Don Doumakes is a Democrat from Harrison County. -promoted by Laura Belin

Former Vice President Joe Biden is on the record supporting a return to bipartisan government. I have a problem with that.

President Donald Trump isn’t an aberration of the Republican Party. He is its logical end point. Since the days of Richard Nixon, the GOP has served the interests of the rich by harnessing the power of racist voters. Trump has taken this strategy to the extreme, and still enjoys 92 percent approval among Republicans. The idea that there is a substantial block of moderate Republicans who are willing to cooperate with Democrats is laughable.

Far from it: the GOP become the party of Trump, which is to say, bluntly, the Republican Party is now fascist. That’s not a word to be used lightly, but it fits our current situation. If you doubt it, consider the praise heaped upon the Trump administration by a self-described fascist, not to mention actual Hitler-loving Nazis, for a start.

Can we trust a party that is OK with Russian interference with U.S. elections to play fair in future elections? Can we make peace with a party that openly incited violence against reporters, with deadly results? Can we break bread with people who put children in cages to terrorize their parents? Can there be bipartisan cooperation with the people who established concentration camps to detain migrants on our southern border?

Or course not. There are things that simply cannot, and should not, be forgiven.

Far from bipartisanship, what we need after the 2020 election is a committment to the complete and permanent repudiation of the party of Trump and their collaborators. We need to remind voters that in the last five years, we learned everything we ever need to know about the Republican Party’s trustworthiness and honor. We need to call them “the disgraced Republican Party” from now on.

Top image: Joe Biden speaks at the River Center in Des Moines on May 3, 2019. Photo by Michael F. Hiatt, available via Shutterstock.