Republicans; Making America Look Like Fools
There was a time, not that long ago, when the United States presumed to teach the world how it was done. When it held itself up as a model of a stable, predictable democracy. When it sent idealistic young avatars to distant parts of the globe to impart the American way.
These days, to many watching at home and abroad, the American way no longer seems to offer a case study in effective representative democracy. Instead, it has become an example of disarray and discord, one that rewards extremism, challenges norms and threatens to divide a polarized country even further.
The Republican uprising that led to the ouster of a House speaker for the first time in American history would be enough of a disruption. But the upheaval on Capitol Hill comes as a former president sits in a New York courtroom, already judged to be a fraud, while using increasingly violent language and pushing the limits of a gag order. At the same time, military aid to stop Russian invaders in Ukraine has been held up by a vocal G.O.P. minority in Congress, and another government shutdown looms next month.
The institutions that were already strained during Donald J. Trump’s presidency now face a series of profound stress tests. Can the courts maintain public faith and deal credibly with a former president running for his old job who has been accused of so many crimes it is hard to keep track? Can Congress get its act together enough to simply pick a leader, much less address vexing issues like immigration, spending, climate change and gun violence? Can the presidency in the hands of an aging traditional politician like President Biden be a tool to heal the wounds of society?
Mr. Biden, for his part, emphasized on Wednesday his commitment to trying as he vowed to work with whoever emerges as the replacement for the deposed Republican speaker, Kevin McCarthy. “More than anything, we need to change the poisonous atmosphere in Washington,” Mr. Biden said. “I know we have strong disagreements, but we need to stop seeing each other as enemies. We need to talk to one another, listen to one another, work with one another. And we can do that.”
Not many others in Washington shared his optimism. And that certainly was not the message of his putative rival, Mr. Trump. Outside the courtroom in New York on Wednesday, the former president proved undaunted by the gag order as he attacked the judge who imposed it. “He’s run by the Democrats,” Mr. Trump claimed. “Our whole system is corrupt. This is corrupt. Atlanta is corrupt. And what’s coming out of D.C. is corrupt.”
The former president has long chosen provocation over peacemaking. But in recent weeks, he has escalated the violence of his rhetoric. He threatened to investigate NBC News for “treason” if he gets back in office, mocked the husband of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi who was attacked in their home, called for shoplifters to be shot on sight and implied that Gen. Mark A. Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed as a traitor. “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” he wrote on social media in August.
Mr. Trump’s brand of burn-the-house-down politics played a role in this week’s meltdown among House Republicans, inspiring the far-right rebels who took down Mr. McCarthy. But the Republicans have been building to this moment since before Mr. Trump won the presidency. The ultraconservatives in their conference effectively pressured two previous Republican speakers to leave, albeit without the spectacle of the vote that formally toppled Mr. McCarthy on Tuesday.
America has gone through other periods of deep divisions, as during the eras of McCarthyism, civil rights, Vietnam and Watergate, to say nothing of the Civil War.
What is different now, according to some scholars, is that Republicans under Mr. Trump have directly attacked the foundation of the democratic system by refusing to accept an election that they lost and by tolerating if not encouraging political violence, most notably the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol.
“A democracy on the verge of veering out of control is the consequence when one of the major political players in the democratic process won’t accept the basic rules of the game,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a Harvard professor who recently published “Tyranny of the Minority” with his colleague Steven Levitsky, a sequel to their seminal book, “How Democracies Die.”
Among those presumably watching the tumult of recent days with some satisfaction is President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The state-run Channel 1 on Wednesday night reported with no shortage of schadenfreude that “Washington is on the verge of chaos” and the situation is “as scandalous as it is unpredictable.”
One of the goals of Mr. Putin’s election interference operation in 2016 was to sow dissension in the American system, according to intelligence agencies, and Washington has now managed to do that all by itself. “If Putin is following the chaos,” said Maria Lipman, a longtime Russian political analyst now at George Washington University, “he has every reason to gloat and to feel superior.”
Given the congressional spending fight of recent days that has jeopardized security aid for Ukraine, she added, “what he should truly care about is whether or not the U.S. support for Ukraine might wane in the conceivable future and weaken Ukraine’s military capacity.” There is no guarantee that Congress will approve billions more for Ukraine, and Mr. Putin is clearly waiting to see if Mr. Trump, who criticizes aid to defend the country, will beat Mr. Biden in next year’s election.
Robert M. Gates, the longtime Republican national security official who served as defense secretary for both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, warned in an essay in Foreign Affairs magazine last week titled “The Dysfunctional Superpower” that both Mr. Putin and President Xi Jinping of China were interpreting America’s troubles in perilous ways.
