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      in US Politics

      ‘Naughty favours’: Matt Gaetz seeks to ridicule allegations he paid underaged girl for sex

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      The embattled Florida congressman Matt Gaetz has compared allegations of sexual misconduct involving a minor to earmarks, a congressional process by which spending measures beneficial to representatives’ districts are attached to legislation.“I’m being falsely accused of exchanging money for naughty favors,” he said, speaking to Republicans in Ohio on Saturday.Gaetz also said he wanted to be “Robin” to Jim Jordan’s “Batman”.Jordan is an Ohio representative and hard-right leader in the House, like Gaetz a vocal ally of Donald Trump. He is also dogged by scandal, over his alleged failure to act on sexual abuse by a team doctor when Jordan was a wrestling coach at Ohio state. Jordan denies wrongdoing.Gaetz is reportedly being investigated for alleged sex trafficking involving an underaged woman, other alleged payments for sex and drug use, and possible influence trading with representatives from the medical marijuana industry.He denies all wrongdoing and has said he will not resign. But his outlook clouded on Friday when a former associate indicated he would plead guilty in court in Florida on Monday to charges including paying for sex with a 17-year-old girl.Joel Greenberg, a former Seminole county tax collector, did not name other men in his plea agreement but he is thought likely to help prosecutors investigating Gaetz.Also on Friday, the Daily Beast cited two sources who said a woman the website said Greenberg will identify as having been paid for sex accompanied Gaetz to a “cocaine-fueled party” after a fundraiser in Orlando in 2019. The website also said the woman secured a “taxpayer-funded no-show job” through her connection to Greenberg.A public relations firm hired by Gaetz told the Beast he would not comment, but “the privacy of women living private lives should be protected”.Republican House leaders have not taken action against Gaetz. On Saturday, the congressman spoke at the Ohio Political Summit, a Republican event in suburban Cleveland.“I’m being falsely accused of exchanging money for naughty favors,” Gaetz said. “Yet Congress has re-instituted a process that legalises the corrupt act of exchanging money for favors, through earmarks, and everybody knows that that’s the corruption.”Earmarks have been absent from Congress for a decade but both parties now support their use. Some observers say earmarks promote bipartisan co-operation.Gaetz also took a shot at another Ohio Republican congressman, Anthony Gonzalez.“Is it likely that the Anthony Gonzalez congressional career might mirror the Anthony Gonzalez NFL career?” Gaetz asked. “Whole lot of hype, first-round draft pick, out in four years.”Gonzalez was a wide receiver who spent five years with the Indianapolis Colts, who made him the 32nd and last pick in the first round of the 2007 NFL Draft. He also had a brief spell with the New England Patriots. He was not at the event in Cleveland but he appeared to rebuke his colleague, if obliquely, on Twitter.“Ending child exploitation remains one of my top policy initiatives in Congress,” Gonzalez tweeted. “Anyone engaged in these heinous acts needs to be held accountable and taken off the streets.”At the event in Ohio, Gaetz received a standing ovation. More

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      in Elections

      Arizona Republican calls Trump ‘deleted database’ statement ‘unhinged’

