… Most of what Republicans espouse as a unified minority in Congress comes straight from the party’s identical platforms for 2016 and 2020. But a glaring new feature has been added to the party’s agenda at the insistence of former President Donald Trump. Its adoption among Republican candidates and officeholders bespeaks his undiminished grip on the GOP’s most passionate voters.
It is, of course, the idea that the 2020 election was somehow stolen — or at least that its true outcome remains somehow in question and should therefore be the central business before the nation. …
While it may be without precedent, it’s not without a parallel. There are distinct echoes today of the early 1950s, when false narratives about communism spreading in the U.S. gripped the Republican base because of one man with some personal connections to the Trump phenomenon: Sen. Joe McCarthy. CONTINUED
Ron Elving, NPR News
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