Purge and Binge

Three cheers for the new Trump-dominated RNC.

By
444
Lara Trump, daughter-in-law of former President Donald Trump, attends the Republican National Committee spring meeting on March 8, 2024, in Houston, Texas. (Photo by CECILE CLOCHERET/AFP via Getty Images)

Any successful revolutionary populist movement will eventually purge its political enemies. And after it does, the new establishment it creates will be more corrupt and more ruthless than the one it replaced.

Those historical rules aren’t hard and fast but the exceptions are rare. When a populist insurgency takes charge, expect total consolidation of power—and chaos, of course—to follow.

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  1. Homer.Rainbow

    Never underestimate the will power of people with stockholm syndrome.

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  2. Rossknode

    Why would anyone who is really good at what they do go work for the RNC? The RNC is making the #1 requirement for a job is being loyal to Trump, how good you are at what you do is #2 and you will only keep your job by staying "loyal" whatever the hell that looks like. They will quickly only be staffed by people who really have no idea what they are doing.
    And how exactly do you win an election if your slogan is "Either you are 100% with us or we don't want you?"

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    Normb1442

    I didn't say the professors were Marxists.. I said the complaint was that they were indoctrinating students in Marxism. And it clearly wasn't true. I strongly suspect that most of the complaints we hear today about academia are similarly nothing more than "I don't like their ideas ".

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    Bryson DeAwesome

    how about the Senate and the House?
    all Republicans are evil so i guess we vote Dem across the line in 2024

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    1. Randall Briggs

      Let's be kind and just call our Republican senators and representatives stupid, greedy, and/or cowardly.

      But I imagine that some of them ARE evil, in the Hannah Arendt "banality of evil" sort of way.

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  5. Vaddeman

    Dear Nick:

    If you continue to write columns like this, you’re going to lose your ‘pessimist’ cred.

    On a different topic, I’m dismayed by the many commenters on this site who use the ‘pox on both your houses’ argument for not voting for either candidate. That stance may be useful in fiction, or when there’s an actual third (or fourth… or fifth…) option, but the idea of a third party in this country should have been put out of its misery years ago. And making a conscious choice to refuse to vote because you don’t have the candidate you want is, in my mind, selfish. I’m not happy with either Joe or Don, but one of those two will be sworn in as president in January 2025. I think it’s my civic duty, not to choose the lesser of two evils, but to do all I can to prevent the greater evil from prevailing.

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    1. Nate Nelson

      I can agree with that sentiment...IF you are in a battleground state. Otherwise your vote counts for nothing no matter who you vote for. Not being in a battleground state, I will serenely cast my vote for neither of these corrupt imbeciles.

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      1. Vaddeman

        You can rue your outcast state or, you and the many others who will also 'withhold' their votes can cast them to stop the insurrectionist. That would probably turn yours into a battleground state. But that's just a suggestion.

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  6. Gaveis85

    What the Modern GOP did to Mitt Romney and John McCain just disgusts me

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    1. Randall Briggs

      Republican voters stayed home in 2008 because McCain had worked across the aisle to further needed legislation. Then they stayed home in 2012 because Romney had worked with Democrats when he was governor AND he was a Mormon.

      Those voters taught the "Modern GOP" a lesson: the way to get nominated (and in red states and districts get elected) is to go all in for hyper-partisanship and bigotry. Lesson learned, Trump was the nominee in 2016 and 2020, and will be the nominee in 2024. If he loses this year, even if he can't put two words together and has to wear a bib when he drinks his Boost, he'll probably be the nominee in 2028.

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  7. Ken Motamed

    Yet another misuse of writ large.

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  8. Natenelson

    Can someone please incept into Trump's brain the idea to just rename the party "MAGA" already? I mean at least we in the Remnant could still retain an affinity for what was the GOP (disassociation would be welcome at this point in the ongoing farce)...maybe even try to resurrect it someday after the fever breaks.

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      Kizedek

      How about, “Trump National Front”

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    NN

    Thanks for your columns.

    We go on, one step up and two steps back.

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    1. Martin W Kraegel III

      "One step forward and two steps back, nobody gets too far like that."- The Desert Rose Band

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        NN

        I was quoting Bruce Springsteen. You'd think that after eight years of dissecting every aspect of the Trump GOP problem, we would be set on a clear, healthy direction forward. But no. Everything but. Fortunately, we have Nick here.

