As you may know I keep track of mentions of "Trumpism" in the media. I do so in part because often, "Trumpism" is word indicating the speaker is building a lifeboat for Republicans to float away as Donald Trump goes down.
Here at my house we have a full-time project known as "Burn the Lifeboats."
And so here's a clip that I got auto-notified exists, of The Blaze's Pat Gray talking about Trumpism:
PAT GRAY: I've had this thing in my prep all week about the Tea Party: whether or not the Tea Party is officially dead. Get your thoughts on right now because nobody even talks about it anymore. It's all been replaced, I think, with Trumpism and not Tea Party values.
Okay that's just adorable.
Nevermind that the founder of The Blaze, Glenn Beck (remember him?) turns out took a million bucks from Dick Armey to promote "The Tea Party" on his syndicated radio show in 2009.
Nevermind that the Tea Party was the original lifeboat, very successful lifeboat, that allowed all the Bush dead-enders to pretend they had never heard of George W. Bush, his lying us into war, and his economic catastrophe.
And now the right wing is, in plain sight, reverse engineering their Tea Party success by calling Donald Trump's presidency "Trumpism," rather than Republicanism on steroids.
As I said in the summer of 2016, in an article called "Don't You Dare Call it Trumpism": Trump voters...
...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.
Trump is a Republican. The Tea Party were Republicans. The problem is Republicans.
And our problem is a media that allows Republicans to use their unlimited dark money to rebrand themselves over and over.
Burn. The. Lifeboats.
PS. I'd love to include more of Pat Gray's discussion of whether or not the Tea Party is dead, but after his commercial break, Gray launched into a long segment about "Haven't we given the gays ENOUGH?" and never got back to the Tea Party question. Maybe in a future show.
