David Corn's Blog, page 18

Jim Jordan Tried to Help Trump Mount a Coup. Now He Gets To Be Speaker?

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), like Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the man he hopes to replace as House speaker, lies a lot. Jordan’s rapid-style monologues—on topics such as Russia’s attack on the  2016 election, Donald Trump’s 2019 effort to extort Ukraine, Hunter Biden, and internet censorship—are often loaded with allegations that are demonstrably false. He has made pushing pro-Trump disinformation a priority for the GOP caucus. As the House Judiciary Committee chairman, he presides over a subcommittee on the supposed “weaponization” of the federal government that is mostly devoted to furthering Trump’s claim that the former president is a victim of the Deep State and facing four indictments only because of a vast conspiracy. Jordan uses that post to promote the belief system of the Fox News bubble. And though he may stand out from his colleagues on brazenness, on most topics, his fibs align with his fellow House Republicans.

But Jordan, a leading contender for the speakership, does differ from his GOP colleagues in an important way: his unique role in helping Trump try to steal the 2020 election and launch the January 6 riot. 

Many Republicans endorsed Trump’s Big Lie about the election. But Jordan was one of only a handful of congressional Republicans who actively conspired with Trump to overturn the election results. As he runs for House speaker, Republicans appear eager to ignore that. Yet by embracing Jordan they tie themselves further to that attack on democracy and the Constitution.

Jordan was an early and enthusiastic recruit in Trump’s war on the republic and reality—in public and in private. 

Days after the November election, he spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally in front of the Pennsylvania state capitol. He spread election conspiracy theories within right-wing media. He endorsed Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell’s bogus claims that Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic had robbed Trump of electoral victory. He called for a congressional investigation of electoral fraud for which there was no evidence and demanded a special counsel be appointed. He endorsed state legislatures canceling vote tallies and selecting their own presidential electors. He urged Trump not to concede. He demanded Congress not certify Joe Biden’s victory in the ceremony scheduled for January 6, 2021. 

Behind the scenes, he schemed with Trump. The final report of the House select committee on January 6 lays out in damning detail Jordan’s participation in Trump’s eletion-thwarting machinations. “Representative Jordan was a significant player in President Trump’s efforts,” the committee said. “He participated in numerous post-election meetings in which senior White House officials, Rudolph Giuliani, and others, discussed strategies for challenging the election, chief among them claims that the election had been tainted by fraud.”

As early as November, Jordan was “involved in discussions with White House officials about Vice President Pence’s role on January 6th,” the report noted—conversations that focused on whether Pence could block the certification of Biden’s win. Jordan was one of 10 Republican members of Congress who attended a White House meeting on December 21 where the topic was how to pressure Pence to undo the election.

What understanding, if any, did Trump have with Jordan? The January 6 committee did not find out. And Jordan has never fully explained his role in Trump’s scheming, let alone apologized. He refused to cooperate with the House January 6 committee’s investigation. And now he is close to becoming House speaker—second-in-line to the presidency—without accounting for his participation in Trump’s attempt to overturn an election.

But the committee did uncover evidence that Jordan was hatching some plan with Trump to mount a coup.

On December 27, 2020,  the defeated president held a phone call with Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue. Trump insisted that there had been widespread fraud in the election and raised numerous allegations that had been debunked. Rosen and Donoghue repeatedly told Trump there was no evidence of significant wrongdoing. Trump pushed the pair to publicly state that this had been an “illegal” election. He cited three Republican politicians who were supporting his claim of a stolen election: Representative Scott Perry (R-Penn.), Doug Mastriano, a Pennsylvania state senator, and Jordan, whom he praised as a “fighter.”

When Rosen said to Trump that the Justice Department couldn’t “snap its fingers and change the outcome of the election,” Trump responded, “I don’t expect you to do that. Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican Congressmen.” Trump did not explain what he meant or what the GOP House members—presumably including Jordan—intended to do if the Justice Department falsely declared the election fraudulent. Rosen and Donoghue refused to issue such a statement. 

On January 2, 2021, Jordan led a conference call in which he, Trump, and other members of Congress discussed strategies for delaying the January 6 joint session of Congress, where the election results would be certified. “During that call,” according to the January 6 committee, “the group also discussed issuing social media posts encouraging President Trump’s supporters to ‘march to the Capitol’ on the 6th. An hour and a half later, President Trump and Representative Jordan spoke by phone for 18 minutes.” It is not publicly known what the two discussed. 

Three days later, Jordan texted White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to pass along advice that Pence should “call out all the electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all.”

On January 6—a day of violent chaos and insurrection—Jordan spoke with Trump by phone at least twice. As the committee noted, Jordan “has provided inconsistent public statements about how many times they spoke and what they discussed.” That day Jordan also received five calls from Rudolph Giuliani, and the two connected at least twice in the evening, as Giuliani was attempting to encourage members of Congress to continue objecting to Biden’s electoral votes. In the days after January 6, Jordan spoke with Trump White House staff about the prospect of presidential pardons for members of Congress.

It is obvious that Jordan knows a lot about Trump’s attempt to sabotage the constitutional order and the run-up to the January 6 riot. But he has refused to share any of this with the public. On May 12, 2022, the January 6 committee subpoenaed several Republican members of Congress—including Jordan, McCarthy, Rep. Scott Perry (R-Penn.), and Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.)—to obtain information related to its investigation. Jordan and the others refused to cooperate.

The committee referred Jordan, McCarthy, Perry, and Biggs to the House Ethics Committee for sanction for failing to comply with subpoenas. The committee noted that Jordan and the others “should be questioned in a public forum about their advance knowledge of and role in President Trump’s plan to prevent the peaceful transition of power.” It also stated that the Justice Department ought to seek testimony from Jordan regarding his “materially relevant communications with Donald Trump or others in the White House.”

Jordan was a key advocate of Trump’s election falsehood and co-conspirator in Trump’s bid to steal power. (Trump faces 17 felony charges for this effort.) He was one of the GOP’s chief crusaders pushing falsehoods that threatened the constitutional order. If his fellow Republicans elevate Jordan to speaker, they will be fully embracing Trump’s attack on the republic, and a profound threat to democracy will now be coming from inside the House.  

Former Santos Treasurer Nancy Marks Pleads Guilty to Campaign Finance Schemes

On Thursday afternoon, Nancy Marks, the former campaign treasurer for Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiracy to defraud the United States. As part of her plea, Marks admitted to helping to craft a fake campaign donor scheme—an operation first reported by Mother Jones in February. Prosecutors allege that Santos played an essential role in that plan.

As Mother Jones reported, Santos’ campaign appeared to have listed more than a dozen major fake donations during his first run for office. A follow-up story showed that Santos’ campaign had falsely claimed that one of his relatives made a $5,800 contribution—the legal maximum at that time—to his 2022 campaign. 

Marks admitted on Thursday to listing fake donations to last year’s campaign. The goal of the scheme was to attract more support from national Republicans by making it seem that Santos had raised more money than he had.

Prosecutors allege that the congressman helped execute the plan and referred to Santos as “Co-Conspirator #1” in the criminal information they filed on Thursday. “Co-Conspirator #1 and MARKS agreed to falsely report to the FEC that family members of Co-Conspirator #1 and MARKS had made significant financial contributions to the Campaign Committee,” the document says, “when Co-Conspirator #1 and MARKS both knew that these individuals had not made the reported contributions.”

The scheme to list fake donations from their relatives was designed to meet a $250,000 quarterly fundraising goal set by a national Republican committee. In December 2021, Santos texted Marks a list of his family members along with the amounts that should be listed as their contributions to his campaign, according to the criminal information. None of those family members, including the relative Mother Jones interviewed earlier this year, had donated to the Santos campaign.

The next month, Santos texted Marks that he “really would like to know the final numbers for the [previous] quarter.” He asked, “what did we figure out about the report” and added that he was “lost and desperate.” Soon after, Marks filed a campaign finance report that indicated that Santos had barely cleared the $250,000 fundraising threshold. Yet more than $50,000 of the money the campaign reported receiving came from fake donations falsely attributed to relatives of Santos and Marks.

Marks stopped serving as Santos’ treasurer in January. Since then, Santos has tried to blame Marks for the false statements within his campaign finance reports, saying that his “former fiduciary went rogue.”

In May, Santos pleaded not guilty to 13 federal charges. But that indictment largely side-stepped Santos’ highly suspicious campaign finance practices. With Marks’ plea agreement, Santos could face additional charges in a superseding indictment. The information filed in her case maintains that Marks was not working alone.

Until Thursday it remained a mystery how Santos could have obtained the more than $700,000 he claimed to have loaned his most recent campaign. Prosecutors allege that both Santos and Marks knew that a $500,000 loan the campaign reported receiving from Santos in March 2022 never actually occurred. “I knew that the loan had not been made,” Marks said in court.

Santos allegedly kept members of his own campaign in the dark about the fake $500,000 loan. In March 2022, a person affiliated with the campaign texted Santos, “Did you get the wire done for the [first quarter] loan?” Santos replied, “That’s getting done tomorrow and it’s not a wire, banker check.” Prosecutors made clear that Santos did not have enough money to make the loan. Despite that, a March 2022 presentation by members of Santos’ campaign to the national Republican committee listed as a “Key Factor” that Santos’ “[p]ersonal and political capital” would allow “for a fully-funded operation.”

