Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:20 pm
Fox News contributor Laura Ingraham, never a voice of reason herself, is to no one’s surprise, a Trump supporter. In an op-ed appearing on Fox news Opinion, she argues that “The vast majority of Republicans want Donald Trump to be president,” while the “small group of angry dissenters includes many of the people at the top of the party.”
Trump, she says in a chorus with Steve Doocy, is being betrayed by the establishment Republicans. She complains that, “The Republican Party is led by people who have more in common with the Clintons than with the GOP base.”
This is the Trump line. Trump said the “shackles are off” and has now gone to war against the Republican establishment, adopting what CNN’s Dana Bash calls “the Breitbart strategy.”
And no surprise, given Breitbart’s Steve Bannon running Trump’s campaign. It would be a surprise if Bannon adopted a nurturing attitude toward the establishment. Rapprochement is not what Bannon wants. He wants destruction, and the consequences be damned.
Obviously, this goes much deeper than Ingraham’s simplistic notion of betrayal. And if Bannon is a crusader, Paul Ryan, with his kinda/storta rejection of Trump, is passive-aggressive: One of Paul Ryan’s aids told CNN’s Lisa Mirando that they’re not surprised by Trump’s remarks (who is by this point?) and that he’s “not going to get into a back and forth with him.”
Unfortunately, that is all Ryan has done.
Former press secretary to George W. Bush and current Fox News contributor, Dana Perino, made the simple observation the other day that,
“Attempts to keep the GOP under the big tent have failed. The wings of the party need each other to win, but they can’t get along.”
To say the least.
Ingraham, following longstanding Republican practice, would delegitimize those who disagree with her (e.g. “the elites”), but what is really happening is that the GOP’s demand for intellectual purity has finally bit their own party in the ass.
Trump has declared himself to be the spiritual heir to the Tea Party, and so, of course, supporters of Trump style themselves “patriots.” However, as “America’s Best Christian,” Betty Bowers, explains,
To all the people who have #patriot in their Twitter profile: The definition of ‘patriot’ is any comedian who doesn’t want Trump to win.
Ingraham and others like her cannot conceive, or at least admit, that one could oppose Trump on patriotic grounds. Yet as Arnold Schwarzenegger put it when he announced that, although a Republican, he would not vote for Trump:
“Like many Americans, I’ve been conflicted this election. I want to take a moment to remind my fellow Republicans that it is not only acceptable to choose your country over your party — it is your duty.”
Ignoring any perspective but her own, Ingraham complains that,
“When this election is over, the vast majority of Republicans are going to remember that their supposed leaders — the same officeholders, millionaires, and pundits who told them that they had to “come together” and support John McCain and Mitt Romney — refused to do the same for Donald Trump.”
Well…objectionable as some of the things they have said were, arguably, McCain and Romney were sane. And neither of them bragged about sexually assaulting women or buying beauty pageants so they could see them naked backstage. Neither of them threatened to jail their opponent if they won.
It is ridiculous for Ingraham or anyone else to claim Trump is just like McCain and Romney. But from McCain we get to the first woman to harness the destructive powers of the Tea Party: Sarah Palin, whose own sanity-challenged rantings burned McCain’s campaign to the ground.
It is no surprise the barbarian at the gates, Steve Bannon, had his eye on Sarah Palin in 2012, and it is no coincidence that Sarah Palin came out in support of Trump.
What we are seeing now is a culmination of conflicts that have been brewing for many years; conflicts for which Republicans themselves are responsible.
Steve Bannon wants to destroy the left, he says, but what he has accomplished is to destroy the right instead.
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