Happy Insurrectiversary, everybody! From the donning of the shamanic headdress to the theatrical reenactments of Roger Stone’s conversation with Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio to the cherubic bleats of the schoolchildren chanting “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!,” I truly love this holiday.
With Iowa just around the corner, it’s been predictably nauseating, watching the institutional GOP congeal in a fetid pool at the Dotard’s feet. Tom Emmer’s groveling was particularly debasing. “As someone who has been personally bullied by Donald Trump, l cannot recommend the experience highly enough. He’ll crush America’s dreams the way he crushed mine!” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/04/us/politics/trump-endorsements.html
It’s definitely not a cult, though.
Sure, observing the garish obsequiousness of Elise Stefanik’s ritual un-endorsement of a Republican congressional candidate who had the audacity to refer to the Grand High Gameshowhost as “arrogant,” you might say to yourself, “wow, that’s as culty as it is embarrassing, so, like, almost unendurably culty, I guess is what I’m saying,” but it’s still not a cult.
Look, I’ll admit polling says most Republicans see Off-Brand Orbán as a “person of faith,” while the likes of Romney and Biden are infidels who should be burned at the stake or at the very least poked with reasonably sharp sticks, but it’s totally unfair to call it a culllllll okay, fine, it’s a cult.
A cult of personality. But a worthy personality, an admirable personality, the sort of personality that deserves worshipping, you have to grant that. It’s not as though a third of the country has pledged absolute fealty to a drooling fascist grifter who spends his days obsessively rage-posting about a woman he raped.
Incidentally, I see Wee Don’s countin’ on his buddy Kavanaugh to make all his 14th Amendment worries disappear. C’mon, Brett, it’s what Tobin and Squi would want.
Poor Jimmy Comer always gets SUPER jealous whenever House Oversight Dems produce evidence of yet another Trump crime spree, accepting millions in bribes from foreign governments, for example. “It’s not really fair cuz they’re investigating real crimes and mine are made up,” sulked Comer, while submitting to a Jake Tapper wedgie.
Yeah, you say he didn’t qualify, but Vivek Ramaswamy didn’t wanna be in your dumb ol’ debate anyway, CNN! He’s gonna hang out with his cool new friends Alex Jones and Andrew Tate that night, they’re gonna order a pizza and play GoldenEye and sleep in sleeping bags on the basement floor and you’re definitely not invited, CNN!
Free of Vivek’s fashy yapping at last, Nikki n’ Ron can finally have that civil, nuanced discussion about which of them would pardon Trump harder, while Chris Christie furiously masturbates in the corner. Must-see TV, I’m sure.
I confess I was delighted to see the DeSantis delusion wouldn’t sputter out completely without one final, bitter burst of petulant Rich Lowry fanfic: The Media Done Ron Wrong, the tragic tale of a boy who only wanted to bring efficient, drama-free autocracy to America, brought low by the cameras that cruelly, unjustly documented the inescapable dislikability the candidate radiates at all times. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/04/ron-desantis-media-column-00133707
While Rich spins DeSantistan as some comfortably-shy-of-alt-right utopia, Ron’s batty Surgeon General is stumbling around, issuing official state bulletins that read like bathroom graffiti in a QAnon bar. VACCINES ARE THE LITERAL ANTI-CHRIST THEY DON’T STOP COVID ONLY APPLYING A POULTICE OF HORSE DEWORMER AND BRIDGET ZIEGLER’S BATHWATER TO YOUR BUTTHOLE CAN DO THAT.
Well, good news for anyone who’s ever wondered what happens when you bring a messianic delusion to a Jewish space laser fight: Marjorie Taylor Greene is a-feudin’ with Speaker-for-Now Mike “Moses” Johnson! Look for Mike to swiftly adopt his predecessor’s Capitulate to the Crazy Lady policy in the face of his ever-shrinking majority. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/01/marjorie-taylor-greene-kevin-mccarthy-best-friends
Actually, wingnut intraparty fight club culture is thriving these days, and lucky for us, it’s a spectator sport.
Like, the normie wing of the Michigan GOP is finally making a play to wrestle back control from the loons, but Kristina Karamo has barricaded herself inside a Denny’s bathroom with the party charge card, and she’s already racked up a six-figure debt on Jim Caviezel speeches, George Santos Cameos, and cheezy tots.