Marks’ attorney, Raymond Perini, said that Marks does not currently have a cooperation agreement with prosecutors. But CNN reports that he stated, “If we get a subpoena, we’ll do the right thing.”

Santos’ decision to throw Marks under the bus is particularly callous. A New York Republican strategist who knows Marks told us earlier this year that Marks considered Santos “her favorite client” and that she went on multiple business trips to Florida with him.

Marks, who lives on Long Island, was a veteran GOP operative. She has been the treasurer for dozens of GOP campaigns, including Lee Zeldin’s congressional campaigns and his failed gubernatorial bid last year in New York. During the 2022 election cycle, her company, Campaigns Unlimited, worked for more than 30 PACs and candidate committees.

In 2021, Marks went into business with Santos and other former employees of Harbor City Capital, a Florida investment firm accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of running a Ponzi scheme. As Mother Jones reported, their new company, Red Strategies USA, worked for Tina Forte, a Republican who challenged Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) last year. The goal was to profit off the millions of dollars Forte was expected to raise while running against Ocasio-Cortez. Red Strategies USA earned about $110,000 from the campaign before Forte cut off ties with the company. (When a Mother Jones reporter contacted Forte by phone in January about the arrangement, she said she was too busy making marinara sauce to talk, and did not respond to subsequent requests for comment.)

Marks’ consulting company was paid more than $100,000 by the Santos campaign for accounting and fundraising services. She was never particularly careful in hiding her tracks. As Adav Noti, senior vice president and legal director at the Campaign Legal Center, said earlier this year, “It is awfully hard to believe that whoever compiled and formally submitted Santos’ FEC reports believed that they were true…They are just, on their face, obviously false.” Marks has now admitted that.

Santos could have corrected his campaign finance reports at any time this year and come clean about the fake $500,000 loan. Instead, he insinuated that he was able to loan his campaign more than $700,000 due to secretive business deals. 

The fake loan and contributions from donors who didn’t appear to exist weren’t the only obvious irregularities in Santos’ campaign finance reports. As Mother Jones reported in January:

[Marks] and several relatives contributed more than $30,000 to the Santos campaign. (The relatives each gave the legal maximum of $5,800.) These donors did not give to any other federal candidates this election cycle. The group includes Marks’ two children who were, respectively, 19 and 22 years old when they started donating to Santos, according to public records. 

Marks’ plea agreement comes with a recommendation that she serve between three-and-a-half and four years in prison. She was released from custody with a $100,000 unsecured bond. 

How Kevin McCarthy Set Up His Big Fail 14 Years Ago

On April 15, 2009, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the California Republican, brought Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, the leader of the House GOP caucus, to a rally in his home town of Bakersfield. It was Tax Day, and in 200 or so cities across the nation, a new political force called the tea party was staging raucous demonstrations. This conservative movement had sprung into existence two months earlier, initially as grassroots opposition to government bailouts enacted to protect the economy after the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008. Yet with the support of right-wing establishment outfits, such as Fox News, the Young Republicans, the Heritage Foundation, and FreedomWorks, it quickly morphed into an angry protest of the new president, Barack Obama, the Democratic-controlled Congress, their economic stimulus plan, and much more.

At these mad-as-hell events, where suburbanites dressed up in colonial outfits, there was a disturbing element: signs depicting Obama as the bloody-smiling Joker or Hitler. And others: “Obama Is the Anti-Christ.” “The American Taxpayers Are the Jews for Obama’s Ovens.” “Stand Idly By While Some Kenyan Tries to Destroy America?… Homey Don’t Play Dat!!!” Participants waved Confederate flags. Attendees shared with reporters assorted conspiratorial beliefs that could be summed up in one ominous right-wing fantasy: Obama was a secret Muslim born in Kenya who was in league with shadowy elites and purposefully trying to destroy the nation by increasing the deficit and forcing an economic collapse he could use to impose a totalitarian regime.

The tale of Kevin McCarthy is no Greek tragedy. His departure from the third-highest position in the US government was not a sad day for America. It was confirmation of one of the world’s oldest platitudes: You reap what you sow.

The protesters were a crazy quilt of the right: anti-government advocates, militia people, Christian nationalists, abortion-rights foes, opponents of gun safety measures, libertarians, birthers, social conservatives, and veterans of the so-called Patriots movement of the 1990s. A bit of the old New Right and the Christian right—with even more anger. A central organizing principle appeared to be hatred of Obama and an irrational fear of impending tyranny and doom. 

When Republican extremists forced McCarthy out of the House speakership on Tuesday, they were following a course that McCarthy himself had set for the GOP this very day. He was steering his party into the waters of far-right radicalism. Years later, he would drown in them.

At the Bakersfield gathering, McCarthy introduced Boehner, an old-school, country-club conservative, to this new movement propelled by paranoia and extremism. For Boehner, the rally was a wake-up call—or a warning. As journalist Robert Draper later put it, “Boehner had never seen anything like it—an outcry of anti-Washington vitriol bordering on the elemental—and immediately recognized that he could either board this train or be flattened by it.” These folks were not looking for the Republicans to legislate. Many tea partiers considered the GOP part of the turncoat establishment that was betraying the nation. They yearned for Republicans willing to wage all-out war against Obama, the commie libs, the corrupt elites, and whoever the hell else was destroying their US of A.

McCarthy had led Boehner to what looked to be the promised land for the GOP. If Boehner and the Republicans could harness this energy, they could in the coming midterm elections seize control of Congress. To do so, the Republicans would have to accept and encourage foul and conspiratorial currents. That was a price Boehner and McCarthy were willing to pay for power. But doing so would place both men on the path to failure. 

After the Bakersfield rally, Boehner, McCarthy, and other GOP leaders fully embraced the tea party, despite its extremism and craziness. When Glenn Beck, a Fox host who became an unofficial leader of this movement, railed against Obama, wildly claiming that the president hated white people and was setting up concentration camps for his political enemies as part of his plan to impose a dictatorship, Boehner and other top Republicans appeared on Beck’s show and validated him as an important information source for the GOP base. Republican leaders spoke at tea party rallies where protesters held signs with racist and antisemitic slogans. Boehner addressed one crowd that shouted, “Nazis, Nazis” at the mention of Democrats, and he echoed the tea party’s hyperbolic opposition to Obama’s proposed health care plan, calling it “the greatest threat to freedom I have ever seen.”

Boehner counseled his fellow Republicans to find ways to court the tea partiers, who were worked up about (nonexistent) “death panels,” birtherism, and assorted global conspiracies. After Rep. Bob Inglis, a conservative South Carolina Republican, was defeated in the GOP primary in 2010 by tea party favorite Trey Gowdy, he told me that Boehner’s attempt to use the tea party to win the House was perilous: “It’s a dangerous strategy to build conservatism on information and policies that are not credible.” 

McCarthy was Boehner’s wing man on this mission. Boehner assigned McCarthy the task of crafting a “Pledge to America” for GOP congressional candidates that would appeal to tea party voters. It called for repealing Obamacare (without proposing a replacement) and slashing federal spending. 

The Boehner-McCarthy plan worked. House Republicans picked up a whopping 64 seats in the 2010 midterms and took control. But there was a rub. Many of the tea party-backed newbies were not interested in legislating. They aimed to disrupt and cause chaos. They precipitated crises, threatening government shutdowns and federal default (by refusing to go along with the routine procedure of raising the debt ceiling). A veteran Republican congressional staffer observed, “To be sure, like any political party on Earth, the GOP has always had its share of crackpots… But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital core today.” Years later in his memoir, Boehner, looking back on this class of 2010, would say, “They didn’t really want legislative victories. They wanted wedge issues and conspiracies and crusades.” A chief concern was how their actions played on Fox or on social media. They were, according to Boehner, “just thinking of how to fundraise off of outrage or how they could get on Hannity that night.” Their goal was to increase the tribalist toxicity of American politics. And they had been guided into the party by Boehner, McCarthy, and others. 

In the years ahead, the influence of the tea party-ish Republicans within the House GOP caucus grew, and come 2015, Boehner left the speakership before he could be defenestrated by the radicals. (In a 2014 GOP primary contest, a little-known tea party-favored candidate had defeated Rep. Eric Cantor, the No.2 House Republican, after pummeling Cantor for daring to seek a bipartisan agreement on immigration.) When Boehner gave up the gavel, McCarthy expressed his interest in the post, but the House Freedom Caucus—which had been founded by the tea partiers he had helped become House members—opposed McCarthy, and he withdrew his name from consideration. The fellow who won the job, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, had numerous tussles with the extremists and quit in 2018 before the GOP lost the House. McCarthy became something of a speaker-in-waiting. 

Meanwhile, the tea party had evolved into Trumpism, and the far-right of the GOP became more extreme, as it embraced Donald Trump, his lies, and his authoritarian impulses and transformed into a cult of personality. (Trump had emerged as a far-right champion by peddling the racist birth conspiracy theory popular among tea partiers.) Responsible and stable governance, respectful discourse, preservation of democratic norms—none of that was a priority. To remain a contender for speaker, McCarthy, after the Trump-incited January 6 insurrectionist riot, had to continue to ally himself with Trump and endorse his Big Lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him. That meant McCarthy was striving to lead a party predicated on falsehoods and conspiracism that backed a demagogue who had tried to mount a coup and overturn an American election. 

