THE “GOP” HAS BECOME THE “POT”: PARTY OF TRUMP!

…This should be the logo for the POT!

 

It’s a shame that the GOP is no longer the “conservative party”.

 

Have you noticed all the talk from those involved with politics, whether as a politician or a senior political reporter, they are all asking “Whatever became of that highly conservative, anti-deficit, Reagan like Republican party?”

 

Oh, and those same people are now saying, “How in the hell did a fake politician like Donald J. Trump, wrangle a hostile take-over of the GOP?  Which it appears, he did achieve that goal.

 

Well, let’s just go back a couple of decades and look at what has happened to the basic foundation of the GOP.

 

First, let’s look at what the Republican Party became after the George W. Bush presidency. 

 

Bush left the conservative GOP as a hollowed out party with his botched nation-building projects of invading Afghanistan and Iraq. These highly questionable and expensive wars shook the party’s faith in its "Reaganesque" conservative freedom agenda.

 

On Bush’s watch, we then all experienced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, which totally removed the GOP’s self-image as the “party of fiscal competence”.

 

The Republicans then found another new identity during the Obama years, when they became the party against the basics of a true democracy.  That being, they were against any and all compromise, as they became known as the “Party of No”. 

 

 

And when something more elaborate was needed for the 2016 presidential campaign, there was the party’s total lack of workable ideas that became so painfully obvious.  That was demonstrated when sixteen other candidates tried out for the job of chief executive, and no one but a fake Republican could close the deal using lies and deceit.

 

This is what allowed Donald Trump to snap up what had become the hollowed out shell of the GOP, and then making it his own personal vehicle. This activity has been demonstrated for all of us to see over the latest months through Trump’s bogus tax cuts, his spending bills and a proposed budget that no true conservative would ever tolerate.  That is given the massive debt they will all incur.

And you don’ have to take this past history, or my word for it.

 

Just listen to what President Trump’s own Budget Director, the former Tea Party conservative Mick Mulvaney, stated on “Face the Nation”.  Mulvaney stated that these Trump-branded debt bombs did not square with his former principles. He was then asked, if he were still in Congress, would he vote in favor of Trump’s spending bill?  “Probably not,” Mulvaney replied.

But, as with most of those less than knowledgeable supporters of Trump’s GOP, two days after Mulvaney made this statement on national TV, in another interview he did a 180 turn and totally supported Trump’s debt-bomb budget proposal.  He then reversed his statement saying that he, “Probably would vote for it if it had been brought to a vote when he was in the House.”  (It must be noted that Mulvaney became the first Republican elected in South Carolina’s 5th District in more than a century.  This was due to his being against Obama’s deficit spending.  With this last statement, if he were running today, he probably would not win in his old 5^th district.)

 

But this is not just an issue with Trump or his White House lackeys.

 

Also lacking today, is the fiscal discipline once offered to us by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-WI), who made his career by selling the idea of a balanced US budget.  However,  now Ryan peddles Trump’s deficit spending.  Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) had plenty of Republican partners in denouncing reckless spending when Obama was minding the store. Now that Trump owns the party, Rand Paul today is a hollow, lonely voice in the night.

But fiscal discipline is not the only concept Republicans no longer try to sell.

 

Trump has replaced the free-trade GOP, with a protectionist outlook.  Trump is pushing national isolationism and nativism instead of global US engagement.

 

Do you also recall how Republicans used to pitch virtue, conservatism and personal accountability?  Now, they’ve become the party of alleged wife-beaters and support for pay-off hush money going to porn stars.

 

Today, nothing illustrates that Trump is in control of the party better than the Republican-led House of Representatives cheerfully passing tax-cut and spending bills that together will drive the annual deficit past $1 trillion.  And this is without the slightest prospect of a balanced budget in their plans…..ever. 

 

We are all aware that deficit spending during an economic slump can be a necessary stimulus.  But to do it on this staggering scale, in a period of steady growth and low unemployment, that could eventually sponsor a fiscal disaster of inflation and a recession larger than that of 2008.

 

Republicans of the past used to run on promises that they would make government more efficient by cutting “waste, fraud and abuse.”  Well, today, you can forget that! 

 

Phase one of the first-ever audit of Pentagon budgets recently found the US Defense Department is unable to account for some $800 million in spending.  And this is just from one US  agency!

 

Many more defense agencies remain to be audited. Yet the GOP has insisted on adding an additional $165 billion over two years in new funding for a department that can’t adequately account for the $700 billion per year it already receives.

 

But we all have quickly learned that a lack of transparency is “business as usual for the Trump administration”, and corporate bankruptcy is a familiar harbor in Trump’s world. He says he’s “a promoter,” I say he’s a carnival shill.

 

It has become accepted that Trump will put up phony budget numbers to create an annual fund of about $200 billion, but he will just lie and tell his supporters that it's, ”a $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan”.

 

As I have said since Trump came down his golden escalator in the Trump Tower, Trump doesn’t compare himself to P.T. Barnum for nothing.

 

Finally for those of us who value our two-party system, it is a shame to see the “conservative party”, as that only being their "former concept".  It has since sold itself to the devil. 

 

At one time, they were the “Grand Old Party”, the GOP.  Now they are the POT, the “Party of Trump”.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2018