Trump is not the Disease

He's a symptom.

I try not to spend too much time complaining about the factors that got us to this dark place in history. I’d rather focus on how we survive with American democracy and liberty intact.

There’s much we can all do to treat the symptoms of this disease, but if we want to cure it—and I sure as hell want to cure it—we have to understand it.

So, what’s the disease?

The Republican Party.

---

It’s a common theme in contemporary political analysis that Donald Trump “took over” the Republican Party, and that the Party and most of its members abandoned their values and bent the knee. This is incorrect.

Pundits wonder why people are shocked by Trump’s actions when he’s been telling us for years what he would do. What the pundits ignore, however, is that nearly everything Donald Trump has done since 2015 has been consistent with the GOP’s messaging for the past 40 years.

In other words, why are we shocked that the Republican Party has capitulated to Trump, when they’ve been telling us for decades that he’s what they want?

The corruption of the Republican Party didn’t start in 2016. It has been lurching towards authoritarianism for four decades. There are four paths it has taken to get there:

1. Toughness and violence

2. Power for the sake of power

3. Lies, misinformation, and propaganda

4. Denial

The first three won’t surprise you. We all know about them. But the fourth, the denial, that’s what’s ultimately responsible for the death of American democracy. More importantly, if serious conservatives would stop their denialism, we might actually be able to save democracy.

Macho Macho Man

Before Ronald Reagan was elected President, Republicans and Democrats generally worked to find common ground to address the nation’s challenges and problems. It wasn’t always pretty, but there was a genuine belief among elected officials that their counterparts in the other Party were working in good faith to improve the country for all Americans, even if they disagreed about how best to accomplish that.

Reagan’s election, however, ushered in a Republican Party that embraced machismo, or what Heather Cox Richardson calls “the myth of cowboy individualism,” and Trump is the natural endpoint of that belief system.

Trump was the logical outcome of the myth of cowboy individualism embraced by the Republicans since President Ronald Reagan rose to the White House by celebrating it. In that myth, a true American is a man who operates on his own, outside the community. He needs nothing from the government, works hard to support himself, protects his wife and children, and asserts his will by dominating others. Government is his enemy, according to the myth, because it takes his money to help undeserving freeloaders and because it regulates how he can run his business. A society dominated by a cowboy individual is a strong one.

Men certainly like the idea of a tough leader who does what needs to be done without the baggage of regulation or legal boundaries. It sates their egos by justifying their sense of dominance over everyone and anyone else.

Women love this myth, too. Being a tough, strong woman is empowering, after all. Unfortunately, many women in the GOP are better at macho cosplay than actual strength. Sarah Palin, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kristi Noem, and Nancy Mace have all been extraordinary at sounding tough and verbally attacking their enemies. Still, none can point to any significant policy wins that improved real people’s lives.

The Violence Inherent in the System

The myth of cowboy individualism had a terrifying side effect. It led the GOP to embrace the violent rhetoric that is now pervasive in their Party.

Most analysts and pundits I know look to the election of Barack Obama and the rise of the Tea Party as the start of violent rhetoric on the American Right. I disagree.

I first came face-to-face with the Right’s violent rhetoric back in 1990, at the very beginning of my career in politics.

While a college student in Texas, I worked for an environmental group that seconded me temporarily to the campaign for a state representative candidate. On election day, I was assigned to encourage voters to support the Democratic candidates outside a polling place. I had never done anything like this before.

A young woman approached the school that served as her polling location. With a smile, I made my appeal: “Vote for Sherri Greenberg for State Representative and Jake Pickle for Congress!”

The woman looked at me and spat, “He kills babies.”

“Excuse me, what?” I replied.

“He’s a baby-killer,” she said, and walked past me into the school.

It took me a while to comprehend what she was talking about, but she wasn’t the last voter I encountered that day who talked about killing babies.

Greenberg was a newcomer, so no one mentioned her, but Jake Pickle had represented the District for over a quarter century. Time and again, voters opposed to abortion rights called him a murderer, a baby-killer, and worse when I mentioned his name.

This, to me, was how the Right’s violent rhetoric began. Elected officials—Democrats—who supported a woman’s right to choose weren’t considered good people with different viewpoints. To anti-choice Republicans, Democrats were morally equivalent to actual murderers. They were “killers.”

Calling elected officials “murderers” for their position on abortion wasn’t just a result of the high emotions at the core of that issue. It was a calculated Republican strategy, ushered in by a Congressman from Georgia, Newt Gingrich.

Powerball

When Newt Gingrich was running for Congress in 1978 (his third attempt), he explained his vision for the GOP to an audience of College Republicans. As McKay Coppins wrote in The Atlantic in 2018, the speech was revolutionary.

“One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” he told the group. “We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal, and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics.”

For their party to succeed, Gingrich went on, the next generation of Republicans would have to learn to “raise hell,” to stop being so “nice,” to realize that politics was, above all, a cutthroat “war for power”—and to start acting like it.

(If you’ve never read that article, you really should. I don’t think you can genuinely understand contemporary American politics without knowing its origins in Gingrich’s philosophy.)

Gingrich won that election and began rising through the Republican ranks in the House of Representatives, ultimately becoming Speaker in 1995.

In many ways, Newt Gingrich's actions in Congress followed the pattern of Senator Eugene McCarthy’s communist witch hunts a half-century earlier. Gingrich attracted much attention through high-profile media events, outlandish claims, and name-calling.

The main difference, however, was that Gingrich used rhetoric not against “outsiders” in Hollywood or bureaucrats in the State Department but against his fellow members of Congress, including Republicans who embraced bipartisanship.