Both leaders, he wrote, are convinced that democracies like the United States “are past their prime and have entered an irreversible decline,” evident in their growing isolationism, political polarization and domestic conflict. “Dysfunction has made American power erratic and unreliable,” Mr. Gates wrote, “practically inviting risk-prone autocrats to place dangerous bets — with potentially catastrophic effects.”
And that was before the meltdown in the House of the past few days. In an email on Wednesday, Mr. Gates wrote, “The events of the last couple of days have only underscored how real is the dysfunction.”
From a Capitol Hill Basement, Bannon Stokes the Republican Party Meltdown
The former Trump adviser has helped create the spectacle of G.O.P. dysfunction, using it to build his own following and those of the right-wing House rebels who took down Kevin McCarthy.
On Wednesday morning, two Republicans who hours earlier had toppled Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House made a well-worn trek to a 19th-century brick townhouse a few blocks away from the Capitol and entered the cluttered sanctuary of Stephen K. Bannon’s recording studio.
Representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida, the instigator of the rebellion, and Nancy Mace of South Carolina, one of seven other Republican defectors, huddled with Mr. Bannon for a morning meeting ahead of a joint appearance on his “War Room” podcast.
“Tectonic plate shift here in the imperial capital,” Mr. Bannon told his listeners at showtime, while directing them to donate to his guests online. “We must stand in the breach now. We have to lance the boil that is K Street in this nation.”
From this cavelike studio not far from where Congress meets, Mr. Bannon, the former Trump adviser, has been stoking the chaos now gripping the Republican Party, capitalizing on the spectacle to build his own following and using his popular podcast to prop up and egg on the G.O.P. rebels.
Mr. Bannon has spent years promoting the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald J. Trump, railing against coronavirus mandates and what he refers to as a “criminal invasion of the southern border.” His obsession of late was toppling Mr. McCarthy and taking out what he describes as “uniparty” Republicans who have become indistinguishable from Democrats.
With Mr. McCarthy’s historic downfall this week, his wing of the party has claimed its most prominent trophy.
Mr. Bannon represents a clear through line from the grievance-driven MAGA base to Congress. And his role in the meltdown that played out this week in the House helps explain why the Republican Party appears to be eating its own. He is a vital part of a feedback loop of red-meat media hits and social media posts, online fund-raising and unfettered preaching to an often angry and fervently right-wing base that rewards disruptions and detests institutions.
In past decades, right-wing rebels on Capitol Hill have encountered trouble getting real traction — shunned by lobbyists and big-money political action committees, excluded from leadership suites in the Capitol and disregarded by Fox News. But with the help of Mr. Bannon, who streams live for four hours every weekday, Mr. Gaetz and others don’t need to rely on any of that.
Mr. Bannon casts the agitators as heroes to his devoted MAGA acolytes, and helps boost their small-dollar fund-raising. He participates in calls with members and donors. He offers strategic advice. He hounds Fox News hosts who he argues don’t give them a fair shake. But mostly, he offers an unfiltered platform where individual rabble-rousers can speak directly to the base, known on “War Room” as “the posse,” creating more incentives for them to wreak havoc on the House floor.
For weeks, Mr. Bannon has been strategizing with Mr. Gaetz on the bid to take down Mr. McCarthy, offering himself up as a sounding board as Mr. Gaetz plotted his moves.
“KABOOM,” Mr. Bannon texted a reporter on Monday night, minutes after Mr. Gaetz filed his long-dangled motion to oust the speaker.
He has also encouraged hard-right lawmakers to use the House floor to yank legislation as far to the right as possible — earning themselves media attention in the process. His advice to them: “Get an amendment. Make it as outrageous as possible. Just be on there — don’t worry if you’re not on Fox — we’ll cut it, we’ll play it.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Bannon introduced his guests on his podcasts as the “architects and heroes of yesterday” and gave them airtime to make a fund-raising pitch.
“I do need help because they’re coming after me,” said Ms. Mace, who represents a politically competitive district. “They’ve threatened to dry up all my money. I’ve had multiple members, previous to the vote last night, threaten to withhold fund-raising if I took this vote. It’s a huge amount of pressure. They call your staff, they scare them.” Twice, Mr. Bannon cued her to spell out her campaign website so that listeners could find it.
His audience is still wary of Ms. Mace, a fiscal conservative who leans toward the center on some social issues and voted to hold Mr. Bannon in criminal contempt for defying a subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee.
