Laying the Groundwork for a President Donald Trump

Complete absence of integrity is a rhetorical superpower, by definition only available to the corrupt. Former and current President Donald Trump wields this mendacious power with scorched-earth depravity and impunity bestowed by power-hungry GOP politicians, MAGA disciples, and voter apathy.

It’s January 2025. Former President Trump is now president again. How did we get to this frightening place? Short collective memory of his first administration? Large uninformed segments of the electorate? Covert and overt bigotry and white Christian nationalist fervor? Mass hysteria causing the widespread ingestion of massive Trumpian disinformation? The most talented confidence artist ever to run for president in American history?

All of the above. Remember, however, that most of this confidence artist’s talent is derived from a “complete absence of integrity,” his “superpower.”

How does Mr. Trump get away with it?

We can look back to mid-20^th century U.S. political history and follow the ascending line of GOP false conspiracy and disinformation. That line ultimately has led to the cult-like acceptance of Trumpian turpitude and corruption by the majority of American voters in 2024.

Barry Goldwater and the John Birch Society

During the 1964 Republican National Convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, moderate presidential primary candidate Nelson Rockefeller pleaded with the delegation to separate itself from the conspiratorial, rabid anti-communist John Birch Society that had helped lift his radical-right opponent, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.), to become the nominee:

“It is essential that this convention repudiate here and now any doctrinaire militant minority, whether Communist, Ku Klux Klan, or Bircher. … [The Republican Party] is in real danger of subversion by a radical, well-financed, highly disciplined [minority that is] wholly alien to sound and honest conservatism. … [We must heed] this extremist [John Birch Society] threat and its danger to the party. … Some of you don’t like to hear it … but it’s the truth. The Republican Party must repudiate these people.”

(Rockefeller, Nelson, R-N.Y., presidential primary candidate, governor; Republican National Convention speech; Cow Palace, San Francisco, Calif.; 7/14/1964; as cited in Corn, David; American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy; 2022.)

As David Corn recounts in his excellent history of extremism in the GOP, Rockefeller was interrupted continually by vicious booing throughout his speech, which pushed it well beyond his allotted five minutes. The Goldwater delegates were more than happy to repudiate Communism. That was their thing. Repudiate the KKK? Eh, they could give that some lip service though behind the scenes, wink, wink. But denounce the John Birch Society!? A flat, emphatic “no.”

The John Birch Society, founded in 1958, was named after an “unknown but dedicated American anti-communist” who was killed in China by Chinese communists shortly after WWII ended. By the early 1960s, JBS members believed President Dwight D. Eisenhower (heroic WWII five-star general, moderate Republican, in office 1953-1961) to be a communist agent. And they proclaimed the evils of water fluoridation as a communist “mass medicine” plot to reduce the populace’s ability to resist domination.

The Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater, backed by the “Birchers,” was defeated the following November by Lyndon Johnson (D-Texas). But the conspiratorial extremism has raged on, attaining various levels of acceptance under various movements associated with the GOP over succeeding decades.

Newt Gingrich: “The Man Who Broke Politics”

The key to any political conspiratorial effort is demonization of opponents (largely through massive deceit and fraud). For an evil conspiracy to exist, there must be evildoers to blame for doing or supporting the evil. For some mysterious reason in the modern American political arena, the conspiracy perpetrators are Republicans and the conspiratorial evildoers are Democrats.

After the turbulent ’60s and Nixonian ’70s, Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich came to Congress in 1979. Ultimately he served as speaker of the House for four years in the late 1990s. Referred to as “The Man Who Broke Politics” by McKay Coppins of The Atlantic (November 2018), Gingrich supercharged opponent-demonizing, fortifying it into a powerful art form.

As House speaker, Newt pressured his caucus members to stop socializing with Democrats because it was much harder to lie about them if you had to face them at next Sunday’s barbecue. He discouraged bipartisan fraternization at the congressional tennis courts. He did everything he could to stop across-the-aisle camaraderie that often is the basis for compromise and good government.

“[Democratic policies would bring to America] the joys of Soviet-style brutality and the murder of women and children.”

