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Post by aj2hall on Mar 12, 2024 5:14:40 GMT
Trump's takeover of the Republican Party heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-10-2024As predicted, last week was an important one for the Republican Party.
The Republicans’ rebuttal to the State of the Union on Thursday stayed in the news throughout the weekend. On Friday, independent journalist Jonathan Katz figured out that a key story in it was false. Senator Katie Britt (R-AL) described a twelve-year-old child sex trafficked by Mexican cartel members, implying that the young girl was trafficked because of President Joe Biden’s border policies.
Katz tracked down the facts. Britt was describing the life of Karla Jacinto, who was indeed trafficked as a child, but not in the present and not in the U.S. and not by cartels. She was trafficked from 2004 to 2008—during the George W. Bush administration—in Mexico, at the hands of a pimp who entrapped vulnerable girls. Jacinto has become an advocate for child victims and has told her story before Congress, and she met Britt at an event for government officials and anti-trafficking advocates.
Britt’s dramatic delivery of the rebuttal had already invited parody and concern about the religious themes she demonstrated. The news that a central image in it was a lie just made things worse. “Everyone’s f*cking losing it,” a Republican strategist told The New Republic’s Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling. “It’s one of our biggest disasters ever.”
On Friday, the Republican National Committee (RNC) voted to replace former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, who resigned effective Friday, with Trump loyalist Michael Whatley and Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump. They will co-chair the organization and have made it clear their primary goal is to put Trump back in the White House.
Friday night, on Newsmax, Donald Trump Jr. recorded a video announcing that the old Republican Party “no longer exists outside of the D.C. beltway…. The move that happened today…that’s the final blow. People have to understand that America First, the MAGA movement is the new Republican Party. That is conservatism today.”
Just what that means was crystal clear on Friday night, when Trump hosted Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán at the Trump Organization’s Florida property, Mar-a-Lago. The darling of the radical right, Orbán has spoken at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and hosted former Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson, and his policies inspired the anti-LGBTQ+ legislation Florida governor Ron DeSantis has championed.
The right wing’s fondness for Orbán springs from his having rejected democracy and replaced it in Hungary with what he calls an “illiberal state.” Orbán and other far-right leaders working against democracy maintain that the central principle of democracy, equality before the law, undermines society. It permits immigration, which, in their minds, dilutes the “purity” of a people, and it requires that LGBTQ+ individuals and women have the same rights as heterosexual men. Such a world challenges the heteronormative patriarchal world traditionalists crave.
Orbán’s takeover of the press, elimination of rival political parties, partisan gerrymandering, capture of the courts, and control of Hungary’s government are not just ideological, though, but also economic. Corruption and the capture of valuable factories and properties for cronies have allowed Orbán and his allies to amass fortunes.
“There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He’s fantastic,” Trump said on Friday. Trump said that Orbán simply says, “‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it, right? He’s the boss and…he’s a great leader, fantastic leader. In Europe and around the world, they respect him.”
On Saturday, Republicans in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma, censured Senator James Lankford (R-OK) over his work negotiating the border security measure. In January, state Republicans claimed they had passed a resolution “strongly” condemning Lankford; others said the vote for the resolution was “not legitimate and definitely does not represent the voice of all Oklahoma Republicans.”
Lankford is a far-right senator whom Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) tapped to represent the Republicans in the negotiations. House Republicans had demanded the border security measure before they would allow a vote on a national security supplemental bill that funds Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion.
Because the Democrats are desperate to fund Ukraine, they were willing to give up things they had never laid on the table before, including a path to citizenship for those brought to the United States as children, making the bill that emerged from the negotiations strongly favor the Republican position on immigration. The Border Patrol Officers’ union, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal all endorsed it.
But the House Republicans’ demand for a border measure appears to have been an attempt to kill the national security supplemental bill altogether. As soon as it became clear that there would be a deal, Trump came out against it. He demanded that Congress kill the measure, and his loyalists agreed.
Lankford, who had helped to produce the strongest border measure in years at the request of the nominal head of the party, has now been censured because he crossed Trump.
Meanwhile, on Saturday, Biden signed into law one of the consolidated appropriations bills that must be finished to fund the government. The other must be finished by March 22.
Biden has continued to ride the momentum built by Thursday’s State of the Union speech. His campaign has released a number of advertisements, and today he was in Georgia, where the largest political action committees representing communities of color—the AAPI Victory Fund, the Latino Victory Fund, and The Collective PAC—endorsed him and pledged $30 million to mobilize communities of color to vote in 2024. |
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Post by aj2hall on Mar 14, 2024 22:14:08 GMT
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Post by librarylady on Mar 15, 2024 1:17:44 GMT
We/the Peas don't support TFG so we are thinking he will be defeated. Don't let 2016 be repeated.
