I don’t mean to keep beating this tin drum as loudly as I have been, but I think it’s important to keep reminding people that the current president* is an aberrational modern Republican only in the crudeness of a) his rhetoric and, b) the way he wields his power. (Also, he’s something of a nut, which, in my experience, transcends politics anyway.) For example, as was pointed earlier on Wednesday, Tuesday night’s Republican primary results in various states pretty much preclude any serious attempt by Republican office holders to throw a spanner into the crazy that is dominating our politics at the moment. This morning, on MSNBC, this is what Joe Scarborough had to say on the subject.

“It has devolved into a cult. Primary voters in the Republican Party have devolved into a Trumpist cult.”

That’s a word that’s getting tossed around a lot these days. Retiring Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, opined that his party is in the thrall of “cult-like behavior,” while longtime Republican activist and cable TV megastar Rick Wilson says that the word cult “isn’t strong enough” to describe what’s going on. This makes Corker the moderate, I guess.

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Now, to be clear, I don’t disagree with any of this. We are seeing politics on one side of the aisle turning into a cult, but, alas, that cult is modern Republicanism. Trumpism is merely one breakaway sect of it, and, truth be told, it hasn’t broken away all that far. After all, Corey Stewart got nominated for the U.S. Senate from Virginia not because of his loyalty to the president*, but as an adherent to a far older cult with which the GOP was quite content to be a part of over the previous four decades: the cult of the Confederate States of America.

Another example: as the results were rolling in Tuesday night, Congressman Steve King, the Republican crackpot who represents the Fourth Congressional District of Iowa, took it upon himself to retweet a famous British neo-Nazi named Mark Collett. From the Times of Israel:

“Europe is waking up… Will America… in time?” King, a Representative from Iowa, tweeted on Tuesday, linking to an anti-immigration tweet from Mark Collett. Collett is one of Britain’s most high-profile white nationalists and is a self-proclaimed Nazi sympathizer. He is the former chairman of the youth division of the British National Party, a British ultra-nationalist political movement. Collett was ousted from his party in 2010 over an alleged plot to murder the BNP’s-then leader. He was questioned by police and released on bail.

This is hardly the first time King has shown his pasty white arse on this topic. There was the famous calves-like-cantaloupes line concerning undocumented immigrants. There was the time he smacked Chris Cuomo’s gob into the East River. And there was this moment from the 2016 Republican National Convention that I, for one, will never forget.

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Anyway, at the moment, Steve King is running for re-election. He won his Republican primary with north of 75 percent of the vote and is odds-on to return to Congress for the 17th consecutive year next January. And he is plainly a big, racist bag of nuts. Why aren’t the people who keep sending him back to Congress acting cultishly? How does King’s running buddy from Crazytown, Louie Gohment, keep getting elected? There must be sensible conservative—even very conservative—Republican alternatives to these two galoots. The only conclusion to be drawn is that the voters are electing them because they are the right kind of public embarrassments. How is that not cult-like behavior?

Then there is this great clip from Nicolle Wallace’s MSNBC show on Tuesday, when our charming host loses it completely while discussing the very weird junior-high video project that the president* showed to Kim Jong-un at their meeting in Singapore prior to his discussing his love for beachfront property in the DPRK. Anyway, guest Elise Jordan, who once worked for the campaign of Rand Paul, whose followers never have been known to behave cultishly, shared a laugh with Wallace:

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“Could you imagine, as communications director at the White House, if you had overseen putting together a video like that?”

“No!” Wallace replied.

Well, as a matter of fact, when Wallace was working communications for the re-election of President George W. Bush, that White House comms shop produced a now-legendary video for the 2004 White House Correspondents Dinner in which C-Plus Augustus made happy-fun-jokes about looking for the WMDs in Iraq, the fake casus belli for the war into which he’d lied the country. Listen to everyone laugh, applaud, and rattle their jewelry. Such fun! If only the 849 Americans who died actually looking for those weapons that year had been around to enjoy the show!

There is a cult here, no doubt. But, damn, so far, the deprogramming looks like a long project.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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