Donald Trump is launching internecine warfare on his own party three weeks before the election while, as you’re reading this, many American voters are voting early or filling out their absentee ballots. Trump’s strategy to turn the heat up on negative campaigning in order to trap a willing opponent is a winning strategy for the GOP but when you commit hari-kari on your own party you are disproportionately suppressing your own votes. This has never been done in Presidential politics before unless you count 3rd party challenges by candidates who were formerly with one of the 2 major parties. But this is different, Trump is not mounting a quixotic campaign under a 3rd party banner, he is the Republican nominee.
This is further evidence of the deterioration of the Republican Party that began in 2008 after 8 years of implementation of every policy in the Republican agenda, especially the theory on trickledown economics that resulted in the Great Recession of 2008 and a foreign policy that gave us the Iraq war, the most illegitimate war in U.S. history.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not dancing on the Republican Party graves. I believe in the 2 party-system, that there should be a party that dreams of the possible while the other party figures out how we’re going to pay for it and holds down the extravagance. The excesses of the 1960’s are proof that we can’t live very long with just the Democrats in relevancy; and that’s a tough job and who would want it? Just ask your parents
But when the GOP resisted change in order to expand their base whether it was not recognizing minority rights, gender equality or the existence of diversity of sexual orientation, dealing with immigration in a smart yet compassionate way or even growing the middle class they rejected what for them were hard choices. They chose the easy way out, the lazy way. They went into survival mode and used hatred and fear as their vehicle. Now they have Donald Trump, their own creation. I lament that we are here but they don’t have my empathy.
Mary Shelly writes in her magnum opus “Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance.”