![]() ![]() Cult animosity no sign letting up trial#Starting in 1992 with Pat Buchanan-in many ways the ur-populist of the modern Republican Party-and Newt Gingrich’s angry ascent to the House speakership a couple years later, party insurgents mounted many trial runs that demonstrated, again and again, “the political power of an endlessly repeated lie.”Ī Trump supporter wearing a "Make America Great Again" sweatshirt and giant hat.Ī Trump supporter decked out in “Make America Great Again” gear waits for the start of a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Feb. Cult animosity no sign letting up tv#Trump’s only distinction is that he was better at it than any Republican before him, and he arrived at a moment in history when the internet, social media, and 24-hour cable TV news allowed the lies to insinuate themselves deeper and more extensively than ever before. Trump’s lies spread so easily because for an entire generation the party base had already been subjected to lies and vicious innuendo almost as outrageous as those Trump would go on to use, as Republican leaders sought to appease their shrinking white base with populist anthems and nativist appeals, especially anti-immigration sentiment. The reason Trump sauntered so effortlessly into power, with so little opposition, is that he was merely picking his way through the rubble of what used to be the Republican establishment agenda, Milbank writes. He is a symptom of their illness, not the cause.” Rather, he was “a monster the Republicans created over a quarter century. Trump didn’t rise out of nowhere as some “hideous orange Venus emerging from the shell,” Milbank writes. In one of them, The Destructionists : The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank goes a long way to explaining why Trump’s fingernail marks are still on the doors of the Oval Office and why so many people think he was unfairly forced out. Why is the Trump phenomenon so durable? A slew of new and forthcoming books seeks to tell us. The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party, Dana Milbank, Doubleday, 416 pp., $30, August 2022 The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party, Dana Milbank, Doubleday, 416 pp.,, August 2022 ![]() So serious is the danger that Biden, in his Thursday speech at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, declared that Trump and what Biden called “the MAGA Republicans”-referring to Trump’s Make America Great Again movement-“represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.” 6 mob may have been dispersed, and more than 900 of its alleged participants prosecuted, but the angry amorality of that mob still dominates the Republican Party, rendering many of its elected and appointed officials mere toadies to Trumpian lies. According to a Monmouth University poll released in early August following eight of those hearings, which revealed previously undisclosed details of how Trump incited the insurrection at the Capitol last year, only about 40 percent of Republicans believe Trump did anything wrong-approximately the same percentage as did before the hearings began-and 61 percent of Republicans still embrace his false assertion that the election was fraudulent. 6, 2021, insurrection, scheduled to resume in September, appears to be changing the minds of Trump’s millions of supporters. ![]() Similarly, very little that has come out of the congressional hearings around the Jan. And nothing Trump’s successor, Biden, has done seems to have vanquished the Trump specter on the contrary, Biden has co-opted much of Trump’s populist “America First” agenda even as he recently condemned Trump’s movement as “ semi-fascism.” constitutional order by fomenting a mob eager to hang his vice president (with Trump’s endorsement). President Donald Trump was dragged kicking and screaming out of the White House, after he sought to destroy what was left of the U.S. That’s the most reliable conclusion we can draw from the malign spectacle of the last 20 months since former U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday called “ the American experiment” may no longer be recognizable-or even salvageable. It threatens to haunt us so far into the future that, by the time it’s gone, what U.S. Let the world beware: Trumpism was a long time coming, and it will be a long time going. ![]()
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