It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump
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Read between September 1 - September 3, 2020
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Working intensely in politics is joining a tribe, and if you do it for many years, a comfortable familiarity begins to define the experience.
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You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. —Lee Atwater, 19811
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race was the key in which much of American politics and certainly all of southern politics was played. It was really very simple: the Democratic candidate needed 90-plus percent of black votes to win. If a significant portion voted for a third party, the Republican would win.
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Since 1964, no Republican presidential candidate has broken 17 percent with African American voters, and by 2016 only 3 percent considered themselves Republican.
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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.”
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Feed generations of Republicans these easily digestible bromides, and it isn’t hard to understand the failure of Republicans to grasp the meaning of Black Lives Matter. The cry “Don’t all lives matter?” is just another variation on the assumption that jobs mean the same to all voters.
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As much as many of us—yes, I include myself in this group—would like to, even need to, separate Reagan from Trump, the welfare-queen theme weaponized race and deceit in exactly the same ways employed by Donald Trump.
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The reality is that there is an ugly history of code words and dog whistles in the party, and it’s something Republicans must admit and address.
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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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The rejection of Wallace was as much a statement for the Democratic Party as the acceptance by Trump of the Republican Party.
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As Buchanan and Phillips recommended to Nixon, Fourth Party Candidates: Top-level consideration should be given to ways and means to promote, assist and fund a Fourth Party candidacy of the Left Democrats and/or the Black Democrats. There is nothing that can so advance the President’s chances for re-election—not a trip to China, not four-and-a-half percent unemployment—as a realistic black Presidential candidate.
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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.
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So I launched my career in the party that prided itself on being the “family values” party. When pundits marvel that the Republican Party could accept a man like Donald Trump, who has five kids from three wives and talks in public about having sex with his daughter, they’re missing the point. 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.
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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 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.
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The professional politicization of Christianity as a right-wing force was always more about the acquisition of power than a commitment to Christianity.
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If I look back on my years in politics, the long-standing hypocrisy of the Republican Party should have been obvious. I should have known better because I was there.
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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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But anger and racism and fear of the future have always lurked beneath the surface of the Christian right, like a menacing shark disturbing a calm ocean.
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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 is the equivalent of Donald Trump: addicted to debt and selling a false image of success.
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So what happened when the Republican Party, in a shocking upset, won control of all three chambers of government for the first time since 2007? The federal debt skyrocketed.
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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.
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Instead of killing the economy as Republicans predicted, the Clinton economic plan helped launch one of the longest periods of economic growth in U.S. history and helped create twenty-three million new jobs. Incomes rose; poverty fell. The only period of greater growth was the post–economic crash under the Obama years.12
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For all their bluster about the federal government and states’ rights, the most conservative states in the country are far and away the most dependent on federal aid.
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For every dollar Mississippians pay in federal income tax, the state receives just over $3 back from the federal government. More than 40 percent of Mississippi’s entire budget comes from Washington. Who pays for that? Those evil states like California and New York, where the good citizens pay a dollar in taxes and get less back from the government. Every time a New Yorker or Californian goes to work, he or she is helping build roads, hospitals, and schools in Mississippi.
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In my thirty-plus years of working in Republican campaigns, I can’t think of a single instance where the message of cutting spending really moved numbers toward a Republican.
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If Republicans—or Democrats—were remotely serious about cutting the deficit, wouldn’t it be a logical step to cut out what amounts to farming welfare for rich farmers?
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Republicans have decided there is a direct correlation between the size of a patriotic heart and the size of the defense budget.
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Our taxes pay for an ever-increasing military budget, while our respect in the world has plummeted with Trump as a leader.
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When Reagan took office, the national debt was $934 billion; when he left, it was $2.7 trillion.
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still the Republican Party continues to push tax cuts the same way the Roman Catholic Church uses incense for High Mass, as a comforting symbolism for believers that reminds them of their identity.
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The most likely scenario is that the deficit will continue to pile up until there is a financial crisis that forces the country to feel debt pain. Then the odds are that it will give renewed energy to a tax plan that greatly increases taxes on the wealthy.
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But what is often forgotten is that the National Review began as basically a well-educated-racist publication.
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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.
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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.
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Republicans have built a political ecosphere that thrives on deceit and lies.
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What few people grasp—because they are outside the system and have normal lives to lead—is just how huge the machinery of deception is that the Republicans have erected and how long it has been in the making.
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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.
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The Republican Party is held aloft by a large, powerful, and ever-growing industry of deceit.
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So now the nation is in full possession of the reality that Russians—Russians, for cryin’ out loud—worked on the same side as every Republican volunteer, donor, elected official, and Trump voter.
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The simple reality is that the Republican Party was in business with Russian intelligence efforts, what used to be known as the KGB, and precious few leading the Republican Party seem to give a damn.
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The transition of the National Rifle Association is a perfect parable: over a couple of decades, it evolved from a gun-safety education organization to a thuggish gang that rewards those at the top with millions of dollars based on proven ability to muscle elected officials into doing what they mostly know is wrong.
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No single political figure better illustrates the predicate for Donald Trump than Newt Gingrich. Both men are deeply damaged psychological cripples from dysfunctional families.
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As has been observed, Newt Gingrich is a dumb person’s idea of a smart person, and Donald Trump is a not-rich person’s idea of wealth.
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It isn’t unusual to see both parties blamed for the dysfunction in Washington, which is one of those generalities that fall into a useless-truth category. Yes, both parties are to blame, but here is the actual relevant question to ask: Is one party more to blame than the other? Professor McCarty is clear on Republicans’ greater role in the negativity of polarization:
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There is a direct line between the rising of the national debt and the increased influence of Grover Norquist and Americans for Tax Reform.
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The power a small group of right-wing zealots has over the Republican Party will continue until one of two events occurs: either a critical mass of Republican politicians stands together and stands up to their power, or the party changes such that it is not a white party but a party that looks more like America.
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Like the inability to imagine Donald Trump winning, there is a great failure of imagination to contemplate the damage done to American civil society by Trump’s presidency and the degradation of any moral authority of a center-right party.
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