REPUBLICAN TOLERANCE FOR DESPOTISM KEEPS RISING
Any other Republican president — Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George Bush — would have campaigned in the final week of the midterm elections on the booming economy, unemployment under 4 percent, rising real wages and a stock market up 25 percent.
Donald Trump instead chose to close with racist rants about hordes of terrorists and brown people about to invade the Rio Grande. A man of dark instincts and impulses, he is incapable of uplift and hope; he traffics in fear and hate.
There’s a case to be made that it worked in places, rallying Republican voters in states like Florida and Missouri and even providing the decisive votes in rural areas in a House race Democrats expected to win, centered in Lexington, Kentucky.
So Trump has something to crow about, even if, given his narcissism, he’s wildly exaggerating it, and even though surveys indicate that his last-minute demagogy, after acts of violence, backfired.
The only clear losers in the midterms were Republican politicians like Gov. John Kasich of Ohio and Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, and intellectual conservative journalists like Michael Gerson and George Will, who want the Republicans to return to a principled conservative party that is welcoming and rejects race-baiting.
It’s now Trump’s Republican Party, mean-spirited, bigoted and ethically challenged. We know Trump’s character, so the focus should be on the enablers in the party, such as:
› House Speaker Paul Ryan, an inclusive man, who sold his political soul to accommodate Trump. His likely successor, Kevin McCarthy of California, can skip the sale part.
› The right-wing House Freedom Caucus, whose signature is not limited government or balanced budgets. It is hate-filled partisan attacks to divert from Trump’s illicit behavior and undercut special counsel Robert Mueller.
› Sen. Ted Cruz. In 2016, Trump insulted Cruz’s wife and linked his father to the man who assassinated John F. Kennedy. Facing a tough re-election fight in Texas, Cruz last month slobbered all over Trump.
› South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, once considered a successor to his mentor, the late John McCain, as the conscience of the Senate. Facing lousy polls at home and the threat of a right-wing challenge in a 2020 primary, Graham, who can’t imagine life outside the Senate, has turned into a Trump sycophant and right-wing cheerleader.
One staunch conservative Republican who refused to act as a Trump lackey and who paid the price is Rep. Mark Sanford of South Carolina. He thinks the Trump dominance will prove ephemeral. “We’ve seen this (nationalism/populism) before and it doesn’t last,” said Sanford, who was beaten in the GOP primary. “The Trump effect won’t be long term.”
This can happen only if some Republicans find their spines and souls. The day after the election, Trump gave them an opening to do that when he fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, replacing him with a loyalist hack who now will oversee the special counsel.
There was only one reason to get rid of Sessions: to sabotage Mueller and protect Trump, who clearly has something to hide.
There is a simple way Republicans can show some mettle: if five senators — starting with Maine’s Susan Collins, who complains it’s unacceptable to impede Mueller but does little about it — say they won’t vote for anther federal judge until legislation is enacted guaranteeing the independence of the special counsel. The model is the 1973 set of conditions laid down by Republicans for a special counsel investigating Richard Nixon.
That would require Republicans who have built reputations for integrity, decency and principled values, like Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Ohio’s Rob Portman, to decide they no longer, under the phony pretense of party loyalty, can continue to acquiesce in a despotic regime.
History will determine whether they are a source of pride or embarrassment to their grandchildren. For now, we need to vigorously hold Republican feet to the fire.