This is a short one. Basically, I just want to share, here on the blog, the same thought I Tweeted last night:
Top criterion for viable future GOP candidates for POTUS: How soon did you act to save the country from Donald J. Trump?
— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) May 16, 2017
We’ve seen some Republicans backing away from the guy in recent days with the Comey firing and giving away secrets to the Russians, but I suspect that the time will come in which most of them — if they choose to remain in politics, or if they even want to face their grandchildren with a clear conscience — are going to wish they had stood up, and acted, a great deal sooner…
Seriously, how long do you stick with a guy?
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Right now, who’s “out” covers almost every GOP politician we’re got.
Yep. Just about.
This could put these folks in a bind similar to the Democrats’.
I saw where the Dems were having some sort of confab to plot future strategy, and Hillary, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders weren’t involved because the organizers wanted to emphasize the future. But who on Earth would those future leaders be?
Well, unless the GOP gets busy fixing this mess, who will they still have that’s viable going forward? Ben Sasse maybe…
Of course, the premise of this post reckons without an inconvenient fact: Republicans don’t care what the public at large thinks of them; they’ve been so conditioned to listen only to the fringe that can dominate their primaries. And they’ve been able to parlay support from that fringe into victories. (How? By the fact that the fringe gives them the nomination, and anyone with a major-party nomination has a shot at the general. As I kept warning Democrats who thought it would be neat to see Trump get the GOP nomination last year.)
Still, I think there’s some validity to what I’m saying, because SURELY we’ll get to the point where the non-fringe voters who went with Trump just because he wasn’t Hillary are sufficiently embarrassed that they want nothing to do with him or with other pols who cravenly let him have his way.
Right? I said, RIGHT?…
Trump is a sort of perverted Chauncey Gardner (as re-imagined by Philip K. Dick or Stephen King).
So far he’s shown the authoritarian tendencies we feared – though he apparently lacks the discipline and smarts to actually pull them off. Which is cold comfort in light of the national tragedy/travesty he’s foisting on us all.