This post was edited by SaltyPebble at January 17, 2020 6:02 AM MST"You know, it was like a bunch of black swans landed at one time. You have the confluence of reality TV, of Fox News, of Donald Trump with celebrity culture, of a field of Republicans who — none of them were superstars at the end of the day, no matter how much we wanted them to be. You had Hillary Clinton as the [Democratic] nominee, who had this 30-year pre-existing condition where the Republicans had turned her into Satan incarnate with their voters.So this moment happened, and Donald Trump's moral failings and his racism and everything else about this guy led a party that had been told for years, the only thing you're missing is somebody who will blow up everything. You just want to destroy everything. I mean, it's the Joker candidacy. And they got it.Right now there are three categories of Republicans. A fairly small fraction of them, like a third maybe, really believe in this crap. Really believe that Trumpism is the new way. They treat him as a king. A third of the Republicans are terrified of the guy. They are so scared of a tweet that they hide under their covers every day. And a third of them are like opportunists. They want the judges, they want the regulations for their donors, that sort of crap.The confluence of all those things that came together at one moment gave us this terrible, terrible thing. And look, all of us who worked in the party for a long time, we recognized there were different fractions and factions in the party. I've never been a social conservative, I'm not an evangelical. Everybody has given up in the Republican Party of today. All of those predicates. They don't believe in anything. They believe in Trump, whether they believe in his terror over them or their love of him. It leads to a personality cult, not a political party."
I think that's a good starting point. But further research is required...
Benedict Arnold 
