(Most of todays republicans are absent of responsibility and accountability...)

An underrated component of Donald Trump’s success in the 2016 Republican primary was that he acted as a megaphone for the fringier elements of conservative media. Sites like Stephen K. Bannon’s Breitbart were elevating various far-right theories and stories, scooping up an audience that Fox News, then more constrained, was leaving on the table. Trump was a Breitbart reader and looped the site’s claims into his speeches and interviews. The right-wing fringe of the party — who also read Breitbart — responded by blanketing him with support.

Why? In part because they were frustrated that sitting elected officials and more-mainstream outlets like Fox weren’t saying the things Breitbart was. There was an obvious reason for that: much of what Breitbart offered was false or overheated or otherwise dishonest. And in the Republican establishment of 2015, when Trump announced, there was still a lingering belief that elected officials shouldn’t simply peddle conspiracy theories or misrepresent reality. That belief had eroded in the post-tea party era, certainly, but it lingered.

Until Trump showed that abandoning it entirely offered a different set of rewards. In the same way that Breitbart and even fringier sites like Infowars gobbled up attention by appealing to people’s anti-institutional and conspiratorial sensibilities, candidates for office began doing the same. The nonsense trickled up and is now pervasive. ...