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UPDATE DAY
Since last Wednesday, I have repeatedly commented on the vagaries of a route for which there is no equivalent until before the Civil War of 1861-1865. I'll come back to it one last time.
The era of emptiness
While arm wrestling is common when appointing a speaker, it usually takes place behind closed doors.
What makes the appointment of McCarthy also spectacular is that we witnessed the whole saga live, the cameras of the C-SPAN network concealing nothing.
This is how we have been able to witness disgraceful moments between members of the same political formation. A little more and we were witnessing a real rat race.
During the 15 laps, I briefly hoped that we could witness a real democratic exercise. The twenty mutineers, duly elected, held the balance of power. Why not use it to push policies they hold dear? Some of them did.
Others? Opportunists, like many members of both formations, they tried to grab coveted positions. Less noble, however, they have monetized their “resistance” on social networks by relaunching fundraising campaigns.
For this new batch of elected officials inspired in the Trump way, whatever the reasons, the important is to attract attention.
Politics differently
For some very conservative resistance fighters, there were therefore representatives of a new “way of doing politics”. Between the accumulation of clicks and the staging of each gesture, we seem to be heading towards a new type of influencer or the birth of political reality TV.
Among the anti-McCarthys we find elected as Paulina Luna, Lauren Boebert or Matt Gaetz. Members of the same brotherhood: all in style and very little in substance.
Here is an example of an advertisement that features Paulina Luna, a Republican rookie that observers are watching:
Lauren Boebert, also obsessed with weapons, did not hesitate to sink into racism to attack an elected Muslim Democrat.
See this post on Instagram
A post shared by Lauren Boebert For Congress (@laurenboebert)
< p>Matt Gaetz is not to be outdone and his first days of January were occupied by a whirlwind of absurd “news”. He was first associated with an intimate relationship with his colleague Luna, herself the target of witchcraft accusations by another Conservative candidate. This candidate is linked, it cannot be invented, to the infamous Roger Stone.
Trained in spite of herself into this whirlwind, Paulina Luna claims to have been sexually harassed. I recall in passing that in 2021, she had previously accused her rivals of planning her assassination.
I would not mention these vulgar gossip except for the fact that they reveal two important realities. The first is that we have confirmation that undoing Trumpism will take more than an election cycle. The second is that to achieve his ends, McCarthy had to give in to pressure from uncontrollable elements in his training. He will now have to assume it.
