Live from the Orange-Haired Baboon Cage: Peter Suderman: The G.O.P. Is a Mess. It’s Not All Trump’s Fault: "When the year began, the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, cited health care and taxes as his top legislative priorities...
...Yet... the Republicans have accomplished essentially nothing. They have become a party without a consensus. It would be easy to simply blame the president.... Yet... Trump... is not their root cause... [but] an avatar of the party’s pathologies, the culmination of its cynical and shambolic trajectory over the last two decades. Many of those issues can be traced back to the administration of George W. Bush, which functioned as an enormous political bait and switch. The 43rd president campaigned on humble foreign policy and prudent conservative solutions, but his presidency quickly became oriented almost exclusively around a political defense of the Iraq war.... Domestic policy, and... domestic policy expertise became an afterthought at best, an opportunity for cynical political maneuvering at worst....
National security fear-mongering and culture war controversies, especially over same-sex marriage, were employed to rally the base and ensure its loyalty, even as dissatisfaction with Mr. Bush’s governance continued to grow. The Bush presidency, then, was both a failure and a fraud.... The party infrastructure... leaders... functionaries... activists and operators... formed a partisan phalanx around the president, playing down his flaws, if not refusing to acknowledge them....
Mr. Bush left many voters on the right angry, resentful and suspicious.... The focal point for much of the post-Bush right’s anger and resentment was the Tea Party... mixed genuine desire for limited government with white resentment... paranoia... hucksters and manipulators... unconventional and unqualified candidates. Republican Party elites were only too happy to exploit this inchoate energy as long as it was useful. This is how John McCain ended up selecting an untested firebrand like Sarah Palin... how Mitt Romney campaigned with sideshow characters like Kid Rock and, well, eventually Donald Trump....
Mr. Trump’s goals have more to do with Twitter feuds and personal aggrandizement than any particular policies. Under Mr. Trump, the party’s chief internal debate is not so much about which governing vision to pursue but whether there should be one at all. This reality is not lost on all Republicans. Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, one of the party’s most libertarian members, recently said that when he realized that primary voters backed him and his fellow libertarians Rand Paul and Ron Paul, it wasn’t for their ideas. Instead, he said, “they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race — and Donald Trump won best in class.” Republican voters weren’t voting for any policy outcome. They were voting for chaos. And that, more than anything, is what the party has come to stand for.... Mr. Trump didn’t cause any of this. He just took advantage of it. He is the most successful huckster of the bunch....
Someday, Mr. Trump will no longer be president. And the Republicans will probably still be the same dysfunctional and disappointing party it is today.
