April 2024 Ignominious Absurdity of the Month: the IGGY

1. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga). A mild earthquake struck New York and parts of the Northeast this month. The most notable thing about the tremor was the rarity of any sort of perceivable seismic activity in the tri-state area. Marjorie Taylor Greene had an explanation, writing on X that the quake was evidence of God's displeasure with America.

"God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent. Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come. I pray that our country listens," the Republican from Georgia warned.

Greene also referenced the total solar eclipse that will be visible in some parts of the United States on Monday. While eclipses are natural phenomena that scientists can predict with precision, certain far-right figures have pushing bazaar conspiracies around the event. Masonic rituals, satanic rights, and even the arrival of the New World Order have all been floated as possible happenings during the brief darkening of the sky. Greene seems to at least agree that the moon blocking the sun is more than just another machination of the cosmos.

Earthquakes are also well-documented natural phenomena, of course, explained not by a deity's feelings about the people in a certain area but by the shifting of the tectonic plates that comprise Earth's crust. While we're sure Greene, like most Americans, learned this in an elementary school science class, her read on the earthquake that hit New York City on Friday seems to be informed more by her long history of conspiratorial thinking.

Who could forget when the congresswoman blamed 2018's California wildfires on Jewish space lasers? Or when she suggested that Democrats were intentionally setting fires to food processing plants? Or the various times she's suggested mass shootings were intentionally orchestrated false flags? Or when she said flooding at the 2023 Burning Man festival was God's "way of making sure everyone knows who God is."

2. Senator Tom Cotton. (R-Ark). Demonstrators shut down the Golden Gate Bridge in April to protest Israel's ongoing military operations in Gaza, inspiring Cotton to suggest on Morning Joe that his fellow Arkansans would have tossed them into the water and glue their hands to the pavement, forcing them to rip off their skin to escape.

Perhaps Cotton thought this a funny, but Morning Joe host, Joe Scarborough begged to differ:

This is really some “Try that in a small town” vigilantism bullshit.  Someone falling from the Golden Gate Bridge — would likely die. Period. This isn’t funny.”

Guess which side Cotton would be on at the Edmond Pettus bridge?

So yeah, this really got Morning Joe going off on a rant.

"Police officers would be the first to say, don't do that," Scarborough said. "Cops would say, please don't do that, please don't say that. Please don't take matters into your own hands. I'll put it this way. I doubt Sen. Cotton is any more exasperated than I am when I see people doing this, blocking people who are going to work or trying to take their kids to a doctor's appointment or trying to make an airplane at O'Hare [International Airport], so they can get home in time to see a kid's ball game or a recital, or just to be home with the people they love."

"There are ways to protest, and there's ways, I think, not to protest," he added. "This is extraordinarily counterproductive to any cause you're pushing, but here we have a guy, Tom Cotton, that went to Harvard, undergrad and law school, served in the military, who is talking about throwing people off the Golden Gate Bridge, ripping their skin off. We had a United States senator go on a network, national network, suggesting that Americans rip skin off of people's hands because they're aggravated and take matters into their own hands."]

"This is just beyond stupid on his part, beyond dangerous on his part, to say this, and I must say, this goes -- Cotton that used to be on this show, pre-Trump, would never have said something like that," Scarborough said. "Tom Cotton that we interviewed time and again on this show would have never said anything like this. This shows how violence and violent rhetoric has become normal practice in the Republican Party. These are the people who are preparing for a guy who has promised to be a dictator from Day One."

The disgusting Cotton has a habit of suggesting totalitarian and authoritarian actions.

He infamously called for the U.S. military to be deployed in June 2020, as protests raged across the nation over the police murder of George Floyd.

This jack boot dictator scumbag inspires to be President He promises to out-Trump, Trump.

3. New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu. Today, on ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos asked Chris Sununu about his recent switch from supporting former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley for the Republican presidential nomination to supporting former president Trump.

“Just to sum up,” Stephanopoulos said, “You support [Trump] for president even if he's convicted in [the] classified documents [case]. You support him for president even though you believe he contributed to an insurrection. You support him for president even though you believe he's lying about the last election. You support him for president even if he's convicted in the Manhattan case. I just want to say, the answer to that is yes, correct?”

Sununu answered: “Yeah. Me and 51% of America.”

Aside from its overstatement of Trump’s national support, Sununu’s answer illustrated the triumph of politics over principle. Earlier in the interview, Sununu explained that he could swallow all of Trump’s negatives because he wanted a Republican administration. “This is about politics,” he said.

Sununu is part of the Republican faction that focuses on cutting taxes and slashing regulations. Trump has promised further tax cuts, while Biden has said he will raise taxes on the very wealthy and on corporations to make sure the nation does not have to cut Social Security benefits and Medicare. Republicans have suggested they will make those cuts to balance the budget, although at least 90% of the current budget deficit not due to emergencies like Covid is a result of tax cuts under George W. Bush and Trump. 

Sununu may be embracing Trump for his fiscal policies. But there is possibly another dynamic at play in the shift of Republican leaders behind Trump. As Thomas Edsall outlined in the New York Times on April 10 in a piece about donors, they appear to be afraid of retaliation if they don’t join his team. Certainly, he has worked to instill that fear, warning in January that anyone who contributed to Haley’s campaign “from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp. We don’t want them and will not accept them.”

4. Trump’s Former GOP Critics. So much for running against Trump. On an ordinary calendar, there are four seasons. On a Republican political calendar, there are only two: book season—when members of former administrations demonstrate their willingness to call out their ex-bosses in hopes of making a bestseller list—and election season. That second one is when, like the swallows returning to Capistrano, Republican critics of Donald Trump flutter back to stand dopily at his side.