After the Republicans barely won the House in 2022, McCarthy got what he craved. But he was now the head of a political party rooted in lies, violence, and chaos. Worse, to gain the speakership, he had cut a deal with the most extreme members of the GOP caucus—the sort of Republicans he had welcomed into the party in 2010—and he handed them control of his fate. No one who hopes to govern reasonably can have a lifeline attached to a Trump extremist, such as Rep. Matt Gaetz. 

The tale of Kevin McCarthy is no Greek tragedy. His departure from the third-highest position in the US government was not a sad day for America. It was confirmation of one of the world’s oldest platitudes: You reap what you sow. In this case, 14 years ago, McCarthy exploited an eruption of far-right grievance, paranoia, racism, and irrationality. With this move, he and Boehner succeeded in gaining political control but further corrupted the soul of the party (Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, and others had earlier encouraged extremism within the party). A straight line runs from the tea party to Trump. And just as the tea party Republicans chased Boehner out of the speakership, the Trumpiest Republicans of today devoured McCarthy, who long ago had opened the gates to this extremism. 

It took over a decade for the cynical calculations of his past to catch up to McCarthy. But with his support of the tea party and, then, Trump he bolstered the conditions that yielded his ruin. He helped turn the Republican Party into a threat to American democracy. It’s fitting that he became a victim of his own creation. 

Portions of this article were drawn from David Corn’s American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, which was recently released in an expanded paperback version. 

RFK Jr. Aided by GOP and Trump PAC Donors

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. held a swanky fundraiser for his presidential campaign last month in the upscale Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, much of the news focused on the anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist‘s celebrity guest: musician Eric Clapton. The legendary guitarist—who has promoted vaccine disinformation and who has a history of racist remarks—played for a crowd that raised a whopping $2.2 million for the Kennedy scion, who has been politically disowned by much of his family and who appears to be on the verge of shifting his Democratic presidential bid to an independent run. Also present was Stephen Stills of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, who subsequently released a statement noting he still backs President Joe Biden and attended only to support Clapton. Less attention was paid to the hosts of the event who helped Kennedy Jr. haul in this pile of cash at their gated compound: Aubrey and Joyce Chernick.

In recent years, the Chernicks have been generous donors to Republicans and pro-Trump political action committees. They also in the past have financed Democratic candidates, conservative outfits, and groups cited as Islamophobic.

Aubrey, who in March donated $3,300 to Kennedy Jr., is a Canadian-born billionaire tech entrepreneur and philanthropist. He sold his first venture, a software firm, to IBM for $641 million in 2004. He now runs a cybersecurity firm called Celerium. 

, in June he he gave the maximum contribution of $6,600 to the presidential campaign of Governor Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.). Last year, he maxed out to Dr. Oz when the Republican TV doctor ran for Senate in Pennsylvania. He donated $2,900 to Harriet Hageman, who successfully challenged Rep. Liz Cheney in the Republican primary for Wyoming’s lone House seat. He donated $5,800 to the reelection campaign of Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and kicked in another $17,500 to political action committees associated with Scott. 

His wife Joyce has been a more prolific political donor. She, too, has backed the presidential bids of DeSantis and Kennedy Jr.. Last year, she contributed $2,900 to the New Journey PAC, a conservative group founded by an associate of Rush Limbaugh that focuses on Black voters and that endorsed Trump in 2020, and she gave $5,000 to Make America Great Again, Again, which was set up in 2021 as the primary super PAC for Trump. (It has been folded into a new PAC called Make America Great Again Inc.)

For the recent midterm elections, she donated $2,900 to Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and another $2,900 to his Take Back the House 2022 PAC. She also poured $10,000 into Right Women PAC, a group run by Debra Meadows, the wife of Mark Meadows, the former GOP congressman and onetime chief of staff who was indicted in Georgia on election interference charges. Right Women PAC helped fund the campaigns of pro-Trump women candidates, including Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. It employed Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who aided Trump in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Like her husband, Joyce donated $23,300 to Tim Scott’s campaign and PACs. 

Aubrey and Joyce have not always been GOP-only donors. In the 1990s and 2000s, they supported Democrats (Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, congresswoman Jane Harman) and Republicans (Mitt Romney, John McCain, Mitch McConnell, and Newt Gingrich). After 2014, they stopped making donations to federal candidates. They resumed in 2021, now supporting just Republicans and conservative candidates and PACs. 

The Chernicks have supported on-the-right operations outside of electoral politics. In 2005, Aubrey was a key investor in Pajamas Media, a website that started off with an ideologically eclectic jumble of bloggers but that soon became a right-wing outlet that featured a hawkish stance on Israel. (I was on the original editorial advisory board for Pajamas Media but departed as it lurched toward the right.) In its conservative iteration, Pajamas Media, which became known as PJ Media, featured a host of far-right conservatives, such as Tammy Bruce, and dispatched Joe “The Plumber” Wurzelbacher as a war correspondent to Israel. As one of its founders, Charles F. Johnson, a blogger and web designer, told the Daily Beast, within years it had become “one of those cookie-cutter right-wing websites.” In 2019, Salem Media acquired PJ Media and added it to the company’s stable of conservative sites, including Townhall, HotAir, and RedState. 

Aubrey and Joyce Chernick have been, respectively, president and vice chair of the Fairbrook Foundation. In a 2011 report titled Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America, the Center for American Progress, a liberal group, noted that between 2004 and 2009 the Chernicks’ foundation contributed $1.5 million to what CAP termed Islamophobic organizations. It reported, “Among the recipients: ACT! For America, receiving $125,000; the Center for Security Policy ($66,700); the David Horowitz Freedom Center ($618,500); the Investigative Project on Terrorism, ($25,000); Jihad Watch ($253,250); and the Middle East Forum ($410,000).”

Jihad Watch is a website run by Robert Spencer, a leading anti-Islam activist who has claimed that Islam is an inherently violent religion and that radical Islam is subverting the United States. In 2009, Politico reported that Joyce Chernick provided a majority of the $920,000 the right-wing David Horowitz Freedom Center gave to Jihad Watch. 

In an interview with Mother Jones, Aubrey Chernick would not comment on the fundraiser for Kennedy Jr. or even confirm that he and his wife hosted it at their home. But he did discuss the couple’s support of RFK Jr. He first explained it by blasting the Democratic establishment for “going after Bobby” and saying that “the country needs some alternatives.” Asked if he and Joyce were drawn to Kennedy Jr. due to the candidate’s opposition to vaccination, he replied, “Yeah, we’re a little bit—we didn’t like the cancelation elements [regarding anti-vaccination material during the Covid pandemic].” He added, “There wasn’t good information about the side effects of vaccination.” He remarked that he was “not happy about” Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, the public–private partnership that facilitated and accelerated the development, manufacturing, and distribution of Covid-19 vaccines. (A source who knows the Chernicks says that the couple have said they are opposed to mask-wearing and being vaccinated for Covid.)

Is it odd that DeSantis supporters would give money to Kennedy Jr.? “In their own way, both are courageous for freedom,” Chernick insisted. Citing DeSantis’ response to Covid in Florida, he praised the governor for doing “his own research into vaccinations” and becoming “his own person” on this issue. DeSantis, Chernick said, “was criticized but he had the courage to go ahead. Isn’t that a commonality with Bobby Kennedy?” 

In an email to Mother Jones, a spokesperson for Kennedy Jr. declined to say how the fundraiser at the Chernick residence came about. Instead, the spokesperson commented, “Team Kennedy is very grateful for the support of Joyce and Aubrey… We are grateful to all our contributors, be they Democrats, Republicans, or Independents.” 

Kennedy Jr.’s run against President Joe Biden has received other Republican big-money support. Of the $16 million raised (through July) by a super PAC backing his campaign, at least $5 million came from Timothy Mellon, a longtime GOP donor. (Mellon donated $1.5 million to a Trump-aligned organization in 2022.) Another $500,000 was donated to this pro-Kennedy super PAC last year by a tech entrepreneur and vaccination opponent named Mark Gorton, a onetime supporter of progressive causes who recently contributed to DeSantis and Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.). Whether it’s because of Kennedy’s war on vaccination or his potential to discomfort Biden and the Democratic Party—or perhaps both—the Chernicks and other GOP donors have fueled the long-shot campaign of a candidate with the most hallowed name in Democratic politics.

If Kennedy decides to flee the Democratic race and run as an independent—or perhaps as a Libertarian Party candidate—his appeal to pro-Trump Republicans could lessen. Recent polling gives no clear indication of whether his presence on the general election ballot (which might not occur in every state) would be advantageous for either Trump or Biden. But he will likely retain the ability to pull in significant campaign cash, even though he’s an antivax propagandist and conspiracy theorist—or because of it. 

Donald Trump, Stochastic Terrorist

Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. Plus, David Corn’s American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, a New York Times bestseller, has just been released in a new and expanded paperback edition. 

If you’re not familiar with term “stochastic terrorism,” now is a good time to bone up, for the leading Republican candidate is a stochastic terrorist.

Stochastic terrorism is defined by conflict and law enforcement experts as the demonization of a foe so that he, she, or they might become targets of violence. Scientific American recently put it this way:

Dehumanizing and vilifying a person or group of people can provoke what scholars and law enforcement officials call stochastic terrorism, in which ideologically driven hate speech increases the likelihood that people will violently and unpredictably attack the targets of vicious claims. At its core, stochastic terrorism exploits one of our strongest and most complicated emotions: disgust.

In addition to disgust, fear and hatred can work, the point being to depict a person or set of people as a loathsome other undeserving of respect or acceptance, and a dangerous threat. Establishing such a framework boosts the odds that a lone individual or group will violently assault the deprecated.

