Hill chatter: Republican Senators who are up in 2022 increasingly fear primary challenges on the basis of supporting McConnell as leader.
— Ben Domenech (@bdomenech) January 24, 2021
One comment: “He’s setting us up and he doesn’t seem to even realize it, or he just doesn’t care.”
And after I moved the embassy to Jerusalem, African-American & Hispanic unemployment levels were at the lowest rates ever recorded! pic.twitter.com/uHgMv4Uioz
— Blompf2024 (Shadow Presidency) (@blompf2020) January 24, 2021
) (@blompf2020) Tulsi actually naming and defending White people.
— It's Okay (@UpAndOv3r) January 24, 2021
She has more spine than most GOP politicians. pic.twitter.com/nyx7T9x64E
It should be completely unsurprising that red-browns like Tulsi Gabbard, Glenn Greenwald, and Jimmy Dore have started operating within the right-wing.
— Kareem Rifai ? (@KareemRifai) January 24, 2021
Democrats rejected their ideology these past two elections; Republicans embraced it. pic.twitter.com/UkWzlDxs9l
I’m of two minds on impeaching Trump a second time.
“For four years, McConnell and others in the establishment wing of the Republican Party embraced the conceit that they could temper Trump’s behavior, exploit his popularity, and ignore the racist, violent, and corrupt forces he unleashed. Ornstein observed that McConnell, in a cynical bargain, “used Trump to accomplish his goals of packing the courts and getting tax cuts.” (Since 2016, the top corporate tax rate has been nearly halved, to twenty-one per cent.) In exchange for these gifts to the Party’s corporate backers, McConnell stayed largely silent in the face of Trump’s inflammatory lies and slurs—even though, according to insiders, he privately held the President in contempt. He covered for Trump’s political incompetence, eventually passing budgets and pandemic relief, despite Trump’s tantrums and government shutdowns. And he protected Trump from accountability during the first impeachment trial, in early 2020, announcing in advance that there was “zero chance” a Senate under his leadership would convict the President. …
After the January 6th insurrection, dozens of the largest corporate campaign donors, including A.T. & T., Comcast, and Honeywell, used their cash to send a message: their political action committees would no longer contribute to the hundred and forty-seven Republican representatives and senators who had opposed certification of the Presidential election even after the Capitol riot, on the spurious ground that the process had been less than fair. Even Koch Industries, the huge oil-refining conglomerate that has served as the conservative movement’s piggy bank for decades, said that it was reëvaluating its political contributions. McConnell, who once infamously declared that the three most important ingredients for political success in America are “money,” “money,” and “money,” was reportedly alarmed. A spokesperson for McConnell denies this, but, according to the Associated Press, he spent much of the weekend after the Capitol assault talking with colleagues and the Republican Party’s wealthy corporate donors, promising that he, too, was finally done with Trump. …
Jentleson, the former Senate aide, thinks that McConnell and his party are in a very tricky spot: “The glue that kept the Tea Party and establishment Republicans together during the past few years was tax cuts and judges. And McConnell can’t deliver those anymore. So you could basically see the Republican Party coming apart at the seams. You need to marry the forty per cent that is the Trump base with the ten per cent that’s the establishment. McConnell is like a cartoon character striding aside a crack that’s getting wider as the two plates drift farther apart. They may not come back together. If they can’t reattach, they can’t win.”
Moderate Hunter thinks:
It is a relief to be done with Blumpf and I would rather move on from his presidency. It is better for the country to focus on the issues that matter and impeaching Trump a second time would inflame his supporters, exacerbate polarization and make it less likely to get anything done. I don’t think he LITERALLY intended for his supporters to march on the Capitol. It was supposed to be a grand act of performance art on that stage Alex Jones had put up outside of Congress, but the Qtards didn’t grasp this and assumed THE STORM WAS COMING and followed a bunch of the dumbest people there into a trap.
Radical Hunter thinks:
Blumpf’s impeachment and martyrdom would ensure that he can’t run again in 2024 and further our ongoing project of finding someone competent who can replace him as a standard bearer. We were all fed up with Trump’s leadership two or three years ago. We wanted a reboot. It would infuriate his supporters and split the Republican Party at a time when the Trump base is already angry with Mitch McConnell. The more important goal is gassing the establishment of the Republican Party and its corporate policy agenda which is a massive albatross that hamstrung the Trump presidency. We want to get rid of those people so that we can build out a more Longist populism from the other end of the party.
