Greene and Cheney: The GOP’s internal rift
Call it the “Donald Trump two-step,” said David Jackson in USA Today. Republicans both distanced themselves from the former president and hugged him in a pair of votes last week, highlighting their “delicate dance” over the post-Trump direction of the party. In the first vote, only 11 of 211 House Republicans joined Democrats in removing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from a pair of committees. Greene, a hard-core Trumpist, has become a lightning rod for past statements embracing QAnon, suggesting that school shootings were staged, and endorsing the killing of prominent Democrats such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. When Greene made a speech before the vote expressing some regret for her nutty statements, some Republicans reportedly gave her a standing ovation. The same Republican caucus voted 146-61 to keep Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney as the House’s thirdranking Republican, defying demands from the party’s Trumpist wing that she be demoted for her pro-impeachment vote. What these votes suggest is that Republicans would like to “move past Trump while also keeping his voters.”
In backing Greene, 199 House Republicans have “embraced anti-Semitism and violence,” said Dana Milbank in The Washington Post. They’ve
“rallied to the defense” of an unhinged flamethrower who’s shared propaganda videos from Holocaust deniers, questioned whether a plane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, and “posted on social media about hanging Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.” After briefly sounding remorseful, Greene reverted when she was booted from the two committees, saying Democrats are running “a tyrannically controlled government.”
Still, the Cheney vote opens “a new chapter” for the divided GOP, said Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. She called Trump’s incitement of the insurrection “the gravest violation of his oath of office by any president in the history of the country,” and yet remained standing. Fellow anti-Trumper Sen. Ben Sasse also is pushing back against “the MAGA clowns,” said Matt Lewis in TheDailyBeast.com. Sasse taunted the Nebraska Republicans about to censure him for his criticism of Trump by saying, “I still believe—as you used to—that politics isn’t about the weird worship of one dude.” With their courageous leadership, Sasse and Cheney are giving other principled conservatives “a permission structure” to renounce Trumpism, and proving that escape from the Trump cult is possible.