Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The traitors and seditionists are looking for a way out

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Politico:

Inside the GOP’s week from hell

The big question for the GOP going forward is how last week’s events will reorder Republican politics. Specifically, how much power will Trump wield after he leaves office?

Republicans, at least the ones I spoke with, are unanimous in the view that Trump’s role in inciting his diehards has undermined his influence. The question is how much. Some say that we’ve lived through plenty of Trump scandals that haven’t loosened his grip on the party.

But before the election, Trump had a claim to a series of accomplishments Republicans could tout — from overseeing the confirmation of hundreds of new federal judges and three Supreme Court justices to defying conventional wisdom on the Middle East and China in ways that are likely to endure, at least in the GOP.

That won’t be his legacy. Rather, I suspect any accomplishments will be entirely overshadowed by his unwillingness to concede and his decision to incite a mob. As a practical matter, his role in losing the Republican Senate majority demonstrated that there can be a political cost for standing with Trump.

WaPo:

Talk-radio owner orders conservative hosts to temper election fraud rhetoric

After months of stoking anger about alleged election fraud, one of America’s largest talk-radio companies has decided on an abrupt change of direction.

Cumulus Media, which employs some of the most popular right-leaning talk-radio hosts in the United States, has told its on-air personalities to stop suggesting that the election was stolen from President Trump — or else face termination.

A Cumulus executive issued the directive on Wednesday, just as Congress met to certify Joe Biden’s election victory and an angry mob of Trump supporters marched on the Capitol, overwhelmed police and briefly occupied the building, terrorizing lawmakers and leading to the deaths of five people

Tim Alberta/Politico:

Jan. 6 Was 9 Weeks — And 4 Years — in the Making

I spent the last election cycle immersed in the metastasizing paranoia behind Wednesday’s assault on Congress. Nobody should be surprised by what just happened.

There is one thing that connects these movements: Both were born out of deception. Republican leaders convinced the grassroots of 2009 and 2010 that they could freeze government spending and reform entitlement programs and repeal Obamacare. Trump convinced the grassroots of 2015 and 2016 that he, too, could repeal Obamacare, while also making Mexico pay for a border wall and overhauling the nation’s infrastructure. The key difference is that the Tea Party slowly faded into obscurity as voters realized these promises politicians made were a scam, whereas the MAGA movement has only grown more intensely committed with each new con dangled in front of them.

Extraordinary message:

Timothy Snyder/NYT Magazine:

The American Abyss

A historian of fascism and political atrocity on Trump, the mob and what comes next.

In this sense, the responsibility for Trump’s push to overturn an election must be shared by a very large number of Republican members of Congress. Rather than contradict Trump from the beginning, they allowed his electoral fiction to flourish. They had different reasons for doing so. One group of Republicans is concerned above all with gaming the system to maintain power, taking full advantage of constitutional obscurities, gerrymandering and dark money to win elections with a minority of motivated voters. They have no interest in the collapse of the peculiar form of representation that allows their minority party disproportionate control of government. The most important among them, Mitch McConnell, indulged Trump’s lie while making no comment on its consequences.

Yet other Republicans saw the situation differently: They might actually break the system and have power without democracy. The split between these two groups, the gamers and the breakers, became sharply visible on Dec. 30, when Senator Josh Hawley announced that he would support Trump’s challenge by questioning the validity of the electoral votes on Jan. 6. Ted Cruz then promised his own support, joined by about 10 other senators. More than a hundred Republican representatives took the same position. For many, this seemed like nothing more than a show: challenges to states’ electoral votes would force delays and floor votes but would not affect the outcome.

Bob Inglis/USA Today:

A foreseeable fire: A steady diet of red meat turned the Tea Party into Trumpism

I could have joined my colleagues and survived, even thrived, in the Tea Party era. But instead I lost an election rather than fan the flames.

A House Republican colleague returned to Washington circa 2009 to tell us how he was going to survive the Tea Party. He was just back from holding a series of Obamacare town halls in his deep red part of Georgia. He said that he had learned how to handle the rabble-rousing crowd from a meeting that had gotten off to a bad start. The people were mad at him and mad at the world. Halfway into the meeting he found a pivot. He told the crowd that he got it — that they just want him to go to Washington and ‘raise some hell.”

The crowd roared their approval. He became an active Tea Partier that day and, subsequently, a full-throated Trumper.

