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Erica Newland serves as counsel for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit organization founded in 2017 to fight democratic breakdown in America. Before Joe Biden’s victory was officially confirmed in January, she researched some of the ways that Donald Trump’s allies in Congress might sabotage the process. She came to a harrowing conclusion. More
Having fueled mistrust in elections, Republicans are pointing to voters’ fears to justify new voting laws.You’ve heard this koan a million times: If a tree falls in a forest and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?Now let’s try a variation: If a tree doesn’t fall, and nobody was there to watch it stay upright, could you be persuaded to believe that it made a crashing sound anyway?What am I driving at here? Read the latest article by our reporter Maggie Astor, and you’ll get it: In state legislatures across the country, Republicans have put forward hundreds of bills this year aimed at limiting access to the ballot — and they’ve justified it with the argument that, even if widespread election fraud isn’t a real problem (it isn’t), the fact that some voters believe it is ought to be reason enough to do something about it.For decades, suspicion of voter fraud has far outpaced actual instances of impropriety. That is partly because, as Republican politicians have increasingly focused on restricting access to the ballot, they have justified it with a crescendo of claims (mostly fallacious) about improprieties.But not until President Donald Trump lost his bid for re-election last year had false claims of voter fraud become a central political issue. Nowadays, addressing supposed fraud is at the heart of the G.O.P. platform. Representative Liz Cheney is proof of that: This week, she lost her Republican leadership post in the House because she was willing to call out Trump on “the big lie.”This stuff gets very meta very fast — so to wrap my head around it all, I contacted my colleague Maggie to ask her what she’d found in the process of reporting her story. Here’s what she said.Hi, Maggie. Your story is specifically about restrictive voting laws, but it’s also about something broader: the way that, as you describe it, “disinformation can take on a life of its own, forming a feedback loop that shapes policy for years to come.” To what degree was this a longstanding problem — and how much is it something that Donald Trump and his supporters have taken to a new level?The basic problem predates President Trump. You can see a similar pattern in, say, the campaigns against routine childhood vaccinations. The disinformation about supposed side effects spreads, and eventually you start to see politicians talking about how they’ve spoken to lots of parents who have serious concerns about vaccinations and arguing that those parents’ concerns should be accommodated in policy.There’s no question that we’re seeing this happen more because of Trump and his supporters. But it’s not that the feedback-loop pattern is becoming more common, per se — it’s that Trump has promoted so much disinformation, and the disinformation campaigns among his supporters have become so enormous and effective, that we end up seeing the pattern more just because of the volume of disinformation.One quotation that didn’t make it into my article was from Matt Masterson, a fellow at the Stanford Internet Observatory who was previously a senior election security official in the Department of Homeland Security. He told me: “There’s no question, none, that this was the broadest campaign that I have seen to undermine confidence in elections, and so now the push is broader and more pervasive across the states because the lies are broader and more pervasive across the states.”States across the country are using worries about fraud to justify legislation. How widespread have voter-restriction laws become at the state level this year? Are we looking at something on a historic scale?It’s absolutely on a historic scale. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks voting-related bills, legislators in 47 states have introduced a total of 361 bills with restrictive provisions this year. For comparison, in 2017, the Brennan Center counted 99 bills in 31 states.That doesn’t mean the push to restrict voting is new, of course. Far from it — 99 bills in 2017 is still a lot, and more broadly, these sorts of laws have proliferated since the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act in 2013. But the scale is unlike anything we’ve seen before, and many of the individual bills are really sweeping.In your story, you quote a state senator from North Carolina, Ralph Hise, who wrote to you: “Elected officials have a responsibility to respond to declining voter confidence, and failure to do so is dangerous to the health of our republic.” But what about responding to declining voter confidence by simply shoring up voters’ faith in the election system, given that widespread fraud basically isn’t real? Are there any Republicans who seem willing to do that?You do see a very small number of Republicans doing that. Think Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney or Adam Kinzinger. But the Republicans who are saying that the election was secure, and who have tried to push other Republicans to acknowledge the same, have not been received well by the broader party, to put it mildly. Just yesterday, of course, Cheney was ousted from her leadership position in the House Republican caucus because she denounced the disinformation.So yes, there are Republicans who are willing, but they’re just not influential voices within the party now — even when they’re people like Romney who were once extremely influential voices within the party.Were you forwarded this newsletter? Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More
