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US White House, home of the United States President, at night.
When a first-term president is run out of office after receiving the greatest number of opposition votes against a presidential candidate in American history, his defeat prompting joyful dancing in the streets, you would think the leaders of his political party would realize they’re on the wrong path and begin making drastic changes as quickly as possible.
First of all, what leaders? Second, Republicans will have another big problem after Donald Trump is finally evicted from the White House. Most Americans want to quit thinking about Trump every day as soon as possible. But Republicans have a very different problem: Trump was feared and loathed by the massive majority of Americans who turned out in record numbers to end his presidency, but a large majority of Republicans still embrace him. In five years, he transformed the Republican Party into the Cult of Trump.
Most of us watching from the outside could never understand how Trump did it. We found him crude and offensive; to his supporters, that was their favorite part. We thought they were incredibly ignorant for believing anything Trump told them since he lied so constantly and obviously; they thought it was hilarious that fact-checkers couldn’t keep up. Rich, fat cats had always lied to people like them, but Trump was their very own lying, rich, fat cat. They loved him when he said publicly embarrassing things about injecting poisonous disinfectant to kill coronavirus and George Washington crossing the Delaware to take over all the airports. It proved he was really one of them. They couldn’t be happier all those other stuck-up, lying, rich, fat cats who used the run the Republican Party didn’t like him.
Hatred of the Changing World
That wasn’t the way it was supposed to work when Richard Nixon invited white, working-class racists into the Republican Party after Democrats drove them out by supporting civil rights. Wealthy country club Republicans welcomed the votes of all those they considered riff raff. They used those votes to pass bigger tax cuts for themselves and put more of the cost of government onto the middle class. Trump did the same thing, but at least he gave lower-class white people a voice by helping to spread their visceral hatred of the changing world around them. The tail was now publicly wagging the Republican dog.
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Republicans officially ceased to exist as a mainstream, conservative political party at that fake 2020 Republican National Convention televised from Trump’s White House. Remember that convention’s Republican platform? No, you don’t. There wasn’t one. Delegates passed a brief resolution declaring their only platform was to support Trump’s presidency. Historic Republican conservative principles were replaced with one of those joke T-shirts that said, “I’m With Stupid!”
The truth is that Trump has never had any clear, coherent set of conservative political principles, at least not any a legitimate American political party would ever openly adopt. He’s always believed whatever pops into his head to say next. The more outrageous the better for attracting attention. Vile racism and sexism, self-aggrandizing lies, denigration of his imaginary enemies, hatred and suspicion of anyone “foreign,” support for crazy conspiracies alleging child molestation, murder and cannibalism by prominent Democrats, encouragement of violence by dangerous armed militias, the list goes on.
Copycat Extremists
That’s why the candidates immediately scrambling for attention as the next Trump before the body is even cold are copycat extremists like Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley. Republicans already know what to do to stop their party from becoming a permanently dwindling minority party in a racially diverse nation. But they don’t want to do it. Reince Priebus, as the party’s national chairman, laid it all out in 2013 in a Republican “autopsy” after President Obama defeated Mitt Romney.
“Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the party represents, and many minorities wrongly think Republicans do not like them or want them in the country,” Priebus’s report said. Latino voters “tell us our Party’s position on immigration has become a litmus test, measuring whether we are meeting them with a welcome mat or a closed door.” Four years later, Priebus was chief of staff to Trump, the most racist, anti-immigration president in modern history, who not only slammed the door in the faces of Latinos but took their children away and jailed them in cages.
But one of the largest presidential popular vote defeats in history failed to decimate Republicans in the House and Senate as the party feared it might. Instead, Republicans gained seats in the House of Representatives and had just a net loss of one seat in the Senate to Democrats, as we wait to know the outcome of two Georgia runoff elections decided in January. Now, they’re afraid to drive away any of Trump’s supporters. But it’s long past time for Republicans to rid their party of virulent white supremacists and become a decent, mainstream, American political party. Democrats did it 50 years ago.
