Ron Brownstein: The House GOP’s Investigation Conundrum

The list of investigative priorities for the House Judiciary Committee that the incoming chairperson, Jim Jordan, sent to the Justice Department earlier this month reads like an assignment sheet for Fox News.

And that was before Jordan, with incoming House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chair James Comer, repeatedly insisted the FBI had colluded with Big Tech to undermine former president Donald Trump by suppressing information about Hunter Biden’s laptop prior to the 2020 election.

It was also before reports surfaced that Kevin McCarthy, in his bid to secure the votes as speaker, promised far-right members of his caucus that he would authorize investigations into the Justice Department’s treatment of the insurrectionists who rioted in support of Trump on January 6. This was also before McCarthy threatened to launch impeachment proceedings against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Two months before taking power, the new House Republican majority has signaled that its investigative agenda will channel the preoccupations of the former president and his die-hard base of supporters. But it has set this course immediately after a midterm election in which voters outside the core conservative states sent an unmistakable signal of their own by repeatedly rejecting Trump-backed candidates in high-profile senate and gubernatorial races. That contrast captures why the GOP’s plans for aggressive investigations of President Joe Biden may present as much political risk for the investigators as it does for the targets.

But the new majority’s focus on airing echo-chamber conservative obsessions risks further stamping the GOP as the party of Trump precisely as more Republican leaders and donors insist the recent election results demonstrate the need to move beyond him. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/11/republican-house-majority-biden-investigations/672259/

Philip Bump: Nick Fuentes is a symptom of the GOP’s problem, not the disease

This, not the antisemitism as such, is the GOP’s problem with Trump. It’s that Trump has always been desperate to send signals to his base of support that he agrees with and loves them. That his political instinct has always centered on stoking loyalty from his most energetic supporters, a tactic that helped him narrowly win the presidency in 2016. Others in the party, often worried about party primaries, adopted a similar policy of declining to confront Trump’s base, which is why the response to controversies has consistently been silence.

The new challenge is that Trump’s base increasingly includes more toxic elements. Trump giddily encourages QAnon adherents on Truth Social after years of keeping them at something of a distance. He’s embraced the idea that the Capitol rioters have been unfairly targeted, despite the day’s violence. He’s attacked Jewish Americans as he’s ignored Ye’s rhetoric in favor of depicting Ye as a symbol of support from Black America.

In other words, the base to which he and his party is beholden is increasingly flecked with the sorts of elements that would once have been incomprehensible as targets of political outreach. By now, the fringe has been pulled so close to the establishment that only people like Fuentes still sit at the fringe in the first place. The disinterest in kicking anyone out of the party’s political tent is the central problem that makes a Trump-Fuentes dinner possible in the first place.

Incidentally, Trump himself answered our original question. On Truth Social, he shrugged at the idea that he should have turned Ye away. After all, the two of them got along great. Besides, at the dinner, Ye expressed no anti-Semitism, & I appreciated all of the nice things he said about me on ‘Tucker Carlson.’ Why wouldn’t I agree to meet?

It’s not like his party would have objected . https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/28/trump-fuentes-ye-dinner/

Henry Olson:The GOP’s Path to Dumping Trump Will Be Torturous

The new Republican Party breaks down into four rough factions in response to this query, and none has a clear plurality. Instead, the party has three factions of nearly equal size and a fourth tiny one whose votes might be decisive.

The three lions are Mega MAGA, the Old Guard and the MAGA Adjacent. I estimate each are about 30 percent of the party’s voters and are numerous in virtually every state. The minnow is the Never Trump group, which constitutes about 10 percent of GOP voters. They are strongest in wealthy suburbs and major metropolitan areas such as New York and D.C.”

If DeSantis sours and some MAGA Adjacent voters go back to Trump, then the final two candidates will be Trump and whichever Old Guard candidate can solidify his or her position. But if DeSantis stays strong and the Old Guard remains split, then DeSantis will make it to the final round and the Old Guard voters have to decide who the nominee will be.

