CARLTON FLETCHER: Republicans punish their own who don’t blindly follow Trump

I must follow him, ever since he touched my hand I knew, That near him I always must be, And nothing can keep him from me, He is my destiny.

— Little Peggy March

I have a confession to make. Until the time of Ronald Reagan, a beloved man but a really bad president, I believed strongly in the Republican Party.

Even after the dirty dealings of “Tricky Dick” Nixon, which alerted me at an early age to the importance of political goings-on and how they shaped the world, I still naively believed that the GOP was the party of right (figurative and literal).

I was young, and most of my political insight was gleaned from views expressed by my father. I loved and admired the man so I reasoned that, when it came to politics, he had to be right.

But as I grew older, more mature — OK, how about more aware? — I came to see the national Republican Party for the dichotomy it had embraced: the party of the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor. Unfortunately, it soon become apparent, only one of those two groups benefited from Republican politics.

Of course, there were still leaders in those post-Nixon and even post-Reagan days who, while loyal to their party, would work with the “other side” to make sure items vital to the American people were addressed. They actually understood the meaning of the word “compromise.”

Now, compromise is a four-letter word, synonymous with cowardice and surrender, among politicians who could not give one whit less what’s good for Americans. Their only concerns are for themselves, their exalted leader, their benefactors, the party and the people they want to dupe into re-electing them. One of this country’s great shames, politics-wise, is that its people keep sending increasingly egomaniacal greed-mongers to Washington who are there to “oppose” anything the other party does and to rake in as much illegal cash “donations” as is possible, the needs of the American people be damned.

The Republican Party reached new lows recently when it conspired to, essentially, nullify the impact of two significant members of its party because those members did not give in to the will of the party’s demigod ex-president, Donald Trump. Because Lynn Cheney denounced Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him — despite mounds of evidence to the contrary — she was removed from her leadership position in the House. And because Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan refused to use his influence to have state officials illegally change the outcome of state election, he has been — more or less — forced to step down from that post.

Cheney, a House representative from Wyoming, is the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney (George W. Bush’s ticketmate and long a stalwart member of the party). She had the guts, when the whimpering cowards of her party refused to do so, to stand up to Trump’s lie and tell members of her party that they were heading for more losses in national races as long as they continued to ride the coattails of a man who led an insurrection against the country he was elected to lead, all in an effort to bolster his ego.

Cheney told her GOP comrades that they were following a losing formula by continuing to suck up to Trump, but the overwhelming majority of Republican Congressional members are too frightened of — Egad! — maybe losing an election to anger the man who got 7 million (!) less votes in the presidential election than a very weak Democratic opponent.

To her credit — and she certainly has more guts than her quivering colleagues — Cheney has said she will continue to speak the truth in an effort to change the direction of the party that she loves and do everything she can to make sure Trump is never elected again to a national office.

Duncan, a bright young man who came out of nowhere three years ago to win the lieutenant governor’s office, has worked tirelessly during his three years in office to, among other agenda items, push Georgia as the tech leader in the changing post-COVID economy. His — and others’ — work is obvious, as new tech companies, bringing with them thousands of good-paying jobs, have made their way to the Peach State.

But Duncan, who impressed local voters during a campaign stop in Albany during his run for office, is deemed by Trump extremists — in seats of power under the Gold Dome and voting loyalists who blindly follow the ex-president — to have been unfaithful when he did not use his influence to overturn the election results in the state, results that had been confirmed by two separate hand counts and the judicial system all the way up to the Supreme Court.

So Duncan has announced he will step down to work on growing a new Republican Party, one that is not tied to the whims of any one megalomaniac and his or her followers.

While the true believers applaud these asinine moves of the GOP, time will tell if they have only followed — and led their supporters — a man whose ego wrote a check they couldn’t cash.