So former President George H. W. Bush and Junior published a book criticizing Donald Trump, calling him a “blowhard”. “We have seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty,” Bush said. “We’ve seen nationalism distorted into nativism, forgotten the dynamism that immigration has always brought to America.” The Trump Administration responded in a statement, “If one Presidential candidate can disassemble a political party, it speaks volumes about how strong a legacy its past two presidents really had.” This is the most factual statement that I’ve ever heard from the Trump Administration, and one that every liberal and progressive knows to be true because we all know that George H.W. Bush was Trump, before Trump. We all know that Donald Trump (as well as Russia) simply copied a decades old Republican playbook and ran with it. It is important that America understands that Trumpism didn’t begin with Donald Trump. The Bush family and Republican establishment are actively working to shift all their historical political sins onto Donald Trump in the short-lived memories of the average American voter. Do not let them get away with it.
Check out this gem written in back 1991 which illustrates why 'Hortonism' is no different from Trumpism. Hortonism Redux in the White House It's the exact same pattern as the NFL kneeling controversy. This is the art of Republican politics in two simple steps:
Step 1) The Republican leadership gins up controversy by drawing attention to something divisive that would otherwise have long gone unnoticed and forgotten by the public, or irrelevant.
"But the proponents of this mild palliative are not the ones who have made it Topic A on the political agenda. The law would have been enacted without fuss last year if someone hadn't vetoed it with a huge flourish. It is Mr. Bush and company who are out to convince Americans that discrimination in favor of blacks and women is our leading social malady." Colin Kaepernick was unemployed, largely unnoticed and a distant memory in the minds of most Americans until Donald Trump went to Alabama and drew attention to him.
Step 2) the Republican leadership then obscures the nuance & facts of the debate in order to appeal to the worst instincts and assumptions of Republican supporters, and exploits a mainstream press too incompetent to explain facts and nuance to them:
"A second feature of Hortonism is that complicating details can be counted on to melt away. The press cannot annotate every reference to ''[Michael] Dukakis' furlough program for murderers'' with the information that it was initiated by his Republican predecessor and 42 other states had one, too. Nor can reporters explain every time Mr. Bush uses the term ''quota bill'' that the dynamics of his bill and the Democrats' regarding statistical disparities are almost exactly the same."
"More important, this punitive-damages fuss has nothing even arguably to do with quotas, since the disputed provision only applies to cases of purposeful discrimination proved in court, not to statistical disparities. There can't be two citizens in a thousand among those exposed to all the ''quota'' rhetoric who are aware of this point.
"The Republican marketing of the quota issue has been brilliant and despicable. It is Willie Hortonism redux. Not that anyone who prefers one version of a civil rights act to another is necessarily racist. But Hortonism isn't racism. Hortonism is the cynical concoction of a divisive issue in the political laboratory for narrow electoral advantage. Hortonism has certain familiar features." The Boston Globe has a series of 1991/1992 articles in the upper left hand column that further illustrate why George H.W. Bush was Trump before Trump, and how all that was old is new again. Bush revs up 'politics of division' over rights bill On Politics Today "The stakes for the Democrats are enormous. Both opinion polls and election results demonstrate in unmistakable terms that Democratic candidates for president, governorships and Senate seats all must fight uphill battles to win the support of working-class white voters in states with large black populations in which the affirmative action issue seems germane. That has been illustrated starkly in the success of David Duke in Louisiana and, of course, the re-election of Sen. Jesse Helms in North Carolina last fall. But the problem for the Democrats goes beyond the immediate impact of the race issue in the 1992 presidential campaign. The most serious hazard is that Bush will focus on the issue enough to make it the central domestic concern while Democrats ineffectually struggle to turn the voters' attention to education or health care. The electorate will once again be treated to a campaign about "values" rather than about ability or policies or "the vision thing."" The lineage from Trump can be traced through Bush and Wallace Wallace to Bush