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Tag: taxpayer money

  • Orlando, Orange County push back on DOGE wasteful spending accusations

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    548. SEE YOU GUYS THEN. SEE YOU THEN. TONY. ALL RIGHT. THE STATE DOSE TEAM CONTINUES TO TARGET WHAT THEY CALL WASTEFUL SPENDING BY CITIES AND COUNTIES. ORLANDO IS TAKING THE LATEST HIT FROM REPUBLICAN LEADERSHIP. BUT AS WESH TWO NEWS POLITICAL REPORTER GREG FOX EXPLAINS, THE STATE IS LEAVING OUT KEY INFORMATION. ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE. OUR PROPERTY TAXES ARE HIGH BECAUSE OF YOU. USING RHYME AND METER, REPUBLICAN CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER BLAISE INGOGLIA BLASTED SPENDING IN THE CITY OF ORLANDO DURING THE PAST TWO MONTHS, THE CFO AND STATE DOSAGE TEAM HAVE BEEN REVIEWING SPENDING IN THE CITY AND IN ORANGE COUNTY. THEY FLAGGED SEVERAL PROGRAMS, INCLUDING $460,000 SPENT COUNTING TREES, $150,000 SPENT ON ASSISTANCE FOR UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS, $67,500 OVER FIVE YEARS FOR HOT YOGA CLASSES, AND $6,000 ANNUALLY FOR A POET LAUREATE. THE PEOPLE KEEP ASKING, WHERE DOES IT GO? THE COFFERS RUN EMPTY, YET TAXES STILL GROW IN THE HALLS OF THE CITY. ONE LESSON IS CLEAR WASTEFUL SPENDING ECHOES YEAR AFTER YEAR. I CAUGHT UP WITH MAYOR BUDDY DYER AND HE SAYS THE CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER MAY HAVE WANTED TO DO A LITTLE MORE HOMEWORK BEFORE MAKING HIS REMARKS. IT’S ALL POLITICS. IT SHOULD BE BENEATH THEM. MAYOR DYER EXPLAINED THAT THE YOGA PROGRAM IS PART OF EMPLOYEE HEALTH AND WELLNESS, AND THE ASSERTION THAT THE CITY IS WASTING TAXPAYER MONEY. COUNTING TREES DOESN’T HOLD WATER. ACCORDING TO THE MAYOR, BECAUSE THE PROGRAM OF ENSURING THE HEALTH OF THE CITY’S TREE CANOPY ISN’T FUNDED WITH LOCAL TAX DOLLARS, STATE AND FEDERAL FUNDING. AND WE HAVE A TREE TRUST FUND WHERE IF YOU TAKE DOWN A TREE, YOU’VE GOT TO PAY INTO IT. SO NO GENERAL FUND RELATED TO THAT. SO THEY DIDN’T DIG VERY DEEP IN TERMS OF THEIR ANALYSIS AND CRITICIZING MONEY SPENT ON THE CITY’S POET LAUREATE. SEAN, WELCOME. DURING THE PAST FOUR YEARS, THE MAYOR POINTS OUT IT WAS MODELED AFTER THE STATE’S POET LAUREATE PROGRAM THAT’S BEEN AROUND FOR NEARLY A CENTURY, AND MONEY THAT GOES TO THE ORLANDO CENTER FOR JUSTICE TO ASSIST THOSE WITH IMMIGRATION CASES IS NOT FROM THE GENERAL FUND, BUT THROUGH GRANTS. RESPONDING TO CONTINUED CRITICISM FROM THE CFO ABOUT ORANGE COUNTY SPENDING, MAYOR JERRY DEMINGS RELEASED A STATEMENT SAYING ORANGE COUNTY TAKES ITS RESPONSIBILITY TO TAXPAYERS SERIOUSLY, AND WE STAND BY THE INVESTMENTS WE MAKE IN OUR COMMUNITY COVERING ORANGE COUNTY. GREG FOX, WESH TWO NEWS. THE STATE HAS GIVEN NO TIMETABLE ON WHEN THEY

