There was Minnesota state Rep. Peggy Bennett at the  Freeborn County Fair, sitting on a chair juxtaposed to a life size cardboard cutout of Donald Trump.

This is the same man who said to Billy Bush of “Access Hollywood,” on the set of the soap opera “Days of our Lives,” as one of the female stars was approaching: “Yeah, that’s her, with the gold. I better get some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab’em by the (expletive). You can do anything.”

What the heck happened to the local Republican Party that they would publicly allow such a juxtaposition of our state representative?

Former Republican Party White House economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan, Paul Krugman, titled his July 31 column: “Who ate Republicans’ brains?” Krugman explains that the intellectual and moral collapse did not happen to the Republican Party all at once. “Republicans have spent decades losing their ability to think straight, and they’re not going to get it back anytime soon.”

Krugman’s conclusion of not anytime soon may be wrong given that the event in Charlottesville dramatically exposes the Republican Party. The party has welcomed Nazi right-wing ideologues to take over their party and actually hold leadership positions in the White House.

Right after the Trump election, I wrote a letter to the editor predicting what would happen next, and all of my predictions were correct except one. I predicted back then that our only hope was the next election cycle. Now my prediction is that the Republican Party will soon get its brain back.

Ted Hinnenkamp

Albert Lea