John Harwood over at CNN does a piece on the GOPer standard opereation procedure post Donald Trump….
To assume lies would sink House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is to misunderstand the nature of today’s Republican Party: They actually demonstrate his credentials to lead it.
That’s not merely because Donald Trump remains the dominant GOP figure. The former President lies incessantly, and his aberrant behavior compels fellow Republicans to lie about him.
The problem runs deeper than one man. For a minority party joining blue-collar voters driven by cultural resentment with affluent donors fixed on the bottom line, gaining and wielding power requires dissembling beyond the conventional equivocation that politicians in all parties have always used to amass popular support.
One of the GOP’s most successful political consultants of recent decades issued that judgment in a confessional 2020 memoir. Stuart Stevens titled his book: “It Was All a Lie.”
One clear policy example is tax cuts. Like other GOP candidates in 2016, Trump promised that his tax plan would benefit the middle class, not the rich.
“It’s going to cost me a fortune,” the billionaire candidate said.
That no-tax-cut-for-the-rich pledge was crafted so as not to alienate his working-class supporters. But it was false. As originally proposed and ultimately passed by Republican lawmakers, Trump’s plan provided the largest tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.
Lately, Republicans have handled this problem by keeping their objectives quiet. They adopted no platform at their 2020 national convention. To avoid a forum where the party’s nominee would be pressed to speak honestly, the Republican National Committee recently abandoned cooperation with the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates….