Retired Colonel Doug Mastriano can make Donald Trump look like a moderate. Or a kind of “soft tea”, as the Washington Post columnist James Hohman wrote a few days ago in a metaphor that in other places we would translate as decaffeinated coffee.
The already aspiring governor of Pennsylvania =since he prevailed last night in the Republican primaries for the position=, meets all the requirements of a diligent member of the American extreme right. And he is a staunch Trump supporter. Especially in defense of the former president’s lies about the false fraud in the 2020 presidential elections.
Mastriano was in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, when thousands of Trump supporters tried to annul the result of those elections by force, with the result of nine deaths. Him, yes. he stayed outside the Congress venue.
The former military man and now senator in the Upper House of his state has promised that, if he wins the position for which he will fight in the mid-term elections in November, he will do everything possible to prohibit abortion after six weeks of gestation; another proof of unwavering adherence to the principles of the Trump movement.
The problem is that Mastriano is so, so extreme that many Republicans fear he will spoil their party’s hopes of regaining the crucial job of governor of Pennsylvania, which the party lost eight years ago to Democrat Tom Wolf: a spoiler to the time to ratify projects of the two chambers of the state, controlled by the Trump party.
An example of Republican fears regarding Mastriano was given in the midst of the primary campaign by Sam DeMarco, chairman of the party in Allegheny, one of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties: “I don’t want to see my party fall off the cliff when we have a chance in front of us,” DeMarco said to argue his rejection of the Trumpist’s candidacy. And he tweeted the conclusions of a poll that predicted Mastriano’s defeat against the Democratic candidate and now the state’s attorney general, Josh Shapiro, who yesterday won the Democratic primary without opposition.
Another Trump-backed candidate, now House member Ted Budd, won the Republican Senate nomination from North Carolina.
4
