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The last four years under President Donald Trump's leadership have been tumultuous for politics but the end of Trump's reign has dealt a hefty blow to the Republican Party.
After months of Trump's post-election antics, falsehoods, and conspiracies being circulated with the help of Republican lawmakers, many Americans, and major corporations reached their breaking point after an angry mob of pro-Trump rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
<p>With the loss of the White House, the Senate, and a major party split between real staunch Republicans and fierce Trump supporters, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/01/16/957281673/republicans-wonder-how-and-if-they-can-pull-the-party-back-together" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">the ailing political party is left wondering how and if it can ever recover from Trumpism</a>, according to NPR. </p><p>Veteran Republican pollster Frank Luntz weighed in on the latest intraparty battle between Republicans. While he admitted that intraparty disagreements are relatively common, he noted the distinct difference the Republican Party is now facing. </p><p>"This one is so deep and so polarizing — and people are so passionate about it — I don't know how you heal it," Luntz admitted. "I don't know how you bring these people together."</p><p>According to Luntz, the latest divide is between those who supported Trump's impeachment as opposed to those who did not. Luntz's research also revealed a pattern that may be a foreshadow for the future of the Republican Party. On Jan. 12, Luntz took to Twitter with highlights from his research as he noted that approximately "<a href="https://twitter.com/FrankLuntz/status/1349070337602854913/photo/1" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">43% of Trump voters say they would definitely vote against </a>any lawmaker who supports impeachment."</p><p><br/></p>
<div class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="4ac0bba7a50485a2a88df62d4f61d4cb" id="7dc12"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-partner="rebelmouse" data-twitter-tweet-id="1349059557515960320"><div style="margin:1em 0">𝟲𝟱% of Trump voters say they are angry with the U.S. political system.
𝟲𝟲% say they have little or no trust in the… https://t.co/NZZztdhCvf</div> — Frank Luntz (@Frank Luntz)<a href="https://twitter.com/FrankLuntz/statuses/1349059557515960320">1610475837.0</a></blockquote></div>
<p><br/></p><p>If this were to happen in the upcoming 2022 primary election, there is a strong possibility even more Republicans could lose Congressional seats, which would make the party's recovery even more difficult. <br/></p><p>"That makes it impossible for Republicans to put together a majority by 2022, and in fact, that's a direct threat to the existence of the Republican Party overall," Luntz said.</p><p>During Trump's "Save America" rally that subsequently led to the U.S. Capitol riots, his son, Donald Trump Jr. identified the greatest distinction the Republican Party is currently facing. "This isn't their Republican Party anymore," Trump Jr., said. "This is Donald Trump's Republican Party."</p><p>That distinction could impact the Republican Party for many years to come. From the looks of it, it may also lead to the party's demise. Stuart Stevens, a current adviser for the anti-Trump political action committee, The Lincoln Project, and a former Republican consultant, also broke down the true meaning of how Trump's Republican Party has distorted the rule of law. In a nutshell, democracy is only to be upheld if they win.</p><p>"I think it's just a straight-up red line," said Stevens. "This is so much greater than any differences over tax policy or trade policy. It's a fundamental belief in whether or not you want to continue the American experiment. A large portion of the Republican Party has decided they are for democracy if that means they win, and they're against it if it means they lose. Which is to say, you don't believe in democracy."</p><p>Despite Trump and Republican lawmakers' efforts to invalidate the results of the presidential election, he will be leaving the White House on Jan. 20.</p>
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On Saturday, POLITICO reported that Kirk Adams, former GOP Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives and ex-chief of staff to Gov. Doug Ducey, slammed the "craziness" of the Arizona Republican Party, calling it "embarrassing."
"The craziness from the state Republican Party … it's pretty embarrassing," said Adams. "We have been fed a steady diet of conspiracy theories and stolen election rhetoric and, really, QAnon theories from the state Republican Party since before the election, but certainly after."
