Blame GOP for Trump

(Cape May County Herald opinion from a year and a half ago on Trump and GOP complicity, as relevant as ever.)

By Kevin McKinney,  May 11, 2016 

As Donald Trump sells out America, leaving behind a slew of defeated establishment candidates to squirm and sweat before the funhouse mirror in this Twilight Zone playing on an endless loop, one thing is clear: these United States of America aren't what we've cracked them up to be, and we wonder, were they ever?

Our once great nation's standards, values and hopes have seemingly crumbled right before our eyes into a reality TV rubble, where the truth is a joke, the disingenuous reigns, insults are hip, fear motivates and a walking, talking tabloid caricature has a serious shot at the Oval Office.

How did we get here? How did the most powerful democracy in the world become so desperate as to welcome the phony, inciting declarations of a billionaire successfully bidding for the highest office in the land?

The Republican Party only has itself to blame. The unmitigated rise of ‘The Donald’ is as much about the tangible as the intangible, about a twisted, single-minded, conservative ideology which has long catered only to a powerful, select few.

In truth, it’s been a slow fade. Presumptive Republican presidential candidate Trump is just the tip of the iceberg, the most visible symptom of an insidious disease that for decades has been quietly compromising many aspects of American life - our security, health, finances and overall quality - certainly since Reaganomics trickled down, trickled out and left the people dry.

But, only now, in the flotsam wake of unprecedented, ultra-conservative, think-tank-orchestrated, corporation-endorsed, alarmist manipulation of the people's hearts, minds and lives since the watershed 2001 high-jacking of the White House is the devastation suddenly and sickeningly obvious.

Donald Trump is what happens, he's the result, the divine justice administered, in the wake of so much criminal negligence and inexcusable abandonment of the people in their most desperate times of need.

After eight hellish years of George W. Bush's "War of Terror" against the American people - through the inexplicable Sept. 11 failures, Iraq War lies, profiteering and bloodshed, domestic spying, bungled Hurricane Katrina response and the deregulation-instigated 2008 Great Recession - untold damage was done.

Then, while millions of Americans were losing their homes, jobs and savings, obstructionist Republicans blocked hundreds of bills, including those designed to help veterans, senior citizens, women victims of violence, ill Sept. 11 first responders, the jobless, middle class families, teachers and the underpaid.

Today, more than 16 million American children are living in poverty and the richest one-tenth percent of Americans have almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. The only time congressional Republicans have lifted a finger for the past seven years was to point it accusingly at the president.

Fear-mongering and personal attacks became common. Trust in the Republican establishment evaporated like so many campaign promises.

Emerging from this atmosphere was the bright and shiny political outsider, ‘The Donald,' to the rescue of the disenchanted.

Promising change in loud, condescending, childlike declarations - repeating his adjectives, "great," "amazing," and "special" - devoid of substance, the grand illusionist gradually won the hearts of the forsaken and desperate.

Who can resist a peep under the sideshow circus tent?

Despite his anti-establishment appeal, Trump, in essence, is the amplified embodiment of everything ugly about today’s Republican Party.

Rock bottom line: Obsessive greed and the relentless pursuit of absolute power, is the mad scientist that inadvertently electrified and enlivened this amalgamation of our lesser selves, Trump, to run amok, deceive, disparage and ultimately destroy with impunity.