Sure, your 401k is in the crapper, the government is shut
down, and Facebook has been sharing your intimate private chats with the
Fortune 500, but things could be worse.
On top of all that, you could be a Republican. The truth is that they are
the people who are really getting
screwed.
As we turn toward 2019, the grand deal that Republicans
made with the devil is beginning to smell like the fish you left in the trash
that time that the garbage collector missed your pick-up.
It was all so much fun for the right wingers when the only
consequence of Donald Trump’s lies was the sight of the liberal media going
into pulmonary shock on a daily basis, agog with outrage at Trump’s projectile bullshitting.
Slowly, however – but surely -- things are changing. It is
now becoming more apparent that Trump’s deceits have all been improvised explosive devices set on
timers designed to detonate in the hands of Republicans. It is the Trump worshipers, lackeys, apologizers, enablers, and suck-ups -- from Ann Coulter to Rush Limbaugh to Mitch McConnell -- who are getting toasted by
the time-bombs they were eagerly carrying for the President.
The fiscal Republicans who wanted Trump in order to get a sweetheart tax overhaul, tough renegotiation of “stupid” trade deals, and broad rollback of
governmental regulations are now finding that the financial markets are cratering in the wake
of the trade wars, burgeoning deficits, and the economic policy chaos that reigns in
the Trump administration. Wall Street does not speak in sound bytes, it communicates at the end of each trading day with triple-digit numbers in burning red.
The Republicans who wanted Trump because of a perception
that Obama was weak on the world stage have found a President who splays
himself before global thugs, negotiates by preemptively giving away the store,
and ignores evidence of political murder, cyber-warfare, and manipulation of our
elections.
The Republicans who expected that by now there would be a
fifty foot tall border wall that was paid for by Mexico are finding out that no such
wall exists, has even started to exist, should exist, or ever will exist. There
is no longer even a pretense that Mexico is going to pay for it. They are also
learning that the price of Trump’s radical anti-immigration tough border policy
is a shameful practice of separating parents from children, and that two
children below the age of eight have died in the custody of United States
border security officials.
The Republicans who love Trump’s BSD posturing about a
strong military were startled to see General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, H.R.
McMaster, and General John Kelly all leave the administration, diminished and
in disgust. The Commander-in-Chief, meanwhile, orders troop movements based on
his political needs, sending troops to protect our southern border against an
illusory invasion from poor immigrants, and away from a strategic role in
Syria.
The Republicans who loved Trump’s convention speech about
being the “law and order president” are witnessing a White
House in open warfare with U.S. intelligence agencies and the FBI, and a President who actively seeks to discredit these vital government organizations.
The Republicans who wanted a CEO from the private sector to
come in and bring world class business leaders to the task of governance are
now seeing gaping vacancies in the Federal government leadership, and
beleaguered Trump officials tagged with “acting” titles because no first class
people want the stain and legal liability of working in this White House. The
White House is filled with toadies, suck-ups, and sycophants, and Trump is
actively recruiting more.
The Republicans who supported Trump because he promised to
repeal ObamaCare on day one and replace it with medical care that was "superior"
and "far less expensive" have discovered that when Trump made his vow, he did not even
begin to understand the complex world of medical insurance. They have
learned that the primary Republican solution for lowering the cost of
healthcare is to go back to a world where millions of Americans are uninsured,
where preexisting conditions are not covered, and where taxpayers shoulder the
burden of millions of emergency room visits that must be treated but cannot be
paid for.
The Republicans who loved the idea that Donald Trump would
“drain the swamp” have witnessed more guilty pleas, indictments, and corruption
than any Presidency in memory, as cabinet officers resign in disgrace and the
President himself openly violates the emoluments clause in the Constitution.
The Republican elected officials who hitched a ride with
Trump in order to get a sweet tax deal and a few Supreme Court Justices are now
finding Trump a bit too hot to handle. Mitch McConnell was publicly dissed when
Trump welched on signing a stop-gap spending bill. One time Presidential
aspirant Paul Ryan’s career is finished. Trump's concern that his supporters would become
“tired of winning” must seem bitterly ironic to the the net 40 Republican Congressional
Representatives who were sent packing in a mid-term blue wave.
Sooner or later, Republicans have to notice that the only
people who actually believed the bullshit in the first place were, uh, Republicans. Democrats may be angry, but
they do not feel victimized by
Trump’s deceit, because they were not naive, ignorant,
cavalier, or willfully gullible enough to buy into any of it in the first
place.
But the people who believed it? They are starting to get pissed. They
are beginning to feel victimized, let down, and manipulated. They are starting to voice their anger, disappointment, and sense of betrayal. Call it the turning
of the screwed.
