Some Friendly Post-Election Advice for Republicans

You don't deserve it, but you're getting it.

Hello, GOP politicians! I know this one still stings. And it should. Pain is an important warning sign, and you have blown past dozens of others.

Since the election, You have been sputtering out frantic rationalizations for why the American public pantsed you, spun you around, and tied your earlobes together on Election Day, none of which have been correct. Real talk: You have been marinating so deeply in conservative media and the Nazi bar that used to be Twitter that you have completely lost touch with the values of anyone who doesn’t have a closet full of gold bullion and white hoods.

In a just universe, liberals would leave you to it so that in the midterm elections you can get stomped straight through the Earth and tumble out the other side into cold, empty space. But you know how annoying we are about giving everyone a fair shot.

So here it is: The List of Things You Absolutely Must Do if you want the GOP to continue to exist beyond being something so foul to mention that people turn around three times and spit afterwards. No skips, no substitutions. Save yourselves or spend the rest of your life elbowing hundreds of former colleagues to be the cut-for-time guests on conservative political shows that no one watches anymore.

1. Unlearn what you have learned. You’ve spent the past decade telling yourselves and each other that Trump is the shining foulmouthed demigod who can make or break you. Now he can only break you. The stench of Trump will cling to your clothes and your hair and there is not enough vinegar and tomato juice in the world to wash it out. Rely on weasel gerrymandering games at your peril: There is no such thing as a safe Republican seat.
2. Denounce, impeach and remove Donald Trump. There is no other way to get yourself clear of him. You’re a Trump supporter or you aren’t, and he’s the guy who crashed the economy and took everyone’s food and health care away. If you are opening your mouth to object, go back to point one. Your colleagues who won’t impeach are cowards, fascists or both. Denounce, impeach and remove, or be honest with yourself about what you are. 
3. Take Congressional power back and dump the tariffs. I don’t care what the Supreme Court does or does not rule. Pull the economy out of its death spiral or you and your party are screwed for generations. Everyone will remember which party had a stranglehold on all three branches of the government when the prices shot up, the jobs went away, and the social safety net was set on fire. But wait! Will other countries that we have screwed over just accept that everything is OK now and go back to trading with us once the tariffs are gone? Of course not. As far as they know, you eager doormats in the GOP will turn right around and hand the economy’s keys to the next aspiring autocrat with a heavy hand and a light tether to reality. The only way to regain even a scrap of trust is to forcibly reject Trump and Trumpism. No international trade boom without the next step…
4. Send a whole bunch of your Republican colleagues to jail. Yes, Trump—Don’t even need to have a trial! He’s already got a felony conviction on the books!—but not only Trump. Not by a longshot. Start impeaching, removing, and alleyooping people and evidence to the proper authorities (Whoops! Better start with Pam Bondi!) and don’t stop until the house is clean. Anyone who violated the Constitution. Anyone who ordered, approved, or tolerated evidence-free military strikes on “drug boats.” Everyone involved with DOGE illegally firing people, guzzling our personal data, and yanking Congressionally approved aid that would have kept hundreds of thousands of human beings alive. Everyone who ordered, approved or tolerated sending military troops to tear-gas American citizens. Anyone who took a freaking takeout bag full of bribe money on camera. Anyone who warped national policy to ride a wave of grift. And if The Hague asks to speak to someone, hand that sumbitch over. Want to make sure you look unassailably patriotic during the whole mess? Consider going after anyone who passed classified information to enemy nations. It might even wake up a deep, uncynically patriotic part of your soul that has been buried.

You cannot skip this step. You cannot gloss over the part where it gets uncomfortable. Nothing improves until people get consequences. While you think about that, it might behoove you to remember that only the first person to sing gets the plea deal. Save those texts and emails, pull your conscience out of the mothballs, and make damned sure that the people who behaved even worse than you did are the ones who get the rap.

It is insane that it’s necessary to lay out these steps, but here they are.:

5. Stop being horrifying bigots to the trans community.
6. Stop debating whether it’s OK to pal around with white supremacists and Neonazis.
7. Stop starving your constituents for political leverage.
8. Stop making it impossible for your constituents to afford medical care.
9. Stop letting masked, untrained psychopaths abduct people off the street and send them to secret prisons
10. Bring back the funding for childhood cancer research
11. Look at those last six. I know this piece was supposed to be about practical political advice for a party that has gone way too far astray, but freaking look at them. Is this really who you wanted to be? 
12. Stop huffing your own supply. The reason it seemed OK to be an actual child-starving monster is because you have been wallowing in Fox News, Twitter, and other hard-right sources too foul to mention. Fox News, the flag-bearer of the bunch, was never, ever supposed to be taken seriously as a source of facts. It was a cynical Republican exercise in spinning politics, shouting propaganda, and bitching and moaning to pull real news outlets to the right. It was a wink-wink exercise that only the rubes—you know, those people that you are currently starving—were supposed to believe. And Twitter was bought by Elon Musk for the express purpose of drowning discourse with right-wing poison. But generations of the GOP have been lapping it up like comfort food and spewing it back in each other’s faces for so long that you have no connection to what’s actually going on in the country. It has made you weaker, meaner, and dumber. And it has insulated you from how much your constituents loathe Republican policies once they see them in action.

Will doing all this be enough to save your party and your career? Maybe, if you do one more thing:

13. Run to the left. Weird, right? You and legions of centrist pundits have been condescendingly oozing that liberals should turn right for decades now. Well, the Overton window just slammed down on your fingers, kids. If you keep going as you have been, you’ll be lucky to be dealing with an election blowout instead of a full-on French Revolution, so you’d better sprint left and you’d better be loud and contrite while doing it. Support Medicare for all. Shout down bigots of all stripes. Fund infrastructure projects with good union jobs. Fight corporate prisons and corporate landlords.

Use any leftover political cynicism to throw your billionaire benefactors and corporate cronies under the bus. Yank the government contracts of bad actors. Have televised Congressional hearings. And tax them. Tax them until steam comes out of their ears. Tax them until their ties spin around in circles. Tax them like your political career depends on it. You might even start to like it.

Do all that, do it quickly, and do it consistently, and you might be able to sell yourself to enough voters as a reformed, wiser human being instead of one of the cowards and fascists who were willing to destroy the country.

If you don’t, you won’t just suffer career-ending, humiliating political defeats. You’ll carry around the lifelong stain of being an autocrat’s stooge who worked to harm the people and the Constitution of the United States.

And you will deserve every second of it.