VOTE! get like minded people to vote...it can be over in a heartbeat.
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Post by aj2hall on Mar 17, 2024 17:59:25 GMT
When Lara Trump took over the RNC and fired the staff, I thought it might be a good thing. All of the money would go towards Trump, there will be no one with any experience etc. Now, I'm a little worried www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/republican-national-committee-sues-michigan-states-voter-rolls-rcna143250The Republican National Committee sues Michigan over the state's voter rolls The move claiming that Michigan's voter rolls are inflated comes as Trump allies have moved into leadership positions at the RNC ahead. The Republican National Committee sued Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, on Wednesday in an attempt to force election officials to trim down the state’s voter rolls.
The lawsuit, which was filed in federal court, argues that Michigan is violating the National Voter Registration Act’s requirement to maintain clean and accurate vote registration rolls.
The move comes just days after Trump allies effectively took over the RNC's leadership ahead of the 2024 election. |
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Post by aj2hall on Mar 21, 2024 21:44:48 GMT
Medicaid work requirementsthreadreaderapp.com/thread/1770796109692031285.html?utm_campaign=topunroll1. For many years, Republicans have been seeking to add a work requirement to Medicaid
(It's based on the discredited idea that poverty exists because people are lazy)
Georgia Republicans turned this idea into a reality
It's not going well
🧵
2. In 2018, the Trump administration issued a rule allowing states to get waivers to tie Medicaid eligibility to employment
A bunch of states tried it. Some of the plans were invalidated by courts, and then Biden revoked the waivers for the rest
But Georgia sued, saying it was a regulatory "bait and switch"
So they are the one state that ties Medicaid expansion to a work requirement
3. The program “has cost taxpayers at least $26 million so far, with more than 90% going toward administrative and consulting costs rather than medical care for low-income people.”
Only 3.5K people have been able to enroll in the first year.
4. Georgia had predicted 25K enrollment in the first year.
Meanwhile, @deloitte has collected $2.4 million in consulting fees
Expanding Medicaid without the red tape could have helped as many as 395K Georgians
Despite the program’s failures, GA Gov Brian Kemp is fighting to extend the program, which is set to expire in 2025, to 2028.
Numerous other states, anticipating the possibility of a second Trump term, are trying to follow Georgia's lead
6. The idea that Medicaid recipients don't want to work is bogus.
61% ALREADY work
Others cite “caregiving responsibilities, illness or disability, or school”
The work requirement doesn't incentivize people to work because they already want to
It just creates red tape
7. If Trump wins a second term and imposes these requirements across the board, hundreds of thousands of people could lose coverage
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Post by aj2hall on Mar 23, 2024 2:35:14 GMT
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Post by aj2hall on Mar 24, 2024 23:31:26 GMT
I can't decide if he's courageous for leaving or cowardly for not staying and fighting against the extremists in the party. I do appreciate that he is speaking up about the state of the Republican Party. Ken BuckFormer GOP Rep. Ken Buck rips House Republicans:
"Since this Congress started, there have been efforts to impeach the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the president, the attorney general, the FBI director, and, in fact, did impeach the director of — the secretary of homeland security.
Serious problems with setting priorities. We have a very tragic circumstance in Ukraine. We have spiraling debt, all kinds of out-of-control problems, and we focus on messaging bills that get us nowhere.” |
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Post by mollycoddle on Mar 24, 2024 23:44:22 GMT
I can't decide if he's courageous for leaving or cowardly for not staying and fighting against the extremists in the party. I do appreciate that he is speaking up about the state of the Republican Party. Ken BuckFormer GOP Rep. Ken Buck rips House Republicans:
"Since this Congress started, there have been efforts to impeach the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the president, the attorney general, the FBI director, and, in fact, did impeach the director of — the secretary of homeland security.
Serious problems with setting priorities. We have a very tragic circumstance in Ukraine. We have spiraling debt, all kinds of out-of-control problems, and we focus on messaging bills that get us nowhere.”He’s not wrong. Republican House members are dropping like flies. What is their majority now-one? This is really unheard of. But they deserve it. What have they accomplished? Very damn little. |
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Post by Merge on Mar 25, 2024 1:59:19 GMT
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Post by Merge on Mar 25, 2024 2:00:35 GMT
I can't decide if he's courageous for leaving or cowardly for not staying and fighting against the extremists in the party. I do appreciate that he is speaking up about the state of the Republican Party. Ken BuckFormer GOP Rep. Ken Buck rips House Republicans:
"Since this Congress started, there have been efforts to impeach the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the president, the attorney general, the FBI director, and, in fact, did impeach the director of — the secretary of homeland security.
