McGeachin’s downfall: From normal conservative to Nazi conference speaker
In February 1939, a group pledging to put America first held a rally at Madison Square Garden in celebration of George Washington’s birthday. A 30-foot portrait of Washington hung in the background, flanked by American flags. The audience said the Pledge of Allegiance and listened to a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Keynote speaker Fritz Kuhn warned that communism was spreading across the country. He said the country needed to be guided by Christian values, which had fallen into degeneracy.
“We, with American ideals, demand that our government shall be returned to the American people who founded it,” he said.
The large crowd greeted Kuhn, the leader of the German American Bund, with the Nazi salute, as a 2017 documentary showed. It was five months before Hitler invaded Poland.
The event was deeply unpopular. It took 1,700 police officers to keep enraged crowds from storming the theater, the New York Times reported at the time. Certainly, no one in state government wanted to be anywhere near it.
Eighty-three years later, white nationalist Nick Fuentes and his followers held their third America First PAC conference in Orlando. This time, there were lots of government officials participating, including U.S. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar — and Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin.
Fuentes, a segregationist and Holocaust denier, and his followers chanted “Putin! Putin! Putin!” as the Russian dictator lobbed rockets and bombs at cities across Ukraine.
Speaking at the conference, Fuentes took note of recent comparisons between Putin to Hitler. “They say that’s not a good thing,” he said with a laugh.
When our lieutenant governor’s turn to speak came, she attempted to spur on the Nazis at AFPAC. “We are literally in a fight for our lives,” McGeachin told the crowd.
“Keep up the good work fighting for our country,” she said.
McGeachin’s metamorphosis
When I first met McGeachin, nearly a decade ago, this is not an eventuality I would have predicted. She used to be a quite conservative but fairly normal Republican.
McGeachin served from 2002 to 2012 in the Idaho House, including as chair of the Health and Welfare Committee. She was very conservative, but she was not crazed. She worked on anti-abortion legislation with Sen. Chuck Winder. She joined Democrats to vote against the Risch tax shift in 2006. She endorsed Mitt Romney in 2008 and 2012.
By the time I arrived in McGeachin’s hometown of Idaho Falls in 2014, she had faded into the background. She ran a pretty nice bar where I’d have a drink from time to time. Occasionally, other reporters and I would call her for comment about an old political figure’s retirement or death. She had a pretty reasonable critique to level against Idaho’s liquor license system.
McGeachin’s character began steadily changing, as so many other conservatives’ did, around 2016. She became an outspoken advocate for Donald Trump, served in a leadership post on his state campaign committee and acted as his delegate.
Even so, when she was interviewed ahead of the general election, she did not attempt to defend Trump’s rhetoric.
“It’s not my style. It’s not how I speak,” she told East Idaho News ahead of the 2016 election.
But, as has happened with many other Republicans, when McGeachin ran for office two years later, she had fully adopted the Trumpist style. She came to political debates with militia types acting as bodyguards. She blasted the late Sen. John McCain as a traitor.
Trump’s key political attribute, as many others have noted, was a total lack of shame. Any time he was caught in a scandal, he simply doubled down. That’s the McGeachin who gave a taped speech to what was essentially a Nazi rally.
Always double down
It’s not at all clear what thought she would gain. She certainly didn’t impress Fuentes’ followers, who as she spoke posted comments mocking her stiff reading style, made sexual remarks about her, said she should get back in the kitchen and claimed that her shirt featured designs indicating that she is a pedophile.
It’s entirely possible that McGeachin had no idea she was going to share a stage with Nazis. Her campaign staff is not competent, and she blunders constantly from scandal to scandal.
In an older day, she would have had an out.
McGeachin could have said: “I didn’t know who these people were. I was given bad advice. I shouldn’t have been there. I’m sorry.”
But it seems she simply doesn’t remember how to do that anymore. She only knows how to double down.
“Not a chance!” McGeachin tweeted in response to suggestions that she resign.
“Never apologize!” cheered David Reilly, the antisemitic former radio host who recently sought a seat on the Post Falls school board.
That strategy will not work here. It is quite likely to be the last nail in her political coffin.
And her legacy will be this rather pathetic memory: pandering to Nazis — while they jeered and laughed at her.