Don't blame Donald Trump.

Republicans of the old school variety have been all over the media these days, alternately shaking their heads and their fists in frustration as they watch Donald Trump trampling the political landscape in their name. But the simple truth is that Trump has followed the GOP playbook to a T. He has pandered to evangelicals and the gun lobby. He has appointed judges that are off the charts – in some cases literally – at the conservative end of the spectrum. He is rolling back the regulatory state. And he has cut taxes. Hugely.

When the New York Times editorial board declared last Sunday that Republicans Have Become the Party of Debt, it was as though they had been out of the country – or perhaps on another planet – for the last thirty-five years. It is a tribute to the power of the Republican brand that a fair share of Republicans – along, apparently, with the Times editorial board – continue to believe that the GOP is the party of balanced budgets, small government and individual liberty. For decades, that brand has been an illusion. 

The Times editorial pointed wistfully to Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who lashed out at his Republican colleagues during his brief filibuster of last week's budget deal: “If you were against President Obama’s deficits, and now you’re for the Republican deficits, isn’t that the very definition of hypocrisy?” Of course it is, but so was Paul's own vote in favor of tax cuts that are projected to add $539 billion to the federal deficit over the next two years, nearly double the spending hike in the two-year spending bill that he decried. It is an article of faith with math-challenged conservatives that a deficit produced by reducing revenues is different from one created by increasing spending. To resolve that quandary – and in the eyes of the New York Times, burying once and for all the GOP reputation for fiscal prudence – they have chosen to do both, Paul's flailing hypocrisy notwithstanding. 

On the eve of the financial collapse in 2008, I published this graph of the change in the public debt by presidential administration. I was trying to make the same point back then that the members of the New York Times Editorial Board still find hard to grasp: This is not their parents' Republican Party. As illustrated here, the public debt declined as a percent of GDP under Presidents Nixon, Carter and Clinton, while rising under Ronald Reagan and both Presidents Bush. The Republican Party's principled commitment to balanced budgets began to crack with Ronald Reagan's embrace of supply side economics. As was evident in Republican rhetoric as they passed last year's tax cuts, under the tutelage of a cabal of charlatans and cranks, the GOP cast aside its long-standing belief that making difficult fiscal choices was an essential responsibility of governing, in favor of the myth of self-funding tax cuts.

It was the electoral self-interest of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, that led the Republican Party to turn its back on its defining principles and embark on the journey that led it into the arms of Donald Trump. Having suffered a razor thin loss in his first presidential bid in 1960, before winning the White House eight years later with a narrow margin in the popular vote, Richard Nixon swore that he would never suffer a near miss again. And thus was born the Southern Strategy. 

Looking across the electoral landscape of the 1960s, Nixon determined to reshape the Republican coalition by bringing Southern Democrats into the Republican Party. In the wake of the civil rights and anti-war movements, and the cultural turmoil of the 1960s, Nixon's strategy targeted the Southern and culturally conservative working-class voters who were estranged from the Democratic Party and had given Alabama Governor George Wallace 13.5% of the vote in the 1968 Presidential Election. Nixon – who had won nearly a third of the black vote in 1960 – anticipated that the GOP could gain a significant advantage in the Electoral College if it essentially traded its historical support among blacks and Northeastern liberals for the Southern white vote that had long constituted the Solid South of the Democratic Party. After winning the White House by barely half a percent in 1968, he was swept to a second term four years later with a 23% edge in the popular vote, and the largest Electoral College landslide by any Republican in history.

When Ronald Reagan ran against a weak Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential race, he might have chosen to return to the GOP roots, but instead doubled down on Nixon's strategy. In his famous states' rights speech at the Nashoba County Fair in Mississippi in the summer of 1980, Reagan adapted George Wallace's famous words, segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever, into a pattern of coded racial rhetoric that would become the GOP standard for decades to come. Just a few years after Congressional Republicans voted overwhelmingly to support the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – in contrast with a sharply divided Democratic Party – Reagan committed the Republican Party to rolling back the U.S. Department of Justice commitment to civil rights by his promise to "restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them."

