Metastatic Trumpism

Trump isn’t the disease. He’s no more than a symptom.

Trump is the Frankenstein Monster the Republican Party has been building since at least 1968.

When Nixon embraced the “Southern Strategy” to bring in racist white voters, to cash in on their anger at the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and school desegregation — that was a seed of Trumpism.

When Reagan talked about “welfare queens” and railed against “big government” and told us Medicare and Social Security were “socialism” — that was a big seed of Trumpism.

So was Reagan’s weird economic theories where tax cuts would magically raise tax revenue, and the militarism of valuing war toys more than Americans — that was Trumpism too.

Decades of hyperpartisanship of every Republican candidate and every Republican official who insisted anyone who didn’t support Republicans must be a traitor to America — Trumpism.

Reagan cursed “illegal immigrants”. He and Nixon and G. W. Bush ran stunningly criminal presidencies, with dozens of high-ranking officials being indicted or going to prison for blatantly criminal behavior — Trumpism.

Reagan and Bush cozied up to far-right “religious” leaders and led wars on women’s healthcare rights. Neither went far, but they created the unholy alliance that is the “religious right”. Trumpism relies on that.

Nixon, Reagan, and Bush increasingly let industries write the “regulations” that were supposed to rein in their depredations — which has gone mad under Trump.

Reagan started the tendency to appoint officials to lead departments who were hostile to the mission of those departments, and dedicated to dismantling them. That is now a requirement for Trumpist officials.

There is no aspect of the Trump Reich which was not foreshadowed and embraced, and is now still defended, by Republicans, from their faux-populism to their racism to vote suppression to their condemnations of a free press.

Ridding ourselves of Trump — even if we successfully impeach and remove him from office — will not stop Trumpism. It won’t even slow the growth of this metastatic Trumpist cancer. Only one thing will do that.

We must mount a decades-long effort to erase the Republican Party from American politics. They must lose everywhere. The damage they’re doing to American institutions, to the courts, to our nation, to the planet will not end with Trump’s removal.

Removing Trump, whether through impeachment, forced resignation, or the 2020 ballot box, must not be allowed to be seen as having cured the disease. The cancer is omnipresent, chronic and still growing.

Every office in every election in every district in every state must be challenged. We will need a generation to cleanse the federal courts. Americans need to show up at the ballot box every single time, screaming, “Enough! We will resist, and we will overcome!”

This is a war for the survival of democracy. We dare not ease up, we dare not again become complacent.

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

We only have a Republic if we fight to keep it.

Inaction is not an option.