Weapons of Mass Delusion

 

Robert Draper, “Weapons of Mass Delusion: When The Republican Party Lost Its Mind,” Penguin Press, 2022, 362 pp.

This book describes how a new breed of Republicans--led by Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Madison Cawthorn--far from moving on from Trump after January 6th, have taken the politics of hysteria to even greater extremes and brought American democracy to the edge.  

The violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, was a terrible day for American democracy, but many people dared to hope that at least it would break the fever that had overcome the Republican Party and banish Trump's relentless lies about the stealing of the 2020 election. That is not what happened. Instead, "the big steal" has become dogma among an ever-higher percentage of American Republicans. What happened to the Republican Party, and America, during the Trump presidency is a story we more or less think we know. What has happened to the party since, it turns out, is even more disquieting. That is the story Robert Draper tells in Weapons of Mass Delusion. 

Draper chronicles the road from January 6 to the 2022 midterms among the Republican base and in the U.S. Congress, rendering unforgettable portraits of how Marjorie Taylor Greene and her ilk came to shape their party's terms of engagement to an extent that would have been unimaginable even five years ago. He also brings to life the efforts of a dwindling group of Republicans who are willing to push back against the falsehoods, in the face of a group of ascendent demagogues who are merrily weaponizing them. With a base whipped up into a perpetual frenzy of outrage by conspiracy theories--not just about the big steal but about COVID and vaccines, pedophilia and Antifa and Black Lives Matter and George Soros and President Obama, and on and on and on--the forces of reason within the GOP are on the defensive, to put it mildly. 

The book also benefits greatly from reporting conducted in Texas, Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, and other bellwether states in the country of the mind of undending conspiracies. Robert Draper has been a fair-minded chronicler of the American political scene for over twenty-five years. He has seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. He has never seen it this ugly. Ultimately, this book tells the story of a fearful test of our ability, as a country, to hold together a system of government grounded in truth and the rule of law. Written on the eve of the 2022 midterm elections, Draper's account of a party teetering on the precipice of madness reveals how the GOP fringe became its center of gravity. 

 

*Not so long ago, fake news stories were routinely smothered, simply by being ignored by the biggest newspapers and the major TV networks, their storylines safely confined to the National Enquirer and its tabloid competitors.  Rogue legislators with histories of racism or addiction to conspiracy theories usually suffered the same fate for the same reason – nobody gave them ink or air time.

 

*The internet and its infernal algorithms are the main reasons no institution or congressional leader retains the power to protect the public from outright insanity.  Draper’s new book about Washington in the 18 months after January 6 is all about the fatal consequences of the brave new world the internet created, in which Republican outliers like the Arizona congressman Paul Gosar and his mentee, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, are much more likely to be rewarded for “outrageous, fact-free behavior” than to be penalized for it.

*Draper describes three common notions about Donald Trump’s successful putsch: the idea it was accomplished through “force and surprise”; the notion “that the party was fully functioning and purposeful” before Trump took it over; and the contention “that the GOP bore no responsibility for the crime committed against it”.  As Draper writes, “Each of these notions is false.”

*Draper provides new anecdotes about and original analysis of the most outrageous actors, like Gosar and Greene, and their main enabler, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy.

Gosar spent a decade in Congress “building a portfolio of outrageous conduct even before social media’s ‘attention economy’ was fully capable of rewarding him for it”. One Gosar staffer was “advised by a top Republican operative, ‘You need to get out of there, that man is insane”. Another GOP aide called the congressman “my nominee to be that guy who comes in with a sawed-off shotgun one day”.

*Draper finds most astonishing is that Greene, who attributed forest fires to (possibly-Jewish connected) space lasers and openly promoted QAnon conspiracies, would only need a year in Congress before becoming “the party’s loudest and most memorable messenger outside of Trump himself”.  Draper provides an excellent description of how Greene’s personal wealth and determination made it possible for her to move to an adjoining district and win the primary after the incumbent retired. She loaned her own campaign $500,000 and by March 2020 the extreme House Freedom Caucus had contributed nearly $200,000 more.

*After Greene won the first round in her primary, before the run-off, Politico ran this pithy summary of her greatest hits: Greene “suggested that Muslims do not belong in government; thinks black people ‘are held slaves to the Democratic party’; called George Soros … a Nazi, and said she would feel ‘proud’ to see a Confederate monument if she were Black because it symbolizes progress made since the civil war”.

*McCarthy and the rest of the House leadership denounced Greene. But then a funny thing happened – “or rather did not happen – back in Georgia. The attack on Greene by “fake news” and “the equally fake Republicans” delighted her new constituents and she won the run-off by 14 points. At her victory party, she said of Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House speaker: “We’re going to kick that bitch out of Congress.”

*The intellectual bankruptcy Draper chronicles pivots around McCarthy, whose blind ambition to become the next speaker leads to a series of despicable choices. First, he decides he must push Liz Cheney out of Republican leadership, because she refuses to pretend Trump lost the election because of fraud. Then he goes out of his way to mend his friendship with Trump and turn a blind eye to Greene’s outrages, because he is convinced he cannot win a House majority without Trump’s craziest supporters.

 

*The exact moment the Republican party lost its soul probably came after the January 6 rioters tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to the duly elected new president by storming the Capitol – and a few hours later seven Republican senators and 138 representatives still voted to sustain spurious objections to the electoral votes of Pennsylvania.  McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, were not among those election deniers – although McCarthy earlier voted to object to results from Arizona. But their refusal to convict Trump in his subsequent impeachment trial, or to stand up to any allies of the insurrection, guaranteed their party’s addiction to the lie that the presidential election was stolen.

My Notes:

Pg. 50:  Con: the ability to inspire confidence in the furtherance of a swindle.

Every con artist relies on this same tactic, and Trump was no different: they reveal themselves, or at least enough of themselves, to convince a mark that they are utterly transparent and so despite their best efforts are simply incapable of deception.  This was Trump’s greatest talent.  Lacking in raw charisma, he drew people close with his al-too-humanness: the boasts, the whining, the flattery, the voracious neediness.  So encompassing was his pathos that one could lose sight of his malevolence, until the moment when it seemed to swallow up the sun.  Trump’s disinterest in anyone but himself was undisguised.

Pg. 68:  Though the Freedom Caucus fulminated about Obama’s ‘imperial’ behavior in having signed 129 executive orders during his second term, the same group fell strangely silent when Trump issued 220 such orders during his one term.