Republicans' Self-Prostitution to and Enabling of Trump Comes Home to Roost

In Donald Trump's mind loyalty is a one way street: he wants blind loyalty but gives nothing back in return and will stab a heretofore loyal supporter in the back the moment he or she fails to live up to Trump's always shifting loyalty test. With his insane hour long call on Saturday to Georgia's Secretary of State has shown that he expects election results to be overturned and votes discarded if he doesn't like the results.  The only election fraud in view is what Trump and those in the GOP who continue to prostitute themselves to Trump and his base of deplorables are demanding be done in violation of both state and federal election laws.  Meanwhile, big business has had enough of Trump and nearly 200 business leaders - typically allies of Republicans - have called on Congress to certify Joe Biden's victory and Trump's toadies in Congress are being accused of behavior worse than treason.  One can only hope the GOP implodes tomorrow in Georgia and the ruin for Republicans will be immense.  As noted in a piece here, when Senate Republicans wrongly acquitted Trump from impeachment, knowingly or not, they sent Trump a message that he could do whatever he wanted, the law, decency and morality be damned. Trump has rum with that message and it has come home to roost for Republicans.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the calls of the business community to end Trump's lies and attempted election fraud.  Here are excerpts:

Almost 200 of the country’s top business leaders urged Congress to certify the electoral results for President-elect Joe Biden in a letter Monday, arguing that “attempts to thwart or delay this process run counter to the essential tenets of our democracy.”

The letter marked the business community’s most significant push yet to ensure President Trump’s efforts to overturn the November election are unsuccessful. Signers included a wide array of executives of Fortune 500 companies, from the leaders of banks, airlines, investment firms, pharmaceutical companies, professional sports leagues, real estate conglomerates, top law firms and media companies.

Many of the leaders have previously been wary of getting publicly involved in politics, and some have been supportive of [Trump] the president. . . . Among the signers included leaders of Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, Pfizer, the National Basketball Association, Mastercard, Blackstone Group, BlackRock, Lyft, Deloitte, Warby Parker, Moody’s, WeWork, Ernst & Young, JetBlue, MetLife, Condé Nast, the Carlyle Group, Hearst, American Express, Saks Fifth Avenue, Price Waterhouse Cooper and Deutsche Bank, along with 150 more.

In addition to alienating would be donors Republicans - at least those still beholden to Trump and his deplorables are being accused of treason like behavior as noted in a scathing but highly accurate piece in The Atlantic:

“We are what we pretend to be,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote in the opening of his 1962 novel, Mother Night, “and so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” Republicans in Congress are pretending to be seditionists—and so they have become, in fact, seditionists.

Forget all the whispered denials and the off-the-record expressions of concern in private; ignore the knowing smirks on camera from GOP officials who are desperately trying to indicate that they’re in on the joke.

This is sedition, plain and simple. No amount of playacting and rationalizing can change the fact that the majority of the Republican Party and its apologists are advocating for the overthrow of an American election and the continued rule of a sociopathic autocrat.

This is not some handful of firebrands making a stand for the television cameras. . . . Today, the “sedition caucus” includes at least 140 members of the House—that is, some two-thirds of the House GOP membership—and at least 10 members of the Senate. Their challenge comes after weeks of insistence that the 2020 election was rigged, plagued by fraud, and even subverted by foreign powers. The president and his minions have filed, and lost, scores of lawsuits that ranged from minor disputes over process to childlike, error-filled briefs full of bizarre assertions.

Instead of threatening to gavel these objections into irrelevance, as Biden did four years ago, Vice President Mike Pence “welcomes” these challenges. Pence’s career is finished, but he could have stood for the Constitution he claims to love and which he swore to defend. However, cowardice is contagious, and no mask was thick enough to protect Pence from the pathogen of fear.

Perhaps the sedition caucus didn’t mean to go this far. . . . But for Trump, there is no such thing as too much humiliation. . . . And just as they have done for the past four years, elected Republicans tried to convince themselves that if they supported this outrage, it would be the last time they would be required to surrender their dignity; that this betrayal of the Constitution would be the last treachery demanded of them. That if they complied one more time, they would be allowed to go back to their privileged lives far from the districts they claim to represent—places few of them really want to live after tasting life in the Emerald City.

Engaging in sedition for insincere reasons does not make it less hideous. Arguing that you betrayed the Constitution only as theater is no defense.

Indeed, shredding the Constitution purely for personal gain is perhaps the worst of the sins of the sedition caucus. . . . But we are, in the main, dealing with people who are far worse than true believers. The Republican Party is infested with craven opportunists, the kind of people who will try to tell us later that they were “just asking questions,” that they were “defending the process,” and of course, that they were merely representing “the will of the people.” Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz are not idiots. These are men who understand perfectly well what they are doing.

The members of the public and the institutions of American life should shroud these seditionists in silence and opprobrium in perpetuity: no television interviews, no sinecures at universities or think tanks, no rehabilitating book tours, no jokey late-night appearances, no self-serving op-eds.

The sedition caucus is worse than a treasonous conspiracy. At least real traitors believe in something. These people instead believe only in their own fortunes and thus will change flags and loyalties as circumstances require. They will always become what they pretend to be, and so they cannot—and must not—be trusted ever again with political power.