Chapter 4: The Party That Sold Itself Out

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Chapter 4: The Party That Sold Itself Out

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our
moneyed . . . corporations, which dare already to challenge
our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the
laws of our country. —Thomas Jefferson

It was October 10, 2016, and the world watched as the last credible, integrity-bound Republicans surrendered.

Just three days earlier, the infamous Access Hollywood tape had played on TVs worldwide. Donald Trump bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy,” claiming that “when you’re a star, they let you do it.” The footage triggered a political firestorm. House Speaker Paul Ryan distanced himself, canceling a planned appearance with Trump. Senator John McCain withdrew his endorsement entirely. Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz declared he could no longer support Trump while looking his fifteen-year-old daughter in the eye.

Louise and I watched the debate that followed on CNN. Trump stepped onstage in St. Louis, glowering. Rather than apologizing, he dismissed the comments as “locker room talk,” deflected, and attacked Hillary Clinton’s husband. He even threatened to imprison Clinton if elected: “You’d be in jail,” he snarled. Throughout the evening, he physically stalked Clinton around the stage like a predator.1

The audience saw not a man apologizing, but dominating. That night, something remarkable happened. Instead of collapsing, Trump’s poll numbers improved. The white “Christian” male-dominated Republican base, initially rattled, rapidly reconsolidated. Republican men didn’t care what he’d said. They liked how he made them feel: powerful, angry, unrepentant.

By morning, Republicans crawled back into line. Chaffetz, less than seventy-two hours after declaring Trump immoral, tweeted: “I’m voting for Trump. HRC is that bad.” Senator Deb Fischer of Nebraska, after calling on Trump to step aside, reversed herself: “I plan to vote for Mr. Trump,” as if nothing had happened.2

A line had been crossed, but it didn’t matter. Because Trump was winning. And the Republican Party had decided that winning was the only principle worth preserving.

This wasn’t a hostile takeover of the GOP. This was its final form. That night didn’t break the party; it revealed its post–Reagan Revolution’s true character.

To understand how the Grand Old Party of Lincoln and Eisenhower became the grievance-fueled vehicle for Trump’s authoritarian ambitions, we must trace its evolution over decades. Trump didn’t create the modern Republican Party; he merely exploited and stripped away the last pretenses from a transformation decades in the making.

The Long Descent into Trumpism

Donald Trump didn’t invent Republican cruelty, racial resentment, or truth denial. He inherited it. He perfected it.

The party that once claimed to be Lincoln’s heir—founded to oppose slavery’s expansion, that pushed for Reconstruction, that under Teddy Roosevelt championed conservation, the estate tax, and checked corporate power—had already

· Embraced the Southern Strategy, deliberately courting white racial resentment

· Turned dog whistles into bullhorns in its rhetoric about crime, welfare, and immigration

· Married billionaire donors with evangelical Christians in an unholy alliance of plutocracy and theocracy

· Transformed media from a source of shared facts into a propaganda machine

Trump simply lit the match that ignited this volatile mixture. But the kindling had been carefully stacked over decades with billions of dollars.

Nixon’s Southern Strategy: The Blueprint of Betrayal

The modern Republican Party’s transformation began with Richard Nixon and the 1968 election. America was in turmoil: the civil rights movement challenged long-standing racial hierarchies, the Vietnam War created generational conflict, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy traumatized the nation.

As I detailed in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, we now know that President Johnson and Vice President Humphrey had worked out a peace deal with the Vietnamese by late summer 1968. Nixon, through an agent, reached out to the South Vietnamese and offered them support if they’d refuse to sign the deal, provoking Johnson to call Senator Everett Dirksen and complain that “this is treason.” (Dirksen answered, “I know.”) As a result, another million Vietnamese and over twenty thousand American GIs died during Nixon’s presidency.3

But that was just the prelude to what would follow. Instead of appealing to America’s better angels, Nixon saw opportunity in exploiting our historic demons. As Bill Moyers told me over dinner at Norman and Lyn Lear’s home some years ago, when Democrats under Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they knew they were sacrificing their once-solid grip on the South. Johnson, Moyers said, proclaimed after signing the Civil Rights Act words to the effect of, “We have lost the South for a generation.”4

Nixon saw these disaffected white Southern voters as key to a new Republican majority. Thus was born the GOP’s “Southern Strategy,” a deliberate effort to appeal to white racial anxieties without explicitly racist language.

