It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump
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There is nothing strange or unexpected about Donald Trump. He is the logical conclusion of what the Republican Party became over the last fifty or so years, a natural product of the seeds of race, self-deception, and anger that became the essence of the Republican Party. Trump isn’t an aberration of the Republican Party; he is the Republican Party in a purified form.
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I spent 2016 predicting that Donald Trump would not win because I refused to believe what Donald Trump proved about Republicans, about myself, could be true.
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Many will argue that my view of the Republican Party is distorted by my loathing of Trump. The truth is that Trump brought it all into clarity and made the pretending impossible.
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Politics is in many ways a perfect marketplace. Candidates and parties learn very quickly what works and what doesn’t and focus time, energy, and money on the share of the marketplace that pollsters tell them is accessible to persuasion or motivation. Since 1964, Republicans have learned that they will have little success in appealing to black voters.
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What happens if you spend decades focused on appealing to white voters and treating nonwhite voters with, at best, benign neglect? You get good at doing what it takes to appeal to white voters. That is the truth that led to what is famously called “the southern strategy.” That is the path that leads you to becoming what the Republican Party now proudly embraces: a white grievance party.
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Even given the choice of supporting an alleged child molester with a troubled, to say the least, history on race or a moderate Democrat, 68 percent of white Alabama voters stuck with the alleged child molester. Only African American voters, particularly African American women, saved Alabama from itself.
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The modern Democratic Party has fought for civil rights and believes government has a moral role in helping to create racial equality in America. The modern Republican Party has fought civil rights and is very hesitant to assert government has a role in equality of any sort, including racial.
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But the inadequacy of legislation supported by Democrats is far different from a calculated effort to appeal to white voters by manipulating the race issue. One is a failure of policy. The other is a moral failure.
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So many Republicans embraced Trump’s view that they were victims, as was he, because they had actually believed this all along. Theirs was a white birthright, and the rise of nonwhites was an unjust usurping of their rights.
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So the Nixon White House laid out the path to electoral success by maximizing white grievance and suppressing the African American vote through a combination of manipulation, lies, and legal challenges. It was this road that the Republican Party took to the Trump White House. There is nothing new about Donald Trump. He hasn’t invented a new politics or executed a brilliant and novel strategy. Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and even Ronald Reagan played the same race-based politics of resentment. It is precisely Trump’s predictability and, alas, inevitability that is so ...more
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But I think 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.
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The Republican Party was—and still is—afraid of Donald Trump.
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How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy, and the national debt in a matter of months? You don’t. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren’t deeply held. In the end, the Republican Party rallied behind Donald Trump because if that was the deal needed to regain power, what was the problem? Because it had always been about power. The rest? The principles? The values? It was all a lie.
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Trump doesn’t signal a lowering of standards of morality by Republican voters. Instead, he gives them a chance to prove how little they have always cared about those issues. Trump just removes the necessity of pretending. “Family values” was never a set of morals or values that the Republican Party really desired to live by; instead, “family values” was useful in attacking and defining Democrats.
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The entire modern Republican definition of the conservative movement is about efforts to define itself as “normal” and everything else as “not normal.”
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The Republican use of “family values” was the weaponization of two key elements of its power structure: racial prejudice and a politically conservative Christianity, from Catholics to evangelicals.
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The family values that the Republican Party not only embraced as a personal ethos but wielded as a club against political opponents was built on the fantasy that sex did not exist. Liberals had sex, too much of it.
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The Christian right would like the world to believe it was the political arm of Jesus Christ, come to life to save a sinful America. In practice it operates more like a Christian-related super PAC for a white America. The professional politicization of Christianity as a right-wing force was always more about the acquisition of power than a commitment to Christianity. It was where the commercialization of Christianity meets the politicization of Christianity.
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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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The very strangeness of the figures makes them harder to judge by the standards of normal human behavior. Their entire artifice is to appear abnormal and thus escape judgment. These men are “different” and should be judged differently.
Mark Schwartzman
Talking about Trump & Jimmy Swaggart
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It is a strange phenomenon of Republican politics that candidates are quick to announce that God would like them to win.
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Now whenever I hear the loonies on the right asserting that God wanted Trump to win, I always wonder why it didn’t occur to them that if God really was involved, he probably could have won the popular vote for Trump. And done it without the Russians’ helping.
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Decency, kindness, humility, compassion—all touchstones of a Christian faith—have no value in today’s Republican Party. All his life, Donald Trump has believed these to be weaknesses, and now that is the view of the party he leads.
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I hoped the Trump era would be seen as an aberration and made less ugly by those who might have influence over the president. That hasn’t happened. Rather than Republicans and people of faith checking his most unappealing sides, the president is dragging down virtually everyone within his orbit.
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we need no longer pretend that those who support bad men like Roy Moore and Donald Trump are remotely motivated by love of neighbor or charity or compassion. The fear of a changing world is now validated and given legitimacy at the highest levels. They are free now to be openly what they felt obligated to mask. They can now admit it was all a lie.
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The Republican Congress now represents a party with very few significant defining principles other than the promotion of the president’s impulses at that moment. —Republican former senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire1
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I was never burdened by the notion that I was working for a political party that was fundamentally hypocritical on the deficit and economy and one that would proceed to impeach Bill Clinton for lying about sex under the leadership of Speaker Newt Gingrich, who was having an affair with a former House intern himself. The point of politics, as far as I could see, was to win, and when you were winning, what could possibly be wrong?
