More than 11 years ago, before Donald Trump emerged from the primordial ooze of the far-right fever swamp, before the aborted January 6 insurrection and before the latest spasm of Republican extremism felled House speaker Kevin McCarthy, two renowned political scientists, Thomas Mann, and Norman Ornstein, put their finger on the essence of increasingly dysfunctional US politics: the Republican party.
Mann and Ornstein argued that the Grand Old Party (GOP) had become an “insurgent outlier” that was “ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition”.
Legislating is not seen as a tool for bettering the plight of the American people but rather an opportunity to troll Democrats and play to the perceived slights of the party’s rank-and-file supporters.
McCarthy, like countless Republican supplicants over the past eight years, realised that his political aspirations were directly tied to his willingness to support Trump and the extremist forces within the party that have rallied around him.
Another Republican apostate, former presidential candidate and current Utah senator Mitt Romney, who twice voted to convict Trump in his impeachment trials, recently announced that he wouldn’t run for re-election.
In a series of interviews with the Atlantic’s McKay Coppins, he recounted how, “in public”, his fellow Republican senators “played their parts as Trump loyalists, often contorting themselves rhetorically to defend the president’s most indefensible behaviour.
The original article contains 1,050 words, the summary contains 226 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
More than 11 years ago, before Donald Trump emerged from the primordial ooze of the far-right fever swamp, before the aborted January 6 insurrection and before the latest spasm of Republican extremism felled House speaker Kevin McCarthy, two renowned political scientists, Thomas Mann, and Norman Ornstein, put their finger on the essence of increasingly dysfunctional US politics: the Republican party.
Mann and Ornstein argued that the Grand Old Party (GOP) had become an “insurgent outlier” that was “ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition”.
Legislating is not seen as a tool for bettering the plight of the American people but rather an opportunity to troll Democrats and play to the perceived slights of the party’s rank-and-file supporters.
McCarthy, like countless Republican supplicants over the past eight years, realised that his political aspirations were directly tied to his willingness to support Trump and the extremist forces within the party that have rallied around him.
Another Republican apostate, former presidential candidate and current Utah senator Mitt Romney, who twice voted to convict Trump in his impeachment trials, recently announced that he wouldn’t run for re-election.
In a series of interviews with the Atlantic’s McKay Coppins, he recounted how, “in public”, his fellow Republican senators “played their parts as Trump loyalists, often contorting themselves rhetorically to defend the president’s most indefensible behaviour.
The original article contains 1,050 words, the summary contains 226 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!