February 22, 2016

Sorry, George: The Republican Party Is Wrecking the Republican Party

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


From George Will, bemoaning the fate of a Republican Party in thrall to Donald Trump:

It is time to talk about his tax records.

OK, let’s talk! Unfortunately, this is not the first line of Will’s column, it’s the last. Is it a two-part column, and this is just the cliffhanger? I don’t know. I was reading the column for a different reason, when it suddenly stopped dead on this sentence.

So why was I reading the column? Because I was intrigued by the headline: “Donald Trump relishes wrecking the GOP.” You see, a few days ago President Obama claimed that Trump merely “says in more interesting ways” what every other Republican says too. Will isn’t buying:

Certainly not last week when Trump said, “I like the [Obamacare] mandate.”…Trump was not saying “what the other candidates are saying” when last week he said: “Every single other [Republican] candidate is going to cut the hell out of your Social Security.”… Embraces torture and promises to kill terrorists’ families.

Trump quickly backed away from his mandate mistake, and other Republican candidates endorse torture as well—as have large majorities of Republican voters since long before Trump burst on the scene. They just don’t say so in quite such interesting ways as Trump.

So, once again, we’re left with Trump’s heresy on Social Security. That’s about it. With fairly trivial exceptions, Trump is quite mainstream on all the other big conservative hot buttons: taxes, health care, abortion, guns, military spending, regulations, climate change, crime, deficits, and smashing ISIS to bits. Given all this, he sure is getting a lot of mileage out of his slight nonconformities on issues like eminent domain and Planned Parenthood funding.

So is Trump really wrecking the GOP? I don’t see it. The GOP wrecked the GOP. They’re the ones who have spent the last 30 years building the kind of party that Trump appeals to. If Michael Moore entered the Democratic race, do you think he’d have the same effect? After all, he’s loud, he’s funny, and he’s unapologetically liberal.

But he wouldn’t have any serious impact. He’d build a small movement and get some good press, and that would be that. There just aren’t enough Democrats around who’d find his brand of rabble-rousing convincing presidential material. The Democratic establishment hasn’t spent the last 30 years building that kind of party.

So let’s knock off the crocodile tears about Trump wrecking the Republican Party. This is the party the Republican establishment built. They found it convenient, and they were pretty sure they could keep it under control. But they couldn’t. They started a bonfire to keep the rubes good and fired up, and now they’re getting upset because someone else is throwing in a few logs and taking ownership of it. Boo hoo.

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate