Coop Scoop: The GOP's Love Child Has Come Home To Roost Edition

Marjorie Taylor Greene As The Republican Future

February 5-6, 2020

Issue # 61

By Marc Cooper

Imagine the horror of the “adults” in the Republican caucus when one of their secret love children actually came home to stay. Would they now be exposed as something other than they seemed?  How to explain this sudden appearance by a bastard child to Wifey and the Kids?

Here these Republicans presented themselves as upstanding, somewhat puritanical, clean cut guys and gals, committed to family values, the honoring of heterosexual marriage, the American Way, honesty, decency, cleanliness and of course Godliness.  The very embodiment of rock-ribbed conservative values.

Who knew they had a double life?  When their friends were not looking they were out carousing all night and sometimes into daylight with a whole lot of unsavory folks: Nazis, Proud Boy fascists, racist militias, an unhinged dictatorial Maximum Leader and the backstreet riff raff of the anti-Semitic and plainly insane QAnon moondogs.

No surprise these extra-curricular activities have produced a whole litter – and I do mean litter—of  mutant offspring. A generation of upcoming Republico-Fascists, the most prominent among them (this week) is the addled Georgia freshman Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (heretofore to be known as MTG).

The lady has certainly sucked up all the media oxygen of the last week or two and with good reason.  The Republican Party, still in the grip of Trump and Trumpism, went out of its way to make her the face of the party’s new direction (though it isn’t really new as it is strikingly overt).

The post-Trump month will be noted in history as a definitive turning point for the Republicans.  We all knew it would be but nobody was sure what direction the party would take with the Liar-in-Chief exiled in Mar-a-Lago.

The answer is now in. The only detail left hanging by the Republicans is a name change for the party, something I still would not rule out.  I think the Nationalist Party would be more fitting.  The White Nationalist Party would be even more precise but not really political viable (yet).

Consider the steps taken over the past four to six weeks by the Republicans to best define themselves.

Much more than half of the congressional delegation refusing to recognize Biden’s victory.

Ninety-five percent of House Republicans voting to scrap the Senate trial for Trump’s second impeachment, not caring that he egged on and, in fact, incited the January 6 assault on the Capitol. 

All of a sudden these flag-waving patriotic “conservatives” no more than shrugged their shoulders after the pro-Trump mob, led by declared fascists, stormed the Capitol, beat one police officer to death, poked out the eye of another, broke the ribs of another, drove two other cops to suicide, injured as many as another 140 police, defecated on the House floor, urinated on the Capitol walls, shouted out death threats to congressmembers and to former VP Pence, brought guns with them, along with handcuffs and zip ties, and topped it all off with some pilfering and looting.

So what? If Coronavirus can be downgraded to “the flu” I don’t see why these same folks cannot mistake an armed assault on the country’s democratic nerve center for a simple “wild party.”

Then when ultra-conservative Daddy’s Girl, Liz Cheney (the #3 Republican in the House) voted with nine other GOP reps to impeach Trump, calls rang out that she be tarred and feathered.

In the end, five times as many Republicans (61) voted to strip Cheney of her leadership position than the meager eleven who voted to take away MTG’s committee appointments.

What’s more, several credible sources report that in the private meeting of the Republican caucus to review the cases of Cheney and Greene, the latter dolt was given a standing ovation by the courageous members of the GOP gathering.

This is all prelude to the next Big Vote in the Senate in about two weeks when, we can easily predict, that the near entirety if not the unanimous action of the Republicans will be to acquit Donald Trump of any responsibility for the January 6 attack.

This in spite of mounting evidence that a number of Trump aides and Trump himself were in on the planning of the attack that had been well-publicized in advance throughout social media.  And even if one argues that Trump’s incendiary speech that day is protected speech, there should be NO protection for a Commander-in-Chief who spent a couple of hours on his couch, wolfing down fast food, and watching TV to cheer on the rioters as if he was Superbowl fan instead of the President of the United States obligated to intervene and call it all off.

