The Ant That Killed the Grand Old ElephANT (Party) in America

 

An old African proverb says, “An ant can kill an elephant.”

The ant is said to get into the elephant’s ears and trunk and gnaw and nibble until the pachyderm goes completely crazy and dies from exhaustion.

That African proverb has come true in America.

The ant that vanquished the Grand Old Republican elephant is none other than Myrmecia pyriformis (bull dog ant), or hereafter to be known as “Donalditus Trumpus”.

Donald Trump tunneled his way right into the ears and trunk of the Grand Old Party (GOP, Republican Party), drove its establishment leaders batty and became the presumptive nominee.

The republican bosses tried to sneeze him out. They tried to cotton-swab him out only to drive him deeper into their ear canals.  They tried to cough him out. Nothing doing. Donalditus Trumpus kept on tunneling.

Just like the bull dog ant, Trump cannibalized his party brethren. One by one he chewed, ripped, vivisected, chomped, munched, eviscerated and mutilated them, leaving their carcasses strewn on the campaign battlefield.

Trump renamed Senator Ted Cruz as “Lyin’ Ted” and described him as “a pussy”.  Trump taunted Cruz: “Be careful, Lyin’ Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife!” Trump said Cruz’s father was associated with J.F.K.’s killer. But Trump did not call Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh”. Former House Speaker John Boehner did.

Trump berated Jeb Bush as “another clueless politician” and a “desperate pathetic figure.”

Trump maligned Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) as “nasty” and a “dumb mouth piece.”

Trump vilified Gov. John Kasich as “a dummy, a total dud” and “bought and paid for by the lobbyists.”

Trump derided Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) as “a low life”, “a basket case”, “a choker”, a “fraud lightweight”, “a nasty little guy” and a “joke”.

Trump reviled Mitt Romney as “a total joke, and everyone knows it!”

Trump mocked Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) as “lowly” and “truly weird”.

Trump called New Jersey governor a “weak” “little boy”. Christie called Trump one of the “carnival barkers of today.” A few months later, Christie “proudly” endorsed Trump as the “best fit for the White House.”

Trump dismissed the Koch Brothers (the billionaire Republican Party bank rollers) as puppet masters “looking for a new puppet”. (I guess bull dog ants don’t make good puppets.)

Trump charged the Republican nomination process is “crooked” and “rigged”.

Like the bulldog ant, Trump spared no one. He stung his rivals and critics injecting his venom of racism, sexism, fascism, militarism, jingoism, narcissism, infantilism and vigilantism.

Trump’s rivals tried to challenge him in a doomsday mud wrestling (mudslinging) cage match.

They lost!

They should have heeded George Bernard Shaw’s admonition: “Never wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.”

Trump loves to wrestle in muck.

Marco Rubio called Trump a “con man” and a “white supremacist”.

Cruz attacked Trump as a “pathological liar”, “utterly amoral”, “a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country has ever seen” and “a serial philanderer”.

Kasich called Trump “divisive and insulting”.

Trump wallowed in verbal filth and loved it. He soaked himself in the slime and grime of fear and smear dirty politics and tricks.

Today Donald Trump is King of the Republican Ant Hill!

“It is necessary to destroy the national Republican Party to save it!”

The famous war correspondent Peter Arnett reporting from Vietnam in 1968 quoted a U.S. Army major who said, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

It has now become necessary to “destroy” the national Republican Party to save it.

Of course, a “recommendation” to “destroy” the Republican Party is a tautology. It’s like what Mark Twain once said, “Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.”

Donald Trump has already destroyed the national Republican Party. It can’t be destroyed again!

The history of the Republican Party after 2016 will be written as R.P.B.T. (Republican Party Before Trump) and R.P.A.T (Republican Party After Trump).  Or it could just be R.I.P. Republicans.

The Republican Party is one of the oldest political parties in the world going back to the mid-1850s. It was founded by anti-slavery activists, modernists, ex-Whigs, and ex-Free Soilers (who opposed slavery in the western territories).

The Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, the “Great Emancipator” is dead (and has been for quite a while). R.I.P.!

What is the Republican Party with Donald Trump as its standard bearer? What does the Republican Party of Donald Trump stand for?

Donald Trump’s Republican Party is openly the party of the Ku Klux Klan, southern segregationists and Neo-Nazis.

Trump is the White Horseman of the Trump-Aryans.

But truth be told, the Republican Party is reaping what it sowed decades ago.

Beginning in 1968, Republicans (led by Tricky Dick Nixon) adopted the so-called “southern strategy” in an effort to gain the political support of disaffected racist white voters with promises to roll back the gains of the civil and voting rights movement. The Republican Party became a symbol of white supremacy in the South.

For over four decades, the Republican Party played dog whistle politics. They promised to enforce “law and order” (code for crackdown on African Americans). They pledged to “dismantle the new deal state” (code for significantly cutting back Medicare, Medicaid,  Social Security and eliminating Obama Care).  They raved and ranted against “illegal aliens” (code for brown foreigners and non-Christians  taking over America). They accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists” (code for Islamophobia). They preached “compassionate conservatism” or “We do not believe in a sink-or-swim society.” By 2008, George Bush had sunk the American economy and millions of poor and middle class Americans to the bottom of the ocean.

The Republican Party steadfastly stuck to its southern strategy for decades and refused to change. The Republican base clung to its ideology of white supremacy and fed on a diet of racism, sexism, chauvinism, xenophobia and religious bigotry.

