Iād take the metaphor a step farther: thereās a fungus, cordyceps, that infects ants and seizes control of their brains to alter their behavior to the fungusā advantage. Another example is the toxoplasma parasite thatās often spread by cats: when mice are infected with the parasite, they no longer fear the smell of cats (and sometimes even want to play with them!), thus becoming easy prey. Scientists call it āfatal attraction.ā
What Trump has done to the GOP is really quite impressive, worthy of either cordyceps or toxoplasma. And, frankly, itās amazing that they didnāt even see it coming or try to stop him. (More on that in a moment.)
A registered Democrat and donor to the Democratic Party his entire life, Trump appropriated much of Bernie Sandersā platform in 2016 to ingratiate himself with working class Americans.
He promised universal healthcare ācheaper than Obamacare,ā taxes so high on the morbidly rich that āmy friends wonāt speak to me,ā said he would bring Americaās factories back home from overseas, and pledged to strengthen and expand Social Security and Medicare.
All, it turns out, were lies, although most in his base believe to this day that he did or nearly did all those things.
Having used Bernieās policy positions (and a healthy dose of dog-whistle racism, essential for the Republican base) to win office in 2016, he proceeded to step into, take over, and then ā like cordyceps or toxoplasma ā alter top-to-bottom the behavior of the GOP.
Trumpās no idiot. He saw how the GOP was weakened, first by the Nixon scandals, then by Reaganās neoliberalism that gutted the middle class, then by Bush and Cheney lying us into two unnecessary and illegal wars. The party was in a state of crisis when the nation elected our countryās first Black president, which gave Trump his opening.
Fifty years earlier, Nixon had injected the first āeggā of racism and white supremacy into the GOP with his āsilent majorityā and āwar on drugs.ā
The former was an explicit shout-out to white racists abandoned by the Democrats in 1964/1965 when LBJ pushed through and signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, the latter an explicit technique to disrupt the Civil Rights and anti-war movements. Abandoning all subtlety, Nixon called it his āSouthern Strategy.ā
A decade later, Reagan pulled southern racists even deeper into the GOP by kicking off his 1980 election campaign with a speech about āstatesā rightsā to an all-white audience at an obscure Mississippi county fair near the site where three Civil Rights workers were brutally slaughtered in June, 1964. While most Americans ā and all major American newspapers and TV networks ā missed the significance of the event, southerners heard the whistle loud and clear.
Reagan amplified it with his āwelfare queenā comments and his sympathy for white people offended by a āstrapping young buckā using food stamps to ābuy a T-Bone steak,ā while āyou were waiting in line to buy hamburger.ā
With the ground laid by Nixon and Reagan, that singular event of Obamaās presidency gave Trump the lever he needed to inject the larvae of his sociopathy into the moribund GOP.
He began with his claim that Obama wasnāt even a US citizen but had been born in Kenya, as clear a reference to race as his assertion earlier this week that the Black prosecutor Fani Willis and the Black judge Tanya Chutkan are both āRiggers.ā
But Trump was only able to finally take over the GOP in 2016 because a group of corrupt politicians and rightwing billionaires got there first, setting up the partyās faithful to believe absurd lies and step into alternate realities.
It started with Nixon claiming he had a āsecret planā to end the Vietnam War when, in fact, heād reached out to the Vietnamese and scuttled an actual peace treaty that LBJ had negotiated in the summer of 1968.
When President Johnson called Republican Senator Everett Dirksen to tell him about it just days before the election, Dirksen accused Nixon of ātreason.ā
Reagan then convinced Americaās Republican voters that if theyād just cut taxes on the morbidly rich, prosperity would ātrickle downā to average middle class people because it would āunleashā the ājob creators.ā
His cutting the top tax bracket from 74 percent to 27 percent unleashed them, all right: it unleashed them to buy thousands of politicians at both the state and federal level; to flip more radio stations, TV stations, and newspapers hard right; to purchase yachts and mansions around the world, and even to build their own spaceships.
Reagan told Republicans if they stopped enforcing the anti-trust laws that Republicans had fought for in the 1890s and Republican presidents Teddy Roosevelt and Robert Taft had used, prices would drop and Americaās small towns would prosper. Instead, the average American family pays $5,000 a year more than citizens of countries that still enforce their anti-monopoly laws and small-town America has been gutted, with literally millions of local retailers and small employers put out of business by Big Box stores.
Reagan sold Republicans (and a few Democrats) on the idea that āfree tradeā would lower costs for Americans and, to some extent, it did: our stores were quickly filled with cheap, disposable junk. But the price we paid was 50,000+ factories and over 16 million good-paying union jobs moving to Asia and Mexico.