(Gingrich, Newt, R-Ga., U.S. House representative; House floor speech; 1983.)

“[Republicans] like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz.” 

(Gingrich, Newt, R-Ga., U.S. House representative; as cited in Cummings, Jeanne; “Gingrich out to Save America”; Atlanta Journal-Constitution; 1/16/1994.)

Newt Gingrich set this tone in Washington, D.C., and across national political discourse. He, along with his disciples, has continued this style of rhetoric as private citizen (albeit GOP luminary) Gingrich.

“There is a [Democratic] gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government if it can get control of it. I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion.”

(Gingrich, Newt, R-Ga., former U.S. House speaker; Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor; 11/14/2008.)

Newt’s style of rhetoric is known in certain circles as “say-anything politics.”

Barack Hussein (no relation) Obama and the Tea Party

Then the first African American president ran for the office and won. Donald Trump was appalled. And he took notes.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, which culminated in Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-Ill.) defeat of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Obama’s ethnic background was at the center of GOP opposition to his candidacy, overtly and covertly. The heaviest push, to appeal to the polite Republican families, was not aimed manifestly at Mr. Obama’s particular shade of epidermal pigmentation but rather every conceivable way to drape some form of “otherness” over him — to imprint upon the public that Obama is “not one of us.” Otherness was the substitute for Blackness.

They said he was not born in the United States, thereby ineligible to be president. Never mind the Hawaiian birth certificate. That was forged. Never mind the 1961 Hawaiian newspaper birth announcement. That was planted. His birth father was from Kenya, therefore Obama, the son, must have been born there. Father was raised Muslim though had converted to atheism by the time Barack was born, but Barack must be a secret Muslim (— not that there’s anything wrong with that). Never mind that Barack Obama’s parents divorced when he was 2 years old and that he saw his father only once more after that at age 10. Never mind that Barack Obama was raised by his Wichita, Kansas-born Caucasian mother and her parents in Hawaii, USA. And never mind Barack Obama’s decades as a member of a Christian church.

It was all part of the Kenyan (Black) Manchurian Candidate conspiracy.

After Inauguration Day 2009, the GOP got serious, collectively vowing that this Black man never would be reelected.

The tea party movement was created as a far-right wing of the Republican Party with the goals of denying President Obama a second term and torpedoing his first. Ostensibly it was a grass-roots political movement pursuing the principles of small government, lower taxes, and reduced national debt. In practice it was an “AstroTurf” movement, i.e., purported to be spontaneous but created by veiled big-money Republican interests, and a vehicle to promote bigoted tropes and false conspiracies about the president. Tea party proponents often dispensed with the niceties of racial dog-whistling, instead perpetuating blatant lies and epithets.

The polite Republicans did not participate directly in the tea party’s vile bile thrown at the president; however, they tacitly approved of it by not speaking out against the racism and lies. Their increasing practice of quietly looking the other way — because the bile supported their cause — helped create a Republican Party monster, of which the party lost control. It set the stage for a Frankensteinian Donald Trump presidential run, nomination, and administration.

To John McCain’s credit, he did not condone the lies and xenophobic attacks. But the movement got away from John. Within a short time after he lost the 2008 election his outdated political style of largely honest debate on the issues became a quaint memory among Republicans.

“I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle [against Democrats] over the nature of America, by the time [my grandchildren] are my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.” 

(Gingrich, Newt, R-Ga., 2012 presidential primary candidate, former U.S. House speaker; pre-campaign speech; Cornerstone Church, San Antonio, Texas; 3/27/2011.)

Mitt Romney and the Boston Orwellian Offense

On May 29, 2012, Gov. Mitt Romney (R-Mass.) clinched the GOP presidential nomination to run against incumbent President Barack Obama (D-Ill.). In 2011, Donald Trump threatened but declined to run as a Republican. He was, however, paying attention.

