If Trump is a man without grace, his daily outrages would not be possible were he not surrounded by men and women without honor. And indeed, the diminution of the Republican Party is perhaps the saddest part of this sorry spectacle. Republicans like Paul Ryan and Mike Pence used to oppose a Muslim ban as unconstitutional and repugnant. Now they smile and nod and consent as a ban on visitors from majority Muslim countries is implemented – one that will ultimately impact people of all faiths from those countries, and which somehow skips countries where previous attackers have actually come from, but where Trump and his family happens to have business interests.
Republican lawmakers fret behind closed doors about the devastating impact of ripping away tens of millions of Americans’ healthcare, yet in public they grin along and say nothing; or duck their constituents and head for cover out the back door.
American civil servants and scientists are being gagged, long-serving diplomats dismissed from their posts, and the institutional memory of our federal government shoved out in an ideological putsch by the new administration, while GOP Senators refuse to lift a finger in protest. Instead, they approve each of Trump’s billionaire cabinet nominees, after pretending to dress them down for the C-SPAN cameras.
They sit around the table at a White House luncheon, grimacing in stale silence while Trump fantasizes about millions of phantom “illegal voters” who kept him from winning the popular vote; as if Republicans haven’t spent decades spinning the same fables about “voter fraud” to justify enacting draconian voter ID and other restrictive laws that keep people of color from the franchise.
Far from acting as a check or balance on the White House, the Party Men and Women of the Grimacing Old Party are content to fiddle while the amateur administration descends into chaos. Men like Speaker Ryan are too married to their ideological determination to dismantle the social safety net to let a little thing like an unraveling president, who’s tossing away allies while racing to get on the phone with Vladimir Putin, trouble their spotless minds.
Republicans have abandoned any pretense of being Americans.