Gabriel Schoenfeld, the author of Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media, and the Rule of Law, was a senior adviser to the 2012 Romney for President campaign. He observes the damage that Trump has done to the GOP:
Figures like Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer, cogs in the White House machinery who today seamlessly defend Trump and his lies, did not come to Trump World from the fever swamps of Breitbart News. They are from the heart of the GOP apparatus, the Republican National Committee, where only yesterday — in the aftermath of Mitt Romney’s 2012 defeat — they were preaching moderation and inclusiveness.
Employing their skills to rationalize Trump’s fabrications, his misogyny, his debasement of discourse and language, and his strange admiration for and acquiescence to Vladimir Putin, these apparatchiks have compromised themselves even more than Trump’s band of true believers. There is no going back. The latter — figures like Jeffrey Lord, Kayleigh McEnany,and Katrina Pierson — have come to resemble a cult of unswerving loyalty to Trump and the Trump line….
As the Russian collusion story enters a new and perhaps decisive phase, it would not be surprising to see these intellectuals [Bennett, Gelernter, Kimball], along with the political operatives and politicians, stick with Trump to the bitter end. Having wandered into the muck, they are loath to admit how badly they’ve soiled themselves, let alone turn back. Their dilemma is quite similar to the one their hero now faces as the lies unravel and the truth comes to light. They have no good choices. The rest of us can take satisfaction that the ship of fools has run aground.
Via Don Jr. Russia emails trap Trump and his whole circus. They have no good choices.
There’s much yet to come, and those of us in opposition will see it through, confident from the beginning that we have been right in that opposition.
I’m a feeble old man, with a bad wrist and a worse attitude. I’ve lived thru Nixon working out a deal to get elected that got 22,000 additional servicemen killed in Vietnam. I’ve lived thru the R-Team graven-image, R. Reagan, selling missiles to Iran, only to have them shot back at us. I’ve lived thru the Clenis’s money-shot to the blue dress. I’ve lived thru Dubya making up an excuse to get us into a 16-year-long war that has cost us 4,424 deaths and 31,952 wounded (to date).
But..I’ve never lived thru anything quite like what we are dealing with today. I am, like most of us geezers, a bit faded in the senses, and distressingly jaded. My taste buds don’t work as well as they once did, but they are waking up like they just got a three-tablespoon mouthful of fresh-ground horseradish. What could be more bracing in the morning than to wake up to the over-lubed scion, and eponymous crotch-fruit, of the President of the US confessing to working with our bigliest enemy ever to throw the election?
Make no mistake about it: the Russians were not “working to influence” the election. They threw it to Trump. It is undeniable, at this point. Now we know how Diem felt after we engineered a coup against him. (Well…he didn’t actually feel much for very long, as he got snuffed in the process.) Trump is in office because the Russians installed him there. There is no way to fig-leaf it. We got done by the Russians with exquisite precision.
And they did it with the collusion of the flag-waving, god-fearing, patriots of the Republican Party. It is ironic, after being hippie-punched all of my adult life as a filthy commie, to discover that the punchers were not upstanding patriots at all. They were, instead, working for the enemy. The Republican party is still doing its level-best to enable and protect Trump. Ends, justify means, I guess. A few more measly dollars off their tax bills is all that matters, and how those dollars get into their pockets is of no importance. How has one political party devolved so far? When will the R-Team wake up and say “What the hell are we doing to the country?” My guess is never, as their main goal is to screw the poor and not contribute to the common weal, and Trump is their ticket to that nirvana.
I’ve almost run out of metaphors to describe the slipperiness of the slope Trump is on. He is dropping like an anvil in a vacuum. His terminal velocity is measured in Mach numbers. His shock-waves are breaking greenhouse windows in a wide area. It ain’t just greenhouse windows, either. He is rapidly defenestrating the Republican party. He will be gone soon, more likely by resignation than impeachment, as the party in power really, really, needs him to sign-off on the hallowed tax-breaks and poor-screwing. Maybe not, though, as Pence is a lot more likely to get the job done than Trump..
We shall see. It’s coming to a head, and soon. I wonder if Putin might be feeling a little buyer’s remorse? This isn’t working out all that well for him, either.
Thanks much for these comments. I’ll say that I’m not the oldest man in Whitewater, but I am well past being the youngest. For me, too, these are different times. The severity of Trump’s offenses is profound, but then even worse is the tolerance of millions for these offenses. Not even tolerance, but celebration: Trump’s core supporters revel in his authoritarianism, bigotry, mendacity, and mediocrity.
Even to believe that Putin (dictator, militarist, and murderer) might be an ally is to reject the American way of life for its exact opposite. A normal, properly-thinking person would not hold the thought. Even if a candidate had made a deal for election interference with a free foreign nation (France, let’s say), it would have been wrong. To solicit a deal with Putin is a far worse embrace of misery and murder.
America once had Copperheads, and she once had the Bund, and Trump’s core supporters are like this: opponents of their own society’s democratic tradition. We heard so much during the Cold War about fellow travelers and fifth-columnists; those who chose Stalin over Roosevelt were irredeemably wrong. (A generation later, The Beatles had it right: “But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/You ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow.”)
Yet here we are, facing fervent supporters of an autocratic, bigoted, lying tool of a foreign dictator.
They’ll not win this fight: they’ll meet a relentless opposition until they meet political ruin. Soon, one hopes, but whether soon or long, they will meet that same end.
But this didn’t happen by accident. Long after we’ve won, we’ll have to consider how this came to be, how so many, in so many places, betrayed reason and principle this way…