Last year, after the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Florida residence, in search of stolen classified documents, an Ohio Trump devotee named Ricky Shiffer, wearing tactical gear and armed with an AR-15, tried to breach the FBI field office in Cincinnati. He failed and fled, and later died in a shootout with law enforcement. Noting that far-right Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), a leading election denialist, after the raid, had declared, “We must destroy the FBI,” my colleague Mark Follman wrote:

Was Shiffer spurred to attack the FBI by the statements from Trump and Gosar? It’s hard to know, and that’s no accident. Shiffer’s actions point to a rhetorical method experts call “stochastic terrorism,” whereby a leader vilifies a person or group in ways likely to instigate random supporters to attack those targets, while the instigator maintains a veneer of plausible deniability. Trump made this form of incitement a hallmark of his presidency, galvanizing extremists by railing against and dehumanizing his “enemies.” The country saw the devastating consequences when his supporters stormed Congress to obstruct certification of the presidential election.

Of course, there have long been many instances of Trump encouraging political violence. Axios has compiled a list. As has ABC News. And Vox. And the New York Times. Often, it’s been tough-guy bluster, with Trump telling law officers to handle suspects roughly, pledging to shoot looters, or saying to attendees at his rally that it’s okay to beat up protestors. Stochastic terrorism is more indirect and perhaps more effective: It’s pinning a bull’s-eye on the back of an opponent in a volatile situation—perhaps suggesting the world would be safer without this supposed threat—knowing this could lead to violence against that target. It’s indirect incitement, inspiring someone else to do the dirty work.

Trump is a master of this. After all, he got thousands of his cultists to storm the Capitol and try to prevent the congressional certification of his loss to Joe Biden. In recent days, he has fired up his stochastic terrorism machine. For a Rosh Hashanah messaged posted on social media earlier this month, Trump railed against “liberal Jews”: “Just a quick reminder for liberal Jews who voted to destroy America & Israel because you believed in false narratives! Let’s hope you learned from your mistake & make better choices moving forward!”

This holiday greeting came as antisemitism appears to be on the rise, and it certainly carried a menacing tone, suggesting that liberal Jews—who are a majority of Jews—are enemies of the United States. It is not hard to imagine that a deranged person contemplating an attack on a synagogue would read this post as a green light.

Trump was far more explicit in a recent post on Army Gen. Mark Milley, who is about to step down as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He denounced Milley for the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan (an action that Trump had set in motion) and called him a “Woke train wreck.” Trump assailed Milley for talking to his Chinese counterpart in the final turbulent weeks of the Trump presidency (which Milley said he did in coordination with other senior defense officials to assure China that Trump was not planning a surprise attack on China).

Trump called this a “treasonous” step and “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!” Once more, it is not difficult to envision a Trump fanatic seeing this as a call to assassinate Milley. He might as well have exclaimed, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent Milley?” And with Milley a possible witness against Trump in the stolen documents case, this post might also have been an attempt at witness intimidation. (Gosar also implied Milley should be put to death, writing in his weekly newsletter, “In a better society, quislings like the strange sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung.”

Days later, Trump condemned NBC News and MSNBC—and their corporate owner, Comcast—for committing “Country Threatening Treason” with their critical and “vicious” coverage of him. He threatened to investigate them should he regain the White House. I assume NBC News and MSNBC reviewed their security procedures after this. (Interest declared: I am an MSNBC contributor.)

Accusing a person or entity of treason is essentially saying that they deserve execution. That sends quite the message to Trump’s supporters, especially the unhinged ones. And we already know that they can be a violent bunch and follow his not-so-subtle hints to target his opponents (and to beat up cops).

Trump is hardly alone in deploying this form of terrorism. Last week, billionaire Xer Elon Musk tweeted, “The Soros organization appears to want nothing less than the destruction of western civilization.” Given that billionaire philanthropist George Soros has long been the target of antisemitic attacks, antisemitic conspiracy theories, and at least one assassination attempt, that Musk himself has previously mounted an antisemitic attack on Soros, and that Musk’s X platform has been credibly accused of hosting an increase in antisemitic posts, one might expect Musk to be a bit careful here. But…no. Musk didn’t call for violence to be waged against Soros, yet by characterizing Soros as seeking the “destruction of western civilization,” he hyperbolically presents Soros as an existential threat to the United States and the entire Western world. Now what should one do about such a threat?

As Follman noted, many Republicans have followed Trump’s lead in deploying extreme rhetoric that could spur violence:

After Mar-a-Lago, Trump allies claimed that the feds were coming for the MAGA base next. If the FBI can do this to him, they inveighed on social media and Fox News, just imagine what they could do to you. Ditto with their response to new funding boosting the ranks of the dilapidated IRS. This represents a stark reversal for the GOP: Whereas President George H.W. Bush once renounced the National Rifle Association for disparaging federal agents as “jack-booted thugs,” Republican senators now wield such rhetoric. “Stop Biden’s shadow army of 87,000 IRS agents,” Ted Cruz warned. Chuck Grassley insinuated that an IRS “strike force” could show up with assault weapons “ready to shoot some small business person in Iowa.”

At a rally last year, GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has been trying to out-Trump Trump, said of Dr. Anthony Fauci, “I’m just sick of seeing him. Someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac.” With much conflict and disagreement still prompted by the Covid pandemic, DeSantis was legitimizing the idea of committing violence against Fauci. The crowd roared with approval.

Trump, Musk, DeSantis, Gosar—they all know they are speaking to or tweeting at people who are angry and riled up. The brush is dry, and they are suggesting where a match should be lit. In August 2022, Follman attended a threat-assessment conference where leaders in the field told him they were deeply alarmed by the tense national atmosphere: “While far-left rhetoric has stirred some violent protests and threats, they said, plots and attacks fueled by Trump’s incitement and MAGA extremism are by far the driving concern.”

With Trump under indictment in four cases—for a variety of allegations, including treasonous actions, stealing classified government documents, and making hush money payoffs to a porn star—and lashing out, threats of violence are increasing. The New York Times summed up recent developments: a woman called the chamber of the judge overseeing the federal election interference case against Trump and said, “We are coming to kill you”; FBI agents are worried about threats to their families; and top prosecutors in the cases require round-the-clock protection. The bottom line: “As the prosecutions of Mr. Trump have accelerated, so too have threats against law enforcement authorities, judges, elected officials and others. The threats, in turn, are prompting protective measures, a legal effort to curb his angry and sometimes incendiary public statements, and renewed concern about the potential for an election campaign in which Mr. Trump has promised ‘retribution’ to produce violence.”

Trump recently visited a gun store in South Carolina, and his campaign posted on X that he had purchased a Glock pistol. With his indictments, it would likely be illegal for the store to sell him a firearm, and the campaign quickly deleted the post, noting that he had admired the gun but not bought it. All this could be read as another violence-triggering signal to his supporters. This store that Trump promoted supplied one of the weapons used in the racist shooting last month at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida.

Trump and the GOP continue to get away with their encouragement of violence. Why wasn’t his post suggesting Milley be executed major news for a week, provoking controversy and forcing every Republican to respond? The answer is obvious: Trump’s extremism has become fully normalized. It’s Trump being Trump. When he endorses the nutty and dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory, when he says the Constitution should be suspended so he can be reinstated as president, when he dines with a white nationalist and a prominent antisemite—none of this prompts lasting national outrage that transcends the usual tribal partisan politics.

Then again, why should it? Trump has done worse. He has (so far) gotten away both with trying to mount a coup and with inciting a violent riot that he hoped to exploit to stay in power—at least insofar as he’s the odds-on favorite to snag the Republican nomination. And despite all that, he’s often treated by much of the mainstream media as a politician, not a peril. Yet for the security of American democracy, Trump needs to be widely seen for what he is: this stochastic terrorist. The more he vilifies his detractors, the more he assaults the justice system, the more likely there will be more violence. He knows this, and that is the point.

As a Presidential Candidate, Cornel West Aligns Himself With Far-Left Radicals

Cornel West, the celebrity academic (formerly of Harvard and Princeton), fiery antiracism campaigner, and current Green Party presidential candidate, has a long association with the Democratic Socialists of America, having served as the group’s honorary chairman. But as he campaigns for president, West is moving beyond the DSA and forging bonds with far-left activists who call for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, who support the Chinese and North Korean regimes, and who are associated with communist organizations and Russian state propaganda operations.

What has brought West into this circle is his opposition to US military assistance for Ukraine. In July, he posted a statement on social media blaming NATO and the United States for having “provoked Russia into a criminal invasion and occupation of Ukraine.” He called the Russia-launched conflict “a proxy war between the American Empire and the Russian Federation,” and he slammed the Democratic Party as “a party of war and Wall Street targeting Russia and China.” 

West is currently scheduled to headline a Washington, DC, forum on October 3 that aims to spur opposition to the Biden administration’s support of the Ukrainian government’s fight against the Russian invasion. Part of a “global mobilization” of self-described peace groups, the event is being co-sponsored by an outfit long tied to communist organizations, and West will share the stage with speakers from the farthest side of the left, including some who have worked for Russian state media.

According to promotional material for the forum, the other participants will be Claudia De La Cruz, Eugene Puryear, Medea Benjamin, and Lee Camp.

