WASHINGTON (AP) House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy appears to have settled on a strategy to deal with a handful of Republican lawmakers who have stirred outrage with violent, racist and sometimes Islamophobic comments .

If you cant police them, promote them.

The path to power for Republicans in Congress is now rooted in the capacity to generate outrage. The alarming language, and the fundraising haul it increasingly produces, is another example of how Donald Trump , the former president, has left his mark on politics, changing the way Republicans rise to influence and authority.

Success in Congress, once measured by bills passed and constituents reached, is now gauged in many ways by the ability to attract attention, even if it is negative as the GOP looks to reclaim a House majority next year by firing up Trumps most ardent supporters.

That has helped elevate a group of far-right lawmakers including Reps. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul Gosar of Arizona whose inflammatory comments once would have made them pariahs.

Rather than face punishment for personal attacks that violate longstanding norms of Congress, theyve been celebrated by conservatives, who have showered Boebert and Greene with campaign cash.

We are not the fringe. We are the base of the party, Greene, who has previously endorsed calls to assassinate prominent Democrats , said last week on a podcast hosted by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.

The hands-off approach by Republican leadership gives them license to spread hate speech, conspiracy theories and misinformation that can have real world consequences, while testing the resolve of Democrats, who already removed Gosar and Greene from their committees.

Its also a different tack from the one McCarthy took in 2019 when he stripped then-Rep. Steve King of Iowa of his committee assignments for lamenting that white supremacy and white nationalism had become offensive terms.

Boebert offers the latest example.

In two videos that surfaced recently she likened Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat who is one of three Muslims in Congress, to a terrorist concealing a bomb in a backpack. Boebert has also repeatedly referred to Omar as belonging to a jihad squad, as well as black-hearted and evil.

Her comments drew widespread condemnation and led to calls for Boebert to become the third GOP lawmaker this year to be removed from congressional committees. But instead of publicly apologizing to Omar, a defiant Boebert insisted that Omar should be the one to issue a public apology to the American people for her anti-American rhetoric, as well as past anti-Semitic comments, which Democrats condemned at the time.

In the uproar that followed, Omar received death threats, including a voicemail left by a man who called her a traitor and suggested she would be soon be taken off the face of the (expletive) earth.