Newt Gingrich. Photo (cc) 2010 by Gage Skidmore.
The Washington Post today has an excerpt from Dana Milbank’s new book, “The Deconstructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crackup of the Republican Party.” Here’s a free link so you can read the whole thing. Milbank offers some pretty bracing stuff. For instance:
Admittedly, I’m partisan — not for Democrats but for democrats. Republicans have become an authoritarian faction fighting democracy — and there’s a perfectly logical reason for this: Democracy is working against Republicans.
Milbank traces the degeneration of the Republican Party into an antidemocratic force animated by white supremacy to the rise of Newt Gingrich in the early ’90s. I’d go back further than that, but there’s no question that Gingrich represented something new and terrible, or that it reached its full flowering in the form of Donald Trump.
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mzanger
Newt is so important, as an early and clever student of Mein Kampf. When I read a report that Trump asked why the generals couldn’t be more like Hitler’s generals, I think about Newt advising him. Likewise the remark that Georgia Asst AG Ryan Germany had “a nice name” in the find-me-votes call. I am pretty sure Trump did not get these ideas from his own research, or he would know how Hitler’s generals tried to kill him. I think the reported mis-calculation that CoVid was an urban disease has a Newtish ring to it, also, IMO.