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Over the past few weeks, President Joe Biden has repeatedly emphasized his friendship with Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. At the National Prayer Breakfast in early February, for instance, he praised McConnell as a man of your word. And youre a man of honor. Thank you for being my friend.

Bidens publicly professed affinity is weirdly at odds with the political situation. Going back to the Obama era, McConnell has led the Republican Party in a strategy of near-total obstruction which he has pursued with ruthless cynicism. It is true that he has, at times, signaled distance to Donald Trump and condemned the January 6 insurrection. But McConnell is also sabotaging any effort to counter the Republican partys ongoing authoritarian assault on the political system.

The distinct asymmetry in the way the two sides treat each other extends well beyond Biden and McConnell. Republicans immediately derided Bidens pledge to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court while Democratic leaders are hoping for bipartisan support; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insists the nation needs a strong Republican party meanwhile radicals like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, who fantasize about committing acts of violence against Democrats, are embraced by fellow Republicans, proving they are not just a extremist fringe that has hijacked the Party, as Pelosi suggested. And when Texas senator Ted Cruz recently intimated that Republicans would impeach Biden if they were to retake the House whether its justified or not, the White House responded by calling on Cruz to work with us on getting something done.

Republicans could not be clearer about the fact that they consider Democratic governance fundamentally illegitimate, yet some establishment Democrats act as if politics as usual is still an option and a return to normalcy imminent.

There is certainly an element of political strategy in all of this. Democrats are eager to present themselves as a force of moderation and unity. But Bidens longing for understanding across party lines seems sincere. He has been reluctant to make the fight against the Republican partys assault on democracy the center piece of his agenda; Democratic leadership has proved mostly unwilling to focus the publics attention on the Republican partys authoritarian turn.

One important explanatory factor is that many Democratic leaders are old. They came up in a very different political environment, when there was indeed a great deal of bipartisan cooperation in Congress. There is no reason to be nostalgic about this the politics of bipartisan consensus more often than not stifled racial and social progress. But there was certainly an established norm of intra-party cooperation until quite recently. When California senator Dianne Feinstein hugged South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham at the end of the Amy Coney Barrett hearings in 2020, it was a bizarre throwback to those days of amity across party lines in the midst of a naked Republican power grab.

Beyond institutional tradition and personal familiarity, this inability to grapple in earnest with the post-Obama reality in which Democratic politicians are almost universally considered members of an Un-American faction by most Republicans has deeper ideological roots. The way some establishment Democrats have acted suggests they feel a kinship with their Republican opponents grounded in a worldview of white elite centrism. Their perspective on the prospect of a white reactionary regime is influenced by the fact that, consciously or not, they understand that their elite status wouldnt necessarily be affected all that much. The Republican dogma that the world works best if its run by prosperous white folks has a certain appeal to wealthy white elites, regardless of party.

From that vantage point, it is rational to believe that the bigger immediate threat is coming from the Left: an agenda seeking to transform America from a restricted, white mens democracy that largely preserved existing hierarchies to a functioning multiracial, pluralistic, social democracy is indeed a losing proposition for people who have traditionally been at the top. When Biden insists that Im not Bernie Sanders. Im not a socialist, and instead emphasizes his friendship with Mitch McConnell, he offers more than strategic rhetoric. Many establishment Democrats seem to believe that it is high time to push back against the radical forces of leftism and wokeism.

The constant attempts to normalize a radicalizing Republican Party also have a lot to do with two foundational myths that shape the collective imaginary: the myth of American exceptionalism and the myth of white innocence. We may be decades removed from the heyday of the so-called liberal consensus of the postwar era, but much of the countrys Democratic elite still subscribes to an exceptionalist understanding that America is fundamentally good and the US inexorably on its way to overcoming whatever vestigial problems there might still be. This often goes hand in hand with a mythical tale of Americas past, describing democracy as being exceptionally stable. Never mind that genuine multiracial democracy has actually existed for less than 60 years in this country. What could possibly threaten Americas supposedly old, consolidated democracy? Acknowledging what the Republican party has become goes against the pillars of that worldview.

Finally, the American political discourse is still significantly shaped by the paradigm of white innocence. Economic anxiety, anti-elite backlash, or just liberals being mean whatever animates white peoples extremism, it must not be racism, and they cannot be blamed for their actions. The dogma of white innocence leads to elite opinion instinctively sanitizing the reasons behind the rise of rightwing demagogues, a common tendency in the commentary surrounding the success of George Wallace in the late 1960s, David Duke in early 1990s, or Donald Trump in 2016. The idea of white innocence also clouds Democratic elites perspective on Republican elites: Since they cannot possibly be animated by reactionary white nationalism, they must be motivated by more benign forces, fear of the Trumpian base perhaps, or maybe they are being seduced by the dangerous demagogue.

