A recent column in The Economist analyzed Trump’s appeal among Republicans and came to an unsurprising conclusion, unsurprising at least to me – that while various Republicans have scattered interests in the few positive proposals that Trump has made, what unites almost all hard-core Republicans is Trump’s unmitigated hate of Democrats.

I suspect his hatred of the media is also another factor, although the Economist column didn’t go into that, but the fact that hatred is what largely motivates the most hard-core Republicans is something that we’ve all observed, and something that most people shy away from – or address by saying that the Democrats are just the same.

No… the Democrats have a considerable range of faults, and what they’ve proposed and endorsed may at times be extravagantly expensive, excessively regulation oriented, and often painfully far too politically correct, but it’s not based around hatred and oppression. They may want to tax Americans more than Republicans want, and more than may be economically healthy, but they’re not running around with political rally after political rally based on hatred and chanting “lock them up” about notable opposition political figures. Democrats aren’t claiming that white nationalist groups have “good people” in them, but Trump is, and hard-core Republicans just brush off such statements.

In the past Democrats have gerrymandered political districts in a fashion similar to the Republicans, but certainly since the 1970s [and before that, a great many of the now conservative Republicans were southern Democrats who later became Republicans after Lyndon Johnson pushed and signed Civil Rights legislation], current Democrats haven’t disenfranchised voters by such tactics as closing polling places in Republican voting strongholds, nor have they enacted legislation in state after state designed to deny the vote to the poor and minorities and then “justified” it by fraudulently claiming “voter fraud,” despite the fact that no evidence of significant fraud has ever been discovered in recent decades.

Republicans also tend to ignore the fact that they’re incredibly insistent on “law and order” when dealing with the poor and minorities, and totally ignore such laws when they apply to CEOs who engaged in fraudulent lending practices that brought on the last recession, and even change the laws to make certain forms of price-fixing legal [i.e., the provision that forbids Medicare from negotiating lower drug prices from pharmaceutical companies]. Likewise, penalties for “white-collar” fraud and theft, when even levied, are far less stringent than those for thefts committed by the poor and minorities, even though the dollar value of the white collar crimes is far greater.

As a whole, Republicans also don’t like to elect women or minorities. Ever since women could vote and be elected to Congress, the vast majority of women elected have been Democrats, and it’s gotten to the point that, for the last 20 years more than 70% of all women in the U.S. House of Representatives have been Democrats. In the present House 83% of the women are Democrats, and in the new House in 2019, at least 86% will be Democrats, while out of the estimated 200 Republicans, it appears that only 13 will be women, while 83 out of 232[so far] Democrats will be women. As for minorities, only seven percent of Republican Representatives are minorities of any sort, while more than forty percent of Democrats are minorities, similar to the fact that forty percent of the U.S. population is composed of minorities.

Interestingly enough, 88% of all Trump voters were white, which certainly tracks with how few elected Republicans are anything other than white and male, disproportionately over sixty.

But all of this poses a problem for Republicans, and the nation. Within roughly twenty years our multi-ethnic nation will become even more so, and there will also be more women in positions of economic and political power. Yet Trump and more than a few Republicans are continuing and increasing their attacks on their opponents, especially minorities and women.

At the same time, it appears that those who call out this GOP hate-mongering and racial bias are usually ignored or demonized by the Republicans, and in the latter case, doing so in a wide public forum can be dangerous to one’s health, particularly one’s political health, especially if one is a moderate Republican.