Friends of Padre Steve’s World,
With his poll numbers in freefall and dozens of GOP leaders fleeing his toxic fascism, Donald Trump has gone on the attack. Trump bragged that he is now “unshackled” from the GOP and yes while he is attacking Hillary Clinton and threatening in a typical banana republic fascist dictator sort of way that he is going to jail her if he is elected, even more importantly he is now gone nuclear on the GOP and the firestorm has just begun. His attacks against any and all GOP leaders who oppose him or are critical of him are creating a scorched earth situation which will scar the GOP and it is largely the fault of GOP leaders for creating the moral and ideological toxic waste dump from which he emerged. Today, after a firestorm of tweets directed at Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, in which he tweeted: Our very weak and ineffective leader, Paul Ryan, had a bad conference call where his members went wild at his disloyalty. Trump tweeted:
Disloyal R’s are far more difficult than Crooked Hillary. They come at you from all sides. They don’t know how to win – I will teach them!
It is the beginning of the end for the GOP and I have been predicting this for almost a year, often using the comparison of the meltdown that happened to the Democratic Party between 1858 and 1860. The bitterness and divisiveness of that collapse kept the Democrats out of the White House for 25 years and the trend would not be fully reversed until Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in 1932.
But even so there was something very different about that collapse than what is happening today in the GOP. In 1858-1860 the meltdown was centered on the expansion of slavery into the new territories, and Northern Democrats who were in favor of allowing the Southern States to keep their slaves were opposed to slavery’s expansion. That divide blew up in 1858 and 1859 with the attempt of Southerners to get Kansas admitted into the Union as a Slave State when the vast majority of Kansans opposed slavery. Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, a man who most people expected to win the Presidency in 1860, led the opposition and fought his fellow Democrat, President James Buchanan to the bitter end to stop the attempt and in the process infuriated Southern Democrats so much that they would not support him and ran a Southern Democratic ticket against him in 1860. The result was that Abraham Lincoln won the election with a plurality of the vote. When the South seceded Douglas rallied Northern Democrats around the Union as Southern Democrats led their States into the Confederacy.
If you are interested you can see the first article that I wrote about it here:
When Political Parties Implode: The Battle over the Lecompton Constitution and its Relevance Today
I later revised and expanded that article into a five part series in March of this year.
But as I said, today’s situation in the GOP is different. It is not about policy. It is about a cult of personality centered on a Presidential nominee who demands absolute loyalty to himself and tolerates no dissent. It is about a man and a cult that sees no problem in trashing the Constitution, of banning reporters and news organizations that it disagrees with from their rallies, a leader and a cult that has no problem using physical violence against opponents, a leader and a cult that revels in xenophobia, which has hijacked the Christian faith, which supports the actions of a Russian leader who has relentlessly worked to subvert the United States and its allies, a man who brags about his ability to avoid paying taxes, who mocks the disabled, calls POWs and wounded warriors “losers”, demeans the military and its leadership at every opportunity, and views women as objects who should be sexually assaulted. I’m sorry, the man and his cult are deplorable. Conservative columnist George Will described the vapid world of Trump’s supporters in a column that was published yesterday. He noted:
“Trump is a marvelously efficient acid bath, stripping away his supporters’ surfaces, exposing their skeletal essences. Consider Mike Pence, a favorite of what Republicans devoutly praise as America’s “faith community.” Some of its representatives, their crucifixes glittering in the television lights, are still earnestly explaining the urgency of giving to Trump, who agreed that his daughter is “a piece of ass,” the task of improving America’s coarsened culture.”
To watch Pence, Pat Robertson, Robert Jefferess and other right wing religious hacks masquerading as ministers praise and defend Trump after his comments about assaulting women was to watch the old guard of the Religious Right throw themselves into the abyss. No wonder people are fleeing the church.
It is about a man who based on his actions as a businessman which crushed investors as well small business owners, who sues anyone that attempts to expose him, as well as his threats as a politician against his opponents, including those in his own party would be quickly establish himself as a dictator if elected. Sadly, it seems that many of his supporters want just that.
So now the Civil War in the GOP that I predicted months ago is erupting in full view of all. It is going to be a disaster for the party, a party that I belonged to for 32 years. I left the GOP in 2008 after I returned from Iraq, but that does not mean that I don’t have a certain amount of grief in watching the unfolding disaster. While it is too early to say what the final result will be, it is not too early to say that this will have a major impact in American politics and quite possibly hand the Democrats the reins of government for decades, but this is the fault of the GOP. For decades its leaders have basked in the support of unprincipled ideologues, talk radio hosts, and unscrupulous Christian religious leaders who have done nothing but sown the wind of hatred and division and now are reaping the whirlwind. As I said at the top, they created the moral and ideological toxic waste dump from which Trump emerged and they will have to own the result.
There are some who are now speculating that Trump is no longer trying to win the election and has ulterior motives. I have seen a number of commentators who think that he is going to use this to attempt to build a new media empire with the help of Breitbart’s Steve Bannon and former Fox News chief Roger Ailes. But I think that there is another good possibility, the possibility that Trump will take his supporters, especially frustrated Tea Party and Religious Right types and form a new party built around him. If that happens I believe that the rump of what is left of the GOP will struggle to survive after the election.
The GOP Civil War has broken out and while Trump’s supporters in Breitbart say that he has already won it, the fact is there is only one thing that is for certain, for the GOP there will be no winners.
Peace
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