We began with a rational conversation, and now you are telling me that Bush was worse, Trump doesn’t worry you, Russian collusion was a hoax, and he’s good on trade?

I think we’re done here.

I agree that the Republicans aren’t salvageable in the sense that their party is too far gone to reform. But to say their party “is dead” (in anything other than the moral sense) is to ignore reality. You sneer at them as having no future, which may be true…..but for the foreseeable future, they control all the branches of the federal government save the lower house of the legislature, as well as most state governments, they have a chokehold on the judiciary and a neo-authoritarian as head of state, not to mention millions of rabid followers impervious to reason. And as you yourself say, they may well win the presidency again. You can write the GOP off as beyond reason, but acting as if they are powerless — and worse, adopting rhetoric that plays into their hands — is foolish and self-destructive.

The GOP’s only options are to broaden its base or die? Let me suggest a third possibility: further entrenchment of countermajoritarian minority party rule under an increasingly neo-fascist administration that no longer needs votes, because it has consolidated power and made elections irrelevant.

You lived through eight years of Bush? Wow — a historical perspective that goes back a whole twenty years. I lived through Vietnam, Nixon, Watergate…..and I bet we can find folks who lived through the Depression and WWII, like my friend Renee who survived Auschwitz, who can attest to the dangers that this administration presents.

This began as a discussion about how to build a more progressive America, predicated on the mutually agreed premise that the GOP are swine. I didn’t think we had to have a conversation about how Trump’s a con man, but maybe we do.