Right. Which is why staying in Congress while going against Trump will basically render her powerless and make her look weak. If she leaves Congress, she won’t have to suffer the indignity of continuing to be (or now having been) a useful tool for someone who she no longer agrees with as a person, but whose basic platform she still agrees with.
Irruncible’s razor: When a Republican elected official leaves office, it’s because they no longer feel that their public-sector grifting can exceed the gains of private-sector grifting.
That will generally be because they’ve been either marginalized by the party or their lobbyists, but sometimes because a superior private-sector grift has emerged.
Personally I think it’s a straightforward loss of influence, I don’t believe she’s lined up anything better on the outside, though she may be assuming Jesus will make everything work out.
Greene’s influence in Trumpworld has been crowded out by other nutters like Laura Loomer, and her influence in Congress has collapsed due to changing political fortunes. During the Biden admin, Marge could gain a lot of leverage by threatening to derail Mike Johnson’s agenda. But now obstruction hurts Trump, so she can’t do it. Moreover the wingnut caucus has basically disintegrated. Gaetz is gone, Boebert is on thin ice having been re-elected by only a triple-digit margin.
She played a dumb game that was always going to collapse, and that day has arrived.
That’s a better way of putting it. She isn’t leaving because she saw the light and no longer believes in Making America Great. She’s leaving / being forced to leave because her approach to Making America Great is no longer useful to Trump.
Good point. It’s never easy to get important things accomplished, but – good point.
I like it.
I want to come back to this, though it was just a small part of Krugman’s piece. It sort of blows my mind, but also makes me think I’m part of the problem due to lack of imagination. Stay with me for a moment…
Sure, there were a handful of wackos like the guy who brought a weapon into that pizza place in DC expecting to find abused kids in the basement. I realize Q-Anon conspiracy theories, as silly as they sounded to me, were taken seriously by some people. Hell, I know some otherwise intelligent folks who aren’t yelling it from the rooftops, but will quietly admit to minor suspicions that we didn’t actually send astronauts to the moon. But for every million or two who give credence to a crazy idea like that, perhaps only one guy actually “goes to the pizza place to rescue the kids”.
But am I really to believe that many millions of people actually thought that:
- There is a vast cabal of evil doers whose goal is to abuse kids and…
- This predilection afflicted only those whose personal politics leaned left, and…
- It was so well hidden or protected that no law enforcement could derail it, yet it could be brought down by a single individual with unique skills and insights, and…
- That individual was Donald Trump???
No. I just don’t buy it. I cannot believe there is a sizeable group of humans who think this way. Surely, it has to be motivated reasoning that they are aware of on some level, and really they just like Trump because they saw him on that insipid TV show some years back. They cannot possibly be surprised, lo these years later, that the Democratic pedophile ring was a myth and be experiencing disillusionment in Trump. That can’t be what’s behind the “MAGA implosion”, such as it may or may not be. Perhaps Krugman is just over-estimating.
Or…
Do I lack the imagination and / or cynicism necessary to believe my fellow humans are this dumb? If so, perhaps I’m part of the problem. Maybe that’s why Trump wasn’t taken seriously at first and grew in power while people like me were left wondering what everyone saw in him. I don’t know what to do about this.
Blood libel goes back about 1,000 years, so other than Donald Trump, this type of conspiracy has been with us for a long, long time. In my own lifetime, we had people here in the United States believing there was a vast conspiracy of Satanic cults engaging in the ritual sexual abuse of children. Ultimately I don’t know how many people believe the QAnon baloney though.
Something has changed. Can you imagine a media figure back in 1992 going on the air, telling people the 1991 Luby’s Cafeteria shooting was a false flag operation designed to implement gun control? Those supposed victims? Crisis actors. Of course not. A crank like that would have their show pulled from every network faster than you could blink. But these days, a man like that can make millions shilling fake boner pills.
We have all been newbies to their internet at some point in our lives. Urban legends went around. I, myself, realized sometime after clicking send that maybe I had passed on something bogus. Those spam e-mails received at least a few replies people interested in buying extenders.
Broadband internet took longer to reach rural areas than it did the cities. The perpetrators of various scams had more time to develop their pitches and techniques. The pickings were easier from the fresh blood. Maybe those were factors helping Qanon spread.
Many things have changed, but there’s one in particular that I think explains this. My hypothesis is that back in the day (let’s say before Trump I, but maybe as far back as when Obama was first elected), the crazies were more evenly split between the parties. Then, to put it in terms of professional sports, what happened is the Democrats traded their crazies to the Republicans in exchange for the likes the Cheney family. Tulsi Gabbard and Liz Cheney are prominent examples, but it likely applies to the ordinary voters that swing elections. Now that the vast majority of the crazies vote R, it makes sense for Republican politicians to cater to them specifically, whereas before, when half the crazies voted D, it didn’t make sense.
I’ve heard multiple pundits explain that those of us in the sane world (my words) likely don’t understand how foundational this belief is to their world view. It’s not a policy disagreement (they largely don’t care about that shit). It’s bedrock importance.
Yeah, those of us outside the MAGA bubble are confounded how people can believe such nonsense. Believe it? They are slavishly devoted to it.
IF MTG gained $20 million since being elected, seems like maybe a little insider trading. If she gets out now, maybe she dodges potential inquiries.
Which makes me even more skeptical that there’s any sort of “MAGA implosion”. Evidence doesn’t matter to people who believe nonsense. Do you think seeing Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photos of the Apollo landing sites changed many minds among the moon landing conspiracy theorists? I’m betting not.
If that’s true, it’s hard to envision how MAGA people might drift away from their beliefs any time soon.
You may be right re: the implosion, but if the pundits are to be believed—that the true believers got the villains and heroes backward—then such a betrayal would at least require something to replace their devotion.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that was her thought pattern, but I doubt it’ll work that way. I think the “true MAGAts” would turn on her in a New York minute to serve as an example to the rest of them who might want to break away, too.
I don’t expect the core to turn their backs on MAGA. I do expect the people on the edge will. I won’t pretend to know exactly when or how that will happen though.
I doubt it will implode, but I suspect at least some will just study their belly button lint and ignore what they think is a President. He’s just a dumb criminal.
Seems more like an axiom – self-evidently true and requires no further proof.
In 1928, Herbert Hoover won the Presidency. Over the next four years he presided over the Great Depression, the Smoot Hawley tariff act, he had the army attack a homeless camp made up of World War One veterans and their families, over 6,500 banks shut down between 1929-1933 which cost millions of people their life savings, the Nazis came to power in Germany… and, despite this, Hoover still received 75% of his 1928 vote count in November 1932.
What can I say, other than the majority of Republican voters do not vote on the basis of reality but of tribal identity?
She also resigns just as she qualifies for a pension, so I’m sure that has something to do with it.
Cite:
The difference between the parties has shifted significantly since then. It used to be that the Democrats were the party of the working class and the Republicans represented the merchants. It shifted to liberal vs. conservative during the civil rights era and Richard Nixon’s southern strategy. el donald’s cult now seems to be ejecting the educated intellectuals. College professors used to tend to the conservative side.