Billionaires and CEO's and Republicans! Oh my!
Billionaires, CEO’s, members of congress and other familiar old guard Republican operatives like Karl Rove, attended American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) secretive annual World Forum in Georgia. The main topic of conversation was Donald J. Trump, the presumptive nominee of the Republican party for President of the United States of America, and no one in attendance was very happy with that according to a report from The Huffington Post.
This comes on the heels of Peggy Noonan’s lamentations on last Tuesday’s “CBS This Morning”, about the effects of Trump’s campaign on the Republican Party. He could break it. He could break it. Imagine what happens if he racks up a lot of delegates, they get to the convention, it looks like Trump has won, and the party machinery finagles it away from him. Trump supporters would bolt the Republican Party.
There has been much regret expressed about not taking Trump’s campaign more seriously nine, six or even three months ago. It is questionable whether or not anyone could have done anything to stop Trump from dominating his Republican opponents and taking such a commanding lead, if the Republican establishment had taken him more seriously. Now, Donald Trump is a serious threat to the establishment and it looks like the Republican Party is on the precipice of a civil war from which it may not easily recover.
At the AEI World Forum, one anonymous attendee disclosed that a lot of the discussions about Trump centered on how this happened, rather than how we are going to stop him.
Seriously? If the Republican establishment still does not know how this happened, then they are extremely stupid people. The Republican Party and their various surrogates like Fox News (the official media outlet of the Republican Party and reliable source of GOP presidential candidates), conservative talk radio and conservative blogs stoked and enflamed their base and supporters for the past seven years, and longer. Donald Trump is simply pieces of each, sewn haphazardly together, much like his campaign speeches, and then electrified to life. The Republicans are Dr. Frankenstein and Trump is The Monster they made. Unfortunately, for them and perhaps all of us, The Monster is cognizant of his own power and is only interested in pursuing that power to it’s logical end — the Presidency of the United States of America, and he’s doing it based on a campaign that promises “phenomenal” things without even a hint on how he’ll accomplish anything other than “wait and see”.
“Make American Great Again…Wait and See” is Trump’s motto and the salivating crazies, that comprise his support, wildly cheer whenever the budding authoritarian mentions “The Great Wall of Trump”, banning Muslims from entry (temporarily or not), the predictable crowd pleasing “repeal and replace”, the great deals he will make (he doesn’t say what deals or with whom he would deal but one has to assume that if the price is right, it wouldn’t matter), building up the military for national defense and how he would whore them out to those willing to pay, bombing the shit out of ISIS and bringing back quaint interrogation practices like torture.
The Republican Party has spent the last seven years saying some of the most outrageous things and now they are perplexed that their rabid base and most reliable primary voters, believed everything they had to say and more. The crazies are no longer the fringe in the Republican Party. They are now it’s core and more than a few of them are in Congress, courtesy of gerrymandered districts.
Let’s not forget that the polarization of American politics is something that has seen constant growth since 1989, and well illustrated by Renzo Lucioni who created a series of iconic network visualizations of the voting records from the 101st Congress through the 113th Congress. The graphs were featured in a 2013 article that appeared in The Economist, titled United States of Amoeba. The reason for the aptly named title is:
Though America’s political polarisation has become a fact of life, it has never been seen so graphically: as a diseased brain, with few neural pathways between the two hemispheres.
I will go so far as to posit that a major cause of this polarization began to occur shortly after the FCC stopped enforcing the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, when conservative talk radio began blossoming into the stinkweed we see today. This is what our politics have become. Two sides with very different opinions and neither feeling the necessity to present the opposing views, although, I firmly believe that conservatives are far less willing to even listen to opposing viewpoints as liberals would. It’s probably so, because conservatives tend to be very religious (and white) and conservative talk radio and commentary is their second Bible and one does not argue with the Bible.
So, to now hear that the Republicans are confused about Trump, Trumpism and Trumpeteers is perplexing to me. The Trump phenomenon is entirely one of their own making. They grew it with patience and persistence over many years. They thought they were growing an orchid but it turned out to be a Venus flytrap and they are the unwitting flies, ensnared by their own monstrosity and being slowly digested. Good riddance.