Throughout the film's first hour, McKay plants the seeds for conservatism’s rise. Cheney meets Roger Ailes as a young congressional staffer; Antonin Scalia before he became a Supreme Court justice; and even a drunken George W. Bush (a hilarious Sam Rockwell) crashing a Christmas ...read more
Last month, the North Carolina Board of Elections unanimously refused to certify the election of Republican Congressman-elect Mark Harris, who beat his Democratic opponent, Dan McCready, by about 900 votes. Harris, the only representative not to be seated when the new Congress ...read more
To put it mildly, the Republican Party is explosively crapping its cage about Donald Trump's prospects for being re-nominated in 2020. The party establishment is so terrified, in fact, that its leadership is actively circling its orange wagons around its bloated chief executive ...read more
After decades of the GOP crushing the economy of California with gridlock and a freeze on raising taxes, Democrats took control of the legislature with a supermajority in 2012. They immediately raised taxes and, like magic, the largest state with the largest economy suddenly ...read more
Young Turks journalist David Sirota is known for stirring division within the Democratic Party. Throughout 2015 and 2016, he dedicated most of his reporting to attacking Hillary Clinton while showering Bernie Sanders with praise, despite receiving criticism for failing to ...read more
If you haven't heard about this yet, it's amazing that this story isn't front page news across the country and testament to how coddled Republicans are by the media in this country: State Rep. Matt Shea of Spokane Valley in conservative eastern Washington has been under fire ...read more
Early voting has been going on in Florida for more than a week now, and the results so far have been strong. Totals in Orange County and Lake County have favored Democrats and surpassed those set during the last midterm cycle in 2014. One million voters have shown up to vote ...read more
Until now, there has never been a concerted call for the wholesale destruction of a political party in modern times. That was until Mitch McConnell broke the Senate, the Tea Party broke the House, and Donald Trump finished the job.... To continue reading this article, please go ...read more
If you're wondering just how dangerous the GOP has become, consider the words of Tom Nichols, a Republican trying, in his own words, to fumigate his party... To continue reading this article, please go here. As a Banter Member you'll get access to our beautiful, ad free digital ...read more
On Wednesday, the New York Times published an anonymous op-ed by a "senior official in the Trump administration" who claimed to be a patriot protecting America from Trump: But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is ...read more
If you don't follow Elliott Lusztig (a pseudonym) on Twitter, you really should. He's insightful and his tweets are good for clarifying the ongoing tragedy that is American politics. One of Wednesday's threads is a helpful look at why Republicans are ignoring the threat Trump ...read more
There was a time when the Republican Party fancied itself the party of personal responsibility. Of course it was aimed directly at welfare recipients -- the "takers" -- and was never intended to trigger blowback. The party's use of racist "Southern Strategy" dog whistles has ...read more
The Banter Long Read: Republicans have a demographic problem. No, not the one about blacks and Latinos and, no, not the one about Baby Boomers dying off. This is a new one and potentially even more lethal to the long term prospects of the GOP... To continue reading this article, ...read more
Yes, folks, you read that headline correctly. In a story broken by Axios this morning, Paul Ryan, the 54th Speaker of the House of Representatives, will retire from Congress at the end of this current session, becoming the first sitting Speaker to forgo re-election in an ...read more
At this point, it's clear that Republicans are in a lot of trouble come November. Trump's erratic behavior and incompetence has depressed enthusiasm among GOP voters while his corruption and all around vileness has enraged and energized Democratic voters. It's so bad that ...read more
If you haven't watched Donald Trump's weekend rally in support of Rick Saccone, don't bother. Just turn on Fox News and watch it at double-speed for a few minutes and you'll get the idea. Trump's rallies have always sounded like Cap'n Spazzy McMethmouth doing his best impression ...read more
The NRA released another ominous ad over the weekend featuring Dana Loesch promising the enemies of her gun lobby paymasters that their time was "running out". Naturally, she was immediately raked over the coals for trying to sound like a mafia hitman. Still, this is far from ...read more
The Banter Long Read: Trump-Republicans have much to answer for. On top of electing this incompetent, misinformed Russian agent, Donald Trump, to the presidency, saddling us all with the responsibility of containing then cleaning up the decades worth of mess he's making, ...read more
Since the rise of Trump, it's been tempting to revise our collective memory of the 2012 election and make Mitt Romney seem like a good guy. After all, he smiles a lot, he seems like a loving grandfather, and he did invent Obamacare. I've gone easy on him too: on my second day of ...read more
The entire political universe is (justifiably) hyperventilating over former White House Chief Strategist and current white nationalist Steve Bannon throwing Donald Trump under the bus: Steve Bannon said the meeting Donald Trump Jr. took with a Russian government lawyer in June ...read more
The Banter Long Read: Trump is an albatross wearing a pair of cement shoes tied to an anchor strapped to the deck of the Titanic and logic dictates Republicans should be heading for the lifeboats with all due haste once they get their tax cut. There's just one tiny little ...read more
For those of you on tenterhooks concerning the disastrous new GOP tax bill, your worrying is about to get worse: John McCain, the deciding vote in killing the last two GOP attempts to destroy Obamacare, just announced he will support this bill today, saying: “I believe this ...read more
The Banter Long Read: There's a virus rapidly overtaking the Republican Party. It's called Trumpism, and it's killing the party. Don't get me wrong, I'm perfectly satisfied to see the current Trump-dominated GOP commit slow motion suicide, (hopefully) to be replaced by a party ...read more
Now that Bannon has "voluntarily" left the White House, Axios reports that he will be the attack dog of the billionaire Mercer family and he's ready to take on the "globalists" (read as: "Jews") that are running the world. In other words, despite ridiculing the KKK and Nazis, ...read more
The Banter Long Read: A few months ago, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy was caught on tape joking, "There's two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump." Although McCarthy apologized for the remarks later on, he wasn't entirely wrong.... (Word Count: 1592) To ...read more