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      The Republican who leads the Arizona county elections department targeted by a GOP audit of the 2020 election results is slamming Donald Trump and others in his party for their continued falsehoods about how the election was run.Maricopa county recorder Stephen Richer on Saturday called a Trump statement accusing the county of deleting an elections database “unhinged” and called on other Republicans to stop the unfounded accusations.“We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer. As a party. As a state. As a country,” Richer tweeted.Richer became recorder in January, after defeating the Democratic incumbent.The Republican state senate president, Karen Fann, has demanded the Republican-dominated Maricopa county board of supervisors answer questions raised by the private auditors she has hired.The Arizona senate took possession of 2.1m ballots and election equipment last month for what was supposed to be a three-week hand recount of the presidential race won by Joe Biden.We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer. As a party. As a state. As a countryInstead, the auditors have moved as a snail’s pace and had to shut down on Thursday after counting about 500,000 ballots. They plan to resume counting in a week, after high-school graduation ceremonies planned for the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, which they rented for the recount.Trump’s statement said, in part, that “the entire database of Maricopa county in Arizona has been DELETED! This is illegal and the Arizona State Senate, who is leading the forensic audit, is up in arms.”Richer and the board say that statement is just plain wrong. In recent days, both he and the board have begun aggressively pushing back at what they see as continuing falsehoods from Republicans who question Trump’s loss.“Enough with the defamation. Enough with the unfounded allegations,” Richer tweeted on Thursday. “I came to this office to competently, fairly, and lawfully administer the duties of the office. Not to be accused by own party of shredding ballots and deleting files for an election I didn’t run. Enough.”The board, led by Republican chairman Jack Sellers, have been aggressively using Twitter to push back, firing off messages slamming the private company doing the audit. The board plans to hold a public hearing Monday.“I know you all have grown weary of lies and half-truths six months after 2020 general elections,” Sellers said on Friday in announcing Monday’s meeting.Fann sent Sellers a letter on Wednesday requesting county officials publicly answer questions at the senate on Tuesday, but she stopped short of her threat to issue subpoenas.Fann repeated the senate’s demand for access to administrative passwords for vote-counting machines and internet routers. County officials say they have turned over all the passwords they have and have refused to give up the routers, saying it would compromise sensitive data, including classified law enforcement information held by the sheriff’s office.Fann proposed allowing its contractor to view data from the routers at county facilities under supervision of the sheriff’s office.“The Senate has no interest in viewing or taking possession of any information that is unrelated to the administration of the 2020 general election,” she wrote.The county says the passwords the senate is seeking are maintained by Dominion Voting Systems, which makes the vote-counting machines and leases them to the county.The company said in a statement on Thursday that it cooperates with auditors certified by the US Election Assistance Commission, and did so for two prior audits of 2020 results in Maricopa county, but won’t work with Cyber Ninjas.Fann has hired that company, a Florida-based cybersecurity firm, to oversee an unprecedented, partisan review of the 2020 election in Arizona’s largest county. They are conducting a hand recount of all 2.1m ballots and looking into baseless conspiracy theories suggesting there were problems with the election, which have grown popular with supporters of Trump. More

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      in US Politics

      Ignore the hype of Republicans threatening to ‘break away’ over Trump | Cas Mudde

