Lindsey Graham Seems Unfamiliar With the Republican Party

Senator Lindsay Graham has an interesting (that is to say, delusional) opinion of how his fellow Republicans treat people with views that are different from their own.

The South Carolina Republican embarked on a remarkable intellectual journey to arrive at this destination. On Wednesday, Graham made an appearance on Fox News to complain about a new bill being considered by the New York state legislature that would require the restaurants located in the state’s highway rest areas to be open seven days a week. The only firm that runs afoul of this law appears to be Chick-fil-A, which is closed on Sundays as an extension of its founder’s conservative Christian values.

Graham made a specific demand of the Democrats seated in the state legislature: Do as conservatives do and just leave well enough alone. “Bottom line is, conservatives are tolerant,” he said. “We are, you know, kind of, get out of your business, you leave me alone, I’ll leave you alone.”

To find proof of just how wrong Graham is, look no further than the company he’s defending. Chick-fil-A donated considerably to anti-LGBTQ organizations for years. While the company stopped those donations in 2019, owner Dan Cathy still contributes to anti-LGBTQ groups.

Meanwhile, across the country, Republicans have pushed bill after bill limiting LGBTQ people’s rights to perform in drag, access health care, or simply be in public. They have passed laws preventing people from getting abortions, forcing them to flee out of state for medical treatments—if they can afford to, that is. Graham himself tried last fall to pass a bill banning abortion after 15 weeks.

All of those things—how someone dresses, what health care they seek, whom they choose to love—are arguably just “their business.” And yet despite Graham’s claim of tolerance, Republicans seem to feel justified in legislating all of that away.

It is, however, genuinely good that the Republican Party has become a haven for those who lack self-awareness. Baby steps!

Pharmaceutical company executive-turned-Republican presidential aspirant Vivek Ramaswamy is facing a fresh round of speculation that his long shot bid for the White House’s days are numbered, with multiple news outlets reporting that his campaign has suspended all of its plans to spend money on television advertising, even as the first critical contests of the GOP primary loom on the calendar—the Iowa caucuses are scheduled for January 15, with the New Hampshire primary following eight days later.

As NBC News reported on Wednesday, Ramaswamy’s campaign has conspicuously stopped spending on television advertisements and currently has no airtime reserved for any future television spots. The report notes that the candidate spent “more than $200,000” on television ads the first full week of December, after an early November announcement that the campaign had plans to spend upwards of $10 million on combined advertising in the early primary states. “Since that announcement, the campaign has spent $2.2 million on TV, digital and radio ads, according to AdImpact,” NBC News reports.

While the cessation of ad buys is traditionally associated with campaigns that are on or near the proverbial ropes, Ramaswamy is spinning the decision as an innovation rather than a setback. The Daily Beast reported that the candidate defiantly confirmed NBC’s report with a post on X (formerly Twitter) that characterized television ad buys as an “idiotic” waste of money. Per the Daily Beast:

“Presidential TV ad spending is idiotic, low-ROI & a trick that political consultants use to bamboozle candidates who suffer from low IQ,” Ramaswamy posted to X on Tuesday night, confirming an NBC report that first broke the story of his pivot.

After months of campaigning and with less than three weeks to go until the New Hampshire primary and Iowa caucuses, Ramaswamy now says he plans on “doing it differently.”

His campaign said it intends to focus in on mail, text and door-to-door outreach, spending “$$ in a way that follows data…apparently a crazy idea in US politics,” Ramaswamy said in his tweet.   

Following the data, it would appear that Ramaswamy is running a distant fourth in the most recent Real Clear Politics polling average of the last three weeks of the race—58 points behind former President Donald Trump and seven points behind Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley; he remains slightly ahead of former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. In recent weeks, his campaign has left the impression that it is not actually trying to win anymore, and his debate performances have strayed into bizarre, conspiratorial territory. 

Trump greeted the news of Ramaswamy’s ad buy suspension with a prediction of his own: “He will, I am sure, Endorse me. But Vivek is a good man, and is not done yet!” Trump posted on Truth Social.

Republicans have begun to push a wild new conspiracy about Jack Smith, trying to discredit the special counsel who has been investigating Donald Trump for the past year.

The latest bizarre claim that’s been percolating on the right contends that Smith participated in a multimillion-dollar extortion scheme in the late 2010s when he worked as the chief prosecutor for the special court in The Hague investigating war crimes committed during the Kosovo War.

Despite a lack of evidence to support this accusation, it has already begun to make its way into the Republican mainstream. Trump’s former national security advisor (and pardon recipient) Michael Flynn has tweeted multiple times about the conspiracy in an attempt to lend it a veneer of credibility.

This latest bit of rumormongering began to circulate in early December when a former DEA employee named John Moynihan filed what he called a “whistleblower complaint” against Smith. (Since Moynihan no longer works for the DEA, he’s not technically a department whistleblower anymore.)

Moynihan alleges that a blackmail ring set up in the special Kosovo court “extorted millions of dollars from wealthy individuals targeted for investigation and/or prosecution by the Kosovo Specialist Prosecutor’s Office,” also referred to as the SPO. Smith worked as the SPO’s chief prosecutor from 2018 until 2022. Moynihan says he has witness testimony proving Smith was an “active participant” in the ring.

Moynihan’s primary witnesses are Kosovar businessman Halit Sahitaj and Kosovo-born journalist Milaim Zeka. Sahitaj was arrested in Spain in August for extortion and money laundering, while Zeka has been accused over the past decade of witness intimidation, money laundering, threatening a prosecutor, and wiretapping.

Both men say they were approached by a man claiming to be a U.S. intelligence official as part of the investigation into Kosovo war crimes. The man then pushed them to send money to a secret bank account, supposedly at Smith’s behest. Neither Sahitaj nor Zeka were able to confirm if the man was indeed an intelligence official, and they never had any face-to-face interaction with Smith.

