So long Republican Party.

It’s officially the cult of Trump now.

When I was in grade school my best friend (we can call her Jenny) was this funny, smart, secretly independent girl who wore her mousy brown butt-length hair in the same simple braid every single day. She loved to ride bikes, explore the woods, ride her horse and feed her pet rabbits. She would blissfully spend whole days barefoot in the grass with her nose buried in a book.

She was the kind of girl who would pick up giant spiders without so much as flinching whereas I would be halfway back to the house screaming in horror in under a minute.

Her parents made her wear a skirt one day a week and she absolutely hated it. She wanted the freedom of pants and shorts, but she always did as she was told. Always so dutiful and demure on demand.

We were very different in that I was always loud-mouthed and demonstrative, often inappropriate, whereas she as she kept her independence closer to the vest. You would see it when she got to stretch her legs on the playground or during gym when she would run so fast it seemed to light the ground beneath her on fire. You’d catch glimpses when she would laugh uproariously at her goofy, terribly behaved bad influence of a best friend. But what the world saw was Jenny the high honor roll student, the ballerina, the quiet helper around the house. Always so modest.

We got to high school the same as we ever were, but one Christmas break she returned to school looking different. It wasn’t a super drastic change, but after all those years of looking the same, it was still noticeable. Her mousy brown hair was now sun-streaked. The braid was looser, wilder. When I asked if she had colored her hair she blushed and said it was the Florida sun.

But after that, every time she would return from school breaks, her hair would be even more changed than before. Wild, platinum blonde waves were falling in her face so much it nearly always covered her eyes and she would have to brush it aside just to talk to someone. Her sporty clothes were gone. Replaced with shorter and shorter skirts, brightly colored skimpy tops, and strappy bras. A girl who hated makeup was wearing so much she was starting to look more like the school staff than my best friend.

And then one day out of nowhere, she had an accent. Not specific to any one place, just not hers. And when I noticed that, along with everything else about her that was so drastically different, all of the sudden I thought to myself that the girl I had always known was gone. I had been watching it unfold, watching her morph for all those years aware of the changes but increasingly accustomed to it, and then one day I realized I was looking at an entirely different person. One I didn’t really like or trust.

But the old Jenny wasn’t ever coming back. In her place was someone who I felt had lost her way. Had lost sight of herself. Forever. And I had to accept it.

Just like we have to accept that the Republican Party as we knew it, is gone. It’s lost its way. It’s lost sight of itself. And it’s never coming back.

No, I don’t have the same nostalgia for them as I do my old friend Jenny, believe me— but the essential sentiment is the same. We’ve been watching them morph before our very eyes from the party of Lincoln to the party of Reagan to the party of W, to the party of Trump, and while it has as things do, seemed to have changed slowly and then all at once, what we are looking at now has as much in common with Lincoln as blonde, nebulous accent Jenny had with that girl in the woods enjoying the spider crawling up her arm.

If we ever had any question after January 6th about just how beholden to that flaming orange asshole they had become, we can once and for all dispense with that shit now.

Because after the party line impeachment inquiry sham of a fucking vote, there is no longer a shadow of a doubt. Not only ain’t this your grandfather’s Republican Party anymore, this is more like an alien spaceship that crashed in a field somewhere on the Oklahoman panhandle and a bunch of shape-shifting humanoid-adjacent, sperm-like looking creatures spilled out and stumbled, oozed or slithered (frankly probably all of the above) their way to the Capitol where they consumed the spongelike, gelatinous goo housed inside those oddly large GOP craniums, and then began “governmenting.”

Or rather un-governmenting.

They ALL voted for this bullshit. Like they all voted for “Moses” Mike Johnson. Every. Single. One. Of. Them. Even the ones who have said publicly that there is no evidence of anything that even comes close to a high crime or misdemeanor. They STILL voted yes.