The meeting produced little progress, underscoring the political challenge for President Biden as he seeks to exploit the narrowest of majorities in Congress to revive the country’s economy.WASHINGTON — To hear the participants tell it, President Biden’s first-ever meeting with Republican and Democratic leaders from both houses of Congress was 90 minutes of productive conversation. It was cordial. There were no explosions of anger. More
The Wyoming Republican gave an unrepentant final speech warning her colleagues that Donald J. Trump was leading them toward “destruction.” They booed and kicked her out.WASHINGTON — In a remarkable display of loyalty to Donald J. Trump, Republicans moved quickly to purge Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming from House leadership on Wednesday, voting to oust their No. 3 for repudiating the former president’s election lies and holding him responsible for the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.The action, orchestrated by party leaders, came by voice vote during a raucous closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill that lasted just 15 minutes. With the votes stacked against her, Ms. Cheney made a defiant final speech rather than fight the ouster, warning that Republicans would follow Mr. Trump to their “destruction” by silencing dissent and refusing to reject the myth of a stolen election. She drew boos from her colleagues.After months of infighting that erupted after the violent end to his presidency, Republicans’ unceremonious ouster of Ms. Cheney, the scion of one of the nation’s most powerful conservative families, reflected how far the party has strayed from the policy principles and ideological touchstones that once defined it.The vote — and the manner in which it unfolded — also illustrated how Republican Party orthodoxy has come to be defined more by allegiance to a twice-impeached former president who prizes loyalty over all else than by a political agenda or a vision for governing.It came as more than 100 Republicans, including some prominent former elected officials, said they were considering breaking off and creating a third party if the G.O.P. failed to make major changes to extricate itself from Mr. Trump’s stranglehold and what it called “forces of conspiracy, division and despotism.”In an unrepentant last stand minutes before Republicans voted to strip her of her post, Ms. Cheney urged her colleagues not to “let the former president drag us backward,” according to a person familiar with the private comments. She said that if the party wanted a leader who would “enable and spread his destructive lies,” they should vote to remove her, because they had “plenty of others to choose from.”“I will do everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office,” Ms. Cheney told reporters afterward. “We have seen the danger that he continues to provoke with his language. We have seen his lack of commitment and dedication to the Constitution.”Ms. Cheney’s public comments on Wednesday were an unmistakable jab at Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader.After the deadly assault on the Capitol by Mr. Trump’s supporters, Mr. McCarthy said the former president had been responsible for the violence and should have quickly called off rioters who were threatening the lives of members of Congress and his own vice president. But he quickly walked back the criticism, which had enraged Mr. Trump, and since then he has arguably done more than anyone else in his party to keep the former president in the fold.Most Republicans are aware of the iron grip Mr. Trump still holds on the party’s voters.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesAfter backing her in a previous leadership challenge, based on her vote to impeach Mr. Trump, Mr. McCarthy had come to see Ms. Cheney as a distraction and political liability in his quest to regain the House majority and become speaker.For her part, Ms. Cheney made it clear that she regarded her ouster as a historic mistake, and intended to continue to be vocal in her criticism. She invited David Hume Kennerly, a former official White House photographer under President Gerald R. Ford with deep ties to her family, to record the day behind the scenes, and defended her stance in a lengthy television interview with NBC less than an hour after the vote.It represented a remarkable arc for the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, a stalwart Republican who became a despised figure among the left for advancing the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, a falsehood that drove the nation to war.On Wednesday, though, Democrats lavished praise on Ms. Cheney for her refusal to spread a lie, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi calling her “a leader of great courage, patriotism and integrity,” and pointing to her removal as a troubling sign for Republicans.