I wish the Atlantic offered gift links because this is one I’d really love to share with you. Here’s a gift link to this article in the Atlantic. It’s from Mark Liebovitch and it’s about the invertebrate cowards in the Republican Party. Donald Trump had them pegged:
In the summer of 2015, back when he was still talking to traitorous reporters like me, I spent extended stretches with Donald Trump. He was in the early phase of his first campaign for president, though he had quickly made himself the inescapable figure of that race—as he would in pretty much every Republican contest since. We would hop around his various clubs, buildings, holding rooms, limos, planes, golf carts, and mob scenes, Trump disgorging his usual bluster, slander, flattery, and obvious lies. The diatribes were exhausting and disjointed.
But I was struck by one theme that Trump kept pounding on over and over: that he was used to dealing with “brutal, vicious killers”—by which he meant his fellow ruthless operators in showbiz, real estate, casinos, and other big-boy industries. In contrast, he told me, politicians are saps and weaklings.
“I will roll over them,” he boasted, referring to the flaccid field of Republican challengers he was about to debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library that September. They were “puppets,” “not strong people.” He welcomed their contempt, he told me, because that would make his turning them into supplicants all the more humiliating.
“They might speak badly about me now, but they won’t later,” Trump said. They like to say they are “public servants,” he added, his voice dripping with derision at the word servant. But they would eventually submit to him and fear him. They would “evolve,” as they say in politics. “It will be very easy; I can make them evolve,” Trump told me. “They will evolve.”
Like most people who’d been around politics for a while, I was dubious. And wrong. They evolved.
You have to read the whole thing if you can. It’s such a stunning indictment of Republican Party. He takes us through the early days of Trump’s ascension and the short lived fierce resistance to him among the party’s luminaries through the presidency, January 6th the official takeover of the RNC, the pilgrimages to Mar-a-lago and the Manhattan courthouse and more. It’s astonishing to see it all in one place.
He writes that after Trump’s ignominious loss in 2020 and January 6th it seemed inevitable that the party would want to move on. (I didn’t think so FWIW …) But it wasn’t to be:
[T]he speed with which Trump has settled back into easy dominance of his party has been both remarkable and entirely foreseeable—foreseen, in fact, by Trump himself. Because if there’s been one recurring lesson of the Trump-era GOP, it’s this: Never underestimate the durability of a demagogue with a captive base, a desperate will to keep going, and—perhaps most of all—a feeble and terrified opposition of spineless ciphers (“weak like a baby”).
Ain’t that the truth. Trump has shown us something no one else has ever been able to do. What a perfect storm.
And, by the way, make note of the fact that the feeble and terrified opposition of spineless ciphers he refers to aren’t the Democrats. They have been stand-up guys and gals in this whole thing even going so far as to beat him at the ballot box and then pass a bunch of very liberal domestic policies while the Trump clown car continued to run around in circles. They set aside their differences to fight the opposition because the stakes are so high. They are the only real political party in America.
