CaptainKudzu

Tuesday, February 16, 2021

Ravi and Donald and the evangelicals

After reading two pieces on Ravi Zacharias and his secret life this week, I was struck by the parallels between how Ravi’s staff covered for his abusive behavior and how evangelicals have covered for Donald Trump. In both cases, Christians ignored warning signs about troublesome and sinful behavior and ended up enabling corrupt leaders to do significant damage to their own causes.

If you aren’t familiar with Ravi Zacharias, he was a respected theologian and author who died in 2020. After his death, revelations of sexually abusive behavior came to light along with details of how the staff of his ministry brushed aside complaints and ran interference when anyone tried to investigate the allegations. Our own Steve Berman and the Dispatch’s David French both provide detailed accounts of Ravi’s secret sins so I won’t cover the same ground here.

red and white Do Not Enter street sign — Photo credit: Tech Nick/unsplash.com

I’ve read some of Ravi’s writings and taken part in some of his Bible studies in the past. He was a great thinker and his perspectives were valuable, but now I look at his private life and wonder how the people around him could have ignored the warning signs that indicated Ravi was an abusive monster in private. I also have to wonder what it is that makes Christians look the other way and excuse the behavior of such sinful men.

Granted, the tendency to excuse evil is not solely found among evangelicals or conservatives. Off the top of my head, the Catholics have had their scandals with priests, and Democrats have had no shortage of sex scandals. In recent years, we’ve seen Anthony Weiner, Al Franken, and Katie Hill get in trouble for being unable to keep their hands (and other body parts) to themselves.

But Christians are supposed to know better. People who understand the doctrine of depravity of man should understand that, if given enough rope, most people will end up hanging themselves. For that reason, people need to be held accountable and not given anything that approaches absolute power. That applies to people we like and trust as well as people that we don’t. We don’t do our friends any favors by allowing them to get into trouble because we refused to hold them accountable.

The Founders understood that government authority was most accountable when closest to the people, but we’ve forgotten that today. Over the past few years, like ancient Israelites begging for a king, I’ve watched Christians and conservatives, people who should know better, wishing for a president-for-life and arguing that presidents (or one president anyway) should be above the law.

Maybe it’s wishful thinking. Maybe it’s what we call “mission-itis” in aviation, the desire to set everything else aside and focus on getting the job done, no matter the cost. Many justify excusing Ravi and Trump’s sins by pointing to the good that they have done.

But the problem is that Christians are told to tell the truth and call out sin, even when it is committed by people on our side who are doing things that we like. Right and wrong is a matter of black and white. The gray of whataboutism does not apply in spiritual matters.

“Woe to those who call evil good….”

In both cases, however, it isn’t just that Christians look past Ravi and Trump’s sins. Many don’t even seem to be able to see them. Ravi’s staff simply couldn’t comprehend that their pastor was abusing women and Christian Republicans can’t accept the fact that Trump has a long history of dishonesty, corruption, and abuse and has now provoked a violent insurrection.

There are probably many reasons for the tendency to give corrupt leaders a pass, but I think it boils down to two. One is confirmation bias that becomes a form of denial. We like the people on our side and simply refuse to believe the worse about them, even when it’s true. (Conversely, we often won’t believe anything good about our adversaries, even when it’s true.) They belong to our tribe and it’s our tribe against the heathens and socialists and the rest of the world.

The second reason is transactional. They do things that we like and we don’t want to ruin that. Holding leaders on our side accountable means that the other side wins. We lose the policy that we like in Trump’s case, or, in Ravi’s case, we rationalize that many people that Ravi’s ministry touched (sorry, poor choice of words) may never be saved.

There is also an additional subset that is totally oblivious to the problems around them. This is more possible than ever now that we can totally avoid hearing different opinions due to our propagandistic and sectarian media that is split along partisan lines.

Don’t like what you hear on the news? Just call it fake news and flip back to a channel that will tell you what your itching ears want to hear. The Bible hints that even Christians can be deceived and that fact seems obvious these days when we often seem to beg to be deceived.

I’m not suggesting that Christianity is not true. I think the evidence suggests that it is. But many modern elements of Christianity are not biblical, even if we assume that they are. It’s similar to how ancient Jews took the God-given Torah and added even more rabbinic laws on their own. There is a difference between what God says and what man thinks God should say.

