Donald Trumo
(cased on article n LA Times) Debbie Dooley was so frustrated in 2009 over bank bailouts and stimulus packages that she threw herself into organizing Atlanta’s first tea party rally. Today, the daughter of a Southern preacher has shifted her energy and passion into electing Donald Trump as the latest Washington outsider to shake up the status quo.
Dooley explains, “The support for Trump is not only a screw-you to the Republican establishment, it’s a screw-you to the conservative establishment, [People] are sick and tired of the same old, same old — just money corrupting the political process. They work hard, they vote for elected officials and they expect them to keep their promises.”
“I don’t see Ted Cruz being a job creator,”
“We’ve given the Republican Party a chance,” said Amy Kremer, another founding tea party leader. “They would have never taken the House without the tea party. We gave them the Senate. What have they accomplished? They haven’t accomplished a damn thing.”
The most high-profile splits are between original tea party leaders like Kremer and Jenny Beth Martin, who were part of that first tea party in Atlanta and who went on to help form Tea Party Patriots. Martin says the Tea Party now dominates the GOP, “It shows, this movement, seven years and three weeks old, is picking the presidential nominee on the right. That’s a big deal.”
Trump’s national spokesman, Katrina Pierson, shows the elasticity of tea party loyalties with one of the most circuitous routes to her new boss. She was a Democrat who voted for Obama before becoming a Dallas tea party leader backing Cruz. Then she switched to Trump after the senator introduced her to the billionaire, according to reports.
Adam Brandon, president of FreedomWorks, a libertarian advocacy group formed by leaders of an earlier Koch-backed enterprise, said the split doesn’t signal the end of the tea party as much as “an evolution of it. …. The one thing that comes out of this: The Republican Party is a smoking crater on the ground,” said Brandon, who in his spare time is a Revolutionary War reenacter. “The tea party has won. Now the bifurcation is: Do you want a burn-it-down with Donald Trump or do you want a battler like Ted Cruz.”
“We just don’t dive into a primary of this magnitude and try to dictate,” said a person within the Koch network granted anonymity to discuss. “It would harm the willingness of a lot of people to work with us. … It would harm our long-term effectiveness.”
That’s fine with Dooley, who said she’s fed up with both the GOP establishment and big-dollar Washington donors telling people what to think.
“They look down their noses on average people in the grass roots,” she said. “They think they’re the only ones who can define conservatism.”