Michael Tomasky: Hail to the Chief: "It’s worth stepping back here to review quickly the steps by which the Republican Party became this stewpot of sycophants, courtesans, and obscurantists...
...I used to argue, in these pages and elsewhere, that the Republicans could have stopped Trump, and I still believe it.... But... no one stood up to Trump. His only forceful critic was Mitt Romney, who called him “a phony, a fraud” in a scathing speech; but he delivered that speech in March 2016, two days after Trump had swept the Super Tuesday voting, i.e., after he was already well on his way to the nomination.... Today, Romney, running for the Senate in Utah, cheerily predicts that Trump will “be reelected solidly.” This is at least the fourth political incarnation of Romney, from the moderate who gave Massachusetts a health care plan in the early 2000s to the “severe” conservative who ran for president in 2012 to the anti-Trump spokesman of two years ago to the capitulator of today.
This is the remarkable thing we have witnessed: the Republican Party has essentially ceased to be a political party in our normal understanding of the term and has instead become an instrument of one man’s will.... We have learned something very interesting, and alarming, about these “conservatives,” both the rank and file and holders of high office: their overwhelming commitment is not to democratic allocation of power, but to their ideological goals—the annihilation of liberalism, the restoration of a white ethno-nationalist hegemony. They know better than to speak of such things openly, but every once in a while they have allowed a piece of the cat’s anatomy to slip out of the bag, a tail here, a hind leg there. In June 2016, for example, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said:
For all of his obvious shortcomings, Donald Trump is certainly a different direction, and I think if he is in the White House he’ll have to respond to the right-of-center world which elected him, and the things that we believe in. So I’m comfortable supporting him....
In other words, to McConnell, that “right-of-center world” predated Trump, and on most important questions—taxes, deregulation, cultural issues, and the judges who have the power to nullify so many liberal achievements—Trump would do just what McConnell wanted a Republican president to do. It has often been written, and I’ve written it myself, that the Republicans have been weak in the face of Trumpism. But I’ve come to think that’s wrong. They’re not weak at all. Most of them are perfectly happy to have become Trump’s vassals. They were waiting for just such a man....
It is possible that Mueller will issue a report so damning and so ironclad that Republicans will have no realistic choice but to abandon Trump. But that seems very unlikely. The party as a whole—and let us not fail to mention Ronna Romney McDaniel, current chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, niece of Mitt, and as slavish a Trumper as exists—has spent a year and a half rehearsing for the big moment. Past practice suggests all too clearly what will happen. Some of the more senior and respected Republicans, the Lindsey Grahams and Orrin Hatches, will hop onto the Sunday shows to express their “grave concern” or some such as they did after the Helsinki conference. A few will be one or two careful ticks more forceful—young Nebraska senator Ben Sasse, say, who has a history of writing tweets and Facebook posts that denounce Trump (and then doing nothing else). These reproaches will generate a round of respectful headlines in places like Politico, enough to convince a few of the first-tier talking heads that these men (and possibly some women; Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski springs to mind) are serious, that this will finally be the moment they will do the honorable thing. And then they’ll return to their pro-Trump states and districts, lie low for a few days, and come back to Washington hoping they can quietly let the whole thing drop. Other Republicans, of course, will serve as Fox News’s legislative flacks and unload on Mueller....
The bulk of the rest of them will swim with the tide.... They have no wish to denounce Trump. He does things they disagree with sometimes. There’s the family separation policy, which one suspects they’d have been fine with if the polls weren’t so overwhelmingly bad. And there’s the matter of tariffs, on which most Republicans do genuinely disagree, and which could produce real tension later on. But in the meantime, all evidence tells us that the Republican Party is delighted with Trump, as we will see in the upcoming hearings for Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.... The conservative movement is a few Supreme Court decisions away from having unlimited power, and one sees no Cincinnatus among them.
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