    Orlando, Orange County push back on DOGE wasteful spending accusations

    Updated: 6:56 PM EDT Oct 2, 2025

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    “Roses are red, violets are blue. Our property taxes are high because of you,” Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia said during a Jacksonville news conference. The Republican used rhyme and meter to blast spending in the city of Orlando and Orange County, spending on programs that conservative leadership in Tallahassee considers wasteful and unnecessary. During the past two months, the CFO and state DOGE team have been reviewing spending in the city and county. Ingoglia flagged several programs in Orlando, including $460,000 spent “counting” trees, $150,000 spent on assistance for undocumented immigrants, $67,500 over five years for hot yoga classes and $6,000 annually for a poet laureate. Focusing on the poet laureate, Ingoglia said, “The people keep asking, where does it go? The coffers run empty, yet taxes still grow. In the halls of the city, one lesson is clear: wasteful spending echoes year after year.” WESH 2 News talked with Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer, who said the CFO may not have done all the homework he should have before making his remarks, with Dyer adding, “It’s all politics. It should be beneath them.”Dyer explained that the yoga program is part of employee health and wellness, which is encouraged in cities and counties across the country. The assertion that the city is wasting taxpayer money counting trees doesn’t hold water, according to the mayor, because the program of ensuring the health of the city’s tree canopy isn’t funded with tax dollars, with Dyer adding, “That’s funded with state and federal grants. It is a State Department of Agriculture program that we’re doing, and we have a tree trust fund that, when you take down a tree, you have to pay into it. So there is no general fund in that. So they didn’t dig very deep in terms of their analysis.” Addressing the money spent on the city’s poet laureate, who has been Shawn Welcome during the past four years, the mayor points out that it was modeled after the state’s poet laureate program, that’s been around since 1927.It’s worth noting that the state does not pay a stipend to the poet laureate. Orlando had been paying less annually, but for the new poet laureate named this month, the annual stipend will amount to $6,000, up from $4,000 annually for Welcome. And money that goes to the Orlando Center for Justice, to assist those with immigration cases, is not from the general fund, but through grants. Responding to continued criticism from the CFO about Orange County spending, Mayor Jerry Demings released a statement saying, “Orange County takes its responsibility to taxpayers seriously, and we stand by the investments we make in our community.”

    ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. —

    “Roses are red, violets are blue. Our property taxes are high because of you,” Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia said during a Jacksonville news conference.

    The Republican used rhyme and meter to blast spending in the city of Orlando and Orange County, spending on programs that conservative leadership in Tallahassee considers wasteful and unnecessary.

    During the past two months, the CFO and state DOGE team have been reviewing spending in the city and county.

    Ingoglia flagged several programs in Orlando, including $460,000 spent “counting” trees, $150,000 spent on assistance for undocumented immigrants, $67,500 over five years for hot yoga classes and $6,000 annually for a poet laureate.

    Focusing on the poet laureate, Ingoglia said, “The people keep asking, where does it go? The coffers run empty, yet taxes still grow. In the halls of the city, one lesson is clear: wasteful spending echoes year after year.”

    WESH 2 News talked with Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer, who said the CFO may not have done all the homework he should have before making his remarks, with Dyer adding, “It’s all politics. It should be beneath them.”

    Dyer explained that the yoga program is part of employee health and wellness, which is encouraged in cities and counties across the country.

    The assertion that the city is wasting taxpayer money counting trees doesn’t hold water, according to the mayor, because the program of ensuring the health of the city’s tree canopy isn’t funded with tax dollars, with Dyer adding, “That’s funded with state and federal grants. It is a State Department of Agriculture program that we’re doing, and we have a tree trust fund that, when you take down a tree, you have to pay into it. So there is no general fund in that. So they didn’t dig very deep in terms of their analysis.”

    Addressing the money spent on the city’s poet laureate, who has been Shawn Welcome during the past four years, the mayor points out that it was modeled after the state’s poet laureate program, that’s been around since 1927.

    It’s worth noting that the state does not pay a stipend to the poet laureate. Orlando had been paying less annually, but for the new poet laureate named this month, the annual stipend will amount to $6,000, up from $4,000 annually for Welcome.

    And money that goes to the Orlando Center for Justice, to assist those with immigration cases, is not from the general fund, but through grants.

    Responding to continued criticism from the CFO about Orange County spending, Mayor Jerry Demings released a statement saying, “Orange County takes its responsibility to taxpayers seriously, and we stand by the investments we make in our community.”

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  • Seven years, $13M in tax dollars: What happened to Cambridge Harbor?

