Donald Trump may be the devil to a GOP that has been pot boiled down into a witches brew of religious zealots, anti-immigrant xenophobes, pro-unpigmented-male-power partisans, and anti-government anarchists, but his campaign, that does not require coming to either the Kochs or Karl Rove for cash, is positively imploding the billions spent to co-opt the Republican party. For that one likely inadvertent public service, he may actually save America as he drags the GOP beast into the ashes.
Trump is wrong about so many things, but he is fundamentally right about one: Government is broken, and little, if anything, gets done. That, of course, has been the aim of the far-Right funders who have injected the political Botox of the Cruzes of the world directly into the arteries of government.
For the Republican Party to field more than a dozen kooks, conspiracy theorists, conniving hate speech authors, and crazies has been, at the least, a national shame, and, at worst, turned the process of picking the preeminent leader of the free world from big top majesty to carnival sideshow.
To position one of the worst of these Senatorial scabs like Ted Cruz, whose self-aggrandizing faux filibuster in the anarchists' shutdown of the federal government in 2013 cost America precious fiscal credibility and billions of dollars, into Reagan redux, the salvation of the GOP, is insulting to socially moderate, formerly Republican, voters.
That vast, self-disenfranchised "independent" voter, the fiscal conservatives who have become the amputated fourth leg of the GOP elephant, are ignoring three decades of Koch conditioning. In fact, they're running, with open arms, to the Mussolini-like strongman, Trump.
The Donald's "deal" drivel -- light on solutions but dripping with fear of foreigners, fear of minorities, and fear of free trade -- is the new lightbulb to which the white flight fear-moths, who respond to that kind of programming, are now drawn.
That has left both fiscally fat but ethically bankrupt ends of the Republican Party, the Neocons and Tea Party, without traction, and in disarray.
The "Dump Trump" movement waited until it was far too late to coalesce around a candidate out of the GOP Rat Pack.
Ohio governor Kasich, who is effectively Scott Walker Lite, all of the minimal political ethics without the union lightning rod attached to his mouth, is the closest thing to a grownup in the room that the GOP have, but he has trouble gaining traction, because the remaining 22% of registered voters who call themselves Republicans have been so conditioned to toxic messaging that no one of a Neoconservative or Tea Party stripe can effectively run for President in the Republican Party.
Romney was plowed under by the GOP Catch 22 in 2012, and it's happening again, on steroids:
You cannot spout anti-government, anti-woman, pro-single religion Kool-Aid to get through the white water rapids of a Republican primary season, and then turn into the general election and look appealing to socially moderate fiscal conservatives. Not with cameras. Not with social media.
How do you win in the totality of America for the biggest job on the world stage when you preach white male power to an America that is now in a minority majority and increasingly run by women? LGBTQ hate when the majority of Americans now accept and understand that lifestyles that aren't theirs are not a threat, and so many gay people are major forces in corporate boardrooms and icons in the media and sports?
It's harder to sell the evils of government when it becomes increasingly clear by the day that Republican intransigence is the cause of the broken roads, rotting bridges and tunnels being driven on by the 1%'s new 2016 Ferrari, "Cruzing" down the road, waving to the American working classes from the rearview mirror.
Objects in the rearview mirror may be closer than they appear.
Even Trump, who has leveraged the toxicity of the reality television media to Wagnerian heights of political drama, cannot escape the terminal velocity of Republican sewer politics.
His visions of a Mexico-financed wall may excite white Right fright, but it is turning off conservative Hispanics, who were instrumental in helping George W. Bush squeak into the White House in 2000. His position on abortion, all six of them, undercuts him with both his base and with non-aligned voters who might become supporters.
Republicans are scattering like ants from a magnifying glass, trying to find somewhere to regroup and rally. The Koch Brothers $889 million slush fund sits largely on the sidelines of this train wreck. Only $34.1M in total by all GOP funders has been spent on down-ballot Senate and House races.
They do so, in part, because the anarchist dynamic duo terraformed the nation over 30 years to create the environment for this chaos. It proves their point that democratic government doesn't work, and plutocrats like themselves are the answer to order and stability.
They do so, in part, because, like ants, they know that their hill can be washed away by the Trump tide in 2016, but they can spend and prevail in mid-term 2018, when young voters, minority voters, and LGBTQ voters historically don't participate in their democracy.
The pundit class is abuzz with chatter about the GOP, R.I.P.
The GOP may be a corpse, but it's more like a zombie from The Walking Dead. If the party continues to fight Trump, and every indication is that they will, there is a high likelihood that the party will fracture.
In Colin Woodard's new book American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good which, in part, places these current GOP struggles into historic context, he makes the case for a historic party shift, where the more toxic elements of the party, namely the anarchist Libertarians of the Koch stripe, are marginalized back into a fringe group.
The signs of Woodard's theory that the vast political middle eventually pulls extremism down are being seen. While Trump continues to grow his power, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is spending $100 million to defeat Tea Party candidates in down-ballot races in 2016, and vows to continue in 2018, until compromise and order are brought back to the conservative side of the political Force.
Conservatism is never dead, and there will always be a voice for people who believe in fiscal and/or social conservative principles, but the Republican Party itself is dying. There is evidence that the kind of massive party realignment seen in 1868 may be happening again.
R.I.P., GOP. For the good of the nation, make it ASAP.