I always saw the Republican Party as the party of values.  I voted for Republicans more than once.  The Calvinist in me was often drawn to them.

To me, the system’s genius was that two powerful forces – the Republican Party and the Democratic Party – balanced each other.

One stood for austerity, limited government, and the centrality of business. The other saw itself as the people’s party and fought for the needy and vulnerable.

They came together on the central structure that held the American experiment together – respect for the peaceful transfer of power, the sanctity of elections, and the need to put partisan issues aside when the country was in trouble or faced a serious crisis like a pandemic.

In the past 20 years, after the rise of the far-right conservative movement in the GOP, every single one of those central values has been discarded or annoyed. There is no longer anything holding the country together except the courts and most people.

The winner didn’t take all; he left something for the other side to do and treated the opposition with respect.

The Republicans are paying for their extremism now.

There is no worse fate I can think of for anyone or anything than Donald Trump taking over any institution that loves freedom and democracy.

The Republican Party has abandoned that system, and has become a kind of political cult, devoted not to the great values that spawned it, or to the larger welfare of the country and its constitution, but to one man – Donald Trump – who makes no secret of his utter contempt for democratic positions and his passion for fascism.

History has already taught us one thing: if Donald  Trump is your leader, get out the suicide net. He is reliable about the only thing: he stumbles and fails and his foot is full of the holes in which he shot himself.

There is only one value, one policy for cults and fascist states – the leader. For most of the country’s history, people who threatened the government were considered traitors. In the new incarnation of the Republican Party, people who oppose the leader become traitors, and the real traitors become patriots.

I hope the Founders are really dead, their worst nightmares are coming to pass.

Democracy is, in fact, a fragile system that has always depended on the two parties working with one another to make sure the structural glue held together.

This year, the courts and old-line Republican Party people held off Trump and his wid dogs for as long as they could and are now being overwhelmed and overrun.

Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, has long seen itself as not just another Midwestern Republican stronghold but the symbolic heart of the party: It’s home to the town of Ripon, the sentimental birthplace of the GOP.

The party began as a bunch of radical abolitionists. They have been mostly Old Farty white men in modern times, but there was nothing radical or extremist about them. They were true conservatives at a time when the term still had meaning.

This is a mesmerizing time for me as a former political writer. The GOP was founded in a schoolhouse in Fond du Lack to organize against slavery. How ironic that this once noble political party is now locked in a wrenching death throe that promises to upend American political history.

The party is shrinking itself every day, hemorrhaging moderate followers and supporters all over the country, as the party of Lincoln becomes the party of Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Green, and a raging army of angry and gullible white and mostly male shitheads.

If this is truly the last stand of white nationalists against people of color, then diversity has never seemed a better bet. The refugees are coming, the refugees are coming.

When we moved from Providence to Atlantic City, a black teacher who bought our house to the horror of our very racist white neighbors – they sprayed” n-lover” on our walls –  shocked me by telling me that he never understood how white men came to conquer so much of the world, when the white men he knew were all pretty stupid.

I took this as an exaggeration until I saw the Capitol riot and the shock of the rioters when they discovered what they were doing was not only illegal but was widely considered reprehensible.

They didn’t seem to know that they didn’t really have to do what Donald Trump was telling them to do.

As always, the media functions on a plane somewhere between paranoia and hysteria, understandable, in a way,  after being called enemies of the state for four years.

Still, the perspective hole widens, and I always feel this need to jump in and wave my arms a bit and say, wait, let’s take a closer look at all this turmoil.

The big thing to remember is that Donald Trump is very much the loser he always dreaded becoming. The media insist on portraying him as a monstrously powerful new Mussolini, but the facts don’t bear that out.

It’s hard to recall any politician in American history who screws up more often than Trump, most recently by blowing an election as he did last year and once again in Georgia. Perhaps the African American teacher was thinking of blowhards like him.

If the American electorate has made nothing else clear in recent years, it wants its national leaders to be somewhat to the center-right, but not too far in any direction. They went for Joe Biden because he is the anti-Trump, and they could not bear four more years of Trump’s mad tweets, the very things his followers most love about him.

Trump world is a bubble of unreality and seething grievance.  They are no longer politicians, but something else – the raging mob Jefferson and Adams feared so much.

“A mob is no less a mob because they are with you,” wrote Adams.

Today, the only real policy of the once-proud GOP is loving Trump and obeying him. The real Republicans have been pushed to the sidelines, are hiding in silence, or have fled. They might go somewhere else, start something else, or hide out until their D-Day comes.

