CHAOS— Trump’s Best Friend… And That’s Just What His Congressional Allies Are Giving Him

The House GOP Conference has reconvened - by Nancy Ohanian

Though MAGAts argue that Trump is a strong leader not afraid to shake things up— and believe that Trumpian chaos is necessary to bring about real change— his ego-centric chaos behavior is not just destructive but also dangerous. Clearly, he’s only interested in power and self-promotion and doesn’t give a hoot about the consequences of his actions. In a MAGA sense, chaos is the state of disorder, confusion and uncertainty characterized by rapid change, conflicting information and a lack of clear leadership. Trump has been adapt at exploiting peoples’ fears and thriving in a chaotic environment, using it to his advantage.

1. Chaos distracts from his own shortcomings and failures. When there is so much turmoil and confusion, low IQ people unable to think abstractly, can’t focus on specific issues. This can make it easier for Trump to get away with things that he would not be able to if people were paying closer attention.

2. Chaos has created opportunities for Trump to seize more power since when weak people— his followers— feel uncertain and insecure, they turn “strong and decisive” leadership he has always exploits this by portraying himself as the only one who can bring order to the chaos (that he creates).

3. Chaos helps Trump use divide and conquer tactics against his opponents. When people are focused on fighting each other, they are less likely to unite against him, making it difficult to mount a successful challenge to him.

Inside the House Republican conference, members aren’t trying to point the finger of blame for the impending shutdown on the Democrats (yet— they will) but on their own factions. The neo-fascists in the “Freedom” Caucus are running around blaming the shutdown on McCarthy. Bob Good (R-VA), driven by uncontrolled hatred of McCarthy, told PunchBowl reporters that “If the speaker doesn’t show leadership and we don’t do our job, then the speaker owns it.” By “leadership,” Good means McCarthy must do exactly what the “Freedom” Caucus tells him to do. When he says “if we don’t our job,” he means the nearly 200 mainstream conservatives in the GOP conference must accede to the “Freedom” Caucus demands.

One of the worst of the right-wing goons in the House, Ralph Norman, who represents a deep red R+12 upcountry district— primarily York, Lancaster, Sumter, Kershaw and Spartanburg counties— told the media, “We’re going to have a shutdown. It’s just a matter of how long.”

Let me come back to the House in a second. I just want to point out that there are also shut-down boosters in the Senate. It’s just that they haven’t gotten control the wayMcCarthy has allowed Trump and the “Freedom” Caucus to control the House. On Thursday, the Senate passed, 91-7, a key procedural motion on the way to passing a bipartisan appropriations bill. The 7 NAYs are the shutdown supporters. I bet you could guess their names:

• Ted Cruz (R-TX)

• Rick Scott (R-FL)

• Josh Hawley (R-MO)

• Cynthia Lummis (R-WY)

• Mike Braun (R-IN)

• Eric Schmitt (R-MO)

• Pete Ricketts (R-NE)

Earlier 5 slightly less “shut it down” supporters had tried helping the 7 filibuster the motion— Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), Closet Queen Scott (R-SC), Roger Marshall (R-KS), Ted Budd (R-NC) and Joni Ernst (R-IA). That failed 85-12… and the 5 then left the 7 out to dry while they voted for the underlying motion.

Alan Grayson is running for the Florida Senate seat occupied by Rick Scott. I asked him if he was surprised that Scott was one of just 7 senators who wants to shut down the government. He wasn't. "No," he saidd, "I am not 'surprised' that Rick Scott wants to shut down the federal government. And I’m not surprised that he’s bragging about it, either. Whenever you read some nutty, halfwit, reckless, RWNJ quote, there is a good chance that it will be immediately followed by the phrase 'Senator Rick Scott said.'"

So, back in the House, Mike Simpson, a hard right Idaho conservative who is part of McCarthy’s leadership team, is unenthusiastic about a government shutdown but understands the “Freedom” Caucus can force it. “It seems like you always get some new people in,” he said, “that have got to touch the stove, which is kind of what is happening here. There are people who say the government could shut down and no one would really notice. Really?”