Reagan associate Grover Norquist emerged as the architect of the political strategy that would bind historically Democrat Southern and socially conservative working class whites to the GOP for decades to come. The coalition strategy that he laid out in the late 1980s focused on a half dozen single issue voting groups – anti-tax, pro-gun, pro-life, pro-faith, anti-gay marriage, pro-property rights. Norquist's purpose was not to define the principles of the Republican Party, but rather to provide GOP candidates with an electoral roadmap: swear fealty to each of these groups and he guaranteed victory on Election Day. Norquist "center right" strategy did not dictate where any given candidate should stand on other issues – free trade, immigration, death penalty, and the like – it was simply an electoral strategy to build an enduring Republican majority. 

The commitment of the Republican Party to balanced budgets died with George Herbert Walker Bush's support for the 1990 tax increases. When Bush violated his no-tax pledge – in favor of what he imagined to be the higher Republican principle of fiscal rectitude – he doomed both his own re-election and put the final nail in the coffin of that long-standing GOP article of faith. Norquist's Taxpayer Protection Pledge, combined with the ascendency within the party of – in the words of long-time Republican insider Pete Peterson – "an unholy alliance of tax cutting Republicans and big spending Republicans" doomed the fiscal principles that the GOP once stood for. As Grover Norquist observed a few years ago, explaining why a commitment to balanced budgets had no roll in his electoral roadmap, 'the simple the truth is that no one cares about budget deficits except a few old men sipping scotch at the New York Metropolitan Club.' 

For all the hew and cry from disgruntled Never Trump Republicans – and the New York Times editorial board – it is not Donald Trump who undermined the commitment of the Republican Party to what had long been its core principles; it was Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan who set the course to where the GOP finds itself today. A half-century ago, Nixon and Reagan lured disgruntled Southern and culturally conservative Democrats into the Republican Party. Over the ensuing decades, as those voters became the base of the GOP, abortion, guns, faith and the myth of self-funding tax cuts – along with coded racial rhetoric that has increasingly seeped into public policy – have become the core commitments of the GOP, effectively replacing the principles that the party once stood for.

It should be no surprise, then, that Donald Trump has succeeded by aping the style and substance of a Southern populist. Far from trampling on what some view as Republican traditions, he has diligently embraced the Norquist electoral playbook that Nixon and Reagan first put in place. If he chose to deepen his appeal by being more Huey Long than Jeb Bush – giving no regard to Republican pieties about balanced budgets, small government or individual self-reliance that have long since been rendered quaint – it is because he understands that the GOP did not take over the Southern Democratic Party, as Richard Nixon imagined, instead, the Southern Democratic Party took over the GOP.

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit: Why Federalism is Not Just For Racists Anymore."

Artwork by Jay Duret. Check out his political cartooning at www.jayduret.com. Follow him on Twitter @jayduret or Instagram at @joefaces.

The cunning of Vladimir Putin.

Everyone is piling on Christopher Steele these days. The twenty-two year veteran of the British MI-6 intelligence service is the author of the 'Russia dossier' that has become the target of Republican ire. Over the past few weeks, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, Senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsay Graham, and the Wall Street Journal editorial board have each targeted Steele, dismissing the long-time Russia expert as just one more partisan hack in our roiling politics.

At issue are the FISA surveillance warrants issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that allowed the FBI and Department of Justice to wiretap Trump campaign associate Carter Page. Four different FISA judges approved the electronic surveillance of Page, an investment banker with ties to the Kremlin. Nunes and the rest are challenging the validity of those warrants on the basis that the applications for the warrants relied heavily on material derived from Steele's dossier, which, they contend, was tainted by the former British spy's partisan bias. As illustrated in this graphic from Fox News, Trump loyalists argue that the approval of the Page wiretaps by the FISA court was part of the critical path of events that led to the appointment of Robert Mueller as Special Counsel to investigate the whole Russia matter. Like one of those crafty defense attorneys on Law and Order that Republicans despise, Nunes, Grassley, Graham – and the President himself – are essentially arguing that the Russia investigation, in its entirety, should be thrown out on a technicality – on a defective warrant.

