Jim Jordan And The Beginning Of DeMAGAfication

Jordan's humiliating faceplant could represent an important breakthrough

MAGA Tears (Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

I write this knowing Jim Jordan could still win in the end, or give way to a MAGA speaker with a little bit more chill, or even to Speaker Donald Trump. But that’s sort of the whole point. What we saw with Jordan’s gunpoint nomination, then outright defeat on the House floor Tuesday, was the menace and incompetence the right has visited on the rest of the country for years turned inward. And it failed. 

Trump, and his loyalists like Jordan, don’t accept defeat in any context that offers them a pretense of deniability, they keep pushing and pushing until they claim the power they seek, and when that doesn’t work they lie and plot revenge and overturn the game board. 

What makes this somewhat different is that, with all those threats out in the open, directed at people who’ve always surrendered to them, Jordan lost anyhow, every vote tallied in a public roll call. Republicans happen not to like that stuff so much when it’s deployed against them. If it had been a secret ballot, he probably would’ve lost by a much larger margin—and he probably would’ve claimed fraud. Now everyone can see the tactics he and others like him employ, the lies they tell and threats they make to get what they want—and that they can be stopped anyhow. If Jordan withdraws, it will be because of his dirty dealing and bad acting. 

And that could be step one in what would be, if we’re lucky, a long and grueling process of deMAGAfication.

It helps that the outcome here can’t be gainsaid. In unquestionable defeat, and only in this way, can we see how the right-wing elite has come to function, and even how its system of control can run smoothly, until it becomes a feedback loop of toxic shit and clogs up like a golden toilet in Trump tower.

The Jordan fiasco reminded me of Donald Trump’s first primary, when he lied about losing the Iowa caucuses and all but promised to sabotage his own party if he wasn’t ultimately awarded the nomination. The similarities mostly end there: Trump didn’t need to threaten anyone to win the nomination in 2016; Jordan lost the speakership vote without a clear path back to contention. But like Trump he also lost his first real ballot, then, in defeat, rejected the rules of the game. He saw to it that the actual winner of the GOP leadership election (Steve Scalise) would falter on the House floor, confronting the rest of the party with a take-it-or-leave-it proposition: Either I get the job or chaos reigns. 

And so it continued. Once that first threat worked well enough to get him nominated, Jordan mounted a campaign of blunt intimidation, enlisting Trump (who thinks Jordan can make his legal troubles go away) and Fox News to bully his many detractors into submission. When many of them caved, he marched them out single file to deliver some variation on the same endorsement: I talked to Jim, he convinced me, you’ll be convinced too if you know what’s good for you! 

I mused, and was vindicated in my theorizing, that this was actually a sign of weakness. Why orchestrate an elaborate pageant of converts if you actually have the votes? 

It was all false bravado, this time meant to mislead other elected Republicans. 

We know how their methods work, because we see them at work outside the GOP conference all the time. Republicans threaten to default on the debt unless they get what they want. Then the party leadership and Fox News and various other right-wing influencers get to work creating a mirage of a different kind: Of Republicans who won’t cave, who stand on principle, and on the side of the American peopblah blah blah—and if the libs don’t yield to their demands, the consequences will be their fault. They aim to get inside the heads of mainstream journalists and rank and file Democrats, and cow them into conceding. It often works.

Even before 2020, Republicans did this ahead of elections too, stipulating to GOP juggernauts whether or not they existed, until everyone else, including Democrats, started wondering if maybe their confidence was rooted in something real. Of course we’re losing, we haven’t been focused on (crime, inflation, the border, “Rich Men North of Richmond”), which we now see are the issues voters really care about. 

A couple things have changed over the years, particularly after 2020: Republicans have increasingly ensconced themselves in a right-wing information system that they once understood to be for the rubes; they are now the target audience of their own propaganda, and as such their mental habits have deteriorated. By 2020, it made them vulnerable enough to create internal problems. Millions of people, including no shortage of officeholders, believed Trump’s re-election was inevitable, and then embraced his lies when he claimed to have been cheated. That prefigured the insurrection, but it also prefigured many things since. The concocted Biden impeachment and the Jordan speakership that may never be are both emanations from Trump and Fox News. Fox feigned Trump’s inevitability so effectively that, when he lost, Fox found itself forced to choose between fessing up (at the expense of viewership and profitability) and continuing to lie, and so the lies have poured forth. 

It has thus become increasingly difficult to determine when MAGA loyalists know they’re lying (or simply don’t care what the truth is) and when they’re deluded by their own propaganda. It took a major congressional investigation to uncover all the evidence that Trump knew his claims about the election were lies. The pro-insurrection senator Mike Lee—once ballyhooed as a rising GOP star and a bright legal mind—gets regularly bamboozled by conspiracy theorists on Twitter, where he refers to himself as “based.” 

Before suplexing himself into the well of the House, Jordan (who represents a gerrymandered district that’s almost 90 percent white and lives in symbiosis with right-wing media) told Scalise “America wants me.”

No it doesn’t! The mind reels imagining all the scolding liberals would be in for if they inhabited the kind of bubble that fed such delusions of grandeur. 

But this is, in abstract form, the crisis America faces. Donald Trump is the main manifestation of it, Jordan as speaker would also pose a real danger. American democracy has many other weaknesses, loopholes, and antidemocratic components. But the acute threat is from this partisan formation, this perpetual-motion machine of bad faith, and it will continue in this way until its leaders are stopped for rejecting truth and the rules of fair play.

They actually have to be defeated on the specific terms they set; their bluff—“what we want or the country gets it”—has to be called or they’ll keep blustering their way into more and more power, more and more victories.

And for the first time since the insurrection itself, at least a few Republicans are becoming untethered. 

“I want the next speaker to acknowledge [that Trump lost the election] and I don't want someone who was involved in the activities surrounding January 6,” said conservative Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), “There's no way we win the majority if the message we send to the American people is we believe the election was stolen, and we believe that January 6 was OK, it was tour of the Capitol."

I was even more struck in some ways by these comments from Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE)—perhaps the only House Republican who’s “moderate” in any cognizable way—“You don’t have a process where I play by the rules and these other people can’t and then they get what they want. That’s not American. Americans want fair play and rule of law.”

My first thought was, yes, this has to be a bedrock principle in a democracy. Second, why don’t Democrats draw the same line when Republicans take legislative hostages?! Third, where was Don Bacon’s concern for the rules during all those other hostage crises?

No Republican now agonizing over this fiasco has clean hands, not even Don Bacon, but you can see, in his frustration with being jerked around, a narrow path to the end of Trumpist politics. Naturally it had to come home to roost for Republicans before they understood why it was so corrosive, but MAGA can’t win—not in the House, maybe not even in the electoral college—if Republicans start using their power to block it. 

We naturally can’t count on that. Jordan has already turned MAGA hordes on Scalise for not doing enough to help (the nerve!); he’s warned the rest of the conference not to entertain teaming up with Democrats to fill the power vacuum; Bacon’s wife has started receiving abusive, anonymous emails and text messages. They won’t stop unless they are stopped, and they could easily wear their obstacles down through sheer menace. But if MAGA loses this fight, in this way, it’ll be a small breakthrough and a big precedent.