Would Republicans Act Against Extremism if Right-Wingers Assassinated Republican Leadership?

I was reading about the horrible murder of that judge in Wisconsin and noted that Mitch McConnell was on that guy’s to-murder list. Then I was thinking, what would have happened had Mike Pence been lynched on January 6, 2021? That was a real possibility.

Then I began to wonder–would it make any difference? Are Republican politicians so craven, so desperate for power, so determined to be reelected that they would let themselves be killed in order to do it?

I think the answer is no to the first question and yes to the second.

If Pence had been killed or if some right-winger decides to take out some other Republican for the crime of not being loyal enough to Trump or whatever, I actually do not think it would make a significant difference in the course of the Republican Party. I think that it would take about 5 minutes for someone to start saying it was a Democratic false-flag operation, about 3 days for Ted Cruz to parrot that, and then about 10 days for your more establishment Republicans to just stop talking about it and move on as if it never happened.

I’d like to think that I am overly pessimistic here. But I don’t think I am. This party is so dominated by racist, misogynist, homophobic, gun-toting extremists that even if one took out their own, it would be swept under the rug pretty fast. Even if it was someone as prominent as Pence or McConnell.