Kicking the accountability can down the road eventually leads to bigger problems. The Bible tells us that “everything exposed by the light becomes visible.” Our secret sins and corruption will eventually be illuminated for the world to see, often with humiliating consequences. I think that’s particularly true when we sin in God’s name.

Ignoring corruption also directly hurts the victims of abusive leaders. A pro-life ideology is inconsistent with looking the other way while men like Ravi harass and rape women or while men like Trump lie their way to power and line their pockets from public service. The victims of Ravi’s predations and the supporters that Trump considered cannon fodder are not expendable commodities to be used and discarded.

When the time of reckoning comes, it is better for us to be on the side of the light than to be shamed as one of those who have helped keep corruption hidden in the darkness. Just ask the people who helped hide Ravi’s abusive behavior or those who lost careers or freedom covering for Donald Trump.

Scandals also hurt the causes that we seek to serve. Republican corruption served up both houses of Congress and the White House to the Democrats while Ravi’s corruption is pushing many away from the saving grace of God and Christ. If you truly believe in your cause, you should help to police the behavior of those who serve in its name.

As humans, we may be able to justify our hypocritical behavior on earth, but God hates sin, no matter which side the sinner is on. Our rationalizations and excuses will fall flat when we stand before God in judgment.

Thank God for his grace and forgiveness, but we need to recognize and repent from our own hypocritical and self-destructive behaviors.

From the Racket

America's pandemic fail

The pandemic is not over yet. When it is, books will be written on the Coronavirus and humanity’s response, but even at this point, maybe the beginning of the end or maybe what Winston Churchill might call the end of the beginning, some lessons seem readily apparent. One of these is America has not handled the pandemic well.

We are now 11 months into the American phase of the pandemic and the US is the undisputed Coronavirus champion both in terms of total cases and total deaths per Worldmeters.info. In per capita terms, the US ranks seventh in total cases (between Slovenia and Luxembourg) and tenth in total deaths (between Bosnia-Herzegovina and North Macedonia).

Many people have denied the seriousness of COVID-19 from the beginning. While COVID is much more infectious and deadly than the flu, we can be grateful that it isn’t any more dangerous than it is. If it was, our inept response would have the death toll much higher than just shy of 500,000 where it currently stands.

In fact, it is the relatively unique balance between infectiousness and deadliness that makes the Coronavirus so dangerous. The AIDS virus is very deadly but difficult to transmit so its spread was limited, even though it killed people slowly. Likewise, SARS had a high death rate but didn’t spread easily so that outbreak was contained. At the other end of the spectrum, Ebola killed quickly and was very infectious, but this ultimately worked against the virus. Victims of Ebola often collapsed and died before they had the chance to infect many other people.

COVID-19 found a sweet spot between being too deadly and not infectious enough. The Coronavirus spreads much more easily than the flu and also has a much higher death rate, but its victims can transmit the disease for several days before symptoms become apparent. Research shows that about 20 percent of people infected with COVID-19 are asymptomatic. These people, especially if they eschew mitigations like masks and social distancing, can infect large numbers of other people. This insidious characteristic of COVID-19 makes it seem less dangerous to some people but has actually contributed to the virus’s global spread and high death toll.

At this point, I’ve known lots of people who had the virus. Those afflicted run the gamut from my 92-year-old aunt, who had a mild case, to a friend’s 47-year-old wife, who died three weeks after being infected. I’ve also had friends who still suffer the effects of “long COVID” months after contracting the disease. Most people who survive COVID tell me, “You don’t want it,” but some, especially those with mild or asymptomatic cases, don’t seem to believe that the disease is serious for anyone.

Aside from the asymptomatic super-spreaders, COVID-19’s MVP is the conspiracy community. From the first weeks of the pandemic, hysterical posts on social media and fake news sites heralded the beliefs that the pandemic was a hoax intended to implement socialism or fascism (or both!), crash the economy, gut religious freedoms, and trick people into taking the Mark of the Beast, which is cleverly disguised as a vaccine, don’t you know!

These conspiracy theories, along with the mistaken belief that the virus wasn’t dangerous, led to large numbers of people refusing to wear masks or social distance. This contributed directly to the virus’s unrestricted spread throughout the American population. Even at this late date, many people still don’t believe that masks work or that there is a reason to social distance. The facts don’t bear this out.

