The Truth About Why the GOP Won't Stand Up to Trump

Since the Republican party nominated Trump in 2016, many have asked numerous questions about the GOP.  Why would they do this?  Do they no longer have any scruples?  Why are they deaf to their own constituents, who are among the growing number of people opposing Trump’s agenda?  Most of all, people ask why the GOP doesn’t stand up to Trump, particularly when his behavior is at its most egregious.  I’ve pondered this question a great deal myself, and I’ve only recently come to understand the answer.

Like many, my initial assumption had to do with the poison that is party politics.  As we are in a system ruled by political parties, loyalty to those parties is put above all else.  It is nearly impossible to rise through the ranks of a party, win an election, or accomplish anything of substance without the support of your party (which is precisely why political parties are so antithetical to the vision our founders had for this country). 
There is certainly truth to this in the GOP’s failure to stand up to Trump; they believe that it would be the height of shame and dishonor to disparage one of their own (despite the fact that Trump is not, in fact, one of their own; historically, he has mostly supported Democrats and third parties such as the Reform Party, and sided with Liberal causes on most issues until running for President as a Republican).  They also support him because they know he will forward their agenda, something they haven’t had the ability to do in eight years.  It is painfully obvious to anyone who knows how to read body language that they see exactly who and what Trump is, and that they loathe him as much as anyone.  But they also know they cannot renege on their Faustian bargain lest they incur the wrath of Trump’s base.

This seems like a perfectly fitting explanation, and it is, but it isn’t the whole truth.  It doesn’t explain everything.  I didn’t realize it until I started looking deeper into the actions of the GOP over the last few years, and even over the past few decades.  The true cause of the GOP’s cowardice is the moral rot at the center of the party, a decay that has festered like a cavity in a tooth for decades.  They were able to mostly hide this rot up until the rise of Trump, and it was the rot that allowed him to win.

The nature of the rot is quite obvious: it is the section of the party populated by extremists.  Currently, this is the Alt-Right, the people that follow Breitbart and InfoWars, the very people that elected Trump.  But this rot isn’t new; it has been a part of the Republican Party for decades, and it was a part of the Democratic Party before that.  Until recently, they held no true loyalty to any party (which isn’t inherently bad; I am loyal to no party myself.  The problem is that their loyalty is determined not by shared views, but by shared opposition), yet they peddle a revisionist history that seems to suggest otherwise.  Many of them fled the Democratic Party for the Republican Party during the Civil Rights movement, but they still weren’t loyal to the GOP.  Most of the rest came during the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s as the GOP secured its hold on the fundamentalists and evangelicals, who are amongst the most hard-right of anyone on the spectrum.  It was this influx of extremists that actually doomed the party to what it is today.

Now, before anyone starts screaming, let me point something out.  Yes, I said much of the damage was done when fundamentalists and evangelicals joined the GOP.  But that doesn’t mean I believe them to be either inherently good or bad.  I personally am agnostic about all religions, but I will not denigrate religions either.  Religious liberty is one of the most fundamental and most important freedoms in our country, and it is one I will defend to my dying breath.  But people forget that freedom of religion also means freedom FROM religion.  Historically, religions have done everything they can to quash nonbelievers, and this is precisely why the founders wrote the First Amendment; they recognized the inherent danger in religion run amok.  It isn’t that Christians or Jews or Muslims or Hindus or Sikhs or Buddhists or any other religions are bad, but that power tends to corrupt them and that extremists pervert them to justify their own agenda.  More importantly, religion tends to attract bullies and invite judgment, which is the root of the problem in the Republican Party today.

Put simply, the Republican Party today is full of bullies.  As the base of the party shifted, so too did the people representing it.  Over the past twenty to thirty years, we have seen a major shift towards the right in the GOP, as well as a shift towards arrogance, partisanship, and bullying.  Political parties have always been rife with these things, of course, but this is different.  The Republicans no longer attempt to hide their partisanship or disdain for anyone who disagrees with them.  They do everything in their power to undermine their opponents while simultaneously complaining that their opponents won’t work with them.  They bicker and name-call in a way we expect only from children.  They run on a mentality of “us versus them,” meaning anyone opposed to them is their enemy.  With behavior like this, it is no wonder someone like Trump was able to rise.

