Trump’s congressional claque looked at their toes
by digby
TPM reports on Justin Amash’s journey from Freedom Caucus member to lone wolf:
New details have emerged on what led to Rep. Justin Amash’s (I-MI) formal withdrawal from the Republican Party in July.
According to a Washington Post report out Tuesday, the spat between President Donald Trump and Rep. Mark Sanford (R-SC), a fellow House Freedom Caucus member and unapologetic Trump critic, forced Amash to reconsider what it meant to be part of the party.
During a meeting with Republican congressmen in late June, the President had sarcastically congratulated Sanford — who wasn’t in attendance — “on running a great race” after losing his primary to a Trump-aligned GOP candidate. That same night, Sanford found out what Trump had said and learned that Amash had his back during a dinner with fellow Freedom Caucus members.
“Justin said, ‘We have to defend Mark, because if he goes after him, he could go after any of us,’” Sanford told the Post. “Everyone else there, well, they just kinda stared at their toenails.”
As the Post noted, Freedom Caucus founding member Mick Mulvaney is now Trump’s acting chief of staff and budget director, and Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Mark Meadows (R-NC) have become some of the President’s most vehement defenders.
Amash left that dinner frustrated as he realized that the Freedom Caucus was just another group of Trump cheerleaders, the Post reported. Up until then, Amash had felt that the Caucus had more of a backbone, especially when its members would criticize Barack Obama on spending and what they felt was executive overreach.
It took that long? Hmmm. I’m not sure I buy that. I think he just thought he could live with this:
He told the Post that it’s all basically “performance art” and that he was not shocked that his fellow Caucus members turned toward Trump as a way to “survive until the next season.” Amash added that most would be surprised by what these same people say about the President off-camera.
The cowardly sycophants throwing one of their own overboard was the straw that broke the camel’s back:
Amash decided that “he’d had enough of the show” shortly after the dust-up over Sanford. The next day, Amash tweeted that Trump’s visit was a “dazzling display of pettiness and insecurity,” and took time away from the Freedom Caucus.
“He ghosted them,” Corrie Whalen, Amash’s former communications director, told the Post.
After Trump had mocked Amash’s departure from the GOP in July, the Freedom Caucus refused to come to his defense.
The Freedom Caucus sycophants are banking on the fact that if Trump wins their power will be uncontested and if he loses, everyone will be anxious to “get back to normal” and they can start shrieking about the deficit and entitlements again as if nothing ever happened. Either way, it’s win-win for them.
I am terrified that they are right. If the first happens, we are hopelessly screwed on every level. As for the second, I see very little appetite among the Democrats for putting an end to this charade once and for all. Trump didn’t invent it. He is just the grotesque mutation of what the right wing has been all along.
Democratic officials, like all of us, are exhausted with this non-stop GOP assault on reality. But their destructive behavior is killing us, literally in some cases with guns, climate change and the re-emergence of fascist nationalism. They need to fight.
But I honestly don’t have a lot of faith that they will do it. I can see us simply moving on to the usual economic arguments about debt and programs and entitlements and this anti-democratic, fascist movement will continue to fester and grow until it finally empowers someone who really knows what to do with it.
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