The Dark Side of the 2016 Presidential Insurrection: Trump’s Phenomenology in a Toxic Eruption

That recent history is loudly echoing amid a deepening sense that the country could be heading back to a dark political place as another Election Day looms. There is a chance of another violent eruption in this toxic age.

As he contemplates a 2024 campaign and rallies for 2022 candidates, ex-President Donald Trump is conducting a new symphony of political malice and facing little pushback from his party despite the insurrection’s example of where the politics of malevolence can lead.

The country remains in a constant state of rancor five weeks before the election and there are signs that it won’t change.

This coincides with painful and far from complete investigations into what happened after the 2020 election. On the first day of the trial of five Oath Keepers militia charged with seditious conspiracy, jurors heard how senators cried while hiding from the mob.

The former President took to his social media accounts last week to accuse Senate Minority LeaderMitch McConnell of having a death wish and of being racist towards his wife Elaine, who he had a strained relationship with. The FBI agents that Trump was accusing of being “vicious monsters” were part of a lawful search of his Florida home.

The one of the ex-President’s top boosters who played into the politics of fear at the weekend rally was Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

A man was charged in June with trying to kill a Justice. The same month, New York Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin, who’s running for governor, was attacked by a man at a campaign event. The alleged attacker did not appear to have a political motive, but it reminded me of the vulnerability of candidates on the stump.

Former Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona was left with life-changing injuries by a gunman who attacked a constituency event in 2011, killing six people. Louisiana GOP Rep. Steve Scalise was seriously injured in a shooting at a congressional baseball practice. The man had disliked both Trump and conservatives, according to his public records and letters to his newspaper. After saying the shooter had apparently volunteered for the presidential campaign, and making clear violence of any kind was unacceptable, it was obvious that Sanders was not a fan of the kind of insinuation Trump is known for.

The former President used a brutal tone in his campaign rhetoric. Trump was able to create an impression that violence was a legitimate tool of expressing political grievances because of his month by month build- up, and then he was able to make the argument that disagreements should not be decided through violent action.

In a nation with easy access to guns, with a recent history of political violence and where Trump and others use false claims of voter fraud as political rocket fuel, it is reasonable to wonder what dire consequences may haunt this election season.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/04/politics/trump-violent-rhetoric-analysis/index.html

Bennie Thompson: Trump’s social media assault against McConnell deserves condemnation in the Ugly Poverty of Political Correctness

Bennie Thompson, who chairs the House select committee, spoke to his colleagues in both parties on Monday as he condemned Trump’s social media assault on McConnell.

He said in a statement that Trump’s rhetoric “could incite political violence, and the former President knows full well that extremists often view his words as marching orders.”

“The ‘death wish’ rhetoric is ugly even by Mr. Trump’s standards and deserves to be condemned. Mr. Trump wrote that Mr. McConnell wanted to be killed, but the paper said that was not what he wrote.

The former President appears to implicitly offer his supporters a kind of permission to emulate his incitement. His tendency to drag other down into the political gutter with him and the fact that Republicans have to decide between their political careers and publicly tolerate his Extremism has contributed to a coarsening of the wider political culture.

Republicans often use the rhetoric of Democrats to suggest their supporters are being victims of targeted attacks. This happened recently when Biden referred to Trump supporters as fascists. Intemperate political rhetoric should always be condemned. But any objective viewing of Trump’s speeches and social media posts must conclude that he’s an incessant and deliberate offender.

Part of the reason why is that his own party – some courageous lawmakers aside – almost never steps into condemn him. This was borne out by the uncomfortable dodging from Florida Sen. Rick Scott, the chairman of the Senate GOP campaign committee, on Sunday shows when he was asked to condemn Trump’s post about McConnell.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/04/politics/trump-violent-rhetoric-analysis/index.html

Why is the President so nasty? Conservative recriminations against Donald Trump during a campaign exposing the naiveties of the party

“You know, the President likes to give people nicknames. You can ask how he came up with the nickname. Scott told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” that he was certain he had a nickname for him.

