Trump didn't somehow turn Republicans meaner and dumber. They did that themselves

Daily Kos
18 July 2019

This, on the National Republican Congressional Committee's new shamelessness and crudity of message, is an awful lot of words from The New York Times and it still doesn't quite get to the meat of the matter. It's not that the NRCC is mimicking Trump's behavior, in their now-rampant name-calling, nickname-giving, lying, and universal "socialist" and/or "anti-Semite" labeling.

It's that this descent into abject propagandizing is being led from the very top. Republican congressional leader Kevin McCarthy, the slippery Capitol eel who spent Tuesday insisting that obvious racism wasn't racism and that Democrats were being terribly uncouth in saying so out loud, and NRCC chair Rep. Tom Emmer are the ones demanding it and orchestrating it. Names can be put to this strategy; it did not arrive from nowhere.

So what does this say about them, personally? It says that Trump or no Trump, this is the sort of people they are. This is the sort of person that the Republican Party, including the members cited in the story as being unhappy about the entire Republican apparatus being turned into a pie-throwing machine, puts in top positions.

And it predates Trump by several decades; Kevin McCarthy’s playbook is, if anything, the Newt Gingrich playbook dumbed down to a bare handful of grade-school taunts. It was Frank Luntz who helped Republicans craft a new party era in which words no longer meant what they meant, and of making the public believe that orange was now purple via focus-group-tested misdirections. It was Dennis Hastert who helped maneuver the party into a new post-9/11 era of simply lying to the American people outright, even over matters of war, and declaring that anyone who pointed out the truth was perhaps on the side of terrorism, or France. (He also pioneered other, ahem, new Republican trends.)

It's not quite right to say that Republicans are mimicking Trump's juvenile and aggressively dishonest rhetoric. That's unfair. Republicans worked very, very hard to invent juvenile and aggressively dishonest rhetoric, to weaponize it, to orchestrate it via a handful of preferred outlets; Trump mimicked them.

If anything, Trump's contribution was to prove that you could do all of it far more stupidly than Frank Luntz originally envisioned—that you didn't need to pretend at dignity, coherence, or anything else. You could lick the walls, hang from the chandeliers, and inform audiences of your penis size and the base wouldn't give a damn if you gave them that or the faux-wonk Gingrich version.

You could say the racism part softly or say it loud; you could use proxies to smear your war-veteran presidential opponent as perhaps a traitor to the nation or just stand up at a rally and call them short. Luntz and the others assumed you needed to put at least a thin coat of respectability on it; as the William F. Buckleys of the movement steadily gave way to Andrew Breitbarts, then Jesse Watters, that coat was scraped bare without any chipping from the latest buffoon.

Yes, the NRCC (and Republican National Committee) are in a new era in which the ransom notes are written in crayon and you can get farther with the base eating paste than arugula. But it's not new that people of the caliber of Kevin McCarthy would "rise" to leadership positions, then use those positions to drag the whole party down a bit deeper into the mud. And it's not new that the party would call every last opponent, in every race from the presidency to dog catcher, a communist or socialist or against the troops or some other incessantly repeated phrase distributed on a memo and stretched so thin it soon becomes a mere mouthing of syllables.

Let's not give them the credit of thinking the party fell to this point from somewhere higher up. It was Republicanism sliding to this point that allowed Trump to sweep up a thoroughly morals-devoid, fact-hostile base with a two-bit carnival act that had worn thin a decade back. He could leave the country tomorrow and Kevin McCarthy would not suddenly discover decency in his absence. It never worked that way.