The Republicans are Worse

I accept Donald Trump is the President, but that doesn’t alter that I think he is a sociopath and something of an “evil genius.” This is not a compliment. The Democrats and the neoliberal reaction to Trump’s populism by painting him as an inept buffoon backfired. It only emboldened him with a tactic he can deploy, where a handful of outlandish statements from a thirty-minute speech attract media attention, while his rightful condemnation of the World Trade Organization, NAFTA, and China’s “developing country” status being a source of unfair economic advantage (and for a regime that is so consistently brutal in terms of human rights) go ignored. The collective mischaracterization of Trump as a moron by liberal politicians and pundits reinforced the “DC insider” narrative, which the President has played to his advantage as needing to “drain the swamp” of career politicians and their media spokespeople. Now, he isn’t really doing that at all, because there’d have to be a similar day of reckoning in the GOP, but it sure makes for some frightening rally footage, furthering the outrage. It’s a negative feedback loop that has gaslit the American viewing public into normalizing and accepting an administration fueled by hate and greed.

Beyond the moralist argument against the present state of the Republican Party is that their policies don’t make sense. They’re the party of states’ rights, but they also want cannabis to remain federally illegal. Some Republicans have opened up to the idea of legalization because they recognize its future as America’s next cash crop, but consider the paleoconservative stance of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who once said he withdrew his endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan because he learned they smoked pot. How do Republicans reconcile their borderline libertarian stance on personal freedom and responsibility with their desire for strict governance over the prohibition of abortion? How can they be anti-abortion but pro-war and still call themselves (in many cases) Christians?