In the course of a week, Liz Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris over Donald Trump, then John McCain’s son did, and then Dick Cheney. Their public statements have consequence for a reason they did not intend.

Trump’s rise in the GOP has generated a long-overdue debate in the party, pitting a deeper populist conservative philosophy against the RINO “classic conservative” worldview. There are some Republicans in between, but they are hard to locate. Most have taken sides.

Two Types of Republicans

Two types of people have associated with and registered as Republicans. One group, which we can call Republicans In Name Only (RINO) or “Never Trumpers,” identify as more conservative than woke “progressivism” or even extreme liberalism. They are somewhere between “moderate conservative” and the “center.” They are like the “Conservative Party” of England, quite liberal but conservative only as compared to communists, socialists, and extreme labor union activists. (READ MORE from Dov Fischer: The Ocasio Convention)

Those RINOs would prefer tightening the borders but can be quite comfortable with a steady trickle of illegal aliens, as long as they are fewer than a million or two a year. They use the old Jeb! Bush argument that Hispanics never will vote for Republicans if we enforce our southern border, so we never will win elections.

Many of those RINOs also are titans in Big Business and actually want Illegals flooding in because they work for peanuts, glad to take whatever they can get. That brings down wages for American workers in the lower economic rungs, amplifying profits for RINOs like the Koch Brothers, the Bain Capital crowd, and the like.

RINOs want “free trade agreements” because “classical conservative free-market economics” calls for it as a religious sacrament and increases their profits. It allows them to purchase goods and materials from China and other foreign producers cheaper than if they had to buy American, where prices are affected by union demands, workers’ legitimate needs for a fair living wage, healthcare, Social Security and Medicare protections, and other benefits.

Free trade agreements also work great for RINOs because they can move their businesses overseas to avoid extra American labor costs and government regulations. Through “free trade,” they can move to Mexico or China and make more money. Meanwhile, back home, tens of thousands of once-good-paying jobs disappear.

Few “Never Trumpers” are based in high-crime inner cities. They have college and graduate degrees, memberships in country clubs, time and money for golf. They want unimpeded drilling for American energy, but they can afford the “Green New Deal’s” excesses if they must. They don’t care about abortion, this way or that. Many have guns, others don’t. Many have religion, others don’t.

Think of the Koch Brothers, Mitt Romney, the first George Bush (H.W.) and Jeb! Bush, James A. Baker, and a wonderful writer, George Will. And another, Peggy Noonan.

I distinguish between ideas and persons. If he writes well and injects great anecdotes, I will grant him that publicly. And that is the great tragedy of the Never Trump RINO.

Until Trump, true right-wing conservatives have not had a chance to vote these past 50 years for our guys for president, except for Ronald Reagan, who at least powerfully talked the talk and was solid on foreign affairs. Nixon was not a true conservative — price controls, Big Government, some terrible justices, excessive eagerness to open to Russia and China.

Ford was a mixed bag, honorable but weak. To fight the Left, we need strong. George H.W. Bush: “Read My Lips.” Bob Dole was past his prime and too deeply a part of the Beltway. John McCain and Mitt Romney were just awful, unduly elevated by early New Hampshire primaries with crossover voting.

None of the above satisfied the GOP rank and file, but we voted for them. We did not want McGovern, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama, Hillary, or Biden. We were true and went with the better — or least bad — choice, the choice that probably would pick less awful justices and judges, might keep a few Illegals out, might say a kind word about the cops, might let the energy industry drill or frack a bit, and might keep the military stronger or at least less rainbow-colored. (READ MORE: Columbia University Stinks Just a Bit Less Today)

We did not allow personal feelings of disappointment about a GOP candidate drive us to the Dark Side. Country came and comes first.

By contrast, regard RINO Never Trumpers. To become the Republican presidential nominee in 2016, Trump had to take on Jeb! Bush. Jeb! had been coronated by the media and the RINO elite as the undisputed nominee. The RINO donors all lined up. Media wrote about the first three-president dynasty. (John Quincy Adams (#6) was the son of John Adams (#2). FDR (#32) was Teddy’s (#26) fifth cousin. Benjamin Harrison (#23) was the grandson of William Henry Harrison (#9). James Madison (#4) was second cousin to Zachary Taylor (#12).) It was in the bag. All they needed to say was “Jeb!”

Trump Busts the RINO Monopoly

And then came Trump. He captured the essence of Jeb! in that first debate, tagging him as “low energy,” and Jeb! never recovered. Here is how the RINO insanity ensued:

