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oath keepers
Trump’s Terrifying Pardons: Egocentric, Incompetent Leadership Provokes Panic
Individuals eager to overturn democratic institutions stand sanctioned, if not emboldened, to commit another violent insurrection.
Jan 30, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump’s flurry of executive orders rattled nerves, elevating the tension levels of many Americans. On his first day in office, he pardoned the January 6 rioters, withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, transferred 1,500 military personnel to the southern border, and began mass deportations. Each of his leadership behaviors rings their own unique alarms. But in the interest of brevity, I’ll explore only the impact of the pardons.
Trump promised to screen those prosecuted for the seriousness of those January 6 crimes—at least during the weeks prior to taking office. Nonetheless, on his fateful first day, Trump issued blanket pardons for all of the approximately 1,600 individuals involved in the insurrection. One-third of those cases involved “assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement.” Trump wiped the insurrection’s criminality clean, issuing “a full, complete, and unconditional pardon” to those prosecuted; he also commuted the sentences of those already serving prison time. A few cases involved brutal violence, and several others sedition.
Examination of even a small sampling of these cases explains why anxiety erupted, how rage fuels it, and how general fearfulness can be expected to surge over time. Consider these examples, starting with the ones who committed violent acts.
Trump rendered the January 6 event a non-event. The insurrection (almost) vanishes from history.
Daniel Rodriguez received a three-year sentence for deploying an “electroshock weapon” against a policeman and then “plunging it into the officer’s neck.” William Lewis received the same amount of jail time for spraying “streams of Wasp and Hornet Killer spray at multiple police officers.” Israel Easterday received a 30-month sentence for blasting an officer “in the face with pepper spray at point-blank range,” after which the officer “collapsed and temporarily lost consciousness.” The brutality of these crimes is self-evident.
Regarding prosecutions for sedition, former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio received a 22-year prison sentence for orchestrating his far-right extremist group’s attack on the Capitol. It topped the 18-year sentence handed out for Oath Keeper’s founder Stewart Rhodes. One-time Proud Boys leader Ethan Nordean also received an 18-year sentence. The leader of the Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers, Kelly Megs, was sentenced to 12 years in prison. Details of their guilt in directly planning to overturn the U.S. government can be found in publicly available court documents.
Perhaps the clearest example of sedition occurred when the Southern states seceded from the United States in 1861, sparking the Civil War. Sedition, the crime of illegally inciting people to rebel against a government, is rarely prosecuted. The last significant case of sedition involved socialist leader Eugene V. Debs who, during World War I, urged resistance to the draft and obstructed military recruitment. He was convicted of sedition in 1918, receiving a 10-year sentence. The fact that four of the January 6 insurrectionists were convicted of sedition is remarkable. But, now, and again, those convictions—for literally attempting to topple our government—are moot.
Most presidents issue pardons at the end of their terms, not at the beginning. They deliver them for reasons related to the public good, not for their self-interests. For the first time in U.S. history, Trump pardoned these individuals on his first day and for his personal gain. The pardons reinforce the fictional narrative that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him—a belief Trump (allegedly) holds despite the absence of a shred of tangible evidence. More importantly, they show how Trump’s egotism overshadows his regard for the rule of law.
Americans’ levels of anxiety heightened, in reaction to these pardons, for several reasons. The perpetrators of the January 6 violence, not only freed but newly empowered, may go on to harm others. Several have already threatened those who testified against them, including injured Capitol police officers. Some promise retribution. Who cannot help but feel fearful of the release of violent criminals in any context?
Those convicted of sedition, and many of those who committed violence, show no remorse. Some feel proud, considering their actions necessary. Because of the pardons or commutations, the perpetrators can retain weapons they own or purchase new ones. Will their freedom lead directly to other forms of violence? Might Trump’s pardons inspire other would-be violent criminals? These are all nerve-wracking questions.
