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The New Know-Nothings

Trump’s G.O.P. is not the party of Reagan and Bush, but of a much older, darker American political tradition.

Citizen Know Nothing: a portrait of a young man representing the nativist ideal of the Know-Nothing party in 1854.Credit...Sarony & Co., via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Ms. Boylan is a contributing opinion writer.

My fellow Americans: It is my honor today to announce the formation of a new political party, which I am calling “the Republican Party.”

You can be forgiven for thinking, Wait, don’t we already have one of those? But please. Under Donald Trump, the Republican Party, at least as we once understood it, has become a fantastical entity, a creature not wholly unlike the Abominable Snowman, or the Chupacabra, or the mythical Squonk of central Pennsylvania, the imaginary creature that spends its days deep in the forest, weeping in despair at its own hideousness.

“There is no Republican Party,” said John Boehner, a former Republican speaker of the House, back in April. “There’s a Trump Party. The Republican Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere.”

While the Republican Party naps, the thing that has arisen in its place bears an eerie resemblance to another party in American history, one that we thought was gone for good. But more about that in a moment.

In the meantime, I’d like to present the platform of my new Republican Party. It consists of things formerly believed by, you know, the Republican Party.

  • First, my party supports civil rights. It was Ulysses S. Grant, the second Republican president, who fought for and signed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which gave African-Americans equal treatment in public accommodations and public transportation and prohibited their exclusion from jury service. In his spare time, Grant also wiped out the earliest version of the Ku Klux Klan.

    The Trump Party, meanwhile, casts its eyes upon white supremacists and neo-Nazis and declares them “very fine people.”

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President Donald Trump, en-route to the NATO summit earlier this month.Credit...Samuel Corum for The New York Times
  • My new Republican Party believes in some limitations on federal spending, including deficit reduction.

    The Trump Party has created a budget that is projected for the first time to regularly produce deficits of over a trillion dollars, every year, as far as the eye can see.

  • My party stands firm in its resistance to Russia. As in the Republican Party platform of 1952, it opposes Russian interference in American affairs and in particular the “military and propaganda initiative which, if unstayed, will destroy us.”

    The Trump Party has decided that, all things considered, it has more trust in the dictator of Russia than in the intelligence officers of the United States of America.

  • My party supports national health care, of the sort created by the Republicans’ 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney, while he was governor of Massachusetts.

    The Trump Party believes in destroying the Affordable Care Act, which has brought health insurance to 20 million Americans since 2010, and replacing it with nothing.

  • My party stands for protecting the environment, like Theodore Roosevelt (father of our national parks system), like Richard Nixon (founder of the Environmental Protection Agency), like a generation of Republican leaders — from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush — who endorsed the policy of cap-and-trade as a business-friendly means of reducing carbon emissions.

    The Trump Party’s new head of the E.P.A. opposes climate science and fought to get taxpayers to bail out failing and polluting coal plants.

  • My party stands for sex education and AIDS prevention, as did President George W. Bush in 2003 when he initiated the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, thus saving millions of lives in Africa.

    The Trump Party budget this year funded abstinence-only education and cut back on sex ed programs that actually work, while paying bribes to buy the silence of its leader’s porn star ex-mistress.

There are more planks to my new party platform, but this is a start. In the meantime, it should have a slogan. Right now I’m kind of partial to “A Kinder, Gentler Nation,” a phrase George H.W. Bush actually uttered in his acceptance speech at the 1988 Republican National Convention. But I’d be grateful for your suggestions.

There’s still a problem: what to call the party now led by Mr. Trump? I propose calling it the “Know-Nothing Party,” given its resemblance to the entity whose primary passion, in 1852, was its loathing for immigrants. Back then, its members were called the “Know-Nothings” because at one time they were supposed to deny any knowledge of its existence. In a way, that’s fitting, since many Trump Party stalwarts deny that the president has altered the party at all, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, had his own thoughts on the Know-Nothings. If they won, Lincoln wrote, he would prefer emigrating “to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

Of course, I’m an unlikely savior for the Republican Party, and truth be told I never agreed with much of its politics. But I once respected its stand on issues that mattered, even if I disagreed with how it pursued them. Luckily, there are many people well positioned to act, politicians who, unlike Mr. Trump, have spent decades promoting the principles of the Republican Party as we all used to know it.

The Republican Party could be overthrown by the Republican Party and replaced with — well, the Republican Party. That would require that the people John Boehner described as “napping somewhere” find their principles and their courage, and wake up.

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Jennifer Finney Boylan (@JennyBoylan), a contributing opinion writer, is a professor of English at Barnard College and the author of the novel “Long Black Veil.” @JennyBoylan

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