As the Mueller probe escalates, Trump and the Republican Party he leads are coming increasingly undone

The centipede has dropped its heaviest shoe yet. Michael Flynn’s plea deal makes explicit that he is cooperating with the special counsel in the Russia investigation. It also makes plain that that investigation reaches into the inner sanctums of the Trump White House and the Trump clan. Mueller would not have let Flynn off with just a single charge of lying to the FBI if he did not in return get evidence from Flynn that will ensnare a fish — or a school of fish — even bigger than the former national-security adviser to the President of the United States.

Will it be Jared Kushner or Jeff Sessions or Mike Pence or Donald Trump himself, or some or all of the above? When it comes to the Russia investigation, Flynn’s pleading has now made at least one thing abundantly clear: the centipede will be dropping more and heavier shoes as it slithers through the swamp Trump himself has brought to Washington.

Mueller’s flip of Flynn could not have come at a more momentous juncture. A confluence of developments — the Russia investigation, the tax bill, the Roy Moore scandal, the celebrity sexual harassment revelations, the North Korean crisis — has brought the country to a watershed. For the developments are all intertwined, revealing how far we have descended into an anti-world in which the hitherto inconceivable has become commonplace.

The tax bill which the Senate has now passed on strictly partisan lines is the least exceptional item on the bill. After all, Congress is doing what it is supposed to be doing: passing laws. But the historic legislation has one feature that stands out among all the rest. Whatever one makes of the wisdom of the cuts in the corporate tax rats and the radical scaling back of both the estate tax and the alternate minimum tax, the central fact that leaps out is that the reform, according to Congress’s own non-partisan analyses, adds a 1.4 trillion-dollar hole to the federal debt.

Not long ago, the GOP was populated by the budget hawks who brought us the semi-disaster of sequestration. Now, almost overnight, the GOP has become the party of profligacy. The switch is just one more signpost marking the degree to which the Republican party has rushed to make itself over in the image of Donald Trump. Irresponsibly widening the yawning federal deficit is the least of it. One after the next, Republican politicians have fallen under Trump’s sway, accepting his unacceptable behavior, defending it, justifying it, or explaining it away.

After the white supremacist rampage in Charlottesville, Trump told the world that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the conflict. That shocking pronouncement, putting a gloss on neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, and open racists, had been preceded by innumerable other displays of bigotry: the Judge Curiel affair, the Muslim ban, the tarring of Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers, the birther movement to delegitimize America’s first black President, and much else extending back decades. But Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House and the great hope of the conservative movement, took to CBS after Charlottesville to tell the nation that when it comes to Donald Trump and matters of race, “I know his heart’s in the right place.”

Is there anyone more craven in Washington than Paul Ryan? Only the servile gnome, Reince Priebus, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, comes to mind. And has any mainstream Republican leader played a larger part in enabling Donald Trump to rise from the gutter of Fifth Avenue and bring its stench to the Oval Office? Ryan’s dark place in American history is secure.

If blatant racism is perfectly fine, how about pedophilia? Roy Moore’s senate race in Alabama has thrust that once unthinkable question into the center of the public square. Enough credible accusations have been leveled to persuade any fair-minded person that the former judge has a deeply checkered sexual past. Yet Republicans, fearful of losing their majority in the Senate, have greeted Moore’s candidacy with an epic volume of hemming and hawing.

At first, Senate Republicans suggested that they would work against Moore’s candidacy and would expel him from their chamber should he win the race.

But after Trump ended his prevaricating silence and endorsed Moore, the formerly voluble Senate critics of the judge now found it was their turn to lapse into evasive silence. The fact that the President of the United States and the leader of their party had endorsed a pedophile for a United States Senate seat has elicited from Republican congressional leaders nary a