There is much evidence to support the use of masks. A January 2021 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reviewed the data and reported, “The preponderance of evidence indicates that mask-wearing reduces transmissibility per contact by reducing transmission of infected respiratory particles in both laboratory and clinical contexts,” but cautioned, “Public mask-wearing is most effective at reducing spread of the virus when compliance is high.”

Therein lies the rub. The conspiracy theorists have undermined compliance in both voluntary and mandatory mask guidelines.

This has a real-world effect. A cursory glance at the Worldmeters comparisons of state cases per capita finds that the 20 states with the worst records on COVID infections are almost all red states with no mask mandates. Rhode Island is the only blue state in the top 10 while Illinois ranks twentieth.

Per capita death statistics look a bit different. New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts make up the top three. Many red states are then interspersed with other New England and mid-Atlantic states.

But looking at the statistics more closely, we see that New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts death curves were frontloaded last spring when the virus was still new and relatively unknown. Much of the death toll in those states was due to infections that occurred before lockdowns and other mitigations were put into place.

Many of these deaths were also due to tragic orders by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, and others which moved recovering COVID patients into nursing homes and allowed the virus to spread among the vulnerable elderly patients there. Those policies ended up helping to spread the virus to the most vulnerable segments of the population.

Internationally, the story is much the same. Sweden was used as an example by the pandemic-deniers in the early months. Not so much anymore. Sweden currently stands at 22 on the world rank of per capita COVID cases and twenty-third in deaths. The Nordic country was finally forced to tighten its COVID restrictions in January amid a post-Christmas surge in cases.

The history of the Coronavirus pandemic will tell us that lockdowns do work… when people comply with them. Science and logic agree that the virus cannot spread where people do not interact. When areas lock down, the virus has nowhere to go.

There are two good examples to support this theory. The first is China and the second is New Zealand. China (ranked 190 in per capita infections) is guilty of botching its initial response to the virus as well as spreading misinformation about the threat (although there is no evidence that the communist nation spread the virus intentionally), but they ruthlessly enforced a lockdown that seems to have stamped out the disease in their country.

Successful lockdowns don’t require an authoritarian communist government either. New Zealand (ranked 188 in per capita infections) locked down early and aimed to eradicate the disease within its borders rather than focusing on a quick reopening. When cases flare up, as they did over the weekend, the Kiwis lock down the affected area quickly to minimize the spread.

In the United States, we suffered from poor leadership. If Gov. Cuomo is to be blamed for New York’s nursing home deaths, then it is only fair to blame Donald Trump for the almost unceasing stream of misinformation that he spewed forth throughout the pandemic. It was the Trump White House that set unrealistic expectations for “15 days to slow the spread” when most health experts were saying that the pandemic was a long-term problem. The president also said that the virus would disappear in the summer heat, eschewed masks and social distancing, and never seems to have found a quack cure that he didn’t like. President Trump’s undermining of his science advisors cost an unknown number of lives and helped to prolong both the pandemic and its associated economic crisis. Further, the Trump Administration’s plan to stockpile and distribute the vaccine seems to have been sadly lacking.

The Administration even gave up on providing hard data on the pandemic early on. The COVID Tracking Project, an effort created by the Atlantic magazine, is now the go-to source for collecting and sharing Coronavirus data across the 50 states. There are exceptions, but overall, the Trump Administration does not seem to have taken the pandemic seriously.

Led by the Trump Administration, the American focus on getting things back to normal, even as the pandemic raged around us, has been counterproductive. I’ve said for almost a year now that the only way to get the country back to normal was to defeat the Coronavirus, not pretend that it doesn’t exist. So far, my prediction is being borne out.

In the US (and in smaller-scale examples around the country), we have seen three separate waves of Coronavirus so far. These occurred last spring with the original outbreak, last summer as businesses reopened and the BLM protests raged, and last fall and winter when cold weather drove people indoors and families gathered for Thanksgiving and Christmas. In each of these cases, mitigations such as masks, social distancing, and lockdowns eventually reversed the surge. In the first two cases, the virus returned when people let their guard down.