“Look what’s happening:
The Arizona Republican Party voted yesterday to censure three faces of the Republican establishment — Cindy McCain, Gov. Doug Ducey and former Sen. Jeff Flake — and reelected state party chair Kelli Ward, a fierce Trumper.
The 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump are being hit with swift punishment, including brewing primary challenges, censure votes and public scoldings, the N.Y. Times reports (subscription).
Some House Republicans, egged on by right-wing media, are pushing an uphill fight to oust Cheney from her third-ranking leadership post. In Wyoming, she faces a long-shot primary challenge.
The bottom line: This will be the new reality for Republicans until 2024, or Trump fully exits the scene. …”
Throw them out.
The corporate wing of the GOP alienates far more people than it attracts.
“Much as he did twelve years ago, Joe Biden comes to the White House amid a punishing economic crisis. Yet the opposition he faces is entirely different, for Donald Trump has shattered the Republican Party’s old small-government pieties and ushered in a new working-class conservatism eager to use government to serve the common good.
Just kidding: things will be almost exactly the same. Expect the GOP to offer up strong doses of deficit hysteria, a fierce push for austerity, and a congressional war of attrition aimed at bogging Biden down in an extended recession. For now, the most striking thing about Trump’s takeover will be how little it affects the basic dynamics of the right in opposition. …
To no great surprise, Trump didn’t move left on economics. Workers did benefit from the hot economy of his first three years in office, which MAGA ideologists spun as proof of the president’s unique business acumen (much as Third Way ideologists had once taken the 1990s economic boom as proof of the virtues of Clintonism). But instead of an infrastructure bill, there was a massive corporate tax cut; instead of a family leave plan, there was a failed attempt to strip healthcare from tens of millions of people. Up and down the federal bureaucracy, a familiar cast of industry shills set to work dismantling labor rights and environmental protections. Trump’s most durable accomplishment was the rubber-stamping of scores of Federalist Society judges, each one a devoted steward of the interests of capital. …
The striking thing about this record is not so much the lack of outright defections from Trumpism (with rare exceptions like Julius Krein, whose magazine American Affairs has been the most heterodox voice of the movement). It’s the lack of any sustained criticism, even as Trump made it ever-clearer that he had no interest in the agenda that right populists ascribed to him. This doesn’t look like the behavior of a faction genuinely dedicated to winning ideological battles. …
The most basic obstacle facing right populism has been around for decades: the people who matter on the right would rather get filthy rich with 45 percent support than slightly less filthy rich with 55 percent support, and the configuration of American political institutions makes this a perfectly rational strategy. The way to change this calculus is not to convince them of their errors but to render the strategy unviable. That would require a democratization of American political life so that the pursuit of majority support becomes a necessity rather than a luxury.”
This is a great article.
It beautifully sums up five years of frustration with Trump on this website.
In the beginning of Trump’s rise in 2015 and 2016, there were moderates and Independent voters like us who jumped on the Trump Train to move the party in a more nationalist and populist direction. We genuinely hated mainstream conservatism and its antiquated policy agenda and supported Trump as a wrecking ball who could level those people and move the party into alignment with its own voters and the political center. Mitch McConnell represents everything we dislike about the Republican Party.
Starting in 2017 and culminating in the Capitol Siege in 2021, Trumpism began to lose the ideologues and was stripped down to the conspiratards, grifters, plan trusters and a vacuous personality cult. It became about loyalty to the man himself and his reality television presidency, not advancing a populist or nationalist agenda. Millions of people were content to “win” by getting the corporate tax cuts and criminal justice reform and to “trust the plan” as long as they felt like they were “owning the libs” by having Trump the man in the White House. Meanwhile, we were losing hundreds of our monuments, getting wiped off the internet, Antifa was exploding in size, etc. There was no upside to the Trump presidency. Mitch McConnell used it to advance his own toxic agenda. We got the same old shit sandwich: MIGA, pro-business libertarian judges, tax cuts, deregulation, “opportunity zones” and that stuff.