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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The Jan. 6th Endgame (w/ Robert Costa)
The Steal That Never Happened (w/ Mark Bowden & Matthew Teague)
Taking on the Proud Boys (w/ AG Racine)
The Build Back Better Debacle (w/ Max Rose)
Durbin's Doubts (w/ Senator Dick Durbin)
Operation Whistle Pig (w/ Jana Winter & Hugh Handeyside)
A Tale of Torture (w/ Mohamedou Ould Slahi)
Bob Dole: End of an Era (w/ Scott Reed)
Supreme Court Greenhouse Effect (w/ Linda Greenhouse)
A debriefing on the President's briefers (w/ David Priess)
Attempt to mobilize older Americans (w/ Bill McKibben)
Climate Crisis and the way forward (w/ Ben Adler & David Knowles)
The meddling in US elections (w/ Sec. Brad Raffensperger)
The Dopesick Tragedy (w/ Danny Strong & Beth Macy)
Bannon indicted (w/ Evan Osnos)
A Bird's Eye View (w/ Fiona Hill)
How the NRA changed American politics (w/ Ryan Busse & Tim Mak)
Virginia down to the wire (w/ Tom Davis)
The Steve Bannon Supoena Situation (w/ Rep. Jamie Raskin)
The Truth Behind "American Crime Story: Impeachment"
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