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      “Over 100 Republicans, including former officials, threaten to split” from the Republican party, the New York Times declared on Tuesday. The next day the Washington Post upped the ante, headlining that the 100 Republicans were vowing “civil war”; the columnist Jennifer Rubin proclaimed the beginning of “the stampede away from the GOP”.Sounds exciting, but what has really happened?On Thursday, a group of some 150 former Republicans published “A Call for American Renewal”, a manifesto with the stated aim of “building a common sense coalition for America”. The call itself reads mostly like the US constitution but with a distinct anti-Trump undertone. While the former president is never named, the manifesto warns against “forces of conspiracy, division, and despotism”, opposes “the employment of fear-mongering, conspiracism, and falsehoods”, and rejects “populism and illiberalism”. It emphasizes the importance of the constitutional order, rule of law, and pluralism, while implicitly supporting immigration and explicitly celebrating “our diverse nation”. So far, so good; but is this anodyne statement worth all the hype?Active office-holders, with power and relevance, are conspicuously absent from the signatoriesThe document’s signatories include many of the usual suspects of the Never-Trump right, including people associated with the Lincoln Project, like George Conway and Jennifer Horn. It also includes a lot of “formers”: the former US representative Charlie Dent, the former secretary of transportation Mary Peters, the former governor Tom Ridge, and the former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele. But while these former office-holders express support for current Republican “rebels” like Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney, people such as Cheney and Romney themselves – active office-holders, with power and relevance – are conspicuously absent from the signatories. I doubt they will go much further than a non-committal positive reference, when asked or pushed by journalists.For all the media spin about “influential Republicans” or “Republican leaders”, none of the 150 signatories currently holds a significant position within the Republican party. In fact, the vast majority are people past their political career or who never were politicians. Many of them are probably better known to Democratic voters than Republican ones. During the Trump presidency, figures such as Max Boot and Michael Steele became liberals’ favorite “Republicans” largely by featuring primarily in liberal media.This is probably why this manifesto is vague about the concrete actions its signatories hope to achieve. Despite hints and recent media speculation, the document makes no explicit call for a third party. In fact, one gets the sense that the organizers are internally divided over strategy – and, for that reason, leaving all options open. Under the subheading “What’s the Call?”, the document reads: “That’s why we believe in pushing for the Republican Party to rededicate itself to founding ideals – or else hasten the creation of an alternative.”In essence, the whole manifesto is a real-world extension of the largely online Lincoln Project. Like the Lincoln Project, it offers a psychologically reassuring but ultimately questionable narrative frame for anti-Trump Republicans: the “soul” of the Republican party, which has been stolen or crushed by Trump and his wannabes, is at stake, and honorable Republicans must restore it. This is grounded in an elitist view of the Grand Old Party that rests on very loose empirical and historical grounds. As I’ve argued many times before, Trump did not hijack the party, at least not in ideological terms. In fact, for several decades the views of the Republican base had much more in common with Trump than with the signatories of this manifesto. That empirical fact will not change, no matter how hard the Lincoln Project and Never-Trump Republicans try to whitewash the Republican past – a whitewashing the liberal media happily amplifies.This is the Republican party of an imagined past, harkening to a moderate, noble era that never really existedEvan McMullin, who gained some media prominence by running as an independent candidate against Trump in 2016 – he won a whopping 0.54% of the vote – seems to at least acknowledge the current reality. In an interview with Fox News, he estimated that just “a fourth to a third of the party” wants a new direction. He added, rather optimistically: “Obviously that’s still a minority of the party but it’s a significant number.” Even assuming that all these people want to move the party in the same direction as the signatories of the “Call for American Renewal”, a fourth to a third of Republicans would be a mere sliver of the general population. While this would be more than enough to start a new party in the proportional electoral systems common in other countries, it is, under the United States’ two-party system, nowhere near enough to challenge the Republican party, let alone the Democratic party.Don’t get me wrong. It is great that at least some former prominent Republicans are willing to stand up to Trump and for liberal democracy. But this initiative is not a serious competitor to the current Trumpian Republican party and it will not be the Republican party of the future. It does not even reflect the Republican Party of the past. Instead, it is the Republican party of an imagined past, harkening to a moderate, noble era that never really existed. Amplifying the anti-Trump Republicans’ message uncritically, as many liberal media and politicians are doing, will not make them more relevant within the Republican party. However, it might help them further whitewash their own pasts as well as that of the Republican party.
      Cas Mudde is Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, the author of The Far Right Today (2019), and host of the podcast Radikaal. He is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in US Politics

      Will Republicans back a commission to investigate the Capitol breach?

