Republicans are still mired in trump’s toxic legacy, but america is moving on | thearticle

This has been a bad week for the Republican Party in Congress. Behind closed doors, they voted to eject Liz Cheney from her position as their third most senior Representative in the House.

This humiliation was inflicted because a woman who was once the darling of conservative America has in recent months condemned Donald Trump as a danger, not merely to the Republicans but to

the Republic. In solidarity with her stand, 150 rebel Republican politicians and officials, including 27 former members of Congress, yesterday threatened to form a breakaway party. How has

the Grand Old Party come to this pass? Refusing, unlike her fainthearted fellow-congressmen, to be intimidated by mafia-like threats from the Trump camp to terminate her career, Liz Cheney

has consistently denounced his false claim that Joe Biden stole the 2020 presidential election. While most other Republicans keep digging themselves deeper into this unconstitutional hole,

Ms Cheney wants her party to move on from the Trump era. Most of her compatriots have already done so. The former President has reciprocated with a barrage of insults, greeting her demotion

on Wednesday with his trademark schadenfreude: “Liz Cheney is a bitter, horrible human being,” he wrote. “She has no personality.”  This ugly dispute is, of course, about politics as well as

personalities. Trump did not miss the opportunity to remind Americans that her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, as the leading hawk in the Bush Administration, was instrumental in

the decision to invade Iraq — and that his daughter is a chip off the old block: “She is a warmonger whose family stupidly pushed us into the never-ending Middle East disaster, draining our

wealth and depleting our great military, the worst decision in our country’s history.”  Donald Trump represents the isolationist tendency in American politics, while Liz Cheney belongs to

the wing of the Republican Party that supports military intervention in defence of US interests and allies. This never-ending debate is especially heated right now, with Israel under attack

from Hamas, China menacing Taiwan and the Taliban poised to retake Afghanistan when US forces withdraw on the _dies irae _of September 11.  In time of war, bipartisanship should be at a

premium in Washington. However, the poison injected by the insurrection on January 6 is still coursing through the body politic. The polarisation prohibits any appearance of co-operation

across the party divide. Liz Cheney probably sealed her fate a fortnight ago, when she allowed Biden to fist-bump her as he made his way to the podium to address Congress. She is now blamed

by her party for fraternising with the enemy. Her branding as a traitor may have sunk her hopes of running for the presidency in 2024 — if indeed she survives as the sole Representative for

Wyoming that long. She will be challenged by at least six pro-Trump Republicans when she comes up for re-election next year. The depths to which the Republicans in Congress have sunk were

illustrated by another ugly incident at the Capitol this week. On Thursday Marjorie Taylor Greene, the congresswoman made notorious by her advocacy of the conspiracy theory website QAnon, is

reported to have launched into a tirade against her Democratic opponent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, popularly known as “AOC”, outside the House Chamber. “Hey Alexandria,” Ms Greene allegedly

yelled. “You don’t care about the American people!” She accused AOC of supporting the “terrorist groups” Antifa and Black Lives Matter. This very public provocation has now been denounced by

the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who has called for the “verbal assault” to be referred to the Ethics Committee. In theory, this process could lead to Ms Greene being barred from the

Chamber. In a break with normal protocol, she was stripped of her committee positions earlier this year by the Democrats after her refusal to apologise unambiguously to the House for

peddling extremist conspiracy theories.  Unfortunately, Marjorie Taylor Greene probably cares more about the money she will doubtless raise from hardline supporters in the wake of her

outburst than she does about any censure she may now face from the Congressional authorities. AOC was demonised by Trump, not only for her pro-socialist and anti-Israel attitudes, but — less

legitimately — for her Hispanic background. In 2019 the then President told Ocasio-Cortez and the other three members of the ultra-progressive “Squad” on Twitter to “go back and fix the

totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came”. Trump was widely criticised for this “racist” language: all but one of the four women were born in the US. Undeterred, his

supporters allegedly came looking for AOC when they stormed the Capitol last January; the New York congresswoman claims that she heard them shouting her name and hid in a closet. She now

dismisses the abuse she received from Ms Greene: “I used to work as a bartender. These are the kinds of people that I threw out of bars all the time,” she said, describing Greene as “a

person who supports white supremacists in our nation’s capital”. This week’s relatively trivial incidents throw a garish light on the descent of American politics — especially on the Right —

into a pit of violence and vituperation. The damage that has been done in recent months to civility, dignity and due process will take years to repair — if indeed it ever is. Donald Trump

has just announced that he will return to the campaign trail with two rallies this summer. America, it seems, will not be rid of his baleful presence for years to come. Until it can detach

itself from this incubus, the Republican Party will continue on the road to perdition. A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We

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