The COVID Tracking Project @COVID19Tracking

Our daily update is published. States reported 1.1 million tests, 55k cases, 65,455 people currently hospitalized with COVID-19, and 1,078 deaths.

The high death toll and hospitalization rates from the three COVID surges underscores the folly of the “herd immunity” approach. Letting the virus run rampant through the population, as many pandemic skeptics have suggested, would have had a devastating effect. It would have also likely have been futile since we now know that antibodies from the disease are not permanent and people can catch Coronavirus more than once.

The herd immunity strategy also would have run the risk of creating more mutations. Unlike the flu, COVID-19 has a very low rate of mutations. This is thanks to components of the virus which act as “proofreaders” to minimize errors as the virus copies itself. This feature of the virus makes it much easier to create vaccines for COVID-19 than for the flu virus, which mutates very quickly.

But a low rate of mutations does not mean no mutations and the more the virus spreads, the more mutations are created. As an example, if the rate of mutations is one percent, then 100,000 replications could yield 1,000 new mutations. However, if the virus replicates itself 100 million times then there is the potential for a million mutations. This increases the chances that new mutations would be more deadly. Trying for herd immunity would be rolling the dice when it comes to more dangerous mutations.

And we know that there are several new and dangerous mutations already. Thankfully, these new strains seem responsive to most existing vaccines, but a vaccine-resistant COVID mutation is not out of the question if the virus mutates enough.

For now, however, the vaccines work and they work extremely well. A study of the Pfizer vaccine in Israel found that fewer than 0.1 percent of people who took both doses of the vaccine contracted COVID-19. Let me say that again. Less than 0.1 percent of people who took the Pfizer vaccine, 544 out of 523,000, even got sick from the virus. Only 15 of these cases needed hospitalization and no one who was vaccinated has died.

The vaccines work, but we need time to get them distributed. We also need to make sure that the conspiracy fearmongers don’t frighten people away from the miracle drugs that can save their lives.

If people really want to get the country – and the world – back to normal, the way to do it is to get everyone vaccinated and to use mitigation strategies like masks and social distancing to stay alive and healthy in the meantime.

Many online denizens of social media are more concerned with clickbait than with saving lives, however. And if the economy crashes now, then that just means that Joe Biden will have a harder time getting re-elected and holding Congress. We know from the January insurrection that some politicians are more than willing to risk the lives of their supporters.

When the history of the Coronavirus pandemic is written and read by our grandchildren, there will be collective facepalming at the stupidity of much of what we’ve done over the past year. The errors have been bipartisan, although Donald Trump seems to have been singularly ill-suited for leading the country through the crisis.

Maybe when the pandemic is over and we’ve begun to return to normal we can decide that, if something sounds too stupid to be true, that it at least bears more investigation from objective sources. Just because someone tells you what you want to hear, whether good news or a dystopian fantasy, it doesn’t mean that what they say is the truth. As the Bible advises, we should test the accuracy of what people tell us and hold them accountable. Don’t listen to people or sites with poor track records.

If the experience of 2020 and 2021 teaches us nothing else, we should learn to distrust the conspiracy pages and other purveyors of fake news. After all the people who have died, lost their health, and even gone to jail over the past year because they believed fake news, the time would seem ripe for Americans to become more discerning about what they put into their minds. But, somehow, I don’t think we’re ready to give up our confirmation biases and addiction to outrage yet.

From the Racket

Wednesday, February 10, 2021

Convicting Trump would be good for the Republican Party

Today is the kickoff for Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial. It is widely expected to be another exercise in futility with Republicans circling the wagon to protect the former president, but the party might well be better off if in the long run if it rips off the scab and votes to convict and disqualify Trump from holding office in the future.

Donald Trump is somewhat unique among former presidents. In addition to being the only president in American history whose supporters have stormed the Capitol in an attempt to prevent his successor from taking office, Trump is the only living former president who has both additional eligibility and the wherewithal to make another attempt at the presidency. Trump and Jimmy Carter are the only living presidents to serve only one term, but Carter’s health is not good enough to mount another campaign.

Trump could run again but probably could not get elected. The former president’s popularity has plummeted since the election with his approval at 34 percent in the final CNN-SSRS poll of his presidency. Given his behavior figuratively attacking the election results and provoking the literal attack on the Capitol, Trump would almost certainly be poison at the ballot box in 2024.