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      House Democrats are poised to adopt legislation to create a 9/11-style commission to investigate the Capitol attack, in a move that will force Republicans to either embrace an inquiry that could embarrass Donald Trump – or turn a blind eye to a deadly insurrection.The proposal, endorsed by the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, would establish a 10-member commission evenly split between Democrats and Republicans – and allow the top ranking members from each party to jointly authorize subpoenas, in addition to doing so by majority vote.Crucially, it would focus narrowly on facts and causes relating to the attack on the Capitol on 6 January by a pro-Trump mob and the interference with the peaceful transition of power. Five people died amid scenes of chaos and violence that shocked the US and the world.Whether Democrats can seize the moment and push the legislation through Congress remains unclear. The Democratic-led House is likely to swiftly adopt the bill, but it could falter in the 50-50 Senate should Republicans insist on a commission with a mandate to investigate their own political priorities.The push from Pelosi and senior House Democrats underscores their resolve to investigate Trump and hold him accountable for what they consider to be his role in inciting a deadly insurrection that shook the core of American democracy.Complicating matters is the fact that the current Congress is far more polarised than it was after the September 11 attacks, with the parties sceptical of each other’s motives. Democrats see some Republicans as complicit in fuelling the 6 January attack by perpetuating lies about a stolen election.While some Republicans, including Liz Cheney, have backed the idea of a commission, most of the party’s lawmakers say they won’t accept a proposal that could give Democrats the upper hand in determining the course and conclusions of the commission’s work.The proposal for the commission is modelled closely on the commission Congress established in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, where recommendations led to reshaping of congressional oversight authority and intelligence gathering.Negotiations over creating a commission had been stalled for months over disagreements about the panel’s structure and scope, until the top Democrat on the House homeland security committee, Bennie Thompson, and the top Republican, John Katko, announced a bipartisan agreement on Friday.Pelosi deputised Thompson to lead talks as she felt the homeland security committee was an appropriate venue, and as Katko was one of only three House Republicans to accept Biden’s election win, impeach Trump and punish extremist congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene for endorsing executions of Democrats, according to sources familiar with discussions.The current draft of the commission proposes an equal split on membership and subpoena power, after Republicans denounced Pelosi’s initial plan that envisioned a committee with seven members appointed by Democrats and four by Republicans.But the scope of the commission is still tightly focused on 6 January, with Pelosi unwilling to entertain Republicans who want its mandate expanded to cover violence during last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality and racism.The announcement of the compromise gives House and Senate Republicans a bruising conundrum: embrace the commission, sure to embarrass Trump and spark a backlash that could jeopardise support from his voters ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, or effectively turn a blind eye to the insurrection.Democratic aides involved in the negotiations were unsure whether Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, would extend his support, the sources said, in part because members of the House GOP conference increasingly seek to downplay or even outright deny the violence that took place on 6 January.Democrats also note that McCarthy has since hired the former White House political director Brian Jack, who was involved in planning the “Stop the Steal” rally that immediately preceded the attack – raising the spectre that either McCarthy or one of his own aides could come under investigation.Liz Cheney, who was ousted from House Republican leadership this week over her repeated repudiation of Trump, told ABC McCarthy, who spoke to Trump during the attack, should “absolutely” testify before the commission, either voluntarily or via a subpoena.The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, remained mum on Friday as to whether he would endorse the commission. However, he has taken issue with its mandate, saying appointees, not House Democrats, should dictate investigation parameters.Pelosi has suggested to her leadership team in recent weeks that she would be receptive to forming a select committee to investigate the Capitol attack as a fallback, should the bill not receive sufficient support in the Senate, the sources said.But the speaker’s preference would be to create a commission, they said.Introduced two days after Trump was acquitted by Senate Republicans in his second impeachment trial, the proposal to create a commission signaled Pelosi’s intent to pursue the former president.She ran into Republican resistance, with McConnell slamming the idea as “partisan by design” and McCarthy condemning Democrats for trying to move ahead unilaterally.Even if Congress fails to create a commission, it is still likely to get some answers.Seven House committees – including judiciary, intelligence and oversight – are conducting investigations into the intelligence and security breakdowns that allowed the mob to breach the Capitol.In near-identical letters sent in March to 16 agencies across the executive branch and Congress, the committees demanded all documents and communications relevant to the certification of Biden’s election win.The investigations are similar to House Democrats’ efforts to investigate Trump during his first impeachment inquiry, when Pelosi huddled regularly with six committee chairs before the House impeached the president over the Ukraine scandal.House and Senate committees have held hearings to investigate the Capitol attack and heard from witnesses including the current and former chiefs of Capitol police and defense and national security officials.Pelosi has said all information gathered during committee hearings will serve as a key resource for either a commission or a select committee. More

