Over the weekend, the sitting Republican governor of Kentucky stood in front of the collection of deplorables and hate group members known as the Values Voters Summit and held forth on whether or not the election of a president from the opposing party would require a violent uprising if the nation is to survive. Said Gov. Matt Bevin:
I did an interview and they said, “Do you think it’s possible, if Hillary Clinton were to win the election, do you think it’s possible that we’ll be able to survive? That we would ever be able to recover as a nation? [...] I do think it would be possible, but at what price? At what price? The roots of the tree of liberty are watered by what? The blood, of who? The tyrants to be sure, but who else? The patriots. Whose blood will be shed? It may be that of those in this room.
This is the conundrum of the modern Republican Party: They are enamored with the "strength" of tyrants like the opposition-stifling petroboss of a much-diminished Russia—why oh why couldn't our American leaders act with such authority?—while simultaneously convinced that their American counterparts are such tyrants, and that it is such a chafing thing that the time may come when "patriots" have to up an' murder some of ‘em. The evidence of the tyranny is sparse, mind you; the most current examples are an incremental step toward much-needed healthcare reform, a Kentucky clerk being required to do her actual job even if it gives her sad feelings inside, and numerous conspiracy theories about the black American president being secretly not American enough because reasons.
This is not some addled loon in the backwaters of the militia movement. It also isn't Donald Trump, the man on whom Serious Republican voices have cast all the party's excesses. This is the sitting Republican governor of an American state addressing the movers and shakers of the nation's theocratic movement, speculating aloud not on whether the nation would "survive" the election of someone from the opposition party, but on how much blood his allies would have to spill to make it happen.