-----Original Message-----
From: Miriam Vieni [mailto:miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] ;
Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2016 2:35 PM
To: 'blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx'
Subject: RIP, GOP: How Trump Is Killing the Republican Party
Taibbi writes: "In an age when Donald Trump is a presidential nominee, what
does 'serious' even mean? In any case, the cybercomics who fanned the flames of
the Cruz-Zodiac meme will someday be first-ballot entrants in the Trolling Hall
of Fame."
Donald Trump. (photo: Brendan McDermid/Reuters)
RIP, GOP: How Trump Is Killing the Republican Party
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
19 May 16
Indianapolis, Indiana, May 3rd, 2016, a little before 8:30 p.m. Texas Sen. Ted
Cruz strode onstage beneath a gorgeous stained-glass relief in the city's Union
Station. The hall was doubling as a swanky bar for an upscale local hotel, and
much of the assembled press was both lubricated and impatient. The primary had
been called for Donald Trump more than an hour before. What was the holdup?
"God bless the Hoosier State!" Cruz said to whoops and cheers after he finally
emerged. He was surrounded by a phalanx of American flags, family members and
his gimmick running mate of six and a half days, Carly Fiorina, who stared out
at the crowd with her trademark alien-abducted smile.
Cruz glanced back and forth across the room with that odd, neckless,
monitor-lizard posture of his. He had to know the import of this moment.
Nothing less than the future of the Republican Party had been at stake in the
Indiana primary.
A Cruz loss effectively meant ceding control of the once-mighty organization to
Trump, a seemingly unrepentant non-Republican more likely to read Penthouse
than the National Review.
Before the vote, Cruz put it this way: "We are at the edge of a cliff, staring
downward."
Now, Cruz was over that cliff, having been trounced 53 to 36 percent in his
last-gasp effort to keep Trump from the nomination. In a detail the film-buff
candidate Cruz would appreciate, he left Indiana with the same number of
delegates as future senator John Blutarsky's grade-point average in Animal
House: zero-point-zero.
Still, Cruz looked like he was ready for the "Was it over when the Germans
bombed Pearl Harbor?" speech. He was going to fight.
"Will we hold fast to our founding values of rewarding talent, hard work and
industry?" he asked. "Or will we continue on that path of creeping socialism
that incentivizes apathy and dependency?"
The crowd roared.
"Will we keep America safe from the threats of nuclear war and atomic
terrorism?" he thundered. "Or will we pass on to future generations a land
devastated and destroyed by the enemies of civilization?"
More raucous cheers.
Cruz smiled. If he has a good quality, it is that he's not easily deterred by
criticism. As he took the stage that night, he surely knew that former Speaker
of the House John Boehner had recently called him "Lucifer in the flesh," and
that fellow senator Lindsey Graham had said, "If you kill Ted Cruz on the floor
of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody could convict you."
Likewise, when it was revealed Cruz once stated that one has no inherent right
to "stimulate one's genitals," his college roommate Craig Mazin popped up to
call him a hypocrite who'd whacked it plenty in college.
During the campaign, surprising numbers of Americans were even willing to
believe Cruz might also be the Zodiac Killer. The infamous Bay Area murders
began two years before Cruz was born, but 38 percent of Floridians at one point
believed Cruz either was or might be the Zodiac.
Were they serious? In an age when Donald Trump is a presidential nominee, what
does "serious" even mean? In any case, the cybercomics who fanned the flames of
the Cruz-Zodiac meme will someday be first-ballot entrants in the Trolling Hall
of Fame.
Finally, on the morning of the Indiana primary, Cruz woke up to hear opponent
Trump babbling that Cruz's own father had been hanging out with Lee Harvey
Oswald before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a bizarre take on a
ridiculous National Enquirer story that Trump, of course, believed instantly.
Trump brought this up on Fox and Friends, which let him run the ball all the
way to the end zone. "I mean, what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald, shortly
before the death – before the shooting?" Trump asked. "It's horrible."
American politics had never seen anything like this: a presidential candidate
derided as a haggardly masturbating incarnation of Satan, the son of a
presidential assassin's accomplice, and himself an infamous uncaptured serial
killer.
Despite the media humiliations, Cruz talked passionately of his supporters'
resolve. "Just a few days ago, two young kids, ages four and six, handed me two
envelopes full of change," he said. "All of their earnings from their lemonade
stand. They wanted the campaign to have it."
The crowd cooed: Awwww! There was no way he could quit now and let those kids
down. Except that moments later, Cruz did just that, announcing he was
suspending his campaign because "the path to victory has been foreclosed." Then
he fled the stage like he was double-parked.
The air vanished from the ballroom. Cruz supporters went nuts.
Nooooo! they screamed, hugging each other and crying. Many volunteers were from
faraway states. They expected to be continuing on somewhere the next morning.
Now they were all basically fired.
"What the fuck do we do now?" whispered one.
The pundits present were less emotional. "Does he get to use the lemonade money
to pay campaign debts?" wondered one.
As ignominious an end as this was for Cruz, it was a million times worse for
the Republican establishment.
The party of Nixon, Reagan and two Bushes had needed a win by Cruz, a man not
just disliked but loathed by the party elite, to stave off a takeover by Trump.
And yet Cruz's main pitch to his voters had been that between himself and
Trump, he was the one less connected to the Republican Party. "Cruz is the true
outsider," was how one supporter put it in Indiana.
Cruz volunteer Dan Porter seemed stunned with grief after the results came in,
but his sadness was reserved for Cruz, not the Republican Party. He couldn't
seem to wrap his head around the fact that so many people had voted for Trump,
a man who'd "been a Democrat his whole life," while a dedicated
constitutionalist like Cruz had been so roundly rejected.
So lost in thought that he stared at the carpet as he spoke, he gave just an
incidental shake of the head when asked what the future of the GOP would be
now. It was as if the question wasn't even that important.
"Oh, there won't be a Republican Party," he said. "It's basically over."
Cruz had at least won nearly 600 delegates and had passionate supporters
shedding real tears for him at the end. But nobody anywhere was crying for the
Republican Party. Even Custer had a less-lonely last stand.
Trump, meanwhile, spent the night basking in voluble self-admiration from Trump
Tower in New York. This is becoming his victory ritual. The lectern from which
he spoke said it all: TRUMP – VICTORY IN INDIANA – NEW YORK CITY.
Trump's naked disdain for the less-glamorous American flyover provinces he
somehow keeps winning by massive margins continued to be one of the livelier
comic subplots of the campaign.
