That GOP crackup we’ve heard about for years? Yeah. It’s here.
by digby
This is a fascinating podcast from Politico Global, well worth listening to:
For this week’s Global Politico, we convened eight prominent Republicans to answer the rapidly proliferating questions about a GOP that seems increasingly at war with itself—and heard two starkly different stories about a party that might have won the White House and both houses of Congress but sounds at times like it’s more on the verge of a nervous breakdown than a national takeover.
From five top Washington insiders like Heritage Action CEO Michael Needham, Republican Main Street Partnership chief Sarah Chamberlain, and former top advisers to 2016 candidates Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, came increasingly pointed laments about Trump’s “lack of presidential leadership,” his bombastic party-bashing tweets, absence of a governing philosophy and political compass ruled by a “collection of impulses” rather than a coherent strategy.
“This is a party that doesn’t know where it wants to go, but also happens to have all the power,” National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru says. “You’d have to say the Republican Party is in about as bad of shape as you can be while holding the White House, the House, the Senate, most governorships and most state legislatures.”
“There is a real governing problem,” adds Alex Conant, a Republican consultant and former top Rubio campaign adviser. “Look, I don’t care what the issue is, you cannot pass massive pieces of legislation without presidential leadership. There is no example in American history of major legislation passing without the president of the United States dragging it across the finish line. We just haven’t seen that at all from President Trump yet.”
It is just such thinking that infuriates Trump himself and his diehard backers, as was abundantly clear when I later interviewed for The Global Politico a second group that included strategist Roger Stone, a Trump friend and adviser of decades; Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, an anti-immigration activist now heading a controversial national electoral commission for Trump; and Kentucky-based commentator Scottie Nell Hughes. Not only were they not chagrined by Trump’s contentious first six months of his presidency, they urged him to get even more combative—against enemies within the GOP perhaps above all.
Stone, for one, says Trump should “throw Mitch McConnell and the boys over the sides so fast it would make your head spin” and fire his national security adviser H.R. McMaster for alleged ties to “globalists” like liberal Democratic donor George Soros. Stone even has unkind words for McConnell’s wife, Trump Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. Trump’s new chief of staff, John Kelly, came in for a warning after just two weeks on the job, with Stone saying the retired Marine general is already “on a very slippery slope” by trying to cut off Trump from hard-line supporters and the alt-right media.
“Will these quislings that he has appointed,” Stone asks of the president, “take him down?”
Hughes and Kobach, while less inflammatory in their recommendations, are equally supportive of Trump’s campaign against internal dissent and a party establishment that, Hughes insists, still hasn’t fully accepted last year’s election results. “They haven’t learned their lesson yet that President Trump won,” she says, attributing the backlash to a president who has exposed the hollowness of congressional Republicans’ repeated pledges to shake up a system they are in fact benefiting from.
The finger-pointing in both groups over the failure of efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare with a GOP alternative in many ways summed up the state of a party that is less a united team these days than a circular firing squad. Some of those I interviewed blamed Trump, some accused other Republicans of “lying” about their willingness to repeal the health-care law, and still others thought McConnell and the rest of their party’s leadership should take the fall for a failed process.
Taken together, the comments of the Trump flame-throwers along with those of the Washington insiders they love to bash suggest one incontestable fact they can all agree on: “Trump’s nomination,” as Stone puts it, “was the hostile takeover of the Republican Party.”
This story used to be pre-written about the Democrats with a headline “Dems in Disarray.” But even with all the usual infighting among the center-left and the left, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like this. But then the Democrats have never elected an unfit,cretinous buffoon president so perhaps it’s not a fair comparison.
Seriously, there’s never been anything like this. The modern conservative movement built a party based upon racism, xenophobia and nationalistic chauvinism and pretended it has something to do with “freedom” and “small government.” It worked for a while to contain this monstrous strain. The dam finally burst and here we are.
And frankly, it doesn’t sound like any of these Republicans have grappled with the real problem yet.