It’s months from the conventions, but if today is any indicator, the results are all but guaranteed.
No matter the results of the election, the impact in the Republican Party is clear. After years of playing with its ‘southern strategy’, the party has been colonized by a northern real estate magnate, Donald J. Trump.
Loud, bombastic, boastful, narrow-minded and vain, Trump now epitomizes the party. The party faithful have worshiped at the steps of the Chamber of commerce, and genuflected before the Big Ball on Wall Street, so to bend to a billionaire is only natural.
The party has become, in essence, the Party of Business, and in furtherance thereof, it has turned a blind eye to the pains and needs of the poor and the dispossessed.
It was not always so.
It was the 1870s when the spirit of Lincoln animated the party.
It’s most loyal voter was the newly-emancipated Black people. Wives tossed their husbands out of their homes if they dared vote for a democrat.
But the Republicans, in their (not-so)’Great Compromise’ of the 1870s, supported Rutherford Hayes for President, who announced a ‘let it alone’ policy, allowing racist southern forces to attack, at will, Black voters. Black troops were removed from the South (and incidentally marched to the West to fight ‘Indians’!) and Black Republicans were left to the tender mercies of the terrorists – groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
That betrayal burned inn Black American memory for decades.
In the ‘60s, the time of the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movements, the Republicans once again turned their backs on Blacks, and waged a Southern strategy – an appeal to white nationalism, xenophobia and anti-Blackness.
Donald J. Trump is the logical development of that process.
Loud, bombastic, bullying, racist; he is the very embodiment of the so-called ‘conservative’ movement.
He is more.
He has become the Republican Party.
He is the true leader of the newest version of the Grand Old Party. Lincoln has left the building.
The GOP has become the Trump Party.