From seemingly wondering if Iowans had eaten too much genetically modified corn
to thanking the "poorly educated" after his Nevada win, Trump increasingly
doesn't bother to even pretend to pander. This, too, is a major departure for
the Republican Party, whose Beltway imageers for decades made pretending to
sincerely prefer barns and trailers to nightclubs and spokesmodels a central
part of their electoral strategy.
Not Trump. Hell, he went out of his way to brag about being pals with Tom Brady
in the week before the Indiana primary, and still won by almost 20 points.
Given the level of Colts-Patriots antipathy, this is a little like campaigning
in Louisiana wearing a BP hat, or doing a whistle-stop tour through Waco with
Janet Reno.
After his crushing win, Trump gave a breathless victory speech. It was classic
Trump. "The people of Indiana have been incredible," he said. "I campaigned and
I made lots of speeches and met lots of incredible people... You don't get
better. The crowds got bigger and bigger... I didn't want to leave... We had a
tremendous victory tonight... Boy, Bobby Knight was incredible."
He had a few choice words for the GOP leadership. "I want to thank and
congratulate the Republican National Committee, and Reince Priebus," he
croaked, as his heavily-made-up, Robert Palmer-chicks collection of wives and
daughters twisted faintly in a deadpan chorus behind him.
"It is not an easy job, when you have 17 egos," Trump went on, smiling. "And
now I guess he's down to one."
The crowd roared. The RNC had kissed Trump's ring. That was it, right there,
the death of the modern Republican Party.
After 9/11, it felt like the Republicans would reign in America for a thousand
years. Only a year ago, this was still a party that appeared to be on the rise
nationally, having gained 13 Senate seats, 69 House seats, 11 governorships and
913 state legislative seats during the Obama presidency.
Now the party was effectively dead as a modern political force, doomed to go
the way of the Whigs or the Free-Soilers.
After Indiana, a historic chasm opened in the ranks of the party. The two
former President Bushes, along with Mitt Romney, announced they wouldn't attend
Trump's coronation at the convention in Cleveland. Additionally, House Speaker
Paul Ryan refused to say he would support the nominee.
There were now two Republican Parties. One, led by Trump, was triumphant at the
ballot, rapidly accruing party converts, and headed to Cleveland for what,
knowing the candidate, was sure to be the yuugest, most obscene, most joyfully
tacky tribute to a single person ever seen in the television age. If the
convention isn't Liberace meets Stalin meets Vince McMahon, it'll be a massive
disappointment.
From there, this Republican Party would steam toward the White House, which,
who knows, it might even win.
The other Republican Party was revealed in the end to be a surprisingly small
collection of uptight lawyers, financiers and Beltway intellectuals who'd just
seen their chosen candidate, the $100 million Jeb Bush, muster all of four
delegates in the presidential race. Meanwhile, candidates whose talking points
involved the beheading of this same party establishment were likely to win
around 2,000.
Like French aristocrats after 1789, those Republicans may now head into
something like foreign exile to plot their eventual return. But whether they
will be guillotined or welcomed back is an open question.
This was all because they'd misplayed the most unpredictable and certainly most
ridiculous presidential-campaign season Americans had ever seen.
On the one hand, they'd been blindsided by Trump, a foulmouthed free-coverage
magnet who impulsively decided to make mocking the Republican Party mullahs his
pet project for the years 2015-2016.
But they were also undone by a surge of voter anger that was in significant
part their own fault. In recent years, the Koch brothers/Tea Party wing of the
GOP had purged all moderates from the party, to the point where anyone who was
on record supporting the continued existence of any federal agency, said
Mexicans were people, or spoke even theoretically about the utility of taxes
was drummed from the candidate rolls.
Their expected endgame here was probably supposed to be the ascension of some
far-right, anti-tax, anti-government radical like Scott Walker, or even Cruz.
Instead, this carefully cultivated "throw the bums out" vibe was gluttonously
appropriated by Trump, who turned the anger against the entire Republican Party
before surging to victory on a strongman's platform of giant walls, mass
deportation and extravagant job promises that made the moon landing or the
Bernie Sanders agenda of free college look incrementalist in comparison.
One could say this was just a calamitous strategic misread on the part of the
Koch-brothers types. But another way to look at it is that this was the
inevitable consequence of the basic dynamic of the party, which by the end was
little more than a collection plate for global business interests that were, if
not foreign exactly, certainly nationless.
There was a time in this country – and many voters in places like Indiana and
Michigan and Pennsylvania are old enough to remember it – when business leaders
felt a patriotic responsibility to protect American jobs and communities. Mitt
Romney's father, George, was such a leader, deeply concerned about the city of
Detroit, where he built AMC cars.
But his son Mitt wasn't. That sense of noblesse oblige disappeared somewhere
during the past generation, when the newly global employer class cut regular
working stiffs loose, forcing them to compete with billions of foreigners
without rights or political power who would eat toxic waste for five cents a
day.
Then they hired politicians and intellectuals to sell the peasants in places
like America on why this was the natural order of things. Unfortunately, the
only people fit for this kind of work were mean, traitorous scum, the kind of
people who in the military are always eventually bayoneted by their own troops.
This is what happened to the Republicans, and even though the cost was a
potential Trump presidency, man, was it something to watch.
If this isn't the end for the Republican Party, it'll be a shame. They
dominated American political life for 50 years and were never anything but
monsters. They bred in their voters the incredible attitude that Republicans
were the only people within our borders who raised children, loved their
country, died in battle or paid taxes. They even sullied the word "American" by
insisting they were the only real ones. They preferred Lubbock to Paris, and
their idea of an intellectual was Newt Gingrich. Their leaders, from Ralph Reed
to Bill Frist to Tom DeLay to Rick Santorum to Romney and Ryan, were an
interminable assembly line of shrieking, witch-hunting celibates, all with the
same haircut – the kind of people who thought Iran-Contra was nothing, but
would grind the affairs of state to a halt over a blow job or Terri Schiavo's
feeding tube.
A century ago, the small-town American was Gary Cooper: tough, silent, upright
and confident. The modern Republican Party changed that person into a
haranguing neurotic who couldn't make it through a dinner without quizzing you
about your politics. They destroyed the American character. No hell is hot
enough for them. And when Trump came along, they rolled over like the weaklings
they've always been, bowing more or less instantly to his parodic show of
strength.
In the weeks surrounding Cruz's cat-fart of a surrender in Indiana, party
luminaries began the predictably Soviet process of coalescing around the
once-despised new ruler. Trump endorsements of varying degrees of sincerity
spilled in from the likes of Dick Cheney, Bob Dole, Mitch McConnell and even
John McCain.