Nixon’s political strategist Kevin Phillips was remarkably candid in a 1970 New York Times article: “From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that. . . . The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.”5

Instead of saying the N-word, Republicans began using coded phrases like “law and order,” “states’ rights,” and “forced busing.” As strategist Lee Atwater would later admit in a candid 1981 interview: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N-word, N-word, N-word.’ By 1968, you can’t say ‘N-word’—that hurts you. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights. . . . You’re getting so abstract. ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘N-word.’ ”6

This strategy paid massive dividends. In the 1968 election, Nixon won five Southern states that had been Democratic strongholds for generations. In 1972, he swept every Southern state, cynically redrawing the map of American politics along racial lines.7

Reagan: The Smile on the Guillotine

If Nixon provided the blueprint for the Republican Party’s racial strategy, Ronald Reagan perfected its execution. With his Hollywood charm, Reagan could deliver messages with a smile that would have sounded sinister from Nixon.

On August 3, 1980, Reagan chose to launch his general election campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964. Standing near the site of this infamous racial crime (later made into the movie Mississippi Burning), Reagan declared: “I believe in states’ rights.”8 Nobody in the all-white audience misunderstood his meaning; with Reagan, the GOP had perfected the art of the racial dog whistle.

Once in office, Reagan deployed cultural scapegoats with surgical precision. He invented the myth of the “welfare queen,” supposedly a Chicago woman who “has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands.” Though never explicitly identifying her as Black, the racial subtext was abundantly clear.9

Reagan gave America a powerful myth: that minorities, “welfare cheats,” and “liberal elites” were the problem, not billionaires and corporations rigging the economy. He wrapped regressive economics in racial, gender, and cultural resentment, teaching Republicans that plutocracy could win elections if sufficiently disguised.

Trump would later repeat this formula almost verbatim, just louder, cruder, and without Reagan’s disciplined delivery. The difference was not one of kind, but of degree.10

The Parasitic Takeover

In my analysis, the relationship between Republican leaders and their party wasn’t just political: it was parasitic. Each successive Republican figure injected their ideological “eggs” into the party’s body politic. Nixon implanted the first “eggs” of racism with his “silent majority” rhetoric and “war on drugs,” designed to disrupt civil rights movements. Reagan then incubated these tendencies with his “welfare queen” comments.

What makes Trump’s takeover remarkable isn’t that he introduced something entirely new, but that he fully consumed a host corrupted over decades, first by Nixon’s scandals, then by Reagan’s policies undermining middle-class security, and finally by Bush and Cheney’s tax cuts and disastrous wars. Like the cordyceps fungus that infects ants and controls their behavior, Trump didn’t just lead the GOP; he seized control of its brain, redirecting its behavior while feeding on its institutional body.11

Gingrich and the Media Machine: The Death of Truth

If Reagan provided the ideological framework, Newt Gingrich and Roger Ailes revolutionized the tactical approach, turning American politics from an adversarial but functional system into a zero-sum blood sport, the perfect foundation for Trump.

Gingrich became Speaker of the House in January 1995 following an explosion of billionaire money and right-wing media characterizing President Clinton’s first two years as corrupt and socialist. He explicitly rejected the traditional view that politicians should work across the aisle for the common good. Instead, he preached that politics should be played like warfare, with enemies and few rules of engagement.

