To what degree is the rise of an extreme candidate like Trump the Republican Party's own fault? There's a great article (in Dutch, sadly) I read this morning that tried to explain the rise of Trump using the insights of Thomas Mann and Norman Orstein: [...] Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party. That quote is from 2012. The article further argues that the polarizing politics of the Republican Party has lead to candidates getting ever closer to the end of the political spectrum. "Trump is what you get when your party abandons all moderate politics." Do you think there's truth to that?Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies. The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations. And Republicans in the Senate have abused the confirmation process to block any and every nominee to posts such as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, solely to keep laws that were legitimately enacted from being implemented.