While celebrities and regular folks flood social media with warm and fuzzy photos from 2016—remember the mannequin challenge? millennial pink? Pokémon Go to the polls?—there’s one group conspicuously sitting this trend out: Republicans who spent that year absolutely torching Donald Trump.
A viral video compilation making the rounds captures the receipts in devastating fashion. It’s a supercut of GOP officials and conservative figures from 2016, back when they had spines, calling Trump exactly what he was: dangerous, unfit, a threat to democracy.
The same people who now bend the knee, fight for cabinet positions, and trip over themselves to praise Dear Leader.
THE DETAILS: The video stitches together post after post of Republicans warning America about Trump before they decided power was more important than principles. We’re talking about the same folks who now act like they’ve always been ride-or-die MAGA. The cognitive dissonance is stunning—or would be, if we hadn’t watched the capitulation happen in real time.
OF COURSE: None of this is surprising to anyone who’s paid attention. The entire Republican Party infrastructure that once claimed to oppose Trump has since been absorbed into his cult of personality. The people who called him a con man, a fraud, a danger to the republic? They’re now his most loyal soldiers, having traded whatever remained of their dignity for proximity to power.
WHY IT MATTERS: As CNN notes, the 2016 nostalgia trend reveals something deeper about how much has changed—and not for the better. While everyone else can post throwback photos and remember simpler times, Republican officials can’t participate without exposing their own spectacular moral collapse. Their 2016 posts aren’t cute memories. They’re evidence of cowardice.
BOTTOM LINE: The viral compilation isn’t just embarrassing for the GOP—it’s a document of how authoritarianism consolidates power. It happens when people who know better choose complicity over courage. Every Republican who denounced Trump in 2016 and now serves him made a choice. The internet remembers, even if they’d prefer we forgot.