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      ‘This fever will break’: Republican Jeff Flake on the slow fade of Trumpism

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      By now, Jeff Flake thought this would all be over.
      Flake, the former Arizona Republican senator and outspoken critic of Donald Trump, concedes that he expected the ripple effects in the Republican party Trump’s loss of the White House to have been bigger by now.
      Instead, Flake has had to watch as Trump departed office but Trumpism refused to fade around the country. That includes in Flake’s home state, where the Republican party recently censured him alongside the two other most prominent Republicans – Cindy McCain, the widow of the late senator John McCain, and Doug Ducey, the Arizona governor.
      “I do think this fever will break, but it’s been slow,” Flake said in an interview with the Guardian. “It’s been really slow.”
      For much of the Trump administration Flake was something of a solitary voice within his party, opposing him first as a rare anti-Trump statewide elected official and then as a member of the club of Republicans who stood up to the 45th president only to face blowback.
      Throughout all of that Flake hoped Trump would leave office one way or another, other Republicans would see the same light he did, and the opposition to the 45th president would grow. Flake calls it a “migration” of Republicans away from their fealty to Trump.
      “This migration will start,” Flake said chuckling. “It’s just slow to get going.”
      These days the outlook for anti-Trump Republicans can feel both bright and dark. Trump is out of office and there are elected Republican officials actively working to move on from Trump under the specter of blowback from activists within the GOP.
      Congressman Adam Kinzinger of Illinois has set up a political action committee to fight against the QAnon movement saturating the Republican party. The House Republican conference chairwoman, Liz Cheney, and almost a dozen other Republicans voted to move forward with impeaching Trump again.
      Other Republicans stood up to Trump as he was pedaling unfounded claims about voter fraud after Joe Biden won the presidential election but before he took office.
      But those forces are more a small rebellion or insurgency and less an army involved in an inter-party civil war. The anti-Trumpists are growing but very slowly, Flake concedes. Flake thinks successfully convicting Trump in his upcoming impeachment trial would help speed things along. More

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      George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s longtime secretary of state, dies at 100

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      President Ronald Reagan’s longtime secretary of state, George P Shultz, who spent most of the 1980s trying to improve relations with the Soviet Union and forging a course for peace in the Middle East, has died. He was 100.A titan of American academia, business and diplomacy, Shultz died Saturday at his home on the campus of Stanford University, according to the Hoover Institution, a thinktank where he was a distinguished fellow.Shultz held three major cabinet posts in Republican administrations during a long career of public service. He was labor secretary and treasury secretary under President Richard Nixon before spending more than six years as Reagan’s secretary of state. Shultz was the longest serving secretary of state since the second world war and had been the oldest surviving former cabinet member of any administration.Condoleezza Rice, also a former secretary of state and current director of the Hoover Institution, said in a statement that Shultz “will be remembered in history as a man who made the world a better place”.As the nation’s chief diplomat, Shultz negotiated the first-ever treaty to reduce the size of the Soviet Union’s ground-based nuclear arsenals. The 1987 accord was a historic attempt to begin to reverse the nuclear arms race.After the October 1983 bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 soldiers, Shultz worked tirelessly to end Lebanon’s brutal civil war in the 1980s. He spent countless hours of shuttle diplomacy between mideast capitals trying to secure the withdrawal of Israeli forces there.The experience led him to believe that stability in the region could only be assured with a settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and he set about on an ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful mission to bring the parties to the negotiating table.Former secretary of state Henry A Kissinger, reflecting in his memoirs on the “highly analytic, calm and unselfish Shultz,” paid Shultz an exceptional compliment in his diary: “If I could choose one American to whom I would entrust the nation’s fate in a crisis, it would be George Shultz.”Over his lifetime, Shultz succeeded in the worlds of academia, public service and corporate America, and was widely respected by his peers from both political parties. He was awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor, the presidential medal of freedom, in 1989.Shultz had largely stayed out of politics since his retirement, but had been an advocate for an increased focus on climate change. He marked his 100th birthday in December by extolling the virtues of trust and bipartisanship in politics and other endeavors in a piece he wrote for the Washington Post.Coming amid the acrimony that followed the November presidential election, Shultz’s call for decency and respect for opposing views struck many as an appeal for the country to shun the political vitriol of the Trump years.“Trust is the coin of the realm,” Shultz wrote. “When trust was in the room, whatever room that was – the family room, the schoolroom, the locker room, the office room, the government room or the military room – good things happened. When trust was not in the room, good things did not happen. Everything else is details.” More

