Delusions and the Republican Crack-Up

The GOP fantasy world of lies and deception finally confronts reality

Ask Ben Shapiro, conservative gadfly: the Republican electoral disaster of 2022 had nothing to do with abortion. Or fears the party would end democracy. Or January 6. Or election denialism. Or Trump exhaustion. Or the publicly stated goal of cutting Medicare and Social Security. Or its threats to send America over the financial cliff with its debt-limit blackmail.

No, Shapiro says, all of that was irrelevant to the GOP’s historically terrible showing in the midterms. It was all just a popularity contest, like a vote for the king and queen of the high school prom. “People liked the Republican agenda,” Shapiro intoned. “They just didn’t like the Republican candidates. And people didn’t like the Democratic agenda, but they liked the candidates better than the Republican candidates.”

Where did Shapiro get this idea? He made it up - like so much else the GOP has done over more than a decade. This is the political equivalent of a disease I’ve discussed before: Republicans just say things. Not based on truth, or evidence, or even logic. Instead, this habit dating back decades starts with what either the GOP politicians - or their billionaire contributors - want to be true, and from there they vomit out statements that not only are false, but often make no sense.

“Climate change is a hoax!” But…then why are all Fortune 500 companies and most industrialized nations preparing for it? “We’re going to outlaw abortion nationwide because Americans want that!” But…why do polls consistently show that more than 60% of Americans supports abortion rights? “Guns don’t kill people!” But…then why did shooting deaths drop when assault rifles were banned, and almost triple when the ban ended? 

Now this didn’t spring up from nowhere. It started in the 1990s, when Rush Limbaugh - who had hours to fill on the radio and no one doing any real reporting for him - spewed whatever nonsense came to mind. Rupert Murdoch, seeing the money to be made by making stuff up, formed Fox News. The entire conservative media bubble was built in the years that followed, and now Republicans who spend endless hours saying whatever is convenient have been trained in the “just say things” philosophy.

Nothing brings out the delusions and falsehoods more than a Republican electoral loss. We reached the point about a decade ago that the party decided, if they don’t win it has nothing to do with a rejection of their political philosophy. Shapiro’s argument is one. And of course, the endless claims of fraud - illegal immigrants voted, machines flipped votes, pens were secretly designed to prevent Republican votes from being counted, fake ballots were brought in by Democrats, yada, yada, yada, allows Republicans to avoid considering they might have lost because, well, they lost. 

Now, we’ve reached a new classic, pushed by Republican fools who don’t want to admit their own mistakes: Voters turned against them because the GOP wasn’t radical enough, and that’s Senator Mitch McConnell’s fault. 

Of course, the first person to push that line was Donald Trump, who famously declared just before the midterms that, if the Republicans won, he should get all the credit, and if they lost, he bore none of the blame. ““It’s Mitch McConnell’s fault,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social website “He blew the midterms, and everyone despises him.”

Trump then hit the phones, reaching out to his most craven acolytes in the Senate, to join him in this nonsense. Senator Josh Hawley - the same one who was first to announce he would do Trump’s bidding on January 6, 2021, and attempt to thwart the Electoral College vote on January 6 - was the first to heed the call. "The old party is dead,” he tweeted. “Time to bury it. Build something new." (A lot of folks on Twitter at first thought he meant Trumpism, but no, Hawley was blaming McConnell.)

Next up: Trump’s lily-livered worshipper, Senator Ted Cruz. “Mitch would rather be leader than have a Republican majority,” Cruz said on his podcast. “If there’s a Republican who can win who’s not going to support Mitch, the truth of the matter is he’d rather the Democrat win.”

Cruz argued, essentially, that the problem was all about McConnell’s failure to spend campaign money on lost causes. Hawley lyingly said it was because Republicans weren’t pushing for Trumpian policies. "What are Republicans actually going to do for working people?” he tweeted. “How about, to start: tougher tariffs on China, reshore American jobs, open up American energy full throttle, 100k new cops on the street. Unrig the system.’

What a load of junk. But like with most Republican lies, the truth takes longer to explain. Congress can’t impose tariffs - that was delegated to the President by the Reciprocal Trade Agreement Act of 1934 and Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act. Add to that - pushing for trade tariffs was, until Trump, a violation of a commitment to free trade, a foundational element of Republican political philosophy. 

Reshore American jobs? Sure, let’s do it…except that would involve imposing tax penalties to those companies that offshore jobs, something Republicans have repeatedly shot down. Open up American energy full throttle? Oil production is now at the same level it was just before the onset of COVID shut down the global economy; natural gas production is higher than before the pandemic; liquid natural gas exports are hitting records; rig counts are at a four year high; oh - and America is investing more in clean energy rather than surrendering that almost $1 trillion market to other countries. 100 thousand new cops on the street? Been there, done that - Biden’s Safer America plan literally invested to add 100,000 cops on the street, and both Hawley and Cruz voted against it. Then, unrig the system? What system is Cruz talking about? And how does he plan to unrig it? Who knows?

Bottom line, this is just a bunch of junk Republicans say with no intent on following through on anything. If these “policies” had been advanced by Republicans, they would have had to spend less time screaming “far-left liberal!” and “socialist!” and “gaaaaaayyyyyssss!!!” - the kind of red meat hatred that enrages their base and wins votes.