Even though Gingrich ultimately resigned from Congress in 1999, he continued to promote his political philosophy through Republican channels, and that philosophy took hold of the Party.

Cowboys and Indians

Following Gingrich’s lead, Republicans began redefining all politics as an us-versus-them zero-sum game. In Congress, however, particularly after the September 11th terrorist attacks, there was still a sense that Republicans and Democrats needed to work together to defeat America’s common enemy.

At the state and local level, however, Republican orthodoxy adopted the position that any Democrat, regardless of their actual position on any specific issue, was just as much an enemy as Al-Qaeda. The Party also tacitly approved racism against Muslims, Arab Americans, and others, while publicly professing to be opposed to it.

At this time, two GOP tactics became clear: Taking over typically non-partisan elected boards and commissions, and establishing permanent majorities through gerrymandering.

The first tactic, centered on using national issues to win local campaigns, was implemented in races for city councils, county commissions, and school boards. Republicans running for non-partisan city council seats would accuse opponents who happened to be Democrats of wanting to take people’s guns away, or of “supporting the terrorists” when they expressed support for civil liberties. GOP candidates for non-partisan school boards attacked Democratic candidates for their positions on abortion.

While the tactic didn’t always succeed, it increased partisanship, solidified identity politics, and institutionalized subtle racism at the local level.

The other tactic, gerrymandering to establish permanent majorities, was far more insidious and was an early indicator of the GOP’s willingness to flout the rule of law. The approach was simple: use the redistricting process after the 2000 census to ensure that Republicans would keep their majority in subsequent elections. By 2010, the tactic was formalized as REDMAP.

What makes the GOP’s gerrymandering tactic insidious is its willingness to draw district maps that it knows are entirely illegal but that will be subject to years of court battles. While those cases are resolved, Republicans benefit from the illegal maps. As recently as 2022, the Supreme Court allowed Alabama to use a district map that the Court had previously said was illegal.

As I’m sure you know, the Trump administration is using the same tactic: breaking the law and benefiting from the illegal activity while the courts play catch-up.

Overall, the Republican Party’s Cowboys and Indians approach, in which they are always the good guys no matter what they do, and Democrats are always the bad guys, has led to hyper-partisanship and government dysfunction, which is just what they’ve always wanted.

Facts? We don’t need no stinkin’ facts!

The Republican Party’s abandonment of truth has been extensively examined, so I won’t spend much time on it. Here are a few examples:

• The George W. Bush Administration lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to invade a sovereign nation.

• FOX News viewers are consistently shown to be less informed about factual current events than others, and far more likely to be Republicans.

• Birtherism, a Big Lie.

• Before the passage of the Affordable Care Act, one of the GOP’s most shrill claims was “Death Panels,” which was a complete lie.

• Q-Anon, a Big Lie.

• The 2020 election results, another Big Lie.

• Everything lie Donald Trump has ever told, that every Republican in Congress refused to call out.

There are so many more examples that it’s just not worth listing.

Look, every politician lies. Sometimes they lie because they must—telling the truth would jeopardize policy negotiations or other critical business. Sometimes they lie because they need to bluff before policy or political negotiations.

Occasionally a politician will lie to cover their ass. Either they did something on a personal level that they need to cover up, or they did something their constituents wouldn’t like, so they lie about it.

Since at least the early 2000s, the Republican Party has been completely comfortable lying to the American people for the exclusive purpose of consolidating power. Republicans lie to voters because they know the lie will win them votes. If they get caught in a lie, they just keep denying it, blaming the media,” and inventing conspiracy theories.

Of course, they rarely get “caught” in any lie, because the media (the same media the GOP loves to blame) seems to be perfectly happy to keep acting as if serial lying is normal behavior for public officials. In short, gaslighting works.

Serious Conservatives Must Stop Living in Denial

You can think of the first three paths I’ve described above as ingredients for the autocracy cake. To bake a cake, however, you need an oven to apply heat. In this metaphor, the heat is the denialism of serious conservatives.

When I say, “serious conservatives,” I’m talking about people who still believe in smaller government, individual rights, lower taxes, personal responsibility, strong defense and foreign policy, and all the other things Republicans said they believed before “owning the libs” became the Party’s entire platform.

Many serious conservatives no longer consider themselves Republicans, and that’s good, but all of them continue to live in denial. They all believe that one day, somehow, the Republican Party will come back to them and once again adopt their serious conservatism.

They are lying to themselves and doing the nation a great disservice.

They have the power to end Trump’s authoritarian takeover, but they are afraid to use that power. Instead, they hope and pray that the Democratic Party will somehow save the day and destroy MAGA, so they can go back to being serious conservative Republicans.

How can they do that?

Serious conservatives must establish a new political party to represent serious conservatives.

Every time I say this to serious conservatives, I’m told that it’s not realistic. Building the infrastructure for a new party is impossible. It would cost too much and could never win.

This is all BULLSHIT.

We are witnessing the dismantling of American exceptionalism from the Constitution to our alliances to our standing in the world. Still, serious conservatives stand around and moan, begging Democrats to save the nation, while criticizing the Democratic Party for being liberal.

No shit, Sherlock. Liberal is what Democrats do. Stop expecting them to change because you’re too lazy to do the right thing.

Why are serious conservatives still failing America? Because starting a truly conservative political party in 2025 would be hard? Guess what: Autocracy is hard, too. Your Party created this mess, and serious conservatives were perfectly happy to tolerate the machismo, the power plays, and the lies when you thought you were in charge.

Stop whining and start working. Go to Missouri, start a Conservative Party, and run serious conservatives for the state legislature. See what happens

Give true conservatives in Red states an alternative to MAGA. Otherwise, you’re still part of the problem.