Republican dignity deficit

When President Trump was campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, there were still Republicans that hadn’t lost their mind. Looking at Donald Trump from the standpoint of fact, his primary opponents and other Republican politicians like Lindsey Graham painted him as he is, a con man unqualified morally, temperamentally, and intellectually to be president of the United States.

During the campaign, Trump’s wild rhetoric and the abominable treatment of his adversaries was consistent with that portrayal. Trump belittled his primary opponents. He called them by offensive nicknames like Little Marco (Rubio). He made fun of the appearance of Ted Cruz’s wife and implied that Cruz’s father was implicated in the Kennedy assassination. It went down from there as Trump slimed every one of the Republicans running for president.

After more than two years, Trump has proven that, if anything, the harshest critics of his campaign had fallen short. Trump has told a world record number of lies, committed multiple cruelties, small and large, and broken every principle of fairness, law and decency.

Where are those prophetic GOP Trump critics now? Like a hated dictator’s last, hard-core defenders, the Securitate in Ceausescu’s Rumania for instance, they are heeding the call to close ranks and fight to the last for their leader.

The best of the apologists express “concern” or hold on to a guilty silence. The worst, like GOP Senator Lindsey Graham, and Representatives Steve Scalise, and Kevin McCarthy, affect outrage at the very idea that their dear leader might have committed a crime, or an impeachable offense, or betrayed his country by trying to use the nation’s military arsenal and foreign policy to blackmail a foreign leader into providing dirt on a potential political rival.

Where, oh where, did these men misplace their courage, their dignity, their honor?

Trump has emasculated the Republicans and excised their moral sense. Like North Korean elites, GOP Senators are afraid to even think much less to say that the Emperor has no clothes. Some of these men have felt Trump’s cruelty themselves and know how low Trump goes. But the terror that Trump might direct his invective at them paralyzes them. It turns them into parrots repeating talking points they can scarcely believe. Fear makes sophists of them all. Pathetic characters in a play that easily moves from tragedy to farce and back.

Then there is Stephen Miller, the ultimate fanatic. He is not motivated by fear of Trump. He positively relishes his role of accusing the accusers, of charging the disclosers of the president’s criminal betrayal of the nation with being the real criminal themselves. As the architect of Trump’s administration war on immigrants, Miller deserves to be charged by an international tribunal with crimes against humanity. Wishful thinking: The United States ignores international tribunals.

It takes enablers, apologists, and fanatics to bring down a democracy. This administration has all three types.  We have known forever that Trump has an empathy deficiency. Now the Republicans are showing that they suffer from a serious dignity deficit. This is dangerous.

As Trump makes ever wilder and more serious accusations, as the president threatens Senators, whistle blowers and their sources, the peril to what is left of American democracy increases. It is ever clearer that Trump is determined to rescue his presidency and to secure reelection in 2020 at any cost. He is casting about in strange places—the Ukraine, Australia—to craft crazy conspiracy theories to create doubt on the reality that Russian intervention helped Trump win in 2016.

An ominous picture is emerging. A desperate administration is already looking for convenient scapegoats, conducting McCarthy-type investigations, threatening to shoot the messenger and deploying all hands, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Attorney General Robert Barr, and attorney without portfolio Rudy Giuliani in a goal-line defense.

Trump and the administration team are trying to turn the impeachment narrative on its head. Warping reality is their best hope. Trump was happy to let the Russians help him steal an election and now he is looking overseas for help in 2020, all the while pretending that the Democrats are the cheaters. Trump has time and again pulled coups against the Constitutional powers of Congress, but he is now charging impeachment amounts to a coup.

The 2020 Republican playbook has not changed fundamentally because of the impeachment process, it has just gotten nastier. The revelations about Trump’s bullying of Ukraine have increased public support for impeachment and decreased approval for Trump to its lowest level yet. And the revelations keep coming. The way the Trump administration is defending itself from charges of obstruction of justice is by stonewalling, refusing to testify before Congress, withholding documents. In other words, as they go about denying obstruction of justice, they are committing brand-new acts of obstruction. Corruption of all types—political, economic, moral—is so deep and pervasive in the Trump administration and the Trump family that more scandals are bound to emerge.

Alertness should be the watch word for everyone that wants to live in a decent, democratic country. Playing dirty politics has become the normal mode for Republicans. This time they are mired in an emergency of Trump’s making and they will play dirtier than ever. The stakes are high because if the Democrats win big in 2020, especially a progressive Democrat, all the bodies the GOP has been burying for years will rise to the surface and the stench will stick to the Republican Party for a long time to come.