The GOP’s Transformation Under Trump Has Been Internal Terror & Cowardice
On Thursday, Federal Judge Beryl Howell— in ruling against Trump for firing National Labor Relations Board chair Gwynne Wilcox without cause (other than her being Black and a woman) or due process— reminded Señor Trumpanzyy that he is not a king and that the U.S., despite Republican ideologue Curtis Yarvin, is still not a monarchy. “The President does not have the authority to terminate members of the National Labor Relations Board at will, and his attempt to fire plaintiff from her position on the Board was a blatant violation of the law,” wrote Howell. “An American President is not a king— not even an ‘elected’ one— and his power to remove federal officers and honest civil servants like plaintiff is not absolute, but may be constrained in appropriate circumstances, as are present here… A President who touts an image of himself as a ‘king’ or a ‘dictator,’ perhaps as his vision of effective leadership, fundamentally misapprehends the role under Article II of the U.S. Constitution.”
Trump is appealing, of course, well-aware that anything that gets to the extreme right Supreme Court will likely go his way. Although… the first case that did— didn’t. Didn’t go her way. Reliably right-wing hacks John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett voted with the 3 normal Justices to reject an appeal disallowing a freeze on USAID funding. End of the story? Not at all. MAGA world let the dogs out— against Barrett. Thursday night, Ann Marimow reported that the decision “unleashed a torrent of vitriol from the president’s supporters largely aimed at a single justice— Barrett. On podcasts and social media, conservative allies of Trump called the former law professor and appeals court judge ‘evil,’ a ‘closet Democrat’ and a ‘DEI hire.’”
“She is evil, chosen solely because she checked identity politics boxes,” conservative activist Mike Cernovich posted on Twitter, suggesting Barrett was put on the bench because she is a woman. “Another DEI hire. It always ends badly.”
“She’s a rattled law professor with her head up her ass,” Mike Davis, a former law clerk to another Trump nominee, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, said on Stephen Bannon’s podcast on Wednesday.
In a slew of other social media posts, Trump’s supporters suggested Barrett should be impeached, with Eric Daugherty, a conservative media personality, posting: “Democrats are loving Amy Coney Barrett lately. Tells you everything.”
Some of the attacks centered on interpretations of Barrett’s body language after she greeted Trump before his address to a joint session of Congress this week. While justices traditionally attend the annual address, they remain seated throughout the speech and usually take pains not to applaud or react.
On his War Room podcast, Bannon played a video clip widely shared online of Barrett, standing stoically alongside three other current justices, after shaking hands with Trump. Bannon suggested Barrett had given the president the “stink eye.”
“That’s not a look of admiration,” he said.
With Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, the federal courts have emerged as one of the only checks on the administration’s aggressive efforts to expand presidential power by shrinking the size of the federal bureaucracy, freezing federal spending and firing independent agency watchdogs. The administration is facing more than 100 lawsuits challenging its initiatives, with many facing pushback from lower-court judges.
…Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk have suggested Trump could ignore court rulings with which he disagrees, with Musk posting, “The only way to restore rule of the people in America is to impeach judges.” Trump’s allies in Congress have gone further, introducing articles of impeachment against three federal judges after they ruled against the administration.
…“[T]he intimidating words and actions we have heard must end,” William R. Bay, president of the American Bar Association, said in a statement this week. “They are designed to cow our country’s judges, our country’s courts and our legal profession.”
Even before the high-stakes legal battles, Roberts in his annual report in late 2024 lamented rising threats against judges that he said undermine judicial independence.
“Violence, intimidation, and defiance directed at judges because of their work undermine our Republic, and are wholly unacceptable,” wrote Roberts, who along with Barrett did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
A fully fascist movement, the MAGA reaction to opposition is as predictable as it is dangerous. The moment one of their own deviates even slightly from the cult’s expectations— whether it’s a Supreme Court justice, a Republican governor, a member of Congress or a Fox News host— they are vilified, threatened, and cast out as traitors. It’s a movement driven by grievance, rage, and the insatiable need to dominate, not govern. Their attack on Barrett— once their handpicked ideological warrior— proves that there’s no loyalty in Trump’s orbit, only blind, knee-jerk obedience. The second someone steps out of line, they become an enemy to be destroyed.
