People still deny its actually happening, just like in 2012, which is crazy. Trump was the culmination of things before him that pushed the GOP to fascism, not the creator. An opportunist who -- with the help of Bannon - pushed the GOP to its full-on anti-democracy ways today.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/23/politics/republicans-extremists-worse-than-2012/index.html
Dismissed in 2012, this diagnosis of GOP ills has now become undeniable
(CNN)The essay described congressional extremists, their rejection of truth, a party turning into authoritarians or "an apocalyptic cult." It bore a striking headline:
"Let's just say it: The Republicans are the problem."
Published in 2012, that Washington Post piece demonstrates more than the foresight of its political scientist authors, Tom Mann of the center-left Brookings Institution and Norm Ornstein of the center-right American Enterprise Institute. It shows the disease within the Republican Party had spread long before Trump metastasized it.
Their conclusions -- that the GOP had become "ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition" -- did not gain wide acceptance then. Many journalists joined leading Republicans in dismissing them.
"Ultra, ultra liberals" whose views "carry no weight with me," sneered Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnel
