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The GQP: Trumpist Death Cult


Hugo Stiglitz

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Dude, I'm a military brat who went to A&M and works directly with the military at the moment...do you think there's a decent chance that I've pulled the lever for more than my fair share of Republicans? Do you think that I currently vote almost exclusively for Democrats because I think they're all swell with nothing but great ideas for the country? Democrat politicians suck too. They lie, cheat, and steal to enrich themselves.
But, it blows my mind that, after the election and all the way up to and after 1/6 and seeing how far into the deep end Trump has pushed the entire party, supposedly rational, intelligent people can still try to pretend that there isn't a very obvious lesser of two evils. The GOP made its bed and has absolutely no intention of leaving it anytime soon. It's despicable.
Once they abandon the hate, lies, conspiracies, and blatant anti-Democratic tendencies of Trump cultism, I'll be happy to discuss (and vote) primarily on policy. Tell me when I should start holding my breath.


Counterpoint: But Beto!!!
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fatty, you do this every few months, and it's getting pretty tiresome. You go on your "Who am I supposed to vote for?" anti-Democrat rant. We see through it, and the kind of posts that you rep. You'll vote for every Republican whose last name isn't actually Trump and feel great about it. Just own it. You'll never acknowledge that they're all one in the same now. I'll happily vote for the next R who denounces Trump and supports conservative policies that I agree with...but where the fuck is that unicorn? If they're out there, they're staying quiet as fuck as to not get Cheney'd. So what good are they?
[mention=2817]aggie08[/mention]
First, I post positive rep to all kinds of shit I disagree with on several borderline posters, because there’s one or two posters that follow them and neg rep every post. It’s a bullshit practice, and it sucks, but I enjoy reading their POV too, and don’t think they should be sent to beg rep hell for them.  You’ll (rarely) see me neg random af posts too, after receiving 9-20 in a row from the same poster.  It’s a stupid af game, but I guess we’re all here. 
 
Second, I don’t know what you think you see thru. I was not a Trump fan from the beginning. I’m not a Cruz fan, either. But what, vote for Beto? Fuck outta here. If I’m going to pick a sleezy lying pile of shit, I’ll stick with the one I know.  I’d much rather Boebert, Gaetz, MG, Hawsley, etc all replaced with competent Rs. Would I take a trade to remove their worthless asses for D’s, 0%. My politics run about 25-30% off of center right.  You have the ability to see the politicians that are straight bad for America on the right, but no ability to identify the bad actors on the left? So I’m sorry you’re tired that I mention my party left me in a political sub forum every few months, but the other sure af hasn’t done a single fucking thing to get my vote. Which is fine, I’m not their target. Doesn’t change the fact there’s a lot of us without a party at the moment. 
So you admit to voting for Cruz? He is evil incarnate. Trump basically skull fucked him and Cruz asked for more. Sometimes it's ok to just not vote in a race. Or vote 3rd party.

Cruz is only mad that he doesn't have Trump's ability to draw in morons. He wants to be Trump. But yes, keep voting for him. You are the problem.
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As false claims of a stolen election took root in 2020, Arizona’s attorney general — a Republican — spoke out on national television. Donald Trump was projected to lose the swing state, he said on Nov. 11, and “no facts” suggested that would change.

This month Mark Brnovich called into a far-right podcast with a different message: His investigation into the vote was turning up “serious concerns.”

“It’s frustrating for all of us, because I think we all know what happened in 2020,” the attorney general told the host, former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon, without explaining what he meant. The podcast titled the segment “AZ AG On Interim Report On Stealing The 2020 Election.”

Many GOP candidates have embraced the former president’s false election claims while seeking a coveted endorsement in their 2022 primary races. But Brnovich, now running for Senate, stands out for his shift over the past year and a half. His Senate campaign has highlighted his ongoing review of the 2020 vote, launched last year in response to a widely-ridiculed audit commissioned by state GOP lawmakers.

How powerful is Trump's hold over the GOP?
More than 10 months after leaving office, former president Donald Trump maintains a powerful hold over the Republican Party. (Video: Zach Purser Brown/The Washington Post)
Critics say Brnovich has caved to conspiracy theorists for political gain in the Republican primary. Calculated choices to keep fanning Trump’s grievances mean more misinformed voters, more distractions for election workers and more questions about who will stick up for democracy in the future, said Tammy Patrick, a former elections official in Arizona’s biggest battleground, Maricopa County.


“If no one is held responsible for lying … or undermining confidence based on their own greed and, you know, desire for power to either be elected or be reelected — if no one is held accountable for those actions, then we are in real trouble right now,” said Patrick, who now works with the nonpartisan group Democracy Fund.

Brnovich’s comments on the election are hardly the most extreme among Arizona’s midterm candidates: He has not called to decertify results or end the state’s long tradition of mail-in voting, like prominent GOP contenders for governor and secretary of state. But coming from Arizona’s top legal officer, Brnovich’s words hold particular weight.

In a campaign email this week, Brnovich said his office found nearly a fifth of early ballots in Maricopa County were “transported outside the chain of custody”; in fact, his report found missing information on paperwork but offered no evidence that ballots left the proper hands. On Bannon’s podcast, he claimed the county uses artificial intelligence to verify ballot signatures; in fact, every signature is verified by election staff.

“As his investigators could have told him if he asked,” tweeted Stephen Richer, a top elections official for Maricopa County and a Republican. “Unreal.” Democrat Adrian Fontes — who held Richer’s office in 2020 — said in an interview that Brnovich was emblematic of the GOP and that “political cowardice doesn’t surprise me anymore.”


A “stop the steal” cowboy hat at the “Protect Our Elections Rally” in Phoenix on July 24, 2021. (Cassidy Araiza/For The Washington Post)
The attorney general’s office referred most questions to Brnovich’s campaign, which did not respond to requests for comment.


“From his days prosecuting gang and public integrity cases, to his current tenure as Attorney General, Mark Brnovich’s record of upholding the rule of law is beyond reproach,” said Katie Conner, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office, in a statement. “Our Office remains dedicated to the integrity of the investigation, not with responding to political or social media chatter.”

She did not respond to a question about whether Brnovich believes Biden fairly won the election.

Brnovich announced his campaign for Senate last June, as Arizona’s partisan audit was in full swing. “I understand there are a lot of people who are frustrated and have questioned the results of the last election, and to me, that speaks to the need for confidence in the system and the need for election integrity measures,” he told local news station KTAR in July. The five-month spectacle — which election experts called deeply flawed — affirmed Biden’s win in Maricopa County but also provided new fuel for baseless theories.


The GOP-led Arizona Senate enlisted a Florida-based company called Cyber Ninjas with no prior experience auditing elections and a chief executive who promoted claims the 2020 vote was tainted by fraud. The recount of more than 2 million ballots included UV lights and a hunt for traces of bamboo.

When the state Senate shared an audit report in September, Brnovich said it raised “serious questions” and began his own review. This month — under growing pressure from the right to show results — he released an interim report that laid out voting “vulnerabilities” but described only isolated cases of fraud.

Some of Trump’s most ardent supporters were unimpressed.

“I don’t like letters,” tweeted far-right Arizona state senator Wendy Rogers (R). “I like arrests and prosecutions.” Trump weighed in scathingly Monday, saying the attorney general was choosing “non-controversy” and all but ruling him out for an endorsement.

Arizona lawmaker speaks to white nationalists, calls for violence — and sets fundraising records

Soon Blake Masters, one of Brnovich’s opponents in GOP Senate primary, was on “War Room,” the same podcast where Brnovich had promoted his election investigation.


“I don’t think Brnovich’s heart was in it,” said Masters, a venture capitalist who was part of Trump’s presidential transition team.

He asked why county leaders were not in handcuffs.

Many Republican primary candidates have leaned into false claims about the 2020 election while banking on the support of the president and his loyal followers. In Georgia, Trump-endorsed gubernatorial candidate David Perdue has amped up his rhetoric this year, falsely claiming that both his Senate race and the presidential race were “stolen.” Around the country, officials who helped run the 2020 election and certify its results have drawn challengers who repeat Trump’s falsehoods.

Much rarer: GOP candidates who went on the record affirming Biden’s win but have now backtracked. When The Washington Post asked every Republican member of Congress who won the election in late 2020, most did not have a clear position.


Zachery Henry, a former communications director for the Arizona Republican Party, said Brnovich had a strong conservative track record as attorney general and argued he would have been the clear front-runner to challenge Sen. Mark Kelly (D) if he had not come out early defending the election.

“I’m sure there are other Republicans who felt similarly to him and just were never asked publicly,” said Lorna Romero, a conservative political consultant. “And then now they’ve kind of changed their tune. … I guarantee you there’s plenty of Republicans out there that saw that there was a massive groundswell and a good fundraising opportunity.”


Contractors examine ballots for a GOP-commissioned audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County on May 6, 2021. (Matt York/AP)
Brnovich’s election report from this month was critical of Maricopa County’s voting processes, echoing Republican pushes around the country for “election integrity” measures that others call unnecessary. He suggested early ballot signatures were processed too quickly; said hundreds of ballot transport forms were missing required information; and alleged that election departments’ use of private grant money raised “serious concerns,” without providing details. In a statement, two Republican Maricopa County leaders said there was “no new evidence, nothing that would have changed the results, and nothing that should lead people to question the overall health of our electoral system.”

How Trump allies are pushing to hand-count ballots around the U.S.

Joining the “War Room” podcast on April 7, Brnovich added another criticism: He said the county had recently “admitted” to using artificial intelligence to authenticate signatures on early ballots. Local election officials had actually emphasized the opposite in a February response to Brnovich’s office — “To clarify, all signatures are verified by a human and not a computer or software.”


“They’re now copping to, ‘it’s artificial intelligence and not human,'” said the podcast host, Bannon. “Is that as big a deal as it seems, sir?”

“I think it is, Steve,” Brnovich said. “I mean, I will let people draw their own conclusions.”

Richer, the Maricopa County recorder, tweeted his outrage: “Omitting material information … is not how prosecutorial ethics works,” he said. In an open letter last year to fellow Republicans, Richer had urged his party to move on from Trump’s 2020 grievances and named Brnovich as a GOP leader who agreed the election was not rigged.

Asked whether Richer thought Brnovich should face a formal misconduct complaint, a spokesman, Marcus Milam, said the recorder had no further comment. All lawyers are generally “required to avoid dishonesty,” but they are most often disciplined for their actions in court, said Keith Swisher, a legal ethics professor at the University of Arizona.


Conner, the spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, declined to specify what technology Brnovich took issue with. “We have never said that signatures were verified exclusively by AI,” she said.

In an email, county officials had described a “scan” that categorizes signatures as high or low confidence. But they said workers are trained to “analyze all [signatures] the same regardless.”

Megan Gilbertson, a spokesperson for the Maricopa County Elections Department, told The Washington Post that scanning technology is not used for verification but helps staff get unsigned envelopes to managers more quickly.

Patrick, the adviser at Democracy Fund, is intimately familiar with the processes Brnovich criticized. Working Maricopa County elections for more than a decade, she said, she did thousands of signature reviews and audited the safeguards in place for moving ballots.

“And sometimes people forget to sign one portion of the form … because elections are conducted by people, for people,” she said. “And people make mistakes.”

Brnovich could have been a “lighting rod,” she argued, someone who took in the misinformation roiling the Arizona GOP and tried to neutralize it.

Instead he veered toward conspiracy, she said. “It kind of breaks my heart.”

