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One of these days I will have to write my oral history of the Republican civil war, but today is not that day.
In any case that is not how I remember things going down.
What Trump did was accurately identify key fault lines that cut across large swaths of both the conservative and corporate sides of the Republican electorate as well as former Democrats who'd been alienated by the national party's embrace of things like open borders, decarceration, drag queens in pre-schools, and men in women's sports. IE "it's the economy stupid", bread and butter issues are what win elections. This should not have been such a novel insight but this is where the whole "skin in the game" element comes into play.
By the spring of 2016 it was already clear that the upcoming election would be a fight between the beltway establishment and some variant of the Tea-Party with Hillary Clinton representing the establishment. A vote for Hillary was a vote for more of the same, and for a large swath of the population who viewed the foreign, financial, and domestic policies of the last decade as just one massive fuck-up after another "more of the same" was not a compelling sales pitch. @faceh's rant about rewarding failure reflects much of the sentiment I heard from voters at the time. As such it seemed clear to me that despite being the favorites of the national party neither Jeb Bush nor Chris Christie ever really stood a chance. If a voter wanted business as usual, what did either of those two have to offer over Hillary? Accordingly the 2016 Republican primary looked like it was Ted Cruz's to lose. However, Cruz's campaign was hampered by the fact that he was a career politician with no real accomplishments to his name aside of being able to climb the party ladder. As such there was a lot of discussion at the state committee level about whether Cruz had the balls to fight the beast or would he become just another beltway stooge if elected.
something I don't think that a lot of our more liberal posters here really grasp is that despite their surface level similarities the internal organization and power structures of the Republican and Democratic parties are radically different. Republican state and municipal committees are more like independent chapters than wholly-owned subsidiaries. State and municipal reps wield real power and a national party endorsement doesn't carry the same weight in funding or in raw primary votes that it would in the Democratic Party. The Florida RNC backed Trump over Jeb Bush despite Bush being the governor of Florida at the time, and there wasn't anything the national committee could do about it because Florida was a net contributor.
Enter Trump, Trump doesn't have Cruz's problem, he's not a career politician, he has a portfolio of accomplishments he can point to, and for all the sneering from establishment liberals about him not being a proper gentlemen, there is no question in anyone's mind about whether he has the balls or stomach for a fight. By adopting the most popular planks of the Tea-Party platform he immediately made himself the front runner. Cruz and Trump would fight it out to the end, but the choice was only ever going to be between Tea-Party original recipe (Cruz and Rubio), and Tea-Party extra crispy (MAGA). When Rubio threw his lot in with Trump, that put an end to the debate.
Trump isn't "wearing the Republican party like skinsuit" so much as he is the brick that the electorate has chosen to throw through the establishment's window. You and others keep throwing around words like "destruction", "chaos" and "weaponized incompetence" like this wasn't the plan from the start. It's only "incompetence" if you define "competence" as supporting a top-down liberal order.
This misapprehension of the message being sent by electing Trump is why the keep stepping on rakes. "Oh my Lord he's breaking norms and doing things without checking for permission, this is chaos!"
Honey if the politicians are upset that's valued added.
More cynically, the main thing Trump actually offers is breeches of decorum, which angry voters interpret as the best thing available. Not through any bad faith on his part, but his short attention span and lack of actual follow through. The US will be in approximately the same cultural and political position in 2028 as it is today, just as it was in the same position in 2020 as 2016.
The establishment is happy to use him as a useful patsy, and the hysterical shrieking about him being neo-Hitler confuses people into thinking he is a more substantial threat to the establishment than he is. So he's a vessel to channel discontent and anger into dissolution.
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