Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The myths of demagogues collapsed too

Lost amidst the tangle of steel and roadway that fell into the icy Patapsco River in Baltimore on Tuesday were eight men pursuing their American Dreams. Two were rescued. Crews pulled the bodies of two others from the water on Wednesday. Four others are presumed dead. Will Bunch considers who the victims were and what their lives meant:

From the day in the mid-2000s when a then-20-year-old Maynor Yassir Suazo Sandoval crossed the border into America, he never stopped working. The youngest of eight children, Suazo was fleeing numbing poverty and a dead-end career path in Azacualpa, a small rural village in the western mountains of Honduras.

The undocumented Suazo wound up in Greater Baltimore, a magnet for Central American refugees with its relatively cheap housing for the bustling Eastern Seaboard, a friendly climate toward migrants, and lots of opportunity. With American dreams of entrepreneurship, he took menial jobs like clearing brush, then launched a package delivery service, and when COVID-19 ended that, started working overnight construction for a Baltimore contractor, Brawner Brothers.

Suazo was described by friends and family as happy, outgoing, and tireless. He had to be. While supporting a wife and two kids, he was also sending $600 to $800 a month back to Azacualpa, enough to help family members buy a small hotel and even support youth soccer. In Baltimore, he was what his brother called “the fundamental pillar” for a growing number of relatives who made it to Maryland. Home from the grueling construction work at 5 a.m., he was out working again by noon, picking up extra dollars cleaning yards, painting houses, or landscaping.

New arrivals like Sandoval, Bunch explains (as though it’s not right before our eyes), “take some of the most dangerous jobs in America, with construction ranked ‘a high-hazard industry‘ by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration because of risks like falling or getting crushed under heavy equipment.” * They make up about a third of the construction workforce and more than half of those killed in falls.

You’ve seen such men, as have I here. Latino men, like Bunch says, landscaping, roofing, painting houses, repairing roadways, etc. Others, men and women, perhaps second-generation, speaking unaccented English, operate my favorite Mexcian restaurant just walking distance from the house.

When the Dali cargo ship demolished that bridge support on Tuesday, it also obliterated all the ridiculous lies and myths our demagogues have been spreading around immigration. There were no sex traffickers aboard the Key Bridge that night. Nobody was dealing fentanyl. They were not “animals,” but fathers and husbands like Suazo and Luna, whose wife occasionally showed up in her food truck to bring the men tacos and pupusas. They were filling potholes so their children could have an even better life.

These six workers who perished were not “poisoning the blood of our country,” they were replenishing it. This is a moment of clarity when we need to reject the national disease of xenophobia and restore our faith in the United States as a beacon for the best people like Suazo. They may have been born all over the continent, but when these men plunged into our waters on Tuesday, they died as Americans.

Xenophopbia is the other national epidemic. Driven in large part by status anxiety, clods like Trump and his imitators teach their minions to hate what they do not know, and what their families have forgotten. (We’re all immigrants here, even First Peoples if you look back far enough.) But it sells when you’ve got nothing else to offer to people who feel as if they’re hanging onto what little they have by the skin of their teeth or by their fingernails. George W. Bush once spoke of making the pie higher. Trump is peddling zero-sum America. Keep your brown hands off my pie!

Status anxiety breeds hatred. Ignorance fuels it. Ultimately, was there ever a time when strangers were welcome here?

Harbours open there doors to the young searching foreigner
Come to live in the light of the big L of liberty
Plains and open skies bill boards would advertise
Was it anything like that when you arrived
Dream boats carried the future to the heart of America
People were waiting in line for a place by the river

It was time when strangers were welcome here
Music would play they tell me the days were sweet and clear
It was a sweeter tune and there was so much room
That people could come from everywhere

* Heavy construction work was my gateway to engineering school. Ask me sometime about the hazards.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

Four years ago today, as Americans were dying in hospitals, Trump went around his team of elite medical professionals to instead ask A-Rod for advice on how to handle his failed COVID response pic.twitter.com/C1PcZUm2XQ

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) March 28, 2024

The Very Stable Genius at work.

Those of you who’ve been reading me for 20 years know how I have felt about Joe Lieberman.

