ArcaMax

What a week. In a prebuttal to President Joe Biden’s prime-time “Battle for the Soul of the Nation” speech, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Thursday called on the president to “apologize for slandering tens of millions of Americans as fascists.”

McCarthy was upset by the way Biden said in a Delaware fundraiser that the “extreme MAGA philosophy” in the Republican Party’s Trump wing is “like semi-fascism.”

I say, if the shoe fits, wear it. Like Biden I know that all Republicans are not MAGA-red-to-the-bone Trump loyalists. But quite often it’s hard to tell the difference.

Look, for example, at how polls and right-wing pundit chatter was revealing some ambivalence in Trump’s supporters about whether it was time to move on to some other rising party stars such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. That sentiment quickly faded when the court-sanctioned FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago home for national security documents immediately triggered a surge in loyalty to the Big Donald himself.

“I want to be very clear,” Biden said. “Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans.”

I agree. But Trump’s support remain so strong in party ranks that sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference.

That fierce loyalty seemed to embolden Trump this past week as he unleashed a 24-hour tweetstorm on his social media platform Truth Social of some 88 messages carrying various conspiracy theories.

“Declare the rightful winner or, and this would be the minimal solution, declare the 2020 Election irreparably compromised and have a new Election, immediately!,” he wrote.

Even die-hard conservative scholars agreed that possibility was bonkers, coming almost two years too late.

Yet, emboldened by his MAGA enablers, Trump grabbed attention prior to Biden’s prime-time address by promising to issue full pardons and a government apology to rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

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