Tommy Washbush
For the modern Republican Party, embarrassing moments are as common as grains of sand on a beach. But Wisconsin Senate President Chris Kapenga may have made it into the history books with his stunningly abject missive to the nation’s disgraced and deranged former president.
After Donald Trump lashed out at Kapenga and other Wisconsin lawmakers, accusing them of “working hard to cover up election corruption” and advising his followers, “Don’t fall for their lies!” the Republican from Delafield stuck his sniffer up the ex-presidential hinder.
“Let me first say that very few people have the honor of being named publicly by a United States President,” Kapenga wrote his Maximum Leader early this summer. He did not reject Trump’s insane insistence that the 2020 election was fraudulent. In fact, Kapenga submitted, “I called the auditor in charge of the election audit that is taking place in Wisconsin and requested a forensic component to the audit.”
Who’s a good boy? Yes you are.
Kapenga thanked Trump for “doing great things as our President,” carefully not referring to his tenure in the past tense. He shared that he wears a Trump/Pence mask on airplanes because “if the liberals are going to force me to wear a mask, I am going to make it as painful for them as possible.” He asked for the President to reward his loyalty by inviting him to play a round of golf.
Kapenga’s groveling garnered national attention. The website Wonkette called it “the most embarrassing thing we have ever seen from a person who is ostensibly a grown man.” A New York Times editorial board member said it “provides a valuable master class in the art of Trump sycophancy.”
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes highlighted Kapenga’s brown-nosing as “an incredible example of Trump-era Republicans in generally democratic decline, not to mention absurd levels of humiliation.” And all to placate “probably the most famous sociopath in the country, maybe the world, a guy who had a 29 percent approval rating upon leaving office.”
State legislative Republicans, as Kapenga indicated, are doing their utmost to back Trump’s Big Lie that he won the election. Among other pointless probes, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos has hired a team of three former police officers — including a party partisan who once released a discredited report alleging voting fraud — to investigate “potential illegalities and/or irregularities” in the 2020 election.
“Is there a whole lot of smoke or is there actual fire?” Vos asked. “We just don’t know yet.”
The speaker also tapped former state Supreme Court Justice Mike Gableman to oversee the review. Gableman needed just a few days after the 2020 election — and zero evidence — to proclaim it was stolen. He will be paid $44,000 in tax dollars for four months; the retired cops will each make $9,600 over three months.
Robin Vos is a known political quantity in Wisconsin. He’s hyper-partisan, ethically acrobatic, and a bit of a jerk. But he is not stupid. He knows full well that Trump lost the election and that the only purpose his probe will serve is to cater to what is now the GOP’s lunatic mainstream. Vos, like others, has embraced the Big Lie out of political opportunism, heedless of the corrosive impact it will have on our battered democracy.
The Republican Party, born in Wisconsin, has adopted as its primary political strategies rigging voter boundaries, suppressing votes, and stirring division over boogeymen like critical race theory and Mr. Potato Head. It is deeply invested in denying reality, even regarding COVID-19, which is now on the rebound, almost exclusively among the unvaccinated.
A quarter of young adults aged 18 to 25 — a group that is most likely to transmit the disease and, despite a relatively low death rate, is highly susceptible to long-term complications such as loss of smell and taste — say they “probably” or “definitely” will not get vaccinated. These and other refuseniks are preventing the nation from reaching herd immunity as the virus mutates into deady new forms, threatening everyone.
And yet we have Sen. Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, braying against “indiscriminate mass vaccination.” During one recent appearance, Johnson made so many untrue statements about the pandemic that YouTube removed a video of the event for violating its rules against medical misinformation. Johnson also recently opined that climate change is, as he put it, “bullshit” — a position shared by his party in spirit, if not wording.
Let’s set aside the question of whether deliberately spreading lies is good politics; in some situations, it may be. But clearly it is bad for the nation and bad for our democracy. If the Republicans of Wisconsin don’t care about that, they are more than just embarrassing; they are dangerous.
Bill Lueders, Isthmus news editor from 1986 to 2011, is the editor of The Progressive.