I doubt they will all be silent or complicit for too much longer

This Trump worship motivates and inspires the new Republicans but it is repellent to about two-thirds of the country.

As the party tries to punish and cast out people like Sen. Kasse and Rep. Cheney – the very embodiment of the Republican voters they so need – there remains nothing left but an extremist, conspiracy-driven cult that has just gone cuckoo, or perhaps always was mad and was waiting for a host to occupy.

Donald Trump has about one major national political figure fronting for him now, and that is the mysterious and sycophantic Sen. Lindsey Graham. I have no idea what his sexual proclivities are, and they are none of my business, but I can tell you this from having known many men who have been in love with men or women.

Lindsey Graham is in love with Donald Trump. There is just no other way to explain his tortured mooning and slavish slobbering. In fact, power is an aphrodisiac, and some people love power more than life itself.

And what a pair they make.

Graham was almost swooning rhapsodically on Fox News the other night talking about how much he looked forward to getting down to Mar-a-Largo to play some golf and talk about how to get even with the few remaining Republicans who dare to speak their minds.

When Lindsey speaks about Trump, he looks as if he is about to faint, and maybe he is. Perhaps it’s those big golf clubs, or maybe that nest on the top of Trump’s head or that orange and tanned skin.

The movie ought to end with both of them sailing off on a golf cart somewhere near Mar-a-Largo. If Trump’s notion of loyalty is what it appears to me, Graham will soon get run over by one of those carts. If Mitch McConnell wasn’t loyal enough for Trump, Lindsey Graham hasn’t got a prayer.

I should say that the media is somewhat misleading in its hysteria about the Republican Party. Its devolution into a cult is certainly disturbing. And it has upended our political system.

Still, it is essential to note that the party is destroying itself, and it precisely the same way Trump ruined his chances of winning the November election.

The Democrats have a couple of years to make their case and I bet they will do it. Trump has taught them a lot, and his dirty tricks work just as well for them as they did for him.

National political parties must, by definition, have an open tent. The Republicans always had moderate and liberal leaders like Nelson Rockefeller and extremist right-wing leaders like Barry Goldwater.

They all had their niches and co-existed happily for generations.

Not any more. The new Republicans, the party of QAnon and white Christian nationalists, has absolutely no room for mainstream conservatives who honor the constitution, liberal Republicans who liked to help the poor, or the hard-line conservatives who despised big government.

They are being pushed out of the Republican Party or leaving all over the country. Americans wouldn’t elect Barry Goldwater as President, and they didn’t elect George Wallace as President, and they didn’t elect George Mc Governor Hubert Humphrey, President, and they didn’t re-elect Donald Trump as President.

They elect Presidents close to the center, with one exception – and look at the dreadful mess of things he made.

What on earth gives anyone the idea that the country is ready to elect the party of  Marjorie Taylor Greene as President? What single policy are they proposing beyond opposing everything President Biden proposes?

President Biden is intensely focused on actually working on issues that affect people. He is no saint, I am sure, or miracle worker, but he’s off to a pretty impressive start.

In harshly attacking Mitch McConnell, Trump has officially declared open warfare and clove the party in two. The party is now closed to anyone who doesn’t believe Nancy Pelosi is hiding child sex victims in the basement of the capitol.

The GOP and its followers and are no longer a national political party running on its values and policies. They no longer have any values as we understand the term.

Trump worship is not the most stirring value I can remember hearing.

If this is all a successful formula for winning over the 80 million people who voted for Joe Biden, I will take my flag down and head for Costa Rico, riding the donkeys all of the way.

But I can’t see it, no more than I could see Trump winning re-election.

There aren’t enough of these people, not this year or ever, and there are fewer and fewer of them every day. The only major groups Trumpism attracts are Proud Boys and old men glued to Fox News. It’s not enough, the New America is pouring over the hillside like the Hobbit army.

These people screw up every single thing they try to do, just as President Trump did. The capitol assault was horrible, it was also the dumbest act of insurrection ever attempted.

Fear them if you wish, and organize against them by all means. You will have good company, including most of America.

Time moves mercilessly and quickly in politics. June 2021 will look nothing like February, and December will look even stranger and more surprising.

Trump’s acolytes have well learned his lessons on how to fail: cater to a narrow extremist mob and alienate everything and everyone else, from voters to CEOs. We have our troubles, but that can’t work, short of a military coup, and that didn’t work either.

Thank God these people don’t read any history. No bookie in North America would bet on them.

The house rules are the same: stand strong, stay calm and keep your perspective. The one you are being fed daily is lacking coherence and perspective.