Trump’s executive order also negates the time spent by prosecutors, defense attorneys, bailiffs, and jurors involved in these cases, blatantly disrespecting them. Given that nearly 2,000 cases were filed, it is likely that 40,000 or more persons served in the justice process. Their hundreds of thousands of hours of work, time spent away from the families, and the stress involved in processing these cases ends up a total waste. Dispiriting is too mild a word. Trump shows a breathtaking lack of understanding of what justice means.
On an entirely different level, the pardons and commutations threaten the foundations of governmental order. All indictments, prosecutions, and sentences, for charges ranging from trespassing to seditious conspiracy, have been nullified. Trump rendered the January 6 event a non-event. The insurrection (almost) vanishes from history. And now armed individuals intent on overturning the U.S. government, and those lying in wait for the opportunity, remain a lingering risk. Individual loyalties to Trump could change in a hot second. Individuals eager to overturn democratic institutions stand sanctioned, if not emboldened, to commit another violent insurrection.
Trump’s executive orders impact the American psyche in still other ways. We Americans, or citizens of any country, rely on government to provide a basic sense of physical and emotional stability. Along with ensuring access to clean water and air, food, education, and medical care, governments provide citizens with law enforcement and judicial systems. The fairness of these systems warrant constant evaluation, but not through their destruction. Trump opened fault lines in these basic structures, eliciting distrust. Whether conscious of them or not, Americans feel these losses. Will we be safe from harm, or from another attempt to bring the government down? Will other institutions be threatened? While I was finalizing this essay, Trump issued a directive freezing spending on all forms of federal assistance.
Finally, many individuals (like me) are enraged at Trump’s release of individuals who the justice system indicted, tried, and imprisoned. Anger that lacks an adaptive channel of expression may cause any number of psychophysiological problems. It becomes suppressed (conscious) and repressed (unconscious). Americans can expect to experience symptoms ranging from headaches and muscle pain to panic attacks and depression.
Events like these pardons and commutations, or the federal funding freeze, seep into our collective psyches, our unconscious minds. They impact Trump’s supporters, most of whom will feel concern about his impulsivity despite their backing his election. In a statement made in his first day in office, Trump declared, “We’re going to do things that people will be shocked at.” One week in, and he has indeed delivered shocks.
Trump continues to make disquieting speeches and to issue orders. He acts impulsively. Many of his directives, like nominating unfit individuals for cabinet level positions or removing security details for his former advisors, show a reckless disregard for the American public. Trump is motivated by power and revenge, not by empathy and care. He displays precisely the opposite qualities of a competent leader. Simple logic argues that Americans’ anxiety levels will be on the rise.
Thus far, Americans mostly remain apathetic, as I discussed in a recent essay. However, one wonders when the angst and the anger fueling much of it will rise to the surface. When, and if, it does, oppositional movements will likely emerge. Quite possibly, there will be mass demonstrations. These will further test Trump’s judgment. Will he heed their calls, or will he turn the military against American citizens? What if the military refuses? Could there be a military coup? Then, real panic would arise. The international financial markets would crash. Even glancing fantasies of such scenarios raise blood pressures, validating that Trump’s first days in office are truly creating a pandemic of fear.
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What Trump's Pardons and Retribution Say About His Fascist Threat
What history teaches should worry us very much.
Jan 29, 2025
President Trump’s recent granting of freedom to nearly 1,600 January 6 insurrectionists, followed by other actions fulfilling what the New York Times last week called “his promises to exact revenge on his perceived enemies,” emphasize the ominous portent of an authoritarian regime in the United States.
The history of fascist regimes documents a direct correlation between unleashing political violence and the intimidation, muzzling, arrests and worse of political opponents which leads to securing mass acceptance for repressive policies and governance.
