A half-century of horrible Republican behavior

This timeline is a reminder that GOP awfulness didn’t start with Trump.

Donald Trump didn’t make the Republican Party corrupt and bigoted – he just supercharged its corruption and bigotry. As evidence, I offer this timeline of the last 50 or so years, starting with Richard Nixon. I think it drives home the point that lovers of liberty must stop Republicanism, not just Trumpism.

1974

Nixon resigns as president after his political crimes are revealed, and he’s pardoned by new President Gerald Ford. This lack of accountability will come back to haunt our country.

1976

Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan demonizes the poor by focusing on a Black Chicago woman who is labeled a “welfare queen” after scamming taxpayers. The woman is a criminal and totally atypical of welfare recipients, but Reagan uses her to feed a stereotype. Also in 1976: a Republican in Ford’s Cabinet, Earl Butz, is ousted after saying privately, “I’ll tell you what the coloreds want. It’s three things: first, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit.”

1977

Nixon says presidents are above the law: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

1979

Donald Trump meets dirty trickster Roger Stone for the first time. They’ll do business together.

1980

In a shocking example of party over country, supporters of Reagan secretly send a message to our enemy Iran, which is holding 52 American hostages. Knowing the hostages’ release would help President Jimmy Carter’s re-election bid, the Reagan supporters tell the Iranians that if they hold the hostages until after the election, they could get a better deal from Reagan. In effect, the Reagan backers urge Iran to keep Americans in captivity longer. Also in 1980, Carter’s debate briefing book is stolen and ends up in the hands of the Reagan campaign. After the skulduggery, Reagan wins.

1981

GOP strategist Lee Atwater explains the Republicans’ “Southern Strategy” to exploit racism, saying they can no longer use the n-word so they use code language instead: “you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff.” Atwater’s damning admission will be revealed years later and won’t be attributed to him until after his death.

1983

Reagan’s interior secretary, James Watt, resigns after mocking affirmative action by saying an agency panel has “a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple.”

1986

The Iran-Contra scandal breaks, with a report in a Lebanese newspaper that the Reagan administration secretly sold weapons to our enemy Iran despite a supposed arms embargo. The arms sales were part of a deal in which American hostages held by Iran-allied militants were released despite longstanding U.S. policy not to negotiate with terrorists. The scandal becomes even worse when it’s revealed that some of the money Iran paid for the weapons was secretly diverted to Nicaragua’s Contra rebels despite a congressional ban on such funding.

1988

George H.W. Bush wins the presidency after using a race-baiting ad blaming opponent Michael Dukakis for a crime spree by a furloughed inmate named Willie Horton. Bush dodges responsibility for Iran-Contra, insisting he was “out of the loop.” But Bush’s own 1986 diary entry, revealed after Bush leaves the White House, says “I’m one of the few people that know fully the details” about Iran-Contra.

1989

The federal debt soars in the Reagan era. By 1989, it’s nearly triple what it was in 1980. That won’t stop the Republicans from successfully casting themselves as budget watchdogs.

1990

Rep. Newt Gingrich’s political action committee issues a memo to GOP candidates with a list of recommended words to describe Democrats, including “decay,” “sick,” “pathetic,” “traitors,” “welfare,” “corrupt,” “cheat” and “steal.”

1991

David Duke, former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, runs for Louisiana governor as a Republican (despite Bush’s opposition) and loses in a runoff, attracting 671,009 votes.

1992

Bush issues Christmas Eve pardons of Republicans in the Iran-Contra scandal.

1993

Haley Barbour is named GOP national chairman 11 years after his losing Senate bid in Mississippi, a race in which a Barbour aide complained about “c**ns” at a campaign stop and Barbour, embarrassed that a reporter heard it, told the aide if he kept saying racist things he would be reincarnated as a watermelon.

1994

Gingrich exploits a tragedy in which a South Carolina mom kills her two sons. Gingrich says it “reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things. The only way you get change is to vote Republican.”

1996

Bob Dole’s presidential campaign is suspected of working with Religious Right activists to attack presidential rival Steve Forbes for “supporting homoerotic art.” In fact, the Forbes family’s yacht has a Robert Mapplethorpe print, but it’s a seascape, not homoerotic.

1997

Gingrich, now House Speaker, is reprimanded by the House for an ethics violation and ordered to pay $300,000 in investigation costs.

1998

Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois, who pushed for Bill Clinton’s impeachment over the Lewinsky scandal, is outed for his own marital infidelity decades earlier. Hyde calls it “a youthful indiscretion” even though he was 41 at the time.

1999

Republican politician Christine O’Donnell says on TV: ''I dabbled into witchcraft. … One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, and I didn't know it. I mean, there’s little blood there and stuff like that.'' O’Donnell later runs for the Senate in Delaware and wins the GOP nomination in 2010. When her past comments become an issue, she does a TV commercial announcing, “I am not a witch.” O’Donnell loses but gets 40% of the vote.