It is hard to write anything about 'Russia dossier' without feeling like you are descending into the world of conspiracy theories and political mud wrestling. The dossier – for those who have been living in a cave for the past year or two – is a collection of 13 intelligence memos prepared by Christopher Steele from June 20 to December 13, 2016. The memos reflect material provided from a range of sources, including current and former Russian foreign ministry, finance and intelligence officials within Vladimir Putin's orbit.

The dossier is rarely mentioned in the media without the adjective "salacious" attached to it. Its reputation for salacious content is a reference to just one paragraph in the entire 35-page file. That paragraph, which appears on page two of the memo dated June 20, 2016, describes Donald Trump cavorting with a number of women in the presidential suite at the Moscow Ritz Carlton in 2013, an incident that is referred to in later memos as part of the kompromat (compromising information) that the Russians hold for potential blackmail purposes.

While that event has not been confirmed, it is worth noting that Trump's long-time bodyguard Keith Schiller did confirm in his testimony to Congress last year that he and Trump were at the hotel at the time, and that a Russian associate did offer to "send five women" up to Trump's room. But Schiller recalls that he (Schiller) declined the offer, saying "We don't do that type of stuff." Schiller subsequently went to bed and could not confirm what, if anything, might have happened later.

For all the attention the Russia dossier has garnered, few people seem to have actually read it. Ironically, the labeling of the dossier as "salacious" has limited the amount of attention that has actually been paid to its contents. The importance of Steele's work is not in what it says about Carter Page – or even what it says about Donald Trump – it is what it says about Vladimir Putin. The memos describe the strategy supported and directed by Putin to, in the words of a senior foreign ministry official, "sow discord and disunity both within the US itself, but more especially within the Transatlantic alliance which was viewed as inimical to Russia's interests." The dossier in its totality describes an "information operation" designed to use psychological, cyber and propaganda tactics to achieve long-standing Russian and Soviet goals of undermining liberal western democracies, which they had been unable to achieve through diplomatic initiatives or military intimidation.

No one should be surprised that Vladimir Putin wants to restore Russia's power and dominion to what it was at the height of the Soviet empire; he has suggested as much many times. And, certainly, none of our long-time allies in Europe have any doubt about the very real threat that Putin's ambitions represent. The importance of the dossier is that it focuses on Putin's view that neutering the power and prestige of the United States is a critical path step in achieving his ambitions, and that it describes the strategy Putin has orchestrated to accomplish that objective.

The fact that Putin has put in place an ongoing effort to disrupt our democracy is no longer in dispute – at least outside of the Oval Office. Each week, it seems, there is new evidence of Russia's tactics, from the use of bots to stir up controversy and conflict on social media, to direct attacks on the integrity of our election apparatus. An example of this latter effort was confirmed this week by the Department of Homeland Security report that Russia was successful – to a limited extent – in hacking state voting systems in advance of the 2016 election. If Putin's objective was to sow discord and disunity in our society, it is safe to say that he has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

The arguments made over the past few weeks by Devin Nunes, Senators Grassley and Graham, and the Wall Street Journal editorial board illustrate the point. While it was released with much fanfare, the memo that Nunes prepared in his capacity as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee barely takes issue with the substance of Steele's dossier. Instead, it simply asserts that Christopher Steele was a partisan, and therefore his work product should not be relied upon to secure a FISA surveillance warrant.

Nunes memo can be summed up in a single sentence in the second to last paragraph: "While the FISA application relied on Steele’s past record of credible reporting on other unrelated matters, it ignored or concealed his anti-Trump financial and ideological motivations." The sentence is striking because, despite all the partisan uproar, Nunes does not attack the substance of the information presented in the dossier. He does not suggest that Steele is a crackpot or conspiracy theorist. He does not argue, as some have suggested, that the entire dossier was made up out of whole cloth as part of a Russian disinformation campaign. Indeed, he affirms Steele's past record of credible reporting. Instead, like Grassley, Graham and the WSJ editorial board, the Nunes memo simply insists that the information in the dossier should be disregarded because Steele was a partisan. And the proof that Steele is a partisan is a statement he made in September 2016 – cited earlier in the memo – confessing that he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.” 