“This is part of his plan,” said Capitol Police officer Michael Fanone who suffered a traumatic brain injury and heart attack after being pulled from the police line, beaten and shocked with a stun gun on January 6, 2021. “The plan is to pardon those on his behalf, because he knows that will send a message to the citizens of this country,” he told MSNBC’s Joy Reid. “If you commit crimes on my behalf, I support you. If you try to prevent me from doing things I want to do, you know what is coming.”
“This is actually about the future, why this is so dangerous,” said podcaster Jon Favreau. “Because now Donald Trump has pardoned all of these right-wing extremists who were armed, who committed violence, who are not apologetic at all, who are not maintaining their innocence either. They’ve said they’re guilty. They’re not apologetic. And now they’re out of prison. And other right-wing extremists who might want to cause violence now know that if you commit violence in Donald Trump’s name, then he’s got your back. And so why wouldn’t they commit violence again?”
While initial outrage focused on the pardons, Trump’s decision to pull security protections for people he has demonized who continue to face death threats, like infectious disease adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci and other moves targeting perceived opponents, underline the stakes. Trump’s “retribution is intended not just to impose punishment for the past but also to intimidate anyone who might cross him in the future,” said the Times calling it a “signal” Trump is “willing to impose potentially profound consequences on anyone he sees as having been insufficiently loyal.”
“We can take this back to 2015, when (Trump) said at his rallies punch them out to people who were protesting, and I’ll take care of your representation. I’ll pay for your lawyers,” noted Sherrilyn Ifill, former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.
Trump’s language in his campaign and first term helped fuel a rise in far-right hate speech that led to vigilante mass shootings at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 and at an El Paso Walmart in 2019 by gunmen influenced by Trump’s violent rhetoric. It was also evident in the 2020 storming of the Michigan Capitol by armed anti-government militia and a plan by one group to abduct Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer. That came after Trump encouraged supporters to “liberate” Democratic-led states from Covid-19 safety measures he opposed, and tweeted solidarity with the Michigan militia protesters.
The pinnacle of the violence, of course, was the January 6 insurrection intended to overturn the 2020 election. It emphatically escalated the role of violence to achieve authoritarian rule. That was the danger seen in Trump’s pardons within hours of his inauguration for his second term.
“Now they’re all talking about revenge,” noted Favreau. “Revenge against the people who testified, against the prosecutors, against the judges who put them in prison. And so like when the Proud Boys come to your community and start marching or menacing people or whatever the hell they do, what are the police going to do?”
“Now it’s our turn,” said Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, who received the longest riot sentence for mobilizing his right-wing group as an “army” to keep Trump in power through violence after his pardon. Trial evidence showed he and his lieutenants, inspired by Trump’s directive to “stand by” during a 2020 presidential debate, joined what Trump promised would be a “wild” protest on January 6. Similarly, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes echoed Tarrio, projecting plans for retribution against police witnesses and prosecutors “on up the chain.”
“The most important part of the pardons isn’t specifically who is released from prison, but the meaning of Trump’s gesture: Radical militias are free to act with impunity — as long as they’re loyal to Trump,” wrote Ali Breland in The Atlantic. “After the riot, as law-enforcement agencies began to prosecute those involved, the militias went underground. Political violence, particularly by the right, has been ascendant over the past several years. Now, after the pardons, right-wing extremists no longer have to hide.”
In her book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, describes the binding of political violence to modern dictatorships, especially in fascist regimes dating to Mussolini’s organization of Fascist Combat Leagues in 1919. It began with assaults and murders on union leaders, socialists, and left-leaning priests in offices, homes, city occupations and ultimately a march on Rome by thousands of fascists and Blackshirt paramilitaries that led to his appointment as prime minister, in what Ben-Giatt called “an elite-approved transfer of power.”
“Fascist violence was neither random nor indiscriminate,” driven by persuading “law and order conservatives and members of the middle class to tolerate fascist violence as a harsh necessity” against disorder or provocation, wrote Robert Paxton in The Anatomy of Fascism. “For some, fascist violence was more than useful: it was beautiful,” he adds, a prescient prediction of Trump’s labeling January 6 a “day of love.”
