Throughout the heartland, the MAGA wing of the GOP has erupted in yet another round of hate-based onslaughts and outbursts that seem deliberately calculated to Make America Grate Again.
And grind. And grimace.
But not to the point where you might actually display the patriotic guts to do the one thing you know, deep down, you absolutely need to do to safeguard America’s democracy. Namely, vote to tell Donald Trump: “Never again!”
Trump and his most militant Trumpers believe you won’t ever become so enraged that you will rise up and rebel by voting to send our defeated 45th president that one message he cannot bear to hear. They believe that because they have seen one prominent Republican after another caving in to Trump’s bullying — kneeling down and kissing up to Trump’s political aspirations.
Even what is left of the Republican Party’s once formidable — but now politically discombobulated — rank and file now seems eager to trump Trump.
At the Texas Republican Party’s state convention earlier this month, we saw the militants who run the state party push through provisions that had been culled from the furthest right fringe of Texas Republicanism. Their convention approved a declaration that President Joe Biden “was not legitimately elected.” Never mind that America has just seen House hearing testimony from Trump loyalists who said Biden indeed won.
Trump’s Attorney General William Barr testified that his investigation concluded Biden was legitimately elected. He called Trump’s Big Lie about the election being stolen “Bullshit.”
And Arizona’s ultra conservative Republican House Speaker, Rusty Bowers, who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, refused Trump’s desperate pleas asking him to approve a fake slate of electors who would vote for Trump, even though recounts showed Biden won Arizona.
The Texas Republicans were all about showcasing their far-right fringe. They voted on a platform that called for a repeal of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and declared homosexuality “an abnormal lifestyle choice.”
And the Texas Republicans pushed a provision to have their state vote in 2023 on whether Texas should secede from the United States. Really. Even the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative icon, once wrote: “If there was any constitutional issue resolved by the Civil War, it is that there is no right to secede.”
Trump’s MAGA Republicanism has plunged that once Grand Old Party into an immorality that would be unrecognizable to the Republican heroes who forced Richard Nixon to resign in disgrace, led by Arizona’s Sen. Barry Goldwater, who used to pose proudly with his rifle for National Rifle Association ads.
This past week, Missouri’s former Republican governor who is now running for senator, Eric Greitens, released an ad in which he too is posing with his shotgun. But his message was quite different.
“Today we’re goin’ RINO hunting,” said Greitens, referring to so-called Republicans In Name Only. “The RINO feeds on corruption and is marked by the stripes of cowardice.” A smoke bomb erupts, a tactical force bursts in waving guns. “Join the MAGA crew,” Greitens says. “Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire — until we save our country.”
That ad should set bipartisan minds boggling, coast to coast. But then again, we’ve also just seen a far different outrage on our news screens. We saw Bill Barr and Rusty Bowers — two top Republicans who rejected Trump’s shameful efforts to sabotage our democracy — admit that they’ll vote for Trump again if he is the GOP nominee in 2024.
Here’s Barr (on NBC): “Because I believe that the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic Party, it’s inconceivable to me that I wouldn’t vote for the Republican nominee.”
Here’s Bowers (to The Associated Press): “If he (Trump) is the nominee, if he was up against Biden, I’d vote for him again. Simply because what he did the first time, before COVID, was so good for the country. In my view it was great.”
And here’s our bottom line: Two men who you might have hailed as heroes — for just saying no to Trump — shockingly see nothing abhorrent about voting to return to the Oval Office the man who, the last time he was there, tried to make them his accomplices in committing the greatest political crime in America’s history.
A president overthrowing the votes of the American people. Deep-sixing our democracy. Shredding our Constitution. Just for the sake of politics.
Is there no sense of shame?
