Did anyone ever imagine that the MAGAts wouldn’t eventually be at each other’s throats. It’s who they are— what kind of hideous, fractious, self-righteous people are attracted to the cult. Reporting from Kalamazoo yesterday, Patrick Marley outlined the Magadonian civil war that is raging in Michigan, where the GOP is shut out of power but where they MAGAts have taken over the party apparatus. It’s a war over purity centering “on ideological differences, personality clashes, disputes over religion and arguments about whether to continue stoking false claims of a stolen election.” It’s similar to the GOP civil wars in Georgia and Arizona. Local Republican Parties in Kalamazoo, Macomb, Hillsdale and Saginaw counties are now fully dysfunctional, roiling with internal civil wars.
There are law suits, physical fights, screaming matches, party bankruptcy, expulsions, extreme extremism… These people are losers and the state’s voters gave the Democrats full control— with victories across the board. The MAGAt running for governor, Tudor Dixon, wound up with 43.9%. The MAGAt running for attorney general, Matthew DePerno, wound up with 44.6%. The MAGAt running for Secretary of State, Kristina Karamo, did worst of all with just 41.9%, so of course the MAGAts made her party chairman. The GOP majority in the state House went from 57-53 seats to a Democratic majority of 56-54 seats. The state Senate was even worse for the GOP, where their 22-16 seat majority turned into a Democratic majority of 20-18. The Republicans also lost a congressional seat and only an incompetent DCCC rep them from losing a second one.
The GOP was soundly rejected— so the MAGAts have doubled down… and have been fighting among each other ever since. “The differences among Michigan Republicans,” wrote Marley, “reflect both style and substance. As the party prepares for a June 25 visit from the former president to suburban Detroit, the most active Republicans here broadly embrace Trump’s ‘America First’ maxim but don’t always agree on what that phrase means. Many remain skeptical of the 2020 election results but differ on whether to continue to focus on the issue. They disparage the party’s old guard but often fight over who they consider to be part of the establishment. The situation has led to mutual suspicion and attempts to oust one another from the party. Those efforts in turn have sparked accusations and counteraccusations that some members are trying to rig party elections… [Some] worry the fractures mean a segment of Republicans will lurch so far right that they will repel independent voters and make it impossible to win statewide elections.
After Trump’s victory in 2016, his ardent supporters became active in the Republican Party in Michigan and soon overtook it, said Roe, who served as the party’s executive director for part of 2021. They continue to push people out of the party whom they deem suspect, he said.
“They basically see anyone who has been there as part of the problem and a RINO,” or Republican in name only, he said. “I think there’s been a systemic effort to eradicate people that have been involved for many years, and they’re being replaced by MAGA-aligned folks that have not been involved and engaged that don’t necessarily understand how the process works.”
Jeff Timmer, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party, said the latest purity tests are emerging even within the “Make America Great Again” movement just as the party weighs whether to renominate Trump or choose someone else.
“This is more MAGA-on-MAGA violence, or more MAGA versus ultra-MAGA,” said Timmer, who is now an adviser to the anti-Trump Lincoln Project.
…Jon Smith, who is active in the branch of Hillsdale County Republicans that lost the recent court case, said the various fights among Michigan Republicans could take years to work out. In the meantime, he said, they may lose elections.
Smith, 45, was drawn to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones years ago because of his false claims that the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the United States was an inside job. He later got involved in his local chapter of the Republican Party, emphasizing the needs of the working class and using Trump’s tactics to battle the establishment. He blamed the party’s troubles on “globalists” and moneyed interests who don’t pay attention to the needs of ordinary Americans.
“People are embarrassed to say they’re Republican,” he said. “The George Bush-type crowd, the Mitt Romneys, the John McCains, all these pompous, rich, White globalists really have crippled our name for a long time.”
Karamo was received warmly by several dozen Republicans during a recent stop in Jackson, a small city known for hosting an 1854 meeting that was instrumental in the founding of the Republican Party. Attendees drank Faygo and ate pizza as Karamo argued that Democrats had turned into Marxists who want to “erase the human family,” called for impeaching and jailing President Biden, and said the country suffers from “mass psychosis.”
“Our government has been captured,” she told the group. “If you and I were out there breaking the law, we’d be in jail. We’d all be sitting in jail. But yet these individuals in our government are free to break the law.”
That’s the kind of messaging that goes over great with MAGAts, but the moment a swing voter hears it, that’s another voter lost to the GOP. And oner of the most prominent Republicans in the country, someone who has a great deal to say about what the messaging is that will reach the voters, said something the other day even more insane— if also more obtuse— than what Karamo said. Meet Elon Musk:
Not everyone knows who Sulla was, although a few people may know him as Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix. He was a Roman general who won the Republic’s first big civil war and got himself made dictator. Musk wasn’t interested in his skills as a military man; he referred to his time as a dictator, when he led the aristocracy against… normal people. As dictator he used proscriptions to exile and execute his political enemies. Musk is attracted to that kind of psychopath badass. Some people think he likes DeSantis so much because they are both autistic— and I’m not fully discounting that— but I think what draws him to DeSantis is the obvious Sulla factor… and the fact that DeSantis wife is a Mafia princess from a brutal, murderous family— and who runs DeSantis’ operations. Sulla killed lots of people and had their property confiscated as he consolidated his power.
Plutarch in his Life of Sulla: "Sulla now began to make blood flow, and he filled the city with deaths without number or limit.” Julius Caesar, a teenager, was one of his targets but escaped by fleeing the city. Ultimately Sulla executed thousands of Roman citizens extrajudicially. I’m sure that idea gives Musk a hard-on.
His “reforms” led to the end of the Roman Republic.