The Forum

Ever since Donald Trump captured the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, many center-left observers have clung to the hope that somehow the party that willingly voted for a serially bankrupt authoritarian would return to its senses. A quick survey of Google News shows that more than 3 million articles have tackled the so-far unanswerable question of when the “fever” around Trump will “break.”

It’s easy to see why this idea is so appealing. The thought that Trump will simply go away—for medical, judicial, or other reasons—would indeed be a fairytale ending to our long national nightmare. A fresh round of this speculation gained traction in the wake of this week’s FBI search for classified documents reportedly relating to nuclear security at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound in Palm Beach, Florida. Many liberal observers suggested that surely this time our badly battered system of checks-and-balances oversight might give us a moment of both political catharsis and long-overdue legal accountability for our most corrupt and law-breaking president.

Unfortunately, the probability of such a scenario is about as great as Disney doing a remake of a princess film that’s true to the original stories. Our inconvenient reality is that the broad political formation that gave rise to the Trump presidency on the right is deeply embedded in the nation’s long history of white and Christian fundamentalist grievance—and the mobilization of these forces into an increasingly confrontational, violent, and fascist politics is likely to continue long after Trump himself is a distant memory.

Though many people wish to deny it, Trump’s authoritarian impulses and disregard for truth are in perfect sync with the Republican electorate’s wishes. For a chilling case in point, look no further than last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held in Dallas, Texas.

As it happens, CPAC was a familiar touchstone of my former life as a Republican consultant.  I attended and even managed the social media for a number of pre-Trump CPAC events. During them, I witnessed a wide array of oddball speakers and exhibits—a feature of the annual right-wing gatherings meant both to titillate and scandalize mainstream press outlets covering them. But the tone and substance of CPAC conferences have shifted dramatically over the past six years, from annual confabs catering to obscure think tankers and policy wonks to multiple enraptured gatherings of the faithful.

That’s not merely a figure of speech; one striking theme at last week’s CPAC gathering was the disappearance of any acknowledgment of gay Republicans from the event’s stages. Recent  conferences had featured speeches from LGBT Log Cabin Republicans, but the Dallas regional conference made it crystal-clear that Republican politics is now all about imposing far-right Christianity on the rest of America via a false narrative of supposed religious persecution.

Indeed, the signature set piece of this year’s gathering was a veritable hard-right passion play. It was a cage set up on the conference floor to dramatize the detention of January 6 insurrectionists who had sought to overthrow the legitimate election of President Joe Biden and install Trump as a coup president.

Sporting a fake orange jumpsuit, inexplicably bare feet, and a red Make America Great Again cap, Brandon Straka—himself a January 6 rioter—enthralled CPAC attendees with an hours-long performance as a heroic pro-Trump patriot unfairly treated by law enforcement. Never breaking character, he cried and prayed aloud as onlookers listened to audio recordings purporting to be accounts of similar hardships from actual jailed insurrectionists.

According to Vice News reporter Tess Owen, the line to see Straka’s installation stretched the entirety of the CPAC exhibit hall, as hundreds of gawkers awaited their turn to express support verbally or by throwing money into the cage. No one seemed to be aware that Straka had managed to avoid actual jail time by entering into a plea bargain with federal prosecutors in exchange for what officials called “valuable” information about key organizers of the pro-Trump rallies that took place before the storming of the Capitol.

The spectacle only grew as event security parted the crowd to allow self-proclaimed Christian nationalist Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA.) to enter the fake cell and begin reciting The Lord’s Prayer. Several audience members joined in, with one man extending the supplication with an ad-libbed prayer to Michael the Archangel—a formulaic spiritual appeal that has become popular among some members of the QAnon movement. He ended his divine address with an imprecation against “Brandon,” the far-right’s long-hackneyed way of saying “Fuck Joe Biden.” (That the symbolic inmate at the center of all the self-dramatization was actually named Brandon was another irony that escaped the transfixed crowd.)

Greene and the CPAC faithful were just getting started in courting the outer reaches of extremist fantasy. The next day, she delivered a full-throated defense of her “good friend” Alex Jones, the penis-pill salesman and radio host who just days earlier had been ordered by an Austin, Texas, jury to pay nearly $50 million in a lawsuit filed by a man and woman he falsely accused of faking their children’s deaths in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting. (Another overlooked irony in all this was that Brandon Straka’s installation was the closest anyone may come to witnessing the figure of the “crisis actor” that haunts the imaginations of Jones supporters as they malign the victims of school shootings and their surviving family members.)