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    Seven years and more than $13 million in taxpayer money later, an Eastern Shore nonprofit tasked with transforming Cambridge’s waterfront has produced little more than a slab of concrete and a brick promenade along the Choptank River.

    “We have been spending a lot of money and we still have an empty field,” said Republican state Del. Tom Hutchinson, who represents Caroline, Dorchester, Talbot, and Wicomico counties. “It is frankly time to get shovels in the ground and make something happen. It’s been a very, very long process.”

    At the same time, group officials say they need more money to get the work done, with a memorandum scheduled to go out to potential investors next January.

    Since Cambridge Waterfront Development, Inc. (CWDI) first formed in 2018, it has received $13.16 million in grants and over 17 acres of free land, and it has paid out more than $5 million to contractors, according to the latest publicly available financial information. The nonprofit was created by the state of Maryland, Dorchester County and the City of Cambridge.

    Yet the only visible progress is a partially built 900 ft. brick promenade that was supposed to be completed this summer and now may be finished by the end of this month.

    The 34-acre development, named “Cambridge Harbor,” is nestled between the Choptank River Bridge on Rt. 50 and Cambridge Creek in the City of Cambridge.

    On paper, plans call for a boutique anchor hotel, a fishing pier, a 1.5-acre park, restaurants, a promenade for bicycling and walking, an expanded public beach, and a blend of commercial and residential development.

    State and local officials said the project appears to be years away from any substantive progress.

    Pier funding has yet to be approved by the state. A hotel developer hasn’t been hired and master plans haven’t been approved by the city.

    “I don’t think CWDI did anything right in terms of facilitating the successful redevelopment of the Cambridge Harbor site,” Former Cambridge City Manager Tom Carroll said.

    He resigned his position in March 2024 in frustration, Carroll said, with the project’s lack of progress.

    CWDI Board President Angie Hengst said she’s heard the concerns and acknowledges the delays. She blames the lack of visible results on the 2021 COVID-19 epidemic and poor working relationships between CWDI, city and county officials.

    Big vision, slow progress

    Part of the problem is how much the project is dependent on unconfirmed plans.

    The state intends to tear down the current 2,500 ft. pier along the Choptank River Bridge, which is old and unusable, then build and manage a new one. However, there’s no money budgeted to do any of that.

    “Funding for both the demolition of the old pier and construction of the new pier is subject to future budget allocations,” said Eric Luedtke, director of Capital Projects for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.

    Among the reasons it hasn’t been in state budget discussions is that the city, county and CWDI couldn’t agree on a location for the new pier. That was resolved this summer, with the three settling on a preferred site. Even so, Luedtke said construction discussions were only in the early planning stages, as not even the length of the new pier has been decided.

    He also would not give an estimate for how much demolition or construction would cost.

    There are also questions about the hotel. CWDI officials said they’re in “final negotiations” with Pinnacle Hospitality Group to serve as the hotel developer. Hengst said she expects a deal by the end of October — although a nearly identical pledge was made in 2023.

    If a deal gets approved in October, the actual hotel design work wouldn’t be expected to start until January 2026, CWDI officials estimate. Calls to Pinnacle were not returned by The Sun’s deadline.

    Regardless of which company operates the hotel, it is currently scheduled to be placed right next to a yacht maintenance facility. In recent CWDI meetings, Cambridge residents questioned whether the noise from a working yacht facility would drive away tourists and how the hotel would operate in the off-season. CWDI officials, meanwhile, believe the yacht facility and a “working waterfront” could be an attraction.

    Hengst told The Baltimore Sun the group did a hotel feasibility study in June 2021.

    “However, the study is stale and was completed while coming out of the pandemic,” she added.

    The Sun requested a copy of the study, but Hengst said she didn’t know where it was. She added that Pinnacle’s interest in working with CWDI shows the hotel is viable.

    “Since we have a hotelier wanting to develop the site, it does confirm that it’s a desirable location,” she said.

    Money goes for demolition

    Multiple residents have also raised questions at both CWDI meetings and those of the Cambridge council in recent months, about where the nonprofit’s money went.

    The group received $13.158 million in federal, state and local grants over the past six years, according to both the CWDI’s tax filings and Hengst. That includes $8.849 million in state grants; $2.4 million from federal sources; a total of $1.5 million in ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) funds from Cambridge, Dorchester County and the state; $204,000 directly from Cambridge and $205,000 directly from Dorchester County.

