How the Tea Party Got Hijacked by Trump’s Troll Party

I could not have written this better myself. With a baby in each arm, I could not have written it at all...
Life can be hard....





As the candidates gather at the Reagan Library for the second 2016 presidential debate, a longtime conservative consultant says the Tea Party has morphed into the Troll Party—and it’s a fight for the soul of the GOP.
All my life, the Republican Party has been my political home. Helping it succeed has been my work for decades. It was never perfect, but families never are.


Flawed, and given to wrong turns from time to time, we had good years and terrible years. We elected presidents, took back Congress after decades, lost it, and took it back again. Our leaders ranged from bad to extraordinary. But through it all, the GOP was the one party even vaguely amenable to limited-government conservatism, to at least some adherence to the Constitution over the social preferences of the moment, and to the constraints on government power that our Founding Fathers so cherished. It was nice while it lasted.
Today the Republican Party has two choices before it: It can either reform itself, or fracture and surrender to the Troll Party.


Let me explain what I mean. The Troll Party’s central characteristic is an ever tightening spiral of self-reinforcing and self-referential purity tests that makes communicating with anyone beyond the febrile and furious a nearly impossible task. The people pushing for this transformation aren’t a majority yet, but when a virus infects the body politic, its minuscule size belies its massive impact.


[link to www.thedailybeast.com]