MAGA was always supposed to be about “taking our country back.” But do Donald Trump’s most ardent soldiers even want to be part of the United States of America?
Texas Republicans not only want to secede but also imagine that after backing out of our country, they would live in an Eden of their own creation where there are no state or federal income taxes. How this penniless republic would then fund even basic services, much less build infrastructure and raise an army, not even God knows. But the state’s record of running its own power grid isn’t a hopeful indicator.
Were this fantasy ever realized, of course, Republicans would elect no more American presidents. This year, such a withdrawal would mean that Democrats would hold both the House and Senate. And even the sort of tourists tempted to visit Texas’ beautifully restored Confederate monuments might be scared away by its pro-choice position on vaccinations of all kinds. Americans are generous people, so some of us would send humanitarian aid.
I’m not sure if the sort of person who’d consider NRA favorite Sen. John Cornyn a sellout for trying to do even a little something about mass shootings knows that none of this is going to happen.
But the law-and-order party is definitely pushing Texans to ignore any federal law that it decides “should be ignored, opposed, refused, and nullified.” On Juneteenth, the party declared that it wanted to start by repealing the Voting Rights Act.
The enemies of “cancel culture” want to cancel gay people — sorry, Log Cabin Republicans — along with “woke corporations” and “education involving race.”
Texas schools should, according to the GOP platform, be required to teach the evils of socialism, while climate science and even evolution would be presented as “challengeable.”
Already, among Republicans not just in Texas but across the country, elections are legitimate only if the right candidate wins. Which is how the Texas GOP knows that Joe Biden is not our legitimate president, though somehow, all of the other candidates elected in 2020, when the GOP overall did very well, are perfectly legitimate officeholders.
This is not just “moving to the right” but moving to the alt-universe in which those Republicans who have not lost their way are considered the enemy, too. And not just the enemy, but the rightful prey of the righteous.
I refer, of course, to the loathsome new commercial from Missouri Senate candidate Eric Greitens, the disgraced former governor, who has declared open season on “RINOs,” or Republicans in name only. The GOP leader of the Missouri Senate called the police after seeing the ad.
It shows the candidate, along with his pump-action shotgun and a bunch of other guys in tactical gear, storming a house in search of those Republicans who don’t agree with him that reality is whatever “dark MAGA” men say it is.
“Join the MAGA crew,” Greitens says in the video, inviting Missourians to get their “RINO hunting permits. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.” Or leave it.
As Tuesday’s Jan. 6 committee hearing again made clear, it was brave Republicans — RINOs, as MAGA would have it — who did save our country after Biden was elected.
Arizona House Speaker Russell Bowers described being pressured by Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani to convene a committee to replace the state’s electors with a slate willing to vote for Trump instead. “I will not break my oath” to the state and U.S. Constitution, Bowers told them.
Bowers kept asking them for evidence that the massive fraud they were describing had actually occurred. And they kept putting him off, telling him that they did have proof without ever producing any. At one point, Bowers said, Giuliani came out and said, “We’ve got lots of theories; we just don’t have the evidence.”
The loopy lawyer formerly seen as “America’s mayor” tried to convince him to overlook that technicality and put his party first, asking, “Aren’t we all Republicans here?”
Yes, of the sort that some Democrats don’t believe exist, and that Trump and his allies don’t want to survive unscathed.
Asked to read from the journal Bowers kept at the time when Trump was leaning on him, he did: “I do not want to be a winner by cheating,” he wrote. “I will not play with laws I swore allegiance to with any contrived desire towards deflection of my deep foundational desire to follow God’s will, as I believe he led my conscience to embrace. How else will I ever approach Him in the wilderness of life, knowing that I ask for this guidance only to show myself a coward in defending the course he led me to take?”
Bowers also talked about the threats he and his family had received, and about how upset his “gravely ill” grown daughter had been about protesters in his neighborhood blaring lies calling him a pedophile. She isn’t upset any more because she died in late January, but does that make MAGA world ashamed? You know the answer.
Republican election officials from Georgia also testified about being pressured to pretend that there had been widespread fraud that they tried to find but couldn’t. While Trump’s legal team claimed that 10,315 “dead voters” had cast ballots in the state, for instance, Republican officials found only four. They found 0 underage voters.
Fulton County election worker Shaye Moss testified that she and her mother, also an election worker, had been forced into hiding after Giuliani claimed that they had changed the outcome in Georgia by bringing in “suitcases” of fake Biden ballots and scanning them multiple times.
GOP officials said that all the video Giuliani had claimed proved fraud actually showed was the normal process playing out. The “suitcase” was the usual carrying receptacle for votes. And that “memory stick” that Moss’ mother had supposedly handed her, and that Giuliani had told the world proved she was as guilty as a drug dealer passing off a vial of cocaine?
It was a ginger mint, said Moss, who like every other election worker in that video has since left her job.
Since then, Trump supporters have succeeded in replacing many of the Republicans who did put country above party — who still recognize laws they might not like and winners for whom they did not vote — with those who do not.
They’ve been replaced by those whose view of American democracy is so far from anything the founders they claim to love ever believed that it’s no wonder some want to exit this country and start a new one.
The Jan. 6 committee is right to make Republicans who did the right thing under extreme pressure the heroes of these hearings. Because if the American experiment is going to continue, we’re going to need many more like them.
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