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      Liz Cheney raises possibility of criminal investigation of Trump for provoking violence

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      Liz Cheney, the third most senior Republican in the House of Representatives, has raised the possibility of Donald Trump being criminally investigated for provoking violence during the 6 January US Capitol insurrection, pointing to a tweet attacking his own vice-president, Mike Pence, that was posted after the assault had begun.In extraordinary remarks on Fox News Sunday, Cheney made specific reference to the “massive criminal investigation” on the Capitol insurrection that is now sweeping the country. She said that the probe would cover “every aspect” of the events of 6 January and look at “everyone who was involved”.But she reserved her most pointed words for Trump. “People will want to know what the president was doing,” she said. “They will want to know whether the tweet that he sent out calling Vice-President Mike Pence a coward while the attack was underway was a premeditated attempt to provoke violence.”Cheney’s evoking of possible criminal action against the former president comes just two days before the start of his impeachment trial in the US senate for “incitement of insurrection”. Though she will not be participating as a juror at the trial – that role is performed by senators – her comments signaled the turmoil that the impending proceedings are causing in her party.Last week she survived an attempt by fellow House Republicans to remove her from her leadership position in protest at her support of Trump’s impeachment. On Saturday, the Republican party in her home state of Wyoming voted to censure her, calling for her immediate resignation.Cheney said Sunday she would not step down. “The oath I took to the constitution compelled me to vote for impeachment – it does not bend to partisanship or political pressure, and I will stand by that.”But the swirl of criticism around her, coupled with her sharp reference to possible criminal consequences for Trump, point to how the former president continues to roil the Republican party, to the extent of threatening to tear it apart.On Tuesday, he will make US history by becoming the first sitting or former president to be subjected to an impeachment trial for a second time.Ahead of the historic proceedings, prominent Democrats took to the Sunday political shows and spoke with passion about why Trump deserved to be convicted for his role in allegedly inciting the 6 January assault. Ayanna Pressley, a congresswoman from Massachusetts, called on senators to “honor their oath and hold Trump accountable and bar him from ever holding office again”.Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union, she recalled the “harrowing and traumatic” assault on the Capitol and placed it in personal and historical context. “As a black woman, to be barricaded in my office, on the ground, in the dark – that terror is familiar in a deep and ancestral way for me.”She said she was haunted by the image of black staff in the Capitol building cleaning up the mess caused by the white supremacist insurrection. “That is a metaphor for America. We have been cleaning up for white supremacist mobs for generations – and it must end,” she said.By contrast, there was little sign among Republican senators of any substantial appetite to convict. Should all 50 Democratic senators vote to do so, they would still need to be joined by 17 Republican senators to reach the two-thirds majority required by the constitution.Rand Paul, the Republican senator from Kentucky, said Tuesday’s trial was an attempt to criminalise political speech. Speaking on Fox News Sunday, he said: “Are we going to impeach and potentially criminally prosecute people for political speech when they say ‘Get up and fight for your country, let your voices be heard’?”The Republican senator from Louisiana, Bill Cassidy, told NBC News’s Meet the Press that the trial had been rushed. “There was no process. If it happened in the Soviet Union you would call it a show trial.”Pat Toomey, the Republican senator from Pennsylvania who has been critical of Trump, told CNN that he thought it “very unlikely” that the former president would be convicted. Without conviction, senators would not be able to move to a further vote to bar Trump from ever holding public office.The case for impeachment will be presented to senators by House managers. In their brief, they allege that Trump “summoned a mob to Washington, exhorted them into a frenzy, and aimed them like a loaded cannon down Pennsylvania Avenue”.In a 14-page rebuttal, Trump’s lawyers argue that he did not engage in insurrection and that impeaching him as a former president is unconstitutional.The evidence stage of the Senate trial is likely to focus on Trump’s remarks leading up to the violence on 6 January, which left five people dead. At a rally earlier in the day, Trump used visceral language, saying “we will not take it any more” and “you’ll never take back our country with weakness”.It is not known whether impeachment managers plan to single out Trump’s tweet attacking Pence. In the tweet, which has now been removed from Twitter as part of Trump’s suspension from the platform, he criticised the then vice-president for failing to block counting of the electoral college results of the presidential election that Trump lost.“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done,” Trump posted.The tweet was posted about 10 minutes after it was reported that Pence had been ushered off the floor of the Senate following the violent breach of the Capitol by Trump supporters and white supremacists. During the attack, members of the mob could be heard chanting “hang Mike Pence”. More