With early voting in Virginia’s crucial legislative elections about to start, you better believe Glenn Youngkin is noticing. “If these idiots go through with this,” one of the key operatives at Youngkin’s Spirit of Virginia PAC told me, we’re going to lose our chance to retake the Senate and we’ll probably lose the House as well… They’re killing us.” As we pointed out yesterday, most voters are very concerned about what the House Republicans are doing. Let me re-run this graphic from Data for Progress so you can see what people think they will notice in a shutdown:

As John Bresnahan and Andrew Desiderio wrote to close out the week, “It wasn’t supposed to be this way.” Biden and McCarthy made a deal in May to prevent exactly this chaos. Trump wasn’t having any of it and his set his “Freedom” Caucus dogs (+ Elise Stefanik on McCarthy’s own leadership team) loose, leading to McCarthy losing control of the appropriations process. “Despite ordering appropriators to draft the annual spending bills at a level more than $100 billion below that mandated under the Fiscal Responsibility Act— the Freedom Caucus demanded this when they blockaded the House floor back in June— McCarthy has only been able to pass one appropriations measure so far. GOP leaders were forced to send members home Thursday after conservatives balked at a procedural vote on the massive Defense bill— which virtually all House Republicans say they want to pass badly… [N]ow, 15 days ahead of a possible government shutdown, the House Republican Conference is asking just what is the HFC’s plan to win a faceoff with the Senate and President Joe Biden over the FY2024 spending bills. Their answer: That’s not our job. Let’s be perfectly clear here. The reason Speaker Kevin McCarthy is in a bind is because the Freedom Caucus is threatening to vote against procedural motions to bring GOP-drafted bills to the floor. The [neo-fascists] also refuse to vote for a short-term measure to keep the government open for any period of time. The HFC claims McCarthy has broken promises on the issue that he made during the speaker election. McCarthy says that isn’t true. But what we can say definitively is that the HFC looks ready to dive right back into a well-worn if ultimately futile tactic— shut down the government to see if they can exact some concessions from Democrats and the White House. The idea being that if the government shuts down, Democrats will give into Republican demands on issues such as the border.”

And as helpful as ever, here’s Matt Gaetz (R-FL) undercutting McCarthy some more:

Click the image to hear Gaetz acting like a 5-year old

Susan Glasser explained this to New Yorker readers the other day— The Rage of the Toddler Caucus on Capitol Hill. Blaming Trump, for the self-inflicted, painful mess in the House, she wrote that “the word ‘unprecedented’ is no longer sufficient. We’ve run out of synonyms, analogies, and time to escape the mess… [A]s Congress returned from its protracted summer recess, the Trumpified, radicalized House Republican Conference was preparing to shut down the federal government when funding runs out at the end of this month and to impeach President Biden, both for no apparent reason. Speaker Kevin McCarthy has a majority so slim that he’s effectively a prisoner of his party’s most reckless extremists. On Tuesday, he sought, in effect, to make a bargain— to buy their acquiescence to measures for keeping the government open, the Speaker agreed to their demand for a dubious impeachment inquiry into Biden and his son Hunter’s overseas financial dealings. But, by Thursday, having failed entirely to placate his tormentors, McCarthy was reduced to throwing F-bombs at them, daring them to follow through on their threats to file a motion to oust him.”

Make no mistake: this is a crisis born out of weakness. Imagine any other Speaker agreeing to embark on an impeachment inquiry as a mere bargaining chip— and a failed one at that— in his struggle to control his own party members. The way Republicans talked about the latest unsuccessful effort to manage their own faction of nihilists was so telling. “Maybe this is just Kevin giving people their binkie to get through the shutdown,” one Senate Republican told The Hill of McCarthy’s impeachment announcement. I immediately thought of perhaps the most infamous quote of the post-2020-election period, when Washington was in a collective state of denial that Trump was doing what he was doing to overturn Biden’s victory. An anonymous “senior Republican” had told the Washington Post

What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change. . . He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.

Proof that the binky would not soothe the House Toddler Caucus was swift in coming. Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican whose threats against McCarthy helped prompt the Speaker’s abrupt decision to open an impeachment inquiry despite saying just eleven days earlier that he would not take that step without a vote of the full House, took to the floor soon after the announcement to say that it did not matter. It was, Gaetz insisted, just a “baby step.”