Having not recently suffered a revolution or a foreign-military occupation,
Americans haven't seen this phenomenon much, but the effortless treason of
top-tier Republicans once Trump locked up the nomination was the most
predictable part of this story. Politicians, particularly this group, are like
crackheads: You can get them to debase themselves completely for whatever's in
your pocket, even if it's just lint.
That's why the first rule of any revolution is to wipe out the intellectuals.
Trump is surely already dreaming of the vast logging camp he will fill with the
Republican thinkfluencers who are at the moment making a show of being the last
holdouts.
Not surprisingly, in the past weeks, there was an epidemic of Monday-morning
quarterbacking among the Beltway punditocracy, as GOP cognoscenti struggled to
cope with the reality of Trumpism.
There were basically two responses among the tie-and-glasses sect of
Republicans to the prospect of kneeling before the philistine Trump: In the
minority stood New York Times lonely-hearts moralist David Brooks, who took the
remarkable step of looking at Trump's victories and wondering what part of this
unraveling could be his own fault. In Brooks-ian fashion, this essentially
noble response came out as painful pretentious comedy. He concluded that the
problem was that upper-crust conservatives like himself hadn't spent enough
time getting to know the dirtier folks below decks.
Instead of "spending large chunks of my life in the bourgeois strata," Brooks
promised to "go out into the pain" and "build a ladder of hope" by leaping
across "chasms of segmentation."
Translated into English, this might have meant anything from trying the
occasional domestic beer to actually hanging around the unemployed. But at
least Brooks recognized that on some level, the rise of Trump pointed to a
connection failure in the Republican kingmaking class.
No others among his conservative brethren saw it that way. Most Republican
intellectuals recoiled in blameless horror from the Trumpening, blaming
everything from media bias to the educational system for his rise. Some even
promised to degrade themselves with a vote for Hillary Clinton before ever
supporting Trump.
George Will of The Washington Post might have been the loudest objector. Will
increasingly seems like a man who is sure history will remember him for his
heroic opposition to Trump, and not for those 40-plus years of being an
insufferable spinster who writes bad columns about baseball to prove his ties
to the common man.
His diatribes against Trump, a "coarse character" who reads the National
Enquirer and brags about the size of his "penis" (one could almost feel the
pain it caused Will to have to commit this word to paper), took on an almost
religious character.
Just before Indiana, Will began treating the nomination of Trump like a forest
fire or a SARS outbreak, something that with the right spirit of sacrifice
could be contained with minimal loss of life, and perhaps only four years of a
Hillary presidency.
"If Trump is nominated," Will wrote, "Republicans working to purge him and his
manner from public life will reap the considerable satisfaction of preserving
the identity of their 162-year-old party."
But the crowning effort on the right-wing snobbery front came from none other
than British blogging icon and noted hairy person Andrew Sullivan. The
aforementioned came out of semiretirement to write a 7,000-word jeremiad for
New York magazine about how Trump was the inevitable product of too much
democracy.
The CliffsNotes summary of his monstrous piece, "Democracies End When They Are
Too Democratic," might go something like this: When I read Plato in grad
school, I learned that in free societies the mob eventually stops deferring to
the wisdom of smart people, and therefore must be muzzled before they send
Trump to wash the streets with our blood.
Sullivan's analysis was a balm to the decades of butt-hurt that await the
soon-to-be-ex-elite of the Republican Party. It blamed Trump's rise on everyone
but Republican intellectuals: Obama, Black Lives Matter and even "the gay left,
for whom the word 'magnanimity' seems unknown."
"A struggling white man in the heartland is now told to 'check his privilege'
by students at Ivy League colleges," Sullivan wrote, in a sentence that would
probably be true enough, if those two groups ever interacted. Sullivan was
right that white conservatives in places like Indiana hate Ivy Leaguers and
Black Lives Matter and the gay left and safe-spacers and feminists and all the
other mocking, sneering, atheistic know-it-all types from cosmopolitan cities
who scoff, as Obama famously did once, at their guns and their religion.
But they also hated all of those people eight years ago, 16 years ago, 30 years
ago. What's new about the Year of Trump is that they have now also suddenly
turned on their own party. Why?
Sullivan basically ignored this question. The closest he came to an explanation
was a passage saying that "global economic forces" hurt blue-collar workers in
particular, forcing them to compete with lots of other unskilled and basically
fungible human beings around the world. Which made them, he guessed, pissed off.
This avalanche of verbose disgust on the part of conservative intellectuals
toward the Trump voter, who until very recently was the Republican voter, tells
us everything we need to know about what actually happened in 2016.
There never was any real connection between the George Wills, Andrew Sullivans
and David Brookses and the gun-toting, Jesus-loving ex-middle-class voters they
claimed to embrace. All those intellectuals ever did for Middle America was
cook up a sales pitch designed to get them to vote for politicians who would
instantly betray them to business interests eager to ship their jobs off to
China and India. The most successful trick was linking the corporate mantra of
profit without responsibility to the concept of individual liberty.
Into the heartland were sent wave after wave of politicians, each more strident
and freedom-y than the last. They arrived draped in the flag, spewed patriotic
bromides about God, guns and small-town values, and pledged to give the
liberals hell and bring the pride back.
Then they went off to Washington and year after year did absolutely squat for
their constituents. They were excellent at securing corporate tax holidays and
tax cuts for the rich, but they almost never returned to voter country with
jobs in hand. Instead, they brought an ever-increasing list of villains
responsible for the lack of work: communists, bra-burning feminists, black
"race hustlers," climate-change activists, Muslims, Hollywood, horned owls...
By the Tea Party era, their candidates were forced to point fingers at their
own political establishment for votes, since after so many years of bitter
economic decline, that was the only story they could still believably sell.
This led to the hilarious irony of Ted Cruz. Here was a quintessentially
insipid GOP con man culled straight from the halls of Princeton, Harvard, the
Supreme Court, the Federal Trade Commission and the National Republican
Senatorial Committee to smooth-talk the yokels. But through a freak accident of
history, he came along just when the newest models of his type were selling
"the Republican establishment sucks" as an electoral strategy.
Cruz was like an android that should have self-destructed in a cloud of sparks
and black smoke the moment the switch flipped on. He instead stayed on just
long enough to win 564 delegates, a stunning testament to just how much
Republican voters, in the end, hated the Republican kingmakers Cruz robotically
denounced.
All of these crazy contradictions came to a head in Indiana, where Cruz
succumbed in an explosion of hate and scorn. The cascade started the Sunday
night before the primary, with a Cruz stump speech in La Porte that couldn't
have gone worse.