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      Never Trumpers' Republican revolt failed but they could still play key role

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      The Republican rebellion failed: Donald Trump won.“I was disappointed over the last few weeks to see what seemed like the Republican party waking up,” the Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger observed on NBC’s Meet the Press last week, “and then kind of falling asleep again”.Kinzinger is among a band of Republican dissidents who openly defy the former US president’s continued dominance of the party. They are small, bullied and vastly outnumbered. But in a finely balanced Congress where anti-Trump sentiment is wider than it first appears, they are likely to play an outsized role in the future of American politics.The known “Never Trump” resistance consists of 10 members of the House of Representatives who last month voted to impeach him for inciting an insurrection at the US Capitol. They include Liz Cheney, the most senior woman in the Republican caucus, who declared “there has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the constitution”.I would hate to see what the mailbox of someone like a Mitt Romney isThen there are five senators who rejected spurious process arguments and voted to press ahead with the impeachment trial: Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. The group will soon shrink because Toomey has announced that he will not seek re-election next year.But it is an open secret in Washington that they have many fellow travelers: Republican traditionalists who privately despise Trump, and may well convict him if only the vote could be held by secret ballot, but dare not speak out for fear of retribution from rightwing media and increasingly radicalized state parties. This can take the form of primary election challenges, heckling in public places and even death threats.Charlie Sykes, editor-at-large of the Bulwark website and author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, said: “I would hate to see what the mailbox of someone like a Mitt Romney is. We’ll see more scenes of folks harassing the moderates at airports but, within the leadership ranks, they understand what the stakes are. I’m guessing that rather a large number of senators share Romney’s view and are probably telling him that they wish they could say the same thing.”This well of tacit sympathy is one reason why Romney and other senators are unlikely to face personal hostility from colleagues. Another is that, with the Senate evenly split at 50-50 – the Democratic vice-president, Kamala Harris, holds the tie-breaking vote – Republicans cannot afford to ostracize or alienate any members.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, explained: “Neither party can afford to shun a single member of their caucus in the Senate because to overcome a filibuster you need 51 votes – a legislative filibuster is 60 – so every party needs every senator.“That’s why the Senate is, at least for now, a safer place to be a maverick than the House of Representatives, although now with the margin in the House, you need every vote on each side as well.”The Republican caucus in the House is more overtly Trumpian, as evidenced by the newcomer Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has espoused racist and antisemitic views and expressed support for the QAnon conspiracy theory. That indicates why Cheney – the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney – has faced a more severe backlash from Trump loyalists than any senator.Although she survived an attempt this week to oust her as the party’s No 3 in the House as punishment for endorsing impeachment, an Axios-SurveyMonkey poll found that Cheney is far less popular than Greene among Republicans and those who lean Republican.There are more of us than there are of themShe could still face censure from the Wyoming state party and a primary challenge. The Republican congressman Matt Gaetz, a fervent Trump backer from Florida, even flew to Wyoming to urge supporters to vote her out. “Washington DC mythologises the establishment power brokers like Liz Cheney for climbing in a deeply corrupt game,” Gaetz told a rally of about a thousand people in Cheyenne. “But there are more