How the GOP became the party of zombies

Russia learned how to hijack Republicans in 2015 and hasn't stopped since

Have I ever told you about the zombie ants of the Amazon rain forest? Ants that live in the jungle are vulnerable to a parasitic fungi. They attach spores that penetrate an ants’ exoskeleton and assume control of the ant. At first, however, the ant acts normally. It appears just like a regular ant.

And then, with no warning, the ant leaves its nest, descends to a height where the humidity is more hospitable to the fungus, and finds a leaf on a plant approximately 10 inches from the jungle floor. Then the ant clomps its jaws into a leaf vein and waits to die.

In 2015, Russia attached a spore to the Republican Party. That’s when the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm, prodded alt-right, anti-Obama media outlets to run with the story that Jade Helm 15, an ordinary military exercise, was a pretext for an invasion of Texas. Local yahoos got their panties into such a twist that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-You Kidding Me) wrote a letter¹ to the Secretary of Defense demanding he clarify his intentions, and Gov. Greg Abbott (R-We Really Doing This) ordered the Texas State Guard to monitor the federal troops.

We all thought it was a hoot, but then again we didn’t know it was the Russians messing with us. “At that point, I’m figuring the Russians are saying, ‘We can go big time,’” said Michael Hayden, the former director of the CIA and NSA. “At that point, I think they made the decision, ‘We’re going to play in the electoral process.’”

And play they did, starting in the 2016 election cycle when, to paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, the going got weird, and the weird turned pro. Sometimes spores of Russian disinformation infected non-Republicans, such as in May 2016, when the Internet Research Agency scheduled both an anti-Islam and a pro-Islam rally at the same time at a Houston mosque, leading to some yelling and fighting. And Russian bots were somewhat successful in promoting Jill Stein, the Green Party’s presidential nominee in 2016, leading Hillary Clinton to brand her a Russian asset.

But for the most part, Russian disinformation strategies have found willing hosts in the Republican Party. The Mueller Report called Russia’s interference in the 2016 election “sweeping and systemic” and “identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign.” Russia hacked Hillary’s emails and collaborated with the Trump campaign on how it would release them over Wikileaks. A whole bunch of people went to jail for this, and when Donald Trump wasn’t lying about it, he was telling other people to lie.

And it wasn’t like he was being slick about it, either. He bragged, incorrectly,² that Vladimir Putin called him “brilliant.” “If he says great things about me, I'm going to say great things about him,” Trump said. He made such a meal of his supposedly great relationship with Putin that in a presidential debate Hillary, correctly, called him Putin’s puppet.

We do not lack for evidence that Russia’s messing with our elections. A later senate investigation confirmed that the Trump campaign’s eager participation in Russia’s election interference constituted a “grave counterintelligence threat.” And a prominent NRA member and lobbyist was arrested for helping the Kremlin’s campaign to interfere in our 2016 elections.

Republicans, for the most part, are carrying on like this is nothing more than caterwauling from Democrats. It’s almost as if they’ve been taken over by the body snatchers.

In 1984, the Reagan campaign ran a metaphorical ad called “Bear in the Woods.” It opens with a footage of a bear in the woods, and it begins with the narrator saying, “There’s a bear in the woods.” The ad was unsubtle, but it gets to an interesting choice in the next two lines: “For some people, the bear is easy to see. Others don’t see it at all.” At the height of the Cold War, Reagan was taunting Democrats as so deluded they couldn’t even recognize the Soviet Union as a threat.

Now the shoe is on the other bear claw. Democrats, whose favorite shape is a circular firing squad, would never put up with this crap. For crying out loud, Al Franken was forced to resign for sexist jokes. If Joe Biden were genuinely running a criminal enterprise in Ukraine with his failson Hunter, I have zero doubt that Democrats would send him off to into the sunset. There is nothing a Democrat likes more than being right, even if it means losing an election, or perhaps especially if it does, so much more so the self-righteous grandeur.

But the Republican Party seems unable to recognize that it’s taking direction from Russian disinformation, endlessly parroting talking points from Moscow: An Arizona state senator called Ukraine’s president “a globalist puppet for Soros and the Clintons.” Charlie Kirk, the head of Turning Point USA, excuses Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying, “Putin is going into places that want him.” And Marjorie Taylor Greene sounds directly controlled by Moscow when she accuses NATO of “supplying the neo-Nazis in Ukraine.”

“I wish Putin was president of America,” says Nick Fuentes.

Jade Helm is happening all over again, except this time it’s not funny. A Russian disinformation campaign is stoking calls for secession over the crisis at the Texas-Mexico border. Instead of telling the Russians not to mess with Texas, the Texas Attorney General is instead refusing to comply with a federal order, writing, “The state will continue utilizing its constitutional authority to defend her territory.” Now Biden has to face real-world worries if he enforces a federal court order in a state being run by Russian counterintelligence.

Biden, of course, has his own worries in Washington, where House Republicans want to impeach him for seeking $5 million in bribes from an oil company in Ukraine, an allegation that came from an FBI informant named Alexander Smirnov. Initially, the F.B.I. didn’t want to turn over Smirnov’s tips because his handler didn’t think he was telling the truth. The claims were too easily disproved.

But the House Oversight Committee used threats to get Smirnov’s claims and based its impeachment case on them. Sen. Charles Grassley even released a copy of an F.B.I. record that included Smirnov’s false allegation, calling them “very significant allegations from a trusted F.B.I. informant implicating then-Vice President Biden in a criminal bribery scheme.”

This week, the FBI arrested Smirnov. It turns out he’d been making it all up because he had it in for Joe Biden. The House Intelligence Committee, doing great work in irony, remains undeterred in its work to undercut a president who has led the West’s opposition to Russia’s invasion and discredit the country being invaded. Putin couldn’t be more in charge of this if he had a suite at the Mayflower Hotel.

The ant in the Amazon finally dies after the fungus has eaten the ant’s innards. “Several days after the ant has died, the fungus sends a fruiting body out through the base of the ant’s head, turning its shriveled corpse into a launchpad from which it can jettison its spores and infect new ants,” according to National Georgraphic, which adds the disturbing detail that the fungus only infects a few ants at a time. The parasite can’t kill the entire nest. They will always need fresh zombies.

Mitt Romney was right in 2012 when he said that Russia was the biggest threat to the United States. He deserves credit for that, and for standing up to this insanity now, to the extent that he has.

Now, however, Russia is posing a different threat from inside the Republican Party. Biden did well in his Valley Forge speech by casting his re-election against Trumpism as a fight for the survival of this democracy. But he fell short in treating Republicans as if they have control over their own actions. Just as the 2024 campaign is a relitigation of the 2020 campaign, it’s also a continuation of what began in Texas in 2015 when Russia realized it had a willing host in its parasitic attempt to undermine our ability to govern ourselves.

Where is Charlie Wilson when you need him?

Jason Stanford is a co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Threads at @jasonstanford, or email him at jason31170@gmail.com.

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1. So ridiculous was this letter that Elie Jacobs, Frank Spring and I published a satirical reply from the SecDef to Sen. Cruz. We thought it was obviously satire, but enough members of the press took it seriously enough to call the Defense Department for comment. The Military Times even had to write a piece asserting that while our letter was “a pretty funny joke,” it was nevertheless not real. And I had to add the following disclaimer to the letter: “Note: This is not actually a letter from the Secretary of Defense and is, in fact, the work of those under whose bylines it ran. Secretary Carter is much funnier.”

2. Putin actually called him яркий, which means brilliant in the sense of colorful. Putin was calling him a colorful character, not a genius.