Opinion by
Max Boot
Columnist
April 7, 2021 at 9:56 a.m. CDT
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), one of only 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach then-President Donald Trump this year, recently told the Atlantic why he remains committed to the party: “I’m a Republican because I’ve been a Republican far longer than Donald Trump has. He’s a Republican usurper.… I’m not going to let him take the party. So I will fight. I will fight like hell.â€
I admire Kinzinger’s fighting spirit. I once shared it. I recall saying something very similar in 2016 when Trump was marching through the Republican primaries: It’s my party, and I won’t leave it. My hope was that a decisive win for Hillary Clinton would bring the GOP to its senses. That obviously did not happen, so the day after the 2016 election, I re-registered as an independent after a lifetime as a Republican.
It is a decision I have not for a moment regretted, because the GOP has become even more of a horror show than I anticipated. As former House speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) notes in a new memoir, the “crazies†have taken over. There are vanishingly few John McCain-style Republicans left; Kinzinger (a lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard) is one of the few. The party’s center of gravity has shifted to kooks such as Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (who blamed Jewish space lasers for wildfires) and low-rent hucksters such as Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz (who reportedly shared nude photos of his sexual conquests with his colleagues and is under investigation for possible sex trafficking).
Most Republicans don’t care that Trump locked up children, cozied up to white supremacists, tear-gassed peaceful protesters, benefited from Russian help in both of his campaigns, egregiously mishandled the pandemic, incited a violent attack on the Capitol and even faced fraud complaints from his own donors. A new Reuters-Ipsos poll finds that 81 percent of Republicans have a favorable impression of Trump. Wait. It gets worse: 60 percent say the 2020 election was stolen from him, only 28 percent say he is even partly to blame for the Capitol insurrection, and 55 percent say that the Capitol attack “was led by violent left-wing protestors trying to make Trump look bad.â€
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/07/gop-cant-be-saved-center-right-voters-need-become-biden-republicans/