In this age of misinformation, it has often occurred to me that even the most outrageous lie is often glossed over with the thinnest patina of truth. While rational people have the wherewithal and enough concern to crack through the veneer, others see opportunity, especially when the lie feeds some larger purpose.
Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” of a “stolen” 2020 election has been deployed not only to decry a lost election but is regularly put forth by MAGA Republicans as evidence of a “deep state” of corruption throughout the institutions of government. The result is that for nearly four years, Donald Trump’s branding of the election as “rigged” and “stolen” has given license to his followers to engage in all sorts of odd and frightening behavior.
The first election after the “Big Lie” was promulgated occurred in November of 2022 and the most dramatic manifestations of this political pathology were the midterm elections that gave shape to the current US House of Representatives.
In Fools on the Hill: The Hooligans, Saboteurs, Conspiracy Theorists, and Dunces Who Burned Down the House (2024) bestselling author and syndicated Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank offers a day-to-day, up-close-and-personal account of the United States House of Representatives of the 118th Congress which first convened on January 3, 2023.
The stars of this clown show are predominantly members of the House Freedom Caucus (HFC) which was organized in 2015 by far-right conservative Tea Party members. The first chair of the HFC was Congressman Jim Jordan from Ohio. Other prominent figures who have been a part of the HFC are Marjorie Taylor Greene of Florida, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, and Paul Gosar of Arizona.
After the 2016 election victory for Donald Trump, the HFC became the congressional wing of the MAGA movement. One of the unwritten qualifications for membership in the HFC is undying loyalty and fealty to the manufacturer of the “Big Lie.”
With something like 40 members that are part of a very slim Republican majority in the House, the HFC has wielded an unimaginable degree of power within our democracy. During similar moments in our history a political party was able to temper its most radical members by joining with centrists from the other side in order to govern.
Of course, there really has never been a “similar” moment in our history because any rational Republicans today who reach across the aisle are excoriated. Democrats are not just the political opposition to MAGA Republicans. They are “communists” and “socialists.” They “hate America.” As Congresswoman Greene has said openly, “Democrats are a party of pedophiles.”
As Milbank writes, Greene has also claimed that “Jewish Space lasers start forest fires; Democratic officials ought to be executed; pandemic health restrictions were akin to actions of Nazi Germany; joining the military is ‘like throwing your life away; the 9/11 attacks were an inside job; various school shootings were faked; members of Congress are being spied on by ‘Nancy Pelosi’s Gazpacho police’ [apparently confusing Adolph Hitler’s secret police with soup].”
We’ve heard some rather shocking comments like this from Greene and a handful of other MAGA types and, unfortunately, many of us have become immune to such things in the Age of Trump. In Milbank’s Fools on the Hill, however, we see that the Trump effect on the People’s House runs much deeper. It is not just a handful of representatives from safe Republican districts who are giving us a few evening sound bites. Indeed, the behavior of this group threatens the very fabric of American democracy.
Congressman Ralph Norman of South Carolina “called for Trump to bring out the military to overturn the 2020 election – but didn’t know how to spell it. ‘Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!!’ he wrote in a text to Trump’s chief of staff.”
Illinois Republican Mary Miller claimed “that [President] Biden had acted to ‘force young girls to share locker rooms with 18-year-old men.’”
Rick Allen from Georgia told another congressman that “he needed to ‘get right with Jesus’ because of his support for gay marriage.”
After ousting Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House, Republicans chose Mike Johnson to replace him; a man who had “called homosexuality ‘inherently unnatural’, a ‘bizarre choice,’ and a ‘dangerous lifestyle’ that would lead to legalized pedophilia and bestiality.” As Milbank adds, Johnson had also “blamed mass shootings on legal abortion, evolution and no-fault divorce laws, and he blamed post-Hurricane Katrina looting in Louisiana on atheists and legalized gambling.” He also claimed “that God ‘had been speaking to me’ about becoming Speaker.”
Not to be outdone in the category of communicating with the Almighty, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, after filing impeachment articles against President Biden, claimed “I am directed and led by him… by the spirit of God.” This from a woman caught on video in September of 2023 at a live performance of the musical Beetlejuice which “showed her boyfriend groping her breasts and Boebert groping his crotch.”
Arizona’s Paul Gosar “made a cartoon in which he killed [New York Congresswoman] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.” As Milbank writes, Gosar had also “dined with white nationalists, traveled with them, spoke at their conferences, defended them on social media, and promoted their racist themes. He promoted fringe websites that called the Holocaust a hoax, praised Hitler, and condemned ‘Jewish warmongers’ in the U.S. government.”
