A contributor on Quora asked yesterday:
It’s because the GOP is rudderless and has been since the Neocon/Teaparty takeover of the party in the 1990s and 00s and it RINO’d out all its independent voices. The Republican party is so devoid of political, economic and social principles now, conservative or even patriotic, that it ran without a platform in 2020 general election. Its mission statement was effectively, “Whatever our golden boy says…”
They didn’t even dust off their decades-old anti-tax/pro-life/pro-gun boilerplate, possibly because the RNC read the polling data. They knew that most of the country was fed up with phony Republican tax cuts which benefited mostly the Investor class, most Americans wanted Republicans to keep their grubby mitts off Roe and 89% of Americans want stricter gun control.
In the absence of core tenets and beliefs, the GOP has nothing to sell. But it wants to be elected and re-elected so it has to manufacture issues just so it can justify grabbing the mic. Its 40+ year drought of initiating legislative efforts that actually help people has given them nothing to brag about so they can only tear down their opponents and steal credit for things they had no role in creating, like Trump claiming he fixed a broken economy which had 80 straight months of economic growth before he got there (and crashed it).
Trump’s relentless dishonesty set the model for the new Trumplican party. It became a Liar’s Club dominated by those with the loudest bullhorns and the most strident media sideshows. In that world, Truth doesn’t matter. When you have no beliefs you don’t have to defend them. You’re free to focus all your energy on attacking your enemies, defending your sleazy allies and manufacturing “alternative truths” to support your down-on-all-fours biases.
I was in an Uber yesterday. The driver had Greg Kelly’s radio show playing on Newsmax. It was one nasty, bald-faced lie after another, stitched together with half-truths and clumsy innuendo like “They’re building a wall around Biden’s house in Delaware like Obama did! These hypocrites know that walls work!” No, you unscrupulous dumbass. The Secret Service builds those walls so they need fewer agents to control access to the property.
Lots has been said about the Cult of Trump but it’s not really an apt comparison. Most cults have at least SOME core beliefs even if they’re psychotic ones like master race supremacy or intergalactic leviathans seeding planets with humanoid life. The Trump cult has only one: the monster himself. When the monster is slain they know they too will cease to exist so they defend him passionately. They’re like the Howard Beach yahoos who stood outside federal court on Centre Street cheering for John Gotti before he was finally sentenced to life in solitary at Marion. They disappeared back to their rat holes like the fascists who goosestepped for Hitler and Duce.
