Partners in Grime
Yesterday, Trump posted a self-aggrandizing tweet that concerned New York which ended with him referencing himself as a king. “Long live the king!” he wrote.
And then for bad measure, the official White House account on Elon Musk's TwiXter posted the following --
To be clear, as reprehensible, undemocratic, infantile and un-American as this is -- it's not about Trump. After all, we know who he is. And longtime readers of these pages know what sentence is going to come next: It's about the elected MAGOP members of Congress, who support and enable him, almost unanimously. Because without their approval, Trump could do next to nothing.
There is Trump, calling himself a king. Posting a graphic as king (with his egomaniacal head too big for the crown.) And as far as I know, there has not been one word of pushback from a single MAGOP in Congress. Deathly silence. All of them accepting it as normal. Enabling it.
This is about the elected MAGOP members of Congress who enable Trump.
The thing is, I’ve been writing that for a long time here. But recently, I’ve come to the realization that it not only doesn’t go far enough in its criticism, it also really doesn’t describe the reality.
The reality starts with that the MAGOPs in Congress are no longer a minority wing of the party, but its mainstream today. Traditional Republicans are now the minority wing. The MAGOP is what the former Republican Party of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Eisenhower has become. They would be fringe in today’s party – even if they were considered in the party at all now, but dismissed as mere RINOs instead, or pushed out completely, like deeply conservative Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. And further, and more to the point, it’s not just that these MAGOP merely enable Trump. Rather, they embrace and endorse his fascist actions and what they know are lies.
So, this isn’t simply enabling Trump’s fascism, cruelty, white supremacy, anti-Semitism, desire to be a dictator, claim of being a king. Enabling it all can be something as simple as closing your eyes to what is going on, denying an awareness of it. But the MAGOP have gone far beyond that. They defend Trump’s actions. They adopt his positions as theirs. They excuse his lies and try to explain them as true. They get down into the dirty filth with Trump and join his reveling in it. This far-transcends mere enabling and passive support – today’s MAGOP have accepted all that Trump does and made it their own positions.
And even more explicitly, it is their full acceptance of what Trump does that allows it all to occur. One can accept something without being involved. But so much of what Trump does actually, literally, Constitutionally requires by law that his party in control of Congress not only allow it, but are the ones who legally make it happen.
That’s why this is about the elected MAGOP members of Congress – and why even that doesn’t go nearly far enough in explaining their part in the complicity.
When we see news stories that say what “Trump” has done, that lets the MAGOP off the hook much too easily. Because it’s what they did, as well. They didn’t just enable it, didn’t just allow Trump’s actions to happen – they often literally, by law, are who did it. They own it, as much as Trump. It is their positions.
When people complain about what Trump did, they have to know it’s what Trump and his party did. When people go to vote in Special Elections this and the Mid-Terms next, they have to know that the MAGOPs on the ballot aren’t free of sin, they aren’t just the sycophantic water carriers of a fascist, they're who filled the buckets. Trump merely showed them where to get the water. And then together they poured out the muck.
So, from this point on, I’m going to do my best not to just write about Trump and add “But this is really about the elected MAGOPs in Congress” as an afterthought. I’m going to try my best to make it part of the story itself. I know I won’t be consistent – sometimes (perhaps often) the writing would get too convoluted and just be linguistically clumsy – so I’ll still write about what “Trump” did. Sometimes, it’s just better that way. But at its foundation, from here forward, it’s about what Trump and the elected MAGOP members of Congress did. Joined at the hip. Together.
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