De La Cruz is presently the 2024 presidential candidate of the small, far-left Party for Socialism and Liberation. The PSL split from the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party in 2004, and one of its founders has declared, “We are communists.” The party calls for the “revolutionary” overthrow of capitalism and denounces “reformist hopes” for a “kinder, gentler” capitalism. The PSL has supported the North Korean regime and its pursuit of nuclear weapons and also hailed the Chinese Communist Party, defending it against various charges of human rights violations. Brian Becker, a co-founder of the PSL, used to co-host a show on Radio Sputnik, a Moscow-created propaganda network. 

Puryear, a co-host of the forum, was the PSL’s vice presidential candidate in 2008 and 2016. He, too, once hosted a show on Radio Sputnik, which is the radio and digital outlet of Rossiya Segodnya (Russia Today), the Kremlin-controlled media agency that directs the RT television network. (RT America shut down shortly after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.) Camp, a comedian and far-left podcaster, had a show on RT America until the cable network shuttered. He blamed the “US government war machine” for RT America’s demise.

Medea Benjamin, the other-co-host for the event, is a co-founder of Code Pink, a longtime opponent of US military intervention overseas. She is scheduled to co-host a fundraiser for West prior to the forum. Code Pink was the subject of a recent New York Times investigation that reported that this antiwar group has received significant financial support from a pro-China tech mogul named Neville Roy Singham who lives in Shanghai and that the group has defended or downplayed China’s human rights violations.

The Times said that its reporters had “tracked hundreds of millions of dollars to groups linked to Mr. Singham that mix progressive advocacy with Chinese government talking points.” As an example, it noted that Code Pink “once criticized China’s rights record but now defends its internment of the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs, which human rights experts have labeled a crime against humanity.” Singham, who is married to Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans, also has funded the People’s Forum, a New York-based meeting space that hosts radical left lectures and events and that De La Cruz and another PSL activist have co-managed.

(After the Times article appeared, Code Pink, the People’s Forum, PSL, Benjamin, Evans, De La Cruz, Puryear, Camp, Becker, and others signed an open letter accusing the newspaper of engaging in “McCarthyism” and joining with “right-wing extremists” to use “intimidation tactics” to smear Code Pink, the People’s Forum, and other “advocates for change.” A spokesperson for Code Pink tells Mother Jones, “We do not spread talking points from foreign governments.” She adds, “The notion that we are influenced by external political entities or governments is not only false—it’s insulting. We’ve always been an independent voice for peace, and we refuse to be labeled otherwise… The Chinese government’s violation of [the Uyghurs’] human rights is of concern to us and we join the call for justice for the Uyghurs. At the same time, we call out the US government, which is using the human rights of the Uyghurs as a tool to drive war with China, instead of a human rights issue that needs to be addressed as such.” In a 2021 interview, though, Evans did seem to excuse or diminish the Chinese government’s harsh treatment of the Uyghurs.)

The October 3 panel opposing US military assistance to Ukraine is sponsored by Code Pink, Peace in Ukraine (a collection of antiwar groups), and the ANSWER Coalition. ANSWER is an antiwar outfit that emerged in the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and was organized by the Workers World Party, a small political sect that split from the Socialist Workers Party to support the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. The WWP, an advocate of socialist revolution and the abolition of private property, praised the regimes of Fidel Castro and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il. It campaigned against the war-crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. ANSWER’s spokesperson at the time of its founding was Brian Becker, who went on to leave the WWP and form the PSL. He is currently the national coordinator of ANSWER. Last year, Becker gave an interview to Global Times, a propaganda outlet tied to the Chinese Communist Party, and hailed the CCP as “a source of great inspiration for people who seek a socialist and humanist alternative.”

With his participation in the October 3 event, West has allied himself with a small coterie of far-leftists, some of whom promote extremist ideology and some of whom have voiced support for authoritarian regimes or partnered with Russia-controlled media operations. 

West and his campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

West and his backers might argue that he is merely joining forces with those who also oppose US policies that he deems dangerous. Yet when a presidential candidate takes a stage, he or she can expect to be judged by those who share the platform. The current line-up for this forum places West in the company of radicals, Chinese apologists, and chums of Russia’s propaganda machine. Given his status as a prominent public intellectual and academic, his headlining appearance boosts the standing of his co-speakers and the organizing outfits. Choosing to appear with these people is a significant campaign decision. 

Can the Media Meet the Challenge of the GOP’s Bogus Impeachment?

Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. Plus, David Corn’s American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, a New York Times bestseller, has just been released in a new and expanded paperback edition. 

“Sentence first—verdict afterwards.” So declared the Queen of Hearts during the trial of the Knave of Hearts (for allegedly stealing tarts) in Alice in Wonderland. This approach, which Lewis Carroll meant to symbolize the height of absurdism, seems an apt description of how the House Republicans are proceeding with an impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden.

As of now, there is no evidence that Biden did anything to warrant the political equivalent of a death sentence. Yet rather than merely continue pursuing their multi-committee investigation of Hunter Biden’s admittedly questionable business dealings to determine if President Biden ought to be subjected to an impeachment inquiry, the Republicans have rushed to the presumed sentence before even coming close to reaching a verdict. This is absurd.

In previous impeachments, the basic facts of the alleged wrongdoing were known. The Watergate break-in and Richard Nixon’s efforts to impede the investigation of the burglary and subsequent cover-up were matters of public record when the House of Representatives on October 30, 1973, launched an impeachment inquiry. Previously, the Senate had created a special investigative committee and held the nationally broadcasted Watergate hearings, and federal prosecutors had long been on the case and sending Nixon’s minions to the hoosegow.

In the cases of Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, the basics of their wrongdoing were confirmed prior to the House kick-starting impeachment. The infamous Starr report, which detailed Clinton’s affair with an intern and his subsequent lies about it, was submitted to Congress in early September 1998. The House GOP voted to launch the impeachment process a few weeks later. With Trump, there was no question that he had leaned on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to produce dirt on Joe Biden. A quasi-transcript of the phone call had been released. And Trump’s incitement of the insurrectionist assault on the Capitol on January 6 was done in full public view.

Whether these impeachments were justified or not, they were predicated on established misdeeds.

Not so now. What is this impeachment about? It’s about Republican speculation that Joe Biden was somehow involved in illicit activity with Hunter. Yet there is no confirmed evidence of that or that Hunter’s business ventures—which do appear to have been sleazy attempts to score big money by trading on the family name—were illegal.

The House Oversight Committee has released a compilation of what it calls “evidence of Joe Biden’s involvement in his family’s influence peddling schemes.” But this list mainly offers testimony and documents showing that Hunter Biden vigorously name-dropped his pop to grease business deals and that on a few occasions Biden met or chatted with his son and his son’s overseas business associates. There’s no information indicating Biden took official actions to help Hunter or his colleagues. This “evidence” could lead someone to think that something improper might have occurred; it provides leads that ought to be investigated. But it is not the basis for considering political execution.

House Republicans have repeatedly been forced to acknowledge that evidence linking Biden to corruption has not yet been unearthed. On CNN this week, Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) was pressed on whether the Republicans had found direct evidence of Biden malfeasance. He replied, “The point of the [impeachment] inquiry is to give us greater standing to get the full evidence.”

Moreover, Rep. Jim Comer (R-Ky.), the leader of the GOP impeachment inquiry, has distorted and exaggerated the investigation’s findings, repeatedly hurling false allegations about President Biden.

This is sentence first—investigation afterwards. We’re going to have an impeachment inquiry to see if we can find evidence to justify an impeachment inquiry. (I’d certainly welcome any investigation of wheeling-and-dealing conducted by relatives of elected officials, including, say, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.) As you would expect, numerous Republicans have conceded this impeachment effort is about weakening Biden for the 2024 election and seeking revenge for Trump.

Bottom line: This is a bogus and trumped-up impeachment crusade.

We now turn to an important question: How does the media cover and contextualize a sham impeachment? The aim of the Republicans—if they cannot produce true evidence of Biden corruption—is to tarnish the president by linking his name to “impeachment” in as many headlines and news accounts as possible. Can the media report on these shenanigans without being an accomplice, without bolstering a bad-faith effort driven by far-right extremists and conspiracy-mongers, such Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz? Even though news accounts sometimes note that the Republicans have yet to produce evidence to justify impeachment, the overall coverage ends up boosting the Biden-is-corrupt innuendo being slung by the Republicans.

Not to pick on the New York Times—but why not, since everyone does. When House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced on Tuesday that he was initiating an impeachment inquiry of Biden without a House vote, the Times covered his declaration on the front-page. The headline blared, “McCarthy Opens Inquiry of Biden, Appeasing Right.” In the opening paragraphs, the article focused on the internal GOP politics, reporting that McCarthy was doing this to appease far-right lawmakers and “quell a brewing rebellion among ultraconservative critics.”

The paper had a line in the third paragraph stating that after months of digging Republicans have found “no proof” of Biden corruption. But then it reported in detail McCarthy’s charge that Biden had lied about his knowledge of Hunter’s business dealings and that the Biden administration had given the president’s son “special treatment” in a criminal investigation. It quoted McCarthy declaring that the House Republicans have “uncovered serious and credible allegations into President Biden’s conduct” and that “these allegations paint a picture of a culture of corruption.” (Note that McCarthy said “allegations,” not “evidence.”) A greater amount of ink was granted to McCarthy’s accusations than the absence of evidence.