Things went sideways as Cruz was working his way into a "simple flat tax"
spiel, a standard Republican snake-oil proposal in which all corporate, estate
and gift taxes would be eliminated, and replaced with a 10 percent flat tax and
a 16 percent consumption tax. Not because the rich would pay less and the poor
would pay more, but because America and fairness, etc. He was just getting to
his beloved money line, claiming, "We can fill out our taxes on a postcard,"
when a 12-year-old boy interrupted with cries of "You suck!" and "I don't
care!"
Cruz couldn't quite handle the pressure and stepped straight into the man-trap
the moment presented. He lectured the kid about respecting his elders, then
suggested the world might be a better place if someone had taught a young
Donald Trump that lesson. It was a not-half-bad line of the type that the
Harvard lawyer is occasionally capable. But Cruz couldn't help himself and
added, "You know, in my household, when a child behaves that way, they get a
spanking."
Boom! Within hours the Internet was filled with headlines about how Ted Cruz
had suggested spanking someone else's 12-year-old for telling him he sucked.
This was on top of the ignominy of having already called a basketball hoop a
"ring" while giving a speech on the gym floor in Knightstown, the home of the
fictional Hickory team from Hoosiers. No American male would call a basketball
hoop a ring, and even a French immigrant would know better than to do so in
Indiana, but this was the kind of run he was on.
The rest of the race was a slapstick blowout. Carly Fiorina fell off a stage,
and Cruz's wife, Heidi, actually had to answer a question from a Yahoo!
reporter about her husband being called the Zodiac Killer. Heidi Cruz calmly
responded that she'd been married to Ted for 15 years and "I know pretty well
who he is." This, of course, was exactly what the wife of the actual Zodiac
Killer would say, making for a perfectly absurd ending to a doomed campaign.
As anyone who's ever been to high school knows, there's no answer to "You
suck!" When a bully pulls that line on you, it's because he can smell the
weakness: the Jonas Brothers album in your closet, your good grades, your
mantleful of band-camp participation trophies, whatever. When the mob smells
unorthodoxy, there's no talking your way out of it. You just have to hold on
for dear life.
Trump has turned the new Republican Party into high school. It will be cruel,
clique-y and ruled by insult kings like himself and Ann Coulter, whose headline
description of Cruz ("Tracy Flick With a Dick") will always resonate with Trump
voters more than a thousand George Will columns.
And anyone who crosses the leader from now on will be fair game for the kind of
brutal fragging Cruz and his circle experienced in Indiana. Dissenters will be
buried under a cannonade of abuse coming from everywhere: Trump, other
politicians, reporters, Internet memers, 12-year-olds, everyone. Add tough
economic times to the Internet, and this is what you get: Nationalist High.
Indiana was the end of an era. As Fiorina moved through a pancake house on
primary morning, her supporters meekly bowed and curtseyed as though she were
the Queen Mother, calling her ma'am and showing off the small-town civility and
churchy hospitality that was once a defining characteristic of Republican
campaign-trail events. In the Trump era, this seems likely to be replaced
forever by the testosterone-fueled diss-fests that had undone Cruz in this
state.
"People don't care about civility anymore," said Cruz supporter Julie Reimann
with a sigh. "It's another sad state of affairs, and when you see it across the
Midwest and in our small towns, it's like, 'What has happened to us? Why are we
so mean?' "
The real question might be, "Why weren't we meaner before?"
Politics at its most basic isn't a Princeton debating society. It's a desperate
battle over who gets what. But during the past 50 years, when there was a vast
shift in the distribution of wealth in this country, when tens of millions of
people were put out of good, dignified jobs and into humiliating ones,
America's elections remained weirdly civil, Queensberry-rules reality shows
full of stilted TV debates over issues like abortion, gay marriage and the
estate tax.
As any journalist who's ever covered a miners' strike or a foreclosure court
will report, things get physically tense when people are forced to fight for
their economic lives. Yet Trump's campaign has been the first to unleash that
menacing feel during a modern presidential race.
Some, or maybe a lot of it, is racial resentment. But much of it has to be
long-delayed anger over the way things have been divvied up over the years. The
significance of Trump's wall idea, apart from its bluntly racist appeal as a
barrier to nonwhite people, is that it redefines the world in terms of a clear
Us and Them, with politicians directly responsible for Us.
It's a plain rebuttal to the Sullivan explanation for why nobody between the
coasts has a decent job anymore, i.e., that there are "global economic forces"
at work that we can no more change than we can the weather. Trump's solutions
are preposterous, logistically impossible and ideologically vicious, but he's
giving people a promise more concrete than "tax cuts will stimulate growth that
will eventually bring jobs back." He's peddling hope, and with hope comes anger.
Of course, Trump is more likely than not to crash the car now that he has the
wheel. News reports surfaced that Donald Trump, unhinged pig, was about to be
replaced by Donald Trump, respectable presidential candidate. No more
schoolyard insults!
Trump went along with this plan for a few days. But soon after Indiana, he
started public fights with old pal Joe Scarborough and former opponents Graham
and Bush, the latter for backtracking on a reported pledge to support the
Republican nominee. "Bush signed a pledge... while signing it, he fell asleep,"
Trump cracked.
Then he began his general-election pivot with about 10 million tweets directed
at "crooked Hillary." With all this, Trump emphasized that the GOP was now
mainly defined by whatever was going through his head at any given moment. The
"new GOP" seems doomed to swing back and forth between its nationalist message
and its leader's tubercular psyche. It isn't a party, it's a mood.
Democrats who might be tempted to gloat over all of this should check
themselves. If the Hillary Clintons and Harry Reids and Gene Sperlings of the
world don't look at what just happened to the Republicans as a terrible object
lesson in the perils of prioritizing billionaire funders over voters, then they
too will soon enough be tossed in the trash like a tick.
It almost happened this year, when the supporters of Bernie Sanders nearly made
it over the wall. Totally different politicians with completely different ideas
about civility and democracy, Sanders and Trump nonetheless keyed in on the
same widespread disgust over the greed and cynicism of the American political
class.
From the Walter Mondale years on, Democrats have eaten from the same trough as
Republicans. They've grown fat off cash from behemoths like Cisco, Pfizer,
Exxon Mobil, Citigroup, Goldman and countless others, companies that moved jobs
overseas, offshored profits, helped finance the construction of factories in
rival states like China and India, and sometimes all of the above.
The basic critique of both the Trump and Sanders campaigns is that you can't
continually take that money and also be on the side of working people. Money is
important in politics, but in democracy, people ultimately still count more.
The Democrats survived this time, but Republicans allowed their voters to see
the numerical weakness of our major parties. It should take an awful lot to
break up 60 million unified people. But a few hundred lawyers, a pile of money
and a sales pitch can be replaced in a heartbeat, even by someone as dumb as
Donald Trump.