But America continued to change.  The Republican Party remained willfully oblivious of the principle, “demography is destiny”. That is, population trends and distributions determine the future of a nation. The Census Bureau says in less than three decades the U.S. will become a majority nonwhite nation. By around 2020, “more than half of the nation’s children are expected to be part of a minority race or ethnic group”, according to the Census Bureau. The youth vote gave Obama (60%) the edge in his 2012 victory over Romney (36%). The U.S. has become “more diverse, more nonwhite, more liberal, more secular, and more immigrant and more LGBT-friendly.”

The East Coast establishment Republicans cynically manipulated benighted white segregationist southerners talking about gun rights, abortion, school prayer and immigration. But the southern segregationists suddenly woke up when they saw a black man in the White House. The “Tea Party” movement was launched after Obama became president with the alleged aim of reducing the U.S. national debt and federal budget deficit by reducing government spending, and for lower taxes. Their defining rallying cry became, “take-our-country-back”. From whom? From Obama and his ilk?

Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), before he became majority leader, declared the Republican War on Obama: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president. That’s my single most important political goal, along with every active Republican in the country.”

Obama today is laughing at McConnell as the Republican Party creeps into inevitable implosion.

Re-inventing  the Republican Party

Republican South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, the second Indian-American governor in the United States is “scared”. “I think what [Trump] will do to the Republican Party really makes us question who we are and what we’re about.” Former Minnesota Republican senator Norm Coleman hopes “the party won’t destroy itself” with Trump as the standard bearer.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) simply could not support Trump because “I’m just not ready to do that at this point. I’m not there right now.”

The Koch Brothers, the most powerful bankrollers of conservative causes in America, declared they will not use their billion-dollar campaign war chest to block Trump’s presidential nomination. Charles Koch said there is an outside chance he could support Hillary in November, but “We would have to believe her actions would be quite different than her rhetoric. Let me put it that way.” Asked if it was possible another Clinton could be better than a Republican, Koch said: “It’s possible.”

Republican leaders are telling their rank-and-file members to stay away from Cleveland and do their own thing locally.

It seems a good many establishment Republicans will likely leave Trump to hang out to dry. Trump made his bed. Now he has to lie in it.

Trump presents an existential question and a clear choice for those claiming to be Lincoln Republicans.

Republicans today should heed Lincoln’s words in his 1862 annual message to Congress: “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise — with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

Or they can hope for salvation in their hopeless White Knight to win the White House for them.

Where the hell is Jon Huntsman when the Republicans need him most?

Time magazine once called Jon Huntsman, “The Potential Republican Presidential Candidate Democrats Most Fear.” The Christian Science Monitor asked, “Is Huntsman the one Obama fears the most?”

Huntsman is a former republican governor of Utah, a businessman and diplomat who served in the administrations of five U.S. Presidents including service as Obama’s Ambassador to China.

After he came in third place in the 2012 New Hampshire Republican Primary, Huntsman got out of the race. He reamed his fellow republican candidates, and condemned the race itself, for the personal attacks and negative campaigning. “At its core, the Republican Party is a party of ideas, but the current toxic form of our political discourse does not help our cause,” declared Hunstman.

Huntsman refused to attend the 2012 Republican Convention or any other future party convention “until the party focuses on a bigger, bolder, more confident future for the United States—a future based on problem solving, inclusiveness, and a willingness to address the trust deficit, which is every bit as corrosive as our fiscal and economic deficits.”

Jon Huntsman is what resurrected Republican Party needs. But where the hell is Jon Huntsman when the Republicans need him most?

When Trump is officially coronated (I meant nominated) as the Republican candidate in July 2016, I hope to finally see all of the republicans who have been hiding their faces behind white sheets for decades. It would be great to associate the sheets with the faces.

Donald Trump says, “I’m representing a lot of anger out there.  We’re not angry people, but we’re angry at the way this country’s being run. And a lot of them are angry at the way the Republican Party is being run.”

Trump and his Trumpistas are angry, but not about gridlock or the way the “country is being run”.

Trump and the Trumpistas are angry because THEY no longer exclusively run the country. They are angry because they are no longer the Kings of the Hill.

Trump and the Trumpistas should know that the politics of anger is the politics of self-destruction.

Trump and the Trumpistas remind me of the allegorical advice of the two wolves a Cherokee grandfather gave to his grandson. “My son, there’s a battle between two wolves inside us all. One is Evil. It’s anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, inferiority, lies and ego. The other is Good. It’s joy, peace, love, hope, humility, kindness and truth.”

The boy listened and asked, “Grandfather, which wolf wins?” The grandfather replied: “The one you feed.”

Donald Trump can overfeed his wolves a high calorie diet of racism, sexism, fascism, militarism, jingoism and vigilantism.

It is up to decent freedom-loving Americans to fight the Big Bad Wolf  with joy, peace, love and hope.

I believe in the end the bull dog ant that destroyed the Republican Party will prove to be a Pharaoh ant (Monomorium pharaonic) in the general election. He will be nothing more than a bothersome and exasperating political pest.

Behold the Pharaoh King of the Republican Ant Hill!

Personally, I share Will Rogers’ view that “Politics is the best show in America. I love animals and I love politicians, and I like to watch both of ‘em at play, either back home in their native state, or after they’ve been captured and sent to a zoo, or to Washington.”

Better yet, I like a show where I can watch pigs wallowing in muck.

I am not worried about infestation of America by Donalditus Trumpus because I believe “God takes care of fools, drunks, babies and the U.S. of A.”

Dump Trump!