After losing the presidency and the Senate thanks to Donald Trump’s disastrous management of COVID, Republicans look determined to try to ascend again in Washington by parroting his stolen election lies. If you can’t snap out of a slumber, it seems, the second best thing is to dive back into the delusions of your dream.
Consider Ohio, where a recent two-term Republican governor named John Kasich spoke up with intelligence and strength against Trump, and where the current Republican governor, Mike DeWine, correctly diagnosed the Jan. 6 insurrection, saying that the ex-president ”has started a fire that has threatened to burn down our democracy.”
The Kasich-DeWine GOP is nowhere to be found among the current crop of Republicans vying to replace the retiring Sen. Rob Portman next year.
Jane Timken, former state GOP chair, has boasted of turning the party into “a well-oiled, pro-Trump machine.”
Another Senate candidate, former state Treasurer Josh Mandel, called Rep. Anthony Gonzalez a “traitor,” the likes of whom should be “eradicated from the Republican Party,” after Gonzalez voted to impeach Trump.
Then there’s J.D. Vance, author of “Hillbilly Elegy.”
The Republican golden boy who grew up poor in Appalachia, went to Iraq, then graduated from Yale Law School and became a venture capitalist is in the midst of a bout of self-flagellation for telling the truth about Trump in 2016.
Back then, he tweeted that Trump was “reprehensible” for his views on “immigrants, Muslims, etc.” and told NPR, “I can’t stomach Trump.”
In his desperate bid to get on the right side of the monster, Vance has deleted the offending tweets, saying “I regret being wrong about the guy.”
If the Republican Party in not-long-ago-swing-state Ohio has been swallowed whole by Trump, even as his free-fall dive off the deep end continues, even as he and his confidantes, buying into a clinically insane conspiracy theory, seem to think his return to the Oval Office could come as soon as August, what hope does the national GOP have?
— New York Daily News