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First, Denial. OMG, The New York Times did not just run an op-ed in which an anonymous senior administration official described the president of the United States as plagued by “amorality” and needing “adults in the room” to control “parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”
Next, Humor. This is — must be! — a movie comedy: “State Dinner for Schmucks” meets “Presidency! Trump Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue.”
Next comes Bargaining: That’s the part where Republicans prove they have learned nothing.
It will begin when Republican senators vote unanimously, probably next week, to confirm Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court — even though yesterday’s lowlights of Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing included his telling senators he couldn’t say whether it would be illegal if Trump offered a presidential pardon as a bribe to keep witnesses like Trump lawyer Michael Cohen or campaign chair Paul Manafort from burying Trump.
And it will continue as Republicans keep pushing the ideas the author of the instantly infamous op-ed approves of — and even cites as a reason the “adults in the room” humor and tolerate Trump — less because they are Trumpian than because they are the lodestar of post-2000 Republicanism.
There’s the $1.4 trillion tax cut, aimed at corporations and currently subsidizing stock buybacks above all. There’s the “deregulation” the piece cites as a reason why the White House staff protecting us from Trump tolerates him: That’s the widely unpopular effort to take health insurance away from 20 million-plus people and the equally unpopular decision to pull out of the Paris climate accords, the better to assuage a coal industry that employs all of about 50,000 workers. Plus the law that protects “community banks” from over-regulation by dialing back oversight of institutions with $50 billion in assets.
And finally, there is the party’s long-running campaign to remake the courts in its own image, which has only become more urgent as demographic change closes in on a party that has lost the popular vote for president in six of the last seven elections. Knowing it’s their last chance, the GOP will swallow Kavanaugh, even though his performance this week publicly reduces their poses of strict constructionism and adherence the rule of law to the quivering nakedness of would-be emperors that it has always been.
And that’s only the problems the party has in Washington.
The irreducible thing is that Trump didn’t come from nowhere — he came from the party’s base. He didn’t stumble to the Republican nomination in 2016 — he tore it from 15 more-established pols (plus former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina) who sold the same economic and judicial policies. Trump simply raised the ante on them by adding a steaming pile of racism and xenophobia, in the form of trade and immigration policies that the op-ed’s author disapproves of — but which were the whole reason Trump clubbed establishment Republicans like baby seals.
This is the party base that follows Trump blindly into misadventures like Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate with an alleged taste for making passes at young girls. That tolerates Rep. Jim Jordan, the former college wrestling coach currently pretending to have never heard the team doctor was molesting wrestlers at Ohio State, and who wants to be speaker of the House.
And that has reduced Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who last year warned that Trump was a “nut job,” a “disgrace” and a “kook,” to a quivering bowl of mush whose biggest daily decision is whether to praise Trump’s golf game or assure him it would be just peachy to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions in favor of an AG who will close the probe into whether Trump’s team conspired with Russia to rig the 2016 election.
One needn’t be a political consultant, or a shrink, to know Graham’s problem is fear of a primary challenge back home.
Yeah, that base. And it will be here when, in the starkest words of the op-ed, Trump’s presidency is over — “one way or another.”
It’s a party that is rotten from the top down and the bottom up, all at once. It’s a special double play, the corruption of the D.C. party married to the tribalism of its base. Good luck with that.
Trump’s presidency is over, functionally at least, and has been since Michael Cohen named him as a de facto co-conspirator in an extremely tasteful scheme to pay off a porn actress and a Playboy model (and maybe others). His last meaningful act as president, before taking the midterm-election whipping he deserves and whatever lies beyond, was nominating Kavanaugh. Whom Graham said yesterday, not inaccurately, is certain to be confirmed by a unanimous Republican Senate caucus.
Two years ago, my now-17 year old began refining a dinner-table comedy routine, to my amusement and his mother’s horror, about the many splendors of his imaginary role as Donald Trump’s secret husband. It’s not tasteful, but it’s less the opposite than, say, Stormy Daniels and her awful lawyer-who-thinks-he-should-be-president-himself. As I tittered at it, little did I dream that Trump’s actual denouement would make my kid’s banter seem dignified by comparison.