Republicans, already reeling from Trump's disastrous presidency, now have a whole new problem to deal with: Avoiding being labeled Nazi sympathizers: New Hampshire Republican Party staffers arrived at work Thursday morning to find their Concord headquarters vandalized.A rock had ...read more
Rep. Steve King's astonishing cruelty apparently knows no bounds. The notoriously heartless Iowa congressman told the Examiner that he would find extra money for Trump's ludicrous border wall by denying vulnerable women health care and starving poor children to death. And no, ...read more
Supply side, or "trickle down" economics has been one of the central policies of the Republican party ever since Ronald Reagan came down from the mountain with the Laffer Curve carved into stone tablets. But supply side theory has probably never been more purely or completely ...read more
Now that Trump has openly obstructed justice and Republicans winked and looked the other way, there's really no going back. There can be no last minute "Come to Jesus" moment where the entire Republican Party will realize what an awful mistake they've made. While Republican ...read more
The Republicans lost their minds when they nominated a man who supported states’ rights, was endorsed by the KKK, and was accused of having his finger on the nuclear button. His convention was a disaster, with the moderates in his Party only endorsing him at metaphorical ...read more
As a flood of dark money swamps Washington in support of placing Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, the Democratic Party has a choice to make... To continue reading this article, please go here. A Banter Membership gets you access to the magazine and all our Members Only content. ...read more
No matter what you think about Donald Trump, one thing he seems to be accomplishing is his promised shakeup of the political classes in Washington. Everyone knew Democrats would find little good in a Trump administration. But what he probably didn't expect was that he would very ...read more
It's no secret that when more people vote, Republicans lose. This is the reason the GOP works so hard to suppress voting rights under the guise of "protecting our elections from voter fraud." However, even though we all know this is true, right-wing lawmakers never openly admit ...read more
On Tuesday, Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue decided that targeting undocumented immigrants just wasn't going to cut it and introduced a bill to hurt the immigrants who are doing things "the right way." The Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment Act (RAISE ...read more
On Tuesday, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) dodged questions about president-elect Donald Trump's appointment of well-known white supremacist Steve Bannon as his chief strategist. Ryan proclaimed that it is time to "look forward" and not backward at Bannon's vile history ...read more
In a sobering, brutal piece published in New York Magazine today, Andrew Sullivan lays bare the terrifying reality of what a Trump presidency would do to America. Characterizing Trump as a sociopathic, misogynistic and racist bully with "no concept of a non-zero-sum engagement", ...read more
Elizabeth Warren has had enough of the GOP's "sudden" concern for the integrity of our democracy after spending years undermining it in every way possible. It's about time the party of "personal responsibility" actually took some for a change. On Wednesday evening, Donald Trump ...read more
On Saturday evening vandals threw a Molotov cocktail through the window of the Hillsborough, North Carolina GOP, destroying the office. On a building adjacent to the Republican office the words "Nazi Republicans leave town or else” and a swastika were spray-painted on a wall. On ...read more
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has spent much of the last week screaming "rigged elections!" And now it looks like this unfounded nonsense has begun to infect his simple-minded supporters, one of whom is an elected sheriff. Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke ...read more
Two weeks ago, John Oliver joked about how American politics had reached a new low in the form of Donald Trump's candidacy. A week later, he lamented that the previous low was now barely in sight from our new vantage point somewhere deep in the earth's crust. After Saturday ...read more
Eighteen years ago, 21-year-old Matthew Shepard succumbed to the injuries sustained in a brutal hate crime six days prior. While his death led to a major legislative change in the United States, nearly two decades after his stunning murder, the LGBTQ community is still fighting ...read more
For any of you out there with video editing skills, I have a request. Please mash up the audio of Donald Trump talking about his proclivity for sexual assault with this video: You don’t need to change the footage. Just intersplice the audio. I want to belly laugh at the ...read more
On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump announced to the world that he was running for president of the United States and in the same speech called Mexicans rapists and criminals. When the day was over, the Republican base was cheering for their new leader. Now, with just four weeks left ...read more
Responding to the Buzzfeed story about Republicans privately panicking about the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency, senior editor for Business Insider Josh Barro sums up the extraordinary cowardice of the Republican Party: The fact that the party is officially standing by ...read more
Richard Wolffe has a fascinating take on the 8 year Republican led campaign to destroy President Obama that, he claims, has had the complete opposite effect. Pointing to Obama's approval ratings (52%) that are "almost identical to Reagan’s in August 1988 (53%) and a dramatic ...read more
After Donald Trump 'joked' about Second Amendment people shooting Hillary Clinton and her Supreme Court picks, it is now time for the Republican Party to put an end to this madness. Because enough is enough is enough. This means the party must officially disavow themselves from ...read more
Donald Trump's campaign is imploding in a way that's so spectacular and unprecedented that it's tempting to just sit back and marvel at it, like it were some kind of holiday fireworks display grand finale set to the crescendo of the 1812 Overture. The problem, of course, is that ...read more
The Associated Press has just reported that U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has officially reached the number of delegates needed to secure the party’s presidential nomination. In other words, the Republican Party is now in the hands of a fascist. According ...read more
After his humiliating exit from the presidential race, Marco Rubio has slowly crept back into the news cycle. In a Politico story, Rubio stated a new found love of the Senate, and said this when asked about being considered for Vice President by Donald Trump: I have no ...read more
Even though Donald Trump has yet to be officially nominated for president, the Republican Party is already brainstorming ways to repair the broken primary process that led to Trump's unlikely ascendancy. Among other ideas, the RNC is looking at proposals which, for example, ...read more