With Trump’ pardons for January 6, suggested Ifil, “he wants to know he has a kind of army, a group of Brownshirts who will support him, who will show fealty to him to the point of violence,” referencing the most infamous linkage of political violence and fascism — Nazi Germany.
The rise of Hitler
In Hitler’s First Hundred Days, Peter Fritzsche describes the murderous connection. Hitler’s climb also coincided with the formation of a paramilitary organization, the Sturmabteilung (SA), or Brownshirts that carried out his ideological mission of revenge, including physical assaults on those he blamed for Germany’s defeat in World War I, mainly Communists, the Social Democratic Party (a party similar to the centrist Democrats of today in the U.S.), and Jews.
Through street violence against his enemies, the Nazis and SA created an atmosphere of disruption and chaos that, accompanied by an economic collapse in a global depression, produced a desire for political change and distrust in democracy and traditional parties by ordinary Germans.
By 1932, the Nazis had become the top party in the parliamentary elections. But they were eroding support in January 1933 when the then-ruling rightwing nationalist, monarchist parties and leaders, like President Paul von Hindenburg, that also hated the left and Social Democrats, agreed to appoint Hitler chancellor. They believed it “was the only way to establish an authoritarian state” they also favored, writes Fritzsche, thinking they could control him, as many traditional Republicans believed of Trump prior to his first term. It was a catastrophic miscalculation. “It took a long, long time when Germany was already in ruins, for conservatives to understand that they had made a pact with the devil in 1933,” Fritzsche observes.
Like Mussolini before him, Hitler saw physical coercion as central to eliminating his political opposition and helping achieve acceptance of the then majority of non-Nazi supporting Germans. Almost immediately the Brownshirts escalated street attacks to “settle the score,” as one put it, on those deemed as, in words Trump would emulate in 2024, “the enemy from within.” In a February 1933 speech, Hitler declared, “there can be only one victor: either Marxism or the German Volk (people).”
“The Nazis won support because of their militance,” says Fritzsche. “By launching furious, uncompromising attacks on the ‘system’ and physically engaging their enemies, they dramatized the combustibility of the present. … and opened the way to the future. “I want no softies in my movement, I want fanatics,” Hitler told a reporter for the UK Daily Mail, yet another similarity to Trump’s opinion of conservatives, including his own Cabinet appointees, who failed to show unquestioned loyalty to him.
Just weeks after Hitler’s appointment, a massive fire consumed the Reichstag, Germany’s legislative building, akin to the U.S. Capitol. Hindenburg declared a state of emergency, convinced by Hitler and his rightwing coalition allies that Communists were to blame for the fire as a step toward insurrection, though many still believed the Nazis orchestrated it. The order “symbolized the death of representative government and the rule of law,” writes Fritzsche, followed by federal decrees that suspended civil liberties, expanded protective custody and sanctioned the removal of state governments.
The SA Brownshirts, who “sustained the extraordinary energy of the Nazi movement” were deputized by the government as auxiliary police. They now had unlimited power to break up opposition meetings, shut down opposition parties and newspapers, and assault political opponents. Thousands were arrested, mostly Communists initially, then Social Democratic leaders. Home raids, arbitrary arrests, torture of prisoners and prolonged periods of incarceration created fear and widespread disquiet and reinforced a growing sense of national emergency especially heading into new elections in early March.
The violence coincided with other Nazis tactics to build their power in the election turning the election to a victory plebiscite. They exploited state resources, including domination of the media and national festivals, depicted their role as savior of the nation, and “presented themselves as the guardians of a sound moral order threatened by ‘Marxists’ and Jews’.” Immediately after the election, the SA “instigated a reign of terror wrecking trade union and Social Democratic offices, occupying city halls,” and escalated virulent attacks on Jewish shops, synagogues, and street beatings of individual Jews.
