The GOP feud between Donald Trump and Roy Moore gets even uglier
Despite an embarrassing loss in a deep red state and a party that’s desperate to avoid him, Roy Moore somehow manages to stay in the news. He has yet to announce whether he’s running again for the U.S. Senate in 2020, but all signs suggest he’s not getting out of politics anytime soon, disgraceful as his past may be.
Moore is expected to make an official announcement in June over whether or not he’s running again for Doug Jones’ current seat – and not many Republicans are thrilled about that, including Donald Trump himself, who tweeted last week that Roy Moore won’t be able to win in November and urged him not to run. It’s interesting to note that neither Trump nor Republicans at large are touching on why Moore is so toxic, with Trump even saying that he had nothing against Moore besides his unelectability. The unsaid part of that tweet is that Trump and most of his fellow Republicans are perfectly fine with the fact that nine women have accused Moore of sexual misconduct – they just wish it didn’t hurt their chance of keeping the Senate.
Moore has an entirely different idea of why he lost, still claiming that his seat was stolen. After Moore lost in 2017, right-wing media spread a bunch of nonsensical racist theories about minorities being bussed into Alabama to vote for Doug Jones. Moore still blames voter fraud for the loss, but he thinks all these warnings about his candidacy are evidence that the Republican Party itself is behind his failure, not Jones or even the Democrats.
Moore ranted accordingly on a local right-wing talk show, saying establishment Republicans fear him because he won’t join their club in the Senate – that they’ll rig the election in favor of anyone but him. If it sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same harebrained nonsense Donald Trump screamed through 2016 about the election being rigged against him. Whether or not Moore runs, Republicans are still feeling the effects of their failure to stop Trump in 2016 – candidates who are even more reprehensible and dimwitted than he is, inspired by the nonsense Trump tweets freely. It may have been what helped them win in 2016, but now it’s quickly chiseling the party apart.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making