The GOP's Monster Has Turned on Its Creator

The party set the stage for the Trumpism that is now tearing them apart

Were it not for the demands of slaveholders, Donald Trump never would have been president. 

He never won a popular vote. His demands that GOP candidates kowtow to his delusions and lies fuels the nominations of crazies. And those candidates, when faced with a sane electorate, lose, lose, lose. Trump is, was, and always will be a loser. 

Every sane Republican politician knew that from the get-go. They knew the man was reckless, dishonest, narcissistic, and fundamentally a terrible person who would be a dangerous president. But they sided with him for one reason only: They took advantage of flaws in the Constitution to slice and dice their base, appealing to the worst instincts of the easily fooled, and used their divisive approach to empower lunacy. Donald Trump was the ultimate outcome. 

This is where the Founders messed up. They abandoned hopes for a presidential popular vote to lure a consensus with the Southern states dependent on slaveholding. The answer: the Founders created the Electoral College, which would increase the power of the Southern states in a way they could not get with a presidential popular vote. Then, to address the same fears of slaveholding economies about legislative power resting with the most populous states, they created a system where every state, no matter how small, received two Senators.

Making it worse, in the 21st Century, GOP state legislatures aggressively used computerized analyses to create unbalanced districts, packing their base tight into more districts while throwing Democrats into fewer.

The result: The Republican Party no longer needed to appeal to the majority on any level of elections. By banding together many southern and midwestern states, they could depend on the Electoral College to give them the presidency, even if they lost the popular vote by tens of millions. Same with the Senate, where Republicans consistently get far fewer total votes than Democrats even when the win control. And thanks to gerrymandering, Republicans running for the House no longer needed to appeal to a broad electorate - just throw red meat to the most rabid of their supporters, no matter how crazy.

This was the real monster created by the Republicans as it separated itself from needing to appeal to the majority of Americans. Focusing solely on the math, they needed only to get out the base to win the presidency even when losing the popular vote. And believe me, the Republican Party will never win the majority of the vote again. Same with the Senate, maybe same with the House.

That a horror like Trump would emerge from this morass was inevitable. A tighter and tighter exploitation of a system to gain power through a minority of the vote pulled together more and more of the rabid base. Trump played on that in shameless ways. Republicans saw him for what he was before his nomination - as Senator Lindsey Graham famously said, “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it.” Graham was prescient, but he didn't understand that the destruction would require a few years to play out.

Trump lived on conspiracy theories - the Deep State, “they spied on my campaign,” the Big Lie - which fed in perfectly to the years of the same types of conspiracy theories used by the GOP to further enrage the already angry base. They tricked them to believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya who as out to destroy America and Christianity; that education standards developed by state governors were part of an anti-Christian communist plot to turn children gay; Obamacare was a plot to create “death panels” to murder the elderly; that a military exercise was an attempt by Obama to take over Texas; that the United States was part of a one world government using something called Agenda 21 to end property rights, impose communism, and force locals onto rail cars heading to secret camps.

(To see how indulgent the Republicans were of this craziness, look at 2012. Agenda 21 was an uncontroversial, non-binding resolution adopted in 1992 by the United Nations during the George H.W. Bush Administration. It was nothing more than non-enforceable declaration of interest in managing urban development and land-use policies in ways that minimized the impact on the environment. Twenty years later, the Republican National Committee—overlooking that a Republican president had signed Agenda 21—adopted a resolution slamming the document as an "insidious scheme" designed to impose a "socialist/communist redistribution of wealth." Senator Ted Cruz, as always, jumped on the craziness, declaring that Agenda 21 would ban golf courses and paved roads, just like when he said the Green New Deal would ban steak.)

When a mentally ill, malignant narcissist, and pathological liar came along to jump on top of the conspiracy theory train, the base had been prepped for it. And it had real impact: It led to the “Covid Hoax” and anti-vaxxer conspiracy theory that worsened the pandemic, it fed the Big Lie that resulted in the January 6 insurrection; and it allowed for the growth - and endorsement by actual politicians including Trump - of the QAnon Cult which is demanding the execution of Democrats because of the belief that they are kidnapping children and drinking their blood.

Add to that the GOP’s reliance on political crack cocaine: Rage. The party has depended on Fox News, the dealer of this dangerous drug. Once, the network was a somewhat reasonable means of presenting news from a conservative viewpoint. But it quickly realized that rage addiction was a real thing, and that feeding such fury brought viewers back again and again. Hell, to keep up the dopamine hits rage addicts feel, many of them never turn off Fox when they are home. Great for ratings, terrible for America.

The tactic pushes extremist talking points to every news event, messages that rapidly become the GOP mantra. That induces more rage, which keeps viewers in the right-wing information bubble, and leads to a constant repetition by the base of utter nonsense. But once the lunacy moves outside the bubble, the general electorate becomes repulsed and turn instead to candidates that care about the real world. The rage addiction can help the GOP win close races in the tiny little bastions of power they have isolated for victory, but the dependence of this is a loser long term. 

Democrats have finally recognized they have to turn out in huge numbers to overcome the anti-democratic methods adopted by the GOP, the voting suppression and all the other ways Republicans try to push to victory even while losing. And the GOP has already signaled, after their historically dismal performance in the 2022 midterm election, that they won’t respond by trying to appeal to more voters. Instead, they are tripling down on keeping people away from the polls, with proposals like throwing out the Constitutional Amendment that lowered the voting age to 18 and instead pushing it back up to 21. Or, in one of the more bizarre solutions, Fox pushed making sure more women get married because then they will vote Republican. And of course, they are turning to old faithful: The results had nothing to do with the GOP message, it was all the result of fraud.

Which brings us back to Trump and his history of losing. Yup, the Founders solution to indulging the slave states created a way for the minority of voters to select the president. But it won’t last forever. Trump, the ultimate outcome of the monster of reliance on a minority of votes to win, has not shelved his narcissism or mental illness. As he has repeatedly made clear, he is perfectly happy to tear the Republican Party apart if he doesn’t get his way, either by destroying any GOP presidential candidate that isn’t him, or by taking his MAGA cult off and forming a third party. The Republicans don’t know how to handle it. When you make a deal with a deeply disturbed person, whose lunacy you recognize, who - as Graham said - will lead to the destruction of the party, you deserve it because of your tactical abandonment of democracy. 

Trump and Trumpism is the Republican nightmare. And those of us who love America should take delight as we watch the GOP struggle to wake up.