Peter Meijer: Democrats ‘Subsidizing’ MAGA Challenger’s ‘Entire Campaign’

By Charles Hilu

Monday, August 01, 2022

 

This morning, Representative Peter Meijer published a scathing op-ed in Common Sense entitled, “Why the Democrats Are Funding My Far-Right Opponent.” He details alarming spending from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Michigan’s third congressional district, where he will face off against the Trump-endorsed John Gibbs in tomorrow’s primary:

 

Since the election of Donald Trump — and especially since January 6 — Democrats have claimed that democracy is under grave threat. Party leaders like Sean Maloney, the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, have claimed that we are in an existential conflict between defenders of democracy and advocates of authoritarianism. “It’s not just about Trump,” Rep. Maloney said late last month on MSNBC. “It’s about a MAGA Republican movement that is defined by serious, serious things like the attack on our democracy.” He warned: “It’s going to be those MAGA Republicans who take away your rights, your benefits and your freedoms.”

 

So you would think that the Democrats would look at John Gibbs and see the embodiment of what they say they most fear. That as patriots they would use every tool at their disposal to defeat him and similar candidates that they’ve said are an existential threat. 

 

Instead they are funding Gibbs.

 

Democrats like Maloney argued that Republicans who looked the other way during the Trump era put party over country. But they know of what they speak: In one of many such naked political gambits aimed at elevating the weaker Republican candidate ahead of the November midterm elections, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) launched a $435,000 ad buy to promote the election-denying Gibbs in the final days leading up to our primary. 

 

This is not an insignificant amount of money for the Gibbs campaign, nor is it an insignificant act by Democrats. The DCCC’s ad buy was more than Gibbs raised over the entire duration of his campaign. It was also nearly 100x the support Donald Trump himself offered to Gibbs (a single $5,000 contribution from the Save America Super PAC). In other words, the Democrats are not merely attempting to boost a candidate over the finish line: They are subsidizing his entire campaign.

 

He goes on to detail the moral depravity and hypocrisy of the Democrats’ efforts:

 

Over the past year, in private and in public, these Democratic colleagues praised the courage of Republicans like me. Majority Leader Steny Hoyer called my vote “an impressive display of courage and integrity.” To leading Democrats, we were the Good Republicans. 

 

At the same time, to some in my party, we were Bad Republicans — RINOs at best, traitors at worst. After the impeachment vote, I was immediately censured by two county parties in my old district. In my new district, the Republican Party of the largest county repudiated me a few weeks ago. The Michigan GOP Chair joked about my assassination. There have been too many online threats to count.

 

Watching this unraveling inside my party has been utterly bewildering. The only thing that has been more nauseating has been the capacity of my Democratic colleagues to sell out any pretense of principle for political expediency — at once decrying the downfall of democracy while rationalizing the use of their hard-raised dollars to prop up the supposed object of their fears.

 

Democrats have themselves acknowledged the unprincipled nature of the game they are playing. Representative Seth Moulton (D., Mass.), who flew to Kabul with Meijer in the midst of President Joe Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, told the Washington Post Friday that, “I think Peter is exactly the kind of Republican we want to have around, but at the end of the day we have to win the majority and that is the bigger concern.”

 

To conclude his piece, Meijer illustrates just how dangerous the game the Democrats are playing could be:

 

Conventional wisdom dictates that these extreme candidates are less electable than the normal Republicans Democrats targeted to defeat. But with a historically unpopular president in Joe Biden and inflation at 40-year highs, less-electable doesn’t mean un-electable. As the January 6 Select Committee continues to warn about the ongoing threat to democracy, their own party dues are paying to help elect the same villains they rail against.

 

This is what Democrats apparently do not understand: This year will likely be a wave year, one in which anti-Biden sentiment will help Republicans, no matter how far-right they are. Democrats may learn a very difficult lesson in November if Gibbs and other candidates they boost end up winning. If that happens, they will be complicit in any supposed “attacks on democracy” that may ensue.