Last week, this clip of NY Times royal court scribe White House reporter Maggie Haberman made the rounds. In it, she describes how Republicans are admitting privately that they regret support Il Trumpe. Mind you, they’re still not actually doing anything. It’s not as if they said, ‘you know what? We need to protect the Mueller investigation.’ None of them are proposing any concrete action. So it’s just more intensely furrowed brows, signifying nothing.
But what this is, to my mind, is a way to influence the political press, to convince them that Republicans didn’t like Trump. To convince the hapless political press corps that, in fact, they opposed him–when in reality, they enabled him. In about five years, most Republicans, including voters, will act as if Il Trumpe never existed. And the useless political press corps, which still has not really confronted how they enabled Trump’s rise, will gladly go along. Those politicians and their associated operatives won’t be personae non grata. Nope. They will be invited onto the talk shows, into think tanks, and the corporate board room.
I fear there will be few, if any, consequences for Republicans or the Republican Party as a whole. If there aren’t any consequences, if there is no punishment, then they will do the same crap again, except this time more intelligently with a better front man.
This is why, if Democrats take back power in 2021, we can’t afford to do the ‘looking forward, not back’ bullshit again: without consequences, we will enable even worse behavior.
mikethemadbiologist
Can you remove the ‘strike-out’ HTML marker from the near-beginning of your latest post?
As for the point of the post, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the American political and media establishment to admit that this president represents a massive implosion of decades-old – no, probably centuries-old – norms of ethical and political behavior for a chief executive and his enablers in the legislature and party offices. As you say, after two years or two decades of dancing around the problem, to admit it now would be to admit to two years or two decades of negligence and collaboration.
Ha! I assumed the universal strikeout was part of Mike’s commentary on the punditocracy’s tendency to forget their own past failings.
#same
Did this stop the endless strikeout?
This is absolutely correct and I get upset at the more liberal bloggers, who should KNOW better, who are so quick to pounce when a prominent Republican disses Trump. Karl Rove is a case in point. Rove should not be getting any press, any where, any time and certainly not from liberal bloggers. He was a cancer on our democracy then and he is one now. All he’s doing is laying the groundwork for Republicans to say they were secretly against Trump the whole time.