Now, there are some whispers of reality among Republicans when the doors are closed and the words “off the record” are spoken to reporters: The public didn’t “like” their candidates, as Shapiro said, because the ones Trump brought onto the playing field were whackadoodles. The GOP lost the Senate because of the terrible or loony candidates pushed by Trump: Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Don Bolduc in New Hampshire, Leora Levy in Connecticut, Gerald Malloy in Vermont, and who can forget the worst candidate in human history, Herschel Walker in Georgia. Lots of seats flipped from Republican to Democrat, but the most telling was in Michigan: Rep. Peter Meijer, the only freshman Republican congressman who voted to impeach former Trump, was viciously attacked by the former president, sending him down in flames in the primary to Trump’s favorite, John Gibbs. More evidence that Trump cares only about his ego: The seat that likely would have been held if Meijer was the nominee instead Democrat Hillary Scholten. 

The GOP’s political delusion problem is also reflected in their endless screaming about election fraud. This party has one philosophy: “We won, or it’s fraud.” There seems to be a shocking belief among them that every seat in the country would be held by Republicans but for fraud. The idea that the country is split about 50/50 in terms of Democrats and Republicans, that sometimes a party wins and sometimes it loses, that not everyone likes the Republican agenda, seems foreign to them. No, it’s not them. It’s the stupid voters. Or the corrupt Democrats. But never, ever, ever the GOP itself.

The reality is, the Republicans are no longer connected with reality. They are so used to just saying things, with no concern about their truth or falsity, that they have lost the ability to govern in the real world. I long believed that this was just performance at by GOP politicians - make things up, or dramatically misrepresent them, go on Fox News, convince the base of the lie, rinse, wash, repeat. But there are a handful of experiences that have made me think it is just possible that Republican politicians believe their nonsense.

The first time I thought this was when I was at a charity event raising money for the Epilepsy Foundation. Also in attendance was a Republican Congressman, and the two of us began to chat. Eventually, he slapped my shoulder saying he had to fly back to Washington, because he and his colleagues were meeting to discuss hearings about Hunter Biden (this was long before the “Hunter Biden laptop” nonsense.) The imaginary “scandal” at that moment was that Joe Biden had blackmailed Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was after his son. I told the Congressman the whole theory made no sense - the prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was our equivalent of the Attorney General; months passed between the time Joe Biden said anything about Shokin and his being forced out; the man was so corrupt that the week before he stepped down, even his own senior team resigned and leveled accusations against him on national television; and days before Shokin’s departure, the International Monetary Fund said it might cut off billions of dollars in support for Ukraine if the prosecutor stayed in office. 

No, the Congressman replied, it was all about Joe Biden, he had done it all. The case would be bigger than Watergate, he said. Then he left for the airport.

Then there is the whole “every loss is caused by the deep state” conspiracy theory. No one had ever heard of this before until Trump started pushing it. Any rational person figured this was just more nonsense for the GOP conspiracy-theory base, but then I saw some text messages between Sean Hannity and Trump’s criminal former campaign manager, Paul Manafort. When no one was looking, they spewed together about “deep state” conspiracies against Republicans and purported “scandals” that were nothing more than GOP delusions which - GASP! - aren’t prosecuted (which to them is more evidence of a deep state.) One example, from Hannity:

“There are so many obvious crimes that are NOT being investigated. Clear felonies committed. Conflicts of interest. A deep state leak EVERY DAY.”

It didn’t have to be like this. After the GOP’s loss in 2012 against Barack Obama, sane heads in the party decided it was time to sit down and analyze themselves. That resulted in the so-called “Autopsy Report,” which laid out how Republicans could become a governing party and reach greater numbers of voters. A few excerpts since this was the last gasp of the GOP’s sane wing.

If we believe our policies are the best ones to improve the lives of the American people, all the American people, our candidates and office holders need to do a better job talking in normal, people-oriented terms and we need to go to communities where Republicans do not normally go to listen and make our case. We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them, too. We must recruit more candidates who come from minority communities.

***

We must blow the whistle at corporate malfeasance and attack corporate welfare. We should speak out when a company liquidates itself and its executives receive bonuses but rank-and-file workers are left unemployed. We should speak out when CEOs receive tens of millions of dollars in retirement packages but middle-class workers have not had a meaningful raise in years.

***

The pervasive mentality of writing off blocks of states or demographic votes for the Republican Party must be completely forgotten. The Republican Party must compete on every playing field.

Yah, well, none of that happened. Instead, the GOP nominated Trump, embraced extremism, and quadrupled down on grotesque gerrymandering and voter suppression as their method of winning elections. Rather than reach out, they decided to work hard to keep people they, ahem, don’t like from voting. 

And going forward, it’s clear that no matter how many losses pile up, the Republican Party is stuck as an extremist party, one that has abandoned the America that so many have fought and died to form and preserve. Nothing demonstrates that further than when Trump recently called for terminating parts of the Constitution. This, obviously, was something Republicans could easily condemn. No person who wants to terminate the Constitution can then turn around the pledge to uphold it if elected president. A lay-up. But no. Even attacking the Constitution is not enough.

As example: When ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos tossed a softball to Rep. Dave Joyce of Ohio after Trump’s statement. He asked, “Can you support a candidate, in 2024, who’s for suspending the Constitution?” And Joyce responded, “I will support whoever the Republican nominee is.”

There is no line. And to the GOP, there is no truth. Just what’s convenient for them to believe.