THE GOP GOES FULL TRUMP INSURRECTIONIST

Another day, another demonstration of the self-immolation of the Republican Party.

The news this week has been unrelievedly bad for one Donald J. Trump. We now know that he was the author of the attempted coup. We now know he fully intended to get the 2020 election “overturned;” that he suggested law enforcement agencies could seize voting machines; and that, if elected in 2024, he will pardon those who violently attacked our seat of government, resulting in five dead and scores wounded.

So how does what passes for the mouthpiece of the Republican Party - the Republican National Committee - respond to all this?

David Bossie, one of the Trumpiest of the insurgency supporters, put forward a motion to expel Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the two Republicans who not only denounced the attempted coup but are serving on the committee investigating the treason.

Ronna - who doesn’t want to remind Trump she’s a Romney so she dropped her middle name - McDaniel, who heads the RNC, got that modified so it is “reasonable.” Now the RNC has only “censured” Cheney and Kinzinger.

Just to prove how supine they are, how much in Trump’s grasp, in his thrall, the censure resolution explicitly says that Cheney and Kinzinger want to “destroy” Trump rather than help the party win the majority, and that their committee is engaged in the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.” They are additionally accused of “advancing a political agenda to buoy the Democrat Party’s bleak prospects in the upcoming midterm elections.” They are also accused of “...both using their past professed political affiliation . . .

“Professed.”

This is not a stray word. It’s an accusation that Cheney and Kinzinger were never real Republicans, that they were imposters the whole time; that their actions over the past year represent not a break in behavior, but a revelation of their true selves.

This is actual, flat-out Stalinism. After consolidating his power in 1929, Stalin declared war on Soviets he considered tainted by their connections to the political movements that had come before him. Beginning in 1934 he wiped out an ever-changing group of political “enemies.” They were always accused of having never been the loyal revolutionaries they “professed” themselves to be.

Folks, we are waaaaayyyy beyond Hitler and the Nazis now. They never made their enemies into “unpersons” who had never existed, where photographic evidence of their existence was officially erased. But that’s where Ronna Romney and the rest of the RNC are headed.

Cheney’s response will be in the history books: “I’m a constitutional conservative and I do not recognize those in my party who have abandoned the Constitution to embrace Donald Trump,”

Kinzinger also pointed to the truth, that “conspiracies and toxic tribalism hinder their ability to see clear-eyed.”

These are extraordinary and revealing claims. The Republican Party’s official, openly declared position is now that its long-term planning and prospects are part and parcel with securing total impunity for an effort to overthrow the very foundations of our political order.

The official position of the Republican Party is now that those who sought to achieve this, through mob intimidation and violence, are officially now” ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse,” now elevated to being as martyrs and heroes.

Their official position is that there’s no need for any national political accounting with regard to the role that Trump and his co-conspirators played in inciting that violence.

Republicans will demur from that characterization. Oozing with their usual phony piety, they will insist that of course they condemn the violence and believe it deserves prosecution; their only objection is to the committee’s onerous treatment of the nonviolent.

Trump has succeeded in making this the official party orthodoxy.

You will recall that in 2020, the party declined to create a platform. They passed a one-page resolution which resolved that the party stood for whatever Donald Trump wanted:

“RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.”

Yes. That was the party platform. Historically, a political party has a bunch of ideas and the person they nominated for president was the elected champion who would support the party and its platform.

According to Trump, the president is his own monarchical state and the party exists to support him in the perpetuation of his power.

The Republican Party has no platform but support of Trump, no plan but to support his every effort to destroy out constitutional democratic republic.

Of course they will do everything they can to destroy anyone who says the emperor has no clothes.

This vote of censure by the RNC will put more pressure on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Oklafornia) to hold a vote that will expel Cheney and Kinzinger from the GOP conference. There is no pressure on him of any kind toward accountability for Trump; no pressure on him flowing from the latest extraordinary revelations about Trump’s true insurrectionist intent. That’s because the Republican Party is now the Party of Insurrection, of Treason.

Right now, there is serious discussion about scenarios in which a GOP-controlled House overturns the 2024 presidential election. One possibility is that they might count sham presidential electors sent by a corrupt GOP governor. As incredible as it seems that such a thing can happen in the oldest working democractic government on earth, the fact Republicans are now taking an official, unabashed, pro-insurrectionist stance can leave little doubt that they would exactly do this if the conditions for it aligned.

With 80 percent of Republican voters supporting that, with the central GOP committee taking that stance, only a fool can say the the party wouldn’ bless such a scheme. The entire party, from voters to office-holders, is now irredeemable.

The Lincoln Project and the Never Trumpers are right. The Republican Party must be burned to the ground, and its ashes scattered and buried. There is no “resurrection”, no “apology,” no “reinstatement in good standing” for a political party that takes the stance that was taken this morning.

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