Mr. Romney was a mixed bag of veracity and fib. Coming into the 2012 election season, his reputation was intact as the former successful governor of Massachusetts. Under his leadership, the state had created a model for nationwide health care reform with the goal of establishing health insurance for almost all state residents. There were three primary components to this 2006 law, An Act Providing Access to Affordable, Quality, Accountable Health Care, aka “Romneycare”: 1) individual mandate (almost all residents were required to have at least minimal coverage; 2) preexisting condition coverage (no health exclusions); and 3) subsidized coverage for low-income residents. Obama’s ACA (aka “Obamacare”) followed this model closely.

Over the course of his presidential campaign, Gov. Romney quickly attained the reputation of equivocator, prevaricator, and finally, liar. President Obama’s signature legislation, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA for short), was modeled after Romney’s Massachusetts health care reform. But because the ACA had become so hated among Republicans (mostly because Obama had introduced it), Romney felt he had to distance himself from it and lie about its similarities to his plan.

Which he did. Lie.

Mr. Romney supported abortion rights before 2015. But while positioning himself to run for president, he began opposing those rights.

Throughout the campaign Mitt said repeatedly, “Obama inherited a bad economy and made it worse.” The “made it worse” part had been rebutted widely even by lauded Republicans.

Fellow GOP members chided Mitt Romney for his truth-bending (-breaking?) and flip-flopping ways. Even Newt Gingrich said he lied.

“Defending the right to lie as a candidate is a pretty bad idea.”

(referring to a recent statement by Mitt Romney)

(Gingrich, Newt, R-Ga., 2012 presidential primary candidate, former U.S. House speaker; Westwood One’s The Laura Ingraham Show; 12/21/2011.)

“Being a well-lubricated weather vane, being on different sides of the critically important issues of the day as Mitt Romney has found himself over and over … is not what the American people are looking for.” 

(Huntsman, Jon, R-Utah, 2012 presidential primary candidate, former [Obama] ambassador to China, former governor; hospital expansion dedication; Huntsman Cancer Institute, Salt Lake City, Utah; 10/28/2011.

“Romney … is a recidivist reviser of his principles.”

(Will, George, conservative writer and commentator; “Mitt Romney, the Pretzel Candidate”; The Washington Post; 10/28/2011.)

“I have … never seen a guy change his positions on so many things, so fast, on a dime. Everything.” 

(referring to Mitt Romney’s campaign tactics)

(Giuliani, Rudy, R-N.Y., 2008 presidential primary candidate, former New York City mayor; MSNBC’s Morning Joe; 12/15/2011.)

Finally, Jonathan Gruber, Ph.D., primary developer of Romney’s Massachusetts health care plan, refused to mince words.

“[Mitt Romney is] a liar.”

(criticizing Romney’s attempts to mislead the public and distort the similarities of the Massachusetts health care law [implemented by Romney as governor] and President Obama’s Affordable Care Act)

(Gruber, Jonathan, Ph.D., M.I.T. economics professor, core architect of “Romneycare”; CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, MD; 12/18/2011.)

Then the first African American president ran for reelection and won. Donald Trump was apoplectic.

“This election is a total sham and a travesty. … We can’t let this happen. … Revolution. … We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. … Let’s fight like hell and stop this disgusting injustice! The world is laughing at us. … We are not a democracy.”

(Trump, Donald, R-N.Y., billionaire real estate mogul, reality show personality; Twitter post; 11/6/2012.)

So Donald took more notes — and made plans.

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[AUTHOR’S NOTE:]

To Mr. Romney’s credit, he later became one of the Republican Party’s fiercest critics of candidate and President Donald Trump. In the first Trump impeachment trial (for extortion of Ukraine for political gain), Mitt was the lone GOP senator to vote for conviction. He also voted to convict, along with six other Senate Republicans, in Mr. Trump’s second impeachment trial (for incitement of insurrection Jan. 6, 2021, to overturn the 2020 reelection loss). Mitt has spoken out strongly and consistently against the election and reelection of former President Trump.

Mitt Romney is a great example of the sometimes complicated nature of politicians and other human beings. In 2012 he was known as a flip-floppity fabulist and protector of his wealthy brethren. From 2016 through 2024 he has been a patriotic giant among the minute minority of Republicans willing to disavow and disown Donald Trump’s inhumane, autocratic candidacy and presidency.

Setting the Table for a Donald Trump …

Let’s review the GOP response to the Obama years, 2009-2017:

— We’ve got blatant tea party racism, xenophobia, and white Christian nationalism.

— We’ve got flagrant Mitt Romney lying, admonished even by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, “the man who broke politics,” the man who said, “[Republicans] like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz,” the man for whom the term “say-anything politics” was coined.

— And we’ve got tacit approval of all this by “polite” Republicans who remained quiet, looked away, didn’t call out the obscene extremism within their party because in the short term it helped their cause.

These components set the stage for a President Donald Trump: the most vile, egomaniacal confidence artist ever to befoul a television screen; the most corrupt, incompetent, amoral president in American history.

“A perfect Stormy of electoral anomalies put Donald J. Trump in the White House Jan. 20, 2017. His supporters will argue against these points until the ‘Make America Great Again’ cows come home, but it’s clear — crystal — in my mind. The storm’s components? 1) Proved Russian pro-Donald election interference solicited, welcomed, and employed by the Trump campaign; 2) FBI Director James Comey’s misguided reopening (then reclosing) of the Hillary Clinton email investigation 11 days before Election Day; 3) a now-exposed last-minute illegal hush-money payment to adult-film actor Stormy Daniels to keep her extramarital affair with Donald secret [which in the wake of Mr. Trump’s Access Hollywood inadvertent hot-mic recording release — in which he bragged about his celebrity entitlement to sexually assault women — surely would have sunk his campaign]; and 4) Donald’s willingness to lie and shock with abandon.”

(Ersin, Tom; Trumpism: Why Traditional Republicans Should Withdraw Support [2017-2021: A Primer]: 2022.)

Donald took Mitt’s tenuous attachment to truth and Newt’s say-anything politics to never-before-seen extremes during a presidential campaign or presidency. Literally. (And I am literal in saying literally.) Donald told 30,000-plus documented lies during his first four-year administration.

Donald supercharged tea party xenophobia and race-baiting. He said publicly there were “very fine people on both sides” of a deadly 2017 clash between counterprotesters and “Unite the Right” groups including neo-Nazis, KKK members, and white nationalists. The protesters were marching with tiki torches chanting, “Jews will not replace us,” to promote white supremacy and stop the decommissioning of Confederate monuments in Charlottesville, Virginia.

In his first campaign’s kick-off speech Mr. Trump called Mexican immigrants “rapists” and drug dealers. On cable news he reiterated his call for the execution of five Black and Latino young men even after they were exonerated by DNA evidence and freed from prison. To his White House aides he called Haiti, El Salvador, and some African nations “sh*thole countries” and said Nigerian immigrants would never “go back to their huts” after they saw America. He opined that not enough immigrants to the U.S. come from “nice [white] countries” like Denmark and Switzerland. Check the google for more, lots more.

… in Spite of His Crimes

Donald Trump disrespects democracy and the Constitution. He tried to use the Department of Justice, with zero evidence, to investigate and jail political opponents. He tried to extort a desperate U.S. ally for false dirt on his likely presidential competitor. And when he later lost to that competitor, he tried to overturn — violently and systematically — that presidential election. Again, do your own search for more evidence of his unfitness to hold any political office. There are far too many examples to list them all here. 

Then there are the crimes being processed by the judicial system.

In May 2024 Donald was found guilty, by a jury of his peers, of all 34 felony counts of business records fraud and election interference in relation to the Stormy Daniels cover-up. He was convicted in spite of having some of the most expensive lawyers money could buy.

Add to this his additional offenses since he entered government in 2017:

3/31/17 — Trump University Fraud: services were found to be simply “infomercials constantly pressuring people to spend more” — $25 million settlement; Trump University forced to shut down permanently

11/7/19 — Trump Foundation Fraud: funds were used for personal and campaign use, never for charity — $2 million judgment; Trump (“charitable”) Foundation forced to shut down permanently

12/6/22 — Trump Organization Criminal Tax Fraud — $1.61 million judgment against Trump Org.; CFO pleads guilty to 15 felonies, sentenced to 5 months prison, $2 million in penalties; then in April 2024, CFO sentenced to 5 additional months in prison for lying to protect Mr. Trump from criminal exposure

5/9/23 — Sexual Assault and Defamation of E. Jean Carroll: judge clarifies it was “rape” — $5 million judgment

1/26/24 — Defamation of E. Jean Carroll — $88.3 million judgment (he wouldn’t stop defaming her after the first judgment)

2/16/24 — Civil Fraud: massive overvaluing, undervaluing of assets to acquire loans, better loan terms, lower taxes — $355 million judgment (plus $95 million interest)

5/30/24 — Again, Election Interference and Cover-Up: falsification of business records — 34 felony convictions, 10 gag order violations

And let’s look closer at his two, two, impeachments:

12/18/19 — Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Congress — The president tried to extort Ukraine — by withholding desperately needed military aid previously authorized by Congress to fend off Russia’s invasion of its borders — in exchange for phony dirt on his primary presidential opponent, Joe Biden. Then President Trump tried to cover it all up.

1/13/21 — Incitement of Insurrection — The president conspired to overturn his 2020 reelection loss: 1) spread the lie that the election was fraudulent; 2) plotted to replace legitimate Biden electors with fraudulent Trump electors in several key states; 3) pressured election officials to overturn their state’s vote count to favor him; and 4) incited his supporters to storm the Capitol to stop the counting of electoral ballots. Then President Trump tried to cover it all up.

Mr. Trump was not convicted in either impeachment trial by the Senate only because enough Republicans were blindly loyal to him no matter the depth of his corruption, no matter what he did. But both legal cases were made far beyond a reasonable doubt to anyone who values truth and the rule of law.

Oh, and let’s not forget the Russian collusion and obstruction of justice during Donald Trump’s campaign and first year in office:

“Contrary to popular belief, special counsel Robert Mueller did not determine there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election cycle. The Mueller report specifically did not draw a conclusion on collusion, instead saying only that the campaign’s activities fell short of legally indictable conspiracy. Later, the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee’s ranking member and associates determined that the Trump campaign’s dealings, communications, and cooperation with the Russians [to cheat in the election] were the very definition of collusion. Though for some ungodly reason, that collusion was not illegal.

“The obstruction of justice, however, was illegal. … Special counsel Robert Mueller laid out 10 areas of obstruction of justice [in which Trump blocked or impeded the Russia election interference investigation], five of which were widely considered by legal experts across the political spectrum to be indictable and convictable. … The 10-15 pages of the [report’s] Introductions and Executive Summaries explain everything you need to know.”

(Ersin, Tom; Trumpism: Why Traditional Republicans Should Withdraw Support [2017-2021: A Primer]: 2022.)

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Astonishingly, this guy won the presidency again in 2024, albeit only by about 1.6% of the popular vote and less than a majority.

This is what tacit approval of a white nationalist, serial liar, and aspiring autocrat can produce. Donald took over the Grand Old Party. Early on, “respectable” Republicans looked the other way in pursuit of fewer regulations and conservative judges, and they ultimately created a monstrous emperor. Now almost all GOP politicians are beholden to the emperor if they want to hold onto their offices, their power, their financial connections. Criticize the emperor in any way — or even be insufficiently enthusiastic in your praise — and you’ll be tweet-attacked, primary-ed in your next election, shunned at the (country) club, excommunicated.

The denial across the Republican Party is so powerful that even countless formerly respected members have no influence. Many of those patriots spoke the truth about Donald Trump’s unfitness for office because they served in his 2017-2021 administration and witnessed close-up his danger to democracy and national security. But the Trumpian disinformation, mass hysteria, white nationalism, irrational fear and grievance, and selfishness run so deep that reality has no meaning for the MAGA masses.

Unless you were born before 1932, the 2024 presidential election, literally, was the most important of your lifetime.

Pity the fool that missed the real issue — democracy.

Then pity the rest of us because there were too many fools.■