But the primary
Claire McCaskill tells us what we already suspect – Senate Republicans know Trump is many cards short of a deck but they keep shtum because Republicans.
In the interview, the blunt-speaking Missouri Democrat, reflecting on her election loss to Republican Josh Hawley — a political novice whom she also referred to as a “bright shining object” — also didn’t mince words for the Republican Party.
While she warned that history “will judge some of my colleagues harshly that they didn’t stand up to this President at some of the moments where he has been unhinged about particularly the rule of law,” she also said that GOP senators have privately conceded they can’t speak out against Trump because of backlash they’d receive from their base.
“Now they’ll tell you, if it’s just the two of you, ‘The guy is nuts, he doesn’t have a grasp of the issues, he’s making rash decisions, he’s not listening to people who know the subject matter,’ ” she said. “But in public if they go after him … they know they get a primary, and they know that’s tough.”
So it’s all about them, and not the good of a country of 327 million people. “Gee, I don’t know, Marv, which is it gonna be, the welfare of 327 people plus to a considerable extent the rest of the 7 billion on the planet, or…me? Tough choice but I’m gonna hafta go with me, because me. Me and my job. That’s the important thing here.”
We knew this, but that doesn’t make it any less disgusting.
The blame for enabling Trump goes back to before his inauguration, or even his candidacy. Although the rise of Trump happened fairly quickly, it was the result of decades of failures by the GOP.
The GOP base was right to be angry. Year after year, their party’s leaders talked about how they were the party of Real Amurrricans, who really cared about the common folk unlike those Democratic Party elitists. But the average GOP voter didn’t believe in trickle-down economics, or privatizing Medicare, or most of the abstract principles that conservative writers and leaders did. Yet when push came to shove, the only policies they implemented were (1) tax cuts for the rich; (2) cutting back regulations that protect Americans from corporate predation and fraud; and (3) wasting American blood, treasure, and diplomatic credibility on chest-thumping foreign adventures.
In a better world, or at least a country with a better electorate, this would have led to a long period of electoral dominance by the Democrats. But for a variety of reasons (some blame corporate media, some the fecklessness of the Democratic Party, some blame rich megadonors empowered by Citizens United, but I blame the voters themselves, who would rather shoot themselves in the foot if told it would prevent some non-white person somewhere from getting something they didn’t “deserve”), the GOP base couldn’t bring itself to vote for the party on the other side of the culture war.
Instead, Trump came along and told them that Washington has been taken over by elites who don’t care about you, and I’m gonna blow it all up. (There’s a reason there were many folks who liked Trump AND Bernie Sanders.) He gave them simple solutions to their problems: no more of the same-old, dubious and abstract promise that “you’ll get new jobs created when we unleash the power of the free market from the government shackles,” it was “we’re gonna bring back coal mining and factory jobs by deporting immigrants and banning imports!” Immigration isn’t a complex issue with difficult enforcement issues — just build a wall! We can just turn back the clock and Make America Great Again!
If the GOP had spent any energy over the past 30 years actually trying to come up with policies that would directly help ordinary Americans in observable ways, maybe they would have had some credibility when this snake oil salesman came along and offered their voters the sun and moon and stars. But instead, all the other umpteen candidates could do was be watered-down versions of Trump. Hell, the party had spent decades telling their voters that government employees are stupid and venal, that common sense is better than qualifications and expertise, and that any idiot (George W. Bush, Sarah Palin) can run the government — is it any wonder that voters figured that even if Trump was an idiot, it wouldn’t matter?
No wonder their party was stolen out from under them. GOP officeholders are like elderly parents who abused and/or neglected their kids for decades, and then wonder why they don’t call any more.
They are being held hostage by the insanity that they created.
How right. They have been screaming about “elites”, “liberals”, and the horrors of government for my entire life. So is it any wonder the voters turned to a candidate that wanted nothing more than to break the state? And claimed (in spite of his billions) to be a man of the people, and not an elite? When they redefined “elite” to mean educated instead of filthy rich, they set this up to happen.
The conservatives have never really wanted to break the state; they have only wanted to loot it to enrich themselves, and use it to control what people did in the privacy of their own bedrooms. The state has been a useful tool to them for enforcing conformity, and once broken, it will no longer be useful as a tool. And I suspect they don’t want to live under King Donald anymore than the rest of us do, but the powers they flung at Nixon, at Reagan, and at Bush (not to mention many presidents starting with Wilson) and their abdication of the system of checks and balances, have lead us to a delusional oligarch with dreams of becoming an absolute monarch, untouchable and unstoppable.