For decades, pollsters have been telling us the electorate yearned for a third way, a nonpartisan who wasn't wedded to either party and would represent the vast middle. Along comes the brash, imperfect real estate developer who had worked with both sides of the aisle in "the art of a deal." The media elite loved it, especially the most salacious exploits of the prowling Manhattan mogul.

That is right up until presidential candidate Trump embraced a reformulated version of America First that turned out to be a direct threat to those global media empires. You know, the ones who profitably ran all those Big Pharma ads while "reporting'" on COVID. It wasn't long before the crude tapes and "hush money" stories started rolling in.

Indeed, Trump's real sin was his desire to return to the economic and foreign policy nationalism that had been summarily quashed by globalists in both parties. And it was a grave enough transgression to warrant his destruction by any means necessary.

Yet the unhinged, shrill attacks combined with the shredding of a president's constitutional protections — whether his right to free speech, due process or private property — has revealed a number of disturbing truths about the American political system that are no longer so easily hidden.

This is Trump's real legacy.

The Republican party is not a political movement — it is a club that exists for the reelection of its members. America's institutions are falling apart (from the border to the classroom to the boardroom) while inflation is hollowing out the middle class. But the top of the GOP's agenda is adding another $100 billion in foreign aid to a $34 trillion national debt. It's a stark reversal from the old right, whether Eisenhower in Korea; Nixon in Vietnam or Reagan in Lebanon — they all knew how to cut their losses. House Speaker Mike Johnson even removed border protection from a bill that was sure to pass given a Republican establishment in both chambers that perpetually pounds the war drum. Buoyed by a perverse Lincoln-Project political consultancy swamp that serves its donor class and you see how political movements die when people start to make money off them.