If you clicked this article hoping to find a scholarly piece about the leathery-backed beasts of Africa, you should probably turn back now. And honestly, why would you expect a political writer to know anything about animal biology or behavior? Shame on you!! Maybe you should stick around and learn something. The subject I will cover here is not the massive and proud horned rhino you were looking for; today you will learn about the diminutive and venomous RINO. And when I am done here today, whether you foolishly came to learn about animals or even more foolishly came to be outraged by or validated by my analysis, you will have learned something. The RINO (Republican in Name Only if you still haven’t gotten this) is a more complicated subject than it first appears.
Let’s talk about the origin of the term….
Interestingly, while many people attribute the term RINO to Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement, the first use of the term in modern times was in 1992 by John DiStaso, a political reporter for the New Hampshire Union Leader. And the term “Republican in Name Only” itself has been used as far back as the late 19th Century. Of course, these facts have not stopped establishment Republicans from lying and saying this is a term Trump and MAGA made up. After all, what better political defense is there than lying and playing victim? Establishment RINOs have learned well from Democrats.
But here is a real curveball for you. Establishment Republicans aren’t the only RINOs; they are just the most vocal kind at this point. And if you think RINO doesn’t apply to anybody but the establishment, well, you’ve been drinking too much of the establishment RINOs’ Kool-Aid. The long-form of the term is over a century old, and it has seen the rise and fall of many GOP Establishments. So how do we find its definition?
There is some debate about this……
So part of what inspired this article is a discussion I was having about this. To make things less charged, we will call the sides of this current debate the Populist and Establishment sides. Each side has its own belief about what a RINO is. I will break this down into a side-by-side chart.
| Establishment View | RINO’s are only Republicans who actively vote with Democrats on things that are against the important parts of the Republican platform, like abortion or raising taxes. Thus, we aren’t RINOs because we don’t do these things. We fight for Republican values |
| Populist View | RINO’s are Republicans who protect the establishment and fight against populist politicians. They are actively thumbing their nose at the base, and they have been for a long while by putting their priorities and the priorities of massive financial donors ahead of the issues important to the base, often working with Democrats to do this. |
Would it shock you to know BOTH of these definitions are right? Both of these definitions cut true to what a RINO actually is. So maybe it is time I reveal my definition, the one very true and every valid definition of what a RINO is. And im sure you’ll agree, this is the real deal.
RINO
/ˈraɪnoʊ/
noun
- A Republican rigidly devoted to preserving their political establishment.
- A politician, activist, official, or individual who claims to be Republican and willfully prioritizes institutional self-preservation, personal ambition, or obstruction to preserve the status quo over the clear priorities of the Republican voter base, the principles of self-governance, and the long-term well-being of the Republican Party and the American Republic. Often displays soft arrogance and spiteful traits.
Such politicians typically come into power by making promises to voters, then use procedural tools, internal resistance, or quiet deal-making to fulfill their own priorities while frustrating delivery on the issues that the voting base cares about, thereby eroding enthusiasm and future governing capacity while obfuscating enough to keep the baseline support needed to maintain their position.Usage note: Distinct from ordinary policy disagreement; the defining trait is the deliberate subordination of base responsiveness to personal priorities and establishment interests.
Simple no? Really take notice of that last part. This isn’t about policy disagreement. You and I can totally disagree; what matters is whether one of us subverts the will of the party because we don’t like something or because we can gain from it. Thats when you have crossed the line. And it applies to Republicans across the years and on many sides of many ideological debates.
Let’s take Larry Hogan and the most toxic sycophants of his following; by 2018, I was very sick of Larry Hogan’s behavior and how he snubbed the voter base. I made my grievances known, but i still voted for him instead of Ben Jealous, and I didn’t tell people not to vote for him. Hell, I even told people he was an odious pile of garbage, but they should vote for him because the alternative was Crazy Ben Jealous. Then in 2022, Dan Cox ran against the terrible Kelly Schulz, who had been hand-picked by Hogan and lost in a terrible primary where the real losers were the voters because neither candidate was up to the task of winning or leading. Cox won in large part because voters were rejecting Larry Hogan and his faction after years of being snubbed, and they did not want 4 more years of a Hogan clone ignoring them. (A Trump endorsement didn’t hurt either) When it came time to gracefully do the right thing and get behind the nominee the voters of the party chose, Larry Hogan refused to get behind Dan Cox and instead kept spouting to the media that Dan was a nutjob and wasn’t going to win.1
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what you call a RINO. Again, let’s compare the two paths of action here. I, who am also an elected official though much less important, chose to vote for Larry in 2016 and tell people to vote for him because he may have been a no-good RINO, but if I voted for Ben Jealous, or just didn’t vote at all, we would have been in a worse place than we are today and when the next election rolled around in 2022. In 2022 however, Larry chose to attack and sabotage the party nominee, instructing the voters who elected him to not vote for the Republican Nominee by calling him a nutjob and saying he wouldn’t win. Some would argue this gave him better chances to run for Senate in 2024, but we all know how that went. I am sure his Senate run was a large factor in his decision to trash Dan Cox, he is a RINO after all, but his big motivation was to punish the Republican Voter base for not stepping in line.
