And a miserable pack of useless slugs it was.

Former Republican House majority leader, John Boehner recently observed that, “The Republican Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere.” And what a disgusting phenomenon that party was and is. With a few notable exceptions it was and is clueless about this rare thing known as “the interests of the American people.” When Boehner took over in 2010 I thought that a unique opportunity had been handed to the Republicans and that now we would see some serious pushback, some coordinated counter offensive.

But no, it was the usual GOP deer-in-the-headlights instant stall into ineffectual irrelevance. It was, sad to say, much the same stillborn hope I had that Trump would pull out all the stops on sealing the border with troops then in Sand Land. They would be brought back to patrol our OWN freaking borders instead of Abdul’s was my absurd thought but it wasn’t Trump’s.

Pat Buchanan aptly captures the gist of the Republicans as useless, sellout artists pursuing vaporous but ruinously expensive missions to straighten everybody out. America as God’s gift to the world and the GOP as His vicegerent:

Consider. That GOP was dedicated to free trade, open borders, amnesty and using U.S. power to punish aggressors and “end tyranny in our world.” That GOP set out to create a new world order where dictatorships were threatened with “regime change,” and democratic capitalism was the new order of the ages.

Yet, Donald Trump captured the Republican nomination and won the presidency — by saying goodbye to all that.

How probable is it that a future GOP presidential candidate will revive the Bush-Boehner agenda the party rejected in 2016, run on it, win, and impose it on the party and nation?

Bush-Boehner Republicanism appears to be as dead today as was Harding-Coolidge Republicanism after 1933. And if Trumpism is not the future of the GOP, it is hard to see what a promising GOP agenda might look like.^[1]

Mr. Trump is an improvement on what passed for a political something on the “right” but we’re not out of the woods. More war on Syria, confrontation with North Korea, ratcheting up the level of needless tension with the Russians, and drinking Israel’s bathwater where it’s fake paranoia about Iran is concerned were not what I envisioned for the first months of his administration. But, there it is.

So where will America go now? It’s effectively leaderless in the ideological realm with Trump exhibiting little interest in or understanding of the Constitution. He has discovered the phrase “health care” in Article I, Sect. 8 to my amazement and seems indifferent to the presence of the bit about Congress having the authority to declare war. A 15-year-old Authorization for the Use of Military Force in Iraq isn’t what is required constitutionally as it no more authorizes U.S. military force to be used in Madagascar than it does in Syria. But there we are.

And as I’ve said before, Trump is clueless about the importance of free speech and all the ways in which the left seeks to take it away. He recognizes no fundamental threat to public order in the AntiFa slime that appear regularly to attack decent citizens. Public order and defense of our freedoms is a core responsibility of government at any level but Trump shows more interest in petty tweet storms than in understanding and articulating just one or two of those aspects of public life that are imperiled by the rise of the ultra left and the descent of the Democrat Party into the pit of identity politics. Expect leadership from Trump on economic and regulatory issues but don’t expect him to use the Justice Department to deal with California’s de facto secession or any other of the centripetal forces that plague us. Is a 230% increase in border crossings consistent with Trump’s vaunted concern for sealing the border?

Look not to Trump but, too, look not to the GOP where Ryan and McConnell were its public face. The Republic is indeed adrift with the very concept of “citizen” abandoned in favor of open borders and theft of jobs from the 95,000,000 million Americans currently out of work. Look for nothing but surrender from the old crowd on all that.

Note to GOP: Clean up your act and fight for something other than for surrender to every foreigner on the planet, or be replaced.

As Buchanan correctly observes, the old GOP is history and the choice for the next flavor of the GOP is Trumpism or something else, something unpredictable. The Alt Right is like a hint.

Personally, I don’t see any kind of a renaissance in American thinking. The growth of the federal leviathan and the judicial tyranny that makes that possible have gone unnoticed by all but a few. The presence of millions of illegal third-world immigrants and the job theft this has entailed has engendered no fury. Trump’s election was a close thing not a landslide. Foreign wars and the ruinous expense of pointless foreign wars coupled with gigantic trade imbalances together with the above mark America as a nation of chumps. There’s an excellent chance we’ll follow in the steps of our British cousins and let freedom slip from our grasp. I just don’t see that that many Americans give a damn. Cable TV will mock their standards and celebrate multiculturalism and diversity and they’ll eat it up and enrich those who mock them.

Notes
^[1] "Buchanan: 'Boehner's Right! ...It's Trump's Party Now.'" By Patrick Buchanan, ZeroHedge, 6/5/18 (formatting removed).