r/politics • u/Quirkie The Netherlands • 1d ago

Soft Paywall Obama Breaks Silence on Trump’s ‘Unimaginable’ Presidency - “Imagine if I had done any of this,” the former two-term president said.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/obama-breaks-silence-on-trumps-unimaginable-presidency/
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u/AlphaGoldblum 1d ago

Oh, they had plenty of time to stop this. Nixon and Reagan invited the cancer into the party by wooing Evangelicals, but it wasn't until the Tea Party that it fully metastasized. And even then, the GOP still had a slim chance to stop the hostile takeover of the party. Instead they welcomed Palin with open arms and doubled down.

...but the GOP also knew it would win them elections to embrace the lunacy of the religious right. The old guard thought they could outplay the new guard, but, and this is apparent with Trump, they underestimated how fucking unhinged the new blood was.

Just to exemplify this: in the span of decades, Romney went from being considered an insane Republican to seeming completely reasonable (and effectively exiled from the modern GOP).

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u/Grand-Pen7946 1d ago

The original circus leader was Newt Gingrich. A lot of Congressmen from the 80s and 90s of both parties have frequently said that there was a radical shift in tone when he showed up. There have been a lot of opportunists and charlatans, but Newt successfully created an institution of theatrics and doing politics for show.

A lot of the negative effects of the Reagan era and its philosophy were really pushed and enacted by Newt in the 90s, with Bill Clinton complicitly playing along to appease him. That's not to absolve Clinton of his own genuine neoliberalism, but much of the shockwave of Reagan does come from Newt Gingrich who turned Congress into a circus, and you can draw a straight line from him to Lauren Boebert and her ilk.