Trapped by Trump: How the Tea Party’s glorious victories created the GOP’s current nightmare

[DonViejo]

Do Republican leaders still think their only problem is a rogue candidate? If so, they haven't paid attention

HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

Donald J. Trump ✔
@realDonaldTrump

It is so nice that the shackles have been taken off me and I can now fight for America the way I want to.

10:00 AM - 11 Oct 2016
22,858 Retweets 60,443 likes

That tweet sent shock waves through the political world yesterday. Democrats understood it to mean that the next four weeks are going to be an ugly mud-wrestling contest the likes of which this country has never seen. They donned their hazmat suits and ventured into the mire. The Republicans, on the other hand, understood that Donald Trump had just declared war on their party.

In a flurry of tweets, he characterized House speaker Paul Ryan as “weak and ineffective” and claimed he provided “zero support.” He then accused Sen. John McCain of being foul-mouthed and begging for his support in the past. And he said the GOP was harder to deal with than his Democratic rival declaring, “Disloyal R’s are far more difficult than Crooked Hillary. They come at you from all sides. They don’t know how to win — I will teach them!” Trump wasn’t just unshackled, he had staged a prison break and was running screaming through the streets as his many millions of fans cheered him on.

All this evidently came as a surprise to the GOP establishment, which apparently assumed it could abandon all pretense of supporting its own presidential nominee with no repercussions. Apparently leading Republicans still don’t understand what is happening to their party. They seem to be under the impression that their only problem is a strange interloper by the name of Donald Trump, and they couldn’t be more wrong. Their problem is that they have a large and powerful faction of voters who despise them as much as they despise the Democrats.

When President Obama was elected, the Republican base of the party, demoralized and defeated after the mess of the Bush administration, the Great Recession and the euphoria of the Obama campaign, quickly gathered its wits and reformed itself into a new entity they called the Tea Party. At first it simply existed to oppose President Obama’s agenda, the health care reforms in particular. Backed by big special interests and right-wing media, they became a force to reckon with and in 2010, with the economy still mired in recession and people still feeling desperate, they helped the Republicans win back a congressional majority, along the way unseating some long-term Republican incumbents like Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah and Rep. Bob Inglis of South Carolina, both taken down by primary challenges from the Tea Party right. They marched into Washington with a mandate to confront the establishment.

-snip-

http://www.salon.com/2016/10/12/trapped-by-trump-how-the-tea-partys-glorious-victories-created-the-gops-current-nightmare/

[demotux]

1. Trump's palindrome ...

Maybe when Trump's insanity grows in such a way that even Palin seems reasonable, then the GOP is finished ...

[sailfla]

2. That Karma will bite you on the ass