It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump
Rate it:
Open Preview
Kindle Notes & Highlights
6%
Flag icon
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.
7%
Flag icon
There is a small kernel of truth in it—the woman used four, not eighty names, and the total fraud was $8,000—but when four becomes eighty and $8,000 total becomes $150,000 a year, Reagan is just lying. The majority of all welfare goes to white
14%
Flag icon
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.
15%
Flag icon
The entire modern Republican definition of the conservative movement is about efforts to define itself as “normal” and everything else as “not normal.”
16%
Flag icon
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.
19%
Flag icon
Decency, kindness, humility, compassion—all touchstones of a Christian faith—have no value in today’s Republican Party.
23%
Flag icon
Like my native Mississippi. 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. Trump won West Virginia by more than forty points. For every dollar a West Virginian pays in ...more
34%
Flag icon
But how does a black person hear these same words, knowing that it took thirty thousand federal troops to force the University of Mississippi to accept one African American?9
34%
Flag icon
The embrace of Trump by the Republican Party is a repudiation of everything we claimed to believe.
36%
Flag icon
What is so unintentionally dangerous about the propositions asserted by Magnet and so many others like him is that they give an intellectual justification for an entire industry of hate that has come to dominate the Republican Party.
37%
Flag icon
The essence of Bennett’s arguments for the role of character in a society was a plea based on decency and patriotism, not partisanship.
37%
Flag icon
So what sort of signal does it send when a man as intelligent and thoughtful as Bill Bennett decides to contradict his entire body of work to support a man like Donald Trump? What value is left in intelligent reasoning? Donald Trump didn’t crash the guardrails of political and civil standards; rather, the highway officials eagerly removed the guardrails and stood by cheering as the lunatic behind the wheel drove the party straight off the cliff of reason.
41%
Flag icon
But if I’m going to be honest about honesty, I have to admit that I saw in practice—okay, I participated in—the process the authors of Network Propaganda found through their research. Republicans have built a political ecosphere that thrives on deceit and lies. It is an industrialized sort of deceit that is unique to the Republican Party. Over the last decades, Republicans
41%
Flag icon
have been conducting an experiment to determine how many control rods of truth could be taken out of a civil society’s core reactor of truth without creating a meltdown. It didn’t start with Trump, but Trump may prove to be the meltdown. 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. 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 ...more
45%
Flag icon
Conservatives have managed to turn the phrase “mainstream media,” or “lame stream media,” as that noted arbiter of intellectual rigor, Sarah Palin, called it, into a pejorative. But what is mainstream media? It’s the journalism that believes in standards, strives to report facts, and has a professional standard to correct errors. It’s the news the majority of Americans consume. The brand of conservatism that has emerged from those early beginnings at Human Events requires the absence of professional standards. The entire purpose of this ever-increasing brand of conservative journalism—and it ...more
48%
Flag icon
The Republican Party is held aloft by a large, powerful, and ever-growing industry of deceit. The purpose of much of conservative media is to lie to their audience. It is fitting that at the heart of the Trump presidency itself is a lie: Almost every Republican elected official in Washington knows Donald Trump is unfit to be president.
49%
Flag icon
Cowardice is one of the least appealing of human qualities, and a deeply damaged Cowardly Lion leads the Republican Party. To willingly follow a coward against your own values and to put your own power above the good of the nation is to become a coward.
49%
Flag icon
The American political process with its deep dependence on the need to raise money is a system designed not for the best governance but for the selection of the person who can put up with being humiliated the longest. Those with the lowest standards willing to grovel and beg are often the recipients of the greatest rewards. That’s true across any party lines, but what is unique about the Republican Party is the clear direction in which it has allowed itself to be driven.
50%
Flag icon
The same November day when Tom Ridge won the Pennsylvania governorship, Republicans took control of Congress for the first time in fifty years. This was the “Contract with America” election that made Newt Gingrich into the Death Star of the Republican Party. No single political figure better illustrates the predicate for Donald Trump than Newt Gingrich. Both men are deeply damaged psychological cripples from dysfunctional families.
52%
Flag icon
The evidence points to a major partisan asymmetry in polarization. Despite the widespread belief that both parties have moved to the extremes, the movement of the Republican Party to the right accounts for most of the divergence between the two parties. Since the 1970s, each new cohort of Republican legislators has taken more conservative positions on legislation than the cohorts before them. That is not true of Democratic legislators.11
53%
Flag icon
The GOP has been gradually shedding its status as a broad coalition party and has started demanding litmus tests on fiscal, social, and foreign policy issues. There were signposts on the road ahead—the Gingrich revolution of 1995, the Clinton impeachment circus—but things got much worse after September 11, with the massive infringements of civil liberties that followed and the bluster and bravado that preceded the invasion of Iraq. By the 2010 midterm election the party had collectively lost its mind. The evidence is all around us: the debt ceiling debacle, the kamikaze politics over the ...more
61%
Flag icon
The reality that so many Republicans feel the need to justify their support of Trump with these apocalyptic constructs is a telling indication of their desperate contortions to prove that doing what they know is wrong is in pursuit of some higher good.
62%
Flag icon
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.