Ronald Reagan. Grover Norquist. Newt Gingrich. Wayne LaPierre. Rupert Murdoch.
Without those five gentlemen — and I use the term loosely — Donald Trump and the other MAGAts would never have made it through the doorway.
Reagan was the one who said government was the problem, not the solution, and that the scariest sentence in the English language was “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
Norquist was the anti-tax lobbyist who said he wanted to shrink government to the size where he could drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.
Gingrich was the bomb-thrower who told Republicans to start using terms like sick, demented and traitorous to describe their opponents.
LaPierre was the gun company lobbyist who built the National Rifle Association into a juggernaut that twisted the Second Amendment beyond all recognition.
Murdoch? He’s the guy who created a 24-hour news channel that couldn’t expand into Canada because Canadian broadcast law requires stations to tell the truth.
Without the world those five created, there would be no Trump and very few Trumpanzees.
We probably shouldn’t leave Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon out of this discussion. On the whole, Johnson had a positive effect, but misleading the public about Vietnam was the beginning of what was known as the Credibility Gap. There have always been the wackos on the fringes who hate and mistrust the government, but starting with Johnson, more normal people started wondering if the president was lying to them.
Once Nixon was president, they no longer had to wonder. Nixon did have his good qualities and did some good things, but his paranoia had him lying and cheating to win an election he would have won easily without the dirty tricks.
And once he was done, the government-hating part of the population was growing fast.
Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman had done a wonderful job of showing people what a positive force government could be in helping people improve their lives. But Reagan the other villains didn’t want the government helping anyone. In fact, they wanted government to be doing a lot less for everyone except defense contractors.
Cutting spending in other areas meant cutting taxes for the rich. Reagan slashed the top income tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent, and the era of a smaller gap between the middle. class and the rich was over.
Just like that.
If you look at the gap now, it’s bigger than any time since the late 19th century and the Gilded Age.
In the 1960s, there were only a handful of billionaires in the U.S. and the richest of them were worth two or three billion. I don’t need to tell you how rich they are now.
We don’t live in FDR’s world anymore.
And that’s a damn shame.
Thank you Ronnie, Grover, Newt, Wayne and Rupert.
You gave us Trump and the others like him. And all it cost us was our America.