Many people act as if there is some dispute about Donald Trump's character, intelligence and his actions, both while president and outside of office. There isn't. Everybody knows the Emperor has no clothes. It's not that the flippers mildly criticized Donald Trump and then retracted those mild criticisms. No, these people denigrated him in some of the strongest and most unequivocal ways possible and then did a 180 degree turn around. They didn't do these mental gymnastics because they genuinely changed their mind. They all know how permanently he disqualified himself by attempting a coup by various methods including inciting an armed insurrection. Many of them admitted this at the time. The only reason they altered what they said about him publicly is because they wanted political power and were afraid of him. They know he is morally bankrupt, an absolute sociopath. Their naked ambition combined with some fear led them to bow down to Donald Trump and kiss the ring despite knowing how wrong it was to do so. It would have been a sign of their lack of integrity even if there weren't broader effects on the United States and the world. However, there are enormous costs to their cowardice, enormous costs for the country and for the world. If it weren't so despicable and dangerous, it might be funny. Donald Trump himself likened himself to a snake that was let into a house and turned on its owner. He did this while pursuing a second term. It might be the single most honest thing Donald Trump has ever said. Let's be crystal clear. When they discarded their backbone, they enabled everything that came after. Until the ugly racism and bigotry began to completely dominate the Republican Party when then Senator Barack Obama became the nominee of my political party, I believed that members of Congress on both sides wanted what was best for the country but differed on what was best and how to get there. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell dispelled that forever when he admitted that his first priority wasn't to help the country recover from the Great Recession that his party's president had led us into but rather to defeat President Obama in his bid for re-election. Still this pales in comparison to what Republicans have done with the advent of Donald Trump. They put their political power and seats in office above our own democracy.
Here we find virtually every important and prominent Republican. Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz and Mitt Romney laid waste to Donald Trump in the primary. Then the Hollywood Access Tapes were unveiled and we heard Donald Trump admit that he loves to commit sexual assault. We heard him proudly talking about his infidelity. In the primary, for the first few months of elections, Donald Trump had a plurality of support but not an overwhelming majority. We didn't know how committed fundamentalist Christians were to him. Fundamentalist Christians had told us how we needed to clean out the White House because President Clinton had a consensual extra-marital affair with an adult intern. A few of his most prominent critics were engaging in their own marital infidelity. It was believed that fundamentalist Christians were sincere, God-fearing folk who held to moral absolutes, that they lived holy, righteous lives themselves, and they demanded it of their leaders. How naive we were. Therefore, when the Hollywood Access Tape became public, then many people believed that too many fundamentalist Christians would abandon Donald Trump who was, of course, the nominee for president of the Republican Party for him to win. It was politically advantageous to publicly shame Donald Trump and dozens of prominent Republicans even publicly said that he should suspend his campaign or withdraw his candidacy. We learned that fundamentalist Christians would become the first to engage in world class mental gymnastics politically and they stayed with Donald Trump. He won the electoral college by a little less than 80,000 votes in three states, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Senator Marco Rubio was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His committee's report acknowledged that Russia acted and intervened in our 2016 presidential election in order to try to help Donald Trump win. Former FBI Director James Comey did his part by violating the norms and ethics of the FBI in publicly criticizing the 2016 Democratic Party nominee for president shortly before election day. Donald Trump was also illegally preventing another brick, maybe one too many, from overturning the wheelbarrow. David Axelrod has a saying, "How many more bricks can the wheelbarrow carry?" Individual events rarely by themselves take down a powerful politician. It does happen, but it must be a significant event that shocks the public conscience. However, when multiple events confirm a powerful politician's particular predilection or vice, then this tends to damn the politician as the successive event(s) corroborate the vice. Donald Trump falsified business records to hide his sexual affair with a porn star while his third wife had just given birth to a son. He falsified those business records to hide FEC violations, not reporting campaign contributions and exceeding the campaign contribution limit, and he did so because he didn't want a paper trail to point earnest investigative reporters to that sexual affair with Stormy Daniels. If that had become known, we might never have arrived here. Donald Trump won. His harshest critics who had blasted him immediately bowed down to him. He is the only president to have began his term underwater in his job approval and favorable ratings. Yet, Republican voters loved him. The vast majority of congressional districts for reasons good and bad are not competitive. Only a small percentage of congressional districts are swing districts. Thus, the only fear Republicans in Congress possessed was of Republican voters turning on them because they didn't support Donald Trump. Their concern was of losing a primary, not of losing a tough, competitive election in a swing district. Moreover, Donald Trump was in a powerful position to help or hurt them. They folded. And this was the first in a series of such cowardly acts. It was seen in the time immediately after the insurrection and some time after it. It was seen in the responses to the impeachment. It was seen in the opposition to a more bipartisan committee investigating Donald Trump's attempted coup and the insurrection he incited. It was seen in the lead up to the 2024 Republican Party primary and the primary itself. It was seen again in the general election campaign.
