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Former US President Donald appears on the jumbotron at the Republican National Convention held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Lee Bon-young/Hankyoreh)

By Lee Bon-young, Washington correspondent

After covering the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on July 19, I had some time to spare before my flight, so I decided to visit Lake Michigan.

On the shore of the lake, I came across a statue of someone who looked haggard and exhausted. It turned out to be a bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln.

“President,” “Emancipator” and “Martyr” are inscribed on the front of the statue’s base. The words made me think of how, only one day earlier, Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination only a few miles down the road.

While it may seem odd to lump Lincoln and Trump together, the two have more in common than one would think. Both were Republican presidents. If the bullet that grazed his ear five days before he made his convention speech had veered only fractions of an inch closer to his head, Trump, too, would have been deemed a martyr. In fact, at the National Association of Black Journalists convention on Wednesday, Trump casually boasted that he’s been “the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln.”

When Trump won the presidential election in 2016, many gasped in disbelief, wondering how Lincoln’s Republican Party could have fallen so far. Underlying this dismay was the assumption that Trump had usurped the party through pure chance and cunning machinations.

However, a close inspection of the Republican Party’s history shows us that luck wasn’t the only factor that enabled Trump to take over the party. In fact, it seems that the party sorely needed someone like Trump.

Take the McCarthyism of the 1950s as an example. Despite knowing that Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s claim that the US government was teeming with USSR spies was absolute nonsense, the leadership of the Republican Party backed him up for its own political gain. This plunged the US into absolute chaos, and many innocent people were persecuted. 

The Southern strategy pursued by the Republican Party in the 1960s also revealed the party’s true colors by demonstrating that it would resort to anything for the sake of obtaining power. The Republican Party stood in solidarity with white Americans from the South who were vehemently opposed to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was signed by President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat. As such, the discriminatory and racist aspects of the Republican Party became more and more prominent. From that point onward, the Republican Party started to walk a path of decline as a consequence of losing followers in the North and gaining enormous support in the South.

This is the historical context that gave rise to the party’s current racist rhetoric, which is characterized by anti-immigrant sentiment. Since it’s become harder for them to be overtly anti-Black in their racism — not to mention that doing so won’t help them secure votes — Republicans have shifted their focus to their war on immigration.

In any case, white supremacy lies deep at the heart of the Republican Party. That’s why it was so difficult to spot people of color at the RNC, no matter how hard I kept my eyes peeled. Though it insists on keeping the Republican name, the “White Supremacy Party” would be a more fitting name for the party. 

Some consider Trump a successful McCarthy. There’s no difference between McCarthyism, which accused everyone and anyone of being a communist or a spy, and Trumpism, which shuns those who braved long and grueling journeys across the border to provide a better life for their families, calling them vermin, sexual predators and murderers.

In that sense, Trump isn’t an anomaly but follows exactly in the steps of his Republican predecessors. There’s a reason that Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the US House of Representatives who weaponized extreme partisanship and used phrases so vulgar and hostile that they had never been used before in modern US politics, delivered an address in support of Trump at the RNC. Gingrich is probably jealous of Trump for successfully achieving his dream of becoming president by such means.

When the time comes for in-depth post-mortems of the decline of the United States, I believe that a substantial portion of the blame will fall on the Republican Party.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]