The Republican Party is now essentially a wasteland where political hacks must go for the allure of a well-financed political career. With over fifty years of tampering with a functional structure of a working democracy, once open to vibrant change, corporate leaders have profusely financed and created an agency of toxic tomfoolery to oversee corporate control. Self-aggrandizing Republican leaders have so refashioned a once noble party for corporate control and favor that truth-twisting has reached clownish extremes. Tomfoolery suggests clownishness but Republican antics go well beyond such suggested harmlessness to the toxic realm of death, destruction, and disease – needless deaths of hundreds of thousands in a bogus war in Iraq, a pandemic that killed millions globally, many through lies and misinformation, a GOP fifty-year denial of climate change, followed by destruction of lives and property in climate-change disasters, and financial ruin in Wall Street greed-fests.

The GOP has made Trump and Trumpism their centerpiece, including all the Trump corruption and criminality. Corporate money had already financed a relentless for-profit path to power and control. Its precepts were already fashioning government policy that enabled pilfering and pillaging by an economic structure built with corporate money. Their economic rules/power grabs made a succession of grifting/fraud/corruption practices possible – banks, Wall Street, even a bogus war. Both parties helped the corporate effort but the GOP carved out the toxic tomfoolery for continuing corporate support.

Though the corrupt grifter has laid a firmer foundation for democracy’s death, Trump, is now in criminal legal peril, ready to delay his way out of it. Other minor players are set to do his bidding in clownish ways, like Rep. James Comer who desperately claimed a witness to Biden corruption got lost, or the witness search/promise by Jim Jordan regarding FBI corruption goes on and on, claimed but never found, or Rep. Brad Wenstrup’s promise of an impartial inquiry in accusing Dr. Anthony Fauci – one of the most respected scientists in the world – of having masterminded the creation of the COVID-19 virus is falling flat on its face.

The name Republican, especially in a majority, spells lies, theatre, and more lies with nothing of substance ever accomplished. SCOTUS continues to take away rights, in effect, functioning as a Republican right-wing caucus. Defying precedent, right-wing-controlled SCOTUS seem to be acting as a Super legislature while several of the six Federalist-society-selected justices are grifting billionaire money and favor. A dark money fund under control of Leonard Leo & the Federalist Society seems poised to finance corporate-favored endeavors in the meantime, already financing the selection of the six conservative justices and legislation for red states to suppress non-white voting.

Toxic tomfoolery will be with us, as long as Trump has sway over the Republican Party and/or corporate money calls the shots for a fading democracy.