By honoring an election denier at California’s capitol, GOP caucus tells on itself | Opinion

Before he became Acting Director of National Intelligence and Ambassador to Germany under former President Donald Trump, Ric Grenell tried to sound the alarm about him on Twitter in 2016: “Trump is dangerous. Wake up. He’s reckless.”

Grenell was right, of course. Then, like so many other, um, ideologically flexible Republicans, Grenell signed on with Trump after he became the GOP nominee. Grenell then deleted all his negative tweets about Trump, started sucking up to him and never looked back.

On Monday, California Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones, R-Santee, and Assemblyman Bill Essayli, R-Riverside, paraded Grenell around on the Senate floor as a great American and hero for being the first openly gay member of the cabinet.

Woohoo.

Opinion

This stirring gesture by the legislature’s GOP caucus was somewhat mitigated by their walkout a few weeks back on a vote declaring June as LGBTQ+ Pride Month and honoring drag queen Sister Roma of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Oh, well, gestures are everything in the shattered hulk of the imploded Republican Party.

Sen Scott Weiner, D- San Francisco, noted acidly that the “GOP is honoring Richard Grenell on our Senate floor, after having protested our actual Pride celebration. Grenell is a self-hating gay man. He’s a scam artist pink-washer for Trump & spreads anti-LGBTQ, anti-vax, election-denier conspiracy theories.”

For his part, Grenell would be rather low on my list of LGBTQ+ role models, given that many members of his Republican party have crafted hundreds of proposed laws targeting LGBTQ+ people in various states.

And then there is Grenell’s preposterous professional record of playing footsie with extremists, taking money from despots and spreading false conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election. And those are only the lowlights. As America’s ambassador to Germany, Grennell was lambasted by German officials.

“Grenell isn’t behaving like a diplomat but instead like a right-wing extremist colonial governor,” Martin Schulz, the former leader of the SPD party in Germany, said in the Los Angeles Times. This was around the time Grenell told Breitbart News that he wanted to empower conservatives throughout Europe, comments that were seen by some in Berlin as “a rallying cry for parties like the ostracized far-right Alternative for Germany.”

Oh, but there’s more. ProPublica reported that Grenell’s political consultancy was paid $103,750 to help out noted Friend of Democracy and Gay Rights Victor Orban, the leader of Hungary and the latest poster child of the U.S. Foxosphere. Memo to Ric Grenell: Orban thinks being gay is a woke conspiracy.

Grenell even went to Nevada after the 2020 election to stand before a bank of microphones and assert, falsely of course, that the election outcome was rigged in that state.

Senate President Toni Atkins, an actual LGBTQ+ heroine, walked out with other Democrats as Grenell was being touted as a pathfinder.

Grenell is just another Trumpie narcissist and he wouldn’t last three seconds with Atkins. But perhaps he could tell the legislature something else: Trump is dangerous. Wake up.

He’s reckless.

Oh. He already did. He and his followers just forgot.