Arrogance, that is the word for it. That is the most toxic trait of a RINO. Whether it’s an establishment tick like Larry Hogan punishing his own party’s voters for rightly rejecting him, or an egotistical nutjob like Marjorie Taylor Greene who focused more on getting attention from the media than advancing the Republican Agenda and resigned in disgrace. Arrogance and spite are always central to this behavior and this label, along with a dash of greed. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of arrogant or spiteful people in the GOP, and politics in general, for that matter. But the thing that makes someone a RINO is when accommodating those traits becomes more important than doing what’s needed to move the party forward and deliver for our voters.
Now for a Gallery of Rouges.
For some fun, im going to end this article with a comical profile of 4 RINOs.
Matt Gaetz
Matt Gaetz, the man who shit the bed in October of 2023. See, little Matt here couldn’t keep his hands off little girls apparently and House Ethics was conducting a probe into him over this. When he approached former Speaker McCarthy about forcing them to end the investigation, McCarthy said rightly said no, since that would have opened him up to a potential ethics probe down the line. So Matt and his buddies came up with some lies about broken promises on Ukraine Funding, hoping you wouldn’t notice that just days earlier McCarthy had passed a spending bill that cut off Ukraine funding, and moved ahead with the Democrats and a few RINO’s to remove him as Speaker. This lead to 3 week leadership battle where some of the same RINO’s who helped Matt remove McCarthy plotted to hand the gavel over to Hakeem Jeffries. Eventually, Mike Johnson was elected, who then proceeded to break most of the promises McCarthy made about omnibus bills, all while Matt defended him as a better choice till Matt eventually resigned.
Mitt Romney
Mitt Romney is the failed presidential candidate known for throwing his gay staffer Ric Grenell under the bus during his failed 2012 Presidential run. This failure then failed to stop Trump from getting the nomination in 2016, and failed again to impeach him with the help of the Democrats. He failed his way through many failed op-eds about how bad Trump was that failed to garner my interest, to say the least. After announcing his acceptance of his failure when he retired in 2024, he now fails to be relevant as he grumbles his hatred about the orange man who so utterly broke him.
Thomas Massie
Thomas “Masshole” Massie spent an unremarkable 14 years in office achieving absolutely nothing. No pieces of legislation he introduced ever managed to pass the floor. Tommy-boy gained a cult following by being a vocal malcontent, which seemed kind of cool at first when he was actually making a point, but increasingly became sad when he ran his mouth but failed to get things done. When things finally began to get better for the Republican voter, Tommy Masshole, instead of contributing, began to go on long incoherent tirades full of conspiracy theories and anti-semitism. He lost his primary in 2026 and some say you can still hear his voice ringing throughout the halls of Congress saying, “It was the JUWWWWWWWWWSSSSSSS!!!!”
John Bolton
Holy Fuck! What happened to you, Colonel Sanders!? Oh wait, thats just fucking John Bolton. He is an unremarkable RINO who helped kill lots of innocent members of our armed forces with his disastrous foreign policy positions during the Bush Administration. He then did what all unremarkable people do when they get chucked to the dustbin of DC politics: he joined a think tank and spewed more of his odious opinions until Trump threw him an undeserved chance and made him National Security Advisor. The Budget Colonel lasted a year in this position, during which he paraded around like a pompous ass and butted heads with Trump over the latter’s belief in diplomacy rather than killing our men and women in uniform, till he was fired in 2019. After he was fired, he wrote a hack memoir which illegally utilized classified material but was heavily praised by liberals and other RINOs because he stuck it to the orange man. Little Johny was riding high until 2025 when he was indicted because, while he was leaking classified materials to his book publisher, Iranians hacked the morons email. He pleaded guilty to unlawfully retaining and transmitting classified material and may face 5 years in prison. Deebo from Cellblock F says they already have an outfit picked out for him, and they plan to name him Janine.
I hope you enjoyed this little educational snippet. Now go out there, and apply RINO correctly and fairly.
- Make no mistake, dear reader, your humble author also agrees Dan Cox is a nutjob. But just like I said with the odious pile of garbage in 2018, the alternative is worse. Vote for Dan Cox in November. He isn’t great, but I will take a nutjob over a stolen valor tax-obsessed Democrat. ↩︎
William Hellmann 