Following Trump down

The following editorial recently in the Washington Post. ‘How

did you go bankrupt?” one character asks another in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises.” “Two ways,” is the response. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

In the matter of the Republican Party’s moral and ideological bankruptcy, the GOP is still in the “gradually” phase. Donald Trump is seemingly destined to accumulate all, or nearly all, of the 1,237 delegates needed to win the GOP presidential nomination on the first ballot. In the face of this not quite entirely inevitable but quite entirely odious prospect, the thing to do is declare your unequivocal opposition and fight it.

Alas, leading Republicans, such as House Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller (Fla.) and Transportation Committee Chairman Bill Shuster (Pa.), have endorsed Trump. Others are calibrating their responses.

These include Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, who leavened his endorsement of Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) with praise for Trump’s supposed tapping of legitimate voter concerns.

The category contains people who should know better, such as Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (Tenn.), who observed, apropos the candidate’s unserious April 27 foreign policy address: “I think when somebody transitions and gives a serious speech about something, I think giving an ‘atta boy’ is an appropriate thing to do.”

Then there’s Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), last seen trading crude insults with Trump, en route to a humiliating primary defeat in his home state on March 15. In those days, Rubio choked up when asked if he’d keep his promise to support the GOP nominee, even if it should be Trump; he declared it was getting “harder every day.” On April 20, however, it seemed to be getting easier again: “I’ve always said I’m going to support the Republican nominee, and that’s especially true now that it’s apparent that Hillary Clinton is going to be the Democratic candidate” — as if Rubio would have been more sanguine at the prospect of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the White House.

Who knows why Republican politicians equivocate about the most repugnant political phenomenon in recent American history. Opportunism? Cluelessness? A sincere wish to influence the process for the better?

Someday, everyone involved in American politics will be called upon to account for his or her behavior during Trump’s run for the White House. Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus forged one route months ago, cheerfully pronouncing: “Winning is the antidote to a lot of things.”

It will be instructive to watch which politicians follow Priebus to the moral poorhouse, and which have the gumption to chart a different course.