#WTH Trumpification
Trump hasn't taken over the GOP. He's taken over politics.
I got an email from Axios yesterday telling me that “The Trumpification of the Republican Party is now complete.” Now, I’m not going to tell you again what I think about Donald Trump, because that is old news. What I am going to tell you is that the Trump takeover of the GOP machine, whether we like it or not, is standard operating procedure. He has been the candidate of the GOP for three presidential cycles, duly elected through real primaries, with real votes counted. You may not like him or his cronies or partisans, but there's nothing weird about this. What is weird is how Donald Trump has taken over the Democratic Party.
You’ll see a little artifice in that last sentence, because, of course Donald Trump hasn’t actually taken over the Dems, duh. But in style, manners, populist excess, and in his determination to play to the base (against the center), Donald Trump’s brand is all over Joe Biden’s party. Kinda crazy, but I’ll give you chapter and verse:
STYLE: Biden now likes to call Trump a “loser.” Axios also reports that “Biden is convinced he'll rattle Trump if he taunts him daily.”
MANNERS: Here’s Biden at the Gridiron dinner: "…one candidate is too old, mentally unfit to be president." he quipped. "The other's me."
POPULIST EXCESS: Take just one example — Biden’s determination to forgive student debt in the face of a Supreme Court decision that said doing so was illegal. This week, “President Joe Biden announced another round of student loan debt forgiveness Thursday, totaling $5.8 billion for nearly 78,000 public-sector workers, and will be sending congratulatory emails to those borrowers next week.” The total is now at $144 billion in “relief.” Your doctor’s janitor paying off his boss’s student loans. Incredible.
PLAYING TO THE BASE: 80 percent of Americans support Israel in its battle against the terror group Hamas. But a small but significant chunk of the far left of the Democratic Party — especially younger people — support Hamas. Biden has used his State of the Union and his legal authorities to play to that crowd relentlessly in the last month. He has announced US troops will build a pier in Gaza, has repeated called for a cease-fire* (*release the hostages too, he whispers), has taken on the democratically elected Israeli Prime Minister, and encouraged his proxy Chuck Schumer to call for Netanyahu’s ouster. Whom does that please? The 80 percent? Nah.
It’s not news that Donald Trump has ousted the gentlemen and women of the OG-GOP in favor of a brash new breed of Trumpy trolls who think nothing of abusing their adversaries in terms more appropriate to a school yard than the hallowed halls of Congress. And again, we may think the death of comity and courtesy is a bad thing (I do), but also respect that many Trump voters are sick and tired of being sneered at by ladies and gentlemen who have neither respect nor empathy for their very real travails. Sometimes, you want to be represented by someone who’s going to kick ass, not jawbone his opponent to death.
But but but… Joe Biden and his adherents have insisted that’s not the way it should be. They are not scum, street fighters, trolls, base panderers or anything else Trumpy. Except they are. Like it or not, it is Donald Trump who has transformed American politics, and, er, Trumpified the United States of America.
Rank and file conservatives within the GOP have been to the GOP establishment what black and Hispanic groups have been to the Democrat Party … they have only been given attention when the election rolls around. Afterwards the conservatives throughout red state America are forgotten while the GOP elite wine and dine while outsourcing American jobs to our “good friends” to the South, and to countries that hate us, like the People’s Republic of China. The GOP elite have been doing this in tandem with the Democrat Party.
As for more civility in politics … that is long gone. But I would strongly put forth that it is the Democrats and the Left who have been injecting toxicity into the body politic for decades. I can distinctly remember the outrageous attacks and slander leveled against then POTUS Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, with even despicable slogans and leftist memes blaming Reagan for the HIV epidemic and depicting Ronaldus Magnus with full blown AIDS.
Democrats and their leftist ilk have routinely slandered conservatives and Republicans as fascists and Nazis (btw … collectivist ideologies that are anti-capitalist, anti-religion, anti-gun ownership, and anti-individual freedom) throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. Does anybody remember the slanders against then Speaker Newt Gingrich and the later BusHitler signs and slogans at the leftist “anti-war” rallies?
Conservatives were later derided as “teabaggers” (a vulgar sex act spawned by Howard Stern) during the Tea Party movement among other vile epithets. That takes us up to the Trump MAGA movement; in which Democrats and the Left resurrect their fascist, racist, chauvinist chants and tropes against this newer and bolder Conservative grass roots movement.
The difference now is that while the Left continues its trench warfare attitude against their political opposition, the opposition (i.e., Trump and MAGA) have responded to the Left’s tactics in kind. The conservative movement has grown tired of the milquetoast responses by past standard bearers like John McCain and Mitt Romney.
Too many conservatives are sick and tired of being told that the border will be secured and that our nation’s economic policies will bring more jobs home, only for none of this to happen because of weak and gutless GOP leadership. Trump, despite all of his brashness and rudeness, is the 800 lb. gorilla that the rest of flyover country wants so that we can bring back American sovereignty, prestige and national pride.
G’day …
Our politics is in the gutter because the electorate buys it. The power of government is so vast that there is no recourse to its plunder. So people have chosen to use the coersive power of the state to further their ends- right or wrong. Trump's winning of the presidency sent a bad signal that his style wins. Sad because Reagan's example was effective in demolishing his opponents with style, grace and humor.