Republicans on the verge of a nervous breakdown

Donald Trump is in big trouble and Republicans in Congress are freaking. They went as far as storming a hearing room to physically prevent the impeachment investigation from proceeding, but only managed to delay testimony by five hours. The GOP, traditionally a party of conservative tailored suits and starched shirts was acting like a bunch of 1960s radicals; Trump has taken such total ownership of Republican hearts and minds that his derangement is now their derangement. Unlike the storming of the Bastille, the GOP’s mob move in the halls of Congress failed.

Since then, one witness after another has laid out increasingly damning facts about Trump and his Ukraine scandal. As I write this, arguably the most credible and damaging witness against Trump, Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman, in full military uniform and bedecked with combat medals including the Purple Heart for a wound he received in Iraq, is giving a deposition before congressional investigators. It is a closed hearing so the American people will not get the chance to see it or to gauge how low Republicans in the room are willing to slither and crawl to obey Trump’s command to defend him hard. My bet: They will go as low as it gets, which in this case is to try to besmirch the character of an unimpugnable witness, a hero twice over, who showed courage in combat and as much valor by testifying in Congress in defiance of President Trump’s wishes.

What irresistible force compels Republicans to humiliate themselves like this and to damage their reputation for all time? The answer includes but is more complex than simple fear of their rabidly reactionary constituents; hello, Lindsey Graham. And it is not just that Trump’s camp followers are like participants in an “end of the world” death cult, although that also is true. They will obey their version of Jim Jones, follow him to the ends of the earth, and drink the lethal Kool Aid too. And, as several studies show, when predictions about the end of the world don’t come through, they invent stories to convince themselves it is all part of the plan. As in, Mexico will pay for the Wall, and if it doesn’t the Prophet was right all along anyway.

But there must be something beyond these admittedly powerful influences that explains all that Republican genuflection. There is.

Although during the primary campaign Trump was not the choice of the Republican establishment, once he became president, they discovered that he was the answer to all their dreams and desires. He gifted billions of dollars to the billionaires who fund their campaigns. Trump gave the Pentagon trillions and less than nothing for human needs like health care and nutrition, cutting these programs while sharply increasing money for the military. Zillions for death, zero for life.

Beyond Trump’s economic policies, on the cultural front he tried to push the blacks down and the immigrants out. He wanted to shove non-heterosexuals back to the dark corners. He is all for banning abortion and making women barefoot and pregnant again.

This is Republican heaven. That is why Republicans defend Donald Trump so fiercely. It is not out of love or loyalty or principle. They know that only a person with no conscience or empathy, a natural-born serial liar with well-developed skills in the dark act of demagoguery, a cruel and heartless human being like Trump, would have been able to enact such an ugly agenda. As it turns out, this has been the unacknowledged GOP agenda all along, at least since Reagan.

What are a few high crimes and misdemeanors compared to this ideological and material bonanza for Republican members of Congress and their billionaire owners or, excuse me, donors?

What is trading American sovereignty to foreign countries, Russia, China, Ukraine, for political dirt about an opponent compared to billions for right-wing fat cats and the pleasure of watching the president step all over blacks, Latinos, Muslims, women, gays and while wearing golf shoes?

To his credit, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenski, a democrat and a patriot, chose not to sell his country’s sovereignty even in exchange for American missiles for defending his nation against Russian tanks. You can blackmail many people and you can buy many others by giving in to their deepest hidden desires, like the economic, cultural, and political counterrevolution Trump has handed the GOP. But there are some you can’t blackmail or buy. Zelenski is one of these. Colonel Vindnam is another. The whole of the Republican Party, with very few and partial exceptions, are not.

The GOP, for its betrayal of the Constitution and the country, for its preferential option for the haves and its punishment and disdain for the have nots, for trying to turn the clock back to the era of lethal clandestine abortions and stigma for being gay or lesbian, for these and too many other moral crimes to list, deserves an apocalyptic defeat in 2020. A fatal and final political beating would be ideal. Drive them so deep into the ground they can never get out.