Donald Trump Didn't Kill The Tea Party

Donald Trump was the Tea Party.

Loud, arrogantly ignorant, bigoted, subsisting on a steady diet of manufactured outrage, paranoid conspiracies and narcissism.  

This has been the thesis of a bunch of stuff I've written, including this bluntly entitled post from 2015 ("Trump is the Tea Party") and in 2016 ("Donald Trump: The King Of All Teabaggers").

The Tea Party was also, as everyone now knows, a scam.  A successful and well-funded Republican rebranding shell game cooked up to allow the meathead base of the Republican Party to weasel out of responsibility for all the horrific shit they had cheered on during the Bush administration and seamless transition into a long, loud racist primal scream against the changing complexion of America generally, and the Kenyan Usurper specifically.

As usual, while Fox News ran breathless, wall-to-wall coverage every time a dozen Gadsden-flag waving goobers gathered in a Ramada Inn parking lot, and the mainstream media gushed over this brand-new, grass-roots movement that had sprung up spontaneously everywhere at once and (they swore) had no previous record of political involvement...

...it was the scurvy dogs of the Liberal blogosphere/podcast-universe who tested the patience of our readers and listeners by pointing out, week after week, year after year, that there Was No Fucking Tea Party.  That is was nothing but  a bunch of Republican assholes who wanted cosplay as patriots and independents and scream about Obama and not be bothered with with a lot of questions about the Bush/Cheney bumper stickers they had forgotten to scrape off of their trucks.

Or one disreputable Liberal wag put in all the way back in 2009:

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, [Republicans] have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

And here I am again, back in 2016:

 By early 2010, it was absolutely clear to anyone who wasn't a Republican operative or enabler that the "tea party" was emphatically NOT a spontaneous movement of concerned citizens with no previous political affiliation, but was just one more, GOP-manufactured re-branding scam.  Ed Kilgore wrote about it, as did Max Blumenthal (pay-walled site) and E.J. Dionne. There was also this July, 2010 Gallup poll that concluded:

The Tea Party movement has been the focus of media attention during the past year, and has had some success in getting its preferred candidates nominated or elected in the 2009-2010 election cycle. However, as Gallup has pointed out, those who describe themselves as Tea Party supporters are in many ways indistinguishable from, and largely a subset of, Republican identifiers more generally.

But here's the thing.  There was absolutely no stomach in the Beltway media for reporting the obvious fact that these idiots in tricorner hats were nothing but the same old Republican wingnuts...

Then a funny thing happened.

Donald Trump came oozing down the escalator and into the fanatical embrace of the Republican base  which trigger Republican Joe Scarborough to follow the example of David Brooks and come right out and say well of course the whole "tea party" thing was bullshit and of course we all knew it   (h/t Heather at Crooks & Liars)

So why bring this up now?

Because while you doing important, real-world stuff, your Never Trump "allies" have been busy, busy, busy rewriting history in all sorts of ways, but always with the same goal: to isolate Donald Trump as the Patient Zero of GOP madness, uniquely culpable for the gibbering, fascist nightmare that is the GOP, while absolving themselves and the pre-Trump GOP generally of any whiff of responsibility for what their party has become.

For example, this from your friends at The Bulwark:

It's pretty straightforward.

Host Charlie Sykes reads-with-alarm a laundry list of the hundreds of billions of dollars Joe Biden is asking America to invest in its citizens' health, education, infrastructure and future and pines for the good old days when principled conservatives would put on tri-corner hats and gather in Ramada Inn parking lots to firmly and patriotically insist on austerity and lower taxes.

Which is not at all as I remember it.

And having read out this list of new and proposed spending which, make no mistake, is huge, Mr. Sykes asks...

Sykes:  So here's my provocative question.  Where's the Tea Party now?  Where's the grass-roots push against all of this spending?  Why aren't we seeing rallies and demonstrations and, y'know, the people with the tri-corner hats now given all of this?  Because instead we're getting a lotta the stuff about the Dr. Seuss, the bogus meat story, the Kamala Harris book story and, y'know, some rhetoric about socialism, but where's the Tea Party?

Amanda Carpenter: There is none.  Donald Trump killed it.  It's over.  Nobody...nobody cares anymore.  Nobody cares.  Um, I think this goes to the larger leadership vacuum, that we are facing -- I don't want to say "post-Trump Republican Party" -- maybe just "post-Trump White House"...

Nope.

Nope.

And nope.

Perhaps once upon a time there were a few dozen, Ayn Rand/Libertarian purists out there who believed taxes are slavery and all government spending is the work of the Devil, but they had nothing to do with the roaring, raging Fake Tea Party shoutfests that were promoted and covered by Fox News like the Second Coming.

And because Never Trumpers are coalition of media-connected Republican men and women whose self-image would be destroyed if they ever took honest stock of their party's past and their own responsibility for how it became what it is today, this relentless revising of the past is never going to stop.

Burn The Lifeboats