'Eating each other alive': GOP warned chaos in Michigan party could become the norm

Michigan's Republican Party has been beset by vicious infighting and power struggles since Donald Trump's election loss there in 2020 — and a report warns the GOP it's a possible preview of what it's going to face in other states.

Election conspiracy theorist Kristina Karamo was removed as the state GOP chair earlier this year after a chaotic reign, but her loyalists are now hostile to new chairman Pete Hoekstra, and bitterness lingered at a recent meeting to help nominate a 2024 presidential candidate — despite widely held agreement it should be Trump.

The process was acrimonious, reported Slate. "The MAGA activists in charge are eating each other alive," the report stated.

“There’s four other people in here that rose their hands to discuss,” said former reality TV star Billy Putman, a GOP delegate at that meeting. “Discussion is discussion until it’s ended!”

The discussions went on for hours as attendees aired grievances and conspiracy theories about brainwashing operations and Chinese communist plots, and the process was repeatedly halted by arguments about rules for conducting the meeting. GOP veteran Michelle Smith offered a simple theory for the chaos and dysfunction.

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The report said the problem seems to be from the type of people Trump has spurred into activism — and that is echoed across the country.

"Trump’s sudden rise and surprising 2016 victory attracted a new cohort of activists who had not previously been politically engaged and did not, on some level, understand that it is possible to lose an election," Slate reported. “'I’ve suffered losses before,' Smith told me on the morning of the convention. 'A loss is a loss. But they say, I got off my couch — why didn’t we win?’”

Karamo, a former community college professor and occasional GOP volunteer, serves as a clear example of that path into politics, which she began actively engaging in during the vote-counting process in 2020. Her ally Angela Hall, who leads a local GOP chapter in the Upper Peninsula, also exemplifies Smith's theory.

“After the 2020 election, things just seemed off, the results didn’t mesh,” Hall said. “And then the Michigan Senate and House Oversight Committees held hearings where they interviewed election workers. I think each meeting lasted like seven hours. I watched every minute of both meetings, and I was devastated by what was said, under oath, as sworn testimony, as far as lack of election integrity, and just thought, well, I better start digging in, if I want to try and make a difference.”

Hall's concerns about the election lined up with her frustration with mask mandates and vaccination requirements during the pandemic, but her support for Trump is more symbolic of a conspiratorial thinking than loyalty to the quadruply-indicted former president.