Start the countdown clocks rolling, because the battlelines are being drawn and war is about to be waged. The war we’re talking about is one between what’s left, if anything, of the old school Republican party and the new-MAGAfied GOP, led by Donald Trump. January 15 is the Iowa Caucus. Trump expects to walk away with a win. He also expects all of the Republicans to dutifully fall in line and woe betide those that don’t.
Trump thinks nothing of using life and death imagery. In describing Ted Cruz recently he said, “Ted — he shouldn’t even exist. I could’ve destroyed him. I kind of did destroy him in 2016, if you think about it. But then I let him live.” That’s how Trump sees himself, as an emperor, he whose thumbs up gesture confers a benediction and he whose thumbs down gesture destroys a career. He loves to think of himself in those terms. So what will happen to those who have not yet bent the knee by the 15th? New York Times:
Mr. Trump has endorsements from nearly 100 members of the House of Representatives. The next closest candidate, Mr. DeSantis, who served in the House, has only five. Ms. Haley has one.
In the Senate — the body of elected Republicans most resistant to Mr. Trump — he has 19 endorsements. Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley have zero. More G.O.P. senators will soon follow. Senators John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming are expected to endorse Mr. Trump before the Iowa caucuses, according to two people briefed on their thinking.
The chairmen of the Republican Party’s House and Senate campaign committees were both early endorsers of Mr. Trump. He has almost four times as many endorsements from governors as Mr. DeSantis has. Mr. Trump’s political team, meanwhile, has told people it plans to not work with the Republican Governors Association because the group’s executive director has been an adviser to Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, who endorsed Mr. DeSantis.
Mr. Trump has been courting Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, placing several calls to him since he ended his campaign on Nov. 12 and deploying allies like Lindsey Graham, a fellow South Carolina senator, to make the case for Mr. Scott to issue an endorsement before their state’s primary on Feb. 24, two people familiar with the outreach said.
Now understand why this is important: The GOP, if it was going to take a stance against Trump and look forward to a post-Trump world, would be taking that stance if it was going to. It won’t. It can’t. The reason Trump didn’t get removed from office is because this iteration of the GOP is gutless compared to previous GOPs. Back in the days when Barry Goldwater informed Richard Nixon that he was through, the Republicans of that era were of a mind to put the Constitution above Nixon and get rid of him if need be. They would have impeached him and removed him. Nixon knew that and he resigned.
Not so today. Trump was impeached twice. He could have been removed twice. The congressmembers and senators didn’t have the balls for it, plain and simple. They were too afraid. So they kept kicking the can down the road, hoping that the Trump problem would somehow be somebody else’s problem. And it’s not. It’s still theirs, still the problem of the legislators who wouldn’t rid themselves of Trump at the right moment.
So they’re stuck. Now he’s got a gun to their collective head, once again, and he’s making a list and checking it twice: if any Republican doesn’t endorse him before the Iowa caucus, it’s their ass in the wringer. “They always bend the knee,” Trump said of Tom Emmer, after Emmer reluctantly endorsed him, after posting that voting for Trump “would be a tragic mistake!” Well, let the tragedy begin.
And begin it will. The tragi/comedy you’re about to see, the complete and utter farce, is the utter capitulation of the Republican party to the force that has been the agency of their doom since 2018, and that is Donald Trump. Once again, like a junkie who cleans up for a while and resolves “never again,” they’ve got to swallow the bitter pill, the poison, that is Trump.
And they know what will happen. It’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde time. Empowering Trump is going to destroy them. But empower him they will. Because they’re cornered and they’re scared and they’re cowards.
And America’s only salvation is to vote every damn one of the Republicans out.
They’ve painted themselves into a corner with very slow-drying paint.
So slow drying they’ll be stuck their for ages – unless they make a real mess of leaving early.