For Democrats, the GOP’s state of turmoil should look familiar

Which major American political party — and which president of the United States — does this describe?

1. The president, who is the leader of the party, is viewed by a huge swath of Americans as a liar;

2. Many of the promises he made in the recent presidential election have been reversed, forgotten or ignored by the president;

3. Many believe this president is actually enriching himself while in elected office;

4. Millions of American citizens — including young voters, women and minorities — are taking to the streets in huge protests against the administration;

5. Racial division is prevalent;

6. The president, and thus his party, play a “race game” by tolerating — even possibly cultivating — white supremacists while carefully using ambiguous, often contradictory language to make both sides believe he is on their side;

7. Areas of the Old South and Appalachia — devastated by a bad, decaying economy — went big for this party and this president;

8. The president’s new budget is riddled with debt and excessive spending; there is no attempt to even mention “balanced budgets” or concern about deficits or the national debt;

9. Fiscal conservatism is long forgotten;

10. Instead, big government spending is “The New Way,” on both the military and on programs here at home. More spending and tax cuts — together, guns and butter — at the same time! Spend, spend, spend — and borrow, borrow, borrow;

11. During the campaign this president promised to bring the troops home from a never-ending, costly war on the other side of the world — and to use that money here at home to “re-build America”;

12. Instead, in his first year as POTUS, he increased the number of troops sent to that war and authorized even more money to be spent there;

13. The president is viewed as crude and rude;

14. He has an explosive temper; he often reams out his top staff;

15. One of his closest White House aides had to leave because of a “relationship” problem;

16. He has odd sleeping habits; he is often up late at night;

17. A growing part of this political party has disdain for the FBI — and, instead, has a romanticized view of Moscow and the KGB and the “revolution” over there;

18. Some of these party people actually have more faith in Moscow’s leader than they do in the director of the FBI;

OK, enough.

Who are we talking about? Which political party? And which POTUS?

Is this Donald J. Trump and the current Republican Party?

Or is it circa 1965, and Lyndon Baines Johnson and his Democratic Party?

Answer: Both.

LBJ and The Donald have much in common. LBJ lied at his core about almost everything — including, in the 1964 campaign, promising not to send “our boys over there” to Vietnam; less than a year later he’d sent American “boys” to Vietnam, peaking at 500,000 Americans.

LBJ’s lying permeated his administration and the Pentagon leadership and, ultimately, fostered what became known as the “credibility gap.”

Trump has recently crossed a threshold of 2,000 lies and deliberate misstatements catalogued in his first year in office, according to .

Trump also did a 180 on troops and funding in Afghanistan. After pledging to get out, he actually approved his own “surge” in Afghanistan.

LBJ played race very carefully. The Democrats of the mid-1960s were riddled with racists and segregationists like Gov. George Wallace and Southern senators like Richard Russell (D-Ga.) — and LBJ befriended them, used them for years. But Johnson also wanted to move the Democrats toward a more open, tolerant position — and he wanted to keep Northern liberals as part of his coalition.

Trump has consorted with the alt-right/white nationalist faction of the party. But, unlike LBJ, he has made no effort to reach out to black leadership. In fact, he has repeatedly insulted them.

LBJ blew open federal spending on his Great Society programs which morphed into what we now call “entitlements” by creating Medicare and expanding Social Security. No matter how well-intentioned these programs were and are, they can’t and won’t pay for themselves. So they have become the main sources of our long-term national debt crisis-in-the-making.

Trump refuses to even talk about this entitlement situation. And his new budget is a fiscal disaster. Any pretense of “fiscal conservatism” is gone. The Tea Party has turned into yet another group of political hypocrites; deficit hawks have been abandoned in the dust.

LBJ’s closest White House aide, Marvin Watson, had to resign because of a personal sexual situation; Trump’s staff secretary, Rob Porter, just resigned because of alleged past spousal abuse.

By 1965 there was a small but growing part of the Democratic Party that would soon blossom into the New Left: an anti-military, anti-authority movement that idolized foreign revolutions in Russia (Lenin), Cuba (Castro) and Red China (Mao). That left wing of the Democratic Party trusted those anti-American dictators more than they trusted J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, or Gen. William Westmoreland and the U.S. Army.

Today — amazingly — more Republicans trust Vladimir Putin, a career KGB agent who hates America, than the FBI, when comparing various polls. That is what Donald Trump and Fox News have done to the Republican Party.

The once-Grand Old Party has morphed into the 1960s Democratic Party.

And just as that party lost in the next presidential election in 1968, this new Trump-Republican Party cannot stand.

The only question is what comes next.

John LeBoutillier, a former U.S. congressman (R-N.Y.), is the co-host of REVOLUTION — The Podcast, available on Soundcloud and iTunes.