Rise of Donald Trump should be no surprise to GOP

I've been following politics for most of my adult life. Still, I've found myself more than a little surprised by the meteoric rise of Donald Trump, the politician. When he first announced, I thought it was novel. I thought that, while he would inject some spice into what promised to be a dull campaign season, he was no one to be taken seriously. I figured his extreme views on immigration, and his embrace of the nutty "birther" movement would drive him from the race before the Iowa caucuses. How wrong I was. Not only is he still in the race, he's now the leading contender for the GOP nomination and has a very real shot at becoming the Republican standard bearer for 2016. What was once unthinkable a short six months ago is now a very scary reality. Upon further reflection, though, Trump's success should come as no surprise to anyone who's been paying attention for the last 20 years.
   What has made Trump so successful? Easy. He's playing into the fears that have been pushed by the Republican Party for the last two decades: fear of Muslims, fear of illegal immigrants "taking over" our country and fear of being the victim of another terrorist attack like we were on 9/11. Above all, Trump is a fearmonger, and he's taken advantage of our fear to drive his own success. But fear isn't the only tool Trump has used to propel his campaign. Trump has also tapped into a very real anger in the American electorate, the feeling that no matter who we elect, nothing will ever change for the better. Trump has successfully positioned himself as a political outsider, someone with new and different answers. This sounds good, right? After all, who wouldn't want to "make America great again?"
   Here's the problem with all that. Trump is the embodiment of everything wrong with today's Republican Party. He's a bigot and a xenophobe. He says the things out loud that have been whispered among Republicans for years, but that they would never have dared express. His ideas might seem to make a certain kind of sense, but the truth is, he has very little chance of ever making  them a reality. With his bombastic, take-no-prisoners personality, the more likely scenario is that he'll  anger leaders in Congress to the point that they will refuse to consider any of his proposals, thus rendering him an ineffective figurehead. Worse, his massive ego and "my way or the highway" approach to everything is likely to alienate our international allies and worsen our standing in the world. The end result of a Trump presidency could very well be the permanent marginalization of the Republican Party as a party of extremists, bigots and xenophobes.
   The GOP, to its credit, has been horrified by Trumps's success and has done everything it can to derail his campaign. But if they're honest with themselves, and with the American people, they really have no right to be surprised. The sad truth is, they are solely responsible for creating the Trump phenomenon. He is the end result of the party's decades of fear-mongering and illicit bigotry. That he is now saying out loud what they have been saying secretly among themselves is no one's fault but theirs.
   If one good thing might come out of the Trump candidacy, I hope it is this: I hope that the party will realize just how far to the right they have drifted and start to move itself back toward the political middle. I hope that after almost three decades, the party will finally divorce itself from the poisonous pact it forged with the Religious Right and recommit itself to the core principles that made it great and that were embodied by past GOP presidents such as Ronald Reagan and Bush the Elder: smaller government, less taxes and staying out of people's personal lives. If that happens, then the Trump experiment will not have been in vain, and the entire country will be better for having survived this surreal nightmare.