative commentator Lisa Boothe for the kind of freewheeling interviews that were commonplace over the past five years.

The ex-president blasted President Biden for the border surge and railed against Republicans who have criticized him. Trump also reiterated his claims about election fraud — a topic that many Republicans are eager to move on from. Continue reading.

Trump was a failed president — but the GOP base loved him because he ‘punished’ people they hate: columnist

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The Republican Party base still loves former President Donald Trump, even though he was soundly defeated in his re-election bid and his unpopularity cost his party control of both chambers of Congress.

Atlantic columnist Adam Serwer writes that there’s a simple reason the GOP base still loves Trump despite being ousted from office after just one term: They saw him as a punishment for all the people in America whom they hate.

“Trump was not a successful president,” Serwer contends. “But as a form of punishment, he was everything conservatives dreamed of, and they loved him for it.” Continue reading.