Is Gaetz a true believer or fellow grifter? And does it matter?
One of the dangerous aspects of this is that we don’t know exactly what defines “yesterday’s Republican Party” and “Donald Trump’s party.”
Take this, for instance. It’s an exchange between former hard right GOP congressman Joe Walsh and current hard right GOP congressman Mo Brooks:
Brooks doesn’t care about being a hypocrite, of course. He is shameless and his voters are too. In this respect, Trump is no different than Bush or Reagan or any of the other Republicans who inevitably hike the deficit with outlandish tax cuts and military spending and then try to force the Democrats who take over after they mess everything up to cut programs and funding for people who need it in order to “cut the deficit.” They do this, of course, while insisting that taxes can never be raised and military spending can never be cut. Remember, it was Dick Cheney who said, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”
This is a very old dynamic. Democrats need to quote Dick Cheney and just do what is necessary.
What is new is people like Joe Walsh coming to understand the shamelessnes of the Republican Party and pointing it out. I don’t know if it has any influence. But there are bound to be some people out there who are uncomfortable with the hypocrisy of it. A handful anyway. Will it make a difference? I honestly don’t know.
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