The rub is that Trump remains popular among Republicans. The same poll found that 80 percent of Republicans approved of Trump, compared to only 34 percent of independents and two percent of Democrats. If these numbers hold, Trump could conceivably win the Republican nomination in 2024 but would almost certainly go down to another humiliating defeat.

The GOP has two choices at this point. They can kick Trump to the curb and ban him from future political campaigns or they can gamble that he won’t scuttle their chances in 2024.

There are pros and cons for the party with either course. The most obvious problem is that the 80 percent of Republicans who still like Trump are the same people that will be called upon to re-elect Republican senators. If we’ve learned anything from the past four years it is that Republican senators will do almost anything to get re-elected. That almost certainly includes acquitting a man whose rhetoric put their own lives in danger as a violent mob of insurrectionists stormed the Capitol.

On the pro side of the ledger, moving against Trump now would give the party two years to rebuild. By purging the conspiracy and Trumpist wings from the party, the factions that didn’t show up for David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, Republicans may be able to win back some of the moderate conservatives and suburban voters that they lost during the Trump years.

Republicans also have less to fear from a muzzled Trump than they did while he was allowed free rein on Twitter. Without access to social media, the former president was recently reduced to sending an angry letter to the Screen Actors Guild in which he resigned from the union before he could be dismissed. The letter, which is reminiscent of Trump’s tweetstorms of yesteryear, closes with the former president’s familiar signature above the name, “President Donald J. Trump.” The letter comes across as the sad rantings of a beaten man.

The bottom line is that Donald Trump behaved extremely poorly after the election and was unique among American presidents in undermining faith in our elections. No president has ever endangered the Constitution the way Donald Trump did in the series of events that led up to the January 6 insurrection. Republicans who value the traditional principle of constitutionalism should vote to ban Trump from politics.

That isn’t to say that Democrats have done a good job of making it easy for Republicans to vote against the former president. The Democrats could have asked for help from Republican Trump critics in drafting the Articles of Impeachment and given more floor time to Republicans who favored impeachment. Different wording might have influenced some Republicans, such as Chip Roy of Texas, who were critical of the president’s actions but had technical problems with the impeachment article. The Democrats could have also appointed Republicans as impeachment managers to make the effort more bipartisan. The Articles of Impeachment should have paid more attention to the pattern of Trump’s actions since Election Day and put less emphasis on his speech on January 6.

There are signs that the Republicans could have a viable party once again. Even as Donald Trump lost the White House and the Senate for the GOP, Republicans picked up a total of 12 House seats now that Claudia Tinney has been certified the winner in New York’s 22nd district. Many members of the voting public obviously don’t like what progressive Democrats are selling, but they like what Trump is selling even less.

Yet, I have very little doubt that Republicans lack the spine to convict Donald Trump. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) recently said of the impeachment, “Everyone makes mistakes, everyone is entitled to a mulligan once in a while.”

Aaron Rupar @atrupar

beyond parody

I’m sorry, but spending two months spreading lies about election fraud, trying to overturn election results, and provoking your supporters to attack Congress in an attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power is not a mistake. People who make a concerted effort to overthrow the elected government of the United States do not deserve the same treatment as a golfer who shanks a drive out of bounds.

If Republicans not only refuse to hold Trump accountable but allow him to be a kingmaker in the party going forward - or worse yet, a candidate - then the party deserves the drubbing that they are likely to get in 2024.

There were many indications that Trump was going to be a disaster in 2020. As early as 2019, Rasmussen showed that 52 percent of voters planned to vote against the president, but Republicans ignored the warning signs and doubled down on the unpopular-but-popular-in-the-GOP candidate. In the end, Biden won 51.3 percent of the popular vote.

Voters who twice rejected Trump in the popular vote even before he tried to overturn the Constitution have spoken. Republicans would do well to listen to them, and Democrats are giving the party a relatively easy way out of Trumpland if they choose to take it.

In other news, Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama became the latest Republican to announce his retirement. Shelby joins Richard Burr of North Carolina, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, and Rob Portman of Ohio in his decision to not seek re-election in 2022.