I’ll just leave this here:

Out of respect for Joe Lieberman's family, the early runs of our obituary will downplay his killing of the Obamacare public option, warmongering in Iraq, championing of Betsy DeVos, lobbying for China's ZTE, and co-chairmanship of No Labels.

— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) March 28, 2024

Merchan hit him with a gag order. Not that he cares. But maybe someone should look into a straight jacket.

Update:

After attacking over what court officials said was a hoax Twitter account that didn't belong to Justice Merchan's daughter, Trump on Truth Social attacks the justice's daughter again, this time by name.

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) March 28, 2024

The judges didn’t buy his defense of the coup attempt

During a disbarment hearing, Jeffrey Clark’s attorney argued his client shouldn’t have to take the stand because it could be played on MSNBC… pic.twitter.com/LpBy1aMsgG

— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) March 28, 2024

David Kurtz at TPM:

With the Jan. 6 case against Donald Trump ground to a halt and the no real prospect of the Georgia RICO case against him reaching a verdict before November, yesterday’s ruling against Trump co-defendant John Eastman in California may be the closest we get to a taste of a Jan. 6 verdict before Election Day.

In recommending that Eastman be disbarred for his role in the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election, a state judge issued a blistering ruling that treated the autocoup with the historic seriousness it deserves. It came after a full evidentiary record was developed over months and extensive legal argument, like a full-blown trial. Eastman plans to appeal, and ultimately the state Supreme Court will decide whether he’ll be disbarred, but in the meantime he is suspended from practicing law.

Some highlights from the 128-page ruling by state Judge Yvette Roland:

“Most of his misconduct occurred squarely within the course and scope of Eastman’s representation of President Trump and culminated with a shared plan to obstruct the lawful function of the government.”

“The evidence clearly and convincingly proves that Eastman and President Trump entered into an agreement to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress by unlawfully having Vice President Pence reject or delay the counting of electoral votes on January 6, 2021.”

In sum, Eastman exhibited gross negligence by making false statements about the 2020 election without conducting any meaningful investigation or verification of the information he was relying upon.

A bonus reference to Watergate figure Donald Segretti, whose own disbarment case in California was cited:

The scale and egregiousness of Eastman’s unethical actions far surpasses the misconduct at issue in Segretti. Unlike Segretti whose offenses occurred outside his role as an attorney, Eastman’s wrongdoing was committed directly in the course and scope of his representation of President Trump and the Trump Campaign. This is an important factor, as it constitutes a fundamental breach of an attorney’s core ethical duties. Additionally, while the Segretti court found compelling mitigation based on his expressed remorse and recognition of his wrongdoing, no such mitigating factor is present with Eastman.

A couple of years ago, as the bar proceedings against various Trump world figures were getting underway, I confess I grew impatient when my reporting team kept getting excited about this or that procedural development. Disbarment is weak tea for what we’re dealing with here, I would insist. And yet here we are with only the bar proceedings having provided anything like a modicum of accountability in a timely fashion.

It’s better than nothing …

Trump has “envoys” going around the world:

After an anti-corruption crusader unexpectedly won last year’s presidential election in Guatemala, democracy teetered on the edgein the Central American country. Amid law enforcementraids on election offices and threats of violence, the Biden administration worked feverishly to lay the groundwork for a peaceful transfer of power.

But not Richard Grenell, a former diplomat and intelligence official in Donald Trump’s administration, who arrived in Guatemala in January, days before the new president was to be sworn in — and threw his support behind aright-wing campaign to undermine the election.

Grenell met with a hard-line group that sued to block the inauguration. The group thanked him for his “visit and trust.”He defended Guatemalan officials who had seized ballot boxes in an effort to overturn a vote declared “free and fair” by the United States and international observers,and he attacked the U.S. State Department’s sanctions against hundreds of anti-democratic actors.

“They are trying to intimidate conservatives in Guatemala,” Grenell said in a television interview. “This is all wrapped into this kind of phony concern about democracy.”

Grenell’s intervention highlights the extraordinary role he has carved out in the three years since Trump left the White House. From Central America to Eastern Europe and beyond, Grenell has been acting as a kind of shadow secretary of state, meeting with far-right leaders and movements, pledging Trump’s support and, at times, working against the current administration’s policies.

