THE GOP OF REAGAN IS NOW SIX FEET UNDER

super Tuesday was good for Democrats, good for right-wing Republicans, and absolutely dreadful for the ashes of the traditional Republican establishment.

Trump’s sweep through the Tuesday primaries erases any doubt that the Republican Party defined by allegiance to Reagan’s world view has been transformed into a culty of personality singularly dominated by and dedicated to the advancement of Trump.

When Nikki Haley ended her bid thei morning, Trump has effectively clinched his third consecutive presidential nomination and embeds his role as party leader in concrete.

As Alex Conant, a Republican strategist and veteran of Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign tweeted,“When a party nominates somebody three times in a row, it’s not a fluke or an accident — it’s because the party belongs to him.”

The platform Reagan established in 1980 - a hawkish foreign policy, free-market economics and social conservatism - is dead. As of now it is Six Feet Under

As Tuesday’s results demonstrate, Trump’s lock on Republicans’ loyalty has endured, regardless of two impeachments, party losses in congressional elections and defeat by Joe Biden in 2020.

As Steve Bannon put it, “In 2016, Trump launched a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. That takeover is now complete.”

Most of Trump’s stances are now those of the party’s primary voters, including issues such as confronting Russia, projecting US power internationally and free trade.

Amost two-thirds of Republicans now opposse further funding for Ukraine. “

The break with the Reagan Era is underscored by the poor showing of GOP candidates who most closely aligned themselves with Reagan.

Haley, running on a traditional conservative platform, has failed to bring around Republican primary voters. She’s become steadily less popular with them as the race has gone on.

Trump’s triumph will hasten the sunsetting of the Reagan era. The number of Republicans who voted for “The Gipper” is steadily shrinking. We forget how far away the 1980s are from today. The youngest person who could have voted for Reagan in 1980 is now 57 or 58.

With Trump’s encouragement, the party has grown hostile to senior figures such as Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney, who identify with Reagan. After Romney announced he was not running for re-election and McConnell announced he was not running for Senate Republican leader in the new congress, Trump responded with glee: “We’re getting rid of the Romneys of the world,. We want to get the Romneys out.”

Bannon noted, “Every Republican institution of any significant power has now gone full Trump. And every important institutionalist has been removed, from Kevin McCarthy in the House to Mitch McConnell in the Senate to Ronna McDaniel at the Republican National Committee. Some people may not like it. But it’s all Trump and his MAGA army now.”

Yesterday, Mitch McConnell endorsed Trump, a turnaround that amounts to a surrender in the icy relationship between two of the most prominent Republicans in the country.

McConnell made the endorsement public after Nikki Haley dropped out of the race following Trump’s big Super Tuesday wins, saying: “It is abundantly clear that former President Trump has earned the requisite support of Republican voters to be our nominee for President of the United States. It should come as no surprise that as nominee, he will have my support. During his Presidency, we worked together to accomplish great things for the American people including tax reform that supercharged our economy and a generational change of our federal judiciary – most importantly, the Supreme Court. I look forward to the opportunity of switching from playing defense against the terrible policies the Biden administration has pursued to a sustained offense geared towards making a real difference in improving the lives of the American people.”

McConnell knows he will have no voice in anything that happens in Washington on November 6, regardless of who won. Like German politician Fritz Von Papen, who had opposed the rise of Hitler until the Nazis were the biggest vote winner in the January 1933 election, at which point he facilitated President Hinderburg’s acceptance of the Nazi revolutionary as Chanceller, declaring that the establishment could “manage him.”

The sudden détente marks the culmination of what has been almost a decade-long up-and-down relationship between the two GOP figures, which has been colored by bad blood in recent years.

McConnell laid the blame at Trump’s feet for what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, at the Capitol, angering Trump by declaring him “practically and morally responsible” for the attack. McConnell also considered voting to convict the ex-president in his second impeachment trial, but ultimately argued that the judicial system was a better arena to hold Trump responsible for his actions.

Senate Republicans pointed to McConnell’s long game, which is his push to win back the majority in November. Assuming the GOP wins Manchin’s seat, Republicans only need one more seat to win back control of the chamber if President Biden wins reelection. If Trump wins, Republicans would be set in the upper chamber. “He’ll look past a load of shit to improve the path to the majority,” one Senate GOP member said. McConnell will be known to history for all time to come as the man who could not overcome his parochial, partisan view to take steps that would insure the continuation of the system of government he had served in.

More than two-thirds of Senate Republicans have thrown their weight behind Trump’s campaign.

When Nikki Haley ceded the Republican nomination to a man who drove the economy into a ditch, mismanaged a pandemic resulting in hundreds of thousands of excess American deaths, attempted a coup, was found guilty of sexual assault in a court of law, and is currently facing 91 felony charges, saying: “It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party who did not support him, and I hope he does. This is now his time for choosing.”

If there’s been a more cowardly statement over the last year, I can’t think of it. As Jonathan V. Last has said often, “Any person or institution which is not explicitly anti-Trump will become a tool for authoritarianism eventually.”

Haley has resigned herself to being a useful tool for Trump’s attempt to overthrow the constitutional democratic republic and replace it with authoritarianism.

As opposed to Haley’s gutless surrender, Joe Biden stated:

“It takes a lot of courage to run for President – that’s especially true in today’s Republican Party, where so few dare to speak the truth about Donald Trump. Nikki Haley was willing to speak the truth about Trump: about the chaos that always follows him, about his inability to see right from wrong, about his cowering before Vladimir Putin.

“Donald Trump made it clear he doesn’t want Nikki Haley’s supporters. I want to be clear: There is a place for them in my campaign. I know there is a lot we won’t agree on. But on the fundamental issues of preserving American democracy, on standing up for the rule of law, on treating each other with decency and dignity and respect, on preserving NATO and standing up to America’s adversaries, I hope and believe we can find common ground.

“We all know this is no ordinary election. And the stakes for America couldn’t be higher. I know that Democrats and Republicans and Independents disagree on many issues and hold strong convictions. That’s a good thing. That’s what America stands for. But I also know this: what unites Democrats and Republicans and Independents is a love for America.”

“There is a place for them in my campaign.”

Now, we move into what is likely to be the worst eight months any of us can remember, an expensive, incredibly vicious, dirty and prolonged general election slugfest between a president and a former president, a campaign that will be unlike any before.

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