What I wonder, though, is how much of this was planned or did it just sort of happen organically and the GOP was fine with breathing life into new ways to fuck with people's minds along the way?

So, I have thought about this a lot over the years and watched the strategies of the Republican party. It goes back further but in terms of where the Republicans have ended up I would start with the Nixon administration. Essentially, the guys that worked for his campaigns that can be called The Rat Fuckers. These guys would unleash nasty lies about opponents that they basically thought of as practical jokes. In the movie All the Presidents Men there are a couple of scenes with a guy named Donald Segretti and he talks about ratfucking which he did end up going to jail for. Interesting to note as well that Karl Rove was working with guys like Segretti back then.

This basically does not go away though and you get to a guy like Lee Atwater, another Republican consultant/strategist that again employed some rather nasty tactics designed to create havoc in the country and played upon racist agendas. 

Here's Lee Atwater talking about "The Southern Strategy":

Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now you don't have to do that. All that you need to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues that he's campaigned on since 1964, and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.

Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

Atwater: Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger". By 1968, you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this", is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger". So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner.

So, what we are seeing now, is just a continuation of this. It's not new and Donald Trump, who is a moron, certainly did not come up with this. You need a Trump as a front man to take these things to an extreme. Political candidates of the past would not want to be associated with these tactics and would typically try to avoid it being so blatant. Trump did not care though and is racist himself, so using racist tactics was fine with him. The idea is to rile the public, separate them, and get them angry and filled with fear. Not a new tactic, an old one.

The current crop of Republican loons, well, they don't care about hiding it or making it "more abstract" as Atwater would say. They are not as worried about coding the message. 

The people that advised Trump also were pushing and continue to push hate for immigrants. Same strategy as the Southern Strategy, you just turn it on immigrants. Look, the Republicans know that a portion of their base are racists and bigots. So, they now are openly and fully embracing them. 

Behind closed doors guys like Kevin McCarthy will say Trump is scum but in public he hails Trump as a the wonderful leader of the party. I don't care what McCarthy says behind closed doors, what matters is what he says in public, to the people that will be casting votes. He lies to them and tells the truth when he thinks they can't hear him. Essentially, elected Republicans do look at their voters as morons they have to tolerate and placate by saying total nonsense in public.

There was a guy doing talk radio in Boston for a while, Jay Severin, who also worked as a Republican strategist/consultant. He promoted the hell out of taking a scorched earth approach to politics. He preached that you should only appeal to your base, that Republicans should never compromise with Democrats (even if the result would be beneficial for people) and the answer when the Democrats wanted to do something/anything should always be no.

Well, there it is. That is how Mitch McConnell has primarily operated and it was the strategy of Trump and his minions. Severin was promoting all this long before Trump was a candidate for president. Trump operated exactly how a guy like Severin would have told him to. Appeal only to your base, screw everybody else, troll everybody that will not go along with you, lie, cheat, and steal to keep power and screw the losers. 

Exactly what Severin preached, is where our politics have gone. Severin was not the only guy saying this though, he just proudly said it on the radio. Had Severin seen the riot at the capitol that Trump caused, he would have been cheering that on like a lion eating a mountain of free steak. 

So, really the thing that Trump added to the equation was he just had no shame. No shame about his greed, his only wanting to help and promote himself, his embrace of racists and bigots, of scum like Putin, he was fine with all of it. There is nothing Trump would not kill or destroy to give himself power and he does not care who knows it. 

This is not hidden, it is right out in the open but for some reason, millions of people in this country embrace it. They like it. Christians seem to really love it. 

Why? This is the question we all ponder but the reasons are sort of simple. Essentially, the Trump voter does embrace the destruction of our country. It is part of Trump's appeal for them. Christians believe the world will be destroyed paving the way for the return of Christ who will lift up his faithful minions. So, Trump being hell bent on destroying things is all good to them. Does not matter that his reason for doing it is to enrich himself because in their view, god can use an evil man to achieve his goals. So, it is fine if Trump is evil, god's will is the destruction of everything before his kingdom comes.  

So, to a lot of sick and twisted Christians, Trump is just a tool of the lord and so must be embraced. 

Stupid? You bet but this is their reality. 

It's just been growing for years, helped along by removing things like the Fairness Doctrine, stacking the Supreme Court, money flowing in from all over with no oversight, and sure, media like FOX, OAN, and the rest that just bullshit their followers to death. 

This leads us to the attachment of parts of the GOP to Putin. First, they have a shared goal, destroy the United States, our government, and our alliances in the world. 

I don't think Trump really loves Putin, he does not love anybody, but he does love what Putin is, his money and his power. He thinks Putin is brilliant because Putin can do what he wants and his people fear him and worship him or they will be jailed or killed. This is Trump's dream. 

I think the main love for Russia that Republicans have is as a model for what they want the United States to be. They want a Russian style kleptocracy, run by an autocrat that has no concerns about having to have pesky elections. You have a group of wealthy oligarchs and everybody else just falls in line or is killed or thrown in a gulag. 

That's the endgame for these Trump Republicans. They don't hide it, they pretty much don't have to because their followers are all in with getting it done. Not sure their followers realize what it would mean for them or if they look at how Russian citizens live and think "Yes, that's the life for me!" and if it is, why don't they just move to Russia and fulfill their dreams?