Republicans show how to sell your soul to Trump
It’s the wonder of the Trump era and one of the saddest, scariest themes of the impeachment inquiry so far: the teeming crowd of sellouts and suck-ups who eagerly traded principle for position and are in some cases doubling and tripling down on that transaction, to a point where it’s fair to ask if there was ever much principle to begin with.
I’m looking at you, Lindsey Graham, who somehow decided that Trump was the new John McCain, which is like deeming tripe the new tenderloin. I’m looking at most of the Republicans in the Senate. I’m not so much looking at Attorney General William Barr, odious as his behavior has been, because it’s clear in retrospect that he never made much of a pretense of rectitude, at least not in the context of Trump. He also wasn’t on record trashing Trump, not the way Pompeo and Graham and so many others who now dutifully echo him and gaze beatifically at him were. They must have broken necks from their moral whiplash. Barr’s neck supports that big head of his just fine.
Mike Pompeo, who first signed on as Trump’s C.I.A. director and then flattered his way to secretary of state, is a paragon of these lackeys-comelately, and he’s especially vivid proof of how easily and completely the lure of power can overwhelm any call to conscience.
He raised his hand for secretary of state after he’d seen his predecessor, Rex Tillerson, humiliated by Trump and fired by tweet. This was more than a year into Trump’s presidency, by which point the rationalizations of other supposedly serious conservatives who took top administration jobs no longer held water.
But Pompeo had a heady shot at a vaunted job that almost surely wasn’t going to come his way any other time. So he lunged for it, then demonstrated with his obsequiousness that doing good and doing right were never high on the agenda.
He wrote an op-ed article that essentially broke with his fellow Republicans to promote Trump’s view that Saudi Arabia’s butchery of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi shouldn’t give anyone pause. What are a few severed body parts among allies?
He recalled the ambassador to Ukraine just to please the president and his babbling Beelzebub, Rudy Giuliani. He listened mutely to that July 25 phone call between Trump and the Ukrainian president, decided to ignore what he heard and then claimed — until a few days ago — that he was utterly in the dark about any pressure on Ukraine to kneecap Joe Biden.
In Greece on Saturday, he proudly portrayed the Trump administration’s approach to Ukraine as a high-minded vigil against corruption and an attempt to ensure against interference in American elections.
The tale sounds familiar because it is. It’s the story of Faust, who sold his soul for renown, then endured the ugliness of that deal. It’s also the story of too many of Trump’s Republican enablers to count. Sure, they decided to prop and pretty him up, a man whose unfitness for the Oval Office was never really in doubt, out of tribal loyalty, a force far too potent in American politics today. But some rushed to him because that’s where the riches were, at least metaphorically. That’s where the fame was.
And they weren’t simply burying the hatchet with a politician who hadn’t been their preferred candidate or whose positions differed from theirs only slightly. They were dismantling the chain saw that they’d wielded in the face of a fraud whose conduct, along with some of his proposals, was antithetical to who they claimed to be.