"We can't let him trash the GOP," Ryan fumed, noting that Donald Trump

was not representative of the policies or the people in the Republican Party.

House majority leader Kevin McCarthy nodded in agreement.

When it was his turn, McCarthy joked that Trump had switched parties so many times he couldn't tell a donkey from an elephant.

Party leaders had failed to knock out Trump early, so now they were trying to coalesce around someone who could stop him. In the mean-time, Paul Ryan wanted House Republicans to distance themselves from the New York businessman, who they all expected would lose any-way. It wasn't just that Trump was hostile to GOP orthodoxy; he was breathtakingly ignorant about the rule of law, the Constitution, and the democratic system. The select group of lawmakers and staff were tasked with developing a platform that was the antidote to Trumpism.

From page 15

Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump

"We can't let him trash the GOP," Ryan fumed, noting that Donald Trump was not representative of the policies or the people in the Republican Party.

House majority leader Kevin McCarthy nodded in agreement.

“When it was his turn, McCarthy joked that Trump had switched parties so many times he couldn't tell a donkey from an elephant.”

That was Kevin McCarthy in 2016.

Kevin McCarthy today!!

"Deep Republican divisions erupted onto the House floor on Tuesday as a handful of far-right conservatives blocked a Pentagon spending bill from coming up for debate, dealing an embarrassing setback to Speaker Kevin McCarthy as he struggled to round up votes to prevent a government shutdown in less than two weeks.

In a development rarely seen in the House, five Republicans broke with their own party and refused to allow the usually broadly bipartisan military funding measure to be considered, registering their objections to Mr. McCarthy’s strategy in an escalating fight over federal spending. It left the chamber paralyzed for the moment, with little time before a Sept. 30 deadline to avert a government closure.

The stunning setback sent Mr. McCarthy and his lieutenants scrambling for a way forward both on their yearlong spending bills and a temporary funding bill that had already run into a buzz saw of opposition from the far right as the speaker faced fresh threats of an ouster from detractors in his own party. Even if it could make it through the House, the temporary spending measure stood little chance in the Democratic-led Senate, where its combination of deep spending cuts and stringent border policies was seen as a nonstarter."

MORE AT:

The New York Times

Right-Wing House Republicans Derail Pentagon G.O.P. Bill, Rebuking McCarthy

The floor defeat underscored the G.O.P. resistance Speaker Kevin McCarthy was facing as he struggled to round up votes to avoid a government shutdown.

Sept. 19, 2023

***

"The long-awaited federal indictment of Donald Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election may be necessary to contain the threat to American democracy that he has unleashed. But it’s unlikely to be sufficient.

The germ of election denialism that Trump injected into the American political system has spread so far throughout the Republican Party that it is virtually certain to survive whatever legal accountability the former president faces.

With polls showing that most Republican voters still believe the election was stolen from Trump, that the January 6 riot was legitimate protest, and that Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 results did not violate the law or threaten the constitutional system, the United States faces a stark and unprecedented situation. For the first time in the nation’s modern history, the dominant faction in one of our two major parties has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to accept antidemocratic means to advance its interests.

The most telling measure of that dynamic inside the GOP is that Trump remains the party’s central figure. Each time GOP voters and leaders have had the opportunity to move away from him—whether in the shock immediately after January 6, or the widespread disappointment over the poor performance of his handpicked candidates during the 2022 election—the party has sped past the off-ramp.

Polls now show Trump leading in the 2024 GOP presidential race by one of the biggest margins ever recorded for a primary candidate in either party. The Republican majority in the House of Representatives has been exploring ways to expunge his two impeachments and/or block the investigations he faces. Even the other candidates ostensibly running against him for the 2024 GOP nomination have almost uniformly condemned the indictments against him, rather than his underlying behavior. Prominent conservatives have argued that Trump cannot receive a fair trial in any Democratic-leaning jurisdiction.

All of these actions measure how much of the GOP is now willing to accept Trump’s repeated assaults on the basic structures of American democracy. While the key state-level Republicans rejected Trump’s direct demands to invalidate the results in their own states, most House Republicans voted to reject the election results and most Republican state attorneys general filed a lawsuit to decertify the outcome in the key swing states won by President Joe Biden. In the election’s aftermath, the majority of Republican-controlled states, inspired by Trump’s baseless claims of endemic voter fraud, passed laws on a party-line basis making it more difficult to vote, or increasing partisan control over election administration.

Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian who specializes in American politics, told me that U.S. history has no exact precedent for a party embracing a leader so openly hostile to the core pillars of democracy. Presidents have often been accused of violating the Constitution through their policy actions, he said, but there is not another example of a president moving as systematically to “manipulate the apparatus of government or elections in order to subvert the will of the people.”

The closest parallel to Trump’s actions, Wilentz said, may be the strategies of the slaveholding South in the decades before the Civil War. Those included violent attacks on abolitionists, suppression of antislavery publications, and the promulgation of extreme legal theories such as the denial of basic rights to Black people in the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, all of which were designed to protect slavery against the emerging national majority dubious of it. That decades-long “antidemocratic thrust” from the South, Wilentz noted, “finally culminated in the greatest violation of the American Constitution in our history, which was secession.”

By contrast, Wilentz added, the GOP’s continued embrace of Trump amid the evidence of his misconduct contrasts sharply with the party’s refusal to defend Richard Nixon in the final stages of Watergate. “When Richard Nixon was about to be impeached, he didn’t storm the Capitol to get rid of Barry Goldwater,” Wilentz said, referring to the conservative Republican senator who warned Nixon that he would lose a Senate vote to remove him. “He resigned.”

All of this suggests that personal accountability for Trump is unlikely to erase the tolerance for antidemocratic actions that has spread in the GOP since his emergence. Yet many experts who study the health of democracy still believe that prosecuting him remains essential.

Kristy Parker, a counsel at Protect Democracy, a bipartisan group that focuses on threats to democratic institutions, says it is crucial to show the “silent majority” of Americans who support the constitutional system that no one is above the law. “They need to see that the Department of Justice prosecutors are willing to take the risk of indicting Trump,” Parker told me. “They need to see the election workers ensuring that people get their vote counted. They need to see the police officers standing up to the rioters. They need to see people within the system working.”

MORE AT:

The Atlantic

Trump’s Threat to Democracy Is Now Systemic

Each time GOP leaders have had the opportunity to move away from Trump, the party has sped past the off-ramp.

By Ronald Brownstein August 2, 2023