The Infowars founder reveled in expressions of solidarity from Greene and other right-wing political leaders during his Monday program, telling viewers that “we are the Republican Party and our populist movement is winning.” As if to underscore the point, the Daily Beast reported just hours later that Fox News host Tucker Carlson is apparently gravely concerned that his own regular text message discussions with Jones might become public after Jones’s texting history was inadvertently sent to the plaintiffs attorneys in the case, and has since been forwarded to the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack.

However dismaying the spectacle of CPAC may be, the Jones verdict does point to some institutional safeguards that may, over the longer term, at least stanch the spread of extremist toxins through the right-wing body politic. So far, it’s notable that Jones’s day of reckoning in the courts hasn’t summoned a broad corps of defenders in the GOP. Most Republican elected officials have avoided standing up for him, at least in public. Even his friend Carlson (who wrote a blurb for Jones’s upcoming book) has yet to denounce the $50 million judgment.

Given the extraordinary pro-corporate bias of Texas’s civil liability law, it’s very unlikely that Jones would be forced to pay anything close to the full amount the jury ordered. Nonetheless, it is one of only several that Jones is facing for his defamation of Sandy Hook families. Most of the parents have sued him in Connecticut, the state where the murders happened—and where the courts are not as ideologically tilted against plaintiffs as they are in Texas. So even though Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis’s successful suit may not put Infowars out of business, the larger Connecticut suit (which the plaintiffs have already won because Jones failed to comply with discovery requirements) and a separate Texas defamation case may get the job done.

No one can predict the future, but the repeated success of the cases against Jones and the series of litigation victories notched by voting machine companies Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems over 2020 election lies told by Fox News, Newsmax, and MyPillow executive Mike Lindell suggest a possible path forward for the forces of truth and accountability. Specific, targeted legal action against far-right media operators just might be the best way to begin arresting the cacophony of disinformation that’s been disfiguring our politics for decades.

Even if the lawsuits don’t yield an uninterrupted string of wins for the plaintiffs, they have already led to major changes at right-wing media outlets such as Newsmax and Fox, which have both been loath to regurgitate Trump’s nonsensical lies about his loss. There are also some indications that Fox honchos Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch are actively working to steer Republican voters away from Trump via their other media properties. By contrast, the much-smaller right-wing TV upstart One America News has clung to Trump’s voting conspiracies and has since been dropped by every major national cable and satellite distribution company, leaving its continued ability to exist in doubt.

Nonetheless, the broader false narrative of persecution is, if anything, poised to gain deeper credence on the right in the wake of this week’s historic FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. In no time flat, many top Republican officials joined the restive, openly confrontational and violence-minded chorus of far-right pundits and activists in raging against the lawful attempt to procure stolen classified documents. Here, the Alex Jones worldview continued to reign unchallenged: All of Trump’s ardent defenders signed on to the hoary and self-serving victimology long promulgated by the former president himself: that he’s a heroic martyr to the sinister machinations of out-of-control deep state bureaucrats loyal only to liberal Democratic power agendas. (Never mind, of course, that  the current director of the FBI was appointed by Trump himself, and that all America’s FBI directors have been Republicans.)

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has become a favorite of the MAGA base, called the search “another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents.” Not to be outdone, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the House minority leader, tweeted “The Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization,” and vowed immediate investigations of the search after the GOP regains a House majority. Numerous other elected Republicans echoed McCarthy’s threats. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich baselessly claimed on Tuesday that the FBI might have planted evidence as it examined Trump’s living area.

Right-wing activists were far more radical in their responses. “Tomorrow is war,” popular Christian nationalist commentator Stephen Crowder urged his Twitter followers Monday evening. CNN reported that tweets mentioning “civil war” spiked dramatically after news broke of the Mar-a-Lago search. On TheDonald, a website for hardcore Trump followers, the top-voted comment on the site’s article about the FBI’s action urged members to “lock and load” their weapons. And in short order, a former Jan. 6 rioter and white nationalist Trump supporter was shot and killed after trying to mount an armed assault on an FBI office in Cincinnati.

Former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon fanned the flames further on Tuesday in an appearance on “The Alex Jones Show,” where he claimed that the “Deep State” was working on plans to assassinate Trump—a dangerous lie that Jones himself has floated for years, even before Trump took office in 2017. In other words, even a Trump out of power is poised to be resurrected for at least a political generation as a conservative movement martyr.

Yes, targeted legal action against Trump and his media minions may be the first line of defense against their deliberate efforts to destroy American democracy, but there is no doubt that they are more than willing to use violence or the threat of it to avoid accountability for crimes. And for years to come, you can count on CPAC to fastidiously re-stage every imaginable perceived slight to the righteous rule of white nationalist impunity—and then some.