Why did the Republican Party Allow Donald Trump to Corrupt Them So Fully?

Politics & Elections
1

As suggested by @What_Exit, I am starting this discussion in response to the discussion held here, to avoid thread-shitting there:

I believe that discussion is disingenuous on its face because it begins with erroneous assumptions and then asks the wrong question.

Donald Trump was never a RINO. He was never a Democrat, a Republican or anything else. Donald Trump was and is a corrupt, selfish person, whose only motivations ensue from his desires to enrich, pleasure or glorify himself. He is a bigot, a racist, a misogynist, a being entirely without grace, generosity of spirit or empathy.

Donald Trump never changed. The shock was the extent to which Republicans allowed themselves to be co-opted by Trump’s culture of corruption, greed, grift, bigotry, racism and misogynism. When they realized they wouldn’t be punished by their voters for holding such abhorrent views, the adopted the whole approach. The Republicans were the guardrails that failed. Trump never changed a bit.

I think this is the point @Ann_Hedonia was making, and it’s a valid one. I don’t believe you can have a meaningful or honest discussion of one entity (Trump) without considering the other (the Republican party).

As for the question I posed in the title of this discussion, the Republican party was well on its way to corruption, greed, grift, bigotry, racism and misogynism years before Trump. But in Trump, they found the perfect vehicle to complete their transformation from a legitimate political party into an aspiring authoritarian regime. They were not afraid of him. They reveled in him. They never cared how many principles they had to sacrifice at the altar of single party minority rule.

Now Trump has become a liability and they’re looking for an offramp. They have a new poster boy – and he’s even worse than Trump.

2

A lot of people voted for Trump, and others in the Republican party want those people to vote for them, so they agree with and protect Trump.

3

Trump is the manifestation, not the cause, of what’s happened to the GOP.

4

Because most Republican office-holders are and were morally bankrupt.

5

The most important goal for Mitch McConnell was a stacked Supreme Court. He was working on that before Trump. Trump got out of McConnell’s way on that. Add the insane tribalism that Republicans live for, and you’ve got a flying wedge of congressional Republicans in front of Trump.
Do not underestimate this insane tribalism. Democrats gave Franken the boot, and he had a real future. Republicans don’t do that. They’re more likely to destroy their own in defense of their tribalism. Ask Liz Cheney.

6

Because they couldn’t get off the tiger, to borrow the Truman expression.

Many Republicans - Cruz, Graham, etc. - recognized what a POS Trump was, but once the party’s base latched on to him, there was no safe way to disembark from the tiger - get off and you get eaten.

7

I don’t know how many of us have heard of Mark Levin. He’s a right wing radio host that likes to stir things up and has published some books.

He went from being a “never Trump” guy in 2016 during the primaries (his guy was Cruz), to voting for him, to being a HUGE supporter ever since. He attacks RINOs daily, including Romney, Cheney, and of course McConnell.

On January 5, 2021, Levin insisted Congress’s imminent counting of the Electoral College votes was an act of “tyranny” because of the supposed fraud.[119] He told his listeners, “If we don’t fight on Jan. 6 on the floor of the Senate and the House… then we are done.”

8

I don’t know where anyone gets the idea that there was a major shift in the Republican party. Their base voters are the same, their policies are the same, their love of power over country is the same. Trump didn’t “corrupt” them, he simply stripped away the veneer the party was hiding behind.

9

The tail wagged the dog. The people will defend and root for the home team, because it’s the home team. The talking heads live off the money provided by the people and, if they say anything negative about the home team then they won’t be making money and they’ll be taken off the air. Ergo, the talking heads all move over to defending the home team or leave the business. This gives the team a large leadership body who are all defending the indefensible, and reinforcing the position of the people.

And note that none of that description requires the word “Republican”. Everyone should be very afraid of the process, regardless of their politics. You avoid that outcome by making sure that the election process is good and, for example, doesn’t break and choose the crazy option when you have 11 normal people competing in the primaries for the sane vote, leaving the crazy vote to take the day.

10

The point I was trying to make was that the Republican Party had begun to descend into grievance and grift before the alliance with Trump.

Here’s a link I’ve posted before about the Republican Party descent into grift. It’s interesting because it was written in 2012, and at the time, preTrump, the author felt that the epitome of the lying politician was Mitt Romney.

Trump began a parallel descent into grievance and grift at around the same time, around the time he stopped being a shady real estate developer and started raising his personal profile so he could grift off his brand, with shady enterprises like Trump University and pee vitamins.

This shift was probably precipitated by the enormous clusterfuck that was the Trump Soho project, which was plagued by incidents like a fatal construction accident and the discovery of an old African-American burial ground in the site. Then his kids were lying so hard to investors that they almost landed in jail, which was averted because Trump gave everyone they cheated their money back on the condition that they not cooperate with prosecutors- then he gave the DA that didn’t pursue obstruction charges a large campaign contribution. This incident also helped fuel his persecution complex.

And then they found each other and hooked up, a marriage that was probably facilitated by the grievance amplification of right wing media, like Fox News.
Trump taught the Republicans that they could be openly corrupt and get away with it, and they gave him the machine and an endless supply of dispensable cronies. And here we are.

11

This. He is a symptom of the GOP’s irredeemable racism and corruption.

12

Which is the point I was trying to make by starting this thread, exactly.

There could not be a more sick, co-dependent relationship than the one that exists between Trump and the Republican party. One could not exist without the buy-in from the other, and it’s impossible to have a meaningful conversation about Trump and who he is without understanding this underlying co-dependency.

13

They wanted to be corrupted. They were begging to be corrupted. They were on constant search for somebody even more corrupt than they were to show them the way to absolute degeneration.

This is 2022. All those who do not think that my words are a woeful understatement of reality are living in a dream world. The Republican Party cannot be uncorrupted. It has been pointing itself toward this goal for 60 years. It has achieved its dream. It will not give it up for any rational reason.

14

I’d advise caution with this. The Republicans did not change in a dramatic way with the political ascension of Trump. They who are they are, they’ve been who they’ve been. They’re just not so cautious about saying it out loud anymoe.
The Republican party can and will survive without Trump, no dependancy required.

15

That’s a fair point and one with which I agree. The Republicans needed Trump to transform into the Trump party, but they don’t need Trump to carry on with the openly authoritarian minority rule party they have become.

I think I made that point in my OP, but it bears repeating.

16

A Vox article on comparative political parties.

There is a fascinating chart there, graphing the world’s major political parties, including the Dems and the Republicans. The Dems are pretty much average; the Republicans … not so much.

(Is there a way to link to a chart?)

17

And yet, it’s only happened with the Republicans.

True. And when you have a party which is dedicated to undermining the democratic process, the choice should be clear how to vote.

18

19

The bell curve would say that the average voter isn’t excellent.

Cities probably have a higher share of intelligentsia but I can promise you that boring, well-researched, skeptical, principled folk are still the vastly dominated minority.

There’s no downside to having instant-runoff and etc. And compared to the risk of catastrophe, there’s simply no reason to not have protections in place.

20

The Republican Party has been corrupt all along. Trump simply exposed them.