GOP continues to degrade itself with Biden effigy incident

Opinion editor’s note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes a mix of national and local commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

At Friday night’s Johnson County, Kan., GOP event headlined by Ted Nugent — an event the Kansas GOP had promoted — you could kick or beat an effigy of President Joe Biden with a bat.

Video of the event, which was held at the Overland Park Convention Center, shows several of those who played this fun game kicking the figure in the Biden mask with gusto. Or it did, until it was taken down late Sunday night.

“This conduct is shameful, and it is wrong,” Mike Kuckelman, the previous chairman of the Kansas Republican Party, posted on Facebook. Sure it is.

“It’s just gross,” he said in a phone interview with the Kansas City Star Editorial Board. And that, too, is true.

But when he says, as he did in the Facebook post, “We are Republicans, and we’re better than this,” that’s unfortunately no longer true: On Saturday, Donald Trump again imitated Biden’s stutter. Which is behavior every third grader knows to be cruel, though the former president’s crowds love it.

For years, and not only on Jan. 6, the former president has regularly encouraged violence. His own defense secretary, Mark Esper, has said that Trump asked why they couldn’t just shoot protesters in the legs after George Floyd’s murder. Trump has also suggested shooting migrants in the legs, and has on many occasions encouraged crowds to beat any protesters who might be among them. “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato,” he once said, “knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously.”

So while it’s great that there are still Republicans out there who expect better, it’s their own leader who encourages worse.

“Fellow Republicans, let’s not forget our outrage when Kathy Griffin engaged in similar shameful conduct against President Trump,” Kuckelman said on Facebook. “We rightfully demanded she be canceled. Please, we must speak equally as loudly in our condemnation now.”

“I don’t agree with President Biden’s policies, but he is a fellow human being. No one should condone or defend this horrific and shameful conduct. Please join me in condemning last night’s baseball bat beating of the effigy of President Biden and join me in calling for the resignations of Mike Brown,” the current Kansas Republican chair, “and Maria Holiday,” Johnson County Republican chair.

In an email message to the Kansas City Star Editorial Board, Brown said he was in Houston on Friday and it wasn’t a Kansas GOP event, though he personally had sent emails promoting it.

Many Republicans who weighed in on Kuckelman’s Facebook post said he was right.

“I agree. This is totally inappropriate,” said one poster who had attended the event. “Thankfully,” the booth “was not in a prominent position.”

“Let’s hope the press doesn’t see this,” said another.

Some said this kind of disrespect is why they’re no longer Republicans, because this is a perfect representation of who and how their former party is now.

Greg Musil, a centrist Johnson County Republican and former Overland Park City Council president, wrote, “Why are we even surprised by this type of juvenile and disrespectful behavior? It’s par for the course for extremists. Dwight Eisenhower, Bob Dole and Ronald Reagan are spinning.”

Mark Kahrs, national committeeman for the Kansas Republican Party, wrote, “This is exactly the type of behavior we expect out of angry America-hating progressives. It is inexcusable behavior from Republicans.”

If more Republicans in Kansas and beyond really believed that juvenile, disrespectful behavior were inexcusable, Donald Trump would not be running their party, and bringing out the worst in their partisans.

On Sunday night, the presumptive ’24 GOP nominee even took the time to write a long post insulting Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel. “Has there EVER been a WORSE HOST,” he asked, then said they could “perhaps replace him with another washed up but cheap ABC `talent,’ George Slopanopoulos.”