Yes, Donald Trump is a problem. He is a short term, immediate problem, who should be excised from office with all deliberate speed, so he won’t become a more severe longer term problem. However, he is mostly a symptom and a catalyst, but not a cause. The main cause of the most significant long term problems that this country faces is the rot, decay and moral bankruptcy of the Republican party that began over 50 years ago.
Donald Trump is a lazy, mostly ignorant, criminal con man, a carnival barker, and a self-promoter, whose only real interests appear to be acquiring money (which he’s not all that good at doing) and being the center of attention (which he’s fairly good at doing). Unfortunately for the country, he did have enough street smarts to determine what motivated the majority of the current Republican base along with a few other stragglers to obtain the Republican nomination for president.
Given the current tribal partisanship in the country, the country’s current population distribution, and the way the electoral college determines who becomes president, anyone who is able to gain either major political party’s nomination for president has a reasonable chance of actually becoming president.
It’s worth noting that the Republican party was not always as morally bankrupt as it currently is and someone such as Donald Trump could not have obtained the Republican nomination for president in 1960, or even in 1988. If the Republican party were not in the state of decay and moral bankruptcy that it’s in currently, Donald Trump could not have attained the Republican nomination for president in 2016.
The origins of the Republican’s party’s current decline can be traced back to at least 1964, when the Republican party and the right really started exploiting racial divisions and escalating the strategy of dividing the American electorate on cultural issues with an “us versus them” mentality, as many middle and working class whites felt that the country was starting to unravel uncontrollably around them. The Republicans animated their voters by using coded language to tell them in essence that the policies created by “liberal intellectual elites” who then controlled the federal government were in effect causing them (e.g. white middle class and blue collar voters) to start to lose their privileged status by unfairly elevating the privilege and status of those who were undeserving (e.g. blacks and other minorities) in what was essentially a zero sum game consisting of finite resources. The implication was that if one gains privilege and status, someone else, by definition, must lose privilege and status.
The Republican party was able to convince its voters that the federal government was being used mainly to benefit “others” instead of benefiting “us” as it had done for the 30 plus years after Franklin D. Roosevelt first became president. The Republican party was able to start unmaking the New Deal consensus of the American electorate that had led to the middle class prosperity of the “Baby Boom” years.
The federal government benefiting “others” (read: the federal government is bad) has consistently been a major Republican party theme employed by all Republican nominees for president from Barry Goldwater all the way to Donald Trump.
The 1966 midterm election, the first election where the signs of the fracturing of the New Deal consensus was visible, was the first midterm election held after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights of Act of 1965 were passed, and after the Watts riots and the Free Speech Movement on the Berkeley campus of the University of California (symbolizing the “elite liberal” institution of the type that socially conservative blue collar whites have come to loathe, which Ronald Reagan constantly referenced in his 1966 campaign for California governor), and due mainly to white backlash against those and similar events the Democrats lost 47 seats in the House, 3 seats in the U.S. Senate, and 8 governor’s houses. Since then Democrats haven’t come close to having the number of members in the House or the Senate that they had at the beginning of Johnson’s full term as president in 1965, with the anomalous exception in the House in the few years of Republican routs immediately after Richard Nixon’s resignation due to Watergate.
The Republicans successfully used the “us versus them” and “government no longer works for us” (government is bad) playbook for decades, winning the presidency five out or the next six elections after Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide victory, with the sole exception being the first presidential election after Nixon’s resignation, which, as noted, was a result of the brief post Watergate backlash.
Then as demographics started catching up with Republicans, they added the tactics of gerrymandering and voter suppression (among others) to help them get awarded (or steal as the case may be) the electoral college even while losing the popular vote. Republicans can still get close enough to win at the presidential level due to the electoral college and, in part, because many older white voters of the Republican base are located in critical swing states, and they tend to be much more reliable voters than younger voters and people of color.
The Republican party while openly welcoming racists and misogynists and the types of individuals who were attracted to George C. Wallace has purged any moderates such as the likes of Nelson Rockefeller, Earl Warren, George Romney, George Christopher, Thomas Kuchel, Dwight Eisenhower, Mark Hatfield, etc. from its ranks. It is the people who currently make up the Republican party, especially those elected to Congress, who are enabling Trump and his criminality.
If the majority of current Republicans had any sense of putting country over party they would have prevented Trump from gaining the Republican nomination for president in the first place, and if somehow they did not stop his nomination and election, the Republicans in Congress would have held Trump accountable for his actions while in office by providing proper oversight and they would have put an end to his illegal and unconstitutional activities.
Given the current state of the Republican party, it’s important to understand that our county’s problems won’t suddenly disappear when Trump is gone from office. Yes, when Trump leaves office certain immediate inappropriate behavior and activity will come to an end for a period of time. However, the Republican party without Trump at its head will still stand for the things that it did before Trump: climate change denial, terrible immigration policy, immensely destructive and disparate wealth distribution policies, an insane lack of reasonable gun control legislation, racial discrimination, voter suppression and gerrymandering, etc., etc., etc.
It may be comforting and possibly reassuring to believe that when Donald Trump is out of office most of our nation’s ills go with him. Unfortunately, that is far from the case. It’s the ills of the Republican party that gave us Donald Trump and those ills are preventing significant progress on addressing our country’s problems, and the Republican party’s ills won’t suddenly disappear when Donald Trump is no longer in office.
In order to enable the federal government to begin to address our county’s problems in a significant way the Republican party has to change and become more representative of the American people at large, or it has to decrease in influence to the point where it effectively becomes irrelevant.