This could put the Never Trumpers in the driver’s seat. They might prefer someone such as outgoing Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan or Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), but they should quickly realize their first choice has no hope of winning the nomination. Will they instead get behind an Old Guarder, propelling that person to the final two even if that means MAGA Adjacent voters might later coalesce around Trump? Will they back DeSantis as the lesser of two evils to send Trump packing, even if their hearts are elsewhere? Or will they effectively abstain in the early stages and let the crucial choice of the final two competitors take place without their input?
One can see from this that all Republican contenders, even Trump, must perform an intricate dance to prevail. The person who pirouettes to the winners’ platform will have to be skillful indeed. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/28/republican-primary-2024-dump-trump/

Charlotte Klein: Elon Musk Slashed Twitter's Safety Team. Then A Chinese Spam Campaign Ran Rampant

The global implications of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, in which Twitter’s staff has dwindled from roughly 7,500 to 2,000, was on full display Sunday, as Chinese spam accounts—suspected to be connected to the government—seemingly manipulated the platform to obscure reports of protests against the country’s COVID policies. For hours on Sunday, users who searched in Chinese for major Chinese cities on Twitter were inundated with links for escort services, porn, and gambling, a flood of content from numerous Chinese-language accounts, some dormant for months or years that researchers said was aimed at reducing the flow of news about the escalating protests,  according to the Washington Post. Twitter was aware of the problem by midday and was working to resolve it, per the Post.

Twitter has in the past dealt with foreign interference, and a former Twitter employee told the Post that this specific technique by accounts thought to be tied to the state is a known problem that our team was dealing with manually, aside from automations we put in place. But Sunday’s campaign comes as Twitter’s content-moderation capacity is particularly weak. Musk has wreaked havoc on the Trust and Safety team since taking over late last month, ushering in massive layoffs and attempting to overhaul the company's approach to content moderation. What happened Sunday, the former employee said, was another exhibit where there are now even larger holes to fill, because all the China influence operations and analysts at Twitter all resigned. All of which leaves Twitter in a much different position to take on misinformation campaigns than, say, in 2020, when it found and removed thousands of state-linked accounts spreading pro-China content regarding coronavirus and protests in Hong Kong. In 2021, Twitter again removed thousands of accounts tied to Chinese propaganda campaigns, this time regarding the human rights abuses that China has been accused of committing against the Uyghur population. Musk hasn’t commented specifically on the Chinese activity around the protests, tweeting early Monday, The amount of pro psy ops on Twitter is ridiculous! At least with new Verified they will pay $8 for the privilege haha.

Stanford Internet Observatory Director Alex Stamos tweeted Sunday that his team was still working on our own analysis while sharing a thread suggesting the Chinese actions were an intentional attack to throw up informational chaff and reduce external visibility into protests in China. He added: Looks like we might have the first major failure to stop gov interference in the Musk era.  https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/11/elon-musk-slashed-twitters-safety-team-then-a-chinese-spam-campaign-ran-rampant

Michael Hiltzik: Elon Musk’s engagement with the far right on Twitter is out of control

Michelle Goldberg: Antisemitism’s March Into the Mainstream

Early this year, the Republican House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy — who could soon become House speaker — castigated Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar for speaking at one of Fuentes’s events. McCarthy’s refusal to say anything about Fuentes’s meeting with the Republican Party’s most influential figure suggests that the boundary between the intolerable and the acceptable is shifting.

That’s what Trump does: By violating the norms holding together liberal democratic society with impunity, he renders those norms inoperable. If it were just Trump doing this, that would be bad enough. But other narcissistic celebrities are now joining him in reveling in reactionary transgression.

Ye is launching a vanity presidential campaign run by the far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, who recently wrote on Telegram, “We’re done putting Jewish interests first.” After buying Twitter, Elon Musk enthusiastically welcomed both Trump and Ye back to the platform, and has been tiptoing up to the edge of antisemitism himself. On Sunday, he tweeted that Alexander Vindman, the Jewish retired Army officer who testified about Trump’s attempt to extort Ukraine’s president, is both “puppet & puppeteer,” echoing an old antisemitic trope about Jews pulling the strings behind world events. On Monday, Musk tweeted an image of the alt-right symbol Pepe the Frog.

For most of my adult life, antisemites — with exceptions like Pat Buchanan and Mel Gibson — have lacked status in America. The most virulent antisemites tended to hate Jews from below, blaming them for their own failures and disappointments. Now, however, anti-Jewish bigotry, or at least tacit approval of anti-Jewish bigotry, is coming from people with serious power: the leader of a major political party, a famous pop star, and the world’s richest man.

