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Trump’s Wrongdoings Are a Feature of His Party, Not a Bug
The GOP was corrupt long before 45 came along
A Republican president stands accused of traitorous acts, working in cahoots with a kleptocracy that emerged from the ruins of the USSR and its KGB — a menace the GOP long grounded its very identity upon fighting — in multiple schemes to undermine our national elections.
Many have asked why the Republican Party would stand lockstep behind such a brazen criminal. The most commonly heard answer is that Trump has “taken over” the Party. That’s true insofar as the president is always the head of his party, but it is not a satisfactory answer.
Trump has managed to line up virtually every significant constituency of the GOP, not the least among them its senators and House members, behind him with remarkable uniformity, to the point that many GOP House members enthusiastically joined Trump in declaring his conduct with Ukraine to be “perfect” and nearly none were willing to criticize his conduct during the impeachment debate, while virtually all GOP senators stand ready to suppress further evidence of Trump’s criminality, then summarily acquit him.
The truth is, Trump and his serial illegal electoral interference are the apotheosis of a transformation of the GOP that began during the Reagan presidency, if not before. It is a transformation arising from the Republican Party’s slow but insistent recognition that it has become a permanent minority party, advancing policies that are widely unpopular, and that its political success is dependent upon hobbling democracy and, most importantly, the electoral process.
Ratcheting up voter suppression
The GOP’s now direct opposition to democracy is demonstrated in the party’s relationship with the now gutted Voting Rights Act (VRA), the Great Society legislation that combated Jim Crow voter suppression schemes. The hollowing out of the VRA, and its continued somnolence, is attributable in substantial part to two Republican figures who are poised to play significant roles in the upcoming impeachment trial: Chief Justice John Roberts and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