Reagan promised us if weād just follow Milton Friedmanās advice (when he was secretly being paid off by the real estate lobby) and end rent controls, cut home mortgage subsidies like those through the FHA and VA, and throw our housing markets open to unrestrained speculation and both corporate and foreign ownership, every American could live the American Dream.
Instead, foreign investors and massive hedge funds run by Wall Street billionaires are buying up Americaās housing stock and turning it into rental properties, both exploding the price of houses and rents. The clear and measurable result is an epidemic of homelessness and tent cities.
Reagan promised us if weād just end āoppressive regulationsā ā designed to keep our food supply safe, our drugs affordable, clean up our air and water, and protect our children from death by firearms ā the āmagic of the free marketā would provide all those things in spades.
Instead, our food supply is filled with chemicals, microplastics, and heavily processed faux foods that have produced two generations of obesity and related metabolic disorders in children along with an explosion of cancer, birth defects, and other once-rare diseases.
Reagan promised us if weād just stop funding public schools and stop teaching civics and instead direct that money to private for-profit or church-run voucher and charter schools it would grow the levels of literacy, civic engagement, and healthy political dialogue.
Instead, about half of all American adults cannot read a book written at an eighth-grade level, according to the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy. Only 39 percent of Americans can name all three branches of government, leaving our nation vulnerable to racist white nationalists and fascists wanting to transform the democratic experiment our Founders began with our American republic.
The next Republican president, George W. Bush, nakedly lied to America about the āthreatā presented by Saddam Hussein and Iraq to justify a war that cost our nation dearly in both blood and treasure, just to enrich the failing Halliburton (former CEO: Dick Cheney) and other oil companies in Bush and Cheneyās orbit.
Bush also pushed through a plan to clear-cut forests he called the āHealthy Forests Initiative,ā and a plan to deregulate pollution controls he called the āClear Skiesā legislation.
By 2010, Republican voters were primed to believe pretty much anything party politicians told them. That was the year the billionaires really got busy taking control of the partyās base.
They started by funding the Tea Party, theoretically a response to President Obamaās effort to provide affordable healthcare for all Americans. Tri-cornered hats and bizarre signs saying things like āKeep Your Government Hands Off My Medicareā popped up all over America, as the billionairesā Astroturf movement rented high-end busses to bring gullible retired boomers to staged media events across the nation.
That morphed into the āfreedom agenda,ā branding everything in sight with the word. From trashing queer people, to calls for more tax cuts for billionaires, intimidation of teachers and librarians, massive Red-state-by-Red-state voter purges, legalizing open carry of assault weapons, criminalizing abortion, and a campaign to end the teaching of Black History, āfreedomā has spread across the GOP.
This week we even learned that the billionaire-funded Freedom Caucus in the House intends to try to crash the US economy just in time for the election (knowing Biden will get the blame) by refusing to fund the government for the 2024 fiscal year.
Republicans have taken their āfreedom agendaā to such extremes that theyāre actively suppressing dissent to promote it. When a group of moms of children who died or barely survived a mass shooting at the Covenant Elementary School wanted to testify before the Tennessee General Assembly, they were escorted out by state police the Republican leader, Rep. Lowell Russell, had called.
In todayās GOP, fully in the thrall of Donald Trump and his authoritarianism, dissent is not allowed. Just ask Justin Amash or Liz Cheney.
Trump has done his work, and the Republican Party is no longer a legitimate political party. Like a cat with a toxoplasma-infected mouse, heās eaten the party whole.
It has no platform, no moral compass, and no loyalty to the Constitution or Americaās historic ideals. Instead, it does whatever the billionaires who own it tell it to do (with the ability to bribe given them by five Republicans on the Supreme Court who legalized political bribery in Citizens United).
This grift, started by Richard Nixonās treason and lies and exploited over the years by the morbidly rich, has now so completely absorbed the party that itās hard to see it returning to the conservative-but-willing-to-compromise entity it was during the Eisenhower presidency. Hell, most Republican voters today donāt even remember Eisenhower, much less venerate him.
As the esteemed Republican activist and constitutional scholar J. Michael Luttig told CNN a few weeks ago:
āA political party is a collection and assemblage of individuals who share a set of beliefs and principles and policy views about the United States of America. Today, there is no such shared set of beliefs and values and principles or even policy views as within the Republican party for America.ā
Mourning the loss of the party he was once proud to be part of, Luttig added:
āAmerican democracy simply cannot function without two equally healthy and equally strong political parties. So today, in my view, there is no Republican Party to counter the Democratic Party in the country. And for that reason, American democracy is in grave peril.ā
A return to some semblance of normalcy in the GOP is essential to restoring a normal, functioning government to our nation, as Luttig points out. Odds are, however, itās first going to take a widespread destruction of that party ā provoked by huge Democratic wins in 2024 ā to come about.
And, given the bizarre spectacle we witnessed in the Republican presidential debate, that canāt come soon enough.
