Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind - Hardcover

Draper, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593300149 ISBN 13: 9780593300145

Verlag: Penguin Press, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

One of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2022

The disturbing eyewitness account of how a new breed of Republicans—led by Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Madison Cawthorn—far from moving on from Trump, have taken the politics of hysteria to even greater extremes and brought American democracy to the edge

The violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, was a terrible day for American democracy, but many people dared to hope that at least it would break the fever that had overcome the Republican Party and banish Trump's relentless lies about the stealing of the 2020 election. That is not what happened. Instead, “the big steal” has become dogma among an ever-higher percentage of American Republicans. What happened to the Republican Party, and America, during the Trump presidency is a story we more or less think we know. What has happened to the party since, it turns out, is even more disquieting. That is the story Robert Draper tells in Weapons of Mass Delusion. 

Through his extraordinarily intrepid cross-country reporting, Draper chronicles the road from January 6 to the 2022 midterms among the Republican base and in the U.S. Congress, rendering unforgettable portraits of how Marjorie Taylor Greene and her ilk came to shape their party’s terms of engagement to an extent that would have been unimaginable even five years ago. He also brings to life the efforts of a dwindling group of Republicans who are willing to push back against the falsehoods, in the face of a group of ascendent demagogues who are merrily weaponizing them. With a base whipped up into a perpetual frenzy of outrage by conspiracy theories—not just about the big steal but about COVID and vaccines, pedophilia and Antifa and Black Lives Matter and George Soros and President Obama, and on and on and on—the forces of reason within the GOP are on the defensive, to put it mildly. The book also benefits greatly from reporting conducted in Texas, Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, and other bellwether states in the country of the mind one might call a fever of undending conspiracies.

Robert Draper has been a wise, fearless, and fair-minded chronicler of the American political scene for over twenty-five years. He has seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. He has never seen it this ugly. Ultimately, this book tells the story of a fearful test of our ability, as a country, to hold together a system of government grounded in truth and the rule of law. Written on the eve of the 2022 midterm elections, Draper’s account of a party teetering on the precipice of madness reveals how the GOP fringe became its center of gravity.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and National Geographic Magazine. He is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestseller, Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush. He lives in Washington D.C. with his wife, Kirsten Powers.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

The Dentist-Patriot

At eight thirty in the morning on January 6, 2021, a tall and wispy-haired man in a gray tweed overcoat with a red necktie stood at the Ellipse with his back to the Washington Monument-seemingly alone, except that he happened to be posing for a photograph that would soon be posted to his Twitter account beneath the phrase "Morning in America." He wore a COVID face mask decorated with the American flag, pulled well below his nose. He moved with a slightly rolling gait from a hip injury and twitched a bit from an unspecified neurological disorder but otherwise cut an indistinct figure-the kind of man who managed to draw attention only through painstaking effort.

Paul Gosar was his name. He was a dentist by trade and by disposition, the kind of fellow one could easily imagine pleasantly humming ancient melodies and cracking cornball jokes while his fingers rifled through the mouth of a captive audience.

Gosar was no one's idea of a history maker. But history swivels, more often than not, from rogue acts committed by rogue actors who trip the wire and blow up the bridge and then are barely heard from again.

This, at least, was Paul Gosar's intention, except for the barely-heard-from-again part.

For the past decade, Gosar had been a U.S. congressman. He was a Republican whose district in Arizona was one of the most conservative in America. His ten-year span of legislative accomplishment was relatively thin: a few post office renamings, several federal land exchanges, a couple of lucrative federal works projects in his district, and most of all, four years of assisting the Trump administration in slashing environmental protections on Arizona's federally owned lands.

Until that day, Paul Gosar's reputation, to the extent that he had one, was not the kind an officeholder traditionally sought to cultivate. His fellow House Republicans found him odd and occasionally offensive. Some harbored deeper concerns about the man. As one of Gosar's office staffers was advised by a top Republican operative, "You need to get out of there. That man is insane."

And as another senior GOP aide would reflect, "Gosar was my nominee to be that guy who comes in with a sawed-off shotgun one day."

But Gosar was in fact ahead of his time. He had dedicated much of his political career to building a portfolio of outrageous conduct even before social media's "attention economy" was fully capable of rewarding him for it. First, as a candidate in 2010, he espoused doubts about President Obama's American citizenship. Then came Obama administration mini scandals-the tragic attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya; the gunrunning fiasco gone awry in Operation Fast and Furious; the appearance that the IRS was targeting conservative groups-each of which Gosar cast as Watergate-scale malfeasances.

