The Republican party is in a dance with death with its leader Donald Trump, as he keeps going further and further in his ties with the worst elements of American politics, consisting of racists, misogynists, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis. His dinner with Nick Fuentes and Kanye West/Ye has forced even the more servile members of the party criticize him.
House and Senate Republicans are speaking out against former President Donald Trump’s dinner last week with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, and white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
“There is no room in the Republican Party for antisemitism or white supremacy,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday. “And anyone meeting with people advocating that point of view, in my judgment, are highly unlikely to ever be elected president of the United States.”
…The leaders’ reactions to the dinner came a day after former Vice President Mike Pence said that Trump should apologize for even sitting down with Fuentes.
“Trump was wrong to give a white nationalist, an antisemite and Holocaust denier a seat at the table,” Pence said in an interview with News Nation Now. “And I think he should apologize for it, and he should denounce those individuals and their hateful rhetoric without qualification.”
Other Republicans and conservative Jewish leaders have also criticized the dinner with Fuentes and Ye.
Several Republican lawmakers and prominent Jewish conservatives have condemned Donald Trump for meeting with white supremacist and antisemite Nick Fuentes, in a rare distancing from the ex-president.
Trump’s former vice-president Mike Pence, the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and several Republican senators were critical, to varying degrees, of Trump, who has come under fire after dining with Fuentes last week.
…Jewish conservative figures also spoke out against Trump, including Jay Lefkowitz, a former adviser to George W Bush.
“We have a long history in this country of separating the moral character of the man in the White House from his conduct in office, but with Trump, it’s gone beyond any of the reasonably acceptable and justifiable norms,” Lefkowitz told the newspaper.
…Ben Shapiro, a Jewish rightwing personality who has been supportive of Trump in the past, rejected Trump’s explanation in a post on Twitter.
“A good way not to accidentally dine with a vile racist and anti-Semite you don’t know is not to dine with a vile racist and anti-Semite you do know,” Shapiro wrote on Sunday.
But Republican leader of the House Kevin McCarthy, mindful of the fact that he can afford to lose only four members of his caucus for the Speakership vote, once again tries to ingratiate himself with Trump by providing him with excuses.
Earlier in the day, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy denounced Fuentes, who is labeled as a white supremacist pundit and organizer by the Anti-Defamation League, in language similar to McConnell’s, though he stopped short of condemning the former president.
“I don’t think anybody should be spending any time with Nick Fuentes. He has no place in this Republican Party,” McCarthy said. “I think President Trump came out four times and condemned him and didn’t know who he was.”
When a reporter pointed out to McCarthy that the former president only denied knowing Fuentes — not condemning his ideologies — McCarthy responded, “Well, I condemn his ideology, it has no place in society; at all.”
It seems like Fuentes and his allies might have deliberately staged the high-profile meeting, knowing it would be controversial, to pressure Trump into being even more openly supportive of the crazies like him in his base, rather than doing it with winks and nods and dog whistles.
“I wanted to show Trump the kind of talent that he’s missing out on by allowing his terrible handlers to dictate who he can and can’t hang out with,” [Milos] Yiannopoulos told NBC News.
“I also wanted to send a message to Trump that he has systematically repeatedly neglected, ignored, abused the people who love him the most, the people who put him in office, and that kind of behavior comes back to bite you in the end,” he added.
And, Yiannopoulos said, he arranged the dinner “just to make Trump’s life miserable” because news of the dinner would leak and Trump would mishandle it.
Fuentes echoed the sentiment: “I hate to say it, but the chickens are coming home to roost. You know, this is the frustration with his base and with his true loyalists.”
As they say, with friends like these, who needs enemies?
But as with all the other times when Trump has crossed what seems like a red line into unacceptable behavior, with time will this too fade away and these people crawl back to him? My guess is yes because the Trump-Republican relationship has all the hallmarks of an abusive one where the abused person repeatedly says that the latest outrage is the last straw and they are leaving for good, only to return later.
I guess “Jews for Trump” figured that after the Muslims and immigrants, they’d stop.
Is there any way to ‘handle’ this event that would make it acceptable to anyone but the most bigoted repulsive sociopaths?
Even the slime ball who thinks he is going to be speaker has noted that white supremacists are repugnant and have no place in our society.
I’m sure the recent election has reminded the rats that their supposed base is in fact, a fast shrinking minority of American voters.
I predict the battle for speaker is going to be quite entertaining, and give McCarthy a 30% chance of actually being chosen speaker. I know there are some other candidates, but the whole party just figured out that 70% is a lot more than 30%, and 70% of Americans hate the current GOP. Who knows what next week will bring? Some convictions in the multiple GOP criminal cases would be a nice Xmas gift to American democracy.
A number of Trumpistas have already said that they don’t intend to vote for McCarthy for Speaker of the House, so I doubt that it’ll be long before he crawls back to Trump to get their votes. And McConnell is utterly shameless and will do whatever he thinks is best for him, which could depend on the outcome of the Georgia runoff; but I’d guess that he’ll be crawling back soon as well. It’s not like we haven’t seen that before.
