The GOP’s Ongoing Moral Surrender to Trump

The Republican Party and countless cowardly Republican officeholders continue to falsely claim they support "family values" and "Christian values" and in many cases support book bans erasing the existence of LGBT people in schools saying that gays are "immoral," yet daily they support a man who embodies immorality writ large, namely Donald Trump, and who is a stunning example of what a truly moral person would never want the children or grandchildren to be. The goal of such self-prostitution and jettisoning of any shred of moral principles is all too evident: remaining in office, avoiding a primary challenge by MAGA lunatics, and avoiding Trump's wrath and the wrath of his cultist followers. But GOP elected officials are not the only ones underscoring the party's utter moral bankruptcy.   There are millions of Americans who continue to support, some quietly others openly, driven by their racism, homophobia and/or religious extremism.  Moral values and decency are nowhere in the picture even as many of those complicit in supporting Trump's immorality put on shows of false piety, pack church pews where they utterly ignore Christ's true gospel message and denigrate blacks, gays, non-whites in general, and non-Christians.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the GOP's surrender to immorality.  Here are highlights: 

The elected officials who quietly defend Donald Trump’s immorality even though they know better are just as bad as the comically devoted Trump courtiers.

“I didn’t come here,” Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina complained last week, “to have the president as a boss or a candidate as a boss. I came here to pass good, solid policy.” Tillis was referring to Republicans who were abandoning a deal on border security because they thought reaching a solution with President Joe Biden would hurt Trump’s electoral chances in the fall. It is immoral, Tillis added, to look “the other way because you think this is the linchpin for President Trump to win.”

As Bruce Willis’s fictional cop John McClane would say: Welcome to the party, pal. In theory, Republicans care deeply about the situation on the southern United States border. In reality, most of them seem to care only about whatever Trump wants at any given moment, and what Trump wants is to take refuge in the Oval Office from his multiple legal problems. Tillis’s outburst, although welcome, was a rare moment of candor from a senior Republican senator about the degree to which the party’s once and future nominee has gutted the GOP of any remaining principles.

For years, Trump has attacked and obliterated anything like virtue in the Republican Party, a process that regularly features Republicans pulling their political souls from their bodies and handing them to Trump in jars for display on his mantle at Mar-a-Lago.

But some of the less noticed enablers in the GOP are those who remain quiet in the face of Trump’s ghoulish attacks on others rather than risk Trump turning his ire—and his MAGA mob—on them. When challenged, they speak up only long enough to make excuses for Trump and engage in moral obfuscation over issues that they must certainly know are not remotely complicated . . . .

Senators Tim Scott and James Lankford, for example, were both asked over the weekend about the $83.3 million defamation jury verdict against Trump. Scott’s Trump sycophancy has now filled the core of his political existence, so there’s no point in discussing his excuse-making and what-abouting. But Lankford was hardly better. . . . . Despite Lankford’s senatorial circumspection here, these “legal cases” have already been decided, and Trump can only challenge the awards, not the verdicts that he’s liable for sexual abuse and multiple instances of defaming the victim.

Lankford resorted to mumbling about the cases against Trump that “failed,” implicitly supporting the idea that Trump’s legal troubles stem from partisan prosecutions and not because the former president was found liable for sexual abuse, defamed his victim, and may have engaged in several felonies.

Republicans such as Lankford are, in their mushy equivocations, possibly more destructive than people such as Cruz and Scott, or even Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, all of whom have chosen to become comically obsequious Trump courtiers. . . . . . the vapor of her [Stefanik’s] 180-proof ambition is so enveloping, its fumes so eye-watering, that few but the MAGA faithful can take her seriously.

When Lankford quietly throws shade at the entire judicial system, however, he is offering an escape hatch not for Trump but for ordinary Americans who otherwise would be appalled at what Trump has done. Such statements are part of a years-long Republican effort to create a permission structure for Trump supporters, to model how a reasonable person can dismiss Trump’s astounding disregard for the law and even for basic decency and yet still vote for him and other GOP candidates in the name of some greater good.

The greater good, of course, is to ensure that Republicans can keep living in Washington, D.C., and exercising power on behalf of a shrinking political minority.

A tiny handful of elected Republicans have said that they will not vote for Trump. (They won’t vote for Biden either, of course, and if Trump wins—well, such is the price of saving the republic while keeping one’s hands clean.)

Lankford is not up for reelection until 2028. When GOP leaders cannot express even a hint of principle on fundamental moral issues for fear of angering one of the most immoral presidents in modern history, then it remains a mystery what, exactly, conservative Republican leaders are hoping to conserve—beyond their own power and a home inside the Beltway.