It was not until the middle of the piece that the newspaper reported that some Republicans have not supported impeachment because GOP investigators have yet to produce evidence tying Biden to his son’s business dealings. Mainly, the Times handled the evidence question in the usual he said/she said approach, quoting Democrats insisting that no evidence of corruption has been turned up.

It’s all politics, charge and countercharge. Rs and Ds operating on the same level. Certainly, this adheres to journalistic convention. But it affords impeachment scammers an advantage, amplifying their insinuation that Biden is corrupt. And it allows them to—wait for it!—weaponize impeachment. That is, to use this dramatic course of action, justified or not, to spread the unproven notion that Joe Biden is a criminal dirtbag.

A story that appeared in the Times the next day similarly focused on McCarthy’s political dilemma, as well as his flip-flop on the issue of proceeding with impeachment absent a House vote. (He had previously said there must be such a vote.) But on the question of evidence—or the lack thereof—the newspaper again gave its readers thin gruel, with a half-sentence reporting that some Republicans were uncomfortable about “moving forward in the absence of solid evidence.”

All this downplays a central component of the story: the Republicans are proceeding with an impeachment absent hard-and-fast evidence. That helps the GOP.

How can the media avoid providing platforms to scoundrels whose goal is to spread disinformation and poison the national discourse? There was another example in the Times this week of empowering a liar. In an article about House Republicans who oppose military aid to Ukraine—even though firms in their districts manufacture weaponry being sent to Ukraine—the paper quoted Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) saying, “our constituents have great concerns about seemingly unlimited taxpayer money being used to fund the war in Ukraine, especially when Americans are struggling at home with rising inflation and places like East Palestine and Maui continue to be ignored by the Biden administration.”

The Biden administration didn’t ignore the train derailment disaster in East Palestine or the wildfires in Hawaii. It deployed multiple agencies to help the Ohioans, and Biden traveled to Maui. Why would the paper of record print an outright lie from Jordan and help him advance a deceitful agenda?

It may sound hyperbolic to say this, but there is a war going on in the United States over the future of American democracy. Disinformation is perhaps the most potent weapon in that war. And impeachment is now another front in that war.

So how does the media cover a (so far) baseless impeachment day by day without aiding and abetting the weaponizers? This circus cannot be ignored. But with each twist and turn, must reporters again and again lead with the fact that there is no solid predicate for this impeachment? Perhaps, even if that could get boring for reporters and their viewers and readers. Without context, unconfirmed accusations hurled by unprincipled accusers can influence the political debate. Remember how the Republicans spent years bleating “Benghazi” over and over to tarnish Hillary Clinton ahead of the 2016 election? McCarthy boasted then that the GOP’s multiple Benghazi probes—which never proved any of the wild conspiracy theories—caused her poll numbers to drop. The Biden impeachment is the same strategy—on steroids.

McCarthy and his House colleagues are exploiting impeachment to generate headlines and soundbites that create the impression that Biden is a crook—to give Fox and its wannabe competitors plenty of grist for their propaganda-churning mills and to help Trump return to the White House with an authoritarian agenda. That is the crux of the story here. Whether the rest of the media plays it that way will determine if the extremists—those who tried to overturn the last election, who downplayed or excused a violent attack on the Capitol, and who now support a demagogic presidential candidate who subverted the constitutional order—succeed.

Meet the Democratic-Led DC Consulting Firm With an Offshoot That Tries to Elect Republicans

Rational 360, a high-powered Washington, DC-based strategic communications firm and digital agency, promises to use “innovative” means and a network that extends “deep into the Halls of Congress, the White House, and Fortune 500 boardrooms across the country” to advance the “mission-critical goals” of its clients, a roster of corporations, trade associations, military contractors, policy advocates, and others. The company—one of the many inside-the-Beltway firms that crafts messaging and peddles influence—promotes itself as a purely bipartisan operation, though its top leaders are mostly Democrats with White House experience earned during the Clinton and Obama years. Yet despite these Democratic roots, Rational 360 plays the field, having recently set up a company to help elect Republicans, while also creating an offshoot to assist Democratic campaigns. Moreover, it has advised No Labels, a dark-money and self-professed centrist group that is preparing to possibly run a third-party presidential candidate in 2024 in an effort that could help Donald Trump.

With these activities, Rational 360 looks as if it is trying to profit from all partisan sides—right, left, and middle.

The company was formed in 2009 when Rational PR and the Stevens and Schriefer Group, an advertising outfit, created a firm to pitch large corporate clients. The eight partners at the time included Patrick Dorton, who had been a top aide in the Clinton White House and the chief spokesman for  Arthur Andersen LLP during the accounting firm’s 2002 collapse, which occurred due to its role in the Enron and Worldcom financial scandals. 

Dorton is now the CEO of Rational 360, and the other top officers of the company include notable Democratic veterans. Brian Kaminski, a managing director and co-founder, notes in his company bio that before he joined the firm he “gained communications experience on Capitol Hill in the Office of [Democratic] Senator Barbara Mikulski, in the Office of the First Lady, and at the Democratic National Committee.” Melissa Green, a managing director and senior counsel for the company, was an aide in the Clinton White House and began her career at the political consulting firm of prominent Democrats James Carville and Paul Begala. Joe Lockhart, another managing director, was a press secretary for President Clinton. The firm, true to its bipartisan pitch, also includes officers and staffers with Republican pedigrees.

“People generally think of Rational 360 as a Democratic-run firm, but here they are trying to help Republicans,” says a person familiar with Rational 360’s operations. “And with this arrangement, could they have a candidate on both sides of the same election?”

According to Federal Election Commission data, Rational 360 has done no work for federal candidates or political action committees, except a in 2020 for Americans for Tomorrow’s Future, a Republican super PAC, for which it was paid $5,000. But in 2021, it created an offshoot entity to provide digital media services to Democratic candidates—without identifying this group’s link to Rational 360. 

The firm, Blue Perigon Digital, went live with a website that year. It boasts that it can create messages for Democratic candidates that can reach base and swing voters and “groups that Democratic candidates have struggled to reach in the past with persuasive content.” The site lists 15 officers and staffers. All of them also work at Rational 360. But their employment at Rational 360 is not mentioned in any of the bios posted on the Blue Perigon Digital site. In fact, there is no reference to Rational 360 anywhere on the website. It’s as if Blue Perigon Digital does not want to be associated with Rational 360—or vice versa.

The president of Blue Perigon is Hina Razzaq. She is also a vice president at Rational 360. On the Blue Perigon site, she identifies herself as a “Former Digital Lead in Wisconsin for Hillary Clinton.” A principal at Blue Perigon, Collin Berglund, is a managing director at Rational 360. Cassie Rudolph, the digital director for Blue Perigon, is the lead senior strategist for digital at Rational 360.

A perigon is an angle of 360 degrees.

Blue Perigon’s most lucrative work, according to FEC data, has been its consulting for Rep. Donald Norcross (D-N.J.). The firm banked $574,000 toiling for him in 2022. Its website boasts, “As a result of the comprehensive digital vote-by-mail [get out the vote] program led by Blue Perigon Digital, Donald Norcross was re-elected as Congressman for New Jersey’s 1st District with a higher number of mail-in votes than any other district in New Jersey.” He won his race with 62.3 percent—which essentially matched the 62.5 percent he drew in 2020.

During the 2022 campaign, Blue Perigon also was paid a little over $73,000 by the campaign of Joy Fox, a Rhode Island businesswoman who lost a Democratic primary for a House seat. Gabe Amo, who recently worked in the Biden White House and who is running for Congress in Rhode Island, has paid Blue Perigon for digital advertising this year.

In early 2023, another Rational 360 offshoot appeared on the web. Its name is Red Octagon Digital, and it proclaims, “We help Conservative candidates and causes win by honing the data that moves the needle, creating the content that generates votes, and reaching precisely the right audience.” All eight of its officials and staffers are Rational 360 employees or managers. As with Blue Perigon Digital, none of their bios—or any other section on the site—reference Rational 360.

Red Octagon’s managing director, Lindsey Kolb, is a managing director at Rational 360. Cassie Scher and Jim Billimoria are each a vice president at both companies. All three previously worked for Republican shops. Kolb also has been a staffer for the NRA and the Heritage Foundation. So far, the FEC has no data indicating any candidate or political action committee has retained the services of Red Octagon Digital. But it’s still early in the 2024 cycle.

“People generally think of Rational 360 as a Democratic-run firm, but here they are trying to help Republicans,” says a person familiar with Rational 360’s operations. “And with this arrangement, could they have a candidate on both sides of the same election?”

In an email exchange with Mother Jones, Dorton said that Rational 360 “is a proudly bipartisan communications, public relations and public affairs firm with a strong digital practice” and “does not engage in partisan political campaigns or ideological causes on either side of the aisle.” But he noted that its ranks include past “senior operatives” who worked for Democrats and Republicans and “who are often sought out to help specific candidates and causes.” Blue Perigon Digital and Red Octagon Digital were set up, Dorton said, as “legally separate entities from Rational 360” to allow the firm’s Democratic and Republican staff “to separately and voluntarily originate and take on passion-projects that fall outside of Rational 360’s strict bipartisan standards.”

Dorton added: “This is part of our employee retention strategy, as we don’t want our talented staff, who come from diverse political backgrounds, to leave because they can’t originate and pursue projects they are passionate about.”

Dorton insisted that the websites of these two firms contain no references to Rational 360 because the communications company encourages “our employees not to list their firm affiliation when engaging in any kind of partisan political activity.”

