"RINO" is such a funny acronym. The vast majority of the Republican base use it to disparage the small coalition actually vested with powers in the Republican Party.  The people most proud to call themselves "Republican" are likely the same ones whom most Republican voters would call "Republican in name only."  The RINOs rule, and the Republican voters hate them for it.

I remember seeing Mitt Romney getting booed and heckled at an event in Utah by ordinary Republicans who correctly see him as a backstabber extraordinaire, and Monsieur Pierre Delecto burst into an aristocratic episode of tsk-tsk-ing and why-I-never exasperation while he pointed out that it was he, Mitt Romney, who had been the 2012 Republican nominee for president (before choking to the communist-in-chief) and that his father not only was a prominent Republican and governor of Michigan last century, but also should have been president, too!  (Darn that Goldwater and his defense of liberty against Big Government!)  Leave it to a RINO to immediately refer voters to his family résumé as haughty proof of his ideological bona fides.

Romney is the perfect mascot for a gaggle of Roves, McConnells, Lincoln Project rejects, and Chamber of Commerce globalists à la Paul Ryan.  They are generals without troops, prancing around like the prima donna, blissfully unaware that no one follows them anywhere.  In this way, it makes perfect sense for the majority of Republican voters to despise their own political leadership so feverishly that the Republicans with all the power are also Republicans deemed so fake and unfit to serve that their titles convey authority "in name only."  "Let them dine in their hoity-toity Republican clubs and jeer at the Americans made from sterner, sturdier stuff," Republican voters continue to say, "but we know who they really are."  RINOs might be the upper 1%, but the bottom 99% could not give a fig.

Yet here we are again with the 2024 presidential race kicking into low gear, and the RINOs remain convinced that they can manipulate the Republican electorate into doing their bidding.  Paul Ryan is on a mission to tell anyone unfortunate enough to be within earshot of his nasal scoldings that Donald Trump is too old, too toxic, too much of a loser to be the Republicans' nominee again.  If anyone knows anything about being a toxic loser, it is surely Paul Ryan; it took Donald Trump to actually carry the state of Wisconsin for Republicans in 2016, after native son Ryan was embarrassingly rejected by his neighbors four years earlier.  (Is that why Ryan hightailed it to C-suite offices in New York City, where he could be around like-minded friends?)

As for being too old, well, I have my doubts that P90X Paul could manage 90-minute speeches in the baking sun wearing a full suit as effortlessly as President Trump, but campaign season is just heating up.  There will be no dearth of opportunities for Americans to judge for themselves who is "low energy" and who is not.  Biden, for instance, is low-energy.  That wretched excuse for a man looks like an assortment of old twigs that would struggle to keep a fire going.  The doddering, corrupt fool cannot distinguish his life's Jenga tower of lies from the hallucinations that plague him.  Biden is who Paul Ryan pretends Trump to be.  Trump, on the other hand, pretends to be no one — he is just himself — and Paul Ryan still fails to understand why voters find that quality so refreshing.

So Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney hate Donald Trump.  Turtle Mcconnell and "Turd Blossom" Rove hate Donald Trump.  Almost all of the Republicans in the U.S. Senate and probably two-thirds of the Republicans in the U.S. House hate Donald Trump.  Every corporate board member and Wall Street chieftain committed to draining middle-class Americans' pockets dry while singing sweet love songs to globalism's crony capitalism all hate Donald Trump.

Mexican president AMLO, the drug cartels and sex-traffickers who control the Southern border, the cheap labor–loving U.S. Chamber of Commerce committed to sticking it to America's blue-collar workforce, and the United Nations–World Economic Forum–U.S. Uniparty hydra-headed monster pushing for unlimited illegal immigration across America hate Donald Trump.  Controlled opposition Fox News, taxpayer-funded PBS, the Sulzberger family's New York Times, Jeff Bezos's Washington Post, and all the Big Tech monopolists who conspire with the federal government to censor Americans and manipulate public opinion hate Donald Trump.

The millions of unelected bureaucratic agents of the permanent Deep State all hate Donald Trump.  The Intelligence Community and Department of (in)Justice (any DOJ that persecutes America-loving J6 protesters as "terrorists" and "insurrectionists" is antithetical to notions of justice), which went out of their way to frame the America First president as a Russian spy, criminal, and traitor, definitely hate Donald Trump.  America's enemies in China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and wherever communism has reared its ugly head hate Donald Trump.

And I look at this magnificent collection of "elite" hatred toward President Trump, and I think, "My goodness, this man must be doing something right."  As Charles Hurt has often noted, Donald Trump truly has the best enemies!  When you consider that he spent four years doing everything he could to increase American prosperity, self-respect, and security while being constantly hounded by the entirety of the federal government (vivid proof that an unconstitutional Leviathan has usurped Article II's executive power originally vested in the president) — all while taking no salary for his troubles — it is difficult to name another American politician who has given so much of himself for so little in return.  For his efforts, worms like Romney, Ryan, Rove, McConnell, and all the rest could never even muster a simple "thank you."  As Maya Angelou dryly warned, "when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."

Significantly, most Republican voters seem to have taken Angelou's good advice to heart.  Gone are the days when they could be cowed into voting for some squishy Brahmin RINO because Bill Kristol, Steve Schmidt, Michael Steele, Nicolle Wallace, or George Will tells them they must.  No longer will Republican voters endure those who unjustly insult them to their faces and go on national television to apologize to Democrats on their behalf for their perceived cultural transgressions.  After watching Paul RINO and Turtle McConnell waste their majorities, fail to repeal Obamacare's socialized medicine, refuse to fund President Trump's border wall, surreptitiously sponsor the Deep State's efforts to convict Trump as a Russian spy, aid and abet the Democrats' subversion of elections through mass mail-in ballot fraud, and encourage the DOJ's ruthless harassment and persecution of J6 defendants, rank-and-file Republican voters will never trust Establishment Republicans again.

All of this raises the question: why on Earth would those even slightly tainted by the reek of RINO stench think Republican voters will forget the last fifteen years of betrayals and do as they say?  Globalism, Chamber of Commerce, democracy building, open borders, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, Big Tech censorship, two-tiered justice, corporate wokeism, the Deep State — these are all vile and dirty words for most Republican voters, even as they are openly embraced to varying degrees by the RINO Establishment Class.  Who would possibly want an endorsement from Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan, Rupert Murdoch, or anybody whose fortune is sustained by the greasy quid-pro-quo revolving door between corrupt government offices and corrupt corporate boardrooms?

To be honest, those types of endorsements are now the "kiss of death," proof of a politician's potential for RINO-ness, even if the nefarious condition has yet to be overtly seen.  That is why I like the guy with all the enemies — because he earned their ire well.

Image: hansgklein via Pixabay, Pixabay License.