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      in US Politics

      Liz Cheney regrets vote for Trump but won’t say she’ll leave Republican party

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      Liz Cheney has become the figurehead of the Never Trumpers, Republicans seeking to loosen the former president’s grip on their party, but the Wyoming congresswoman was for him in the last election.Newly removed from Republican House leadership, Cheney spoke to ABC’s This Week in an interview to be broadcast in full on Sunday.Asked if she voted for Trump in 2020, she replied: “I did.”Asked if she regretted it, she said: “I was never going to support Joe Biden and I do regret the vote. I think that it was based on policy, based on sort of substance and what I know in terms of the kinds of policies [Trump] put forward that were good for the country. But that I think it is fair to say I regret the vote.”Cheney came out against Trump after the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January, by supporters he told to “fight like hell” in service of his lie that his conclusive defeat by Joe Biden was the result of mass electoral fraud.Most of the congressional GOP has stayed behind Trump but Cheney was one of 10 Republicans in the House to vote for his impeachment, on a charge of inciting an insurrection. Trump was acquitted at trial after only seven Republican senators could be persuaded to follow suit.Cheney also told ABC that Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, should either voluntarily testify before any 6 January commission about his conversation with Trump as the attack happened, or be compelled to do so.Cheney is a staunch conservative and a daughter of Dick Cheney, a former congressman, secretary of defense and vice-president. As such she is a member of a party establishment either beaten into near-silence by Trump’s harangues, like Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell; vilified by Trump’s supporters, like Utah senator and 2012 nominee Mitt Romney; or simply acquiescent.Trump remains excluded from social media over his role in the Capitol riot but on Saturday he issued statements replete with rants about supposed electoral fraud and “crooked, disgusting, and very dishonest media outlets”. In one, he called McConnell a “weak and pathetic leader”.On ABC, interviewer Jonathan Karl also asked if Cheney would stay in her party should Trump decide to run for president again – as he has hinted he might – and then win the nomination in 2024.“I will do everything that I can to make sure he’s not the nominee,” Cheney said. “And, you know everything necessary to make sure that that he never gets anywhere close to the Oval Office again.”But, Karl repeated, would she remain in the party if Trump were the nominee?“I will not support him,” said Cheney. “And we’ll do everything I can to make sure that doesn’t happen.”Some Republicans outside Congress have mooted the formation of a new conservative party. Most observers think such a move unlikely to succeed.Nonetheless the brewing civil war in Republican ranks was set to dominate the US political talk shows on Sunday.Cheney was also due to be interviewed on Fox News Sunday. Another anti-Trump House Republican, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, was booked by NBC’s Meet the Press. NBC also booked the Texas representative Dan Crenshaw, a Trump loyalist.CBS’s Face the Nation was due to feature Joni Ernst of Iowa, the only woman in Republican Senate leadership, who this week criticised the House GOP for “cancelling” Cheney. CNN’s State of the Union booked Fred Upton, a Michigan representative and moderate who has been close to Biden.Cheney’s replacement as the No 3 Republican in the House, Elise Stefanik, was due to speak to Fox Business. The New Yorker is a former moderate who swiftly moved to the hard right and gained Trump’s support.Stefanik backed a formal objection to electoral college results in Pennsylvania, one of two states Republicans challenged on the day of the Capitol riot. She indicated a willingness to challenge other states but no senator followed suit.Cheney told ABC: “I think the issue really is Donald Trump and it really is the party and whether we’re going to be a party that’s based on the truth.“I think we’ve seen consistently since the election, certainly since 6 January and in ways it has increased since 6 January, the former president’s willingness to be very aggressive in his attacks on democracy and on our electoral process.” More

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      in US Politics

      Republican Covid lies follow foreign strongmen’s lead – and are deadly for it | Robert Reich

