Too many Republicans are thinking like Judas

Paul Krugman

The denarius, ancient Rome’s silver coin, was supposedly the daily wage of a manual worker.

If so, the tax cuts that the richest 1 percent of Americans will receive if the Affordable Care Act is repealed would amount to the equivalent of around 500 pieces of silver each year.

What inspired this calculation? The spectacle of Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, and Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, defending Donald Trump’s firing of James Comey.

Everyone understands that Comey was fired not because of his misdeeds during the campaign but because his probe of Russian connections with the Trump campaign was accelerating and, presumably, getting too close to home. So this looks very much like the use of presidential power to cover up possible foreign subversion of the U.S. government.

And the two leading Republicans in Congress are apparently OK with that cover-up, because the Trump ascendancy is giving them the chance to do what they always wanted, namely, take health insur- ance away from millions of Americans while slashing taxes on the wealthy.

So you can see why I find myself thinking of Judas.

For generations, Republicans have impugned their opponents’ patriotism. During the Cold War, they claimed that Democrats were soft on communism; after 9/11, that they were soft on terrorism.

But now we have what may be the real thing: circumstantial evidence that a hostile foreign power may have colluded with a U.S. presidential campaign, and may retain undue influence at the highest levels of our government. And all those self-proclaimed patriots have gone silent, or worse.

Just to be clear, we don’t know for sure that top Trump officials, and maybe even Trump himself, are Russian puppets. But the evidence is enough to take seriously.

And we know how to resolve the remaining uncertainty: independent investigations conducted by officials with strong legal powers, insulated from partisan politics.

Almost an entire party appears to have decided that potential treason in the cause of tax cuts for the wealthy is no vice. That’s barely hyperbole.

How did a whole party become so, well, un-American? For this story now goes far beyond Trump.

In some ways conservatism is returning to its roots. Much has been made of Trump’s revival of the term “Amer- ica First,” the name of a movement opposed to U.S. intervention in World War II. What isn’t often mentioned is that many of the most prominent America-firsters weren’t just isolationists, they were actively sympathetic to foreign dictators; there’s a more or less straight line from Charles Lindbergh proudly wearing the medal he received from Hermann Goring to Trump’s cordial relations with Rodrigo Duterte, the literally murderous president of the Philippines.

But the more proximate issue is the transformation of the Republican Party, which bears little if any resemblance to the institution it used to be, say during the Watergate hearings of the 1970s. Back then, Republican members of Congress were citizens first, partisans second.

Most people now realize that Donald Trump holds basic American political values in contempt. What we need to realize is that much of his party shares that contempt.