Serious problems with setting priorities. We have a very tragic circumstance in Ukraine. We have spiraling debt, all kinds of out-of-control problems, and we focus on messaging bills that get us nowhere.”He’s not wrong. Republican House members are dropping like flies. What is their majority now-one? This is really unheard of. But they deserve it. What have they accomplished? Very damn little. They’ve gone out of their way to prevent anything from being accomplished because it might give Biden a win. Party over country indeed. |
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Post by aj2hall on Mar 26, 2024 2:46:41 GMT
We can only hope the mood has changed away from MAGA Republicans heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-24-2024-sundayThe Senate passed the appropriations bill shortly after midnight on Saturday morning, and President Joe Biden signed it Saturday afternoon. In his statement after he signed the bill, Biden was clear: “Congress’s work isn’t finished,” he said. “The House must pass the bipartisan national security supplemental to advance our national security interests. And Congress must pass the bipartisan border security agreement—the toughest and fairest reforms in decades—to ensure we have the policies and funding needed to secure the border. It’s time to get this done.”
House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has refused to bring forward the national security supplemental bill to fund Ukraine, Israel, the Indo-Pacific, and humanitarian aid to Gaza. He has also refused to bring forward the border security measure hammered out in the Senate after House Republicans demanded it and passed there on February 13. Johnson is doing the bidding of former president Trump, who opposes aid to Ukraine and border security measures.
Congress is on break and will not return to Washington, D.C., until the second week in April.
By then, political calculations may well have changed.
MAGA Republicans appear to be in trouble.
The House recessed on Friday for two weeks in utter disarray. On ABC News’s This Week, former representative Ken Buck (R-CO), who left Congress Friday, complained that House Republicans were focusing “on messaging bills that get us nowhere” rather than addressing the country’s problems. He called Congress “dysfunctional.”
On Friday, NBC announced it was hiring former Republican National Committee (RNC) chair Ronna McDaniel as a political analyst. Today the main political story in the U.S. was the ferocious backlash to that decision. McDaniel not only defended Trump, attacked the press, and gaslit reporters, she also participated in the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
In an interview with Kristen Welker this morning on NBC’s Meet the Press—Welker was quick to point out that the interview had been arranged long before she learned of the hiring— McDaniel explained away her support for Trump’s promise to pardon those convicted for their participation in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by saying, “When you’re the RNC Chair, you kind of take one for the whole team.”
That statement encapsulated Trump Republicans. In a democracy, the “team” is supposed to be the whole country. But Trump Republicans like McDaniel were willing to overthrow American democracy so long as it kept them in power.
That position is increasingly unpopular. Former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) wrote on social media: “Ronna facilitated Trump’s corrupt fake elector plot & his effort to pressure [Michigan] officials not to certify the legitimate election outcome. She spread his lies & called 1/6 ‘legitimate political discourse.’ That’s not ‘taking one for the team.’ It’s enabling criminality & depravity.”
McDaniel wants to be welcomed back into mainstream political discourse, but it appears that the window for such a makeover might have closed.
In the wake of Trump’s takeover of the RNC, mainstream Republicans are backing away from the party. Today, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) said she could not “get behind Donald Trump” and expressed “regret that our party is seemingly becoming a party of Donald Trump.” She did not rule out leaving the Republican Party.
In Politico today, a piece on Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, by Adam Wren also isolated Trump from the pre-2016 Republican Party. Pence appears to be trying to reclaim the mantle of that earlier incarnation of the party, backed as he is by right-wing billionaire Harlan Crow (who has funded Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas over the years) and the Koch network. Wren’s piece says Pence is focusing these days on “a nonprofit policy shop aimed at advancing conservative ideals.” Wren suggested that Pence’s public split from Trump is “the latest sign that Trumpism is now permanently and irrevocably divorced from its initial marriage of convenience with…Reaganism.”
Trump appears to believe his power over his base means he doesn’t need the established Republicans. But that power came from Trump’s aura of invincibility, which is now in very real crisis thanks to Trump’s growing money troubles. Tomorrow is the deadline for him to produce either the cash or a bond to cover the $454 million he owes to the people of the state of New York in fines and disgorgement of ill-gotten gains for fraud.
