Mike Pompeo almost got it exactly right with his critique of what’s gone wrong in the GOP circa 2023. Speaking at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, D.C., the former Kansas congressman and secretary of state put his finger on the deep problems in the Republican Party.
“The future of our American miracle is on the line,” he said “We should have won big” in the 2022 election. “I’m happy that we won the House, but we barely captured it. … We lost three elections in a row, and the popular vote in seven of the last eight.”
After the November red wave that insular right-wing pundits had been promising turned out to be more of a puddle, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley took to The Washington Post (because you can’t trust the mainstream media, you know?) to pen an op-ed that began with a claim designed to gain maximum attention for one of the loudest GOP voices in Washington:
“The old Republican Party is dead,” he wrote. “It has been wasting away for years now, and this month’s midterm results are the finishing blow. If Republicans learn nothing else from this election, they must learn that much.”
Hawley called to remake his party for “America’s working people” — a tall order for the banker’s son who graduated from Stanford and Yale Law. But he’s not wrong in identifying the rot.