Republicans have changed their tune on a few of their stances now that Donald Trump is the president-elect.
The so-called “Trump dance” is everywhere in sports arenas. Calls for “free speech” are drowning out previous threats against jailing members of the press.
In the weeks since Trump’s election victory, some social media users have pointed out his party’s hypocrisy now that he is set to return to the White House in January.
From school lunches to keeping sports out of politics, here are all the things the Republicans used to loathe that they now love.
School lunches
Trump picked former independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr to serve as secretary of health and human services.
RFK Jr’s mission to “Make America Healthy Again” will in part take place in school cafeterias.
Weeks before his nomination, he said on Fox & Friends last month that if he were given a role in Trump’s cabinet, he promised to “get processed food out of school lunches immediately.”
If this mission sounds familiar, it’s because back in 2010, First Lady Michelle Obama launched her Let’s Move! Campaign, which set out to tackle obesity and provide kids with healthy school lunch foods. She championed the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which gave the USDA authority to update nutritional standards for foods sold in schools, promoting vegetables, lean protein and less sugar.
Despite their similar goals, the receptions from the GOP have been very different.
“This is the single most important video on the internet right now,” conservative commentator Benny Johnson wrote on X alongside a video of RFK Jr standing in front of a Cap’n Crunch box and Doritos bag while decrying the issues with processed foods. Johnson continued: “We must stop poisoning ourselves & our children. Soon this will be illegal. Can’t happen fast enough.”
CNN recently aired a montage of conservative pundits roasting the former first lady’s initiative at the time. In one 2010 clip, Sean Hannity asked: “Does every American family need a dietitian appointed by the government to tell them that this food is going to make you fat and this food is not?”
“I’m old enough to remember when Michelle Obama tried to make school lunches marginally healthier and the right-wing called it ‘communism’ & cried about it for YEARS,” one user wrote. Some did in fact liken her lunch program to communism.
MSNBC contributor Brian Tyler Cohen also pointed out the GOP’s flip: “MAGA’s embrace of RFK Jr’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ is so funny because these same people CRUCIFIED Michelle Obama for daring to suggest that American kids should have access to healthy lunches in school.”
Another X user said: “Michelle Obama had a ‘healthy kids’ initiative and the Republicans fought it with everything they had. Unbelievably hypocritical.”
The support for RFK’s ‘MAHA’ movement comes after Trump, during his first administration, tried to unsuccessfully roll back some of the school nutritional standards set in the Obama era.
Perhaps one X user summarized the conundrum best: “It is not the message they hate, they hate the messenger.”
Keeping politics out of sports
In another example of how everything Trump touches turns to gold, the notion that politics and sports should be kept separate has come full circle now that the so-called “Trump dance” is ubiquitous in sports arenas.
In 2016, NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem in protest of police brutality.
Two years later, after the NFL required players to stand during the national anthem, then-President Trump hailed the league’s decision: “You have to stand proudly for the national anthem or you shouldn’t be playing, you shouldn’t be there, maybe you shouldn’t be in the country.”
The following year, former ESPN anchor Jemele Hill branded Trump as a “white supremacist” in a 2017 tweet, prompting former Fox News host Tucker Carlson to quip that ESPN stood for “Endless Stupid Political Nagging.”
“Stick to sports” became a rallying cry.
Now, after Trump’s re-election, politics and sports are visibly intertwined. X users are posting videos of athletes mimicking the president-elect’s signature hip and elbow wiggling dance.
“They were screaming for 8 years to keep politics out of sports but they win one popular vote and all of the sudden you can’t turn on a football game without running into a Trump reference head first,” one user said.
“The Venn diagram of ‘keep politics out of sports’ people and people who are praising athletes for doing the Trump dance is a circle,” one wrote.
Another wrote, pretending to quote MAGA Republicans: “‘KEEP THE POLITICS OUT OF SPORTS’ unless it’s a politician we like.”
Free speech
The right have also expressed self-serving views when it comes to free speech.
“I love the First Amendment. Nobody loves it better than me. Nobody,” Trump said in 2017.
Ahead of his so-called hush money trial, a judge put Trump under a gag order, a move Trump argued was “wrongfully attempting to deprive me of my First Amendment Right to speak out against the Weaponization of Law Enforcement.”
Since then, Trump has referred to the press as “the enemy of the people” while on the campaign trail. He has called for two networks’ broadcast licenses to be revoked. He pleaded for a third to be investigated for treason. He said anyone burning the American flag should be criminalized.
He even suggested that journalists should be jailed if they don’t reveal their confidential sources.
After the draft of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision was released, showing its plans to reverse Roe, Trump took to his Truth Social: “They’ll never find out, & it’s important that they do. So, go to the reporter & ask him/her who it was. If not given the answer, put whoever in jail until the answer is given. You might add the editor and publisher to the list.”
JD Vance asked Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2023 whether he would investigate a Washington Post journalist but also said at the vice presidential debate that he opposed social media’s moderation of content.
Meanwhile, his “first buddy” Elon Musk, who also happens to be the world’s richest man and owner of social-media platform X, has described himself as a “free speech absolutist.” After taking over the X, he lifted Trump’s ban on the platform, while a number of journalists have been mysteriously banned.
One X user wrote: “Republicans don’t want freedom of speech. They want immunity from speech, and don’t want to be held accountable for the offensive crap they say.”
