Ted Cruz and his conscience amicably part ways

Please respect their privacy during this difficult time.

“His conscience threaded its arm through his. “Don’t you feel wonderful?” it pursued. “Even John McCain has endorsed Donald Trump — a man you said was ‘a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country has ever seen.’ Only you, Ted Cruz, stands firm.”

“Yes,” Cruz said. His foot was tapping nervously under the table. With an effort, he stilled it.”

And Trump, who declared that he wouldn’t accept his endorsement if he gave it, gladly accepted his endorsement.

Because language, reality, and principles mean absolutely nothing in the nihiistic Orwellian lie that is the Trump Right.

Reader Dan Conway does the autopsy on what Trump has achieved, not only in wrecking the GOP, but in completing the demolition of the Christian Right the Tea Party began:

The despicable Calvinist Tea Party destroyed the GOP. Not Trump. These people who don’t have the temperament to govern a Boy Scout troop committee have ruined the US for 6 years. They destroyed the GOP.

The veneration of Trump by Cruz once again demonstrates the point I am making: Trump is the architect of The New Right.

While in 2000, Bush could quip at the Al Smith dinner that he looked around the room and saw the “haves and the have-mores” or as he termed it “his base,” he was really mistaken. A small group of wealthy folk weren’t his base, but a frustrated group of racists trained to resent “the other” we’re his base.

This mob, catechetized by Limbaugh, Hannity, and provided intellectual cover by Douthat, Reno, and now Dreher, are the base. Trump is motivating these folks to express hatred and to will violence on their enemies (who happen to be other Americans).

Conservative Christians have created the fantasy platform that is hateful in the name of Trump. Called “Christian,” this platform escaped critique by otherwise orthodox writers fretting over women in vestments claiming ordination.

This platform and Trump actually represent what Xtnity is to the “nones.”

Not Kaine. Not Clinton. The cacophony claiming these two are demons is too loud.

Trump has remade the Right, and this includes shaping the religious right, into his image.

American Christianity is now a brand of Trumpism. Anti-factual, hate-mongering xenophobic. This is the face of Christianity to the nation and the world.

Right wing pro-lifism is also reformed into Trumpism. Anti-factual, it promotes hate, demonization of its opponents, and despises the liberal pro-life movement, which it spends considerable resources battling.

The New Right is Trumpism. American Christianity, formed in its self-professing orthodoxy by conservatism over three decades, is entirely subsumed by the techniques of Trumpism and is the religious form of this brand.

Pro-lifers, in their xenophobic, anti-factual lust for this authoritarian have given their movement to him.

The architect of the New Right and all its institutions, movements, and religious groups is Trump.

Future generations will asking how, in the Age of Pope Francis, American Catholics could, in large numbers, back a racist demagogue like Trump.  Future Catholic apologists will have to explain (as they have to explain about those pictures of Catholics seig heiling Hitler) that Catholic supporters of Trump were, in fact, a minority in the Church, albeit a serious threat among white conservative Catholics.  They will have to point out that globally, Catholics looked on the rise of Trump with surprise and horror and bafflement, wondering how American Catholics–and especially those who boasted of their superior fidelity to the Faith and commitment to human life could possibly have fallen for such a transparent fraud.

And, very possibly, they will have to deal with some future left wing specialist in anti-Catholic agitprop who will write something called “Trump’s Pope” in which Francis, about as nakedly hostile to Trump’s demagoguery as any pope could be, will somehow be transmogrified into his most ardent supporter.  I wonder how long it will take after his death for that lie to circle the world before truth can get its pants on?

What a tangled web the post-modern, post-Christian Right has woven for itself in its prostitution to this sociopathic con man for the racist alt right.