Speaker Mike Johhnson has joined the Republican chorus ripping the Biden Administration’s response to Hurricane Helene. At the same time, he’s refusing to call the House back into session to appropriate more money for disaster relief. Today’s Republican party in a nutshell. See also Newsweek, How Mike Johnson’s Big Decision Could Impact Helene Relief Efforts.
Liz Cheney has been saying that if Trump loses in November, what’s left of the Republican party might have to form a new party. Zachary Basu of Axios also writes that a Potential Trump loss threatens destruction of the modern GOP. “Never before has a party’s identity been so deeply entwined with the fate, fortunes and flaws of one man. Four consecutive poor election cycles would unleash a wave of sustained scrutiny that the GOP — as it currently exists — may not survive,” writes Basu.
If the Republicans suffer significant losses, including the White House, in November, then certainly the MAGA movement can’t survive as a political force except maybe as a local or regional entity. It won’t die right away, of course, but since it’s a cult of personality it won’t survive without Donald Trump.
And Trump is being eaten alive by senlility with every passing day. Whether he wins or not, I expect that by some time next year the Trump family will be forced to admit he has Alzheimers. His short-term memory issues are getting more pronounced. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he’s already been diagnosed and the family is keeping it secret as long as possible, And most likely MAGA will go the way of the Temperence Movement once he’s no longer able to lead it. Do read this weekend’s New York Times exposé of Trump’s mental state. See also The Media Is Finally Waking Up to the Story of Trump’s Mental Fitness by Michael Tomasky at The New Republic.
If MAGA dies in a timely manner, IMO there might be enough left of the old GOP establishment to reconstitute something approximating the old GOP. And if the MAGAts stomp out and form their own party, so much the better. But Cheney and Basu apparently think it’s more likely that the remnants of the old establishment will have to form a new party and let the Republican Party die from MAGA cancer, so to speak. And they’re closer to the thing than I am.
But if Trump wins, the Republican Party is still toast. It will be utterly consumed by MAGA, and MAGA is not a political party but only a caricature of one. The real question then will be if the United States survives, especially as we’ll end up with President J.D. Vance. I don’t even want to think about it.
Meanwhile, the rhetoric coming from Trump and his allies is increasingly dangerous. Now they’re openly claiming that Democrats were behind the two assasination attempts.
At Talking Points Memo, David Kurtz writes that West Virginia is considering secession if Trump loses.
Take, for instance, the resolution that four GOP lawmakers introduced Sunday in the special session in West Virginia. It’s as extreme as anything I’ve seen in the last few years. The proposed resolution, inter alia, calls on West Virginia not to “recognize” the results of the 2024 presidential election if “election fraud in any state was a major reason that resulted in a candidate for President obtaining a majority in the Electoral College.”
“Election fraud” is defined in the text very broadly to include a laundry list of bogus right-wing claims ranging from non-citizen voting to “prosecutions for apparent political motives.” By this definition, Special Counsel Jack Smith’s ongoing prosecution of Donald Trump could be sufficient grounds on its own for West Virginia to refuse to recognize a victorious Kamala Harris as the legitimate president.
This is from the draft resolution:
That, the State of West Virginia will not recognize any election of the Democrat candidate for President during the 2024 election cycle if the Republican presidential or vice-presidential candidate is assassinated, seriously injured during an assassination attempt, incarcerated, de facto eliminated or barred from the ballot in any states, or is the subject of legal actions that preclude their effective campaigning …
This probably won’t go anywhere, of course, but the fact that actual state legislatures are thinking about this is worthy of note.
"Today’s Republican Party in a nutshell"
Yep nothing but clickbait, lies, bullshit, misinformation designed to appease the master (diaper don) and keep the mouth breathing magats in line. No matter the markets are soaring, gas prices are low, jobs are plentiful, folks watching FAUX thinks it's a hellscape. I watched some of the first segment of Joy Reid's show today. She tied all the ever-increasing racist Stump shit and his more successful apprentice Elon Musk's recent assertion to Stumps side (if only he could have picked him for VP, JD would be toast). How Harris's Candidacy today is being treated the same as the racist reaction to Mandela, Musk understands all to well, it's in his genes! My only problem with Joy's presentation is my problem with pretty much all of our mainstream corporate media's coverage of this election. They go on and on about how dangerous Stump is and how he is becoming increasingly racist and violent, but they never call out their associates over at FAUx news and other mainstream wing-nut outlets. The people who watch FOX are being sold a completely different bill of goods, one not based the slightest in reality. The magats are a lock but FAUX is hoping to smooth Stumps edges for the less low info republican voter, I think it’s working. Until objective "journalists " are willing to call out their friends bought and paid for by the Billionaires the information needle is not going to move. People like Joy need to admit the problem isn't just Stump and Musk it's her friends in the media that are getting paid to sell him. We are 30 days out and they are still playing games. No wonder Harris is reluctant to sit down with any of them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f2g4RMfhS0
Evidence?
