Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley are playing a slimy game: They're disowning the insurrection without retracting their support for the big lie that incited it. But they have a problem: New video shows unambiguously that the lie did drive the assault. My latest: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Senate Dems will introduce a sweeping pro-democracy bill today as the first bill under their new majority. Includes automatic voter registration, rehabbing Voting Rights Act, and more.
It's the Dem answer to Trump's assault on our democracy:
One quick correction: The bill will be announced today, not introduced. It's the first honorary bill of the new Senate, S1. Dem aide says Schumer will ensure it gets a vote, though unclear when.
As former DHS official @juliettekayyem tells me, the memo shows:
"His own intelligence agencies” have concluded that “the lie that the election was stolen, which Trump continues to nurture, will motivate violence in the future.”
Let's be clear: For the far-right groups that carried out Trump's insurrection, the siege of the Capitol was a huge success, a major propaganda coup. I talked to experts in right-wing extremism about what this event really meant to them. Alarming stuff: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
"By all measurable effects, this was for far right extremists one of the most successful attacks they’ve ever launched. This will be propagandized on for the next decade."
I talked to folks tracking how the insurrection is playing on the far right:
The multiple security failures at the Capitol are already being treated as a propaganda victory by some on the far right, who see this as a sign of corruption and vulnerability:
Conor Lamb's powerful rebuke of the Sedition Caucus stands as an important statement about this dangerous moment. He laid bare an essential truth: The core ethos of this movement is that it does not feel bound by *legitimate* electoral outcomes. My latest: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Here's my best effort to describe the true nature of the ethos of bad faith driving Trump and his insurrectionists:
The spin from McConnell and his allies is Trump's focus on stealing the election helped cost them the Georgia runoffs. It's nonsense. Republicans did all they could to exploit everything he unleashed among his voters. Don't let them memory-hole any of it: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
The spin from McConnell and his allies is that Trump's conspiracy theories and grievances about the election cost them in the suburbs.
But McConnell and Republicans spent weeks feeding GOP base voter delusions on this front, for purely cynical purposes: