The Kind-Hearted Smart Aleck

Any time I hear a Republican sound surprised by the rise of Donald Trump within the GOP, I have to chuckle, for his ascendancy in the party didn't just happen overnight, and for as unintentional as it may have been, the president has become a direct reflection of decades worth of GOP regressions. The Republican Party used to be a respectable party. It was the party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower. It was a party that supported healthcare reform similar to the Affordable Care Act, a party that supported stricter gun laws, a party that supported higher taxes for the wealthy, a party that fought for the civil rights of all. Had I been alive in the days of Lincoln, I would have been a Republican, but it's not 1865 anymore. The GOP is no longer the party of Lincoln; it's the party of Trump, and with this new identity, the party has gone from respectable to contemptible, losing their sense of selves, and with that, the sense of what's best for the cou...

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 ...