Republican Pennsylvania U.S. Senator Pat Toomey Validates This Blog on Trump and Trumpism

United States Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, a Republican, warned in his farewell speech on the floor of the Senate last week that the GOP “can’t be about or beholden to any one man” in a clear reference to the Republican Party’s leader, Donald Trump. The highest-ranking GOP leader in the Commonwealth made clear his opposition not only to Trump personally, but to Trumpism, by also counseling against adopting “protectionist nativist isolationist” policies. In remarks to the media afterward, Toomey also observed that Trump is loosing his hold over his party. I have been warning on this blog about how the Republican party has been allowing itself to be dominated by Trump, whose poor character leads him to dishonesty, corruption, disloyalty, indecency, misogyny and cruelty, and that the party has re-defined itself and conservatism as whatever Trump supports, which is a populist mix of protectionism, isolationism, nativism and authoritarianism, none of which are conservative. Toomey was one of 10 Republican Senators to vote to convict Trump of inciting the insurrection on January 6, 2001 to thwart the certification of the votes of the Electoral College, labelling Trump on the Senate floor a “demagogue.” Trump’s candidate endorsements across America, as I posted about, were based primarily on loyalty to him and acceptance of his false claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election, instead of on qualifications or electability. He endorsed a candidate in the GOP primary to replace the Keystone State’s outgoing Senior Senator. Trump’s candidate won the primary, but went on to lose the seat to a liberal Democrat, thus depriving the Republicans of winning the majority of the upper chamber of Congress. The GOP’s disappointing congressional elections results were widely interpreted as a referendum against Trump.