 

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I don’t think Ttump is running again. Especially if he can just continue doing this shit. 100k for a DA race
 

You seem to be implying Trump could face consequences for his actions and I’m not sure what leads you to think that.
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His party has left him, so now he…still votes for them. 
 

the idea from either side that the worst X is still better than the best Y is bullshit team politics.  It’s also rarely the case that the worst X is running against the best Y, so you should look at each candidate as an individual and not as a party rep. Party affiliation should be but one thing that informs your opinion of a candidate. 
 

and I personally wouldn’t trust anyone who says they believe the party line on everything. Those people have no beliefs- which would be ok if that led them to vote in the manner that they know or believe their constituency would want but I think it mostly leads to voting how their campaign funders would want. 

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On 4/22/2022 at 10:34 PM, fattyflattie said:

fatty, you do this every few months, and it's getting pretty tiresome. You go on your "Who am I supposed to vote for?" anti-Democrat rant. We see through it, and the kind of posts that you rep. You'll vote for every Republican whose last name isn't actually Trump and feel great about it. Just own it. You'll never acknowledge that they're all one in the same now. I'll happily vote for the next R who denounces Trump and supports conservative policies that I agree with...but where the fuck is that unicorn? If they're out there, they're staying quiet as fuck as to not get Cheney'd. So what good are they?

@aggie08

First, I post positive rep to all kinds of shit I disagree with on several borderline posters, because there’s one or two posters that follow them and neg rep every post. It’s a bullshit practice, and it sucks, but I enjoy reading their POV too, and don’t think they should be sent to beg rep hell for them.  You’ll (rarely) see me neg random af posts too, after receiving 9-20 in a row from the same poster.  It’s a stupid af game, but I guess we’re all here. 
 

Second, I don’t know what you think you see thru. I was not a Trump fan from the beginning. I’m not a Cruz fan, either. But what, vote for Beto? Fuck outta here. If I’m going to pick a sleezy lying pile of shit, I’ll stick with the one I know.  I’d much rather Boebert, Gaetz, MG, Hawsley, etc all replaced with competent Rs. Would I take a trade to remove their worthless asses for D’s, 0%. My politics run about 25-30% off of center right.  You have the ability to see the politicians that are straight bad for America on the right, but no ability to identify the bad actors on the left? So I’m sorry you’re tired that I mention my party left me in a political sub forum every few months, but the other sure af hasn’t done a single fucking thing to get my vote. Which is fine, I’m not their target. Doesn’t change the fact there’s a lot of us without a party at the moment. 

Honest question. What is it that you think Beto would do that is so horrible?  I’m not asking so I can refute your thoughts, necessarily, as long as you come with reason and logic. I am genuinely curious. 

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On 4/22/2022 at 10:50 PM, aggie08 said:

Dude, I'm a military brat who went to A&M and works directly with the military at the moment...do you think there's a decent chance that I've pulled the lever for more than my fair share of Republicans? Do you think that I currently vote almost exclusively for Democrats because I think they're all swell with nothing but great ideas for the country? Democrat politicians suck too. They lie, cheat, and steal to enrich themselves.

But, it blows my mind that, after the election and all the way up to and after 1/6 and seeing how far into the deep end Trump has pushed the entire party, supposedly rational, intelligent people can still try to pretend that there isn't a very obvious lesser of two evils. The GOP made its bed and has absolutely no intention of leaving it anytime soon. It's despicable.

Once they abandon the hate, lies, conspiracies, and blatant anti-Democratic tendencies of Trump cultism, I'll be happy to discuss (and vote) primarily on policy. Tell me when I should start holding my breath.

This here, anyone thinking the new TRP (Trump Republican Party) is still the Republican Party is mistaken. The GOP of old is closer to the Democratic Party than the TRP and by a wide distance. If you aren't a Trumper you should now consider yourself a Democrat for at least the time being.

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21 minutes ago, MonkeyDoughnut said:

This here, anyone thinking the new TRP (Trump Republican Party) is still the Republican Party is mistaken. The GOP of old is closer to the Democratic Party than the TRP and by a wide distance. If you aren't a Trumper you should now consider yourself a Democrat for at least the time being.

