The GOP’s Remarkable Transformation into Party of Political Posers

The GOP isn’t a political platform, but a performative script in search of sellouts and sycophants

Republicans might be anti-trans, but they certainly aren’t strangers to transitioning. Donald Trump was the first GOP politician to come out as a completely new person. The thrice-married Manhattan libertine, who took license to grab women by the pussy, reinvented himself as a family values Republican. His act was so convincing that he won 80% of the gullible white Evangelical vote in 2016.

To secure the former President’s coveted endorsement, politicians are now following in his footsteps and undergoing extremist makeovers. In Pennsylvania, television personality Mehmet Oz, known as Dr. Oz, is running for the United States Senate. In his quest to get Trump’s imprimatur, the celebrity cardiovascular surgeon transplanted his bleeding-heart liberalism with heartless conservatism.  

Just a couple of years ago, Oz used his media platform to protect women’s health and could easily have been confused with a Planned Parenthood spokesperson.  

“It’s, as a doctor—just putting my doctor hat on—it’s a big-time concern,” Oz said in a 2019 interview, which aired on the Breakfast Club radio show. “Because I went to medical school in Philadelphia, and I saw women who had coat-hanger events. And I mean really traumatic events that happened when they were younger, before Roe v. Wade. And many of them were harmed for life.”

Concern about coat hangers, of course, is secondary to dressing up in a coat of “conservative correctness” to pander in a Republican primary. On his campaign website, the TV quack cynically jettisoned his supposed principles in favor of wooing the GOP’s Grand Poohbahs.

“Dr. Oz is a successful heart surgeon – he has literally held a beating heart in his hands. He knows how precious life is and is 100% Pro-Life.”

Unfortunately for the slippery surgeon, not everyone can pull off a con like The Don. Oz’s stunning contortion over abortion showed he was no political wizard and the flip-flop made him look like the Cowardly Lion. While his transformation earned him Trump’s endorsement, conservatives are repulsed by the doctor’s lack of a moral pulse.

“President Trump was very out of sync in picking Oz," said Dave Ball, chairman of the Washington County Republican Party. “People have been calling me all day and asking, ‘What the hell was he thinking?’”

J.D. Vance is another huckster peddling phony baloney as conservative red meat. The author of Hillbilly Elegy, Vance is running for U.S. Senate in Ohio. In 2016, he voted for moderate Evan McMullen over Trump in the primary and said that the Orange Ogre “is cultural heroin” and was “leading people to racially ugly attitudes.” Now that he needs Trump’s kiss of credibility, Vance is “taking on an entirely new persona”, alluded Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman.  

Tom Nichols wrote a scathing article in The Atlantic, “The Moral Collapse of J.D. Vance”, that neatly summarized his candidacy.  

Vance has not only repudiated his earlier views on Trump, but has done so with ruthless cynicism, embracing the former president and his madness while winking at the media with a What can you do? shrug about the stupidity of Ohio’s voters….  

….The writer Tim Miller recently noted in The Bulwark that within the space of a week, Vance … “defended a Nazi from being kicked off of twitter … shared a thread defending election fraud conspiracies … fantastically claimed Google was ‘hiding’ his website” and “mocked reporters for saying they were traumatized by the Capitol riot”…. Instead of a candidate who’s willing to speak hard truths to his people, Ohioans now have a native son who has returned to weaponize their resentment and cultural dysfunctions. 

If we’re on the topic of conservative political posers, it’s a requirement to mention Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-NY., the third ranking Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives. According to NBC News:

Before 2019, Stefanik bore many markings of a traditional Republican. She worked in George W. Bush's White House and with Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign, and during her first 2014 congressional race, she pitched herself as an independent thinker and voice.

Mother Jones magazine added:

Stefanik sounded practically like a Never Trumper, as she called on Trump to recognize that Russia had attacked the 2016 election to help him, urged him to release his tax returns, and assailed him for his comments about women. 

Sadly, Stefanik realized that climbing the career ladder meant loyalty to Trump. She effortlessly ditched her beliefs and triumphed politically by promoting Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election being stolen. Stefanik was rewarded for her newfound tribalism when the GOP unceremoniously canceled Liz Cheney, R-WY, and installed her in Cheney’s place as the chair of the Republican Conference.

Then, there is protean Louisiana Sen. John Neely Kennedy, a former Democrat turned Republican and FOX News flamethrower. Louisiana State University professor Robert Mann wrote of Kennedy’s remarkable reinvention in The Washington Post, “We wonder what happened to the reasonable, non-incendiary Kennedy we once knew.”

According to Mann:

In preparing this piece, I found a lengthy interview Kennedy did in October 2004 with the Shreveport Times. In pitching his Democratic Senate candidacy, he was articulate, restrained and progressive.

But what stood out in that 2004 interview was the absence of the homey sayings, abusive zingers and character assassinations that have become Kennedy trademarks. He was nothing like the man you see these days insulting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — “It must suck to be that dumb” — or vilifying then-Interior secretary nominee Deb Haaland as “a neo-socialist, left-of-Lenin whack job.”

Sure, all politicians occasionally change their positions, but not to the point of twisting themselves into resembling soft pretzels doing backflips on yoga mats. The modern GOP is no longer an intellectually sound political platform, but a performative script in search of eager sellouts and sycophants. Anyone willing to read the loony lines or tell provable lies with a straight face can be elevated into positions of enormous power. It’s no longer what you know or who you know, but the cravenness you’re willing to show.