“For the sake of our democracy, reasonable Republicans across the country must take back their party,” Ms. Pelosi said.Behind closed doors in the Congressional Auditorium, a blue-carpeted, wood-paneled hall where Republicans sat in theater-style seats, Ms. Cheney took to the stage on Wednesday morning to make her parting plea, drawing jeers as she warned her colleagues about the consequences of their current course. She ended with a prayer quoting from the Book of John — “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free” — and asking God to “help us to remember that democratic systems can fray and suddenly unravel.”“When they do,” she added, “they are gone forever.”Republicans made it clear they were not interested in those reminders.“She who thinks she leads, but has no followers, is only taking a walk,” said Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, as she made the motion to recall Ms. Cheney, according to a statement her office released afterward. “Liz, I’m afraid you’re a woman who is only taking a walk right now. You have lost your followers.”Republican leaders, who portrayed Ms. Cheney’s removal as a way to unify the party, declined to allow members to register a position on it.When Representative Tom Reed of New York, a moderate who has announced his retirement from Congress, rose to ask whether a recorded vote was allowed, he was told no. Mr. McCarthy had told his colleagues that a voice vote was important to show “unity,” and that it was time to “move forward” and look toward winning back the House, according to a person familiar with the remarks.When the time came, the ayes loudly drowned out the noes. The ouster was so swift that some Republicans were still trickling in to take their seats when Ms. Cheney strode up the center aisle to make her way to a bank of microphones and reporters waiting outside.Mr. McCarthy left without making a public statement, avoiding reporters altogether.At the White House later in the day, speaking to reporters after meeting with President Biden and other congressional leaders on infrastructure, Mr. McCarthy brushed off a question about comments by Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, whom he has anointed to succeed Ms. Cheney. Ms. Stefanik had echoed some of Mr. Trump’s false claims around widespread voter fraud.“I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election,” he said. “I think that is all over with.”Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, brushed off reporters’ questions about the party’s leadership after a meeting with President Biden at the White House.Doug Mills/The New York TimesRepresentative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, who helped lead the charge against Ms. Cheney, said his case boiled down to a simple idea: “Can’t have a conference chair who recites Democrat talking points.”“It’s time to focus on stopping the Democrats and save the country,” he said.Mr. Trump weighed in Wednesday morning with statements attacking Ms. Cheney and cheering her removal, including one calling her “a poor leader, a major Democrat talking point, a warmonger and a person with absolutely no personality or heart.”Republicans who have styled themselves in his image also gloated openly, including the freshman Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, who treated Ms. Cheney to a mocking farewell on Twitter: “Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, goodbye Liz Cheney.”For all the backbiting and turmoil, the episode has also exposed a party unmoored from its traditional policy prerogatives even as Republicans hope to retake control of the House in 2022. Aware of the iron grip Mr. Trump holds on their voters and donors, Mr. McCarthy and other Republicans have made the calculation that to retake the majority, they need the former president’s support — or at the very least, cannot afford to invoke his wrath.“The notion that 5 percent of the Republican Party is going to eviscerate the influence of President Trump in the party never was plausible,” said Representative Dan Bishop, Republican of North Carolina. “It’s not good for the Republican Party. It’s not good for the country.”But the episode has only called attention to the party’s devotion to Mr. Trump, its tolerance for authoritarian tendencies, and internal divisions between Trump acolytes and more traditional Republicans about how to win back the House in 2022. All those dynamics threaten to alienate independent and suburban voters, undercutting what otherwise appears to be a sterling opportunity for Republicans to reclaim the majority.Representative Ken Buck, a conservative Colorado Republican who did not vote to impeach Mr. Trump and voted against removing Ms. Cheney on Wednesday, warned that the party’s rush to purge dissenting voices was more politically dangerous than Republican leaders seemed to understand.“Liz didn’t agree with President Trump’s narrative, and she was canceled,” Mr. Buck said.“It’s time to focus on stopping the Democrats and save the country,” said Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, who helped lead the charge against Ms. Cheney.Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times“We have to deal with this narrative at some point,” he continued. “There are major issues — the border, spending. But to suggest that the American people in 2022 won’t consider the fact that we were unwilling to stand up to a narrative that the election was stolen, I think will be taken into consideration with their vote.”Republicans’ choice of replacement for Ms. Cheney has amplified that narrative. While party leaders have cast Ms. Stefanik as a unifying figure who will stick to the party script and stay focused on taking back the majority from Democrats, the New York Republican has resurrected Mr. Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud and pledged to stand by him and “his focus on election integrity.”Ms. Stefanik’s hasty ascension has also sparked discontent among the hard-right members of the Republican conference, who are suspicious of her recent transformation from a mainstream moderate who was skeptical of Mr. Trump into one of his most vocal defenders. They have taken issue with her voting record, including voting against his signature 2017 tax cuts bill and his efforts to seize funding to build a border wall.“I think she’s a liberal,” Mr. Buck told reporters on Wednesday. But he added that with top Republicans and Mr. Trump uniting to support Ms. Stefanik, he doubted that anybody would want to risk a future chairmanship or leadership role should Republicans win back the House by taking her on. “Which I think is terribly unfortunate,” he added.Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, circulated a broadside on Tuesday accusing Ms. Stefanik of being insufficiently conservative and said top Republicans were making a mistake by rushing to elevate her. On Wednesday, he appeared to entertain running against her.“She should have an opponent,” Mr. Roy said.A vote on whether to elevate Ms. Stefanik to the No. 3 post is expected on Friday. More
Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Republican leader, suggested on Wednesday that members of his party recognized that President Biden had been legitimately elected, four months after he and 146 other Republicans voted to overturn the election results.“I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election,” Mr. McCarthy told reporters after meeting with Mr. Biden and congressional leaders at the White House to discuss infrastructure spending. “I think that is all over with. We’re sitting here with the president today. So from that point of view, I don’t think that’s a problem.”In reality, numerous Republican lawmakers continue to question the legitimacy of the presidential election, in lock step with former President Donald J. Trump. Hours before Mr. McCarthy made his comments, he joined other House Republicans in voting to oust Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming from her leadership position for repudiating the former president’s election lies and denouncing the lawmakers who encouraged them.Ms. Cheney’s likely replacement, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, recently claimed that election officials had engaged in “unprecedented, unconstitutional overreach” last year and expressed support for a Republican-led audit of the 2020 election results in Arizona, part of a continued effort to cast doubt on Mr. Biden’s victory there.Other congressional Republicans, including Representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, have also endorsed the Arizona audit, and the lie that the election was stolen has fueled a barrage of restrictive voting bills across the country.In January, 147 Republican lawmakers voted against certifying Mr. Biden’s victory. When asked point-blank whether they believed Mr. Biden won the election legitimately, they rarely give a straight answer. And the few who have spoken out against efforts to delegitimize the election, or who have publicly criticized Mr. Trump’s actions related to the election — such as Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Representative Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio — have been rebuked.Addressing her fellow Republicans before they voted to oust her Wednesday morning, Ms. Cheney said that they should not “let the former president drag us backward,” and that if they wanted a leader who would “enable and spread his destructive lies,” they should vote to remove her.They responded with jeers. More
When it comes to the fate of big cities in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, there are two sets of overlapping economic and political consequences, but they are not necessarily what you might expect.Declining tax revenues, business closures, spiking rates of violent crime and an exodus to smaller communities have left major urban centers anxious about surviving the pandemic’s aftermath and returning to a new normal.But all is not lost.In a paper published earlier this month, “America’s Post-Pandemic Geography, two urbanists who come from very different political perspectives, Richard Florida, a professor at the University of Toronto, and Joel Kotkin, a professor at Chapman University, argue:Any shift away from superstar cities may augur a long-overdue and much-needed geographic recalibration of America’s innovation economy. High-tech industries have come to be massively concentrated — some would say overconcentrated — in coastal elite cities and tech hubs. The San Francisco Bay Area and the Acela Corridor (spanning Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C.) have accounted for about three-quarters of all venture-capital investment in high-tech start-ups. In the decade and a half leading up to the pandemic, more than 90 percent of employment growth