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There’s a language war here that Republicans have been winning for decades. “Welfare” is what the poor get because they are, well, poor, and being poor is a choice because in America anyone can succeed. Or something close to that. But “grants,” “tax breaks,” and “incentives” are the language businesses use to describe the corporate welfare they demand in exchange for doing what they usually have to do or want to do anyway, like build a new data center or factory or, in the case of sports, a new stadium.
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This patriotism-equals-defense-spending is now so common with Republicans that it’s difficult to remember when it was otherwise.
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Americans get the worst of both worlds. Our taxes pay for an ever-increasing military budget, while our respect in the world has plummeted with Trump as a leader. In the sandbox of Donald Trump’s mind, spending more on defense proves he’s a tough guy, while working with allies proves he’s weak.
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A belief in the power of tax cuts is about as close as it can be to a definitional core belief that exists in the Republican Party.
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The losing Buckley argument was one that would continue to be a touchstone of the Republican credo on race until today: that in America, race doesn’t matter; anyone can succeed. It is the essence of the “color blind” assertion that is perversely racist but reassuring to white people. It has the benefits of sounding antiracist—we are all people, or, as it were, “all lives matter”—but is in practice deeply racist because it ignores the reality of the impact of race in every element of American society.
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Many current anti-Trump Republicans wax nostalgic about the days of the intellectual firepower of the National Review, but the truth is that Trump’s racism is a direct descendant of William Buckley’s early racism. By 2004, Buckley would say, “I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong. Federal intervention was necessary.”
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The entire conceit of compassionate conservatism was an acknowledgment that conservatism had failed to provide an alternative to the conservative critique that liberals believed any problem could be solved through more money and more government.
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Once you convince yourself that racism has been defeated and that the real problems in America are the crisis of the family structure, it’s a short walk to the impeached Alabama judge and defeated Senate candidate Roy Moore’s passionate claim that blacks were better off during slavery. America was great, Moore claimed, because “families were united—even though we had slavery. They cared for one another. People were strong in the families.”
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When any political movement loses all sense of self and has no unifying theory of government, it ceases to function as a collective rooted in thought and becomes more like fans of a sports team.
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All Republicans want to do is beat the team playing the Giants. They aren’t voters using active intelligence or participants in a civil democracy; they are fans. Their role is to cheer and fund their team and trash-talk whatever team is on the other side. This removes any of the seeming contradiction of having spent years supporting principles like free trade and personal responsibility to suddenly stop and support the opposite. Think of those principles like players on a team. You cheered for them when they were on your team, but then management fired them or traded them to another team, so ...more
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Stripped of any pretense of governing philosophy, a political party will default to being controlled by those who shout the loudest and are unhindered by any semblance of normalcy.
Mark Schwartzman
Incredibly dangerous - this opens the door to the GOP being taken over by the conspiracist kooks, and why QAnon is taking such a strong hold over the party
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One of the hallmarks of the Trump era is the alacrity with which intelligent people embrace stupidity.
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The acceptance of the conspiracy theories is just one station in the slaughterhouse of truth that is the Trump presidency. 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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If it often seems that the Republican Party is living in a world disconnected from reality, that’s because it is. Large elements of the Republican Party have made a collective decision that there is no objective truth.
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We will make the argument throughout this book that the behavior of the right-wing media ecosystem represents a radicalization of roughly a third of the American media system.
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Fox News is unique in American media history as serving more like the in-house propaganda arm of a strong-man dictator than operating by the accepted norms of professional journalism.
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In distinguishing between objectivity and impartiality, Human Events’ editors created a space where “bias” was an appropriate journalistic value, one that could work in tandem with objectivity.
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Like his defense of segregation in the National Review, the McCarthy book is a reminder for those who today, in the age of Trump, like to cast William Buckley as the lost soul of true conservatism: that for all his well-crafted sentences and love of language, Buckley was often a more articulate version of the same deep ugliness and bigotry that is the hallmark of Trumpism.
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The 1987 FCC decision to stop enforcing the fairness doctrine supercharged conservative media into a billion-dollar industry. Now there was no need to be concerned with offering equal time or performing a news function. It was true for liberals and conservatives, but the conservative audience has proven wider, more reliable, and more profitable, which is not surprising. For all the reasons discussed above, conservatives were hungry for a different source of information and belief, a stronger bond than mere opinion, that would validate and confirm their view of the world that was strikingly ...more
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The playing ground between “mainstream” media and the conservative alternatives is forever tilted against the side that has standards, because part of those standards is admitting mistakes and correcting them on the record. The result is a disproportionally long catalog of errors in the press with standards because, more often than not, there is little if any pressure within conservative journalism to admit errors, much less correct them.
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The Trump era’s consistent denial that you did not hear what you heard and did not see what you saw has managed to make George Orwell one of the most relevant authors of the day. When Donald Trump tweets, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” Orwell’s 1984 is the perfect framework in which to understand his mentality: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
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Conspiracies are dominant realities in the world Trump and his followers inhabit. Unseen but powerful forces that the uninitiated can’t see shape their world.
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In a sane world, a center-right party of a country facing an attack on the foundation of its democracy would lead the charge to defend the country. It was a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, who issued the ringing challenge to the Soviet Union “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” That party has now been transformed into Russian apologists, more concerned with defending Donald Trump than defending the country.
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