of us than there are of them.”Sykes observed: “When you have somebody like Matt Gaetz flying to Wyoming, he’s doing that because he thinks that that strengthens his brand in the GOP [Grand Old Party] to attack other Republicans, which tells you about the toxic nature of this civil war.”It is debatable whether, as Kinzinger posited, the Republican party really was close to waking up from its Trumpian fever dream. Although the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, and House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, both stated that Trump bears responsibility for the deadly violence at the US Capitol, McConnell then voted against holding an impeachment trial and McCarthy visited the ex-president at his Florida redoubt to mend fences.Taking McConnell’s cue, a further 44 Republican senators supported a resolution declaring the trial unconstitutional because Trump is now a private citizen. It meant that his eventual acquittal is all but certain, just as it was at his first impeachment trial a year ago when Romney was the sole senator to break from the party line.Such is the Trump base’s hold on the party that while some establishment Republicans stay and fight, others often retire and walk away. In recent years they have included Bob Corker and Jeff Flake, senators from Tennessee and Arizona respectively, soon to be joined by Rob Portman, an Ohio senator who recently announced he would not run for election again. Justin Amash, a Trump critic in the House, left the Republican party in 2019.But the current crop of Never Trumpers in the Senate are likely to keep speaking out because of a mix of pragmatism and principle. In November Collins and Sasse won the cushion of six-year terms; Murkowski comes from a state that uses ranked-choice voting, meaning that she could leave the Republican party and still have a strong chance of re-election next year; Romney is wealthy and has already had a shot at the presidency so has little to lose.Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist who ran a Senate campaign against Romney in Massachusetts in 1994, said: “He’s a conservative: that’s clear from how he votes on issues, from how he’s reacted to the Covid-19 relief. But in terms of the norms and standards of democracy, he’s going to do what he believes and, if it turns out that it hurts him in Utah, I don’t think he cares.”Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney have been the standard bearers and we need to reinforce their leadership as much as possibleSimilarly unapologetic, Kinzinger has announced a new political action committee called Country First, urging Republicans to cast off their mantle as the “Trump-first party” and “unplug the outrage machine”. In his Meet the Press interview, the congressman warned that the party had peddled “darkness and division” and “lost its moral authority in a lot of areas”.Though they often seem like voices in the wilderness, the rebels can point to reports that thousands of people have quit the Republican party since the US Capitol riot on 6 January. They also have the support of former party officials and outside groups that worked for Trump’s defeat last year and continue to oppose him.Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said: “Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney have been the standard bearers and we need to reinforce their leadership as much as possible.“It’s not about establishment Republicanism versus pitchfork Republicanism – that’s just a false flag argument. The Republican party either is or isn’t something. Either Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney stand for what that something is or they don’t. Either Marjorie Taylor Green and Jim Jordan [a pro-Trump congressman] stand for what that is or they don’t. And that’s the battle.”Steele, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, added: “I happen to think that Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney represent the opportunity for a governing majority in the future. I think Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene and all that Trumpist bullshit isn’t the future of the party. I stand with Adam Kinzinger. Let’s have that fight.” More

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      The martyrdom of Mike Pence