Emergency decrees, coercion, and consent
By Day 34 of Hitler’s reign, executive power passed almost completely into the hands of the Nazis, and enabled the Nazis to “consolidate one party rule.” The Communists were the first targets, “but all independent political organizations were eliminated or coordinated in the months to come,” Fritzsche notes.
Through the Spring of 1933, the Nazis engineered acceptance by a majority of the German people with a collective conformity, also based on opportunism, patriotic fervor and the far-right nationalist ideology they had long fostered, including racism and antisemitism.
Contrived fears that “the German people were about to perish” at the hands of Communists and Jews, offers a chilling parallel to the white nationalist Great Replacement conspiracy theory, and Charlottesville neo-Nazi and KKK marchers chanting “Jews will not replace us.”
“Coercion always accompanied consent,” says Fritzsche. Ben-Ghiat draws a similar outcome with fascist Spain under Gen. Francisco Franco, quoting philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset who said: “the threat in my mind of an eventual violence, coercion, or sanction that other people are going to exercise against me” bred conformity.
“Social Democrats believed they could not compete, they could pick up after the Nazis had bankrupted themselves and could act in the future, but not in the present. But the popularity of the Nazis was such that the future kept slipping away, and the pieces the socialists finally did pick up in the late 1940s were destroyed cities and millions murdered,” Fritzsche concludes.
That should be a warning to all elected officials, corporate CEOs, major media, community organizations and anyone else rolling over and seeking to align with Trump and his MAGA policies.
Hitler had no intention of giving up power. “I’m never leaving here” he said a week after moving into the chancellery. ”We have power and we’re going to keep it.” Top Nazi Hermann Goering echoed Hitler, predicting the March 5 election “would surely be the last for ten years or even a hundred years.”
“In four years, you don’t have to vote again,” Trump famously said to supporters last July. “Success is going to be retribution,” Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio told conspiracy monger Alex Jones after his release. “We’ve got to do everything in our power to make sure that the next four years sets us up for the next hundred years.”Keep ReadingShow Less
Could 2024 Bring Another January 6?
The institutional and cultural conditions that led to the insurrection have not abated; if anything, the landscape has only become more permissive.
Oct 23, 2023
More than 1,100 people—most of whom are white, employed men between the age of 18 and 50—have been charged by the government in connection with the January 6, 2021, insurrection. Several were reportedly surprised by their legal troubles because they viewed themselves as having acted to save democracy.
One of the men convicted was Stewart Rhodes, the founder and leader of the Oath Keepers, a far-right anti-government militia group. Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years in prison for seditious conspiracy and other charges related to the insurrection, but he has argued that he deserves leniency because his organization operated in service of the public.
It is not just jailed participants who view the attempted coup as an expression of patriotic duty. Nearly half of Republicans viewed it as an act of patriotism, according to a December 2021 poll.
In a 2023 survey, 33% of white Americans agreed that gun ownership is a sign of good citizenship.
The truth is, this feeling is a core part of American identity, and it brings together two ideological strands present in the American experience since its founding: martial republicanism and white male supremacy.
Martial republicanism encompasses the belief that men—and only men—become good citizens by serving their country in war and politics. This ideology is the seed of modern democracy. Many democratic countries today recognize political participation and military service as the rights and obligations of citizenship.
Martial republicanism does not have a specific answer to who exactly may become a virtuous citizen. At the time of the American Revolution, white male supremacy provided that answer. It was white men who could be entrusted with the country’s defense and its political life.
This was inscribed in the United States’ institutions. The Uniform Militia Act of 1792 mandated white men to serve in the state militia. In some states, militia membership enabled men to vote. Because state governments didn’t have the fiscal capacity to pay for defense, the law required these men to own their own firearms and military supplies.
To be sure, the country’s military has changed since. In 1903, militias were federalized and professionalized. But an ideology that valorizes guns and views government institutions with hostility has survived. And when the gun world merged with the Republican party in the 1990s, these ideas received broader attention.
