Markos Moulitsas: Trump is just deserts

It’s unsurprising that the Republican establishment is panicking over Donald Trump and his pernicious effect on the GOP’s electoral chances this November. 

“If Trump is the Republican nominee in 2016, there might not be a conservative party in 2020,” wrote conservative columnist George Will. 

{mosads}“If Mr. Trump is its standard-bearer, the GOP will lose the White House and the Senate, and its majority in the House will fall dramatically,” wrote Republican strategist Karl Rove. 

That makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is the fantasy version of the Republican Party created by establishment conservatives — a party that hasn’t existed in decades. 

“The worst outcome for the party would be the nomination of Donald Trump,” wrote conservative columnist Michael Gerson, a former George W. Bush White House official. “It would involve the replacement of the humane ideal at the center of the party and its history. If Trump were the nominee, the GOP would cease to be.” 

Wait, what? “Humane ideal”? 

Gerson continued, “Whatever your view of Republican politicians, the aspiration, the self-conception, of the party was set by Abraham Lincoln: human dignity, honored by human freedom and undergirded by certain moral commitments, including compassion and tolerance.”

The idea that the Republican Party and its conservative movement have any notion of compassion or tolerance is laughable. 

This is a party that rose to power by explicitly playing to racial divisions in the South. This is a party that has consistently alienated African-Americans, Latinos, immigrants, homosexuals, Muslims and women because doing so appeals to bigoted voters. Intolerance is baked into the GOP’s DNA. 

As for compassion, conservatives now openly mock “compassionate conservatism,” a notion that hasn’t reared its head since Bush’s failed presidency. 

This is a party and a movement that cares more about bombs and missiles at the Pentagon than it cares about strengthening our nation’s social safety net. This is a party that wants to send young victims of horrendous violence in Central America packing, that showed nothing but vile contempt for Syrian war refugees — even children. This is a party that has spent decades trying to unwind Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and which is desperately trying to revoke the law that has provided millions with health insurance. 

“[Trump] offers a barking carnival act that can be best described as Trumpism: a toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued,” former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who was then running for president himself, said over the summer. “Let no one be mistaken: Donald Trump’s candidacy is a cancer on conservatism, and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised and discarded.” 

More recently, Jeb Bush lamented, “It’s very fun to talk about the theatrics, but his views are not the views of a conservative.”

Those two sons of Texas should have seen this coming. It was their home state that inflicted Ted Cruz on the GOP Senate caucus and on America. Trump is a perfect reflection of modern conservatism, along with Cruz and Ben Carson and the rest of their presidential candidates. How could there be any rationality or sanity when ObamaCare — hatched in the halls of the conservative Heritage Foundation — is now hailed as the coming of communism? 

Trump gained traction because he finally said out loud what Republicans have been saying in coded language for years. They created this asylum, they fed its inmates, and now those inmates have taken control. 

Anyone paying attention these last few years knows what the conservative movement looks like: exactly like Donald Trump. 

Moulitsas is the founder and publisher of Daily Kos.