in America’s innovation economy was concentrated in just five major coastal metros: San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, San Diego, and Boston, according to the Brookings Institution.In addition, Florida and Kotkin write:The current shift to remote work makes geographic rebalancing of these industries more feasible, and a number of leading big tech companies have openly embraced it. Such a rebalancing might help not only smaller cities develop more robust economies but also take some pressure off the housing and real-estate markets of superstar cities and tech hubs, making them more affordable.In an email, Florida argued that a key motivating force driving many of the recent departures from big cities was the desire to be away from the pandemic, as well as from pandemic restraints imposed by local governments:More affluent people, especially risk-oriented entrepreneurial types are fleeing to less restrictive more open environments, where they choose to undertake their own risks and, if they have kids, to send them to school.There is also political fallout from the nation’s changing demography.Jonathan Rodden, a political scientist at Stanford and the author of “Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide,” explained in an email how the geographic dispersion of Democratic voters may help slowly shift Republican and competitive districts in a leftward direction:Even before 2020, there was already a strong correlation between net county-level in-migration and increasing Democratic vote share. In 2020, this relationship was incredibly strong. All around the country, counties that experienced in-migration saw increases in Democratic vote share — in some cases very large increases — and places experiencing out-migration saw increases in the Republican vote share. These in-migration counties that trended Democratic were mostly suburban, and the out-migration counties that moved toward the Republicans were both urban core and rural counties.For decades, Rodden continued,Democrats have been excessively concentrated in urban centers, which makes it difficult for them to transform their votes into commensurate legislative seats. But as cities lose population, most of the growing suburban counties are either red counties that are trending purple, or purple counties that are trending blue, and very few are overwhelmingly Democratic.Democratic suburban gains were already evident in the 2018 and 2020 elections in states like Georgia, Arizona, Texas and North Carolina.At the same time, the movement of Democratic voters from urban centers is very likely to moderate the agenda-setting strength of progressive urban voters. This process will lessen an ideological problem that plagued Democratic congressional candidates.In “Why Cities Lose,” Rodden wrote:Voters in the urban core congressional districts are ideologically quite distinct from the rest of the country, and quite far away from the median district. And the most extremely conservative rural districts are actually not very far away from the pivotal districts around the median.Rodden continues:In most U.S. states then, urban districts are far more liberal than the rest of the state. As a result, Democrats face a difficult challenge in trying to manage their statewide party reputation. If it comes to be dominated by urban incumbents, they will find it hard to compete in the pivotal districts.In his email, Rodden argued that because Republicans control congressional redistricting in many more states than Democrats do, Democrats may not make immediate gains in the House as a result of these population shifts. But, he noted, as these trends continue, districts gerrymandered at the beginning of the decade may shift in a more progressive direction over time:Republican map-drawers will be working with a rapidly moving target, and the task of making projections for elections 6 or 8 years into the future in suburban and exurban areas might be difficult. The future political orientation of suburban areas depends, in part, on choices that will be made by both parties in the years ahead. Gerrymandering takes very little effort when your opponents are already geographically packed. As they spread out and mingle with your supporters, the job becomes more challenging.John Austin, director of the Michigan Economic Center, pointed out in an email that “even before the pandemic, there were a growing number of exceptions to the seemingly inexorable march of a tech and knowledge economy to consolidate in handfuls of superstar global cities.” He cited as especially attractive those smaller cities with research universities, including Iowa City, Iowa; Ann Arbor, Mich.; State College, Pa.; and South Bend, Ind.