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  10. Ready for the Meteor

    The enemy of my enemy is not my friend, and I won't vote for either one.

    The populist cult that has seized the GOP just isn't that smart - as disgusting as January 6th was, it wasn't exactly the work of a mastermind. These bellicose clowns are the "gang that couldn't shoot straight." Drunken and angry, they're tactically dangerous, but strategically impotent.

    The progressive left is more insidious. They have worked for decades to capture our institutions of political, economic, and social power, and have turned at least two rising generations of Americans against the classical liberal norms and values enshrined in our system. The aftermath of October 7th has given us a glimpse of how successfully the minds of our youth have been poisoned.

    Can the country survive another clumsy attempt to subvert an election?

    Can the country survive a third wave of indoctrinated students?

    In a choice between a heart attack and cancer, I choose neither.

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      BillAZ

      Do you ever wonder whether the first view leads to the second and the second view inevitably leads to the first? It's not a cycle you break by opting out.

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        Kizedek

        Exactly. The “populist cult that just isn’t that smart has seized the GOP” *because* they hold the second view which was pushed day and night by rightwing talk radio, and now by Trump and Russian bots.

        I recently read a report that the top 50 or so Facebook Pages regularly read by “evangelicals” were actually run by bots.

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    2. Ken Motamed

      "Neither" is not an option; it's a cop-out.

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      1. Ready for the Meteor

        OK, Sta-Puft marshmallow man it is.

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      Normb1442

      "These bellicose clowns are the "gang that couldn't shoot straight." Drunken and angry, they're tactically dangerous, but strategically impotent."

      And if Trump wins, they will be released WITH AN APOLOCY via a Trump pardon -- he has already said he will do this. They were strategically impotent because Trump is an idiot, but rest assured that there are people behind the scenes like Bannon or Miller who will know how to use them.

      Let's see -- have them set upon a peaceful demonstration in, say, New York City, beating up a few antifa people and maybe a cop or two, and Trump describes it as an insurrection by antifa and calls in the National Guard and takes over the city. You KNOW FOX will back him up on that, don't you? If you have storm troopers who owe their freedom to you, and you have a media that will defend any atrocity they commit, and you have the power to back them up, which Trump will, you can basically take over the country.

      The country is surviving a "wave of indoctrinated students" as we speak. It survived the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations; it will survive these just fine. It will NOT survive an administration which starts its term in office by creating a private army that it places outside the law by abuse of the pardon. If you're unhappy about a bunch of college kids making noise, God bless. But PLEASE -- don't visit fascism upon us for something we have seen before and which is part and parcel of the freedoms will not longer enjoy under Trump.

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      1. Randall Briggs

        That is an excellent response. To paraphrase Chiang Kai-shek, the Democrats are a disease of the skin; Trump and his party are a disease of the heart.

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        BillAZ

        Agreed. Although I have concerns.

        I was reading a history of the 1948 Arab Israeli War and the thing that always impresses is that the Israelis, were organized, cohesive and determined to protect the nascent Israeli state. With the exception of some the Arabs were disorganized, ill-equipped, fractious and leaderless. The war Egyptians, Syrians, Iranians, etc fought was basically a nationalist abstraction very few were willing to give 110% too. Wounded pride was not a sufficient motivation to die for as opposed to the IDF's fight for Israel's survival.

        Compare then; MAGA is fighting for a particular vision of America perhaps warped beyond recognition but irrelevant because they know what they want. And these masses energized by a charismatic strong man will generally subordinate their safety and interests to their cause.

        Now consider what country these young educational elite fighting for. It's certainly not the America I grew up in. They look at that country with contempt and would jettison the only real establishment candidate that would prevent the spread of the "fascism" you refer to. Perhaps because they think we are all already fascists.

        What the Left is fighting for then is a Progressive abstraction - not our country - that includes trigger warnings and safe spaces. If there is a coming conflict -whether civil or political - I'm skeptical that they will suffer a poke in the nose for that abstraction. They are more likely to flee to Canada.

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          Kizedek

          Likely as that is, it …belies the idea that MAGA are “persecuted”.

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            BillAZ

            True... despite the persistent delusion that they are oppressed.

