The Heart And Mind Of The Republican Party, Revisited.

Earlier I wrote a piece about how I see the Republican Party.  It's not based on research but on my own experiences and the opinions those inform.

I recently read that post again and still agree with most of it, except that the problems of the Trump base are putting several of the more traditional type free-market (free-money-for-some) Republican politicians in a real bind, and the same applies to the dilemma of how to accommodate (or not) the increasingly more explicit racism and sexism of the party's new base and of some inside the Trump administration.

Some Republican politicians appear to have made the Faustian bargain.  Paul Ryan might be one of those.*  What he and other free-market Republicans get from Trump is so good** that they are willing to wear blinders and ignore all the Trumpian outrages, Trump's penchant for dictatorship and his groveling adulation of one Vladimir Putin.

I cannot predict how the internal power struggles inside the Republican Party will develop.  But its extreme right wing fringe is currently dragging the party even further to the right, and the impact of such "thinkers" as Stephen Miller inside the Trump administration means that white supremacists/misogynists are emboldened in general.

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* Though he is retiring, in order to spend more time with his teenage children.  Right.  He  is probably retiring because he calculates that Trump, like Humpty-Dumpty, is going to have a great fall, and all the Republican congresscritters cannot put him back together again.  This means that Ryan must wait out the coming catastrophe, after which he can return to Washington as the golden money-boy.

** Like much lower taxes for the super-rich, many fewer regulations to protect the workers or the environment.