The four departing senators are relative moderates and three of the seats are in battleground states. Those facts are concerning for both the ideological tilt of the GOP and Republican chances of winning back the Senate.

In 2022, Republicans will be defending 20 seats compared with 14 for the Democrats. The increasing number of open Republican seats in battleground states may mean that Democrats can add to their advantage in the Senate if they play their cards well over the next two years. It’s also another reason that Republicans need to kick Trump to the curb so that they can find rational, non-Trumpy, non-tinfoil hat candidates.

The GOP has two choices at this point. They can kick Trump to the curb and ban him from future political campaigns or they can gamble that he won’t scuttle their chances in 2024.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar

beyond parody

From the Racket

The GOP's 'Big Tent' is not big enough for conservatives and Trumpists

Ronald Reagan is one of my favorite presidents. I actually had a chance to see the Gipper speak live once upon a time, an experience that along with growing up in the Reagan era, cemented my ideological ideas early on.

Reagan was not only a popular politician, he was a deep thinker and shrewd political strategist. One of the lasting ideas that Reagan gave us was the idea that the Republican Party should be a “big tent.”

Photo credit: Nicholas Hippert/unsplash.com

“The Republican Party,” Reagan told California Republicans in 1967, “Both in this state and nationally, is a broad party. There is room in our tent for many views; indeed, the divergence of views is one of our strengths.”

For years, I adhered to this philosophy as many other Republicans (of which I was one until 2016) turned on each other. I was a Tea Party guy from the earliest rallies of 2009, but pretty quickly I saw that the Tea Party was being used to split the GOP into factions. People like Ted Cruz were using the movement to attack, not just the liberals and Democrats, but rivals within the Republican Party.

This movement culminated in the 2013 government shutdown over Obamacare. Cruz orchestrated the shutdown ostensibly to stop Obamacare, but the path to victory was never quite clear. Republicans were a congressional minority and didn’t have the votes to kill the Affordable Care Act. Skeptics of Cruz’s plan, me among them, asked how shutting down the government was supposed to get Democrats to change sides because winning more votes was the only way to get the bill passed.

The entire plan was reminiscent of “South Park’s” underpants gnomes. The shutdown gnomes, I pointed out, had a plan that went something like this:

Phase One - Shut down the government
Phase Two - ??????
Phase Three - Victory!

Share The Racket News

“Don’t bother us with details,” was the response. “We might as well give it a try. At least he’s fighting!”

Sure enough, the shutdown was a disaster. The rub was that the Republican base, led by Cruz, blamed RINOs in the Republican Party for the defeat rather than the Democratic majority or Cruz’s lack of strategic planning abilities.

I spent the next few years talking about Reagan’s 80 Percent Rule and the art of realizing what was possible and what was impossible. The party shouldn’t split over small differences, especially when the fight was over strategies that were demonstrably impossible based on simple mathematics.

Over time, however, I realized two things. First, the Republican base valued people who could fight over people who could win. Cruz was a fighter even though he lost while John Boehner, the Speaker of the House at the time, was a good strategist who defeated Obama in the fiscal cliff negotiations and became the first leader to actually reduce the deficit in real dollars (not projected spending growth) since Eisenhower.

To put it in Ben Shapiro’s phrase, which I love, “facts don’t care about your feelings.” I had always viewed the Republican Party as the more rational party, but I was seeing the GOP veer toward an emotional response rather than accepting the objective truth of Boehner’s accomplishments.

Cruz was a failure and Boehner was a success yet Cruz was the Republican hero while Boehner was derided as a RINO. This brought me to my second realization, the fact that Ted Cruz was either too stupid to realize that his strategies were counterproductive or else he had a different strategic goal than the rest of the party.

The latter seemed more likely. Cruz’s strategy was never intended to beat the Democrats. Cruz’s strategy was intended to promote Ted Cruz to a position of prominence from which he could launch a presidential campaign. In so doing, Cruz and his Tea Party backers violated Reagan’s 11th commandment, found in the same 1967 speech, that “Thou shall not speak ill of any Republican.”

I’m not writing this just to dump on Ted Cruz, although it is easy, fun, and gives me a chance to say “I told you so,” since Cruz is more generally seen for the unprincipled self-promoter that he really is these days. I’m making this point because Donald Trump usurped Ted Cruz’s role as the outsider and fighter in 2016. If Trump had not run, Cruz’s campaign would have been very similar to what we saw from Donald Trump.