“Many techies realize they can flee the costs, congestion and craziness of the coasts (like the Bay Area),” Austin said,and find a lot of people like them and robust culture and diverse community in the Nashvilles scattered across the county. This kind of tech-talent immigration only happens to places these folks perceive to be a place with lots of people like them and a rich culture mix — coastal techies now know Phoenix and Boulder fit the bill — but this is also a huge opportunity for places like Madison and Ann Arbor and the Marquettes and the Ashevilles, which do have a rich and diverse talent base, tech-scene, food and music and all that.Austin believes that the movement of high-tech workers to smaller, redder states will benefit the Democratic Party.As these areas gain knowledge workers, Austin wrote, they will see local politicsevolve to be more progressive, and better inoculated against the appeal of right wing populist demagogues like Trump. Local residents will become more optimistic and forward looking, not responding to the siren song of nationalism, nativism and pullback from the international order. Newcomers leaven the polity. This is clearly what we see in places like Grand Rapids in West Michigan and other smaller tier former manufacturing centers in the Midwest.Once a rock-ribbed Republican county, Grand Rapid’s Kent County voted for Biden over Trump 51.9 percent to 45 percent.In their March 2021 paper, “From L.A. to Boise: How Migration Has Changed During the Covid-19 Pandemic,” Peter Haslag and Daniel Weagley, professors at Vanderbilt and Georgia Tech, identified the highest percentage of movers from one state to another, topped by California residents going to Texas, then New York to Florida and Illinois to Florida.The geographic trends are striking. Of the top 20, 19 were from blue states to red states.Last year, Manhattan’s population fell by 20,337, the largest drop in 30 years, according to data compiled by William Frey, a Brookings senior fellow.Over the three decades from 1990 to 2020, Frey found that in large metropolitan counties, the population of inner and outer suburbs grew twice as much, at 38.7 million, as that of center cities, at 18.8 million, as shown in the accompanying graphic.Pandemic’s urban population loss nothing newPopulation growth in the urban cores of large metros has been dropping sharply since 2016, but only became a net loss in the last year. In those regions’ suburbs, growth has cooled, but still showed a net gain during the pandemic. More
Liz Cheney and Donald Trump in happier days.Andrew Harnik/Associated PressI asked a Republican who spent time with Representative Liz Cheney last week what her thinking was in speaking out so forcefully, so unyieldingly, against Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, despite knowing that this might cost the three-term congresswoman her political career.“It’s pretty simple,” this person, who requested anonymity in order to speak openly, told me. “She decided she’s going to stay on the right side of her conscience.”“She wasn’t going to lie to stay in leadership,” he added. “If telling the truth was intolerable, she knew she wasn’t going to keep her leadership position.”Ms. Cheney was certainly right about that. Early on Wednesday, House Republicans ousted her from her position as the chairman of the House Republican conference, the No. 3 leadership slot, one her father held in the late 1980s. The next priority of Mr. Trump and MAGA world? To defeat her in a primary in 2022.The takedown of Representative Cheney was not an “inflection point,” as some have called it. It was the opposite — the latest (but it won’t be the last) confirmation that the Republican Party is diseased and dangerous, increasingly subversive and illiberal, caught in the grip of what Ms. Cheney described in The Washington Post as the “anti-democratic Trump cult of personality.”“Remaining silent and ignoring the lie emboldens the liar,” Ms. Cheney, unbroken and unbowed, said in a speech on the House floor Tuesday night. “I will not participate in that. I will not sit back and watch in silence while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law and joins the former president’s crusade to undermine our democracy.” Her Republican colleagues, cowardly and classless, cleared the chamber as she began her remarks. But they can’t escape her searing indictment.Declaring fealty to a lie has become the single most important test of loyalty in today’s Republican Party. Everyone recognizes this, but from time to time we need to stop to register its true significance.“It’s a real sickness that is infecting the party at every level,” Barbara Comstock, a Republican who represented Virginia’s 10th Congressional District before Mr. Trump’s unpopularity in the suburbs sunk her chances in the 2018 election, told Lisa Lerer of The Times. “We’re just going to say that black is white now.”This should come as a surprise to exactly no one. For more than five years, the Republican Party and its leading media propagandists embraced and championed Mr. Trump’s mendacities, conspiracy theories and sociopathic tendencies. As a result, their brains became rewired, at least metaphorically speaking; the constant accommodation Republicans made to Mr. Trump caused significant cognitive distortions.As a result, they have detached themselves from reality. The expectation that once Mr. Trump left office the Republican Party would become a normal party again was wishful thinking from the beginning. There is no post-Trump fight for the “soul” of the Republican Party. At least for now, that battle has been decided.Liz Cheney understands that only a decisive break with Mr. Trump will stop the continuing moral ruination of the Republican Party. But her break with the former president, while courageous, came too late to change anything. She is trying to rally an army that doesn’t exist.It doesn’t exist for two reasons. The first is that many grass-roots Republicans, having been fed a steady diet of fabrications and disinformation for the last half-decade, are deluded. They