I think this is really all I would like to see. True conservatives have to come out of this spiral and the only way it looks like that can occur is if they temporarily side with the Dems (or don’t vote) to get their house back in order. 

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The funny thing is that as a young man I felt drawn to the Republican Party because of the bush “compassionate conservatism” branding.  I liked, and still like, the general idea of fiscal responsibility. My definition of that term has changed as I’ve aged. But the biggest thing that pushed me toward political independence was the realization that the giant party plank of fiscal responsibility was never actually practiced. Budgets from Reagan, bush, trump, are as high and deficit dependent as any democrat. But they spend on different things.  And I realized how I’d rather the spending be allocated, since nobody is trying to lower spending. 
 

This heel turn from callousness to hate has not had the shift in support that I would have expected. 

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56 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

I think this is really all I would like to see. True conservatives have to come out of this spiral and the only way it looks like that can occur is if they temporarily side with the Dems (or don’t vote) to get their house back in order. 

This.  I've repeatedly asked folks who I know couldn't vote for a Democrat to just abstain from voting period.

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31 minutes ago, Pancho said:

 

Yeah, that was obvious. Nobody who bitched about Kaepernick kneeling during the National Anthem cared about respect for the flag. Meanwhile they were intent to trample all over the Constitution, the actual thing the symbol of the flag represents. They were upset about a black man getting uppity. That’s it.

And because there’s a Frank Zappa quote for everything:

”There’s a big difference between kneeling down and bending over.”

They just wanted Kaepernick to bend over. Shut up and throw the ball. 

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I live in Sarasota and my wife and I were just talking about all of these assholes that have moved to this area recently. Unfortunately, there are a lot of MAGA types with money to burn here. So I’m sure that will play into some of their future grifting plans. On a positive note, I might get to dust off my egg tossing skills one of these days.

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On 4/15/2022 at 8:15 AM, Cement said:

Well well well....Trump's candidate in Georgia is getting....trounced.

Goes to show that Trump is losing his influence in the GOP slowly but surely, which scares the piss out of the liberals.  

I've always known that the Dems need Trump a lot more than Republicans and if when Desantis becomes the leader of the GOP the Dems are good and properfucked worse than South Austin's mom.  

Completely agree with Delano Squires here - 

 

Maybe DeSantis will make it all the way to the Superbowl!

Your post reads as though all you have is a rooting interest in seeing your team win. What aspect of DeSantis makes you celebrate the rise to power you predict? How do you see him improving the republic?

And please, no pablum about restricting the size of government or fiscal responsibility without being very specific. Nobody believes that any more. Consider the actions of his that have brought him to fame. What is your stand?

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21 minutes ago, Pato del Muerto said:

But the surplus is begotten of the devil’s lettuce, so it is unholy and therefore this tax reduction is not Christian and therefore not republican endorsed. 

The reefer giveth, but reefer madness taketh away. They better hold onto that surplus cash for when they have to imprison the majority of the state for doing reefer madness things!

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1 hour ago, RomaVicta said:

Maybe DeSantis will make it all the way to the Superbowl!

Your post reads as though all you have is a rooting interest in seeing your team win. What aspect of DeSantis makes you celebrate the rise to power you predict? How do you see him improving the republic?

And please, no pablum about restricting the size of government or fiscal responsibility without being very specific. Nobody believes that any more. Consider the actions of his that have brought him to fame. What is your stand?

He doesn't respond. He comes on here to troll. Just neg and move on.

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23 minutes ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

I got some quotes for a landscaping job I need done, but it never occurred to me to solicit bids from jailed child porn purveyors.  I may have missed out on a hell of a deal.

 

None of them deliver on time and on budget these days. 

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3 hours ago, Neonmoon said:

Jesus, there are a lot of pedophiles elected by the Republican Party 

how much free time do you have? it's the fucking party of pedophiles and closet homosexuals. keep in mind this is part 30. there are 29 other pages of deviant history.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/4/6/2090446/-Republican-Sexual-Predators-Abusers-and-Enablers-Pt-30

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