Almost as much fun as the mutually annihilating, acrimonious divorce between Wayne LaPierre and the National Rifle Association. I really thought those two were gonna make it. So many common interests, like children’s funerals, and racism.
Perhaps if Jesse Watters had asked his tarot-reading guest what the cards said about accusing Texas Congresscreep/maladjusted ragebeast Dan Crenshaw of insider trading, he could’ve avoided getting publicly eviscerated as a “fucking clown” and “mediocre entertainer” who “pees sitting down.” Me-OW!
If the Florida Republican Party had only paid that $2 million ransom when they had the chance, they wouldn’t be dealing with headlines about how their party Chairman, who was already under investigation for sexual assault, is now also under investigation for “video voyeurism.” This is why Aesop has that fable about the crane who gets blackmailed by that rapist tortoise.
Capitol Riot truther Maya Flores abandoned her campaign to regain her old seat in Congress, to instead enter the restaurant business, announcing the summer 2024 opening of Maya’s False Flag Ranch & Kitchen, serving only the most authentic cuisine Flores can steal and present as her own. Don’t worry, Republican voters, I’m sure she’s not lying to you about anything important. https://newrepublic.com/post/177852/gop-house-candidate-mayra-flores-stealing-peoples-food-photos
Mike Flynn believes the United States should have one and only one religion, presumably state mandated, and I gotta say, that ranks pretty high on the list of Things Mike Flynn Should Not Be in Charge Of. This is how we wind up in Planet of the Apes scenarios, people.
It’s definitely super healthy that we’ve successfully integrated the steady drone of low-level domestic terrorism as acceptable background noise. Wave of bomb threats targeting state capitols? Dude gets arrested for threatening to assassinate a Congressman? Ho hum, wake me up when somebody opens fire inside the Colorado Supreme Court building or somethin’. Or, actually don’t. Multiple casualties, or let me sleep in.
I bet the handful of countries that failed to take advantage of Bob Menendez’s bribability are kicking themselves right now. Anyway, despite yet another superseding indictment, the blue team’s shittier, less-fun George Santos still refuses to resign, which isn’t my favorite thing.
Green Day’s guest appearance on the Two Minutes Hate allowed MAGA Nation a fleeting feeling of cultural relevance that likely didn’t survive the news that Vanilla Ice headlined the Mar-a-Lago New Year’s party.
Yeah, the culture wars’re still real, real dumb, though at least Barbara Streisand has Lauren Boebert on the run. On the other hand, The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles’ plan, to “turn Mickey Mouse into a Nazi” could shake up the battlefield in ways we can’t foresee.
Despite heavy investment in the lucrative “white nationalist troll” demographic, the Hellsite Formerly Known as Twitter (where, if you’re masochistically inclined, you can follow me @john_luzar) is now worth 71.5% less than it was when a certain doltpilled narcissist overpaid for it. Which is, it goes without saying, entirely the Anti-Defamation League’s fault.
Maybe Elon should hand the reins over to someone less economically suicidal. Maybe even someone who creates prosperity, rather than obliterating it in fits of pique. Someone like, say, I dunno, Joe Biden? “C’mon Joe, you must be pretty bored with creating jobs by now, why not embrace the challenge of rescuing a billionaire tech bro from the consequences of his own shitty decisions?” https://thehill.com/newsletters/business-economy/4392235-hot-jobs-report-gives-biden-a-boost/
“Can’t, dork. Too busy fighting ascendant American fascism at Valley Forge. Suck an egg.”
How Trump Has Used Fear and Favor to Win Republican Endorsements
"President Joe Biden lambastes Trump for Jan. 6 Capitol riot, a day ‘we nearly lost America’"
The former president keeps careful watch over his endorsements from elected Republicans, aided by a disciplined and methodical behind-the-scenes operation.
Former President Donald J. Trump during a campaign rally last month in Durham, N.H. As of this week, every member of the House Republican leadership is formally backing his presidential campaign. Doug Mills/The New York Times
By Jonathan Swan, Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman Jan. 4, 2024
On his last day as president on Jan. 20, 2021, Donald J. Trump stood in a snapping wind and waved goodbye to relatives and supporters before he took his final flight on Air Force One back to Mar-a-Lago. No elected Republican of any stature showed up at Joint Base Andrews for the bleak farewell.
