Over the past decade or so, the GOP has been far better at describing what it stands
against than what it stands
for, so it is perhaps no surprise that the party has increasingly come to define itself not by some set of shared principles, but by its cultish devotion to one man:
Donald Trump. He is undeserving of the fealty undeserving of many of the spoils he’s come by in his maddeningly charmed life but no matter: The Republican establishment for years had a void, and he finally came around and filled it. Not all Republicans were thrilled with the arrangement, of course, but for much of his tenure most avoided doing anything to disturb it; there were tax cuts to pass, courts to pack, and libs to own.
CRAZY RICH
Arthur Hayes lives large. Like Bobby Axelrod-in-
Billions large. Just replace New York with Hong Kong and infuse it with a dose of Silicon Valley where unicorns spring from the minds of irrepressible company founders and, well, you get the picture. One minute Hayes is hitting the powder in Hokkaido, the next he’s crushing it on a subterranean squash court in Central Hong Kong’s Wall Street. And all the while he keeps one eye trained on an obscure-sounding currency exchange that he built out of thin air and through which more than $3 trillion has flowed.
Screen-star handsome and fabulously wealthy, the African American banker turned maverick personifies the contemporary fintech pioneer. But the feds describe Arthur Hayes differently: a wanted man who “flouted” the law by operating in the “shadows of the financial markets.” Hayes’s indictment was unsealed in October, and he remains at large in Asia as prosecutors in New York hope to arrest him and try him on
Following Senate Minority Leader
Mitch McConnell’s condemnation of Rep.
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s support for far-right conspiracy theories, the causes for the Georgia Republican’s disputes on the Hill received a favorable retelling on Fox News. On Monday night’s
Special Report, chief congressional correspondent
Mike Emanuelcovered Greene’s controversial collision with her colleagues––though, he conveniently spared his audience from the specifics of her past views. Rather than noting that the freshman congresswoman has claimed the Sandy Hook shooting was staged and 9/11 was an inside job, blamed a space laser for causing wildfires, harassed a survivor of the Parkland shooting, and espoused support for the crackpot QAnon movement, the segment essentially portrayed Greene as a would-be conservative martyr who is being persecuted by Democrats for some vague reason, citing the Democratic demand that she be stripped of her role on the Education Committee as “more ev
After
Donald Trump became the first president in United States history to be impeached for a second time, he struggled to find lawyers to represent him, which probably had something to do with the violent insurrection he incited. Then
Lindsey Graham reportedly recommended
Butch Bowers to him, and it appeared the South Carolina attorney would represent Trump at his upcoming Senate trial. Over the weekend though, the two parted waysâalong with four (4!) other lawyers expected to work on the caseâreportedly over Trumpâs insistence that the team focuses on his entirely baseless claim the election was stolen from him. That left the 45th president in a pretty desperate spot, a desperation reflected by the duo now set to represent him, i.e. a veritable whoâs who of sexual-predator defenders who seemingly have such low standards theyâll sign anyone as a client, unhinged ex-presidents accused of trying to overturn the results of a free and fair election included
Lindsey Grahamcalled him a “race-baiting, xenophobic bigot.”
Ted Cruzsaid he was “utterly amoral,” a “sniveling coward.”
Marco Rubiodescribed him, correctly, as little more than a “con man.” There was broad effort during the 2016 Republican primary to cast
Donald Trump as some kind of
rara avis, an unwelcome and incongruous presence among the “serious” candidates he was running against in that crowded field. But as would become apparent in the years that followed, there was less daylight between him and the party stalwarts than they’d have liked to admit, and he didn’t stage a hostile takeover of the party as much as he helped it finally become what it had been on track to be.