Lindsey Graham is illustrative of the GOP as an institution. Like the GOP, people think Graham is a weakling, a kind of dainty loser blowing in the wind. But Graham is extremely conniving. He is aware of the cartoonish image of himself and uses it to his advantage 1/
So you think you're going to play Graham, you're going to whip Graham/the GOP into shape, but it doesn't work out that way and you ultimately end up getting conned and neutralized 2/
This is the obstacle people who want to reform the GOP will encounter over and over. Trump may have superficially changed the GOP, but its funding structure is the same, it did to him more or less what it did to Reagan. The GOP is like a death trap for populism 3/
Not sure how to bypass this. With Trump, we tried the top-down approach: run someone from within the GOP and have them try to reform it from the top. But Trump was too unfocused, undisciplined, given to petty disputes, and open to compromise with the GOP 4/
Maybe if Trump was abler at mobilizing the anger of his base to cow the GOP into submission and back a series of true AF candidates... but it's unclear if that would work, because this is the GOP after all and generally speaking you don't capture the GOP but vise versa 5/
The bottom-up approach that does not involve simply running America First Republicans and attempting to stage an insurgency is creating an alternative party and connecting with a large enough base of people. This would take more time and a lot of money 6/
A good litmus test for anyone involved in this would be to embrace issues that the GOP finds totally toxic, like healthcare reform and raising corporate taxes, two things the GOP won't touch because they've memed themselves a corner where these things are sOcIalisM 7/
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