“It’s a f*cking nightmare!” Republican aides whine about how Biden is running the tables on them
“Nobody’s listening to me or my terrible ideas!”
This is becoming a very common refrain from Senate Republicans as the Biden presidency rolls into its fourth month. Long accustomed to acting with impunity during the Trump years and perhaps having taken Biden’s bipartisan talk a little too seriously, the GOP is having a very hard time adjusting to life in the minority — and they are all too eager to whine about it.
The so-called “moderate Republicans” in the Senate, who almost universally vote along party lines despite their self-congratulatory aspirations of “moderation,” are especially unhappy at their treatment by the Biden administration, to say the least. One staffer from this so-called “G-10,” moaned to POLITICO that, “It’s a f*cking nightmare…Biden is a horrible villain for us. There are deeply entrenched narratives that have some truth but are no longer totally true. Reporters believe them despite all evidence to the contrary.”
POLITICO writes — with a straight face — that the Republicans are mad that they can’t shake the “hardwired media narrative” that “Biden is a reasonable, deal-making moderate and that Republicans talk about compromise but really just want to obstruct.”
They probably have trouble shaking it because it’s not a media narrative, it’s just the truth. They seem incapable of understanding that politics, compromise, and bipartisanship are two-way streets. After 12 straight years of fanatical Republican obstruction against anything and everything Democrats have tried to do out of sheer partisan spite, one would expect that perhaps some sort of peace offering and gesture of goodwill would be in order to demonstrate that Republicans were not solely acting out of bad faith like they always do.
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They had a prime opportunity to do so with the recent vote on Biden’s blockbuster COVID-19 relief bill, but not a single Republican, not even any of these “moderate Republicans,” voted for Biden’s blockbuster COVID-19 relief bill. How they expect anyone is supposed to see this as anything other than more of the same obstruction is beyond our understanding, but then again, we aren’t immensely wealthy octogenarians entirely out of touch with the realities that everyday Americans face.
The aide went on to complain that “everything [the Democrats] support is defined as either Covid relief or infrastructure and everything they oppose is like … Jim Crow voter suppression and evil… And you constantly just feel like you’re in this gaslighting chamber of insanity. But it’s working.”
It is absolutely breathtaking to hear Republicans complain about a “gaslighting chamber of insanity” when that was an accurate description of the entire White House under Donald Trump. In reality, he’s once again simply stating the truth. The Democrats are intent on passing Covid relief and revitalizing our long-neglected national infrastructure while Republicans are tirelessly working to pass literally hundreds of repressive Jim Crow-style voter suppression bills and discrimination bills against transgender Americans for no reason other than sheer bigotry.
One has to question what POLITICO is trying to accomplish by publishing these ridiculous complaints without pointing out the obvious issues with the legitimacy of their gripes or really any kind of pushback or context at all, but we have to admit it is gratifying to see the GOP finally getting a taste of their own medicine. Go cry about it!
Original reporting by Ryan Lizza, Rachael Bade, Eugene Daniels, and Tara Palmeri at POLITICO