But confessing that he was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected does not mean that Steele's motivations were ideological. As a British MI-6 officer, he watched first-hand the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the new Russian state led by the KGB-trained Vladimir Putin. If one reads the first seven or eight memos in the dossier – those written in the months before Steele expressed his concerns about Trump – one can imagine his growing concern with what he was hearing. Those memos describe nothing less than a strategy to undermine Russia's most powerful geopolitical adversary – and Great Britain's closest ally – to reestablish Russian dominance over its historical spheres of influence, and ultimately to overturn the post-World War II international order.

And in Donald Trump – those memos suggest – Putin appeared to have found his perfect, if unwitting, counterpart. Trump's America First foreign policy would easily comport with Putin's desire – as described by a senior Russian finance official in the dossier – "to return to Nineteenth Century 'Great Power' politics anchored upon countries' interests rather than the ideals-based international order." Over the course of the presidential campaign, Trump consistently pandered to Putin; Trump's team removed support for Ukrainian independence from the Republican Party platform; and Trump's pro-Putin rhetoric was leading to a significant softening in American attitudes toward Russia and Vladimir Putin, particularly among Republicans. In Steele's July 30th memo, a Russian émigré source within the Trump campaign sums it all up, when he reported that the "Kremlin had given its word" that the comprising material that the Russians had gathered would not be deployed against Trump, "given how helpful and cooperative his team had been over several years, and particularly of late." 

There was a reason Christopher Steele's hair was on fire, but it was most likely not the bias that Nunes and the rest contend. It was because – in Steele's mind's eye – he was watching the rise of a real world Manchurian Candidate, in real time. In the pre-Trumpian world, Steele's reporting would not brand him an ideologue in the manner Nunes suggests, but rather a loyal friend to the United States – concerned with the survival of American leadership in the world and its role as the bulwark against everything that Vladimir Putin stands for.

Even if Nunes believed Steele to be a partisan producing opposition research for a Democrat, that should not be a reason to ignore the contents of the dossier. After all, it is a truism of politics that opposition research is only valuable if it is factual. The fact that Nunes appears to have been unable – as the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee – to look past his own bias against the author of the dossier and consider the implications of its contents for the security of our nation represents an institutional failure of the first order.

The fact that Chuck Grassley and Lindsay Graham similarly chose to pile on in a purely partisan manner illustrates the most peculiar and distressing aspect of our politics today: how the Republican Party, en masse, has succumbed so completely to Donald Trump's particular mix of cultural and political power. The willingness of each of these parties to ignore the substance of the dossier – which is not about Carter Page or Donald Trump, but the credible portrait it provides of Vladimir Putin and the threat he represents – demonstrates the depth of our dysfunction, and the extent to which the leadership of the GOP has defaulted to the new political maxim of our era: one is either pro-Trump or part of the treasonous cabal that opposes him.

There are three possibilities with respect to Trump himself. First, that he is everything that Putin could have ever hoped for, because much of what Christopher Steele has written is true, and the collusion and corruption was deep and enduring. Second, that Trump is everything that Putin could have ever hoped for, because his pathological narcissism and defensiveness about the election blind him to any concern about how Putin is seeking to neuter America as an adversary and impose his will on the west. Or third, that Trump is everything that Putin could have ever hoped for, because he is content to have America cede its post-World War II leadership role in the world.

When Mitt Romney was the Republican Party nominee for President, he observed that Russia is our greatest geopolitical threat. Five years later, it appears we have come full circle. Today, we are led by a President – with the Republican Party in his wake – who, whatever his reasons might be, simply does not care.

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit: Why Federalism is Not Just For Racists Anymore."

Artwork by Jay Duret. Check out his political cartooning at www.jayduret.com. Follow him on Twitter @jayduret or Instagram at @joefaces.