It’s unusual for a former diplomatic official to continue meeting with foreign leaders and promoting the agenda of a presidential candidate on the world stage.Grenell’s globe-trotting has sparked deep concern among career national security officials and diplomats, who warn that he emboldens bad actors and jeopardizes U.S. interests in service of Trump’s personal agenda. In the process, Grenell is openly charting a foreign policy road map for a Republican presidential nominee who has found common cause with authoritarian leaders and threatened to blow up partnerships with democratic allies.

“I think Trump and Grenell would upend American leadership of the free world, from Truman on the left to Reagan on the right, and replace it with something much darker,” said Daniel Fried, who spent four decades in top State Department posts, including as an assistant secretary of state andadirector of the National Security Council. “It’s transactional. Democratic values are irrelevant, and it’s isolationist.”

[…]

His profile is rising in Trump’s MAGA movement, which hails him as a champion of the “America First” platform. Trump and his supporters view a second term as an opportunity to elevate his most loyal backers, who potentially would test traditional guardrails against abuse of executive power.

The former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., in an online chat with Grenell last month, touted his record as ambassador to Germany and called him a “top contender for secretary of state.”

“Your name comes up a lot in some very high levels. You’re in there with the base,” Trump Jr. said, adding that Grenell was “probably the only ambassador who spoke truth to power.”

Grenell calls himself a diplomat but acts as a rapid-response, war-room director, perpetually exalting Trump and trolling his political foes on social media and in interviews.

Grenell was nothing more than an internet troll when Trump lifted him into an ambassadorship and then Acting Director of National Intelligence. He was vert active in the coup attempt flying into Nevada to try to overturn the results. He is on par with Stephen Miller for sheer evil.

I don’t know what laws can be deployed to stop this unprecedented behavior but you would think there would be something you could do about a person who had a top security clearance as the Director of National Intelligence running around the world in opposition to the elected US Government. If there isn’t, there should be.

This person will be hugely important in a new Trump administration. Just think of it.

“That’s because you don’t have a criminal mind”

Back in my table-waiting days, a customer who had just signed his credit card receipt asked for the carbon copies (yes, that long ago). Noticing the quizzical look on my face, he explained it was because of reports of thieves dumpster-diving for credit card numbers. That never would have occurred to me, I told him.

“That’s because you don’t have a criminal mind,” the customer smiled.

On that, Ed Kilgore considers what steps Donald Trump took to steal the 2020 election. Several tactics he used four years ago are now “off the table.” But considering he would not admit defeat in 2020 and what he demonstrated he was capable of, what else might he try if he loses a 2024 reelection effort premised on keeping himself out of prison?

“Rolling Stone is reporting that the Biden campaign is examining a ‘comically long’ list of ‘nightmare scenarios’ that might develop. To be forewarned is to be forearmed, to a considerable extent,” Kilgore writes.

Trump won’t have the presidency this time, nor access to the Department of Justice or Department of Defense, nor to invoking the Insurrection Act.

“It’s easier to hold power than to seize it,” Kilgore advises. He runs through a list of tools Trump-the-challenger won’t have for turning an election loss into a stolen win.

Getting to the nub of it, Kilgore explains:

So what new election-coup tactics could Trump pursue in 2024? There is one terrifying possibility: the deployment of MAGA bravos to disrupt the casting or counting of Election Day votes in order to justify nondemocratic methods of determining the presidency. To put it another way, the more legislators and judges close off nefarious legal methods of subverting an adverse election result, the more Trump and his supporters may be tempted to resort to good old-fashioned ballot-box-stuffing violence. It would be immensely helpful to secure as many pledges against this lurch into open authoritarianism as possible among Republican elected officials and party leaders. And as an added safeguard, Joe Biden might want to win by a landslide.

Brynn Tannehill’s long Twitter thread considered what Trump and his MAGA allies might do to turn the U.S. into a Trumpistanian dictatorship if Trump gets elected. But my old customer reminds me that it’s not so easy for someone without a criminal mind to anticipate what Trump & Co. might cook up to seize dictatorial power after losing. The Biden-Harris “comically long” list of “nightmare scenarios” is likely not long enough.

They might have to hire former felons to thwart prospective felons.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

On casting stones at patients in distress

Consider where the American Taliban wants to take this country. For anyone who missed it, this clip below is the Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina. He may sound like he is a member of the lunatic fringe, but he is not. Mark Robinson is just shoutier.

