Letter to the editor: Party of Trump

To the editor:

Sadly, the “party of Lincoln,” which emerged in the 1850s in large part out of the struggle to make Kansas a free state, is now the “party of Trump.” Its standard bearer is the antithesis of all that we admire about the Great Emancipator. And perhaps even more tragically for Kansas, our state’s Republican officials, from the U.S. Senate to the Statehouse, have meekly accepted, enabled or endorsed Trump, ensuring the destruction of a once great political party. Not one of these so-called leaders has had the moral courage to say “enough already,” this is wrong.

The “GOP” has been moving toward this abyss for several years. One can only hope that in the wake of the shameful Trump debacle real leaders will restore what was once grand about the old party — if not in the tradition of moderate progressives such as William Allen White, Lawrence’s Walter R. Stubbs, Alfred Landon, Arthur Capper, Clifford R. Hope and John Anderson, then in the principled conservative mold of Frank Carlson, James B. Pearson, Keith Sebelius, Robert Bennett, Mike Hayden, Jan Meyers, Nancy Landon Kassebaum, and Bill Graves. That leadership will not come from the ranks of current Republican officeholders. But there are some rational moderates left, who are starting to reassert themselves. Power to those whose task it is to build a party of which Abraham Lincoln could be proud.