The Republican Party, in its present makeup, needs to die so that something better can rise from its ashes.

Too many of its present “leaders” lack the spine to confront their “MAGA” master’s moral bankruptcy. They’ve feared being “primaried” by Trump clones, which suggests a greater interest in their own reelection than in doing what is good and right for both people and planet.

Their would-be MAGA king is a three-wives adulterer, was unsurprisingly convicted of sexual assault, a fake university scam, tax cheating, etc. He’s someone the “Christian” right has sullied itself with over one issue. It’s as if Jesus was only interested in a mother’s womb and could care less about the womb of Mother Earth, given us to develop, manage and sustain as service to him. Mother Earth, by the way, supports the lives of some 8 billion people.

If you want to solve a border problem, forget Mr. MAGA. He had four years to construct his simplistic wall-cure for immigration issues. And what did he do? Lots of glitzy photos and few miles of actual new wall. Worse, money for this scam on voters was not provided by Mexico as promised. Rather, it was removed from the national defense budget. Worse again, in 2023, he prevailed with a spineless Republican-controlled Congress to scuttle a bipartisan border bill authored in the Senate. Border patrol spokespersons called it the best border bill in decades. Why are Republicans voters putting up with this? Habit? Spite? It’s a mystery to me.

Now he’s being challenged by a woman of color. She’s shown flashes of brilliance and logic. So the chaos and bluster guy has resorted to naked racism, calling Harris dumb and reluctantly Black. Is this what the MAGA crowd calls leadership?

Remember what’s now famously known as “swift boating?” John Kerry was a swift boat commander. These were smaller vessels capable of traversing narrow waterways and exposing enemy troops. The political advisor Chris LaCivita found some Vietnam veterans, who were never on a Kerry boat, to badmouth Kerry’s leadership in 2004; up until that time, he was sporting a serious lead over George Bush. The certain Kerry train to the White House was derailed, and Bush won based on lies from Republican soldiers who were Kerry haters. This set a marker for dirty politics, one that’s about to be revived by Trump’s hiring of LaCivita.

Now that artificial intelligence can create stunning replicas of voice and body, look for LaCivita to field some stealth lying. That’s perfectly OK with Trump; fact checkers found more than 30,000 falsehoods by him in just four years as president. That’s 7,500 per year or about 21 per day. One is left to wonder if he’s even capable of being honest and telling the truth. Do we want more of being in Trump’s’ deep, dark hole with no bottom?

It’s true, we need electoral reform that offers more choices and freedom to vote for all, regardless of skin color. That reform will never happen under Trump or the Project 2025 agenda. For what it’s worth, Project 2025 got much of its content from people in his administration.

These are the same people who went along with Trump’ people-killing, COVID-19-foot-dragging, ensuing supply chain fiasco and price-gouging made possible by necessary shutdowns as an unconfronted virus savaged citizens; two impeachments; inspiring an assault on the nation’s capital and then lying about a “stolen election”; weakening environmental regulations when climate change was ramping up its threat to human survival, etc.

Do we want this kind of “leadership” again?