My overwhelming emotion in the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump is despair.
My crushing depression is not caused just by the attempted assassination. It has been triggered by the host of events that led up to and followed the shooting in Pennsylvania.
It started with the Republicans thirst for power at any price. Between 1933 and 1995 they were the minority party in the House of Representatives for all but four years. Republican Congressman Newt Gingrich had the answer. He embraced wedge politics by unjustifiably labelling Democrats as “traitors,” “communists,” or “un-American”. Republicans were “patriots,” and the only “true Americans.”
It worked. Republicans have held the majority in the lower house for 22 of the past 30 years.
Then in 2009 along came the Tea Party with its demands for lower taxes, a reduced national debt and federal budget and decreased government spending.
The Tea Party was followed in 2015-16 by Donald Trump. He married wedge politics to the populism of the Tea Party. At first the Republican old guard opposed him. Then he started to win with a mixture of wedge rhetoric, scapegoating, and dangerously over-simplified answers to complex problems.
After winning the presidency in 2016 he set himself up not as the leader of the Republican Party but as THE Republican Party. If you wanted to secure the Republican nomination for an elected office you first had to pledge fealty to The Donald and his increasingly right-wing policies. If you refused you were branded a RINO (Republican in Name Only) and destined—in many cases—to fail at the first hurdle.
Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 should have been the end of the cult of Donald Trump. It wasn’t. He kept it alive by donning the mantle of victimhood and claiming– without a shred of evidence—that the 2020 election was stolen by Biden and that he was the real winner. On January 6, 2021, a mob incited by Trump’s lies and rhetoric stormed the US Capitol in an attempt to thwart the peaceful transfer of power.