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      3. Martin W Kraegel III

        I think the concern is about the people running the college/universities, Fortune 500 companies, media conglomerates, tech companies, etc., rather than college kids. And guess what? The anti-Vietnam war protesters ended up bequeathing us the Boomer culture that's still with us today as the dominant force in culture and government.

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          Normb1442

          I have no idea what you're talking about here. When the Vietnam War was going on, corporate CEOs avoided ostentatious shows of wealth and while they made more money than most, to be sure, it wasn't until Jack Welch began preaching the gospel of the all-powerful CEO that the wealth gap began to go out of control. As far as I know, neither Welch nor Ayn Rand -- the high priestess of capitalist rectitude -- spent much time protesting the war. As I noted to another poster below, when I was in college we heard a lot about how professors were indoctrinating students in Marxism. I attended one of the most liberal college in the country in 1960 and not ONE SINGLE PROFESSOR (including the only black one) spoke out in support of the sit-ins, and a few openly opposed them.

          So tell me, what is your beef with the people running these places and how are they somehow related to Vietnam protesters?

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          1. Randall Briggs

            Few professors in the 1960s were Marxists. But the center did not hold against the avalanche of protests in elite institutions. And those non-Marxist professors failed to inculcate in their students--the Baby Boomers (my generation)--with how precious our freedoms are. The next generation of college professors included plenty of Marxists, and there are still plenty of them in academia. I'm in deep-red, MAGAfied Oklahoma, and I've encountered them even here, in state-funded colleges and universities.

            I'm not urging a purge, as our governor and the superintendent of education are. But we should be willing to confront those people with better ideas and arguments.

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      4. Ready for the Meteor

        Norm, we wont know if we survive the wave for many years to come. But the indications aren't good. The boomers' anti-war views (which were not, incidently, the result of indoctrination, but rather the fear of being drafted into a war they didn't understand) were fundamentally different from the anti-enlightenment views taught in schools today. Polls show that young adults are not shedding their college ideas as quickly as they did in the past. Maybe this is a critical mass phenomenon, since a larger fraction of young adults are grads now, or maybe it's something else. But when more and more of the reins of power are gathered by those who think we should judge a person by the color of his skin rather than the content of his character, I think we need to worry. We won't know the effect of the indoctrinated generations for another decade or two, but it's at least as big a roll of the dice as letting a crazed monkey into the Whitehouse again.

        I also think your scenario is pretty unrealistic. We've seen violent rioting in many cities in the last few years. It's ugly and people get hurt, but it's hardly an existential threat to the nation.

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          BillAZ

          "We've seen violent rioting in many cities in the last few years."

          Sure. We've seen violent rioting for the last 100 years mostly around the issue of race. And it used to be that whites did a lot of that rioting, i.e., Tulsa. You can't point to this as anything other than evidence of the vestigial problems that still exist around race in this country. It shouldn't be news given our history.

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          Normb1442

          1. When I was in college, I heard many of the same complaints about professors indoctrinating students in Marxist ideas. I happened to be attending one of the most liberal colleges in the country in February, 1960, when the sit-in movement exploded onto the country. NOT ONE SINGLE PROFESSOR endorsed the sit-ins (including the only black professor), and several outright condemned them. Most students supported them and some went south to help out. The brother of one of them was murdered by police in Mississippi. The idea that students are empty husks into which the prejudices of their professors can be poured and which then take root is nonsense.

          As for opposition to the Vietnam War, yes, a lot of it had to do with the draft, but before you accuse the students of not understanding the war they might be forced to fight in, bear in mind that ALMOST NOBODY understood what the war was about, because Presidents of both parties lied in their teeth about it, and we know this about them now. The students didn't, but many of them were closer to the truth than most Americans.

          2. Exactly who are you referring to as people who judged by skin color instead of character. If it's the MAGA crowd, I too am concerned. If it's that you feel people of color being put into position of power which YOU believe to be on other than the merits, I disagree. I grew up in a country where serious amounts of power were given only to white people, without even a hint of consideration of the qualifications of people of color. In my lifetime, I am delighted to note that the situation has improved considerably. Not knowing where you're coming from saying that, I hesitate to presume. But if it's not the MAGA crowd, I
          think you're indoctrinated in ways far worse than any student today.

          3. I'm not worried about students being indoctrinated because I don't see what they're being indoctrinated to believe. Please enlighten me. Students have been moving to the left on cultural issues since the 1960s, in ways which I personally find quite positive. I don't think it's because they indoctrinated. I think it's because they're young. I'm not as radical and I used to be. Most everyone I know is aged similarly.