And so the rage of the toddlers now threatens to take the entire government down. For what? To prove, once again, that these are not serious people on whom we have bestowed great power? On Thursday morning, McCarthy told a reporter that he himself had no idea why this was happening. Some of his Republicans were refusing to pass a defense-funding bill, without objecting to what was in it. They were also opposed to McCarthy’s preferred option of passing a continuing resolution to keep the government open, while negotiations continued with the Biden Administration and Senate Republicans. And they didn’t want to make a big omnibus deal, either. “I’m not quite sure what they want,” he concluded. He soon adjourned the House for the week, having made no progress at all. The impeachment process that the Speaker has unleashed in his weakness, meanwhile, will likely roll on throughout the remainder of 2023, offering Trump a campaign issue to throw at Biden and tying Congress in yet more knots.

McCathy’s betting that Gaetz, Bishop (NC), Crain (AZ), Norman (SC), Rosendale (MT), Good (VA) and Roy (TX) won’t have the votes to oust him— or won’t have the votes to replace him if they do oust him. Remember that mess in January when Republicans were trying to elect a speaker? It may be worse this time— while paralyzing Congress even if it means shining a spotlight on divisions inside the GOP. You think the MAGAts care? They don’t see it like that. To Trump, this is all about him— “me, me, me”— and the paralysis and chaos is about the Establishment he— and the MAGAts— see as his enemy.

"ME!" by Nancy Ohanian

Dana Milbank wrote that “McCarthy, whose main strength as a leader has always been his steadfast devotion to self-preservation, recognized that he was about to get trampled by the impeachment parade. So he stepped out in front of it and pretended to be the drum major… McCarthy’s very public surrender [to Gaetz and Marjorie Traitor Greene] was his most pathetic moment to date in a short tenure that has had many. In a flailing attempt to preserve his job as speaker, he set the House on an ineluctable course toward deploying the gravest punishment contemplated under the Constitution against the president. He did so even though, after months of lurid probing of the financial (and sexual) dealings of Biden’s drug-addicted son, House Republicans have produced no evidence of wrongdoing by the president— only wild, unsubstantiated allegations of bribery. And McCarthy did so by unilaterally authorizing the impeachment inquiry even though he has said for years, and as recently as two weeks ago, that such a momentous act could be taken only by a vote of the whole House. He is trying to save himself at the expense of his Republican colleagues from competitive districts, who will now be forced to defend two ludicrous claims: That the millions of dollars brought in by Biden family members trading on their famous name is a monumental scandal, but the billions of dollars brought in by Trump family members using similar means is totally kosher; and that Biden, the man Republicans have spent years portraying as senile and over-handled, is really a hands-on criminal mastermind.”

The terms don’t really matter, because Gaetz and his co-conspirators just keep adding more demands— and insults. “Much of the McCarthy regime has been a failure theater,” Gaetz said, and he threatened to call for a vote to oust McCarthy every day if the speaker doesn’t bend to the far right’s various spending demands. “If we have to begin every single day in Congress with the prayer, the pledge and the motion to vacate, then so be it,” the Florida congressman said on the call.

McCarthy responded with a low blow befitting his lowly stature, alluding to Gaetz’s alleged sexual misconduct with a minor. “Matt is upset about an ethics complaint,” he told CNN’s Manu Raju.

It seems clear that the far right desires a shutdown— or, as Rep. Scott Perry (PA), head of the House Freedom Caucus, put it this week, “a pause in government funding.” Another of the firebrands, Rep. Andrew Ogles (TN), told a group of reporters that the “fearmongering” about a shutdown from “woke folks” is misplaced: “A temporary shutdown isn’t going to stop Social Security checks from being delivered. It’s not going to stop veterans benefits from being delivered. And quite frankly, if the government is not open, we’re not wasting taxpayer dollars.”

This would explain the vague and disorganized list of spending demands outlined at a Freedom Caucus news conference this week. Cheered on outside the Capitol by right-wing activists, including the mother of slain Jan. 6 rioter Ashli Babbitt, the lawmakers’ grievances were all over the lot.

“A government that tells you you can’t buy the stove you want or drive the car you want is a government of tyranny, and there is no freedom in America,” Perry offered.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), joining his House counterparts, howled about excessive spending yet also incongruously complained that the federal government won’t “give money to my farmers and my ranchers for the hurricane.”

Roy expressed outrage about, in no particular order, “covid tyranny,” “the Wuhan lab leak,” sex trafficking and parents’ rights.