Robert Draper - Weapons of Mass Delusion : When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind

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As a journalist, I have written books and lengthy magazine stories about the Republican Party for over two decades. Though Ive done my best not to shade these accounts, I must confess that theyve tended to bear the telltale influence of my father, a lifelong Republican.

At his best, Bob Draper epitomized the GOPs best. He was an optimist and a man who went by the facts while following the guidance of his Christian faith. He trusted individuals while nurturing a healthy suspicion of authority figures. He was immune to cultism. He would not dream of cheating to get ahead or of blaming someone else for his shortcomings. And though Im sure he viewed his life trajectorymarine, taxpayer, capitalist, family man, community servantas that of an American patriot, he never once felt the need to say so, or to assert that someone who voted differently from himas his wife of sixty-four years nearly always didwas therefore a socialist, a traitor, or human scum.

As my eighty-nine-year-old father withered away in a Houston hospital bed in November 2019, he remained doggedly cogent. Among his final thoughts was the observation that his political party had become even less recognizable than he now was. Referring to President Donald Trump, my father rasped, All he knows how to do is lie. A week before his death, Bob Draper expressed the fervent hope to his two sons and his minister that a Democrat would defeat Trump and that the GOP would thereafter come to its senses.

A year later, only one of those wishes would come true.

This book focuses primarily on the eighteen-month period after the Trump presidency whenif my father could have had his waythe defeated GOP would have obligingly retreated to its traditional mooring and, after due penance, sought to reclaim its valor as a party tethered to reason. Except, of course, that is not at all what happened.

What occurred instead is that the Republican Party plunged deeper into a Trumpian cult of compulsive dissembling and conspiracy mongering. It fell hostage to the partys most fevered extremists, self-described patriots who habitually characterized their ideological opponents on the other side of the aisle as communists, traitors, and terrorists. It became anti-civility, anti-science, antilaw and order. It ostracized the few Republicans willing to upbraid the partys descent into madness. Its leaders ceased to lead. Its longtime legislatorsthe adults in the room, establishment regulars, favorites on the K Street fundraising circuitmeekly receded into their tornado shelters, assuring themselves that the storm would pass soon. Meanwhile, its Democratic adversaries mostly abandoned the usual victors schadenfreude, instead regarding the Republicans with astonishment and outright fear.

In short, the Republican Party lost its mind. The mass migration from Reagans Morning in America to Trumps Make America Great Again to the former presidents wild-eyed Save America is one in which the usual partisan differences gave way to an existential call to arms. Given that America has organized its entire governing system around the presumption of two healthy political parties, the GOPs growing commitment to a funhouse-mirror version of reality would seem to represent a threat to the nations democratic experiment.

The period I chronicle here constitutes a moment when the this is not normal fretfulness accompanying the seemingly anomalous Trump era metastasized into this is dangerous and is not going away. Evidence of this alarming development would crop up across the country and throughout the greater Republican Party, from Florida to Washington state, from GOP presidential aspirants down to local precinct chairpersons. But the tension between the partys reality-based wing and the lost-its-mind wing would most acutely reveal itself within the 211-member Republican Conference, the minority party in the U.S. House of Representatives.

This narrative therefore focuses in particular on the key actors in the House GOP at a moment of reckoning for the party. It is a moment I viewed mostly at close rangebeginning with the morning of January 6, 2021.

PART ONE

ONE DAY IN WASHINGTON

Representative Paul Gosar

Chapter One

THE DENTIST-PATRIOT

At eight thirty in the morning on January 6, 2021, a tall and wispy-haired man in a gray tweed overcoat with a red necktie stood at the Ellipse with his back to the Washington Monumentseemingly alone, except that he happened to be posing for a photograph that would soon be posted to his Twitter account beneath the phrase Morning in America. He wore a COVID face mask decorated with the American flag, pulled well below his nose. He moved with a slightly rolling gait from a hip injury and twitched a bit from an unspecified neurological disorder but otherwise cut an indistinct figurethe kind of man who managed to draw attention only through painstaking effort.