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      A hospital in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, is being charged under the country’s National Security Act for sounding the alarm over a lack of oxygen that resulted in Covid deaths. The hospital’s owner and manager says police have accused him of “false scaremongering”, after he stated publicly that four patients died on a single day when oxygen ran out.Since Covid-19 exploded in India, the prime minister, Narendra Modi, seems to be trying to the control the news more than the outbreak. On Wednesday, India recorded nearly 363,000 cases and 4,120 deaths, about 30% of worldwide deaths that day. But experts say India is vastly understating the true number. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, estimates at least 25,000 Indians are dying from Covid each day.The horror has been worsened by shortages of oxygen and hospital beds. Yet Modi and his government don’t want the public to get the true story.One big lesson from the Covid crisis: lying makes it worse.Vladimir Putin is busily denying the truth about Covid in Russia. Demographer Alexei Raksha, who worked at Russia’s official statistical agency, Rosstat, but says he was forced to leave last summer for telling the truth about Covid, claims daily data has been “smoothed, rounded, lowered” to look better. Like many experts, he uses excess mortality – the number of deaths during the pandemic over the typical number of deaths – as the best indicator.Trump wants the credit for developing the vaccine. Then he also gets the blame for so few of his voters taking it“If Russia stops at 500,000 excess deaths, that will be a good scenario,” he calculates.Russia was first out of the gate with a vaccine but has fallen woefully behind on vaccinations. Recent polling puts the share of Russians who don’t want to be vaccinated at 60% to 70%. That’s because Putin and other officials have focused less on vaccinating the public than on claiming success in containing Covid.The US is suffering a similar problem – the legacy of another strongman, Donald Trump. Although more than half of US adults have received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine, more than 40% of Republicans have consistently told pollsters they won’t get vaccinated. Their recalcitrance is threatening efforts to achieve “herd immunity” and prevent the virus’s spread.Like Modi and Putin, Trump minimized the seriousness of the pandemic and spread misinformation about it. Trump officials ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to downplay its severity. He declined to get vaccinated publicly and was noticeably absent from a public service announcement on vaccination that featured all other living former presidents.Trump allies in the media have conducted a scare campaign about the vaccines. In December, Fox News host Laura Ingraham posted a story on Facebook from the Daily Mail purporting to show evidence that Chinese communist party loyalists worked at pharmaceutical companies that developed the coronavirus vaccine.As recently as mid-April, Fox News host Tucker Carlson opined that if the vaccine were truly effective, there’d be no reason for people who received it to wear masks or avoid physical contact.“So maybe it doesn’t work,” he said, “and they’re simply not telling you that.”Why then should anyone be surprised at the reluctance of Trump Republicans to get vaccinated? A recent New York Times analysis showed vaccination rates to be lower in counties where a majority voted for Trump in 2020. States that voted more heavily for Trump are also states where lower percentages of the population have been vaccinated.The Republican pollster Frank Luntz says Trump bears responsibility for the hesitancy of GOP voters to be vaccinated.“He wants to get the credit for developing the vaccine,” Luntz said. “Then he also gets the blame for so few of his voters taking it.”Trump’s Republican party is coming to resemble other authoritarian regimes around the world in other respects as well – purging truth tellers and trucking in lies, misinformation and propaganda harmful to the public.This week the GOP stripped Liz Cheney of her leadership position for telling the truth about the 2020 election. At last week’s congressional hearing about the 6 January attack on the Capitol, one Republican, Andrew Clyde, even denied it happened.“There was no insurrection,” he said. “To call it an insurrection is a bold-faced lie … you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.”Biden says he plans to call a summit of democratic governments to contain the rise of authoritarianism around the world. I hope he talks about its rise in the US too – and the huge toll it’s already taken on Americans. More

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      in US Politics

      Can ‘Never Trump’ Republicans gain party control – or is it a lost cause?

