RINO hunting in the age of Trump

Fresno CA

Description

RINO used to mean someone who didn’t follow party orthodoxy. But in the Trump era it came to mean disloyalty to the former president. While the term RINO has been used for decades to insult Republicans who didn’t follow party orthodoxy, its meaning has transformed in the Trump era to be largely centered around the former president’s personality and personal agenda, according to Matthew Continetti, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism.” Traditionally, RINO and similar terms, like “me-tooer” during the New Deal era, were used “to indicate that a Republican is deviating from conservative views,” Continetti said. “But what we’ve seen in the last two years is that the term has no relation to policy and what it’s really about is whether the Republican stands by Donald Trump or not.”