How Much Longer Will Congressional Republicans Betray America?

The national nightmare that is the Trump presidency could be over in short order if congressional Republicans would cease putting their party and their steal from the poor to give to the rich agenda.  Unfortunately, even as more and more Americans come to the realization that the Trump White House represents a real life version of the tale of the "Emperor  has No Clothes," all signs are that members of the GOP continue to put their party and toxic agenda ahead of the interests of the nation.  Indeed, some appear to be engaging in their own efforts to obstruct justice and undermine the rule of law.  A prime example is Senator Lindsey Graham against whom we can only assume that either Trump or the Russians have compromising information that is being used to turn him into a Trump sycophant.  The task for Democrats is to make sure between now and election day in November, 2018, that as many voters as possible are educated about the GOP's betrayal of both average Americans and constitutional government.  A column in the Washington Post looks at how Republicans are throwing the country and voters under the bus.  Here are excerpts:

The most astonishing aspect of the response to Michael Wolff’s book is that anyone is surprised. President Trump’s unfitness for office was obvious long before he was elected. Once he moved into the White House, the destructive chaos of his administration was there for all to see. Future historians will scratch their heads to figure out why it took this particular book to break the dam of denial.

None of this takes anything away from Wolff’s achievement in “Fire and Fury.” On the contrary, he deserves our thanks for creating Trump’s “emperor has no clothes” moment, even if this point should have been reached before, say, Nov. 8, 2016. Trump’s tweets on Saturday pronouncing himself “a very stable genius” only underscored the damage Wolff has done and Trump’s dumbfounding insecurity.

But Wolff alone cannot bring this presidency crashing down, given how many Republicans still seem determined to protect Trump. Even as the news was dominated by Wolff’s revelations, Republican Sens. Charles E. Grassley and Lindsey O. Graham made a criminal referral to the Justice Department on Friday — and not against anyone who might have colluded with Russia.

[T]he episode was one of many signs that Republican leaders in Congress are sticking with Trump in the face of the damage the president’s increasingly obvious and glaring shortcomings are doing to our country. Over the weekend, Republican leaders trooped up to Camp David to meet with Trump and pledge their allegiance to a common agenda.

Trump will continue to try to rally what base he has left with tweets about kneeling NFL players, immigrants, law and order and “political correctness.” He will keep attacking Hillary Clinton, the surest sign of his weakness, since his own record has done little to draw Americans his way. He needs targets to make his enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend approach work.  But it’s not working as well as it used to. 

Trump’s [and the GOP's] policies have shown that his true commitments are to himself and to other very wealthy people and corporate interests. . . . . His other policies, reflected in his slew of executive actions, have weakened federal protections for the environment, for workplace safety and worker pay, for civil rights and for small investors.

In response to what is little more than a traditional right-wing agenda, there has been a marked erosion of loyalty to Trump among voters who thought they were casting ballots for a populist and are getting ideological and plutocratic policies instead. A Pew Research Center survey last month found Trump losing ground particularly among whites without college degrees and white evangelical Christians, groups whose devotion Trump counts on.

What might be called the Wolff Effect will thus be paradoxical. It could strengthen the bonds between Republican politicians and Trump at the very moment when everyone else is coming to terms with how dangerous it is to have a president who is so uninformed and unstable. In the meantime, more traditional journalists will carry on their painstaking work, piling up evidence that Trump did all he could to block a legal accounting for the methods that helped get him to the White House in the first place.  We should have gotten here sooner. But far better late than never.