“Former Republican strategist Stuart Stevens described the GOP under Donald Trump as a party of cynics, stooges, racists, and obsequious enablers whose profiles in cowardice bear an uncomfortable resemblance to 1930s Germany. “When I talk to Republican politicians, I hear Franz von Papen,” he says, referencing the German chancellor who convinced Germans that so-called radical leftists were a far greater threat than Adolf Hitler. “They all know that Trump is an idiot. They all know that he’s uniquely unqualified to be president. But they convinced themselves that he was a necessity.”
“Republicans have sacrificed every last belief and principle they held dear on the bonfire of Trump’s vanity. And now, not even the catastrophically mismanaged coronavirus pandemic can wake them from their stupor.”
“There was a core set of beliefs that, say, 90% of the party would have agreed on, were fundamental, definitional, nonnegotiable for the Republican Party: personal responsibility, character counts, strong on Russia, deficit matters, fiscal sanity, free trade, strongly pro-legal immigration. These were fundamental, nonnegotiable bedrock principles that define what it was to be a Republican. So, Trump is not that, the party now has drifted away from those. The party is actively against each of those. We are the character-doesn’t-count party. We are to the left of Bernie Sanders on trade, as far as I can figure out any coherent policy to it. We’re [Vladimir] Putin’s poodle. And so, then you say, How does anybody abandon deeply held beliefs in three, four years? and I think the answer is you don’t. It just means you didn’t deeply hold them.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/09/ex-republican-strategist-surveys-the-wreckage-of-trumps-gop
