This weekend, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham started urging his fellow Republicans to unite behind Trump. This from a guy who once called Trump a “race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot.” Graham is just the latest member of the GOP to fall in line after months of saying Trump was absolutely unacceptable.
In North Carolina, we’ve seen the pattern repeatedly. Democrats used to warn voters that electing Republicans would lead to cuts to public education and our university system. Republicans would cry foul, calling the accusations baseless scare tactics. Now that the GOP has taken control of state government and cut funding to public schools and universities, those same Republicans are on board with those policies.
As House Bill 2 rips the state apart, causing companies to back out of plans to expand and costing North Carolina needed jobs, nobody in the party that calls itself pro-business is willing to speak up. Maybe they’re cowed by their bullying leaders. Maybe they believe it’s more important to maintain control than adhere to principles. Regardless, it’s bad for business.
The party that once preached small government routinely uses the heavy hand of big government to squash local initiatives and usurp local power. Most recently, HB2 is getting attention for nullifying a local ordinance, but that’s just the latest in a long line of authoritarian moves. They’ve repeatedly redrawn county and municipal districts to make them more Republican. They’ve interfered in control of water systems and airports. They’ve even introduced a bill to take away private property rights in an effort to kill off the solar energy industry.
While Republicans insist that competition makes everything better, they’ve reduced competition in campaigns–the one place that the Founding Fathers actually believed it to be necessary. They’ve used extreme gerrymandering to tighten their grip on power and reduce dissent. They only support that free market thing when the system is rigged in their favor.
Donald Trump is actually a very good representative of what the party is becoming. He’s a guy with no principles who will say anything to win an election and hold power. The North Carolina Republican Party has already evolved into the Trump Party. They are no longer the conservative party and they’ve shed any pretense of the moderation that defined their North Carolina leaders in the 1980s and 1990s. They’re now the authoritarian party. The rest of the country is apparently following suit.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
Trump has had nearly his entire campaign paid for by a complicit media noise machine who has been falling all over themselves to break the story of the next outrageous and ignorant thing to issue from his cake hole. It may not meet the definition of the old-school “yellow journalism”, but it definitely meets the definition of the current-day “green journalism”. Because you don’t have to be accurate, you just have to be FIRST.
The GOP created Trump, and now they’ll have to own that.
Wholeheartedly agree with the first three commenters, and there are a lot of things that scare me about this whole year. I’m old enough to remember Republican Governors and other office holders whom I could actually respect. Those days are over. The party has imploded on itself but still holds their tenacious grip on power. This is why the down-ballot races are so important. I fear that the attitude of “the deck is stacked against us, might as well just stay home” will override any common sense that some Demos may have. If we have any hope of keeping Trump out of the White House we have to stick together. Meanwhile, Senator Sanders, in a childish fit of pique, is doing his level best to tear the party apart, when we’ve never needed a united front more. There is so much at stake this year, mainly, of course, the composition of the Supreme Court for generations to come. Our only hope for survival is to get out the vote in ALL races, not just the presidential race.
I don’t think it is weird to recall the moderate and sane Republicans, but it was quite some time ago in political terms. (I like the “Bush on steroids” although you may be doing even Bush a disservice. Not sure, but ……)
We do need a serious and responsible opposition party for democracy to work, so while I sometimes wish the GOP to end this election cycle in total and complete disarray across the entire nation, a part of me says “be careful what you wish for.” However, I am pretty sure I can count on the Democrats to do their usual infighting if Hillary wins and they also get a majority in the Senate, so there may be no need for an opposition party. Today, I would settle for not seeing Donald Trump on my TV!
Amen.
The willingness of leading Republicans to unite behind Trump after earlier describing him as an ignoramus, a xenophobe, a misogynist, a bigot, and a danger at the nuclear button is the height of hypocrisy (although GOP’ers keep raising the height’s bar), as well as a disgusting display of having little in the way of integrity or principals.
Could not agree more. Not surprised either.