It may be tempting to claim that Donald Trump has completely hijacked the Republican Party and turned it into a fascist, authoritarian party. After all, it used to be that the GOP was known as “the Party of National Security,” “the Law-and-Order Party,” and “the Party of Fiscal Responsibility.” Donald Trump has made a mockery of all these monikers.
In the area of National Security: he has conflated his own interest with national foreign policy; he has spilled national secrets to the country’s biggest adversary; he has mishandled classified documents on a colossal scale; he has expressed admiration for the world’s most monstrous authoritarians and has invited them to run rough-shod over our allies; and he operated a government of chaos that has traumatized the population.
Regarding Law-and-Order: he has instigated the biggest assault on our democracy since the Civil War and he praises and promises to pardon the thugs who attacked the Capitol Hill Police; he has bent the Justice Department and the IRS to persecute his adversaries and defend his allies; he has disparaged the United States’ preeminent law-enforcement agency (FBI) for doing their job in a non-partisan manner; and he has attacked and undermined the credibility of the election system—the very bedrock of our system of Law and Order.
And lastly, about the Party of Fiscal Responsibility: Trump boasts of having created the best economy in the history of the world whereas his delinquency left the economy in shambles when he was voted out of office; his greatest legislative action on the economy was to increase the federal deficit by more than all previous presidents combined by granting huge tax breaks for the people and corporations who needed it least.
Even with all this, the GOP continues to fanatically support him.
This is no mystery, because Donald Trump did not corrupt the party. A close look at the recent history of the GOP reveals that it has been on this trajectory since at least as far back as Ronald Reagan, and seeds for the anti-democratic trend go back further to Richard Nixon, who famously attempted to corrupt the Justice Department and oversaw criminal activities to cheat in his reelection campaign.
Before that, Nixon was the first of three Republican presidents to interfere with foreign policy during their first successful run for the Presidency. Nixon interfered with Lyndon Johnson’s attempt to coax the South Vietnamese into a peace agreement with the North in order to settle the Vietnam War prior to the 1968 election. Ronald Reagan’s campaign conspired with the Iranian revolutionaries to befuddle Jimmy Carter’s attempts to free the American embassy personnel held hostage by the revolutionary Iranian government. And Donald Trump’s welcoming of Russian interference in all his elections is quite apparent. Even George W Bush’s first election in 2000 is tarnished by the violent actions of the “Brooks Brothers Riots” that shut down the orderly process of counting ballots in Florida.
Whether or not Nixon directed the interference and whether or not the effort was determinative is under debate. Parallel arguments can be made about Reagan and Trump. In the case of Bush, the efforts were clearly decisive. The point is that all these Republican candidates for president were willing to benefit from methods that lay outside the usual legal framework to attain office. Consider that Republicans have been de-legitimizing non-White voters and gerrymandering districts for decades in order to consolidate White minority rule in state houses, and a stark picture of a party unconcerned with the ideal of democratic rule is quite clear.
If Republican administrations could be recognized as having generally served the public interest, then this obvious flaw would be easily dismissed as forgivable. However, through bullying and propagandizing, Republicans have been pulling the center of debate toward their elitist goals for decades. Their success in setting the terms of the public discourse culminated in Bill Clinton’s appropriation of the Republican agenda in the 1990s with his announcement that his legislation would “end welfare as we know it.” They have dragged Democrats further and further to the right with their anti-progressive tax policy since Reagan, so that the creation of the Billionaire Class—those who will most benefit under authoritarianism—is the direct result of explicit policy choices made with the collusion of Democrats as unwitting accomplices up until the emergence of a new Progressive movement in the early part of this century.
The multi-ethnic election of Barak Obama was a dangerous interruption to the Republican project to quietly perpetuate a de-facto White Nationalist government. Discrediting him became of paramount importance; the Republican leader in the Senate made it his singular goal to “make Obama a one-term president.” They ejected all pretense to allegiance to the principals that they had espoused for decades when they abruptly rejected conservative ideas that made reasonable sense in policy as soon as Obama endorsed them. By doing so, Republicans revealed themselves as no longer having any interest in legislating for the Public Good. The rush to secure three new Conservative judges on the Supreme Court was the last step needed to secure the overall aim. There was no further need to pretend to cater to the public interest because all the pieces were put in place to seize all governmental authority.
Donald Trump did not hijack the Republican Party. Republicans denigrated him in 2015 and 2016 until they saw that his apparent immunity from public outcry made him the perfect character to carry the banner of their anti-democratic strivings. They tossed aside all pretense, and they elevated him to the status of a God in their voters’ eyes. Trump did not create this party, he merely defined the forces that have been operating for generations as MAGA, and they will persist long after his time passes regardless of whether he again attains the presidency.
The real questions are: Can we prevent him from cheating his way into the White House? and How do we dis-empower the White Nationalist forces in our country?