burn it all down

Styx would seem to agree with me that the GOP needs to burn to ash and blow away. That, or it needs to burn and then rise again, phoenix-like, from the cinders:

Some highlights:

• Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, etc., represent the old-style GOP:  "aged, has-been neocons peddling the same shit they were peddling back in the 1990s when the Baby Boomers still had color in their hair."
• The GOP can't continue the same failed policies that led to Obama.
• The Dems want the Republicans to be weak.  The Dems want to promote a culture war within the GOP—young populists vs. the old-guard neocons.
• Liz Cheney was doing the wrong thing by voting to impeach Trump.
• What happened at the Capitol was a riot, not an insurrection.  Cheney jumped the gun.
• The GOP should expel Mitt Romney along with Cheney.  Such people represent the past, i.e., the failed neocons.
• If you think the GOP would benefit from the advice of Cheney, Romney, et al., then the party deserves to collapse and die.
• Dems will get annihilated in the midterms; Biden's honeymoon period will be over.
• The neocons, meanwhile, need to be primaried out and jettisoned.
• The neocons are exactly the same as the Pelosi Democrats.  Same fucking shit.

Donald Trump seems to have rejected the idea of forming a third party.  His people have dismissed any links with the already-registered Patriot Party, and my impression is that Trump plans to continue to function as a conservative Republican, refashioning the GOP from the inside while keeping the voter bloc consolidated.  My intuition is that it'd be better to let the GOP die on the vine and to form an alternative party that represents a fresh start with a distinctly different platform from that of the GOP.  Trump is, after all, still very much a 90s-era New York liberal Democrat.

Either way, whether Trump forms a new party or not, there are problems.  If Trump forms a new party, there's the above-mentioned risk of splitting the GOP voting bloc.  The GOP will become a Never Trump bastion, and the Never Trumpers will be glad to be rid of Trump, but the party will also lose a significant number of conservatives who buy into Trump's agenda.  In an election year, this might be an advantage for the more-unified Democrats.  If Trump doesn't form a new party, then he's committing himself to fighting massive internal resistance to his vision of what the GOP ought to become.  The Never Trumpers proved themselves to be a huge inertial force to be reckoned with, which is another reason why I advocate outright fission over internal rebuilding.  

But here's the truth:  the 75 million people who voted for Trump, many of whom were not old-guard GOP, already represent a bloc unto themselves.  Trump already has the momentum he needs to form a Patriot Party, so long as he can clearly articulate what such a party stands for, and how his new party would contrast with the old-guard GOP.  

I hope Trump reconsiders his urge to stay within the confines of the GOP; Republicans have already shown that, even when Trump elevates them to positions of power, prestige, and privilege, there is no guarantee that they will pay Trump back in kind.  The Supreme Court, despite Trump's elevation of three Justices, simply rolled over and played dead when it came to reviewing election fraud.  Various appointees inside Trump's administration also proved to be less than loyal to Trump, and the GOP members of Congress who seemingly sided with Trump in some cases (McConnell, Graham) proved to be, at best, fair-weather friends.  Only Ted Cruz, whom Trump roundly insulted during the 2016 election campaign, has remained steadfastly loyal to Trump; the other senator reliably on Trump's side is Rand Paul.  

Trump would do better, I think, to abandon a GOP that has never loved him for attempting to remake it from within, and to establish a new party built on strong foundations of unshakable loyalty.  To this end, he will need to be a better judge of character than he's been in the past, and he'll need the help of a reliable circle of loyalists.  

But what do I know?  I've been wrong before.