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      After Donald Trump had exhausted all of his claims of voter fraud and could contrive no more conspiracy theories that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, and after his revolving menagerie of legal mouthpieces had all of their motions tossed out of every venue up to the supreme court, and after his reliable enabler, Attorney General William Barr, informed him his accusations were false and he had reached the end of the line, and resigned, Trump came as a last resort to rest his slipping hold on power on his most unwavering defender and ceaseless flatterer, who had never let him down: his vice-president, Mike Pence.
      Nobody was more responsible for fostering the cult of Trump. The evangelical Pence had been Trump’s rescuer, starting with his forgiveness for the miscreant in the crisis during the 2016 campaign over Trump’s Access Hollywood “grab them by the pussy” tape and then over the disclosure of the “Individual One” hush money payoff to a porn star about a one-night stand to shut her up before election day – AKA “the latest baseless allegations”. Pence was the indispensable retainer who delivered the evangelical base, transforming it through the alchemy of his faith into Trump’s rock of ages. After every malignant episode, from Charlottesville (“I stand with the president”) to coronavirus (“The president took another historic step”), the pious Pence could be counted on to bless Trump for his purity of heart and to shepherd the flock of true believers.
      “Trump’s got the populist nationalists,” Stephen Bannon, Trump’s pardoned former senior adviser, remarked. “But Pence is the base. Without Pence, you don’t win.”
      Withstanding the howling winds of narcissism, the unshakably self-abasing Pence upheld the cross over Trump. On the evening of 3 May 2017, Trump welcomed his evangelical advisory board for dinner in the Blue Room of the White House.
      “I’ve been with [Trump] alone in the room when the decisions are made,” Pence testified to the assembled pastors. “He and I have prayed together. This is somebody who shares our views, shares our values, shares our beliefs.”
      Nobody more than Pence had modeled adulation of Trump to become the standard for sycophantic imitation. At the first meeting of members of Trump’s cabinet, on 12 June 2017, the president called on each to offer praise.
      “I’m going to start with our vice-president. Where is our vice-president?” Trump asked. “We’ll start with Mike and then we’ll just go around, your name, your position.”
      “This is just the greatest privilege of my life,” Pence said, setting the tone for the others. More

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      Trump left behind a monstrous predicament. Here's how to tackle it | Robert Reich

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      Next week’s Senate trial is unlikely to convict Donald Trump of inciting sedition against the United States. At least 17 Republican senators are needed for conviction, but only five have signaled they’ll go along.Why won’t Republican senators convict him? After all, it’s an open and shut case. As summarized in the brief submitted by House impeachment managers, Trump spent months before the election telling his followers that the only way he could lose was through “a dangerous, wide-ranging conspiracy against them that threatened America itself”.Immediately after the election, he lied that he had won by a “landslide”, and later urged his followers to stop the counting of electoral ballots by making plans to “fight like hell” and “fight to the death” against this “act of war” perpetrated by “Radical Left Democrats” and the “weak and ineffective RINO section of the Republican Party”.If this isn’t an impeachable offense, it’s hard to imagine what is. But Republican senators won’t convict him because they’re answerable to Republican voters, and Republican voters continue to believe Trump’s big lie.A shocking three out of four Republican voters don’t think Joe Biden won legitimately. About 45% even support the storming of the Capitol.The crux of the problem is Americans now occupy two separate worlds – a fact-based pro-democracy world and a Trump-based authoritarian one.Trump spent the last four years seducing voters into his world, turning the GOP from a political party into a grotesque projection of his pathological narcissism.Regardless of whether he is convicted, America must now deal with the monstrous predicament he left behind: one of the nation’s two major political parties has abandoned reality and democracy.What to do? Four things.First, prevent Trump from running for president in 2024. The mere possibility energizes his followers.An impeachment conviction is not the only way to prevent him. Under section three of the 14th amendment to the constitution, anyone who has taken an oath to protect the constitution is barred from holding public office if they “have engaged in insurrection” against the United States. As constitutional expert and former Yale Law professor Bruce Ackerman has noted, a majority vote that Trump engaged in insurrection against the United States is sufficient to trigger this clause.Second, give Republicans and independents every incentive to abandon the Trump cult.White working-class voters without college degrees who now comprise a large portion of its base need good jobs and better futures. Many are understandably angry after being left behind in vast enclaves of unemployment and despair. They should not have to depend on Trump’s fact-free fanaticism in order to feel visible and respected.A jobs program on the scale necessary to bring many of them around will be expensive but worth the cost, especially when democracy hangs in the balance.Big business, which used to have a home in the GOP, will need a third party. Democrats should not try to court them; the Democratic party should aim to represent the interests of the bottom 90%.Third, disempower the giant media empires that amplified Trump’s lies for four years – Facebook, Twitter and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and its imitators. The goal is not to “cancel” the political right but to refocus public deliberation on facts, truth and logic. Democracy cannot thrive where big lies are systematically and repeatedly exploited for commercial gain.The goal is not to ‘cancel’ the political right but to refocus public deliberation on facts, truth and logicThe solution is antitrust enforcement and stricter regulation of social media, accompanied by countervailing financial pressure. Consumers should boycott products advertised on these lie factories and advertisers should shun them. Large tech platforms should lose legal immunity for violence-inciting content. Broadcasters such as Fox News and Newsmax should be liable for knowingly spreading lies (they are now being sued by producers of voting machinery and software which they accused of having been rigged for Biden).Fourth, safeguard the democratic form of government. This requires barring corporations and the very wealthy from buying off politicians, ending so-called “dark money” political groups that don’t disclose their donors, defending the right to vote and ensuring more citizens are heard, not fewer.Let’s be clear about the challenge ahead. The major goal is not to convict Trump for inciting insurrection. It is to move a vast swath of America back into a fact-based pro-democracy society and away from the Trump-based authoritarian one.Regardless of whether he is convicted, the end of his presidency has given the nation a reprieve. But unless America uses it to end Trumpism’s hold over tens of millions of Americans, that reprieve may be temporary.Thankfully, Joe Biden appears to understand this. More

