Must take stand now

That the president and foreverTrumpers are beyond the reach of reason, moral appeal, and even simple prudence has long been clear. It’s time for reasonable Republicans to take a stand and call him out.

They have been playing with fire since they capitulated to his bullying shortly after the nomination, believing they could benefit from his support for their policy agenda and hoping they could nudge him toward better behavior. While they do not perform the obligatory bowing and scraping he demands, their steady passivity enables the cult of personality that surrounds him. While they do not overtly endorse his worst excesses, their timid, best-case explanations amount to justification. When they apologize for his most cynical stunts with fine legal parsing, they surrender to an even deeper cynicism.

They trivialize his most dangerous actions as a matter of “management style,” but mocking the notion that expertise matters, disavowing the basic idea of science, and undermining institutions from the courts to the press to the CDC is not just “style.” At the level of the presidency, style is substance. The fire has gotten out of control and is now burning us badly.

Reasonable Republicans seem to think that the president has a special knack or even genius that, nasty though it may be, is one of a kind, and believe they can wait him out until November or even another four years, but the danger that he embodies is greater than they recognize. It requires no special intelligence to discern fears and resentments and the divisions among people. What distinguishes the president is a relentless will to do anything whatsoever to play upon them to elicit adulation. That he can succeed because of his unprecedented direct, unchecked access to masses of people via social media is a genie that will not go back in the bottle. It’s time for responsible Republicans to take a stand now. DARYL RICE Little Rock