As the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol starts its work, former president Trump and his supporters are consolidating their power over the Republican Party. Through it, they hope to control the nation.
Trump this morning tried to assert his dominance over the party by issuing a statement in which he demanded that Republican senators scrap the infrastructure bill that has been more than three months in the making. Although he did not note any specific provisions in the bill, he claimed that senators were getting “savaged” in the negotiations because Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) “and his small group of RINOs wants nothing more than to get a deal done at any cost to prove that he can work with the Radical Left Democrats.” Trump ordered lawmakers not to do an infrastructure deal “until after we get proper election results in 2022 or otherwise…. Republicans,” he ordered, “don’t let the Radical Left play you for weak fools and losers!”
The term “RINO” comes from the 1990s, when the Movement Conservatives taking over the Republican Party used it to discredit traditional Republicans as “Republicans In Name Only.” It reversed reality—the Movement Conservatives were the RINOs, not the other way around—but it worked. Movement Conservatives, who wanted to get rid of the New Deal and take the government back to the 1920s, pushed aside traditional Republicans who agreed with Democrats that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, and promote infrastructure.
Now, the former president is doing the same thing: claiming that the Movement Conservatives who now dominate the leadership of the Republican Party are not really Republicans. True Republicans, he says, are those loyal only to him.
He is using the infrastructure bill as a loyalty test. The reality is that an infrastructure package is very popular, and walking away from it will cost Republicans in states that are not fully under Trump’s sway. A new poll by the Associated Press and NORC at the University of Chicago (NORC is the nonpartisan National Opinion Research Center affiliated with the university) finds that 83% of Americans, including 79% of Republicans and 80% of Independents, want funding for roads, bridges, and ports. Sixty-six percent of Americans, including 43% of Republicans and 53% of Independents, want to pay for it with higher taxes on corporations.
Walking away from those kinds of numbers seems like political poison, and yet the discussions to whip the bipartisan bill into shape seemed to veer off track today.
The demand for Republican loyalty is playing out as the January 6 committee gets down to business. Organizing that committee has driven a wedge through Republican lawmakers. After an initial period in which leaders like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) expressed outrage and a desire to learn what had created the January 6 crisis, the leaders have lined up behind the former president. Emboldened, Trump’s supporters have become more aggressive in their insistence that they, not those interested in stopping a future insurrection, are the good guys.
After Republican senators rejected the establishment of a bipartisan select commission and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) set up a House select committee instead, McCarthy tried to sabotage the committee by putting on it two extreme Trump supporters out of the five slots he was assigned. He named Jim Jordan (R-OH) but pretty clearly expected Pelosi would toss him and put up with Jim Banks (R-IN), whom McCarthy had named the ranking member of the committee. Banks was on record attacking the committee as a leftist plot, and could undermine the committee’s work while getting enough media time to launch him as a national political candidate (his hiring of Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson’s son long before this indicated his hope for good media coverage for a possible swing at a higher office).
But Pelosi didn’t play. She refused to accept either Jordan or Banks, prompting McCarthy to pull all five of his nominees. She had already chosen Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) as one of her eight seats on the committee; yesterday she added Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) as well. Both Cheney and Kinzinger are Movement Conservatives, but they are not willing to jump on the Trump bandwagon.
Today, when PBS correspondent Yamiche Alcindor asked McCarthy what he thought of Cheney and Kinzinger’s participation on the committee, he called them “Pelosi Republicans.” He has suggested that they might face sanctions from the party for their cooperation with the committee.
Both Cheney and Kinzinger voted for Trump. Cheney voted with Trump more than 90% of the time. Kinzinger voted with him 99% of the time in the president’s first two years in office. Trying to make them into Democrats because they did not support the insurrection is a double-edged sword. McCarthy is trying to read them out of the Republican Party, for sure, but he is also tying the entire party to Trump, and it seems likely—from Trump’s rising panic, if nothing else—that the committee will discover things that will not show the former president and his supporters in a good light.
