To Be a Republican...
What they support with their votes, their dollars, their effort, and their silence.
The Observations.
To be a Republican is to support armed gangs stalking American cities, men who go masked, smash in doors, and drag away men, women, and children for disappearance. These gangs kill Americans by shoot them in the face or ramming their cars, use children as bait, and then hide behind the FBI. It means believing that human being should be drug into the cold in their underwear and left to die in a frozen parking lot. To be a Republican is to support military raids on Apartment buildings, zip-tying children, ripping apart homes, families, lives all for a TikTok video. To be a Republican is also to support sending men to die in foreign gulags based on lies so you can preen by their cages and setting up domestic internment camps on a scale undreamed by Stalin where the disappeared can be caged out of sight and out of law.
To be a Republican is to support slandering the disabled, the female, and the dead, indeed all those who disagree with you. You call them Domestic terrorists, “scum” and worse, then back those claims up with incessant threats of violence. Indeed being a Republican means supporting constant abuse against everyone from citizens, to elected officials, to once-friendly nations all of whom face a constant threats to be arrested, invaded, blockaded, or executed. Whole populations are slandered with crude racism around poisoning the blood of the country, or “creating stories” of animal torture, all for political gain. Meanwhile special government employees and Vice Presidents give Nazi salutes and talk up racial hierarchy.
To be a Republican is to excuse crude sexism from calling a reporter “piggy” or a “stupid stupid woman” or treating those around you like props. It means questioning whether women should even vote at all and claiming that empathy is a fatal disease.
To be a Republican is to support open corruption including pardons for drug traffickers, fraudsters, and political hacks. It means supporting open shakedowns of companies, our allies and even taxpayers through fake lawsuits, graft in contracts, war for oil, and illegal transfer of funds. It means supporting seizure of business property and family access, “free” jets from foreign adversaries, and turning our foreign policy into an excuse for business deals. Inequality still rises along with the costs of living, housing, and healthcare but being a Republican means blaming all that falsely on outsiders and then focusing on building demolition, marble armrests, and tax cuts for the already rich. It means blocking trade to enforce monopolies, and demanding that the government support the spread of cancer-causing toxins just because some billionaire will profit off of it.
To be a Republican is to support poisoning our economic and security relationships with bullying, infantile demands, and erratic tariffs issued on a midnight whim. It means supporting policy via Truth Social with an extra dose of racism. It means raging against healthy, functional, and once-friendly democracies while publicly fawning over the very dictators who have invaded our friends, threatened our alliances, and attacked our economy.
To be a Republican means supporting direct calls to “terminate the constitution”, open gerrymandering for power, declarations of “war” on judges, open attempts to censor speech, arrests without warrant, and use of the “department of justice” for personal revenge.
To be a Republican means claiming to support “family values” while elevating a serial adulterer who pays for silence along with a cabinet of abusers and those who cover for them. When you are a star after all, Republicans support you doing it. It means elevating people who maintain long friendships with pedophiles; who hide records to protect the abusers; lie about what the records say; and give sweetheart deals to their procurers in exchange for their silence. Girls as young as thirteen were groomed for rape and far from defending the innocent Republicans want us to focus on the Dow Jones Industrial average. In the view of those who claim to want a “Christian Nation”, money and power erases morality.
Every moral line that Republicans draw, he steps across and they quickly follow. Every principle they claim to hold is jettisoned at his command, and they greet each new outrage with willful blindness, desperate excuses, boasts, and finally venal emulation and screaming about the Dow. No matter how they posture as moralists or responsible leaders they will eventually be happy to create stories and demand that reporters “smile and have fun” rather than seek answers about why young girls were raped.
I believe that many do not like some or all of what is happening, at least when it affects them. But feelings mean nothing unless you act.
The Objections.
Many Republicans and independent voters will object to this on citing ignorance, imagination, or unhappiness. They will say they did not know Trump would do this or are unaware of it now. They will say that they did not imagine it would come to this because the “adults in the room” would stand up. Or they will say that they do not really support it at all.
