Stop Pretending The GOP Is Trump's Prisoner. They Bent Over Willingly For Him
The Republican Party could have stopped Trump at any time. But they didn't want to.
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October’s issue of The Atlantic has caused quite a stir. The cover, seen above, is striking in its imagery and, apparently, the first time in the magazine’s history that it’s devoid of any kind of headlines or typesetting. So much the better to impart the danger of Trump’s attempt to return to Washington as the tyrant he so clearly wants to be.
There’s just one small problem with The Atlantic’s cover: It shows the GOP elephant in the back of Trump's carriage as a sad prisoner, held in chains.
That’s absolute bullshit and I’m really fucking tired of the press pretending otherwise.
When Trump waddled down that escalator in front of a hired crowd in the summer of 2015, the GOP ignored him. Trump was a clown, a buffoon. But by the end of the year, it was clear they had a problem.
Instead of doing something about it, Republicans let him rile up the crowds with racism and misogyny. They saw an opportunity. A new Tea Party in the making. They saw their base being energized and mobilized by rage and hate and Republicans figured they could ride that wave to power just like they did in 2010.
But they failed to understand that Republican voters craved the pure, unadulterated spite and racism Trump was feeding them by the truckload. The GOP had spent billions of dollars and decades turning their base into a toxic swamp of bigots and imbeciles who then gleefully followed the loudest bigot and imbecile of them all.
Never-Trumpers and their close personal friends in the media are constantly telling the story of how Trump “infected” the Republican Party. How he “corrupted” it. How everything was nice and normal before that June 2015 escalator ride. How, if Trump would just go away, everything would go back to the good ol’ days when Republicans were good people before they were led astray by a monster.
Oh, go fuck yourself.
There’s a scene in The Nightmare Before Christmas1 where Oogie Boogie has his skin/cloth sack ripped off to reveal that underneath, he was just a swarm of creepy bugs all along.
You see where I’m going with this. Oogie Boogie was a scumbag throughout the entire movie. Absolutely no one was surprised to find out that he was even worse under his mask.
And so it is with the Republican Party. Trump didn’t change who they were. He pulled off their mask and, surprise!, they were even worse underneath.
Well, not really a surprise because the left has been screaming about them for decades. We saw them as the fascists they were and said, explicitly, where their party of treasonous white nationalists was heading. The press, naturally, told us to shut the fuck up. How DARE you stupid liberals say such untrue and mean things about the Grand Old Party?!
This would be the same press that couldn’t stop congratulating Republicans for how clever they were for calling us “baby killers.” Because saying untrue and mean things is apparently OK if you’re a Republican. For a more recent example of this, look at how the press cried big sobby tears over the JD Vance couch fucker joke and how it looked the other way as the entire Republican Party spread the dangerous lie that Haitians were eating pets in Ohio.
Regardless of the press being a bunch of backstabbing fucksticks, the Republican Party has been a breeding ground for fascists and monsters for a century, at least. Even BEFORE they became avowed racists, the GOP was extremely pro-fascist. They loved them some Nazis before, during, and after WWII. Go listen to Rachel Maddow’s Ultra podcast.
Nixon kicked off the GOP’s embrace of white nationalism with the fucking Southern Strategy. The Southern Strategy’s sole purpose was to entice racist white Southerners to leave the Democratic Party by offering them a new home in the GOP. How? By telling them that the GOP was the party of white power, now and forever.
We’re not supposed to talk about it, but Ronald Reagan was a virulent racist, bigot, and a rapist.2 His made-up “welfare queen” story gets memory-holed along with Republicans laughing as AIDS ravaged the gay community.
George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign was explicitly anti-LGBT when it wasn’t busy terrorizing the public over Muslims existing.
Then came the Tea Party and the never-ending ocean of racism that vomited out of the GOP after the election of a Black man to “their” White House. The constant threats of violence. The calls to overthrow the government. The coordinated efforts to rig elections.
Trump? Trump who? He wasn’t even a fucking footnote yet. Yeah, he became the ringleader of Birtherism but Trump had just latched on to something ugly that was already there.
Trump did not change the Republican base. What he did was give them permission to be their worst selves, out in the open, and they eagerly accepted. No more pretending to be good neighbors and patriotic Americans who loved this country. Trump told them it was OK to spit on everything and everyone they hated, especially America and its democracy and diverse population.
And they loved it. So. Fucking. Much.
No one can make you enjoy being cruel and spiteful. If I give you permission to kill puppies, you’re not going to do it unless you already want to kill puppies. I can tell you to hate America and democracy and, hey, isn’t this Nazi stuff with the concentration camps and mass murder and fascism pretty cool? Let’s try that! But unless you’re already the type to enjoy goosestepping and ethnic cleansing, you’re not going to be all that interested.
But Republicans? Let me tell ya, Republicans were ready and willing.
Elected Republicans fell in line because Trump was the gateway to undreamed of power. With a corrupt Supreme Court and a puppet in the White House willing to rubber stamp whatever was put in front of him, Republicans could warp America into their twisted vision forever.
Not every Republican thought this bargain was a good idea and once Trump proved to be too erratic to control and cost them election after election, they wanted off the Trump Train. But it was too late. Republican voters will never go back to pretending to be anything but rabid bigots and fascists. The party has been taken over by grifters and imbeciles elected by the base of morons carefully cultivated through decades of mind-killing propaganda.
The GOP is not a prisoner of Trump. The Republican Party created him and then he killed the Republican Party. In November, Trump will lose and the GOP, long dead, will finally begin to decay.
The cover of The Atlantic should not show the GOP elephant as a prisoner. It should show it as a bloated rotting corpse, just like the orange-faced thing squatting on top of it.
There are 52 days until the 2024 election. Vote blue like your life depends on it. This is America. No kings. No weirdos. Vote Harris and Walz.
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One of the greatest films ever made and when Disney tries to make a live-action version, I will join the ranks of the Gen-X/Millennial uprising to smite them. Finally, something to unite our generations.
Reagan was Trump before there was Trump, all the way down to his brain melting.
This is deliciously petty and true at the same time. Just because the Cheneys are endorsing Kamala Harris doesn’t erase their past sins fucking up the country in the service of the Heritage Society and Rupert Murdoch.
Fascism has never gone out of style for the GOP, they were just hiding it under a cloak of “respectability” and faux patriotism. That facade has been ripped away and lies in tatters. Vote Blue 💙