believe Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories, in large measure because they want to believe them, and now they are addicted to them. And addictions are hard to break.The latest CNN/SSRS survey found that 70 percent of Republicans believe the false allegation that Joe Biden did not defeat Mr. Trump; a mere 23 percent said Mr. Biden won, despite the Trump administration’s admission that “the November 3 election was the most secure in American history.”These Republicans believe they are truth-tellers and patriots, sentries at freedom’s gate. They are utterly sincere; they are also quite dangerous. They are taking a sledgehammer to pillars of American democracy: confidence in the legitimacy of our elections, the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power.Most Republican members of Congress, on the other hand, don’t believe President Biden was illegitimately elected. Kevin McCarthy, Elise Stefanik, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham aren’t deceived. They are play acting in ways that are unethical and cynical, but they are not stupid. They’re fully aware that the cancerous lies have metastasized — they each played a crucial role in spreading them, after all — and to refute those lies publicly would put targets on their backs.Many of the most influential figures in Republican politics have decided that breaking with Mr. Trump would so alienate the base of the party that it would make election victories impossible, at least for the foreseeable future. That’s essentially what Senator Graham was saying when he recently went on Fox News and posed this question to his Republican colleagues: “Can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no.”This means that the new Republican establishment will accede to pretty much anything Mr. Trump demands in order to keep good relations with him. And we know what the former president’s main demand is — insisting he was cheated out of a second term.So we have reached the point where a member of one of the Republican Party’s leading families, a person of unquestioned conservative credentials, is now less popular with the Republican base and more reviled by the House leadership than the onetime QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene, who just before the Jan. 6 insurrection referred to that day as Republicans’ “1776 moment.”Ms. Cheney was stripped of her leadership post because she committed the unpardonable sin in 2021’s Republican Party: She spoke the truth about the legitimacy of the 2020 election results and refused to back down. Whatever she was before, she is a voice of conscience now, reminding her colleagues of their Faustian bargain with their peculiar Mephistopheles, Donald Trump. It enrages them even as it haunts them.Today the Republican Party is less a political party than a political freak show. It is being sustained by insidious lies. And people who love America, starting with conservatives, should say so. Otherwise, if the Republican Party’s downward spiral isn’t reversed, it will descend even further into a frightening world of illusion.Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner), a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who served in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations, is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More
Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherToday, Liz Cheney, the No. 3 Republican in the House, is expected to be removed from her leadership position.Her role in the party has increasingly become untenable for many. Ms. Cheney has continued to speak out in the starkest of terms against President Donald Trump’s role in fomenting the Jan. 6 riots and the continued insistence that the 2020 election was stolen.In doing so, she has found herself on a lonely political island.We look at the factors behind her ouster and the new requirements for Republican leadership.On today’s episodeCatie Edmondson, a reporter in The New York Times’s Washington bureau.Representative Liz Cheney’s leadership role is embattled despite her conservative voting record and her status as a member of a Republican dynasty. Erin Schaff/The New York TimesBackground readingIn turning on Ms. Cheney, Republicans have bowed to Mr. Trump’s election lies.The Wyoming congresswoman challenged Republicans to turn away from Trump after Jan. 6. Instead, they turned on her.“History is watching.” Here are five key arguments from Ms. Cheney’s Washington Post opinion essay this month.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.Transcripts of each episode are available by the next workday. You can find them at the top of the page.Catie Edmondson contributed reporting.The Daily is made by Theo Balcomb, Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Annie Brown, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, M.J. Davis Lin, Austin Mitchell, Neena Pathak, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Daniel Guillemette, Hans Buetow, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Bianca Giaever, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Alix Spiegel, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano and Soraya Shockley.Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Mikayla Bouchard, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Nora Keller, Sofia Milan, Desiree Ibekwe, Laura Kim, Erica Futterman and Shreeya Sinha. More
