It’s Not A Mystery 🧟‍♂️

My latest for @LincolnSquareHQ

“Something happened in the Republican Party. We evolved a system that rewarded lack of character and elevated weak men and women.”

An Inside Look: How the Law-and-Order Party became the Party of Jeffery Epstein https://t.co/h20TuQxhsg

— Stuart Stevens (@stuartpstevens) August 9, 2025

What happened to the GOP is that Goldwater lost to LBJ; and the arch-conservatives who saw Goldwater as their avatar started working on Project 2025. Not literally, but their own version of how things ought to be. Their next avatar was Newt Gingrich, and the wholly Astro-turfed “grassroots” Tea Party, which they treated as useful idiots and discarded as soon as the Tea Party became useless.

Not at all unlike MAGA.

Trump didn’t do a damned thing to the GOP. He’s not that smart, ambitious, cunning (feral or otherwise), or strategic. The GOP was hollowed out after the Tea Party and W and Cheney/Rumsfeld got through with it. That and decades of Chicago school of economics bullshit about the cause of inflation (Reagan didn’t lower government spending, as Friedman preached; Volcker raised interest rates to over 20% and strangled inflation out of the economy) and how government should be “run like a business.” Like Trump’s businesses? Or Elmo’s?

That argument, of course, is why NWS is rehiring 450 employees laid off by DOGE, and why Pantex had to rehire everyone to keep watch on nuclear fuel and processed nuclear waste in America. Because businesses don’t do that shit; governments do.

Trump and Project 2025 are nothing more than where the GOP has been driving the country since at least 1964. Some in the GOP don’t like that reality, because the party finally caught the car they were chasing. And it’s a bus full of zombies hungry to destroy brains.

Some of us can’t but say we told you so. And welcome to the resistance.