1. Trump beat Jeb! in a rough way, and he distinguished himself from the RINOs, putting him at odds with the whole Bush clan.
2. Dick Cheney — actually, an excellent conservative — has been a lifelong intimate of the Bush family. He was Secretary of Defense to George H.W. Bush and then Vice President to George Dubya Bush. He had no private schemes to become a president afterward. He simply served his country honorably while manifestly devoting the deepest loyalty to the Bush family. In return, Dubya accorded him enormous power as Vice President.
3. Since Trump ended up at odds with the Bushes, and since Cheney is tight with the Bushes, Cheney evolved to endorse the wild-radical extreme-woke Harris over Trump. On the one hand, it makes no sense. But this is the craziness of the RINO world. To hurt Trump, Cheney would rather see a 15-justice Supreme Court comprised of 15 Sotomayors and the likes of the One Who Cannot Define “Woman” than to see nine Scalias, Alitos, and Thomases. He would rather see the great American military over which he presided succumb to transgenderism and sensitivity training than to prepare for nuclear Iran, China, North Korea, and Russia.
4. Thus his daughter. One day, Liz Cheney was a rising superstar in the GOP right wing, rooted in red state Wyoming. Then she replaced her red state with a bullfighter’s red cloak, charging full-steam ahead at Trump. She ended up like the bull.
5. And the same with the McCain clan, who turned out to be very petty people behind the veneer and façade of gentility. Their tell-tale sign: They refused to invite Sarah Palin to the memorial for John. How petty and small!

In time, all things become clear. Sometimes right away. Sometimes after a few years. Sometimes after a lifetime.

As we look back on Joe Biden’s term, so many more see now what was clear to many of us four years ago. He never intended to be a unifier but to actualize Obama’s tearing up of the American fabric.

He never was going to honor his promises in Scranton to free the energy industry and to allow unbridled fracking. He never was going to protect the border. And he campaigned from his basement not primarily because of COVID but because he was a gaffe machine. For years, he denied that he had been in cahoots with Hunter’s corruption, bringing millions from Ukraine and China to the entire Biden criminal enterprise.

The media covered for Biden and Hunter. During the 2020 election cycle, social media barred mention of the laptop, and the corrupt Bidens and media found support among the corrupt infesting the intelligence community, all claiming “Russian disinformation.” Now Hunter pleads guilty to everything and probably will get sentenced to 10-17 years in prison as part of a scam that will see him pardoned by the Big Guy in four months. One final Biden “Catch and Grab.”

As we consider now, eight years after 2016, what kind of president Jeb! really would have been, our political Rosetta Stone is Ana Navarro. Jeb! introduced her to us as a great Republican, a member of his transition team, his Director of Immigration Policy. She likewise had been an advisor to John McCain. We otherwise had no idea who this character was. She was the Great Hispanic Republican. Now, a few years later, we know. Imagine if she had been Jeb! Bush’s Mayorkas in charge of the border.

It does not take great insight to understand why the GOP rank and file — the people who actually vote — have associated with Trump’s leadership in reconfiguring and metamorphosing the GOP. Whether a Republican voter has advanced graduate degrees for white-collar professions or works on assembly lines (in or out of unions) or in mines, today’s GOP voters share so much in common.

None ever wanted McCain or Romney as choices but gamely voted for them anyway, resisting any notion to vote for Obama as a “Never Mitt” or “Never McCain” sore sport protest. Republican voters want tough on crime; no-compromise tough on the border; “Drill, baby, drill!” and fracking. Uniformly, the Republican voter wants our military spared from sensitivity training to embrace a culture of LGBTQIA+++ sex-change, orange-and-blue hair, 18 face rings in the nose, the eyelids, the tongue, and whatever else is next in the rainbow.

This is what a conservative American wants: schools where kids and grandkids are spared that LGBTQIA+++ junk, too. Parents and other taxpayers don’t want to send our boys to effectuate regime change, but do want a defense posture that is so strong and imposing that it prevents foreign entanglements and wars simply by projecting the Armageddon that awaits any who dare mess with the U.S.A.

The rank-and-file Republican voter does not do country clubs, by and large, but takes the family for a modest dinner at Cracker Barrel or Denny’s. If they can’t afford Disneyland more than once in a lifetime, and can’t stand the choices offered in the movies, they stream at home or watch I Love Lucy reruns.

American mainstream conservatives want protective tariffs to even an uneven world market where everyone else tariffs us anyway, while denying the workers in their countries decent wages and benefits. Tariffs keep corporations at home, and that means jobs for Americans. Sensible people don’t want trillions pumped unnecessarily into the economy, triggering spiraling inflation that leads the price of food to become so expensive that families have to skip a meal every day, and middle-class professionals can no longer afford to go to Starbucks once a week.

Then interest rates skyrocket to subdue the out-of-control inflation, and those rate hikes cause mortgage rates to skyrocket in tandem. As a result of that:

1. With mortgages at such rates, new buyers cannot afford to buy their first homes;
2. Current homeowners cannot afford to sell and move to new homes because they dare not lose their Trump-era 2.75 percent mortgage for a new Democrat-era 6.75 percent mortgage;
3. Therefore, new buyers are further shut out as the supply of houses on the market gets choked off, further propelling purchase prices according to the law of supply and demand; and
4. Landlords, watching house-purchase prices explode, accordingly explode the prices they charge for their rentals.
5. As a result, unlike the Trump years, wage increases do not keep up with rising living costs.

At election time, sensible Republicans do not allow personal vendettas to impel them to endorse and vote for left-wing Democrats. If the McCains and Cheneys cannot figure this all out, so be it. But they have exposed why the GOP rank and file moved to Trump from the RINOs. In most cases, not because they love everything about Trump, his comportment, and his wince-generating moments, but because he stands for what they stand for, and he has a record that proves he is far more than bombast and actually gets things done, changing the playing field.

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