GOP

Many people are still mystified about one of the greatest ironies of American politics. That is, how Trump, a guy that almost no one in the GOP political establishment liked in the beginning, and despite everything dirty about him still owns and runs that establishment lock, stock and barrel.

It must be difficult to be a Republican. Beyond the necessary deference to their former president, what issues and attitudes require their support?

Everyone expects politicians to exaggerate. A hyper-positive pose is what successful politicians assume. However, Republicans have taken this to an exorbitant level that so distorts the truth that many voters will find it difficult to determine what they should support. The most damaging example of this is Donald Trump’s insistence that he won the presidential election but his victory has been denied by fraud and corruption.

First, it was Juneteenth. Now it’s Willie O’Ree. Let’s take both and then try to see what the GOP is up to.

It started almost the instant that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden announced that California senator Kamala Harris was his VP pick in 2020. The “it” was the sniping, rumor-mongering, and flat-out attacks on Harris.

The GOP’s relentless war on alleged rampant voter fraud targets not thousands, as many critics have noted, but millions of eligible voters.

Prominent Black business CEOs have rescued American democracy. They united in unequivocal opposition to efforts of numerous states to establish voting rights restrictions. They asserted that “voting is the lifeblood of our democracy … and is the most basic and fundamental right of all Americans.”

All eyes have been on Georgia’s blatant effort to shove the state permanently back in the red-state column with its unabashed Jim Crow-style vote-suppression ploy. But this is just the warmup for the GOP’s main act, to once and for all erase from the books the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

While Black activists are celebrating Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election, conservatives are working to assure that their candidate will not lose the election in 2024. They understand the narrow difference between victory and defeat.

GOP-controlled state legislatures in more than two dozen states have introduced a tsunami of bills aimed at making sure there is no repeat of the 2020 election.

It’s been three months since Trump decisively lost the election to Biden. Yet you can still count on one hand the number of top Republican officials who have appeared on the national Sunday TV talk shows to condemn Trump’s actions.

There is no surprise that most GOP senators say they are wary of convicting Trump. Their reluctance, really refusal, to convict him, is routinely chalked up to naked, raw, hard-nosed partisan politics with a heavy dose of fear.