Stars and Strife
“Hello, deplorables!”
That’s how Amy Kremer greeted the thousands of Trump supporters she had helped gather at the Ellipse in Washington, DC, on January 6 to “stop the steal.” Resplendent onstage in a bold leopard-print shawl, with the White House rising up behind her, the former flight attendant had come a long way since she and another Georgia woman, Jenny Beth Martin, became known as the “founding mothers” of the tea party movement back in 2009.
During the heyday of the grassroots conservative movement that had sprung up to oppose President Barack Obama, Kremer had headlined cross-country bus tours stumping for candidates like Christine (“I’m not a witch”) O’Donnell and fighting against the Affordable Care Act. The tea party had helped elect hardcore conservatives who blew up immigration reform and took down former Republican House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) for insufficient conservatism.
But six months into the life of the movement, the two women split up, and this was before a bitter legal dispute—over tactics and money and salacious rumors—that lasted for years. As the Republican Party absorbed and institutionalized their movement, Martin successfully embedded in the Washington GOP establishment while Kremer kept trying to recapture the outsider energy of those early glory days.
Her efforts culminated in a 27-city March for Trump bus tour kicked off in late November and backed by thousands of dollars in donations from MAGA diehards like MyPillow founder Mike Lindell and Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist. “We’ve got to take to the streets and DEMAND ELECTION INTEGRITY,” the tour website exclaimed. “If they can steal this election from President Trump, we’ll never get our freedom back.” Like the pied piper, Kremer schlepped from Florida to California, luring supporters to DC for the Save America rally on the early January day that Congress was set to certify the election. And come they did.
“You know, this president hasn’t asked for much from us,” Kremer told the cheering Trump supporters that day. “He’s asked us for our vote, and he asked us to show up today. And I don’t think he’s gonna be disappointed!” As one of the defeated president’s most loyal cheerleaders, she landed on the same stage as him. (Martin, while present at the rally, was in the audience.) But Kremer’s moment of defiance presaged something more ominous, as thousands of rally attendees, some carrying Confederate flags or dressed in tactical gear, marched to the Capitol and set off a riot that left five people dead and the country reeling.
In the decade since it began, the tea party movement has united several disparate strains of right-wing extremists—Islamophobes, nativists, paramilitaries, Christian and white nationalists—under a single banner. The movement triggered by the election of the first Black president “blew down all the barriers” once separating these groups, says Devin Burghart, the executive director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, who has studied the tea party since its inception. It “created a mass movement for this far-right activity that has been successful at moving ideas about white victimhood and white dispossession into the mainstream of American politics.”
Though they took different paths to January 6, together Kremer and Martin’s story reveals the larger tale of how the tea party surged, faded, and then mutated into a diehard pro-Trump operation instrumental in the radicalization of the Republican Party.
“I come from the tea party movement, and I’m asked all the time: What happened to the tea party?” Kremer told the crowd at the Ellipse. “Well, we’re