And let’s be clear: the calls to ignore court rulings, impeach judges, and purge independent watchdogs aren’t just authoritarian fantasies— they’re trial runs for what’s to come. Vance and Musk openly advocate for Trump to rule as a dictator, and the Republican-controlled Congress is already laying the groundwork to make it happen. MAGA’s America has no room for the rule of law, no tolerance for dissent, and no interest in democracy. The only question left is how far they’ll go before the rest of the country decides to stop them.
Yesterday, Mica Soellner and Max Cohen took a look at the vicious MAGA attack against conservative Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) by Trumpist primary challenger John Fleming. A founding member of the fascist House Freedom Caucus, Fleming, currently Louisiana state Treasurer, “wants to hit Cassidy for his bipartisan voting record and his 2021 vote to convict Trump following the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. Cassidy,” they wrote, “is just one of three Senate Republicans left who voted to convict Trump. ‘Sen. Cassidy gets all the benefits of being a Republican in a Republican state, but yet is doing things that enable Democrats to have their way,’ Fleming said in an interview. Cassidy secured Trump’s endorsement in his 2020 race, but the president has since soured on the Louisiana Republican over his impeachment vote. As recently as last year, Trump slammed Cassidy as ‘one of the worst senators’ and a ‘disloyal lightweight.’ Yet Cassidy hasn’t become an anti-Trump force and, despite his skepticism over HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he has voted [out of fear] for all of Trump’s Cabinet nominees.”
Fleming, who says he wants to earn Trump’s endorsement, insisted that Cassidy’s vote to convict Trump following Jan. 6 is an “insurmountable” obstacle in a GOP primary.
“Had he been successful along with the other Republicans who voted to convict, Trump would not have been able to run for reelection,” Fleming said.
The four-term House member also slammed Cassidy for supporting the bipartisan infrastructure bill. Cassidy has touted his work negotiating the legislation.
But Fleming said there are parts of the bill that Cassidy hides that support Democrats’ social and green agenda.
“We’re not seeing any broad transition of our infrastructure at all,” Fleming said. “It was sold as one thing and turned out to be something else as a bait-and-switch type of thing.”
John Kennedy, Lousiana’s other senator— and a former Democrat— hasn’t endorsed either candidate yet, lthough Fleming has picked up endorsements from congressional fascists like Scott Perry (R-PA), Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Marlin Stutzman (R-IN), none of whom have any sway in Louisiana. This far Cassidy has raised over $6.5 million for the race while Fleming is raising next to nothing and is $530,000 in debt. A recent Morning Consult poll found that 69% of Louisiana Republicans approve of Cassidy’s job performance, a significant improvement since his impeachment vote.
On Thursday, Elisabeth Bumiller took a look at the fear of Trump and his MAGAts— among Republicans (and normal people). “Even longtime Republican hawks on Capitol Hill,” she wrote, “stunned by Trump’s revisionist history that Ukraine is to blame for its invasion by Russia, and his Oval Office blowup at Zelensky, have either muzzled themselves, tiptoed up to criticism without naming Trump or completely reversed their positions. More than six weeks into the second Trump administration, there is a chill spreading over political debate in Washington and beyond. People on both sides of the aisle who would normally be part of the public dialogue about the big issues of the day say they are intimidated by the prospect of online attacks from Trump and Elon Musk, concerned about harm to their companies and frightened for the safety of their families. Politicians fear banishment by a party remade in Trump’s image and the prospect of primary opponents financed by Musk, the president’s all-powerful partner and the world’s richest man. ‘When you see important societal actors— be it university presidents, media outlets, CEOs, mayors, governors— changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism,’ said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard and the co-author of the influential 2018 book How Democracies Die.”
