At this point, Republicans who believe their party can come back from Trumpism are like stage-four lung-cancer-patients who think things will turn around if they just quit smoking. Again and again in Liz Cheney’s memoir Oath and Honor, a worthwhile book by an honorable woman, she relates some new outrage by her fellow Republicans and exclaims in disgust that this was once the party of Reagan.
It still is.
Trumpism is not the GOP’s devolution, it is its fulfillment. After securing the GOP presidential nomination in 1980 Ronald Reagan kicked off his campaign in August at Mississippi’s Nashoba County Fair near the site, sixteen years earlier, of the murders of Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner, and James Chaney during Freedom Summer. And he used the opportunity to announce his support for “states’ rights,” which, in the days of those murders was what Southern racists said they were for instead of saying they were for maintaining segregation. It was as blatant a dog whistle to racists as any mainstream presidential contender had ever employed. Even more pertinent to Trumpism, was Reagan’s announcement, during his inaugural address five months later, that “Government is the problem.” No one at the time asked (and I can’t remember anyone since asking) the logical question: If government is the problem, then why did this man just campaign to be head of the government? If anyone had asked, it’s unlikely Reagan would have been honest enough, even with himself, to supply the answer: to begin the process of burning it all down.
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