The Bill is Coming Due for Those Who Sold Their Souls to Trump

 Perhaps it's a result of my Catholic upbringing even though I left the Church years ago in disgust over both the Church's anti-gay virulence and the horrific sex abuse scandal that traced all the way to the Vatican.  The nuns drilled into us the concept that there was good and there was evil and that one did not embrace evil in order to pursue personal power and influence or under some strained concept that the ends justified the means.  This lesson was seemingly lost on countless white evangelicals and the vast majority of Republicans who sold their souls to Trump for varying reasons - most involving person advancement or harming those they deemed "other" and viewed as less than fully human. Sadly, Trump's supporters and his enablers and sycophants have demonstrated that the moral failings and absence for any concern for others that allowed monsters like Hitler to rise to power are alive and well in a significant portion of the American populace (many of whom hypocritically claim to be "Christian") and almost all elected Republicans.  As a column in the Washington Post by a former Republican, hopefully the bill for their moral bankruptcy is fast approaching.  Here are column excerpts:

Between President Trump’s Rose Garden rant on Tuesday (which Mary L. Trump should definitely include in the paperback version of her book delving into her uncle’s erratic behavior) and the White House’s excuse that it never authorized trade representative Peter Navarro to write a screed attacking the world’s leading infectious-disease expert, it has become a wee bit difficult for in-house lackeys, elected Republicans and card-carrying members of the right-wing media to keep up the pretense that Trump and his administration are functioning normally — or even functioning at all.

Increasingly, the White House operates not so much as the head of the executive branch but as a site for Trump’s personal and political breakdowns. It is hard to see that any official business is performed in an administration obsessed with covering Trump’s lies, catering to his ego, attacking his opponents and providing emotional refuge for those whose identity depends on venerating the Confederate flag and excusing systemic racism. There is almost no actual policy happening and no rationale for the administration’s continued existence.

Let’s turn, then, to the Senate Republicans who voted to acquit him (that would be everyone except Utah Sen. Mitt Romney), the House Republicans who mouthed Russian propaganda in his defense and the horde of right-wing pundits and media figures who both financially sustain and humiliate themselves with never-ending rationalizations for a president who struggles to complete a sentence, let alone think through complex policy matters.

The elected Republicans should be confronted at every turn by mainstream media and voters:

• Do you think President Trump is fit even to complete his term?

• Do you regret supporting his exoneration in the Ukraine scandal?

• How can you support a president who clings to the Confederate flag and defends the killing of African Americans by police by saying more white people are killed?

• How can the administration address the pandemic when members of the administration heap scorn on Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases?

• Why are you supporting a president who refused to respond to Russian bounties placed on U.S. servicemen and women?

• Does the self-enrichment and corruption bother you, even a little?

• Is there anything he could do or say that would cause you to renounce him?

The right-wing media cohort — including both those helplessly corrupted by the money and fame that goes with feeding Trump’s frenzied base and those with pretensions of respectability (the “but Gorsuch” crowd, before Gorsuch disappointed them) — have other concerns. . . . . they will likely become the conspiratorialists and rancid critics of the new administration. No accusation will be too far-fetched, no source of gossip turned away.

The spineless sycophants — who attacked Never Trumpers for their show of integrity, who fashioned disingenuous excuses for Trump and who concoct elaborate rationalizations to oppose voting for former vice president Joe Biden (Socialist!) — will swear up and down that Hillary Clinton would have been worse. (Really — denying a pandemic? Inducing supporters not to wear lifesaving masks? Embracing white nationalists? Staffing the White House with a cohort of incompetents? Giving Vladimir Putin a free pass on targeting U.S. troops?)

What “polite society” (if there is such a thing) must not do is forget their role in sustaining an un-American president whose incompetency has resulted in more than 100,000 unnecessary deaths.

The bill is coming due for those who sold their souls to Trump. The voters may boot out a good number of incumbents. The rest of us, however, will have learned how through silence and collaboration a cadre of well-educated comfortable men and women can rationalize and excuse anything. It has been a frightening lesson in human weakness and propensity to accommodate themselves to evil, which should remind us the only thing that really matters in public life is character.

Trump supporters and Hitler's supporters share a common theme: hatred of others and placing short term self-interest above honesty, decency, and basic morality.  Those who continue to stand by Trump truly need to become unwelcome in polite society.