Quisling weeps
/Greenwich’s Dan Quisling and the fellows in his “the election was no mandate” Gin & Tonic Republican crowd might want to consider this:
[M]ore Americans now say the GOP best represents their interests than those who say it is the Democratic Party who does so. About half of Americans say Republicans best represent "people like them" compared to 43% who say so about Democrats — a shift from recent years when the Democratic Party was believed to be more representative of "people like them."
No mandate, Dan? What’s really happened is that the country, especially your former party, has moved on, leaving you behind on your couch, plotting how to regain the control you’ve lost. How sad.
PJ Media’s Ben Bartee has observed the same old guard reaction to the election, but on q larger, significant scale, and has thoughts:
Congressional RINOs Thwarting Trump’s Agenda Need to Pay the Political Toll
Donald Trump in 2024 dominated the popular vote and the Electoral College, massively outperforming even the pundits’ most bullish predictions.
He delivered the Senate and the House.
He stitched together a brand-new GOP coalition that might, if the base isn’t betrayed as it usually is by both parties, deliver victories for years to come.
He is the undisputed leader of the party.
He has a mandate, which is to actually #DraintheSwamp this time around, to clear out the special interests that rob and manipulate and persecute the American public, and to restore law and order to all sectors of society — including to the most prolifically criminal class of them all: the ones at the top.
Many Senate Republican dinosaurs — careerists who were there long before Trump and hope to remain after he’s gone, up until they’re being wheeled around by a staffer like Diane Feinstein’s corpse was before it finally gave up the ghost — don’t like or respect American voters to exemplify any due deference to the executive branch.
…. While corrupt and immoral, these people are not stupid; they can sense their institutional power threatened by a strong, populist executive like Trump, so their instinct is to play passive-aggressive defense. They know they can’t come out and denounce Trump fully because it would cost them dearly — look what happened to Liz Cheney in her own state — so they settle for shivving him in the back at every turn.
And corporate media is giddy to help them out under the auspices of checks and balances.
Via Politico (emphasis added):
While much of the GOP has become a Trump subsidiary, there are still some Senate Republicans who consider themselves members of a co-equal branch of government and take their Advise and Consent duty seriously…
The challenge will not just be how willing they are to thwart Trump, but whether they will be willing to do so with more than one nominee. It’s one thing to rise up with safety in numbers and block, say, Matt Gaetz’s nomination as attorney general should it reach the floor. It’s quite another to torpedo Gaetz and then take down another, let alone two or three, more Trump appointees.
It’s worth watching, though, because this same bloc of Republican lawmakers would also be the most likely to reemerge later in Trump’s term to selectively challenge him on issues (tariffs or foreign policy come to mind) or an inevitable power grab.
Greenwich RINOs believe that their day will come again; I’m guessing — hoping, anyway — that they’ll end up in the elephant graveyard with their GOP betters instead.