Republican Nihilism And The Rise Of Trump

Paul Waldman:

...[T]he Republican willingness — indeed, eagerness — to abandon traditional norms of governing has crippled our political system.

While others might locate a different starting point, I'd argue that the seminal moment of this trend was the "Brooks Brothers riot" that occurred on November 19, 2000, during the counting of the disputed votes in Florida. Worried that election officials recounting votes in Miami-Dade county might produce a result favorable to Al Gore, Republicans sent congressional staffers posing as ordinary Floridians to the offices where the counting was taking place. They proceeded to shout, pound on doors, and generally intimidate the election officials, who eventually became so frightened for their safety that they stopped the counting.

That was just one particularly vivid incident in a remarkable story, in which the election came down to a state governed by the Republican candidate's brother, where the Republican candidate's state co-chair was also the state's chief election official, where the two of them had engineered a "purge" of voter rolls that had disenfranchised thousands of legitimate voters, and where the counting was eventually stopped by five Republican members of the Supreme Court, in what was one of the most absurd and shameful decisions in its history.  [snip]

...[T]he people who have come to dominate the Republican caucuses in the House and Senate arrived in Washington not to make laws, but to tear the institutions of government down. So it's quite alright with them if nothing in Washington works — after all, that only validates their argument to voters that government can't do anything right, and what we should do is continue to undermine it and strip away its protections wherever we can. [snip]

Where does this all lead? To Donald Trump.

When your party proves again and again that it treats governing like a joke, you wind up picking a joke of a candidate to be your nominee for president.

We've left plenty of meat out.  The entire article deserves a read.