“I hope no one is racist. I hope no one says anything that’s inappropriate,” Scott said, encapsulating the manner in which Trump has intimidated his party into submission through seven years of fury since he announced his first campaign.

In recent weeks, part of McCarthy’s pitch to his critics has been warning that if they don’t unify, then Democrats could theoretically band together and peel off a few Republicans to elect the next speaker.

Some of the Republicans speaking out now have previously enabled Mr. Trump and his policies, either through public support or silence. While they long privately claimed to disdain Mr. Trump’s politics, they were fearful of crossing the party’s base.

The party is getting political consequences. Trump-backed candidates lost key Senate races in Pennsylvania and Arizona, as well as several House races from Alaska to North Carolina. On Saturday, Democrats clinched control of the Senate with a hard-fought re-election victory for Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada. In the House, despite predictions of a G.O.P. wave, neither party had secured a majority.

The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal are owned by Murdoch and have called for Mr. Trump to be thrown out. Mr. Trump shouldn’t be the party’s presidential nominee in 2024 according to Winsome Sears of Virginia and Robin Vos of Wisconsin.

Moderates complained about the party’s plunge into conspiracy theories and divisive issues in order to light up the right-wing media. Senator Mitt Romney, a Republican from Utah, called for a return to classic fiscal conservatism. Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire said during a SiriusXM Radio interview Friday that Mr. Trump risked “mucking up” the party’s chances of winning in Georgia.

In the days leading to the election, Senator Charles E. Grassley spoke at a Trump rally in Iowa, saying it was time to move on from the pet issue. He wrote that he should stop speaking in 2020.

Similar recriminations are taking place across the Capitol, where some House Republicans are questioning their leadership’s embrace of the MAGA wing, lack of a cohesive message on abortion, and decisions to spend precious resources in deep blue territory late in the game.

A small group of GOP senators want their leadership elections to be delayed so that they can have a family discussion about why the GOP didn’t do well. The senator from Missouri vowed to oppose McConnell in the race for GOP leader.

McCarthy’s comments represent a sharp escalation in his public pressure campaign against critics, including Biggs, who last week announced his own bid for the speaker’s gavel.

He said that there needs to be a discussion about whether he should be the speaker. “I think we should have a very frank discussion internally about where we’re going to be going forward.”

The story of the naive Senate leadership: Donald Trump, Tim Cook, Tom Emmer, and the Particle Activists

Florida Sen. Rick Scott, the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, is among those calling for a delay in the Senate leadership election scheduled for Wednesday, saying it “doesn’t make any sense” to have them this week.

“A lot of people have called me to see if I’ll run,” Scott said. Is it still possible for us to win Georgia? I will not remove anything from the table.

Meanwhile, Trump aides and allies have been privately critical of Tom Emmer, head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, amid the GOP’s underwhelming midterm gains, especially on the House side. Republicans appear to be on track for a House majority, though CNN has not projected who will control the lower chamber. Emmer is competing against Rep. Jim Banks, an ally of Donald Trump Jr., for the position of House GOP whip.

“They’ve been measuring the draperies, they’ve been putting forth an agenda. Nancy Pelosi said on CNN that they haven’t won it yet. “After the election is concluded, depending on who was in the majority, there’ll be judgments made within their own party, in our own parties, as to how we go forward.”

The finger pointing has begun and those conversations are likely to intensify when the full House and Senate return to Washington this week.

In the Senate races, where control of the Senate was determined, others in the party have blamed Trump for the failure of his hand-picked candidates. McConnell’s super PAC spent more money than any other group in the race, and it was not lost on his allies.

The correlation between big losses and the rise of the populist movement is high, according to Pat Toomey. My party needs to face the fact that they probably aren’t going to do well if they choose candidates based on fealty to Donald Trump.

McConnell and Scott have also been publicly at odds all election cycle when it comes to strategy, with McConnell sounding the alarm about candidate quality while Scott opted to take a hands-off approach in the primaries.

Scott didn’t rule it out when he was asked if he would challenge McConnell for the top spot.

