Analysis: “The dam has broken” for the GOP. But for how long?
WASHINGTON — After 17 months, three weeks and six days of Donald Trump’s tumultuous presidency, some of his fellow Republicans had finally had enough. “The dam has broken,” Sen. Bob Corker, a Republican critic from Tennessee, said on Tuesday.
But has it really broken and if so for how long? As Trump scrambled to patch any holes on Tuesday by reimagining his extraordinary news conference with Russia’s president the day before in Helsinki, the question was whether he had reached a genuine turning point or simply endured another one of those episodes that seems decisive but ultimately fades into the next one.
For the moment, at least, this time did feel different. After seeming to take President Vladimir Putin’s word over that of America’s intelligence agencies on Russian election meddling, Trump was being accused not only of poor judgment but of treason — and not just by fringe elements and liberal talk show hosts, but by a former CIA director.
While the accusation of treason has been thrown around on the edges of the political debate from time to time, never in the modern era has it become part of the national conversation in such a prominent way.
The list of Republicans rebuking the president included not just the usual suspects like Corker, who has been a frequent critic and plans on retiring when his term is up in January, but friends of the president like the former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who called his performance in Finland “the most serious mistake of his presidency,” and the conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, which called it a “national embarrassment.”
Even some of the normally friendly folks at Fox News expressed astonishment, including Neil Cavuto and Abby Huntsman, whose father, Jon, is Trump’s ambassador to Moscow.
That Russia would become the third rail for the party of Ronald Reagan is a sign of just how far politics have shifted under Trump. Republicans once denounced President Barack Obama for suggesting that he would have more “flexibility” to work with Putin after his re-election; now Trump treats Putin as a trusted friend.
And that was too much for John Brennan, the former CIA director who had already emerged as one of Trump’s most vocal critics. He called the performance “nothing short of treasonous.”
Max Boot, the former Republican who has become one of Trump’s sharpest critics, noted in a column on Monday in the Washington Post that accusing him of treason was once unthinkable. No longer. “If anyone is ‘the enemy of the people,’ it is Trump himself,” he wrote.
Trump returned to the White House on Monday night as protesters outside the gate shouted, “Welcome home, traitor.” Even Dictionary.com trolled the president, tweeting out a definition: “Traitor: A person who commits treason by betraying his or her country.”
It later said that searches for “treason” had increased by 2,943 percent. By Tuesday afternoon, the word “traitor” had been used on Twitter 800,000 times and the word “treason” about 1.2 million times.
Even some opponents, however, expressed caution.
“The word treason is so strong that we must use it carefully,” Eliot A. Cohen, a former State Department official under President George W. Bush and a longtime critic of Trump, wrote on Twitter. “But that press conference has brought the President of the United States right up to that dark, dark shore.”
Brennan said Tuesday on “Today” on NBC that he understood how charged the term was when he used it, but said the events justified it.
“I’m sure Ronald Reagan listening to what Mr. Trump was saying could not believe it and is rolling over right now, unfortunately, in his grave,” he said.