There Are No Excuses for Moral People Supporting Trump/the Vichy GOP

Many Republican "friends" have argued that we should not allow our "political differences" to separate us despite their support for the foul individual in the White House and a Republican Party that continues to enable him and push an agenda that is harmful to the majority of Americans and downright dangerous for minorities, including members of the LGBT community.  The husband is more tolerant of them than I am and argues that dialogue must continue.  For me, however, things are no longer a matter of political differences.  It has come to a matter of morality versus immorality.  Perhaps it's a hold over from my Catholic upbringing where things were black and white, right and wrong.    There are clear moral choices on November 6, 2018: (i) a vote against hate, bigotry and immorality if one votes for Democrats or (ii) a vote to support hate, bigotry and immorality if one votes Republican.  One can be complicit in evil or oppose it.  Each of us has the choice and history will judge us just as 1930's Germans are rightly judged.  It is really that simple as a column in the Washington Post lays out.  Here are excerpts:

This time, our eyes are wide open.  Exactly two years ago, many Americans held their noses and voted for Donald Trump. Some were conservatives willing to tolerate his vulgar excesses in hopes of getting tax cuts, a repeal of Obamacare and a friendlier judiciary. Others had Clinton fatigue. Sure, they were concerned about Trump’s words about Mexican “rapists” and what he liked to do to women — but maybe those were just words. Maybe Trump could build a coalition across traditional party lines to get things done.

Now, all Americans have seen the results with their own eyes:

Trump defended neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville.

He oversaw a policy separating young children from their parents and warehoused the kids at the border, including some who have yet to be reunited.

He took Vladi­mir Putin’s word over that of the U.S. intelligence community, accepting Russia’s denial that it interfered in our election.

He had hired Paul Manafort and three other senior campaign advisers who eventually pleaded guilty or were convicted in a sprawling and ongoing criminal probe of Russia, Trump and the 2016 election.

He attacked the news media as the “enemy of the people.”

He befriended some of the world’s most loathed autocrats, including Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, whose extralegal death squads have killed thousands; and he refused to take serious action after the Saudi regime murdered and dismembered a Post contributing columnist in Turkey.

He opened personal rifts with the leaders of Britain, Germany, Canada and other countries that had been stalwart allies.

He has released an unending stream of invective on Twitter and in speeches, often in vulgar and misogynistic terms.

He insulted John McCain after the Arizona senator’s death, initially not ordering flags to be flown at half-staff.
He has established a whole new level of mendacity, averaging 30 false or misleading statements a day now, and totaling 6,420 such bogus claims during his presidency.

And he has exploited and worsened divisions among Americans, coarsened public discourse and used racial hatred, resentment of women’s gains and fear of immigrants and minorities as political weapons.

Now, we are seeing Trump close the midterm campaign with openly racist appeals.

He offered more conspiracy theories even after a crazed Trump supporter sent pipe bombs to CNN and a dozen of the president’s oft-cited enemies, and when a lunatic apparently motivated by the Trump-inspired paranoia about the caravan murdered 11 Jews worshiping at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.

And he closed the campaign with a vile ad showing a Mexican man who killed two police officers, accompanied by the message: “Democrats let him into our country. Democrats let him stay” — though the killer came to the United States during the presidency of George W. Bush.

On Tuesday, voters will make a decision in what is the purest midterm referendum on a sitting president in modern times:

Will we take a step, even a small one, back from the ugliness and the race-baiting that has engulfed our country?

Or will we affirm that we are really the intolerant and frightened people Donald Trump has made us out to be?

If we choose the latter, 2018 will in some ways be more difficult to take than 2016. This time, we don’t have the luxury of saying we didn’t really know what Trump would do.  Our eyes are wide open.