ALL IN FOR TRUMP

Defendants in the Moscow Show Trials, 1938

All writers and researchers on the subject of authoritarianism point to a moment in the creation of an authoritarian dictatorship where it is made clear to all followers that they are now expected to “toe the line” on anything the movement’s leader says, without question. Failure to do so will, at a minimum, result in the individual being expelled from the movement.

This, with Donald Trump’s MAGA GOP, we are now seeing political purity - in the form of absolute, complete loyalty to the Maximum Leader - being declared the the only way; there are no longer any half-way Trumpers.

This past weekend on the Sunday Shows, three Republicans who might possibly be picked as Trump’s Vice-Presidential nominee - people who as short a time as a year ago were presented as cause for hope that the Republican Party wasn’t completely lost to aggressively amoral Trumpism - refused to state they would accept the results of the 2024 election, advancing lies so humiliating about the result of the 2020 election that they should be haunted by them forever.

At the ballot box, at the county and state organization level, and in official party talking points, MAGA demands complete and total devotion to Trump and enthusiastic acceptance of his lies. There are no exceptions. It is either MAGA fealty or the exit.

The radical nature of this party overhaul is sometimes shrouded from clear view by the fact so many pre-Trump, non-MAGA Republicans are still around. While some have retired or been forced out, many, many more have adapted and remained, comfortable with selling their souls to Satan in return for the cold porridge of a position in the Party of Trump, completely unaware that like everything else he touches that dies, they are now soul-dead.

Past sins against the church of Trump - such AS Tim Scott declaring in 2021 that Trump lost the 2020 election, which was not fraudulent - will be forgiven if the sinner has publicly repented. The hypocrites ad strivers who will do or say anything to remain close to power, those who are not true believers, can remain in good standing in the cult, so long as they pay public lip service to its central tenets and biggest lie.

The stories of people like congressman Newhouse, attorney Spies, Senator Tim Scott, and Governor Doug Burgum illustrate the situation. None of them is an anti-Trump stalwart or MAGA true believer. They are all traditional Republicans who have done what the4y believed they had to do to remain in good standing in the MAGA Party. For years, they coexisted with people they privately detested, according to the statements of people who know them. But now it is time for them to become wholehearted members. They have done so knowing that Trump perversely likes having converted “sinners,” those who have bent their knee most abjectly to him, that he can further humiliate since they have proven they have no moral courage, no backbone, he need be concerned with. He holds them in contempt and they know he does, and yet they stay.

Congressman Newhouse is one of two Republicans left in the House who voted for the second Trump impeachment, for leading the teasonous insurrection on January 6. He survived the first round of the Stop The Steal purges in 2022, because of the State of Washington’s “jungle primary” rules and running against a gaggle of unimpressive MAGA challengers, who split the vote. This is also what savd the only other Republican impeachment voter left in the House, David Valadao of California.

Newhouse kept his head down, never appearing in any public setting where he said why he voted to convict Trump. He votes consistently with the party in the House. His reward for being a team-player came yesterday, when Super-Trumper Tiffany Smiley, the failed MAGA candidate for Senate who lost her race in 2022. In announcing her candidacy as his only opponent, she targeted Newhouse’s vote for impeachment as her sole disagreement with him, saying “That’s not a vote that represents the voters of the Fourth District. Donald Trump is our nominee, and we need Donald Trump’s policies in this country to save this country going forward. So given Newhouse’s past history with Trump, I don’t believe that Newhouse is the best person to legislate with a Trump administration.”

Spies, until last week the Chieff Counsel of the Republican Party, had the courage to speak against the tthe 2020 election lies at CPAC a month after the insurrection, correcting another panelist on stage for suggesting machines had switched votes, an act that prompted angry shouts of anger from the MAGA crowd. He said “I may get booed off the stage for this, but I have to say that’s simply not true. There is just zero evidence that’s true.”

Now, the fact he has remained silent on the subject since was insufficient to keep him from being forced to resign his position, leaving indicted Trump co-conspirator Christina Bobb to provide legal guidance to the party.

Trump posted on Truth Antisocial, “Great news for the Republican Party. RINO lawyer Charlie Spies is out as Chief Counsel of the RNC.”

And in the face of all that, Spies was still determined to insure he could remain in good-enough standing to keep his other clients, to accomplish which he publicly statee there were no hard feelings about it and he was ‘still 1000 percent behind Mr. Trump,’ telling CNN he would “remain focused on getting President Trump and Republicans at all levels elected in November.”

That’s nothing compared to the depraved obsequiousness from Scott and Burgum. Now that Trump has consolidated power and taken over the party as the leader for a third campaign, any real dissent from that supremacy is no longer tolerable. All must prove themselves publicly to be fully loyal. If not, they will be the next targets of the purge.

On January 28, after Trump was found by a civil jury to have sexually abused and defamed E. Jean Carroll, Scott was asked by ABC’s Martha Raddatz whether the verdict gave him “any pause in your support.” Scott’s answer wasto scoff that Democrats who support Joe Biden “don’t pause when they think about Hunter Biden.” Appearing on Face the Nation three weeks later, he refused to say whether as vice president he would reject electors, calling it a “hypothetical question.”

This past Sunday on Meet the Press, where he was asked at length by Kristen Welker about Trump’s refusal to commit to accepting the 2024 election results and whether he agreed with that, he replied this wouldn’t be an issue, because Trump would win the election. He kept repeating that through her serial attempts to get an actual answer. Finally saying, “ I expect President Trump to win the next election. And, listen, I’m not going to answer your hypothetical question. . . .”

Trumpism - like Stalinism - is totalitarian.

This is all right up there with the Old Bolsheviks proclaiming their undying personal loyalty to Stalin in the 1938 Moscow Show Trials, knowing full well they would end with a bullet in the back of their head in some Lubyanka basement cell.

This is what we face, and why a Truth and Reconciliation Commission will eventually be needed to clean out the MAGA traitors from the dark corners they will lurk in after Trump’s defeat in November.

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