How Donald Trump's Schizoid Administration Upended the GOP

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

January 2018. We're trapped in an intellectual prison from which there is no escape. The modern American experience has been reduced to a few grim lines: President Donald Trump says something crazy; we freak out. A leak comes out; we obsess over it. Someone gets fired; the deck chairs on the sinking ship of state get rearranged a little. Trump says something crazy again. Rinse, outrage, repeat.

It's a fatal mind loop worthy of an early Twilight Zone episode, and if you think about it (although the next presidential tweet will likely pre-empt that possibility), we've been riding in this same moronic circle for more than two and a half years. Cycling through the Twitter opinions about the president's latest brain belch has become an irresistibly shallow national ritual. It's clearly a monster distraction from something. But what, exactly?

At the one-year anniversary of his inauguration, several crises seem to have quietly worsened under the cover of Trump's insanity. A big one is the continuing collapse of the two major political parties – particularly the Republicans, whose dysfunction now seems beyond terminal. With characteristic myopia, the GOP establishment spent most of the past year trying to rid Washington of alt-right icon and former chief Trump strategist Steve Bannon, instead of worrying about the larger problem, i.e., the voter rage that put Trump in the White House.

An intense inside game of leaks targeted the self-proclaimed Lenin of the alt-right. Bannon was blamed for the violent neofascist-march fiasco in Charlottesville and booted from the White House in response to it, despite being the only staffer to correctly predict the boss's inability to believably denounce Nazis in public. Then Bannon was chucked from Breitbart by Trump's billionaire pals, the hedge-fund Mercers. That was after sleazebasket wallflower author Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury depicted Bannon dumping on Trump's "treasonous" Large Adult Son and Fredo-esque ex-bed-wetter, the embarrassing Donald Jr.

This was typical Beltway thinking, imagining that eliminating the person eliminated the problem. But by sidelining Bannon, the party overlooked who put Trump in power in the first place: millions of fist-shaking angry white guys who spent 2016 screaming kill-the-Beltway-bastards epithets like "Drain the swamp!"

Moreover, the final wipeout of Bannon came at roughly the same time Trump was helping the GOP elders pass a tax-reform bill that was shepherded through by infamous Goldman Sachs heavy Gary Cohn and was, predictably, a massive giveaway to the rich. After all that anti-establishment Sturm und Drang, in other words, Trump in just a year had been reduced to a dumber, louder version of what he spent the entire 2016 race running against: a patrician Republican toady. The Trump-voter mob was still out there, furious, but the swamp avenger they sent to Washington no longer existed even in theory.

Throughout 2016, it looked like the major consequence of Trump's run would be the destruction of the modern Republican Party. Then he won, temporarily papering over deep schisms that had opened, really, on both sides of the political aisle. Democrats in the past year have at least had the illusion of being united by opposition to the Orange One.

Republicans have been forced to try to rule while being consumed from within by cancerous divisions, a spectacle that's grown more gruesome and unseemly with each passing month. Watching this schizoid administration try to rule in spite of itself has been like watching the world's worst comedian die onstage, only not for 15 minutes, but for a year, and counting. What could possibly be left of the party at the end of this nightmare?

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/taibbi-trump-schizoid-administration-up-ended-gop-w515787?utm_source=rsnewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=daily&utm_campaign=012318_17