Sophia Nelson is an award winning journalist, a former White House reporter for JET Magazine and is the author of the forthcoming book, EPluribus One: Rediscovering America’s Lost Political Code (Jan 2017).

What is all of this fake shock and awe over Donald Trump about?

I have been stunned at the utter hypocrisy on display in the GOP over the past week or so, as party leaders, analysts and pollsters scramble to repudiate Trump for his comments, tone and temperament.


Who are these people kidding? Trump is not some kind of Frankenstein monster roaming the quiet GOP political countryside. Trump is simply the new face of the old Republican Party.

I know of what I speak. I put in two decades of service in the GOP: In college, I was an intern to a Republican senator and worked at the Republican National Committee. I was a legal intern in the office of the RNC general counsel during law school, and later served as a regulatory counsel to then-New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman. At age 28, I was nominated to run for Congress as a Republican. I then returned to Washington, D.C., in 1997 to become the first black female Republican committee investigative counsel in the House of Representatives. In 2004, I served on George W. Bush’s Campaign legal response team.

Throughout my years in the GOP, I came to see that loyal and dedicated African-American Republicans like me were not welcome in the party. We were systematically blackballed, ignored, mistreated, marginalized and silenced. And so I left party politics to pursue life as a private sector attorney, then as a journalist, author and independent observer of politics.

Let me pose this to all of those Republicans now running scared of the big bad Donald Trump: Seeds, once planted, eventually grow up to become things with roots. Ever since Richard M. Nixon planted the seed of prejudice when he developed the so-called “Southern Strategy” to appeal to white Southern voters, the Republican Party has been growing in its current direction.

Throughout my years in the GOP, I came to see that loyal and dedicated African-American Republicans like me were not welcome in the party.

Watered for decades by racial division, separatism and a total lack of understanding of the experiences of people of color and women (GOP lawmakers in Congress, for example, refuse to support equal pay for equal work for women or to reauthorize current Voting Rights Laws), the seed has finally taken root and become larger than life—in the form of one Donald Trump.

Today, when Trump “shocks” the GOP establishment with his comments—past and present—about Muslims, about Mexicans being rapists, about women belonging on their knees, about how blacks don’t need black award shows, I don’t see anything surprising. I see the natural consequence of the GOP’s own choices.

As the old folks used to say, the chickens have finally come home to roost.

I became a young Republican when I was a sophomore in college in 1988 after I met Jack Kemp. I loved his sunny optimism and his economic message: Like many black people before me, I believe wholeheartedly in the ideas of a limited government, less taxation and regulation, and more economic opportunity, especially for the urban underclass.

But, as I have written many times over the past 20 years, my journey as a young Republican woman of color was often fraught with isolation and frustration. And eventually, in 2004, the party establishment’s insidious racist and hostile attitudes became too much to bear. As much as the GOP claimed to be inclusive, I saw what was going on behind the curtain: The party was dominated by a power structure that didn’t advance women or minorities easily, and had room for only a select few black conservatives.

I saw numerous black and brown pioneers in the Republican Party denied opportunity, despite being enormously gifted and qualified, as less credentialed white men rose above them. They were passed over for chief of staff jobs. They were not given a chance to run for high office (with support) in winnable Republican districts. They were not seen as valuable. Sometimes they were cast out, or worse, run out.

I saw white men make major mistakes and get slapped on the wrist; I saw black conservatives make small mistakes and get their careers destroyed. Many of the black Republicans I know personally were blackballed by white party hacks. (One was shunned because he dared speak his mind privately about much needed minority outreach reforms. He has never worked in GOP politics again.)

What I see now is a political party caught in its own web of deceit, division and demagoguery—one that could have changed years ago, but chose not to.

Don’t take my word for it—take a look at the GOP’s primary base (over 90 percent white in the 2016 primaries), its leadership, its staffers, its state party committees—and watch the white out you will see at the 2016 GOP convention in Ohio.

What I see now is a political party caught in its own web of deceit, division and demagoguery—one that could have changed years ago, but chose not to. I was one of the several and constant voices challenging the party leadership in the 1990s. I remember being a young attorney fresh out of law school, and getting into a tiff with the RNC chairman at the time and his staff over an “open internal letter” I wrote to the GOP leadership about their treatment of blacks and women. That letter caused a major firestorm that almost cost me my job working for New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman. She did not relent to pressure to fire me. I was told, however, that the RNC would only let it go if I shut my mouth. Which I did—to keep my job and protect my fledgling career.

And yet today, people like Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell and my long-time friend Speaker Paul Ryan, who I've known since the mid-90s, profess to be shocked when the GOP front-runner makes race-baiting comments?

For the record, I have nothing against white men. My paternal great-grandfather was a white man, as was my maternal great-great-grandfather. But I do have something against prejudice, and a stubborn refusal to change with the times. The country has changed in color and complexion. Minorities make up a larger share of the population than ever before. Women are now over 50 percent of the workforce. And yet the GOP is still stuck in the past, ignoring the realities of this increasingly diverse electorate. America is not a country of white men, and it should not be ruled by them.

I will not name the people who have turned the Republican Party into the party of Trump, but I know their names. I lived it first-hand. And I can tell you that many of the same people who are now elevated in the GOP hierarchy as governors, members of Congress and political operatives you see on TV share Trump’s views. They like America as it used to be. They like phrases like “take back our country.” They like an America where white men have all the power, money and access. They do not like the changing complexion of Americans, and they do not understand the serious criminal/social justice plight that sparked the black lives matter movement. Trump may be a new low for the GOP, openly playing verbal footsie with David Duke and the Klan, but his thoughts have been echoed by people in the establishment behind closed doors for decades.

I can tell you that many of the same people who are now elevated in the GOP hierarchy as governors, members of Congress and political operatives you see on TV share Trump’s views.

Is it then any wonder that the GOP is about to nominate Donald J. Trump as its standard bearer?

Racism is a seed. Anger is a seed. Division is a seed. Entitlement is a seed. Seeds grow.

It will be hard to cut Donald Trump down, but the party needs to try. Perhaps it’s too late to bring someone like me back into the fold—or the scores of conservative blacks I know whom the establishment shoved aside. But it’s not too late for the party to appeal to a younger, more diverse generation of potential GOPers.

To do this, the best men and women of the Republican Party, like Governor Nikki Haley, Governor Susana Martinez, Governor John Kasich and others who have for too long been silent must step up and show the country that being white and male is not a conservative principle, or a conservative requirement. It is high time that the Grand Old Party lives up to its founding principles and welcomes people of all races and genders to its ranks.

If someone in the GOP doesn’t start to do more than just make fancy speeches attacking Trump, the party will continue to descend into fractiousness and bigotry. And the country will move one step further from our founding motto: E pluribus unum—Out of many we are one.