Check out this video that Trump played to the rally crowd on January 6th and tell me is isn’t redolent of Leni Riefenstahl’s work for you-know-who:

While the Republicans will certainly acquit Trump, his defense team is working with the Senate minority to try and limit how much truth can be told at the upcoming trial.  The Trumpies, of course, want to use their time on the floor to further propagate the Big Lie of Biden not winning.  But mostly they want to drown out what they know will be the devastating testimony about the severity and bloodiness of the assault along with Trump’s complicity in it.

It’s for this reason that we should all vigorously support the impeachment and the trial even if we know its ridiculous outcome.  The argument of the Democrats will not be aimed at their Republican colleagues, but rather at the American people who have the unrestricted right and necessity to see this sociopathic ex-President more fully exposed.

All of this raises the question of just why the Republicans have taken this course of becoming a radical, anti-democratic party with a more than embryonic domestic armed terrorist wing.

Isn’t the conventional wisdom that the outcome of this shift will be a marginalization of the party, alienation of all except the loonies, and a stack of coming electoral losses? It is. And I think that’s correct.

But I’m in no way sure.

Indeed, David Plouffe, who was both campaign manager for and Senior Advisor to President Obama, said in a podcast this week that Republicans see this conversely.  Paraphrasing now, Plouffe said if you look at the last election, the Republicans gained seats in the House winning 27 of 28 tightly contested races, held back to some degree the Democrats in the Senate, and swept up a number of state legislatures that the punditocracy had predicted would go blue. And Trump did, in fact, win more votes than any Republican or Democrat in history – except Joe Biden.

In other words, said Plouffe, Republicans see their current extremist course as successful so why change it?  “Just wait till 2022,” said Plouffe. “That’s when we’re going to see a whole lot more Marjorie Taylor Greens running for office and perhaps winning.”

I would be remiss if I did not devote at least a few lines to MTG herself, even with the tsunami of coverage for her.  I love the subhead on Erin Gloria Ryan’s piece in The Daily Beast on MTG:

 “Marjorie Taylor Greene is Sarah Palin but not occasionally charismatic. Steve Bannon but not occasionally smart.  Donald Trump, but not occasionally funny.”

No. MTG is a humorless and addle-brained fanatic with no political experience other than posting outrageous garbage on Facebook and other social media. In spite of her half-hearted denials on Thursday, MTG has most definitely praised QAnon and its anti-Semitism and its out of this world conspiracy theories.  She has advocated and endorsed killing her political opponents – Democrats. And has not worried at all about her stream of implicitly racist and demeaning views of just about everybody who is not a crazy Southern cracker like she is.

Stripped of all committee work by the Democratic majority, she now has plenty of time to fund raise (and she will be swimming in money) and to shoot off her mouth making old time Republicans like Mitch McConnell just grin and bear it.

Now, some might ask, why all the attention on MTG when congress is already packed with crazies like Ted Cruz, Louie Gohmert, Matt Gaetz, Josh Hawley, and so many others?

It’s because while all of the above are in the same ballpark as MTG she’s got the dugout seats and they are out in the bleachers. While independently wealthy, MTG is not part of any elite.  She did not go to Harvard like Cruz and Hawley. She did not work her way up the ladder by serving on the schoolboard.

MTG is one of millions of Mini-Me Trumps who could easily be the Republican future. Crude, raw, reckless, racist, insulting, and loud.  She’s the very personification of the New American Citizen that the Trumpies want to promote. And that’s why she scares the Bejeezus out of older more stolid traditional Republicans.  Her day has come and theirs is quickly fading away.

I have little doubt that Plouffe is correct in predicting a wave of MTG’s in 2022 and perhaps 2024. Truth is that the Old Guard Republicans, including the once omnipotent Mitch McConnell, are now a clear minority in their own party and arguably an endangered species.

