When Did the Republican Party Start Wanting America to Lose?

I still remember in October 2009, when conservatives openly gloated about rejection of the US bid to host the 2016 Olympic games. “The ego has landed!” The reason? If winning helps Obama, we want America to lose.

This kind of “thinking” would have been unthinkable 30 years ago. Now, it’s unremarkable.

First, how far in disgrace would, say, Walter Mondale (1984) or Bob Dole (1996) or John Kerry (2004) have been if any had said, openly and in public, that he hoped there was a recession in the next 12 months because it would harm the incumbent president. If any candidate had openly said he hoped millions of Americans would lose their jobs and retirement savings and thousands lost their homes, that would have been the end of his/her career. Now? Donald Trump says, and repeats, that he hopes there’s a recession in the next few months because it would hurt Biden? Barely makes the news.

This Republican hopes for America to fail hit its worst (for now) with the current border protection fiasco. First, over the past decade the Republicans have managed to rebrand the immigration issue from “hard working, good family people, but we need to control illegal immigration” to the absurd image of an invasion of rapists, criminals, drug smugglers, and child traffickers. They have used a real, complicated emergency (the inability to process large numbers of asylum seekers who are flooding the country from failed states like El Salvador and Venezuela) and created a wholly imaginary emergency (the flood of criminals, rapists, traffickers, and terrorists crossing the southern border illegally). And they insisted on tying funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan to “fixing the border.” Their hard line on immigration – their claim that the southern border is the real national security crisis – has already delayed this urgently needed self-defense funding since October, endangered Ukraine, and jeopardized our position in the world. “The southern border” is THAT urgent.

And as a result, Senate negotiators agreed to a bill that largely was a surrender to Republican priorities. It increases funds for border protection, narrows asylum rules, makes it easier to deport, all Republican priorities, with no mention of traditional Democratic issues such as “a path to citizenship” or DACA.

Some of the most conservative Republican senators advise their House colleagues that this is the best bill that can ever be approved and that the chance to pass it is highly perishable. One called it a “once in a generation opportunity.”

So, you’d think the people who invented this crisis would be eager to pass this bill. No. It actually looks to be dead, because Republican congressmen think the existence of the crisis helps them politically and they don’t want to give Joe Biden a win.

Think about the thundering irresponsibility of this: I’m the guy/we’re the party that claims we’re being invaded by the world’s scum. Our children are being killed by the fentanyl they bring in, they’re raping our wives and daughters, bringing crime and disease to every town in the USA. “Poisoning the blood” and “destroying the fabric” of the country. It’s an emergency. “You won’t have a country.” But come to think of it, I’d rather have these rapists and fentanyl smugglers invade YOUR neighborhood because I think that will make you vote for me.

And making it even worse, the funding desperately needed by Ukraine has now been delayed almost six months and there’s every indication it will die with the border bill. The MAGA House Speaker has introduced a proposal that would separately approve funding for Israel but there’s no indication of movement on Ukraine, which is barely sustaining a stalemate on the ground right now. Putin knows he has no chance of prevailing on the battlefield, but his hope of victory is sustained by the House Republican majority and Donald Trump, closer allies to Putin and more loyal servants than the President of Belarus. Killing Ukraine funding is an act of betrayal and appeasement not equaled since Neville “Peace in our Time” Chamberlain gave away Sudetenland.

Now, the “I’d rather fail than let Biden have a win” mentality is spreading.. House Republicans and Democrats agreed on a tax bill: we’ll let you guys restore the child tax credit, which will lift millions out of poverty if in return you let us give the same amount in pointless tax breaks that will do nothing but increase the federal deficit and our campaign funds. In today’s Washington, that’s a brilliant legislative accomplishment. But Senator Grassley has already signaled it’s probably dead in the Senate because he doesn’t want to “help Biden.”

It's not that many years ago, back when the Republicans put up four 40+ state landslides in the space of five elections, that the Democrats were thought to be running on empty and the Republicans were the “party of ideas.” The collapse of this party within the span of a person’s career is one of the most remarkable political events ever.