    According to tax filings and other financial records, 27% went to construction, 24% went to design, 24% went to buy property, 18% to demolition and 7% to operating costs.

    How was the money spent?

    • CWDI executive director annual salary – $100,000

    • Demolition costs to tear down Dorchester General Hospital – $2.45 million

    • Cost of purchasing Dorchester General Hospital and 17-acre property from University of Maryland Shore Regional Health – $2 million

    • Project management bill for contractors – $936,004

    • Engineering bill for contractors – $581,514

    • Architect services – $381,096

    • Insurance broker fees – $112,557

    • Cost of purchasing Richardson Maritime Museum and surrounding property – $818,000

    State officials say the money was used as intended.

    “The Department’s awards have been used as intended for demolition and acquisition,” said Allison Foster, the communications director for the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development. “The dilapidated hospital buildings have been successfully demolished and the site acquired, clearing the way for new development.”

    That new development stands at 34 acres now, thanks to both of these land purchases and additional property given by the city. But there’s nothing to see yet and for that, CWDI officials partly blame a lawsuit.

    A costly legal fight

    In 2024, CWDI looked to sell 2 acres of the city-donated land to Yacht Maintenance Company, which is owned by George Robinson, the brother-in-law of former CWDI board member Jeff Powell. The City of Cambridge argued that the land deal violated the original agreement, which required the nonprofit to advertise for and eventually choose a master developer for the property before agreeing to any land transfers. Instead, the CWDI board had appointed itself as master developer with no public process.

    Both sides agreed to dismiss the case on Aug. 21, 2024, after Del. Hutchinson stepped in as mediator. In the wake of the meditation, founding CWDI board member Rich Zeidman resigned, along with CWDI executive director Matt Leonard. Attempts to reach both men were unsuccessful by presstime. Caroll also resigned his position with the city at that time. Meanwhile, CWDI got permission to sell the land to Yacht Maintenance.

    Hutchinson said change in leadership on both sides was needed, “in order to regain the trust and to rebuild the CWDI board.”

    “We had to get the city to drop the lawsuit,” Hutchinson said. “When you get to a point that you have a lawsuit, the only people that win are the attorneys with the fees. It was important to get people back to the table to talk collectively.”

    Hengst said the fight was a major setback.

    “That certainly stopped things dead in their tracks,” she said.

    Moving forward

    But now, Hengst said, the group is moving forward. She points to infrastructure and design plans, which CWDI is working with the city planning staff to get approved. She also points to the hotel developer, with whom she hopes to have a contract signed by the end of October.

    Accomplishing Phase I comes with a price tag of $9.24 million. That includes $5.24 million for public infrastructure, $800,000 for design and development costs, a $300,000 match for a grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration, $2.4 million for that brick promenade and $500,000 to repair the wharf.

    Using the land sale proceeds, the new EDA grant and $1.25 million left over in ARPA funds, the nonprofit says it has all but $2.89 million covered.

    Despite repeated delays, Hutchinson said he remains hopeful the project will eventually succeed.

    “It’s been a challenge — there have been disagreements and some legal challenges along the way,” he said. “I think we are past that.”

    Have a news tip? Contact Eastern Shore bureau chief Josh Davis at jdavis@baltsun.com or 443-366-1844. You can also contact reporter Glynis Kazanjian at gkazanjian@baltsun.com or 301-674-7135.

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  • Nancy Pelosi: ‘Follow the Money’

    Nancy Pelosi: ‘Follow the Money’

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    The former speaker of the House discussed Silicon Valley Bank, January 6 revisionist history, the coming election, and more in a South by Southwest interview focused on money and greed.

    Travis P Ball / Getty for SXSW

    House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s message at the annual South by Southwest festival could be summarized in three words: Follow the money.

    Pelosi uttered that specific phrase—and similar versions of it—several times during her interview with Evan Smith, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, as part of the magazine’s Future of Democracy summit this morning in Austin, Texas.

    Pelosi, who represents California’s 11th congressional district, began by discussing the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the anxiety sweeping through not only her home district but the tech and financial industries as a whole. “I don’t think there’s any appetite in this country for bailing out a bank,” she said. “What we would hope to see by tomorrow morning is for some other bank to buy the bank.” She said there were multiple potential buyers, but she couldn’t reveal their names. Pelosi pointed out that former President Donald Trump had authorized the reduction of certain Dodd-Frank protections that had been instituted following the 2008 financial crash: “If they were still in place and the bank had to honor them, this might have been avoided,” she offered. Rather than repeating our recent history and using taxpayer money to rescue the failed institution, Pelosi said the focus should be on protecting depositors and small businesses at risk of closing or not making payroll. “We do not want contagion,” she said.

    Franklin Foer: You’ll miss gerontocracy when it’s gone

    Pelosi pointed to money—the reckless use and exploitation of it—as the root of virtually every problem facing America and the world today. Whether the potential fallout of a failed bank like SVB or the rise of autocracy around the world, it all comes down to money, money, money, and little else. “Money buying Russian oil is paying for the assault on democracy in Ukraine,” Pelosi said. She accused China of “buying” votes from smaller countries at the United Nations, and said the U.S. must join with the European Union “in using the leverage of this big market to have the playing field be more even.”

    Pelosi refused to say Trump’s name even once during her one-hour session, referring to the 45th president instead by “What’s his name” under her breath. Still, she condemned the extremism and anarchy that had overtaken American politics since Trump began his rise nearly eight years ago. Her husband, Paul Pelosi, who was struck in the head with a hammer by a home invader last fall, joined her on today’s trip to Texas, which was unusual, given that he’s still recovering from the attack. “I was the target,” she said. “He paid the price.”

    She spoke of the January 6 insurrection with sadness and disgust—anarchists “making poo-poo on the floor of the Capitol”—and acknowledged the rioters’ goal to put a bullet in her head that day. Her successor, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, recently gave a trove of January 6 material to Fox News in the name of governmental transparency. Fox’s biggest star, Tucker Carlson, downplayed the severity of the Capitol storming in a broadcast last week. “Something must be wrong with Tucker Carlson,” Pelosi said. “There’s money that runs a lot of it.”

    David From: No tears for Kevin McCarthy

    Taking a brief conciliatory note, she said she was hoping “for the best” for McCarthy as he continues his first year as House speaker. “We need to listen, and I hope that Kevin will listen to other than just the very radical, right-wing fringe of his party,” she said, apparently gesturing at Trump and other election deniers. When asked about the prospect of Trump again becoming the GOP nominee in 2024, she was ready with a canned line: “If he is, we impeached him twice, and he’s gonna lose twice.” (Left unsaid was that neither impeachment resulted in Trump’s removal from office.)

    As for President Joe Biden, Pelosi called him a “magnificent leader” and said that she “certainly hopes” he will run again. (She joked that he’s younger than she is.) Nevertheless, Pelosi seemed slightly agitated that Biden had yet to formally declare his candidacy, leaving other potential candidates in the Democratic party with few options. “I think it would be efficient for us to have a president seek reelection, and we should be moving on with it when we can. Whatever decision he makes, we’d like to know.”

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    John Hendrickson

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  • Republicans Need to Stop Being Jerks

    Republicans Need to Stop Being Jerks

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    Let’s say you’re a politician in a close race and your opponent suffers a stroke. What do you do?

    If you are Mehmet Oz running as a Republican for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, what you do is mock your opponent’s affliction. In August, the Oz campaign released a list of “concessions” it would offer to the Democrat John Fetterman in a candidates’ debate, including:

    “We will allow John to have all of his notes in front of him along with an earpiece so he can have the answers given to him by his staff, in real time.” And: “We will pay for any additional medical personnel he might need to have on standby.”

    Oz’s derision of his opponent’s medical condition continued right up until Oz lost the race by more than 250,000 votes. Oz’s defeat flipped the Pennsylvania seat from Republican to Democrat, dooming GOP hopes of a Senate majority in 2023.

    A growing number of Republicans are now pointing their finger at Donald Trump for the party’s disappointments in the 2022 elections, with good reason. Trump elevated election denial as an issue and burdened his party with a lot of election-denying candidates—and voters decisively repudiated them.

    But not all of Trump’s picks were obviously bad. Oz was for years a successful TV pitchman, trusted by millions of Americans for health advice. The first Muslim nominated for a Senate run by a major party, he advanced Republican claims to represent 21st-century America. Oz got himself tangled up between competing positions on abortion, sometimes in consecutive sentences, precisely because he hoped to position himself as moderate on such issues.