In a 2023 survey, 33% of white Americans agreed that gun ownership is a sign of good citizenship. Alarmingly, 56% responded that the government is so powerful that people need guns to protect themselves from it.
The link between civilian gun ownership and political violence is reinforced by political elites, from former President Donald Trump to Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia. Allusions to armed citizenship and violence have been featured in political ads. Candidates have even appeared armed in Christmas cards.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Ads have featured Manchin shooting through a bill attempting to regulate fossil fuel companies, an armed Eric Greitens (former Republican governor of Missouri) breaking through a suburban house door hunting RINOs (Republicans in Name Only), and Jerone Davison (a Republican congressional candidate from Arizona), a Black man, holding an AR-15 in order to scare away “a dozen angry Democrats in klan hoods” invading his lawn.
To be sure, their proponents say that these ads are purely metaphor, but studies show that violent language can have deadly consequences, and trusted political elites can incite followers to violence.
The wave of threats and violence in politics should not be surprising. The institutional and cultural conditions that led to January 6 have not abated; if anything, the landscape has only become more permissive. Data shows that, from the U.S. President down to school boards, officials are regularly threats and actual violence. Specifically, while the U.S. Capitol Police recorded 3,939 threats against Congress in 2017, that number was 7,501 in 2022, nearly doubling in six years. The threats targeted both parties equally.
Unless political elites and leaders take these warnings seriously, the 2024 election cycle promises more excesses and, possibly, more violence. The country cannot endure a repeat of January 6.
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'Enormous Victory': Four Proud Boys Convicted of Seditious Conspiracy for Jan. 6 Attack
One journalist noted that those convicted "identified President Donald Trump's admonition for them to 'stand back and stand by' as a major motivation for recruitment and action."
May 04, 2023
The former chairman of the Proud Boys was among four members of the white nationalist and misogynist group convicted on Thursday of seditious conspiracy for planning and carrying out the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. The members now face a maximum prison sentence of 20 years and numerous potential fines.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) proved to a jury in Washington, D.C. that former leader Enrique Tarrio was sufficiently involved in the conspiracy to attack the U.S. Capitol as members of Congress certified the 2020 election, even though he was in a hotel room in Baltimore on the day of the insurrection—having been banned from the nation's Capitol the day before by a judge for burning a Black Lives Matter flag stolen from a church.
Although Tarrio wasn't present on Capitol Hill as thousands of supporters of Republican then-President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol, encrypted messages revealed during the trial showed that the Proud Boys leader wanted a "spectacle" in Washington, D.C. on January 6 and that he said after the attack: "Make no mistake. We did this."
Prosecutors also publicized a document titled "1776 Returns" that they said Tarrio used to map out the planned occupation of Capitol building. The document said the Proud Boys and other far-right, pro-Trump groups including the Oath Keepers would fill federal buildings and at least one news outlet—CNN—"with patriots and communicate our demands."
The document also said the group would maintain control of "crucial buildings in the D.C. area for a set period of time" and would try to get as "many people as possible inside these buildings."
The attack came as Trump and other Republican leaders baselessly claimed that President Joe Biden was not the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, and months after Trump called on the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by" as he repeatedly suggested fraud would be rampant in the voting process.
"These Proud Boys just convicted of seditious conspiracy against the United States identified President Donald Trump's admonition for them to 'stand back and stand by' as a major motivation for recruitment and action," said Todd Zwillich, deputy Washington, D.C. bureau chief for Vice News.
Along with Tarrio, Proud Boys chapter leaders Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, and Zachary Rehl were convicted of seditious conspiracy.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly asked the jury to continue deliberations over a seditious conspiracy verdict for a fifth member, Dominic Pezzola, who admitted to smashing a Capitol building window with a stolen police shield.
All five members were convicted of other charges including obstruction of an official proceeding and preventing lawmakers and law enforcement agents from carrying out their duties.
