If you are an alleged anti-Trump Republican or Independent who supported the disastrous policies and war crimes of the George W. Bush administration, moved on to the Tea Party and other toxic right-wing groups to attack Barack Obama, and now want to haughtily lecture the Left about anything, kindly shut up and do the serious introspection you so badly owe yourself and your country.

I’ve heard more than enough from you.

You have done an enormous amount of damage to America, and rather than apologizing for it, have pivoted directly to running your mouths and admonishing the people who have stood by this country for decades about the electoral decisions they are making during these truly scary times.

Because make no mistake about it: You and your pathetic, anti-American party gave us Trump, and the long list of lowlife Republicans like W. before him. Let me be precise here: You are cowards and double-talkers who feast on fear to pad your pockets, while endlessly pedaling your rotten goods on behalf of the monied lowlifes who hide in the shadows of the corporate establishment that owns you.

I was reading a column by David Frum in The Atlantic Thursday that was so condescending that it’s amazing he didn’t break a hip writing it while standing on all his faulty premises. Frum is one of the chief instigators of this collection of know-it-all Republicans, who never owned their part in the nation’s decline and, worse, want to blame it on the good and decent people they have been spitting on for years — the ones who were smart enough to vote for people like Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, and Obama.

History has proven these people were right about all of it, and guys like Frum were 100 percent wrong. Frum used to write speeches for W., for God’s sake — he is widely credited with coining the phrase “axis of evil” for Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address. By October 2008, Bush had a 25 percent approval rating among the American public, which makes Trump’s current 33 percent seem Lincolnesque by contrast.

And he’s going to tell us how to deal with the mess he created?

Seriously ...

In fact, The Atlantic has recently become a clearinghouse for these phonies and all their unmitigated garbage — mostly old white guys who want to have everything both ways, because they lack the enlightenment to understand that it was white male privilege that gave them their creaky pulpit to talk down to the rest of us in the first place.

The Atlantic is hardly the only place you’ll find these parasites. I try to avoid the 24/7 drama of TV news at all costs, but when I click in on occasion I see that MS NOW and CNN are positively littered with these very people.

It’s insane, it really is.

Nothing scares these so-called “Never-Trumpers” more than a person who sees right through the polluted Republican system they operated in and ultimately gave us the very thing they are now warning us about: Trump. The label itself dates to the 2016 campaign, when a circle of Republican writers, operatives and donors publicly broke with the party over Trump’s nomination, and it has since grown into a media ecosystem of its own — one later institutionalized by groups such as the Lincoln Project, founded by veteran Republican operatives in late 2019 to campaign against him.

These are the people who to this day are more scared of Democratic Socialists than they are of Mitch McConnell Republicans, whom they supported with gusto for years, and still do.

The damage guys like McConnell did to America with their help is catastrophic.

And what about all the truly disastrous programs they have endorsed with words and treasure through the years that have led to the greatest inequality in personal income since the turn of the 20th century? What about all these horrid wars they gave their stamp of approval and eagerly endorsed? What about the sizzling bigotry of their party for the past 75 years? What about the zealots of the radical, dangerous Christian Right that so many of them cut their crooked teeth on? Do they even believe in climate change? And has anything scared them more than the landmark Civil Rights and Voting Rights legislation passed in the 1960s, which their party has been quietly setting fire to for decades — a project the Supreme Court itself advanced in 2013, when its Shelby County v. Holder ruling invalidated the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance formula — and which ultimately gave us the most corrupt Supreme Court in history? That is also the court that extinguished women’s rights with its 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, and allowed corporate raiders to buy politicians, and presumably them, with its 2010 Citizens United ruling.

So now they are going to lecture the Left about their tactics as they fight against the most horrid man in American history?

How truly rich.

What are your qualifications other than doing literally the most minimal thing possible by voting against a woman-abusing bigot? Are we supposed to fall all over ourselves because you showed you are capable of doing just one half-decent thing?

Please. Spare us with this.

Congratulations, you have passed the easiest litmus test in the world, and now sound a lot like Trump after he has allegedly passed one of his monthly cognitive exams.

Person-Woman-Man-Camera-TV ...

It’s no wonder you supported the pathetic Bush family, which has done generations worth of evil to this country, resulting in hundreds of thousands of needless deaths and mental and physical damage amid the wreckage of the illegal wars you supported.

And forget W., if you possibly can ... I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody cut and run from a fight faster than his brother Jeb after the weakling Trump chased him off the stages of those insane 2016 GOP presidential debates. Trump branded him “low-energy” for a year, and by February 2016, after a distant finish in the South Carolina primary, Jeb had suspended his campaign for good.

Has anybody heard from this guy in the past decade? While the country he lied that he cared about burns, he is most likely on some yacht off the coast of Maine counting his money and sipping 200-year-old Scotch, with both pinkies out.

So where is that revolting family you hold so dear during this time of peril?

I mean if you really want to do some good, you’d be calling them out regularly with the zeal that you attack Democrats.

But you won’t because the way I figure it, the very minute Trump is finally dead and gone, you will be right back on the right-wing gravy train talking down to everybody, but this time from a comfy perch on Fox News with all your old buddies.

You are just hanging on until that blessed day, and if you can make a little scratch doing it, all the better. I see you trying to make a profit from your phony enlightenment and condescending bull.

What I really don’t get is why anybody on the Left would put up with you.

You are doing more damage to this country than anybody I can think of, because you allege to know better. You are grifters who have somehow convinced people you have all the answers, when you’ve been wrong about everything for your entire miserable lives.

You are a hell of a lot like Trump in that regard.

Instead of standing up for something, you appease and criticize both sides, which truly is the coward’s way out. You risk nothing and hold up your crooked right index finger to see which way the political wind is blowing and slither in that direction.

Anybody can do it, which is what makes you so uninteresting and shallow.

History is full of phonies like you. Hell, our nation is full of phonies like you. Consider these self-righteous universities, which couldn’t surrender to Trump fast enough after he was elected. Ironically, I’ll bet many of you attended these pompous places.

You disgust me, you really do, and it’s about time I let you know it.

If you really want to help, you will just fold up your wallets, go away, stop dividing us, and let the real patriots in America handle this, because right now, you are nothing but the problem.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

Primary sources:

• The Atlantic column
• George W. Bush approval ratings
• Toxic Tales on Amazon
• D. Earl Stephens on Substack