In today’s GOP, only litmus test is loyalty to Trump

Carl P. Leubsdorf, Tribune News Service

In the pre-Trumpian era, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and Paul Gosar would have been treated as right-wing curiosities, fringe figures outside the mainstream of the Republican Party.

Few in the political world would have taken them seriously.

But the radicalisation of the GOP under former President Donald Trump has elevated their role, along with other far out GOP House members and state political figures.

Because of their ties to the former president, they now epitomize the GOP to at least as great an extent as elected leaders like Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy.

The rise of fringe figures validates the concern of many of us that one unfortunate aspect of Trump’s election would be to empower the racists, anti-Semites and other hate groups who have always been present in American society but were mostly rejected by its leaders.

When one sees some of the people Trump has embraced and the way House Republican Minority Leader McCarthy avoided rejecting Boebert’s and Greene’s incendiary views, that fear seems to have been realized.

House Republicans voted unanimously this week against Rep. Ilhan Omar’s bill condemning Islamaphobia that Democrats brought up after Boebert’s recent remarks about the Minnesota congresswoman that used anti-Muslim tropes. Greene has also been condemned for making anti-Muslim comments.

And given the way the former president is using his continuing political influence, their role could be further enhanced.

Trump signaled in 2016 he would tolerate the views of such groups by refusing to reject an endorsement from neo-Nazi, Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. He doubled down as president by his comments during the violent 2017 clash in Charlottesville, Virginia.

After a white supremacist protesting the removal of Confederate statues drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one, Trump condemned “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.” He later said there were “very fine people on both sides.”

His statement was widely seen as conferring equivalence on both the white supremacists and their opponents. It drew widespread condemnation across the political spectrum.

Former Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, in an unusual joint statement, declared, “America must always reject racial bigotry, anti-Semitism, and hatred in all forms.” Former Vice President Joe Biden said Trump’s statement prompted him to reconsider his decision to retire from politics and seek the 2020 Democratic nomination.

“With those words, the President of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it, and at that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime,” Biden said, vowing to restore “the soul of America.”

When Trump became president, advisers persuaded him to name mostly traditional appointees. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis could have served under other recent chief executives.

But over time, Trump replaced them with political loyalists like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. He named two chiefs of staff, Mick Mulvaney and Mark Meadows, from the House Freedom Caucus, the most conservative Republicans in Congress and a group that had repeatedly undercut GOP leaders.

Perhaps the No. 1 symbol of Trump’s embrace of questionable political elements is Steve Bannon, a former investment banker and movie producer whose Breitbart News was a major purveyor of ultra-conservative ideology, untruths and anti-establishment activism.