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Donald Trump. (photo: Brendan McDermid/Reuters)
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/r-i-p-gop-how-trump-is-killing-the-republican-party-20160518http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/r-i-p-gop-how-trump-is-killing-the-republican-party-20160518
RIP, GOP: How Trump Is Killing the Republican Party
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
19 May 16
ndianapolis, Indiana, May 3rd, 2016, a little before 8:30 p.m. Texas Sen. Ted
Cruz strode onstage beneath a gorgeous stained-glass relief in the city's Union
Station. The hall was doubling as a swanky bar for an upscale local hotel, and
much of the assembled press was both lubricated and impatient. The primary had
been called for Donald Trump more than an hour before. What was the holdup?
"God bless the Hoosier State!" Cruz said to whoops and cheers after he finally
emerged. He was surrounded by a phalanx of American flags, family members and
his gimmick running mate of six and a half days, Carly Fiorina, who stared out
at the crowd with her trademark alien-abducted smile.
Cruz glanced back and forth across the room with that odd, neckless,
monitor-lizard posture of his. He had to know the import of this moment.
Nothing less than the future of the Republican Party had been at stake in the
Indiana primary.
A Cruz loss effectively meant ceding control of the once-mighty organization to
Trump, a seemingly unrepentant non-Republican more likely to read Penthouse
than the National Review.
Before the vote, Cruz put it this way: "We are at the edge of a cliff, staring
downward."
Now, Cruz was over that cliff, having been trounced 53 to 36 percent in his
last-gasp effort to keep Trump from the nomination. In a detail the film-buff
candidate Cruz would appreciate, he left Indiana with the same number of
delegates as future senator John Blutarsky's grade-point average in Animal
House: zero-point-zero.
Still, Cruz looked like he was ready for the "Was it over when the Germans
bombed Pearl Harbor?" speech. He was going to fight.
"Will we hold fast to our founding values of rewarding talent, hard work and
industry?" he asked. "Or will we continue on that path of creeping socialism
that incentivizes apathy and dependency?"
The crowd roared.
"Will we keep America safe from the threats of nuclear war and atomic
terrorism?" he thundered. "Or will we pass on to future generations a land
devastated and destroyed by the enemies of civilization?"
More raucous cheers.
Cruz smiled. If he has a good quality, it is that he's not easily deterred by
criticism. As he took the stage that night, he surely knew that former Speaker
of the House John Boehner had recently called him "Lucifer in the flesh," and
that fellow senator Lindsey Graham had said, "If you kill Ted Cruz on the floor
of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody could convict you."
Likewise, when it was revealed Cruz once stated that one has no inherent right
to "stimulate one's genitals," his college roommate Craig Mazin popped up to
call him a hypocrite who'd whacked it plenty in college.
During the campaign, surprising numbers of Americans were even willing to
believe Cruz might also be the Zodiac Killer. The infamous Bay Area murders
began two years before Cruz was born, but 38 percent of Floridians at one point
believed Cruz either was or might be the Zodiac.
Were they serious? In an age when Donald Trump is a presidential nominee, what
does "serious" even mean? In any case, the cybercomics who fanned the flames of
the Cruz-Zodiac meme will someday be first-ballot entrants in the Trolling Hall
of Fame.
Finally, on the morning of the Indiana primary, Cruz woke up to hear opponent
Trump babbling that Cruz's own father had been hanging out with Lee Harvey
Oswald before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a bizarre take on a
ridiculous National Enquirer story that Trump, of course, believed instantly.
Trump brought this up on Fox and Friends, which let him run the ball all the
way to the end zone. "I mean, what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald, shortly
before the death – before the shooting?" Trump asked. "It's horrible."
American politics had never seen anything like this: a presidential candidate
derided as a haggardly masturbating incarnation of Satan, the son of a
presidential assassin's accomplice, and himself an infamous uncaptured serial
killer.
Despite the media humiliations, Cruz talked passionately of his supporters'
resolve. "Just a few days ago, two young kids, ages four and six, handed me two
envelopes full of change," he said. "All of their earnings from their lemonade
stand. They wanted the campaign to have it."
The crowd cooed: Awwww! There was no way he could quit now and let those kids
down. Except that moments later, Cruz did just that, announcing he was
suspending his campaign because "the path to victory has been foreclosed." Then
he fled the stage like he was double-parked.
The air vanished from the ballroom. Cruz supporters went nuts.
Nooooo! they screamed, hugging each other and crying. Many volunteers were from
faraway states. They expected to be continuing on somewhere the next morning.
Now they were all basically fired.
"What the fuck do we do now?" whispered one.
The pundits present were less emotional. "Does he get to use the lemonade money
to pay campaign debts?" wondered one.
As ignominious an end as this was for Cruz, it was a million times worse for
the Republican establishment.
The party of Nixon, Reagan and two Bushes had needed a win by Cruz, a man not
just disliked but loathed by the party elite, to stave off a takeover by Trump.
And yet Cruz's main pitch to his voters had been that between himself and
Trump, he was the one less connected to the Republican Party. "Cruz is the true
outsider," was how one supporter put it in Indiana.
Cruz volunteer Dan Porter seemed stunned with grief after the results came in,
but his sadness was reserved for Cruz, not the Republican Party. He couldn't
seem to wrap his head around the fact that so many people had voted for Trump,
a man who'd "been a Democrat his whole life," while a dedicated
constitutionalist like Cruz had been so roundly rejected.
So lost in thought that he stared at the carpet as he spoke, he gave just an
incidental shake of the head when asked what the future of the GOP would be
now. It was as if the question wasn't even that important.
"Oh, there won't be a Republican Party," he said. "It's basically over."
Cruz had at least won nearly 600 delegates and had passionate supporters
shedding real tears for him at the end. But nobody anywhere was crying for the
Republican Party. Even Custer had a less-lonely last stand.
Trump, meanwhile, spent the night basking in voluble self-admiration from Trump
Tower in New York. This is becoming his victory ritual. The lectern from which
he spoke said it all: TRUMP – VICTORY IN INDIANA – NEW YORK CITY.
Trump's naked disdain for the less-glamorous American flyover provinces he
somehow keeps winning by massive margins continued to be one of the livelier
comic subplots of the campaign.
From seemingly wondering if Iowans had eaten too much genetically modified corn
to thanking the "poorly educated" after his Nevada win, Trump increasingly
doesn't bother to even pretend to pander. This, too, is a major departure for
the Republican Party, whose Beltway imageers for decades made pretending to
sincerely prefer barns and trailers to nightclubs and spokesmodels a central
part of their electoral strategy.
