The GOP Has Always Been A Cult

Ingraham: If Trump wins, this will be referred to as the age of Trump. He dominates the policy debate in ways that no one has done since Reagan. And if he picks a strong VP… this coalition could be in power for 50 years pic.twitter.com/B4VJ0sESlp

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 13, 2024

Never Trumpers lament what Trump has done to the party of Reagan. He is the sainted President who could do no wrong (Reykjavik is expunged from GOP history books), could only be wronged (Oliver North sinned: St. Ronnie remained pure and holy and above the betrayals of his underlings), whose singular miraculous accomplishment (there only has to be one for secular saints), was…delivering a speech at D-Day ceremonies in the ‘80’s?

To hear the comparisons to Biden’s speech at the same event, you can be forgiven if you think so.

Before that, the GOP was the party of Lincoln (until St. Ronnie kicked off his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, tacitly linking himself to white supremacists while teaching us all it was polite to talk about “welfare queens” in their Cadillacs. (No wonder the working class loved him.)

When was the last time you heard the Democratic Party described as the party of Jefferson? Except by GOP critics trying to link the party to slavery and rape? No Democrat ever speaks in such hagiographic tones about FDR, or LBJ, or any other Democratic President of the 20th century. (I’ll almost give you JFK and “Camelot,” but that’s mostly because he was young and he died violently and shockingly. JFK’s main gifts to history were convincing men to quit wearing hats (look it up) and to teach young people they, too, could matter. In fact, you want to blame the Boomers in one man, blame JFK.)

The GOP has always been a party of personality. First it was Lincoln, made a secular saint by assassination (his efforts always more honored in the breach than in the keeping). They abandoned Lincoln as LBJ embraced civil and voting rights; and after Nixon led them into the wilderness, Good St. Ronnie led them to the political promised land in a fictional Cadillac, with an equal fiction about being a warrior against the “Evil Empire.” (IMHO, if you hadn’t guessed, Reagan was a middling President at best, a senile boob at worst (the endgame), who had fortune in his opponent, Mikhail Gorbachev. It was Gorbachev who tore down the wall, not St. Ronnie Ray-guns.)

Small wonder, really, that the crowd frothed to madness by the Astro-turfed TEA Party, would turn to Trump as their next cult leader.

It was as inevitable as sunrise.

And all the wise men of the GOP, Rumsfeld and Barr and Cheney, the one’s who thought mastering Washington’s games made them Masters of the Universe. That rotten structure was crumbling into dust anyway. Trump is just the avatar of its collapse. Now even Cheney’s daughter Liz has been turfed out into the place of darkness and gnashing of teeth. (In the name of political ambition she turned on her own sister. Joe Biden embraces his convict son like the wonderful father embracing the prodigal:

…Liz Cheney’s embrace of a theory of democracy that rejects Trump/MAGA is not, IMHO, redeeming.) The GOP Masters of the Washington game were proven to be men riding the train, with chains upon their hands, not their hands on the controls. Trump is what they asked for, and it turned out they got it.

So McConnell and the rest who denounced Trump in 2021 and toady to him today in the Capitol haven’t changed their stripes, because they never did. Trump was the iconic party leader (*cough* cult leader *cough*), and then for a few hours he wasn’t (the tell was when McConnell refused to rally the troops to impeach Trump the second time, and bar him from office. By then passions had already cooled, and probably nobody really meant to take responsibility for what they said in January. By ‘73 Nixon didn’t have the grassroots Trump did in ‘24. But Nixon faced a real political party. Trump leads a cult of personality.).

The lesson is this: Texas has been a one-party state since Reconstruction, and that party was never the party of Lincoln. LBJ famously lamented that he’d signed away the South when he signed the VRA (that was the one that really put the Feds in charge in the South). (Imagine any politician so determinedly doing so right a thing today. Just saying…). The dominance of the Democrats in Texas peaked in the’70’s with some of the most liberal legislation in the land (no, seriously), and not really all that much concern for Roe v Wade, which came out of Houston (IIRC).

That was all eradicated before the end of the century. And Texas stayed a one-party state, without electing Democrats, or really noticing any change. The slide from one party to the other was practically seamless. It was truly a bloodless coup. Hell, we traded in the Governor Miz Anne for Shrub, and never looked back. How much more devoted to one-party rule could we be?

The slide from the party of the sainted Reagan to the party of the unfit for human society Trump, was just as easy, and as easily accomplished. There wasn’t really any change at all, not even the party names. It was so seamless and smooth it was practically a continuum.

Some would say, in fact, that it was. But some still refuse to see it at all.

Pelosi: I do wish there would be an intervention from his family, assuming they loved him, that they would intervene, that the Republican party would have an intervention, they have become a cult to a thug pic.twitter.com/j4tOMwHuqU

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 14, 2024

What the Speaker Emeritus said. Except I think “become,” while the right term temporally, is carrying a bit too much baggage to be accurate. The change wasn’t that dramatic or radical. It’s more like they are finally a cult to a thug. But it’s what they were always going to be.  IMHO.