The Predestined End of the Trump Era
What did you all expect? Seriously, what did you really expect?
When the Republican President of the United States tells Republican voters that the election process is rigged, Republican voters tend not to show up. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, and two Republican U.S. Senators learned that the hard way on Tuesday.
Today, we saw the absurd conclusion of the drama surrounding the Presidential Election, where far too many Republican members of Congress made fools of themselves protesting election results, not because of any evidence of fraud, but in order to placate the ego of a fragile and defeated President.
The Presidency of Donald J. Trump is ending in the way most of us expect to; with the Democrats taking over control of both the Executive and the Legislative Branches, while the Republican Party is divided and in flames.
This was inevitable. I wrote this five years ago;
In a spin of irony, many of the Trumpkins are now trying to demand loyalty of Republicans to support Trump if he is the Republican nominee solely because he’s the Republican nominee. It’s ironic because many of these same pro-liberty types refused to show such loyalty to other Republican candidates, even though many of these Republican candidates (Bush, McCain, Romney, etc) had issue platforms and positions within the accepted ballpark of conservative values. There is not a single position that Trump holds that can be classified as conservative. In fact, Trump’s main position in the election is that he is for winning and against somebody else winning. Beyond that, he will say or do anything to get elected, regardless of its morality.
How right I was.
Donald Trump has been a disaster for the Republican party, both locally and nationally. No one can deny the moral rot that has beset the GOP, where Trump has been boorish behavior a feature and not a bug, and where Trump has greased the skids to allow all manner of conspiracy theorists and ne'er-do-wells to not just infiltrate the party, but to become leaders within the party.
Four years ago the Republican Party would have never seen QAnon conspiracy fans like Marjorie Taylor Greene get elected to Congress. Now, there are more Republicans like Greene than anybody is particularly comfortable with.
But Trump has also poisoned the ideological well of Republicans too. Far too many Republicans have flipped their positions on taxes, spending, tariffs, free trade, government handouts, national security, foreign policy, and other issues as well. Republican ideology has become more transactional than it ever was before the Trump era.
Look at this thought.
No Republican, no conservative, would have ever suggested that “We would have won the Senate had Mitch McConnell not blocked more government handouts” prior to the Trump era. Now, government handouts are just another thing that Trump supporters expect from the government. The GOP went from “handouts are socialism” to “more handouts!” in just one presidential term.
Now, the Republican Party is divided. Those who continue to placate Trump are on one side; those of us who never bought on to Trump have been joined by those who have given up on him on the other. One side is going to continue to push for Trump’s firebrand version of leftist policies after Trump has left the scene. The other will be pushing for a return to the Republican policies and values that made the party electorally successful. There will be time later for a more in-depth examination of that ecosystem going forward.
But Trump leaving the party divided and in ruins was how this was always going to end. When a politician makes everything about him, and when a party sells out to make fealty to its leader the most important policy platform, defeat is inevitable. Now the GOP must remake itself into a conservative party of ideas and people instead of a political vehicle design to placate the ego of one man.
But don’t you dare think that this wasn’t how the Trump era was predestined to end.