<p>"The Trump era did more damage to the Republican Party in Arizona than almost anywhere else," reported David Siders and James Arkin. "Over the past two years, Republicans lost both Senate seats. In November, the state flipped Democratic in a presidential race for the first time since 1996. The GOP state party chair is currently at war with the governor. President Donald Trump's fingerprints are on all of it, yet the state party will likely pass a resolution next week to officially 'support & thank' the president. It'll also vote on measures to [censure] three prominent Republicans who were deemed insufficiently beholden to Trump: Gov. Doug Ducey, former Sen. Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain, the wife of the late senator."</p><p>Such censure resolutions punishing perceived disloyalty within the party have become common in recent years; in 2014, the Arizona GOP <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/01/26/mccain-gop-arizona-censure/4909683/" target="_blank">censured</a> Sen. John McCain himself for his "disastrous" record — a measure decidedly out of step with the state electorate, which re-elected him overwhelmingly two years later.</p><p>The losses for the Arizona GOP could worsen on their current path. In 2022, Ducey is term-limited from running again, raising the possibility of an even harder-right nominee, and Democrats could also make a play for the state house. Moreover, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, who only won a special election, will stand for a full term that year.</p>
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At its core, the Constitution of the United States sets forth the rules for attaining power, limiting power, sharing power and transferring power. With his speech on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, Donald Trump violated every one of them. A man obsessed with power and panicked about losing it threw away his oath to protect and defend the Constitution and incited a mob to violate his oath alongside him. With the same lies he used to get elected president in the first place — the lies of racism and white supremacy, and fealty not to country but to tribe — he whipped his crowd of followers into a frenzy and set them upon his enemies in the Congress, the body which was at that moment certifying the election of his opponent, Joe Biden, as president. He told them Biden's election was illegitimate. His presidency was being stolen from him. His followers were to "stop the steal" by stopping the count of the legitimate votes of state electors in the Electoral College. He encouraged his mob, nearly every one of them white, to steal back the election from Biden and return him to the White House.
This article first appeared in Salon.
<p>If you hate democracy and the democratic process, you cannot love the country founded on those principles. Donald Trump hates America, and he has managed over four years to turn the Republican Party into a party that hates America along with him. Here's the beauty part. They are guilty of the very thing they accuse their opponents of every day: That quarterback over there taking a knee during the National Anthem? He hates America. Those Black Lives Matter protesters against police brutality and the killing of unarmed Black people in the streets? They hate America. Those doctors in that Planned Parenthood clinic providing safe and legal medical procedures to women, everything from pap smears to abortions? They hate America. Those brown mothers and fathers and their babies at the border seeking asylum in this country, protection from killings and persecution at home? Amazingly, they hate America, the very country in which they seek shelter and want to join by becoming its citizens.</p><p>You want to talk about turning logic upside down on his own head? Looking at a blue sky and declaring it is black? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Donald Trump's Republican Party. He has remade it in his own image. He has turned the party of Lincoln into the party of George Lincoln Rockwell. He has brought the Confederate flag into the hallowed halls of the Union. He re-fought the Civil War, and having lost yet again, he has created a new Lost Cause: today's Republican Party.</p><p>The 149 Republican members of Congress who within hours of the sacking of the Capitol voted against certifying the electoral ballots of Arizona and Pennsylvania — in effect, to steal the votes of citizens and throw them away — they think they don't hate America. But they voted against democracy immediately after a howling mob of insurrectionists had been driven from the halls of the Capitol. With their votes, the new Republican Party pledged allegiance not to America, but to Donald Trump.</p><p>This is where we are, folks. Remember the two-party system? It's over. One of our political parties, the Republican Party, has allowed itself to be taken over by revolutionaries and insurrectionists. We now have one political party and a mob.</p><p>The Republicans have also sought to tear apart the system of checks and balances established in the Constitution by seeking to turn one branch, the judiciary, into an outpost of their party. They have packed the courts with factotums loyal not to America, but to them. They made no bones about what they were doing. They even went so far as to establish a mechanism for the destruction of the judiciary, an association from which they drew judicial candidates who would rule not impartially, not loyal to their oaths or the Constitution or the rule of law, but to the party that put them on the bench. Not satisfied with disabusing logic and law, they turned language upside down by naming their authoritarian club the Federalist Society. You can almost hear them chortling every time they meet in one of their little conclaves to dine and lift toasts to their anti-democratic goals.</p><p>That's why the assault on the Capitol last week was more than a mob scene of trespassing and looting and destruction and desecration. It was an attack not on a building but on the Constitution itself, on the principles the country was founded on. Sure, they displayed Confederate flags and broke doors and windows and attempted to locate and kidnap congressional leaders and the vice president. They violated numerous laws, which are now listed in the indictments being handed down against them. And much has been made of the hypocrisy of people who carried flags displaying the thin blue line of "Blue lives matter" battering and even killing the police officers who tried to defend the Capitol. </p><p>But the real crime of the mob was not loving the country which has given them a place to prosper in good times and succor in times of loss and distress. Many of them wore military-style camouflage clothing and Kevlar helmets and vests, but few of them actually served their country as soldiers. The "patriotic" slogans they shouted marked not only the death of irony, but the death of democracy itself. Like husbands who batter their wives and children, when they're caught they claim they love what they sought to destroy. Their protestations don't merely ring hollow, they are a mark of the system of oppression they represent.</p><p>Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2020, was Donald Trump's America writ large. On display was the inverse of the country we have always seen ourselves as, the country that told the rest of the world, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore," and we will welcome them and give them warmth.</p><p>Donald Trump's Republican Party took those words and laughed at them and threw them in the trash. They will continue in their campaign of hate and destruction. If we let them, we won't have a country to love anymore, because they will have hated it out of existence. It's our choice.</p>
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