It's important for there to be a record of their statements about Donald Trump's moral bankruptcy and unfitness for office. It's important because it reminds the public that everybody agrees that Donald Trump is morally bankrupt and disqualified for the office he now holds. There is no debate here. There are only those few Republicans who are willing to tell the truth and those who threw away their spine because it was more politically expedient to do that than hold onto it.
With that, let's review some of the more awful examples of this cowardly behavior. The Atlantic ( Hypocrisy, Spinelessness, and the Triumph of Donald Trump - The Atlantic) pointed out that Donald Trump predicted they would abandon their ethics and their criticism:
“They might speak badly about me now, but they won’t later,” Trump said. They like to say they are “public servants,” he added, his voice dripping with derision at the word servant. But they would eventually submit to him and fear him. They would “evolve,” as they say in politics. “It will be very easy; I can make them evolve,” Trump told me. “They will evolve.”
He was right. Let's consider Lindsay Graham Lindsey Graham: Trump should have been kicked out of the party - POLITICO
Note the brazen hypocrisy. He portrayed himself as one of the brave few willing to tell the truth about Donald Trump and then shortly before election day he attacked Republicans who endorsed Vice President Harris.
“He took our problems in 2012 with Hispanics and made them far worse by espousing forced deportation,” Graham said. “Looking back, we should have basically kicked him out of the party.”
Asked how that would be done, the South Carolina senator suggested Republicans could have united against him like many are doing now.
“The more you know about Donald Trump, the less likely you are to vote for him. The more you know about his business enterprises, the less successful he looks. The more you know about his political giving, the less Republican he looks,” Graham said. “We should have done this months ago.”
“How many of these guys when there were 17 of us basically hid in a corner?” Graham asked. “They didn’t wanna, you know, poke the guy. They didn’t wanna get people mad. Ted Cruz was running as his best friend.”
“Any time you leave a bad idea or a dangerous idea alone,” he warned, “any time you ignore what could become an evil force, you wind up regretting it.”
He also said (All of Lindsey Graham’s Flagrantly Self-Serving Flip-Flops on Trump: A 5-Act Play – Mother Jones
In 2015, Graham appeared on the channel he’s called “fake news,” CNN. “There’s only one way to make America great again,” he said. “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”
He continued with Lindsey Graham: Donald Trump is a 'race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot' | The Week
Lindsey Graham: Donald Trump is a 'race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot'
Below, I refer to a source of quotes of Republicans about Donald Trump. Unfortunately, here Politico chose to be completely dishonest. They didn't differentiate between Republicans who abandoned Donald Trump after the insurrection and have continued to oppose him and those Republicans who said they opposed him because of lack of character or because he attempted a coup and incited an armed insurrection because it was politically expedient to do so and then returned to support him even after the insurrection because that became politically expedient to do so. Those are two very different reasons: one is based upon principles and the other is based upon political expedience. These people had principles before the insurrection. Donald Trump violated those principles. Therefore, they oppose Donald Trump and have continued to do so. That's not a person flip-flopping. That's a person who holds onto their moral compass. That's the difference. Conflating them like this isn't merely puerile reasoning, it's lying. The author knows better.
After the insurrection he said They Love Him, They Love Him Not: The Many Conservatives Who Have Flip-Flopped on Trump
Jan. 6, 2021
May 6, 2016
“I don’t believe that Donald Trump has the temperament and judgment to be commander in chief. I think Donald Trump is going to places where very few people have gone and I’m not going with him.”
Ted Cruz from the same politico article said :
“A serial philanderer…pathological liar…utterly amoral…a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen.”
Here's what JD Vance famously said about Donald Trump: The Republicans who want to be Trump's VP were once harsh critics with key policy differences | AP News
JD Vance
In a 2016 interview with Charlie Rose while promoting his book “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance called himself “a Never Trump guy” and said of the soon-to-be-president, “I never liked him.”
He told NPR that year, “I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.” He wrote an op-ed for The New York Times titled: “Mr. Trump Is Unfit For Our Nation’s Highest Office.”
Vance said he didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 and his former roommate shared images of a text message Vance sent him that year in which he called Trump “cynical” and said he could be “America’s Hitler.”
Secretary Rubio said (same source)
Rubio also called Trump a “con artist,” and “the most vulgar person to ever aspire to the presidency.”
Here's what Mike Johnson said about Donald Trump and this was before the insurrection: Johnson Has Endorsed Trump. He Said in 2015 Trump Might Be ‘Dangerous.’ - The New York Times
“The thing about Donald Trump is that he lacks the character and the moral center we desperately need again in the White House,” Mr. Johnson wrote in a lengthy post on Facebook on Aug. 7, 2015, before he was elected to Congress and a day after the first Republican primary debate of the campaign cycle.
Challenged in the comments by someone defending Mr. Trump, Mr. Johnson responded: “I am afraid he would break more things than he fixes. He is a hot head by nature, and that is a dangerous trait to have in a Commander in Chief.”
Kevin McCarthy is as responsible as anybody for the current situation in which somebody who attempted a coup by various methods including inciting an armed insurrection in order to fraudulently alter who won the electoral college is now back in the Oval Office. He rehabilitated Donald Trump and his political career. Donald Trump knew that he was going to be indicted and face felony charges for the crimes he committed and that his best chance to protect himself legally was to get re-elected to office. His plan was to use his money to delay and have Republicans try to muddy the waters politically by lying to their Republican voters. However, he could not have done this without the help of Kevin McCarthy. Kevin McCarthy was the House Republican leader after the insurrection. Donations from corporate sponsors had slowed to a crawl because of the insurrection. McCarthy was trying to retake the House, but he knew he needed more donations to do that. Donald Trump's supporters are, for all practical purposes, members of a cult and they are willing to give him every penny they have. His list of donors could turn things around and help McCarthy lead the Republican Party to retake the House of Representatives. He knew that the insurrection disqualified Donald Trump, but he cared more about retaking the House. Therefore, he decided to rehabilitate Donald Trump and agree to support him in exchange for his donor list. That's why Kevin McCarthy is particularly responsible for the current state of affairs. PBS gives us this Recording captures McCarthy saying he would urge Trump to resign | PBS News
In the recording of a Jan. 10 House Republican Leadership call posted by the Times Thursday night, McCarthy is heard discussing the Democratic effort to remove Trump from office and saying he would tell Trump, “I think it will pass and it would be my recommendation he should resign.”
It’s unclear whether McCarthy, who is in line to become House speaker if Republicans gain control during the fall midterm elections, followed through on his thinking or was merely spit-balling ideas shared privately with his colleagues in the aftermath of the deadly Capitol assault.
In the same conversation, McCarthy told his colleagues he doubted Trump would take the advice to step aside.
“That would be my recommendation,” McCarthy is heard saying in response to question from Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., who would emerge as a staunch Trump critic. “I don’t think he will take it, but I don’t know.”
The Hill adds to our understanding Cheney: McCarthy went to Mar-a-Lago after Jan. 6 because Trump was ‘not eating’
In “Oath and Honor,” CNN also reported Cheney says McCarthy told her Trump was aware he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden — and had told him so two days after the election.
It is a matter of public record that Donald Trump's own previous vice president declined to endorse him.
Nikki Haley's reversal can't go unmentioned: 'I feel no need to kiss the ring' of Trump, Haley says as she refuses to drop out - ABC News
Many of the same politicians who now publicly embrace Trump privately dread him. They know what a disaster he's been and will continue to be for our party. They're just too afraid to say it out loud," Haley told supporters in Greenville.
"Well, I'm not afraid to say the hard truths out loud. I feel no need to kiss the ring. And I have no fear of Trump's retribution. I'm not looking for anything from him," she continued, drawing applause. "My own political future is of zero concern."
It is also worth noting that Donald Trump's own previous longest serving chief of staff, Marine General John Kelly, stated that Donald Trump is a fascist and prefers the dictatorial approach to government. John Kelly says Donald Trump fits ‘fascist’ definition and prefers ‘dictator approach’ | CNN Politics
CNN —
John Kelly, the retired Marine general who was Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, entered the 2024 fray in stunning fashion in a series of interviews published Tuesday, saying the former president fits “into the general definition of fascist” and that he spoke of the loyalty of Hitler’s Nazi generals.
