Trump was never the GOP’s future

5 min readNov 9, 2017

You’re never as good as you think you are when you win;
and you’re never as bad as you feel when you lose.

The Republican party got what it deserved this week. Across the country, both meaningful and symbolic losses piled up, giving facebook activists everywhere a degree of hope that maybe, just maybe, there was a viable future to the Democratic Party and armageddon will have to wait for another day.

We’ve seen this story before: most recently, in the wake of the 2008 election. After getting thoroughly shellacked like Ohio State, the GOP retreated into its room and locked the door, determined to listen to nothing but the moaning caterwauling of Thom Yorke. Eventually, the Tea Party mob rolled up on its Huffys and began throwing stones at the GOP’s window: Join us, and regain your balls! The temptation was real and the GOP rode shotgun as the Tea Party engineered national victories in 2010, and a string of local victories giving the GOP power over nearly 2/3 of the states. But the two sides never entered into a full symbiosis. Romney’s 2012 loss was blamed on his lack of “conservatism” and the longer Obama practiced centrist hackery, the more the Teapublican Monster fumed over his “socialism.”

Finally, in 2016, the Monster got exactly what it wanted: The Uberbirther himself Donald Trump became the face of the Republican Party. Trump is the epitome of 1980s masculinity — vapid, vulgar, and white; a “millionaire” just as superficial and narcissistic as the Everyman imagines he would be in his position. It didn’t matter that he was a lifelong New York Democrat. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t “conservative” in any meaningful political sense. He was a reflection of the Monster: he watched FoxNews and read Breitbart; he cursed Obama and the entitled minorities, just like the Monster did. He showed himself to be a terrible person and that’s exactly why they loved him.