That means “Republican in name only,” of course. It’s a stale epithet. Mildly clever in its origins, it referred mainly to elected Republicans in Washington who posed as conservatives for their home-state constituents (“severely conservative” as the squishy Mitt Romney described himself), but who, at best, mounted little meaningful resistance to the progressive ascendancy and Leviathan’s expansion.
RINO is inapposite with the Republican Party having become the Trump Party. Indeed, it’s the Republican Party that is now “Republican in name only.” No longer are we talking an entity that is substantively the Republican Party — meaning the politically and ideologically conservative major party in the United States. A party wedded to that orthodoxy no longer exists, so it is irrational to speak of RINOs who feign allegiance to the orthodoxy. ....
The RINO insult is incoherent. Most of what Trump labels RINOs are what, until recently, we thought of as actual Republicans. They are on the outs now because (a) they won’t join the Trump personality cult and, (b) to the extent there is an ideological “Trumpism” (as opposed to one man’s eccentric, reactive views), they won’t swallow its heresies from traditional conservatism (e.g., big intrusive government, runaway spending, unsustainable entitlements, protectionism, skepticism about America’s leadership in the world, embrace of anti-American dictators while vilifying American political rivals, and the promise of a Democrat-style retributive-justice system rather than a traditional American justice system that reveres equal protection under the law). (Continue reading and see "why he can't win")
Also see my blog post, You might be a Rino, if ... and Confessions of a RINO.
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