Everyone's favorite "conservative" at the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin, penned a column on Monday arguing that there really is no post-Trump Republican Party. According to Rubin, the GOP is nothing but a bunch of xenophobic, homophobic, racist, anti-science, white supremacists that want to keep people of color oppressed.
From her column (emphasis mine):
In anticipation of President Trump’s loss in November, there is a cottage industry of speculation about the fate of the post-Trump Republican Party. The New York Times’s David Brooks pines for a Republican Party without racism, anti-government animus or unbridled faith in free markets. (The technical term for that might be “the Democratic Party.”) It would be refreshing to see the Republican Party cast off its obsession with old white men in favor of “a cross-racial alliance among working-class whites, working-class Hispanics and some working-class Blacks.” That, however, supposes Hispanic and Black voters have no memory of years of racism and xenophobia, and that the party’s heavily White support is based on something other than racial resentment. Both propositions are questionable.
A Republican Party that does not depend on White grievance and cultural resentment (leading to incessant whining that its members are victims of everything from Facebook to climate scientists to immigrants) and does not depend on what Brooks aptly describes as “an anti-government zombie Reaganism long after Reagan was dead and even though the nation’s problems were utterly different from what they were when he was alive” would frankly not have much to say. After you strip away those two failed themes, what’s left?
The unpleasant truth for those expected to say “there are fine people” in both parties is that, aside from a few stray governors and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), there really are not fine people running the Republican Party. They have sold their souls to Trump and either passively or actively bought into white supremacy and religious authoritarianism (which weirdly has as its most vocal proponent the attorney general). They waged war on the Constitution and objective reality. There is nothing redeeming in any of that — or in the right-wing media machine encompassing the deluded true believers and money-hungry charlatans willing to throw red meat to an audience they suppose consists of uneducated bigots.
The issue post-Trump then is twofold: What respectable ideology could the Republican Party adopt, if it wanted to? And, if a think tank could concoct an acceptable center-right ideology, what constituency could it possibly attract?
Apparently Rubin is no different than the left-wing hacks that make assumptions about conservatives and the Republican Party. The reason President Trump has so much support is because people are tired of politics as usual. Americans are tired of the mainstream media – that are really hacks for the Democrats – pretending to be unbiased. Americans are tired of progressives continually going after them for being Christians who practice what they preach (just look at the cake baker who was shunned for not wanting to make a cake for a gay couple). Americans are tired of being told that they must be murderers for wanting to protect themselves and their families with the Second Amendment or that they believe life begins at conception and abortion is wrong.
The reason President Trump has so much support is because he's become the voice of the silent majority who is silent no more. He has said everything Americans truly think and believe, especially when it comes to closing our borders, getting people back to work and putting America's interests first. He has said what people whisper in private but are afraid to say out loud. In a lot of ways, President Trump has encouraged Americans to stand up for their principles and beliefs and not to be ashamed of it. He's not afraid to call out the media, the swamp and the Democrats for their corruption. There's finally someone in the White House who is willing to fight for the little guy.
It's always amazing to hear people say Trump's base is comprised of white supremacists. What about the number of vocal blacks and Hispanics who have come out in support of the president? It's hard for them to ignore things like a record-low unemployment for blacks and Hispanics before coronavirus ravaged the nation. It's hard for them to ignore the fact that Trump delivered on criminal justice reform while Democrats have spent decades promising it.
WaPo's so-called "conservative" can admire people like Mitt Romney because he didn't cause any waves but people outside the Beltway are cheering for the fighter-in-chief.