With the bottom falling out of the Trump campaign as per the latest public polls (and with Republican strategist Mike Murphy tweeting that GOP internal polls are even worse), Paul Ryan opted to let GOP congressional candidates know they were free to dump Trump earlier this morning.
Trump responded with a nasty tweet about Ryan — and the full implosion was on.
Any (false) hopes that Republican mucky-mucks may have harbored about Trump’s (insane) debate performance staunching the gashed artery of his campaign were dashed with the reality of a free-falling Trump dragging down both GOP House and Senate candidates.
How did the once-proud GOP get here? The autopsy probably begins with Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” back in 1968 when the party of Lincoln sold out to racist appeals in order to flip the south from Democratic to Republican.
But Ronald Reagan, great demonizer of all things government and promoter of a culture of selfishness, greed and trumped-up class warfare, is really the godfather of the current GOP self-immolation.
The Reagan years spawned nearly all of the malignant forces that have led to today’s epic meltdown, from sleazy operative, Roger Ailes, who went on to create Fox News, to conservative talk radio and its cynical promoters of every lunatic right wing conspiracy theory gobbled up by the hardcore GOP base, to Karl Rove who promised, with great fanfare, to create “a permanent Republican majority.”
Along the way, the powers that be in this conservative hierarchy exploited social issues to coax the religious right on board while throwing red meat to the racist and homophobic white males who comprise the guts of the Republican base. These, along with business conservatives who would supply the money, were the elements Rove believed would lead to a dominant GOP for decades to come.
Reagan equated taxes with theft and government with corruption. And the GOP set out to ensure that those became self-fulfilling prophesies at every oppotunity, from driving massive deficits by cutting taxes for the wealthy while looting trillions from the federal treasury into private hands under the guise of the Iraq War, to demonstrating the complete failure of Michael Brown’s FEMA in response to Hurricane Katrina.
“See,” they would declare, “government doesn’t work!” It was Grover Norquist’s “drown it in the bathtub” approach to government and governing.
The election of Barack Obama posed yet another opportunity for conservative powers to further feed their preferred narrative. The creation of the Tea Party, the spreading (and belief) of insane conspiracy theories including those questioning the birthplace, citizenship and religion of Obama, “death panels,” FEMA detention camps and more, all stoked the bonfire that began as a lit match under Ronald Reagan.
In 2010, the conservative brain trust thought they had finally acquired the final piece to their puzzle of permanent electoral dominance: the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Unlimited campaign financing from America’s wealthiest citizens would all but guarantee a monstrous funding advantage for GOP electoral efforts.
The 2016 presidential election offered the GOP the first real opportunity to rev up all of their disparate elements and take control of all three branches of government.
Ah, but the Law of Unintended Consequences, or, perhaps, the Giant Wheel of Karma, has a way of delivering a boomerang gash to the noggin when one least expects it.
The very forces the brain trust had unleashed — racist, xenophobic, homophobic, paranoid, anti-intellectual and anti-intelligent, in general — rose up at the same time that 17 one-off presidential candidates each found at least one millionaire/billionaire sugar daddy to support his or her candidacy, a direct result of the Citizens United decision.
This effectively meant that candidates didn’t have to drop out due to lack of funds early in the campaign. Prior to Citizens United, non-performing/under-performing candidates would typically have to quit the race after Iowa or New Hampshire because they would run out of money. But this year, the field was still six candidates for South Carolina on February 20, and five candidates all the way through March 1, Super Tuesday. Depending on the state, some combination of Kasich, Rubio and Carson were skimming off anywhere from 30 percent to more than 50 percent of the total vote, allowing Trump to top Ted Cruz while taking, in most states, far less than 40 percent of the vote.
Trump, of course, leveraged the years of cynical conservative fawning to the ignorant, paranoid base to drive his own numbers above those of Cruz and the remaining weak links. (And what does it say that even the execrable Ted Cruz couldn’t stoop low enough to get under Trump’s limbo bar of violent, racist, xenophobic speeches and rallies?)
All of the forces the brain trust had created to drive their permanent hold on power came together to “grab them by the balls,” as Samantha Bee put it so beautifully. Trump took the carefully curated ignorant base and the splintered field funded by eccentric, power-hungry billionaires and won the nomination.
And that leads us directly to today’s massive implosion. It’s kind of nice when it all comes together like this, isn’t it? And to think we have conservative hero Ronald Reagan to thank for bringing us to this point.
Thanks, Ronnie.