What is the state of our union? If you look at traditional economic metrics, things are humming along. We have emerged from a pandemic, have weathered the worst of the ensuing inflation, labor markets are booming along at unheard of levels, and even investors have to admit that given all that has transpired, to have the S&P 500 exactly where it was two years ago – and still up almost 20% from Election Day 2020, when Donald Trump said the sky would fall if he was not reelected – is pretty good.
But if you believe in the two party system, this is a bleak moment indeed. As Nancy Pelosi commented the other day, the nation needs a strong Republican Party, but “this is not it.” She may have been pointing to Kevin McCarthy’s weakness as Speaker, but her words were as aptly pointed at Republicans in the Senate, where Mitt Romney – just ten years ago the standard-bearer of the GOP – is regularly shunned by his peers for making eminently reasonable statements that fail to be sufficiently hostile to Joe Biden or the Democrats. So it was last week, when Romney’s irrefutable suggestion that George Santos has no place in Congress, was met by silence among his peers; just one more reminder that nearly the entire Republican establishment has given up the ghost and cowers in fear of offending the party’s vengeful, conspiracy-infected, party base.
Donald Trump’s MAGA movement – the most recent iteration of nativist isolationism that has been deeply rooted in our nation’s DNA since the founding of the republic – has officially taken over the Republican Party. As Marjorie Taylor Greene observed recently, the GOP is 70% MAGA now. While some may refute that number out of hand, it is validated by public opinion polling suggesting that half of Republicans apparently believe Democrats are child-trafficking pedophiles, while two-thirds continue to believe the 2020 election was stolen, despite all evidence to the contrary. MAGA dominance over what George W. Bush once called the “reality-based community” is evidenced by the behavior of formerly mainstream Republicans who have learned to parrot MAGA talking points.
Last week, when the Chinese balloon appeared over the Montana skies, it provided reams of data, not on atmospheric conditions or the location of Minuteman III intercontinental missile silos – all of which anyone from here to Beijing can pull up on an iPhone – but on the depraved state of the Republican Party.
When the balloon first emerged in the Montana skies, Donald Trump pounced on the issue, demanding in ALL CAPS on his alternative Truth Social website that the Chinese invading aircraft be shot down. Before one could say the words “Hunter Biden’s laptop,” Republicans across the nation’s capital – with the predictable exception of Mitt Romney – rose up as if on command, insisting that Trump “would never have tolerated this.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, who day by day is supplanting Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy as the face of today’s GOP, seized the moment, tweeting that “literally every person” she knew was talking about how to shoot down the balloon. Then, MAGA darling Kari Lake, as if to prove her own national security credentials as she continues to position herself to be Donald Trump’s running mate in 2024, tweeted a photo of herself in full camo with a gun, looking to the skies, ostensibly ready to take down the Chinese invading balloon twelve miles overhead.
Whatever the facts of Balloongate might be, neither Donald Trump nor Marjorie Taylor Greene could give a hoot. Within hours, as the issue migrated from the risk of satellite debris falling on populated areas in Montana should the balloon be shot down, to a national security crisis of the highest order, it vaulted to center stage across the MAGAsphere. One more defense of Donald Trump. One more source of amped up outrage. One more opportunity to extract a few more dollars from the new base of the Republican Party.
When Marjorie Taylor Greene screamed “Liar!” at Joe Biden during the State of the Union speech last week, she was not seized by a momentary fit of rage, but rather following a proven gameplan for fleecing her supporters. “Remember,” GOP politicians whisper down the lane to each other to this day, “[South Carolina Congressman] Joe Wilson raised $2 million in twenty-four hours after he screamed ‘You lie!’ at Barack Obama during a speech to a joint session of Congress.” Though that iconic moment took place almost a decade and a half ago, it has become a defining moment in our politics. Forget that Wilson was sanctioned by his peers for his “breach of decorum,” that breach of decorum has become the modus operandi of many Congressional Republicans for a simple reason: it works. Breach decorum; incite outrage; collect money.
Which takes us back to the state of the union. For somewhat less than half the country – but apparently well more than half of the GOP – the state of the union has become one of preoccupation with really silly stuff, as Balloongate was just the most recent example. While we are coming to understand the intelligence purposes and capabilities of the Chinese balloon, two things appear clear. First, China has been sending surveillance balloons across the globe – including the United States – for years. And second, military and intelligence officials interviewed about the matter do not seem particularly perturbed.
Surely, no one in Congress can seriously believe that our adversaries don’t spy on us – or that we don’t spy on them. While Marjorie Taylor Greene accused Joe Biden of refusing to stop the Chinese from surveilling our missile silos and military facilities, former Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer, who grew up on a farm just down the road from an intercontinental missile silo, pointed out the absurdity of the hyperbolic response on the right. Anyone, he observed, who wants to see where our missiles are buried can drive by the silos and snap a photo. “Taking a rental car,” he suggested, “would be a lot cheaper than sending a balloon from Beijing.”
If the issue is overhead photo surveillance, as Greene suggested, spying on the United States is a pretty easy gig, and it has become easier by the year. A decade or so ago, National Public Radio ran a series on the country’s land based intercontinental missile system, together with images of missile silos from Google Maps. One reader at the time offered an ironic response to the publishing of what some might have deemed at the time – and today, apparently – to be top secret information: "Thanks for the map. Can you now publish the GPS coordinates? You've been real helpful, Kim IL Sung."
And that was ten years ago. Today, Google Maps provides GPS coordinates with a single click, and there are any number of apps that are surely being mined on a regular basis for useful data by foreign intelligence services. One example is Strava, a running app, which a few years ago inadvertently identified and broadcast to the world the location of secret military installations across the globe. And then there is TikTok, the Chinese espionage tool masked as a video-sharing app.
When it comes to intelligence operations against the United States, data gathering is not the challenge. As Vladimir Putin demonstrated in 2016, the art is in the design of strategies that will set us against each other; that will, to use an overused word, trigger our worst instincts. And last week offered an abject lesson: want to take us down a notch and embarrass the United States in the eyes of the world, send a balloon our way and watch us turn on each other like a pack of rabid dogs. And that may well have been the objective, argued Dr Hoo Tiang Boon, a China expert at the China programme at Singapore's S Rajaratnam School of International Studies. "They have other means to spy out American infrastructure, or whatever information they wanted to obtain. The balloon was to send a signal to the Americans, and also to see how the Americans would react."
In her official Republican Party response to Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech, newly elected Arkansas Governor, and former Trump Press Secretary, Sarah Sanders painted a dissenting view of the state of the union. Forget Biden’s optimistic vision of a nation emerging from pandemic years at home and defending democracy abroad, Sanders mirrored the American Carnage theme from Donald Trump’s inaugural address, painting a picture of the country through her eyes as a dark, forbidding place, with woke mobs ransacking the landscape. With no sense of irony, she suggested that “the choice is between normal or crazy.”
And so it is. In today’s Republican Party, crazy is firmly in control. But the problem for the nation is not the half of Republicans who embrace QAnon conspiracy theories, the Big Lie, and the venomous nonsense that Greene and her compatriots spew on a daily basis. Rather, the problem is the erstwhile normal Republicans who have continued to play along, and in doing so have vaulted them into positions of power. They want to believe this has all been a bad dream, and one day it will all be over. But it doesn’t work that way. The more power they cede to the MAGA majority in their ranks, the worse things will get. Nancy Pelosi hit the nail on the head; the time has come for Republicans in the reality-based community to make a choice: have the courage to stop cowering in the shadows and take their party back, or have the courage to leave the GOP.
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