The Conservative Political Action Conference wrapped up their annual party on Sunday with a dystopian storyteller spinning a tale of political intrigue and skulduggery to an audience of screaming fans.
Trump repeated all the lies he had told over a four year assault on America and the people’s ability to discern fact from fiction. He demonized immigrants, people seeking colorblind justice, attempts to improve access to healthcare for all, those who would try to save a planet from the human assault upon it and all countries other than our own. He would celebrate money. Stock prices, employment at the expense of livable wages, the very rich paying less and less and getting more and more, a bottom-line vision for a country of victims of this way of governing human beings.
He doubled down on what we now call the Big Lie, a term appropriated from the Third Reich’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels. Alternately referred to as “the little doctor” and “the rat” by party insiders, Goebbels used the concept of the Big Lie as a central philosophy in population control. The idea was the bigger the lie the easier it was to sell, as people would find it impossible that something so outrageous would be suggested if it wasn’t true. Goebbels Big Lie created a fear and loathing of the Jew.
Trump used the concept unrelentingly, and his victims were countless and varied. Whenever he made another egregious misstep in his failed attempts at leadership, a new scapegoat would be needed and Trump would craft the lie that would deflect responsibility onto an unsuspecting innocent victim. Careers and reputations would be destroyed and the loyalists would believe that it was the right thing to do, that these people had attacked the very core of American values and had to be excised.
He quickly gained grovelling political boot lickers when it was clear how dire the consequences were likely to be if you criticized him, even with the most tepid reserve.
But now that was all ingrained in the Republican Party. Four years of this reign of terror left the party with a platform of hate. Not really any policies of a recognizable form, just hate, victimhood, rage and vengeance. The new GOP health plan, for example, had been touted during the entire Trump presidency, but it had never actually existed. There was no policy. The imminent defeat of Covid-19 was a continuous refrain over the last year, but there was no policy, just a mounting death toll with no plan to stop it. An enormous give-away to the very rich was crafted into tax law, but there was no inkling of how it would be paid for, no coherent policy for the historic theft. On and on it would go. The GOP adopted it all and joined in parroting the Big Lies necessary to gaslight a nation.
But now there is just one central Big Lie that will allow all the others to stand, allow more to be crafted, enforce the dumbing down of an entire sector of our population for the continuing victimization of them.
The Stolen Election Lie.
This lie is specifically designed to enrage the faithful, to make them feel wronged, so wronged they are willing to fight back by any means necessary. They proved the willingness to do so on January 6th and Trump’s CPAC speech was designed to keep them at the razor’s edge, ready for anything, righteous indignation the fuel for their own destruction.
He got plenty of support. Donald Trump Jr. tried to rename the event TPAC (you can figure that out), though honestly that got very little traction. Ted Cruz auditioned for “Braveheart”, screaming “Freedom!” to wrap up his speech in a throaty growl. It got a cheer though it sounded forced and not a little embarrassed. Josh Hawley got a better reception as he seemed more sane than Ted. The fact is, while saying absurd things that were truly adversarial to American democracy, he seemed controlled, educated, prepared and ready to put the faux intellectual justifications to work undermining the American voter. For those of us who see through the ruse that is being crafted, while Cruz solidified his wacko bona fides, Josh Hawley looked like a very dangerous player in the game.
Trump also announced there would be no third party established to be a counterpoint to the GOP. While news outlets as disparate as the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal all reported on Trump floating the idea of starting the new party and even suggesting the name Patriot Party, Trump dismissed the reporting, as usual, as “fake news”. He correctly told the crowd that the formation of another party would simply split their vote and weaken the growing new Reichstag, so he would remain a Republican.
The new party would have been the death knell for the conservative voice in politics. Someone got through to him and the light went on and the Patriot Party died with that realization, but that moment will make the crumbling of the GOP less predictable, more dependent on the emergence of Republican leaders of integrity who will stand up against the avalanche of misinformation and outright lies. If they can be found they will need to build a following of a loyal GOP base that have become embarrassed by what their party has become. That base will have to be willing to lose elections to win back the party.
This is a very tough get.