McCarthy is interested in being seen as standing up to the most extreme members of his conference. The path to the GOP majority went through moderate seats in places like New York that could be trouble for the party in the second election in four years. Swing-state voters, like the ones who are tormenting him now, were mostly turned away from those who were campaigning for Trump. The anti-Trump vote was also decisive in the 2018 election when Republicans lost the House and in 2020 when they lost the presidency.

The senior Republican told CNN that political physics says you cannot appease the HFC all at the same time. “If you straddle that fence, you better hope it’s not barbed wire.”

It hasn’t fully broken through despite Trump’s campaign. Some of Trump’s closest allies are attacking McCarthy in the media. A Pelosi ally went on Steve Bannon’s show and said that she would vote for McCarthy, despite the fact that she was against it.

More context: Trump has been eager to lock up public support from Republicans for his third presidential bid, with a separate GOP source saying he has been asking to see which GOP lawmakers have endorsed him in the media.

But it also reflected Greene’s growing personal power, after she broke with some radical GOP members and lined up to support McCarthy’s speakership. After coming to Congress as a fringe figure, and quickly losing her committee assignments over her past retweets of violent rhetoric against Democrats, Greene now promises to be one of the most prominent faces of the new GOP majority. She can make comments to other people that are offensive without fear of censure from the leader of her party. And it also shows that while Trump’s power may be waning elsewhere after a lackluster launch of his 2024 campaign, his influence over his followers in the House, like Greene, remains strong.

Several members of the Freedom Caucus met with McCarthy in his office Monday as they seek to extract concessions from him in exchange for their speaker votes.

The pro-McCarthy Republicans are signalling support for a different approach, in the rare scenario of McCarthy and Biggs not being able to get 218 votes on January 3. There is a longshot idea that they would find a moderate Republican who could get the 218 votes needed to win the gavel.

Rep. Bob Good, who said McCarthy faces “an uphill climb” to the speakership, said they’ve asked McCarthy to bring to them his proposal for running the House.

Representative Scalise: Towards a Resolution of Pelosi’s Disagreement with the Commission on a Fundamental Right-Dependent Issue

They have been trying to get rules changes that empower individual members and weaken the speaker, but that is not their main focus.

He said they want to change dramatically, to reflect the will of the people and to acknowledge how broken it is. It’s incumbent on anyone that wants to lay out their vision and how they would change their portion of it.

Hard-right Republicans took advantage of the opportunity to get promises from their would-be leaders. Representative Steve Slaughter asked if Mr. McCarthy would investigate Pelosi, after Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said she would support him.

I am not going to get into speculation, Scalise told CNN. Our focus is to have it resolved by January 3. A lot of conversations have been taking place with the members who have voiced their concerns.

Mr. Scalise apologized and said he should not have commented at that time, according to two people who were familiar with the exchange.

The 2016 Republican Reionization Conference: State and Local Issues with a Left-Right Reply to Mike Pence, J. Cole, and Kevin McCarthy

The GOP was struggling to find a path forward after disappointing results in the election, as well as trying to understand the impact Mr. Trump had on their election. It came as the former Vice President Mike Pence was speaking about President Trump and his actions on the attack on the Capitol.

It will be a narrow one according to Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma. It makes it crucial that you have someone with good political skills. Somebody that knows every part of this conference.”

As a right-wing faction threatens to tank his speakership ambitions, House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy delivered a promise: “I’ll never leave,” making clear he has no plans to drop out of the race even if the fight goes to many ballots on the floor.

McCarthy is in a difficult position in his campaign for the speakership as a result of some compromises that threaten to leave him with no choice but to abandon the position in the long term.

“Our initial plan is vote for Kevin and let him fight this out repeatedly. … But if they think they’re going to use this to infinity to drive him out, well, we’re not going to bend to their will,” said Rep. Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican.

McCarthy warned that there was a danger that if the five GOP Members vote as a bloc on January 3, they could be in serious trouble.

You would have good people running if Kevin took his name out. One Republican lawmaker believes that the guy would be GOP Representative Steve Scalise.

If McCarthy can only get the votes of Republicans, we will see if he jumps into the race.

