Frankly, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wy) is showing the kind of profile in courage not seen among Republican leaders since John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. No doubt you recall how he famously alienated “the base” by refusing to propagate base lies about Barack Obama being a Muslim socialist hell-bent on destroying the country.
But it appears Republican leaders learned an oxymoronic lesson from McCain’s loss. And, yes, the black-swan presidency of Donald J. Trump institutionalized that lesson. After all, Trump based his presidential campaign on little more than pandering to the base with whatever lie or conspiracy theory he thought they wanted to hear. And the more he pandered to them, the more they supported him.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party lost control of the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives … and itself on Trump’s watch. Yet he still enjoys such fealty (and that word often seems more appropriate) that he has congressional leaders purging their ranks of people like Cheney. This, simply for the Trumpian sin of refusing to propagate his Big Lie about widespread fraud stealing the 2020 presidential election from him.
House Republicans voted Wednesday to remove Rep. Liz Cheney from the No. 3 position in caucus leadership after she vocally rebuked Donald Trump, a move that strengthens the former president’s grip on the party.
‘We must be true to our principles and to the Constitution,” Cheney, R-Wyo., told fellow House Republicans before the closed-door vote, according to a source in the room. ‘We cannot let the former president drag us backward and make us complicit in his efforts to unravel our democracy. Down that path lies our destruction, and potentially the destruction of our country.
After the vote, Cheney said that if Trump tries to run again, ‘I will do everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office.
(NBC News, May 12, 2021)
Everyone thought Trump was channeling old Crazy Eddie when he boasted he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose any support. Remember that? Nobody believed it. The inside joke, of course, is that Trump didn’t either.
Michael Cohen, his former consigliere, testified before Congress that Trump launched his presidential campaign as nothing more than a grift for free publicity for his branding business. This is why he was as surprised as the rest of us when it ended with him not only as president of the United States but as leader of the largest personality cult in history to boot.
Indeed, you’ve probably heard Cheney decrying her fellow Republicans as members of a cult wholly devoted to Trump – truth, the Constitution, and even the welfare of the country be damned. But the manifest absurdity of this devotion is that it now clearly has far more to do with foolish pride than political belief.
After all, it is self-evident that the vast majority of Trump’s supporters will be damned if they’ll ever admit they were wrong about him. And, if that means propagating his Big Lie about the election (or anything else), they’re going to do so with zealous pride.
As it happens, though, Cheney is only echoing what some of us have been saying about Republicans for years. For example, I have written, among far too many commentaries to count, “(White) Evangelicals Supporting Donald Trump Like Israelites Worshipping the Golden Calf,” January 20, 2016, “Republicans Abandon Faith and Values to Hail Trump as ‘Chosen by God’,” March 6, 2019, and “Republicans Knew From Day One That Supporting Trump Was Like Israelites Worshiping the Golden Calf,” November 23, 2019.
This is why it’s hardly news that Republicans have forsaken policies and principles to worship Trump as their, well, two-legged orange calf the way the Israelites did to worship that proverbial golden calf. Except that they’re upstaging the Israelites now by offering their idol a human sacrifice.
But kudos to Cheney for not recanting, choosing instead to face her Joan-of-Arc reckoning with dignity and grace. On the other hand, she would probably do well to properly calibrate her political scope before firing what she hopes will be the kill shot to stop Trump – even if Trumpism survives.
Because I’ve been urging for some time now that the best thing Cheney and other disaffected Republicans can do – for their party and the country – is to form a new party to split the GOP. This is why I was both heartened and frustrated when I read the following headline in yesterday’s edition of The New York Times
- Over 100 Republicans, including former officials, threaten to split from G.O.P.
According to the report, they are going to present party leaders with a list of reforms which, if not implemented, will trigger their move to split the party. But my immediate reaction was: What the hell are they waiting for?! After all, there’s no climbing out of the dystopian rabbit hole party leaders have gone down into with Trump. Not least because those Republicans plastered the sides with grease, sleaze, and slime going down, remember?
In other words, it’s a fool’s errand:
- For Cheney to make it her life’s mission now to ensure Trump never returns to the White House. Frankly, anyone who knows anything about him surely knows Trump is only using the prospect of running in 2024 to fleece his followers. As it was in 2016, a grifter is gonna grift. Indeed, apropos of fools, everyone should know by now that any money he raises will no more likely fund a 2024 presidential campaign than the hundreds of millions he raised funded efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Even Rudy Giuliani is bemoaning these days about how Trump pocketed most of the latter. So why would anyone donate for the former? Oh right, members of a cult will do whatever their Dear Leader commands.
- For these “over 100 Republicans” to threaten members of Trump’s cult to repent, or else. Hell, you have erstwhile respectable Republicans like Sen. Lindsey Graham publicly warning that you either support him or get erased by him. This, because Graham is now convinced Republicans cannot win without pledging absolute fealty to Trump – who has shown time and again that he’s nothing more than a demagoguing fabulist, racist, narcissist, and misogynist – who happens to be an insurrectionist to0.
Granted, Graham is now a notorious weasel who personifies the contempt Trump must have for all Republican men who line up to kiss his ass after he humiliates them (and, in some cases, even their wives). And don’t get me started on the insidious hypocrisy of Republicans railing against “cancel culture” as an article of political faith. Because here they are now canceling one of their own – pursuant to a new culture of lie or die in Republican politics.
All the same, I wish Cheney and others well. Because nothing less than the fate of American democracy depends on them saving enough Republican souls to render the GOP nothing more than a death cult, politically.
Related commentaries:
golden calf… Trump’s GOP… impeachment 2.0… tribalism…