The violent insurrection at the Capitol last year was a sobering day for American democracy, and yet many people thought that - at the very least - it would break the fever that had overcome the Republican Party and push it to separate itself from Trump and move on from his repeated lies with respect to “the big steal.”
That is not what happened - instead, the past two years represented a pivot point between “this is not normal “ and “this is dangerous and not going away” as we’ve all been witness to GOP taking the “plunge deeper into a Trumpian cult of compulsive dissembling and conspiracy mongering,” falling “hostage to the party’s most fevered extremists” as “the usual partisan differences [have given] way to an existential call to arms.”
So writes journalist Robert Draper in his recently published “Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost its Mind,” an account of how a “new breed” of Republicans - the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Madison Cawthorn - far from moving on from Trump, have taken the “politics of hysteria” to even greater extremes.
Through his extraordinarily intrepid cross-country reporting, Draper chronicles the ascent of these faces of the “new GOP” among the Republican base and within Congress, rendering unforgettable portraits of how “Greene and her ilk” came hold such sway over the GOP, shaping its terms of engagement to an extent that the GOP establishment - likes of Kevin McCarthy - would only begrudgingly admit.
On this episode of the podcast, we sit down with Draper to talk about just how the GOP has, as he says, “lost its mind.”
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Buried Treasure: "The Spiro Agnew Method"
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Impeachment: Day 1
Buried Treasure: "The Roy Cohn - Donald Trump playbook"
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Buried Treasure: "A new take on the Hoffa mystery"
Maddow on Trump, Putin, and oil
Buried Treasure: "From Bin Laden to al-Baghdadi"
Max Rose's road to impeachment
The Kasich case for impeachment
Not an Agatha Christie Mystery
Deep State Demons
Bonus Episode: The Smoking Texts
"We're not fooling around"
The Whistleblower's Complaint
Buried Treasure: The Stennis Compromise
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