    But Oz’s decision to campaign as a jerk hurt him. When his opponent got sick, Oz could have drawn on his own medical background for compassion and understanding. Before he succumbed to the allure of TV, Oz was an acclaimed doctor whose innovations transformed the treatment of heart disease. He could have reminded voters of his best human qualities rather than displaying his worst.

    The choice to do the opposite was his, not Trump’s.

    Adam Serwer: The cruelty is the point

    And Oz was not unique. Many of the unsuccessful Republican candidates in 2022 offered voters weird, extreme, or obnoxious personas. Among the worst was Blake Masters, a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Arizona. He released photos and campaign videos of himself playing with guns, looking like a sociopath. He lost by nearly five points. Trump endorsed Masters in the end, but Trump wasn’t the one who initially selected or funded him. That unsavory distinction belongs to the tech billionaire and Republican donor Peter Thiel, who invested big and early in the campaign of his former university student.

    Performative trolling did not always lead to failure. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis indulged in obnoxious stunts in 2022. He promoted anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists. He used the power of government to punish corporations that dissented from his culture-war policies. He spent $1.5 million of taxpayer money to send asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard.

    But DeSantis was an incumbent executive with a record of accomplishment. Antics intended to enrapture the national Fox News audience could be offset by actions to satisfy his local electorate: restoring the Everglades, raising teacher pay, and reopening public schools early despite COVID risks.

    DeSantis’s many Republican supporters must now ponder: What happens when and if the governor takes his show on the road? “Pragmatic on state concerns, divisive on national issues!” plays a little differently in a presidential race than it does at the state level. But the early indications are that he’s sticking with divisiveness: A month after his reelection, DeSantis is bidding for the anti-vax vote by promoting extremist allegations from the far fringes that modern vaccines threaten public health.

    A generation ago, politicians invested great effort in appearing agreeable: Ronald Reagan’s warm chuckle, Bill Clinton’s down-home charm, George W. Bush’s smiling affability. By contrast, Donald Trump delighted in name-calling, rudeness, and open disdain. Not even his supporters would have described Trump as an agreeable person. Yet he made it to the White House all the same—in part because of this trollish style of politics, which has encouraged others to emulate him.

    Ilana E. Strauss: How science explains why some politicians are jerks

    Has our hyper-polarized era changed the old rules of politics? James Poniewozik’s 2019 book, Audience of One, argues that Trump’s ascendancy was the product of a huge shift in media culture. The three big television networks of yore had sought to create “the least objectionable program”; they aimed to make shows that would offend the fewest viewers. As audiences fractured, however, the marketplace rewarded content that excited ever narrower segments of American society. Reagan and Clinton were replaced by Trump for much the same reason Walter Cronkite was replaced by Sean Hannity.

    It’s an ingenious theory. But, as Poniewozik acknowledges, democratic politics in a two-party system remains an inescapably broadcast business. Trump’s material sold well enough in 2016 to win (with help from FBI Director James Comey’s intervention against Hillary Clinton, Russian hackers amplified by the Trump campaign, and the mechanics of the Electoral College). But in 2020, Trump met the political incarnation of the Least Objectionable Program: Joe Biden, who is to politics what Jay Leno was to late-night entertainment.

    Trump-led Republicans have now endured four bad elections in a row. In 2018, they lost the House. In 2020, they lost the presidency. In 2021, they lost the Senate. In 2022, they won back the House—barely—but otherwise failed to score the gains one expects of the opposition party in a midterm. They suffered a net loss of one Senate seat and two governorships. They failed to flip a single chamber in any state legislature. In fact, the Democrats gained control of four: one each in Minnesota and Pennsylvania, and both in Michigan.

    Plausible theories about why Republicans fared so badly in 2022 abound. The economy? Gas prices fell in the second half of 2022, while the economy continued to grow. Abortion? The Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in June, and Republican officeholders began musing almost immediately about a national ban, while draconian restrictions began spreading through the states. Attacks on democracy? In contest after contest, Republicans expressed their contempt for free elections, and independent voters responded by rejecting them.

    All of these factors clearly played a role. But don’t under-​weight the impact of the performative obnoxiousness that now pervades Republican messaging. Conservatives have built career paths for young people that start on extremist message boards and lead to jobs on Republican campaigns, then jobs in state and federal offices, and then jobs in conservative media.

