When was the last time centrist talking heads declared, "Donald Trump just became president" (because he bombed someone, or something like that)? I think it's been more than a year. At this point, you have to be a truly fanatical practitioner of bothsidesism not to see that Trump is every bit as terrible a human being, and every bit as much a menace to the republic, as some of us warned when all the cool kids were busy snarking about Clinton's emails.
The real news of the past few weeks isn't that Trump is a wannabe Mussolini who can't even make the trains run on time. It's the absence of any meaningful pushback from Congressional Republicans. Indeed, not only are they acquiescing in Trump's corruption, his incitements to violence, and his abuse of power, up to and including using the power of office to punish critics, they're increasingly vocal in cheering him on.
Make no mistake: if Republicans hold both houses of Congress this November, Trump will go full authoritarian, abusing institutions like the I.R.S., trying to jail opponents and journalists on, er, trumped-up charges, and more — and he'll do it with full support from his party.
But why? Is Trumpocracy what Republicans always wanted?
Well, it's probably what some of them always wanted. And some of them are making a coldblooded calculation that the demise of democracy is worth it if it means lower taxes on the rich and freedom to pollute.
But my guess is that most Republican politicians are spineless rather than sinister — or, more accurately, sinister in their spinelessness. They're not really ideologues so much as careerists, whose instinct is always to go along with the party line. And this instinct has drawn them ever deeper into complicity.
The point is that once you've made excuses for and come to the aid of a bad leader, it gets ever harder to say no to the next outrage. Republicans who defended Trump over the Muslim ban, his early attacks on the press, the initial evidence of collusion with Russia, have in effect burned their bridges. It would be deeply embarrassing to admit that the elitist liberals they mocked were right when they were wrong; also, nobody who doesn't support Trump will ever trust their judgment or patriotism again.
So the path of least resistance is always to sign on for the next stage of degradation. "No evidence of collusion" becomes "collusion is no big deal" becomes "collusion is awesome — and let's send John Brennan to jail."
To some extent this is just human weakness in action. But there are some special aspects of the modern GOP that make it especially vulnerable to this kind of slide into leader-worship. The party has long been in the habit of rejecting awkward facts and attributing them to conspiracies: it's not a big jump from claiming that climate change is a giant hoax perpetrated by the entire scientific community to asserting that Trump is the blameless target of a vast deep state conspiracy.
And modern Republican politicians are, with few exceptions, apparatchiks: they are creatures of a monolithic movement that doesn't allow dissent but protects the loyal from risk. Even if they should happen to lose a race in their gerrymandered districts, as long as they toed the line they can count on "wing nut welfare" — commentator slots on Fox News, appointments at think tanks, and so on.
Even now, I don't think most political commentators have grasped how deep the rot goes. I don't think they understand, or at any rate admit to themselves, that democracy really could die just a few months from now.
And if it doesn't, if Republicans lose Congress and Trump leaves office on or before January 2021, the same people who kept declaring that Trump just became president will try to go back to pretending that Republican politicians are serious, honorable people who care about policy. But they aren't.
So remember this moment. We're seeing, in real time, what the GOP is really made of.
Paul Krugman, New York Times, August 18, 2018.
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August 20,2018
Post Script. "If Republicans hold both houses of Congress this November, Trump will go full authoritarian, abusing institutions like the I.R.S., trying to jail opponents and journalists...and he'll do it with full support from his party." - Register! Vote! #Midterms2018