Every time we have seen signs of a Republican ethical spine, whiplash ensues. After voting to acquit Trump in the most recent impeachment trial on grounds that the Senate had no constitutional grounds to even hear the case, Mitch McConnell, in a speech before his colleagues, laid the blame for the insurrection directly at the feet of the President, calling his actions a “…dereliction of duty.” But even before the CPAC charade began McConnell, when asked if he would support a Trump candidacy in 2024, responded simply “Absolutely.”
Nikki Haley, former U.N. Ambassador under Trump, in an address to Republican National Committee members said that the former President “will be judged harshly by history.” After the CPAC appearance she tweeted “Strong speech by President Trump about the winning policies of his administration and what the party needs to unite behind moving forward. The liberal media wants a GOP civil war. Not gonna happen.”
Big players are seeing the writing on the wall. While the poisonous rhetoric of the Trump base carries the threat of their utter destruction, it also seems to be the only hope for survival, as the party has been hijacked by a white supremacist majority, if not explicitly stated then implicitly supported by political decision making like Muslim bans and human carnage at the border. Actual leadership has become personally toxic and untenable.
That leaves us with the straw poll.
At every CPAC conference a straw poll is taken to see who the faithful support for an imagined next presidential election. Romney has won four times in the past, but his name would not appear on the list at all this year. Completely predictably, Trump won the poll with 55% saying they would vote for him in a 2024 primary. The next closest was Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a staunch Trump supporter and uniquely heartless Covid-19 minimizer in a state heavily populated by the most vulnerable. He got 21% but may have been aided by the fact the conference took place in Orlando. Squinting at the two leaders in third place was South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, who had gained support among the base by never shutting down her state, never having a mask mandate and inviting a massive motorcycle rally to go forward that led to a predictable expansion of the disease. She vilified Dr. Anthony Fauci in her speech to great applause, and they rewarded her with a 4% take in the straw poll.
From there it was all downhill. Several also rans included the Trump kids, Don Jr. and Ivanka. Eric was not mentioned. But among those also-rans were the newest darlings of the the Big Lie propaganda machine, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley. Two and one percent repectively was all the energy they managed to supply to the grid. Barely a ripple.
Another statistic stood out from the poll, one that should give the Republican Party pause. Only 68% of those polled thought Trump should run at all. A robust 32% of the most right wing representation of the party that attends the conference feels he should not be in the conversation, period. Immediately after a significant loss of the presidency, the party has chosen the loser as their leader, and because of that they risk losing nearly a third of the party’s support that they had not already lost.
It is hard to see the path to victory with this math.
Going forward we will see the increased legal woes that will dog the former president, the real possibility of criminal prosecution and conviction. The already daunting 32% is likely to grow as his unsuitability becomes more of an indisputable conclusion, even for those that hate to admit it. No heir-apparent seems to be appearing on the horizon, unsurprisingly as Trump would quickly clip the wings of anyone with the audacity to challenge his ownership of the party.
State legislators see the writing on the wall, and are desperately creating bills that will cut back on voting rights, making it harder and harder for marginalized people to be heard, people that are targeted victims of what passes for Republican policy making. The packed far-right wing state legislators will try to steal what they can’t win, and they will have some successes. It will take an army of visionaries like Stacey Abrams of Georgia to make their attempts fail, but Abrams success there will empower a new generation of freedom fighters. The fight for 2022 has already begun and everything is at stake. The GOP is fighting for its very life.
Tellingly, there was almost no talk of policy points at CPAC. There is not a platform that people are excited about, a plan to implement, a vision to enact and run on. There is a man, a person that embodies the darkest parts of all of us, the part of us that can not be committed to paper, to be brought fully into the light as an acknowledged aspiration. It can never be a platform, with planks to be debated and supported. Donald Trump is all the things we can’t admit to. For some of us they are the cross to bear, the things we reject in ourselves, that we fight and refuse to give dominion to. We pursue our better angels, as Lincoln asked us to aspire to. For others it is the part of them that society forbids and they resent it. They long to let the hate flag fly, to stop being embarrassed for identifying the “other” and declaring their superiority over them, their right to their privileged place in a world of their own making.
Democracy was a mistake to these people. This is about rule, and Trump gets it.
At least, that’s what 68% of the minority party thinks.
The Patriot Party is largely unnecessary.
The Republican Party is rotting from within.