But Mr. Bannon sees her as a gift. Her vote to oust Mr. McCarthy allowed him and his cohorts to push back on the notion that it was only an angry group of ultra-MAGA hard-liners who had lost faith in Mr. McCarthy.
“Nancy is not a hard-right intransigent lawmaker,” Mr. Gaetz said on the show. “Nancy is a fiscal hawk.”
Ms. Mace has previously called Mr. Gaetz a “fraud” and accused him of opposing Mr. McCarthy because he wouldn’t defend him against “allegations that he sex-trafficked minors.”
But all of that appeared to be water under the bridge the morning after Mr. McCarthy’s ouster. They were, at least temporarily, allies. On Wednesday, they sat next to each other in Mr. Bannon’s basement, where books about China, Trump and sensible weight loss programs live in messy piles on any flat surface that avails itself. Notes from Mr. Trump written in his trademark Sharpie (“Steve! Your show is sooooo great — Proud of you! Donald”) sit stacked with other miscellany.
The group was still digesting the historic events of the previous day, while figuring out their next moves. They decided, together, to use Wednesday’s broadcast to look ahead, rather than to “dunk” on the former speaker.
“He was punching down; it was really ugly last night,” said Ms. Mace, whom Mr. McCarthy targeted at his evening news conference, suggesting she was lying when she claimed he had not kept his word.
During commercial breaks, they mulled who might be the next speaker, but there was no clear answer. “I asked Jim Jordan on the floor yesterday, you’re going to be the next speaker?” Ms. Mace said. She turned to Mr. Gaetz with an idea. “Want to go meet with any of them today, together? Like, Scalise or Jordan or anyone?” He was noncommittal.
Mr. Bannon was, too.
“I’m just going to see how it develops,” he said. “Who’s got the stones to take on the apparatus?”
Mr. Gaetz has described himself to people as a “Bannonite tribalist.”
Mr. Bannon, for his part, is in awe of Mr. Gaetz, whom he compares to Daniel Webster. He credits the Florida Republican with recognizing early on last year how helpful a slim G.O.P. majority could be to the hard right.
“He sat right here in July and talked about how we weren’t going to have a 30- or 40-seat majority, but that was actually going to be better,” Mr. Bannon said. “We were going to have leverage. He’s a very special guy.”
Many of the newer rebels in Congress have relied on Mr. Bannon for backing as they look to make their own mark.
Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado said she was grateful to him for recently offering her a slot on his show to talk about the southern border, rather than to rehash her embarrassing evening at “Beetlejuice.”
“Steve is an actual trusted source, he understands that my one personal night out does not impact the work that I’ve been doing for four years,” she said. “Steve understands the base and what the base wants. I don’t go on there for the donor aspect, but I’m grateful when folks do chip in.”
Mr. Bannon’s name is often greeted with an eye roll, even among Trump loyalists. He’s seen by some as a man who has made the wrong bet on candidates, like the failed Senate candidate in Alabama, Roy Moore, and has an inflated sense of his own influence. He was charged with defrauding donors who were giving money to build a wall along the southern border, before being pardoned by Mr. Trump. He was sentenced to four months in jail for criminal contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena and is free while he appeals the conviction.
But last week, as Mr. Bannon’s cohort debated amendments to the annual military spending bill on the House floor, Mr. Bannon was glued to C-SPAN like a proud stage parent.
“This is red meat,” Mr. Bannon exulted, as Representative Matt Rosendale of Montana defended an amendment that would prohibit mandatory coronavirus vaccines for service members, referring to the vaccine as an “experimental drug.”
Mr. Bannon, an unrepentant agent of chaos, admits he was spoiling for a government shutdown.
“You create a firestorm now that totally changes things,” he said. “People right now think government is a benefit. I’m going to show government spending as cootie-infested.”
Mr. Bannon is also famously temperamental. He has turned on former friends, like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, for backing Mr. McCarthy during the speaker’s race and on the debt ceiling deal. She has been blacklisted from the show for months.
But after she said she was opposed to any spending bills that included aid to Ukraine, Mr. Bannon said he was warming back up to her. “There’s always a path back,” he said.
On Wednesday morning, Mr. Bannon and his guests tried to temper their glee.
“Do not allow the posse to get punch drunk,” Mr. Gaetz said on the show. There was more work to do.
Mr. Gaetz and Ms. Mace stayed for three segments of the show, until it was time for Mr. Rosendale to pick up the mantle and fire up the base.
“I’ll talk to you later today,” Mr. Bannon said as Mr. Gaetz showed himself out.
Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent. She was previously a White House correspondent. Before joining The Times, she covered the White House and Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign for Politico, and spent a decade covering local politics for the New York Post and the New York Daily News.
