Behold Your Roosting Chickens: Trump Is Not an Outlier of GOP Policy; He Is the Endgame

[Content Note: Bigotry; privilege; fearmongering.]

I've got a new piece at Shareblue, some of the text of which may be familiar to longtime readers, but there's lots of new stuff, too: "Trump has exposed the rot at the core of the Republican Party."

What is one to do when one has no capacity to process fear, no ability to sit with it and live with it, no developed strategies for coping with fear?

Well, in a lot of cases, one buys a gun. Or many guns. And then looks for an authoritarian who validates both your fear and your hatred, and promises that he is the only one who can protect you.

Donald Trump’s entire campaign has been built around such a promise. He is the savior the Republican Party has always promised, but never delivered. And he expresses as much contempt for the party leadership over that failure as the base feels, reflecting and validating their anger at having been ignored.

He exploits their fears for his own gain at every turn. His ascendancy is firmly rooted in the bigotry and anxiety carefully cultivated by the Republican Party for decades. He is not a betrayer of their values, but their most shameless promoter.

And now the party elites have the temerity to publicly lament that the genie won’t go back in the bottle.

“What happened to my party?” wonder the vanishing moderates of the Republican Party, shaking their heads gravely and publicly wringing their hands, before shuffling off to wash them of any responsibility.

But they are what happened to their party. Their reckless exploitation of the darkest prejudices, the worst of human nature. Their greed. Their careless fearmongering. Their cynical scapegoating. Their endless denials of injustice.

They happened, with their insatiable appetites for more wealth, more power, more influence, more control. Their voracious need to win.

They happened. They and their bumper sticker sloganeering in a complicated world.

Now they shamelessly deflect blame by pretending to by mystified by why their base is rallying around a billionaire with a bumper sticker slogan stitched in gold thread on tacky hats.

Head on over the read the rest, because there is a lot more where that came from.

The Ownership Party doesn't want to own their own nominee. But they can't be allowed to shirk responsibility that easily. They built the space that he now fills. They own him. The end.