The seasons are definitely achangin’. In the past week, several of those who have been ranging across the media landscape as Trump’s biggest critics have come limping back into camp. What may be most eye-rolling is not just the cowardice they’re displaying, but the way some are putting a cherry on top by trying to sneak back in without even saying Trump’s name. And at the very peak of the chart has to be the man with the biggest reason to stick to his guns in opposing Trump.

Reporter: You have said that you’re not endorsing Donald Trump, you also have not ruled out voting for him. Why not?

Mike Pence: Well, I’ll just keep my vote to myself. You know I would never vote for Joe Biden.

Pence’s effort to dance around the obvious is absolutely farcical. While saying that he can’t endorse Trump “based upon the differences the president and I still have over my constitutional duties on Jan. 6” to being disappointed by Trump’s failure to call for a national ban on abortion, all Pence can say is that he won’t be voting for Biden. Other than that, he’s leaving everyone guessing.

Why is Pence moderating his position for the man who cheered on his potential hanging? Maybe Pence still has delusions of seeing his name at the top of the Republican leaderboard in some future election. Dreams die hard.

The post-Trump book season was an especially fruitful one as just about every past member of Trump’s cabinet and staff rushed forward to explain how to really know Trump is to really detest him. But whether it’s in print or on the air, few former Trumpers have been so willing to bring out the sharp knives as former Attorney General Bill Barr.

Barr has called Trump “self-indulgent,” “out of control,” “off the rails,” and “nauseating.” Trump has shared the love, calling Barr “a gutless pig,” “lowlife,” and “coward.” This week, Barr has made his move to prove Trump right.

Barr told Bill Hemmer on Fox’s “America’s Newsroom” that “Given two bad choices, I think it’s my duty to do the least harm to the country. In my mind, I will vote for the Republican nominee. I will support the Republican ticket.”

That would be the same ticket that Barr previously called “a horror show” that would bring “chaos.” Why is he doing this? Probably because his future income is dependent on how often he appears on Fox News.

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida has, of course, joined the profiles in cowardness, though no one should be shocked that Rubio’s extremely malleable spine has bent toward Trump once again.

In between book season and campaign season, there was a brief, barely noticeable event called primary season. Some of those who took part in the festivities came back to Trump mumbling and downcast, like Ron DeSantis. Others reached new heights of sycophancy (seriously, is Vivek Ramaswamy at the top of this scale, or do you have to hand it to Tim Scott?).

Primary contenders, Chris Christie and Nikki Haley have yet to swallow the Trump poison, but it’s still early.

After all, in a party where the only platform is “whatever Trump says,” there’s no room for a Republican who doesn’t support Trump. Even if they hate him. Trump’s fine with that. He hates them too.

5. Republican Reactionaries. As anti-Israel protests have spread across many of the country’s most prestigious college campuses this week, several Republicans in Congress have sought to burnish their pro-Israel credentials by calling for the U.S. military to respond. (Note I said “anti-Israel,” not anti-Semitic as they are often portrayed.)

Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton exhorted President Joe Biden to send in National Guard units, while obliquely encouraging motorists to run over protestors. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley similarly demanded a militarized federal response “to protect Jewish Americans,” while Mitch McConnell and John Thune penned a letter, signed by 25 of their fellow GOP senators, calling the demonstrators “anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist mobs” and demanding that “federal law enforcement” respond.

Meanwhile, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson paid a visit to Columbia University’s campus where he was greeted by catcalls and boos. Upon leaving, Johnson also declared he would be demanding that Biden deploy the National Guard to quell the protests if they continued.

As Adam Serwer, writing for the Atlantic, observes, these reflexive calls by Republicans for a military response to protests seem to be less rooted in genuine concern that the protests pose a serious danger to the public or Jewish people than “because these powerful figures find the protesters and their demands offensive.” Serwer points out that school administrators have, when necessary, called in local police to address potential violence, harassment, and property damage.

Until recently most of the protests have not evinced the kind of “mass violence and unrest” that would normally suggest the need for federal involvement. Calling for federal involvement should be taken only under extreme circumstances, for, as history has shown, the presence of federal troops will likely escalate the protests.

Without debating the relative merits or lack thereof of the protests themselves, then, it’s important to note that these demands for a federal militarized response are coming almost entirely from one side of the political aisle. As Serwer points out, they echo the same sentiment Republicans expressed in 2020 in response to the protests by Black Lives Matter over the police murder of George Floyd.

In other words, thus far we have seen a markedly asymmetrical, political response by Republicans to campus protests this week. But we are also witnessing something else: an explicit acceptance of a militarized solution to protests where Republicans find it politically advantageous.

Notably, another well-known Republican has also proposed sending the U.S. military and National Guard units to quell anticipated public protests, albeit of a far different nature, should he be afforded another term in office. That person is Donald Trump, and the people he proposes to target are those Americans he suspects would turn out in the hundreds of thousands to protest the policies he intends to implement.

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And the April IGGY winner is:

Wedded to the belief that American universities are leftist propaganda mills that churn out liberals who vote Democrat and flaunt American traditions and family values, it was natural that many GOP regulars are calling for the deployment of federal troops to quell campus anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian protests. Despite preaching the ills of intrusive government with its “deep state” vigilantes, Republicans have no problem advocating domestic military deployments—as long as they’re against people of color, women, or, college students exercising First Amendment rights. Their sick partisan hypocrisy merits a collective IGGY. As a bonus, I’ll include Tom Cotton as well. Let them stand in infamy.