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With many GOPers, denial Trumps reality

With his big win in the Indiana primary yesterday, it's all but assured business mogul Donald Trump will reach 1,237 delegates and become the Republican nominee for president. While many on the right are distancing themselves from Trump and laying claim he's not representative of the party as a whole, let's not kid ourselves; this had been a long time coming.

1) When Democratic President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, Republican progressives and Democratic conservatives slowly began switching sides.

2) During the Reagan years, the GOP started implementing a trickledown-economic platform, favoring the uber-wealthy over the middle- and lower-classes.

3) With Bill Clinton in office, right-leaning talk radio and cable news outlets (Fox News) made their debuts and started dominating the airwaves, paying more attention to conspiracy theories than fact-checkers.

4) The 9/11 terrorist attacks prompted multiple wars overseas, the government to pass laws favoring a sense of security over liberty, and wrongly painting terrorists as Muslims (or vice versa).

5) Almost immediately after Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, Republican leaders in Congress said their top goal was to limit him to one term. Not long after he entered the Oval Office, a seemingly constant stream of lies was spread about him, from him not being an American citizen, to him being Muslim, to his healthcare plan including death panels, and beyond.

6) Especially since President Obama got elected, Republican politicians have attempted to enforce an increasing number of laws which: Strip women of their reproductive rights, prevent women from receiving equal pay for equal work, deny LGBTs equal rights and services, make it more difficult for multiple demographics to vote (especially minorities, students, and women), provide more tax breaks for the top 1% than the bottom 99%, make it more difficult for women to receive birth-control coverage on their employer-based healthcare plans, limit the number of people eligible for Medicaid, make it more difficult for non-heterosexual white Christian men to be seen and treated as equals in the eyes of the law, etc.

So in comes Donald Trump, who wants to do the following:

- Build a wall between the southern U.S. border with Mexico

- Temporarily bar Muslims from entering this country

- Punish women for having abortions

- Deport all illegal immigrants

- Bomb countries left and right in the Middle East

Not only that, but Trump has:

- Made racist statements against just about every ethnicity one could conjure

- Been openly sexist more times than Sesame Street's The Count could tally

- Uttered extremely xenophobic statements, especially with regard to Muslims

- Made his fortune at least partially due to the $1 million his father initially loaned him (so no, he didn't "build that")

- Been married three times, twice to immigrants (hasn't always been the most faithful husband either)

- Been graded as mostly honest just 9% of the time according to fact-checker Politifact, while he's been graded as mostly dishonest 76% of the time

The Republican Party has spent years spreading fear and paranoia via hyperbole, Fox News, talk radio, and rampant lies. They've done all they can to showcase all whom don't classify as a straight white Christian male in a negative light. With the GOP, not only are corporations viewed as people, corporations trump people, In addition to that, a sense of superiority trumps equality, oligarchy trumps democracy, fallacy trumps reason, and denial Trumps reality. The end result is Donald Trump - the 2016 Republican nominee for president. He may not be representative of the Republican Party of the distant past, but he's a direct reflection of what the GOP has become.

http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/

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