When Lindsay Graham was running for President in 2016, he warned, “Trump is a wrecking ball for the future of the Republican Party.” You nailed it, Lindsay, although your total post-election turnaround on Trump revealed your spineless character. It’s sad that millions of Republican primary voters preferred a lying, racist, narcissistic, bullying, reality TV star to John Kasich, a decent honorable man who was then the governor of Ohio.

Let’s replace the wrecking ball metaphor and liken the Republican Party to the ill-fated Titanic. That Republican ship hit its first iceberg with the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the man who cut the top tax rate from 70% to 50%, thereby helping the rich get richer and widening the gap between those at the top and everyone else.

George W. Bush cleverly loaded white evangelical Christians on board to get elected and continued with the tax cuts for the wealthy scheme. From 2004-2012, the top 1% of households received average tax cuts of more than $50,000 each year; on average, those households received a total tax cut of over $570,000 over that period. The message to future Republicans was clear: play the anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage cards to get elected, then hand out more cash to your wealthy friends.

Regretfully, Sen. John McCain hit another iceberg when he selected the mindless “Christian” populist Sarah Palin as his running mate, a decision he later came to regret.

Donald Trump added a new wrinkle to the Republican playbook: Boldly tap into the racist fears of millions of white Americans, especially those in the midwest and south. He squeaked by with an electoral college victory in 2016, although he lost the national popular vote by 3 million. He lost the national popular vote by an even wider margin (7 million votes) in 2020, although he claimed, in true Trumpian style, that the election had been fixed, that he really won in a “landslide.”. His gullible followers believed him; in fact, many of them remain convinced that Trump got robbed. The con man became the undisputed head of the Republican Party, the raging, conspiracy-spouting captain of the Trumptanic.

And then came the invasion of the Capitol on Jan. 6, the biggest iceberg of all, as Trump’s most rabid supporters, armed with guns and stop-the-steal signs and Trump banners and Confederate flags, invaded our nation’s Capitol with the clear intent of overturning the election. Five people died because of these domestic terrorists, but Trump’s overall popularity barely dipped, a phenomenon best explained by psychologists, experts on cults and, in time, by future historians.

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A few brave Republicans have jumped the Trumptanic, putting principles over party. Republican Rep. Liz Cheney wrote, “There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois, showed his spine when he stated, “We have lost our soul. When you end up where principles don’t matter, beliefs don’t matter, it’s just about who can be the loudest and kind of maintain power through raw anger and aggressiveness, you’re no different than a lot of Latin American countries at this point. If it costs us an election to speak out and save our souls, let’s do it.”

Kristopher Purcell, who worked in the Bush White House’s communication office for six years, reported that roughly 60 to 70 former Bush officials have decided to leave the party or are cutting ties to it.

From January 6-12, about 4,600 Republicans changed their party status in Colorado, according to a CPR News analysis.

Nearly 10,000 Pennsylvania voters dropped out of the Republican party in the first 25 days of the year, according to the secretary of state’s office.

John Danforth, a former Republican Senator, said, “The worst thing is that we have become really kind of a grotesque caricature of what the Republican Party has traditionally been. We were founded as the party of the union, of holding the country together. And now we have got on this populist track which is very much us against them.”

The ever-conniving Sen. Mitch McConnell tried to play it both ways. After voting to acquit Trump in the impeachment trial, he got on camera to totally trash him. Nice try, Mitch. It won’t work. Too late. You lost your chance to throw Trump over the side.

It was reported that the band on the Titanic was playing “Nearer My God to Thee” as the ship went down. That same tune comes to mind as I consider the future of the Republican Party.

David Treadwell, a Brunswick writer, welcomes commentary and suggestions for future “Just a Little Old” columns. dtreadw575@aol.com.

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