But the cast of characters involved in backing Moynihan’s allegations don’t do much to lend them credibility. One of the first websites to report Moynihan’s complaint was Deep Capture, which was founded by former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne. Byrne is an ardent 2020 election denier and Trump supporter who participated in a December 2020 White House meeting, during which Trump mulled how to overturn the election.

When news of Moynihan’s complaint began to break, Byrne tweeted, “I DID THAT!”

Moynihan’s lawyer is also representing John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of a Delaware computer shop who turned Hunter Biden’s laptop over to Rudy Giuliani. And Moynihan himself is no stranger to making wild claims of his own.

In 2018, he and an associate insisted they had 6,000 pages worth of evidence that the Clinton Foundation had engaged in financial crimes. The pair testified before the House Oversight Committee that the foundation was operating as an agent of a foreign government—but they refused to turn over a single page of proof to the committee.

Committee member Jody Hice, a Republican, accused Moynihan at the time of “using us for your own benefit.” Hice added it seemed like there was “a little game going on here.” It seems like Moynihan may be at it again.

Donald Trump seemingly wants voters to know that he has a plan for his potential second term. It’s not a good plan, and it’s entirely self-serving, but it’s a plan nonetheless.

On Tuesday, Trump shared a word cloud on his Truth Social account, offering little explanation about its origin and meaning. The graphic, a throwback to early-2010s internet obsessions, featured words such as “revenge,” “dictatorship,” and “corruption” floating prominently in the center of the blob.

This word cloud originally came from a Daily Mail story published Tuesday, in which voters were asked to offer descriptions of what they felt the potential second terms of both Trump and President Joe Biden—who are expected to face off again in 2024 as their party’s nominees for president—might look like. The Mail then generated word clouds to show what one-word descriptors featured most prominently in their readers’ responses.

The word most used to describe Trump’s return to the White House was “revenge.” The word used most to describe what to expect from a second Biden term was “nothing.”

Trump’s posting of the word cloud seems to imply at least some acknowledgment that these respondents have correctly surmised his intentions. There’s little doubt that he’s gone to some length to steer voters to this specific understanding of what his return to office will be like: The former president has made it clear that if he is reelected, his second term will primarily be about getting revenge on people he feels have wronged him.

Trump has explicitly stated that his 2024 campaign is about “retribution.” And he has left little to the imagination as far as his plans to govern with an iron fist, having lately made a fetish of openly modeling his rhetoric on that of Adolf Hitler.

On Tuesday, pollster and election soothsayer Kristin Soltis Anderson suggested that Trump’s 2024 success will largely depend on his ability to cast himself as the more sane and stable alternative for “an electorate that seems to be craving stability” as opposed to chaos. Trump’s constant touting of his own plans for illiberal retribution suggests that this will be a tall order.

According to Politico, Florida Representative Matt Gaetz is setting up his party for a messy 2024 primary season by throwing his support behind a slew of candidates who are not backed by the Republican establishment. All of his preferred candidates have one notable thing in common, however: They’re running against people who’ve been endorsed by former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Gaetz and McCarthy have been at odds since the latter won the speaker’s gavel in 2022. Since then, Gaetz seems to have made it his sole mission to make McCarthy’s life as unpleasant as possible. Things came to a head in October when Gaetz successfully ousted McCarthy as speaker, plunging the House and Republican Party into chaos.

So far, Gaetz has endorsed three candidates: J.R. Majewski in Ohio, Elizabeth Helgelien in Nevada, and Darren Bailey in Illinois. He denied to Politico that he only endorsed those three candidates because they are running against McCarthy’s preferred people—but he couldn’t resist a dig at his colleague, either.

“He’s old news. Mike Johnson’s speaker now,” Gaetz said in a piece published Tuesday.

But it’s unclear what Gaetz’s endgame is other than being a thorn in McCarthy’s side until the very end. McCarthy is retiring from politics on December 31, after his humiliating ouster and a lackluster time as speaker. There’s no guarantee of how much national influence his support holds, but his endorsements have mainly fallen along establishment Republican lines.

But by endorsing different candidates, Gaetz could force the GOP into a messy season of hard-fought primaries, instead of allowing the party to present a united front. What’s more, Gaetz’s faves are all candidates who don’t have strong chances of winning in the general election. Both Majewski and Bailey, in fact, have already notched electoral losses to Democratic opponents.

Bailey ran for Illinois governor in 2022. He was defeated by Democrat J.B. Pritzker, who had an easy time tagging the Republican as too extreme. Majewski ran for Ohio representative in 2022 but ended up getting hit on two fronts. The victor, Democrat Marc Kaptur, ran a successful series of ads that branded him as an “extremist” for being on the Capitol grounds during the January 6 attack.

What’s more, an Associated Press investigation revealed Majewski had massively misrepresented his military career. Majewski, an Air Force veteran, claimed he had been deployed to Afghanistan after 9/11, where he endured grueling conditions. Instead, he spent six months loading planes at an air base in Qatar, a United States ally that is far away from the main conflict.

Gaetz’s proclivity for throwing a massive spanner into the Republican Party’s works is unlikely to do him any favors in his own career. He’s already incredibly unpopular in his district, and GOP lawmakers are frustrated with him for engineering McCarthy’s ouster. They accused him at the time of wanting attention and weren’t shy when asked about what they thought of him.

“Matt Gaetz is frankly a vile person,” Representative Mike Lawler said in October. “He’s not somebody who’s willing to work as a team. He stands up there, he grandstands, he lies directly to folks.”

Gaetz will nevertheless have a chance to prove that he has some election-year coattails—in spite of a career largely spent trolling his own colleagues.