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babylonsister

(171,056 posts) Wed May 30, 2018, 06:15 PM May 2018

The Moral Compromise Republicans Made to Support Trump in 2016? It's Only Getting Worse

http://prospect.org/article/moral-compromise-republicans-made-support-trump-2016-its-only-getting-worse

The Moral Compromise Republicans Made to Support Trump in 2016? It's Only Getting Worse
Paul Waldman
May 27, 2018
President Trump has given Republicans much of what they wanted. But along the way he has demanded that they abandon a commitment to any principle.

snip//

And at the core of Trumpism is the idea that truth is whatever idiotic whim Trump has at a given moment, and it might be different in an hour or a day. To support Trump is to accept that, and also to accept his assault on any American institution that might hold him accountable, whether it's the press, the courts, the FBI, or a lifelong Republican prosecutor with an impeccable reputation charged by Trump's own Justice Department with determining how a foreign power manipulated our election system.

And guess what: Republicans are happily going along. As The Washington Post's Dan Balz recently pointed out, in poll after poll, the favorability of those Trump is attacking, like Robert Mueller and the FBI, has dropped like a stone among Republicans. In Mueller's case in particular, it is utterly impossible to attribute this to anything other than Trump's attacks, since Mueller never talks to the press and the only knowledge anyone has of what he's actually doing comes from the occasional indictment or the accounts of people who have been interviewed by his team.

Think about it: What do you know about how Mueller is doing his work? If you're one of the vast majority of Republicans who think he's out of control, what specific evidence you have to support that belief? The answer is that you have none, because almost none of Mueller's work has been visible to the public. There's been nothing to suggest that he has been anything but professional and methodical, as befits the reputation that made him a bipartisan choice for the job in the first place.

So all the Republicans who now believe Mueller must be stopped are concluding that for no reason other than the fact that Donald Trump told them so. And they believe that despite the fact that nearly everything Trump says about the entire investigation—like his recent assertion that the FBI planted spies in his campaign—is proven to be a lie almost immediately. His own lawyers insist that he should refuse to allow Mueller to interview him, because "we are not going to sit him down if this is a trap for perjury," as Rudy Giuliani said this weekend. But you can't fall into a perjury trap unless you're willing to commit perjury.

The remarkable thing is that everyone, including seemingly all of Trump's supporters, accept that if Trump were interviewed under oath, of course he'd perjure himself. After all, he can't get through the friendliest Fox News interview without telling a dozen lies, so how could it be otherwise?

President Trump has given Republicans much of what they wanted: a stolen Supreme Court seat, a gigantic corporate tax cut, an impossibly cruel crackdown on immigrants, a sabotage of health security, a rollback of regulations to protect the environment and workers' rights, and more. But along the way he has demanded that they abandon a commitment to any principle other than "This is what Trump wants today."

And when Mueller is done with his work and we see the full panoply of misdeeds from Trump and those around him, Republicans will be asked to keep following Trump through his own moral sewer. They'll be told to insist that there's nothing wrong with cooperating with a hostile foreign power to undermine our elections, that there's nothing wrong with incessant lying, that there's nothing wrong with using the presidency for personal profit, that whatever Trump did was right and good, because it was Trump.

Will they do it? Of course they will. With gusto.