Evidence of a low info republican voter? Look in the mirror
uncledad — The only people in media “getting paid to sell Trump” work for Fox News, OAN, and similar right-wing outlets. The issues surrounding mainstream media’s failure to call him out have to do with longstanding institutional culture more than anything else.
My point is that mainstream media doesn't really call out FOX for enabling Stump. FOX is the infrastructure that props all of these outrageous republicans, to me that is really the story but most in the msm seem unwilling to call out them out on a consistent basis.
I've been thinking about the disintegration of the GOP for years. I like the word "dis-integration" for the picture it draws. "dis" is undo, of course. Integration means "mixing people, combining things" according to the Cambridge dictionary. What has MAGA successfully mixed? White Nationalism, KKK, Christian Nationalism, wacked-out conspiracy theorists, Nazis… you know (and you are free to remind me of groups I forgot.) IMO, it's not that Trump actually subscribes to all the articles of faith of all these groups. IMO, he's promised to all that he'll enable their wicked fantasies but they must pay homage to King Trump. They really want all the stuff they expect Trump has promised. (That's why the fetus people are in arms about Trump moderating his position on abortion.)
I don't think any of the leaders of any of the factions fail to recognize that Trump is an idiot. He's a means to an end because separately they can't get what they want but collectively (integrated) that can. But the leaders of these evil factions do not trust each other – they are separately sucking up to Donald (and he thrives on it) to make sure that their faction gets their objectives.
This whole thing has a reverse counterpart in the 70's when liberal factions worked together collectively for women's rights, indigenous people, gay rights, civil rights, and decriminalization of non-violent offenses (grass)…. and without a cult leader holding it together. Ultimately, the groups got into a silo mentality and quit supporting each other. The BLM movement reversed that to a large degree which is why it scared the pee out of conservatives.
So when DJT loses the election or when he wins but is a useless, senile hulk, each of the faction leaders will try to become the power behind the throne. People like Bannon, Cruz, DeSantis, Vance, and every evangelical suck-up, every white nationalist leader, will compete with each other to take (not share) the power of the presidency when POTUS is incapable of feeding himself without a nurse and totally incontinent. Win or lose, the wheels will come off the wagon, and soon.
Some patriots want to bring back that ol'-time religion of conservative ideology when Trump ceases to be functional leader, he no longer has cult status, which he's losing anyway if the apathy at his rally are an indication. Even if MAGA can't worship at the altar of Trump, they will try to hold together the power of collective resentment. Whatever MAGA morphs into after Trump will resent the ambitious politicians who don't measure up to the iconic figure Trump is to them. (And it's all projection, but Trump was more than happy to play the part – when he's no longer on the stage, nobody else can play it as convincingly.
MAGA will fragment – I agree the Liz Cheney faction will never be accepted but they have a better idea how to build and wield political power than the MAGA MTG's do. Part of that pragmatism, when the new GOP, maybe under a different name, can't win over the Trump cultists will recognize the demographics.To become a majority party without the huge chunk of MAGA trying to reclaim past glory. the new GOP will have to turn to the issues that move the "center." That is the issues central to MAGA hate which non-Democrats never signed up for. The two biggies – accepting non-white, non-males as full equals in this society. That means big support of women's rights, gay rights, full same-sex marriage rights, protecting the legal status of dreamers, sane gun control legislation…
That's not to say the new GOP won't advocate for small government, less regulation, . low taxes for corporations and the ultra-rich. But on a lot of issues that 70% of the public wants, the new GOP will say these were their principles all along. To reach political parity with Democrats, the "conservative" will look a lot less crazy. And the Democrats and the new GOP will take every opportunity to marginalize MAGA.
This could be a golden era politically with huge progress on a host of issues. I'm not saying it will happen in 2026 – in my wildest dreams there won't be evidence of that kind of political maturity for two presidential election cycles, 2032. But the dynamics, the political forces that come into play, could grow our politics into that.
Now we hear the Donald pontificates about the special skill that makes him the rightful ruler of the United States of America. It is about time he let us in on this ability. He is the country's foremost authority on the genes that belong in this country. Who knew he was such an authority? As the commander in chief of breeding stock he will assure us superior generations of individuals that will form the future republican party. We will need no other political party as his will be so genetically superior as leaders that competition with another party will be a waste.