Fast forward to 2021 and Republicans still love the loser who fights. My recent article about how the Republican Party would be better served by disqualifying Trump prompted the following comment on Facebook, which in turn was the inspiration for this column.

This commenter essentially echoes what I’ve been saying. The Republican Party made a deal with the devil to elect Trump instead of Hillary in 2016 and now the bill is coming due. A significant portion of Trump’s base is not Republican, but part of a Trumpian personality cult. The Republican Party is no longer a party of principle but a vehicle for Trump’s personality cult.

The commenter goes on to say in a second post, “We are the ones that won the elections” and that “old Repubs [are] dying off, only the Trump base is what saved your [posteriors]!”

This claim does not bear out the facts. In two elections, Donald Trump never won the popular vote and lost the Electoral College once. He also lost the House and Senate, including two Senate seats in now-purple Georgia. Further, a new Gallup poll shows that the Trump-led Republican Party hemorrhaged 12 points of its support between November and February. Allahpundit tweets the relevant portion of the article:

Allahpundit @allahpundit

context from gallup as the senate gop prepares to quadruple down on trump news.gallup.com/poll/329561/go…

If that weren’t enough, another commenter on my Facebook page vowed, “If they ban him, we’ll just write him in out of spite.” This provides further confirmation to my theory that Republicans would rather lose with someone that they perceive to be a fighter than to win with someone who they don’t believe fights. Winning without fighting is a bigger sin in their eyes than losing.

These people are not conservative in any sense of the word. Limited-government, principled conservatives really have very little in common with these new Republicans who are not adherents to either a particular political platform or even a party that deviates from Donald Trump’s wishes. There is truth to the statement that Donald Trump performed a hostile takeover of the Republican Party, gutted it, and rebuilt it from the inside out.

Going back to Reagan’s speech, we see the error that the GOP has made in recent years with the Gipper’s caution, “Let no one, however, interpret this to mean compromise of basic philosophy.”

Republicans have not compromised their basic philosophy. Instead, they have abandoned it.

A large part of today’s Republican Party is “Republican-in-name-only” and Trumpist-in-fact. While there is some overlap between the two groups, it is becoming increasingly difficult to support traditional Republican values while supporting Donald Trump. The two ideologies are too often in opposition to one another.

Reagan’s big tent and 11th commandment applied to Republicans, but a large part of the party now is not only not Republican but actively hostile to traditional Republican values like limited government (even to achieve your own aims), strict originalist interpretation of the Constitution (even to achieve your own aims), and a worldview based in reality rather than conspiracy theories and wishful thinking.

As my friend Steve Berman posted this morning, Republicans have jettisoned basic truth and honesty in an attempt to get elected and stay elected for what they see as the greater good of fighting (there’s that word again) the left. The problem is that if you lie to people to get elected then you have acknowledged a false reality. You then have to keep standing in that alternate universe in order to stay elected. That’s where Republicans are today. They have to keep lying to feed the beast of their own making and ensure that it doesn’t eat them next.

“Unity does not require unanimity of thought,” Reagan argued, but Republicans of today are unable to accept any deviation from the party line or criticism of Donald Trump. As Republicans censure people like Liz Cheney and Ben Sasse for daring to hold Trump accountable for his attempts to overturn the election results that provoked a violent attack on Congress, it is increasingly apparent that today’s Republican Party is no longer the party of Reagan. It is the party of Trump and only Trump. The Trump Republicans may be running the party into the ground, but make no mistake, they are running it.

There was a time when I hoped that Republicans would return to traditional Republicanism after Trump left the scene. Now, I see that isn’t going to happen. The Republicans are still in love with the loser and will be for the foreseeable future.

It is time for conservatives of good conscience to remove themselves from the Republican Party and start fresh. Trump Republicans should be left with a shrinking and irrelevant GOP in which they can adore Trump to their hearts’ content.

That brings me to another statement by Ronald Reagan, which I’ll paraphrase here:

“I didn’t leave the Republican Party. The Republican Party left me.”

We should be loyal to our conservative ideals, the rule of law, and the Constitution, but not to a party and especially not to one very flawed person.

From the Racket