It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump
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Trump isn’t an aberration of the Republican Party; he is the Republican Party in a purified form.
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Hold Donald Trump up to the mirror and that bulging, grotesque orange face is today’s Republican Party.
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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.4
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That is the path that leads you to becoming what the Republican Party now proudly embraces: a white grievance party.
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about every Republican campaign I’ve worked on had a sizable gay contingent of staffers. The more conservative the candidate, the greater seemed the percentage of gay staffers.
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Today, in the age of Donald Trump, the most openly racist president since Andrew Johnson or his hero Andrew Jackson
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The majority of all welfare goes to white Americans and always has, but the specificity of a woman in Chicago makes the racial appeal clear.
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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 RNC endorsed Roy Moore but ignores moderate governors. What else do you need to know?
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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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The similarities of George Wallace and Donald Trump are striking, from attacking the news media to railing against elites, all played in the key of racism.
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In the American political system, the major political parties should serve a “circuit breaker” function to deny the exploitation of the darkest side of our politics.
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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.
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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 described world is one in which everyone knows their roles: a hermetically sealed world that could exist in any white American suburb.
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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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Trump was running a scam on investors, and the Republican Party has been running a similar scam on voters.
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What happened under Ryan isn’t so much about him as about exposing the fundamental falsehood that Republicans ever cared about the deficit.
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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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which is odd in that Ayn Rand hated Ronald Reagan.
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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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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?
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Only black voters, particularly black women who turned out at record levels, saved the state of Alabama from being represented by an accused child molester who said that he first noticed his wife when he saw her in a high school dance performance.
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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
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Republicans have built a political ecosphere that thrives on deceit and lies.
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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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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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“Limbaugh called his fans ‘dittoheads’ because they mindlessly echoed his prejudices—or he theirs; the pandering went both ways.”
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It’s the journalism that believes in standards, strives to report facts, and has a professional standard to correct errors.
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is to confirm not just your opinion but also your feelings.
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It happens every day, again and again, in large and small instances that combine to reinforce whatever it is that share of the conservative world chooses to believe.
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This is the language not of journalism in search of truth but of a cult.
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The purpose of much of conservative media is to lie to their audience.
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Almost every Republican elected official in Washington knows Donald Trump is unfit to be president.
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The vast majority of Republican elected officials know Donald Trump is unfit to be president and pretend otherwise.
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Donald Trump than Newt Gingrich. Both men are deeply damaged psychological cripples from dysfunctional families.
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I’ve become a radical on campaign finance and support a system of federal funding for all elections.
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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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I’ve worked in campaigns since 1978, and I don’t know of a single race in which illegal voters were remotely a factor.
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But the looming threat of some socialist takeover of America or Sharia law becoming the new Supreme Court standard is all nonsense.
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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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Labeling any media you don’t like as “fake news” is an all-encompassing conspiracy theory that makes truth an enemy.
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The Lindsey Grahams of the world have not changed. We are only now seeing who they always were, freed from any need to pretend.
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So it is with today’s Republican Party. It is a cartel that exists to elect Republicans. There is no organized, coherent purpose other than the acquisition and maintenance of power.