A former conservative talk show host is horrified by Trump and the Republican Party. He's even written a book about it.
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Charlie Sykes isn’t the only person to recognize that the Republican Party has gone batshit crazy, but in many ways he’s one of the more interesting voices to comment on the phenomenon. A former conservative talk show host in his native Wisconsin, Sykes was on the “Never Trump” train from the beginning, watching with horror as the orange-haired one won his party’s presidential nomination, then the office itself, then saw how members of the party managed to justify their support for a man he describes as “an utterly unqualified reality TV star.”
“The capacity of Republicans to rationalize their support appears to be bottomless,” says Sykes, whose forthcoming book, How the Right Lost Its Mind, is the political equivalent of the most frightening Stephen King novel you’ve ever read. “I am less horrified by Trump himself than by what he has done to the rationalizers and enablers. Why are you people defending this, why don’t you see what he’s doing to your own cause?”
Well, it may be about tax cuts, immigration, and other aspects of the conservative political agenda, but as Sykes, who is now a regular on MSNBC, says in the book, “after Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton, the Democrats need to perform an autopsy; the Republicans need an exorcism.”
Sykes see Trump as a symptom of forces that have thoroughly corrupted the GOP—celebrations of nativism and authoritarianism, while ignoring birthers, racists, and conspiracy theorists in its midst (say hi to Alex Jones and Matt Drudge), the toxic rhetoric of Fox News and right-wing talk show hosts, the politics of paranoia (again, say hi to Alex Jones and Infowars) and a conservative base that is now essentially post-literate.
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One person Sykes is definitely disappointed in—although they remain friends—is Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, whom he has known, and respected, for years. “I have said Ryan has struck a Faustian bargain,” says Sykes. “I think he is fundamentally decent, but is unwilling to take Trump on, and is willing to stay on his good side to get tax cuts. And he has made the calculation that as speaker he doesn’t have the independence to comment on every stupid tweet.”
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“Conservatives have to move from radical change agents to say, ‘How can we do no harm?’ How can we maintain prosperity without maintaining this massive gap in income inequality? We’re still stuck with ‘zombie conservatives,’ people who apply lower tax rates to every economic situation. Can we at least have policies that relate to conditions on the ground?”
Well, maybe. But Sykes doesn’t seem all that hopeful. In the short term, “more chaos and division.” The best-case scenario, he says, is the Republicans in Congress “strike out on their own, that Trump becomes irrelevant to their agenda.” And, of course, there’s the Mueller investigation wild card, which could lead who knows where.
But in the long term, Sykes is downright pessimistic. “I don’t see the Republican Party coming out of this intact,” he says. “Alienating women, minorities, and young people for a generation, you’re not going to be able to rub the stink off.”