In US politics, Republican in Name Only is a pejorative used to describe politicians of the Republican Party deemed insufficiently loyal to the party, or misaligned with the party's ideology. Similar terms have been used since the early 1900s. The acronym RINO became popular in the 1990s, and both the acronym and the full spelling have become commonly used by former President Donald Trump and his supporters to refer to his critics within the Republican Party.
The phrase Republican in name only emerged as a popular political pejorative in the 1920s, 1950s, and 1980s. [1]
The earliest known print appearance of the acronym RINO was in 1992 in the Manchester, New Hampshire, newspaper then called The Union Leader . [2] RINO is pronounced like the word " rhino ", and can be used to associate disloyal Republicans with the large, thick-skinned animal. [3]
Bill Clinton would have been proud of what was happening on the third-floor Senate corner at the State House this week. ... The Republicans were moving out and the Democrats and "RINOs" (Republicans In Name Only) were moving in.
— John DiStaso, "Merrill Taps Scamman, Strome and a Thomson". New Hampshire Union Leader . December 31, 1992.
Buttons featuring a red slash through an image of a rhinoceros were spotted in the New Hampshire State House as early as 1992. [4] In 1993, future California Republican Assembly President Celeste Greig distributed buttons featuring a red slash over the word RINO to express opposition to Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan. [1] The term came into widespread usage during subsequent election cycles.
During Republican primary campaign season, some conservative organizations target Republicans who fail to adopt their stances by referring to them as RINOs. A "RINO Hunters Club" formed by the National Federation of Republican Assemblies has taken political action against those they considered RINOs. [5] [6] The fiscally conservative 501(c)4 organization Club for Growth started the "RINO Watch" list to monitor "Republican office holders around the nation who have advanced egregious anti-growth, anti-freedom or anti-free market policies"; other conservative groups published similar lists.[ citation needed ]
Donald Trump and his closest supporters have frequently used the term to describe anyone within the Republican Party he deems to be disloyal. During the 2020 presidential election in the United States, Donald Trump used the term to refer to Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, and Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, due to their refusal to challenge the election results in Georgia during his attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election. He also used the term to refer to Maryland governor Larry Hogan in a tweet, [7] as well as House and Senate Republicans who either voted to impeach and convict him during his second impeachment following the January 6 United States Capitol attack or who voted for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill supported by President Joe Biden. Recently, the term has been used to describe Republican critics of former President Donald Trump, with Trump himself tweeting that Congressional Republicans who recognized Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 US Presidential election are RINOs. Some Republicans critical of Trump occasionally used the epithet to describe Trump himself, due to his history as a registered Democrat. [8] [9]
After former Secretary of State Colin Powell died in 2021, Trump described him as a "classic RINO". [10] [11] [12] After former Vice President Dick Cheney endorsed Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, Trump referred him as an "irrelevant RINO". [13]
After Tom Emmer failed to get the nomination to Speaker of the House, Trump blasted him as a RINO before the press and on Truth Social. Four hours after the failed vote, Emmer withdrew the nomination and lost. [14] [15]
The concept of being an inauthentic member of the Republican Party by not representing its more conservative faction is a recurring theme in party history.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the term Me-too Republicans described those running on a platform of agreeing with the Democratic Party, proclaiming only minor or moderating philosophical differences. [16] [17] An example is two-time presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey, who ran against the popular Franklin D. Roosevelt and his successor Harry Truman. Dewey did not oppose Roosevelt's New Deal programs altogether, but merely campaigned on the promise that Republicans would run them more efficiently and less corruptly.
Let me warn the nation, against the smooth evasion which says, "of course we believe all these things, we believe in social-security, we believe in work for the unemployed, we believe in saving homes—cross our hearts and hope to die, we believe in all these things. But we do not like the way the president's administration is doing them. Just turn them over to us. We will do all of them—we will do more of them, we will do them better; and, most important of all, the doing of them will not cost anybody anything!
