It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump
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Read between September 10 - September 13, 2020
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It’s unfair to blame Trump for how Republican elected officials have responded to his candidacy and election. Each had a choice, and in overwhelming numbers these officials made a personal choice to support a man each knew was wildly unqualified to be president. It’s a familiar pattern, and every Republican can wish upon an American exceptionalism star and it means nothing. Some version of this story has repeated itself throughout the world over the last century, with a cast of political outsiders, including Adolf Hitler: Getúlio Vargas in Brazil, Alberto Fujimori in Peru, and Hugo Chávez in ...more
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But if Trump wins or loses, it is a fantasy to think that the impact of a nation’s major center-right party embracing a racist unprepared to be president with Trump’s deep psychological problems will not be lasting. Perhaps what passes for the establishment in the Republican Party will be able to conjure a cover story to explain why they embraced a man who mocked the disabled, attacked a former POW hero, paid off a porn star from the Oval Office, defended Vladimir Putin’s murder of journalists, bragged about assaulting women, and implored foreign governments to investigate his political ...more
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What institution of the center right stood firm against the disgraceful idiotocracy of the Trump years? One by one the supposed leaders of the party, in office, frantically shed their uniforms of principle to don the uniform of the new ruling power. A few held firm, but in a nation that claims to value heroism under battle, the Armies of the Right fled in terror from…a tweet.
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Even if Donald Trump loses in 2020, the Republican Party has legitimized bigotry and hate as an organizing principle for a major political party in a country with a unique role in the
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The Trump Republican Party has abandoned any pretense of kindness or compassion as a desirable human quality. All his life Donald Trump has seen these as weaknesses, not virtues worthy of aspiration. Now so it is with the Republican Party.
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As the Democratic Party drifts more leftward, there is an urgent need for a center-right party to argue for a different vision and governing philosophy. But how can the party that gave us Donald Trump be a legitimate voice for conservatism as a positive force? Without moral legitimacy, a center-right party becomes a soufflé of grievances and anger that exists to settle scores, not solve problems.