The MAGA Republican Party

     This week from Tuesday January 3rd through Saturday January 7th 2023, the House of Representatives held 15 votes to elect a speaker of the House, and the result was that Kevin McCarthy is the next speaker of the House of Representatives, but what seemed to slip through the cracks of all media sources including Fox News is that this is the very first MAGA Republican Party controlled House of Representatives, and that as of 2022, President Trump has officially taken over the Republican Party. As the official and now undisputed leader of the Republican Party, what does this mean for America?

     When President Trump was a real estate developer he got rich through a particular form of capitalism, people like to say that he is a crook, he is not a crook, everything he does is within the law, or at least a reasonable interpretation of the law according to lawyers that he has consulted. President Trump declared bankruptcy seven times in his life, most people would declare bankruptcy and it would ruin their credit for the next seven years, but Trump's approach to the seven years is that he can only declare bankruptcy once every seven years. You can become rich through many different methods, and Donald Trump the developer appears to have had a long history of becoming rich through a particular form of capitalism in which he specialized in not paying small contractors.

     Prior to 2016, there were literally hundreds of examples of small business owners that started a contract with Trump and 90% of the way through the project he would come in and ask for major changes to the project that the small contractors could not afford to do. They would walk away from the project because they could not accommodate him, he would not pay them, they would sue, he would wait and build up bundles of small business owners suing him, and then every seven years go to a bankruptcy judge that would approve him not paying pretty much all of the contractors that had been suing him for the last seven years, and seven times in his life, basically for 50 straight years he did this to hundreds of small contractors.

     Most people and most business owners pay their employees and subcontractors, for Trump to do the opposite shows that he is ruthless, and while that was bad for small contractors that were foolish enough to sign a contract with him in America, as the president of the United States he approached the United States like another business that he owned, if you don't like Trump this might be a problem, but if you are just a nonpartisan like me you would have to notice that once he got in office all he did was not want to pay people, just like he has done his entire life, but as president of the United States it was everyone else in the world outside of America that he didn't want to pay, and it was our U.S. tax dollars that he didn't want to pay them with.

     As president, Trump approached Europe and said, "You don't pay enough in NATO, you don't pay enough in the United Nations, we pay too much, you have to pay more for your own defense." His constant refrain was that every president and every negotiator before him in every deal made with every country on the entire planet for the last few decades including all Democrats and all Republicans were basically stupid and bad negotiators, and that they all made bad deals for the United States that made the U.S. pay too much. He approached every situation in the same way he did as a business owner, but this time the world was his oyster and America was the beneficiary with him not wanting to pay people outside of America, not wanting to spend as many U.S. tax dollars outside of America, and asking people outside of America to pay more, whether it be the UN, NATO, the G7 or China. As Americans this benefited us tremendously, because he treated all Americans like his own family, as people who deserved to get all of the stuff from the rest of the world for free or for cheap, like he used to do just for his own family before he was president.

     President Trump is smart, funny, and very entertaining, he also seems to have a grasp of international politics and macro-finances that I cannot even try to understand, his use of trade and tariff laws that had not been used in the U.S. since the late 1800s is an example of this, and in classic form he negotiated for the United States to pay less and in this case for China to pay more, playing a tariff war with China with the stated goal of a zero tariff agreement with all of our select trading partners. He also wanted the Federal Reserve to drop the prime lending rate to below 0% with the stated reason being to prop up the U.S. dollar against foreign currencies. President Trump had far more experience dealing with foreign governments, foreign businesses, and foreign currencies before he was elected than any president that I am aware of.

     A ruthless developer made the greatest, most transformative president we have seen in half a century. Is Trump a megalomaniac? Yes, but he revels in it, is aware of it, and even uses it to his advantage with a wink and a nod to let you know that he knows, unlike world leaders of the past who were megalomaniacs but lacked a sense of humor. When President Trump was first elected he told his staff that he wanted his presidency to be like a daily comic strip, he was the superhero, and by the end of each day a story would be complete and he would save the world.

     When speaker of the House John Boehner retired he said that Trump was not a Democrat or a Republican, he was a populist, and that is true. Trump himself has said he's not a Republican, that he is a conservative but he chose to run as a Republican, so his efforts for the last 6 years have been to take over the Republican Party, and he has finally succeeded. Rather than go after Democrats two years into his presidency he chose to put all of his political clout into getting rid of Republicans that had openly opposed him, running candidates in multiple primaries with his endorsements to get rid of incumbent Republicans. Fast forward 2 years and despite losing the 2020 election, many more MAGA Republicans were elected to congress as Trump continued his primary upset strategy for Republicans that opposed him.

     By 2021 when over half of all Republicans said that the 2020 election was stolen the message was clear, if you were a Republican you either had to get with the program or get primaried, and whole slates of state tickets in 2022 were made up of people that said that the 2020 election was stolen, every single candidate on the Republican Party ticket in both Arizona and Michigan openly said it, and so the 2022 elections saw the third and final wave of MAGA Republicans arrive in Congress, and with the election of McCarthy in 2023 the deal is sealed, and we have the first MAGA Republican controlled House of Representatives, and it only took Trump six years to do it. You might think that the 20 holdouts in the first 14 votes for speaker in January of 2023 were traditional pre-Trump Republicans, but they are all gone now like the dinosaurs, the 20 holdouts were even more staunch supporters of President Trump, and were negotiating to turn Congress back into something more traditional from the past.

     Right before the newly elected House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries handed the gavel to Speaker Kevin McCarthy he grandstanded for 11 minutes throwing down one partisan Democrat claim after another, and ended with rhetorical opposites claiming that the Democrats would continue to fight for some Democrat talking point instead of QAnon, and another Democrat talking point instead of Mar-A-Lago. He said this to the first MAGA Republican Party controlled House of Representatives in history, and how wrong he was to do so. He made it clear that the Democrats are still partisan and will never attempt to reach any middle ground with MAGA Republicans, so they will get nothing, no chairs of any committees and possibly not even any seats on any committees.

     Instead the MAGA Republicans will form committees to investigate the FBI suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story, Mayorkas and the whipping hoax at the southern border, the Chinese origins of that disease we all had to deal with, and many other MAGA Republican interests including the possible impeachment of President Biden. They will not support any agenda of the Democrats, and as long as they have the votes, they won't need the Democrats anyway. Since the Democrats control the Senate and the White House no Republican bills will become law in this Congress, but there will be many hearings as the House of Representatives becomes more of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, investigating things like why the FBI labeled parents as domestic terrorists when they objected to Critical Race Theory at school board meetings, and even if no news stations other than Fox covers any of this, if they impeach President Biden it will be hard for the mainstream media to gloss it over.

     Since President Trump has completely transformed the Republican Party and now all Republicans in Congress can be considered MAGA Republicans it is a foregone conclusion that Trump will be the nominee for the Republican Party in 2024. Whether President Trump wins or not in 2024 I don't know, but the MAGA Republicans in the House of Representatives will do everything they can to make sure that it's a fair election.

     And let us not forget that Trump was able to stack the Supreme Court in the four years he had in office with so many conservatives that as he predicted, they would, "automatically," overturn Roe v Wade, which of course happened. Meaning that all Republicans in Congress are with Trump and the Supreme Court is also majority conservative, which sets the stage for Trump potentially becoming president again in 2024, and if somehow the Republicans manage to keep the House and win the Senate, that would place all three branches of government in the hands of conservatives.