Gingrich published a 1990 memo titled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” instructing Republican candidates to refer to Democrats with words like “traitors,” “pathetic,” “sick,” “corrupt,” and “anti-flag.” The memo, distributed through his GOPAC organization, included lists of negative “contrasting words” to be used about Democrats and “optimistic positive governing words” for Republicans. It wasn’t about policy disagreements but using the media to demonize Democrats to justify refusing to cooperate.12

Simultaneously, in October 1996, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes launched Fox News, transforming not just the media landscape but the American mind itself. Fox presented itself as a corrective to “liberal bias.” Its slogan, “Fair and Balanced,” implied that other news sources were unfair. But from the beginning, Fox was designed not to inform but to influence, creating a parallel information ecosystem where conservative narratives were presented as fact.13

By 2011, a Fairleigh Dickinson University study found that Fox News viewers were less informed about current events than people who watched no news at all.14 Fox wasn’t adding information; it was replacing it with alternative narratives.

The combination was lethal for democracy and laid the foundation for today’s MAGA GOP. Gingrich preached that compromise was weakness and government itself was the enemy. Fox News gave Republicans a nationwide bullhorn. Together, they created an environment where facts became optional, conspiracy theories flourished, and loyalty to party leadership superseded commitment to America herself.15

As Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute observed, the Republican Party had become “an insurgent outlier, ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”16

The Tea Party: Astroturf Insurrection

On inauguration day, January 20, 2009, as Louise and I danced in Union Station with America’s first Black president and his wife, a group of Republican leaders gathered at the Caucus Room restaurant next door to what was then our Washington apartment to plot Obama’s destruction. Their plan, as reported by journalist Robert Draper, was simple: “Show united and unyielding opposition to the president’s economic policies. . . . Win the spear point of the House in 2010. Jab Obama relentlessly in 2011. Win the White House and the Senate in 2012.”17

This wasn’t about policy disagreements. It was, in Senator Mitch McConnell’s infamous words, about ensuring that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”18

After this meeting, Republicans could have collaborated with Obama on addressing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Instead, they declared total war, voting unanimously against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act despite the economy losing 800,000 jobs monthly.

But formal Republican opposition wasn’t enough. The party needed a movement: something appearing grassroots but directed from above. Enter the Tea Party.

Ostensibly sparked by CNBC commentator Rick Santelli’s February 2009 rant against mortgage relief, the Tea Party presented itself as a spontaneous uprising of citizens concerned about government spending and debt.

In reality, it was “astroturf”: fake grassroots. Behind the seemingly organic protests were well-funded conservative organizations like Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, backed by fossil fuel billionaires like the Kochs. These groups provided money, messaging, transportation, coordination with right-wing media, and organizational infrastructure for Tea Party rallies.19 Investigative reporting documented how the Koch brothers’ network poured millions into creating and sustaining this seemingly spontaneous “movement.”20

What made the Tea Party potent wasn’t just its corporate backing but its racial subtext. Protesters carried signs showing Obama as a witch doctor with a bone through his nose. They questioned his citizenship, his religion, his very Americanness. Their rallying cry—“We want our country back”—had a clear implication: they wanted an all-white power structure to return.

A 2010 University of Washington study by Professor Christopher Parker found that 73 percent of Tea Party supporters agreed that “Irish, Italians, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without special favors.”21 Further research demonstrated that racial resentment was a stronger predictor of Tea Party support than concerns about government spending.22

This radicalized base—trained to hate compromise and question democratic governance—was perfectly primed for a wannabe autocrat like Trump. When he began his campaign questioning Obama’s American birth, he was speaking directly to a Tea Party audience explicitly cultivated for this message.

The GOP Purge: From Moderates to Mini-Trumps

From 2010 onward, the Republican Party underwent a purge that would have impressed Stalin. Moderate Republicans—willing to occasionally reach across the aisle, believing in governance rather than obstruction—were systematically eliminated.

The mechanisms were numerous:

· Primary challenges against any Republican failing to demonstrate sufficient ideological purity. Congressman Bob Inglis of South Carolina, with a 93 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, lost his primary in 2010 after acknowledging climate change. Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, a six-term senator with impeccable conservative credentials, was defeated in 2012 for occasionally working with Democrats.23

· Gerrymandered districts where the only electoral threat came from the right. After the 2010 census, Republican state legislatures redrew congressional maps to create safe districts where moderation was political suicide.24

· Purity tests on issues from guns to abortion to taxes. Groups like the Club for Growth, Americans for Tax Reform, and the National Rifle Association established rigid litmus tests enforced through scorecards and primary challenge threats.25

