Trump Is (One) Logical Endpoint of the GOP

The party was just waiting for the right fascist grifter.

Image: Gage Skidmore, CC

There have broadly been two theories of the origins of Trumpism.

The first is that Trump is a unique and uniquely talented political figure—a real life incarnation of Asimov’s emotion controlling conqueror the Mule from the Foundation series, who could neither be predicted nor defended against.

The second is that Trump is just an extension of past GOP policies—a distillation of the party’s longstanding mix of white supremacy and oligarchy.

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As the headline of this piece makes clear, I tend to the second explanation, albeit with some caveats. Trump is a very particular figure, with a mix of ignorance, laziness, cruelty, and fascistic instincts which makes him a uniquely horrible president, even in a country with a rich history of horrible presidents. It’s particularly bad luck that the GOP took on its perfected fascist form in this lump of orange hate and grift. But bad luck is sometimes the result of a bunch of bad choices, and if it were not this lump of hate and grift, there’s good reason to believe it would have been another.

White supremacist backlash

I think there are two basic trends in GOP politics which lead to Trump: right-wing media and white supremacy. Let’s take the second one first.

As you’re probably aware, the GOP began in 1860 as the (vacillating) party of multi-racial democracy in opposition to the (openly) white supremacist Democrats. The Republicans largely abandoned their commitment to Black rights in 1877 at the end of Reconstruction. For the next 75-100 years, there was no party of multi-racial democracy, because both parties embraced white supremacy.

That changed over time, as Black people began to organize and push the Democratic party to be less horrifically racist. Finally in the 1960s Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, embraced the Civil Rights movement and passed real electoral reforms. For the first time since Reconstruction, the whole of the US—including the South—became something like an actual democracy, where all people, whatever their skin color or gender, could and did vote, and where the national ideal (at least in public) was generally agreed to be equality rather than white supremacy.

The Democrats became the party of Civil Rights and (overwhelmingly) of Black voters. The Republicans became what the Democrats had been post-Civil War—the party of white supremacist backlash. You can name various signposts on the way—Barry Goldwater, Nixon’s Southern strategy, Reagan, and of course Trump. White people‚ who used to be split between the two white supremacist parties, have slowly, over the decades, sorted themselves into the Republican camp, while most other voters cast the majority of their ballots for Democrats, because white supremacy tends to appeal to white people more than it appeals to anyone else.

White supremacy is fundamentally incompatible with democracy; you can’t both believe that white people should rule and that everyone should have an equal vote. And sure enough, studies show that white people tend to repudiate democracy when they think Black people are likely to have an equal voice in government.

Republicans have of course given lip service to democracy. But their actions have tended to bely their words. The GOP has consistently, stubbornly tried to prevent Black people and people of color from voting—through gerrymandering them into irrelevance, through pushing voter ID laws that disproportionately impact the groups the GOP doesn’t like, through removing campaign finance laws which give the wealthy (who are disproportionately white) more power over elections, and so forth.

I think it’s clear enough how this leads to Trump. Trump hates democracy; he’s a fascist. This hatred of democracy is inseparable from his insistence that non white people are going to take power away from whites. He linked the two in leading the birther movement which claimed that Obama, the first Black president, wasn’t really American and should be disqualified from office. And he links the two in his obsessive insistence that the US is being overrun by immigrants, who will replace white people and white voters.

Again, Trump makes these connections more explicit, and his racism is considerably more overt than that of recent GOP presidents past. But the fundamental core of Trump’s presidency—the belief that white supremacy and democracy are incompatible, and that white people therefore need to jettison democracy—is the longstanding core belief of the post Civil Rights GOP.

Right-wing media

White supremacy is the GOP’s core ideology. But the way that’s curdled into Trumpy carny grift infotainment is a result of the right wing media bubble.

Beginning in the 80s with Rush Limbaugh and conservative talk radio and metastasizing in the 90s with Fox News, the right has increasingly created its own impenetrable partisan safe space, in which the libs are always being owned and the kids these days are always trampling on the (white supremacist, patriarchal) verities of your youth.

Fox originally was (designed to cater to Republican voters and rally them to right wing causes. It quickly started to develop a logic of its own; at this point the GOP often looks like an appendage of its media, rather than the other way around. The network pushes legislators and party actors to take more extreme right wing positions. But it also just pushes them to be more entertaining—which means more outrageous, louder, less responsible.

It also, as political scientist Jonathan Bernstein out, encourages them to be lazier. If you’re a Republican and you go on Fox, no one is going to fact check even the most outrageous claims; on the contrary, you’ll be rewarded for spouting more and more silliness. Fox doesn’t even really cover the news; there’s a whole parallel universe of issues and nonsense talking points which get boosted and reboosted…which means that GOP legislators who go on Fox don’t need to actually know what’s going on in the world. They just need to watch Fox.

The media bubble likes carneys, grifters, snake oil salesmen—flashy bozos who say they have all the answers with a confident smirk. It hates “establishment” pols who have actually put in the work and know that politics are complicated, that different people have different preferences, that there’s no one easy answer to solving all our problems.

You can see the progressive bubble-ification of the Republican party, and all its ramifications, over the last forty years. Newt Gingrich, a glib, grifting bomb thrower, got elected Republican House Speaker in 1994 and started pushing rabid partisan attacks and borderline conspiracy nonsense until his colleagues got sick of him and his ethics violations and booted him in 1998. George W. Bush’s intellectual laziness and Iraq war lies seem like a product of the bubble as well.

The real pre Trump warning sign, though, was the GOP’s inability to control candidate quality. John McCain’s Vice-Presidential pick, Sarah Palin, dissolved into nonsense gibberish upon exposure to national media in 2008. Missouri rep Todd Akin torched his very winnable Senate campaign in 2012 by arguing that women couldn’t become pregnant after being raped—a despicable lie much like the many despicable lies circulating unchecked in right wing spaces.

That same year, the 2012 Republican primary was inundated with a backwash of unqualified cranks—libertarian weirdo Ron Paul, radio host Herman Cain, rabid racist loon Michelle Bachman, Newt Gingrich. The party ended up choosing centristy sober rich guy Mitt Romney—but the Trumpier options were out there, howling around the edges.

It's worth remembering too that in 2016, many of Trump’s competitors were, like him, grifting demagogic dipshits. Carly Fiona had held no elected office; neither had Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon who seemed to be in the primary mostly to run campaign scams. Ted Cruz—the nation’s most hated senator—was in there too; he’s now best known for using his elected office to promote his podcast.

Trump was an unusual candidate in a lot of ways. But the point is that as the right wing media bubble has swallowed the GOP, “unusual” candidates have become more and more usual. Republican primary voters love candidates who are transparent grifters, like the assholes they see on Fox News. And transparent grifters see the Republican presidential process, in particular, as a way to boost their brand and get gigs in right wing media.

Through 2012, the Republicans managed to keep the grifters from winning, at least at the presidential level. But given the party’s trajectory, it was only a matter of time before someone like Trump—high media profile, little political experience, rabidly racist—captured the party.

Someone like Trump

Now, “someone like Trump” didn’t have to mean Trump himself. As I said above, Trump’s particular mix of inexperience, recklessness, rank corruption, and compulsive bigotry has made him about as toxic a president as it is possible to imagine. Newt Gingrich, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson would all have been terrible, evil presidents in a range of ways. But they might well not have been as terrible and evil as the president we’ve got. They probably wouldn’t be threatening to annex Canada, for instance. And of course none of them had Trump’s decades of celebrity media exposure, and so might well not have won in 2016.

But the point here is that the Republicans have been flirting for some time with white supremacy, hatred of democracy, extremist rhetoric, vast, howling ignorance, and government by celebrity— all of which together, I think, provide a good thumbnail outline of Trumpism. Trump wasn’t foreordained. But an ignorant, avaricious, grifting, fascist Republican president probably was, at some point—if not in 2016, then not too long after.

Democrats in general—especially older, centrist Democrats like Biden and Schumer—have tended to talk about Trump as if he’s an odd detour from the true, sober GOP mainstream. They keep waiting for the fever to break; if only we beat Trump this time, or get Trump’s approval down, the real anti Trump GOP will finally reassert itself, and the republic will be restored.

But if you recognize that the GOP has been incubating Trumpism for some time, that strategy looks a lot less tenable. I think there are many Republicans who loathe Trump. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, the minions of the devil all hate each other, because they’re all repulsive and disgusting and why wouldn’t you hate them?

But for the GOP to turn into a party that supports democracy, or a party that respects and promotes qualified candidates—that’s going to require a lot more than just ditching Trump. We need, at the minimum, real structural change, and real consequences for all those who have attacked the constitution, not just Trump.

Otherwise, even if Trump goes, the GOP will continue to elevate the worst people in the world to power. They won’t be exactly like Trump. They might be somewhat better than Trump in some ways. But they will still be self-aggrandizing fascists. And America under their rule will still, and more and more, be a cruel and hateful place.