I actually like Mitch McConnell, Biden said during a press conference a few weeks ago, providing a window into what he sees in Republicans: No matter what they do, underneath theyre good guys, theyll snap out of it. Promise. Its the manifestation of a specific worldview that makes it nearly impossible to acknowledge the depths of Republican radicalization a perspective that severely hampers the fight for the survival of American democracy.

Thomas Zimmer is a visiting professor at Georgetown University, focused on the history of democracy and its discontents in the United States, and a Guardian US contributing opinion writer

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The Republican party is abandoning democracy. There can be no politics as usual - The Guardian

The days events, which were supposed to be about unity, only served to highlight Republicans persistent division over Mr. Trumps attempt to overturn the 2020 election, as their leaders try to move forward and focus attention on what they call the failings of the Biden administration. More than a year later, the party is still wrestling with how much criticism and dissent it will tolerate.

Shame falls on a party that would censure persons of conscience, who seek truth in the face of vitriol, Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, wrote on Twitter. Honor attaches to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for seeking truth even when doing so comes at great personal cost.

He did not mention that the party chairwoman who presided over the meeting and orchestrated the censure resolution, Ms. McDaniel, is his niece.

The censure was also condemned by Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, who, like Mr. Romney, voted to remove Mr. Trump from office for inciting insurrection on Jan. 6, and Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, also a Republican, who called Friday a sad day for my party and the country.

Republican National Committee members defended the measure, describing people who have been questioned by the Jan. 6 committee as victims in a broader Democratic effort to keep focus on the attack at the Capitol.

The nominal Republicans on the committee provide a pastiche of bipartisanship, but no genuine protection or due process for the ordinary people who did not riot being targeted and terrorized by the committee, said Richard Porter, a Republican National Committee member from Illinois. The investigation is a de facto Democrat-only investigation increasingly unmoored from congressional norms.

The Jan. 6 committee, which has seven Democratic members, has interviewed more than 475 witnesses, the vast majority of whom either volunteered to testify or agreed to without a subpoena. It has no prosecutorial powers, and is charged with drawing up a report and producing recommendations to prevent anything similar from happening again.

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G.O.P. Declares Jan. 6 Attack Legitimate Political Discourse - The New York Times

Every election has different candidates, different moods, different circumstances. But all elections in America, going back to 1789, are generally about one thing: the future.

Voters in every election are asked whether they want to keep the status quo or usher in change. For open elections, it is about two different candidates visions of the future. But it is always about whats next for America.

Political parties understand this. In the past, Republicans absolutely understood this. Ronald Reagan sold a new, optimistic vision of America in 1980. In 1994, Newt Gingrich-led Republicans wrote down what they wanted to do in a Contract With America for the midterm elections, and were rewarded by retaking the House for the first time in decades. In 2000, George W. Bush laid out a future theory for compassionate conservatism . Even Donald Trumps 2016 slogan Make America Great Again was rooted in an idea of what he wanted America to be if he were elected.

But today, all the Republican Party can talk about is the past. On Friday, once again, the Republican headlines were all about internal disagreements about what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. In the most important ways, the past is all that matters for them now.

The Republican National Committee meeting in Salt Lake City should really be a jubilant, exciting time. President Biden, a Democrat, is experiencing the lowest approval ratings of his presidency. Democrats have their domestic agenda blocked by fellow Democrats. Election experts agree: the slim Democratic majorities in Congress will very likely flip to Republican majorities following the midterm elections later this year.

However, the conversation this week wasnt about what Republicans could do in 2023 with this new power. Instead, it was about debating Bidens victory in the 2020 election and trying to mitigate what happened a few months later, when supporters of former president Trump violently descended on the Capitol. Nine people on Capitol Hill that day eventually died, and approximately 150 people were injured, including many law enforcement members.

Indeed, the most consequential thing the Republican National Committee did Friday was pass a resolution that labeled the first attack on the Capitol in 200 years as legitimate political discourse and censured Republican Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for serving on a committee investigating what happened.

Hours later came the counterpoint from former vice president Mike Pence. Speaking in Florida to the conservative legal group the Federalist Society, Pence said he had no right to overturn the election in 2020, again disputing a common Trump line.

Frankly there is no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president, said Pence, who was a target of both Trump and the mobs ire on January 6.

Look around the nation. Virtually every open Republican primary, from governor to House to Senate, is rooted in the same question that opened a recent Ohio Republican Senate primary debate: Who won the 2020 election? Despite no thread of evidence that anyone other than Biden won, Republican candidates feel compelled to play into Trumps lie in order to comply with the partys matra.

Locally, in the Congressional race in New Hampshires First District, Republicans are engaged in a discussion about 2020. It is a defining question of the contest, the winner of which is likely to be a member of Congress due to Republican redistricting in the state.

