Some folks are finding this encouraging:
Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming says that many fellow Republicans are “privately” thanking her for standing up to former President Donald Trump as she runs for reelection in 2022.
Cheney, one of the most well-known and vocal members of a small group of GOP lawmakers and leaders opposed to the former president, is one of only two Republicans serving on a special committee organized by House Democrats to investigate Trump’s role in inciting the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol by right-wing extremists.
“It’s a real reflection of the times in which we live that privately and behind the scenes, there are many Republicans who say, ‘Thank you for what you’re doing. We wish we could be more public,’” Cheney told Fox News on Tuesday. “People who understand that what the former president is saying is dangerous, is not true, and who know that our party’s got to be a party based on truth, that we can’t embrace the lie.” [Fox News]
But to me it’s a little odd and makes me wonder if this is indicative of a general mysteriousness in the culture of the Republican Party. Who else cannot name their supporters?
Donald J. Trump.
The former President was infamous for his anonymous validators, as Steve Benen called them, supposedly high-seniority Democrats and business leaders who’d call up Trump and cheer him on, but he couldn’t name them for obvious reasons.
And it’s hard to see a substantive difference between Rep Cheney and the former President here. Each claims support from groups that supposedly hate them. Indeed, Cheney’s lost her leadership position in the House GOP, and that would be because of them, while the President lost his position, although not so directly, because of the Democrats and the business leaders.
It’s not all that hard to extend this observation to the mystical side of the Republicans: the Divine presence, supposedly endorsing the President and his adherents, is a notoriously difficult entity to interview or even get a straight word from on current events; your best bet are proxies who are of either very dubious reputation, or appear to be self-delusional (your pick here). But the choice of believing the mystical, as much as there’s a lot of pressure on the base to believe the former President, remains with the base; if the claimant sweats it, fumbles the words, or is caught fondling the wrong person, the base may choose to disbelieve the claim.
That is actually an attractive alternative for people who don’t want to take the word of experts, who want desperately to assert their own competence to make this choice. There are, after all, no real experts. It makes for an inviting business.
Whether Cheney is good enough in the earnest claim business remains to be seen.
