When you consider how much physical property North America’s colonizers took from the indigenous peoples (i.e., all of it), you might think we’d be less brazen with their intellectual property . . . namely, the names for every full moon as the Earth makes its way around the sun every year. But as any nineteenth-century almanac printer would have told you: Nah, we took it all. We call January’s lunation the Wolf Moon because many tribes noticed the animals being particularly active this time of year, howling on cold nights. The Sioux language calls it the “wolves run together” moon. Although the wolves in New York City don’t need an excuse to run together or apart, the full moon on January 6 was gloriously visible, a fitting crescendo to four days of discord and animus among House Republicans a few states away.

As is the nature of their species, the Republican pack spread itself across one side of the House Chamber. They looked uncharacteristically preoccupied under the pretense of picking a Speaker. While some came dolled up in suits, George Santos, the fabulist Pinocchio elected to represent New York’s 3rd congressional district, opted for Horace Mann–style prep. As the team pariah, he seemed more occupied with picking his nose than picking a leader. But his colleagues didn’t need his input to put on a show. Look how well they pretend to be doing something real! Watch them attempt a huddle! The frown-lined concern on the face of Marjorie Taylor Greene—a woman who wants to deny Democrats the right to vote in red states until they’ve lived there for five years—was one for the ages, like the TV surgeon asking the team, “Should we go in?”

Their newly configured pack now contains several layers of despicable we. First came the classic financial plunderer. Then the lib-hating flamethrower. Next up the lib-hating flamethrower/grifter. Now it’s the lib-hating flamethrower/grifter/fame-seeker. Binding them together is the fact that each has sought and won a job in “public service” solely for personal gain. This has created both new career paths for sociopaths and new avenues for fraud. The ease with which the previously apolitical George Santos gamed every Republican hypocrisy to win a House seat makes it hard to believe he’s simply very good at grifting. I keep waiting to hear that he’s a Democratic whistleblower or a German performance artist.

Although this pack doesn’t run together, its members are always running for something. That’s why their time on the House floor is pure theater—cheap theater, the toughest vaudeville in the Bowery where the acts compete to the death for top billing. Whenever one of them took the podium for a nomination, you could imagine them running backstage to ransack the prop trunk: Yes, this—THIS—is what I need! The crown to do Lear, the skull to do Hamlet, the straw boater for Caruso!

Ever since Sandy Hook, the far right has accused those who’ve survived a mass shooting or are survivors of those murdered in a mass shooting of being “crisis actors.” Their cruelty predated Trump’s nuclear tactic of proactively charging the opposition with the very offense he was committing. When you’re a partisan whose marching orders are all lies, you need to be a great performer, preferably an improv star always mixing it up. As surrogates for their exiled king, they must maintain his verbal bludgeoning of enemies while acting out their fealty. With Trump’s every fuckup, they must rapidly pitch and act out one rationalizing lie after another, like a singing mockingbird or a tripped car alarm. You can almost time their next pivot like the waves of vomiting in a case of food poisoning. The standouts among Trump Improv can take a pedestrian lie to the baroque in half a news cycle. They work like Fox News Hamlets, plotting away in the makeup chair: “the play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.” Except their king, like Richard III, has no conscience: “Conscience is but a word that cowards use.” He also has not a shred of reciprocal loyalty, hanging anyone out to dry at a moment’s notice.

Since 2015, various iterations of the Republican Freedom Caucus have been performing in the corridors of the Capitol but mostly on Fox News, with the singular goal of shutting down the government. More recently, they’ve had to triangulate with both the marginal-decency faction of the Republican House and an even more radical “MAGA Squad” pushing a Trump-or-die agenda. Although when push comes to shove, every single House Republican is on Trump’s goon squad—agents of chaos as well as sabotage, corruption, extortion, and degradation.

Regardless of where House Republicans caucus, it seems like everyone new differs significantly from the marginal-decency long-timers in that they have no legislative goals. They came to Washington to stymie the writing of laws, which you have to assume is what their voters want. The rank hypocrisy of their being against their own jobs does not seem to bother them. They call government employees “freeloaders” while being paid by taxpayers to ensure that nothing gets done in Congress. Thus form follows function: Because they have nothing to get done, they always succeed. Because they have nothing to get done, they can be anything . . . anything including nothing. Some are complete nihilists, the psychological embodiment of skinheads hurling themselves at hard and soft objects. Others mimic incomprehensible and contradictory Pirandellian characters in their daily burlesque of a governing body.

How is it that the MAGA right has managed to usurp the avant-garde performance art of the left? Describing the coinage of “Dada” at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, Hans Arp wrote: “What interests us is the Dada spirit and we were all Dada before Dada came into existence.” We were all MAGA before MAGA came into existence. Except that they are not united to one another, only to their cult leader. If their antics do have a purpose, it’s to run interference between functioning Washington and their constituents until their presumptive king returns with an agenda of anything that pops into his head. They are preparing the American public for autocracy.

Meanwhile, the longtime Republican members do their best to deflect Trump’s Eye of Sauron. They know what can happen. They’ve seen Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, Chris Christie, Ron Desantis, and Nikki Haley pass through Trump’s threshing machine. Given the range of aptitude and intelligence within the pack, you have to wonder how the higher functioning minds deal with those who are less so. “Remember,” said Will Rogers in 1935, “write to your Congressman. Even if he can’t read, write to him.” The latitude of such hyperbole is gone under a cult head professing his love for “the poorly educated.” I’m sure the higher functioning MAGA minds would be onboard with George Bernard Shaw’s contention that “it is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.” But they must know that it’s also dangerous to be both insincere and stupid. I suppose it’s pointless pondering their rationalizations when they collect a paycheck not to pass laws but to fill seats, to be the crash-test dummies of a dying democracy. Many already have that Marco Rubio deadness in their stare.

Witnessing this display of the people’s will reminds me of something the political economist Francis Fukuyama said in 2021: “There’s no question in my mind that the move toward popular primaries abetted the rise of extremism, particularly on the right. I think we were better off with professional politicians in smoke-filled rooms nominating candidates. But try to make that argument today and you’ll get your head handed to you.” If anything conjures a running with wolves scenario, it’s the smoke-filled rooms of our history. But it’s nonetheless strange to think that a nihilistic populism intent on destroying government is the result of greater democracy at the local level.

Although no one in the Republican pack has anyone else’s back, about six hours after the EST full moon, Kevin McCarthy, on the 15th ballot, finally got the votes to become Speaker. It would be charitable to a depthless cadre of sycophants to think that this accord had something to do with the moon. When full, it exerts a lot of power, drawing the ocean to it through its gravitational pull. It reminds humans that we are time-bound animals motivated by love and fear but mostly fear. But I’m not sure the Republican House ever thinks of their humanity; they just indulge their animal instincts and fears. How else do you explain their inability to agree with the people who supposedly share their own ideas? Rather than run together like wolves, this Republican Congress skulks apart like hyenas—nongregarious scavengers that only congregate at kills. Hyenas don’t run but dance nervously at the perimeter, giggling as they fight with an enemy and each other to win a scrap of carcass. This is where you can find the hyenas of the 118th Congress—giggling to the point of hysteria at the fate of the libs they profess to own, and at this chump thing called a functioning society. §