Possibly topping all of this is what happened in Oklahoma. Trump won every county in the deeply Republican state in both 2016 and 2020. The Oklahoma State Election Board has rejected any notion of voter fraud, determining claims of voting machine manipulation were entirely without merit. But still, Oklahoma Republican Party Chair John Bennett said in a Facebook video that election integrity was a top issue of voters in his state. And now there are 22 bills in the legislature there to change voting laws.

Republicans are following their leader Donald Trump, whose latest rallies are mainly about the election he lost, not the partys future. Looking back is now what the party and its members want to do.

But all the discussion about the past might complicate their future in elections.

James Pindell can be reached at james.pindell@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jamespindell.

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American elections are about the future. But Republicans are fully stuck on the past. - The Boston Globe

Paths to power and winning elections inside the GOP are changing rapidly and radically, spawning a new generation of kingmakers while diminishing the clout of many who lorded over the party for years.

Why it matters: Fourteen of the Republican Party's top consultants and operatives across the country spoke in detail with Axios about how profoundly primary races have changed since 2014 the last pre-Donald Trump midterm election and the last midterms in which a Democrat occupied the White House.

What we found: Those sources whose clients range from as Trumpy as they come to establishment Republicans described a clear shift in the party's power brokers. They spoke of changes to the ecosystem across four categories: institutional upheaval, endorsements, conservative media and donors.

Who had the power:

Who has power now:

Between the lines: Most of these changes weren't gradual. They were triggered by the shockwave of 2016.

INSTITUTIONAL UPHEAVAL: Several GOP institutional titans in the 2014 cycle have since receded.

The Koch network: The vast operation established by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch was almost a parallel Republican Party. Candidates and their consultants regularly pitched themselves at Koch donor retreats and worried how the Kochs viewed them.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce: In 2014, the Chamber was heavily involved in Republican primaries. "Chamber Republicans" competed against "Tea Party Republicans," claiming greater appeal to the business community than insurgent conservatives and better prospects in the general election.

Conservative movement groups: Some of the most sought-after brands on the right pre-Trump are no longer considered as important.

SCF's executive director, Mary Vought, rejected this analysis, saying, "Our endorsement is sought after now more than ever because candidates know we do the hard work of raising money for their campaigns. Some groups only give them a press release, but SCF actually raises and transfers hundreds of thousands of dollars directly to their campaigns."

The NRA: In his campaign to become governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin declined to even fill out the NRA's candidate questionnaire. As a result, the NRA didnt endorse him. Nobody seemed to care, and he won the race.

Institutions that still matter: The relationships between many candidates and groups are now explicitly transactional. A prominent consultant who's working for candidates in several GOP primaries this cycle advises clients when they meet with conservative groups to ask specifically what their endorsement comes with.

The bottom line: Many movement conservative brands are shadows of what they used to be. Many of the major conservative think tanks supported policy positions such as reforming Social Security or free trade that Trump obliterated and proved elderly GOP voters didnt actually support.

2. ENDORSEMENTS: Every operative said the only endorsement that really matters is Trump's. But there are nuances. His endorsement alone is not enough; what he actually does for a candidate matters, too.

Some recent polls pointed to those limits. A recent poll by Cygnal, an analytics firm for GOP candidates, found just one in four North Carolina likely primary voters said they'd definitely vote for a Trump-endorsed candidate. A January poll by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found less than half of Georgia Republicans say a Trump endorsement would make them more likely to vote for that candidate.

Operatives also said endorsements can matter in conferring ideological credibility. If you need to convince voters your establishment-seeming candidate is genuinely hardline on immigration, having an endorsement from Ted Cruz or Tom Cotton or praise from Tucker Carlson or Stephen Miller can help.

The bottom line: The GOP operatives we interviewed unanimously said that after Trump, they don't put a ton of stock in the power of endorsements to shape a primary race in 2022.

3. CONSERVATIVE MEDIA: As the news media fragmented overall, traditional conservative media was usurped in GOP primaries by New Wave populist-nationalist media and some once-influential institutions have died or faded. The Weekly Standard shuttered.

Fox still dominates. GOP operatives work as hard as ever to book their candidates on Fox. Getting on the evening prime time shows like Tucker Carlson Tonight, Hannity, and The Ingraham Angle nets low-dollar donations and visibility with primary voters and Trump himself.

Tucker Carlson is the king of the GOP's media wing the person whose support GOP primary candidates most want and whose opposition is to be desperately avoided because it can "move numbers," in the words of one operative who has seen the Tucker effect up close.

An important shift is accelerating online. Many GOP primary voters now get their information directly from influencers including Candace Owens, Dan Bongino, Joe Rogan, Dave Portnoy, Charlie Kirk, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and websites like Ben Shapiros Daily Wire and Breitbart, which dominate Facebook.