Kelly’s comments, two weeks from Election Day, are the latest in a line of warnings from former Trump White House aides about how he views the presidency and would exercise power if returned to office.
In addition to the fascist comments, Kelly — who was Trump’s chief of staff from 2017 to 2019 — told The New York Times that the former president “certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.”
Steve Benen on Rachel Maddow's blog (of MSNBC) lays things out for us clearly regarding the uniqueness of Trump's two Senate confirmed Defense secretaries and their denunciation of the president who nominated them : Mattis reportedly tells Woodward that Trump is a threat to U.S.
Over the course of his presidency, Donald Trump had two Senate-confirmed Defense secretaries. The latter was Mark Esper, who, after departing the Pentagon, warned the American people that Trump is “unfit” for office, a national security threat and a “threat to democracy.”
All of this, of course, is unprecedented: No former defense secretary has ever made public comments such as these about a president he worked for.
But let’s also not overlook Esper’s predecessor. The Bulwark’s Tim Miller reported:
Former Defense Secretary James Mattis privately told Bob Woodward that he agrees with the assessment laid out in his book “War,” which paints Donald Trump as a unique and menacing threat to the country. In an interview on The Bulwark Podcast on Thursday, Woodward said he recently received an email from Mattis, who served under Trump before resigning in protest. In the email, Mattis seconded the assessment offered by Gen. Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom Woodward quotes as calling Trump “the most dangerous person ever.”
Republicans were more willing to condemn Donald Trump and the insurrection he incited immediately after the event. Unfortunately, later events showed that they only did that because it was politically expedient for them, not because of principle. They believed that Donald Trump was done politically after the insurrection and they thought that he would, therefore, be damned by the public and history. When they realized this wasn't true, then they returned to supporting him. The more time that passed, the more Republicans defended him and tried to turn history and fact upside down. Their immediate denunciation and condemnation tell us what they believe was the appropriate moral response to Trump's acts. They denounced him plainly because they thought the public would and they thought the public would condemn him because they understood that this was the appropriate response to Trump's crimes. The AP tells us Jan. 6 Capitol riot: Republicans who blamed Trump now endorse his presidential bid | AP News
Republican Kevin McCarthy, who went on to become House speaker, had called Jan. 6 the “saddest day” he ever had in Congress. But McCarthy, R-Calif., retired last month he endorsed Trump for president and said he would consider joining his cabinet.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has said he would back whomever becomes the Republican Party nominee, despite a scathing speech at the time in which he called Trump’s actions “disgraceful” and said the rioters “had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth because he was angry he lost an election.”
Mitch McConnell said, "There is no doubt, none, " that Donald Trump "was morally and practically responsible" for the insurrection.
But he said ultimately, he did not vote to convict the former president because of constitutional concerns.
"There's no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day," McConnell said shortly after the 57-43 Senate vote that ended in the former president's acquittal.
Mitch McConnell had an opportunity to prevent Trump's return to office. They could have taken an exit ramp if he had led Senate Republicans to vote to convict Donald Trump. 67 votes were needed to convict Donald Trump. If he were convicted, then he would no longer be eligible to return to the White House as president. Kevin McCarthy enabled Trump's return to the office of president by opposing a more broadly bipartisan investigation into and condemnation of the insurrection and Donald Trump who incited it.
McCarthy opposes bipartisan commission to investigate Jan. 6 Capitol attack
This isn't a comprehensive list, but it does make clear that Republicans in Congress including Republican leaders in Congress know that Donald Trump is morally bankrupt, evil, and disqualified himself from the office when he attempted a coup by various methods including inciting an armed insurrection. The testimony of the generals helps to show that everybody knows these things. There is no disagreement on whether Donald Trump is morally bankrupt or that he disqualified himself from being president again by attempting a coup. Everybody knows this. Only a few Republicans were willing to show integrity and retain their moral and ethical principles by standing by their opposition to Donald Trump. The rest are craven cowards. They know better, but they refuse to do better. All they care is their political power and their seats in Congress. They are dominated by naked ambition and it's ugly, but what's worse is that it comes at the cost of our democracy.
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