Maddow Sounds Alarm On Death of Two-Party System: The Republican Party ‘Is Dissolving Itself’ For Trump
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow all but wrote an obituary for the modern Republican party on Monday. In a segment outlining how the Republican National Committee has overseen years of losses while bowing to former President Donald Trump’s outlandish requests, Maddow said the two-party system is “very fast becoming… one party on one side and just a guy on the other.”
As Maddow reported, RNC chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel is being thrown under the bus by her own party, and Trump issued a pronouncement on Truth Social that he will decide whether or not she keeps her job. And for all she’s done for Trump in the name of the party, Maddow posited, “Maybe you don’t need a party, or you don’t need much of one.”
She continued:
Each of the two major political parties in our country has done okay in previous election years, even when the parties themselves were organizationally kind of a mess. What is different here, what’s important for all of us here in this moment, is that the Republican Party now, in the age of Trump, appears to be not just a mess. They appear to be sort of dissolving themselves.
Whatever happens to Ronna Romney McDaniel and however her leadership at the Republican National Committee is going to come to an end, the thing that she will likely go down for in history is the moment in 2020 when, under her leadership, the party decided there would no longer be a Republican Party platform. It decided that officially and explicitly, the Republican Party would no longer stand for any particular thing other than generically saying that they supported Trump’s overall agenda. “We stand for nothing except whatever the leader wants.” That was a signal moment.
Also under McDaniel:
And no, let’s not have any real Republican primary debates this whole year, at least none that include the front-running candidate, because that’s also how he wants it, so that’s what we’ll do. And no, let’s not have general election debates this year either. Because in 2020, Trump got the Republican Party under Ronna McDaniel to say that the Republican Party will no longer allow its candidates to participate in events sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which has overseen general election debates between presidential candidates for decades. He didn’t want that. So he had the RNC pull out of that.
So to recap, it’s a political party with no party platform, no normal nominating process for its nominees, no primary debates, and no general election debates. They’re just coming off the worst back-to-back electoral performance by any party since before [Franklin Delano Roosevelt]. And it’s all because it’s what Trump wants.
She concluded on what this all meant for the two-party system that has fueled the nation’s democratic process since its inception:
[R]ight now, in our country, one of our two major political parties is dissolving itself. And just tonight, potentially preparing to oust yet another of its top leaders, all in the service of just doing stuff for their great leader instead of doing normal party stuff and normal democracy stuff anymore.
And I don’t know how many of you watching this tonight, you know, are mourning the illness and potential demise of the Republican Party as an institution, I understand. But if we are going to stay a democracy with a two-party system, there do need to be two parties of some kind or we’re not that kind of system anymore. We’re going to have to develop into something else.
I mean, right now what we are very fast becoming is one party on one side and just a guy on the other. A guy who, this week, is going before a United States Supreme Court that is going to decide if maybe he might be ineligible to ever hold federal office ever again. What do you call that kind of a system? What could possibly go wrong?
Watch the video above via MSNBC.