Between the lines: Several operatives said they could easily go a whole primary without needing to engage at all with the mainstream media. When they do, they're often trying to provoke outlets the GOP base despises such as CNN to gain street cred with primary voters.

The bottom line: The media landscape is so diffuse now "fragmented, severely sliced and diced," as one operative put it that GOP operatives aren't leaning on one source overall, or the mainstream media at all, in primaries.

4. THE DONOR LANDSCAPE: The recent passing of Republican mega-donors Sheldon Adelson and Foster Freiss were significant in their own right. At the same time, newer donors are cutting the big checks, with people like tech investor Peter Thiel and industrial supply magnate Richard Uihlein single-handedly underwriting high-dollar super PACs.

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The making of a modern Republican - Axios

Those who have followed the scandal-ridden career of Vegas cop-turned-Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald arent shocked to find him mired in Donald Trumps fake electors mess. We would have been shocked if he wasnt up to his neck in it.

The chairman and former Vegas councilman, a frothing Trump fanboy from the start, used the reflected celebrity of his relationship with the former president to promote himself and consolidate his hold on the state party even as it has foundered at the polls. Joe Biden won Nevada by more than 33,000 votes.

The ballots were counted, but the lies kept coming. In the weeks following the 2020 election, McDonald led the GOPs Stop the Steal voter fraud deception and helped promote specious lawsuits before and even after they were swiftly laughed out of court.

Naturally, McDonald was one of the phony GOP electors in seven swing states, including Nevada, that Trump hoped to use to overturn the results of the election he lost, with the party chair front and center as a Dec. 14 ceremony in front of the State Capitol in Carson City that looked more like a bad political skit than part of a strategy to help derail the democratic process.

Like so many Trump-era hustles, the fraud was hiding in plain sight.

Some Nevada Republicans, including Rep. Mark Amodei, defended the phony electors theater as protected political speech, but they were there to set the stage for the big reveal planned for Jan. 6. Multiple calls between Trump officials were made during the planning, with at least one that included attorney Rudolph Giuliani.

Then Vice President Mike Pence went and screwed it all up by following the Constitution.

The multi-state deception has drawn the interest of the Justice Department and the members of the congressional committee investigating the phony electors connection to the deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol. Today, McDonald finds himself and Nevada Republican Party National Committee member Jim DeGraffenreid among those under subpoena by the committee.

The subpoenas request that they appear before the committee on Feb. 24 for a deposition after producing documents by Feb. 11 relevant to their role and participation in the purported slate of electors casting votes for Donald Trump. Other subpoenas were issued to GOP party chairs and officials in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Being dragged before Congress and placed under oath would probably qualify as an ignominious low point for most people, but not McDonald. In fact, it might represent the culmination of his long and notorious career in public self-service as hes spent decades skating from one scandal and score to the next. Along the way, hes drawn investigative scrutiny from the FBI, IRS, and even detectives from his own former police department although, as he repeatedly reminds his skeptics, no criminal charges have ever been filed against him.

As a council member while City Hall was run by mob mouthpiece-turned-Mayor Oscar Goodman, McDonalds willingness to accept $5,000 fees to play consultant for organized crime associate and topless bar boss Rick Rizzolo raised eyebrows even in jaded Las Vegas.

He lost his seat on the council in 2003 after becoming embroiled in an FBI public corruption investigation that sent four former Clark County commissioners to prison along with topless bar mogul Michael Galardi, another McDonald benefactor. But, again, McDonald wasnt charged.

Out of office, he turned the state Republican Party apparatus into his personal political fiefdom. His Chicago ward-boss style combined with fealty toward Trump served him well, even as theyve brought chaos to the party.

When Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske showed the strength of character to proclaim that no widespread voter fraud had occurred in the 2020 election in Nevada, McDonald was not amused. Cegavske, the only Republican currently holding a statewide office in Nevada, was censured by her own party.

In his long tenure as state party chairman, McDonald has failed to consistently denounce the presence of members of the far-right Proud Boys in the GOP ranks as he worked to replace the Clark County Republican Party board with Trump acolytes.

It can be argued that McDonalds messy life has prepared him for this moment in the spotlight.

Back in 2012, the year he was first elected state GOP chairman, McDonald sat for a deposition in a lawsuit involving his pal Rizzolo. A Rizzolo goon had viciously assaulted a Kansas tourist over a paltry bar tab, and the topless bar boss had agreed to pay $10 million to resolve the case. But then he didnt pay up.

But Michael McDonald, like his musical namesake, keeps forgettin. Under oath, McDonald was asked if he knew where Rizzolo had hidden his fortune. He invoked the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination 10 times.

What are the odds that hell do the same before the Jan. 6 committee?

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Nevada Republican Boss and Fake Trump Elector May Be the Model MAGA Man - The Daily Beast