By Mike Weland
Since 2015, we’ve watched the Republican Party freely give, not sell, its soul to one Donald J. Trump. Along with it, it appears Trump also took the good sense and dignity of its highest ranking members, including every Republican serving today in the U.S. House of Representatives, who voted Wednesday to open an impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden without specifying a crime. And that after more than a year of highly publicized hearings have produced nothing but what should be abject embarrassment.
But today’s GOP seems to enjoy looking stupid and servile in deference to their puppet master con man, Trump.
There is not and never has been a whit of evidence to support the inane hearings in Congress chaired by such weak-kneed and silly stalwarts as Ohio’s Jim Jordan and James Comer of Kentucky, both of whom routinely twist logic and fact to justify the time and resources they’re squandering while the serious work of the nation is left undone. It is dysfunction at its finest, a band of My Pillow guy clones squeaking the same stale accusations each and every time Trump pulls their strings, which is often.
“We have damning evidence,” they profess, “right here! He’s guilty!”
But they never produce it. Mainly because it doesn’t exist except in the twisted mind of Trump.
By every standard measure, Joe Biden is doing a decent job as president, especially in the wake of the silly circus that was the one Trump term. But “sleepy Joe” has a ball and chain no other president has ever had to contend with … Donald John Trump … the only U.S. President to ignore the findings of the courts on his election challenges, the only to incite an insurrection in an attempt to deny a successor his rightful term, the fourth U.S. President to not attend his successor’s inauguration (one of whom, Andrew Johnson, shares with Trump the dubious distinction of having been impeached) and the only former U.S. President to have spent every day since his ouster denigrating his successor with lies and baseless claims and encouraging “his” loyal Republicans to do something about it.
They are, incessantly and without basis, sniping at and laying blame for anything and everything amiss right at Biden’s feet, even that for which they themselves bear guilt. Few are quite so good at misplaced blame than the Donald, but his sycophants in the halls of Congress are learning quickly.
And those loyal sycophants, at Trump’s behest, are seeing that Biden faces the same persecutions the Donald himself faced, such as what the liberal Democrats did to him after that “perfect phone call” in which he tried to get a newly-elected national leader to dig up dirt on Biden and cast dark but unfounded aspersions on Joe’s son, Hunter, now under GOP scrutiny all these years with nothing to show but folly. That one call showed the world the malignancy of president of the United States, who insisted, and the integrity of the president of Ukraine, who politely refused.
Since July 2019 Trump has loudly trumpeted a chimera that exists solely in the confines of his juvenile and narcissistically vindictive mind, the “Biden crime family.” And his MAGA cult mindlessly believed and took up the mantra. And Republican leadership, fearing the wrath of MAGA, fell right in line, even after, in the wake of January 6, 2021, a number of them showed their last existing shred of principle, denouncing Trump and his attack on our constitution, for most but a twinkling moment of strength and sanity before they were crawling off to Mar-A-Lago to beg forgiveness, kiss the ring and swear obeisance to the orange one.
Today’s MAGA GOP, now in the driver’s seat of the party, is growing increasingly more psychotic, tilting at the windmills of woke, pushing an ever more radical “conservative” agenda that inflicts their flawed morals on those who don’t share them, making it ever more difficult to vote, mounting an overt attack on democracy and the U.S. Constitution, turning on each other like rats in a hole as the level of stupidity and incompetence required to maintain “conservative” credentials grows ever more radical, attempting nor accomplishing anything of consequence.
It’s not the first time the GOP has fallen head-over-heels for a huckster. From 1950 until 1954, Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy besotted the day’s Republican party with the fear of a communist hiding in every nook and cranny of every edifice of importance to the safety and security of the nation, and in their zeal to protect against one man’s made up monster went to radical, fanatical, extremes.
It wasn’t until attorney Joseph Welch, on June 9, 1954, after countless careers and lives had been ruined by false or misleading allegations, said on national television after McCarthy accused one of Welch’s attorneys of being a communist, “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” When McCarthy tried to continue his attack, Welch angrily interrupted, “Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”
With McCarthy, it was as if a bubble had burst and the GOP had awakened suddenly from a years-long blackout and realized what evil they’d done. They were quick to act, turning McCarthy into a pariah overnight. The once feared firebrand was censured by the Senate, ostracized by his party. He died three years later at age 48, a broken man.
Trump has held the GOP in thrall for eight years now, and despite being indicted on 91 felony counts, being found guilty of sexual assault in civil court and charged with criminal counts in Georgia and New York, there has yet to be a “have you no decency” moment. Time is running out and the threat is far more dire now than it was in McCarthy’s day.
Indeed, his stranglehold on the party only seems to grow evermore constricting as he is far and away the leading candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, even though he is running on promises of ending our democratic republic and crowning himself our first king, twice impeached. It is long past time sensible Republicans wake up to the fact that they’ve been had by an exceptionally skilled confidence man, adept at bluff and bluster to make himself appear tough when he’s but a scared bully who’s gotten away with it for far too long.