The Bulwark: “Cato the Elder’s prescription for Rome’s greatest enemy was stringent. He concluded every speech with this singular imperative: Carthago delenda est – Carthage must be destroyed. Until, at last, it was. Now American democracy has a more lethal antagonist. Regardless of ideology, our imperative must be the political destruction of today’s Republican party. Until then, all the rest – trying to reform the GOP; founding a third party; or imagining a sweet spot in the political center – are dangerous distractions. The GOP’s pathologies run too deep to temporize. Their most glaring manifestation is but a symptom: enthrallment to a dangerous, unstable, bigoted, and nihilistic narcissist possessed by autocratic cravings, a contempt for law, and a poisonous disdain for all other human beings – epitomized by his murderous neglect of a deadly pandemic which needlessly killed over half a million Americans and by his incitement of, and pleasure in, a deadly attack on our Capitol by extremists inflamed by his lies and determined keep him in power.”

“All that is toxic in Trump, and more, defines the GOP’s essence – and would if he disappeared tomorrow. Today’s Republican party is addicted to racism, sexism, nativism, cultural revanchism, fundamentalism, extremism, and authoritarianism. It scorns science; subverts governance; and reinvents reality. Its leaders traffic in ostentatious mendacity. It reduces ‘conservatism’ to a retrograde tribalism steeped in fear and anger. Its congressional wing exists to satisfy donors. It has no coherent policy or purpose save perpetuating its power through minority rule. It is, in short, an existential threat to our survival as a pluralist democracy. Other than that, I deeply admire it.”