Many Trump supporters sincerely believe he would be their saviors from the Democrats and the Republicans. They voted for him to clean up the swamp. Unfortunately for them, Trump was a magnifying glass for Republicans. Never would they have believed they could unleash their level of selfish evil on Americans with a president that had professed he would blow the Republican Party establishment as well.
Because Republicans are now complicit with Donald Trump in materially hurting Americans, when he falls, the Republican Party as we know it will fall too.
Paul Krugman captured that reality in his New York Times piece titled “Faust on the Potomac.” Krugman points out that instead of running away from Trump, Republican are embracing him.
It seems to me that that the real news now is the way Republicans in Congress are dealing with this national nightmare: rather than distancing themselves from Trump, they’re doubling down on their support and, in particular, on their efforts to cover for his defects and crimes.
The technique Republicans used for decades which was to play to people’s most inner evils, and carnal fears finally seemed to have backfired.
For more than a generation, the Republican establishment was able to keep this bait-and-switch under control: racism was deployed to win elections, then was muted afterwards, partly to preserve plausible deniability, partly to focus on the real priority of enriching the one percent. But with Trump they lost control: the base wanted someone who was blatantly racist and wouldn’t pretend to be anything else. And that’s what they got, with corruption, incompetence, and treason on the side.
Nonetheless, aside from a handful of Never Trumpers, just about everyone in the Republican establishment decided that they could work with that.
He concludes with, a reality, Republican will likely have to come to grips with sooner than later.
Trump’s very awfulness means that if he falls, the whole party will fall with him. Republicans could conceivably distance themselves from a president who turned out to be a bad manager, or even one who turned out to have engaged in small-time corruption. But when the corruption is big time, and it’s combined with obstruction of justice and collaboration with Putin, nobody will notice which Republicans were a bit less involved, a bit less obsequious, than others. If Trump sinks, he’ll create a vortex that sucks down everyone involved.
And so we now have the Republican party as a whole fully complicit in Trump’s crimes – because that’s what they are, whether or not he and those around him are ever brought to justice.
What this means, among other things, is that expecting the GOP to exercise any oversight or constrain Trump in any way is just foolish at this point. Massive electoral defeat – massive enough to overwhelm gerrymandering and other structural advantages of the right – is the only way out.
Michael Wolff’s new book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” makes it very clear in one place that Republicans know all that is wrong about Donald Trump. But as a TV commentator said recently, “They are mercenaries there to use Trump.” I pointed this out in my blog post titled “Trump not smart enough to realize GOP establishment using him” as well.
Now the real question is whether Democrats and Progressive capitalize on the removal of the scab from the Republican Party. They better get there act together and coalesce around poor and middle-class centric issues and stop the infighting.
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