At 2 p.m. in the basement of the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel, the mood was distrustful, the air was humid with human moistness, and the disagreements over minor procedural issues simply would not end.

The people assembled in this particular conference room were delegates from Michigan’s 9th Congressional District. They were among those who had come to Grand Rapids this past March for a statewide meeting to help nominate a Republican presidential candidate. And despite all of them believing that the nominee in question should be “Donald J. Trump”—as they insisted on saying his name, for some reason—they had already been there for four hours.

One of the major points of contention was which of these delegates would get to attend the Republican National Convention later this year in Milwaukee to take on the largely symbolic act of officially certifying Trump’s victory in the primary. And things took a particularly sour turn when the meeting chair, Deb Ross, said that a delegate named Billy Putman, who was seeking to represent the district, may have submitted paperwork identifying himself as “uncommitted”—rather than as a supporter of Trump’s.

Putman is a bearded man whose suit jacket and evident enjoyment of public speaking marked him as the room’s most likely aspirant to higher office. (He lives with his parents, his siblings, and their families in a single home, an arrangement which was featured in a 2017 TLC reality series called Meet the Putmans.) He and others considered the allegation that he might not be a Trump supporter to be slanderous. In turn, he accused Ross of being “bogus,” and “disenfranchising everyone in this room.”

Though Ross soon corrected the record, damage had been done. One delegate said with disgust that Ross had lost her credibility by entering “fraudulent” information into the discussion. Others raised dark suspicions that a different group of potential national delegates may have falsified their credentials. A woman in a pink shirt and a man with a blond goatee stood and shouted “point of order” and “point of privilege” repeatedly. (They didn’t seem sure which was appropriate.)

Finally, a man in a turquoise button-down shirt rose with the focused intensity of a military officer preparing to issue an order of great significance. “Motion to vacate the chair!” he yelled. This was as serious as things could get, and not incidentally, a reenactment of the mutiny that far-right Republicans in Congress led against House Speaker Kevin McCarthy last October.

Ross did not respond directly. “The parliamentarians have both advised that we move on, and that’s what we’re doing,” she said. But others called for a referendum on the motion to vacate, and soon there was too much shouting going on for Ross to do anything else.

This scene was a small expression of the absurd dysfunction that has characterized the operations of the Michigan GOP for nearly a year. It is also a window into the problems of the current Republican Party writ large—one of many intraparty conflicts at the state and local level that are exploding across the country.

The problem, in short, is that the MAGA activists in charge are eating each other alive. States in which old-guard “establishment” Republicans were run off—seemingly paving the way for unified efforts on behalf of Trump—are instead beset by resignations, lawsuits, and financial crises. Conflicts are ongoing in Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, and Georgia as well as Michigan, and are tearing apart smaller chapters at even more local levels.

It’s a perplexing state of affairs given that these Republicans are so united behind their presumptive nominee. But as I learned in Grand Rapids, Donald Trump’s wishes are sometimes beside the point to the people who followed him into the party. Their loyalties are to causes bigger—and stranger—than electing one person to the presidency.

Michigan’s March convention was a sort of culmination of MAGA infighting in the state.

In 2020, Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump here by a 150,000-vote margin. Trump’s supporters said the victory had been achieved via fraud centered in the largely Black city of Detroit. Subsequent lawsuits, hearings, and investigations failed to substantiate any allegations of election theft, but the chaos did end up elevating the loudest, most excitable voices to the top of the state’s Republican Party. When their leadership turned out to be unusually dysfunctional and bankruptcy-adjacent even by Trump-era standards, the state organization splintered into two rival factions.

One faction was run by Kristina Karamo, who, before the fall of 2020, had been a community-college professor and single mom who occasionally volunteered for local Republican causes and hosted a small-time, conspiracy-minded Christian podcast. On election night, she joined a number of other Trump supporters to observe vote-counting at an events complex in Detroit. Karamo filed an “incident report” alleging that she’d seen malfeasance there, including the suspicious delivery of ballots between 3 and 3:30 a.m. After it became clear that Biden was going to be declared the winner, her report was cited in lawsuits seeking to have the results thrown out.

Those efforts went nowhere legally, but Karamo proved to be a popular advocate of the cause, appearing on Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs’ Fox shows and, in 2021, traveling to Arizona to observe a so-called audit of election results. Later that year, although she denied believing in QAnon conspiracies per se, she spoke at a QAnon conference in Las Vegas. She became popular with activists across the state who fit an ascendant “grassroots” ethos—culturally blue-collar MAGA voters who believed that the 2020 election had been stolen.

In April 2022, Karamo won a nominating-convention vote to become the party’s candidate for secretary of state—the role that, in Michigan, actually administers elections. Angela Hall, an Upper Peninsula county chair and Karamo supporter, remembers being impressed by her presence. “She gave a speech that was just unbelievable. She’s a very powerful orator. And I said, ‘Well, she’s got something here,’ ” Hall told me.

Karamo lost that race by 13 points, but it didn’t slow her political momentum. Naturally, she didn’t concede defeat; in 2023, she told the news site MLive that the election system is not trustworthy enough for her to be able to say with confidence whether she won or lost. In February 2023, she was elected state party chair—replacing Ron Weiser, a real estate millionaire and University of Michigan trustee. (Talk about establishment!)

Karamo’s critics say she immediately went about putting the state GOP on a “path to bankruptcy.” She failed to raise money and spent what money there was on things like having Passion of the Christ and Sound of Freedom star Jim........

© Slate