          4. With all due respect, you misinterpret my point about the rioting. It's not the rioters who I regard as an existential threat -- we survived it without ever coming close to that. It's the way in which Trump and his operatives could use the riots to seize power and shred the Constitution. It's the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook -- provoke a crisis and use to to expand your power. Maybe you think Trump would never do that. I hope you're right. But I don't want to have to find out.

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            Kizedek

            Your #2 is exactly the question that occurred to me, too. Good answer.

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      5. Martin W Kraegel III

        "...you can basically take over the country." Will you listen to yourself?

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    4. Martin W Kraegel III

      That's all fine except for the fact that the "Flight 93 people", Groypers, alt-right, Catholic integralists, Protestant Christian Nationalists, Trump cult people, white nationalists, the "Deus Vult" people, Bronze Age Pervert etc. have inculcated a new generation of young conservatives into reactionary, anti-liberal, anti-democratic politics as well. So we're getting at both ends with the rising generation, which of course is smaller than any American generation in history and we'll have a bulge of older people fighting to maintain their entitlements, while also fight to keep the borders closed. Where all this goes is anyone's guess.

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      1. Ready for the Meteor

        Hi Martin,

        No question that youngsters repelled by progressive orthodoxy are at risk of falling into the various right-wing pathologies. If I thought these jackasses were successfully recruiting the young, I'd characterize the election choice as lung cancer vs. pancreatic cancer.

        However, I don't think these guys are recruiting a significant fraction of young adults (not yet, anyway). They just don't have the influence that the progressive ideologues have, because they're not running the schools, the NYT, the Fortune 500... Moreover, as you point out, there are many factions, and competition among them decreases the influence of all of them.

        You mention "Flight 93", which says "Democrats are such an imminent threat that we must vote for Trump, regardless of the danger." It seems to me that Nick is making the same argument: "Trump is so bad that we must vote for Biden, regardless of the danger."

        I'm not minimizing the risk from the right. I just think Nick is minimizing the risk from the left, which in my view has smarter, more patient agents who are much closer to their goal than the boobs of the wacky right are to theirs.

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          Kizedek

          “I'm not minimizing the risk from the right. I just think Nick is minimizing the risk from the left, which in my view has smarter, more patient agents who are much closer to their goal than the boobs of the wacky right are to theirs.”

          Sounds plausible on the face of it …but, it’s not that simple. That view of the Left is lied about and pushed by the Right in order to achieve their goal. That’s out of the classic populist authoritarian playbook.

          Clearly, over the last eight years, the Right has been able to rapidly and radically take hold of all kinds of “levers of power” throughout the country at all levels of political and administrative processes, and the stated objective on day one is to “purge and binge” throughout as many federal institutions and agencies as possible.

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        2. Martin W Kraegel III

          You may be correct about that; I don't discount that perspective, but it's worth pointing out that Trump doesn't seem all that together and whoever is pulling the string behind the throne is probably gonna matter a lot. Their won't be responsible adults in the room the next time around. Hell the GOP may have full control of Congress with Trump back in the White House. Both sides overestimate the power of the other side in part because they can't get everything they want in a country of 340 million that's diverse in values and morals.

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            Citizen60

            You may want to reade Project 2025 by The Heritage. It’s the Trump Administration playbook, and people are already being vetted for the next Trump Administration.

            We learned from 2016-2021 how quickly and easily guardrails we thought existed were traditions. With a compliant Senate and SCOTUS, imagine what will be condoned.

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          2. Ready for the Meteor

            Hi Martin - you're right about the lack of responsible adults, and I imagine if we have a second Trump administration that we'll see a lot more unhinged initiatives, more direct affronts to our constitutional system, and no doubt some unqualified judicial nominations, since I suspect Trump is no longer pleased with the FedSoc. But I'm not so sure this movement survives past Trump, and he can't have that many more years here on earth. I don't think there's any organizing principle to MAGA beyond cult of personality, and I can't imagine anyone capable of filling those malignant shoes.

            Perhaps the strongest argument (to me) for voting for Biden despite my concerns about the left is--- Trump's incumbency seemed to turbocharge the left. Maybe a Biden/Harris win would actually leave the left weaker than another Trump term.

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