As Long as McCarthy, McConnell Continue to Violate Truth, ‘Donald Trump Is King’
Trump's NC reemergence was just a reminder of the Republicans' overall anti-democracy campaign
Former president Donald Trump's reemergence to speak Saturday night should be a startling reminder to the nation both to the danger that Trump represents — as well as the overall war on American democracy underway in Trump's name by the Republican Party.
Trump gave a speech to the North Carolina Republican Party drenched in perilous disinformation.
“He is the leader of the Republican authoritarian fascist cult that has declared they’ve abandoned American democracy and they're doing everything openly, not in secret, to take American democracy down,” said MSNBC analyst and progressive podcaster Fernand Amandi. “I like so many other millions of others who voted for the Democratic majority in Congress and to serve in the White House I think are asking the question: 'Are the Democrats doing enough?' Clearly they are on the democracy side. What can they do?
“… They need to drop the pretense that the Republican Party and its current membership in Congress is a party that can be negotiated with, collaborated with,” Amandi added. “These are all members of an authoritarian cult that understands they cannot win through democracy which is why they are trying to subvert democracy. Until they dispense with this pretense that we need to work in a bipartisan manner, that’s not going to change and the Republicans are going to exploit that.”
Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress continue to support Trump and his authoritarianism, according to Kurt Bardella, a former GOP operative and congressional staffer.
“What gives him legitimacy are people like Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell, the Republicans who on January 6 walked back into the house chamber and still voted against certifying the free and fair election. The same Republicans who have opposed a bipartisan January 6 9/11-style commission to investigate what happened,” Bardella said. “As long as they continue to violate truth, to violate oversight, to violate the integrity of our democratic process, Donald Trump is king. His power comes from the Republicans who know better and still pander to these dangerous, extreme fanatics.”
A couple of days before Trump's speech, the lead manager of the former president's cited opinion polling to demonstrate just the damage that Trump and the Republicans' disinformation is doing to the country.
"You know, it's the kind of thing you think of in a third-world country, not in a democracy, not even in an emerging democracy. And to imagine that a former president of the United States is thinking that way or talking that way, it's absurd. But it's also dangerous,” said Rep Adam Schiff (D-Calif). “What's even more dangerous, to me, is the fact that half of the Republican voters out there think that he's still the president, or still should be, that [Joe] Biden lost the election.
"That such a significant percentage of our population could be so deceived by him is alarming. And it just underscores that the threat to our democracy didn't go away when Donald Trump left office,” Schiff added.
The nation is watching the collapse of American democracy, according to author and political scientist Rachel Bitecofer.
Republican-led states across the country have been enacting laws which restrict voting rights — especially for Black and other Americans who typically vote Democratic.
“It’s kind of like being attacked in Pearl Harbor. We had Pearl Harbor. We’ve been living through it. It’s been a slow-running event, but with Trump’s comments about election integrity from the beginning, I mean, beginning of the presidential cycle, we now see about 35 percent of our fellow Americans think that Joe Biden stole the presidency and they’re seeing that message reinforced all throughout their ecosystem,” she said.