2000

Despite losing the popular vote, George W. Bush wins the White House when Roger Stone and other GOP operatives inject chaos into the Florida vote count with the “Brooks Brothers Riot” and the U.S. Supreme Court blocks a full recount, with Republican hero Antonin Scalia writing the opinion.

2002

After the 9/11 attacks, Bush green-lights warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens’ phone calls. Also in 2002, the Washington Post reveals that Bush got a briefing 36 days before 9/11 that was headlined “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” and mentioned the threat of hijacking. This disclosure contradicts a statement by FBI Director Robert Mueller, a Republican, that “there were no warning signs.”

2003

Bush and his aides lie about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to get the U.S. into a disastrous war that claims the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and 4,492 U.S. servicemembers while costing the U.S. $1.6 trillion.

2004

Vice President Dick Cheney, representing the family values party, tells Sen. Patrick Leahy on the Senate floor: “Go fuck yourself.”

2005

Journalists reveal that the Bush administration used taxpayer funds to pay news columnists to back its policies.

2007

Bush leads the U.S. into the Great Recession.

2009

The national debt skyrockets under Bush, increasing by 73% in 2001-2009. Also in 2009, former Bush Press Secretary Dana Perino says: “We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.” She’s forgetting 9/11.

2012

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney is caught on tape saying 47% of voters are “dependent upon government” and “believe that they are victims.” He loses.

2013

New Jersey officials tied to Republican Gov. Chris Christie order lane closures at the George Washington Bridge, causing huge back-ups in apparent retribution against the Fort Lee, N.J., mayor for not endorsing Christie.

2014

Dennis Hastert, the longest-serving Republican House speaker in history, is charged with lying to the FBI to cover up his long-ago sexual abuse of boys. He ultimately does prison time.

2015

Trump announces his bid for president, speaking to a crowd bolstered by paid actors. He calls Mexicans rapists, and rather than scuttling his campaign, the comment seems to make him more popular in the GOP.

2016

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refuses to allow a hearing or vote on President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland, deciding unilaterally that the seat should go unfilled for nearly a year, until after the presidential election. McConnell is banking on a Republican victory, which occurs despite the airing of an audiotape of Trump bragging about committing sexual assault by grabbing women “by the pussy.”

2017

National Security Adviser Michael Flynn lies to the FBI about secret talks with Russia and later resigns. Trump will eventually pardon Flynn.

2018

The Trump regime orders migrant children separated from their parents, then loses track of the parents. Also, Trump refers to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries.”

2019

Attorney General William Barr covers up for Trump by lying to the public about the findings of the Mueller Report on Russian involvement in the 2016 election.

2020

Trump is impeached for the attempted extortion of Ukraine to smear political rival Joe Biden, but GOP senators block the conviction. Also, Trump mismanages the COVID-19 pandemic, including suggesting without evidence that injecting light or disinfectant into a person’s body might kill the virus. Also, McConnell pushes through Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court while the voting for president has already begun – a 180-degree turn from what he said in 2016.

2021

After Trump loses his re-election bid, Republicans incite a deadly insurrection that includes the storming of the U.S. Capitol. Trump is impeached a second time over the attempted coup, but GOP senators again block his conviction. Meanwhile, a poll finds that more than half of Republicans think the election was stolen – despite no evidence that it was – and 23% of Republicans believe the QAnon conspiracy theory that “the government, media and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles.”

2022

The Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court takes away women’s right to an abortion, which had been in place since 1973. Also, Republicans run highly flawed congressional candidates, including Herschel Walker and Mehmet Oz, both of whom lose. A highly flawed Republican winner is outrageous liar George Santos, who is later expelled from the U.S. House and pleads guilty to wire fraud and identity theft.

2023

Trump calls for the “termination” of the Constitution, and in an example of how the media underplay Republican authoritarianism, the New York Times puts the story on Page 13. Also, Fox News, the main propaganda wing of the Republican Party, pays $787 million to settle a lawsuit over its spreading of lies about the 2020 election.

2024

Trump is elected president again after Trump-appointed judges in Florida and on the Supreme Court delay his criminal cases for plotting the Jan. 6 coup attempt and stealing classified government documents. A Supreme Court ruling by the Republican majority creates “presidential immunity,” which means the nation’s chief executive cannot be criminally charged based on his “official acts.” This president-king status is deeply anti-democratic and may well have disastrous consequences in coming years.

2025

Trump refuses to rule out using military force to seize Greenland from a NATO ally, Denmark. He also says an invasion to take back the Panama Canal is an option. And he says he would use “economic force” to annex Canada, another NATO ally. This is insanity, yet the Republican Party seems fine with it. And the year is just beginning.