One prominent first-term critic of Trump said in a recent interview that not only would he not comment on the record, he did not want to be mentioned in this article at all. Every time his name appears in public, he said, the threats against him from the far right increase.
On Capitol Hill, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, a Republican, was wavering in his support for Pete Hegseth, Trump’s [wholly unqualified] nominee for defense secretary, until the president threatened him with a primary and Tillis did a turnabout. (Tillis’s office said the senator was simply performing careful vetting.)
Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi told Zelensky in a meeting at the Hay-Adams Hotel last week that he was there with other senators “as a show of support.” But after Trump’s confrontation with Zelensky later that day, Wicker took down a social media post showing him shaking hands with the Ukrainian leader.
More than a half-dozen Republican defense hawks in the Senate— not a group usually shy about communicating its views— declined to comment for this article or did not respond to requests for comment about Trump’s statements on Ukraine or why other Republicans were not speaking out.
…Not everyone is staying silent. Consider Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University.
“This is the greatest pressure put on intellectual life since the McCarthy era,” Roth said in an interview. “And I think it’ll be seen in the future, as that time was seen, as a time when people either stood up for their values or ran in fear of the federal government.”
Roth has called some of the Trump administration’s rhetoric authoritarian and has spoken out in favor of diversity, equity and inclusion programs. In an interview in the Washington Post’s opinion section last month, he criticized Trump, Vance and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for using their Ivy League degrees to advance professionally while portraying themselves as populists against “woke” universities.
People sometimes tell him he has courage, Roth said, but he insisted it wasn’t so. “When people tell me, ‘Oh, you’re brave,’ it frightens the hell out of me,” he said. “I’m a little neurotic Jewish kid from Long Island. I’m afraid of everything.”
Roth is going public, he said, “because it’s a scandal that the federal government is trying to keep people from speaking their minds.”
Representative Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat and a frequent critic of Trump, said the real fear among Republicans in the House who might otherwise voice criticism of the administration on some issues was violence against their families.
“I’m friends with a lot of these guys, and I had wrongly assumed that what was holding them back from speaking out against Trump was they were afraid of losing their jobs,” he said in an interview. “But what they’re afraid of is their own personal security. They tell me that their wives tell them, ‘Don’t contribute to us getting harassed at church or at the grocery store or at the club.’”
Swalwell, who receives plenty of threats himself, said that he spends hundreds of thousands of dollars of his campaign and office funds on security for his own family, and that his daughter recently included a member of his security detail in a drawing of her family for her kindergarten class.
Senator Todd Young of Indiana is one Republican who has experienced browbeating from Musk for not staying in line. After Young asked tough questions last month at the confirmation hearing of Tulsi Gabbard, now Trump’s director of national intelligence, Musk said on social media that Young was a “deep state puppet.”
Musk soon deleted his post and said he had spoken to Young, whom he was suddenly calling “a great ally in restoring power to the people.” Young went on to confirm Gabbard, although in an interview last week he pointedly said he had not discussed her with Musk.
“I don’t think anyone should be afraid to register their convictions,” he said. “OK?”
…“I know what it’s like to be targeted by him and the mob he unleashes,” [attorney Marc] Elias said in an interview. “It is totally reasonable to be worried. But for a Republican senator to say they are so worried that they’re going to betray their oath of office is such cowardice. Why are you in office?”
History, as you know, is full of moments when those in power faced a choice: stand up to a would-be despot or cower in silence. Today’s Republican Party— bullied into submission by Trump and his enforcers, from Musk to MAGA fanatics— has chosen cowardice. But as any student of history knows, appeasement doesn’t stop an authoritarian; it only emboldens him. The question now is just how much more deeply Republicans will surrender as they march to their political annihilation in the 2026 midterms. More like Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio... or at least some more like Liz Cheney, Lisa Murkowski and Adam Kinzinger?