As his congressional tenure wore on, the Arizona dentist appeared to drift increasingly further from the mainstream. In 2015, Gosar, a devout Roman Catholic, became the only legislator to refuse to attend the historic address of Pope Francis to Congress organized by Gosar's Republican leader in the House, Speaker John Boehner. The reason for his boycott, he said, was that the pope's views on climate change amounted to "socialist talking points." Two years later, Gosar speculated to an astonished journalist from Vice that the violent white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville was actually "created by the left" and underwritten by the Hungarian-born Jewish liberal donor George Soros, who, Gosar baselessly claimed, "turned in his own people to the Nazis." By 2019, he and a fellow Republican outlier, Louie Gohmert from Texas, were insisting to bewildered colleagues that all social media companies had conspired to design and install a kind of uber-algorithm to suppress conservative speech. In early 2020, Gosar implored Trump's secretary of education to withhold federal funding from the University of Arizona, as two of its faculty members had exhibited the temerity to voice criticisms of Israel.

But everything would change for Paul Gosar later that same year. On the evening of November 3, he was watching the election returns in a casino conference room outside of Prescott, Arizona. His own race had been called early, with Gosar's routing his Democratic opponent in the state's ultraconservative Fourth District by nearly 40 points. When the Fox News Decision Desk projected, at 9:20 p.m. local time, that Joe Biden would win Arizona, a loud gasp overtook the conference room.

Immediately, Gosar smelled a rat. Trump could not possibly have lost Arizona. Gosar knew this for a fact. He had spent the past three months campaigning around the state for the president-attending rallies, knocking on doors, handing out flyers. Enthusiasm for Trump was off the charts. Meanwhile, Gosar did not encounter a single voter who claimed to support Biden. And as Gosar would later write in a letter to his constituents, "We all remember when candidate Joe Biden held a rally in downtown Phoenix and precisely zero people attended. Nada. Zilch."

In fact, the Biden event referred to by Gosar was not a public rally but instead a private meeting in a museum with Arizona tribal leaders. Somehow, Gosar's mind failed to capture this information. In similar fashion, he had managed not to know that the Sharpie pens being handed out in Maricopa County's polling stations on Election Day were in fact disseminated to all voters, not just Republicans, and that the Sharpie ink could reliably be read by the Dominion voting machines that the Republican-dominated Maricopa County Board of Supervisors had approved for use in the 2020 elections. It was apparently far easier for Gosar to imagine a dark conspiracy of election theft than to consider the possibility that his door-to-door sampling of voters fell somewhat short of scientific.

As it would soon become clear, Paul Gosar's suspicions were shared by tens of millions of conservative Americans. That their beloved Donald J. Trump might somehow be a historically unpopular president-one whose Gallup approval rating never topped 49 percent at any point during his four-year term-was a reality from which right-wing media and self-segregation had thoroughly buffered them.

At the same time: that Democrats, led by a career politician Trump termed "Sleepy Joe," might be diabolical enough to cheat their way to victory? This was an eventuality for which the same influencers had fully prepared them.

The following day, November 4, Congressman Gosar's longtime chief of staff, Tom Van Flein, reached out to Mike Cernovich, the forty-three-year-old right-wing activist who had promoted the "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory in which Democrats were said to be operating a pedophilia ring in the basement of a Beltway pizza parlor.

Cernovich's lunatic-fringe claims were hardly disqualifying in certain circles. His social media following was immense, dwarfing that of Congressman Gosar. Van Flein therefore recruited him to publicize a march that Gosar intended to stage that night, from the State Capitol in Phoenix to the Maricopa County Recorder's Office. Cernovich vowed to do so, and to drive from California to be present himself.

That same post-election evening, Gosar drove from Flagstaff to Phoenix. With an aide dutifully recording the episode on her iPhone, the congressman trudged slowly but purposefully through downtown in a navy jacket and baggy jeans, clutching a white megaphone in his left hand. A few staffers and allies walked alongside him. One carried the American flag. Another brandished a flag bearing Trump's name. Others fell in with the entourage. A few trucks bearing Trump signs whizzed past, honking encouragement. Someone else in a passing car yelled at Gosar, "Racist!"
Several hundred Trump...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593300149
• ISBN 13: 9780593300145
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 400
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland