The rise of the tea party was, according to their rhetoric, a response rising taxes and a government that had grown too big, too corrupt, and too bloated. Their very “freedom” was at stake, they claimed, because regulations, what the rest of us call “protections”, were strangling our collective American Dream.
Donald Trump was never a tea party candidate. That mantle was more accurately bestowed on Ted Cruz who, after being publicly emasculated and humiliated by Trump, proceeded to support everything the Narcissist-in- Chief has done. And tea partiers themselves have gone silent. Their silence following Trump’s election is a deafening display of their hypocrisy and proves once and for all that their goal all along was to make sure that government was promoting the advancement of white people who they saw as taking a back seat to brown people in America under a black president.
“President Obama is usurping his position to pass a record number of Executive Orders to force his agenda on America!” the tea partiers cried. But the tea party is silent as Donald Trump is on his way to signing an average of 83½ Executive Orders per year. Barack Obama’s average was 34.6.
“President Obama’s administration is a corrupted collection of special interests!” the tea partiers ranted. They are silent, however, as Trump has installed a former oil company executive as our Secretary of State, a billionaire proponent of for-profit education corporations as Sec. of Education, a former Wall Street bank CEO as Sec. of Treasury, and a vulture capitalist as Sec. of Commerce. He has embodied the idea of nepotism beyond anything seen in modern America by putting his own children and their spouses in positions of power in the White House. He has used his position as the most powerful person on the planet to promote his own companies and those of his family. He has embraced Russia, a communist country until recently that was seen as an existential threat to America, like no other president ever has and filled his administration with others who share his love of Russian kleptocrats. The tea party hasn’t so much as raised an eyebrow as the self-proclaimed swamp-draining Trump has restocked the swamp with voracious gators.
“Donald Trump is saying what everyone else is thinking but afraid to say and he’ll get things done!” the tea party told us. Donald Trump campaigned on building a giant wall on our border with Mexico (that has to be transparent lest a drug smuggler toss a 60-pound bag of drugs over it and kill a pure-blooded American) and making Mexico pay for it – he’s done nothing to accomplish that. He said he’d ban all Muslims from entering our country but our system of checks and balances has gotten in the way of him accomplishing that. He said he’d renegotiate NAFTA but has done nothing. He said he’d repeal Obamacare but the so-called artiste of “The Deal” hasn’t gotten a single bill passed to do so. He said he’d cut such good deals that jobs would come flooding back to the USA. Instead, jobs continue to leave the country and Trump just loosened visa rules to allow 15,000 foreign workers to come to the USA to work for low wages. He said he’d release his tax returns but has never done so. He said he wouldn’t touch social security or Medicare but the healthcare reform he promoted does both. All of this and tea party types haven’t uttered a single word.
The tea party doctrine of cleaning up and shrinking government and lowering taxes is a sham. If they truly cared about lowering taxes, they would have been on the front lines fighting Trumpcare which is the single largest tax giveaway to millionaires and billionaires in our lifetime. What they REALLY want is a return to a time when white people were at the top of the heap no matter what their economic status and where brown people knew their place. They want to return to a time when laws protecting people didn’t put people of color on the same footing as white people. They want to go back to when the dreaded “political correctness” allowed them to say whatever shitty thing they wanted to say about non-whites and non-straights with impunity. And what they want most is a white male president to lead the way. THIS is what #MAGA means to them.
The tea party takes deep pride in upholding the values of our country’s Founding Fathers. But they are hypocrites and liars. They don’t want a country founded on the precept that ALL people are created equal and that ALL people have certain inalienable rights. They want a country where white people, preferably white men, are back in charge and running the show.
Those days are gone, rightfully relegated to the dustbin of history where they belong. But the tea party isn’t going down without a fight and Donald Trump is their best chance of taking us backward to a less American America. And like Ted Cruz, tea partiers are willing to sacrifice their “deeply held” values and beliefs in order to exploit Trump’s ascendancy to achieve their anti-American goals.