Even though Gaetz and other hardliners want him to seek the speakership, Rep. Jim Jordan, the chair of the Judiciary Committee, ruled out jumping into the race.

Norman, who is from South Carolina, left a meeting with McCarthy in his office on Wednesday and said he would vote for Andy for speaker. He later added: “All this is positive. We are having good change, no matter what happens. You will see more of it.

In addition to those five, a new group of seven Republican hardliners on Thursday laid out a list of conditions to earn their vote, although they did not specifically threaten to vote against McCarthy if their demands aren’t met.

But McCarthy still has additional levers he could pull. The powerful House Rules Committee, which decides when bills come to the floor, has conservative hardliners pushing for more representation. A person familiar with the matter said McCarthy was urged by a member of the House Freedom Caucus to take a harder public stance on policy issues next year.

If he doesn’t have the speaker votes by January 3, McCarthy may have to embrace it, but his detractors said it’s an issue that is still on the table. GOP sources told CNN there’s potential room to negotiate to give members more power to call for a vote to oust the speaker – perhaps by allowing the vote to occur if a certain number of members call for one, rather than allowing a single lawmaker to call for a vote as the hardliners want.

The majority of the House Republicans voted against the idea of restoring the chair to its original function during a closed-door meeting last month. McCarthy laughed and refused to say if he would visit the issue.

The impact of a January was one of the reasons that we did not see a red wave. Wherever I go in my district, I always hear people say, “Why can’t you guys just get things done?”

McCarthy delayed the GOP committee chairmanships as he scrambled to lock down speaker’s votes. There was some speculation that one of the members competing for a gavel, Rep. Vern Buchanan of Florida, may retire early if he doesn’t win, which would make McCarthy’s math problem even tougher. Buchanan strongly disagreed with the notion.

Some Democrats have said they would like to consider it, and one is a moderate Democrat from Texas who told CNN that some of his GOP colleagues have approached him about it.

Joyce said that some members have reached out to him about running, but he dismissed it. Kevin is the new speaker at the end of the day.

One of the Republicans who publicly oppose McCarthy’s bid is Rep. Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican.

Jeffries told CNN that the Democrats are trying to organize the conference. Republicans are working on organizing a conference. We should see what happens on January 3.

Some of the potential consensus picks that have been floated included retiring Reps. Fred Upton of Michigan and John Katko of New York, who both voted to impeach Donald Trump for inciting the Capitol insurrection; Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, co-chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus; and Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole, a veteran lawmaker and incoming head of the House Rules Committee.

It would take agreement from every single Democrat and the help of five Republicans. He said he would be skiing that day and didn’t want to be in Washington.

In his state, the minority Democrats joined forces with a few Republicans to get a GOP speaker of their choice. Westerman privately made this case to his colleagues at a closed-door meeting this week.

The problem is not going away: Reply to Westerman, Ms. Pelosi, Mr. McCarthy, or the chairman of the Oversight Committee

The problem is that we won’t be able to form a Congress and organize committees in January because we wont be able to push the policy objectives we want to push.

The discussion over changing House rules is good for the party, according to Westerman. But he added: “I’m not really excited about any type of destructive movement.”

If Mr. McCarthy has a plan, he will not share it with his leadership team, what some see as a display of paranoia. A Republican lobbyist named Jeff Miller is among his closest friends, and they have been seen around the Capitol and the RNC headquarters recently.

Mr. Norman, who has described himself as a “hard no” against Mr. McCarthy, declined to discuss his call with Mr. Trump, describing it as a “private conversation.” He was still unsure about who he would support for speaker. Mr Crane did not respond to questions.

When Nancy Pelosi in 2018 found herself about a dozen votes short of what she would need to secure the speaker’s gavel, she quietly picked off defectors, methodically cutting deals to capture exactly enough support to prevail. Ms. Pelosi, renowned for her ability to arm-twist and get things done, gained seven votes by agreeing to limit her time in the House, 8 by promising to implement rules aimed at fostering more bipartisan legislating, and 1 by winning over her lone would-be challenger by creating

The California Republican made a string of pledges to appease the right flank of his party. He traveled to the southern border and called on Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, to resign or face potential impeachment proceedings. He gave Ms. Greene a seat on the Oversight Committee, after she was stripped of her committee assignments for making violent and conspiratorial posts on social media.