Trump does not appear to have the necessary cash and has been unable to get a bond. He claims a bond of such size is “unprecedented, and practically impossible for ANY Company, including one as successful as mine," and that "[t]he Bonding Companies have never heard of such a bond, of this size, before, nor do they have the ability to post such a bond, even if they wanted to.” But Louis Jacobson of PolitiFact corrected the record: it is not uncommon for companies in civil litigation cases to post bonds of more than $1 billion.
Trump made his political career on his image as a successful and fabulously wealthy businessman. Today, “Don Poorleone” trended on X (formerly Twitter).
The backlash to McDaniel’s hiring at NBC also suggests a media shift against news designed to grab eyeballs, the sort of media that has fed the MAGA movement. According to Mike Allen of Axios, NBC executives unanimously supported hiring McDaniel. A memo from Carrie Budoff Brown, who is in charge of the political coverage at NBC News, said McDaniel would help the outlet examine “the diverse perspectives of American voters.” This appears to mean she would appeal to Trump voters, bringing more viewers to the platform.
But former Meet the Press anchor Chuck Todd took a strong stand against adding McDaniel to a news organization, noting her “credibility issues” and that “many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting [and] character assassination.”
This pushback against news media as entertainment recalls the 1890s, when American newspapers were highly partisan and gravitated toward more and more sensational headlines and exaggerated stories to increase sales. That publication model led to a circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal that is widely—and almost certainly inaccurately—blamed for pushing the United States into war with Spain in 1898.
More accurate, though, is that the sensationalism of what was known as “yellow journalism” created a backlash that gave rise to new investigative journalism designed to move away from partisanship and explain clearly to readers what was happening in American politics and economics. In 1893, McClure’s Magazine appeared, offering in-depth examinations of the workings of corporations and city governments and launching a new era of reform.
Three years later, publisher Adolph Ochs bought the New York Times and put up New York City’s first electric sign to advertise, in nearly 2,700 individual lights of red, white, blue, and green, that it would push back against yellow journalism by publishing “ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO PRINT.” Ochs added that motto to the masthead. With his determination to provide nonpartisan news without sensationalism, in just under 40 years, Ochs took over the paper from just over 20,000 readers to more than 465,000, and turned the New York Times into a newspaper of record.
In that era that looks so much like our own, the national mood had changed. |
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Post by aj2hall on Mar 27, 2024 22:30:02 GMT
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/27/trump-2020-election-question/The revamped Republican Party turns Trump’s lies into a loyalty test Analysis by Philip Bump March 27, 2024 Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election because he was broadly unpopular and running against someone who (at the time) wasn’t. He lost handily, trailing Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes out of nearly 160 million cast.
Only by the electoral college was the race considered particularly close; Biden’s victory came down to 43,000 votes in three states. But that was enough for Trump to launch a fervent, unrelenting effort to try to once again wriggle his way into the White House by claiming that the election had been stolen from him.
In the 1,200-plus days since the election ended, no evidence has emerged of widespread or even significant electoral fraud. Instead, numerous theories elevated or embraced by Trump have been debunked. No election in American history has been scrutinized as robustly and ceaselessly as the 2020 contest. Nothing to suggest that the results were invalid or artificial has emerged.
But that observation comes from the real world, in which arguments are tested and abandoned when disproved. Donald Trump operates in Trumpworld, where reality is dependent on the views and positions of Donald Trump. And in Trumpworld, the idea that the 2020 election was riddled with fraud is accepted as fact, even though it isn’t.
In Washington Post-ABC News polling conducted in September, half of Republicans said that they believed there exists solid evidence of voter fraud, which there doesn't.
New reporting from The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey suggests that fealty to this Trumpworld idea is becoming a litmus test for people seeking (or hoping to retain) jobs with the Republican Party. The effective ouster of Ronna McDaniel as the party’s chair and Trump’s confirmation as the GOP presidential nominee meant an overhaul of the party itself. Among the changes: quizzing at least some potential employees on their views of the 2020 election.
From Dawsey's report:
“In recent days, Trump advisers have quizzed multiple employees who had worked in key 2024 states about their views on the last presidential election, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private interviews and discussions. The interviews have been conducted mostly virtually, as the prospective future employees are based in key swing states.”
“‘Was the 2020 election stolen?’ one prospective employee recalled being asked in a room with two top Trump advisers.”
A Republican/Trump spokeswoman insisted that the questions were simply aimed at seeking out “experienced staff with meaningful views on how elections are won and lost and real experience-based opinions about what happens in the trenches.” It’s not hard to peel away the veneer here: The party wants their employees to espouse the view and opinion that 2020 was ripped away from Donald Trump.
