When I arrived in Washington, DC, in early 1981 as a Republican political appointee to a Congressional office position, I was told by the party’s leaders to remember that “this job is not personal.”

“We disagree on many things,” said Rep. Robert Michel, the then-Republican leader of the House of Representatives, “but we remain friends off Capitol Hill. This is business and it’s not personal.”:

That was 42 years ago. So much has changed in four decades. Today, all politics is personal and those who disagree are branded as “traitors” or “treasonous” or “unpatriotic” or simply “un-American.” Too many running for office consider politics as outright “war” and promote violence as the way to settle differences.

Reports The Washington Post:

The arrests of hundreds of rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, has frequently been cited by Republican candidates as proof of a government war on its people.

In early July, at a town hall meeting in southwest Washington state, Republican congressional hopeful Joe Kent told his audience that the “phony riot” on Jan. 6 was being “weaponized against anybody who dissents against what the government is telling us,” from parents angry about public school education to people who had questioned the outcome of the 2020 election.

“These are the types of tactics that I would see in Third World countries when I was serving overseas,” Kent told the crowd gathered in a gazebo in Rochester, a town represented by Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.). “You’d see the Praetorian Guard or the intelligence services grab the opposition and throw them in the dungeons. I never thought I’d see that in America.”

“Radical liberals are behaving like terrorists, calling for a summer of rage,” says a new ad from Catholic Vote, a conservative group spending $3 million this month to target vulnerable Democratic members of the House.

A campaign video for Republican congressional nominee J.R. Majewski shows him walking through a dilapidated factory, holding a semiautomatic weapon, warning that Democrats will “destroy our economy” with purposefully bad policies.

He adds:

Their agenda is bringing America to its knees, and I am willing to do whatever it takes. If I have to kick down doors, that’s just what patriots do.

In televised campaign ads, Missouri Republican Senate candidate Eric Greitens fires off AR-15 assault-style rifles and brags he uses them to “hunt down RINOs,” the popular GOP “Republican In Name Only” slur.

In Las Vegas in June, disgraced and criminally-corrupt former president Donald Trump claimed “Joe Biden helped lead his party’s vile campaign against our police officers, and then he carried the rioters’ agenda straight into the White House. The streets are flowing with the blood of innocent crime victims.”

As usual, Trump ignores the documented facts that showed he urged the crowd of racist, White Supremacists, Republican supporters who answer to him without question to storm the Capitol, resulting in many injuries and deaths of police officers.

Treason and a serious challenge to American democracy do exist — and on Jan. 6, 2021, it came from 1600 Pennsylvania from the vicious, traitorous mouth of Trump, along with those who continue to embrace his lies, treachery, and criminal behavior.