In US politics , Republican In Name Only is a pejorative used to describe politicians of the Republican Party deemed insufficiently loyal to the party, or misaligned with the party's ideology. Similar terms have been used since the early 1900s. The acronym RINO became popular in the 1990s, and both the acronym and the full spelling have become commonly used by former president Donald Trump and his supporters to refer to his critics within the Republican Party.
The phrase Republican in name only emerged as a popular political pejorative in the 1920s, 1950s, and 1980s. [1]
The earliest known print appearance of the term RINO was in the Manchester, New Hampshire newspaper then called The Union Leader . [2] It was invented so that it is abbreviated to "RINO", and pronounced to sound like " rhino ". [3]