Not Trump. Hell, he went out of his way to brag about being pals with Tom Brady
in the week before the Indiana primary, and still won by almost 20 points.
Given the level of Colts-Patriots antipathy, this is a little like campaigning
in Louisiana wearing a BP hat, or doing a whistle-stop tour through Waco with
Janet Reno.
After his crushing win, Trump gave a breathless victory speech. It was classic
Trump. "The people of Indiana have been incredible," he said. "I campaigned and
I made lots of speeches and met lots of incredible people... You don't get
better. The crowds got bigger and bigger... I didn't want to leave... We had a
tremendous victory tonight... Boy, Bobby Knight was incredible."
He had a few choice words for the GOP leadership. "I want to thank and
congratulate the Republican National Committee, and Reince Priebus," he
croaked, as his heavily-made-up, Robert Palmer-chicks collection of wives and
daughters twisted faintly in a deadpan chorus behind him.
"It is not an easy job, when you have 17 egos," Trump went on, smiling. "And
now I guess he's down to one."
The crowd roared. The RNC had kissed Trump's ring. That was it, right there,
the death of the modern Republican Party.
After 9/11, it felt like the Republicans would reign in America for a thousand
years. Only a year ago, this was still a party that appeared to be on the rise
nationally, having gained 13 Senate seats, 69 House seats, 11 governorships and
913 state legislative seats during the Obama presidency.
Now the party was effectively dead as a modern political force, doomed to go
the way of the Whigs or the Free-Soilers.
After Indiana, a historic chasm opened in the ranks of the party. The two
former President Bushes, along with Mitt Romney, announced they wouldn't attend
Trump's coronation at the convention in Cleveland. Additionally, House Speaker
Paul Ryan refused to say he would support the nominee.
There were now two Republican Parties. One, led by Trump, was triumphant at the
ballot, rapidly accruing party converts, and headed to Cleveland for what,
knowing the candidate, was sure to be the yuugest, most obscene, most joyfully
tacky tribute to a single person ever seen in the television age. If the
convention isn't Liberace meets Stalin meets Vince McMahon, it'll be a massive
disappointment.
From there, this Republican Party would steam toward the White House, which,
who knows, it might even win.
The other Republican Party was revealed in the end to be a surprisingly small
collection of uptight lawyers, financiers and Beltway intellectuals who'd just
seen their chosen candidate, the $100 million Jeb Bush, muster all of four
delegates in the presidential race. Meanwhile, candidates whose talking points
involved the beheading of this same party establishment were likely to win
around 2,000.
Like French aristocrats after 1789, those Republicans may now head into
something like foreign exile to plot their eventual return. But whether they
will be guillotined or welcomed back is an open question.
This was all because they'd misplayed the most unpredictable and certainly most
ridiculous presidential-campaign season Americans had ever seen.
On the one hand, they'd been blindsided by Trump, a foulmouthed free-coverage
magnet who impulsively decided to make mocking the Republican Party mullahs his
pet project for the years 2015-2016.
But they were also undone by a surge of voter anger that was in significant
part their own fault. In recent years, the Koch brothers/Tea Party wing of the
GOP had purged all moderates from the party, to the point where anyone who was
on record supporting the continued existence of any federal agency, said
Mexicans were people, or spoke even theoretically about the utility of taxes
was drummed from the candidate rolls.
Their expected endgame here was probably supposed to be the ascension of some
far-right, anti-tax, anti-government radical like Scott Walker, or even Cruz.
Instead, this carefully cultivated "throw the bums out" vibe was gluttonously
appropriated by Trump, who turned the anger against the entire Republican Party
before surging to victory on a strongman's platform of giant walls, mass
deportation and extravagant job promises that made the moon landing or the
Bernie Sanders agenda of free college look incrementalist in comparison.
One could say this was just a calamitous strategic misread on the part of the
Koch-brothers types. But another way to look at it is that this was the
inevitable consequence of the basic dynamic of the party, which by the end was
little more than a collection plate for global business interests that were, if
not foreign exactly, certainly nationless.
There was a time in this country – and many voters in places like Indiana and
Michigan and Pennsylvania are old enough to remember it – when business leaders
felt a patriotic responsibility to protect American jobs and communities. Mitt
Romney's father, George, was such a leader, deeply concerned about the city of
Detroit, where he built AMC cars.
But his son Mitt wasn't. That sense of noblesse oblige disappeared somewhere
during the past generation, when the newly global employer class cut regular
working stiffs loose, forcing them to compete with billions of foreigners
without rights or political power who would eat toxic waste for five cents a
day.
Then they hired politicians and intellectuals to sell the peasants in places
like America on why this was the natural order of things. Unfortunately, the
only people fit for this kind of work were mean, traitorous scum, the kind of
people who in the military are always eventually bayoneted by their own troops.
This is what happened to the Republicans, and even though the cost was a
potential Trump presidency, man, was it something to watch.
If this isn't the end for the Republican Party, it'll be a shame. They
dominated American political life for 50 years and were never anything but
monsters. They bred in their voters the incredible attitude that Republicans
were the only people within our borders who raised children, loved their
country, died in battle or paid taxes. They even sullied the word "American" by
insisting they were the only real ones. They preferred Lubbock to Paris, and
their idea of an intellectual was Newt Gingrich. Their leaders, from Ralph Reed
to Bill Frist to Tom DeLay to Rick Santorum to Romney and Ryan, were an
interminable assembly line of shrieking, witch-hunting celibates, all with the
same haircut – the kind of people who thought Iran-Contra was nothing, but
would grind the affairs of state to a halt over a blow job or Terri Schiavo's
feeding tube.
A century ago, the small-town American was Gary Cooper: tough, silent, upright
and confident. The modern Republican Party changed that person into a
haranguing neurotic who couldn't make it through a dinner without quizzing you
about your politics. They destroyed the American character. No hell is hot
enough for them. And when Trump came along, they rolled over like the weaklings
they've always been, bowing more or less instantly to his parodic show of
strength.
In the weeks surrounding Cruz's cat-fart of a surrender in Indiana, party
luminaries began the predictably Soviet process of coalescing around the
once-despised new ruler. Trump endorsements of varying degrees of sincerity
spilled in from the likes of Dick Cheney, Bob Dole, Mitch McConnell and even
John McCain.
Having not recently suffered a revolution or a foreign-military occupation,
Americans haven't seen this phenomenon much, but the effortless treason of
top-tier Republicans once Trump locked up the nomination was the most
predictable part of this story. Politicians, particularly this group, are like
crackheads: You can get them to debase themselves completely for whatever's in
your pocket, even if it's just lint.