The lunatic fringe right has gone mainstream. In fact, they’ve made it to the U.S. Supreme Court several times already. Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern comment on Tuesday’s oral arguments in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (AHM). They write:

In public, the plaintiffs in this case—a group of doctors and dentists seeking to ban medication abortion—have long claimed they object to ending “unborn life” by finishing an “incomplete or failed” abortion at the hospital. But in court, they went much further. Their lawyer, Erin Hawley, admitted at oral argument that her clients don’t merely oppose terminating a pregnancy—they are pursuing the right to turn away a patient whose pregnancy has already been terminated.Indeed, they appear to want to deny even emergency care to patients whose fetus is no longer “alive,” on the grounds that the patient used an abortion drug earlier in the process. And they aim to deploy this broad fear of “complicity” against the FDA, to demand a nationwide prohibition on the abortion pill to ensure that they need never again see (and be forced to turn away) patients who’ve previously taken it. This is not a theory of being “complicit” in ending life. It is a theory that doctors can pick and choose their patients based on the “moral distress” they might feel in helping them.

That is, AHM wants to define patients at risk of bleeding to death as medically untouchable based on subjective perceptions of their moral purity. No, they’re not joking.

The plaintiffs say they are terrified that one day, a patient may walk into their emergency room suffering complications from a medication abortion prescribed by some other doctor. This patient may need their assistance completing the abortion or simply recovering from the complete abortion, which these plaintiffs deem “complicity” in sin. And they say the solution is either a total, nationwide ban on mifepristone, the first drug in the medication abortion sequence, or a draconian (and medically unnecessary) set of restrictions that would place mifepristone out of reach for many patients. (The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5^th Circuit ruled to reinstate those restrictions at their behest.)

It is a twisted line of logic, one that should never have reached the Supreme Court in the first place. But it is also a product of the court’s past indulgence of outlandish claims about moral “complicity.” As was made plain in the oral arguments and briefing,activist doctors are no longer satisfied with personal conscience exemptions already granted under state and federal law; they now insist that nobody, anywhere, should have access to the abortion pill, in order to ensure that they themselves won’t have to treat patients who took one. At a minimum, they say, they should be able to radically roll back access to the pill in all 50 states to reduce the odds that one of these handful of objectors might someday encounter a patient who took it. This extremist argument lays bare the transformation of the idea of “complicity” from a shield for religious dissenters to a sword for ideologues desperate to seize control over other people’s lives and bodies.

Unclean!

Lithwick and Stern cover some of the back and forth of the arguments. This trend in the religious far right demanding the rest of America live by its most restrictive definition of fundamentalist freedom is not new:

All this is reminiscent of Little Sisters of the Poor, a case about a Catholic charitable group that was afforded an exemption from the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate. The Little Sisters were asked to check a box signaling to the government that they could not comply with the mandate, at which point the government would step in to cover their employees. But the Little Sisters refused, viewing this action—the checking of a box to opt out of coverage—as “complicity” in abortion because it would in turn trigger government payment for contraception (which they viewed as abortifacients). The Supreme Court and the Trump administration ultimately indulged the Little Sisters’ claim.

Here, we have emergency room physicians asserting that they will not participate in lifesaving medical intervention unless they approve of the reason for the pregnancy loss. Presumably, if the pregnant patient is an unwed mother, or a gay or transgender person, the doctor would be similarly complicit in sin and decline service. Seen through this lens, since one can never know which sins one is enabling in the ER, each and every day, a narrow conscience exemption becomes a sweeping guarantee that absolutely nobody in the country can ever have access to basic health care, let alone miscarriage management. (Of course, these plaintiffs might focus only on one set of “sins” they see as relevant.) In a country effectively governed by Kacsmaryk and his plaintiff friends, a gay person suffering a stroke could be turned away from any hospital because of his sexual orientation, all to spare a doctor from a glancing encounter with prior sin. As Tobias Barrington Wolff, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, put it to us in an email, this unbounded view of complicity “is part of enacting the social death of people and practices you abhor, which in turn can contribute to the material death of people and practices you abhor.”

Only the pure deserve to live, and that’s not you if you’re not them. You’re unclean, an untouchable.

