We've been waiting for this.

How is the Mainstream Media going to cover up for this failed Republican outing THIS time?

Last time it was by pretending that "The Tea Party" was a brand new movement of voters, wholly unconnected to the George W. Bush Republican Base. Driftglass called it "The Bush Off Machine."

The wealthier types within the Republican Party had smoother propaganda and went with "No Labels," which pretended to be about bipartisanship but was a Bush-Off Machine for billionaires.

And now we have another failed Republican so-called president, who yeah I admit, is an even bigger failure than Bush (though he hasn't lied us into war YET).

How will the Republican Party aided and abetted by the mainstream media cover up this shite pile?

With some reverso propogando! To wit:

Let's not re-label Republicans this time. Let's re-label everything that has gone wrong with Republican politics as "Trumpism," and then regular "Republicans" will not be responsible for Donald Trump!

But like the Tea Party, this involves the same strategic forgettery on the part of the media. Cable News has to conveniently forget everything I wrote in my post from the summer of 2016, "Don't You Dare Call It Trumpism".

(And yes, it was easy to predict this having lived and blogged through the Bush-Off Years.)

In that post, I pointed to a focus group of Trump voters explaining why they like Donald Trump:

"He speaks his mind, and says what I am already thinking."

"Illegal immigration is the number one issue on my mind."

"He'll make America great again."

The reason the news media interviewed these particular people is, they are registered Republican Primary voters.

They didn't just register to vote this year or fall off a truck into the Republican Party. They voted for Bush, twice. They voted for McCain/Palin. They voted for Romney. And they're tired of losing and being embarrassed by their votes, so embarrassed that they fell for a "Tea Party" rebranding just so they would not have to associate themselves with Bush.

And then the establishment had the nerve to suggest they vote for Bush's brother.

Donald Trump lies about a lot of things, but he is not lying when he says he received more Republican Primary votes than any other candidate in US history. That statistic is skewed by how many Republicans voted "Not Trump," but the fact that the race boiled down to Trump versus not-Trump is not helpful to the "Trumpism" argument. Republican voters selected Trump as their candidate, in state after state after state.

And now cable news again faces a crisis where one party alone is failing at governing, and it's the same party that in my 54 years has ALWAYS been the one that failed at governing: Republicans. And they are pretending that this is all about Trump and his love for Confederate Monuments.

But the top issues for voters on Tuesday were healthcare and gun violence.

Republicans have spent seven years trying to repeal Obamacare, and they almost did it once Trump was in office. The amount of sheer terror that put on average Americans, and particularly mothers, can't be measured.

Gun violence? Republicans will give thoughts and prayers and then genuflect to the NRA.

Is Trump failing? Sure. But there is also a long-term failure of governance on the part of Republicans on those and many other issues.

For instance, in spite of "on many sides Nazis are good people," Trump didn't invent Republican bigotry. Remember when Republican parents would not let their children go to school when Barack Obama was going to do a live teleconference promoting staying in school? Eight years of "Kenyan Usurper" and worse. The whole "build the wall" thing isn't about jobs, it's about keeping out any immigrant who is brown and ESL. Think about Steve King's "calves the size of cantaloupes" comment, and Mike Huckabee's "treat immigrants like Fed Ex packages."

Trump didn't invent Republican "tax cuts for billionaires, slash needed services" either. That's Paul "I'm a numbers guy" Ryan's promise. Anyone who remembers the Bush Tax Cuts knows this is same shite different day, right down to the ridiculous insistence on dynamic scoring. And Bush Tax Cuts came from Reaganomics. Laffer of the Laffer Curve is a star again on Fox! It's not an accident.

Trump didn't invent Republicans' hatred for policies that benefit women's sexual autonomy. Mike Pence was way ahead of Trump.

Trump didn't invent gerrymandering and erasure of Black voters through Crosscheck and "war on drugs" policies.

Trump didn't invent a foreign policy based on anti-immigration or a domestic policy based on anti-Union, anti-worker spite.

It's not "Trumpism" that the voters rejected Tuesday night. It's the Republican Party and their inhuman anti-democratic policies that the voters rejected.

Cable News and the beltway chardonnay circuit would have you forget that. Never forget.

PS. One more reminder: Republicans stole a Supreme Court seat in broad daylight and would have waited for any Republican so-called president before they filled it.

Update: Turns out Driftglass himself was writing a parallel post to this one at the same time. He knows where I live and how to grab my videos. :D