One of the most worthy and disturbing pieces of reporting on January 6 comes this week from researchers Robert Pape and

Kevin Ruby writing in The Atlantic.  They conclude that, yes, the Proud Boys and other neo-fascist groups played an important role in the fracas but they were not the majority of the mob.  What they found was even more disturbing:

On January 6, a mob of about 800 stormed the U.S. Capitol in support of former President Donald Trump, and many people made quick assumptions regarding who the insurrectionists were. Because a number of the rioters prominently displayed symbols of right-wing militias, for instance, some experts called for a crackdown on such groups. Violence organized and carried out by far-right militant organizations is disturbing, but it at least falls into a category familiar to law enforcement and the general public. However, a closer look at the people suspected of taking part in the Capitol riot suggests a different and potentially far more dangerous problem: a new kind of violent mass movement in which more “normal” Trump supporters—middle-class and, in many cases, middle-aged people without obvious ties to the far right—joined with extremists in an attempt to overturn a presidential election.

Deploying more than 20 researchers to comb through every possible document and court record flowing from the event, they focused only on the approximate 200 people arrested mostly for just being in the Capitol illegally.  They excluded about 35 others arrested on serious crimes of violence by the FBI, most of those detained in fact being associated with known far-right and militant groups.

Some among this group of 200 were associated with one or another political sect or gang.  The overwhelming majority were not and they upend many pre-conceived assumptions. Pape and Ruby write:

The demographic profile of the suspected Capitol rioters is different from that of past right-wing extremists. The average age of the arrestees we studied is 40. Two-thirds are 35 or older, and 40 percent are business owners or hold white-collar jobs. Unlike the stereotypical extremist, many of the alleged participants in the Capitol riot have a lot to lose. They work as CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants. Strikingly, court documents indicate that only 9 percent are unemployed.

A majority of this group came from counties that went for Biden but that still have large reservoirs of Trump supporters. 

Big metropolitan centers where Biden won overwhelmingly, such as the counties that include New York City, San Francisco, and Dallas, still have hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters. A third of suspected insurrectionists come from such counties; another quarter come from suburban counties of large metro areas. This breakdown mirrors the American population as a whole—and that is the point. If you presumed that only the reddest parts of America produce potential insurrectionists, you would be incorrect.

I think the last graph of the story packs a powerful punch that should be taken to heart by all who want to defend democratic institutions.

What’s clear is that the Capitol riot revealed a new force in American politics—not merely a mix of right-wing organizations, but a broader mass political movement that has violence at its core and draws strength even from places where Trump supporters are in the minority. Preventing further violence from this movement will require a deeper understanding of its activities and participants, and the two of us do not claim to know which political tactics might ultimately prove helpful. But Americans who believe in democratic norms should be wary of pat solutions. Some of the standard methods of countering violent extremism—such as promoting employment or waiting patiently for participants to mellow with age—probably won’t mollify middle-aged, middle-class insurrectionists. And simply targeting better-established far-right organizations will not prevent people like the Capitol rioters from trying to exercise power by force.

I am as a reticent as the authors are in prescribing any fix for this chilling re-alignment.  If they are correct, it’s much easier to list all the gambits that will not work.  And this data challenges a lot of progressive assumptions: like the article of faith that Medicare for all or a $15 minimum wage or investment in green jobs in the heartland can demobilize some of these folks.

Yet, the bottom line remains the same. Trump wrought much damage and left behind a world of crap – most egregiously an untreated pandemic. We have also inherited from him a bona fide and mass social movement on the right, on the anti-democratic right. 

For the moment, Joe Biden is riding high with a 61% approval rating and even higher approvals for his $2 trillion COVID relief plan that the Democrats APPEAR to be willing to pass without any Republican support.  But nothing is written, as Lawrence of Arabia told his nomadic pal Ali.

I hate to say it, but when it comes to ground level organization and public advocacy (propaganda), the Republican Right seems to maintain a clear lead over liberals and progressives even if their voting base is smaller nationally and Biden is president.

We need a strong social movement on the center-left side of the leger to both offset the strength of the still kicking Trumpies and also to keep the Democrats as much as possible on topic.  The political state of play remains extremely fluid, the terms of engagement are changing daily and many of our assumptions are being put to a test of fire as the U.S. ponders whether or not to remain a democracy. +++

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