'Grab my musket': Former GOP rep. 'exhausted' by battling Trump

Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who said during the 2016 presidential election that he would “grab his musket” if Donald Trump lost to Hillary Clinton, is now so opposed to Trump’s policies he says “I feel like I grab my musket” and is “at war” all the way “from eight in the morning till eight or nine at night.”

In a Substack post shared on Thursday, Walsh recalled how in 2016 he tweeted “if Trump loses, I'm grabbing my musket.” Then he continued “every day, I feel like I grab my musket and I walk out to that battlefield out there. And from eight in the morning till eight or nine at night, I'm just at war.”

Walsh observed that this takes a toll on his health: “I'm not a kid. It's exhausting. I'm tired every night.” Yet after supporting both the far right Tea Party movement and the far right Trump presidency, both of which were “very divisive,” Walsh said that “part of me feels like this is my mission. I've got to, until I drop, I've got to do something about the divide in this country. So it's kind of a cause for me. And maybe it will kill me. It's tiring.”

Earlier this week, Walsh spoke with filmmaker Mark Vicente about his upcoming documentary about narcissism, “The Narcissist’s Playbook,” and used that opportunity to describe how Trump’s narcissistic traits encourage cult-like behavior in his followers.

“I often hear from people I engage with, in this case, Trump supporters, when they are able to see the truth and get out of that, so many of them, Mark, will ask me, ‘Joe, why the f—— didn't I see what was going on?’” Walsh recalled while speaking to Vicente. “How did I not see what he was doing?”

Vicente replied cult members can be eased out of their delusions if they are reminded of the positive things that drew them to the cult in the first place.

“You want to change the world and the person says, ‘You know I'm going to help you do that because that's my mission,’ and there's a surge in your chest because your whole life, if you're politically active or whatever, you care about the world, you want that,” Vicente said. “So you become enamored with somebody that's offering you back your values. You're so attached to that that you can't see what's really going on. And you explain away. You take all the red flags and you turn them pink.”

Earlier in February, Walsh applied this logic to his analysis of the Trump movement. Describing the president’s belligerent actions toward Denmark, Venezuela and Iran, Walsh said Trump supporters who backed him to end all wars are behaving like “a cult” for still standing by him.

“I thought you wanted him to end wars all over the world,” Walsh wrote on his Substack. “You said you wanted him to end American entanglement in conflicts and wars around the world. America shouldn’t be involved in these wars, you said. That’s why you’re voting for Trump, you said.”

He later added, “And you don’t like when people call you a cult, Trump voters? What else are people to think when you voted for Trump to get us the hell out of wars around the world, and instead he gets us involved in wars around the world and starts new wars, and you still sing his praises and support him? What are we to think, MAGA, but that you are a cult?”

Speaking to this journalist for Salon shortly before the 2020 presidential election, Yale psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee predicted he would reject the result if he lost to Joe Biden because of his narcissistic personality. Furthermore, Lee anticipated that Trump would encourage many of his supporters to join him precisely because of the cult-like hold he holds over them, such as described by Walsh.

“Those with pathological narcissism are abusive and dangerous because of their catastrophic neediness,” Lee said. “Think of a drowning person gasping for air: a survival instinct just may push you down in order to save one’s own life. In the manner that the body needs oxygen, the soul needs love, and self-love is what a toxic narcissist is desperately lacking. This is why he must overcompensate, creating for himself a self-image where he is the best at everything, never wrong, better than all the experts, and a ‘stable genius.'”

Lee then added, “Just as one once settled for adulation in lieu of love, one may settle for fear when adulation no longer seems attainable. Rage attacks are common, for people are bound to fall short of expectation for such a needy personality—and eventually everyone falls into this category. But when there is an all-encompassing loss, such as the loss of an election, it can trigger a rampage of destruction and reign of terror in revenge against an entire nation that has failed him.”

Indeed, just as Trump refused to accept the result of the 2020 presidential election when he lost, he has already said he will not accept the result of the 2026 midterm elections unless Republicans retain control of both chambers of Congress (which is exceptionally unlikely because incumbent parties usually do poorly during midterm elections).

“What do you call someone who is at war with our elections process?” Walsh asked on a podcast last month on the subject. “What do you call someone who tries to delegitimize America's elections? What do you call someone who tries to sow distrust in our elections? What do you call somebody who f—— with our elections?”

As conservative commentator George F. Will wrote for The Washington Post last month, Trump continues to push the lie that he won the 2020 election even though the matter has been thoroughly litigated and he decisively lost in court.

“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will wrote. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Will added, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

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