— President and Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, addressing a Democratic audience in New York, September 1936 [18] [19]
From 1936 to 1976, the more centrist members of the Republican Party frequently won the national nomination with candidates such as Alf Landon, Wendell Willkie, Thomas E. Dewey, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Gerald Ford. The mainstream of the Republican Party was generally supportive of the New Deal. In the 1950s, conservatives such as Robert A. Taft and Barry Goldwater, who rallied against "me-too Republicans", [20] were considered outside of the mainstream; serious consideration was given to leaving the then GOP and forming a new ultra-conservative party in coalition with the "states' rights" Democrats of the South. [21]
In the 1960s and 1970s, Republicans considered liberal on economic issues but hawkish on foreign policy and social issues were sometimes called "Nixonian", or "Rockefeller Republicans". [22]
In the 1980s, the term gypsy moth Republican described Republicans from the Northeast and Midwest who voted against the Ronald Reagan administration's proposed cuts in aid to economically distressed people, contrasting with boll weevil Democrats, who voted for these cuts. [23] [24] The gypsy moth is an invasive species destructive to trees in the Northeastern United States. [24] [25]
In 2015 the term cuckservative , a portmanteau of cuckold and conservative, was popularized on the online forum 4chan, and embraced by both internet trolls and the nativist alt-right. [26] [27] [28] The metaphorical "cuck" is represented in a genre of interracial pornography as a masochistic white husband who allows his wife to have sex with a stronger black man, thereby participating in his own symbolic emasculation. [29] [30] [26] [31] [32] In white supremacist vernacular, the term is an accusation of yielding to non-white interests on issues such as immigration or modern display of the Confederate flag; [27] [33] however, the term gained use (with some controversy) [26] [27] [28] by more mainstream conservatives to denounce Republicans whose compromises included vote trading, rhetorical restraint in deference to donors, cooperation with Democrats on any particular initiative, or attempting to court voters by making appeals to supposedly liberal ideals. [28] [34]
The Republican Party, also known as the GOP, is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States. It emerged as the main political rival of the then-dominant Democratic Party in the mid-1850s, and the two parties have dominated American politics ever since.
American electoral politics have been dominated by successive pairs of major political parties since shortly after the founding of the republic of the United States. Since the 1850s, the two largest political parties have been the Democratic Party and the Republican Party—which together have won every United States presidential election since 1852 and controlled the United States Congress since at least 1856. Despite keeping the same names, the two parties have evolved in terms of ideologies, positions, and support bases over their long lifespans, in response to social, cultural, and economic developments—the Democratic Party being the left-of-center party since the time of the New Deal, and the Republican Party now being the right-of-center party.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) is the primary committee of the Republican Party of the United States. Its members are chosen by the state delegations at the national convention every four years. It is responsible for developing and promoting the Republican brand and political platform, as well as assisting in fundraising and election strategy. It does not have direct authority over elected officials. It is also responsible for organizing and running the Republican National Convention. When a Republican is president, the White House controls the committee. According to Boris Heersink, "political scientists have traditionally described the parties' national committees as inconsequential but impartial service providers."
The Rockefeller Republicans were members of the United States Republican Party (GOP) in the 1930s–1970s who held moderate-to-liberal views on domestic issues, similar to those of Nelson Rockefeller, Governor of New York (1959–1973) and Vice President of the U.S. (1974–1977). Rockefeller Republicans were most common in the Northeast and the industrial Midwestern states, while they were rare in the South and the West.
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The Republican Party, also known as the GOP, is one of the two major political parties in the United States. It is the second-oldest extant political party in the United States after its main political rival, the Democratic Party.
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The 2020 United States elections were held on Tuesday, November 3, 2020. The Democratic Party's nominee, former vice president Joe Biden, defeated incumbent Republican president Donald Trump in the presidential election. Despite losing seats in the House of Representatives, Democrats retained control of the House and gained control of the Senate. As a result, the Democrats obtained a government trifecta, the first time since the elections in 2008 that the party gained unified control of Congress and the presidency. With Trump losing his bid for re-election, he became the first president to have seen his party lose the presidency and control of both the House and the Senate since Herbert Hoover in 1932. This was the first time since 1980 that either chamber of Congress flipped partisan control in a presidential year, and the first time Democrats did so since 1948.
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Button of the week: It's slowly making the rounds as circulation is small but the "RINO" (pronounced "Rhino") could become a collector's item. Pictured is naturally the animal with a Ghostbuster's slash through it.
In the 1936 election, FDR had a field day with so-called "me too" Republicans.
... the recipe for a new conservative party was plain: one part Midwestern Taft Republican, one part Southern states' rights Democrat.
What was needed was a Northern counterweight to the "Boll Weevil Democrats", some 50 Southerners who consistently voted with [President Reagan] to whack at [aid to economically distressed people] ... some 20 Frostbelt Republicans have decided to defect from their lockstop White House support ...
... spread fast across the radical right. And ... found its way into the political mainstream. ... White supremacists ... tailor its definition to further describe politicians who don't fall in line with the white nationalist cause.
The radical nature of those ideas along with the pornographic connotations associated with "cuckold" have made the word a subject of hand-wringing among some conservative commentators.
Cuckold pornography portrays a white man watching his wife have sex with another man — usually well-endowed, and usually black.
The idea is, white conservative men enjoy seeing their wives have sexual relations with dark-skinned men, for the purpose of making the country at large darker.
The insult's most general gist is conservatives accused of bowing to one non-conservative idea or another, eg immigration reform, should feel humiliated, their ideology adulterated.