The Republican dumpster fire

It's been a doozy of a month for the GOP.

It’s really hard to know what to laugh at first in the dumpster fire that calls itself the Republican Party. With less than a year since his return to power, Donald Trump is bringing the party to its knees—and its glorious. Not to say that they can’t recover, but the comic relief has provided a nice diversion to masked thugs snatching innocent people off the street.

Let’s go back a few weeks to the crack that’s becoming a chasm. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News commentator who has built his own online media empire, hosted white supremacist Nick Fuentes on his show. The Ben Shapiro set and other traditional conservatives howled. The president of the Heritage Foundation, however, came to Carlson’s defense, arguing that, like him or not, Fuentes is part of the conservative coalition.

Ever since, the conservative movement has been melting down. Prominent members of the Heritage Foundation Board have resigned. Laura Loomer had one of her angry tirades, fighting with Fuentes on line for hours. National Review claimed Carlson is ripping the conservative movement apart. Then, Donald Trump came to Carlson’s defense. So much fun.

I have lots of thoughts about the debacle. This infighting is the proverbial chickens coming home to roost. All of these miscreants have been thriving within the conservative movement for decades.

Tucker Carlson worked his way up through the ranks of respected conservative publications and cable shows. Apparently, nobody noticed that he would say anything for applause—or a buck. Instead, they helped him build the audience that he’s now turning on them.

Nick Fuentes has been spewing his vile since the first Trump administration and conservatives just ignored him until he started attacking Jews and Israel. He was just fine as long as his targets were Blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims. Nobody said much when he had dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Now that he’s trying to assert himself as the heir to Charlie Kirk, he’s become the threat that was ignored for so long.

The Heritage Foundation started out as the original DC think tank, turning conservative ideas into public policy during the Reagan Administration. They morphed into a home for an increasingly populist movement as MAGA took over the GOP. Heritage President Kevin Robert’s defense of antisemitism and white supremacy within the Republican coalition was always where this debate was going to eventually end up because the movement conservatives grudgingly accepted bigotry in exchange for votes to keep Republicans in power.

While Heritage, Carlson, and Fuentes are ripping open the ideological debate and exposing the bigotry of the GOP coalition, Congresswoman Marjory Taylor Greene has announced her retirement from Congress. After years of pushing conspiracy theories, berating her opponents, and blindly following Donald Trump, she finally figured out that she’s been had.

It took awhile, but she got there. The Epstein files were the breaking point for Greene. She believed all of the Qanon crazy about an international pedophile ring run by Democrats and was sure that the evidence was in the files. When Trump refused to release them, she apparently had an aha moment.

David Frum sums it up nicely. “Of all the ridiculous things Greene believed, perhaps the single most ridiculous was that Trump, of all people on Earth, was leading a heroic fight against a global network of pedophiles…But she never did get the joke on the biggest joke in town, the joke that MAGA is about anything more than manipulation, exploitation, corruption, lust, and cruelty. She seems to have sincerely believed the lies that shrewder players merely mouthed. She gained her own millions without appreciating that her allies were scheming for billions.”

Greene had one of the biggest megaphones in the MAGA movement. It will be interesting to see how many follow her lead as she dumps Trump. The grifters and true believers will stay till the end, but she may be the leading of edge of a bunch of people who realize they’ve been duped. Who knows, but it sure has been fun watching it explode.

Finally, X, formerly known as Twitter, released a new version with a location feature that shows where accounts are located and, low and behold, some of the largest MAGA influencers are actually in Nigeria, Pakistan, and Russia. Some accounts have as many as 1 million followers. They’re probably making money off the Elon Musk’s profit-sharing scheme by spreading hate, anger, and lies among Trump’s most loyal online base.

As one account explained, “If I’m understanding this correctly, X is owned by a white nationalist who pays poor people of color in developing countries to pretend to be working class white Americans to scare other white Americans into being afraid poor people of color from developing countries are going to ruin America?”

The last month has exposed the Republican Party. There are still a few Republicans who believe in the conservatism of Reagan. Unfortunately, they’ve looked the other way while Trump and his followers have plundered the government and empowered a basket of deplorables to run our most important agencies, including the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Health and Human Services.

The implosion happening within the GOP sets the stage for a rough election year heading into 2026. The midterms are almost always bad for the party in power. It’s just a question of how bad. The largest wave elections of the century occurred in the midterms of 2006, 2010, and 2018.

In 2026, MAGA turnout was always going to be down because a portion of their base only shows up when Trump is on the ballot. Now, it might collapse altogether. The question is how motivated will Democrats be to show up and how badly will independent voters reject Trump. It could be a romp.