What If RINOs Throw a Republican Party and Nobody Comes?

“RINO” is such a funny acronym. The vast majority of the Republican base use it to disparage the small coalition actually vested with powers in the Republican Party.  The people most proud to call themselves “Republican” are likely the same ones whom most Republican voters would call “Republican in name only.”  The RINOs rule, and the Republican voters hate them for it.

I remember seeing Mitt Romney getting booed and heckled at an event in Utah by ordinary Republicans who correctly see him as a backstabber extraordinaire, and Monsieur Pierre Delecto burst into an aristocratic episode of tsk-tsk-ing and why-I-never exasperation while he pointed out that it was he, Mitt Romney, who had been the 2012 Republican nominee for president (before choking to the communist-in-chief) and that his father not only was a prominent Republican and governor of Michigan last century, but also should have been president, too!  (Darn that Goldwater and his defense of liberty against Big Government!)  Leave it to a RINO to immediately refer voters to his family résumé as haughty proof of his ideological bona fides.

Romney is the perfect mascot for a gaggle of Roves, McConnells, Lincoln Project rejects, and Chamber of Commerce globalists à la Paul Ryan.  They are generals without troops, prancing around like the prima donna, blissfully unaware that no one follows them anywhere.  In this way, it makes perfect sense for the majority of Republican voters to despise their own political leadership so feverishly that the Republicans with all the power are also Republicans deemed so fake and unfit to serve that their titles convey authority “in name only.”  “Let them dine in their hoity-toity Republican clubs and jeer at the Americans made from sterner, sturdier stuff,” Republican voters continue to say, “but we know who they really are.”  RINOs might be the upper 1%, but the bottom 99% could not give a fig.

Yet here we are again with the 2024 presidential race kicking into low gear, and the RINOs remain convinced that they can manipulate the Republican electorate into doing their bidding.  Paul Ryan is on a mission to tell anyone unfortunate enough to be within earshot of his nasal scoldings that Donald Trump is too old, too toxic, too much of a loser to be the Republicans’ nominee again.  If anyone knows anything about being a toxic loser, it is surely Paul Ryan; it took Donald Trump to actually carry the state of Wisconsin for Republicans in 2016, after native son Ryan was embarrassingly rejected by his neighbors four years earlier.  (Is that why Ryan hightailed it to C-suite offices in New York City, where he could be around like-minded friends?)

As for being too old, well, I have my doubts that P90X Paul could manage 90-minute speeches in the baking sun wearing a full suit as effortlessly as President Trump, but campaign season is just heating up.  There will be no dearth of opportunities for Americans to judge for themselves who is “low energy” and who is not.  Biden, for instance, is low-energy.  That wretched excuse for a man looks like an assortment of old twigs that would struggle to keep a fire going.  The doddering, corrupt fool cannot distinguish his life’s Jenga tower of lies from the hallucinations that plague him.  Biden is who Paul Ryan pretends Trump to be.  Trump, on the other hand, pretends to be no one — he is just himself — and Paul Ryan still fails to understand why voters find that quality so refreshing.

So Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney hate Donald Trump.  Turtle Mcconnell and “Turd Blossom” Rove hate Donald Trump.  Almost all of the Republicans in the U.S. Senate and probably two-thirds of the Republicans in the U.S. House hate Donald Trump.  Every corporate board member and Wall Street chieftain committed to draining middle-class Americans’ pockets dry while singing sweet love songs to globalism’s crony capitalism all hate Donald Trump…