That's why the first rule of any revolution is to wipe out the intellectuals.
Trump is surely already dreaming of the vast logging camp he will fill with the
Republican thinkfluencers who are at the moment making a show of being the last
holdouts.
Not surprisingly, in the past weeks, there was an epidemic of Monday-morning
quarterbacking among the Beltway punditocracy, as GOP cognoscenti struggled to
cope with the reality of Trumpism.
There were basically two responses among the tie-and-glasses sect of
Republicans to the prospect of kneeling before the philistine Trump: In the
minority stood New York Times lonely-hearts moralist David Brooks, who took the
remarkable step of looking at Trump's victories and wondering what part of this
unraveling could be his own fault. In Brooks-ian fashion, this essentially
noble response came out as painful pretentious comedy. He concluded that the
problem was that upper-crust conservatives like himself hadn't spent enough
time getting to know the dirtier folks below decks.
Instead of "spending large chunks of my life in the bourgeois strata," Brooks
promised to "go out into the pain" and "build a ladder of hope" by leaping
across "chasms of segmentation."
Translated into English, this might have meant anything from trying the
occasional domestic beer to actually hanging around the unemployed. But at
least Brooks recognized that on some level, the rise of Trump pointed to a
connection failure in the Republican kingmaking class.
No others among his conservative brethren saw it that way. Most Republican
intellectuals recoiled in blameless horror from the Trumpening, blaming
everything from media bias to the educational system for his rise. Some even
promised to degrade themselves with a vote for Hillary Clinton before ever
supporting Trump.
George Will of The Washington Post might have been the loudest objector. Will
increasingly seems like a man who is sure history will remember him for his
heroic opposition to Trump, and not for those 40-plus years of being an
insufferable spinster who writes bad columns about baseball to prove his ties
to the common man.
His diatribes against Trump, a "coarse character" who reads the National
Enquirer and brags about the size of his "penis" (one could almost feel the
pain it caused Will to have to commit this word to paper), took on an almost
religious character.
Just before Indiana, Will began treating the nomination of Trump like a forest
fire or a SARS outbreak, something that with the right spirit of sacrifice
could be contained with minimal loss of life, and perhaps only four years of a
Hillary presidency.
"If Trump is nominated," Will wrote, "Republicans working to purge him and his
manner from public life will reap the considerable satisfaction of preserving
the identity of their 162-year-old party."
But the crowning effort on the right-wing snobbery front came from none other
than British blogging icon and noted hairy person Andrew Sullivan. The
aforementioned came out of semiretirement to write a 7,000-word jeremiad for
New York magazine about how Trump was the inevitable product of too much
democracy.
The CliffsNotes summary of his monstrous piece, "Democracies End When They Are
Too Democratic," might go something like this: When I read Plato in grad
school, I learned that in free societies the mob eventually stops deferring to
the wisdom of smart people, and therefore must be muzzled before they send
Trump to wash the streets with our blood.
Sullivan's analysis was a balm to the decades of butt-hurt that await the
soon-to-be-ex-elite of the Republican Party. It blamed Trump's rise on everyone
but Republican intellectuals: Obama, Black Lives Matter and even "the gay left,
for whom the word 'magnanimity' seems unknown."
"A struggling white man in the heartland is now told to 'check his privilege'
by students at Ivy League colleges," Sullivan wrote, in a sentence that would
probably be true enough, if those two groups ever interacted. Sullivan was
right that white conservatives in places like Indiana hate Ivy Leaguers and
Black Lives Matter and the gay left and safe-spacers and feminists and all the
other mocking, sneering, atheistic know-it-all types from cosmopolitan cities
who scoff, as Obama famously did once, at their guns and their religion.
But they also hated all of those people eight years ago, 16 years ago, 30 years
ago. What's new about the Year of Trump is that they have now also suddenly
turned on their own party. Why?
Sullivan basically ignored this question. The closest he came to an explanation
was a passage saying that "global economic forces" hurt blue-collar workers in
particular, forcing them to compete with lots of other unskilled and basically
fungible human beings around the world. Which made them, he guessed, pissed off.
This avalanche of verbose disgust on the part of conservative intellectuals
toward the Trump voter, who until very recently was the Republican voter, tells
us everything we need to know about what actually happened in 2016.
There never was any real connection between the George Wills, Andrew Sullivans
and David Brookses and the gun-toting, Jesus-loving ex-middle-class voters they
claimed to embrace. All those intellectuals ever did for Middle America was
cook up a sales pitch designed to get them to vote for politicians who would
instantly betray them to business interests eager to ship their jobs off to
China and India. The most successful trick was linking the corporate mantra of
profit without responsibility to the concept of individual liberty.
Into the heartland were sent wave after wave of politicians, each more strident
and freedom-y than the last. They arrived draped in the flag, spewed patriotic
bromides about God, guns and small-town values, and pledged to give the
liberals hell and bring the pride back.
Then they went off to Washington and year after year did absolutely squat for
their constituents. They were excellent at securing corporate tax holidays and
tax cuts for the rich, but they almost never returned to voter country with
jobs in hand. Instead, they brought an ever-increasing list of villains
responsible for the lack of work: communists, bra-burning feminists, black
"race hustlers," climate-change activists, Muslims, Hollywood, horned owls...
By the Tea Party era, their candidates were forced to point fingers at their
own political establishment for votes, since after so many years of bitter
economic decline, that was the only story they could still believably sell.
This led to the hilarious irony of Ted Cruz. Here was a quintessentially
insipid GOP con man culled straight from the halls of Princeton, Harvard, the
Supreme Court, the Federal Trade Commission and the National Republican
Senatorial Committee to smooth-talk the yokels. But through a freak accident of
history, he came along just when the newest models of his type were selling
"the Republican establishment sucks" as an electoral strategy.
Cruz was like an android that should have self-destructed in a cloud of sparks
and black smoke the moment the switch flipped on. He instead stayed on just
long enough to win 564 delegates, a stunning testament to just how much
Republican voters, in the end, hated the Republican kingmakers Cruz robotically
denounced.
All of these crazy contradictions came to a head in Indiana, where Cruz
succumbed in an explosion of hate and scorn. The cascade started the Sunday
night before the primary, with a Cruz stump speech in La Porte that couldn't
have gone worse.