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      Liz Cheney censured by Wyoming Republican party for voting to impeach Trump

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      Liz Cheney, the third-highest-ranking Republican leader in the House, was censured by the Wyoming Republican party on Saturday for voting to impeach Donald Trump for his role in the 6 January riot at the US Capitol.The overwhelming censure vote was the latest blowback for Cheney for joining nine Republican representatives and all Democrats in the US House in the 13 January impeachment vote.On Saturday only eight of the 74-member state GOP’s central committee stood to oppose censure in a vote that did not proceed to a formal count. The censure document accused Cheney of voting to impeach even though the US House didn’t offer Trump “formal hearing or due process”.“We need to honor President Trump. All President Trump did was call for a peaceful assembly and protest for a fair and audited election,” said Darin Smith, a Cheyenne attorney who lost to Cheney in the Republican US House primary in 2016. “The Republican party needs to put her on notice.”Cheney in a statement after the vote said she remained honored to represent Wyoming and would always fight for issues that matter most to the state. “Foremost among these is the defense of our constitution and the freedoms it guarantees. My vote to impeach was compelled by the oath I swore to the constitution,” Cheney said.Republican officials said they invited Cheney but she did not attend. An empty chair labeled “Representative Cheney” sat at the front of the meeting room.Cheney will remain as the third-ranking member of the House GOP leadership, however, after a 145-61 vote by House Republicans on Wednesday to keep her as conference committee chair.In Wyoming just three months after winning a third term with almost 70%, Cheney already faces at least two Republican primary opponents in 2022. They include the Republican state senator Anthony Bouchard, a gun-rights activist from Cheyenne, who was at the meeting but not among those who spoke. Smith also has said he is deliberating whether to run for Congress again.On 28 January the Republican US Representative Matt Gaetz, of Florida, led a rally against Cheney in front of the Wyoming Capitol. About 1,000 people took part, many of them carrying signs calling for Cheney’s impeachment though several were supportive.Trump faces trial in the US Senate on Tuesday over allegedly inciting insurrection when a mob of supporters stormed into and rampaged through the Capitol after a nearby rally led by Trump and close allies.Censure opponents mainly came from Casper, Wyoming’s second-largest city, and the Jackson Hole area near Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks.“Let’s resist this infusion of leftwing cancel culture to try to censure and get rid of anybody we disagree with,” said Alexander Muromcew with the Teton county GOP.Momentum for censure had been growing for weeks as local Republicans in around a dozen of Wyoming’s 23 counties passed their own resolutions criticizing Cheney’s impeachment vote. More

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      Extremists like Marjorie Taylor Greene are the real face of the new Republican party | Lloyd Green

