Hypocrisy, Spinelessness, and the GOP's Surrender to Trump

One of the most disturbing yet remarkable in a very negative way is the manner in which the majority of Republicans have willingly prostituted themselves to Donald Trump.   In the process, they have abandoned everything that the Republican Party claimed to stand for in the past. Fiscal responsibility has been thrown out the window as the massive Trump tax cuts for the wealthy exploded the deficit and the GOP in some ways has become the party of Vladimir Putin.  Meanwhile, any claims to stand for morality and decency have likewise been discarded as the party kisses the ring of perhaps the most morally bankrupt political figure in American history.  Hate, grievance, bigotry racism, homophobia and misogyny have been both embraced and normalized within the MAGA base and the ranks  of Republican elected officials, particularly in Congress.   What is most disheartening as a former Republican is that the Congressional Republicans busy genuflecting to Trump is that - with exception such as Margorie Taylor Greene and those of her ilk - is that they know better.  They simply do not care so long as they think their conduct spares them from primary challenges and helps their reelection prospects.  It is a study in hypocrisy, spinelessness and moral bankruptcy.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the GOP's surrender to Trump and immorality:

In the summer of 2015, back when he was still talking to traitorous reporters like me, I spent extended stretches with Donald Trump. He was in the early phase of his first campaign for president, though he had quickly made himself the inescapable figure of that race—as he would in pretty much every Republican contest since. We would hop around his various clubs, buildings, holding rooms, limos, planes, golf carts, and mob scenes, Trump disgorging his usual bluster, slander, flattery, and obvious lies. The diatribes were exhausting and disjointed.

But I was struck by one theme that Trump kept pounding on over and over: that he was used to dealing with “brutal, vicious killers”—by which he meant his fellow ruthless operators in showbiz, real estate, casinos, and other big-boy industries. In contrast, he told me, politicians are saps and weaklings.

“I will roll over them,” he boasted, referring to the flaccid field of Republican challengers he was about to debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library that September. They were “puppets,” “not strong people.” He welcomed their contempt, he told me, because that would make his turning them into supplicants all the more humiliating.

“They might speak badly about me now, but they won’t later,” Trump said. They like to say they are “public servants,” he added, his voice dripping with derision at the word servant. But they would eventually submit to him and fear him. . . . . Like most people who’d been around politics for a while, I was dubious. And wrong.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Trump told me the following spring, as he was completing his romp to the 2016 nomination. We were talking on the phone, and Trump had just wrapped up a rally in Anaheim, California. . . . . “It’s happening with all of them,” Trump said. “Lindsey Graham just called and was very nice … even though he used to say the worst things.” (Graham had called Trump, among other not-nice things, “a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot” and “a kook.”) Soon enough, the last holdouts would come around too. “It’s just so easy, how they do that,” Trump said.

As went individual Republican politicians, so went the party. . . . After Trump won the nomination in 2016, “The party defines the party” became a familiar feckless refrain among the GOP’s putative leaders.

By the second night of the 2024 Republican National Convention at Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum in July, some attendees had started showing up with a gauze pad slapped over their right ears, a tribute to the boxy white dressing Trump wore to cover the injury he’d suffered in an attempt on his life in Pennsylvania just days earlier. . . . the ear accessories quickly spread through the crowd and became ubiquitous. In a sense, the entire Republican Party has become an accessory. To no one’s surprise, everything in Milwaukee revolved around its unavoidable protagonist, “our 45th and soon-to-be 47th president, Donald J. Trump.”

I’d been watching Trump’s adulators work the arena all week, trying to outdo one another. “My fellow Americans,” Senator Marco Rubio said from the podium while Trump—his Audience of One—squinted up at him like a building inspector. As with many other brand-name Republicans in the arena, Rubio had once despised Trump. . . . Trump derided Rubio as “Liddle Marco” and called him “weak like a baby.” That last assessment held up well.

I talked a lot with Rubio in the last days of the 2016 primary, back when he was happy to speak candidly about Trump, and about how he knew better than to entrust the leadership of the United States to a “fraud,” “lunatic,” and “con artist” with autocratic instincts. And they all knew better—the Rubios, the Ted Cruzes, the J. D. Vances, the Doug Burgums, the Nikki Haleys, the Mitch McConnells, the Vivek Ramaswamys, all of them. They probably still know better. But they are all expedient, to their political core. “If you don’t want to get reelected,” Graham once told me, “you’re in the wrong business.”

For years, many had predicted a reckoning, a shared realization that the noisy, grievance-packed redoubt that the GOP had become—marked by servile devotion to one man—was perhaps not aligned with the party’s best traditions . . . I’d thought that maybe 2024 would be the year the GOP finally began some semblance of a post-Trump future. At the very least, new voices of resistance had to finally assert themselves.

“I feel no need to kiss the ring,” Nikki Haley, Trump’s most competitive primary challenger in 2024, had vowed in February. . . . . But the ring, it would be kissed. “Donald Trump has my strong endorsement, period,” Haley said.

I ran into former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson on the arena concourse. He was one of the only Republican-primary challengers who dared question Trump’s worldview. His campaign had gone nowhere, but Hutchinson held relatively firm. “I’m troubled,” Hutchinson told me. “I don’t want our party to be defined by attacks on our judiciary system. I don’t want it to be defined by anger.”

The speed with which Trump has settled back into easy dominance of his party has been both remarkable and entirely foreseeable—foreseen, in fact, by Trump himself. Because if there’s been one recurring lesson of the Trump-era GOP, it’s this: Never underestimate the durability of a demagogue with a captive base, a desperate will to keep going, and—perhaps most of all—a feeble and terrified opposition of spineless ciphers (“weak like a baby”).

Trump’s last remaining primary challenger, Haley, quit the race on March 6. That same day, Mitch McConnell—who had criticized the then-president for his “disgraceful” conduct on January 6, 2021—endorsed Trump.

The message was clear: “That Republican Party, frankly, no longer exists,” Donald Trump Jr. gloated on Newsmax the day of the RNC staff purges. “The moves that happened today—that’s the final blow. People have to understand that … the MAGA movement is the new Republican Party.”

Yet beneath the Republicans’ triumphalist excitement in Milwaukee, I sensed an undercurrent of disbelief. They were projecting confidence, yes, but there was a tight, gritted-teeth quality to this, of a once-serious party that had now been subdued, disoriented, and denuded of whatever their convictions once were. . . . Republicans had expressed these doubts before, and not so long ago, before they all capitulated.

The nagging dissonance of this spectacle: the gap between what the GOP traditionally believed and what it now allows itself to abide. The party that allegedly reveres the Constitution is going all in on someone who has called for its termination. A party that cherishes freedom is willing to cede authority to a candidate who says he would be a dictator on his first day in office. A party that supposedly venerates law and order is re-upping with an actual felon. A party whose rank and file overwhelmingly wants Russia to defeat Ukraine believes that Biden stole the 2020 election, and that Trump’s legal shambles are entirely a Democratic plot. This is now a party whose standard-bearer has not been endorsed by any former Republican president or nominee, or even his own vice president, who barely escaped death by hanging the last time. And to what end, any of it?

If nothing else, Trump has a keen eye for finding soft targets: pushovers he can bully, rules he can flout, entire political parties he can raze and remake in his image. He would roll over them.