The path to power for Republican women these days begins with a shriek on a stage strobed red white and blue, balanced on a pair of stilettos vibrating to a Ted Nugent bass line. The rise of the Hooters harridan as role model for the ultra-conservative auxiliary is just one of the many abrupt status reversals MAGA ushered in for women.
The lunatic chant of Trump spiritual advisor Paula White’s glossolalia looked relatively tame after Kimberly Guilfoyle’s “I’m ready for my close-up” 2020 campaign operatics. Then Kari Lake. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert surpassed them all as the movement’s trash-tastic leading ladies, whipping out machine guns, spewing obscenities, braying at the President of the United States during the State of the Union, exploding what was left of the Overton Window on the U.S. House floor.
Inevitably, we have arrived at the spectacle that titillates the MAGA man more than any other female performance that isn’t NSFW.
The “catfight.”
A few weeks ago, as Boebert - backcountry Colorado’s gift to America - was trying to fast-track her Biden impeachment proposal, Greene rose on the House floor, approached her former pal and accused Boebert of copying “my articles of impeachment.” When Boebert denied it, Greene replied, “I’ve donated to you, I’ve defended you. But you’ve been nothing but a little bitch to me. And you copied my articles of impeachment after I asked you to cosponsor them.”
Greene was indeed first out of the gate with the House Republicans’ impeachment performance: she introduced articles in January 2021 and again this May. She says the Colorado second termer stole her idea and her language.
During their floor fight, which C-Span recorded but, alas, without audio, Greene was so mad that Boebert accused her of “accidentally spitting” on her lip. The little Jerry Springer blip barely broke through our smoked-out, heat-bulbed consciousness. But just before Congress’s Fourth of July break, the House Freedom Caucus gathered in secret in DC and voted to eject MTG from their club. The fait accompli was revealed after the long weekend.
The expulsion begs an important question: did the Freedom Caucus members rediscover a sense of shame? Did they get queasy about embracing a QAnon conspiracist in the Alex Jones mode who believes school shootings are false flags to produce gun control? Did the revolting video of MTG harassing Parkland high school gun massacre survivors on a public street, widely available with a single click on the internet, finally catch their attention?
The Freedom Caucus, a name that puts the O in Orwellian, has long proven shameless. It was founded in 2015, as the Tea Party caucus was dwindling. The members are demographically whiter than the rest of the white GOP, and even more male. The group was ripe low-hanging fruit for seduction by TFG.
From the day Trump waddled out at the first of the 2015 debates and splattered the stage with misogynistic slime, brazen lies and eye-popping insults, every Republican who didn’t get on board was as quickly defenestrated from the party as a Russian dissident from a window.
In January 2021, Freedom Caucus members fell in line behind he Big Lie, almost unanimously opposing the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory over former President Donald Trump. They welcomed Marjorie Taylor Greene. They saw nothing objectionable in her repeated calls for sedition, secession, “a national divorce.” They chortled when Boebert and Greene - then besties - interrupted the President’s State of the Union speech earlier this year screaming “Liar!”
But the expulsion of Marge has nothing to do with a redemption of their wacked-out moral compass. It is all about what MTG did after the floor fight. She publicly accused Boebert of using impeachment as donor bait. “It’s purely for fundraising,” she told the news platform Semafor. “It's throwing out red meat so that people will donate to her campaign because she's coming up on the end of the month, and she's trying to produce good fundraising numbers.”
With that one remark, the Congresswoman from Georgia violated the principal rule of the Trump-era Republican Party. She acknowledged the performative con that is the sine qua non of MAGA politics and the Trumpy political grift.
From the cheap, Chinese-made Fuck Biden flags that enrich MAGA merch tycoons and befoul American roadways, to the faux outrage about woke, to Bannon’s felonious wall con, to The Big Lie itself, to Murdochs and Tucker Carlson, no one on the real inside believes a word of it. Every speech, slogan and act of the assault on decency, the degradation of the American political discourse has been about $$$.
Now Marge, the kid-harassing QAnon true believer, is on the outside, looking in.
Related reads:
MTG harassing high school massacre survivors.
MTG to Semafor
Biden’s response to MTG
Freedom Caucus booting Marge
Freedom Caucus demographic
“Hooters harridans.” Dead here
The two bimbos you write about, by their very presence, offended me from the beginning. No one would accuse either of them of having been well raised. Aside from being dumb as a box of rocks about what their elected office is about, they are pitiful reminders (along with Gosar, Comar, and the rest of the outpatient caucus) that Lardass ushered in the lamentable age of, shall we say, dreck in the nation's Capitol.