Republicans are screwed because they believed Trump in the
first place, and are now seeing that each of his brazen assertions and promises
were baseless.
Now Republicans have to be feeling even more screwed because now they are stuck
to him like a piece of toilet paper on his heel, visible evidence of
having been recently shat upon and yet unable to wriggle free.
Do you think Ann Coulter actually believed Donald Trump when he said,
“we are going to build a big beautiful wall all along our southern border, and
Mexico is going to pay for it?” Uh, yeah! She wrote a book entitled In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome! Learning that the President was about to sign a stop gap
budget bill with no funding for the wall she was promised, Coulter wrote a
column entitled, “Gutless President in Wall-Less Country.” Rush Limbaugh piled on: “It looks like President Trump is caving on his demand for a measly one
billion in the budget for his wall on the border with Mexico.”
Do you feel it? The turning of the screwed. Trump took them
all, hook, line, and sinker. He lied to their faces, humiliated many along the
way, and brutally manipulated the ignorance and rage of many unemployed or
underemployed Americans who felt abandoned by their government.
The cracks in the blind wall of Republican allegiance can
now be seen with the naked eye.
Trump promised his supporters a foreign policy centered on
the concept of “America First,” which is actually a far cry from the actual
approach he has taken, better characterized as “America Alone.” Trump’s
unilateral decision to pull U.S. troops out of Syria was widely condemned in
Republican leadership circles. Lindsay Graham finally put full voice to the
thought that has been true of so many Trump actions: “if Obama had done this,
we’d be going nuts now.” He went on to characterize Trump’s decision as an
“Obama-like mistake,” a phrase that is guaranteed to make Trump’s blood boil. Marco
Rubio upped the ante by declaring that Trump “is about to make a major blunder”
in leaving Syria.
Trump’s decision on Syria was made without consultation
with allies and in open defiance of the advice provided by his experts in the
military and intelligence communities, causing General Mattis to resign and
deliver a stinging letter of resignation. Mattis’ letter of resignation is best
appreciated when viewed side-by-side with a Donald Trump tweet. The latter
screech with all-cap manic impulsiveness, are devoid of factual or historical
grounding, and are littered with typos, misspellings, and syntax malfunctions.
Mattis wrote with firm, substantive, restrained resolve. He explained to the
President of the United States why our nation evolved in the seventy years
since World War II into the world’s preeminent power: unconditional alliances
with allies and “clear-eyed” perspective on the threats from “malign actors and
strategic competitors.”
Even Senate Majority Leader and major Trump suck-up Mitch
McConnell is showing signs of weariness and angst with Trump. McConnell
publicly acknowledged that he was “distressed” over the Mattis resignation.
Less that a week later, McConnell would be humiliated when he presented the
President with a stop-gap funding bill that the White House had promised to
approve, only to see Trump renege.
More Republican public rebukes: In a direct challenge to
the President's mysterious deference to Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salma, the Senate
passed a resolution that fingered the Crown Prince as "responsible"
for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Wall Street is expressing its profound frustration with
this President with a stunning plunge in the Dow Jones Industrial average, with
wild swings not simply within a single trading days but within single hours.
Perhaps the most egregious deceit of all is the fact that Trump's lies are often intended purely to distract his base and the media away from yesterday's debacle. This very slight-of-hand President is left to govern with sleight of hand. The government shut-down is the latest in a series of invented calamities that merely serve to cut off the media oxygen to a Def Con One explosion like the Mattis resignation.
As the calendar turns to a New Year, we sense it clearly:
the Republicans are increasingly wary of a White House acting without adult
supervision, under unremitting legal pressure, and without any grounding in
history, without any geopolitical savvy, without any clear objective other than
gut judgments rooted in the purely political calculation of self-preservation. The Republicans are figuring out
what the Dems have known all along: if Donald Trump needs to save his political
hide, he will do anything. Fire the
Fed Chair. Shut down the government. Fire Mueller. Pull out of Afghanistan.
Start a trade war.
Start a real war.
Anything.
So they are finally beginning the long, painful,
embarrassing, and strenuous process of pulling their heads out of the sand.
Better late than never.
The timing of this long-awaited reckoning could not be
better.
Imagine Republicans en
masse feeling queasy about Trump’s grip on reality and uneasy about the
meltdown he could cause for Republicans in 2020 at just the moment that Robert
Mueller releases his final report.
Imagine how different the Republican response to that
report might be if enough Republicans are calculating the Mike Pence is better
positioned to lead the party in 2020 than Trump.
Watch the ball drop on New Year’s Eve, Republicans. It
won’t be tough to follow… it will follow the same trajectory as your party as
long as you have that ball and chain named Trump clamped to your ankle.
2019 is going to be an interesting year indeed.
And it begins with the turning of the screwed.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Leave a comment