… even than the old generation. Marjorie Taylor Green is the new paradigm. Rejecting Democratic legitimacy is a given:
A Republican House candidate from Wisconsin says he is appalled by the violence he witnessed at the Jan. 6 rally that turned into the siege at the Capitol. But he did not disagree with G.O.P. lawmakers’ effort to overturn the presidential election results that night.
In Michigan, a woman known as the “MAGA bride” after photos of her Donald J. Trump-themed wedding dress went viral is running for Congress while falsely claiming that it is “highly probable” the former president carried her state and won re-election.
And in Washington State, the Republican nominee for governor last year is making a bid for Congress months after finally dropping a lawsuit challenging his 2020 defeat — a contest he lost by 545,000 votes.
Across the country, a rising class of Republican challengers has embraced the fiction that the 2020 election was illegitimate, marred by fraud and inconsistencies. Aggressively pushing Mr. Trump’s baseless claims that he was robbed of re-election, these candidates represent the next generation of aspiring G.O.P. leaders, who would bring to Congress the real possibility that the party’s assault on the legitimacy of elections, a bedrock principle of American democracy, could continue through the 2024 contests.
Dozens of Republican candidates have sown doubts about the election as they seek to join the ranks of the 147 Republicans in Congress who voted against certifying President Biden’s victory. There are degrees of denial: Some bluntly declare they must repair a rigged system that produced a flawed result, while others speak in the language of “election integrity,” promoting Republican re-examinations of the vote counts in Arizona and Georgia and backing new voting restrictions introduced by Republicans in battleground states.
They are united by a near-universal reluctance to state outright that Mr. Biden is the legitimately elected leader of the country.
If 2022 is one of those proverbial “shellackings” as everyone expects, it appears we’re going to have a large Marjorie Taylor Green faction in the House. In fact, don’t be surprised if they end up deposing McCarthy and putting one of their own in charge.
I hear that Democrats don’t want their candidates to talk too much about Trump or run to hard against GOP extremism because they think the best way to win is to talk up the economy and whatever other positive things they can conjure. (At this point, I’m not sure what those things will be, other than “the GOP is out of power” which perhaps falls under the “speak no evil” edict.) So, I guess the campaigns against these people will be all about health care?
I don’t know. But in America 2021, it sure seems to me that hate trumps love in American politics. But I guess we can hope that if Trump isn’t on the ballot his cult will tune out, even if Trump clones are running all over the country. It looks like that may be our best hope.