Mr. Trump, at that moment, was a pariah among Republican elites. The party’s leaders in the House and Senate, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, blamed him for the Capitol siege. Party fund-raisers assured donors they were done with him. On conference calls, House Republican leaders contemplated a “post-Trump” G.O.P.
Today, three years after Jan. 6 and more than a week before the Iowa caucuses, Mr. Trump has almost entirely subjugated the elected class of the Republican Party. As of this week, every member of the House Republican leadership is formally backing his campaign to recapture the White House.
Mr. Trump has obsessed over his scorecard of endorsers, according to more than half a dozen Trump advisers and people in regular contact with him, most of whom insisted on anonymity to describe private conversations.
He sees gathering the formal endorsements as a public validation of his triumphant return that serves his strategy of portraying himself as the inevitable victor. He calls endorsements the “E word”; when lawmakers merely say they “support” him, he considers it insufficient and calls that the “S word.” In recent weeks, his allies have told lawmakers that Mr. Trump will be closely watching who has and hasn’t endorsed him before the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 15.
“They always bend the knee,” Mr. Trump said privately of Mr. Emmer’s endorsement, according to a person who spoke to him.
And Mr. Trump is privately ranting about and workshopping nicknames for other holdouts, like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.
“Ted — he shouldn’t even exist,” Mr. Trump said recently of Mr. Cruz, a 2016 rival, according to a person who heard the remarks and recounted them soon after. “I could’ve destroyed him. I kind of did destroy him in 2016, if you think about it. But then I let him live.”
Though he still brands himself an outsider, Mr. Trump is now unequivocally the favored candidate of Republican insiders. His rivals, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, are promoting their endorsements by the governors of the first two nominating states in Iowa and New Hampshire. Beyond that, the endorsements race, at the national level, has been a wipeout.
In the Senate — the body of elected Republicans most resistant to Mr. Trump — he has 19 endorsements. Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley have zero. More G.O.P. senators will soon follow. Senators John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming are expected to endorse Mr. Trump before the Iowa caucuses, according to two people briefed on their thinking.
Senator John Barrasso listening to Mr. Trump speak with reporters after a weekly Senate Republican weekly luncheon in 2020. Patrick Semansky/Associated Press
The chairmen of the Republican Party’s House and Senate campaign committees were both early endorsers of Mr. Trump. He has almost four times as many endorsements from governors as Mr. DeSantis has. Mr. Trump’s political team, meanwhile, has told people it plans to not work with the Republican Governors Association because the group’s executive director has been an adviser to Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, who endorsed Mr. DeSantis.
Mr. Trump has been courting Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, placing several calls to him since he ended his campaign on Nov. 12 .. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/12/us/politics/tim-scott-2024-campaign.html .. and deploying allies like Lindsey Graham, a fellow South Carolina senator, to make the case for Mr. Scott to issue an endorsement before their state’s primary on Feb. 24, two people familiar with the outreach said.
Mr. Trump has dealt with his 2024 campaign rivals differently from 2016 — with a longer view to gaining their endorsements.
“People are looking around, ‘Hell, look at all these endorsements’ — that doesn’t happen overnight,” Mr. McCarthy, who announced his retirement .. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/06/us/politics/kevin-mccarthy-congress.html .. from Congress after being driven out of the speakership, said in an interview. “He has a sophisticated system to going about it.”
Tim Scott during the third Republican presidential primary debate in November. Mr. Scott ended his campaign later that month and is now being courted by Mr. Trump for an endorsement. Scott McIntyre for The New York Times
Blunt force and threats
Early in his post-presidential life, Mr. Trump weaponized the power of his endorsement to an extent that no predecessor had ever attempted.
He made it known he was eager to intervene in Republican primaries. Given his cult following among G.O.P. voters, his endorsement, at times, packed the power to end a race.
Entire primary campaigns were organized around winning his endorsement. Trump insiders were hired by candidates as “consultants” for the sole purpose of saying nice things about them to Mr. Trump in the hope he might endorse them. Mr. Trump received these candidates at his homes in Florida and New Jersey and watched gleefully as they, in Mr. Trump’s own words to aides, “kissed my ass.”
In 2021, Mr. Trump endorsed dozens of candidates at every level. No chit was too small to collect, as when he endorsed Vito Fossella for borough president ..https://www.thecity.nyc/2021/11/03/fossella-thanks-trump-in-staten-island-borough-president-win/ .. in Staten Island, N.Y. In the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections, Mr. Trump accelerated his efforts, ultimately endorsing more than 200 candidates.