He promised to hold public hearings on the security breakdown that led up to the attack at the Capitol. He has been quietly meeting with ultraconservative lawmakers in an effort to win them over. The members were urged to vote against the appropriations bill on Monday night.

Do we really need an extra legislative body? The case for a better future GOP congress after the GOP-President Donald J. McCarthy split

The fragile governing mandate for any party in American history would be destroyed by the tiny GOP House majority that takes over in January. And the ideological struggle being waged by pro-Donald Trump extremists inside the party would have made even a more comfortable majority volatile.

The California Republican is fighting a rearguard battle against members who want to make it easier to oust a sitting speaker and he is appeasing ex- President Donald Trump.

McCarthy has used his defiance of theMake America Great Again movement to seek out sound bite confrontations with the press as badges of honor.

This is the reason why the current year-end fight over whether to fund the government for a full year or just a few months is so critical since it could drop a fiscal crisis on the lap of a weak and easily manipulated new.

McCarthy was asked by CNN if he believed she had said she was being facetious. His attitude was not a surprise; it was consistent with his attempts to rewrite the history of the worst attack on US democracy in modern times, for which he briefly said Trump bore responsibility.

The same situation played out when McCarthy did not criticize the formerpresident for having a meeting with a white supremacist at a dinner with Ye, who has made a string of antisemitic remarks. The House Republican leader made up the story that Trump had condemned Fuentes four times when he hadn’t done it before.

McCarthy might be able to win points with his opposition, but no long-term consequence, given that Democrats should be able to pass a broader funding deal in the final days of their majority. The framework agreement on the omnibus appropriations bill was announced on Tuesday by Senate Republicans and Democrats.

The split not only augurs likely future tensions between Republicans in the House and McConnell, it raises the possibility that it will become politically more difficult for some Republican senators to vote for a spending deal now – especially as conservative media has taken up McCarthy’s line.

McCarthy said Friday that the five conservative holdouts – Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Andy Biggs of Arizona, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Bob Good of Virginia and Matt Rosendale of Montana – have not budged in their opposition to him and offered dire warnings that House Republicans’ hard-fought narrow majority could be derailed if they don’t bend.

“We’re still continuing to talk, but they have not moved,” McCarthy told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, taking to the airwaves to argue that the detractors threaten to put the entire House Republican agenda in peril and that basic decisions on legislating and investigating will be “all in jeopardy.”

“I just believe this is a win for the Democrats,” McCarthy said of GOP opposition to his bid. “They’re sitting back, and we can’t allow that to happen. We are the only people who can stop the bad policy of the Democrats.

“Remember, this is a presidential year, so you only have so many months to really get out there and govern,” McCarthy said. You want to start with a bang. Every day you lose, if you lose a quarter, you don’t start strong. So you don’t get new, stronger candidates. You don’t have enough resources to give those candidates more resources to get the message out.

I think Kevin has worked very hard. I think he deserves the shot,” Trump said Friday in an interview with Breitbart News. Hopefully he is strong and will be good. He is going to do what he knows how to do.

“It’s a very dangerous game. Some bad things could happen. Trump claimed that he and Paul Ryan were ten times worse than a strange person such as John Boehner. “Paul Ryan was an incompetent speaker. I think he is the worst speaker of all time.

McCarthy and Trump had a brief falling out following the January 6, 2021, insurrection, with McCarthy even suggesting on a private phone call that was recorded that Trump should resign. McCarthy went to meet Trump at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida a few weeks later after the two made a mistake.

Why the Republicans cannot shoot straight on Election Day: The editorial board at the New York Times-New York Times (Apr.J. Schur, M.A. Pema, C.F. Martin, J.M

The editorial board said the Republicans couldn’t shoot straight since Election Day and that only one of them was to blame.