Man, Republicans have had a rough time over the last few years. 

Since 2016, the party has devolved into a burning cesspit. In 2018, they lost the midterm elections with historically high margins. They lost the 2020 election and threw a hissy fit over it. They said the 2022 midterm elections would cause a red tidal wave, but it turned out to be a red puddle.

By now, it should be abundantly clear that something is not working with these losses continuing to pile up. 

So, where have they gone wrong? Why has the Republican Party been on a continual backslide?

The answer is remarkably simple. The Republican Party, since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, has not been able to quell its most extreme members. 

At no other time has this become more clear than with the circus that was Kevin McCarthy’s tenure as Speaker of the House. 

Since even before day one, the man, who looks like he got left home alone for two Christmases in a row in the early 90s, faced troubles as house leader. Thing is, instead of booby-trapping his house with traps that range from cute and funny to borderline psychopathic, he bent over backward to appease the lowest common denominator in his caucus within the House.

It took 15 ballots in the house to finally choose McCarthy as Speaker, the most for any Speaker since 1856. As a consequence, McCarthy started his tenure as speaker on poor footing, and that unstable foundation continued to crumble for the entirety of his mere 269-day speakership.

He proved to be one of the weakest speakers in the history of the country because of the extremely narrow margin that the Republicans have in The House, with only nine more representatives than the Democrats.

This has allowed a small but extreme sect of the Republican caucus to exert disproportionate control over McCarthy so he could maintain his narrow margin. Lead by Matt Gaetz, a man who looks like if Jack Nicholson had an affair with an onion, this small sect has sewn chaos over the past 11 months in The House.

These few members have wielded a disproportionate amount of power and have used their leverage as a way to extort McCarthy which culminated in the whole fiasco with the debt ceiling in June and a potential government shutdown in September.

Thankfully, a shutdown was avoided … temporarily. As of publishing, we are a week away from another government shutdown with little to no certainty as to whether it will be avoided. Now, you might ask, “Why has Congress sat on their hands for the last month doing nothing while a shutdown is quickly approaching?” 

Well, let’s just say that McCarthy’s booby traps weren’t very successful given that he was voted out of the house because of a proposal by everyone’s least favorite onion man.

From his first to his last day, McCarthy was beholden to the whims of the far right until he was replaced by a man who’s so comically evil that Skeletor sees him as a role model. 

The new Speaker, Mike Johnson, led the efforts to overturn the 2020 election and endorsed policies such as: allowing states to imprison doctors who perform abortions, pressuring Amazon to sell books on anti-gay conversion therapy, allowing states to imprison people for having gay sex, banning abortion in all 50 states, and cutting funding for social security and medicare.

Not only is all of that concerning, but Johnson is also just an exceptionally strange man. 

In 2022, he publicly said at Benton, Louisiana’s Cypress Baptist Church, that he and his son monitor each others’ porn usage. I do not kid, I do not jest. This is the man who is now third in the line for the presidency; a guy who has his teenage son monitor his porn addiction.

Speaking of the presidency, the presidential race for the 2024 election has been an unbridled disaster.

Both Republican debates were completely unhinged with an insurmountable amount of bickering between candidates that have absolutely no chance of winning the nomination. Watching these debates was like watching Keeping Up With The Kardashians but without any of the funny. It was just a sad and pathetic display for the Republicans.

Only two candidates are even remotely viable for the nomination, those being Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. 

Trump continues to act like a high school bully, but now it seems like he got hit one too many times to the head and lost all of his luster. 

His populist appeal, which he generated in the 2016 election by acting like a rabid honey badger and throwing some of the greatest political insults you have ever seen, has completely faded. He’s lost so much of the energy he once had on stage.

Plus that’s not to mention the fact that he currently is facing 91 felony charges across the country. He’s being investigated for fraud, stealing classified documents, and trying to overturn the 2020 election. Suffice it to say that Trump is neck-deep in legal trouble. 

And yet, he is still somehow the front-runner despite everything he did to try to destroy our democracy.

And then there’s Ron DeSantis …

I’ll just save that man for another article, but let’s just say that in terms of name-calling, Trump has still got it. Meatball Ron might be his magnum opus for insulting political opponents.

All of these issues have stemmed from one common cause: the Republican Party cannot control its most extreme and radical members. 

Their continual acceptance of unhinged nut jobs who want to strip Americans of their rights and protections has come to bite them in the rear end as the party is a complete and utter mess. It doesn’t look like that problem will fix itself any time soon.