To clarify the title of this blog post, I want to be clear that currently there are lots of things wrong with the Republican Party.
For example, the failure to acknowledge the reality that humans are causing global warming and we've got to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as rapidly as possible to prevent civilization as we know it from being tossed into the garbage can of history.
But there's a common denominator in many, if not most, of the flaws afflicting today's GOP: Donald Trump.
Trump, who sows discord and destruction with every step he takes, like a malevolent Johnny Appleseed, has infected the minds of the Republican faithful through his never-ending lies. Like other authoritarians, Trump is skilled at manipulating his followers to do his bidding, even when it isn't in their own best interest.
Ronna McDaniel is a great example of this. She was born as Ronna Romney, being a niece of Mitt Romney and a granddaughter of George Romney. So she started life as a member of a noted family of moderate Republicans.
Which was the moral high point of McDaniel's political career. For when Trump came along, she hitched her wagon to Trump's misbehaving horses. That led McDaniel down a path that many other of his acolytes have trod on.
Embracing falsehoods and helping to spread them, even though she knew they weren't true. The subtitle of a Politico story that appeared today speaks the truth: "Ronna McDaniel said the quiet part out loud on NBC: Public loyalty to Trump is at a premium in the GOP, even for those who disagree with him.
For sure.
Getting Democrats to move in the same direction is commonly said to be like herding cats. By contrast, getting Republicans to move in the same direction is like a border collie herding sheep. It just happens naturally, especially in this Age of Trump.
Expressing the courage of your convictions is a huge no-no if this conflicts with Trump's pronouncements. The Politico story says:
When Ronna McDaniel appeared on “Meet the Press,” the focus quickly settled on the outrage at NBC. But for everything her hiring at the network said about the media landscape, it was just as revealing about the state of the GOP.
Freed from former President Donald Trump’s gravitational pull, McDaniel, the former Republican National Committee chair, could now express beliefs that included such bromides as “people who violently attacked Capitol Hill police officers and — and attacked the Capitol” should be held accountable and that in the 2020 presidential election, President Joe Biden won “fair and square.”
It’s unclear whether McDaniel unburdened herself because she had a new benefactor in NBC and not the RNC. “I have no idea whether any answer she gave to you was because she didn’t want to mess up her contract,” said Chuck Todd, Meet the Press’ former host.
But what is clear is that McDaniel seemed to understand those beliefs were unutterable as Trump’s handpicked chair and that speaking them as she did — after his jettisoning of her from the RNC — flouted a large portion of the party. In her NBC appearance, the veil covering the kayfabe of post-2020 election denialism fell, exposing what one of the most prominent party officials thought in private versus what she said in public.
“Sometimes there is a price to be paid for politically expedient bullshit,” said Jason Roe, the Michigan-based GOP strategist whose parents worked for George Romney and who butted heads with McDaniel when he was the state GOP executive director. “It is the unwillingness, the lack of courage to say these things before that matters most, because these things have taken on a life of their own because people who know better didn’t say so, and they gain legitimacy.”
McDaniel didn't possess the moral courage to speak the truth during her time as chair of the Republican National Committee, RNC.
Like so many other Republicans, she was afraid of incurring Trump's wrath if she admitted that the 2020 presidential election was conducted fairly and Biden was the legitimate choice of the American people. Or if she acknowledged that the January 6 insurrection was an attempt to overthrow our democracy and must never be allowed to happen again, in any form.
McDaniel made a lame attempt to excuse herself on Meet the Press yesterday by claiming that as the RNC chair, she had to speak on behalf of the Republican Party even if this conflicted with how she really felt.
That's a bunch of crap.
It's one thing to convey the political positions of the GOP, even if she didn't agree with them. That's the job of a spokesperson. However, it's a whole other thing to contribute to the spreading of Trump's lie that the election was stolen from him and that the January 6 rioters are "hostages" rather than criminals.
Hopefully NBC will realize their error and fire McDaniel from whatever the heck they hired her to do at the network. It's fine to have conservatives as commentators. But it isn't fine to put people on the NBC payroll who bought into Trump's dangerous lies.
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