The result was a dramatic rightward shift. Analysis by the Lugar Center showed that bipartisanship in Congress collapsed after 2010—coinciding with the Citizens United decision that gave billionaires and corporations the legal ability to buy politicians—with Republicans especially unwilling to cross party lines.26

By 2015, the party had become a machine rewarding cruelty, extremism, and blind loyalty over the good of the country or policy knowledge. It didn’t matter that Trump mocked POWs like John McCain (“I like people who weren’t captured”) or bragged about sexual assault. He could “own the libs,” the ultimate virtue in the new Republican Party.

Why They All Fell in Line or Were Purged

When Trump won the GOP’s nomination in 2016, Republican power brokers faced a choice:

· Reject a demagogue with no governmental experience or commitment to democratic norms, or

· Embrace him and get everything they’d dreamed of: tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, conservative judges, and a president who would sign whatever legislation they put before him.

They chose power. Trump gave them:

· Tax cuts: The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act delivered the largest corporate tax cut in American history, slashing the top personal rate from 39.6 percent to 37 percent and the corporate rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. Analysis found the cuts were a massive boon to corporations and the richest Americans, with minimal benefits for workers despite GOP trickle-down claims.27

· Right-wing judges: Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices—Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett—cementing a 6–3 conservative majority. Beyond that, he appointed 234 federal judges—nearly 30 percent of the entire federal judiciary—most vetted by the Federalist Society to advance conservative and corporate interests.28

· A fanatical base: Trump energized the Republican base like no candidate since Reagan, bringing in previously disengaged voters, particularly whites without college degrees who responded to his racial appeals and anti-elite messaging (ironic coming from a college-educated billionaire born to wealth).29

In exchange, Republicans gave Trump absolute loyalty. They defended his worst excesses, excused his attacks on democratic norms, and turned a blind eye to corruption that would have ended any other presidency.

This wasn’t fear: it was calculation. A Faustian bargain made with clear understanding of the trade-offs. Republican leaders decided that power—even temporary power wielded by someone they privately considered unfit—was worth sacrificing their stated principles, constitutional duties, and self-respect.

Senator Lindsey Graham’s transformation encapsulates this bargain. In 2015, Graham called Trump “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” who was “not fit to be president.” By 2019, he had become one of Trump’s most ardent defenders, telling reporters, “To every Republican: If you don’t stand behind this president, we’re not going to stand behind you.”30

The shift wasn’t just hypocritical: it was the logical endpoint of a party that had decided winning was its only principle.

Why It Matters

Donald Trump didn’t destroy the Republican Party. He completed it.

He brought it full circle:

· From Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, to Lee Atwater’s racial coding

· From Eisenhower, who warned about the military-industrial complex, to a party captured by corporate interests

· From Teddy Roosevelt, the trust-buster, to a party celebrating monopolies

· From Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” to “American carnage”

· And from dog whistles to bullhorns in its appeals to white grievance

The GOP spent decades feeding the beast of white resentment, oligarchic power, and media manipulation. Trump put a new face on it and branded it with his name in gold letters.

He was not the disease. He was the final symptom; the fever making the infection impossible to ignore.

As we discovered after Trump’s 2020 defeat, when Republicans embraced his Big Lie about election fraud and facilitated an attempted coup, the party had completed its transformation from a traditional conservative organization into something far more dangerous: a personality cult willing to sacrifice the peaceful transfer of power—the bedrock of democratic governance—to maintain its grip on power.31

And now, in his second term, we’re seeing constraints on his worst impulses tossed aside as he surrounds himself with loyal sycophants, defies courts, targets enemies, corrupts government agencies, and sucks up to Vladimir Putin in a way that would have horrified even Nixon, Reagan, or both Bushes.

The response to the Access Hollywood tape moment of October 2016 wasn’t just Republican hypocrisy. It was a preview of the moral and constitutional abdication to come, when standing up for any principle became secondary to standing with their leader, no matter where he led them.

Even into insurrection. Even into anti-American lawlessness. Even into the abyss.