Such antisemitism still feels, at least to me, less like an immediate source of terror than an ominous force offstage, just as it was for the comfortable fin-de-siècle Austrian Jews in Stoppard’s play. Maybe this time, for the first time, it won’t get worse. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/28/opinion/antisemitism-trump-nick-fuentes.html\

Jonathan Last: The Power of Populism

Republican elites will not determine whether or not Donald Trump wins the nomination. They have little-to-no power to influence that outcome.

Trump is a populist. His power emanates from the voters. And Republican voters have spent the last seven years refusing to do what they were told. They want what they want.

“The Republican party as currently constituted is a populist party. This brings certain advantages. For instance, the party has broadened its appeal to racial minorities by focusing on working-class voters.”

It also comes with disadvantages. For instance, the party’s voters are anti-establishment—up to and including their party’s own establishment. So elites have less influence over the direction of the institution.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what Conservatism Inc. wants. It doesn’t matter what you or I want, either. Because none of us constitute the populist base of the Republican party. Here’s some recent poll data:

 

Eric Lutz: Biden’s Bet: House Republicans' Antics Will Backfire

Despite their tepid midterm performance, Republicans have been giddy about their forthcoming House takeover. Kevin McCarthy, who stands to become speaker, is vowing to remove Democrats Ilhan Omar, Adam Schiff, and Eric Swalwell from their committee assignments—a thinly-veiled act of retaliation for the removal of right-wing extremists Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar from theirs. Greene, who McCarthy says he'll allow to serve on committees again, is eager to use her rising influence in the caucus to push for audits into Ukraine funding as well as the political impeachments of Merrick Garland and other administration officials, including President Joe Biden himself. Meanwhile, Jim Jordan is already rolling up his sleeves as he and other right-wingers prepare to use their newfound committee power to investigate everything from the Justice Department's raid of Mar-a-Lago to Hunter Biden’s business dealings.

The House GOP is framing all this nonsense as legitimate oversight. But the party's actual agenda is much more sinister: to inflict as much political damage on Biden and the Democrats as possible while providing cover for Donald Trump and others on the MAGA right. It’s going to be chaos with Republican leadership, as Schiff told ABC News over the weekend.

As Politico reported Tuesday, the Biden administration has been gearing up to combat the onslaught from the incoming House Republican majority—and from Trump, who is sure to use Biden as a foil as he begins his 2024 White House bid in earnest. The plan, officials told the outlet, is to use the GOP’s antics to draw contrasts with the administration’s agenda. In other words, the White House has accepted the likelihood that Republicans will be able to make headlines and command the news cycle. But the administration believes that it will come off, to the public, as partisan overreach. A lot of what they’ve been talking about are just not things Americans care about, an administration official told Politico

A Politico/Morning Consult poll seems to support this theory: Though there is obviously a market on the MAGA right for Greene-style politics, about 70 percent of respondents didn’t seem to like the idea of lawmakers spending the next two years investigating Hunter Biden and attacking Anthony Fauci. We have more pressing issues at hand, one survey respondent said.

It’ll be tougher for Washington to address those issues over the next two years, unless McCarthy suddenly finds the will and capacity to keep his raucous caucus in line. But that could ultimately reinforce the message voters sent in the midterms: I think the American public wants us to move on, Biden said in his November 9 presser, and get things done for them.  https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/11/biden-bets-house-republicans-antics-will-backfire

Jeff Greenfield: An Early Clue on Trump’s Republican Support

If you are one of those obsessed with following the next presidential election, you will consume the weekly or daily or hourly polls, even though you know they have a collective half-life of an ice cream cone in Saudi Arabia. You’ll watch every debate, no matter how early, in search of the fatal gaffe or resonant sound bite.

But if you really want to know whether Donald Trump is ascendant or in free fall, you might do better to focus on what might seem like a recipe for narcolepsy: the Republican Party’s delegate-selection process across the 50-plus states, territories and commonwealths. Over the next year and a half, there will be no better clue to the strength and weaknesses of Trump and his competitors.

Why? Well, for one thing, the way that delegates are chosen by state primaries, conventions and caucuses are far more important than a dozen debates and tens of millions of campaign dollars. And how the GOP state parties decide how their convention delegates are selected may also tell you whether these state parties are out to hobble the former president — or put him on a glide path to another nomination. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/11/25/trump-2024-presidential-election-00070677