The epic GOP meltdown over the Republican National Committee’s embrace of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol as “legitimate" has forced Republicans to reckon with an ever-deepening divide between its GOP base and a base-level grip on reality.

Establishment-wing Republicans, such as Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, have hoped to put an end to the controversy by either downplaying it or simply stating the facts.

“Let me give you my view of what happened January the sixth,” McConnell told reporters Tuesday at his weekly press conference. “We saw what happened. It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election from one administration to the next. That’s what it was.”

But the truth is, McConnell and other like-minded Senate Republicans are wildly out of step with the grassroots of the party. In fact, the RNC resolution that declared the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection to be “legitimate political discourse” is an unvarnished reflection of where Republican grassroots voters stand. In their heart of hearts, many of them support the Jan. 6 attack, feel it was justified, and they are out to extract a pound of flesh and then some from anyone who doesn’t accept their insane worldview.

As Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri told the Capitol press corps:

Presumably, Hawley was talking about the open Senate seat in Missouri to be filled this November, and he was expressing an unusual amount of alarm about a contest that undoubtedly favors Republicans.

But Hawley’s message was clear—all you Republicans clinging to reality better just shut up, because reality simply isn’t popular here in Missouri, or elsewhere, with “most” Republican voters.

Those may as well be the same Republicans that Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming referred to as “the crazies” in a New York Times piece. For more than two years, Cheney has skipped out on attending even a single Republican Party function in Wyoming. Cheney’s vote to impeach Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection and her more recent work on the select committee investigating Jan. 6 have made her persona non grata among the vast majority of state party activists.

“I’m not going to convince the crazies and I reject the crazies,” Cheney said of Wyoming’s GOP leadership. “I reject the notion that somehow we don’t have to abide by the rule of law. And the people right now who are in the leadership of our state party, I’m not trying to get their support because they’ve abandoned the Constitution.”

Cheney’s Trump-endorsed challenger, attorney Harriet Hageman, reinforced Cheney’s point.

“What you need to understand is that, for most people out in the real world, none of us really care that much about what happened on Jan. 6,” Hageman said.

Actually, that’s a view particularly espoused by Republicans living in their disreality bubble where the 2020 election was stolen (despite all evidence to the contrary) and supposedly disenfranchised GOP voters have every right to just burn it all down. As Hageman also claimed, “I don’t know” who legitimately won the 2020 election or whether former Vice President Mike Pence had the authority to block certification of the election. “I’m not an elections attorney,” she offered.

Hageman is the perfect embodiment of the present-day Republican base and its overwhelming disregard for the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law—they don’t know, and they don’t want to know—because they don’t care.

That may sell in Wyoming and Missouri, but what McConnell and other Republicans maintaining at least a loose relationship with reality know is, that endorsement of lawlessness and chaos won’t sell to swing voters in Senate battleground states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and maybe others.

The good news for Democrats is that the Republican Party is chock full of raging opportunists who will happily continue to drag the party on the way to scoring a few cheap political points. That’s particularly true of the ones who still fantasize they will be president one day.

On Wednesday, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas pushed back on McConnell’s framing of the deadly Jan. 6 assault as a “violent insurrection.”

“I think it is a mistake for Republicans to repeat the political propaganda of Democrats and the corporate media,” Cruz told reporters.

Swing voters take note: Calling the violent insurrection against the U.S. government a “violent insurrection” is a mistake because “most Republican voters” don’t agree and none of them “really care that much about what happened on Jan. 6.”

So, if lawlessness and chaos in the streets of America are your thing, then the Republican Party is perfect for you.

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