In July 2015, then-Rep. Keith Ellison appeared on ABC News’ “This Week” and was asked about his expectations for the Republican Party’s 2016 presidential race. The Minnesota Democrat said the political world needed to prepare itself for the possibility that Donald Trump might very well be the GOP nominee.
Ellison was at a table with other guests, who literally laughed out loud in response, as if the then-congressman had said something outlandish and hilarious. “I know you don’t believe that,” host George Stephanopoulos said, grinning, as if he assumed the Minnesotan was kidding.
The reaction, with the benefit of hindsight, was cringeworthy, but at the time, it seemed easier to forgive those who couldn’t contain their chortles. Trump, who’d announced his candidacy a month earlier, was a buffoonish television personality who didn’t know or care about governing. The idea of a major political party — in the planet’s preeminent global superpower — nominating a racist clown to be the nation’s chief executive was simply unthinkable.
Republican politics was broken, the laughter around the ABC roundtable implicitly suggested, but it wasn’t that broken.
The political world soon learned otherwise. The state of the GOP was, in fact, that bad.
Nearly a decade later, the degree to which the Republican Party is broken appears vastly worse. A Washington Post report this week noted in passing that Trump is “perhaps the most flawed presidential candidate ever.”
He is facing 91 indictments spread over four trials, the first of which is set to begin in three weeks. He has been ordered to pay more than half a billion dollars in civil judgments against him. He has laid out what many critics call authoritarian plans for a second term, and at campaign rallies, he routinely makes inflammatory statements about minorities and immigrants.
This is, of course, just a tiny sampling for what could easily be a book-length list. Trump isn’t just a bad presidential candidate, he is arguably the platonic ideal of the worst imaginable candidate.
We are, after all, talking about a man who’s been credibly accused of being a career criminal. Someone who spent his adult life careening from failure to failure. Someone who oversaw a failed and corrupt presidency. Someone who’s been condemned by several high-profile members of his own team. Someone who lies uncontrollably about matters large and small.
Someone who tried to overturn the results of a free and fair American election. Someone who dispatched an angry mob to attack his own country’s Capitol in the hopes of claiming illegitimate power. Someone who was recently held liable by a jury for sexual abuse. Someone who has gone from describing many Americans as “evil” to condemning them as “vermin” to equating them with the foreign enemies from World War II. Someone who echoes Adolf Hitler. Someone who has repeatedly said he wants to create a “day one” dictatorship in the United States. A healthy political party in a stable democracy would take one look at such a candidate, avoid making eye contact, and run as fast as possible in the opposite direction. In 2024, this same candidate faced credible primary challengers who proceeded to lose practically every primary and caucus — by wide margins — following a monthslong process in which he racked up endorsements from party officials at every level. A broken political party can win elections, but that doesn’t make it sound.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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