The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore has not exactly brought out the best from Republicans, their allies, and their base. Around this time 24 hours ago, for example, a Fox Business host was trying to draw a connection between the disaster and border policies.
In the hours that followed, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Utah blamed the bridge collapse on “diversity” programs. A Republican congressional candidate in Florida made the same argument, as did a variety of far-right media figures.
Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, meanwhile, raised the prospect of the disaster being the result of an “intentional attack,” while Steve Bannon told his audience the collapse could’ve been the result of terrorism.
As the day progressed, the avalanche of weird theories and offensive finger-pointing intensified, tied together with a common thread: “The official line shouldn’t be believed,” conservatives effectively argued. “There are other nefarious truths out there that will bolster the right’s preconceived ideas.”
It is, of course, discouraging to realize that too much of the GOP base will find this compelling, but just as unsettling was seeing Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt tell Fox News’ Laura Ingraham last night that all of this should probably be blamed on the Biden White House.
“The problem here is, this is the consequence, the sort of distrust of terrible leadership, when you have an administration that has weaponized the Department of Justice, tried to throw in political opponents in jail, tried to throw them off the ballot, conducted a vast censorship enterprise to silence Americans who don’t buy into their narrative — whether it was on efficacy of masks, or transmissibility of Covid after you’ve had the vaccine, or the Hunter Biden laptop.”
Just to clarify, the Missouri senator didn’t suggest the White House was responsible for the bridge collapse. Rather, Schmitt suggested the White House was responsible for the fact that much of the right doesn’t believe officials when they talk about the bridge collapse. But the Republican’s line was nevertheless rather bonkers. To hear Schmitt tell it, the White House has engaged in dramatic abuses, which in turn has fueled distrust, which in turn created a crisis of confidence in the wake of a disaster. That might be a more compelling line if those dramatic abuses were real, but in reality, the Biden White House didn’t weaponize the Justice Department, didn’t try to incarcerate its political foes, didn’t try to remove Trump from the ballot, and never launched a “vast censorship enterprise.” Indeed, the far-right senator appears to have gotten the entire dynamic backwards: It’s not imaginary White House misconduct fueling public distrust; it’s Republican conspiracy theorists peddling nonsense that’s left too many conservatives unsure what to believe about reality.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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