They Burned Down The House–And We Let Them
I am a Republican, but QAnon and other radical conspiracies that have been mainstreamed by President Donald Trump do not reflect my values. I am a conservative, but those who stormed the Capitol in reaction of the formal process of tallying electoral votes do not represent me. I am disgusted by those who claim to identify as conservative desecrate an institution that they claim they hold dear, and I’m angry that Republicans enabled it through perpetuating false hope.
A tinderbox was stoked in the weeks following the November election by President Trump, the Republican Party, and those who wish to curry favor with the President. Conservatives began to abandon Fox News in favor of outright conservative propaganda “news” channels Newsmax and One America News Network. The tinderbox may not have been directly lit by the President on January 6th, but I believe he, Rudy Giuliani, and Don Jr. helped make that tinderbox more combustible–using a phrase like “trial by combat”, as Giuliani used in his speech, is awfully incendiary.
As the events were unfolding, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy phoned the President asking him to make a statement to stop the violence, but rather than addressing the nation from the Oval Office to condemn the mob overrunning the Capitol, we get a bizarre Twitter response from the President of the United States:
These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!
President Donald J. Trump from his now suspended Twitter account @realDonaldTrump (transcribed from a picture from TechCrunch)
President-elect Joe Biden appeared more presidential than President Trump did that day. Vice President Mike Pence helped in facilitating the decision to call in the National Guard to help tamp down the mob and protect DC. The President appeared to be fiddling while Rome burned.
Order was later restored and the formal process of counting and certifying the electoral votes was completed. Whether you like it or not–whether you voted for Biden or Trump–Joe Biden will be sworn-in as the 46th President of the United States at noon on January 20th. The 2020 General Election is over.
The President appears to be coasting with most staffers packing up their offices and leaving the White House, and a second impeachment trial is pending–though, he will likely be out of office before a vote is taken by the Senate on conviction or acquittal. A conviction could potentially bar him from holding office in the future, but that’s for the Senate to decide. Republicans, however, will likely feel the impact of Trump’s cult of personality for years to come, and we have ourselves to blame. Republicans, rather than holding the President accountable for his reckless rhetoric, have been tepid in standing up to him in fear of losing voters.
I get it–he says what’s on his mind and some voters find that refreshing. He gets praise for saying what he thinks…or tweets. However, there’s a persistent fear that we will lose “the Trump base” if we go against the President. We (Republicans) can’t alienate the 74 million people who voted for Trump.
Beg pardon for seeing a long-term benefit in breaking the cult of personality to focus more on conservative ideals and how to expand our base. Not all Trump voters buy into the cult of personality–some are genuinely concerned about our country. Some, for example, have small businesses that have flourished with the rolling back of burdensome regulations. We need to listen and hear those voices who felt like they had no voice. Maybe we lose some of the die-hard Trump supporters, but I wager that we would gain more broadband support from voters.
The Republican Party, both here in Georgia and nationally, has an obligation to protect our brand. We loaned our brand to the President of the United States, and he has done a lot to tarnish that brand within the last week. Inaction based around fear of losing supporters is no excuse. It may not be popular to go against the President (and elected officials who wish to ride his coattails) in Republican circles right now, but we have to if we hope to retain any credibility at the conclusion of the Trump administration. We need to push back on baseless conspiracy and be vocal that it has no home in the Republican Party.
It’s time for us to speak the truth–even if it’s uncomfortable or unpopular.
About Author
nsmith
Father. IT Geek. Former 14th District GOP Chairman (2015-2017). Former Walker GOP Chairman (2009-2013). Resident of Chamblee. American. Georgian. Conservative.
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Before the Republic party can reclaim and polish it’s tarnish brand, it needs to come to terms that it was tarnished way before this last week, and already had smugges before January 20th of 2016. Trump found and targeted the people in the Party who would give him the primary. He took the darker side of an issue both parties wanted to fix and amplified it. He said the words that most people cringed over but let it go.
And why? GOP got lower corporate taxes (we all could have had lower corporate taxes in the Obama years if the House had not shelved his corp. tax proposals). We got military spending increases and troop pay raises (only after the GOP held congress stopped worrying over the national debit and cutting spending like they did from 2011-2016, which lead to the GOP across the board cuts’ silliness)… we got regulations lowered (even if industry didn’t want them and in most cases are not following them). Oh and judges. GOP got all the judges Mitch didn’t let Obama have and then broke his own rule exception to make sure the GOP got a 6-3 majority.
Was it all worth it? I mean, lets be frank, any Republican president could have given you this. Pence would have done so( AND MOSTLIKELY held the center right and never Trumpers in the 2020 vote) if Trump had been convicted when impeached.
But the GOP policies are not the issue. It’s the GOP soul.