But ignorance is unbelievable. Trump’s demands for immunity, his celebration of violence, his plans for troop deployments and tariffs, his endless threats and abuse, his crudity and his racism were all features of his campaign. He has never hidden who he is and among Republicans his popularity has never ever waned. What’s more the figures around him from Russ Vought to Stephen Miller published their plans openly or screamed them on TV. They were not fringe characters in the campaign, they were his warmup act. Their plans for racial purges, for declarations of war, their calls to put people “in trauma” and to stage a second revolution or dictate our personal beliefs were out there for all to see. The plans for purges, assaults, and the love of dictators was always there. So too was the demand for complete fealty from “my generals”. Even Trump’s demand to take Greenland, sell out to Russia and be given the Nobel were part of his first term.
The only way you could be ignorant of them is if you are willfully desperately blind, beyond even the powers of Mike Johnson, or if you are just lying to save face.
Lack of Imagination is not serious. After January 6th 2020 Republicans in Congress desperately gelded themselves after Donald Trump sent a mob to kill them. They blocked impeachment, invented lies to the cover for his actions or engaged in desperate false equivalence that cannot even fool themselves. The Supreme Court gave him presumptive immunity to shield him from consequences for the insurrection, from his lies, and the theft of government documents. They even put declared open corruption of government outside of the law. Other lower-level courts threw themselves in the path of cases to avoid holding him, or indeed anyone to account, and those that were arrested have now been pardoned and are likely donning ICE masks and seeking revenge. Since then Trump has only accelerated his demands for complete fealty and threats of further assault and the entire party went along sensing opportunity, fearing political losses, and refusing to ever take a principled stand. Simply put, there are no adults in the room.
There are no institutional forces in the Republican party of much of the government that can hold Trump to account because Republicans wanted it that way. They were not forced to give him a free pass. They were not forced to worm their way into his campaign, on his ticket, or into his cabinet. They do not have to cover for his erratic behavior or expose themselves in endless displays of public fluffing. They chose to. They are choosing it still. To claim that someone, somewhere else will hold him to account is not just illogical, it is delusional, and a complete abdication of the responsibility of free citizens.
It was always clear who Trump is, and what he and those around him intended to do. It was always clear that they would only abet and accelerate his impulses. But I can believe that many voters don’t want “this” or rather don’t want it to affect them. But that claim too holds no weight.
It holds no weight because votes are not wishes, they are a choice. You don’t vote for “tax cuts” or “clearing red tape” you vote for a candidate and their platform not the one or two things you like, and you bear responsibility for what you have done. Once you have given them your vote, you have given the only support that really matters, your emotions mean little or nothing if you refuse to act. Saying that you wanted a tax cut therefore does not give you absolution it just means that you are happy to let ICE shoot your fellow citizens as long as it helps your bottom line.
So, do not tell me that you “don’t like this” tell me what you have done?
If you think Congress should restrain him, have you called them to demand it?
If you think ICE has gone to far, have you shown up to protest?
If you wish people would chage their minds have you gone out to tell them?
If you think big tech is screwing us have you cancelled your subscription?
If you are uncomfortable with the racism and the sexism and the hate, then have you called your party or your friends out?
If you don’t like what the party has become, will you ever vote differently?
Thoughts and prayers will not stop a bullet. Nor will they bring back the dead and emotions mean nothing until they lead us to act.
Until you stand up and be counted, until you publicly call out the corruption, the violence, the racism, and the imperialism, until you stand firm against the destruction then you *do* support this, with your vote and now with your silence. And your personal excuses mean nothing at all. Indeed all it does is force the rest of us to ask ourselves, if they support all of this, what won’t they do given the command?
Postscript. Since the war of choice has already been launched we should contemplate where we really are:
As an additional point, Dr. Paul Kurgman in his recent piece on AI asked:
Imagine the reaction if the roles of the parties were reversed — if a Democratic administration were denying the U.S. military the tools it wants to use because it considered the company supplying those tools too conservative. Republicans wouldn’t just be protesting; they’d be screaming “treason.”
He is right to ask this, and I have asked it myself in other contexts. But at this point we must retire the question. Republican voters have already supported so much that they would call unacceptable that expecting pause is useless. Indeed for the reasons outlined above many do not acknowledge that they support this at all; while others hide behind the premise that the Democrats already are, indeed must be worse; and still others just assume they will never ever lose power or can afford to.
To expect them to pause on reflection is a fool’s errand. They must admit the possibility first. We cannot shock them into clarity. Instead we must plan for things to get far far worse.