He and Vance are set to go after "murder genes" in the immigrant population as a start.
Trump suggests ‘bad genes’ to blame for undocumented immigrants who commit murders – The Washington Post
The only hope for what was the GOP is to rid itself of this perversion of elitism and to promote of those citizens with admirable values and skills. If there is a "political competency gene" they appear to be breeding in a way to make it more and more regressive. They could sure use more positive role models just in case such political skills might be learned.
Trump is the son of an immigrant.
With respect to the collapse of the R Party. It is a fact not liable to good-faith differences of opinion between well-informed observers, that the R Party has ceased to make any pretense of trying to win the support of a majority of the electorate, and to instead pursue "victories" "won" via repressing parts of the electorate likely to vote against them. The national officers of the R Party are unanimous in joining their defeated leader in discarding fealty to the principle of peaceful transfer of power.
The R Party, in short, has some while since, even before Trump rode down the escalator for the cameras in 2015, been not a normal American Party but more of a radical subversive criminal organization. Where exactly this turn took place is open to some debate but I think the definitive moment was after they lost to Obama the 2nd time. I have about given up on the curiously somnolent Watchdogs Of Democracy in the legacy media ever waking up enough to notice this fact. There have been some signs of weakening denial in the last week or so.
Ha, inadvertent violation of Betteridge's Law: Yes, there *is* a Republican Party, and it continues to serve the function its real masters desire.
The real GOP is not the people who vote or register Republican; neither is it the set of candidates running under that banner. The *real* GOP is the large set of interlinked Think Tanks and Institutes which produce the details of the Party's policies and talking points – the propaganda organs funded (lavishly) by the Zillionaires who really determine the Party's priorities. The lifeblood of those institutions is money, and they still have plenty of it.
Decades ago, they recognized that the Party's real priorities (ending the New Deal) are *not* policies which would attract anything close to a majority of voters, so they used Culture War crap to pull in middle- and working-class people. That worked great (for them) for a long time, but it created a "base" that required ever more outrageous claims to stoke the outrage which motivated them to vote against Democrats.
Donald Trump is not – and never was – part of that "Party", but he recognized that it would be easy for him to capture the Mob they had created by tearing off the polite veneer which traditional Republican candidates had been trained to maintain.
In 2016, the institutional GOP watched in horror as Trump exposed all their other candidates as empty suits spouting carefully crafted platitudes to cover their dog-whistling.
In 2017, they were as shocked as the Democrats that Trump had won, and they scrambled to get their handpicked bureaucrats [back] into the Federal bureaucracy, but Trump's insistence on personal loyalty – rather than Party or ideology – turned that process into a mess and essentially prevented any real action for most of Trump's term. (exception: the Federalist Society succeeded in getting Trump to appoint their hacks to the SC)
In 2020, those institutions (and the Zillionaires they work for) pretended to support Trump, but actually spent more time & money on keeping their puppets in Congress, leaving Trump's Mob to fund his campaign.
Since then, they have been treading a fine line, professing support for Trump and setting the stage to blame Democrats for "destroying" Trump, as a long-term strategy for regaining political control of that Mob. Sadly, that strategy seems to be working.
There have been a fair number of Republican politicians who have spoken out against Trump – but [almost?] all of them are *former* officials, either long retired (Dick Cheney, shudder) or having lost primaries to MAGAts (Liz Cheney). The Party machinery [now] knows that their candidates have to publicly pledge allegiance to Trump.
Project 2025 is an ambitious attempt to convince Trump to let them control the appointments process this time. Heritage (a core GOP Institute) added some Trumpist "policies" to the mix, and even hired a bunch of former Trump appointees to put their names on the document to make it more palatable to The Orange One.
Bottom line: the *real* Republican Party – its infrastructure – is still in place, still using good salaries to buy the loyalty of smart creeps. They are biding their time until Trump is gone, at which point they will elevate him to Party Sainthood (like Reagan) and then use their money to regain control over State GOP groups which have been taken over by MAGAts.
Yes, there is still a Republican Party, and it will [slowly] regain control of the Mob it created. Remember: the core premise of that Mob is that Democrats are Bad; Trump has only amplified & cemented that feeling.
I agree with what you say, but the thing you are describing is not a political party. It’s some other kind of movement/institution that has somehow inhabited the space where a political party used to be.
It's what the Republican Party has been for decades. It's the model set forth in the Powell Memo. The Party is the *machinery*, the *infrastructure*, not the voters.