RIP GOP 1854-2024

 

   Today is Donald Trump's 78th birthday. That is the only way and this is the only time I will ever commemorate that. And I only mention that coincidental hijacking of Flag Day to make a point: That Donald Trump has single-handedly destroyed the Republican Party and had officially subsumed it just hours before his birthday. And the GOP let him.

    For good measure, he's also hollowed out the RNC by stuffing it with two-legged piranhas like his daughter in law Lara Trump and Michael Whatley. And the RNC let him.

     You don't need me to tell you that Donald Trump has transformed a once proud major political party  into a shameful and shameless cult. To look at the nauseatingly obsequious behavior of so-called GOP lawmakers during Trump's triumphant return to the scene of the crime, you'd swear they were taking all their cues from Pyongyang or 1930s Nazi Germany.

    They sang Happy Birthday to him like so many Marilyn Monroes in Brooks Brothers suits. One lawmaker wants to name bodies of water after him without a hint of irony or self awareness that Trump rolled back virtually every environmental regulation put in place by the Obama administration.

     Marjorie Taylor-Greene was positively giddy that Trump looked at her and smiled. Mike Johnson, Trump's new Charlie McCarthy, was glowing that Trump patted him on the head and told him what a good little Speaker he was. Another McCarthy can tell you how that is.

     The venue for this mass fellating was the scene, along with the RNC and DNC HQ, where perfectly functioning pipe bombs were found on January 6th. That irony was lost on them, too. It was a clear case to the rest of us of the criminal returning to the scene of a crime except this time the criminal was treated like a Roman emperor back from a successful campaign abroad.

    And, yes, we can call Trump a criminal without resorting to preemptive hyperbole. He was convicted on 34 counts in Manhattan just weeks earlier and awaits sentencing on July 11th, just four days before the RNC's national convention July 15-18th in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

     And that's the ironic thing, that the RNC convention is taking place in the Badger State because that is precisely where the Republican Party was found 170 years ago on March 20, 1854. Actually, it didn't spring up out of nowhere. It was created through a merger of two abolitionist political parties: The Northern Whigs, the Free Soil Party and the Anti-Nebraska movement. All three organizations were opposed to slavery and the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

     To those of us who aren't historically illiterate, that made the newfound Republican Party that had elected one of their own president in 1860 the progressives of their day. That lasted for roughly 70 years until the Republicans slowly began finding their inner southern Dixiecrat and began turning into political heels.

     But, still, decades into that transformation, Republicans stood for things that many Americans supported- Smaller government, lower taxes, strong foreign policy and national defense, etc. They still got shit done. Through a progressive taxation system in which the tax rate for the 1% was 91%, Eisenhower built the interstate highway system, thereby changing America for the better. John F. Kennedy, perhaps the most liberal US president ever, regularly sought President Eisenhower's counsel during his brief administration. In our post WWII swagger, no country, not even the once-mighty Soviet Union, dared fuck with us.

     Then came Nixon, then Reagan, then the Bushes and, finally, Trump.

     We liberals and progressives were always cynical about the downslide of the GOP. But those of us with the healthiest doses of skepticism never imagined the fall of the GOP would come in such a pathetic, shameless, even borderline comical manner as we've seen this week.

     The entire Republican Party, it seems, is literally singing Happy Birthday today with full throats to a mobster and convicted criminal who had sicced a murderous mob on them, the Speaker and even the Vice President on January 6th. Some of them are so divorced from reality they even deny that Trump was convicted in Manhattan. When he called Milwaukee "a horrible city", Mike Johnson even flat-out denied having heard Trump say it despite sitting next to Trump.

     It's impossible to fathom why they are doing this to themselves. At this point, they look and sound like so many Ken dolls, anatomically neutered, Republican Ken dolls kept in their bright shiny boxes ready to be brought out and dandled by Fourth Reich Barbie, Lara Trump. 

    And the man who was convicted of raping a woman in a department store dressing room and cheating  New York State out of countless millions in unpaid taxes, who is under criminal indictment for trying to subvert election results in Georgia and for stealing hundreds if not thousands of highly-sensitive secrets, is being feted by a major political party as if he's the second coming of Kim Jong Un.

     How can they be so blind? we rightly ask ourselves. This man, for want of a better word, who today is now five years past his life expectancy and can barely utter a coherent sentence, a man who has all the loyalty of a flared cobra and whose policy positions are shallower than his neck vagina, is looked upon as the future of their party.

    It simply doesn't make sense. As my late fiancee Barbara used to facetiously ask me, "You expect this to make sense, now?" And I'd always answer, "Yes!"

     Surely, these august statesmen who hold immeasurable power can't be so naïve as to believe that this bloated homunculus, this wroth-filled man-child won't lead us all down the primrose path to rack and ruin. His inattention to the pandemic resulted in a bare minimum of 400,000 American deaths. He was impeached twice and is only allowed to run for president because of their own inattention to their duties.

     Or maybe they're not blind. Perhaps they're cynically using Trump as some moth-eaten, creaking Trojan horse to enact their own poisonous agenda just as they had between 2017-2021. And, being Republicans, they don't give a rat's ass what they do to the rest of the country and the world as a result. Some men just want to watch the world burn, after all.

    So when they hold their convention, they'll nominate a convicted criminal who had just been sentenced days before, one still under indictment in three other jurisdictions. Their standard bearer will be a felon who will be barred from entering at least 40 other countries, many of them our allies, including the UK. And in the very state where the GOP was founded 170 years ago.

     It won't be so much a convention as a wake.