Donald Trump has made the Republican Party cruel, xenophobic, exclusionary, and bigoted.
You knew it was coming.
As soon as former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley emerged as the main threat to Donald Trump in the battle for the Republican nomination, it became inevitable that she would be targeted by him. Any front-runner would do the same thing. But Trump did it with his typical touch.
Last week Trump reposted on his Truth Social account a conspiracy theory that Haley, who was born in South Carolina, was not qualified to be president because her parents, born in India, were not U.S. citizens at the time of her birth. In fact, the Fourteenth Amendment establishes that any person born on American soil is a citizen of the United States and therefore can serve as president.
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By Friday the former president of the United States was referring to Haley as “Nimbra.”
There are two things to know in order to understand what’s unfolding. The first is that Haley’s given name is Nimarata Nikki Randhawa. She has gone by Nikki since she was a child—a local newspaper referred to her as Nikki when she was 12 years old and she had a role in a production of Li’l Abner; and she dropped her maiden name when she married Michael Haley in 1996.
Exactly this. The only change has been that they've started to say the quiet part out loud. Their political behavior hasn't especially changed, they're just not bothering to be any shade of discrete anymore.
Like, who writes these titles? Surely anyone aware of Nixon's war on drugs targeting hippies and black people, or Reagan ignoring the AIDS crisis, or any number of other examples would've made it clear that Republicans have been this way for decades, really since the southern strategy was enacted.
Get all the white voters on your side by stoking racial fears. Trump just realized that the racists are everywhere, and many of them were too dumb to understand the dog whistles enough to be motivated to vote. What some of the rest of us underestimated, was how little the rest of the conservatives would care.
Other way around. The conservative wing has always been cruel, xenophobic, exclusionary, and bigoted. Trump is simply the natural result on top.of all that
It was always that way don’t be stupid. Do you really think GWB’s conman party was not hostile to minorities? Back then they were just “one of the good ones.” They had more nuance with their prejudices and race conspiracies.
This headline is for republican's in denial about their party to feel better about themselves. Those of us who have paid attention to conservatives knew for decades what they really were (I used to tell republicans for years this is what their party is, many used to laugh and handwave telling me I'm silly for thinking what this headline says)
Anyone else remember when W tried to popularize the phrase "compassionate conservatism"? It's an implicit admission that conservatism is inherently uncompassionate.
Anyone who doubts this should listen to the slowburn season on Nixon. As you do, you'll see such parallels with today that you will be not be able to deny how consistently terrible conservatism has been.
Trump didn't make anything. He scratched a scab which revealed a festering wound. All he did was give conservatives the chance to say, "ew, I'm not gonna let that define me," while those who remained said, "I don't trust medical science, that's just a sign that we're healing," and those who jumped on the bandwagon said, "that's never gonna heal properly, but if we help it get worse then we can do the medically sane thing and cut the limb off." Finally, there are those last two in the scab camp who either say, whoa! That wound is insane, heheh! Let's see how bad it can get," or those who say, "God wants this to rot because I'm hiding some naughty secrets. I hope we all die."
Then there's the rest of us who look at all of them and shout, "WHY ARE YOU VOTING FOR A FUCKING SCAB???"
I never understood the You Have Failed Me trope. If I found myself on the side where failing, or being too successful (being a threat) equals death, I'd switch sides as soon as I can. But I suppose this is just the human nature of fascism, and perhaps baffling to non-fascists.