I’m sorry, but your party stood silently by, quietly accepting the votes of racists and xenophobes, for decades. Your party fostered conspiracy theories about the Clintons for decades. Your party invited conspiracy theories about President Obama’s citizenship and religion, for the past almost decade. Your party has entertained anti-intellectualism, brayed about “skewed polls”, an incomprehensibly large global warming conspiracy, and uncountable other lunatic asylum ravings, for decades. Your party has refused to accept the legitimacy of its opposition for decades. Your party has embraced and evangelized sham economics with no actual academic foundation for decades.

And now you’re whining that a guy who is a serial liar, conspiracy theorist, and unstable loon has — well golly gee! — successfully won over your constituents. The ones your party has spent decades buttering up with inane bullshit from every corner of the parallel universe they live in. Who could’ve imagined that a bunch of ignorant voters who have been fed insane conspiracy theories by unofficial GOP propaganda arms would vote for the guy that stopped blowing the dog whistle and just started screaming into a megaphone?

Your party primed its voters for Donald Trump. It was part of a craven strategy to win the votes of white, southern racists by preaching about the evils of a government that was daring to help “those people.” (In case you haven’t gotten the latest issue of GOP Decoder Ring Magazine, “those people” means “blacks, hispanics, and women”.)

I know you think you’re taking some sort of brave stand here, but the time for brave stands in the GOP is long, long past. You were all too happy to ride high through the congressional landslides fueled by rural white racism. You loved patting yourselves on the back because, even though you lost the presidency, you could still wreak havoc in the legislature by demolishing virtually every tradition of compromise that’s existed since our country’s founding. You could assure legislative dominance through gerrymandering, black voter suppression, and other outright dirty tricks. (I know, you were just trying to stop the literally dozens of cases of voter fraud that have ever actually happened.) Never once did anyone in your party ask “If we have to suppress voters and game the system to enact our agenda, is this the right agenda?”

Your party has stood in the way of even the most mundane and essential forms of governance for the last eight years, at the direction of your Senate leader. Your party, for my entire lifetime, has placed politics and winning over the good of the country. It abdicated the role of providing sober, conservative guidance to temper liberal ambitions before I was even born, and instead became obsessed with reverting the country to the 1950s.

Do some naval-gazing and ask yourself why you didn’t abandon this shitshow of a party sooner. Ask yourself whether Ted Cruz, the runner up in your clown-car primary, was really all that much more palatable than Trump. (He wasn’t.) Ask yourself why it took your party’s standard-bearer insulting your living ancestors for you to start seeing the flaws in the party. And then realize that even Donald Trump cannot insult every Republican voter the way he’s insulted you, so you can’t expect similar epiphanies from the rest of your party’s voters.

Because I can assure you that the only people who were surprised by Donald Trump were the ones in the epistemic bubble that the GOP has maintained for the last 30 years. Trump is the GOP ideology in its rawest form: opportunism, paranoia, bullying, and dishonesty. He’s your monster. Stop trying to worm your way into the crowd so you can pretend to gasp in horror like the rest of us actually are doing.