We are now living in a country where a candidate earns $100,000 of goodwill in 24 hours for assaulting a reporter and is rewarded with a congressional seat.
Republican Greg Gianforte’s victory was undoubtedly helped by the fact that most voters had already cast their ballot by the time news broke of Gianforte’s reprehensible attack on a reporter Wednesday night. But it’s not as if Montanans hadn’t a clue about the GOP candidate’s moral fiber.
Gianforte’s a multi-millionaire who ran on promises to “drain the swamp!” and joked about ganging up on a reporter after one of his supporters declared, “Our biggest enemy is the news media.” Sound familiar? Gianforte also repeatedly refused to publicly state what he thought of the GOP healthcare bill that guts pre-existing condition protections and will cause tens of millions of Americans to lose their insurance. But dodging questions wasn’t good enough, he eventually just unloaded on a reporter who asked him one question too many (i.e. two questions) about the legislation. Be warned, journalists: No follow ups for Gainforte or you’ll get clocked.
Suffice it to say, the guy doesn’t have a lot policy finesse and the days of John McCain correcting a supporter who wrongly called Barack Obama an “Arab” in ’08 are clearly over. Now we have direct political descendants of Donald Trump—rich, unaccountable and above the law—being elevated as supporting cast members for Trump’s Oval Office freak show. An old saying comes to mind for every Gianforte voter along with the three major Montana newspapers that originally endorsed him: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
If those voters like what they are seeing in Washington—and they clearly do—they just voted for more of the same. And they will reap what they sow: complete and total governmental dysfunction.
The GOP trifecta of control over the executive and both Congressional chambers (not to mention their Supreme Court edge) has done nothing but highlight the leaderless Republican rabble now presiding over a paucity of ideas. Paul Ryan was exceedingly lucky to even push through a health care bill that’s turned out to be so politically toxic, GOP candidates are now attacking reporters who dare inquire about it.
On the Senate side, Republicans are hoping to kick the can down the road. After convening health care working groups for several weeks, they now want to scrap health care altogether in favor of doing taxes first.
With health care negotiations sputtering, many Republicans are quietly turning their attention to changes in the tax code as a possible path for legislative success. Generally, Republicans are more unified around the fundamentals of a tax overhaul than on the details of health policy.
Good luck with that. The only reason tax cuts (forget about tax reform!) look easier is because Republicans haven’t started talking details yet. Those talks will go south too just as soon as they begin in earnest.
Because what we have now is a spectacle government fielded by GOP lawmakers who haven’t had a fresh thought in several decades and gladly buried their moral compasses in order to keep winning elections. Just look at all the Congressional Republicans who gave Gianforte a pass on physically attacking a reporter and then engaging in a smear campaign.
Republican voters, for their part, have been all too happy to mirror their leadership even after witnessing the havoc Trump is wreaking on our government and our century-old international alliances. He’s literally trashing the U.S. government from top to bottom and inside out.
But that’s okay. Republican voters are so all-consumed by their rage that governing has become an incidental consideration. When Gianforte finally apologized Friday after initially lying about the assault, his confession that he “made a mistake” was immediately met with a supporter’s reassurance: “Not in our minds!” Essentially, too bad you can’t pummel that liberal reporter all over again.
That spontaneous call and response just underscores the fact that Republican voters’ juvenile fixation on expressing themselves and their frustration now supersedes the necessities of electing lawmakers capable of or even interested in governing. Whether they’re just downright ignoring the Trump disaster or they don’t care, their support for him has stayed relatively solid over the past couple weeks even as he leaked sensitive intelligence to Russian operatives, subpoenas started flying on Capitol Hill, and the GOP’s inability to pass any major legislation has become all but a foregone conclusion.
While a Reuters/Ipsos poll last week found Trump hitting his lowest approval rating yet among Republicans, 75 percent, and this week’s Fox poll showed a 7-point softening to 81 percent, he faired two points better at 84 percent in a Quinnipiac survey than he had in the same poll earlier this month.
If there’s good news to be had here, it’s that because Republican voters have now proven they couldn’t care less about actual results, they’re poised to get more of the same self-gratifying spectacle from their favorite emoter in chief.
“It’s an entirely different atmosphere,” Michael Steele, a former Republican National Committee chairman, said. “The president isn’t ideological and ideology is no longer the anchor. So when reporters put microphones in candidates’ faces, they’re asking about the president, tweets, character, your moral outlook and not about a particular policy.”
In other words, the party is Trump, the ideal is Trump—he is the big idea and he’s swallowing the party whole.
And when the GOP enters next spring with nothing to show for their governmental monopoly other than the destructive force of Trump’s bluster, the GOP base along with Congressional Republicans will have successfully alienated everyone other than Trump’s 35-40 percent base of bitter enders.
That’s not a formula for continued electoral success. In fact, it’s a total loser.