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The leaked audio once again caught the leader of the minority in the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy, who privately admits the truth about the dangers posed by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. Only this time the leak provoked (as it were) Tucker Carlson’s rage.
In the last part, the California Republican worries just after the rebel violence that Trump’s allies in the House of Representatives may incite violence against other lawmakers. This comes after an audio recording of McCarthy leaked, suggesting he could call on Trump to resign over the coup attempt.
In both cases, McCarthy never acted on his fears. Which revives a familiar argument from commentators: that Republicans fully understand the threat that Trump poses, but are too cowardly to do something about it.
This is partly true, but misses another part of the story. I’m talking about the extent to which Republicans have refrained from holding Trump and his allies accountable for their crimes against democracy. cynical instrumental purposesas an affirmative act designed to achieve a concrete end: to maintain the commitment of its constituents in the coalition of the Republican Party.
Carlson’s angry remarks on Fox News about McCarthy on Tuesday night help illustrate the outlines of this. What infuriated Carlson was McCarthy’s suggestion in the audio that Twitter might have to cancel GOP representatives for trafficking in rhetoric that could lead to violence.
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“Can’t they take their Twitter accounts too?” McCarthy wondered aloud.
“Kevin McCarthy is a puppet of the Democratic Party!” Carlson roared back.
Carlson criticizes McCarthy for wanting to “censor” social media More ▼ conservative republicans. ” He called on conservatives to “come together” to prevent McCarthy from becoming the next speaker of the House, saying they should not be “happy” with his “leadership”:
The key here is Carlson’s efforts to mobilize conservative voters against the leadership of the Republican Party, and McCarthy in particular. This may fail – McCarthy seems to have strong support at the GOP conference – but he must be worried about efforts to turn millions of Trump voters against him on charges of disloyalty to Trump and the MAGA movement.
What McCarthy seems to have discovered soon after the Capitol uprising was that in order to avoid antagonizing or alienating these voters, he must first refrain from treating the event as an extremely serious moment requiring a serious political response.
This is not what McCarthy thought at first. A traitor to Trump like him initially seemed really horrified by the horrific and deadly violence and the possibility of more.
For example, in the latest audio, McCarthy said a few days after the attack that far-right lawmakers were “putting people in danger” with incendiary attacks on the Republic of Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) Because they believed Trump should be held accountable for violence. McCarthy also seemed genuinely upset that the rebels had brought a “rope” from the number of Republicans in the House of Representatives who attended the rally.
Soon after, of course, McCarthy realized the mistake of his journey and spent the last year minimizing and helping to cover up these events. This is something that is widely denounced as cowardice, with it usually said that Republican leaders would like Trump to disappear, but will not say so:
But that can’t be the whole story. Of course, Republicans fear a backlash from Trump and his constituents if they treat Jan. 6 as a crime against the country.
But something more strategic may be happening here: a deliberate decision to active belittling and covering up Trump’s guilt. This is an affirmative act, a way to do a positive appeal to the Trump base. In that sense, Republicans do not want Trump to disappear; they may want him to soften from time to time, but they also know that his pathologies are helpful in sustaining the energy of his constituents in the GOP coalition.
How else do you explain it when Sen. Lindsay O. Graham (RS.C.) explicitly states that Republicans should not follow Cheney’s remarks because the Republican Party “cannot grow” without Trump? Or when the RNC officially denounced Cheney as a party statement and confirmed that January 6 was a “legitimate political discourse?”
This is an old story in republican politics. Over and over again, Republican and Conservative elites winked or actively encouraged extremism in their ranks to mobilize the political masses, from the tolerance of John Birch’s conspirators to the embrace of Senator Joe McCarthy’s witch hunt to the humor of the “abolition of rights rights” opposition of the superiority of white.
Nicole Hemer, the author of Guerrilla, a new GOP story, notes key tensions here. After tolerating such extremes, these elites sometimes tried to purge them of the conservative movement.
But elites often face extreme backlash, Hamer said. This made them realize that “you can’t clean up your base” because “the PP needs these people to win the election” and “there is energy in the party”.
In that sense, Homer notes, McCarthy’s handling of the situation and Carlson’s attacks on him over his alleged failure to take Jan. 6 seriously are not outside the historical norm for the Republican Party.
“McCarthy had a real inner reaction to the events of January 6,” Homer told me. But, she added, “the Republicans who pointed to Jan. 6 and said ‘this is a disgrace’ were in the midst of a huge backlash.”
As a result, Homer noted, McCarthy “learned very quickly that the base had no problem with Jan. 6,” prompting Republicans to “continue to downplay” those horrors.
You can call it “cowardice” if you want. I say it’s much worse.
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