Washington Post opinion writer Jennifer Rubin said Friday on MSNBC’s “The Last Word” that Republican lawmakers were “not about governing.”
She argued they did not “want good things to happen even for their own people.”
Guest host Ali Velshi said, “You have to be against what the Trump base is against even if it’s not rooted in fact. You can’t be for policies that a Democrat would support. You have to be cool with anti-democratic impulses like voter suppression. That’s where the Republican Party is right now. COVID conspiracies, defending the Capitol riot as overblown or committed by Antifa and BLM. Thinking Republican election officials in states that correctly certified the vote for Joe Biden are traitors and franticly pushing legislation to make sure that never happens again. But when this is what the party is about, how else could they possibly win?”
Rubin said, “You know, your description of Trump reminds me of the old joke if my grandmother had three wheels, she’d be a tricycle, meaning if the current world were upside-down and different, then we might have a rational person, a rational second party. But I think you hit the nail on the head. They’re not about governing. I think we have to get through the notion they want good things to happen, even for their own people. This is about, I think, keeping people angry, keeping people resentful, keeping people with the view that whites are somehow endangered. How could you possibly turn the Chauvin conviction into a bad news story? But yet they do that on Fox News. So they have a completely different view of what politics is about. And it’s about self-promotion. It’s about engaging, keeping people angry and paranoid.”
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