Ex-Republican reveals how the conservative movement is a total scam — and GOP voters are ‘Trump’s willing marks’

Max Boot has left the Republican Party, and he has some harsh words for the conservative movement he left behind.

The whole ideology has become a “racket,” he argues in a new op-ed for the Washington Post, a development he dates to 1996 when Fox News was launched. The latest revelations about the NRA, from the vice president Wayne LaPierre’s profligate spending to the various self-dealing projects spearheaded by the organization’s top executives, only hammer the point home.

Of course, the most obvious sign of the hollowness of conservatism is its figurehead, President Donald Trump. His supposed business success has been exposed as a sham, a sham on which he built a presidential campaign that had no other justification. His supposed religiosity is an obvious hoax. And his policies, supposedly designed to help the “forgotten man,” have only helped the rich get richer. He has no problem letting countless supporters “fall victim to his trade wars,” as Boot puts it, for the sake of nationalist crusade.

View the complete May 13 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.