This past Tuesday Donald Trump made history by becoming the first former president to be hauled into court and be indicted on felony charges and, for Republicans, the rest of the week went downhill from that point.
That is the opinion of the Washington Post's longtime analyst Dan Balz, who surveyed the week's damage that included a key election loss in Wisconsin, infighting among the GOP's House leadership and concluded with the terrible optics of the far-right Republican-dominated Tennessee House expelling two Black lawmakers for protesting the carnage being inflicted on America's children due to the easy availability of high-powered weaponry.
As Balz wrote, it was a "uniformly bad' week to be a Republican and many conservatives may not recognize just how bad it was.
According to the analyst, Republicans just watched the man who could be at the top of the 2024 GOP presidential ticket slammed with 34 felony charges while New Yorkers jeered him outside the courtroom.
"Trump’s arraignment last Tuesday in New York on criminal charges — however the case turns out — and his subsequent speech later that evening from his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, which was replete with lies, distortions and grievances, highlighted the degree to which the former president remains at once the dominant force in the Republican Party, a threat to democratic norms and institutions, and a compromised candidate for president in 2024," he wrote.
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Add to that, in Wisconsin, conservatives suffered a devastating blow with an election loss for a Supreme Court seat, with Balz writing, "Wisconsin voters showed again how damaging the Supreme Court’s decision last year to overturn Roe v. Wade has been to the Republicans, no matter how fervently they had worked to make it happen. Tuesday’s decisive vote in Wisconsin, which flips the balance of power on the state Supreme Court from conservative to liberal, has profound implications not just for the state’s politics but also potentially for the nation."
The ejection of the two Black Tennessee lawmakers capped off the week and outraged the country in light of the fact that a white Democrat, who took part in the same protest, held onto her seat, leading to accusations of racism.
"In Tennessee, meanwhile, the expulsion on Thursday of two young, Black Democratic legislators from the state House took political retribution to a new level and, not incidentally, injected race into the politics of the moment in ways that were inescapable," Balz wrote. "After the March 27 killing of six people, including three children, at a Nashville school, and protests calling for action on guns, Republican legislators found a new way to shock the conscience by punishing two of the protesters by stripping them of their elected offices."
According to the analyst, Donald Trump is at the center of the GOP's problems this week since he emboldened the GOP to move to the far-right over the last six years -- and now it is coming back to haunt them.
"The issues around Trump have been present since he first ran for president eight years ago. His message now as then touches chords of grievance, alienation and racism that had begun to emerge during Barack Obama’s presidency but which have burst out more dangerously since," he concluded.