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      Sixteen minutes and out. The purging of Liz Cheney from Republican leadership in the House of Representatives did not even go to a secret ballot. Instead a voice vote was all it took to confirm the party’s capitulation to Donald Trump and his “big lie” about a stolen election.But Cheney went down swinging, vowing to reporters on Capitol Hill: “I will do everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office,” then using a high-profile TV interview to say of would-be challengers for her seat in Wyoming: “Bring it on.”The public defiance instantly turned Cheney into one of the leaders of the “Never Trump” movement of disaffected Republicans. But it also raised strategic questions over the future direction of that movement and whether it can still regain control of the party – or should now abandon it as a lost cause.Some insist that the party of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan was their home long before Trump’s populist-fantasist invasion and they will fight to drive him out. Others believe that it is time to abandon ship and their future lies as independents or Democrats or even, perhaps, in a breakaway party.“We’re torn,” said Joe Walsh, a former congressman from Illinois. “I left the Republican party a year ago. Liz Cheney isn’t there yet. [Congressman] Adam Kinzinger, who I know well, isn’t there yet. They want to still try to reform and save the Republican party; I don’t think it can be saved.“So there’s a split in the Never Trump world and most Never Trumpers still agree with Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger: let’s try to reform the party from within. I just don’t think it’s reformable. They still harbour ideas that the Republican party can be wrestled away from Trump; it can’t be.”Walsh, who mounted a long-shot challenge to Trump for the Republican nomination last year, believes that a third party is now the only solution. “We’re at a weird moment in American history where, because the Republican party has become a cult, there’s an opportunity to start something new. I think eventually that’s where everybody’s going to get to.”On Thursday a coalition of more than 150 anti-Trump Republicans started a “political movement” urging the party to turn its back on extremism and lies. Members of A Call for American Renewal include lawyer George Conway, husband of former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, and Anthony Scaramucci, ex-White House communications director, as well as 27 former members of the House.The group stopped short of proposing a new party – for now. Co-organiser Evan McMullin, who ran for president as an independent in Utah in 2016, said: “We definitely don’t rule it out but our preference is to reform the Republican party, not necessarily from within. I think most of us believe that the only way to reform the Republican party at this point is to act independently of it.“It means that we will support good Republicans who are upholding the rule of law and defending and promoting truth and the constitution, but we’ll also support viable independents where they exist. If we have to support a unifying Democrat in order to defeat an extremist Republican, we’re going to do that. If it’s Senator Mark Kelly in Arizona running for re-election against extremist Kelli Ward, then we’re going to be for Captain Mark Kelly.”McMullin, a former CIA operations officer, added: “I think in this next cycle we’ll have people who will run under our banner, people who are in office now, people who are capable of mounting credible campaigns for public office. We will invite all to associate with our principles regardless of their party registration and to run as a part of this effort.”Other initiatives in the Never Trump universe include the Lincoln Project, Principles First, the Republican Accountability Project and the Bulwark website. Kinzinger, who with Cheney was among 10 House Republicans to vote for Trump’s impeachment after the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol, launched a group called Country First to recruit and back anti-Trump Republican candidates.Cheney herself now has a platform guaranteed by her family name (her father was George W Bush’s vice-president, Dick Cheney) and looks set to be a more prominent voice than retired senators such as Bob Corker and Jeff Flake. She is reportedly planning more travel and media interviews and a political operation to support candidates who share her contempt for Trump’s false claims of election fraud.Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “Liz Cheney has positioned herself to be a prominent spokesperson for the old style Republican but also a very conservative party that does not kneel before an authoritarian, which is what the others are doing.“She deserves the position that she has has just earned. Now, that’s not to say she’s going to be elected president: she’s pretty far to the right. But how can you not admire her for sacrificing the power she has now and maybe her seat?”I think most of us believe that the only way to reform the Republican party at this point is to act independently of itThere are some signs that Trump’s sway over the party is not what it was. His favourability rating among Republicans in December was 91%, with 74% holding a very favourable view, an Economist/YouGov poll found. This month the same survey showed him at 78% favourability, with 58% very favourable. But congressional Republicans appear to have concluded they cannot fight next year’s midterm elections without him.Kevin Madden, a former adviser to Mitt Romney, now a senator for Utah and outspoken Trump critic, is in no doubt that a long haul lies ahead for Never Trumpers. “What is the plan to mobilise and grow that movement and is that best done inside the party or outside the party?” he asked. “What is the calendar of action on that?“Anybody who thinks that this is going to be waged between now and the midterms or now and 2024 is probably being very unrealistic. The more realistic scenario is that, if Liz Cheney is to be believed about her dedication in this respect, today is the first day of what is probably a decades-long battle for the direction of the party.”A breakaway remains unlikely with the odds stacked against anyone trying to shake up America’s two-party system. Competing with Democrats and Republicans’ vast fundraising machines would be daunting. In the first-past-the-post electoral system, a third party would struggle to convince people that their vote would be not be wasted in hundreds of districts.Madden, who became an independent last year and wrote in the name of Lynne Cheney, mother of Liz, on his presidential election ballot, added: “The work of building the infrastructure to compete across 50 different states or 435 different congressional districts? That is a monumental undertaking.” More