But this isn’t new behavior.  We’ve seen a steady rise in the bullying tactics used by the Republicans since the early 1990s.  They loathed Bill Clinton, and made no attempt to hide it, looking for any excuse to remove him.  Led by Newt Gingrich (who is now among Trump’s biggest supporters, making excuses for the very things he excoriated Clinton), they led a campaign of obstructionism that was unmatched until Obama’s tenure.  They tore apart every word the Clintons uttered and did everything in their power to paint them as un-American criminals.  This culminated with Clinton’s impeachment for lying about an affair, which, while technically correct, was in reality nothing more than a gross act of partisanship (Note: I am not defending Clinton in any way; he was a slimeball who abused women for decades.  But the Republican’s attempt to impeach him for lying about it was not about punishing him or protecting women.  It was about trying to defame and discredit a political enemy.), which is particularly interesting now, given that they are protecting Trump, who is an admitted sexual predator.

There is a great deal of debate over the cause of this behavior, and I don’t pretend to have a concrete answer for it.  I do believe that much of it comes from the fact that the Republican Party has been moving steadily right since the Reagan era, to the point of being extremist now.  Political parties are a delayed reflection of their base, meaning that they change to reflect their voters.  Since the influx of fundamentalists into the GOP, the party as a whole has moved further and further to the right (with the Democratic Party moving further to the left as a response, which is not necessarily a good thing either), with voters electing people they feel better represent them (which is, of course, the entire point of a Democratic Republic).  The problem is that they are putting people in office who are bullies, people like Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, Trey Gowdy, and Darrell Issa, and considering far, far worse people like Roy Moore, David Clarke, and Joe Arpaio.  The three former people were once almost respectable, knowing that they had to mask their true intentions and beliefs in order to succeed politically.  But that mask started slipping with their constant opposition to Obama (which we now know was purely politically motivated), and once Trump became president, they dropped all pretense.

Trump is letting the Republican Part show its true colors, which are stained with bullying, bigotry, and hatred.  That is why they refuse to stand up to him.  It isn’t just party politics; it is the simple fact that to stand up to him would be to condemn themselves.  Condemning oneself isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however; it can actually be a useful first step to solving serious problems like addiction.  The GOP has a serious problem, but they cannot admit it.  They believe themselves to be right about everything, that they are the party of moral superiority.  They make excuses for supporting Trump despite him being the antithesis of everything they allegedly value.  The simple fact that they are politicians means we must judge them not by their words, but by their actions, and their actions prove that they are hate-filled bullies just like their president.

I’m sure many that read this will just say that this is Leftist propaganda, that I just hate Republicans and Conservatives because I am a Liberal.  They couldn’t be further from the truth.  My family has traditionally voted Republican, and most of my relatives are centrist, with some leaning left and some right.  I myself have always believed in the true values of the Republican Party.  That is my issue with them today; they aren’t real Republicans.  The party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Eisenhower died before I was even born.  Now it has morphed into the party of the Alt-Right, populated by bullies, misogynists, racists, and ant-LGBT bigots.  It has turned its back on every principle it was founded on in favor of partisanship and corruption.  The GOP can’t stand up to Trump because they created him, and he allowed them to show how terrible they truly are without fear of repercussion.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.  Karma always catches up in the end.  The voters are seeing the GOP for what they truly are, and they will lose power as a result.  This year’s midterm elections are forecast to hurt Republicans, though there is no consensus as to how much.  In addition, as of this writing, at least 30 Republicans have announced they will be retiring from Congress this year (including the few who actually stand up to Trump; they stand up because they don’t have to fear losing their office, which is really just cowardice), which is yet another death knell for the party; they are losing moderates in droves, which will leave nothing but radicals and extremists, which voters will flee from.  We already saw this happen in Alabama, where a Democrat won a Senate seat for the first time in 25 years.

The Republican Party is reaping what it has spent the last thirty years sowing.  I feel no sympathy towards them, but I also take no solace in seeing them destroyed internally.  They have brought this on themselves, and it is up to them to fix it.