The Pillars of Today's GOP: Fear, Hate, and Grievance

With several Trump backed candidates winning Republican primaries yesterday it is clear that the madness and cancer gripping the Republican Party has not been abated.  Toxic extremism marks these candidates and others within the Republican Party which is now motivated by three things: fear, hatred, and endless grievance.  These poisonous themes play the best among white supremacists who fear losing power and privilege based on their skin color and "Christian" extremists - who utterly ignore Christ's gospel message - who suffer from a persecution complex and seek to inflict their toxic religious beliefs on all Americans.  These currents always flowed within the GOP but it was Donald Trump who perfected appeals to them to win in 2016.  Others, notably Florida's Ron DeSantis emulate Trump's appeals to the ugliest elements in the party base and seek to continually identify enemies - gays, blacks, progressives - that they claim must be defeated to protect America from "enemies from within." Whether the general elections in November will see some of these perveyors of hate and fear defeated remains to be seen.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the pillars of today's Republican Party.  It is not a pretty picture.  Here are excerpts:

For all the defects Donald Trump has as a politician, he does possess certain skills, among them an almost preternatural ability to tap into the sensibilities—the id—of the American right.

Returning to Washington, D.C., for the first time since he left the White House in the aftermath of the violent assault on the Capitol, Trump gave a speech last Tuesday to the America First Policy Institute (AFPI). It was billed as a policy address on public safety. But everyone knows that policy doesn’t interest Trump in the least. What he cares about is the performative part of politics, inflaming people’s passions, creating chaos and conflict. Politics is a stage on which his disordered personality plays itself out.

Despite the speech’s unruliness, certain themes in it are worth examining, because they signal what a Trump campaign might look like. And even if he doesn’t run, they reveal the mindset of the American right. These are the pillars of the GOP.

FEAR: If the hallmarks of Ronald Reagan’s speeches were optimism, hope, and a sense of limitless possibilities, Trump’s speeches are the antithesis. Trump is a genius at tapping into fear. In his AFPI speech, for example, he portrayed America not as a great nation facing significant challenges, but as a dystopia, hellish and desolate, a “cesspool of crime” on the edge of extinction.

Trump spoke about streets “riddled with needles and soaked with the blood of innocent victims,” a nation being terrorized by “drugged out lunatics” and “sadists who prey on children.” He invoked violent gangs “laughing as they bludgeoned the life from their helpless victims” . . . He claimed that America’s largest cities are “literal war zones.”

This grim narrative is one Trump has used for many years, and last Tuesday’s speech echoed his “American carnage” inaugural address. But this speech was bleaker, its portrait of America more terrifying.

[H]is description of America also resonates with many on the right who believe that America is caught in a spiral of doom. It reinforces the core belief among Trump supporters that things are so desperate, embracing Trump’s corruption and lawlessness is necessary to defeat the barbarians at the gates (Democrats).

In the world according to Trump, the choice is a stark one: Support him, and you defend civilization; oppose him, and you invite savagery.

GRIEVANCES: One of the things Trump understood from the moment he ran for president in 2016 was that the Republican Party’s base was roiling with resentments and grievances. Its members felt patronized, disrespected, dishonored, and persecuted by the elite culture. They were sick of it, they were enraged by it, and they weren’t going to take it anymore.

Trump has spent half a dozen years not only validating those feelings but amplifying them. Time and again he signaled to his supporters that they were being viciously and unjustly attacked, that the game was rigged against them. He would be their merciless defender, their avenging angel. This created a powerful visceral attachment to the former president.

This time around, Trump has added something new to the narrative, representing himself as persecuted for the sake of his people.

Trump then said this: “Never forget, everything this corrupt establishment is doing to me is all about preserving their power and control over the American people. They want to damage you in any form, but they really want to damage me, so I can no longer go back to work for you. And I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

Trump is telling his supporters that he is all that stands between them and those who want to inflict great pain and grave harm on them.

HATE: Trump used his speech to portray his opponents as not just misguided but wicked and therefore suitable objects of hate. America’s 45th president said, “Despite great outside dangers, our biggest threat in this country remains the sick, sinister, and evil people from within.” . . . . The January 6 committee, he said, is made up of “hacks and thugs.” He then made this move: “But no matter how big or powerful the corrupt radicals that we’re fighting against may be, no matter how menacing they appear, we must never forget this nation does not belong to them. This nation belongs to you, the American people.”

What Trump has done in the eyes of his supporters is to set up a clash of epic, almost biblical proportions: the children of light versus the children of darkness, patriots versus traitors, the decent versus the depraved. In an existential conflict such as this, everything is permissible; nothing is off limits. This is a fight to the death.

Trump might not run for president in 2024—and if he runs, he might not win. Much of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is turning against Trump. And as Sarah Longwell wrote in The Atlantic on Thursday, focus groups of Trump 2020 voters indicate that “the accumulating drama of the January 6 hearings—which they can’t avoid in social-media feeds—seems to be facilitating not a wholesale collapse of support, but a soft permission to move on.” He may be just a bit too mad even for a MAGA party.

Whether Trump wins or not, he has left an imprint on the Republican Party. In 2016, Trump was the outlier, a political freak. Today his inclinations, his enmities, his style of politics define the GOP. Even the person widely seen right now as the most formidable challenger to Trump, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, is “diet Trump,” in the words of one political strategist.