Congressman James Comer of Kentucky claimed that the president’s son Hunter Biden “had control over… cobalt in Congo, fentanyl on the Mexican border, coronavirus in Wuhan, the Biden administration’s push for electric vehicles, human trafficking, and the sanctioning of Russian oligarchs.” After hinting that President Biden had taken bribes from a foreign national, Comer said on Fox News, in a classic example of the misinformation game, and without a single bit of evidence, that “The American people need to know if President Biden sold out the United States of America to make money for himself.” As Milbank observed, “Fox News dutifully repeated the outrageous allegation 1,400 times over the following four months.” That’s a blatant lie, disguised as a question, repeated on Fox News over eleven times per day for four months.
As these radicals realized the power they held to disrupt the workings of the House, they demanded more and more. As Milbank writes, Republicans in the House “filled their committee hearings and their bills with white nationalist attacks on racial diversity and immigrants, attempts to ban abortion and to expand access to the sort of guns used in mass shootings, incessant harassment of LGBTQ Americans, and even routine potshots at the United States military.”
They tried to impeach President Biden and did impeach Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Along the way, “They insulted each other’s private parts, accused each other of sexual and financial crimes, and scuffled with each other in the Capitol basement. They screamed ‘Bullshit!’ at Biden on the House floor during the State of the Union Address. They used their official powers to spread conspiracy theories about the ‘Deep State’ and for a year protected the serial fabulist in their caucus, the indicted George Santos.” And for good measure, they stood up for the Confederacy… and even claimed that the government was hiding space aliens.”
While Milbank adds a few unsavory anecdotes about Democrats, It is clear where he—and rational Americans—stand… “One side,” he writes, “is measurably nuttier than the other.”
It’s not just what these radicals are saying; it’s what they are doing – or NOT doing. Refusing to support Kevin McCarthy’s bid for the House speakership; McCarthy gave in to the increasingly radical demands of the HFC. As Milbank reports, a “top Democrat” said, “Somebody should check and make sure Kevin McCarthy still has two kidneys.”
Milbank doesn’t hold back. And why should he? The outrageous behavior, incompetence, and sheer idiocy of many members of the current Congress is on full display. “Texas Republican Tony Gonzales said of his right-wing colleagues: ‘I serve with some real scumbags.’ He told CNN’s Dana Bash that ‘These people used to walk around with white hoods at night. Now, they’re walking around with white hoods in the daytime.’”
As a seasoned and respected journalist and commentator, Dana Milbank has compiled a blistering condemnation of these right-wing sycophants of Donald Trump and backed up his observations with 28 pages of detailed notes. He calls these folks, and rightly so, as “marinated in disinformation” and with “little interest in the enterprise of governing.” As Kevin McCarthy said of the “fringiest elements of the right wing”—which he enabled, by the way—they are made up of “individuals that just want to burn the place down.”
With all the infighting, and with any effort to compromise with Democrats off the table, it is no surprise that Milbank has observed that the 118th Congress has been perhaps the most ineffective and incompetent legislative body in American history.
Milbank adds that, “while MAGA Republicans failed as legislators, they succeeded in injecting paranoia, white nationalism, and outrageous lies and conspiracies into the national bloodstream—most of it for the sole purpose of pleasing Donald Trump.”
Republicans opposing or offending Donald Trump find themselves challenged by Trump-supported sycophants in Republican primaries. This means that reasonable and rational Republicans who have called out the madness have been booted out. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger come to mind. I am a liberal guy but I deeply respect both Cheney and Kinzinger, strong traditional conservatives that have been alerting us to the dangers of Trump’s MAGA movement. They stood up against Trump in a principled manner… and paid a political price for it yet, I believe history will recognize their virtue.
The more pressing problem is found in the numbers. While many principled conservatives have been Trumped out of power, Milbank identifies eight House Republicans who are “best known for blocking the House from conducting its business… These eight leading troublemakers were elected by just 12 percent of the voters in their districts, or 543,998 people… just 2 percent of the overall U.S. electorate.”
He goes on to explain: “In effect, this means that, in a country of 330 million, just over half a million people can, through their votes in Republican primaries, essentially bring the government to a halt.”
I don’t think this is what the Framers had in mind. Hopefully, the next few weeks will see us taking a few short steps out of this mess.
