There’s virtually no end to the things that disgust me about politics in America these days. And I trust it will surprise nobody that creatures from the Trumpian cult – masquerading as the Republican Party – feature in most of them.
Democrats have been all over TV lately regaling viewers with tales about how their Republican colleagues routinely repudiate President Trump in private. They invariably end these cloak-room tales by bemoaning the sheepish refusal of those Republicans to ever do so in public.
Mind you, it’s still a curious thing that these Democrats rarely bother to decry the more interesting fact that Republicans routinely praise Trump in public in direct proportion to the way they repudiate him in private.
In any event, here is how Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio summed up this absurd open secret in a New York Times op-ed on Wednesday:
In private, many of my colleagues agree that the president is reckless and unfit. … They know this president has done things Richard Nixon never did. And they know that more damning evidence is likely to come out.
Except that I’m not sure why Brown or the Times thought this was newsworthy. And, apropos of his reference to Nixon, the only surprise was that one Republican (namely Senator Mitt Romney of Utah) actually had the moral courage to vote to convict Trump.
Granted House Democrats presented a mountain of evidence of his guilt. But the open and notorious nature of the Faustian relationship between Trump and this Republican Party has been such for years that nobody thought even one vote for truth and justice in this case was possible. I have written many commentaries lamenting this fact, including “(White) Evangelicals Supporting Donald Trump like Israelites Worshipping Golden Calf,” January 20, 2016, and “Republicans Abandon Faith and Values to Hail Trump as ‘Chosen by God’,” March 6, 2019.
Notably, Republican Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina spent much of the 2016 presidential campaign decrying Trump as a crazy con man. Yet they seem to have decided that, if they couldn’t beat him, they might as well join Trump in perpetrating all kinds of crazy cons on the American people.
Never mind that Trump could be forgiven for thinking that the more he humiliates white Republican men the more they like him. Some, like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, even like him when he humiliates their wives, which puts a fetishistic twist on cuckoldry that is just too perverse for words. And, remarkably, even though they are sons of Cuban exiles, and never miss an opportunity to damn the Castros, both Rubio and Cruz never fail to either enable or defend every one of Trump’s dictatorial misdeeds.
Hell, Republicans have so lost their way that these avowed Christians found themselves applauding at Thursday’s National Prayer Breakfast in Washington D.C., when Trump began fulminating against the basic teachings of Jesus Christ – for Christ’s sake!
Therefore, that relationship’s clearly not the thing. Rather it’s the refusal of Democrats to name their Republican colleagues who continually say one thing about it in private and another in public. This was the case on Friday’s edition of Morning Joe on MSNBC, when Brown himself went all Omertà.
I like Brown. But he came across like a self-righteous panderer; you know, the kind of sinner destined to end up just one ring above the likes of Michael Cohen and Lev Parnas in Dante’s “Nine Circles of Hell”. More to the point, this refusal makes Brown and his fellow Democrats complicit in the Trumpism that is dividing America against itself and making it an international laughingstock.
I mean, what loyalty do they owe Republican colleagues who use them just to soothe their guilty consciences? Surely the greater loyalty must be to the country, which those same Republicans blithely admit they’re helping a reckless and unfit Trump to destroy.
This is why, far from showing Republicans loyalty, Democrats should be serving them contempt. And they should be serving it all over TV by name to shame every Republican playing this two-faced game.
Remarkably, Republicans seem more interested in having Democrats attest that they haven’t lost their minds than in showing God that they haven’t sold their souls. Granted, if they lose those Democrats, they might seek out reporters to soothe their guilty consciences. But outing them might just force Republicans to rediscover their backbones and political values. Hey, hope springs eternal.
Whatever the case, I urge Democrats to stop playing father confessors to these craven Republicans!
And here’s to the first of them mirroring Romney’s moral courage by outing Lindsey Graham — the Republican senator who has bent over backwards so much to defend Trump, it’s a wonder he hasn’t already broken his back.
But he too must find himself saying these famous words to Trump — even if only while looking at himself in the mirror:
I wish I knew how to quit you.
(Brokeback Mountain, 2005)
Related commentaries:
Mitt Romney…
Golden calf…
Republicans abandon faith…
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