Long before there was a Q, or Proud Boys, Boogaloo Bois and the Stop the Steal crowd, there were my former middle Georgia 20 year old neighbor telling me in a kindly voice over my Roy Barnes bumper sticker and a cold beer, the GOP came from Adam and Eve, the Dems evolved from the apes they still looked like and that was why Roy would loss. I’m not saying every one in the GOP is of that opinion, but just like the Dems need to admit they have bad apples, so do honest and real conservatives admit white supremacy exists in hearts and minds of good number of the GOP base. Not just the southern GOP but the national GOP. I see confederate flags fly in Wisconsin when I visit the family. I see it in the comments of my own family.
We are now to the point of a national disgrace, because no one took an angry mod of non colored people seriously so long as they got the tax breaks, and judges. Few saw Q or militias questioning a female governor not in their state as being dangerous, even when they were arrested for planning to kidnap and kill her. It’s also little things. A telling point is a police officer was killed by this GOP voting mob and lead another to suicide. Almost a hundred were hurt and Crickets from the Blue Lives Matter crew. Another is the outrage from the people who have been arrested by the FBI. They don’t think they did anything wrong. They are shocked they could go to jail. Would these exact same people feel this way if the folks be arrested were black or brown skin? You watch the local news interviews of these thugs and they are proud even as they are asking for the president to pardon them. The thing they are special, well at least more so then the black and brown thugs.
First step is admitting this is the current state of the GOP. It makes me sad, heartbroken and angry to say that. We need people of good faith and strong beliefs in their country in both parties. The GOP formed because the Whigs failed and their leaders passed away. Having grown up in the county that gave birth to the party of Lincoln, I want the Republican party to find it’s way again. Yet, it is going to take more then polish to fix the GOP.
The way forward is through telling the truth and listening. However this has been the GOP for decades. What kind of country would we be today if the GOP had kicked Strom Thurmond to the curb in 1964? What kind of country would we be if the GOP had not continually campaigned on white supremacy for decades? Trump is not anything new. He is who the GOP decided to be at some point and remember he listened to talk radio for a year before running for president. Apparently even his support of birtherism wasn’t enough for people like Paul Ryan to upend his nomination and replace Trump at the GOP convention in 2016. For far too long the GOP has been dismissive towards the concerns of people of color and women. In order to move forward the GOP has to take ownership of what they have done and tell the truth going forward. Like Ellyn above I have had many of the same life experiences with conservatives/Republicans the most noxious one being my roommate in the 80’s saying she was voting for Reagan based on the fact that Reagan hated ni**ers.
Thank you Nathan, for your well written and insightful article. I am a county secretary of a party that very likely is going to fall to the Q Anon crowd when we have our County Convention ina couple of months.
Your editorial reflects many of the same concerns that Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse expressed this week in the Atlantic magazine.
The things that are affecting the Georgia Republican party did not start with just Donald Trump.
We have a state 2nd Vice chairman who has gone around Georgia proclaiming that the only value in Republican women is to pump out Republican babies. With crazy talk like that it’s no wonder we have lost tens of thousands of viters in Cobb in Gwinnett County.
The Georgia GOP and its members need to decide if we’re going to allow the Jesus hate you wing of the Republican party in partnership with Boogaloo, the Proud Boys, Stop the Steal, the John Birch Society, and these Q Anon wing nuts to take over the party. Are we going to just outsource the party platform to whatever is featured that week on Alex Jones’s Infowars?
Whatever happens, I hope we resolved it this year so we have our A game on when we go after Raphael Warnock and Stacey Abrams in 2022.
It’s nice to see some Republicans are concerned about what your party has become. I’m a liberal independent voter who’s been afraid of the Republican party for years. It’s the party that’s all about letting corporations gut the nation. It’s the party of pretend morals. It’s the party of Faketriotism, where you wrap yourself in the flag while burning the Constitution. It’s the party of fear, that sent me about a million fliers saying that I should be afraid of Warnock and Orsoff and never telling me what the Republicans would do better. It’s the party that only loves money, which I believe the Bible says is the root of all evil. It is most certainly NOT the party of Jesus because he was all about helping the poor and sick, two groups the Republican’s clearly do not care about.
The Democrat’s rank and file are naive and overzealous but at least they want to help people. They want to get people out of poverty and they want to help the sick. Half of them don’t believe in the Bible but they do a much better job following Christ’s teachings than the supposedly Christian-right does.
The problems with your party started around the time of Reagan. Another cult of personality but at least he wasn’t nuts, or at least not totally nuts. I know you folks aren’t big on education but will you please teach your fellow “conservatives” that when spends all their time telling you out great they are and how horrible everyone else is and how they’re the only ones who will tell you the truth, that’s a cult, not a political party.
