Today’s Republican Party lies, attacks, and loves to spout conspiracy theories, much like Donald Trump, the person many of them stand behind. But the seed of cruelty that the GOP has fully adopted, and nurtured, had been planted long before the former president took office, says Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. Instead, he says on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal, someone else is to blame.
Newt Gingrich.
First, racist language and “your opponent is the enemy” rhetoric were very much part of the party in the 1960s and have evolved into worse versions of that today, but Milbank asserts that Gingrich, a former speaker of the House, officially solidified the GOP strategy of “if you keep repeating a lie over and over again, the huge proportion of the public is going to believe it” in the ’90s.
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“Newt created the world that we are living in today when he came out and said ‘The Republican party’s biggest problem is that it’s not nasty enough.’ He said we gotta start talking about Democrats as traitors abusing their powers, as liars, and cheaters. That was his great innovation in 1994,” Milbank explains. “You don’t have Marjorie Taylor Green or Lauren Boebert or Donald Trump without having Sarah Palin. And I don’t think you have Sarah Palin without having Karl Rove and Dick Cheney before that. And I don’t think you have them without having Newt.”
Things aren’t looking to get any better either, he says, explaining to co-host Molly Jong-Fast more of his reporting on the GOP’s evolution that’s included in his new book, The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party.
“We’ve talked about the beginning of the conspiracy theories, the dehumanizing rhetoric, the dysfunction; it just seems to happen over and over again in cycles. It’s no coincidence that we’re looking at this precarious moment with all this violent rhetoric in the midterms of the first term of a Democratic president. The last time that we had such an episode was the midterms of the first term of the Obama presidency. And before that, it was the midterms of the first term of the Clinton presidency. So everything new is old, it’s just happening in a worse and worse way,” he adds.
Also in the episode, co-hosts Andy Levy and Molly listen to more clips of politicians saying dumb things, this time starring Fox News’ Jesse Watters and sad son Eric Trump.
Listen to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
