While the term RINO has been used for decades to insult Republicans who didn’t follow party orthodoxy, its meaning has transformed in the Trump era to be largely centered around the former president’s personality and personal agenda, according to Matthew Continetti, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism.”
Traditionally, RINO and similar terms, like “me-tooer” during the New Deal era, were used “to indicate that a Republican is deviating from conservative views,” Continetti said. “But what we’ve seen in the last two years is that the term has no relation to policy and what it’s really about is whether the Republican stands by Donald Trump or not.”
The RINO acronym became popular in the early 1990s as the Republican party platform became increasingly fixed around a set of specific issues. In this environment, Republican politicians sought to establish their ideological purity by marking some partisans as “not conservative enough.”
“This was applied to people who were more liberal Republicans, who weren’t taking the positions that conservatives agreed on — on abortion, gun control or on the role of government,” said Richard Davis, BYU professor emeritus of political science, of the term RINO.
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Originally Posted by Dave Grubb
