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.”
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Guantanamo debacle continues (with Carol Rosenberg and Jeh Johnson)
The Trump book blitz begins (with Michael Bender)
Six Months Later (with Congressman Swalwell)
Supreme Court Rulings (with Jess Bravin & Jackie Calmes)
Rudy's fall from Grace (with Christine Chung)
Juneteenth: America's second Independence Day
Crime and punishment (with Bill Bratton)
The untaxed rich (with ProPublica's Stephen Engelberg)
The "enemy of the people" (with Len Downie)
Let's play Hardball (with Chris Matthews)
America the Fallen (with Ben Rhodes)
Inside the Secret Service
The Postal Service's surveillance program
The Republican party's civil war (with Barbara Comstock)
Did Eddie Gallagher cross the line? (with Dan Taberski)
The GOP's flight from facts (with Jon Meacham)
Right-wing extremism and the FBI
Biden's hundred days (with Douglas Brinkley & Jonathan Alter)
Fear and partisanship in Georgia (with Gabriel Sterling)
Biden's refugee problem
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free