(Editor's note: this post was first published on January 4. Since then, the media have reported many new examples of the head-long effort by Trump and the Republican Party to destroy democracy and the rule of law in America. The new articles are designated as such below).

As the mainstream media are increasingly recognizing, Donald Trump has not single-handedly turned American politics into a racist, xenophobic, conspiracy-mongering cesspool. It isn’t even Trump plus his famous know-nothing extremist base that accomplished the deed.

It is the Republican Party that has thrown overboard the basic moral, democratic, and religious values that have guided the country for 240 years. It’s the Republican Party that has adopted lies and extremism as a normal way of life and transformed itself into a replica of the fascist parties that spread so much evil in the 1930s and 40s.

It’s millions of Republicans who, as the 2024 election season heated up in recent weeks, stepped up their all-out, multi-dimensional campaign to impose Trump’s vision of an authoritarian, lawless regime on the United States. Here are some of the prime examples of their deeds. The details under the headlines are the exact or slightly redacted quotes from the articles.

NEW
Trump’s promotion of debunked election report reveals divisions in his circle

• Trump took to his social media website one day this past week to post a report ridden with falsehoods about fraud in the 2020 election. And his legal team cited Trump’s post in a brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, where he faces charges of obstructing the election.
• Trump has been eager to use the election interference case to hash out fraud allegations and conspiracy theories, including by demanding documents about unsubstantiated right-wing media suspicions about government agents infiltrating the mob on Jan. 6, 2021.

“In interviews, academic and legal experts debunked the content of the report Trump promoted.”

NEW
Trump tries reappropriating ‘insurrection’ on Jan. 6 anniversary

In campaign speeches surrounding the third anniversary of the attack, the former president defended people charged in the riot and repeated baseless claims that left-wing or government interlopers caused the breach

NEW
Three years later, beware dangerous revisionism of Jan. 6

• The third anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob comes amid troubling indicators about public opinion on that event.
• A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll published this week shows a sizable share of Americans accept lies about the 2020 election and the insurrection that followed on Jan. 6, 2021.

NEW
Trump skips Illinois loyalty oath promising not to overthrow government

Trump “did not sign a loyalty oath requested of candidates for election in Illinois that asks, among other things, to swear that they won’t support overthrowing the government, according to an analysis of candidate petitions by the local news outlets WBEZ and Chicago Sun-Times.”

NEW
Trump reprises dehumanizing language on undocumented immigrants, warns of ‘invasion’

Former president Donald Trump on Sunday accused undocumented immigrants of waging an “invasion” of the United States, in a speech that highlighted his frequent use of dehumanizing language and exaggerated terms to describe many foreigners seeking to enter the country.

NEW
Trump leaning into his criminality because Republicans love his crimes

Donald Trump has been leaning into the crimes that he's been charged with committing, and MSNBC's Joe Scarborough concluded that his supporters actually approve of him breaking the law.

• The twice-impeached former president has been indicted four times on 91 counts, found liable for fraud and sexual assault, and disqualified from two states' ballots for violating the Constitution's insurrectionist clause
• But his lawyers insist Trump should be immune from prosecution and called for special counsel Jack Smith to be held in contempt for working on the case before that appeal is decided.
• Trump has indicated he intends to be present at the trials where his lawyers will make this argument.

Scarborough’s conclusion: Trump’s attendance is his best campaign move. “Republicans love that he commits fraud, Republicans love that he steals nuclear secrets, and I have no direct evidence of that other than looking at his poll numbers when it comes out that he's actually committed fraud, and when they find out he's stolen nuclear secrets, his numbers go up."

(In IndieDems view, Scarborough has nailed the pathetic state of the Republican Party in 2024).

Led by Trump, GOP candidates take polarizing stances on race and history

The party’s three leading candidates are speaking about history and race in polarizing and provocative ways that sometimes diverge from or distort the facts, some political strategists, experts and civil rights leaders said

• Former president Donald Trump uses dehumanizing rhetoric to describe undocumented immigrants before largely White audiences. The runaway GOP polling leader says they are “poisoning the blood of our country” — comments some experts have compared to Adolf Hitler’s writings on blood purity.
• Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis defended part of his state’s African American history curriculum standards that claimed some enslaved people developed skills that “could be applied for their personal benefit.”
• And Nikki Haley omitted any mention of slavery when she was asked to explain the cause of the Civil War at a town hall event this past week. It wasn’t until the next day that Haley acknowledged the war was “about slavery."

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States were cooperating on election integrity. Then GOP officials quit

Since 2022, nine states where Republican officials administer elections have quit a nonprofit, nonpartisan consortium that helps keep voter rolls up to date through interstate data exchange.

• They did so amid pressure from former president Donald Trump, who claimed in March that the consortium “pumps the rolls” for Democrats. Consequently, voter rolls in those states — Alabama, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, Ohio, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia — are less accurate, and it’s becoming harder to detect the small number of people who improperly vote in multiple states.
• Indeed, as 2024 begins, these same election officials find themselves spending taxpayer dollars to re-create the very tools that the system they abandoned had provided.

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3 years after Jan. 6 attack, GOP loyalty to Trump and rioters climbs, poll finds

• Three years after the 6 attack, Republicans are more sympathetic to those who stormed the U.S. Capitol and more likely to absolve Donald Trump of responsibility for the attack than they were in 2021, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll.
• They are now less likely to believe that Jan. 6 participants were “mostly violent,” less likely to believe Trump bears responsibility for the attack, and are slightly less likely to view Joe Biden’s election as legitimate.

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These politicians denied democracy on Jan. 6. Now, they want your vote.

While the violent mob swarmed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, aiming to subvert democracy and keep President Donald Trump in power, another group was already working on the same project inside.

In an unsuccessful bid to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election, 147 Republicans formally supported objection to counting Joe Biden’s electoral votes.

 (The article provides cartoon caricature portraits of the Republicans, by region.)

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Extremist MAGA Republican Web Site Still Pushing Michigan Election Fraud Lie

Three years after the 2020 elections, right-wing website Gateway Pundit published a lurid story about burner phones, semiautomatic weapons, silencers and bags of prepaid cash cards. “NOW WE HAVE PROOF!” blared the headline.

Of course, they had not a shred of evidence, but the story “provided weeks of headlines that radiated across right-wing media and were repeatedly amplified by pro-Trump influencers.”

“The outlet’s emphasis on long-debunked fraud claims helps explain why election denial has proved so durable.”

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Donald Trump's Own Expert Debunks His Election Claims

“The elections technology expert who former President Donald Trump's 2020 campaign hired to find voter fraud debunked Trump's claims again in a scathing op-ed in USA Today. Ken Block, founder of the analytics company that Trump contracted in the wake of the last presidential election, said on January 2 that the extensive research his company did no evidence that election fraud contributed to President Joe Biden's win. He blasted Trump's "steady diet of lies and innuendo."