They aren’t going to vote for McCarthy because of his continued support of the head magat.
Not every rat is as stupid as he is, and they have already figured out that 70% of the entire country is voting specifically against the GOPs blatantly fascist overreach with SCOTUS, womens rights, and it’s trump problem.
Um, Mitch, there is PLENTY of room for those people in the GOP. There has been for decades.
Soon after Dolt45 was elected, a Jewish woman ask me why I didn’t vote for him because she thought I was intelligent. I told her it was because he acts like Hitler. She scoffed so I told her why I thought he acted like Hitler. I’d read a biography of Hitler a few weeks before the election, mainly because everyone kept comparing Dolt45 to Hitler and I’d wanted to see if the comparison was apt. She was stunned into silence . I have a strong feeling that she didn’t vote for him in the 2020 election.
Lol , now Pence doesn’t like what Dolt45 did by talking to Fuentes. Hey idiot , Dolt45 would have gotten you killed . Kanye is mentally ill , no one pays attention to him other than to watch him crash and burn
Interesting. I don’t know much about American politics, but one thing I do know is that unlike the UK, the parties don’t have a leader as such, just various members with greater or less influence or specific positions like Speaker or President or whatever. Here in the UK, Rishi Sunak definitely is the leader of the Conservatives (as well as PM -- in fact it’s only because he’s the Conservative leader that he IS PM -- he’s not won a general election, he was picked by the Conservative MPs and they didn’t even consult the paying members of the Conservative party about that, presumably after realising they’re all fucking mental after they picked Liz Truss last time), Keir Starmer definitely is the leader of the Labour party. In the US, though, as I have always understood it, there is no “leader of the Republicans” as such. It’s interesting to see a resident of the US refer to Trump as the leader even as his influence supposedly wanes after the disastrous mid-terms.
Let him drag them into the abyss. Ever since the era of Reagan they have been on an accelerating road to corruption and fascist-like values.
Yes, I know the leading Democrats also are beholden to the donor class, but there is a significant difference in scale of the corruption.
Really? Despite all the “no red wave” euphoria, more Americans voted for fascism than against it in the recent elections for the House. Among white non-Hispanic men, the pro-fascist majority was huge.
@KG
Among white
non-Hispanicmen, the pro-fascist majority was huge.Your source is based on exit polls from November 9th, and is entirely consistent with white men being the core voting base of fascists/white supremacists. Hello…Elon, Theil?
However, even staunch Republicans voted against the picks of tfg, (in even higher numbers than 2020) and now the Senate is majority Dem.
The Rs won a basket of snakes by perhaps 3 votes? The race involving the execrable, gun loving maga woman from Colorado is going into an automatic recount.
It’s so ironic that a guy named McCarthy is involved in the modern issue of a pro-fascist Republican party, and he just loves him some Putin.
I anticipate much foot-shooting and throat cutting from the various less well known Republicans that are currently vying for the Speaker of the House. The rats fighting amongst themselves and having to distance themselves from all things tfg ( or continue losing elections) is an excellent development.
(tfg?)
‘The former guy’ is the polite version of the acronym.
Tethys@11,
My source lists “white men” and “white women” separately from “Latino men” and “Latina women” and I assumed these categories were intended to be mutually exclusive, but you may be right that they overlap.
Only if Warnock defeats Walker in the Georgia run-off will the Democrats have an actual Senate majority: if Walker wins, they will have to rely on Harris’s casting vote and share committee chairs, as now. If you’re referring to the House by “basket of snakes”, the majority will not be 3: the Republicans currently have 221 seats to the Democrats 213 with one to be decided, which means they will have a majority of either 7 or 9.
I fully agree. But the facts that more Americans came out to vote for fascism than against it, and that among white Americans it wasn’t even close, are still alarming.
The Dems control the Senate without GA, and the two Independent senators generally vote with the Dems. An extra vote to neutralize the jerk Manchin would be cool, but more importantly, Warnock winning would be an excellent way to underline the trend.
Americans are not down with white supremacists.
The vast majority of American voters have rejected all things maga for two consecutive elections by any reasonable statistical analysis. CNN and their outdated exit polls are not an unbiased or reliable source.
That leaves the R side in the position of having to actually prove they can legislate anything if they have any hope of winning future elections. That’s not likely with an idiot like McCarthy as speaker.
If 1/3 to 1/2 of your caucus openly despises you, a single digit majority is not much to depend on.
It’s not ideal, but overall I think it’s going in the right direction, and it’s a very democratic result.
Tethys@15,
The two independent senators are counted among the 50 who are generally referred to as “Senate Democrats” in all the election coverage I’ve seen.
This simply isn’t true. At this stage, a vote for any Republican can only be regarded as a vote for Trumpism, as the Trumpists completely dominate the party. Even failing to vote at all when the opportunity arises to vote against Republicans is not a “rejection of all things maga”. At the midterms, more Americans voted for the Republicans than for the Democrats (and among white americans it wasn’t even close), while a majority of the electorate didn’t vote at all.