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The GOP Is Not a Political Party—It’s a Cult

In this week’s Elie v. US, our justice correspondent marvels at Trump’s enduring hold over the GOP mind. Plus: the dumbest CEO in the gaming industry.

A supporter bows their head in prayer during a Get Out The Vote campaign rally in Texas.

Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican Party is absolute. In two runoff primaries in Texas this week, Trump-backed Attorney General Ken Paxton beat incumbent Republican Senator John Cornyn to become the Republican candidate for Senate. Cornyn has been a dutiful MAGA servant in the Senate, but Paxton, whose tenure as AG has been marred by corruption scandals and rank extremism, is an election denier, so he got Trump’s endorsement and eventually won.

In the other Republican runoff, election denier Mayes Middleton beat Republican Representative Chip Roy in the race to replace Paxton as AG. Trump didn’t endorse in this race, but he once again seemed to favor the election denier over the dutiful MAGA servant. Clearly, the best way into Trump’s Republican Party remains falsely claiming Trump won the election he obviously lost.

And once you’re in, you’re all but guaranteed victory. Across the primary spectrum, Trump-backed candidates are wiping the floor with Republicans Trump dislikes. GOP Representative Thomas Massie lost his primary last week, and all Massie did was call for the release of the Epstein files. (OK, he also opposed the Iran War.) Massie promptly hightailed it to Costa Rica, where he was spied this week vacationing with Marjorie Taylor Greene, another MAGA Republican who didn’t even bother to run in a primary after she also pissed off Trump by calling for the release of the Epstein files.

I’ve never seen a president with this kind of control over his party, certainly not one with a 34 percent approval rating. Trump is a stunningly unpopular, lame-duck president (or should be, if the Constitution is to be believed), and yet Republicans who support every one of his awful and unpopular policies are getting thrown out of office for not showing enough loyalty to the Dear Leader.

What really gets me is that the fealty demanded by Trump isn’t even being backed up by any overt acts of violence. Crossing Joseph Stalin or Maximilien Robespierre or Augustus Caesar would get you jailed and, likely, killed. Trump hasn’t needed to enforce party discipline using any of those methods. He threatens people with… mean tweets? And they all crumble before him. And the ones who don’t “self deport” to Costa Rica.

The GOP is not a political party—it’s a cult. I don’t know what to do about that, or how to fight it—and I feel like anybody who tells you they do is lying.

Speaking of Ken Paxton, the Texas AG is now coming after the popular online platform Discord, accusing it of being a “hunting ground” for child predators. For the uninitiated, Discord is a social-media app used primarily by gamers that is particularly useful for voice chatting during gaming sessions. It’s not a thing I let my teenager use (yet), but it’s also not the place where I am most concerned about child predators. That place would be Roblox, which I’ve tried to warn parents about multiple times in this space. But what’s really interesting about Paxton’s move is that Discord is one of those safe spaces for the troglodytes of the white-wing manosphere. (It’s safe for non-trolls too, as long as you join more thoughtful servers.) These are the kinds of guys who vote for Republicans because they hate “woke” Democrats, yet they never seem to care that it’s Republicans who consistently push the regulations that try to bring these gaming spaces under government control. They’re so obsessed with hating women and LGBTQ people that they don’t even recognize which political party supports free expression.

South Carolina Republicans rejected a redistricting plan that would have erased the majority-Black district currently represented by Jim Clyburn. People have been calling this a rare post-Callais “victory” for Black folks, and it is, but it’s also very hard to draw a map in South Carolina that weakens Clyburn but still protects his congressional neighbor, Republican Representative Nancy Mace.

Trump apparently wants to make federal workers sign nondisclosure agreements as a way to prevent leaks. I’d say the idea is flatly unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court won’t agree with me. It made staffers sign NDAs after the Dobbs leak. 

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