Then Donald Trump came into the picture. She never liked him, choosing to cast a ballot for former Ohio Gov. John Kasich in the primary elections. Still, when the time came for being a delegate at the GOP convention, she stayed true to the party.
What she witnessed after the 2020 election, however, changed her forever.
Months after Steve Bannon promoted a plot to populate precinct committee positions with people to challenge voters in Democratic precincts, Petsas had coffee with 132 potential candidates.
Each was asked, "Why do you want to be a precinct committee member? Where did you hear about this? Where do you get your news?" It was all stuff like Steve Bannon, OANN and the "Gateway Pundit."
"They believed a vast conspiracy had denied Trump a second term. Some hinted that Trump was secretly fighting a global cabal of Satan-worshipping child sex traffickers,' the book says. They all signed up to join precinct committees, thanks to a request from Bannon.
The book describes Petsas as spending years "fending off extremists," beginning with the 2008 birther campaign promoted by Donald Trump. Local papers described her as ushering in the "Dekookification" of the state party.
"It wasn’t just that Trump was rude, he brought out the rudeness in his followers; they were not winning anybody over by standing on street corners with Trump signs and guns," her section of the book continues. "Kathy believed that elected officials were supposed to represent everyone, not only the people who voted for them. But everything Trump did was for his base. And everything they did was for him. His cult of personality was probably the thing that bothered her most."
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She argued he didn't stand for anyone but himself. It was all she heard about as she knocked on doors, gathering signatures to get Republican candidates on the ballot.
She found it shocking as 2020 approached that his supporters "believed" what he said. Worse, she explained, were the Republicans who "knew better" but went along with him anyway.
Her legislative chair position was challenged in Dec. 2020 by a woman promoting the "1776" themes calling for a revolution. While she hung onto the post during that vote, Kathy was challenged and removed the following year.
In the meantime, Kathy said she was still meeting with people in the county who would tell her to read the conspiracy theories about the election.
"They told Kathy she clearly didn’t know anything about" elections or the process, the book describes. So, she would go home and check their voting record. She found that many of them had just registered to vote or only voted in presidential elections in the past and not at the midterms or local elections.
"And they were lecturing her about how she didn’t understand the process?" the book continues. "They’d personally seen all this fraud, and somehow, someone who had lived and breathed politics her whole life would fail to notice?"
Trying to detoxify the party again after the era of Trump, she found she was outvoted by someone higher up in GOP leadership who wanted the Trump loyalists on precinct committees even if they'd never voted before 2020.
"By May of 2021, to Kathy’s disbelief, she was now going to district meetings with QAnon believers on her own committee," the book describes. She watched as they began shutting down school board meetings because they refused to wear masks. At a hotel where the government was housing undocumented immigrants who came into the U.S. the new supporters began demonstrating.
The man who rented the building space for meetings to the legislative district said he wasn't comfortable with "these people in his building." She called it "worse than embarrassing," thinking they had a "normal" group of people. But she saw what Trump was doing to the GOP.
Finally, she met her foe, a woman who didn't bother to vote in 2018 and wasn't even a registered Republican between 2016 and 2020. Kathy refused to even meet with her, but behind the scenes, Bannon was telling supporters that it wouldn't be easy to combat the "establishment." The new woman went to war, and ultimately, she was removed in "an ambush."
The book goes on to tell similar stories to hers, illustrating how the GOP has been thwarted by the far-right wing of the party who were once nothing more than a loud fringe. It is now those who are taking over the Republicans.
Arnsdorf's book is on sale now.
