Putin and Maxwell: Welcome to the GOP

In embracing a war criminal and a child sex-trafficker, the Republican Party has lost its soul.

All days are not created equal.

September 10, 2001, was every second as long as September 11, 2001. So it was on December 6, 1941, or November 21, 1963. Or January 5, 2021.

Friday, August 15, 2025, may not be remembered as a searing historical event, but it should. In the long collapse of the Republican Party as a traditional center-right American political party, it’s doubtful that any day will better capture the complete degradation and disgrace of my old party.

For decades, the Republican Party was built on two foundations. In foreign policy, it was the party of strength, standing firm against the tyranny of the Soviet Union, dedicated to the principle never to negotiate with terrorists. At home, it was the Family Values party, asserting unequivocally that a marriage between a man and a woman was the great societal panacea, the most effective weapon to eradicate poverty, crime, and drugs.

We can debate how much the Republican Party in the pre-Trump years actually believed in these so-called bedrock values. I wrote a book called, It Was All A Lie: How The Republican Party Became Donald Trump and made the case that no one abandons deeply held beliefs in a few years. To do so only proves they were never deeply held. That’s a broad brush to paint American conservatives, and of course, there are exceptions. But political parties are large organizations of voluntary association, and as someone who worked in five presidential elections and helped Republican governors and Senators in over half the country, my conclusion is that what we called values turned out to be mere marketing slogans.

Which brings us to August 15, 2025.

On that day, an American president welcomed a war criminal waging a war of genocide against a European Democracy to the United States.