CT Blue

Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to beat Driftglass on this one, yet another example of Never-Trumpers rewriting history to, among other things, obscure their own roles in bringing us to the sorry state in which we find ourselves. Charlie Sykes and Joe Scarborough can’t figure out why Trump supporters are willing to destroy Democracy.

“I think where we’ve come since 2015, what’s happened to the American conservative movement, think what’s happened to our political culture,” Charlie Sykes said.

“It’s easy to dismiss Donald Trump as this narcissistic clown, but it is hard to understate the impact that he’s had on our political standards. and to your point, look, you are seeing a full-out attack, not just on the culture of facts, which we had back in 2016, but now on all of the institutions of our constitutional republic. There’s great piece in the Washington Post that talks about how all the other Republican candidates are going after the courts, the system of law, the deep state, sowing distrust in any institution that might challenge or hold someone like Donald Trump accountable.

I’ve put the most blatant fantastical language in bold. The fantasy is that the Republican Party was a party based on a “culture of facts” until Trump came along. Nothing could be further from the Truth. Sykes himself was a Limbaugh wannabe until 2016, feeding right wing paranoia to his radio listeners. Fox “News” has been spreading lies on behalf of Republicans for decades, and Republicans have been happily embracing those lies. Scarborough himself had Trump on his show multiple times in 2016, giving him a platform to spread what every thinking person knew were lies at that time, not to mention that every thinking person knew then that Trump was a budding fascist.

Ever since Ronald Reagan, and perhaps all the way back to Nixon, Republicans have realized that the only way they can win elections and further enrich their rich backers is to lie and divide. That’s what they have been doing since Nixon adopted his Southern Strategy and Reagan announced his candidacy in Philadelphia, Mississippi talking about state’s rights. For years they figured they could garner those votes without going full crazy, but the whackos were bound to take full control, as they now have, at some point. Why I even remember some obscure blogger predicting back in 2012 that the next Republican candidate for President would not be the Romney type “moderate” who would throw enough red meat at the base to garner their votes, but a full on nutjob. I was wrong only in the sense that Trump has no real principles, he’s just a skilled grifter and he saw how to work the grift. It would never have worked had the ground not been prepared for years.

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