Brave Donald suffered for our sins? Yep,
that’s Trump all over
Today’s GOP, controlled by dishonest hero-worshipers, is
inhospitable to conservatives, moderates and people of decency and courage.
By Mona Charen Oct
7, 2020, 4:44pm CDT
·
Kelly Loeffler looked like a standard-issue Republican when she
was appointed senator from Georgia in December 2019. She came from a super-rich
family (like plenty of Democrats as well), she was pro-gun, anti-immigration
and pro-business. Originally pro-choice, her position on abortion evolved in
time for her to be accepted by pro-life gatekeepers.
Once in Washington, D.C., though, Loeffler quickly got with the
program. She described the impeachment of the president as a “circus” and
lambasted Mitt Romney for even voting to call witnesses, whom she was sure
would “slander @realDonald Trump.” Now, she’s encouraging hero worship of
Trump, tweeting: “COVID stood NO chance against @realDonaldTrump.”
This is servile, particularly at a moment when he is literally
endangering others’ lives. When she appeared, maskless and within inches of
others, indoors at the White House announcement for Amy Coney Barrett, she not
only endangered her own health and the health of her loved ones, she became a
soldier in the disinformation war Trump is fighting to dissuade Americans from
taking the threat seriously.
Only yesterday, Republicans were livid that President Barack
Obama downplayed the threat from terrorism. I recall being appalled that no
leading American statesman attended a Paris rally following the 2015 massacre
at Charlie Hebdo headquarters, though European heads of state were there, along
with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and even the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud
Abbas. Attorney General Eric Holder was in Paris at the time, but he skipped
the march.
Republicans fervently believed that failure to confront
terrorist threats to the nation was malfeasance at best and betrayal at worst.
Yet now, to compensate for the inability of the current
president to manage a two-car funeral, we are asked to believe that declining
to confront the threat from a virus is neither malfeasance nor betrayal but
instead some sort of macho heroism.
Tomi Lahren of Fox Nation tweeted that Joe Biden should carry a
purse to go with his face mask. The fawning Rep. Matt Gaetz tweeted: “President
Trump won’t have to recover from COVID. COVID will have to recover from
President Trump.”
And Fox News host Greg Gutfeld said this:
“Maybe it’s a flaw of Trump... he didn’t hide from the virus.
The reason he didn’t hide from the virus is he didn’t want America to hide from
the virus. If he was going to ask America to get back to work, right? ... So he
took the risk, he got the virus, but he was doing it for us.”
He suffered for our sins? Yep, that’s Trump all over.
Let me offer a few more flashbulb glimpses of the state of the
GOP today. A quick glance at the Trump fans who gathered outside Walter Reed
Hospital over the weekend revealed one holding a sign mentioning QAnon (there
may well have been others), and another with a placard cheerily emblazoned
“Super-spreader event.”
Flash: Greg Abbott, Republican governor of Texas, apparently
abandoning several common-sense measures to cope with the coronavirus like
expanding early voting, has now announced that he will limit the number of
ballot drop boxes to one per county. Texas has 254 counties with an average of
about 114,000 people in each. But, of course, they vary in size. The single
ballot drop box in Loving County will only have to handle the county’s 169
residents. The box in Harris County, home to Houston, will have to accommodate
4.7 million. They better get a big box.
Flash: Sen. Ron Johnson, who has tested positive for the
coronavirus (along with Sens. Mike Lee and Thom Tillis), said he remains
opposed to mask mandates because “while masks can reduce the risk of infection,
they’re not a cure-all.” Is Johnson also opposed to food safety mandates,
because while they decrease the incidence of poisoning, they’re not a cure-all?
Flash: Sen. Pat Toomey, one of the last semi-sincere
conservatives, bows out. He never wavered from his free trade principles and
opposed Trump’s revised NAFTA treaty because it flouted those principles. He
joins the 40% of elected Republicans in Washington who have resigned or retired
since 2017.
Flash: The National Republican Congressional Committee has
targeted a New Jersey freshman Democrat with ads aimed at linking him to what
QAnon supporters believe is a Satanic, cannibalistic, child-abuse conspiracy
backed by Hollywood and Democrats. The grounds? Rep. Tom Malinowski supposedly
opposed expanding a sex offender registry. He denies this, but frankly, even if
he had, it’s a totally reasonable position to adopt. I’ve written about the
gross miscarriages of justice those registries can cause.
The NRCC is not a fringe political action committee. It’s the
official campaign arm of the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives,
and it now issues official statements that read like supermarket tabloids.
“Rep. Tom Malinoski lobbied to protect sexual predators.”
This GOP is inhospitable to conservatives (see former Speaker of
the House Paul Ryan among many others), moderates (see John Kasich) and people
of decency and courage (see Mitt Romney). Rather than purging its ranks of
kooks and conspiracists, it welcomes and courts them. Rather than fight fair,
it seeks to win by keeping people from the polls.
America needs a sane, serious, humane, center-right party that
aims to persuade, not to dominate. This GOP is not it.
Mona Charen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy
Center.