Guilty verdicts in seditious conspiracy cases have been rare in the U.S. The Biden administration has successfully prosecuted six members of the Oath Keepers this year for the same crime related to January 6.
Ryan Goodman, former special counsel for the Department of Defense, called the verdict an "enormous victory."
"Important victory for accountability, for historical record, for democracy," Goodman said. "The white supremacist paramilitary group would not have taken these actions without Trump's messaging."
Trump is now seeking the 2024 Republican nomination for president.
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Tea Party Tanks: Latest Poll Shows New Low for Faux Grassroots Movement
Five years after helping sweep Republicans back into office, voters appear to be shedding their support for the movement once described as a "weird and disorderly mob" created to do the bidding of the corporate elite
Oct 26, 2015
According to new polling released by Gallup on Monday, national public support for the far-right Tea Party movement has plunged to historic lows.
The survey shows that only 17 percent of Americans now actively support the Tea Party, while a majority (54 percent) neither oppose nor support the faction, which has aimed to drag the Republican Party further to the right in recent years.
As Democrats and self-identified liberals continue to represent the largest set of outright opponents, the largest drop in support for the Tea Party comes from so-called "conservative Republicans," of which only 42 percent are now supportive, compared to 63 percent who described themselves as backers in 2010.
Gallup noted that the other significant drop in support was among "Republican leaners"—independent voters who lean Republican. Among those voters, support for the Tea Party dropped a dramatic twenty-nine points, from 52 percent in 2010 to 23 percent this month.
Since first appearing on the political scene in the aftermath of the financial crisis in 2007 and the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the Tea Party was primarily interpreted as a re-branding of the Republican Party after the political and economic disasters produced by the presidency of George W. Bush. Though many of its supporters spoke of it as an authentic grassroots movement fueled by conservative and independent-minded voters, observant critics--including journalists like George Monbiot and Matt Taibbi--documented how well-known members of the Republican establishment and other elite interests orchestrated its founding and political development.
Taibbi, for his part, explained the phenomenon of the Tea Party this way:
So how does a group of billionaire businessmen and corporations get a bunch of broke Middle American white people to lobby for lower taxes for the rich and deregulation of Wall Street? That turns out to be easy. Beneath the surface, the Tea Party is little more than a weird and disorderly mob, a federation of distinct and often competing strains of conservatism that have been unable to coalesce around a leader of their own choosing. Its rallies include not only hardcore libertarians left over from the original Ron Paul "Tea Parties," but gun-rights advocates, fundamentalist Christians, pseudomilitia types like the Oath Keepers (a group of law- enforcement and military professionals who have vowed to disobey "unconstitutional" orders) and mainstream Republicans who have simply lost faith in their party. It's a mistake to cast the Tea Party as anything like a unified, cohesive movement -- which makes them easy prey for the very people they should be aiming their pitchforks at. A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.
Despite such criticisms, however, the undeniable energy created by the Tea Party was widely credited with Republican Party victories in the 2010 midterm election, which returned the House of Representatives to GOP control and swept right-wing governors to power in numerous states across the U.S.
The bottom line of Monday's polling, according to Gallup, is this:
Republicans made huge strides in the 2014 midterm elections, including increasing their majority in the House and gaining control of the Senate. However, the Tea Party movement that had played such a huge part in the GOP's 2010 election successes was much less visible this time around. Still, several Republicans elected to the House and Senate with Tea Party support have become major players on the national stage, including presidential candidates Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. The Tea Party movement has also been tied to the Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative Republican members of the House who have played a key role in the current battle to select a new speaker.
While the effects of the Tea Party movement on previous elections still resonate, the big drop in support from Republicans and Republican leaners over the past four or five years may indicate that the Tea Party movement's impact on American politics is fading.
The Gallup poll on Monday was based on telephone interviews conducted between October 7-11, using a random sample of 1,015 national adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.
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