Asked whether Rational 360 employees are paid separately for their work for these offshoots or are granted time off from Rational 360 for their Blue Perigon or Red Octagon endeavors, Dorton replied, “This is all confidential business information that we are not comfortable sharing.” As for who owns Blue Perigon Digital and Red Octagon Digital and where the funds generated by these ventures end up, he also was mum, citing confidentiality.

According to Washington, DC corporate records, Blue Perigon Digital is based at the same address as Rational 360, and its corporate filing lists one director: Dorton. There are no publicly available DC records for Red Octagon Digital, which was incorporated in Delaware.

Dorton also maintained that “Joe Lockhart works only for Rational 360 and is not affiliated with Blue Perigon Digital, Red Octagon Digital or any partisan activities.” Yet he was listed on the website of Blue Perigon Digital as a “senior advisor” until Mother Jones recently inquired about the company.

Not only does it seem that the Rational 360 crew is working both sides of the political street through these offshoots, the company has also directly pulled in big money aiding an outfit that insists it represents the center. On No Labels’ 2021 tax return, the most recent publicly available, the group reported that during that year—in which it raised $11.4 million—it paid Rational 360 $946,000 for consulting services. According to two sources familiar with Rational 360’s operations, the firm continued to perform work for No Labels in 2022 and 2023.

No Labels, a dark-money group that does not disclose who funds it, has been obtaining ballot lines in states to possibly mount a third-party presidential candidacy next year. The name most often floated as No Labels’ possible candidate is Sen. Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat who has pondered leaving the Democratic Party. (Manchin, who recently headlined a No Labels event in New Hanpshire, regularly declines to say whether he would run on the No Labels line.) This project has enraged Democrats and Never-Trump Republicans, who assume a third-party effort would likely draw more votes from President Joe Biden than Donald Trump, the likely major-party nominees, and, thus, serve as a spoiler for Biden and increase Trump’s odds of regaining the White House. 

Dorton declined to comment on Rational 360’s relationship with No Labels, saying that its agreements with clients “prohibit us from discussing details about our work, including the timing and scope of our engagements, with the media.” Maryanne Martini, the communications deputy for No Labels, did not reply to a request for comment.

On its website, Rational 360 asserts, “We are bipartisan thinkers who bring a diverse range of perspectives to client issues that reflect our deep experience working across industries, sectors, and communities.” But these “bipartisan thinkers” also engage in partisan operations. About one-third of Rational 360’s staff of 75 people are listed as working for either Blue Perigon or Red Octagon. Mother Jones asked Dorton, “Is it fair to say that with these two firms and its work for No Labels that Rational 360 is seeking to generate revenue by working for all political sides—the Republicans, the Democrats, and the centrists?” He answered, “No….Rational 360 is focused on bipartisan clients as a business strategy and works to help our clients make their issues heard across the full spectrum of each party.” That’s the messaging.

How Right-Wing Groups Are Plotting To Implement Trump’s Authoritarianism

Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. Plus, David Corn’s American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, a New York Times bestseller, has just been released in a new and expanded paperback edition. 

There is an authoritarian danger that threatens American democracy. It is a separate peril from Donald Trump and his tens of millions of rabid supports. It is the right-wing infrastructure that is publicly plotting to undermine the checks and balances of our constitutional order and concentrate unprecedented power in the presidency. Its efforts, if successful and coupled with a Trump (or other GOP) victory in 2024, would place the nation on a path to autocracy.

Trump’s desire to be a strongman ruler are no secret. He has repeatedly uttered statements that reveal a craving to be in total control of the US government. As he mounts a second campaign for the White House, his team has openly discussed his plans to consolidate government power in the White House should he win. The New York Times recently reported that his crew aims “to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.” The Washington Post ran a story in April headlined, “Trump touts authoritarian vision for second term.”

These plans include altering the rules governing the civil service so that tens of thousands of federal workers—maybe more—would be subject to immediate dismissal by the White House. That would mean that Trump could fire employees at federal agencies who do not pledge their loyalty to Trump—or who question the legality or appropriateness of White House directives. Say, Trump or an underling orders the IRS to audit the tax returns of a political foe and an IRS career official objects, that person could be pink-slipped.

Yet this effort to reshape the US government extends far beyond the fevered fantasies of one failed casino owner and his henchmen and henchwomen. Much of the right-wing establishment—including its leading think tanks and policy shops—are part of the attempt to concentrate federal power in the hands of Trump or another Republican president.

Conservatives have been advocating placing the White House in direct control of the Justice Department—that is, tearing down the (metaphorical) wall erected after Watergate that essentially blocks the president from unduly influencing the decisions of the agency and its criminal and civil investigations.  Leading this charge has been Jeffrey Clark, the top Justice Department official who, not coincidentally, colluded with Trump after the 2020 election to push the department to falsely claim the election returns were fraudulent.(Clark was indicted last month in Fulton County, Georgia, as part of the criminal case that alleged Trump ran a “criminal enterprise” to overturn the last election.) Clark had been working on this Justice Department initiative as a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America, a Washington, DC-based think tank run and staffed by Trump administration veterans, including Russell Vought, the former head of the Office of Management and Budget, and Kash Patel, who worked for Trump at the National Security Council.

The Center for Renewing America is merely a small piece of the right’s let’s-go-authoritarian operation. Dozens of conservative outfits—led by the Heritage Foundation—have banded together to produce what they call Project 2025, which has released a 1,000-page report, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, which provides a blueprint for a wannabe-White-House-autocrat. Their proposals include removing protections for federal employees so perhaps as many as 50,000 could be fired and replaced with Trump (or Republican) loyalists. This would be done under the banner of annihilating the supposed “deep state” bureaucracy and smashing the “administrative state.”

As noted above, this would destroy the civil service, booting out of federal agencies employees with expertise and experience and replacing them with political hacks. We’re talking about EPA lawyers who might inform a White House that its proposal to sell oil leases off environmentally sensitive coastlands would violate the law. Or perhaps a CIA analyst who produces an assessment saying that a presidential policy might yield negative consequences (for instance, a report noting that bombing Mexico could cause an immigration crisis).

There’s much more in Project 2025 than eviscerating the civil service. It, too, calls for curbing the independence of the Justice Department and proposes revved-up prosecutions of persons providing or distributing abortion pills by mail. The project urges rolling back environmental regulations, reversing actions to address climate change, and abolishing the Pentagon’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. One chapter that focuses on the Department of Health and Human Services calls on the next president to “maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family.” In other words, the next chief executive should wage a war on marriage equality.

Project 2025 harks back to a Heritage Foundation tradition. Four decades ago, when Ronald Reagan won the presidency, the far-right think tank produced its first Mandate for Leadership, a thick report laying out conservative proposals for the new administration. Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership volume is a similar right-wing wish-list, but an overarching theme is the fortification of presidential power so a presumably conservative president could single-handedly impose right-wing policies on the nation. For a movement once defined by its cries against the evils of big government, this is quite the turnabout. It is a sign of how deeply Trump’s authoritarian impulse has penetrated into the conservative cosmos.

Project 2025 would make real the yearnings of a power-mad indicted former president. The Heritage Foundation claims it is raising $22 million for the venture, which will include recruiting thousands of right-wingers to “flood the zone” of the federal government. This could be a serious and dangerous operation.

The other night I was asked to discuss this initiative on MSNBC. I prepared by reading assorted articles on the project and its own material. But during the segment, I thought of a particularly dangerous possibility.

Trump has already vowed to pardon the January 6 assaulters if he returns to the White House—which would reward and validate violent insurrectionists, domestic terrorists, and seditionists. Now suppose Trump’s supporters—in large or small numbers—mounted new acts of political violence. Under the proposals advocated by Project 2025, Jeffrey Clark, and others, Trump could order the Justice Department not to investigate or prosecute these criminals. He could protect the brownshirts who engage in violence against his opponents. Similarly, Trump could do the same in cases of election interference or voter suppression. He could instruct the FBI to not probe the shady business dealings of his cronies or allies—or those of his family or his own enterprises. He and his favorites would have free rein across the board to break the law or to assist those who do. (See Vladimir Putin.)

Trump has repeatedly said he would use the Justice Department to prosecute and lock up his opponents and critics. That sounds like the usual Trump bluster. But if he gains full control of the department—and the federal law enforcement system—he and his followers (including the violent ones) could get away with murder. Not to be alarmist, but perhaps literally.

It’s been often said that Trump failed to do more damage to the nation because he and his minions were incompetent The organized right wants to ensure that doesn’t happen again, if Trump stays out of prison and ends up back at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Worse, it seeks to institutionalize Trump’s authoritarian instincts. A mad-king ruler needs a support system, and the Heritage Foundation and its partners are happily toiling away to concoct one for Trump.

Click here to watch the MSNBC segment in which we discussed Project 2025.

Why the GOP Can’t Quit Donald Trump (Hint: Look at Its History)

If only the Republicans could get rid of Donald Trump, it could return to normal. This is a common refrain they you often hear from pundits and members of the political class, or maybe from a relative or friend. Trump, in this view, is a dangerous aberration, and all that is needed to de-Trumpify the GOP is for Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, and other establishment Republicans to display some guts, coalesce behind another GOP 2024 contender, and give the indicted ex-president the boot. Such a sentiment is both magical thinking and ahistorical. 

It’s a fantasy because a majority of the Republican base—tens of millions of Americans—remain enthralled with Trump. Have you seen the “Trump or Death” banners? These cultists cannot be herded by GOP graybeards into another camp. For them, Trump is a theology, and you can’t challenge faith with facts. After the Trump-incited January 6 riot, McConnell and McCarthy took baby steps toward nudging the party out of Trump’s clutches, but they soon realized their voters were sticking with Trump and his lies about the 2020 election and everything else. They turned tail. As recent polls show, a majority of Republicans desire a Trump restoration. For the GOP deep state, resistance is futile. To move against Trump would ignite a civil war within the party. That’s not a battle the Washington sticks-in-the-mud would likely win. And they certainly are not martyrs.

The dump-Trump-and-return-to-your-father’s-GOP sentiment is also an affront to history. I can say that with confidence, having written American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, a New York Times bestseller that is coming out this week in a new and expanded paperback edition. One key point of the book is that your-father’s-GOP is largely a myth. Trumpism—or a version of it—has been a critical part of the Republican Party for seven decades. As American Psychosis shows, since the 1950s, the GOP has always encouraged and exploited extremism. Through McCarthyism, Barry Goldwater’s alliance with the nutjobs of the John Birch Society, Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy partnership with racists, the New Right and the Religious Right, Reaganism, both George Bushes’ embrace of antisemitic conspiracy-monger Pat Robertson, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Sarah Palin, the tea party, and, finally, Trump, the party has long nurtured a relationship with far-right radicals, bigots, fundamentalists, and, yes, kooks. It did so by recklessly and relentlessly stoking the paranoia, fear, resentments, and grievances of conservative voters.

Often this was considered a side-hustle by the GOP establishment, an action necessary to achieve electoral victories that would then allow its officials to govern in a more respectable manner. Court the wingnuts during the campaign but then return to Washington as responsible statesmen. Think of Mitt Romney in the 2012 race enthusiastically accepting Trump’s endorsement, even though Trump was best known politically at the time as the champion of the racist birther conspiracy theory. (A former Romney aide tells me that seeking Trump’s embrace was considered a necessary evil to bolster Romney’s standing with right-wing GOP voters and that after it was secured the campaign wanted nothing else to do with Trump.) But then Trump came along as a candidate in 2015 and tossed all pretenses aside. He made outreach to the extremists a central component of his campaign. He even went on Alex Jones’ show to talk directly to the wackos. 

TL;DR for American Psychosis: The GOP’s relationship with hatred and conspiracism did not begin with Trump. Consequently, yearning for the good ol’ days—like when the House GOP made Rush Limbaugh, a super-spreader of fear and loathing, a honorary member of its caucus?—is misplaced nostalgia. Put another way, the roots of the GOP’s present troubles—which bore the poisoned fruit of Trump—are deep and have long been in place. There is no clean ground to which to return. 

When the book was first published last year, I knew that the Trumpers wouldn’t pay it any attention. But I wondered how the small band of anti-Trump Republicans would receive it. Could they concede that many of the elements of the Trumpified GOP that they now despise were present decades before Trump seized control of the party? After all, nothing comes from nothing. Trumpism was not the political equivalent of the Big Bang. 

As I made the rounds of talk shows and podcasts, I found that some recovering Republicans were able to acknowledge that there had been a rottenness within the GOP that predated Trump and that he was able to deftly exploit. Charlie Sykes, a prominent conservative talk show host and author, called American Psychosis “a searing and deeply reported account of how a major political party binged on crazy pills for decades,” endorsing its core theme.

I was especially interested in how Joe Scarborough, co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, would react. A former Republican House member from Florida who served during the so-called Gingrich Revolution, he had been a consistent critic of Trump and had said goodbye to the GOP in 2017. How would he take to the notion that the road to the Trumpism he deplores was paved by crass and cynical GOP actions over the years that fueled hatred and validated extremism for political gain? 

On air with him, I  laid out this basic thrust of American Psychosis. Scarborough responded, “I’m going to get around to agreeing with you at the end but be patient with me at the beginning. You’re going to think I’m preaching a moral equivalence. I’m not.” I prepared for battle. Usually when someone says they are not about to engage in moral equivalence, that’s precisely what they are about to do. I thought that he was going to resort to the simple—and wrong—argument that “the other side does it, too!” That is, the libs and Dems can be just as nutty and extreme as Trump Republicans and their devotees.

In the book, I countered that argument and showed that there has been an asymmetry in American politics. No prominent national Democrats have ever engaged in anything like McCarthyism, embraced an outfit as extreme and irrational as the John Birch Society or the tea party, or promoted paranoia-driven conspiracy theories that demonize and dehumanize political opponents. In my mind, I began to compose a retort to Scarborough.

He continued:

But I am saying that we have been a nation over the past 50, 60, 70 years that has been paranoid whether it’s conspiracy theories around JFK’s assassination or Neil Armstrong walking on the moon or Democrats saying that George H.W. Bush and the CIA took crack into inner cities to harm Black people or whether it was the truthers after 9/11. We have dealt with this. And sometimes it’s come from the left and sometimes it’s come from the right.

Okay, here we go, I thought. Show me one Democratic president who encouraged any of this. Or one who welcomed into his political coalition a group that included leaders who declared Americans who engaged in private conduct that they deemed immoral should be executed—as Ronald Reagan did when he forged a close relationship with the Moral Majority, which was led by ministers who said that under “God’s word” gay people could be killed for engaging in homosexuality. I kept listening:

What disturbs me so much now are the very people that I knew best, the people that worked with me on my campaigns, starting in 1994…were people that actually…they watched news. They saw the news. You could have a conversation with them. They might say something crazy to you, and I’d say, “Well no, no, you need to read this.” And they’d read it, and they’d be fine. Now I talk to those people, and they say, “I don’t read the news anymore. I just don’t follow it because you just can’t trust the mainstream media.”…They get [their information] from QAnon. They get it from Chinese religious cult websites. They get it from the most bizarre places… We are now in a post-fact world. I can’t even talk to a lot of friends and family members and people I care so much about and I have for my whole life… Tell me about that development because, by the way, I’ve been in the Republican Party until about five years ago. It was never this bad. How did it get this bad?

A tone of pain was in Scarborough’s voice, as he shifted course to note that the conservatives and Republicans in his world had gone bonkers or become captured by fringe conspiracism. I wanted to make sure that no viewer could interpret his initial comments as an argument of equivalence and explained that though conspiracy theories and wacko ideas have existed on both the right and the left, the GOP, not the Democrats, had taken advantage of this for decades.

I agreed with him that “things have gotten worse” on the Republican side but added that one could look to the 1950s and McCarthyism to see that this embrace of irrationality and paranoia has long been part of the Republican brand. Given the history covered in my book, present-day Republicans cannot portray recent developments in the party as an exception. There needs to be accountability for how the GOP has long galvanized extremist forces.

Scarborough cut in and noted that not a single Democratic leader fed the 9/11 conspiracy theory that George W. Bush was behind that horrific attack or allowed it to happen. He then referred to an episode that kicks off an early chapter of American Psychosis: When Dwight D. Eisenhower was running for president in 1952, he spent a day campaigning with Sen. Joe McCarthy in Wisconsin, McCarthy’s home state. He considered adding to a speech he would give that evening a brief denunciation of McCarthy and his reckless Red-baiting. Yet top GOP officials, horrified at the idea of castigating a Republican whose outlandish and fact-free conspiracism was resonating with millions of fearful voters, persuaded Ike not to do it. Instead, Eisenhower delivered an address that echoed McCarthy’s demagoguery.

Scarborough noted that Eisenhower passed on the chance to condemn McCarthy and McCarthyism: “Ike is a hero of mine… [He] refused to say a damn thing about it, and there are parallels to that and where we are today.”

Bingo. I pointed out that this Eisenhower moment might be considered the “original sin” of the modern GOP, when a leader went along with craziness that he knew was both wrong and dangerous for the nation because of “political transactionalism.” Scarborough agreed. “And after that point,” I added, “it happened again and again and again in the party you once loved.” Scarborough replied, “Yep.”

The conversation moved on. (You can watch the entire exchange here.) So Scarborough had been correct in his prelude. He had not resorted to a false argument of moral equivalence. He did not challenge my charge that decades of Republicans accommodating and exploiting extremism led to the triumph within the party of Trumpism.

Comprehending this history is crucial for understanding the present moment and the political crisis that grips America. Crisis? Yes, it’s a crisis. A fellow who tried to overturn an election, who incited insurrectionist violence to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, who has called for suspending the Constitution, who has endorsed the batcrap crazy QAnon conspiracy theory, who has vowed to lock up his political foes, and who has declared his authoritarian intentions is at this moment an even-money bet to win the 2024 election. Despite this peril, there persists within the political media world that notion that it might be possible to bounce Trump, flip a switch, and return the GOP to its days of presumed non-craziness. American Psychosis shows that is improbable. There has never been a time when the modern GOP was free of hateful and irrational extremism. 

Two years after the Trump virus caused a violent eruption that threatened American democracy, little has changed within the party—and its base. Millions of Trump-worshipping Republicans still believe that the 2020 election was rigged and that January 6 was a false flag operation. Should Trump disappear from the scene today, this irrationalism—this psychosis—will not vanish. He’s not the cause of the GOP’s sickness; he’s the symptom. If that is not fully recognized, there will be no effective treatment or cure.

This essay was adapted from an article that appeared in David Corn’s Our Land newsletter. You can sign up for a free trial subscription at www.davidcorn.com.