One of the most exhausting lessons of post-Roe Americais that being “pro-life” definitively means privileging the life of the presumptively sin-free unborn—or even their “dead” remains—over the life of the sin-racked adults who carry them. This is why women are left to go septic or to hemorrhage in hospital parking lots; it is why C-sections are performed in nonviable pregnancies, at high risk to mothers; it’s why the women who sued in Texas to secure exceptions to that state’s abortion ban are condemned by the state as sinners and whores. And it’s why—in the eyes of the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine—it is a greater hardship for a physician to “waste precious moments scrubbing in, scrubbing out” of emergency surgery, as Hawley put it, so long as they don’t believe that the emergency warrants their professional services, than it is for a pregnant person, anywhere in the country, including in states that permit abortion, to be forced to give birth.

Heaven forbid doctors should ritually cleanse themselves only to have to touch a female patient who may or may not have engaged in acts that render them biblically unclean. Stoneable.

These arguments are, of course, untangleable from the right’s less-public demand that the traditional male hierarchy be reinstated to assuage conservative men’s damaged sense of being atop it, and that Christianity, a specific, radicalized variety, be formally declared the official state religion. You will live by their code, one way or another, and women will know their places. Ask Mark Robinson.

Robert Reich opined on the Alabama “frozen embryo” case last month:

According to a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution, more than half of Republicans believe the country should be a strictly Christian nation — either adhering to the ideals of Christian nationalism (21 percent) or sympathizing with those views (33 percent).

This point of view has long been prominent among white evangelicals but is spreading into almost all reaches of the Republican Party, as exemplified by the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling.

It is also closely linked with authoritarianism. According to the survey, half of Christian nationalism adherents and nearly 4 in 10 sympathizers said they support the idea of an authoritarian leader powerful enough to keep these Christian values in society.

During an interview at a Turning Point USA event last August, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., said party leaders need to be more responsive to the base of the party, which she claimed is made up of Christian nationalists.

“We need to be the party of nationalism,” she said. “I am a Christian and I say it proudly, we should be Christian nationalists.”

Think they won’t impose their will at the point of a sword, or a bayonet? Look back at the Christian nationalist banners dotting the Jan. 6 mob and the violence now excused as patriotism by Trump.

Invest now in burkas.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

What BS

Former White House counsel Pat Philbin testified at Jeffrey Clark’s disbarment hearing and talked about the chaotic post-election period at the White House:

“I tried to explain to him that it was a bad idea for multiple reasons,” Philbin recalled Tuesday at a long-delayed disbarment hearing for Clark. “He would be starting down a path of assured failure … If by some miracle somehow, it worked, there’d be riots in every major city in the country and it was not an outcome the country would accept.”

It was Philbin’s first public testimony about the chaotic final days of the Trump presidency since he left the White House. Though Philbin has spoken to both the Jan. 6 select committee and the federal grand jury that indicted Trump for his effort to seize a second term, no transcript or recording of his remarks has even been released.

Philbin’s description of his interactions with Clark shed new light on the frenzied effort by Trump to remake the Justice Department into a tool of his bid to cling to power despite losing the election — a remarkable new account more than three years after a mob of pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol in his name. His testimony followed Richard Donoghue, a former acting deputy attorney general.

Together, the two men described a White House that had let down all guardrails, with conspiracy theories about election fraud reaching Trump, who was an eager recipient of even implausible claims of fraud. Clark, too, embraced some of those claims, they said.

Philbin described feeling relief in the first days of January 2021 when he heard that Trump had ditched plans to appoint Clark as acting attorney general. But he quickly learned in discussions with his boss, Pat Cipollone, and two top DOJ officials — acting attorney general Jeff Rosen and his deputy Richard Donoghue — that the effort had been revived. The men agreed that Philbin should speak to Clark, owing to their decadeslong relationship, and attempt to discern what was happening.

Philbin, who testified for about two hours on Tuesday, described Clark as wildly misinformed about claims of election fraud — countenancing a theory about “smart thermostats” being used to manipulate voting machines — and not sufficiently cognizant of the havoc it would wreak on the country if his plan succeeded. But he said Clark seemed “100 percent sincere” in his beliefs.

“I believe that he felt that he essentially had a duty,” Philbin said. “I think Jeff’s view was that there was a real crisis in the country and that he was being given an opportunity to do something about it.”

