Donald Trump and family are what the Grand Old Party, the party of Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, and of my father, has unloosened upon our country. I’m assuming the Republicans didn’t know, unlike Vladimir Putin, what they were doing. Do they know today what they’ve done? Here I would assume they did, but are afraid for their own survival in the Swamp.

In 2015 the Republicans had 17 candidates to choose from. Did they not recognize the demagogue among them? The demagogue by means of his tweets and popular rallies managed to easily overwhelm the other candidates. And now today he, Trump, is still constantly reminding us that he won, of his great win in the electoral college, totaling 304 votes to 227 for “crooked” Hillary.

At the end of 2015 there were 17 Republican candidates. How many of these can you name? Remember? Only a few months into the new year, 2016, most of them had retired from the campaign for one reason or another, with a good number of them giving their support to Trump. (Why did they do that?)

In any case just the one year later there was just the one candidate, the Donald.  The Republican leadership, such as it is, is still there, not leading, not doing anything to change things for the better, but mostly, just like the rest of the country, watching and listening to the Donald and waiting, waiting, for what?

Here is the Republican, House and Senate, leadership, such as it is, with Donald between the two of them, Ryan and McConnell, definitely in charge while leading them about.

You might want to know what the other 16 candidates are now doing. I know I would, but we hear little or nothing from them. There seems to be no real leadership coming from them nor from the Republican Party. And this must be because of the bullying and demagoguery of the Donald. He is everywhere, the only subject of conversation, dominating the media, overwhelming all of us  with his tweets and popular rallies.

So instead of the 17 candidates we now have the one, the Donald.

And what’s neXt? “What do Democrats stand for?” a Democratic lawmaker asks. “Lawlessness or liberality? Policymaking or virtue signaling? Gender-neutral pronouns and bathrooms or good jobs and higher wages?”

And Trump wasted little time rubbing salt into Democratic wounds. “Democrats used to stand with the Working Man,” he tweeted Wednesday morning. “Now it’s the party of Abortion and Amnesty. All that’s missing is Acid. Sad!”