Today Representative Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS), chair of the select committee and of the House Homeland Security Committee, published an op-ed in the Washington Post. He noted that in a recent CBS News survey, 72% of Americans said they thought there was more to learn about what happened on January 6. He promised that “nothing will be off-limits” as the committee figures out “what happened, why and how. And we will make recommendations to help ensure it never happens again.”
Along with Thompson, Liz Cheney will deliver opening remarks from the committee before it begins to hear the testimony of Capitol Police.
But McCarthy and other Trump supporters are doing all they can to derail the investigation into what happened on January 6. The committee’s work is not a criminal investigation: that is the job of the Department of Justice, which has already charged more than 535 people for their actions in the insurrection. The committee will try to piece together the events leading up to January 6, along with why the response from law enforcement was so delayed. It will look at the response of the White House, as well as the funders and organizers of the rallies of January 5 and 6. It will look at members of Congress, and how they intersected with the events of that day.
Politico’s congressional reporter Olivia Beavers reported that McCarthy will try to counter the committee’s first hearing tomorrow morning with a press conference. Sometime later in the day, Representatives Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ), staunch and vocal Trump supporters all, are planning a press conference outside the Department of Justice, where they plan to demand “answers on the treatment of January 6th prisoners” from Attorney General Merrick Garland.
One of the hallmarks of a personality like that of former president Donald Trump is that he cannot stop escalating. It’s not that he won’t stop; it’s that he can’t stop. And he will escalate until someone finally draws a line and holds it.
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Notes:
Cheney:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-rino-rino-rino
https://apnorc.org/projects/views-on-the-infrastructure-bill/
https://www.oneillinois.com/stories/2021/1/8/kinzinger-voted-for-with-trump-before-turning
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/26/cheney-mccarthy-jan-6-investigation-500741
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/january-6-opinion-poll/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/26/bennie-thompson-jan-6-investigation/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/capitol-riot-arrests-latest-2021-07-22/
https://www.axios.com/jan-6-graphic-footage-capitol-attack-041e0422-42b7-4f4b-8d1b-bc55612733b8.html
Trump: “don’t let the Radical Left play you for weak fools and losers!” I'm always wary of people who overuse exclamation points, which normally happens when the writer lacks calm, intelligent arguments of their own. The idea of he/she who yells the loudest is right is juvenile.
I also judge people on how they treat others in person. For some reason an event has stayed with me. A few years ago, at the G-8 meeting, Trump lumbered into the room late. A man who was in a discussion with others did not see him coming as his back was turned to the President. Most people would simply say "excuse me" and continue on his way. But Trump physically grabbed the man by his shoulders and moved him out of the way without uttering a word. His attempt at proving that he was the most important man in the room showed the world that he was the smallest. I know it was a small thing, but his lack of courtesy and decorum demonstrated that he has no regard for others, neither on a personal nor global level.
It's a given that Trump does not study the issues at hand and his lack of introspection goes without saying. We know that he suffers from some type of narcissism disorder, which subjugates doing what is right for how he looks to the world. We must accept that he is mentally ill, which is a great danger to the country and the world.
Just a quick note on the House Select Committee. With its army of investigators, the truth WILL come out.
"One of the hallmarks of a personality like that of former president Donald Trump is that he cannot stop escalating. It’s not that he won’t stop; it’s that he can’t stop.
And he will escalate until someone finally draws a line and holds it."
Yes, it is indeed quite puzzling that a man that stood in front of television cameras and told thousands of people, some of them armed with deadly weapons, to head to the capital to overthrow the duly elected government transition, has not been arrested for sedition and treason.
If Trump or anyone had pulled that stunt in 1795, I think it highly likely that person would have rapidly faced the consequences of those times.
Tolerance for sedition and treason seems quite high now. I don't understand why, honestly.
Maybe the Justice Department is just moving slow? But, there has not even been an announcement of possible charges of sedition and treason pending investigation.
It is almost like Trump has some magical fairy that can keep him out of jail no matter how many laws he breaks in his life, how many people he grifts and shortchanges, which, have been many.