Tuesday, December 06, 2022

“At Long Last, Sir, Have You No Shame?”

Tremble before his awesome power!
Sure, Josh Hawley, your Senate campaign’s Facebook page still shows you beaming as you embrace the two-time popular vote flop. And yes, Jerry Moran, you can probably credit Trump’s endorsement for scaring off a primary challenger in your bid for reelection this year. Roger Marshall echoed the ex-president’s anti-science musings on the COVID-19 pandemic during his 2018 campaign and made it to the Senate. And Sen.-elect Eric Schmitt is all in on the fiction of building a functioning border wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. 
... 
Yet even Elon Musk — the South African billionaire and social media magnate with a shaky understanding of the First Amendment — gets that Trump’s latest hissy fit is beyond the pale: “The Constitution is greater than any president,” he tweeted Sunday night. “End of story.” 
So, come on, Republicans. It’s time for you, Fox News and the rest of the conservative cinematic universe to unite and take down the cruel, mercurial Big Bad who’s been holding you all hostage for more than six years now. You have the power. You’re the ones who wrote this tale. Put Musk’s words into action: End Donald Trump’s political story once and for all.
For seven years, the right has been explaining, excusing, avoiding, and eventually cheering the most morally depraved figure in American politics. That takes a toll on the psyche. You can tell yourself that the other side is worse. Or you can tell yourself that the critics are unhinged, suffering from “Trump derangement syndrome” whereas you are a man of the world who knows nobody’s perfect. But then Trump will do what he always does—he’ll make a fool of you. You denied that Trump purposely broke the law when he took highly classified documents to Mar-A-Lago and obstructed every effort to retrieve them. And then what does Trump do? He admits taking them! You scoff at the critics who’ve compared Trump with Nazis. And then what does he do? He has dinner with Nazis! (And fails to condemn them even after the fact.) You despised people who claimed Trump was a threat to the Constitution, and then Trump explicitly calls for “terminating” the Constitution in order to put himself back in the Oval Office. 
Hunter Biden seems to be corrupt. He traded on his father’s name. He has abused drugs and engaged in other unsavory practices. He’s a mess. But there is nothing relevant to public policy or civic virtue here. President Biden is hardly the first president to have troubled family members. But Joe Biden didn’t hire Hunter at the White House, and if there is any evidence of the president using official influence on Hunter’s behalf, we haven’t seen it. The Department of Justice under President Trump opened an investigation into Hunter Biden. President Biden has left it alone. It’s ongoing. 
The right has a deep psychological need for the Hunter Biden story. They desperately want Joe Biden to be corrupt and for the whole family to be, in Stefanik’s words, “a crime family” because they have provided succor and support to someone who has encouraged political violence since his early rallies in 2015, has stoked hatred of minorities through lies, has used his office for personal gain in the most flagrant fashion, has surrounded himself with criminals and con men, has committed human rights violations against would-be immigrants by separating children from their parents, has pardoned war criminals, has cost the lives of tens of thousands of COVID patients by discounting the virus and peddling quack cures, has revived racism in public discourse, and attempted a violent coup d’etat. 
They know it. It gnaws at them. That’s why the Hunter Biden story is their heart’s desire. But here’s something else they need to meditate on: Even if everything they’re alleging about Joe Biden were true; even if he did pull strings to help his son and even profited unjustly thereby, it still wouldn’t amount to a fraction of what Trump did. And it still won’t wash out the “damn’d spot.”
No, Trump has no shame. It's not clear he's got any game, either.
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