It's hardly a groundbreaking proposition to say that after four years of Donald Trump in the White House, the Republican Party of 2021 is less an institution interested in actual legislating than it is a collection of loosely affiliated neo-fascists and enablers who have come to understand a fundamental truth of American politics in the 21st century: There are huge swaths of the country who couldn't care less about laws and Congress and "results." They want a sense of self-affirming superiority. They want mean-spirited partisan blood. They want, to put it plainly, politicians who shitpost.
Donald Trump was, and remains, the gold standard for conservative shitposting, having simply offloaded his unhinged opinions and spleen-ventings from Twitter to his personal website. But if he's the one who made the mold, there's a hungry new class of GOP lawmakers eager to break it — a point made extraordinarily clear this week, thanks to (who else?) Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and Clay Higgins, three Republican lawmakers who best embody this spirit of talking shit at the expense of doing, well, anything else.
