13/01/2025
Is the the best the GOP has?
Few people took Lauren Boebert seriously when she first ran for office, in 2019, but she proved to be an energetic candidate, accusing her opponent of being soft on immigration and of failing to support Donald Trump to an adequate degree. Boebert won the primary handily and went on to win a congressional seat in Colorado; as a first-term congresswoman, she quickly developed a cartoonish image. During the campaign, she had said of QAnon, “If this is real, it could be really great for our country,” and on January 6th she tweeted, “Today is 1776.” At a Christian conference, she joked that Jesus hadn’t had enough AR-15s “to keep his government from killing him.” She made a series of Islamophobic comments about Representative Ilhan Omar, and, in 2022, when a same-sex-marriage bill passed in the House, Boebert opposed it, explaining that it was part of a progressive cause that “undermined masculinity.” These various controversies helped establish Boebert as a national figure, and her hard-right image seemed to be effective for fund-raising.
In 2022, she barely won the closest race in the nation, defending her seat by only 546 votes. Then her political prospects, which already looked dim, seemed to worsen because of a tumultuous personal life. After the 2022 election, Boebert got divorced; her ex-husband was arrested twice for domestic altercations; and her oldest son, a teen-ager, was also arrested, having allegedly participated in a string of vehicle break-ins and credit-card thefts. In September, 2023, Boebert herself was kicked out of the Buell Theatre, in Denver, after disturbing other audience members during a musical performance of “Beetlejuice” by va**ng, laughing and singing loudly, and engaging in mutual groping with her date. Three months later, she abruptly decided to seek office for a third term in a part of Colorado where she had never lived as an adult. This month, she will become the senior member of Colorado’s Republican delegation to the House of Representatives. How did it happen? Peter Hessler chronicles the far-right congresswoman’s political career: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/OcPOVU
