Incoming Republican conference chair kisses King Trump’s whole ass
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Elise Stefanik did interviews with Steve Bannon and Sebatstian Gorka confirming her belief that nobody has ever been more committed to fair elections than the very greatest American ever, Donald J. Trump:
Representative Elise Stefanik, campaigning to oust Representative Liz Cheney as the Republican Party’s No. 3 leader in the House for calling out President Donald J. Trump’s election lies, pitched herself as an unshakable ally of the former president on Thursday, calling him the “strongest supporter of any president when it comes to standing up for the Constitution.”
Ms. Stefanik, of New York, gave a pair of interviews on Thursday with hard-right acolytes of Mr. Trump, her first public interviews since announcing she would run for Ms. Cheney’s post amid a drive by Republican leaders to force out the Wyoming lawmaker. She resurrected Mr. Trump’s false narratives, citing “unprecedented unconstitutional overreach” by election officials in 2020 and endorsing an audit in Arizona that has become the latest avenue for conservatives to try to invalidate the results.
“It is important to stand up for these constitutional issues, and these are questions that are going to have to be answered before we head into the 2022 midterms,” Ms. Stefanik told Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former strategist.
In a separate interview with Sebastian Gorka, a former adviser to Mr. Trump, Ms. Stefanik said it would be her job as conference chair to represent the majority of House Republicans.
It’s frankly scary to consider how power-hungry an automaton you would have to be to say this shit.
But, as Serwer says, this is where the party is now:
As I have written in the past, the belief that the 2020 election was stolen, like the claim that former President Barack Obama was not born in America, is not amenable to fact-checking. The assertion of fraud is an ideological statement that political opposition to the Republican Party in general, and to Donald Trump in particular, is illegitimate. Even if Joe Biden got more votes, this logic holds, those votes should not count, because the people who cast them are not Real Americans the way Trump supporters are. To oppose Trump is to be The Enemy, and to be The Enemy is to surrender any claim to fundamental political rights.
Even a lifelong conservative Republican like Cheney becomes The Enemy if she is willing to uphold essential democratic rights—such as the opposition’s right to govern if it wins the most electoral votes—above the whims of King Trump. Cheney’s brave stand looks likely to cost her the leadership position she holds, and has left her isolated within the caucus, one of the few Republicans who have chosen their vow to the Constitution over their loyalty to the party. Yet the party’s rejection of the rule of law is also an extension of a political logic that Cheney herself has cultivated for years.
And, needless to say, Cheney helped to build the monster that is now devouring her.