There’s an obvious immediate utility here. The traditional Republican establishment has struggled for years to accommodate Trump and Trumpism, to exist as respected, credible actors in national politics and political discussions while not alienating the MAGA base. That’s where the “the election was rigged” narrative came from; it was a way of telling Trump’s base that the 2020 results were dubious without having to muss one’s hair with a check-the-ballots-for-bamboo tinfoil hat.
By checking for fealty to the false “stolen” narrative at the outset, Trump’s allies aren’t simply weeding out people who disagree, they’re weeding out people who won’t acquiesce to the Trumpian approach to reality. They’re not just getting rid of people who won’t go along on this one subject; they’re getting rid of people who won’t go along in general.
Soon after Trump took office in 2017, Xavier Marquez, an expert on authoritarianism, wrote an essay for The Post in which he explained the utility of lies like the one about election fraud to authoritarian leaders.
“[L]ies can help ensure the loyalty of subordinates who are forced to repeat them,” Marquez wrote, more than three years before the 2020 contest. “These kinds of lies need not be credible at all to people outside the regime. The more incredible a lie is, the more it can credibly signal loyalty to a political leader in conditions of low trust. When a subordinate repeats an obviously ridiculous claim he or she is degraded, and bound more closely to the leader.”
Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party is the first time since he announced his 2024 candidacy that he assumed control of an existing institution. Upon doing so, he and his allies introduced a screening process that included this fealty test. Which is very much what he’s proposed doing with the federal bureaucracy should he win reelection.
Many of those looking to work for the GOP will have few qualms about acceding to Trump’s version of reality, certainly. Those willing to become party functionaries at this point understand what they’re signing up for. But existing party employees will also probably be disinclined to deviate from any adjustments to their shared worldview. Research published last year found that those who identified their bosses as authoritarian were less likely to correctly spot fake news than people with bosses who encouraged autonomy. More importantly, those with authoritarian bosses were also much less likely to challenge their bosses about false information.
George Orwell’s famous quote from “1984” comes to mind: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
In this case, though, the party isn’t telling anyone to reject the evidence. Not really. There’s a reason that half of Republicans think there’s solid evidence that the election was riddled with fraud: They aren’t being presented with the reality that it wasn’t. Fox News and right-wing social media aren’t assiduously policing misinformation about what happened in 2020 for the simple reason that there’s no utility for them in doing so.
Instead, the party’s just checking to make sure that your eyes and ears didn’t somehow come across the evidence that they’d rather have you ignore.
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Post by aj2hall on Apr 23, 2024 20:03:31 GMT
Good question. Are we finally at the point where the Republican Party turns away from MAGA? Republicans Brett Meiselas @bmeiselas
It feels like MAGA is being chewed up and spit out this week by their own party. MTG and the cuckoo caucus failed miserably to block Ukraine aid and MTG was humiliated on the cover of the NY Post. Gonzales called Gaetz and his ilk scumbags on live TV and Johnson joined him on the campaign trail. Mitch called out Tucker for being a Putin stooge. And in the background of it all, Trump criminality is on full display in a court case that could send him to prison. Is MAGA dying? |
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Post by Merge on Apr 23, 2024 20:58:35 GMT
Good question. Are we finally at the point where the Republican Party turns away from MAGA? Republicans Brett Meiselas @bmeiselas
It feels like MAGA is being chewed up and spit out this week by their own party. MTG and the cuckoo caucus failed miserably to block Ukraine aid and MTG was humiliated on the cover of the NY Post. Gonzales called Gaetz and his ilk scumbags on live TV and Johnson joined him on the campaign trail. Mitch called out Tucker for being a Putin stooge. And in the background of it all, Trump criminality is on full display in a court case that could send him to prison. Is MAGA dying?Nice thought, but as long as MAGA is controlling the RNC, there's little hope that Republicans will turn away from them. We've got a Republican congressman from San Antonio who's been speaking out against the cuckoo caucus (love that name!) and he is, unsurprisingly, facing censure, MAGA support of a primary opponent, and other things designed to drive moderates out of the party. ETA: this guy. www.texastribune.org/2024/04/22/tony-gonzales-republicans-matt-gaetz-scumbags/And this is the gun-humping scum that MAGA supports against him in the primary runoff. www.sacurrent.com/news/south-texas-congressional-candidate-raffles-off-firearm-to-raise-money-34337692 |
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Post by aj2hall on Apr 26, 2024 13:19:48 GMT
Liz Cheney liz_Cheney This tells you all you need to know about today’s Republican National Committee: The person in charge of election integrity for the @gop was just indicted in Arizona for lack of election integrity |
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