The radicalized Republican Party seems hellbent on committing political suicide.
It’s hard to keep up with the twists and turns and the cast of characters in Donald Trump’s failed insurrection against the U.S. Government.
But if you can only understand one thing, understand this: Our government is under attack by the entire Trump-radicalized Republican Party. Donald Trump is just the head of this poisonous snake. There are hundreds of Trump politicians on the November ballot. To defeat Trumpism, I—you—we have to defeat them at the ballot box. It CAN be done.
“I do not want to be a winner by cheating.”
—Testimony by Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers before the January 6th Committee.
Bowers set himself apart from most of the Trump-infected GOP, where cheating has become the preferred way of conducting politics.
Punishing the Truth
In July, Bowers was formally censured by the Republican-controlled Arizona House for telling the truth in his testimony. He was targeted for defeat by Trump as payback for his testimony before the January 6th Committee.
Getting even for telling the truth is a defining feature of the Trump-dominated Republican Party. During his presidency reporters documented over 30 thousand lies Trump told while occupying the Oval Office. Getting even is another operating principle in today’s Republican Party.
“They rule by thuggery and intimidation. So, you know, they found a niche, they found a way—and it’s fear.” —Bowers on ABC’s This Week, July 31, 2022
Bowers is a longtime member of the Arizona House. He ran for a state senate seat because of term limits, but lost. Bowers told the Associated Press his district is very pro-Trump. They punished him for telling the truth and upholding his oath of office.
Arizona Appalls Big Media
The national media did big stories on the Arizona primary because it’s a key battleground state. Trump wooed Arizona Republicans and the courtship paid off. The major candidates he endorsed won their races.
National media like The Atlantic magazine noticed Trump’s triumph in the Grand Canyon state with stories like “The Clutch of Kooks That Just Won in Arizona.”
Charlie Sykes, a columnist at The Bulwark, a conservative publication, summed up the Arizona Republican primary by writing: “Arizona went full batshit.”
Esquire magazine columnist Charles Pierce asked a question many Americans have pondered: “Where do they find these people?”
They are found among ambitious, traitorous Republican ass-kissers and suck-ups. They are White Supremacy democracy-haters, even if they aren’t white. They think the way to a cushy power position in politics is to cater to the angry delusions of the Trump cult. The only thing they pledge allegiance to is the defeated President’s totally false claim that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen through voter fraud.
Arizona, which has been trending purple in politics, had a frenzy from the Radical Right. The lunatic fringe had a boatload of Republican candidates in the primary who are Trump election deniers.
Arizona is the state that spent millions on a sham election audit run by a company calling itself Cyber Ninjas. Critics said it was a fraudit, not an audit. The phony investigation ultimately concluded Biden won Arizona by more votes than were recorded in the official election tally.
Kari Lake, a former TV news reader with no political experience, was the winning Trump-supported Republican candidate for governor. She’s been all-in on Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election.
Not everyone in Arizona was impressed with her insistence on promoting Trump’s Big Lie.
She won by a margin of less than three percent against a wealthy real estate executive. As a loyal Trump bootlicker, Lake threatened to contest the election if she lost, even though it was a Republican primary, not a general election.
Mission to Destroy Democracy
Arguably, the most dangerous GOP candidate in Arizona was Blake Masters, who will face incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly in November. Endorsed by Trump, Masters is what most political observers would call a Right-Wing extremist.
On the forced birth issue, he wants a federal fetus personhood law that would outlaw abortions in all states. Masters:
“Like, we need a federal personhood amendment. That’s what playing offense looks like. That’s the kind of stuff I’m going to push and get done in the U.S. Senate.”
Masters wants to eliminate Social Security so Wall Street can get its hands on the old-age lifeline of millions of Americans:
“Maybe we should privatize Social Security, right? Private retirement accounts. Get the government out of it.”
Masters is joined at the hip with Peter Thiel, a democracy-hating, fascism-loving Silicon Valley billionaire.
Thiel is an immigrant. But that doesn’t matter to immigrant-hating Republicans because he is a big donor to the Trump authoritarian crusade—and he’s White.
Like his hero, Donald Trump, Masters is okay with lying to voters, which has been documented in his roadside campaign signs. One says Blake Masters will prosecute Dr. Anthony Fauci of pandemic fame, once Masters is in the Senate. That’s a lie. The Senate cannot and does not prosecute anyone.
Another Masters road sign says he will stop “Biden’s inflation” when he’s in the Senate. That’s another lie. The U.S. Senate has no control over inflation—none. The Federal Reserve has the levers of power on inflation and the health of America’s money supply. Fed chairman Jerome Powell is the man with the inflation-fighting power. It wouldn’t be Blake Masters, if he makes it to the Senate.
Another gung-ho Trumper, Mark Finchem, won the Arizona Republican primary for Secretary of State, the office that controls elections. And Finchem wants Arizona elections run the way Donald Trump wants them run. Finchem was at the U.S. Capitol during the insurrection of January 6th, 2021 and he’s a member of the extremist Oath Keepers group.
Detroit-born Finchem loves to be photographed wearing cowboy hats. He can be counted on to do all he can to reduce and restrict voting in Arizona, especially among the poor and minorities. Finchem epitomizes Trump’s efforts to undermine democracy state by state.
Trump, meanwhile, continues to peddle his dystopian view of America, as whites slowly find they must share power and clout.
Trump: “Our country is going to hell. It’s going to hell very fast.”
Concentration Camps for the Homeless
As the crowds at Trump rallies get smaller, as an increasing number of Republican politicians delicately treat him as a has-been, the ex-President’s agenda, if he manages to get back in the Oval Office, gets more dictatorial, more Nazi-like. An example that didn’t get much media attention is his plan to create massive concentration camps for the nation’s homeless. This is Trump speaking in Washington in late July at an America First event:
“Perhaps some people will not like hearing this, but the only way you’re going to remove the hundreds of thousands of people, and maybe throughout our nation millions of people we’re talkin’ about, and make our cities clean, safe and beautiful again, is to open up large parcels of inexpensive land in the outer reaches of the cities, bring medical professionals including doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, drug rehab specialists. Build permanent bathrooms and other facilities. Make ‘em good, make ‘em hard, but build ‘em fast and create thousands and thousands of high-quality tents, which can be done in one day. One day. You have to move people out. We’re talkin’ about hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of people.”
We’ve Been Warned
Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne recently wrote “The imperative this year [is] to defeat GOP politicians who refuse to face up to Trump’s crimes against democracy.”
The deniers number in the hundreds.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, one of two Republicans serving on the House January 6th committee, warned all of us that the violent Trump extremists who stormed the nation’s capital on that fateful day in 2021, are ready to do it again:
“…the forces Donald Trump ignited that day have not gone away…they’re all still out there, ready to go…”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a liberal the Trumpers love to hate, was talking recently about the abortion issue, but he could’ve been talking about the entire Trump agenda:
“Don’t think for a second, don’t think for a second this is where they stop… they’re comin’ after you. They are.…This is extremism at a scale level that I’ve never, I never experienced in my lifetime. Wake up, America!”
You don’t have to go out in the street and march around with a sign and shout slogans. You don’t have to get arrested at a sit-in.
You don’t need to get in a urinating contest on social media.
What you need to do is make a commitment to yourself and your country to vote. And vote against the candidates who are trying to destroy our democratic republic and replace it with a dictatorship. That would be most of the Republicans running for office in November.
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