EXTREMIST REPUBLICAN DERANGEMENT HAS MANY FACES, NOT JUST ONE

In a presidential election year, it's understandable that Democrats are focused on everything that's abhorrent about Donald Trump. But even before the campaign, Democrats and many liberal pundits were telling us that America has a Trump problem, not a Republican problem. That's wrong. The Republican Party is rotten to the core. It's full of deranged extremists, and it will still be full of deranged extremists even if Kamala Harris wins a decisive victory next month. A few stories that appeared this week make this clear.

First, there's Michele Morrow, who's the Republican candidate for supervisor of public instruction in North Carolina. A higher-profile Republican extremist, Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, appears likely to lose that state's race for governor by a wide margin. But Morrow trailed her Democratic opponent, Mo Green, by only 2 points in an early-September poll. As Dana Milbank told us this week, she's a dangerous wacko:

As if the good people of North Carolina haven’t suffered enough lately, they also have to worry about this: a network of child traffickers and pedophiles that tortures and kills children to harvest their blood for an anti-aging elixir known as adrenochrome.

Or so believes the Republican candidate to be the state’s superintendent of public instruction, Michele Morrow.

“The evil, demon-possessed people who worship Satan have been using this to try to keep their youth,” Morrow said in a video she posted on Facebook in 2020. “They’ve been using it as a drug that is more powerful than street drugs. ... It is gotten through children who are being tortured and know that they are about to die. Guys, this is deep, it is evil, and it is real. It is truly happening, and we have got to stop it.” Among those she has identified as adrenochrome users is the actor Jim Carrey.

She previously proposed a “Pay Per View” of Barack Obama “in front of the firing squad” because “I do not want to waste another dime on supporting his life. We could make some money back from televising his death.” She also called for the executions of President Joe Biden, Bill Gates and several others....

She has asserted that the World Health Organization has been using vaccines to sterilize people and kill children, which is “their intention, because that is who Satan is.” And she argued that Satan is “in cahoots” with Democrats, globalists, the “one world order,” the United Nations, China and Russia “to take down the United States of America.”

Even though Morrow was at the Capitol on January 6 and urged Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, much of this isn't coming from Trump. Trump sometimes gives shout-outs to QAnon, but he doesn't talk about adrenochrome. And while Trump is now hanging out with the pope of the anti-vaxx movement, Robert Kennedy Jr., he used to brag about the development of the COVID vaccines.

This madness is independent of MAGA, and it still has the potential to win elections. In Indiana, Republican Mike Braun is in a gubernatorial race that's surprisingly tight, though he still seems almost certain to win. If he's struggling at all, it seems to be because of the inflammatory rhetoric of his running mate, Micah Beckwith, who recently said that the Democratic ticket in Indiana represents "the Jezebel spirit" and exhibits a "boldness for immorality." As I told you in June, Beckwith is a Trump supporter and election denialist, but he also thinks the enemy consists of "super-wealthy totalitarian warmonger pedophiles." Again, this is QAnon talk -- but in all likelihood it won't prevent Beckwith and Braun from winning.

And then there's Michele Fiore. You may have heard that Fiore, a justice of the peace and former Las Vegas city councilwoman and state legislator who has also been a national committeewoman for the Nevada Republican Party, was convicted on charges that she used money collected for a slain police officer's statue on rent, plastic surgery, and the wedding of her daughter. You might remember Fiore: She was a highly visible apologist for Cliven Bundy and his supporters when they engaged in armed standoff with law enforcement over his failure to pay fees for grazing his livestock on federal land. In 2016, she told interviewers that it was perfectly appropriate to point weapons at federal agents:

When the federal government feels they're going to govern Americans by gunpoint, I'm sorry. If government is going to point a gun at me, I'm going to point my gun right back. If you're going to shoot me, I'm going to shoot you back. I ain't going to shoot first, but I ain't going to let you shoot me. It's just not going to happen.

She later explained that she was referring not to local police, but to Bureau of Land Management agents, who are from the federal government and therefore presumably illegitimate.

Oh, and Fiore was also one of the first Republican politicians to release an armed-family Christmas card, the kind of card that's now ubiquitous in the GOP:

This was in 2015. Fiore was a Republican extremist when Trump was just getting his footing as a GOP presidential candidate.

And I haven't even mentioned Royce White, the Republican Senate candidate in Minnesota, whose 2022 assertion that "The bad guys won in WWII" just came to light. White was already trailing incumbent Democrat Amy Klobuchar by double digits before this revelation, in all likelihood because of his past anti-Semitic statements, his support for Alex Jones (whose show he's guest-hosted), and his assertion that “Women have become too mouthy.” But he'll still get 40 percent of the vote -- and if he were running in a redder state, he'd probably remain a viable candidate. For that matter, who knows how well Mark Robinson would be running now if he we were in South Carolina rather than North Carolina?

These Republicans talk like Trump and back Trump, but they're doing this independently of Trump. Trump endorsed Micah Beckwith's primary opponent. Royce White was endorsed by Matt Gaetz, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, Kari Lake, and Mike Lindell, but Trump didn't endorse him.

The Republican Party was full of deranged extremists like Michele Fiore long before Trump entered politics, and there's a hunger for deranged extremist candidates in the party that will continue even if Trump drops dead. Democrats need to portray the Republican Party as the party of these people as well as the party of Trump. It might have been easier to beat Trump this year if more voters realized that most of his party is like this.