Perhaps I should have learned from my friend’s example. It might have saved my seat in the United States Congress. I had had one of those raucous meetings. A man had risen in great anger to tell me that, President Barack Obama is so unpatriotic, he doesn’t put his hand over his heart when the national anthem is played or the Pledge of Allegiance is recited. (Apparently, he’d been surfing on some isolated internet island.)

Standing there in front of that crowd, I knew what I could have said, “What do you expect from a secret Muslim … non-American … socialist?” Any one of those responses would have done just fine at that moment.

“That’s our Bob!” the deep red crowd would have said.

I couldn’t do it. I thought of my five kids and wouldn’t do it. “I have been with President Obama,” I said to the man, “I have seen him put his hand over his heart. What you’ve just said is simply not true.”

Jonathan D Sarna/The Conversation:

A scholar of American anti-Semitism explains the hate symbols present during the US Capitol riot

One of the many horrifying images from the Jan. 6 rampage on the U.S. Capitol shows a long-haired, long-bearded man wearing a black “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirt emblazoned with a skull and crossbones, and under it the phrase “work brings freedom” – an English translation of the Auschwitz concentration camp motto: “Arbeit macht frei.”

Another image, more subtle but no less incendiary, is of a different man whose T-shirt was emblazoned with the inscription “6MWE” above yellow symbols of Italian Fascism. “6MWE” is an acronym common among the far right standing for “6 Million Wasn’t Enough.” It refers to the Jews exterminated during the Nazi Holocaust and hints at the desire of the wearer to increase that number still further.

These and related images, captured on television and retweeted on social media, demonstrate that some of those who traveled to Washington to support President Donald Trump were engaged in much more than just a doomed effort to maintain their hero in power.

As their writings make clear to me as a scholar of American anti-Semitism, some among them also hoped to trigger what is known as the “Great Revolution,” based on a fictionalized account of a government takeover and race war, that, in its most extreme form, would exterminate Jews.

Dr Danna Young/Twitter:

I’ve received several DMs from friends asking what do to about parents/family members who believe misinformation regarding the election, vaccines and COVID. Here’s a research-based thread to help explain the roots of these beliefs and how to (and how *not* to) address them. 

One of the things we are wrestling with in the misinformation/conspiracy theory research is that counter-information (“corrective info,” EMPIRICALLY TRUE FACTUAL EVIDENCE) has VERY LITTLE effect on people’s beliefs when those beliefs are rooted in political/social identity. 

In other words, for many of these folks, the evidence, the science, the facts… really don’t matter. 

For example, if your parents trust Trump and they distrust science/media/courts as institutions, and they identify w people/groups who think of themselves as “in the know” and “have the real truth,” then using information and argumentation and evidence is unlikely to move them. 

This is so so frustrating.
It’s crazy-making.
It’s worse than banging your head against the wall.

Cathy Young/Arc Digital:

The End of the Line

The edifice of Trumpism has collapsed. It was rotten from the very beginning.

One can argue endlessly about whether this was an attempted coup. It was, in the sense that a group of people — egged on and encouraged by a president who wanted to stay in office despite losing his bid for reelection — used force to try to prevent the certification of legitimate election results, presumably with the intent of reversing them.

On the other hand, neither they nor the president had any remotely plausible plan for undoing Joe Biden’s victory and allowing Trump to stay in power. This wasn’t Napoleon III failing to secure another presidential term in France in 1851 and staying in power through a “self-coup” supported by the military. (By contrast, on Wednesday, the acting secretary of defense, Christopher Miller — whose abrupt appointment by Trump on November 9 was seen by some as a possible prelude to a coup — essentially left Trump out of the chain of command, activating the D.C. National Guard after conferring with Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.) If anything, the actions of the pro-Trump thugs undercut the (doomed and performative) challenges to the election certification in Congress by prompting some GOP Senators to withdraw their objections in the wake of the violence.

You could call it a clown coup. (Klown Koup?) But the fact that violent thugs invaded and trashed the Capitol with the purpose — however unrealistic— of preventing the legitimately elected next president from taking power is an absolute outrage and an embarrassment to the nation.

Houston Chronicle:

Editorial: Resign, Senator Cruz. Your lies cost lives.

In Texas, we have our share of politicians who peddle wild conspiracy theories and reckless rhetoric aiming to inflame.

Think U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert’s “terror baby” diatribes or his nonsensical vow not to wear a face mask until after he got COVID, which he promptly did.

This editorial board tries to hold such shameful specimens to account.

But we reserve special condemnation for the perpetrators among them who are of sound mind and considerable intellect — those who should damn well know better.

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