Was It All a Lie? How Republicans Sacrificed Principle for Power
Former Republicans are calling out the Party for putting power and money over policy and ideals.
It was indeed all a lie, it turns out. For a long time now, Republican politicians and big donors have had a self-serving agenda. They pushed a phony narrative out to working-class Republicans and true conservatives. They fed them what they wanted to hear. The big donors behind the Party masked their pursuit of money and power by selling this phony narrative to the “base.” It was the political version of consumer fraud.
Trump laid the lies bare. If you play along with Trump, there’s no intellectual policy vision, no moral red line of what you won’t play along with. Yet he’s garnered complete control of the Republican Party in a mere three years. It’s the Trump Party now, with all its grifting, incompetence, stoogery and lies.
The big donors stay with him because he gives them the deregulation, the secret political clout, and the tainted judges that they want. It’s all about the money and power.
It’s always been all about the money and power.
When it comes to standing up to Trump’s abuses or his damage to American institutions, the big dark-money interests funding the party see no need. They pollute at will, rake in the money, and run covert political operations against their own country. This is what they wanted all along. Elected Republicans have spines of foam against this massed power. That’s what happens when a Party cares only about pleasing big secret donors and winning elections.
Don’t just take it from me. Check out what these Republicans and anti-Trumpers have to say.
Here’s a choice quote from Stuart Stevens, former Republican strategist in Mother Jones:
“You have to ask, ‘Does someone abandon deeply held beliefs in three or four years?’ No. It means you didn’t ever hold them. I feel like a guy who was working for Bernie Madoff.”
Conservative commentator and author Jamie Weinstein:
“As for the Republican primary electorate, we learned that perhaps they don’t care so much about conservative principles after all — that the conservative moment may be nothing more than a collection of magazine offices and think tanks in Manhattan and Washington, DC.”
A great interview with Jennifer Rubin, a conservative political commentator for the Washington Post, who to her great credit saw Trumpism for what it was and fought it relentlessly since:
“Republicans have permanently eliminated themselves from credibility to govern. You can’t be willing to sacrifice core American values for the sake of a tax cut and be deemed to be worthy of trust going forward.”
Devastating column by moderate conservative David Brooks:
“The Republican Party is doing harm to every cause it purports to serve.”
Evan McMullin, former CIA operative, chief policy director for House Republicans and independent presidential candidate in USA Today:
“The Republican Party today is dominated by fear, hate, lies and corruption. These dangerous impulses are being driven by the president himself, and many in his party who know it is wrong still enable his abuses to further their own careers. The more elected leaders neglect and outright shun our core principles, the further we as a people stray from the vision that once guided us.”
David French, long-time conservative columnist for National Review and now The Dispatch, says it’s hard to know where Trumpism ends “and the financial scam begins.”
And then of course… there’s the Lincoln Project. We’ve seen the ads, but in this piece they lay out their reasons for starting the group in the first place.
“But this president’s actions are possible only with the craven acquiescence of congressional Republicans. They have done no less than abdicate their Article I responsibilities.”
Having surrendered actual ideas or policies, Republicans have become reliant on right-wing media personalities and networks to sell grievance politics to their base. The media personalities have made personal fortunes selling the lies. Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson — all became fabulously wealthy, not only selling lies but also selling their own schlock goods.
From Josh Barro, a Republican and former “Koch Associate” at the conservative Tax Foundation, who worked at the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and left the party in disgust over Trump:
“If [conservatives look honestly enough, they will realize the conservative information sphere has long been full of lies. The reason for this is that lying has been the most effective way to promote many of the policies favored by donor-class conservatives, and so they built an apparatus to invent and spread the best lies.”
Think what a long con it took to convince blue-collar voters to get behind repealing the estate tax, which would only ever be paid by America’s Tenth-of-a-Percenters!
As Stuart Stevens said:
“angry, rich media figures …. have made fortunes peddling bile and prejudice.” For that money, who cares who’s right? “[E]ven if they are wrong, there is a lot of money to be made denying reality.”
When the story of climate denial comes out, it will be the same: a bill of goods sold to the base; a right-wing media industry that trafficked in disinformation; a big industry that made a fortune polluting the planet; and a party that took the money and looked the other way. It was a giant scam all along, for the benefit of big fossil-fuel donors.
Remember the rallying cry “Build the Wall”? Steve Bannon, former head of Breitbart News and senior Trump advisor, raised $25 million dollars from working-class Republicans in an online fundraising campaign, supposedly for Trump’s border wall. In reality, it was another scam. The money went to:
“home renovations, payments towards a boat, a luxury S.U.V., a golf cart, jewelry, cosmetic surgery, personal tax payments and credit card debt.”
His recent arrest clearly labels Bannon as a fraud and a cheat. But Breitbart has been trafficking in lies and misinformation for years. Why not this Wall scam? It’s an easy switch from one scam to another.
And the scam is essential to the quest for power — it’s the scam weaponized politically into the smear:
“Figures tied to Trump and Bannon have tried desperately to do to Biden exactly what they did to Clinton — accusing him (without evidence) of crooked dealings in Ukraine; casting him as frail and mentally deficient — but unlike in 2016, neither smear has really stuck in the reality-based press.”
Political smear is just another form of scam, run through the same machinery as the rest of it. One man who believed the scam a little too much is in prison for shooting up a pizza place to rescue imaginary children, supposedly hidden by Hillary Clinton for purposes of sexual perversion, in the pizza place’s non-existent basement’s imaginary sex dungeon.
Another beauty: Alex Jones had to pay damages for a scam run for the gun lobby that the heartbreaking massacre of toddlers in a Connecticut elementary school was a fake. The parents of murdered children sued and won.
Behind the gun lobby is one of the biggest scammers of all, the National Rifle Association. The NRA isn’t out to protect the Second Amendment; its job is to sop up money for its executives and juice gun sales. Don’t take it from me; here’s the former #2 at the NRA, Joshua Lewis Powell, in his new tell-all book about NRA dysfunction and graft:
“I was part of a message machine that helped to perpetuate the [gun violence] problem and exacerbate the extremism of the gun debate. . . . The N.R.A. fuel[s] a toxic debate by appealing to the paranoia and darkest side of our members.”
Powell concludes that NRA leadership, led by CEO Wayne LaPierre, fill their coffers by catering to “the extreme fringe.”
All that corruption has landed the NRA in big legal trouble. An 18 month investigation conducted by New York’s Attorney General Letitia James found that NRA executives, including LaPierre, secretly embezzled millions. In the complaint, Attorney General James lays out dozens of examples where the four individual defendants failed to fulfill their fiduciary duty to the NRA and used millions upon millions from NRA reserves for personal use, including trips for them and their families to the Bahamas, private jets, expensive meals, and other private travel.
Again, the NRA and Wayne LaPierre doesn’t care about your Second Amendment rights; they want to get rich.
Republicans acquiesced to Trump because their operation had already rotted through. Big greedy donor interests called all the real shots, and gave the money to spin phony narratives to the “base.” Trump and his associates just made the game obvious through incompetence and through reckless corruption. But why not be corrupt, if you serve Trump? When the whole game is a con, why not help yourself to some loot along the way?
The Party itself is funded, run, and controlled by big money; to confuse the public, it runs a flotilla of phony front groups that is funded, run, and controlled by big money; and it’s all propped up by a right-wing media apparatus that is funded, run, and controlled by big money. It’s one big scam. The rot is complete.
They will cling to their power at any cost.
Truth doesn’t matter.
Principles don’t matter.
It was never about that, that was window dressing for the suckers.
And now Republicans are starting to ‘fess up.
It was all along a scam.
It was all a lie.