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      Republicans in the House of Representatives remain enthralled to Donald Trump and fearful of his base. On Thursday, 95% of the chamber’s Republicans refused to strip the freshman member Marjorie Taylor Greene – a gun-brandishing, hate-spewing, conspiracy-monger – of her committee assignments. The deadly aftermath of the 6 January insurrection changed nothing.Trump is out of office but his spirit lives on. The anger and resentment of the Republican rank-and-file will likely define the party’s trajectory in the coming months and years. QAnon is now a pillar of the party, as much as the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, may disavow knowledge of its existence.Greene’s sins are real, not imagined. Over the years she has blamed California’s wildfires on a Jewish laser beam from space, claimed 9/11 was an inside job, and suggested that school shootings were staged. In 2018 and 2019 she endorsed social media comments that appeared to support the assassination or execution of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi. (Recently, Greene has partly walked back some of her more disturbing past remarks.)Sadly, the Republican party has morphed into a fever swamp fueled by racially driven animus tethered to a fear and loathing of modernity. A normal political party would not have someone like Greene holding office. But Republicans these days function like a fringe grouping.Likewise, the mob that attacked the Capitol cannot simply be discounted as an outburst of conspiratorial rage. The insurrectionist horde left a trail of dead and wounded. Military veterans, real estate brokers and seemingly upstanding members of America’s middle class filled the rioters’ ranks. Deep-pocketed Republican donors reportedly helped make the carnage possible.Yet the discontented-disconnect that propelled Trump’s 2016 electoral upset threatens to undermine Republican efforts to reclaim the House and Senate. In January, tens of thousands of voters exited the Republican party. In Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Utah, the party suffered a cumulative loss of more than 30,000 voters from its rolls.The Republican party has morphed into a fever swamp fueled by racially driven animus tethered to a fear and loathing of modernityPolitics is about addition, not subtraction. An exodus of college-educated suburban moms and dads is not what McCarthy needs to wrest the speaker’s gavel. Likewise, this hemorrhaging will not assist Mitch McConnell in dethroning Chuck Schumer from his perch as the Senate majority leader.Liz Cheney retaining the no 3 slot in the Republican House leadership does not alter this pocked and toxic landscape. Cheney’s hard-fought victory over 61 benighted colleagues is testament to her own grit and the desire of the Republican party’s top-guns to keep the existing power structure intact. Nothing more.Cheney and Greene each carried the day among the House Republicans, but the Georgia freshman actually garnered more of their backing. Cheney’s upward arc is done, while Greene is free to embark on an endless fundraising binge and tweet to her heart’s content. Freedom can be another word for nothing left to lose.Indeed, on the state level, religious-like devotion to Trump is the operative creed of the realm. Those who refuse to kiss the ring are the new heretics.Arizona Republicans censured Cindy McCain, the late senator’s wife, for backing Joe Biden. They also blasted Doug Ducey, the state’s Republican governor, for refusing to steal the election.In Wyoming, 10 Republican county organizations have censured Cheney for supporting Trump’s impeachment, and more are expected in the coming weeks. Already, Cheney faces a primary challenge.Meanwhile, Nebraska’s Ben Sasse confronts possible censure in his home state. He earned their wrath for condemning Trump’s efforts to subvert democracy. Once upon a time, Sasse wrote a book subtitled Why We Hate Each Other.For the record, Sasse is one of only five Senate Republicans who opposed dismissing impeachment charges against the 45th president. He also declined to back Trump four years ago and last November too. A church-going Presbyterian, Sasse framed things this way: “Politics isn’t about the weird worship of one dude.”Really?Even now, Trump is the top choice for his party’s 2024 presidential nomination. Beyond that, more than three-quarters of Republicans believe there was widespread voter fraud despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. For many, the truth is too much to handle.Regardless, Trump’s big lie has taken root and will not soon disappear. The demographic tectonics and disparities that spurred Trump to power are still with us. Biden’s election didn’t change that.Practically speaking, only a string of consecutive electoral losses may snap the Republicans out of their enchantment with the ex-television reality show host. Until then, Trump will remain the Republican party’s dominant force. In Greene’s words, it is his party, “it doesn’t belong to anybody else.” More