Things went sideways as Cruz was working his way into a "simple flat tax"
spiel, a standard Republican snake-oil proposal in which all corporate, estate
and gift taxes would be eliminated, and replaced with a 10 percent flat tax and
a 16 percent consumption tax. Not because the rich would pay less and the poor
would pay more, but because America and fairness, etc. He was just getting to
his beloved money line, claiming, "We can fill out our taxes on a postcard,"
when a 12-year-old boy interrupted with cries of "You suck!" and "I don't
care!"
Cruz couldn't quite handle the pressure and stepped straight into the man-trap
the moment presented. He lectured the kid about respecting his elders, then
suggested the world might be a better place if someone had taught a young
Donald Trump that lesson. It was a not-half-bad line of the type that the
Harvard lawyer is occasionally capable. But Cruz couldn't help himself and
added, "You know, in my household, when a child behaves that way, they get a
spanking."
Boom! Within hours the Internet was filled with headlines about how Ted Cruz
had suggested spanking someone else's 12-year-old for telling him he sucked.
This was on top of the ignominy of having already called a basketball hoop a
"ring" while giving a speech on the gym floor in Knightstown, the home of the
fictional Hickory team from Hoosiers. No American male would call a basketball
hoop a ring, and even a French immigrant would know better than to do so in
Indiana, but this was the kind of run he was on.
The rest of the race was a slapstick blowout. Carly Fiorina fell off a stage,
and Cruz's wife, Heidi, actually had to answer a question from a Yahoo!
reporter about her husband being called the Zodiac Killer. Heidi Cruz calmly
responded that she'd been married to Ted for 15 years and "I know pretty well
who he is." This, of course, was exactly what the wife of the actual Zodiac
Killer would say, making for a perfectly absurd ending to a doomed campaign.
As anyone who's ever been to high school knows, there's no answer to "You
suck!" When a bully pulls that line on you, it's because he can smell the
weakness: the Jonas Brothers album in your closet, your good grades, your
mantleful of band-camp participation trophies, whatever. When the mob smells
unorthodoxy, there's no talking your way out of it. You just have to hold on
for dear life.
Trump has turned the new Republican Party into high school. It will be cruel,
clique-y and ruled by insult kings like himself and Ann Coulter, whose headline
description of Cruz ("Tracy Flick With a Dick") will always resonate with Trump
voters more than a thousand George Will columns.
And anyone who crosses the leader from now on will be fair game for the kind of
brutal fragging Cruz and his circle experienced in Indiana. Dissenters will be
buried under a cannonade of abuse coming from everywhere: Trump, other
politicians, reporters, Internet memers, 12-year-olds, everyone. Add tough
economic times to the Internet, and this is what you get: Nationalist High.
Indiana was the end of an era. As Fiorina moved through a pancake house on
primary morning, her supporters meekly bowed and curtseyed as though she were
the Queen Mother, calling her ma'am and showing off the small-town civility and
churchy hospitality that was once a defining characteristic of Republican
campaign-trail events. In the Trump era, this seems likely to be replaced
forever by the testosterone-fueled diss-fests that had undone Cruz in this
state.
"People don't care about civility anymore," said Cruz supporter Julie Reimann
with a sigh. "It's another sad state of affairs, and when you see it across the
Midwest and in our small towns, it's like, 'What has happened to us? Why are we
so mean?' "
The real question might be, "Why weren't we meaner before?"
Politics at its most basic isn't a Princeton debating society. It's a desperate
battle over who gets what. But during the past 50 years, when there was a vast
shift in the distribution of wealth in this country, when tens of millions of
people were put out of good, dignified jobs and into humiliating ones,
America's elections remained weirdly civil, Queensberry-rules reality shows
full of stilted TV debates over issues like abortion, gay marriage and the
estate tax.
As any journalist who's ever covered a miners' strike or a foreclosure court
will report, things get physically tense when people are forced to fight for
their economic lives. Yet Trump's campaign has been the first to unleash that
menacing feel during a modern presidential race.
Some, or maybe a lot of it, is racial resentment. But much of it has to be
long-delayed anger over the way things have been divvied up over the years. The
significance of Trump's wall idea, apart from its bluntly racist appeal as a
barrier to nonwhite people, is that it redefines the world in terms of a clear
Us and Them, with politicians directly responsible for Us.
It's a plain rebuttal to the Sullivan explanation for why nobody between the
coasts has a decent job anymore, i.e., that there are "global economic forces"
at work that we can no more change than we can the weather. Trump's solutions
are preposterous, logistically impossible and ideologically vicious, but he's
giving people a promise more concrete than "tax cuts will stimulate growth that
will eventually bring jobs back." He's peddling hope, and with hope comes anger.
Of course, Trump is more likely than not to crash the car now that he has the
wheel. News reports surfaced that Donald Trump, unhinged pig, was about to be
replaced by Donald Trump, respectable presidential candidate. No more
schoolyard insults!
Trump went along with this plan for a few days. But soon after Indiana, he
started public fights with old pal Joe Scarborough and former opponents Graham
and Bush, the latter for backtracking on a reported pledge to support the
Republican nominee. "Bush signed a pledge... while signing it, he fell asleep,"
Trump cracked.
Then he began his general-election pivot with about 10 million tweets directed
at "crooked Hillary." With all this, Trump emphasized that the GOP was now
mainly defined by whatever was going through his head at any given moment. The
"new GOP" seems doomed to swing back and forth between its nationalist message
and its leader's tubercular psyche. It isn't a party, it's a mood.
Democrats who might be tempted to gloat over all of this should check
themselves. If the Hillary Clintons and Harry Reids and Gene Sperlings of the
world don't look at what just happened to the Republicans as a terrible object
lesson in the perils of prioritizing billionaire funders over voters, then they
too will soon enough be tossed in the trash like a tick.
It almost happened this year, when the supporters of Bernie Sanders nearly made
it over the wall. Totally different politicians with completely different ideas
about civility and democracy, Sanders and Trump nonetheless keyed in on the
same widespread disgust over the greed and cynicism of the American political
class.
From the Walter Mondale years on, Democrats have eaten from the same trough as
Republicans. They've grown fat off cash from behemoths like Cisco, Pfizer,
Exxon Mobil, Citigroup, Goldman and countless others, companies that moved jobs
overseas, offshored profits, helped finance the construction of factories in
rival states like China and India, and sometimes all of the above.
The basic critique of both the Trump and Sanders campaigns is that you can't
continually take that money and also be on the side of working people. Money is
important in politics, but in democracy, people ultimately still count more.
The Democrats survived this time, but Republicans allowed their voters to see
the numerical weakness of our major parties. It should take an awful lot to
break up 60 million unified people. But a few hundred lawyers, a pile of money
and a sales pitch can be replaced in a heartbeat, even by someone as dumb as
Donald Trump.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize ;
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