And I see folks writing about taking on Warnock and Abrams in 2022. THAT is your parties main problem right there. You shouldn’t be thinking about winning next time, you should be thinking that they’re Americans and you’re Americans and you both want what’s best for America. You may disagree on details but right now you should be thinking about how you can help Warnock and Ossoff and yes, Biden, to help AMERICA.
The left has plenty of issues too but the damned Republican’s for the last 20 years have talked like they had to win everything or burn it down. What I have longed for during those 20 years was an election cycle where the Republican’s lost EVERY race, and consequently they came to their senses, shifted to the middle where real people live, and we could have two political parties again.
That’s not quite what happened but this should still should serve as a wake up call. Please, please, get your collective head out of your posterior and try being Americans instead of Republicans.
Sad that there may have been little, if any, evolution in 50 yrs. In fact, given the way John Birchers were handled, one could argue there has been devolution. Devil-ution through demonization of the other. Georgians like Newt helped keep that road paved; nor should we forget things like how Saxby Chambliss painted decorated veteran Cleland as a terrorist.
I understand how so many may accurately point to hate and bigotry as The Issue. Yet hate may be but a symptom, and the disease is a systemic spiritual ilness. One could just as easily argue too many “Proud” boys and not enough “Humble” boys, or too much mental sloth and not enough diligence, or too much greed for power and not enough compromise. There are several so-called deadly sins in the mix there, and while none are relegated exclusively to any party, and vary of course from person to person, somewhere between 60% and 80% of the Republican party presently appears to be ill. (based upon polls about election validity, e.g.)
If any individual had such a systemic illness, we would excise what we needed to, then proceed to high dosage of treatment to kill off the bad stuff. How do you excise voters? You say you are not welcome here, do not think you are Republicans. They may still register as Republicans, and vote for Republicans, but if you lie to voters, you will be kicked out of the party. If you believe in QAnon, or hung out with white supremacists, you can not run for office (absent some sort of clear redemptive evidence). If you spew hate, or speak in coded racism, or blow dog whistles, we will actively confront you and disavow you. It would be Constitutional to do all this, exactly because the party is a private entity with a right to shape its brand.
I do not think such a policy would result in the collapse of the party, either, because I believe the large majority of the 60 to 80% of the party would follow the path of reason and spiritual health. There would be a loss of numbers, I feel inevitably, but in the trade-off between quality and quantity, one can recover from short-term loss in quantity, but quality is health, and if you let the illness remain in the body, there may never be a recovery.
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” — George Orwell
We have met the demagogue that the ancient Greeks and our founding fathers warned us about and for the sake of our republic I hope the storm has been weathered. I fear we still have too many that consider their political party over country on both sides, but at the moment the Trump cult is responsible for Washington resembling the armed camp it was during the Civil War. Yet, fivethrityeight’s aggregate poll had Trump going out to a 35% approval rating even after doing everything possible and a few things extralegal to cling to the throne. That being said however the overall support for him from within the traditional party appears to finally be waning with a prime example being Senator McConnell’s admission that Trump was culpable in the assault on the Capitol.
And yes we still have those who cannot see in front of their nose. They are blaming “Big Tech” for stifling their 1st amendment rights as if Big Tech is the government. Keep in mind that tens of thousands of accounts that Big Tech deleted 4 years ago didn’t even belong to Americans. Put that in your Trump xenophobic pipe and smoke it.
If the NBC poll is to be believed then 80% of Republicans still think that this was a stolen election. Just damn. See the Orwell quote above again.
OK, what can the party do going forward?
On the national scene go with the gift the Democrats are offering. Vote to convict in the impeachment. Rid yourselves of this cancerous despot. He never understood that loyalty is a two-way street. Pence was as loyal as a puppy, yet when he couldn’t support the 11th hour unconstitutional effort to change the vote of the people Trump sicced his mob after him with a noose. Trump has left a party in tatters; make sure he can’t pull a Napoleon.
At the state level purge yourselves of the racists and xenophobes who supported Trump primarily for that reason. You know they are there. See that top line again. The photograph that Jon Richards took a few years ago of a minority outreach dinner or some such even was pathetic with 1 token minority at each ten top. All I’ve seen lately is Snuggles, ‘nuf said. You can see how demographics are changing and frankly reapportionment will only go so far. Rather than trying to marginalize while still in the majority it would behoove you to appeal to all persons who may appreciate a lower tax/less government approach, not just white people. And yes that is what has been happening. See the Orwell line again.
Also, at the state level you should also purge those claiming this election was stolen, including David Shafer. It wasn’t. See that top line again.
Donald Trump is now history. Make sure he stays that way. Down at the bottom with Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Warren G. Harding. This too is obvious. Own it and rise above this dark chapter in the party of Lincoln.