It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump
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it is telling that the Republican focus on the need to broaden the party has been driven by an instinct for survival and no real sense of a larger purpose. This no doubt explains in part the alacrity with which the party abandoned every principle laid out in the autopsy once Donald Trump emerged as a dominant figure in the primary. How do you go from dedicating a political party to expansion and inclusiveness and two years later rally around a man who calls Mexicans “rapists” and called for a religious test to enter the United States? It’s easy if you view an avowed commitment to inclusion as ...more
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Party did it in 2012 when it served notice that it would not support Todd Akin, the Missouri Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, after he answered a question on his opposition to abortion even in cases of rape:
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In The Immoral Majority, Ben Howe, an evangelical who grew up in the movement, describes the long list of disgraced preachers as “figures who were cartoonish, dramatic, deceitful, wealthy, white, smarmy, judgmental, callous, and, above all, hypocritical. Charlatans.”6 This is about as perfect a description of Donald Trump as one can find.
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Trump claims to be a great businessman who was wildly successful, while in fact he was one of the greatest failures in modern American business history. The Republican Party claims to be a party that understands the need to run government efficiently, managing debt and balancing a budget. In truth the modern Republican Party
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is the equivalent of Donald Trump: addicted to debt and selling a false image of success. The 2016 National Republican Party Platform attacked the Obama administration for a “huge increase in the national debt”:
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But a few basic facts are indisputable: in the post–World War II era, Republican presidents have contributed far more to the deficit than Democrats. As
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Reagan took office, the national debt was $934 billion; when he left, it was $2.7 trillion.
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Just two and a half years into the first Reagan administration, The New York Times analyzed the successes and failures of “Reaganomics,” and it was clear then that deficits were a critical problem:
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One of the hallmarks of the Trump era is the alacrity with which intelligent people embrace stupidity. As
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“it is our character that supports the promise of our future—far more than particular government programs or policies,”
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if he believed what he wrote about Bill Clinton that “a president whose character manifests itself in patterns of reckless personal conduct…cannot be a good president,” how can Bennett support a man who brags about assaulting women and directs his own son to write checks to reimburse his lawyer Michael Cohen for hush payments to a porn star?23
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Trump attacked his primary opponent Senator Ted Cruz by linking his father to the JFK assassination. He has said that a pillow was found on the Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia’s face and he might have been murdered. He’s sided with the anti-vaccine conspiracy nuts. Most famously, he laid the groundwork for his campaign for the Republican nomination by promising he could prove President Barack Obama was born in Africa.
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He’s claimed President Obama wore a ring with an Arabic inscription. He’s said global warming is a “hoax,” that windmills cause cancer.
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Trump on his conspiracy obsessions, treating him like an addled senior citizen who calls his congressman’s office demanding to know why the CIA is talking to him through his dentures.
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The acceptance of the conspiracy theories is just one station in the slaughterhouse of truth that is the Trump presidency.
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Once there is no challenge to the craziest of ideas that have no basis in fact, it is easy for Trump to take one small bit of truth and spin it into an elaborate fantasy.
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We should worry when a politician 1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game, 2) denies the legitimacy of opponents, 3) tolerates or encourages violence, or 4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.19 Republicans in the Donald Trump era are guilty of all four. A review: 1. Rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game. Like much of civil society, American democracy functions under a combination of specific laws and assumed norms. As the Mueller Report makes clear, Trump would likely be indicted for ...more
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reminiscent of when Mississippi’s governor Ross Barnett addressed a Jewish group in Jackson, Mississippi, with “We are all good Christian men and women.” The common thread is fear.
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Illegal voting has long been a felony, and the idea that of all the felonies possible to commit, someone would risk the consequences of a felony conviction to vote is one of the more almost-charming absurdities imaginable.
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Trump is a racist who elevated white nationalists like Steve Bannon from lurking in the shadows of society to the White House.
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The same people who have no problem mandating reproductive choices for women cite personal freedom as an opposition to registering voters. Nonsense.
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How did the state that gave us Ronald Reagan, the state that defined for the world what it was to be an American, the state with the largest number of military bases and the greatest farms of America, the state that built the world’s first great post-automobile city, the state with the industries that changed the world, from Apple to Hollywood—how did that become for Republicans an alien place to be scorned and ridiculed?