When Philbin warned Clark that there would be riots in every major American city if Trump reversed the outcome of the election, Clark responded, “Well, Pat, that’s what the Insurrection Act is for,” Philbin recalled.

Clark, in Philbin’s telling, was referring to a 19th-century federal law that permits the president to use the military to quell civil unrest, an indication that he recognized the grave implications of his efforts. Though it was Philbin’s first time publicly discussing the exchange, the conversation was captured in special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump — without naming either Philbin or Clark, though the identities of both speakers were easily discerned. On Tuesday, Philbin was asked to elaborate on this discussion.

“I don’t think I said anything on the phone. I just thought that that showed a lack of judgment,” he said. “Triggering riots in every major city in America, you’ve got to be really sure about what you’re doing and have no alternatives … In my estimation, that was not the sort of situation we were talking about.”

No, no, no. This was not a “lack of judgement.” The election was on the up and up. Courts all over the country looked at it. There were recounts and audits and Republican officials validated the results. These ideas were batshit crazy and they were solely due to the fact that Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist with a psyche so fragile that he could not accept that he had lost. That’s all it was.

The rest of those nutbags like Clark are either brain damaged or cynical opportunists who saw that Trump has a talent for making people believe lies simply by repeating them over and over again. Either way, there was never any merit in any of this and Philbin obviously knows that and yet is still soft-peddling just what a monumental crime these people perpetrated on the American people.

No? Then you need not apply to the RNC

Trump is making “You can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes” a litmus test to work at the Republican Party.”

Those seeking employment at the Republican National Committee after a Trump-backed purge of the committee this month have been asked in job interviews if they believe the 2020 election was stolen, according to people familiar with the interviews, making the false claim a litmus test of sorts for hiring.

In recent days, Trump advisers have quizzed multiple employees who had worked in key 2024 states about their views on the last presidential election, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private interviews and discussions. The interviews have been conducted mostly virtually, as the prospective future employees are based in key swing states.

“Was the 2020 election stolen?” one prospective employee recalled being asked in a room with two top Trump advisers.

The question about the 2020 election has startled some of the potential employees, who viewed it as questioning their loyalty to Trump and as an unusual job interview question, according to the people familiar with the interviews. A group of senior Trump advisers have been in the RNC building in recent days conducting the interviews.

The questions about the 2020 election were open-ended, two people familiar with the questioning said.

“But if you say the election wasn’t stolen, do you really think you’re going to get hired?” one former RNC employee asked.

“Candidates who worked on the front line in battleground states or are currently in states where fraud allegations have been prevalent were asked about their work experience,” RNC and Trump spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez said in a statement Tuesday. “We want experienced staff with meaningful views on how elections are won and lost and real experience-based opinions about what happens in the trenches.”

RNC staffers were told en masse in early March that they were being let go but could reapply for jobs, and the application process has included an interview with the Trump advisers. The Trump advisers this week are vetting both former employees and some laid-off employees — whose last day is Friday — to decide how many can either return or stay with the RNC.

Doug Heye, a longtime GOP strategist who worked as communications director at the RNC, said the party had long expected staffers to mimic the positions of its presidential candidates. “You’re there for that specific reason,” he said, “to back the candidate up and go along with the worldview.”

But nominees other than Trump wouldn’t make such outlandish claims, he said, or put employees in such an uncomfortable spot.

“The problem with Trumpism is that despite bringing in very smart and very capable people, if you want to play Trump’s game, you have to back him up on everything he says. Claims about the election being stolen is kind of the last frontier of that,” Heye said.

Other questions have included what they believe should be done on “election integrity” in 2024, along with basic questions about their job responsibilities, their previous employers and their opinions on how things are going at the RNC.

Instead of having employees based in Washington, Trump advisers have told prospective employees that many will be expected to move to Palm Beach, Fla., to be near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, hollowing out the RNC headquarters. RNC officials have said it is about combining the operations of the campaign and the committee for maximum use ahead of the general election.

It’s only a matter of time before they’re required to make a formal oath of loyalty to Donald Trump and say “Hail Trump!” when he enters the room. And I’m not kidding. That could easily happen. He’s already got them saluting to the “January 6th choir” at his rallies.