    Former top Trump-administration officials set up a well-funded dark-money group, Citizens for Sanity, that spent millions to post trolling messages on local TV in battleground states, intended to annoy viewers into voting Republican, such as “Protect pregnant men from climate discrimination.” The effect was just to make the Republicans seem juvenile.

    In 2021, then–House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy posted a video of himself reading aloud from Dr. Seuss to protest the Seuss estate’s withdrawing some works for being racially insensitive (although he took care to read Green Eggs and Ham, not one of the withdrawn books).

    Trump himself often seemed to borrow his scripts from a Borscht Belt insult comic—for instance, performing imagined dialogues making fun of his opponent’s adult children during the 2020 campaign.

    This is not a “both sides” story. Democratic candidates don’t try to energize their base by “owning the conservatives”; that’s just not a phrase you hear. The Democratic coalition is bigger and looser than the Republican coalition, and it’s not clear that Democrats even have an obvious “base” the way that Republicans do. The people who heeded Representative Jim Clyburn’s endorsement of Joe Biden in South Carolina do not necessarily have much in common with those who knocked on doors for Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign. Trying to energize all of the Democratic Party’s many different “bases” with deliberate offensiveness against perceived cultural adversaries would likely fizzle at best, and backfire at worst. On the Republican side, however, the politics of performance can be—or seem—rewarding, at least in the short run.

    This pattern of behavior bids fair to repeat itself in 2024. As I write these words at the beginning of 2023, the conservative world is most excited not by the prospect of big legislative action from a Republican House majority, and not by Trump’s declared candidacy for president in 2024 or by DeSantis’s as-yet-undeclared one, but by the chance to repeat its 2020 attacks on the personal misconduct of President Biden’s son Hunter.

    In the summer of 2019, the Trump administration put enormous pressure on the newly elected Zelensky administration in Ukraine to announce some kind of criminal investigation of the Biden family. This first round of Trump’s project to manufacture an anti-Biden scandal exploded into Trump’s first impeachment.

    The failure of round one did not deter the Trump campaign. It tried again in 2020. This time, the scandal project was based on sexually explicit photographs and putatively compromising emails featuring Hunter Biden. The story the Trump campaign told about how it obtained these materials sounded dubious: Hunter Biden himself supposedly delivered his computer to a legally blind repairman in Delaware but never returned to retrieve it—so the repairman tracked down Rudy Giuliani and handed over a copy of the hard drive. The repairman had also previously given the laptop itself to the FBI. Far-fetched stories can sometimes prove true, and so might this one.

    Whatever the origin of the Hunter Biden materials, the authenticity of at least some of which has been confirmed by reputable media outlets, there’s no dispute about their impact on the 2020 election. They flopped.

    Pro-Trump Republicans could never accept that their go-to tactic had this time failed. Somebody or something else had to be to blame. They decided that this somebody or something was Twitter, which had briefly blocked links to the initial New York Post story on the laptop and its contents.

    So now the new Twitter—and Elon Musk allies who have been offered privileged access to the company’s internal workings—is trying again to elevate the Hunter Biden laptop controversy, and to allege a cover-up involving the press, tech companies, and the national-security establishment. It’s all very exciting to the tiny minority of Americans who closely follow political schemes. And it’s all pushing conservatives and Republicans back onto the same doomed path they followed in the Trump years: stunts and memes and insults and fabricated controversies in place of practical solutions to the real problems everyday people face. The party has lost contact with the sensibility of mainstream America, a huge country full of decent people who are offended by bullying and cruelty.

    There’s talk of some kind of review by the Republican National Committee of what went wrong in 2022. If it happens, it will likely focus on organization, fundraising, and technology. For any political operation, there is always room to improve in these areas. But if the party is to thrive in the post-Trump era, it needs to start with something more basic: at least pretend to be nice.

    * Lead image source credits: Chris Graythen / Getty; Ed Jones / AFP / Getty; Drew Angerer / Getty; Paul Hennessy / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty; Michael M. Santiago / Getty; Brandon Bell / Getty; Win McNamee / Getty; Al Drago / Bloomberg / Getty; Alex Wong / Getty

    This article appears in the March 2023 print edition with the headline “Party of Trolls.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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    David Frum

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