Whose Family Values? On Republicans’ Hypocritical Embrace of Donald Trump

“When anyone calls me a liberal, I say, ‘You’re damn right,’ because at the heart of that word is ‘liberty,’” explained law professor, constitutional scholar, and U.S. Congressman Jamie Raskin. “And I’m a progressive, because at the heart of that word is ‘progress.’ And these days, I’m very happy to call myself a conservative, because unlike the party of nihilists and insurrectionists, I want to conserve the land, air, water, the climate system, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Clean Air Act, the Social Security Act, the Medicare Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, you name it. Everything they want to tear down is everything we want to conserve and make work for the American people over the decades of progress we’ve made.”

Republicans, by contrast, have spent decades hiding behind their historical branding to give themselves cover to act in a way that is completely antithetical to their professed values. These are conservatives who don’t intend to conserve anything; constitutionalists who don’t adhere to the Constitution; textualists who are content to discard any text that doesn’t confirm their prior beliefs. The Republicans don’t even believe in their namesake of a “republic” anymore.

So what do they stand for?

Whether you refer to it as branding or spin, talking points or just plain bullshit, if you are engaged in politics, you will endure a daily onslaught of lies. And while no one party has a monopoly on absolute accuracy, only one has cultivated their brand with the express intention of creating an alternate reality. Tiresome though it may be, it is essential to debunk, expose, or at least question radical Republican distortions of the truth, lest they settle and harden as any American’s version of reality.

Since I began my work in political media, I’ve been fortunate enough to learn a great deal from the politicians and political analysts who have shared their views with me and helped inform mine. On the flip side, I’ve also had to endure a truly overwhelming amount of garbage from radical Republicans. Rebutting their shameless lies, switchbacks, and hypocrisy has become a full-time job. At the beginning, I honestly remember wondering, What if there’s not enough news to keep me busy? Now I wonder whether I’ll ever get enough sleep.

But the occupation of extinguishing GOP lies has become far more challenging—because at the helm of their twisted disinformation mechanism is the walking nightmare that is Donald Trump. In 2020, when Trump first debated Biden, he went on a two-minute rant and lied every nine seconds. Chris Wallace made a few paltry attempts to halt the then sitting president’s incoherent tirade, but not even the greatest moderator on earth could refute that many lies in real time.

Republicans, not unlike sheep, have very strong flocking instincts. They will follow one another—regardless of message—into pastures well outside their comfort zone. Trump or no Trump, Republican politicians and their supporters remain bound together by a convenient bag of branding tricks and talking points. For decades, they have put forward specific “values” as justification for their positions. The more I listened, the more I heard the same phrases repeated.

“Family values; fiscal responsibility; states’ rights; pro-law enforcement; upholders of the Constitution.” These handy benchmark slogans are still being touted by even the most immoral and hypocritical members of the party.

So how were their so-called values reached in the first place? And how did our modern fringe group of look-at-me Republicans miss the memo regarding the meaning behind the ideals they claim to uphold? Let’s take a look…

*

The volatile, consequential 1960s and 1970s are often cited as the years during which the modern GOP became animated behind the notion that they’re the party of traditional Family Values™. It was always a front, used to garner power and make themselves appear safe and sound at a time when the Republican Party was flailing. The defeat in Vietnam, the Watergate scandal, Nixon’s resignation, and a wobbly economy left the overwhelmingly white, Christian party in need of a rallying cry. That party viewed itself as being attacked on all sides by those seeking equality (operating under the absurd notion that others’ gaining rights is somehow an affront to their own). Racial integration in schools, the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, and increased awareness of LGBTQ+ rights provoked conservative Republicans to break out their megaphones and shout from some supposed moral high ground. “Family values” proved a crucial shield and sword during this revolutionary era. It would quickly become an essential courting phrase for evangelicals across the country.

The battle against progressive movements was spearheaded by Phyllis Schlafly and other arch-conservatives hoping to convince the public that equality between men and women was undesirable. A powerful activist, Schlafly was known for leading the campaign to prevent ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, and was one of the first to tap into the power of using “family values” as a partisan divide. Unsanitary issues like abortion rights and equity, she argued, were a massive threat to the sanctity of a strong family.

Simultaneously, Christian schools were revolting against progress being made toward, among other things, racial integration, claiming that such movements endangered—you guessed it—family values. The slogan was appropriated across the party, and “family values” became a cloaked phrase used to oppose anybody seen as “other”: immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, women seeking control over their own livelihood.

The GOP has held fast to this very convenient brand as a means of rejecting progressive measures. They still thunder about their party acting as the sole arbiters of a “traditional” American homelife, and continue to offer themselves that moral positioning and permission to impose their agenda on, well, the rest of us.

Which, in the era of near-uniform fealty to Donald Trump, is especially rich. The same party that has been beating its chest about core family values for decades has sold its collective soul for an alleged criminal with revolting behavior and a more than questionable track record when it comes to family, tradition, and anything that could be construed as morality. And they were prepared to do so before he was even elected.

As everyone remembers, in 2016, one month prior to the November election, the now-infamous Access Hollywood tape was published by the Washington Post, featuring then candidate Trump explaining the ways in which one’s celebrity status can be capitalized on to sexually assault women. Really charming stuff. What’s more, his supporters from the party of pure, wholesome values leaped to back him up when he defended his comments as “locker room talk”—you know, the kind that well-heeled family men regularly engage in.

Despite his protestations, this wasn’t just talk. Trump has been accused of harassment, sexual abuse, sexual assault, or rape by at least twenty-six women since the 1970s. One of those women, E. Jean Carroll, took Trump to court and won a $5 million civil lawsuit in New York. In a separate defamation case, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan elucidated that Carroll’s claim that Trump “did ‘rape’” her was “substantially true.” After losing—a fate he has proven he cannot handle in any arena, under any circumstances—Trump defamed her again, was taken to court again, and lost again, this time to the tune of $83.3 million. And yet his cult of supporters has chosen to overlook his sins, for which he has shown the opposite of remorse. They have opted instead to cast Trump as the victim while crucifying the actual survivor.

Not to dwell on the reality that this Republican presidential candidate is more skilled at identifying a child’s sketch of an elephant than he is at exhibiting family values…but his supporters were also happy to ignore the fact that Trump’s former “fixer” Michael Cohen had written checks to buy the silence of Stormy Daniels. Daniels (whose real name is Stephanie Clifford) is a porn star with whom Donald allegedly had an affair in July 2006—four months after his third wife, Melania, gave birth to their son, Barron. Perhaps there are enough members of their party who are happy to accept this grotesque revision of family values. More likely it highlights just how little the party actually cares about its most reiterated slogan, and how willing the GOP is (both inside the Capitol and among the base at large) to excuse Trump for violating everything it claims to stand for. I’m not sure how else to explain why the party of wholesome family values has responded to the behavior of this ambassador of immorality not just with silence…but with high-octane rallies.

The fish rots from the head. And an abandonment of family values helped define Trump’s presidency, right down to his sad troop of foot soldiers. In 2018, an alarming majority of Republicans supported a bill that forcibly separated undocumented migrant children from their parents as soon as they crossed the southern border. There were devastating consequences for thousands of families, resulting in unspeakable trauma for all those ripped away from mothers, fathers, children. While Democrats protested in horror, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions shamelessly admitted that the policy was meant as a deterrent. Other countries, he said, would “get the message.”

Safe to presume that the message he hoped immigrants would “get” was not “‘Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”

Tragically, this inhumane “zero-tolerance” stance flared up again in 2023 and 2024, with Republican candidates teasing the potential of reinstating similar brutality in an effort to outflank each other from the right.

Also worth noting is how limited and specific the party’s definition of family is. Since the Schlafly era, it has referred to white, Christian, well-off, heterosexual nuclear families. The Republican Party Platform has stated for decades that “Republicans oppose and resist the efforts of the Democrat Party to redefine the traditional American family.” Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House and a fervent Trump hanger-on and election denier, has opposed and resisted this as well, calling homosexuality a “dangerous lifestyle,” and writing that legalizing gay marriage would lead to pedophilia and to people marrying their pets, and could potentially destroy “the entire democratic system.” Since taking up the gavel and coming under fire for these published statements, he has suggested that he loves the Bible and the rule of law and doesn’t remember writing the things he wrote, not unlike the way George Santos conveniently couldn’t quite recall using campaign funds for Botox and Ferragamo sneakers.

His extremist colleagues, peddling their “Don’t Say Gay” laws, are delighted to have the most powerful Republican in the House voicing their bigoted opinions. “This is a free country, but we don’t give special protections for every person’s bizarre choices,” Johnson wrote. He’s one to talk about bizarre choices. This proud evangelical Christian uses his son as his “accountability partner” so that they can track each other’s pornography usage. Just like Jesus would’ve wanted?

Sexual assault, paternal negligence, policies that tear apart families, disrespect for a non-heteronormative family structure. How has not a single one of these proven to be a red flag or even an apparent subject of grave concern to a party that claims to not just abide by, but be the sole proponent of, family values? Perhaps Republicans are deluded enough to believe that their party continues to excel at protecting the sanctity of the home. Either that or the phrase serves as a threadbare veil of moral superiority; as language used to dictate how all Americans should live their lives—in their choice of partner, in what they read, in how they pray; on abortion, even in cases of rape…hypothetically committed by the type of man who would brag about grabbing women by the pussy.

__________________________________

From Shameless: Republicans’ Deliberate Dysfunction and the Battle to Preserve Democracy by Brian Tyler Cohen. Copyright © 2024 by Brian Tyler Cohen. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.