After the dizzying double-whammy--the airing of the Access Hollywood tape and the derangement evident in Donald Trump throughout the debate, an English friend of mine asked what "serious" Republicans would/could do now.
I have never been a hard line partisan. Like most Democrats I know, I have always been ready and willing to acknowledge when a Republican gets something right, and when a Democrat does not. And I have long recognised the pernicious impact of intransigent partisanship on the government's ability to do what it needs to do to serve us all.
But this--to use Trump's favourite pejorative--"disaster" called Donald Trump, this brings out the partisan in me. I now dismiss the very notion of serious people within a Party that went along and went along and went along, and did nothing at all to stop this toxic train from barrelling straight through the very heart of our Democracy, poisoning our body politic and sickening near to death everyone engaged in the effort to choose our next President and representatives in Congress.
Yes, there were a handful of "Never Trump" Republicans, but their numbers diminished as the race went on. Those Republicans who took issue with this or that aspect of Trump's campaign or character, defended their decision to support him behind the shield of Party Unity, which was meant to make them seem honourable.
Think about it.
If dispassionately assessed, this means that they would have said the same thing to justify supporting someone who promised the fascistic practices of summary judgments, racial and religious exclusion, sexual predation and quixotic deployment of nuclear arms.
Oh, wait; that's what they did.
But, some apologists have said, Trump was chosen through a credible nomination process, and the Party had to accept the will of its members.
Back up: despite the fact that sober-minded Republicans came to regard John Kasich as far preferable to Trump, how many stepped in to fund the Kasich campaign as it started to succumb to the media-fuelled Trump juggernaught? They chose to do nothing to intervene—nothing to alienate their "base", which to echo our nominee's rightly not-fully-retracted remarks, has proven very base, indeed.
As legions of columnists, commentators and voters have observed, everything Trump revealed on the hot mic had been evident well before the Billy Bush tape was released. There is no way, short of wilful blindness that the dozens of Republicans who withdrew their support upon that release learned anything new from it. Yet they want us to let bygones be bygones; they want us to go on trusting them with majorities in both houses.
It's time to dismiss the idea there can be bipartisanship with people who were so ready and so willing to betray our nation's fundamental principles for the sake of a Party that choose a nominee too ignorant, too arrogant, too indifferent to the wellbeing of the people he'd be meant to serve, to merit any role at all in our government. We must, with crushing majorities deny them the exquisite, exalted privilege of legislating on our behalf.
It is my hope and my plea that, on November 8th, every Republican who has claimed only latterly to see the light illuminating Trump's dark soul be denounced, renounced, and trounced.
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October 10, 2016
