GOP decay

I publish columns by Texan Allen Clifton because he often says what I am thinking. Strange how that works. Once this reign of error by Trump and the sycophantic GOP is over, Allen will be regarded as one of the many heroes of America, who helped to bring our great but flawed nation back from the brink of destruction by speaking truth. The Republicans have so abused the truth I wonder if they even can recognize it any longer. What a pathetic group of spineless greedy enablers they have become.

Let's make one thing perfectly clear: Donald Trump didn't change the Republican Party; he just brought to the surface what so many conservatives had spent decades denying was true.

The racism, bigotry, self-centeredness, out-of-control spending, anti-Constitutionalism, anti-democratic tendencies, perpetual victimhood, and never-ending hypocrisy.

Sure, Trump is all of those things — but the GOP has been all of those things for a very long time.

I wrote my article The Republican March Towards a Society of Sociopaths years before MAGA existed. I wrote The Cult of Republicanity well before Trump was anything more than a loser who called into Fox News to whine about Barack Obama's birth certificate.

Even when I was fairly young, I remember being confused about how Republicans could claim to be the party of "fiscal responsibility" while viewing Ronald Reagan as the "conservative icon" when he nearly tripled the national debt during his eight years as president.

How can you be "fiscally responsible" yet go into massive debt?

Now Trump is on pace to add more to the national debt than any president in history, and you don't hear a peep from Republicans about the need to be "fiscally responsible."

Newt Gingrich was House Speaker during the impeachment of Bill Clinton over a consensual affair — yet Gingrich cheated on both of his wives.

Gingrich's replacement, Dennis Hastert, later admitted to sexually abusing several underage males while he was a high school wrestling coach.

But this was the party of "moral, Christian values"?

Now we have Trump, who has literally cheated on every single one of his wives and has had nearly 30 women accuse him of sexual assault.

It's the party that, in 1989, elected David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the KKK and well-known white nationalist.

The GOP is the party that reinvented itself during Richard Nixon's presidency with a plan called the "Southern Strategy," designed to pander to white resentment, particularly in the South and rural areas, as those voters felt "betrayed" by the Democratic Party's embrace of equality for Black Americans.

It's the party that smiled as it unethically and unconstitutionally denied Barack Obama's presidential right to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court after Scalia passed away — claiming a nonexistent "precedent" against replacing a justice during an election year — then completely contradicted itself a few years later when Republicans rushed to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg after she died just a couple of weeks before the 2020 presidential election.

Yes, Trump is awful. He always has been. As I've said many times before, my disdain for him has nothing to do with politics. I couldn't stand the piece of crap long before he took over the GOP. He's been a horrible person his entire life.

But he didn't "change" the GOP.

He simply brought to the surface and exposed the many truths about it that people like myself have been pointing out for years.

That's why I've said Donald Trump is many terrible things, but one "good" thing he did was prove that the accusations and criticisms folks like myself have made against the Republican Party all these years were not without merit.

Allen Clifton (and he now has a Substack)