Tue Jan 12, 2021, 10:03 PM

Thomas Friedman: Trump Is Blowing Apart the G.O.P. God Bless Him.

When all the facts come out about the treasonous attack on the U.S. Capitol inspired by President Trump, impeaching him three times won’t feel sufficient. Consider this Washington Post headline from Monday: “Video Shows Capitol Mob Dragging Police Officer Down Stairs. One Rioter Beat the Officer With a Pole Flying the U.S. Flag.”

That said, while I want Trump out — and I don’t mind him being silenced at such a tense time — I’m not sure I want him permanently off Twitter and Facebook. There’s important work that I need Trump to perform in his post-presidency, and I need him to have proper megaphones to do it. It’s to blow apart this Republican Party.

My No. 1 wish for America today is for this Republican Party to fracture, splitting off the principled Republicans from the unprincipled Republicans and Trump cultists. That would be a blessing for America for two reasons.

First, because it could actually end the gridlock in Congress and enable us to do some big things on infrastructure, education and health care that would help ALL Americans — not the least those in Trump’s camp, who are there precisely because they feel ignored, humiliated and left behind.

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1 replies	Author	Time	Post
Thomas Friedman: Trump Is Blowing Apart the G.O.P. God Bless Him. (Original post)	brooklynite	Jan 12	OP
I love the response of Socrates to this column	NRaleighLiberal	Jan 12	#1

Response to brooklynite (Original post)

Tue Jan 12, 2021, 10:08 PM

NRaleighLiberal (53,761 posts)

1. I love the response of Socrates to this column

Socrates
Downtown Verona, NJ
2h ago
Times Pick
The runaway Republican freight train is not a recent Trumpian phenomenon.

The GOP slipped the surly bonds of reason many decades ago when Ronald Reagan chirped 'states rights !' to an all-white crowd at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi when he kicked off his 1980 Presidential campaign and when he told Americans that 'government is the problem' and adopted trickle-down fraudonomics.

It's a been a steady descent into radicalism over the last forty years as right wing oligarchs built a massive disinformation and misinformation propaganda industrial complex and echo chamber that has largely disemboweled the average American's ability to see objective reality.

'Principled' conservatives are nearly extinct; they're about as numerous as the number of Capitol police as compared to the Trump mob that overwhelmed them last week.

The majority of Republicans believe - without evidence - that there was election fraud because the Republican Party, their Dear Leader and their media accomplices told them to believe a lie.

How can any American with principles stand with the Republican Party, the party that gaslights America for a living with religious distractions, gun diversions and 'fear and loathing' while laughing all the way to bank, abandoning the country's infrastructure, healthcare, education, environment, democracy and future to a funeral pyre of cheap tax cuts ?

Four decades of radical Republicanism have produced a GOP Frankenstein.

D to go forward; R for catastrophe.

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