Nowhere was his power more evident than in the Ohio and Pennsylvania Senate primaries. Mr. Trump endorsed J.D. Vance in Ohio and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, taking two candidates not expected to win and ensuring their nominations. Mr. Oz lost in November, showing the limits of Mr. Trump’s sway in general elections. Mr. Vance became one of the first senators to endorse Mr. Trump and has been lobbying colleagues to do the same.
Republicans facing primaries saw that Mr. Trump could destroy their political careers. Then there were the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump in 2021. He sought revenge in 2022, and only two of the 10 are still in Congress.
Supporters cheering for Mr. Trump as he arrived at a campaign rally in Reno in December. Max Whittaker for The New York Times
Personal courtship
An underrated factor in Mr. Trump’s domination of party elites is his intense courtship of them — offering a level of direct access that no president in recent times has granted to rank-and-file lawmakers.
Since 2017, Mr. Trump has invested hundreds of hours in his political relationships, repeatedly using the trappings of the presidency to do so. He is constantly on the phone to Republican lawmakers. He invites them to dinner at his clubs, for rounds of golf and for flights on his jet.
His relationship-building paid huge dividends when he needed it most.
On Nov. 15, 2022 ..https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/11/15/us/election-news-results , Mr. Trump announced his third campaign for president. The midterms had been horrible for Republicans and Mr. Trump received most of the blame. Trump-endorsed election deniers lost winnable races. The much-hyped “red tsunami” never materialized. Democrats defied expectations to hold onto power in the Senate. And Republicans, favored to seize the House by a big margin, won only the barest majority.
Only a handful of Mr. Trump’s most loyal supporters endorsed him right away. But Mr. Trump knew he had more support than was publicly evident. His team structured its early campaign activity around gathering endorsements, with Brian Jack, his former White House political director, who serves as his liaison to Congress, managing the process.
Last January, Mr. Trump traveled to the South Carolina Capitol for his first public campaign event, where he announced his leadership team in the state, led by Gov. Henry McMaster and Mr. Graham. This was a display of power in the backyard of his future 2024 competitors — Ms. Haley, the state’s former governor, and Mr. Scott, its junior senator.
Mr. Trump and his team replicated this approach in state after state — and by the early spring of 2023 they had momentum. The most important moment in the endorsement battle, according to Trump advisers, was his humiliation of Mr. DeSantis in Florida. As Mr. DeSantis took a heavily publicized trip to Washington .. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/us/politics/desantis-washington-republicans.html .. in April, a month before he declared his candidacy, the Trump team ruined his visit by rolling out a series of congressional endorsements, including in Florida.
On April 20, Mr. Trump invited to dinner at Mar-a-Lago the 10 Florida lawmakers who had endorsed him. They arrived to signed Make America Great Again hats on their place settings. Representative Byron Donalds, a close DeSantis ally in the past, sat directly next to Mr. Trump.
Representative Byron Donalds with Mr. Trump in 2019. Erin Schaff/The New York Times
The Trump team has focused on creating permission structures for Republican lawmakers queasy about Mr. Trump to feel comfortable again supporting him.
Senator Steve Daines of Montana, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Republican Senate campaign arm, has been one of the most important players in that strategy.
In early February, Mr. Daines had his first face-to-face meeting with the former president after being elected to serve as chairman. They met in Mr. Trump’s office at Mar-a-Lago and Mr. Daines walked him through the Senate electoral map for 2024.
“It’s very important that the president and myself work closely not only on his re-election, but also, importantly, what we can do here to win back the United States Senate,” Mr. Daines said in an interview.
Mr. Daines did not endorse Mr. Trump that day. Instead, the chairman and Mr. Trump conveyed a powerful image to the rest of the party: They posed for a photograph, thumbs up, amid the familiar Mar-a-Lago décor of golden drapes and upholstery.
Jonathan Swan is a political reporter covering the 2024 presidential election and Donald Trump’s campaign. More about Jonathan Swan
Shane Goldmacher is a national political correspondent, covering the 2024 campaign and the major developments, trends and forces shaping American politics. He can be reached at shane.goldmacher@nytimes.com. More about Shane Goldmacher
Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman
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