Republicans will spend time and treasure, likely years and millions of dollars, for consultants and experts and pundits to find out what went wrong and how this happened. Save your money and don’t waste your time. The answer came 10 years ago by a Senator from South Carolina who didn’t live to see his prophetic words come to pass. “If we nominate Donald Trump we will get destroyed…and we will deserve it.” Republicans blew up their party, their values, their dignity and decency for a man who wasn’t even a Republican. Unilateral tariffs on our allies by executive orders isn’t conservative. Siding with Vladimir Putin’s murderous war in Ukraine isn’t conservative. Accepting a bribe from a foreign country in the form of an airplane that costs hundreds of millions of dollars isn’t conservative. Turning untrained thugs in masks loose in our communities to murder American citizens in cold blood isn’t conservative. Threatening to invade and conquer a sovereign country, an ally, isn’t conservative. Pardoning people who assaulted law enforcement officers isn’t conservative. The list is too long and too exhausting to contemplate. Republican law makers lit themselves on fire for a thrice married, sociopathic, mentally unstable reality tv personality who bragged about acing a test to check for dementia and spoke about the asses of male candidates for the US Senate. There was a time when I believed we should welcome any of them who finally spoke up back into polite society. But that ship has sailed. These people should live in shame for the rest of their days, shunned and repudiated in history books, never to hold a position that requires the public trust ever again.